Arabella's Garden -- The View From Home

BFF

2011-12-12T10:48:00.000-08:00

Meet Hawkeye, my new BFF*

Until I got my own girls last year, I had no idea what drama existed in the lives of chickens. In my innocence, I imagined nothing more than cheerful bukking and clucking as my fantasy hens roamed my garden, patrolling for bugs, creating fabulous fertilizer, and laying the odd egg. But in the year and a half since I got my first peeps, I have learned that tv soap operas are nothing on the real life drama of the henhouse.

My first taste of avian angst occurred when the girls were still peeps. Betty, the only solid colored bird in the group (a golden orange RRI/Buff Orpington cross), sank to the bottom of the pecking order as soon as feathers started coming in. I had to apply the smelly purple goo to fend off the bullies.

When I added Babe, my ill-fated bantam frizzle cochin a week or two later, the peck-a-thon recommenced against her. She was just too different for the other girls to deal with, so they harried and chased and pecked her until she was nearly bald and a complete mental wreck.

She made it through the winter and I found a happier home for her with one of my chicken coop tour guests this past spring.

Early this summer, I brought in a couple of young pullets from a poultry swap, to ramp up the egg production, and though they had a bit of an adjustment, they mostly settled in with the gang, though now taking Betty's former spot at the bottom of the pecking ladder.
Sylvia (Dominique/Blue Orpington cross)

and Maisie (Dominique)

But last week I noticed Hawkeye, my sole Ameraucana, was staying inside the henhouse day and night. Was she cold? Winter temperatures had just arrived, and she was in heavy molt. Another day or two went by, the weather warmed up, but still no Hawkeye appeared outside. Was she sick? No, she seemed alert and normal when I checked her out, and when I offered her food, she ate hungrily.

Hmm, maybe it's something else. I read up on molting behavior, and learned that it hits some hens like a version of chicken PMS. They get cranky, moody, and irritable. Their new feathers growing in can be painful if they brush up against anything, so they stay away from the gang. Maybe that was it. I offered her a bowl of water and food, up on her perch atop the nest boxes. She ate as if famished, which she probably was. And she moved around so I could see she wasn't injured or seemingly sick.

A couple of days later I opened the door and caught her in the act of eating an egg from the nest box! Bad chicken. Very bad. As you can imagine, egg-eating chickens are not only bad in themselves, but they often teach other chickens to do the same thing. Various schemes ran through my head all day, as well as visions of the stewpot. Realistically, though, that's probably not an option, since: a) I couldn't imagine eating one of my girls and b) I have no neck-wringing experience. Thinking hard and asking various other chicken owners, I gave her more food in her cave in hopes she had just been desperate.

By now she was giving me a friendly greeting every time I opened the door of the henhouse and looked in. The top photo shows her, coming to say hi as I open the henhouse door in the morning (bearing ... ahem, treats). A couple of days ago I I was kneeling down, attaching something to the wire of the outside run. Suddenly Hawkeye appeared next to me, on the side opposite the other chickens (who, typically, had all come in to see what I was doing). Then she leaned against me, and when I raised my arm, she ducked under it and crawled right into my lap! Then she jumped up onto my arm, and when I finished with what I was doing and stood up to go outside, she flew up onto my shoulder and stayed there, peering into my face and looking around happily.

No matter what I did, I couldn't get her down, so I stood there for a while like some kind of farmer/pirate, with a chicken on my shoulder in place of the standard parrot. No one else was home to help, and I was freezing, so I finally managed to get her down onto the ground. Immediately the two highest-ranking hens ran over and started totally whomping on her! I chased them off and she fled back into the safety of the henhouse, where no one can get at her.

And that's where we are now. Up to now she has been squarely in the middle of the pecking order rankings, so I can only surmise it is her pathetic featherless aspect that has caused the attacks. She was never particularly friendly to me before, so obviously I am now viewed as her protector and new BFF*. Still really a novice chicken keeper, I have no idea if the attacks will stop when she regrows her feather, or if she has permanently sunk to the bottom. Maybe I should knit her a wee chicken 'jumper' (jacket) as the kindly English ladies do for the rescued battery hens?

Stay tuned for further bulletins. Until then, you can call me .......
Kathbeard, head chicken whisperer

*Best Friend Forever

Solar So far

2011-12-05T08:34:00.001-08:00

When we bought this house, 33 years ago, one of the main reasons we chose it (in addition to the fact that we could afford it) was its location in town (halfway up a south-facing hill) and its orientation (long east-west axis) on the lot. Lots of south-facing walls to gather and hold heat, wide eaves for overhead frost protection, and a lot that slopes gently downhill, leading cold air down and out of the garden. What was perfect for gardening turned out to be perfect for solar as well. Large trees close to the house are mostly to the north, leaving the south-facing roof open to the sun's daily path.

Now that we have our cool solar panels, we wonder why we waited so long to do this. Cost has always been prohibitive -- or so we thought until last August, when we found out about all the federal, state and local financial incentives. Unbelievably, they paid a full 3/4 of the total cost of our 3.75 kw system. Some come in the form of tax rebates, so we will have to wait until we pay our next taxes (April) before realizing them. One was from something called the Energy Trust of Oregon, which paid 1/4 of the cost of the system right off the top -- this is a fund set up through our local power company that we have, as ratepayers, apparently been paying into for years. Sweet!

The other big reason why I haven't been more proactive about researching solar for our home was my own longtime desire to be 100% off the grid -- to generate all of our electricity with a home system. That really would have been far to expensive for us to do, so I just wrote it off and never seriously looked into evolving options.

What I have come to realize is that even if all we do is reduce what we buy, it is something. 'Reducing our carbon footprint' is a trendy, PC term for 'using less', ie conserving energy, which is a smart thing to do in any day and age. In these days of world-wide awareness of global climate change (except of course in our own dear country, where business-as-usual trumps the future welfare of humanity), it seems more important than ever to look for all kinds of small ways to have a less negative impact on the planet that nurtures us. It also seems downright crazy NOT to be taking advantage of the sunlight in our area, where the local Chamber of Commerce boasts of 'over 300 days of sunshine a year). Why don't new houses all come with solar?!

