Still no rain

Hilda has been in the habit of letting the chickens out in the morning when she gets up. I have been in the habit of making a cup of tea and checking my email before I get dressed. Today, however, I was up early and, hearing no sounds from upstairs to indicate that Hilda was awake, I put on my gardening clothes and went up to open the coop.  It was so hot last night when we put the chickens to bed that I feared someone might expire by morning.  All ten of them charged out like kids on the last day of school. I realized I’ve been missing quite a show with my slothful habits. The girls run around flapping their wings as if relieved to finally have some space. They seem to re-establish the social order as well. One challenges another. They face off, rear their heads back with neck feathers ruffled, and fly smack into each other—the original game of chicken. It is not clear to me who the winner is, but it is obvious to the chickens. The one brief encounter settles something. One or both run off and soon resume pecking at the grass as if nothing happened. Ina, who has been a pistol from the get-go, fights the most. I wonder if she is the leader of the pack.

After a few minutes, everyone settles down. They scratch in the dust bath, graze, and hang out on the perches in the cage.

Hanging out in the cage

After doing the chicken chores and having my tea and breakfast, I went to the garden. I uncovered the summer squash, cantaloupe, and beans today. I am a big fan of row cover for pest management. If the bugs can’t see the crops, they can’t eat them. I can keep the cabbages and beets covered forever, but the beans, melons, and squash need to be pollinated. Once the flower buds start to develop, I take off the row cover. The plants look beautiful. It won’t last, but having a good start, they don’t normally get so many bugs that it interferes much with the harvest.

Zucchini (right) and cantaloupe (left)

Beans

About 9:30, the sky to the south got dark. Very dark. The clouds moved toward us, and we began to hope that it might storm. I saw lightening and heard distant thunder. The clouds took on a peculiar appearance. “Have you ever seen clouds like that?” Terry asked.

“Not often,” I said. “Maybe never.”

Bizarre clouds preceding NO rain

The sky didn’t turn that dark gray-green that happens right before a tornado, and I didn’t see any funnel clouds dipping down. At 11:00, I put all my tools away. The chickens had retreated to the coop, and I shut the door in case we did get a terrible wind. Terry was watering his trees. I persuaded him to come inside by quoting the lame tag line from the Weather Channel: “When thunder roars, move indoors.” 

For the next two hours, we watched radar map on the Weather Channel.  Light green, dark green, yellow, and even red moved west to east along the Illinois-Wisconsin border, headed straight for us. And then it went around. All around. There was one tiny hole in the storm front over northwest McHenry County. We got nothing. It is getting hard not to take it personally.

I expect the orioles will be leaving soon. Early in the week, I saw a juvenile beg a male to feed him, and the male gave an unmistakable “get your own jelly” lecture. It wasn’t a subtle, “Son, it’s time for you to make your own way in the world.” It was more like, “This is MY jelly. Go away!” The juveniles have responded by feeding themselves. When they are strong enough, they’ll all go to wherever they go.  Usually they disappear right after we take one spoonful of jelly out of a new jar, and then we’re stuck with the jar in the refrigerator until next May. The hummingbirds stay all summer, though.

Dust bath

Conventional wisdom suggests that chickens with access to a dust bath suffer less from ectoparasites. My expectation was that the chickens would tear the lawn to shreds quite readily and make their own dust baths. But after four days, the lawn looks essentially the same. Monday morning, Clarissa was hanging around by the gate. Hilda noticed that her motivation was not escape, but the dirt around the base of the post where we’d dug in the PVC pipes. So I got the shovel and shaved off a bit of sod. I made the dust bath about the size of one chicken because what? I thought they would take turns? Please. I should have known my girls better than that. It was just another excuse to have a fight.

At first they just pecked at it, either because they found something good to eat, or they wanted gravel for their gizzards, or they simply wanted to check it out, and their beaks are their best sensory organs. What if they didn’t know how to bathe in the dust? If this was something they needed to learn from their mom, they were out of luck. Even if I were willing to roll around in the dirt (which I wasn’t), it seemed unlikely that chickens would be able to learn anything from my demonstration. Luckily, Julia came to the rescue. Just as she took the lead in eating caterpillars (another thing I wasn’t willing to do myself), she pushed her way through the crowd, gave the dirt a couple of good scratches, flopped down, and started fluffing her feathers in the dust. Innate behavior wins the day again! Others followed, and it got quite competitive. And 15 minutes later, it was all over. The girls retreated to the coop to hang out in the shade.

