this land

I wonder how many people picked up on the news item that announced that in the last year, the number of complaints about air travel in this country had sharply declined. The cynic will say that the traveler is simply reconciled to a never ending stream of inconveniences. That we've grown used to the delays, poor service, discomfort. That it's like the ugly carpet that comes with the house you just purchased: you can't wait to replace it when you move in, but then you sort of forget about it. After a while, you don't even notice it.

But I have to say, I surely have had a string of good -- no, let me up that a bit: great flights.

Yes, I've been lucky. Weather delays and cancelled flights can sour your mood, so that what may have been fine quickly morphs into one big disappointment. You know it's not the airline's fault, but still, here you are, stuck for days in Atlanta and while you recognize that some people may love Atlanta, it's not home and you just want to be out of that nightmare hub asap. Yes, that can sour your travel mood and I seem to have been incredibly fortunate these months: no cancellations, not many delays either.

But I want to say a good word, too, not only about timely connections and comfortable planes and wonderful staff (for what it's worth, in this country I mostly fly Delta), but also about the privileged view you have of the landscape as you fly over it.

It is fantastic to take off in Madison, where the lakes are still frozen in the middle:






...to cross the mighty Mississippi (or the clearer but still iced over St Croix, about to become the muddy Mississippi):






...and land in Minneapolis, where you can see from up high the layout of the city that is now your daughter's home:






No stop over now. Catch the second flight and head south -- and here I could go hog wild with fantastic birds-eye views of vast deserts and plateaus, but I'll just give you one photo -- of where the mountains meet the arid landscape of New Mexico:






...and finally, anyone approaching Albuquerque from the air will tell you how splendid that flight is, especially if you're a northerner who just isn't used to this kind of landscape. At dusk, the colors are particularly disarming:






So yes, I know the tribulations. I've lived through them: planes that have malfunctioned, been diverted, cancelled, delayed, with broken seats, broken toilets, broken everything but (you hope) the engine that gets you up and back down again. But let me just remember this day of timely, peaceful flights over a magnificent and ever-changing landscape. You truly appreciate the beauty of this place when you fly over it on a more or less clear day and you look down at what's below.

so long, little ones

This morning, just at dawn, I teach Ed the daily routines.
You get to see the sun come up from inside their pen.






Be careful with Lexie. She likes to hop onto the coop roof and watch your every move. She can be feisty, she can be calm. Whatever you have for them -- she wants to be first in line.






We talk about ways of making the cleaning of the coop base easier. Wood chips maybe?

Put out fresh water and you're done. You need do nothing more all day, except pick up the eggs and shut the coop at night.

That's the bare minimum. And I'm explaining it because late today, I'm leaving. A couple of days in Albuquerque with my friend who now lives there and then a couple of days at my younger girl's new place in Minneapolis. And so for four days and nights, Ed is the designated chicken guy at the farmette.

We let the brood out while we sit down to breakfast... 





...and as always, they go straight for my flower beds and I recoil. It's clear to me that they cannot be trusted without oversight. For the hours that we are not watching them, they will eventually have to have a larger pen. Their current enclosure is fine, but if you want pampered chickens, you'll want to give them even more space.

Ed's working on the design for the enclosure and I tell him that the perfect placement would be along the front of the barn. Right by the sheep shed. The space has long been overgrown with canes and weeds and last year I mowed it down sufficiently so that this year we can rip up the fabric that covers the dirt and create a nice (in my view) space for the chickens when we are not on chicken duty.


We work there now, pulling out fabric shreds, digging up weeds and the chickens are so in awe of what we're doing (all those freshly uncovered worms!) and they peck and scratch in places where it's good for them to peck and scratch (just think of all the ticks they're destroying!) and this is, of course, the moment of garden bliss where we are all working so productively together, enjoying each others peculiar idiosyncrasies, enjoying, most of all, being outside on this wonderful spring day.






In the late afternoon, just after I finish packing my case, I ask Ed -- where are the chickens? I no longer have that fear that they will vanish, that a predator will surely swoop down and get them. Mostly, I just want to know that they are not in a place where they may do damage.
Come and see -- he tells me.

Ah yes. Another moment of chicken joy. Together, resting,  keeping cool in the dirt underneath the thick bush. Almost smiling at me, don't you think?


 


Take care of Ed, little ones. And be good!

the good hours

A commenter suggested that I love having chickens, that I've always wanted chickens at the farmette, that this was meant to be.