Here in the Pacific Northwest, most people assume the majority of our electricity comes from the many hydroelectric projects (dams) on the Columbia River. Not so. The majority of our power comes from the same evil coal-burning plants as everywhere else in the country. A good reason in itself to buy less of the stuff.

Part of our system includes an online tracking program, which gives us a graphic display of the panels' current production

It also shows hourly production. Thus we cheer when the sun is out, and watch the power generation spike shooting upward, then gloomily watch when clouds or night-time roll back in, and down to flat it goes. It's a bit of a bummer, starting with a system in fall, since we are heading into the shortest days of the year. Yet we are still making power, 3 weeks from Winter Solstice.

The new electric meter goes *both ways*, and when the sun is shining, we can stand out by the meter and watch the arrow pointing away from the house, indicating that we are not buying, but actually generating more electricity than we are using, and are sending the surplus *to* the power company. So satisfying.

And at the bottom of the online display is a cute little graphic, showing our total carbon offset as 'trees saved' and 'you have generated enough electricity so far to power XXXX houses for one day'. Here is the total after just a couple of days.

I have just paid our first power bill under the new system. It showed that we bought 761 kw from Pacific Power, and generated 112 kw from our system, from the 3 weeks of the month after our system went online. We saved $50 over last year's bill for October -- yay! We'll see how it goes this winter. We are still in the 'balmy' portion of late fall/early winter weather. And as the days grow longer beginning in February, those kws will be increasing. Mr. Sun is our friend!

on grot

2011-12-04T08:37:00.001-08:00

Many years ago my sweetheart and I became addicted to British tv. Monty Python was our gateway drug, but PBS provided us with many memorable BBC moments in our early years of tv-owning. Hard to imagine it now, but we neither owned nor missed owning a television set in our early years together. My parents got our first family tv when I was 5 or 6, around 1957? but I was off to college before they got a color model. I don't think I watched anything on tv during the 6 years I was at uni, and once we were established in our new home of Bend, we relied on the radio for any and all news of the world -- that and the local newspaper, which came out on weekday afternoons and Sunday mornings. Thus I pretty much missed the entire Watergate era, and listened to Nixon's resignation speech on the radio.

I think we procured our first television set in 1976 -- a cast-off color model (my first) encased in a mammoth credenza-type unit that also included a record player, with yes, I think it had actual stereo and storage for LPs. It was huge and weighed a ton, and my sweetheart and a friend drove 8 hours (one way) from Bend to Twisp, Washington, to retrieve it from his mother's house. The impetus for this epic undertaking was the 1976 Olympics, which for some reason we had decided we wanted to watch.

In those years, the only tv station we could get was OPB (with a special antenna), and one pitiful local station, a CBS affiliate that featured news anchors and advertisements so lame as to be almost unbearable to watch. We set the channel changer (manual -- turn the dial -- how I miss those days) and discovered Brit-coms. One early show we grew to love was 'The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin', about a loser-type guy who hated his life and marriage so much that he staged a fake suicide, and began a new life as a purveyor of 'grot'. I don't know if 'grot' is an authentic English slang word, or if the producers of the show invented it, but it made a great impression on us, and has been part of our family vocabulary ever since. Grot is nothing special: useless stuff nobody would want. But Reggie sold it successfully (until he went broke) in his Grot Shop: bad paintings done by family members, homemade wine of hideous flavor: I can't even remember it all.

Fast-forward to today, and grot is alive and well in our lives. As an occasional knitter, I wax and wane in my enthusiasm for the sport. But alas, with rare exceptions, most of my knitted output tends to be fairly grotllike. Witness my latest passion: fingerless mitts. Wow, what a cool thing. Easy to knit, they work up fast and don't use much yarn. Patterns abound in knitting books, magazines and online. Mitts with cables, mitts with beads, mitts with lace fringe, mitts made with multi-colored yarn, mitts for casual and mitts for best dress. Make them all!

After being gifted with an 'easy' pattern by a member of my knitting group a couple of weeks ago, I launched into a pair the very next day. Yes, it turned out to be easy, though I had to make a trip to my favorite yarn shop for coaching on a minor point. Yes, it was fast. Yes, yes, yes. But then what? I put them on and couldn't figure out why, where, or when I would ever actually wear them.

a) I hate things on my hands. I can't stand wearing rings, or having long fingernails.
b) I hate half-things on shirts, pants -- they've gotta be long or short
c) If my hands are cold outside, I want full-finger gloves. If I'm cold inside, I put on another layer and sit by the fire.

But they are so cute! So ...... Dickensian. I saw a prime example on the fingers of Jeremy Brett in a rerun of the classic Sherlock Holmes series only last night.

So I did what any smart person does these days: I Googled my question. 'Why wear fingerless mitts?' and got two opposing answers, both of which I had already figured out for myself:

1) They are stupid unless you are Madonna. If you want to keep your hands warm, wear real gloves instead. If you are not Madonna, and want to look like an escapee from a Victorian poorhouse , go ahead and wear them. Preferably hand-knitted.

vs

2) They are ultra cool. Keep several pairs around for different fashion needs! Look great with boots, tights and mini-skirts.

Uh huh. Right. 'Fashion' and moi don't go in the same sentence. We are not even in the same country. The closest I've ever gotten to 'chic' is 'chick' -- good thing I have chickens.

So I scratched my head, admired them one last time,

and gave them away to the mother of three of my students. She was thrilled, said she wears them all the time, and when I ran into her in the grocery store 3 days later, she had them on (tasting wine) and said she hadn't taken them off since I gave them to her. She is not Madonna, but they exactly suit her eclectic style. Now her three daughters are all jealous. Ha! I see a project materializing: wee mitts for the kids. Now, where's my stash?!

drat

2011-12-04T07:58:00.000-08:00

My computer/internet incompetence has created a slight issue with this blog. All the dates for posts have inexplicably vanished into the maw of the cyberspace vortex. There is surely some way to fix this, however it apparently involves doing something with the dreaded HTML, and with my luck whatever I do will cause the entire blog, with all its posts, to vanish into the ethers. No way am I going to try. So from here on out, we'll all have to use our imaginations to decide when posts are/were written. Sorry. When Mercury is Retrograde, all bets are off.

