Big MaryLou

Missoula went through its hard-fought urban chicken law challenge years ago, during my last residency here.  I had good friends in grad school who were active in the chicken-advocacy that finally set local ordinances making backyard chicken-keeping legal within city limits, and set a few boundaries and guidelines around it. Like a lot of towns and cities, Missoula allows residents to keep no more than three hens (no roosters) as pets and for egg production.  There are other fine-print rules related to smells, food storage, nuisance complaints from neighbors, etc., but generally people are getting on pretty well with small backyard flocks of chickens.  I love this, as a way for people to have access to really good quality, humanely produced eggs (most people with only a few chickens are so attached to and invested in them, they have a pretty good--sometimes ridiculously good--quality of life, compared to factory-farmed chickens).

Chickens don't live forever, though, and when one's entire flock is only three ladies, it's not unusual for urban chicken owners to suddenly find themselves with one lonely hen after the demise (usually from raccoons or dogs) or expiration (generally from old age) of the other two.  Chickens are flock animals, and a single chicken can seem pretty sad and mopey. Faced with one lonely hen on their hands,

My friend and grad school lab-mate Sarah found herself in this predicament recently, and called on us.  I'm slowly realizing that chicken-refuge may become part of our farming plan, because we have already gotten word of another person who is looking to give away hens that she doesn't have time or energy to care for anymore (we're not sure we have room for all of them, but we'll see what we can do).  Sarah got three chickens we she bought a house in her second year of grad school, four years ago.  She's a devout vegetarian, and while she delighted in the egg production and felt at some level she should think of the chickens as livestock, the truth is, they were pets.  There are pictures of her holding them gleefully up to the camera as pullets, on her facebook page. They had names:  Susie Q, Rosie, and MaryLou.

Sadly, over the last few months she lost both Rosie and Susie Q, so a few weeks ago I had a rather morose phone call from Sarah, asking if we could perhaps take MaryLou in to our young flock so she'd have some company.  It turned out to be quite a good deal for us, since she came with a lot of accessories--Sarah is finishing grad school and leaving Missoula soon and happy to have one shed cleaned out of chicken accessories and old straw bales well in advance of her packing and moving.  So on a dark snowy evening, we stopped by Sarah's house with the truck and the cat carrier and loaded up far more than we really expected:  10 or more hay bales, a big bag of scratch, another of layer feed, a half-bag of oyster shells,  a feeder, a waterer, a heated platform to keep the waterer from freezing solid (never needed in Oregon, but quite a necessity here in Montana, we've discovered!).  And of course, the star of the show, one fat black chicken.

We'd thought out 9-week-old chicks had gotten so big and shaped like full-grown chickens, that we'd forgotten they were barely teenagers, and still quite small.  MaryLou had some heft!  A black Maran, I believe, she has feathers the iridescent blue-green black of a crow, and a bright red comb.  All that picking up and loving she'd gotten as a pet chicken meant she was docile and quiet, quite a contrast to our wild wiley hens in Forest Grove.  She did not take kindly to the young upstarts, and for a few days we thought she might not be compatible at all, and even called around a few other friends to see if anyone could take her in.  But luckily, while we were trying to find a new place for her (with no luck) she managed to work out a truce with the 19 young pullets also in the coop.  It's a spacious coop, and they are quick, so there's been very little actual pecking.  But they've learned she's boss, and now she just has to give them a stern eye and they give her her space.

We'd assumed all along that MaryLou was here on a retirement plan.  At Sarah's, she hadn't been laying this winter, and at best we figured we'd get a few eggs in the spring when the days got longer--or she might just live out her retirement eating food scraps, making compost, and keeping the littler girls in check.  But to my surprise, a few days ago while adding more leaves to their bedding, I noticed in the corner...eggs!  Two brown eggs, in fact, and a few more, 2 or three days.  Turns out MaryLou is still working!  They are still rare, but it's great to have some eggs again.  It may be that the days are already getting longer, or that she's getting the high-protein starter feed we got for the chicks, but in any case, it's great to have some real eggs again.  

Important calls.

I try, of course, to be mindful--to be always observant, watching, aware.  But Friday morning, the white sky and clouded ground were a good mirror for my current over-occupied mind. On a mid-morning trip back to the house to make yet another pot of coffee in an attempt to finish out a last low-sleep push through deadlines, overdues, and quite possibly impossible goals, with my head down against the freezing drizzle, my eyes were on nothing more than the slickening snow underfoot, and barely noticing even that.  It's easy to not look, with a mind over-full.

