Happy Anniversary to Us!

Where has the time gone? Really, folks. I mean it. I wake up and it's dark, my train ride to work is dark, the ride home is dark... It's no wonder the hens refuse to lay eggs when the days get shorter. But the specific time I'm referring to today is the year of blogging we've just completed! The first blog post here was on November 7th, 2009, and we've come a long way since those early days. Ready for a trip down memory lane?

Six tiny chicks showed up at the local post office in the late part of summer 2009. It was August, we had just gotten home from a great road trip vacation to Yellowstone NP, Grand Teton NP, and Glacier NP. (This was the vacation where Aimee really got to get in some serious "wheel time" driving the Subaru. I napped in the passenger seat and woke up to find her cruising along at 83 mph in Montana. Yikes!) The coop was nearly finished, and the brooder box was warm and waiting. Portia, Ellen, Raquel, Ursula, Ingrid, and Norma Jean all thrived in those late summer weeks. By December we had our first eggs.

Sadly, we lost one of our chicks in early 2010. Norma Jean, tragically named after Marylin Monroe, died young of an overdose. If only we could have sensed the foreboding in her name. It was a terribly sobering event after such initial success, and it forced us to come to terms with how attached we had become to our little ladies in the backyard.

Bartering eggs around the neighborhood opened up new lines of communication, friendship, and sharing, and we credit the chickens and the garden in the front yard for much of this. One neighbor was so caught up with the beauty of our hens than he asked us to raise a few for him. He built a great little coop and run, and his three chickens are now happy and healthy, and I think they're probably a bit spoiled.

That same batch of chicks brought three new lives into our own flock, though we could never have guessed how much they would teach us or force us to grow over the course of a summer. Winona, the luckiest (or unluckiest) little Wyandotte I have ever known, started out a little slower than her brooder box mates. I dropped a board on her and nearly killed her, but she simply refused to give up. After a few days in isolation under a heat lamp, she rejoined her sisters and has grown up to be pretty close to normal. As it turns out, her inability to prevent getting whacked by me is probably related to her scissor beak condition. To this day, her beak must be clipped regularly, her eyesight leaves a lot to be desired, and she's extremely shy about portait shots with the camera. Though she consistently peck an inch to the left of snacks on the ground, she's a fighter. In other words, she's really darned plump.

Dark Meat is the embodiment of pure joy. I have yet to capture a video of her antics, but believe me that it will be worth the wait when that movie shows up. Perhaps a dedicated post to our funniest chick is in order soon. Neither of the two youngers chickens have started to lay eggs, and this Friday they will be 33 weeks old. They seem to have the support of the toughest chicken union I have ever negotiated with.

Rusty, formerly known as Milla, was the most robust, beautiful, and biggest chick we had ever seen. We remained firmly in denial about his gender until the infamous "borkle" sound I heard one afternoon. We struggled with our decision to slaughter him, and we learned so much about respect and personal limits, none of which were anticipated. Though we have received some criticism about butchering our own animal, it was an important step for the future farm we will someday own. On a personal level, slaughtering an animal I genuinely loved has changed my internal compass for eating, and it has opened my eyes to behaviors and practices I feel I can no longer ignore.

We cut down the massive, very old, and incredibly frail douglas fir in our front yard during the peak of the summer heat. That seemingly simple act has opened up a world of possibility for our small raised bed garden, and we are now looking forward to more work, more harvesting, and more sunlight in our future.

What's to come in the future? If we have learned anything in the last year of urban farming it is that planning is fun, but the farm will make its own decisions with or without our input. Below is a list of hopes, and some of them feel a bit like New Year's resolutions, which is to say that fulfilling or ignoring them are both viable options.