Checking out the hole in the sod

 

Ellie, Ingrid, and Sara compete for the dust bath while
Clarissa wonders what I'm looking at.

Monday night, our friend Diane came to dinner. We hadn’t seen her in a long time, and what with eating and visiting, it got to be 8:30 before we knew it. The sun was going down. Hilda excused herself to put the chickens to bed. To our surprise and delight, they were already in the coop. Victory! They know where they belong at night. It was a cool evening. Eight of the chickens were jammed together on the east side of the roost. Two were in the west corner. We have decided to put the girls to bed a little later, when all we have to do is shut the door.

Eight chickens all in a row

Two outcasts on the other end of the perch

Today we harvested the garlic. At our previous house, we had an old hog shelter that had a roof but no walls. It was a great place to dry onions and garlic. After some discussion, we decided to hang the garlic under the deck. Hilda was concerned that it would get wet when it rained. I know that it is never going to rain again, so I am not worried. If it does rain ever again, I expect that the garlic will dry out quickly afterward. We tied the bundles of garlic to the netting Terry put up to keep the robin from flying at our living room window. We got a nice crop of garlic this year. But what are we going to do with 200+ bulbs of garlic?

Digging the garlic


Hilda hangs the garlic under the deck

Some of our better garlic bulbs

Tonight all 10 chickens were on the east side of the perch. Ellie was on the west end of the line and tried to walk over the others. I’m not sure where she thought she was going to fit in. There was not a millimeter of space between the roosting chickens. Whatever her intent, Ellie only accomplished a disturbance of the peace after which she landed on the floor. We filled the food, changed the water, and left them to sort it out.

Free at last!

We had a couple of nice, cool evenings when we could keep the windows open and sleep under the blanket. I’m happy to see an abundant population of fireflies out in the field. Even with the colder weather, I was amazed to wake up to fog on Thursday morning. I couldn’t believe there was that much moisture in the air. It was beautiful. Made me want to burst into a song from Oklahoma!


The fifth oak and apple trees in the morning fog.



The south garden on the same morning

The orioles have fledged. I see a father oriole feeding juveniles every day. On Friday, there were two juveniles competing for one dad’s attention, from which I inferred that that nest must have fledged two offspring. I haven’t seen a female feeding fledglings yet. Maybe her job is over when the babies start flying.

Father and fledgling at the feeder

Dad eating grape jelly

The hummingbirds are frequent visitors to the feeder. I got a rare picture of two hummingbirds feeding at the same time. It is more common to see one chase another one away or one waiting while another drinks.

Two hummingbirds at the feeder at once. This hardly ever happens.

More often than not, once chases the other away (cool action shot, no?)

Standing room only: one hummingbird drinks while another waits at the top of the crook.

Late Thursday the backordered electric netting finally arrived. Hilda and I put it up Friday morning. I spent a lot of time in the middle of the night this week worrying about how to fix it so we could get in and out and about how difficult it was likely to be to get the posts into the rock-hard ground. Neither worry proved to have foundation. We put eyelets on the side of the coop and tied the end posts to them with string that came in the package. Hilda had the idea of putting in two short pieces of PVP pipe into the ground so the end post would slide easily in and out.  And that was that. Each post went into the ground with two metal rods connected by a horizontal bar. Had the ground been soft, we could have pushed them in by foot, but the cross piece lent itself nicely to the hammer. We put the net off to the south side. When the chickens ruin the grass there, we will reposition it to the north side. We got the solar power unit out and read the directions. The black clamp was supposed to go to a ground rod at least 1.5’ long. Shoot. We didn’t have one. I consulted Terry, who produced a piece of copper pipe. I drove it as far as I could into the ground. When I started bending the end of the pipe, Terry took over, but he didn’t get it much farther in. Then I had to learn about the voltmeter. I thought the power wasn’t working, but it turned out that the light is dim and the current is pulsed. Once I figured that out, I verified that the wires were charged with 3000 volts just like they were supposed to be.

The electric netting (wires run through the plastic strands) and our shade shelters

The end post is held by PVC pipes in the ground and tied to eyelets
in the side of the coop (there's a second eyelet at the top).
The ground rod for the power supply is at the right of the fence post.

