Country Living Challenges: Keeping Chickens (Alive)

Posted on May 29, 2014 by Keely

Our beautiful and obnoxious rooster, Cappy, woke us this morning with his raspy sunrise song. On a typical morning, there’d have been nothing unusual about this, but we were surprised to hear his voice. When we went outside, there he was, drenched with rain and looking irate on the front steps.

Usually, roosters don’t hang out on the front steps.

It all started on Saturday. Last week, we lost several of our hennies. Evert day or two, one or more would go missing. On Saturday night, I didn’t check the birds, but at about midnight I heard clucking and squawking outside my bedroom window. I charged around the house like a lunatic in a state of undress, searching for a flashlight. I couldn’t find one, so I ran outside and switched on the truck’s headlights. Nothing. I ran back in and found the flashlight, put on some more clothes and went out to stalk the night predators. I treed a raccoon on power pole in the yard, but couldn’t find a chicken. After looking, I went to the coop and counted. Everyone was home except Cappy. I figured he was lost.

I didn’t see a trace of Cappy in the morning which I didn’t find strange. Usually, when a chicken goes missing, it’s just gone without a trace except maybe for a few feathers strewn around the site of the kill. I went on with my life and started checking on the birds before bed, finding Windsor in a tree, Sunday night, and lifting her out to stick her in the henhouse where she belongs. It wasn’t until Monday that I saw Cappy again, scratching in the chicken yard like he’d never been gone. It was like seeing a ghost. Sean and I had to lift him and WIndsor out of the trees that night.

Tuesday, we came home a little after dark to find Windsor’s feathers all over the chicken yard, one of the babies torn to bits in the henhouse, and Cappy missing. Sean grabbed the .22 and managed a shot at the raccoon that was still gnawing on Windsor at the back of the chicken yard. He missed the shot and the chicken-thief got away. It’s devastating each time we lose a bird. We try to take care of them, but there’s not much we can do when a coon has learned to go into the henhouse in daylight. Later that night, after we cleaned up the mess and went to bed, we heard clucking and squawking out the window, a repeat of Saturday. We ran out and found a bedraggled looking Cappy, tailfeatherless, sitting on the ground by the back door. We tucked him in and went back to bed.

He was gone last night when we get home, and every day we assume he’s not coming back, but so far he’s proven resilient. He looks ridiculous, strutting around and naked in patches where critters have been at him, and this morning he was soaked to the skin to boot. I wanted to laugh: “The emperor has no clothes!”

Cappy may not be pretty, but he’s tough, which I guess is what counts if you’re a country chicken.

We’re on the lookout for new hens. It’s down to Cappy, Freckles, and the two remaining chicks, who I believe are boys. Remember when we were getting a half-dozen eggs a day? Those days are long gone, no thanks to Chunky and Co.

Portrait of the farmer with lettuce

Posted on May 24, 2014 by Keely

I have missed the pace of summer. When the weather is like this, I go outside in bursts to do chores, swimming through a bathtub of hot and humid air, wading through a sea of glittering, waist high grass, watching for snakes. When I walk through the door, the world is bright and hot and loud and flashing like the Vegas strip, but clean: bluebirds scudding from tree to wire to bending weed, the sprinkler tiktiktikking, flowers thick and logy with perfumed dew, Cappy pompously hollering at everything that makes a sound, grass so green and sparkling that it hurts to look at it, pigs chatting and slapping themselves down in the mud. My skin is instantly slippery with sweat and the dirt turns to mud on my arms and legs. When I come in, I rinse. Sometimes I rinse in the shower three times a day, just to get the salt and grass off and ease mosquito bites. It keeps my skin from itching right off my body. In the house it’s cool and dark and quiet except for the ceiling fan tapping out a slow count to mark the time, which wouldn’t seem to pass at all, otherwise.

you might think I’m vain
so I beg your pardon
but selfies with lettuce should be a thing
because I look my best in the garden

My New Hat

Posted on May 22, 2014 by Keely

Last night I got into bed, all ready to have an early night. Sean was just about to climb in with me, but he heard something out front.

“Chunky’s on the porch. I’m going for it”
“If you get him, what are you gonna do with him?”
“he’ll be too blown apart. I’ll just throw him away. It’d be a different story if we could get any .22 bullets.”

