Port Potager

It’s been a truly strange stretch of weather around here this month. After a nearly two-week cold snap with temperatures bottoming out below zero after Christmas and stubbornly refusing to get above 20 for a good 10 days, we had a rebound that ended in a couple bizarrely humid, 60-degree days. Add several inches of rain to that, and this is all that’s left of the blizzard: Alas, not everyone made it through the cold spell. Kirk found Louisa Catherine dead in the chicken run the other day. As with our other chicken deaths, there are no clues about what happened. Chickens die suddenly and — as far as we know — quietly.  If you’re not sure which chicken was Louisa Catherine, that’s because she never did anything noteworthy enough to mention. She was a gold-laced Wyandotte and cute as a chick:   She wasn’t a great layer, and I think she was the only chicken who could tolerate Lizzy’s craziness . She mostly kept to herself and was pretty far under our radar....

On Tuesday Kirk went out to look for eggs and found Lizzie lying on the ground underneath the ramp to the henhouse. So he had to go out in the rain and bury her back on the hill. Though the other hens left her body alone, it’s not really the kind of thing that can wait for a sunny day. You may recall that Lizzie was a very troublesome bird. She had a bad habit of pecking at her own feathers , to the point that her back and butt were totally bare. Painting Blu-Kote on her skin to protect it was always an adventure. Note the gloves in the photo below: She hated me and tried to attack me every chance she got . I don’t think the other chickens liked her much, but they seemed to mostly ignore her. She wasn’t a great layer, either. Still, we’re surprised she’s gone, because I sort of figured she’d live forever just to spite me. On Monday we noticed that her comb was droopy, but we figured she was just molting. By Tuesday she was dead, and we don’t know why. She could have h...

The additional daylight in the spring means that the chickens begin laying again, after a sporadic winter of not doing very much. Martha and Rachel got the memo weeks ago and are going their jobs well: Sally is also a champ. But sometimes this happens: As you can see, Sally’s eggs has been pecked open and eaten. That blob on the floor of the nesting box shows that several eggs have been raided and destroyed over that past few days. This is not a protein or calcium issue, as they have plenty of extra seeds and oyster shells to eat. This seems to be about spite. I caught Abigail — who, it should be noted, hasn’t laid an egg in months — pecking away at one just the other day. jerk. Kirk and I were also talking just lat night about how Lizzy — the worst chicken — also hasn’t laid any eggs in recent memory, and how she’s generally not earning her keep at all .  And then today I found that she had, in fact laid an egg.  And it was eaten. Along with ...

Our chickens certainly have a language of their own — consisting largely of squabbling and squawking, based on what I can hear from my office during the day. It got me thinking, though, of just how much we all talk about chickens, every day, whether we realize it or not. There are an awful lot of idioms in the English language that come from living near chickens. That’s not too surprising, given that they are some of the most common livestock in the world and that their lives have been intertwined with human lives for the past 10,000 years. We’ve been sharing our land and observing their antics for quite a while, so it stands to reason that so many of our sayings are chicken-related. I’m positive there are more, but here’s what I came up with when I put pen to paper to list our chicken idioms: Chicken (or chicken shit):  Our chickens don’t strike me as particularly cowardly, but they do run away from a garden rake as fast as they possibly can. The awkward flurry...

This is Lizzy. She belongs behind bars: You may recall that Lizzy has some issues. She’s a mean old thing who has attacked me in the past  and who always throws herself at the chicken wire walls of the run every time I walk by — even when I come bearing gifts, like delightful (if you’re a chicken) beetle-ridden cantaloupe halves .  Lizzy has also been pecked at a lot  by someone, though we gave up on trying to police the pecking order months ago. She’s actually got some new feathers coming as part of her natural fall molt and is looking pretty good, though she still freaks out about nothing several times a day. Today was much worse. I brought the chickens the aforementioned cantaloupe for an afternoon treat, and when I opened the door to the run to give it to them, Lizzy straight up attacked me. She jumped on my leg and chased me out of the run.  Chickens don’t have teeth, but she has some little spurs on her feet and pecks with her beak. Havin...

Our chickens were all kinds of out of sorts this spring, pecking each other bare and refusing to lay. Though we tried several interventions to get them to stop, we gave up entirely a couple weeks ago and decided to leave them to their own devices. And we were rewarded: Here are Abigail, Rachel, and Martha, all squeezed into the nesting boxes trying to lay at the same time. We are suddenly back up to four eggs a day, though we don’t get them all unless we are very quick: That dark brown egg is one of Lizzy’s though it’s been pecked apart. I presume she does this herself, because she is (still) stupid and terrible. The other chickens seem to think so, too — just the other day I saw Louisa Catherine oh-so-casually reach over and pull a big beakful of fluff out of Lizzy’s behind and then spit it out with contempt.  Even with the loss of an egg every other day or so, we’re definitely back where we should always be at this time of year as far as production is conc...

Behold what we have been reduced to: These are boughten eggs.  We've only had one egg since putting the blinders on the chickens , and that was from Martha, who managed to get hers off within the first 24 hours. Since then, we haven't gotten one, and I'm assuming that having a piece of plastic wedged in your nostrils is so uncomfortable that it's kind of stressing them out. Or they might be doing a springtime mini-molt: Abigail always does this, but the others haven't ever stopped laying the spring for a mini-molt — they usually molt in the fall, as the daylight wanes. We may have triggered it by dialing their light back in an effort to ease their supposed stress as well, but who knows at this point. To recap this week in chickens: Lizzy is still inexplicably hateful towards only me, throwing herself against the walls of the run whenever I pass by. Kirk gets no such treatment, probably because he feeds them. Rachel's butt is still ...

