Monthly Archives: October 2017

Patience

29 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by in Farm Life, Seasons, Wildlife

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TL;DR. People move in, cut down a forest, and move on.

A shallow line of tall Douglas firs, fringed along the crest of a small hill, with the sky behind. That’s the view from our bathroom window.

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Blacktop snakes up the hillside, past a large garage and through the firs, stopping at the double front doors of a massive west coast style home. I can’t see the house from my bathroom, but I’ve been up there, delivering misdirected mail, etc. So I know how the driveway ends.

We didn’t used to be able to see the driveway or garage from our place, or the sky behind the trees, the whole property was thickly forested.

But that changed two years ago, when the neighbours from hell moved in. Their middle school age children explored every inch of their new property on their dirt bikes and quads, all day long. Lucky kids. Unlucky neighbourhood.

Traffic on our narrow lane increased to the point where my DH started joking about the drug dealers down the road. It turned out they were running an illegal truck yard, with local landscapers, small jobbers and motorhome owners as their tenants.

Worst of all, they started cutting down the forest. The first time the chainsaws came out, I thought “Oh they are just getting a little light in, and maybe reducing the tree litter, they’ve got that big in-ground pool up there. Or maybe, sigh, building more dirt bike trails.” But as tree after tree came down, my unease grew.

On and on the felling went, week after week, a day here and a day there. Logging trucks showed up at least twice to cart loads of huge logs away, and the slash piles grew, keeping pace with the growing bald spot. They left Douglas Firs standing sentinel along the hill crest as if to screen their activities. These people literally paved paradise, to put up a parking lot.

(thanks Joni, it’s a great line.)

Then they torched the slash. Prudence wasn’t one of this family’s strong points either, and they simply lit the piles where they sat. The flames shot fifty feet into the air, and someone in the neighbourhood (not us!) called the fire department. The two big fire trucks took up our whole road, and it was a bit exciting around here while they put out the fires.

After the first few months, the kids stopped with the dirt bike noise. Thank goodness. I don’t know if another neighbour talked to them or whether they just grew bored of that game.

The second year they were here, they took out a bunch more trees, and built the slash piles too high, and yep, you guessed it, that story ended with big red fire trucks too.

Then this spring, in the space of a couple months, they sold and moved on.
Some very unobtrusive new neighbours moved in, and I don’t need to practice my patience with the neighbours any more.

The dawn this morning was beautiful out my bathroom window, all peachy orange fading to golden yellow sky, spiked by silent black trees. A few of them are dying now, I assume from shock, and day by day I watch them shift into their new reality as favourite raven perches, for a while at least, before they shift again and lay down for a long sleep.

And I think about these people who lived here for such a short time, and the lasting mark they made. A mark that will take a hundred years to erase.
It’s quite something, isn’t it.

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Wyandotte Eggs Galore

24 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Chickens, Seasons

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Our laying hens are on their autumn break now; just sitting back, taking it easy and watching their new feathers grow. That’s tough for our egg customers, I hope the flock finish their winter coats soon,

We have a crew of earnest young pullets taking up some of the slack, their eggs are smaller but just as tasty as the grown hens’.

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The oh-so-lovely Wyandottes have begun to lay too, like gangbusters so far, three eggs from three pullets most days. It’s easy to tell the gold-laced gals are laying and the blue-laced gals are not, the goldies’  combs are a brilliant glowing red, while the blues’ are still a soft pink.

Hatched April 1, the gold-laced produced their first eggs within days of their six-month birthday, all three starting the same week, like clockwork. The two blue-laced are a few weeks younger, and from a different breeder. Hopefully they will start soon and be as good at laying as their older flockmates.

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Now we wait, and give the group some time to mature. This laying cycle will last till August or September. When they are a few months older and their eggs size up, I will try some test hatches. With three lines in the pen, the chicks should be strong.

Although I suppose I better not count my chickens before they hatch.

Birds of a Feather, Flocking Together

13 Friday Oct 2017

Posted by in Chickens, Farm Life

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I love a colourful flock, so when I began my crazy chicken lady career, I bought one or two chicks, three at the most, of every breed I could get my hands on. Watching them grow up, and observing flock dynamics, has convinced me of the truth of that old saying about birds of a feather flocking together, they really do!

Chickens love to hang out with others that look like they do. But here’s the thing…how do chickens know what they look like?

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It seems to me that chickens must be self-aware. They know where they stop and the world begins, they recognize their own feather colours and patterns, and they seek out others that look like they do. Fascinating, isn’t it?

All my chickens greatly prefer the company of their own breeds. In fact, I now avoid keeping a chicken without keeping at least one buddy of the same colour.

 

Thankful for Ordinary

09 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by in Chickens, Farm Life, Farm Produce, Gardening, Seasons

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Out to K’s garden, clip fresh sage and rosemary, pull celery. Chop finely, sauté with onions and butter, now the house smells good. (Mom joking, paraphrasing Gram “if dinner is late, fry up a few onions, it’ll keep them guessing”).

Tear stale bread, saved up in the freezer. (Poor chickens, deprived of their favourite). Rinse the bird, stuff and truss, settle in the roaster, add a bit of water to compensate for left oven’s hot bottom, calculate timing, turn on oven, remove extra rack. (Ha! I remembered before it got hot!)