• Honey bees are the next big goal. We'll be starting out with a single hive in the front yard in the spring, and we hope to learn much about the lives and organization of bees, pollination, listening to the weather, and collecting honey.
• Meat birds are the next logical step after Rusty. Though this particular item is under some heavy scrutiny at the moment, it will eventually happen in the coming years, even if next year is not good timing.
• The garden shed will be getting a concrete floor, and we hope to have this completed before the end of 2010. Both it and the garage could use a lot of love and work, but we'll handle that one project at a time. In the meantime, we need a safe place for storage, and we're looking forward to growing more of our garden starts under cover.
• The reclaimed "acreage" in the front yard needs to be converted into beds and a mini orchard. Building raised beds can be a lot of work, but we've had such great success with those that we already have, and Aimee really wants a place to grow raspberries. I'm hoping to rig one or more of them to accomodate a mini hoop house for tomatoes, cukes, and possibly some other fun veggies.
• The line of stumps in the backyard is gone, thanks to the fine efforts of the chickens. A second mini orchard may find its home there.
• Our parking strip is the last vestige of grass (by which I mostly mean weeds and clover) in front of the house. One bed of herbs is already planted, and at least four more are planned. In my mind (as idyllic and ridiculous as it is known to be), I imagine our neighbors casually wandering over to clip oregano and parsley for their dinners in the summer evenings. In reality, I am prepared for more than a little cat poop.
• Many of the bedding plants around the house are going to be removed and re-homed to make way for rhubarb, berries, and who-knows-what-else. We both agree that the calla lilies are waning, the single mum doesn't get enough light, and the dhalia always gets infested with aphids. It's time for edible permaculture.

Are we too ambitious? Probably, but it's always funny to watch us try. Stay tuned over the next year to see what really gets done. What are your plans for gardens, farms, animals, and such?

Chicken Vacation!

You may have noticed that the girls haven't posted anything exciting for a while, but that's only because we've all been on vacation for a week! What's been going on around our urban farm?

The garden has been growing like crazy. We've gotten several days of rain over the last few weeks, and it's worked more than a few wonders. Hmm.... How did this pumpkin get here?

A funny thing happened in the compost pile... We always throw in lots of veggie scraps and leftover bits from growing things, and sometimes things sprout up from the compost after it gets spread around the yard. At least two pumpkin vines were determined to grow this year, despite the fact that I did not plant any.

We hit the motherlode! This lovely specimen was growing OUTSIDE the fence along the sidewalk. Bad idea. I harvested him a bit early, but we were afraid he would get victimized or vandalized by someone walking by. We joked about these pumpkins (affectionately called punchkins in our family) as they began to grow and mature. As many of you may know, cucurbits are extremely promiscuous plants, and they'll cross-breed with anything nearby. Last year we grew three varieties of punchkins and one type of cucumber, so our early plants were named punchcumbers. Thankfully, it appears that the pumpkins are indeed pumpkins, and they are most likely a cross between Jack-Be-Little and Rouge vif d'Etampes, better known as Cinderella pumpkins.

We've eaten a LOT of cole slaw lately...

And I cannot wait to taste my first home-grown brussels sprouts!

Our tomatoes are the talk of the 'hood. No one else has red ones yet, and we've already collected over three pounds of ripe cherry, grape, Vintage Wine, and Brandywine tomatoes. What's our secret? Pruning, trellising with twine, snapping suckers, and generous heaps of crushed egg shells for each plant. Okay, okay, and we bought FABULOUS starts at the farmers market in the spring.

We've had lots of visitors and friends in the garden, and many of them are keen to hold still for a photo op. Can you believe I grew this Echinacea from seed last year?

There's been lots of vacation time just spent lounging and sun-bathing.

A little work got done, too. Look at that brave contractor replacing windows upstairs! Almost all the windows in the house are now energy efficient. Best of all, they open and close and they don't leak!

The girls have had lots of fun, too. They've been out in the yard nearly every day, they've gotten lots of veggie scraps, and the coop got a good cleaning. You can see here that the straw on the floor is all gone. When we clean the coop out, we give the hens a few days to scratch around in the dirt and clean up the extra feed and seeds that fall through their bedding. When fresh straw goes down, they go crazy! It's fun to scratch, fluff, and play with new bedding, so this is a pretty exciting time to be a chicken. By the way, make sure to wish our older girls a happy birthday! They're officially one year old now!

The babies are still babies, however. Winnie and Dark Meat never get to roost on the pole with the older girls, so they sit on top of the nest boxes every night. And no, they have not started laying yet. Portia (pictured in the background) has been looking for creative places to hide her eggs. We found one in the compost bin earlier in the week. Bad chicken!

