7 posts tagged “chickens”

I think I might be running an industrial egg farm. It hasn't been going on for long, but who knows when it will end?

Here are the circumstances that led to my conversion from cuddly and compassionate, quasi-organic chicken keeper to steely-eyed factory-egg producer. A couple of weeks ago, my nine hens stopped laying. They had plenty of good excuses:

The weather turned extra-cold extra-early.

These are the darkest, cloudiest, shortest days of the year, and chickens need daylight to lay. (Right, I don't feel like doing much on cloudy days either.)

They are not as young as they used to be. (Neither am I.)

Some of them are molting. This is a natural process whereby birds lose their feathers and replace them with new ones. A molting hen does not lay. (Having experienced a number of “molts” in my own life, I can empathize.)

Chilly Chicken

My empathy notwithstanding, I needed eggs, and I wasn't getting any. Meanwhile, the chickens were consuming extra-large rations of expensive laying pellets along with smashed apples, old pumpkins and other tidbits.

There is a magic bullet for getting hens to lay in winter: turning on the lights in the henhouse. Battery hens are kept under lights round the clock, year round. And as a result of this unnatural regime, by their second year they are spent, and slaughtered. I had read plenty of lyrical exhortations to let hens follow the rhythms of nature, wax and wane with the seasons, and so on. If there is one who is fervent about following the rhythms of nature, it's me. Let the hens sleep the winter away, I used to think, let me not interfere with the hibernation that the season imposes, to a greater or lesser degree, on all of us.

On the other hand, I don't keep my chickens as pets, not quite. I have chickens because I want my own source of protein, and manure for the garden. Their affectionate nature and quirky personality notwithstanding, it makes no sense to feed nine hens and a rooster all winter if we're not getting eggs. I had tried all the low-key methods I knew to keep them comfortable. I closed their door at sundown. I employed the “deep litter” bedding method, which means that rather than cleaning out the coop periodically, I keep adding hay and wood shavings. This covers up the droppings and keeps the smells away. Most importantly, as the stuff begins to compost, it generates a certain amount of heat. I also plugged in a heated waterer so they would have access to liquid (as opposed to a chunk of ice) around the clock.

But that was not enough to keep them laying. So I capitulated and decided to go the industrial farming way. I installed an energy-saving bulb and turned it on for a couple of hours in the evening, confident that it would return my hens to reasonable laying rates.

To my surprise, it didn't. I was still having eggless days. One frozen evening, after turning on the lights I stuck around to watch the chickens. There was water in the water bowl, plenty of laying mash in the feeder, freshly smashed apples all over the floor. What more could they want? And then it hit me—these chickens were cold. They stood about with their shoulders hunched and one leg hidden in their feathers. They pecked around half-heartedly at the food, but soon returned to their hunched positions, like wind-blown pedestrians waiting for a bus.

Now what is the nicest thing someone who loves you can do when you're chilled to the bone? Offer you something hot to drink, that's what! Hot cocoa, hot chicken soup (forsooth!), hot coffee, hot tea with milk or a little brandy....

I ran inside and heated a quart of water in the microwave. I shook a bunch of powdered milk into a bowl, added some long-forgotten Farina for good measure, and when the water was good and hot mixed it all together and took it out to the coop. I poured the steaming mixture into one of the chickens' rubber dishes, threw in some laying mash, and presented it.

They clustered round like filings around a magnet. The boss hen tried it first, shook her beak, dipped it again and drank deeply. Her friends followed suit, and so did the rooster Charlemagne. By lights-out the bowl was empty.

Next morning, there were two lovely brown eggs in the nest.

And that's how I've been getting my two eggs a day every since. Ag-center types will say that it's the extra protein that does the trick, or the extra warmth. Perhaps. But I think that my hens realize that they've been listened to and understood, and they are rewarding me in the only way they know.

Animals, and plants too, have a way of responding to kind intentions. If you have experienced this (or the opposite!) I'd like to hear from you.

Good friends invited us to celebrate Thanksgiving with them. Our contribution, aside from our irrepressible charm, was limited to a few bottles of wine. It was my easiest Thanksgiving ever, and one of the best.

But that was yesterday. Today is another story.

Vermont's stick season (no leaves on the trees, no snow on the ground, just sticks everywhere) is in full swing. The clouds hover above the treetops, and the brightest color outside the window is the dull yellow of the dead grass.

It's stick season in my soul as well. No spark, no oomph, just existential dread clogging up my vitals. So oomphless am I, in fact, that after asking my husband's permission (I'll explain later) I decided to spend the day in my pajamas, in and around the bed.

