Gains, Loss, The Future

ah, the beginning of fall.  when the temperatures drift down into the balmy mid-nineties, and there is a chance of rain sometimes.  actually, all facetiousness aside, the mornings and evenings have been beautiful!  and enough rain has fallen that the back yard is full of chickweed and egg production is ramping up again. i'm excited about the change of seasons, and fall air is some of the best air.

sadly, we have lost another chicken.  this time there was no disease or predation involved...earlier this week bolo vanished without a trace! there she is to the left, the big black one, having a roll in the dust with pearl last sunday.  by tuesday, however, she was gone. just gone!  no feathers, no yard kerfuffle, everyone had been in the run all day.  all other fowl were fine and normal. but when i went out to the yard after work to give the ladies and gentleman their yard time, she simply was nowhere to be found.

i keep hoping she might come back, but i think it's been long enough that such hope is lost.  my best thought is that she's been bodily assumed into heaven, rapture-style.  at least that's my favorite theory...several others make perhaps more sense but are far more depressing.  she was a non-flyer, but had accidentally hopped out of the run once a long time ago--she was never one for adventure.  

needless to say, all remaining chickens now have flight feathers 1-8 clipped on their right wing, like i did sammo a couple months ago, to prevent further chicken raptures.

i wonder if she accidentally hopped out again, went for a mosey, got lost....and then was bodily assumed.  at any rate, wherever she is, i hope she enjoyed her life here and is enjoying her next life.  if not, i'd like it if she would come back.

in other, better news, we recently acquired two new girls to bump up egg production and add some new feathers to the flock.  introducing tony parker and scotty pippen!

tony parker

tony parker is a lovely young barred rock hen, a classic breed. true to her name, she is especially quick and agile, and does not seem to like to get picked up yet.  however, once caught, she will happily sit on the available lap for pets and chicken talk.  she should start laying big brown eggs any minute!

scotty pippen

scotty pippen is a beautiful red star chicken who, unlike her new sister thus far, is quite friendly. she seems to enjoy being picked up and cuddled, and even hangs around waiting for such attention.  her breed is also an egg-laying machine, and so we are much anticipating her egg scene debut.  in fact, she was destined to go to an _actual_ egg laying machine--a big production chicken house--which explains why her beak was cut.  but here on the TUF, her beak can grow back in all its glory and she can party in the run and yard all day.  i look forward to seeing her beak back!

all chickens have made the adjustment seamlessly, both to the new additions and the loss of dear old bolo.  the flock numbers six once again--tumblr (the rooster), sammo (easter egger), pearl and ninja (original silkies), scotty pippen and tony parker.  we pause to remember the TUFlock chickens who have gone on to the great free-range in the sky: soft grey twitter, baby lil' bitz (we barely new ye!), and big black ol' bolo.  thanks for all the eggs and fun.

milk snail enjoying a fall morning

and finally, a bit about the future: dan and i are pleased to be expecting a new HUMAN addition to the TUF to join us in early march 2013!  all is well so far, and of course we will appreciate another TUF hand around to help care for all these crazy creatures. that's why people originally starting having kids anyway, right? more help around the farm?  maybe we can actually start that garden i've been screaming about since the beginning of this whole experiment!

speaking of experiment, and as a final note, here is a picture of the fantastic carrot soup i concocted the other day.  i had also (true to TUF philosophy) used a bunch of farmer's market vegetable odds and ends, and the frozen carcasses of a roasted local duck and chicken, to make a killer-awesome no-waste stock as the base for this soup.  i basically used this recipe, with lemon juice but no zest, a zillion cloves of garlic, and only 1/4 cup of cream, and it came out pretty dang delightful.  and healthy! mostly!

anyway, there is much coming up to discuss, what with the changing seasons, new girls, new food, new future prospects and all.  thank you for reading, Dear Reader, and though i'm clearly not the best at it, i'll renew my efforts to keep y'all posted and document the process!

