Meet the flock

 We got chickens this year. It's been something I've wanted for well over a decade now, but my husband was adamant that we'd never get chickens. Never never never. Thankfully, he loves me enough that he finally relented. And what do you know, he's often the one out there talking to the birds and holding his favorite!

Because I had so much time to dream about chickens, it also gave me plenty of time to decide what breeds of birds I wanted. I had three main criteria. First, that they be gentle and good with people, because we have kids. Second, they had to be good egg layers. And third, I wanted at least one or two birds that laid pretty eggs. For the kids, and because it's just fun. The breeds I eventually settled on are Plymouth Rock, Black Australorp, and Easter Egger. 

I have heard many, many horror stories of people ordering chicks through the mail only to get a package full of (or at least half full of) dead baby chickens. Awful. When the "no" turned into a "yes" this spring, I looked for a local-ish farm that sells chicks and found one in Fall City, about a 45-60 minute drive away. To make it even more fun, we didn't tell our kids what we had decided. (This is how we've gotten our last two dogs as well, so I suspect they'll catch onto this pattern pretty soon.) The day we went was a school day for our older kid, but our younger one came with us, knowing we were doing something that would be fun at some point, after the loooooong and boring drive.

I wish I had a picture of her face when we arrived at the farm and she saw all the birds. They had way more than just chickens, so we got to look at ducks, quail, geese, and many other birds, both adult and baby. 

And then my girl figured out that we were not just looking at chicks, but picking some out to bring home. The joy, people. ALL the joy! The young woman working there helped my daughter pick out chicks, and skillfully redirected her away from one that was "a bit sleepy"--in other words, a baby chick that likely won't live. But my 5-year-old doesn't know that. We got six chicks (two of each breed) and carefully transported them home.

We didn't tell our older kid what we'd done when we picked her up from school. I just told her to go get something out of the master bath, where we were storing the chicks temporarily in a tote. (They need to stay warm, around 90F, and in winter that tiny bathroom was where we figured we could regulate the temperature the best while also giving the chicks some natural light.) My kids spent the rest of the afternoon delightedly watching their new chicks hop around, cooing over all the little noises they made, giggling at them. 100%, the chicks were worth it just for that afternoon alone. 

Mind you, this hasn't been what I'd call easy. Adding more animals/pets to our household has meant a bunch of changes and coordination. Who will feed and care for them if we go camping for a week? What are we going to do about them getting out of their run all the time? (An ongoing problem--mostly because they love our neighbor's yard.) We've had to figure out a bunch of it as we went along, and move or change things around as we realize that something doesn't work. 

There was also all of the work to put up the coop, which first meant tearing down a rotting, awful wood shed one of the previous owners of our house built. Several times while disassembling it I put my foot through the floorboards, it was so rotten. We made a new area for our firewood (for the backyard fire pit) on one side of our shed. Then we had to level and mulch the ground, THEN we could finally build the coop and run. It took a couple of months, and meanwhile the chicks were in a box in our living room.

While at times not ideal it hasn't been the worst project we've undertaken, and it's been both an interesting and a fun journey overall. The learning opportunities for the whole family have been immense. For example, the old saying that "birds of a feather flock together" really holds true. While they all like to be a group, which is what I thought the saying meant, this is especially true of the breeds, who like to pair up together. Birds of a feather, not just a species.

There is also a pecking order, though mild. None of the birds has been bullied particularly. It's just that there is a pretty clear leader, with her breed-companion enforcer. (It's the Barred Rocks.)

We got six birds and there are, generally speaking, six people who live in our household. (My brother-in-law splits his time between us and my in-laws in Alaska, so it's about 50-50 whether he's here or not.) That meant everyone got to name a bird. They are: Cluckinator (Plymouth Rock), Waffles (Plymouth Rock), Sunny (Easter Egger), Hotdog (Easter Egger), Ithacus (Black Australorp), and Rick James (Black Australorp). Any guesses who named each bird?