Now spending the day in pajamas when I don't have a fever symbolizes a major abdication for me, second only to watching TV in the daytime. Spend a day in pajamas and before you know it, you've stopped washing your hair, then your teeth fall out (because you've also stopped brushing your teeth), then you stop going out (after all, you're in your pajamas) and instead you start keeping cats, lots of them, in the house and you stop changing the litter....

You can see why I had to ask my husband's permission before setting foot on that slippery slope. Since the man is utterly lacking in tragic imagination, he willingly gave me his blessing—heck, he even smiled. And later, when I asked, he took the dogs out into the field and threw balls for them to tire them out. I'm married to an enabler!

So here I sit, in bed, in my pajamas (hair and teeth brushed, however—noblesse oblige) trying to salvage the day in the only way I know: writing.

When it gets dark, I'll go downstairs and make a fire in the stove. Then, still in my pajamas, I'll walk through the attached garage to the attached chicken coop, say a few words to the chickens, and close them in for the night.

November 23, 2008

This fall, one of the strategies I invented against the economic crisis was to scavenge pumpkins. The week after Halloween, people were as glad to get rid of them as my chickens were to eat them. Last week, however, when everything froze up, I noticed that it was taking the chickens a lot longer to eat their pumpkin. It must have hurt their beaks to bang them over and over into that block of orange ice.

Still, when a friend offered her leftover pumpkins, I could not turn them down. They were beautiful pumpkins, bright orange, and not a mark on them. And they were frozen solid. Driving home, I considered the situation. If I put the frozen pumpkins in the chicken house, the hens wouldn't touch them. Then a thaw would come, the pumpkins would get squishy, and the chickens might eat one or two before everything froze again, or the pumpkins rotted. A shameful waste of pumpkins, either way.

I took the five pumpkins in the house and put them on the kitchen counter to defrost overnight. What would I find in the morning? Would the pumpkins deliquesce like Dali watches? Would they explode and spatter everything with juice and seeds?

Next morning the pumpkins still sat, orange and intact, on my blue counter. They were not rotten or moldy or icky in anyway--just a bit soft. No way was I going to throw them on the compost. They were food, filled with vitamins and calories, and somebody—the chickens or the dogs—would benefit from them. But I would have to cook them.

I took a deep breath, sharpened my Chinese chopper, and set my big stock pot on the stove. I chopped the five pumpkins--saving the seeds for the chickens--and steamed them (this took a long time). When they were done, I cooled them and strained them and stuffed them into sixteen quart-sized jars, which I wedged into our overflowing freezer.  Then I scrubbed the stock pot in the sink and wiped my brow.

There, I said, that's done! Waste not, want not. That will show AIG and those other malefactors....

But wait. Waste not? How many hours had I spent trying not to waste the five pumpkins? How much of my unique spirit and creative energy had gone into those sixteen jars? “An expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” Shakespeare wrote. He was talking about lust. I am talking about pumpkins. Still, if we're talking economics here, the expense of spirit has definitely got to be accounted for.

November 22, 2008

I knew it was coming. When I found her two days ago, hunched over and pecking listlessly at the wall, I knew her sickness was upon her again, her lower abdomen flabby and distended. When this happened for the first time in August, I feared that scourge of good layers—egg binding.  I soaked her in a warm bath, dried her off, and provided that chicken panacea: warmth and isolation. In just 24 hours she was looking perky and ready to rejoin the flock.

But this time it was different. The temperature has stayed well below freezing for about a week, so there was no way I could bathe her. Still, I put her in a cardboard box with the top open and a heat lamp suspended over it. But it didn't help. Yesterday, when I offered her water, she drank a couple of drops, just to please me. This morning, she didn't drink at all. When I went to close the coop doors for the night, I knew what I would find.

I turned off the heat lamp and carried the box into the feed room, so as not to upset the rest of the chickens.

Rest in peace, red hen. You were a good and faithful layer. We made your big brown eggs into omelettes, gave them to the food bank, fed them to the dogs. Your last, super-sized egg is in our fridge right now. Tomorrow we will take you into the woods, and in the night the red fox will come—but you will not mind this—and carry you to his den. His wife needs to build up her reserves, to last through the winter and make babies in the spring. You will be their Thanksgiving dinner.

November 15, 2008

Left to his own devices, my husband would live in a condo, surrounded by computers and electronic gadgets, and eating TV dinners. Homesteading, going back to the land, living the “simple life” are strictly my obsessions, not his.