Luckily some senses tune in on their own, and the sound stopped me in my trudge even before it fully registered.  Two notes, familiar, compelling, and new to today.  They brought my eyes up from the snow to slowly rotate and scan the treetops to find it, the small dot high in the birch, calling again.  Of course, it's a familiar song, but it took two calls and the image of the shape for it to fall into place:  a black-capped chickadee.

And with that, the quick instant, I realized 1) I hadn't been paying attention and 2) that I hadn't heard that call or seed any chickadees for a while.  It called me back, and put be back on alert (or at least more alert), and more likely to notice the next thing.  I'm grateful for that two-note call, and for the parts of me that can be watching and listening to that outside world even when I don't realize it.



You can read about (and hear the recording of it) here at the fantastic Cornell Lab website:

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Black-capped_Chickadee/id

Seeds

Seeds have been on the table, quite literally, lately, and very much on our minds as well.  We just put in our big seed order, which will cover most of what we plan to grow this coming (rapidly coming!) spring and summer.  It's the largest seed order I've ever placed, by a long shot.  We're hoping we got everything, and enough of the right things....we'll kind of have to see how it all plays out.  

We went to an interesting event last night, too, sponsored by the Organic Seed Alliance, the Native Seed Search, and a few other local non-profits, focused on seed security.  The speaker from the Native Seed Search (http://www.nativeseeds.org) spoke passionately about the importance of maintaining viable seeds as a public, natural, resource, and the importance of having regional exchanges and seed banks/ libraries to serve as sources for locally well-adapted seed stocks.  It was inspiring, especially after having just ordered our seeds from Vermont....after looking, unsucessfully, for seed sources more locally.   

Missoula is working now to start a seed library, for exchanging, trading, and stewarding varieties of seed that are locally successful.  We're excited to be a part of that, not just to reduce how much seed we need to buy next year, but to participate in that fundamental aspect of agriculture, which really got us all the diversity of crops we have today, of slowly selecting and changing varieties to match our climate, desires, and needs.  As Bill said last night, of saving, selecting, and sharing regional seeds "..that way, we are creating a better world, one that tastes better!"   

The first thing we did on that beautiful new barnwood table we built was to spread out a donation of 75 seed packets from High Mowing Seeds, to see what we had.  It's a ridiculous wealth!  Most of of these packets will go to farmers that we work with on courses, as a gift from the students that they host in their homes.  Farmers in a lot of areas (here as well, not just the tropics) often struggle with getting access to affordable and appropriate seeds.  All the varieties we'll share are open-pollinated, and non-GMO, so farmers can save seeds from one crop for the next year. 

neighbor trails

One wonderful detail of our place here on Sundown is the proximity to an old friend (and former housemate, in fact), who lives "just one pasture over" as I often explain it to people.  It could also be called "next door" I suppose, but since both places have long driveways leading off of Sundown Road, the most efficient way to get between them is to cut across a long narrow pasture, rather than going out driveways and down the road.

Since the last big snow, there has been a fair amount of traffic between our houses, and a nice little path has worn down, by trips back and forth to borrow some warm clothes from a guest, to loan a pair of sewing-scissors, and the last few days, Cedar coming over to borrow the sewing machine and my (limited) expertise as she works on a special sewing project.

It's easy to stay indoors, to stay isolated, from neighbors especially in the cold winter months (unless, of course, your young hungry husky barges into people's front doors and starts eating their pets' food, but that's another story).  We jump-start the neighboring by knowing some of them already, but we are reminded in our recent exchanges of visits, how important those connections are.  It's a good reminder to keep reaching out to others as well, that that verb of "neighboring" is so important for building natural, resilient communities.  Looking out on the neighbor trail through the pasture, just a bit deeper and wider than the deer trails linking other corners, I am reminded that, with a little effort, we can make more of those--a network of neighbor trails and connections for all kinds of support.