RIP Twitter :(

she was a pretty, blue-gray soft girl. she passed on to the great free-range in the sky today, not sure why.  she was a fine chicken. 
this is the most recent picture of her i have, from about a week ago.

she was an odd girl, always separate from all the other ladies. i saw tumblr take her on dates a few times, but she kept to herself most of the time. 
the flock did not dictate her actions!

she was always just a little off, somehow. it's weird, she was almost exactly a year old, 
practically to the day. a full-fledged hen. (she was about 6 months in this pic.)

she hadn't even gotten her comb yet here!

this one is from about a week ago as well. she was normal most of the time, and then sometimes acted really strangely. i half expected her to die at any moment.  but she never seemed to be in pain or depressed...

she took our bout with fowl pox hard, worse than any of the other ladies. but she got through it.

she was a cute and fuzzy baby. also very suspicious.

she laid beautiful chocolate brown eggs, for which her breed (french marans) is known. she will be missed.

thanks for all the eggs, Twitter! you were a very good chicken.  i hope you had a good life with us, and have gone on to something even better!


dan buried her in our place for honored pets passed on. we then spent the day improving the back yard and filling one of the garden boxes with cameroneil compost. her memory will be honored with continued dedication to enthusiastic chicken keeping and garden having.

Garden/Snake

when i first started writing about our TUF attempt, it had a lot to do with coop construction...that was the first step toward ultimately becoming a Totally Urban Farm. another one of our original goals was to build and start a vegetable garden, and almost exactly a year ago, we built the boxes for it on the day we got our first egg. this is what it looked like back then:

then we got focused on the chickens all summer, and it was really hot, and then i was a science teacher for nine months (time consuming, that!), and so the garden boxes filled with weeds and turned into a chicken playground/hot dog wallow...UNTIL THIS WEEKEND.  design revamped, enthusiasm renewed, the TUF garden is within a few weekends' reach!

the 3 original 6'x6' boxes got a 2'x4' inset for easy harvest access. each inset got 2 18" square patio tiles, and the rest of the growing area (84 square feet!) got dug up and covered with hay to get all the weeds out of there.  shortly we will lay down some landscaping cloth, cover it with gravel, cover THAT with local topsoil enriched with our delicious compost, and we will be ready for a fall garden. for real this time!

this space on the side of our our house gets direct morning sun from about 9 am to 3 pm, then is shaded by the house for the rest of the day.  i'm hoping that will be enough sunshine to grow tasty tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers...we are garden virgins for sure, so this will be a learning process. just like everything about the TUF!

speaking of learning experiences: last early june we had a brush with our first Texas Rat Snake, which resulted in the snake making him/herself scarce for the rest of the year.  well, s/he is back.

and now it is more than a brush. it is WAR.  this snake has been stealing the lovely ladies' eggs for the past month, ever since the beginning of may.  "may's snake month," our neighbor once averred, and at the time i was skeptical. no longer.  i am certain that this snake is a significant factor in hampering the as-yet theoretical five-egg day.

my thought is to carefully capture it, constrain it to a pillow case, drive it across 183 and release in a woodsy area. it has probably devoured like a dozen eggs at this point!  i'll go out there, check on the birds, see the carefully crafted deep egg-nests they like to make, but they will be empty.  the other day i caught it in the act of eating one of sammo's eggs.  i made ready to do battle, but the snake dropped the egg (!) and beat it.  and two days ago, as we were putting up the chickens at dusk, we saw it curled in the nesting box.  tumblr was peering at it with great suspicion, and the other ladies were as far away as they could be inside the coop.  we made a heroic joint attempt to capture it, to no avail. snakes always turn out to be surprisingly strong and nimble.

thus, the battle of the rat snake continues, and i will update you, Dear Reader, as developments develop!  and summer is coming right up, with all its time and promise...cooking! grocery store adventures! gardening! more writing!  it's almost, almost here........