(this is me, trying to psychically fix the problem via hands-on healing)

Falling into Winter

2011-12-01T08:24:00.000-08:00

I don't know why I've been so reluctant to embrace winter this year. I have been in full denial of its surely imminent arrival since September. In the face of a predicted snowfall two weeks ago, I managed to lay down a base layer of bark mulch in the chicken day spa, and purchase a new heated waterer to replace the one that died after one short winter season, last spring. I stapled plastic sheeting to the outside of their secure runs, to reduce wind and keep the snow out. At least the girls are ready.

In the garden, though, I have been slow and laggardly in preparing for winter. In early October, I did get the massive tomato harvest picked, much of it still green, and consigned to trays, dishes, baking pans, colanders and other flattish containers spread over every empty surface in house, shop and garage, to gradually ripen. I dried huge numbers of cherry tomatoes in my ancient food dryer, and more are still ripening as the weeks pass.

Only a small part of the tomato harvest:

But the greenhouse is crammed full of my usual wintering-over container plants, and I am in a guilty quandary over what to do with most of them. Normally I let the many bowls with flowering annuals do their thing, protected from severe cold, until supremely short days in January cause them to dwindle to nothing. At that point I shove them under the greenhouse benches and let them die. A few toughies, like petunias and lobelia, actually survive and resume growing and blooming in quite early spring, if I keep them watered and unfrozen through use of a small radiant heater. Same with geraniums, some not-super hardy miniature roses, and a few odds and ends like agapanthus and tender sages.

Scene from a previous, better organized fall:

Part of my reluctance to let things go (planters with still-beautiful coleus, tuberous begonias, zinnias and fuchsia) comes from my feelings of having been robbed of a full season of bloom, due to the very late spring we had. Part comes from a few special favorites that were so amazingly beautiful -- individual varieties, or just spectacular color combinations never before achieved -- and I don't want to let them go just yet.

I plant a lot of these annual color bowls, and I pride myself on their variety and carefully matched hues. I hate those 'red, white and blue' generic planters you find everywhere in big box stores. I imagine mine to be far more subtle and tasteful, but a lot is impossible to duplicate from year to year, since I mainly buy starts where I can at local nurseries, and what is available varies from year to year.

Here is a sampling of what I start with:

and the final result, arranged on the back deck:

The guilt comes from an earlier decision I made to NOT provide extra heat in the greenhouse this winter, in order to conserve electricity and lower our power bills. The purely financial aspect of this is obvious -- saving money is good. There is, however, an additional psychological aspect to things this year that is new.

In mid-August, we attended a presentation on 'yes, you can afford a solar power system for your home or business' offered through our local Sierra Club chapter. We have wistfully thought about having some kind of solar system for decades, but solar anything has always been super expensive and impractical, and we haven't given it serious thought. But the Sierra Club is partnering with various local installation companies around the country, and it sounded interesting, so we showed up. And were amazed to learn that, due to state and federal incentives and new financing options, we actually could afford a pretty cool little system that would provide potentially 30+% of our electric usage for very little money. As in, payback in 3-4 years on a system warranteed for 25 years.

We went home and looked at our power bills, did some research, talked to our bank, and sprang for it. But even before we got our system, we found ourselves determined to reduce our overall electricity usage, so that when we did get our system, the percentage it generated would be as high as possible.

Turning off light switches and unplugging phone chargers when not in use is fine, and all those little kilowatts do add up. But let's face it: heating a greenhouse in our cold winter climate, even at the minimal level I do it (thermostat set to go on only when temps hover around 35 F), uses up a lot of juice. Ow. In the early, heady days of proud solar panel ownership, I vowed to abandon my greenhouse darlings. Practice triage. Hoard only the very dearest and best tender plants in the protected sun porch attached to our house, and good down to 7 F without opening the door into the dining room.

No problem. Conservation is our middle name. Goodbye, annuals. See you, reincarnated, at the nurseries next spring.

Uh huh. Bold promises, easy to make when the sun is shining and the days are long and warm. Not so happy, now that the reality of snow and freezation are upon us. So far I haven't had to make the final decision. Lows have stayed in the low 20's to high teens, and so far have coincided with times I was drying tomatoes in the greenhouse, which kept the temperature warm enough on its own.

But tomato drying is ending, real winter is on the horizon, and soon I must face saying goodbye to the remnants of my glorious summer garden, or ... guiltily plugging in that little heater.

New religion?

2011-10-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

What's wrong with this picture?

Here's a hint. It should look like this:

Today is Thursday. Garbage and recycling cans should be sitting out at our front curb, awaiting their weekly (or in our case, every-other-weekly) pickup by dear old Bend Garbage and Recycling Company. It has been thus for lo, these many years. Maybe 20. Before that, the pickup was on Friday. That change of day wasn't too painful. But recently we got The Letter that rocked our world, telling us our neighborhood pickup day was changing to ........... Monday.

What?! That can't be! It's just ....... WRONG.

Many decades ago, my sweetheart and I, in our youthful arrogance and ignorance, did not appreciate, much less notice, the finer points of garbage. In fact, when we moved into our current house, in 1978, we had never had garbage pickup from our home. Our first homes together -- cheap rentals and rural boondocks property during our college years -- required us to take our trash to the landfill personally, which we did once a month or so. (Recycling was still years in the future.)

Once we moved to Bend, even living in the city limits, we continued the DIY thing. It was only by accident that we stumbled on a whole new world. The guy we bought this house from was so disorganized and slow that he forgot to have garbage service cancelled once he moved out. Thus we awoke one morning, soon after moving in, to find a large garbage truck parked in front of our house, and a nice man hiking back to his truck from our side yard, where he had spotted our garbage cans -- which we had coincidentally installed in the same location as the previous owner had his -- and emptied them into his truck. Wow. How cool was that?

It happened again the following week, and by then we realized we had better set things straight. Upon calling the garbage company to cancel the pickup, it occurred to us that instead we could simply CHANGE THE SERVICE OVER TO OUR NAMES and we could join the rest of the suburban world in weekly garbage pickup. We felt so modern. So grownup.