From bed, I heard that shotgun noise (ch-chk), then a while later, BOOM. Sean came back inside.

“It was a clean kill. I kinda feel like I should do something with it”
“But you said —”
“I’d feel bad”
“okay. Let me get dressed”

five minutes later I was kneeling on a tarp in the middle of my kitchen floor, helping Sean process a raccoon. The entry wound was small, just the size of a quarter. The sternum was shattered and the lungs were full of shot. Chunky didn’t suffer, and most of the meat and fur was in good condition.

I’ll be honest. Sean and I are amateurs when it comes to this stuff. I’m sure any of my students could have gutted and skinned this thing faster than we did, but we’re learning, and at least we have the gumption to try.

Sean froze the head separately for me. When I get home tonight, I’m going to thaw out the hide and scrape it, then wash it and tack it to a board to dry. When it’s dry, I’ll try my hand at brain-tanning. If all goes well, I’m going to try to make Chunky into a hat. We messed up the tail a little, but it’s a first try, and skinning a tail isn’t easy. The head skinned out nicely though.

Raccoon is edible, though my students don’t recommend eating it in the summer. I need to do more homework on that subject before I make a decision. Right now, I don’t know whether we’ll eat it. If we don’t, it’ll go to the chickens, circle-of-life-style. We don’t kill for sport, but to control pests, and we try to make sure that every part is used somehow. We even saved the Arkansas toothpick.

Howdy Farmer

Posted on May 20, 2014 by Keely

I got crafty this weekend! I made the new seat for this old chair out of my old overalls and a worn out pair of Sean’s work khakis. I made the potholder out of an old t-shirt using the bottom of an old lampshade for a loom. Making beautiful and/or useful things out of trash for free leaves me feeling like a giddy rockstar.

We’re expecting a couple of tobacco plants and some heirloom tomato and pepper starts to arrive in the mail sometime soon. It’s expensive to order the plants, but we didn’t have success with the greenhouse this year, and we could use the head start that healthy plants will give us. Sean has been working overtime to till up enough garden for the summer. Yesterday we popped in a set of tomatoes and a set of peppers, and the garden is already half-again as big as it was last year, without our having planted corn. We’re swimming in lettuce, though our peas have some kind of fungus and aren’t producing like they should. The summer garden will be a handful, but I think, with my trusty partner by my side, I’ll do better than I did last year at keeping it from getting overrun.

It seems our garden has laid a golden egg: I looked it up, and the internet says that this guy and his babies are Mostly Harmless, but there are holes in our sweet potatoes, so I have my doubts. He is pretty cool looking, though. In other insect news, those horrible blackflies that come through window screens and bite like mosquitos are back. We haven’t figured out how to keep them out, so we’ll just have to live with the agony until we can create some kind of ingenious solution.

The chickens have been troubled this week. It seems that someone has started eating eggs, which we have to put a stop to somehow. I know it’s because we don’t collect eggs early or frequently enough, but collecting eggs is a real challenge on our schedules, especially since Cappy turned vicious. We gave Spot away this weekend, in hopes that Cappy would chill out. Chunky and his family are back, and though they can’t get onto the back porch because of the foster kitties, they’re wreaking havoc in the chicken yard. We didn’t realize it until today, when we heard the chickens squalling from down in the garden where we were doing some weeding. Sean sprinted up the hill, and by the time I’d caught him he’d already chased two raccoons out of the henhouse. We lost all three of our sexlinks this week, after having had months with no attrition, and it looks like Chunky’s to blame. Sean’s ready to blow the whole Chunky clan away.

The pigs are growing a couple of pounds a day, and they need it! Our barbeque is next Saturday, and we’re expecting more guests than last year. We bought these pigs at a smaller size than last spring’s, and they’ve had less time to grow. We’re expecting them to weigh in at around 110 pounds, whereas Big-un was a hefty 140 by Memorial Day. We won’t have as much pulled pork, but I had to bag and freeze about two thirds of what we had last year, so there should be enough to feed everyone and then some, and Sean’s planning to smoke one of our turkeys to make doubly sure.

Sean and Sizzie mugging for the camera.