They are heritage breeds, so while there are breeds that start laying by 18 weeks, these ladies needed some more time. With the falling daylight going into winter it's a bit iffy how many eggs they'll lay this first year. Our fault, we got them late in the spring because it took so long for us to decide that yes, this year is the year. But that's okay, and we're really just stoked to be getting any eggs at all. Right now it's roughly 3 eggs per day, although I suspect one of them might be laying in the neighbor's yard when they go over the fence and we just haven't found the "nest" yet. This has happened before. For a while Cluckinator was coming up on the porch to lay her eggs in a box we'd set out for recycling. Ithacus was escaping the run to lay eggs in a mulch pile, until she got caught out there during a thunder storm. I went out after the worst of the rain had passed and she was just standing there looking distressed. I picked her up to put her in the run and that was when I realized I could understand sad chicken noises. She hasn't laid eggs in the mulch again, and in fact she's happily using an old enclosed cat litter box that I filled with hay and stuffed in the coop, as are the others we know are laying.

We have figured that at 3 eggs per day we likely will not have to buy eggs from the store anymore. Of course we can happily eat more eggs than that (husband and I can go through four eggs at breakfast by ourselves) but that's our minimum. We'll see how that theory holds up.

Building the coop

Yeah, but is it worth the money?

I don't have an answer for this one yet, and I'm not sure if I'll be able to truly answer this until at least year 3. Right now we've had all of the upfront costs with very few of the monetary benefits (in the form of eggs). We had to build the coop, which was not hugely expensive but it wasn't free either. We bought some fencing for the run. We've been feeding them for over 6 months.

I'm a nerd, so I have been tracking the costs. All the coop and run expenses, the feed, all of that. And on the same spreadsheet I've got a section to keep track of the eggs. Last, I have a section to keep track of the average cost of grocery store eggs in my area each month AND the price I would pay for more ethically raised eggs, just for comparison. As I said, I'm a nerd. It's not like we're going to get rid of the chickens, but I still want to know.

We have done our best to keep costs down. Many of the materials for the coop have been sourced from the 75% off bin at the local big box hardware store, and some of it (most of the concrete footers) were actually a Buy Nothing score. The wood chip mulch we put down in the run was from our last Chipdrop, and was free. We feed the chickens scraps from the house (stale bread, leftover rice or plain cooked beans that were pushed to the back and forgotten, apple cores, vegetable peelings and ends, etc.), weeds and fruits scavenged from the neighborhood (dandelion greens, knotweed, fallen apples or plums, invasive blackberries, invasive knotweed, oxalis, and more). They also get a lot of stuff from the garden, like chard and kale, or tomatoes that squirrels half-chewed before abandoning, the ends of beans that I cut off. I've learned that I can't grow my zucchini or cabbages too close to the garden fence because if the chickens get out, they'll stick their heads through the fence and eat those. Several cabbages had the hearts chewed out by the chickens so the rest of the plant was cut out and tossed in the run, to much delighted warbling from the birds. A few zucchinis have had their ends lopped off and the half-eaten part tossed in for the birds as well. The birds got the sunflowers I grew, and they go nuts for the insides of pumpkins/winter squash. The amount of "waste" from the house and garden that goes to the chickens is astonishing, really. We try not to have much, if any, waste, but it happens. So the birds get the bread crusts my little one refuses to eat, or the last sad end of a hotdog bun that wasn't eaten. I've also tossed a handful of oats in our cast iron skillet to soak up the fat from something we cooked, then tossed the whole mess to the chickens for a treat.

Box chicken laying an egg

For the winter I'm growing a bunch of kale, much of which is destined to be given to the chickens as a high vitamin, quality food supplement that they go crazy for. Since many greens are something one either has not enough or too much of, I don't even feel bad. I grow plenty of chard for my family's needs, it's the excess that goes to the chickens. Or the beet greens do, which we don't particularly care for. (They taste soapy to us.) I have a variety of winter lettuce this year that's doing pretty well even after all the hard frosts, but some of the outer leaves have been damaged due to cold and those go to the chickens as well. In this way, the chickens are increasing the efficiency of what I grow, since less of it is going directly to the compost.