Building with the Barn Boards

We named our last coffee roast for some of the inspiring material that surrounds us here on the someday-farm on Sundown.  Piled in the old barn, behind some of the more modern construction scraps from the big remodel of Anita’s place, there was a small library of weathered grey boards.  We don’t know what all they might have been used for over the course of their life, but they’ve seen some time outside.  Though some may have been from an old fence, we refer to them all as ‘barn boards.’ We used several of them in construction of some of our basic shelves and furniture as we started settling into the house.  With just a quick cleanup from a stiff wire brush, they were pretty good—soft grey, distinguished with age, they made good legs for smoother shelves, butcher blocks, and more, as we started to build a surprisingly matching set of custom furniture for our little place. 

Mabel poses on the reclaimed-wood bookshelf. 

But as with many things, as we gained some more skills, we started to take the woodworking up a notch or two.  Over the holidays, Noah invested in a planer, partly to be able to take advantage of free rough-cut wood that we can pick up from a friend’s small lumber mill in town (also our source of sawdust, but that’s a whole other story).  The planer also allowed us to take down the rough outsides of these barn boards.  The main target was for making a tabletop out of those salvaged barn-boards.  I’d never planed boards before, but it turns out to be a somewhat magical process, peeling away the rough outer layers, even of scruffy, hard-used boards, to expose a smooth, often surprisingly bright surface underneath. 

In this sneak peak at the kitchen table, which we just finished this past week and are completely in love with, you can see the what was lying below that weathered barn-board surface (and a piece of un—planed board, for contrast). 

It’s beautiful (even better with the beeswax finish I'll talk about soon)....beautiful enough that we are actually starting to look around at our coffee table, butcher block, and shelves, and seriously consider taking them apart to plane down their barn-board legs to expose some of those bright colors and grains.    

Currently: Sunday, January 13

Cold snow crunches underfoot, noses crinkle in a morning walk. 19 young chickens are getting tougher in their coop, and our chores got easier with a new hand-me-down heated waterer.  Squirrels and birds have found the spill of corn near the barn, even under a layer of leaves and snow.  A perfect set of wing prints in the new morning powder show the landing spot of one magpie.  This evening that little patch of white remains untouched, surrounded by criss-crossing paths of footsteps from many trips to the barn, imprints of a busy day.  It's left, a rare smooth patch,  a small trace of beauty from winged neighbors, too special to disturb.

No such thing

Another little mini-drama production from the cottage at Sundown Road.  Our characters are intent on finally following through with a plan to cut through the floor of the upper story of the house to allow warm air from the bedroom (the basement/ downstairs), which has the sole heater for the house, to flow directly and more efficiently up to the upper story.

Scene 1: This morning, around 8:30 a.m., finishing coffee while wearing down jackets and wool hats:

Noah:  Before you go to work, how about we quickly punch that hole through the floor for the warm air vent?

Mary:  Hmm, I was thinking of doing that this evening, maybe.  It's kind of a big project, isn't it?  I do need to get some SimBio stuff done today.

Noah:  No, it's just a simple little project.  It won't take long.

Mary:  Well, I guess.  But there's no such thing as a little project.

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Scene 2:  fast-forward montage of measuring, remeasuring, debating, fetching tools, and drilling a pilot hole to confirm that location #1 will not work for placing a heating vent.  characters encounter obstacles including poorly located access points, floor beams, stripped screws, and overall strange house design.
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Scene 3:  Mary perched on a windowsill, Noah crouched with one foot on bed, one on nightstand, finally having found suitable location, drilling through the subfloor and flooring commences in a rain of woodchips and sawdust.

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Scene 4:  11:00, Mary leaves for office, Noah commenced drilling, cutting, fitting vent cover to hole. One broken jigsaw blade.

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Scene 5:  Trip to Lowe's for larger vent cover to accommodate accidentally too-long cut on one side.  Turns out jigsaw was better for some cuts than the skillsaw.

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Scene 6:  4:00
Noah:  Well, it's all in and fitted.  Now I'll just take the rest of the day to build the box around the sides.

[editor note:  this is to make a chute straight up through the space between downstairs ceiling and upstairs floor, so warm air doesn't fill entire sub-floor space.  again, strange house design).


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I stand confirmed:  there is no such thing as a small project.  

We can laugh at it, mostly, but we have had way too many projects like this lately, with little setbacks adding up to big frustration and projects that go on and on.  I'll admit, though, I'm glad we didn't start this one in the evening after all; it would have been another very very late night.