No vacation would be complete without a few tasty treats. The hens get their own designer pancake this morning. There was a little leftover batter and some raspberry seeds from the compote I made, so a fancy chicken brekky was born. Happy vacation!

Doubling Our Acreage

When we bought our house three years ago, we immediately began making plans for a garden in the front yard. We ripped out grass and weeds, fought with topsoil, built raised beds, and started growing. That first year we had four raised beds. This year we doubled the number of beds and started growing strawberries and blueberries. Our harvests have been abundant, but there's still never enough space to grow everything we want.

Do you see the 85 foot tall douglas fir right in the middle of all the action? The poor thing had been topped twice, and it didn't fit in the space provided anymore. To give you some perspective of just how big this tree was, our house is the tallest in the neighborhood. We have ten foot ceilings and an attic big enough to be a third floor. I'd estimate the top of our house (at the peak of the roof) is probably 55 feet tall... Maybe 60 feet. The branches of the fir tree scraped the gutters and filled them with needles. There were pinecones (fircones?) all over the yard. Last year the tree got an infestation of tent worms. All in all, it was a disaster waiting to happen. We worried that a wind storm would bring down branches into our house or the neighbor's house. We fought the horrid ground cover growing beneath that damned tree. We watched as sun-loving garden plants were hidden in shade through most of the day. Worst of all, the squirrels who lived in the tree routinely planted peanuts in our potato sacks.

Aimee and I had talked about having the tree removed since the day we moved in. I finally made a few calls two weekends ago. Three bids and a week later, Doug Fir is gone. I took Monday off work to supervise from the upstairs window sill (mug of tea in one hand, camera in other hand). The Tree Pirate (I swear, I did not make that part up) strapped on his spiked shoes and started climbing. He cut down branches as he moved higher, and some of the branches had to be roped and wrangled to keep them clear of the house. To their credit, this company did a fantastic job. Believe it or not, they didn't hurt a single raised bed, the fence was barely touched as they tossed branches over, and they cleaned up the neighbor's yard before they left.

Now look at the space! Oh, and the sunlight. You've never seen such light. There's enough room to build another ten or twelve beds in the space that's been cleared. We'll be working on a rough plan over the summer, but I'm hoping we'll have all the beds in place before winter hits.

Do you have any ideas for this space? How about berries or apple trees? What are you growing in your urban or suburban farms?

The Perfect Neighborhood, Part 1

Our neighborhood is the best. When you buy a house, they say that location is the most important thing to consider. But how do you test out that location without living there for a while? We spent a lot of time driving, walking, and riding buses in Everett before we narrowed down our possible areas, so we knew which important items on our list could be satisfied by each part of the community. North Everett won out over South Everett for its sidewalks, bus service, and sheer walkability to local amenities. But the mystery of finding the perfect block to live on can't be part of the above equation. Thus enters luck. Having neighbors you get along with is a product of this.

Our block (literally from one stop sign on the east end to the next stop sign on the west end) contains about fourteen houses. We know just about everyone after living there for two and a half years. Below is a description of events from last Sunday afternoon.

Rick, two houses down on our side of the street, has two daughters who spend time with him every other weekend. The younger, Emily, is about 9, the older is 14. Apparently they had been sneaking peeks of our chickens over the fence during their visits. We dropped off half a dozen eggs with Rick on Friday afternoon and invited him and his kids over to see the hens and chicks. Rick's girls got up and cooked those eggs for breakfast (a big surprise for their father), and were especially eager to visit the coop. When they walked into the yard, they caught sight of Ingrid first. She was foraging over by the compost, one of her usual haunts. We watched them scratch and peck and flap for a little while, then we toured the coop itself. Both girls were impressed with the nest boxes but slightly disappointed that no one had laid any eggs yet. I asked if they wanted to see the babies, and their eyes lit up. "You have baby chickens, too?" Emily asked. I took them into the garden shed and we stared into the brooder box, enthralled with the loud peeps from such tiny birds. Both girls were eager to hold the chicks but afraid to hurt them by gripping too tight (a common feeling when you're new to the baby chick gig), and they asked great questions about chickens in general. Emily apparently spoke of nothing but chicken facts for the rest of the day. Their parting gift was several small boxes of stale cheerios, which the new brood has enjoyed quite a bit.