Because we share so much food with the chickens we've only had to buy five bags of grain feed for them so far, the last one of which is less than half gone. And I'm looking into more ways to feed them for free, or things that can be grown in and around their run to feed them. I have big plans for how I want to change my yard for next year, and a lot of it is centered around the feature that is the coop and run. Since chickens were understory jungle birds originally, they still enjoy the feeling of being surrounded and covered by trees and shrubs. I'll have even happier birds next year if their area feels more forest-y, and if they have more to forage for themselves.

Secondary benefits

In addition to reducing our household waste and providing eggs, chickens are one of the best ways we have, at our house, to make compost. Their run is made mostly of wood chips (carbon), which is being combined with their poop (high in nitrogen) and the greens or other food scraps they don't totally finish eating (nitrogen). Add water from the rain and the stirring action of their scratching, and the run is one large compost pile. It's breaking down remarkably fast and by spring any compost I need will likely be sourced from the run, shoveled out and sifted. We have wood chips in reserve so occasionally I throw more into the run, covering up the weeds they didn't care to eat and throwing on more carbon to keep everything in balance. It also gives the chickens a treat in the form of worms and insects to search for and eat. I don't even have to spread it out, just dump in a few buckets of mulch for them to scratch through. Happy birds.

Not having to buy compost will help make my garden even more impactful in terms of money saved, even when factoring in the costs of chicken feed, and it will help boost the output of my garden as well. From my perspective it's a massive win-win. I know there are "veganic" gardeners who manage to do it all without domesticated animals and more power to them, but this is what is working best for us.

Sorry for the poor food photography
but I've never seen such orange
scrambled eggs before.

In even less tangible benefits, the chickens are just fun. The whole family has been having fun watching them, laughing about their antics. Ooh-ing and ahh-ing over each egg, the collection of which simply hasn't gotten old yet and maybe never will. When my brother and niece were recently visiting my niece had a ball looking in the coop for eggs, and my brother joked about getting chickens. (That's how it starts....) 

They have been, at times, a lot of work. We're learning how to do this and that will always be work. For a while they were roosting on the roof of the coop and, scared that the racoons that live nearby would eat them, we had to pull them off the roof each night and shove them in the coop before closing it up. That problem was only fixed by making the roof inaccessible to them with fencing, and has reduced quite a bit of the work. If we can keep them in the run that will reduce the work to benefit ratio down to the point that the work of the chickens is, for us, negligible. So far it's been roughly 50-50, with me definitely weighing the "fun" portion of that heavier. It's hard not to when my kids have spent whole afternoons gleefully watching chicks. 

Last spring I took them to my older daughter's class for show and tell, and it was amazing. It's a very poor urban school, a Title 1 school that offers free breakfast and lunch to all kids because the poverty rate is so high. When I was standing off to the side waiting to introduce the chicks (I only brought 3), the tote started peeping and the little boy closest to me looked over with the most amazed, delighted expression to ask, "Is that the chickens?" I said yes and he had the BIGGEST grin on his face. I'm not sure I'll ever forget that moment. Again, 100% worthwhile just to introduce some city kids to livestock for the first time ever, in many cases.

Drawbacks

Leader of the flock, Clucks

I already talked about the work and the learning curve we're experiencing. The other big drawback so far has been rats. I'm not certain this is entirely a chicken problem, since I've seen evidence of rats in our yard for several years. We even saw one scurrying off our porch in broad daylight several years ago, after it had chewed a hole in a bag of dog food. This also seems to be a particularly rat infested year. I've seen multiple complaints on local gardening pages from people saying they've never had rat problems before this year, and two different families have complained to me about the rats that started nesting in their attic. As if all that wasn't enough, port towns are rather known for having rat problems due to the nature of shipping. So, it's not just us. 

However it is a known thing that having chickens will attract rats and mice. They're drawn to the easy food. While I'm doing what I can to minimize that, like keeping the chicken feed in a rat-proof metal bin and keeping the feeder inside the coop, those bold MFers have been seen going in and out of the coop to steal feed.

For the first time ever I've felt the need for rat traps. I bait it with a bit of chicken feed and leave it just at the entrance to their burrows. It's been, sadly, highly successful. If I was willing to go that route I could feed them to the chickens, who have eaten rat corpses a few times when they escaped. (Disposing of just the head, caught in the trap, was both morbid and distressing.) But I'm too concerned about disease to want to make that a common practice. We put them in the same compost digester that we put dog poop in (with layers of mulch), because that compost will never be used in the garden and won't be used at all for a long time.