That is 75% correct.

But there are times when I'm in total despair and wondering if I could dump the whole lot of them into someone else's unsuspecting lap, along with with maybe two round trip tickets to France as an incentive.

I am completely distressed when the hens (it's always the hens) hammer away at my flower beds.

And this morning proceeded in that vein.

It began well enough.

Sunrise over the old orchard.






Coop care.






A few more minutes' sleep.

Release from pen.

Breakfast.





Distress.

Lexie, as if she didn't already wear the cloak of bad girl for any number of other reasons, is also my biggest garden digger. She has so much energy that she cannot help herself. She must dig!

And I cannot blame her here. Why would certain patches of ground raise my ire? She doesn't get it.

I am near tears by now.
I cannot let them destroy my flower beds! They're years in the making!
Ed is thoughtful. Do you know that they are destroying anything?
I don't want to find out that they are! It will be too late!
Do you want to keep them penned?
How can I? They love to roam! Really, you should see their excitement when I come in the morning to let them out of the pen.  Joy unleashed.

But after a morning of frantic digging, the chickens settle down. They take pauses. They watch our movements. They are fine, they are fine! They relax. I relax.






In other news, we had two big gardening events today that brought us closer to the growing season: both of our suppliers of (free) wood chips dumped truckloads of the stuff for us and so we spent many hours hauling chips to various parts of the farmette. We'll be doing this all season long, but for now, my beds need the ground cover and so we start there.






The chickens, ever curious, follow our progress. It is a good set of hours for us and for them.






And too, we run a few small errands on Ed's motorcycle. I am finally warm enough that I don't insist we take the car. As we ride along the rural back roads, I am reminded of the first time I ever rode with Ed on his old Honda, nearly nine years ago. I was freezing then, completely caught off guard by the wind, the chill in the valleys, the loudness of the engine. It took a while to grow to love these rides.To get over the rough spots.

With the chicks, the love of the good hours is easy. But the rough spots are definitely there. As with most anything in life, it'll take a bit of patience and thoughtful work to get them ironed out.

Not yet a full moon tonight. But soon. In the meantime, the night is mild, the chickens are asleep. 

adventuring

My days at the farmette are deliberately calm. Quiet. Without fuss, usually without much contact with the outside world. This was the goal for at least the early stages of retirement and it hasn't been difficult to stay true to this pattern. Each hour poses the simplest questions: to read? to write? to let the chickens out? In the evening, the content changes, but the questions remain equally small: to cook? to write? to watch a movie? when to put the chickens back in the pen?

The ground is still too cool for planting and besides, there'll be the unexpected cold dip (or two) yet and so garden work proceeds slowly. A pruning, a raking but mostly I wait for the days to grow warmer.

And I enjoy the slow (at this point very slow!) transformations. The multiplying crocuses.






The swelling buds on the lilac bushes. Not extravagant yet, but to a person starved for the growing season, it is enough.


For the chickens, each day brings with it reassurance that the routines are here to stay. And with that reassurance, comes an incredible desire to explore and expand the range of new places in which to scratch, sniff and tumble.

So that when I go out on this cloudy but not too cold morning and I clean the coop, let them roam within the pen, change their water and then say -- so long!, they seem disappointed. Many chickens would be thrilled with a pen of 12 x18, theirs from sunrise to sunset, but not our foursome. They've smelled better and they want it.

And so just before our breakfast (which is increasingly only in the kitchen, where we can keep an eye on them)...






...we let them out. (Here's Oreo doing his threatening dance to ward off enemies.)






And they revisit all their favorite spots around the farmhouse and now they want more. My flower beds are always on the short list and I sweat as I watch them start a scratching project right in the thick of the daffodils and daylilies.

I'm relieved when they pause for a break. Right at the farmhouse doorstep. As usual.






And then they want even more. At first, they explore the area where Ed is working -- right by the garage. He watches, mezmerized by their movements.






Lexie, as always spirited and the most adventurous, gets on the picnic table to see what he's up to. She tries a few pecks to get him to acknowledge her superiority. I shout at her. She gives me a look and gets back down.






When Ed goes away to run errands, Lexie continues to explore. The garage this time. What's this? A moped? What's a moped?






I chase her out.