Peel potatoes, parsnips, carrots, yams and garlic. Chop into thumb-sized pieces. (All but the yams our own, so cool). Rinse Brussels sprouts (Ah Brussels, you were lovely) and mushrooms. Rinse cranberries, add water and sugar, set to boil. (Sure miss you Stuart, and your Arthur Awards, and all those Thanksgiving meal preps you kept me company. Shelagh Rogers will have to fill your air this year).

Dress rehearse the pots I will use, make sure they will all fit into right oven, and happy I thought of this while they were still empty and oven cold. (Batting two for two.)

Pull pies out, pumpkin and lemon meringue this year ( ❤️ C texting me to say she is bringing blackberry apple pie, perfect, the next generation stepping up, and we needed a fruit).

Choose serving dishes and wash the dust from them, get the family silver box out. (Savour that generational thing again).

Count heads, will we use both leaves? Yep, a nice easy nine this year, for still jet-lagged me. Dig out the autumn shaded table linens. And S’s centrepiece.

There! All done for now, the rest is for later, when the house is full of tall young people, and a few oldsters too, visiting and laughing, lending a hand.

Make a cup of tea, sit down in my chair, content, and thankful for ordinary.

So, so thankful for ordinary.

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Working with Wyandottes

09 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by in Chickens

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TL;DR The Wyandotte experiment continues…so far, so good.

I had always wanted Wyandottes, they are gorgeous, and I’d heard they were calm, good layers. But I hesitated when my sister’s Wyandottes turned out to be scrawny, mean layers of measly eggs.

So I waited a few seasons, did some more reading (some people loved their Wyandottes and others had my sister’s experience), and this year, decided to give Wyandottes a shot. I reassured myself that if they turned out grouchy, I could sell them to someone who didn’t mind their personalities. Then I crossed my fingers, ordered eggs from three breeders and hatched a bunch.

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Studying my Standard of Perfection, and weeding out the birds with faults as they grew up, I selected three black-laced gold pullets, two blue laced red pullets, and a silver laced rooster who I think carries the right genes to cover the gold hens and produce silver and gold roosters and silver and gold hens.

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If he doesn’t, all the chicks from he and the gold hens will be silver. The chicks from his blue laced girls will be all variations, that should be fun. My overall goal is the widest possible variety, I do like a colourful flock.

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So far, my birds seem to have calm temperaments (yay!). They all have the full, round, classic Wyandotte body shape that I just love, and they are getting to laying age now, so we’ll find out soon how well they produce.

I hope all goes well with this group over the winter. I had selected two roosters, but, as is the way of chickens, (chickens have a thousand ways to die), one has already met his untimely end. If rooster #2 goes the way of the first, no worries, I will order some more eggs from another breeder and hatch me some new boys. Shouldn’t be a problem, sometimes it seems three-quarters of every hatch, no matter what breed, ends up male. 😉

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A Trip Down Memory Lane

06 Friday Oct 2017

Posted by in Chickens, Farm Produce

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TL;DR Vintage egg carton triggers fond childhood memories. I’m also seriously dating myself.

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I received a very special vintage Woodward’s egg carton recently from a regular client. It sports a 93 cent price tag, and since the last Woodward’s Food Floor closed in the 1980s, this carton must be at least 30 years old.

What makes it extra-special for me is the memories it evokes. My dad sold furniture at Woodward’s all through my childhood. We were a Woodward’s family and  I was a Woodward’s kid. Huge family Christmas parties with candy and presents for every child; REAL Santa Claus (he knew I whined about helping with the dishes!!!) and REAL reindeer in pens outside the store; eating fluted glass bowls of vanilla soft serve in the second floor restaurant while my parents chatted, being fitted for shiny new saddle shoes each school year; and hundreds of times, waiting “at the shoe door” (the exit near the Shoe Department) after the store closed, for Dad to descend the escalator, laughing and joking with his fellow salesmen, while imagining what fun I would have if I was left alone in the big store overnight. I knew the Toy Department inside out, and my fantasy also involved a nice soft bed up in Furniture, and plenty of treats from the Candy Counter.

We bought all our groceries at the Food Floor, and Mom saved the receipts in a popsicle stick box one of us kids had made, because Dad could turn them in once a year for a 15% rebate cheque. Those cheques must have come in very handy for our young family – even covering cabin rental at a resort up island one memorable summer. Woodward’s treated their staff very well in the ’60s and ’70s.

I remember shopping with Mom, my sister riding in the cart while I walked beside. Somehow baby sister got a hold of the egg carton, and smashed at least one egg on the floor before Mom could stop her. I clearly recall looking up in horror as Mom lunged for the carton, my eyes on level with baby sister’s feet; so I couldn’t have been more than four or five.

The best thing about the Food Floor (aside from the live lobsters in the green sea water tank) was the grocery delivery system. At checkout, the clerk packed tall brown paper bags of food into a wooden box, the same size as one of today’s blue recycling bins. Then with a mighty shove, she would send the bin down the chute below her register, along the steel rollers snaking into the deep underbelly of the store. We would go get in our car, and Mom would pull up to the tall racks outside in the parking lot, chant her surname to the man (“F as in Frank, I, M as in Mary, R, I, T, E”) and our groceries would be located, and loaded into the trunk pronto.

Then it was over to the gas station for “two dollars worth please”, and we’d be on our way home, supplied for another week.

My Woodward’s Food Floor egg carton is safely settled on a display shelf now, in my downstairs hatchery / kitchen, where I can enjoy it as I tend my eggs and chicks, and think back to simpler days, when I was just a little chick myself.