Dogs and Chickens

We were a bit concerned about how the dogs and chickens would take to each other. Not so much about our old man dog, who we frequently joke doesn't count as a dog anyway, but the puppy. She was sooooo excited for the chickens, guys, just soooooo excited!!!! When they were chicks we had to keep her from leaping into their box a few times. But as they've gotten bigger she's become much more respectful. My brothers' dogs also respect the chickens. My younger brother has a bird dog who just wanted to love the chickens please until the first time she got pecked on the snout. Now she gives the birds a wide berth, though she still watches them interestedly. She just doesn't try to get at them.

The only dog that has been a problem, honestly, is my in-laws' tiny spaniel. I doubt she could to much to the chickens but she certainly does agitate them. She doesn't seem to be wary of them at all. It makes the birds nervous. Mostly I think she's just set off by the rats, whom she's out to eliminate (yes please!), but the chickens aren't smart enough to know that.

This is not to say that the young dogs (mine, my older brother's, and my younger brother's) don't like to play with the chickens. All of them very much enjoy pouncing at the fence when the chickens are close to it, just to make the birds flutter and cluck. But it's good-natured and the chickens seem to know that because they don't otherwise act scared of the dogs. Nor do the dogs actually chase the chickens most of the time, leaving the birds alone when they escape the run. 

Our puppy, hilariously, seems to enjoy herding the chickens and has collected them up on our porch a number of times, acting very proud despite the fact that I've told her I really don't want porch chickens.

So...worth it?

Yes, it really has been. If you have the space and time, I cannot recommend it enough. There's a reason the crazy chicken lady comes close after the crazy cat lady, although I do promise not to change my decor over to chicken stuff. But they've been a great addition to our lives and I'm happy we tried this. I love going out in the evenings to close up the coop, hearing their soft coos and clucks as they sleep. I love hearing an egg song outside and knowing that one of them is strutting because she just laid an egg. And I really love the eggs.

The Phoenix

 "This awful catastrophe is not the end but the beginning." - St. Augustine

It has been a long time since I've felt like writing much. Well, that's not true. Everything I write has seemed trite and insubstantial. What can I say that is meaningful in the face of what the world around us all has become? My words won't stop school shootings, reverse climate change, fix our dysfunctional political and justice system. What can I say in the face of such large, seemingly intractable problems?

I also haven't wanted to write much since my mom died. Watching someone die, being there for the death vigil, is a profoundly transformative experience, and even though it's been almost two years I'm still processing it. And it's really hard to talk about because how do you describe what it's like to help usher your parent to the end of their existence? There were many wonderful moments, actually, with my brothers and a cousin, who lives nearby and was able to join us for parts of the 3-day vigil. There were also some deeply moving moments while I waited for the family to assemble, when it was just me and my mom. I read out loud to her, just in case any part of her was still there and able to take comfort from my voice. I held her hand when I could. I learned that, even though I'd been reassuring her we would be fine without her and that she could let go, a big part of me would never be okay again. 

Columbine amid strawberries,
bluebells, tulips, and a grape trellis.

I have been forced into learning true acceptance, particularly of the fact that I will never have answers to many questions that I never thought to ask before it became too late.

I had to forgive, all at once, the ways in which we were imperfect together and to each other. She was not a perfect mom and I am a far from perfect daughter. I apologized to her, mostly for coming too late to an understanding of all the sacrifices she made for us, for me, and the choices she made. It wasn't until becoming a mother myself that I began to really understand my mom, which happened when we were already losing her to Alzheimer's.

I've spent a lot of time over the last two years meditating on death and life, and what is meaningful. One of the ways I think the best is while working in my garden. It's an incredible activity to do while thinking of death, because gardening is an inherently life giving, sustaining, and building activity. It's an act of hope. And I really need those things right now. In the face of all the horrible things I can't control, I can at least make my insignificant patch of earth better. Better for every creature that lives on and around this property, right down to the soil microbes.