The whole flock ventures out toward the willow and Lexie discovers the big mound of branches we have there, undisturbed, unshredded, unburnt because Ed swears there's plenty of wildlife that depends on it for shelter, especially come winter. She pokes her nose into one of the openings and now I have to run out to rescue her in case some hibernating animal emerges and goes after the poor innocent girl.





But, no animal emerges and they continue round the mound, like in a folow the leader game and it is our spirited Lexie who leads this adventuring expedition.

And now I can see that she has the urge to lay an egg. She runs back to the coop and so she's out of the exploration for a while. The two hens take charge. I'm still right behind them because I have this fear that they'll go straight for our tomatoes. But they don't do that! They remember the barn and that wonderful pile of mulch and they make their way there and it is so clear to me that their range at the farmette is turning out to be very wide indeed. Now that these chickens have experienced Paris (in the form of dirt baths, limb piles and God knows what else), we're not going to be able to keep them down on the farm -- which in their case is their pen. At least not without a protest and restlessness that I fully recognize because, after all, am I not one who loves to interrupt periods of tranquility with a trip to another corner of the world on a fairly regular basis?

Eventually Lexie runs down again to join us, but by then the hens are deeply covered by dirt, as if in a trance, loving the freedom, the warm air, the dirt, yes, the dirt!






Lexie finds a high perch and seems to shout down at them -- you guys are nuts! -- but there seems to be a smile to her countenance.





She understands adventuring.

Me too. I understand it. Even as I know that the spirited natures of these chickens will give me plenty of headaches in the weeks to come.

Sunday

When a friend asked -- how's the chicken thing going? -- I found myself giving this honest answer: I love it except when they are digging up my flower beds and then I hate it.


Because I am retired, I don't mind the early trek to the chicken coop. Today I went out before dawn when the sky was a heavenly pink and purple...






I let them out and Lexie pecked once and I thought -- training her to stop is going to take some time. But I did not mind. (Here she is, in a calmer moment, puffing out her morning feathers and making herself look three times her normal size.)






And here is the sunrise, finally.






And when I cleaned their coop, I couldn't help but think -- my oh my, they generate a lot of poop. In two weeks, I've already emptied a bucket into the compost pile. That means in the course of the year, I'll have dumped out close to 25 buckets of droppings (to be sure, mixed in with some wood shavings). But I do not really mind that either. Cats, dogs, babies -- they all generate poop and yet you get close to them and tending to the clean up is like breathing -- something you just do.

After the morning cleaning, I head back to bed and sleep for a good hour more. Retirement has made this possible. Suddenly I can sleep outside the night hours. Remarkable.

And so breakfast is rather late.





Ed had opened the gate for the chickens and because it is such a warm spring day, we let them spend nearly the whole day in this way, going from one favorite spot to the next as the temperatures climbs and the sun pokes out to give us a hazy blue April sky.

But the reality is this: they do like the loosely tilled flower beds. The farmette is large, but some spots are more tempting for them than others and I have to say that they do not avoid my flowers.

And that's unsettling.

I am hoping that once the flowers mature, the hens will find them less inviting. But that's a good number of months away. In the meantime, the chicks are as annoying as the chipmunks, who also take it upon themselves to disturb my sense of order in the perennial beds. Darn animals!


On the up side, I do think that my worries about how Isis will take to the chickens (and vice versa) seem to have been overblown. The chickens love to hang out by the front door of the farmhouse (especially when I am inside) and of course, this is the path that Isis takes, coming and going. Here he is leaving...






...and here he is coming back. And yes, the chickens are following him, hoping perhaps that he'll show them the way inside.






And as Ed says -- the hens are indeed earning their keep. Here's their daily gift of eggs: the darker one is Lexie's, the biggest one is Butter's.






And one final photo of the flock. It's when you see them like this, all packed together, out in the field that you think -- what a lovely thing it is to give these guys a home here, at the farmette.






In other news -- Ed is diligently taking the tomatoes out for a bit of sunshine every day now.






And here's a season's first for me -- we take our bikes out to run a few errands today.





I want to say it was thrilling to be out riding again, but because I was out with Ed, the reality is that it was a panting set of minutes. He does ride faster and keeping up with him is not easy.

On the way back, I paused to take a photo of the farmers to the east of us (that's our silo in the background). They're out in great numbers on the weekend, clearing and tilling.






Much as I like watching them move through the steps of growing foods and flowers for our markets, I can't help but feel sad that Farmer Lee is not among them. Her fields, to the south of us are being converted back to corn and soy. In the end, we don't know where she is farming this year. I can hope that it's on great soil, among people who will appreciate the beauty she brings to the landscape.