But that was only the beginning of Garbage Awareness in our lives. Now that we were participants in the weekly event , we began to notice various unique behaviors of our neighbors, related to garbage. Some, like us, tended to wait until the last minute, and be hauling everything out to the can and sprinting to the curb, as the garbage trucks came down the block at 6:00 am. Others, however, set their cans out the night before. Extreme garbageists -- for we began to see this weekly activity as some kind of arcane ritual, with rules and techniques all its own -- set the cans out WHILE IT WAS STILL DAYLIGHT, the day before pickup. This seemed extreme -- or obsessive -- or both. And we began to think more deeply about the whole thing.

We observed that the extreme garbageists tended to be 'older' though of course when this all started, we were only in our 20's, and almost everyone was older than we were. We even laughed at these people, most of them male, for their fanatical zeal. My own dear father was a rather severe example of the old guy garbage zealot, especially after Mom died. He had to restrain himself from snatching newspapers out of our hands while we were still reading them, so we could put them in the recycling. He was once observed standing under a small deciduous tree in his yard on a lovely clear autumnal day, frowning and shaking his fist at the tree because it hadn't yet released all its dying leaves so he could get them raked up and taken away. Why can't they all fall at once, he grumbled.

I suppose it was inevitable that, in the end, and probably because we too were getting older, we began to see the greater beauty in garbage service, in fact, as a sort of religion for everyman. It was simple and clear. Like other religions, it includes a worthy priesthood (the garbage truck drivers), rituals (weekly pickup, make sure your cans are accessible at the curb), seasonal liturgical calendar (pickup one day later in the week at Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's), and even a pilgrimage site (the local landfill) for those desiring that extra feeling of holiness and 'proof'.

In return, it demands only that weekly homage and offering up of the cans, and a small monthly monetary contribution to the head office. We began to see that weekly pickup as a kind of sacrament, much like confession and communion, all rolled into one. Think about it. There are so many terrible things happening in the world: hunger, war, pollution, greed ......... there is a lot to worry about. But most of those things are beyond our small, personal ability to change. By worrying about the garbage instead, there is weekly, inspirational clearing of the slate, as that stuff heads off to the landfill. All the petty worries of the week can be focused and expressed in a few short hours. The larger questions: 'what if the drivers miss our house? 'what if it's really recycling this week and not yard debris?' or, worst of all, 'what if we forget to put out the cans in time?!' are all answered irrefutably by noon of Garbage Day. And so our weekly schedule could be joyfully arranged around that immutable Thursday morning service.

Then came The Letter. No cushioning of the blow with hints about New Revelations From Garbage Elders Portend Changes in Worldwide Trash Dispersal .... just the stark wording stating the end of garbage life as we had known it: 'in order to consolidate routes and save expenses, your garbage and recycling pickup day has been changed to ................. Monday.

Monday!? That's impossible. We'll have to change our whole weekly schedule. They can't do that -- can they? IReading this alarming missive at home, I texted the sweetheart, at work, in a panic.

Garbage pickup changed to MONDAYS. Stop.
Can they do that?! Stop.
Completely discombobulated by this news. Stop.
Considering moving to a neighborhood with proper pickup day. Stop.
Awaiting further instructions.

Am too upset to answer. THIS Monday?!

Maybe we should look for a new religion?
But we have until the 10th to comes to grips with the situation.
If you're not super busy you could call & ask how I'm doing......

We have now had 2 weeks to adjust to the shocking news. After lengthy discussions, we have decided not to sell our house and move to a Thursday neighborhood. We are determined to adapt and change with the times. Religions are merely frail, fallable institutions created by man. We will do our best to rise above these mundane setbacks, and keep our eyes raised to the higher planes, despite the seeming insanity of church policy beyond our reach. Monday has always been housecleaning day. We will vacuum and sweep while the garbage trucks trundle through our streets, and continue our spiritual devotion and monthly titheing. It even makes a kind of sense, all that cleanliness happening, indoors and out, simultaneously.

The thing that may take longer to heal, though, is that feeling of emptiness on Thursday mornings, when the sound of the garbage truck is not heard in the land........

Chicken emergency!

2011-10-10T13:39:00.000-07:00

Perhaps at some point I will go back and update the chicken saga of the past 6 months. For now, let me introduce Maisie, one of The Nuggets, two young pullets I bought at a poultry swap in June to fill out my newly-reduced flock.

I brought Maisie (a Dominique) and her 'cousin', Sylvia (a Dominique/Blue Orpington cross) home together,

and they have been growing and settling in with the older girls fairly well. Both have just begun laying, and we have had the usual run of tiny, weird-shaped, bumpy 'pullet eggs' that all chickens produce while their newly-matured laying mechanism sorts itself out.

Four days ago, I noticed that Maisie seemed to be standing off by herself and was unusually quiet and uninterested in food. I didn't take too much notice because I was super busy and didn't get back out to check on her until I went out to put the girls away for the night, just before dark. Hmmmm, Maisie was definitely looking droopy, and she had some kind of yellow goo coming out of her vent. I had seen it that morning, but in the early light had mistaken it for wood shavings, which lines the nestboxes and sometimes sticks to the girls' bloomers after they've been on the nest. This was definitely goo. Goo is not good.

I went inside and read my 2 chicken books, looked at a couple of online chicken forums, and concluded she was probably eggbound. Sounds bad and it is bad. Apparently when a young pullet starts laying, sometimes the startup mechanism goes awry, and an egg is formed without a shell, or too brittle a shell, and the egg breaks inside the oviduct and gets stuck. If you are thinking, 'ow! ow! ow!' you are probably on the right track. And, since the chicken uses the same passageway (cloaca, aka the vent) for eggs and manure, this means an egg blocking the way also blocks pooping. And if you can't poop, you die.

When I was gearing up to get my first chickens, I read everything I could get my hands on about raising chickens. And although I read about what to do for various ailments, accidents and diseases they could get, I blithely assumed MY chickens would never get sick or have such gross problems.

But now my Maisie girl was in a bad way and none of my local chicken contacts was available. The main chicken guy at the feed store basically said, 'well, it's a chicken, it will either live or die. I don't know of anything you can do for that.' Yeah, yeah, I know, it's a farm animal, but ......... these are my girls and I'm willing to take more time and care than your average farmer with a flock of 200 hens.