Fiftieth

this moment i sit on my back porch balcony, having concocted this adult beverage.  it's a fancy affair of orange juice, grapefruit preserves made by a good friend and traded for eggs, organic strawberries, and local vodka.  _lovely._ as is the weather, warm and breezy and greensmelling.

i won't lie to you, Dear Reader.  i've been holding out.  holding out for that most holy of theoretical days, the Five Egg Day. i've got five hens a-laying, and i really wanted to mark the Fifitieth Post with a Five Egg Day.  i also realize that april 10th marked the anniversary of my very first silly post, and i kind of wanted all these stars to align, you know?  fiftieth post, five egg day, year of TUF.   how poifect would that have been?

but nothing is ever perfect, which is exactly how everything should be.  the ladies and gentleman have the full run of the yard now every day, and seem absolutely thrilled.  we will occasionally leave them in their orignal run for a day, which they dearly loved at one time, but now they spend the whole time in there looking exasperated, as only chickens can.  so these days they are pretty much as free-range as it gets for a Totally Urban (chicken) Farm.

i can't believe i ever thought
he was a girl.

tumblr, while nearly intolerably loud, appears to be a fine czar of the yard. he is vigilant and watchful, and often puts on a showy, strutting, clucking display for the benefit of his hareem.  all the ladies have accepted his leadership at this point, and he seems to do a good job of attending the whole flock while devoting some individual attention to each hen.  i know that sounds ridiculous, but i swear he takes them on dates.  and he makes a variety of strange dinosaur noises: various forms of alarm or annoyance, surprise, his odd clearing-the-throat-while-howling crow, and the occasional elongated string of rythmically delivered clucks punctuated with bwak-KAWS turned up to 11.  i have decided this particular sound is the chicken mantra, actually....they all do it, though tumblr does it at a spectacular volume, and when they are at it, it is unstoppable. bok bok bok bok BWAK bok bok bok BWAK KAW bok bok bok BWAK etc.  happily, it doesn't happen THAT often.

the ladies have discovered that the yard is large and harbors many delightful nooks and crannies for surprise egg laying.  i have had an easter egg hunt every day since easter, and now i completely understand where the tradition originates!  why lay 'em in a logical place like the coop nesting box when you can lay them in grassy corners, between slats of leftover lumber, randomly on the ground...

so i sought to create some cozy egg-laying spaces in the exciting (to chickens) area under the porch/balcony in the back yard, with the intention that i could facilitate fun egg-laying practices while somewhat reducing randomness.  we also stashed the haybale dan brought home the other day under there, since we have graduated beyond the $4 bag of hay days (and the bales are only $15!).  we logically put it in the wheelbarrow, which we logically wheeled into the under-porch area for easy coop access.  WELL.

the very next day i discovered this very ILLogical egg placement.  spurning my delightful boxes, ninja and sammo laid their eggs right smack dab on top of the  haybale!  i guess no one ever accused chickens of being especially logical.

today, however, i found two eggs nestled in the big blue box.  twitter and pearl seem to get it.  oh well, as long as we're getting two and three eggs a day, i don't much care where i find them.  the ladies take turns being the super egg champion!

sometimes we get weird ones.

bolo

sammo

pearl

ninja

twitter

per usual, i have been enjoying some delicious egg dishes...

poached eggs perched over quinoa over refried black beans over organic salad greens, drizzled with balsamic vinaigrette....fast and fabulous!

migas (scrambled eggs/leftover salsa/bottom of bag tortilla chip crumbles) and toast!

more soon, Dear Reader, i promise!  because i have many more pictures of food and adorable pets to blither on about.  i can hold out no longer.  

and yet-the theoretical Five Egg Day  awaits.

Spring Break!

with the spring comes warmth and rains, so trees begin a-budding
and fowl, freed from coop constraints, go merrily a-mudding
to seek and ingest grass and seeds with eager scratch-and-pecks,
while drunk on pollen from the weeds are slow-flying insects.

the sun climbs back from southern climes a little more each day,

giving light for longer times, inspiring hens to lay.

finding four eggs in the nest is common happenstance;

the rooster preens his feathered breast and struts his mating dance.

the coop was scrubbed, vinegar-spritzed, and stuffed with brand new hay,
we held a household/closet cleaning blitz the other day.
springtime zephyrs whistle by and tease all windows open;
out the doubts of winter fly to make way for new hoping.

yesterday's experiment was mini pita bread.
puffed pocket bites were what i meant to get; i got instead
a kind of tender flatbread, small in size, and good with dip--
i cannot escape hummus and its culinary grip.

and that's the word from 'round the TUF. happy spring break all!
here's hoping hope and weather hold; we'll spring it up 'till fall!