This isn't the first time we've had kids over to visit the chickens. Co-workers, neighbors, and general acquaintances have stopped by with both of our broods to collect eggs, pet soft feathers, and inspect our coop made from recycled building materials. Our adventure is their adventure, too.

Stacy and Scott live next door to Rick. In combination with Rick and a few other members of the neighborhood, they're creating a garden in Rick's backyard. This is their second year, and they decided to plow up even more space for more plants. Last year they grew corn. I worried that they wouldn't get any ears of corn due to the fact that they planted a row, not a block. Corn pollinates with wind, so a block makes it easier for the pollen to transfer. I was so wrong. Aimee and I enjoyed several of their ears of corn. They weren't the biggest, but they were quite the achievement. This year they're planting corn, beets, leeks, potatoes, and bush beans. We're already bartering eggs for produce to come. Stacy and Scott frequently have people in the neighborhood hanging out in their front or back yards. They provide plenty of cheap beer, everyone else provides humor and company. We sat with them in the grass on Sunday. The weather was gorgeous and sunny. Scott wants to move to Montana, but his children live here in Washington. Both of them are reluctant to give up the neighborhood we share. We nodded and tipped our bottles back.

The neighbors on our block put together a couple of "events" each year. Halloween and the big summer yard sale are huge. Bonfires, beer, snacks, and great company round each ocassion out. The highlight is spending time with neighbors, who also happen to be really good friends. We watch each other's houses and pets, we nark on kids, and we band together to run out the drug-dealin'-no-good types. The combined efforts of this motley group rousted the final crack dealer from our street just last year. Bear in mind, there are four children under the age of six on this block. We want a clean place for them to grow up.

Donnie and Val live across the street from out house. Donnie is all talk. Honestly, some of the stuff that comes out of his mouth is downright ingenious in its fiction. Val, on the other hand, doesn't take his bs for more than a minute. Three of the chicks in our brooder box will be going to live at Donnie's house once they're big enough for the coop. He'll begin building it in the next few weekends, and he's been over to look at ours several times for inspiration. When we formed the idea of buying some chicks, his only request was for "perty, colorful birds." In fact, he really adored Ingrid, our Golden Campine. She's truly a beautiful bird, but her single comb and small body size make her a bit more work in cold weather. Instead, I settled on some hardy, friendly breeds that lay right through the coldest months. Donnie leaned over our fence while we were mulching the raised beds with chicken compost. "You addin' dirt?" I nodded and briefly explained mulch. Donnie asked about the potatoes growing in burlap sacks next. All of our garden veggies are in the front yard, like an edible landscape of sorts. He pointed at the onions left over from last year and marveled at their sheer size. I showed him the seed heads that were coming up. Before we finished, Donnie ran back to his house and retrieved a frozen bag of croppy he'd fished last summer, complete with a recommendation on how to fry them up for fish and chips. Last year he gave us venison. Donnie loves to hunt and fish. He also promised to bring home a ten foot long douglas fir beam from work for us. We've been gutting our upstairs and are ready to start the remodel. That beam will hopefully help restructure one of the windows which lacks a header.

Donnie and Val have been in their house longer than anyone on the block. They've seen a lot of trends come and go, and Donnie has a story about how he had a hand in every one of those changes. Val lends and borrows books with me. She doesn't seem to relate to many other people, so I try to be a good listener when she comes over. She's obsessed with Wicked and shares a kinship with Elphaba.

Brian and Jessica live next door to us. They're a young couple who bought a house about the same time we did, and they're recently married. Jessica is an elementary school teacher, and she's fascinated with all things science right now. She waved me over to her front yard just as Donnie was heading in for the night. A hoard of ants had flooded the sidewalk leading up to their front door. She felt bad about killing them, and she wanted to get video of the ants for her class. Donnie and I suggested she look on YouTube the next day, but today was a good day for spraying something noxious. Brian came out and handled the task. Jessica couldn't watch the slaughter. Instead, she leaned over our fence and talked to us about biology. "So my class set up these different environments with varying amounts of moisture to figure out what grows best in dry soil, moist soil, and really wet soil. But mold ended up growing in the wet stuff. Part of the lesson was about living versus non-living things, and the course book listed soil as non-living. One of the boys in the class asked me about it, and he reasoned that soil is actually alive. I told him I agreed. Was I right?" I spent a few minutes explaining that soil is a little bit of both, but that it's more alive than dead (so long as we're discussing natural soils). We then talked about the mold and bugs that appeared in the soil, even though it was bagged. She was very relieved when I explained that mold spores travel by air and that's how they get into bagged environments, and that some insect eggs and larvae are in the soil before you add moisture. The water brings them to life.