Following the advice from my favorite chicken blogger, I took Maisie out of the coop and proceeded to a) give her a sort of sitz bath in warm water and epsom salts and b) dose her with olive oil -- in hopes of both getting things moving inside by relaxing the rear end and lubricating the front end. Good thing she didn't feel on top of her game -- the olive oil was pretty challenging even with her in an unusually subdued condition. We were both wet and well oiled when I was done.

Then I brought her into the back porch greenhouse and let her dry out under a warm plant light. She seemed only slightly better by bedtime, but I could hear little 'perking' noises coming from her gut. I worried about her and dreamed about her all night long.

Next morning (yesterday) she was the same, and I was getting pretty worried. This was the third day of her travail, and eggs come along on about a 24-26 hour cycle, so there should have been at least 2 eggs coming down the pike by then. I sat down with my flower essences and did a long session for all her symptoms. I emailed my long-distance energy healing group and asked for their assistance. By mid afternoon still no change. I moved her to a larger container, and changed her water, putting epsom salts in it as per my blog expert.

Soon after that she began pooping a little, with lots of water. (Graphic content, beware). Then, after I had started to give up all hope, about 7:30 last night, I went out to check on her and hooray! She had passed TWO eggs -- one, obviously the problem egg, was broken -- no wonder it had stuck. Oweeee. The second one, coming along behind, was complete, but had only a small amount of shell around it.

She was all perked up and eating like the famished hen she was. Here she is, head up and ready to party.

Today I put her back with the flock and she is a bit embarrassed by her still-goopy bum feathers, but otherwise seems normal. She is spending a lot of time on the inside roost, preening, and hiding from the other girls. In typical chicken fashion, they seem to have forgotten she belongs to the flock and have been whomping on her as an outsider. Pecking order is supreme! Even her former best pal, Sylvia, is whomping on her. I hope things mellow out, for her sake. She is probably the lowest hen on the pecking ladder, and it wasn't the best thing that she was the one to be gone for a couple of days.

But I am so relieved that things worked out -- and am feeling slightly proud that my first bumbling, amateur attempts at chicken doctoring worked out so well.

Time

2011-10-10T12:47:00.000-07:00

If a blogger doesn't blog, does a tree fall in the forest?

Time marches on.

Interestingly, I set this sundial up in my garden several years ago, and it wasn't until sometime this summer that I noticed it was exactly 180 degrees off, ie upside down. North was south and south was north. Hello, Earth to Kathy.

If I had ever tried to tell time by looking at it, I would have been 12 hours off. Do you think I would have noticed? Perhaps my husband is right when he says I have no concept of time.....

Daring quail rescue

2011-07-06T14:05:00.000-07:00

I had seen them, the young quail couple, cruising the neighborhood for a couple of weeks, looking for a good nest spot. Mr. Quail went first, leading the way to first one prospective site, and then another, with Mrs. Quail following unenthusiastically. I kept imagining this conversation:

Mr Q: Right over here. I think you'll love it.
Mrs. Q: Hmph, so far I've seen nothing I like.
Mr Q: OK, here it is. What do you think?
Mrs. Q: No way. Forget it. You'll have to do better than that.
Mr. Q (undaunted): Well, ok, but I have another one over this way.
Mrs. Q (lagging behind and looking increasingly skeptical): Right. Well, let's see it.
Mr. Q: Nice, eh?
Mrs. Q: Uh uh. Forget it. Listen honey, time is running out. We've got to find a home, and soon.

This went on for days and days, but eventually they disappeared, and I figured they had finally found the perfect nest spot. I wondered where it was.

This morning I found out. Walking through the house, all the windows open to let in cool air before the heat of the day, I heard a terrible screeching and shrieking of birds. Oh damn, I thought, one of my cats has caught a baby bird, and I threw on some shoes & went out for a rescue.

But it wasn't my cat at all, it was one of the many neighborhood grey cats, on the street corner across from our house, having it out with my quail pair! This corner is covered with a deep, prickly, overgrown mat of juniper shrubs, and probably looked like great cover for a nest. Unfortunately, the nest had been discovered by the grey cat and the quail family was in complete disarray. The parent birds were on the ground, flying at the cat, which seemed to have confused it momentarily.

I ran across and chased the cat away, then went back into the street to watch the spectacle. Oh my word. The juniper bushes come right down to the street on one side, then give way to a rock wall and a bare gravel area in front of the house on the other side. The quail mother was down in the gravel, leading a covey of the tiniest babies I have ever seen, down along the rock wall away from the corner, to safety. The quail father was up on the rock wall above, encouraging them all, and the stream of babies out of the bushes seemed endless. Eventually I counted 15, maybe 16, and they were trying their best to follow mom, but they must have just hatched. They could barely stand up, much less run along behind mom.

The line of cheeping, tumbling, falling, flopping babies stretched out farther and farther behind mom and dad. More kept popping out of the bushes, long after the parents were out of sight. The father kept up a constant cry of kadoo, kadoo, while the mother made encouraging chirping mom noises, and most of the babies were headed in the right direction.

It was hot and sunny and empty, out there along the rock wall, and a few got confused and turned back the wrong way. Some stumbled out into the gravel and fell over, exhausted. Still more came out of the bushes. I couldn't stand to watch, so I ran in and picked up two that had staggered behind a rock or twig, gotten stuck and frozen. They couldn't have been more than an inch long, each. I could have fit a half dozen in my hand without crowding them.

I followed the head of the parade at a distance, along the entire first yard, across the driveway of the next, and into the next yard. By then the parents had disappeared into the grass and I set my babies down to head for mom. The parents kept jumping up onto the rock wall, not understanding the babies couldn't do the same. They were game, though, and kept on, across the vast, hot waste of the asphalt driveway, up next to the second neighbor's rock wall and eventually onto the path next to the front of the house.

Meanwhile, I returned to the nest site, sure I had seen a couple going back that way. Despite walking slowly, looking carefully and peering into every cranny, I still missed two! Their camouflage is so perfect, they even disappeared into gravel of a different color. I rounded up the last singleton and went to find the parents.

