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....

So just when we decided that Smithy just didn’t come around enough for our tastes and got an indoor cat to play with , another cat seems to have walked into our lives: This one is a big guy, and — despite the somewhat startled expression on his face in the photo above — is oozing confidence. I saw only his black tail scoot past the back door and thought it was Smithy, but then this much bigger  cat sauntered through the cat door onto the porch for what was left of Smithy’s breakfast : This photo is better, since I opened the door to take it. When this guy was done eating, he came right up to me and was just about to walk on into the house, but I didn’t let him. So ever so calmly turned around and walked away, without flinching or even picking up the pace beyond a slow walk.  He looked healthy and clean, so I’m not sure if he belongs to someone or is just a solid survivor. We’ll see if he comes around again for more snacks — I wouldn’t mind having him set u...

So this happened yesterday: After much discussion, we decided that we would really like a house cat in addition to a barn cat. Smithy has become increasingly aloof this spring since we went on our April vacation . He only comes around at night for his food, and sometimes he’ll go a few days without coming around at all. I even tried enticing him with catnip and caught him in a Have-a-Heart trap to give him his tick meds, and though he stuck around on the patio and ate breakfast that day, he wouldn’t come up for a pat. He may change his tune when it gets colder again and he remembers the treats in my warm office, but he seems content to come and go as a barn cat should. Trouble is, we kind of got used to the ultra-friendly barn cats of the past, so we decided we should have a house cat to dispatch the errant mouse and curl up on laps.  So this is Fiddle. He’s an eight-month-old boy who was found in a feral colony, but who the rescuers thought was young enough an...

While we were on vacation , our lovely neighbors came over every day to feed Smithy and check on the chickens. When we got back, there was a half-eaten can of food on the porch so all seemed well.  Fast forward several days, and no one had seen the cat.  The food was still being nibbled (though not devoured), so we alternated between being nervous that he ran away and feeling confident that Smithy was lurking around but hiding.  So by Thursday we set up the iPad to film a time lapse video of his food throughout night (which is when the nibbling usually occurred). We knew something was eating the food, but we wanted to make sure it wasn’t a raccoon or skunk (which have managed to squeeze through the cat door in the past).  In the morning we eagerly looked over our evidence: Did you miss it? Right around the 10-second mark, there’s a flash of...something. It goes by so fast that the kids missed it, but I slowed it down to a frame by frame: ...

If you’ve noticed I haven’t written at all this month, I apologize. And if you didn’t  notice, well, I can only assume that you were as consumed with current events as we have been. It has been an incredibly long — and, to our minds, disorienting and sad — week. None of that has been made any easier by the fact that we are still without heat. I mentioned it in passing in my previous post , and our furnace is still broken. This is no fun at all.  So far we have managed to muddle through with space heaters borrowed from generous friends, and the house hasn’t dipped below 50 degrees inside — yet. We are still anxiously waiting for National Grid to send a crew to put in a gas line so we can switch from oil to natural gas. This will all be incredibly expensive, though we do live in a state with an excellent rebate program for energy-saving upgrades. But if we have to replace a furnace, we figured we should at least get a better fuel choice in the bargain. In th...

The thing about gardening is that you never know what to expect from one year to the next. It’s just about impossible to have every crop do well at the same time, but the flip side is that, no matter how bad some things look, something is bound to go like gangbusters. It balances out. This year, though we’ve been struggling with our tomatoes and potatoes , the strawberries are looking better than they ever have before: A quick correction: the established  strawberries are looking better than ever. Those are the lush plants in the distance. The foreground is full of our newest strawberry plants, which haven’t taken off quite like we wished — at least not yet. Anyway, the plantings from the three previous years are doing amazingly well this season and promise to bear big crops: That’s a lot of strawberries just waiting to ripen. Since taking that photo we have put up our chicken wire fencing and covered the top with bird netting to protect the fruit. That ...

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 ...

