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The Livestock
It is Summer
June 7, ‘08
Out backyard is huge, and can be roughly divided into quarters. Facing outward to the back are the right and left close and back quarters. The close left is the garage and huge tree, under which is Chateau de Poulle. Close right is lawn, back left is garden and back right wilds.
I wish I had a photo of the back yard before Suzanne cleared it of blackberry bushes. Those pernicious, nefarious plants had overwhelmed everything, the back of the yard some six to eight feet deep, maybe six feet tall. It is not like we need them for the berries—the whole county is swarming with them. Suzanne collected enough off our property to make jam sufficient in quantity to last until now. The sides of the roads are chocked with the bushes.
So she has dug out huge swaths of the yard of black berries. Also, she has turned over an entire quarter. In the photo on the right there is it the left half, where you can see yellow straw on the ground. Below that is the middle back of the yard. She’s put in some raised garden beds. We’ve planted stuff we eat: corn, winter melons (several), beans, peas, 4 kinds of lettuce and strawberries. It’s all growing.
It is still often chilly compared to the Bay Area. One day when we were talking about seasons I said it didn’t feel like summer.
“We’re eating out of our garden, Greg. It’s summer.”
Pearl and Marilyn
Suzanne has been wanting some chickens ever since we moved up here. Now it’s reality. We have joined into the rural nature of this place at last.
First, for her birthday, she wanted to have a coop-raising party. Alisha and Brian, Jason, Suzanne and I all got together. We used almost entirely scraps from the work Brian has been doing on their new house. Brian did all the measuring and cutting, Alisha pretty much hogged the nail gun once she got over being afraid of it, and Jason and Suzanne used hammers, wire cutters and the staple gun. I supervised.
Jason and I got artistic and painted the exterior. Nice, eh? So there is Chicken Chateau. Or maybe Castillo Pollo. Since it’s a castle either way, it is obvious that this gorgeous coop is the keep.
Suzanne put up the exterior fence—since the coop is the keep, we call this the bailey (the walled-in section around a castle). The back part of the enclosure is our neighbor’s picket-like fence.
Then she ordered a pair of chickens. They are wyandotes, a breed used for both meat and eggs, and hardy, used to the cold. Their names are Pearl and Marilyn.
I picked them up and put them into their new castle. When Suzanne got home from work we went to look at them and one was gone! Predators already? Nope, it was just perched in our neighbor’s tree. We chased I around—quite amusing, really. We saw that it slipped through the slats in the neighbor’s fence. I stapled it with chicken wire the next day to avoid a repeat of that performance.
They lay 1 egg per day each, pretty much regularly. I don’t know what it is costing to feed them, but it’s probably cheaper than buying eggs. And they are fresh. I’m glad I can eat them now!
Everyone loves the eggs. The chickens are calming to watch. So we are going to get a couple more, in about a month. The breeder sometimes has unusual types too, which we hope to get. As long as they are hardy and lay eggs. We want working animals!
We will also get a pair of ducks soon. The ducks are better at eating slugs and snails, of which there is no shortage here.