He is, however, an extremely accommodating fellow, and over the years has built, mostly out of scraps, a number of objects that have enabled me to live out my fantasies. He has made chicken feeders and chicken roosts and nesting boxes. When I had goats he made me a couple of elaborate milking stands, hay feeders that minimized waste, and a cheese press.

But of all his creations, the one closest to my heart is the latest, the Amazing Apple Smasher.

This was a terrific year for apples in Vermont, and even the wild apple tree in our front field was covered with fruit. The trouble was, the apples were small, hard and bitter. Still, they were apples, so I figured that somebody should eat them. The answer, as always when a questionable food item is under consideration, was the chickens. After all, they adore spent broccoli plants and discarded Halloween pumpkins. Surely they would love those apples.

We picked a great barrel full and carted it to the chicken yard. We threw a little green apple on the ground, where it bounced and rolled like a golf ball. When it came to a stop, Buffy, the boss hen, gave it a peck, but she turned away in disgust when she couldn't make a dent. Not even Charlemagne, our 50-pound rooster, could crack that apple.

“They'll eat it if I break it up for them,” my husband said, hitting the apple with his heel. Sure enough, the apple flew into fragments and the chickens gobbled them up.

“Here, you do it now,” he said, handing me another golf ball. I put it on the ground and stomped, then jumped on it, but I couldn't smash it. All I got was a sore heel.

“This isn't going to work” I said. “I think we should just throw the apples in the compost.”

“Just hang onto them for a while,” my husband said, and went into the basement.

That evening, he handed me two scrap pieces of two-by-four, hinged together at one end.

“What's this?” I said.

“It's an apple smasher. You put an apple between the boards and stomp on the top board, and that smashes it.”

How can any woman turn down such an offering? I didn't think it would work, but to be gracious I carried it to the chicken house, set it on the floor, put an apple in and stomped. Pieces of apple exploded in all directions, with the chickens after them. Then they came back for more.

Now, when then see me with the apple smasher in hand, they gather round expectantly. They love the apples, and I love the stomping. There's something cathartic about the stomp-squish-scatter sequence. And thanks to the apple diet the egg yolks in our eggs are still as bright orange as they were in the summer.

Which goes to show you that you've got to have high tech, if you want to live the simple life.

Apple Smasher and Hen

October 18, 2008

When I first heard of “voluntary simplicity” several years ago, the movement comprised  well-meaning, well-off people who were feeling burdened by their affluence. Their McMansions overflowed with toys, clothing, and appliances. SUVs, station wagons, motor homes, racing bikes and riding mowers spilled out of three-car garages. Every new object brought with it a responsibility (if only to find a place in which to store it) and between work and family duties, these people were too exhausted to enjoy the fruits of their toil. “We don't need all this stuff!” was the battle cry of the time. Occasionally a small voice could be heard murmuring, “and we're hurting the Earth by the way we live.”

That, less than a decade ago, was voluntary simplicity. Apparently we didn't do a good enough job of it, because here we are now, white- and blue-collar, democrat and republican, urban and rural dwellers, cringingly wading into the chilly waters of the new, involuntary simplicity. Foisted upon us by the economic catastrophe, simplicity, willy-nilly, is our future.

Thoreau must be delighted.

Already, signs of change are everywhere. Highway traffic is decreasing, and so are accident rates. The hardware stores around here are sold-out of outdoor clothes lines. My friends and I car-pool to book group and to art openings, and we're all talking about lowered thermostats for the coming winter. Laying hens are in short supply.

Granted, in Vermont these practices don't seem too exotic. Everyone grows a vegetable garden in summer, and in the fall we all play the north-country game of “the first one to fire up the furnace is a chicken.” But this year promises to be different, and battening down the hatches takes on real meaning even in our land-locked state.

I have noticed, however, that for those of us who are not in immediate danger of eviction or hunger, the challenges of the present situation are not without a certain exhilaration. It's hard not to feel excited by the sense of invulnerability that even a small measure of self-sufficiency affords. People are making extra large woodpiles in their yards. I grew winter squashes for the first time, for the chickens to eat when the real cold hits. A friend is experimenting with fermented foods, pickling cucumbers and cabbage to preserve them without need of electricity.

Involuntary simplicity is not without its delights. Witness my simple Saturday. I got up early and went to a nearby village's fabled fall rummage sale, where I bought, for less than two dollars apiece, a number of large wool sweaters that I plan to wear over my regular indoor winter clothes. This, I hope, will enable me to feel comfortable with the thermostat set at 65F, which is our plan for the next six months.