We buried a cat today. We brought him home from the neighbor's yard, where we found him stiff and cold, paws unnaturally curled and raised as if to fend something off. His teeth were bared a bit, but his eyes were closed. A snow shovel wasn't bier enough for what was so recently a purring, warm thing, so I brought up from the basement a cloth, a green curtain that I had sewed long ago and which had once hung in the dining room of the Red House, where we fed babies with plastic spoons and marked time with small colored candles in cakes. Now that's buried too, wrapped around the cat whose body suddenly made sense again as we rolled him over and he looked like he was sleeping. "He doesn't look scared any more," said the boy as we tucked in his friend and carried his body to the hill behind the fence, stirring up papery orange leaves as we went. Three of us scooped fistfuls of light, silty soil over the bundle, and I felt how soft the dust was, fall...

How loud does a blue jay screech? Extra loud, if he's stuck in your three season porch: We've had a lot of birds take up residence here this summer: woodpeckers, chickadees, catbirds, cedar waxwings, and cardinals have all moved in, in addition to the usual robins and sparrows. Kirk even saw a humming bird in the perennial border, though it was too fast for us to get a photo. I think they all took advantage of the power vacuum left by Fletch's absence , and somehow they all manage to get along despite the presence of many blue jays. In case you're not familiar, blue jays are mean . I've seen them keep crows at bay, and they screech and scratch and generally bully anything else with feathers.  And we have a lot of them this summer, picking away at some of our grapes and pole beans.  But how did one end up inside? Cooper must have caught it and dragged it in through the cat door. He then proceeded to play with it for what must have been most of t...

Since Dolley's death , there have been a lot of changes for all of our animals. We had been worried that she, as our pluckiest chicken, would be all over the new chicks when we tried to integrate them into the flock. Because of that, we were really taking our time introducing them  to the hen house and chicken run.  But now the rival groups of chickens are even in number: three big girls and three little ones. Louisa Catherine had already jumped the fence and lived to tell the tale, so we knew were getting close to bringing them together. Enter Cooper. We let him out of his acclimation cage  some time in the middle of last week, since he seemed much calmer. (Well, he was calmer until we tried to leave after feeding him: Then he would throw himself around our legs and hang on for dear life. This was cute as long as you weren't wearing shorts and sandals.) On Saturday, after he rolled over and let me rub his belly as a thank you for his breakfast — to...

It's been two weeks since Fletch has been gone, and the family felt ready to adopt a new barn cat. We went to the Merrimack River Feline Rescue Society , which is the group who helped us find Fletch a few years ago . They take all comers, even ferals and cats with behavioral problems that other shelters won't take in. Because of that, they are willing to place tough cases as barn cats where they can be as active and aloof as they like. Cooper was one of those cases. He's a two-year-old boy found out in the streets of Woburn, and the shelter there couldn't keep him because he was too "cage aggressive." He wasn't having a great time up at the MRFRS, either. The other cats picked on him, and he was mean right back. So they were looking to find him a barn and a job to keep his high energy in check, and that's just what we were looking for. So, after a lot of yowling (he had to be netted to get him into the crate), he was in the car and coming ho...

I've been avoiding this post, but there's nothing left to do but write it. Fletch didn't come home for breakfast Saturday before last, and we haven't seen him for 10 days. We're not certain what happened to him, but it's pretty clear that he's gone. The kids and I covered the neighborhood with flyers to see if anyone picked him up, but we haven't gotten any responses. One hard part has been not knowing what happened to him. As a (mostly) outdoor cat, we always knew his life span would be shorter than some hothouse flower kitty. He was a former stray, so his age was always a guess: He was likely between 9 and 10 years old, but he could have been older. He could have gotten sick, or could just have been older than we thought — he had been sleeping an awful lot lately. He may have trotted off to curl up under a bush somewhere to be alone at the end, as cats are wont to do. It's always possible that he got in a fight with something bigg...