All those white things are blueberry flowers.

Last summer's garden was awful. After about three years of only taking from the garden, giving not much back, the soil was pretty spent. I frantically searched for answers on how to make it better and landed on going back to basics: feed the soil. I mulched heavily, and went to convoluted lengths not to use straight tap water on the garden. (It might have helped that my kids broke our big sprinkler that covered the whole garden.) When we ran out of rain water I filled barrels with tap water to let it sit for a few days and get most of the chemicals out of it before putting it on the garden. It did seem to help, and we're working on putting in even more rain water storage.

I also did something that I considered pretty absurd before--I made my own "fertilizer" or weed tea. Grass clippings, dandelion leaves, worm poop from the vermicompost system, egg shells, even shrimp shells when we had some, all went into a bucket with rain water to sit and ferment. I started adding that to the garden and 

and

it worked. I honestly didn't expect it to, but it really did. Just a small amount, about a cup in a 2-gallon watering can, helped struggling plants. Tomatoes stopped getting blossom end rot, and I was able to actually get a decent harvest. Squashes that were almost dead burst back to life and produced. Everywhere I used this magical, horribly smelly weed "tea" life flooded back to the garden. I fed the soil and the soil started feeding us again. I made more weed tea over the winter, and have been watering all my new crops in with it to start them off in the right way. Once again it does appear to be working its magic.

Overview of the main garden.
Looks very mulchy and brown
but underneath is rich,
dark soil.

I'm also seeing even more the benefits of the work I did last year with mulches. At the end of spring I laid down a fair amount of homemade compost, but only on a few rows because that's all I had. Some of the best I saved for seed starting. My garlic/tomato/sunflower row, at the back, got some of the worst, least finished compost. It is honestly mostly unfinished woodchip mulch. I was hoping that, since there was so much time between that mulching (Jan/Feb) and the planting of tomatoes (May) it would break down some more, but it looked like nothing more than a bed of large wood chips when I went to plant. But the garlic is doing well so I crossed my fingers. On tomato planting day I dug down a couple of inches and marveled at how dark, rich, and friable the soil there suddenly was. The wood mulch was all on top, protecting the soil underneath. The mulches from last year are almost entirely broken down into beautiful soil, with a good layer of fresh mulch on top now to protect it. Even after almost a week of hot, sunny days and no rain, the soil under the mulch is beautifully damp.

The homemade compost was just what was in our round yard waste bin, which is not a hot compost system. This means that it had a ton of weed seeds waiting to germinate. But, it also meant that the lettuce seeds I tried to save and accidentally threw in there were perfectly viable. So were a few chard seeds that went through. I have volunteer lettuce popping up among my tomatoes, squashes, peppers, and brassicas. It's an old adage that you shouldn't interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake. Well, in the garden I don't believe in interrupting food plants that want to grow. Even if they're not where I wanted them to be, who am I to argue with them about where they should grow? If they're easy to separate then I will happily put them where they're "meant" to be, but otherwise they can grow in their chosen place. This especially works with lettuce,

Sugar pie pumpkin with
volunteer lettuce understory.

which is a short-lived crop in summer so it won't take too much root space or nutrients from its companions. (And hopefully this time I'll be able to actually save the seed instead of accidentally dumping it in the compost.) 

I start most of my plants in old plastic tubs and containers that I've saved--from small yogurt cups to large Costco-sized sour cream containers for the squashes. Tomatoes are mostly in papery milk jugs with the tops cut off, because tomatoes have roots that grow deep but not particularly wide. There was plenty of space on top for the accidental lettuce seeds, but also to purposefully double-plant with companion herbs or flowers for some crops. Last year I accidentally dropped a couple of carrot seeds in with some tomatoes and they not only germinated but those were the two best carrots I grew all summer. This year I companion planted carrots with tomatoes in a more purposeful way. It's not a ton of carrots, I have more in a separate row, but since there's the space and it's worked well before, why not? Basil (Genovese, tulsi, and Thai) were companion planted with other tomatoes and with peppers. One pepper got a nasturtium, which is growing beautifully and will help draw pollinators to the garden when it starts to bloom. Not all crops came up in every container--a few squashes never germinated for example--so it's nice to have not wasted the soil/compost and my time/effort. That zucchini might not have come up in that pot but there are some beautiful lettuces and a basil there instead, so it wasn't at all a loss.