We set up two shade shelters for the chickens because it gets so hot in the sun. We also left the cage inside the fence so they would have the outside perches and a familiar place.

With the fencing up, we pulled the cage back from the door. And nothing happened. Nigella looked through the door, but wouldn’t move. Hilda finally went into the coop to shoo the girls out. Ina went first, followed by Jennifer and Clarissa.  And then they all ran back in. After running in and out a couple of times, they discovered clover on either side of where the cage had been. They ate for a little while, but something spooked them, and they retreated inside. They don’t seem to like the direct sun too much.

Nigella: I'm not going out there.

Ina: Fine. I'll go.

And back in again

Hey! There's fresh clover out here!

One of my fond childhood memories is of feeding watermelon rinds to my grandmother’s chickens. Hilda had cleaned some watermelon Friday afternoon, and we put the rinds out for the chickens. That caused some excitement! They came out to eat, but showed a preference for the rinds in the shade. Hilda moved the rinds so they were all in the shade of the plywood we put on top of the cage.

Hilda moves the watermelon rinds to the shade.

Ina has to be above the others, always.

They hung out pretty close to the coop for the first day. They were all in the coop at bedtime, so all we had to do was shut the door.

They all charged out in a hurry when I opened the door Saturday morning. They explored their new freedom by flapping and chasing each other in circles. I suppose they are establishing the social order in the new space. Saturday was cloudy (but no rain), and the girls spent a lot of their time outside. We all went out Saturday afternoon, and just to be safe, we put the girls in the coop with the cage at the door for ventilation. They were not excited about going in.

They came right out when we got home. By the time Hilda and Dad were eating supper on the deck, the chickens were all the way down to the end of the run. My parents had some good laughs as they watched the chickens. As my mother described it, “They’d come out a little way and then realize how far they had gotten from the coop and rush back in.” They were totally not ready for bed at 8:00. I tried to get them in by myself, but two ran out for every one that went in. Hilda and I had to work together to get them into the coop. I kept a hand in front of the coop door while Hilda herded the delinquents.

Hilda was up early this morning to let the chickens out. When she checked on them a little while later, one of the Dominques was outside the fence! Ellie was very distressed to be separated from the flock and ran back and forth outside the fence line. Worst of all was that when Hilda tried to pick her up to return her to the enclosure, she went right through the fence even though the electricity was on. Her feathers apparently protect her from the charge. It has only happened once so far, but it convinced us that we can’t leave them out when we’re gone. We are hoping that they will get big enough that they won’t be able to fit through the holes in the netting when full grown.

We replaced all the bedding in the coop this morning. We probably don’t need to do that every week, but I wanted to install the final (I hope) convenience in the coop: bedpans. Two black plastic trays under the perch will make it easy to get the poopiest wood chips out of the coop. So far, the chickens roost (judging from the accumulation of droppings) on the east side of the perch by the window. I assume that as they get larger, they will take up more of the space.

Installation of the bedpans under the perch

One more nature picture before I sign off. Hilda spotted a great spangled fritillary on the grass this morning. It didn’t seem very active. I picked it up and saw from its extended proboscis that it had been drinking. I put it on the butterfly weed, where it happily drank nectar even though butterfly weed is supposed to be a monarch host plant. I guess the fritillary didn’t read the book.

Great spangled fritillary on butterfly weed. The thin, black proboscis is visible if you look carefully.

Drought, cont.

How dry is it? It is so dry there are stripes above the septic field. Once again, a very promising looking front out in Iowa dissipated before it got to us. We had two drops of rain this morning. Not enough.

Dry, dry, dry. So dry there are stripes of dead grass above the septic field

Tuesday morning, I realized that the south garden was in the shade of two of the big oak trees until about 8:00 a.m. Consequently, I got up at 5:00 Wednesday morning and went directly to the gardening before even having a cup of tea. Desperate times require desperate measures. Hilda and I got the south garden all weeded before the sun came around to bake us. Good news: the wind wasn’t as strong. Bad news: the gnats and flies were terrible.