Over the weekend we finally  were able to get out into the orchard to prune the fruit trees. This is typically a task that we take care of in February . Usually we can count on at least one not-horrible day to shape the trees up. This year, not so much. There was just so much snow that we couldn't even get to the trees.  We've finally had some melting, though, despite the fact that it has snowed every single weekend since the end of January. This time it was just a light flurry and a dusting on Saturday, but still: snowy weekend number ten . Despite the cold and pesty snow on Saturday, Sunday was warm enough for Fletch to enjoy surveying out work from the front porch: And the orchard even has bare ground in spots. Most is still in the snow, and it was enough that I had to wear boots, but at least it was passable:  Since the trees are no longer fully dormant and the buds are beginning to swell, we only did the lightest pruning possible. Pruning en...

We're all a little stir-crazy here in snowy New England, even the cat: That's Fletch, looking like he's ready to pounce on any intruders from his perch on the roof of our side porch. We're not quite sure if he used a snow bank to help in his climb or just leapt up from the fence, but the poor guy must be incredibly bored. The only places for him to go are through our few shoveled paths, and his neighborhood prowls are pretty much impossible with all the snow on the ground. Hunting hasn't been great, either (though he did leave us half a mouse a couple days ago, so that's something).  I love how in this photo Fletch looks like he's working on his vicious bobcat impression. Kirk, who caught Fletch on the roof while feeding the chickens, said that he was actually just mid-yawn. Still, I wouldn't want to run into him in a dark alley. This looks like he's liking the drips off an icicle. I will never understand how or where that ...

As I write this, Fletch is curled up on my lap, as is his wont whenever I try to fill that space with a laptop. This can be irritating when I'm trying to get work done, but today I'm going to let it slide. Let's back up a couple days.  On Monday afternoon I left work early to get home ahead of the snow. You know, the BIG snow that was scheduled to bury New England with several feet of snow over a 36-hour period. I picked up some firewood and gathered up flashlights in case we lost power (we didn't), and I made sure the chickens had food and water to last a few days. I also checked the heat in the workshop and put some food and water out there for Fletch, figuring he'd be stuck out there for a day or so until we could shovel the path to the workshop. He followed me into the house and spent the afternoon curled up until we put him back outside after dinner Monday night. And that was the last we saw of him. Meanwhile, the blizzard was well underway wh...

Our intrepid barn cat hurt himself! We don't know how, but last Wednesday morning he was sporting a pretty gimpy limp when he came to the door for breakfast. I think he was actually pretending to be as fine as he could manage when he knew I was watching, but when he was under the dining room table and thought I couldn't see, he looked way worse. He could barely put any weight at all on his right front paw, and he looked very slow and stiff. That afternoon, Tiegan found him in his bed in the workshop, which is up on a workbench. He couldn't get down by himself — no surprise that he didn't want to leap on his foot if he couldn't even walk on it. So she scooped him up and brought him into the house to eat and sit on her lap for the afternoon. Kirk and I checked his foot, but it was fine. We figured it was a sprain, and a quick look online ( did you know the WebMD has a pets section? ) suggested giving it three to four days before calling a vet. I caved by Frid...

Last year, we had very little corn. Between the squirrels  and a generalized failure to pollinate  thanks to a failed succession-planting scheme, we pretty much got just a couple handfuls of kernels to throw in some salsa. This year, we have some corn: The ears are small, and it's just not as much as you'd hope for from 132 square feet of planting area. Each stalk only produced a single ear at the most, and many not even that. I realize that planting corn in a garden is difficult because you really need a big block of it to ensure pollination, but in the Red House we planted just six stalks one year, and got two or three big, fat ears on each one. So it's not impossible. Next year we'll try a different variety for what could be a last effort at sweet corn. Yesterday I brought in all the corn that looked even close to ready, since I could see it was starting to be picked at (I presume by squirrels, but it could be birds). Sometimes our defense agai...