It’s been several weeks since we rotated first Lizzy and then Martha out of the henhouse in hopes of figuring out which hen is the mean girl who’s been bullying the rest by pulling feathers and leaving red, raw spots on their butts. Vent pecking is not a good thing, because it leaves the chickens who are being picked on open to infection and additional pecking, as they themselves (in addition to all the other hens) might even be attracted to pecking at their red skin. They also have to put a lot of effort into growing new feathers, so they don’t lay well when the protein reserves are going to feather-making instead of egg-laying.  So we’ve decided to pull out all the stops on the bullying and get these girls to like each other again — or at least give them time to heal so their stupid butts aren’t so tempting to their adversaries. We decided on a three-part program.  Step One: More Blu-Kote to cover up red spots and featherless skin. Stupid Rachel kicked the bottl...

Last week we took Lizzy out of solitary confinement and let her back into the henhouse with the rest of the chickens. Her feathers had grown back in nicely, and it didn’t look like she was pecking at herself at all: no purple beak, no feathers on the floor.  On the other hand, Rachel still had freshly pecked spots around her vent (that’s the egg hole for you non-farmers), so someone else was causing the damage.  Naturally, we suspected Martha, due more to her reputation than to any real evidence. So into the box she went to see if the other chickens would heal without her around. So on Easter morning I went out to check on Martha and Smithy, and was alarmed to see this: There was blood everywhere : I’m not sure that picture quite does justice to the murder-esque scene in there. Here’s a closer look at what we were afraid was going to be a bloody mess of a chest wound: And a bloody mess it was, but not a chest wound. Tiegan came outside he...

Lizzy has almost completed her first week in solitary , and she is not happy about it: That death stare follows you all the way around the room.  On the bright side, the move seems to be good for her overall: only a few feathers on the floor of the cage, and we can see that new ones are growing in well (albeit purple). We’ll have to check the other girls to see if they are still being pecked — could there be a different culprit? Or does Lizzy just not play well with others?  In the meantime, if she thought that cage was undignified before, she’s really grumpy about her living situation now that she has a new neighbor: The MRFRS called us today with a barn cat for us, and since it’s supposed be cold and (gulp) snowy this weekend, chicken and cat cages are side by side in the heated workshop. Here’s our new guy: He’s a five-year-old boy we’re naming Blacksmith, but that we’ll call Smithy. He had a home where he was allowed to play outside ...

A couple weeks ago we noticed that several of our chickens were having their feathers plucked by some big meanie. My thoughts immediately went to Martha, who was known to bully the younger girls in her quest to replace Dolley as the henhouse’s ruler of the roost.  Martha still hasn’t shown a smidge of purple dye on her beak, though. That would be a telltale sign that she’s pecking at the other chickens, since we’ve been applying Blu-Kote to their sad, sore butts.  And while I’m happy to report that Sally is growing in new feathers nicely, Rachel and Lizzy have freshly plucked bare spots that look red and raw and terrible. To wit: This is Lizzy’s sad butt. It’s not quite as raw as all that — this photo is after we painted it blue, but the color came out more blood-red than purple in the photo. (The idea behind the blue medicine is to help prevent infection and to mask the redness so that chickens don’t keep fussing at it. Unlike bulls, they are  actual...

We've been enjoying a very mild weekend, and since we tapped our maple on Tuesday, we've collected three five-gallon buckets of sap. That means it's time to break into our wood pile and get cracking on boiling for the year: We decided to go all-in on a real woodpile this year, instead of cobbling together donations and those expensive packages of firewood from the grocery store.  What a difference a year makes in our sap storage facilities, though: Ordinarily we keep the sap buckets packed in a snow bank to keep it cold, but that isn't an option this spring. Almost every bit of snow has melted already! We didn't have much to begin with, and what we did have got washed away in the rain and melted by the nearly 60-degree day we had on Saturday. These are in the shadiest corner (note yet another broken fence section in view — even when winter doesn't deliver in snow, there's always plenty of wind ). Once we set up the maple sugaring...

At least two of our new chickens — Rachel, the Rhode Island Red; Lizzy, the Welsummer; and Louisa Catherine, the Gold-Laced Wyandotte — are laying now, and we’ve collected a dozen eggs so far:  This mis-matched set doesn’t include the four “seed eggs” that we put in the nesting boxes to help the girls figure out where to lay their eggs. Someone’s got it down, but someone else is still laying little eggs on the floor under the roosting bar. But who’s laying where, and which egg belongs to which bird?    All three of our older chickens are molting and appear to be done laying for the season. Martha and Abigail lay green eggs, so that’s not in question anyway. Sally lays light brownish-pink eggs, and you can see that we have three or four full-sized, light eggs in the box. We thought perhaps she was the one laying these big eggs in the box (despite the molt), but today I picked up an egg with a clue:  The downy feather left attached to this lig...

If you've noticed I've been having a little trouble keeping up lately, well … you're right. We're in the middle of a major (and overdue) kitchen remodel, and things are in a state of utter discombobulation around here: We're slowly putting it back together again, but in the meantime, we haven't been able to stay on top of our typical fall food preservation activities. Most things are already done: tomatoes are canned, green beans, okra and broccoli are frozen. But our fruit is just sitting around, waiting to be eaten. We have lots of apples and pears , and they are doing alright since they have a reasonable shelf life — though we'd love to whip up some pies! We're having real trouble keeping up with the small fruit: the second round of raspberries and a third round of strawberries , plus all of our grapes . Normally we'd be in high jam season right now, but we can barely get a dinner together, and it's no fun at all to do the dishes in...