Hilda had things to do in town, but I kept at the weeds until 11:30. I had a tremendous sense of accomplishment. I weeded the peppers, potatoes, and herbs. Finally, I did the flower bed in front of the house. The Napa cabbage needed to be thinned, so I cut out several plants to have for lunch. I noticed insect damage on one of them as well as fresh frass (the correct ecological term for insect poop, and no, I am not making that up). I sorted through the leaves and found a large, brown caterpillar. Last year, I would have been repulsed. This year, I was excited. What a lovely chicken treat!

None of the girls were in the cage, although Nigella was sitting backwards in the door so the wind (which had picked up considerably since early morning) ruffled her feathers (blowing up her skirts, so to speak—just like Marilyn Monroe). Would the caterpillar crawl away before anyone saw it?  Should I try to get someone’s attention before putting it in the cage? My worries were unfounded. I flicked it in, and Julia was on it instantly. Ellie was right behind and stole it as soon as Julia dropped it. In a matter of seconds, everyone was in the cage. Julia gobbled it down in the corner while the others milled around wondering where the caterpillar had gone and/or what the excitement was all about.

I have had to reexamine the conventional wisdom that chickens are stupid. If I had a student who was as observant and exquisitely alert to changes in his/her surroundings as my chickens are, I would consider that student to be exceptionally bright.

The Araucana are getting their cheek feathers. I have to admit, while the idea of having the pastel blue and green eggs that Araucana lay always appealed to me, I didn’t like the look of the breed in the pictures I saw. Those cheek feathers were peculiar. But it’s different when they are your chickens. Nigella’s cheek feathers are the most developed at this point, and I have to say I think she’s beautiful.

Nigella looking resplendant with her cheek feathers. Isn't she adorable? She looks like Santa Claus.

Julia’s grey head is also striking. The feathers are light grey with a dark grey border. She looks very distinguished.

Julia's grey head

The Light Brahmas are getting black collars and tails.

Jennifer shows off her black collar and feathery feet

I just love the first part of summer when I can eat from the garden but am not yet overwhelmed by the harvest. Along with the Napa cabbage, I pulled a head of fresh garlic and two green onions. I stir fried Vidalia onion wedges with celery and the new garlic until cooked but still crunchy. I added soy sauce and the Napa cabbage and steamed briefly until the huge mound of cabbage was reduced to almost nothing. Amazing how that happens. I put my stir fry over rice and garnished with the green onion.

After lunch I showered and worked inside until 4:00, when I went out to pick peas for supper. The wind was hot and fierce. I worked as quickly as I could, but still I was dripping with sweat and covered with wind-blown grit by the time I got done. The dust in my eyes was particularly annoying. Having fresh peas, however, was totally worth it.

It was 100° in the coop, and the girls were panting. I gave them fresh water and went so far as to put some ice cubes in it. Nothing else I could do. Everyone made it through the night, and even though it didn’t rain, it is much cooler today. Praise be.

Moving day

In honor of Father’s Day, I made caramel pecan rolls for breakfast. Hilda provided the coffee, and we had breakfast on the deck. Afterwards, we made the final preparations on the coop. Terry put hardware cloth over the inside of the window to be sure raccoons couldn’t get in. We filled the new 5-gallon waterer and put it up on cinder blocks. Terry put a hook in the ceiling for a chain from which to hang the feeder. Hilda put food in it and hung in up. No more kicking pine chips and pooping on the feed! I filled the grit station and positioned it by the chicken door.

Hilda hangs the feeder

I spread bedding on the floor

The view from the chicken door while the coop is still poop-free

We had a lengthy discussion about how to move the chickens. Hilda thought we should carry them individually from the garage to the coop. I thought the risk of having one start flapping and getting loose was too high. I thought we should carry them all in the cage. Terry didn’t think the cage would fit through the door. In the end, we carried the cage with the chickens to the coop and parked it outside. I picked up the chicks one and a time and tossed them into the coop while Terry manned the door.

Moving the girls to the coop

We took the plastic tray from the bottom of the cage and put the cage outside the chicken door. The books say to leave the chicks in the coop for a few days so they learn that is where they are supposed to sleep. I was concerned, however, that it would be too hot in there. The cage was the compromise. The girls couldn’t go too far from the coop, but they could still get out if they needed fresh air, and having the door open allowed a nice cross breeze through the coop.

Ellie was the first to come out into the cage. She was very excited about the abundance of grass and clover. Others soon followed, and before long, everyone was outside.