Brian and Jessica have turned out to be great friends, and we have a lot in common with them. Brian has helped me learn about fixing electrical problems in the house, and Jessica wrote an amazing children's story based on the great escape of Portia.

The goings-on of our neighborhood are constant entertainment to us, and we wouldn't trade this block for anything short of a real farm on acreage. Someday we will contemplate relocating for that very reason, but I know we'll be giving up this little bit of utopia.

The Payoff of an Adventurous Life

Herding chickens is a little like herding cats.... Cats that can f*$#ing fly.

Yep. That's Portia. Again.

Portia surveys the view from the garage roof.

"Where is everyone else?" Portia asks. It sounds distinctly like,

"Buck-caw?"

"Should I fly to the safety of the ground where my adoring human will save me from the dangers of the wild world and deposit me lovingly into my coop (where I belong with the rest of my comrades)?"

"Nah. Let's explore the roof of the house! My human will never reach me with her garden hoe now!"

A bit of perspective. The neighbors thought this was hilarious. They didn't have to figure out how to get a #$%^&ing chicken off the roof of a two story house. And, for the sake of realism, don't forget to throw in a "buck-buck-buck-buckck-CAW!!!" every thirty seconds for good measure.

"Perhaps I'll see what Mount Baker looks like at sunset..."

Believe it or not, she really did climb to the apex of the roof, approximately forty feet off the ground. I yelled. I coaxed. I rattled a container of scratch. I begged. I pleaded. I shook my hoe. I tossed two buckets of water (nearly on myself). Finally, I realized that Portia was avoiding me. When I walked away, she flew down, then promptly got cornered inside the garden shed. My master plan worked.

The moral of this story is that a good chicken is a chicken with clipped wings. We will be investigating the act of wing clipping over the course of the next week. Enough is enough.

The title of this post was, however, about payoff. I present exhibit 26F:

Yes, that's right. Ingrid finally laid that egg. Three in one day! This is a record. Our flock is now in 60% compliance. Perhaps a little wing snip will persuade Ellen and Portia to step up.

We bought this house...

My name is Robin. My partner is Aimee. Two years ago we bought a house. Her name is Josephine. Josephine was built in 1912. She's holding up well for a girl of her age.

When we bought our house, our last thought was remodeling or changing things, but a home is a constant work in progress, which was one of our very first lessons in home ownership. That first year, around June of 2008, we were forced to do a complete, down-to-the-studs remodel of our upstairs bathroom. I now have a jetted tub, so life worked out well in the end. The remodel was the last in a long line of expenses, including (but hardly limited to) replacing the roof, installing functional gutters, and having a fence built around the property. It had been a long first eight months of home ownership.

Our second year with Josephine was a bit more under control. Her old, flaking paint, originally a pale green, was scraped off and replaced with a deep blue. The neighbor across the street loved it, proudly bringing over a can of Bud Light to describe how we had matched the colors on the can of her favorite beer, right down to the black and white stripe above a line of red. I think I managed to reply something like, "Oh." The front yard has been landscaped on one side, and the seasonal 'creek' we installed now channels water from the roof away from the foundation and our seasonal 'pool' in the basement. Aimee and I built six raised beds out of cedar posts and boards, and we collected more lettuce and green tomatoes than you can shake an organic stick at.

But our crowning achievement, as the girls out back will happily tell you, was the construction and subsequent occupancy of our chicken coop. Our girls were all hatched on Monday, August 3rd, 2009. They arrived in the mail two days later, peeping and ready to eat us out of house and home.

The girls are now comfortably established in their coop, and we eagerly await the day the our first egg will arrive.