Rebuild from Depression Blog

We live on about five acres on the southern edge of the Sequoia National Forest. We make up for in land what we lack in convenience. We are an hour from any major supermarket and so we need to have our meals planned. We rely on foods available in our freezer and on our property.

Fresh eggs are a big part of our plan.

We have a chicken coop with an enclosed chicken yard but on most days we open the coop and allow the chickens free reign of the property. At night, they head back to the coop to roost and we lock them up to protect them from predators.

But in the country chickens are easy pickings for wild animals. We have lost a number of hens to wildlife during the day time. We lost a hen to illness and we have lost one to a night time predator when we forgot to close the door to their coop. Just this week our flock went from eight hens to six. A flock of thirteen hens over two years ago has turned into six. It's time to restock.

We had planned to order various exotic breeds for our next batch of hens, but the loss of one-quarter of our flock this week sent us down to Porterville Feed for a batch of chicks. We hit the store tonight and bought most of their final batch of chicks for the season. We have ten Rhode Island Reds and ten Barred Rocks.

The chicks rode in a box in the back seat next to Frederick's car seat. As we drove home listening to Ella Fitzgerald and peeping chicks, Frederick said "Mama, do you think the chicks are singing to the music?"

Our new chicks have first-class accommodations here at Hilltop House. Chicks are very sensitive to cold and nature intended them to stay with their mothers who would transfer her body heat to them. When you buy a passel of chicks in early November in particular, you could have a rather long time of babying them to make sure they stay healthy.

Frederick's suggestion was that our current batch of six hens could be their mamas. I tried to explain that they likely have other interests. We could have also opted to keep them in the bathtub for a few days under a heat lamp. This is what we did with the first batch of chicks in my household growing up. They literally lived in the bathtub for a couple of days until their accommodations were ready. I have found memories of the chicks in the bathtub but I was about seven years old. Thirty years later, I am much less impressed.

What we opted to do was move a large chicken cage inside, fill it with leaves, put a lamp on top, and cover the whole business with a blanket and towels. It looks terrible but we have a very large house and anyone bothered by the zoo inside our house can go into other rooms. My son checks them throughout the day so they serve a bit of a role in providing child care. And anyone worried about the possible house fire due to the blankets over the lamp-it has crossed my mind as well. Various connectors don't touch the blankets so our risk is reduced somewhat.

As these chicks become chickens, they will provide us with our own source of free-range eggs, rich in Omega-3 fatty acids. The eggs are nature's own depression-busting foods, good for breakfast, good in casseroles, and exceptional in dessert. Read my article on Omega-3s and eggs.

Perhaps our craftsman home designed by architect Irving Gill was not meant to be a chicken coop.

Perhaps your mother has never told you, so let me tell you in case you did not know: raising chicks in your house creates very bad indoor air.

My poor husband Sander has an office next to the porch room where the chicks were living and he has lung problems. It's a bad combination.

Researchers are concerned about indoor air. The air in most of our homes is of poorer quality than the air in Los Angeles on bad days. That's not good. Fumes seep from glues in particle board and other manufactured lumber. Vinyl floors and carpet fibers emit fumes. Carpet glue and carpet pads emit fumes. Animal dander irritates our skin and our respiratory system. All of these irritants must be processed by our body and filtered out. That filtration system requires nutrients.

Chick dander doesn't make the list of scientific studies because most people put the chicks outside in a chicken coop. That's a real good idea. I am not sure how much B-6 or B-12 I've burned through with this chicken dander, but the chicks are moved out now into their permanent home. They will be a bit cold, but Sander will breathe a whole lot better and the house already smells a lot less rangy.

Monday morning a week or so ago marked butcher day. I left home early and drove about two miles to meet up with Dan and Ted.

Dan's family has been in this area for over a century. His family owns a lot of grazing land in the area which he leases to area ranchers. Dan's land is particularly good for grazing because he has water rights to the area creeks and diverts the water to his pastures so that his land is green when everybody else's land is tan or brown. He owns a few head of cattle and calls me when he has an extra. I purchased a steer from Dan to help stock our freezer.