Then my husband and I went down our front field to the wild apple tree that has been loaded with fruit since summer. The apples are small, hard and sour, and we figured that they would make great chicken food. We didn't have to reach up for a single fruit: the ground under the tree was carpeted with apples. In just a few minutes we filled our tub with about sixty pounds of apples, and lugged them to the house.

I put a handful in a pan, covered them in water, and boiled them for a few minutes. They quickly turned soft, and smelled divine. I drained them and carried them to the chicken coop, where they were received quite favorably. I plan to boil the rest of the windfall, bit by bit, and store it in small bags in the freezer, then pop them in the microwave and serve them warm to the chickens on frigid January mornings. I wonder if the dogs too would like them?

At dusk, I picked the last of the broccoli—there was a hard freeze forecast for that night. I steamed it, then sauteed it for supper along with scrambled eggs and some grated cheddar. Soon I will pull up the broccoli plants and take them to the chickens, who will eat every leaf. The kale and chard will continue producing for a while. Then it will be trips to the basement freezer every night before supper.

I find a childish pleasure in all this. It's not unlike going camping and making do with what you have at hand. It's not unlike playing under the table as a kid, saying, “pretend this is our house, and this potato is a loaf of bread....” There are infinite sources of entertainment within the confines of our own yards, if we look closely. The trick to sanity and happiness in this new world is learning to want what we have. If we can manage that, we'll be richer than ever before.

October 8, 2008 

There is a Zen master living in our chicken house, and her name is Buffy. She is big and butter-colored, and as close to spherical in shape as a chicken ever gets. If Zen masters held competitions I would enter Buffy, for she is a champion sitter—or, in poultry parlance, “setter.” When she feels the call to sit (or set), she makes a beeline for the nearest nest, fluffs out her skirts, and turns to stone.

There don't even have to be any eggs in the nest for Buffy to sit, and if there are, they don't have to be fertile. Before the rooster Charlemagne joined our ten hens, Buffy would regularly “go broody” (a term of art meaning “the urge to incubate”) and sit on her celibate sisters' eggs. The fact that for three years not a single egg hatched did not dissuade her. Buffy is into process, and does not attach to outcomes.

Then Charlemagne arrived, and for a while the temptations of the flesh distracted Buffy from her practice. But one night when I went to collect eggs I found Buffy sitting on a nest like a golden Buddha, broody again.

She was sitting on twelve eggs. I calculated that, with any luck, that should yield six cockerels and six pullets. The pullets would reach puberty in the middle of winter—right when the older hens would be taking a break from laying. The cockerels (this is the part I didn't like to think about) would be slaughtered at ten weeks, and we would have tender, home-grown chicken to eat (this is the part I liked to think about).

Quietly I transferred Buffy and the eggs to a nest in an isolated corner of the coop. She was in such a deep trance she hardly noticed the move. I gave her her own little dishes of food and water and left her alone.

But she, and the chicks growing under her, were constantly on my mind, and I went often to check on her. She was always the same--fluffed out, immobile, her eyes open but wearing a fiercely inward, focused look. I never once saw her get up to eat or drink or take a break.

About halfway through Buffy's retreat, I started smelling something awful coming from her corner. I picked her up and saw that there were six broken eggs in the nest. The stench was unspeakable. I ran to the house and coated my upper lip with Vick's (as I'd seen detectives do on TV when they had to deal with a decomposing corpse), put on plastic gloves, and tried my best to clean up the mess without upsetting Buffy or letting the intact eggs get chilled.

Six eggs, I thought, is not too bad. With any luck three of them will be pullets...But days later there was the smell again, and I repeated the Vick's and gloves operation, thinking that surely this time Buffy would give up and walk away. But she persevered, even though there was just one egg left.

Still, I said to myself, an only-child chick will be adorable, and with any luck it will be a girl...

Day 21, hatching day, came and went. On Day 22 Buffy still sat, focusing on her breath. I picked her up and there on the straw was the broken, chick-less egg. I hustled Buffy off the nest, cleaned up the final mess, and went into the house to nurse my disappointment.

That evening, Buffy was back in the corner where her old nest had been, sitting as if nothing had happened.

It occurred to me that I, who had planned and connived and counted chickens before they hatched, was suffering from disappointment, frustration and self-pity, whereas Buffy was utterly contented and at peace. Why? Because, unlike me, she did not attach to outcomes. Was this chicken is trying to teach me something?

One of these mornings, at my usual meditation time, I'm going to take my mat into the chicken house and sit with Buffy, and be enlightened.

P.S. If you are a visitor, I would love it if you would post a comment!  It will require a bit of clicking and typing to join vox, but it will help make this blog into a conversation, as opposed to just me blathering on....