The night is warm, the windows are cracked open.  For those of us who live up north, it can't get much better than that.

chickens, redux

If you've grown weary with chicken posts, move on! Today's Ocean post will have far too many chicken notes for those who think this topic is, well, for the birds.

But I'll keep the text short. You can fly through the photos and then go roost on someone else's blog -- someone who hasn't fouled up her writing with all things chicken.

Though you can't really blame me. We are in the midst of one of those gorgeous April days -- a day so brilliant, so utterly clear that even the high of 50F feels warm. So beautiful that you don't care, or even notice that the landscape is still rather brown.

Or is it? Today, April 5, marks a first for the farmette:






I get up just ahead of the sun (right now, our sunrise is at around 6:30), feed Isis (who basically licks his way through about 14 mini meals a day -- each begged for with those sad droopy eyes, none consumed with great enthusiasm) and go out to release the hens.











And you can tell right away that their demeanor changes with the weather. No restlessness today. Just curiosity. Plenty of it.






During the night, Oreo had made his way up to the roost box in the coop -- a first for him! -- and I don't know whether to be glad or not glad at his accomplishment. On the one hand, he now has the warmth and company of the hens, on the other hand, I get the feeling that they like their quiet time, especially the two hens who have not been around a rooster in their previous life. [As a reminder -- Butter and Whitney had lived with the Chicken Girl and her other four hens, while Oreo and Lexie -- "oops" babies, both of them -- stayed in a coop at Chicken Grandma's and from what I gather, Grandma would have been very happy with a different arrangement from day one.]

The few minutes that I have with the brood this morning are lovely. Lexie flies onto the roof of the coop to watch me more closely...






...and I'm amused at that because, of course, they all could fly right out of the pen if they wanted to. It's just that they've never been inclined to do that. Getting in and out of enclosures is still a bit of a puzzler to these guys. Thank goodness. If they ever understand that flying is an option, we'll have to put a net over the top of the pen, but for now, they're fine, living low to the ground in contented ignorance.


After breakfast (and today you get only the side table, celebrating the colors of the season)...






...Ed and I do some clean up work behind the great barn. Twigs and bramble branches have been piling up at the side as I've pruned and trimmed various sections of the farmette. They can't decompose. There's too much there. And so he takes the lawn mower and shreds it all down to piles of fine mulch. A tedious project. My role is to shovel it all back against the barn.






Of course, the chickens eventually find us. This is new territory for them! Oreo is curious about the barn.






Lexie takes a look around but she does not linger. And Butter and Whitney? Oh, they have discovered the piles of mulch!





A warm, wonderful dirt bath!

And how can you not love their delight? We stopped working just to watch. And smile. And wonder what it would be like to roll around in dirt in that way.


In the afternoon, Ed takes out our 96 tomato seedlings. It's their first taste of spring sunshine.






To the east, the truck farmers are clearing some of the land and of course that gets the chickens' attention.
Don't go there! -- I tell them. That's one sharp looking knife they have! I remember the rooster that the farmers kept in a truck on the land there. He would crow and then wander over occasionally and then he stopped crowing and stopped coming and I knew that some family was enjoying a fine Sunday chicken dinner.






In the meantime, Ed gets busy working on a new fencing project. Lexie is all over him, wanting so much to be ahead of the line in case there is some new offering or idea or gift to be had.





I ask him -- did she peck you?
Of course.
Did you put a stop to it?
Well...
I shake my head at him. What kind of a foster parent are you anyway?


In the evening (but oh! it's still so light outside!) my daughter and her husband come over for a Sunday dinner (this month is full of irregular weekends).





As I put away dishes afterwards, I keep an eye out  (through the kitchen window) on the coop. She's out -- I say to Ed. Back in. Oh, out again. This goes on for a while. Lexie, it appears, likes to forage by herself, by the light of the emerging moon. She's like me, I'm thinking. She likes the night breeze, the quiet around her... But I haven't predators to worry about. Lexie does.

Just minutes before my newly set alarm clock goes off (time to close the coop! time to close the coop!) Lexie goes inside. I lock the coop door and return to the farmhouse, thinking how grand it was to have had this day in April when the skies were the color of a deep blue iris.  The chickens could not get enough of that sunshine and dirt.






Nor could I.