Uh oh, I couldn't see them, and the male was by now on top of the roof of the neighbor's house, trying to chase dangerous me away. No sound of mom and babies. Then, as I walked up towards the front porch, I saw her. She was wedged into the farthest corner of flower bed, in the triangle between the house and the porch, with her wings outspread to make an amazing feathered fan. She didn't look like a bird at all, but some kind of abstract, geometric drawing. All I could see was a triangle of wings and her two beady little eyes locked on mine, daring me to get at her babies.

I bent over to set down the final chick, and as soon as it peeped, another popped out from right under my feet. The mother chirruped and both babies ran towards her. She lifted up her wings and I could see the whole brood, tucked underneath. More than a dozen tiny heads peeped out. Then she broke and ran, followed by the now compact stream of babies, along the base of the porch and into a hole beneath. Vanished!

I checked for stragglers as I returned to the corner, and crossed the street for home, but I think they were all accounted for. I chased the grey cat away again, and haven't seen him since.

i'm still amazed by the whole episode. I suppose I was interfering in what should have been a process of natural selection -- those babies not able to keep up were meant to die. But I figure domestic cats are not meant to be a part of a quail's normal environment, and perhaps my rescuing a small part of the flock will make up for that a bit.

I am left with a sense of wonder at the fragility and toughness of these tiny creatures. They can't have been more than a day old, down barely dry, and yet most of them managed to follow their parents across a vast distance of alien, hostile terrain without help from me.

I don't know what I would have done if I had been left holding the last wee chick, unable to find the parents. I suppose I would have tried to put it under one of my hens. Fortunately, it didn't come to that. I am merely a proud quail auntie with no further responsibilities. But I'm keeping my eye out for that gray cat.

Sex on the Wind

2011-06-23T09:55:00.000-07:00

A recent question to members of an online gardening forum was: 'how do you know summer has really arrived' where you live?' Replies from around the country included comments about hot weather, certain insects becoming a problem, etc. Here in Bend, the answer, for gardeners and non-gardeners alike is: 'pine pollen'!

It's everywhere. Bright greenish yellow and gritty, it covers every outdoor surface and object, filters in through every open door and window, and settles in puddles left by irrigation overspill. In some places it piles up in drifts.

Those who suffer from allergies rush around fearfully, complaining loudly about the pollen, though according to local allergists, the pollen is too large to be an actual allergen. Grasses that bloom profusely now are more likely responsible for all the sneezing and dripping. It really is an amazing phenomena. I'm sorry I didn't get video of the yellow clouds that spurt forth from the trees when a gust of wind hits them.

Here are the culprits.

Pinus ponderosa aka Ponderosa Pine or Yellow Pine. This wonderful tree has a huge range in the West, from British Columbia to Mexico, and all the way east to Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas. It has beautiful thick, platey bark that resists fire

and a delicious vanilla scent on warm summer days, which can be sampled by sticking one's nose deep into the cracks between bark plates (keeping an eye out for passing ants).

In the garden, they tower over the houses and create dry shade at their bases. This grandfather tree sits right next to the front door, embraced by the foliage of a vine maple.

And here is the source of all the trouble.

I chuckle sometimes, as I hear people complaining about the yellow dust on their cars, drifting through the air, and dusting the laundry hung out to dry. How many of us remember that pollen is just the botanical name for plants' male reproductive bits? Yes, we are indeed all covered with pine sperm!

I seen yer sign

2011-06-19T07:49:00.000-07:00

One would hope the fine postal workers delivering our mail each day to be a well-read, literate crew. However, the above words were uttered by the tall, unsmiling man at my front door last week: "I'm a postal driver and I seen yer sign about tomato plants. I brought my mother to get some......"

Every year I go a little bit crazy with tomatoes. Our short, unreliable growing season doesn't give much time for ripening the best-known, beloved gigantic slicers often referred to as 'beefsteak' tomatoes. Experienced tomato-growing Central Oregonians have evolved multiple strategies for dealing with the limitations of our beloved high desert climate. Some plant only under cover, in cold frames or greenhouses. Some plant tomatoes inside Wall O' Waters, and leave them on all season. Some plant in raised beds, against rock walls, or under wide house eaves. I've tried all of these methods.

One of my favorite strategies is simply to plants lots of tomatoes, of lots of varieties. Being obsessive, but also curious, I usually go overboard with tomatoes, ending up with anywhere from 20 to 30 different varieties. Hey, seed is cheap and I look on this as a kind of insurance. I grow about half 'safe' short-season varieties (55-65 days) and half risky but bigger and tastier long-season (for us) varieties (65-85 days). That way if we have an early hard frost, at least I will get something, and if we have a nice long, warm summer and Indian summer, I will also get a good harvest of bigger, longer-season slicers and pasters.

Normally I plant 6 seeds of each variety, aiming to plant 2 of each kind in my garden, and use the rest as frost insurance (in case the selected plants are wiped out by frost untimely during the hardening-off phase). After that I give the extras away to friends. For the past few years I have put a sign out front saying 'free tomato plants' and my neighbors have cleaned me out in no time. This year, in a more entrepreneurial spirit, I put an ad on craisglist for my extra tomato starts. I also put a sign out on the street in front of my house, to bring in walkers and drive-by neighbors.

I was a bit miffed last year when a single neighbor or passerby took the entire lot of free plants off the front porch in one swoop, leaving nothing for anyone else. Whoever it was also took all the boxes and trays I had set out. We're talking more than 10 plants here, and I call that both selfish and greedy. So I thought I would make an attempt to keep out such riff raff and perhaps pay for my time and potting soil.

In the time-honored tradition of country farmstands, I put up a sign indicating prices, and a note to put the money in a box in case I wasn't home. In my experience, most people are pretty honest, and will not steal the cash at such operations. As it turned out, I was home when all of my customers came by, so I did the transactions in person.

Interesting people. I'm not sure what would prompt a person to go to all the trouble to track down my house to buy a few tomato starts, rather than stop at a local nursery. At this time of year, even the big box stores sport displays of tomato plants lined up next to the grills and lawn mowers. Strangely, only a couple of the people who came were actually interested in the fact that my varieties were heirlooms or short-season types, or knew anything about gardening at all. But many seemed merely to have shown up at the prospect of ....... what? The price? Most had no clue about even the most basic facts of tomato culture. For instance, that tomatoes come in two different growth habits: determinate and indeterminate..... or that it is important to look at the days to maturity in order to have any hopes of getting ripe fruit ..... or even that they come in sizes beyond 'cherry' and 'non-cherry'.