Lately on the TUF

traditionally, i have maintained a tenacious loathing of all vegetables that share the pepper/chili family.  it is well documented by those close to me how vehemently and for how long i have opposed peppers and chilies in my food.  this is particularly notable, as there are almost no other foods in the WORLD that have given my appetite such pause.  in just the past few months, however, i have noted the end of this preference phenomenon.

case in point: we went to the downtown farmer's market yesterday for the first time in a while, much to the dogs' collective thrill!  there was a riot of colorful vegetables out in force, with some tantalizing signs of the cooler weather (!) harvest to come.  this time, i was completely dazzled by the peppers and chilies offered up by booth after booth at the market.  i could not believe the diversity of shapes, colors, and sizes--piles and piles of vibrant shiny peppers!  i wanted to swim in them, roll in them like the ball pit at the children's amusement park.  i nearly seized and devoured a bag of impossibly beautiful small specimens labeled "scotch bonnet chilies," but dan (forever the logical realist) informed me that those may be some of the spiciest chilies available, and would turn my pepper-reverie into a hellish spicemare.  he then gathered a collection of delectable, reasonably-spiced peppers and chilies to turn into his famous buffalo chili for dinner.

when we got home, chili preparation began immediately.  it is an all-day cooking event, after all!  the chili master decided to grill the million chilies and peppers we had acquired.  the ground buffalo browned with the onion and garlic as the chilis became aromatic.  THIS WAS GOING TO RULE.

dan then mixed the grilled goodness with the browned business in the big skillet.  he added some lone star beer, chili spices, and a can of tomato paste.  our eyes burned from the onion and chili chopping, but even with eyes squeezed shut we could smell the deliciousness that was in our future.  simmertime!

in the meantime, we had been incredibly productive before noon, dinner wasn't for many hours, and there was some trout in the fridge that needed immediate attention.  it was grilled quickly and turned into a leisurely weekend lunch.  dan enjoyed his neat, the light seasonings and grilled-flavor enough for him.  being kind of ridiculous, i decided to turn mine into non-traditional fish tacos.  that is: organic lettuce and local goat cheez (purchased mere hours before!), some dill pickle slices, and the flaked grilled trout, on toasted tortillas.  HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

at this point, i'm going to do something kind of odd: i'm going to bring up our compost heap.  i began to discuss it in jest in a previous post, but it's time i gave it some real attention.  the compost heap is pretty amazing, actually--it has gone from a tiny afterthought to a real, dirt producing, waste-reducing entity in our backyard.

we have implemented a tupperware container on the kitchen counter in which we accumulate compostables: vegetable tops, bottoms, guts and peels; coffee grounds; compostable dryer sheets; eggshells; various other (non-greasy, non-meat) bits and pieces.  we also have been composting the guinea pig and rat bedding, and incorporating coop/run hay as well.  after several months of stuff-adding, raking, watering, and waiting, the pile is actively producing lovely dirt.  it leans against the chicken run, and the ladies love the bug-fet it offers.  we are still considering the best way to use the finished dirt, considering our shade/sun gardening challenges; however, it has certainly reduced our landfill contribution.  more on this and gardening as developments develop!

now, back to food.  saturday evening, the chili has been simmering all day, filling our house with chiliful aromas.  dan has his over penne, sprinkled with chopped onions; i have mine over market lettuce greens, with the onions and some creamy chunks of goat cheez (i LOVE the stuff!).  as predicted, IS DELICIOUS.

the million grilled chilis lent an unusual sweetness to the dish.  i can safely say this was the best chili i had ever had IN MY LIFE.  i feel like i say that a lot when i talk about dan's chili; he is a really good cook.

in short: tastes change, seasons change, kitchen scraps change into dirt, and the food around here stays tasty.  thank you for your readership, Dear Reader...more soon!