Leaf on the right is severely slug damaged,
leaf on the left is after I started
picking slugs out of the garden.

Feeding the soil has helped in many ways, but it can't help with all the pests. Slugs have been absolutely wrecking my garden, having mowed down my first two successions of brassicas in their entirety. I've been going out pretty much every evening and every early morning to pick slugs off my crops and drop them into a jar of soapy water to drown. My goal is, in fact, total slug eradication. In my garden. They're welcome to live elsewhere. Of course this will never happen, and every day I find dozens more slugs. But I've also got brassicas and peas that will actually live to produce food, so I'm content with my efforts.

The one crop that I won't put in the garden anymore is my Napa cabbage. I've started so. many. of them over the past couple of years and have yet to harvest a single one because of the damn slugs. Apparently Napa cabbage is like slug heroin, and even a larger plant will get eaten to death in one night. This year I'm growing it in food safe buckets in the

Napa cabbage in the greenhouse

 greenhouse. I get the buckets by asking for old frosting buckets from the grocery store bakeries when I'm there. (These are also what I'm making my weed "tea" in.)

The next major change we had to do was to put a fence around my garden. Between us and my siblings we've had four puppies regularly running around the yard over the last three years, and for not insignificant stretches (weeks) we've had FIVE DOGS in our house due to dogsitting for friends and family. Yelling at dogs to get out of the damn garden! and chasing after them was clearly not working, nor was having me plant something and then cry because the dogs ran through again and dug it all up. That's why I didn't have any kind of a winter garden recently, because it got run over and dug up until I gave up. So, a fence was a necessity. My wonderful brother made it for me out of materials we already had. I resisted a fence for a long time because I worried about the shade it would cast, but now I've fully embraced it as the opportunity it is. I can grow vertically, and use its support for tall things like my sunflowers. My peas, sugar pie pumpkins (with extra support), zucchini, beans, and acorn squash (with

Troublemakers!

support) can all grow up the fence, instead of requiring complicated or secondary trellising. I'm also adding more flowers to the vegetable garden this year, instead of keeping them segregated, and nasturtiums will grow beautifully up the fence. My brother put a decorative wooden trellis over the gate, and I've got a nasturtium planted there. Hopefully by late summer it will all be as beautiful as it is productive.

The final big change this year is that we got chickens. For so, so many reasons, not least of which was my younger daughter asking when we could go back to visit my aunt in Maine because "I want to feed the chickens again". The kids didn't know we were getting chickens until the day it happened, and it's made them so happy. They have spent hours staring into the box where the chicks are being kept until we get the coop set up. They'll pop up at random times and declare, "I'm going to go check on the chickens!" and run over there. We haven't officially named the chicks yet--we were going to wait until they get their adult feathers, in part because we didn't want one of them to die and then have to deal with a child whose baby chick that they named had died. Thankfully no chicks have died, and unofficially the kids have claimed the two Easter Eggers as theirs and named them. (Hot Dog and Sunny.) As we have six chicks and six people in the house (with my brother and brother-in-law), we each get to name one.

They're so cute!

The chickens, in addition to weed control and eggs, will be an excellent source of compost. They'll feed the humans and the soil, and the good soil will feed us humans even more. I'm very excited for all of it. Wondering where to put the chicken shit is, in this case, a very good problem to have.

My garden is imperfect, as all gardens are. The mint and bindweed have found their way back in and despite thoroughly going through to dig out mint in the worst rows, it's everywhere. But that's okay. The corn is starting to pop up between the mint anyway, so it's going to be fine.

I'm still working my way out of the soil deficit I built for myself but it's rewarding to see my hard work paying off, and to know that I'm helping to create even more life around me. After all my meditations on death, I've come to the conclusion that my purpose, at any rate, is to foster as much life as I can, no matter how tiny that life may be. I think that's a pretty good purpose, and one my parents would be very proud of.