The postal guy's mother was so unsmiling and uncommunicative, not to mention seemingly ignorant of the most basic gardening knowledge, as to appear downright hostile. Maybe she didn't really want to grow tomatoes at all, but her son insisted. Another woman seemed to have some gardening experience, but demanded to see where I grew the starts, and even my whole vegetable gardening area. A couple of neighbors dropped by, and I gave them the plants for free -- it originally started as a neighborly offering, after all.

In the end, a friend of a friend took my last 7 plants on Friday, and amazingly, I ended up about $50 to the good. Pretty sweet, since I would have grown all those plants anyway. It certainly paid for my potting soil, water, and the electricity to power the soil heating cable and grow lights. Hmm. Next year, maybe I'll grow a few more, put the ad up sooner, and/or offer other vegs. I hope my 'kids' all grow well for the folks that bought them. Maybe I should have insisted on a written disclaimer..........

Jinxed?

2011-05-21T11:05:00.000-07:00

I'm very sorry, fellow Bendites. It's probably all my fault. Yesterday, in the giddy hours of our second warm, sunny day in a row since November, I had the temerity to

put both snow shovels away for the season

AND

hang laundry on the clothesline (it was all my wooly garments too -- I was hoping for the last time until fall -- double my bad).

It's been a long, cold, wet spring. And still is. The plants don't really seem to mind, and the fact that everything is leafing out and blooming 2-3 weeks later than normal bodes well for our nascent fruit crop to survive unscathed by late spring frosts. Here are my beautiful pear trees in their full glory

But even those of us who normally laugh at the weather whiners are dragging a bit this year. I had thought that, since the sweetheart and I spent part of yesterday putting together a new drip irrigation system for my new raised beds, the weather gods would be mollified. Rain often follows a good thorough soaking with ye olde sprinklers and hose. Probably it failed this time because today is PPP day.

What is PPP? It's the 36th annual Pole, Pedal, Paddle race, of course. This annual madness occurs each year around the third week in May, and in the week leading up to the race, the signs are everywhere around town: cars with canoes on top, cars with bikes on top, cars with kayaks, bikes and pods on top. People learning how to kayak on Mirror Pond, 3 days before the race. People renting skis and learning how to ski, 3 days before the race. This 'training' style is practiced by a good percentage of the 3000+ participants, many of whom, just once a year, arise from their couches and form teams with other couch potatoes, who jointly assemble rental skis, someone's rusty bike from the garage, a canoe and a grill (for the after party) and go mano a mano against other teams with names like 'Old Men in Skirts' .. 'Just Keeping Up With the Girls' (husbands) ... 'Shakey Buckets' ... 'The Geriatric and the Junior' .... 'Psycho Mega Hose Beast' .... and my favorite: 'Capitol Punishment' (a team of Republican and Democratic senators from the Oregon capitol, working in the best bipartisan tradition).

The interesting thing is that there is a whole other race, with competitors at the highest levels of athletic prowess. Through the years, Olympians past, present and future have come and raced, surprisingly often beaten by the locals -- among whom there are, admittedly, many former and past Olympians in various disciplines. The couch potatoes and the major dudes are all out there on the same course, though, thankfully, sorted into waves to avoid serious clashes of culture.

The race consists of 6 segments, and the top finishers complete it in well under 2 hours. The race begins on the groomed slopes of Mt. Bachelor ski area, 22 miles west of Bend, and finishes by the river, downtown.

1 Alpine skiing -- competitors must first sprint uphill, wearing helmets, boots and goggles, to grab and don their skis. After a mere 1.15 mile downhill run, the competitors switch to
2 Nordic skiing -- an 8 km course on groomed trails. Then there is a change of shoes and a hop onto the bikes for the
3 Cycling -- 21.7 mile, mostly downhill ride to downtown Bend. Off the bikes, another change of shoes and the
4 Run -- 5 miles, on roads, trails and gravel paths, finishing at the Deschutes River, where everyone hops off the bike and into their boat of choice for the
5 Paddle -- .8 km upstream, 1.2 downstream, then .4 back upstream to disembark and leap out for the final .5 km
6 Sprint.

Sounds like fun? You bet. And you have your choice of ways to have that fun. You can assemble a team of any kind and number -- business ..... family ....... beer-drinking buddies ........ hottie athletes ........ 3rd graders ..... favorite spouse or best friend ...... or you can do all of it solo!

After the race is over, the best part comes. Besides the sore muscles, I mean. And that is the After Parties. Traditionally, the less fit the team members, the bigger, louder and more beer-infused the after party and the grander the war stories. Believe me, they go on into the night. The serious athletes may party too, though I suspect many of them are already making plans for next year.

Judging by the thwock thwock sounds of helicopters over downtown outside my window right now, the first finishers -- the elite athletes and serious, serious soloists and pairs -- are close to the finish line. As for me, I have a heavy day planned of installing drip irrigation, taking down my laundry to dry inside, and transplanting things into the garden. And preparing to hear the sounds of partying until the wee hours tonight, spiced, undoubtedly, of tales of snow at the start line. It's always something.

Oh the excitement!

2011-05-06T08:11:00.000-07:00

During last year's tour I was out there, viewing other peoples' coops, looking for ideas for my own. This year I am one. Yikes. 24 hours out, I am frantically trying to get the place shipshape. The coldest April in decades has put a definite crimp in my spring gardening plans, from cleanup to seed-starting to planting out. I am weeks behind in everything.

My coop enhancement efforts have also been stymied. I had such plans, oh such glorious plans. New paths! Flower baskets at the window! Decorative art on the henhouse! But no. It's going to be just the usual chicken coop, warts and all. Hopefully people won't notice that Babe has bare sections from bad-ass dominant hen peckage. Or that Olive has lost her fluffy booty feathers from (I think) mites.