Ellie was first out. Bridget and Jennifer are in the doorway thinking it over.



More chicks enjoy the grass and clover. The chicks put their tails up more when they are outside. Here Ingrid (the brown one) demonstrates.



Everyone in the cage.

As soon and the chicks were in the coop, I realized that planning everything for full-sized chickens was premature. The water was too high. I replaced the cinder blocks with bricks that were about half as high. The girls found the grit station before they found the food. Afraid that they would fill up on grit, I moved the station next to the food. I knelt in the coop for a little while, directing the chicks’ attention to the food and water until I was convinced that everyone knew where these essential items were.

And the perch was too tall. I checked periodically through the day to see if anyone was able to fly up to a 32” perch. The girls were settling into the coop nicely, but resting on the floor. Meanwhile, I helped Terry plant blackberries and raspberries. After lunch, I built a ladder up to the perch. Ina and Sara showed some interest in it, but didn’t get above the fourth step. At the end of the day I had not seen any chickens on the perch, I saw a poop at the top of the ladder. That didn’t get there by itself!

The ladder to the perch. If you look closely, you can see poop at the top.



Rain!

It has been raining heavily for almost an hour. If it would keep up for awhile, it could make a difference. Hilda's first comment when the rain began: "But I haven't finished watering!" Ha!
Before the rain started, I took off the masking tape Terry put up on the coop walls to make a clean line between the paint and the rubber. It was easier than I thought it would be. I had a razor blade ready in case the rubber below the tape pulled off, but for the most part, it separated cleanly. Terry has installed a latch on the people door and hooks to hold a 2 x 4 over the chicken door. We can now contain the girls in the coop and keep the raccoons out. Still hoping to move them tomorrow.
I'm looking forward to getting caught up on my inside work while Father Sky does the watering for a change.

The coop's home stretch

The coop is nearly ready for the girls, and not a moment too soon. We passed the 6-week deadline last Wednesday. When I began reading up on coops after we had the girls installed in the brooder, several sources emphasized having the coop built before getting the chicks. I was concerned, but thought certainly we could get it built with plenty of time once I was done with classes. Terry was retired, after all. Well. Terry’s inclination to build everything in the best possible way combined with Hilda’s virtually unlimited budget has given us not a chicken coop, but a Chicken Coop. Chateau des Poulets. If the chickens don’t work out, we can use it as a guest house.

No room for Sara! Only nine chickens will fit on the annex perches. Odd that they sorted themselves by color.

Terry put in a door for the chickens, insulated the chicken part of the coop, and covered the insulation with plywood on June 11. The next day, he built an internal wall dividing the chicken space from the storage space. He put a human door and a door to the nest boxes in the wall. He’ll build the nest boxes later, since the chickens won’t need them until fall, and one doesn’t want them to get into the habit of roosting in the nest boxes.

The chicken door

Insulation covered with plywood (left of chicken door) and uncovered (right)

The human door between the coop
and storage area

Next to the human door is an
access door to the nest boxes

Frames for the nest boxes in the coop side

On Wednesday, Hilda and I put a coat of primer on the chicken walls. Terry and I put a perch across the coop so we could paint it while we were doing the walls later in the day.

Perch (left) and painted walls

We had thought and thought about ways to cover the floor to facilitate power washing. Terry came up with the idea of using a liquid rubber coating. (The bucket said something like “foundation sealant.”)While I helped Hilda with the morning chicken chores on Thursday, he went around the coop filling in the larger gaps. He and I put the first coat down. It was slow going. He thought the goop was going to be the consistency of frosting; it turned out to be more like ganache. Thus, it ran down cracks that Terry expected it to fill. “If we did this every week,” I said, “we’d know exactly what to do.”

Terry spreads goop on the floor

So I slopped the stuff on the floor, filling the holes and cracks as best I could, and Terry got busy stuffing filler into the cracks he skipped the first time through. We had only one brush, but there wasn’t room for two people. We traded off when our knees couldn’t stand it anymore. At the end of the job, however, we weren’t satisfied with the coverage. So we put on a second coat today. That coat went lickety split and looked great. Nothing but the hardware left. The books recommend airing the coop for two days after painting. We are on schedule for a Sunday installation of the birds.