Ted was already there when I arrived on Monday, driving his white truck with the license plate "dead cow," towing a trailer with the beef industry bumper sticker.

Ted is a freelance butcher who slaughters two to three animals a day.

I hired Ted to slaughter the steer and deliver it to the meat locker for processing.

The term "bird brain" comes from somewhere, but in reference to a couple of hens on our property, it is not entirely fitting.

Three years ago the Easter Bunny brought fifteen chicks to Frederick. We slowly lost over half in the following two-and-a-half years. In late October, a predator took out an additional four.

The hens are locked up in a hen house at night and the house has an attached, fully enclosed yard. But on occasion the house has not been locked or an animal has gotten into the yard otherwise.

We noticed on the mornings after the predator attacks that one of the Araucana hens had found her way to the roof of our main house, about 100 yards from the hen house. That's pretty smart - get far away from the others and fly to a high spot.

You've seen the bobcat before - he nearly walked into my house two months ago. He purred and acted like he wanted to be a pet. I closed the door.

This blog started with a post about a batch of baby chicks. There were twenty nine months ago and today there are six.

Three-week-old chicks have very little meat and their hearts are about the size of a dime. I learned that today when I dressed out poultry for the first time ever to teach my son an important life lesson about being an "ethical" omnivore.

You may have read my rule here on the blog before, back when my son was playing with a frog. I want to discourage "over-playing" with animals. Boys with lots of energy are prone to that sort of thing. But to say "we don't kill animals" would be a bit disingenuous since we eat them fairly regularly. Thus, the household rule "if you kill it, you eat it."

I always saw it as a bluff.

Dinner tonight took a little longer to prepare than usual and it was dinner for one. It's still waiting to be consumed.

I really don't know if it's good news or bad news. Well, the global loss of bee hives is obviously bad news. But a bee hive vacating your wall voluntarily is usually good news.

We had an intricate plan of "moving" the hive from one of the walls in the Little House to some more appropriate residence. Sometime this winter was to be the date. The plan included a stronger hive, smoke, and lots of local honey and bee larvae. Brit even suggested in the comments of the "Bee Balooza" post that we watch a Winney the Pooh movie to kick-off the bee move. The whole crazy event even inspired the quote of the year to date (to remain anonymous):

"I'd rather get my foreskin caught in a zipper than mess with those bees."

Part of me was looking forward to the madness. It's all part of my therapy. :)

The plan is postponed indefinitely.

It appears that the bees are gone. Within the next week, we will be removing the wall to see what we've got going on. For all of the effort, I am hoping for some "Little House Honey" that I can consume in the Eat Local Challenge next month. I'm foraging all of my food myself, so honey from the wall would fit the bill.

Our now infamous household rule "If you kill it, you eat it," was enforced by me last week. In just a quick update with pictures, I thought that everyone would be interested to know that the chick has been consumed by the five year old who helped it meet its demise.

It's Just Dinner
To entice Frederick to eat the chick and to reduce the trauma of the day, I gave a speech about how "At the end of the day, it's chicken and maybe a little bit more tender than you are used to. Just eat it. It's dinner."

If you have read this blog for any length of time you know of our on-going laying hen angst. We lost a bundle a year ago to a predator, bought a dozen chicks whose lodging in our very home kicked this blog off late last fall. Those chicks grew and became dinner for the bob cat I love to hate, the animal that has finally inspired me to learn to shoot. (That's going well, by the way.)

That same bob cat finally got Henny Penny and Harriet, the two three-year-old hens who decided to live out their final days roosting in trees rather than in the safety of their hen house.

Henny was particularly special to all of us. She was the official favorite, a bit ditzy looking in part because of her small frame and her somewhat uncoordinated nature. No one else talks about this, but I expect she was our favorite because she reminded us of our long-ago cat, Marietta. Marietta was also white, skinny, and uncoordinated. You would think nature would get these sorts of animals first, but both long out-lived any projections, a sign that they were not likely ditzy after all.

With the activity of the bob cat this summer, we bought a new batch of chicks that proceeded to get eaten by a neighborhood cat. We had all but given up on any more birds when we found one remaining Rhode Island Red chick wandering around outside, three days after the cat attack. She needed friends.