Madhouse

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Keely

School has been a madhouse lately. Baseball and softball regionals were in Palestine starting on Friday and running through today. My ninth grade students were preparing for their big state test, and I had to kick up a fuss to keep them from getting pulled out of class to work on the field. Teachers were assigned to work at the ballgames during school hours, which left the kids feeling, fairly, that they were kept in school for no good reason.

P was playing with sketchup in my classroom during my prep on Friday while everything was crazy because of regionals. He made this awesome tractor!

I’m cautiously optimistic about the Algebra test. I had been feeling really discouraged after my mock EOC returned disappointing results, but I’ve remediated a lot since then, and I think that, though the percent of students who score proficient might be lower, I’ll have more of my students score advanced. It starts tomorrow. The main obstacle keeping my students from blowing it out of the park is morale, so I plan to write them individualized encouragement cards tonight. I already hung some posters.
I wasn’t this concerned about scores last year, and I haven’t been thinking about them this year until recently. I guess I’m afraid that if my students don’t top the charts again I’ll lose any leverage I may have with the district. On the other hand, my “leverage” hasn’t earned me any favors this year: I first submitted a request for a new projector bulb last May, and when Sean came to observe my class last week he was surprised to find that I haven’t been exaggerating about teaching in the dark all year. On top of that, I found out today that the 8th grade Algebra class I wanted to create next year has been nixed. I’m pretty crushed. I had hoped to leave my mark on the district by kickstarting a group of students who could realistically pass an AP test, but, apparently, 8th grade Algebra would make our scores look bad. There are a lot of things wrong with this rationale, but let me just acknowledge the obvious (scores are more important than educating kids!? WTF?!) and ask the burning question HOW ON EARTH COULD THIS MAKE US LOOK BAD? Our scores for next year are going to be incomprehensible anyway, since we’re switching to common core, so this is a great opportunity to try something new. I’m hoping to have a chat with the Great Naysayer sometime soon to have my concerns heard. I am convinced that I will not be able to make a difference with the GN, since he’s the one who laid down the No Fieldtrips mandate (because they take away from learning time, apparently in contrast to baseball pullouts), approved the purchase of classroom printers but won’t approve ink, referred to sanctioned student murals as “graffiti”, and attacked a colleague’s personal values during a conversation in his office about a school-related conflict. I like my job and I love my kids, but I need to stop being compliant when I feel that people, myself included, are being abused. If this guy makes my life a nightmare, I’ll just take my mad math teacher skillz elsewhere and bite my thumb on the way out the door.

This weekend was rad. We gardened and gardened and gardened.

There was all this lettuce

Sean made a glorious Sunday brunch. Everything was home grown: a fried egg on salad, English peas sautéed in buttah, and pork sausage.

Sean made a glorious Sunday brunch. Everything was home grown: a fried egg on salad, English peas sautéed in buttah, and Pinkie’s pork sausage.

On Saturday, we went to Palestine to help the Spanish Club with their bake sale. I’m planning to accompany them on their trip to Costa Rica next summer, so I like to help out when I can. Here’s a link to the gofundme page if you’re interested in what the kids are up to. If you want to make a donation, do so here so that 100% of your donation goes to the trip. Gofundme takes a cut.

The Spanish Club couldn’t set up at the baseball field, which was a bummer, but they parked themselves at an intersection nearby and did some business. It was hot and sunny, but the kids are always hilarious and people were generous with us. Sean, Roma and I walked down to the field and watched a very little bit of the boys’ game, but missed the girls’ game entirely. As we were walking back to the bake sale, Roma and I and two of our friends stepped right over a baby copperhead without seeing it. What good is a dog that’s oblivious to snakes? Sean had his foot poised over it when he spotted the little bugger and launched himself balletically into the stratosphere, wailing “Weeeaaaah! Snaaake! Snaaaaaaake!” Sean doesn’t care for snakes.

We had dinner in town (mmmm fried pickles) with Mallory and went to the square for Arts in The Park on Saturday night. We sat on the grass listening to the band, visited with friends we don’t see often and shared a lonely waltz.

Easily the best part of the weekend was visiting our friends Butch and Linda on Sunday evening. Butch helped us slaughter our barbeque hog last spring; he’s an expert on all things critter. Linda is the lady behind Arts in the Park. We chatted for a couple of hours and made plans to get together for dinner and a tour of their farm sometime soon. I can’t wait! One of our summer goals is to spend more time with our neighbors.