It’s hot and dry again. The gardens are irrigated by a system of drip lines and are doing fine. The only hard part about that is remembering to switch the water from one set of lines to the next. Terry has to water his trees with a hose, if it can reach, or with watering cans, which is loads up into the back of the Gator and takes to where he needs them, splashing water all the way. I am experimenting with a few native plants in the wetland and on the bank of the creek. It seemed like a good idea when I didn’t know we’d have a drought. Every other day, I carry two full watering cans to my cardinal flowers, spiderwort, downy foxglove, and turtlehead plants at the edge of the wetland. Then I take the empty cans to the creek, fill them as best I can, and water the lupines, ginger, cardinal flowers, and jack-in-the-pulpits back there. I trudge back to the house through the grasses and clover that somehow continue to grow in soil so dry it is riddled with deep cracks. I rinse out the mud and dead leaves from the creek water and return the watering cans to Terry’s collection by the rain barrel. The whole process takes an hour. I try to get it done before the day gets beastly hot.

While I was trimming the flowers off the asparagus this morning (to keep the stored energy in the roots for next year instead of having it diverted to fruit—Terry’s idea), incessant chirping drew my attention to one of the lower branches on a nearby oak tree. There was Mrs. Oriole feeding her chicks in a pendulant nest. I’m delighted that they are nesting on our property. They certainly eat a good deal of our grape jelly!

The rest of my morning was spent weeding. Weeding is a task that requires intense concentration (so as not to pull the plants you want to keep) while being at the same time mind-numbingly dull. It’s a bad combination. The beans were the easiest, being generally larger than the weeds. I thinned them as I went down the row and was pleased to see the development of numerous root nodules, a sign that nitrogen-fixing bacteria have established that happy relationship in which the bacteria get sugar from the plant and the plant gets nitrogen fertilizer from the bacteria.

Root nodules on a green bean seedling

The beets were the hardest because at this point they are pretty much the same size as the grass and smaller than the amaranth. It is hard not to catch a beet leaf along with the grass leaves and pull everyone out of the ground. I thinned and weeded the cabbages too and gave the culled cabbage sprouts to the girls.

We also gave the chickens worms for the first time today, dropping them into the annex where they wouldn’t get lost in the pine chips. As with any new food, they didn’t quite get it at first. Nigella, presumably by chance, got a worm in the right orientation on an early try. Once she’d eaten that one, she was quite enthusiastic. While her sisters were still tentatively pecking and puzzling, Nigella grabbed a worm, ran to the farthest corner of the cardboard box to dine in peace, then ran back to the annex to get another. Chickens are a hoot!

June 10, Day 40

It is hard to eat with no hands. I first observed this many years ago while watching a snake eat a toad. It was hit and miss at first—the toad was not a willing participant—but when the snake had a good grab on it, it had kept at it, working its jaw around the toad millimeter by millimeter. It was agonizingly slow. The chickens don’t have any trouble with the “crumble,” as the feed is called. These little bits of food don’t need any handling. The greens are another matter. They are most adept at grass. Through several iterations of picking up and dropping, they are pretty good at orienting it so one end is in their mouth. Once the blade is in position, they slurp it down like spaghetti. Broad leaves are another thing entirely. They peck and shake to dislodge the leaflets from the clover and break up the dandelion leaves. It is a lot of work to feed yourself using only your mouth.

Ingrid slurps a blade of grass

Ina eats some clover

Ellie pick lambs quarter from the top of the cage

The entertainment value of giving greens to the chickens has changed the way I pull weeds from the garden. I walk the row first and pull up all the tasty treats before I start in with the hoe. Today I found two enormous lambs quarters growing among the peas. I tied them to the side of the annex, which seemed to help them get the leaves off the stem. In a few hours, the stripped and wilted stems dangled forlornly from the strings.

Jennifer and Ellie graze on lambs quarter from the perches while Bridget forages on the annex floor

The potato experiment is done. The sprouts that I left above ground never did turn green. They sprouted new growth from the base, but otherwise failed to develop.

Original sprout from the pantry, seen in the bottom middle of the picture, never amounted to anything.

The evening primrose I bought in May is blooming now. It blooms in the morning. Go figure.

Evening primrose blooming in the morning

We should be picking peas in a day or two. I’m getting a little panicky that the harvest is starting and I haven’t got my syllabi done for fall yet. I must get into work this week.

Peas approach harvest