There have been photos of some really fancy Bend coops in the newspaper, on Sunset magazine's blog, and on tv. Some of these coops are nice enough for human housing. And here I've been thinking my coop is overly fancy for your average backyard chicken.

Still, it's fun to look back and see the beginnings. It started with research. Lots and lots of research.

Then came the peeps!

Now to find the perfect spot for a chicken coop....

Meanwhile, the girls were growing. Temporary day spa required. We settled on the poor white trash look.

Delivery day!

Painted and with girls installed.

Impromptu day spa added on the south side of the coop (look closely to see bird netting on top)

First egg -- on my birthday

Betty -- that's my girl!

Then came snow. Oops, that's it for the day spa.

Winter substitute. Back to the poor white trash look.

After allowing the girls to rampage in the garden during the winter, I finally had to call in the professionals. Well, one professional: my next-door neighbor, Tim, self-employed fine woodworker, artist, craftsman and all-around nice guy. Well, it was overkill, but he built me the day spa of my dreams last month.

Here's the late winter look of the empty corner.

Let the installation begin:

Love the clear roofing!

Ta da!

Thanks Tim. Now the girls must do their part: buff, primp and practice looking gorgeous.

Meanwhile, the new peeps are outside, though with a heat lamp for nighttime. It's still freezing most nights. In an effort to allow Babe to regrow her winter-pecked plumage, and allow the peeps to grow up within sight and sound of the Big Girls, I have divided the old run into 2 sections. So far, so good. I am pretty sure I have two roosters and only one wee hen .... but I'm hoping she will be enough to keep Babe company in smallness, once the three groups are finally merged.

That's it from here. 24 hours 'til CT-day.

May 1, 1971

2011-05-01T10:14:00.000-07:00

It all started in March 1969. Boot 'n' Blister Club. Love at first sight. Really.

Here we are, caught smooching on one of our first BnB hikes together.

Here we are on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, at the Earth Fair in Eureka, California. Another stealth photo by a friend.

A year later, we married, rather reluctantly, to avert parental wrath at our 'sinful' living arrangements. We didn't particularly believe in marriage, but at the time felt it was worth it to make our lives less stressful. We knew we were going to be together forever, and didn't think it was necessary to have anyone else's permission or approval.
40 years later, we have both come around to a feeling of respect for marriage as an institution worthy of preserving and working hard at. I say that, while admitting that, if I were to get married today, I would have even fewer people present than we did in 1971. And that's saying something.

In retrospect, it seems like a nice hippie-type wedding. We had picked out a grassy meadow, complete with grazing sheep and huge oak trees, near the mouth of the Mattole River, on Cape Mendocino in northern California.

We asked a minister friend to do the job, and he showed up, unshaven and in casual clothes, in proper 'hippie minister' style. My parents and sister drove up from the San Francisco Bay Area. Don's family didn't come (I seem to remember his mum thought we were too young to be getting married) and the wedding guests numbered only 12, including the photographer and 3 small children.

Our friend Mike helped lay out the wedding feast on the tailgate of his 1961 Ford Falcon station wagon: a sheet cake from my parents' bakery, sandwiches, Creamline Dairy milk in the gallon glass jugs, and a case of champagne, of which I think less than 1 bottle was consumed. We weren't much for alcohol, and most people drank the milk.
Neither one of us knew much about 'proper' weddings, but we knew there was something about feeding each other cake.

Wedding guests were few but special.
Russ and his fiancee, Nadeine

Laurel and Lynn

Katie and Mara

I imagine the whole affair cost less than $100, including the minister's fee, the food, my dress, which my mother sewed and I embroidered with flowers on hem and sleeves, and the gasoline for all of us to drive out there. Even with inflation, I doubt many people get married so inexpensively, or so simply. I'm not saying getting married in a sheep pasture, under an old oak tree, is for everybody, but it suited us both perfectly.

40 years later, we're still together, still sweethearts, wondering how the time could have passed so quickly and still hanging out under trees and holding hands. It has been hard work at times. I always cry at weddings now, knowing the heartbreak and troubles ahead for everyone -- it's the human condition. Maybe if any of us knew what was ahead in life, we wouldn't be so willing to gamble on such things as Love! Marriage! But then, we didn't know, and so we did. So far it's still working out.

Thanks, sweetheart. I love you.

Oops

2011-04-11T07:50:00.000-07:00

Chick fever. I would like to blame it on my friend Susan, who was 'forced' to get 2 new chicks last week when her new dog turned out to be a chicken killer,thus reducing her small flock to only two 3 year-old layers. I was already weakening, having walked less and less firmly by the brooder boxes full of peeping cuties each time I visited the feed store over the last few weeks. Enough chickens. I have enough chickens. Really.

But the fact is, I have chicken lust, unsatisfied by last year's initial plunge into chicken ranching. I can see right now that I will have to add April to my list of Danger Months for the year. During May and June I try to stay away from nurseries, with their alluring greenhouses full of annuals and perennials, calling, calling, calling to me: 'take us home. put us in your garden. mingle our colors on the deck. create a rainbow of containers. hurry, before it's too late. the season is short. you know you want to.' and so I succumb.

Now it seems I have to stay out of feed stores during late March and April. (But what if my girls need a bag of feed or some straw for their coop? No, just wait a while......)

OK, it's true. I have had my eye on various breeds to try, next time around, when these girls slow down on the laying. I don't imagine I will have the heart to do them in when their laying days are over, rather I plan to put them out to pasture, so to speak. But I will add a couple of new hens to the flock, probably next year, to keep the egg count up. We really love our fresh organic eggs.

So instead, I have managed, this past month, to walk by the peeping hordes of standard breed chicks, waiting for a good set of bantams! to be available. Two things have spurred me to action now .... well, along with the siren call of cuteness at the feed stores.

One -- my poor sole bantam, Babe, of the frizzled feathers, has become a ragged shadow of her former self over the winter. After all my research and care last year, I still underestimated the amount of space the girls would need, once they grew to full size. The run I had designed was just a bit snug, especially under cold, wet, wintry conditions and long hours of darkness. I also underestimated the power of 'pecking order' in a flock, and I have spent long hours, worrying and feeling sorry for Babe. She is the perfect peckee, different from the other hens in every way: smaller, different color, weird feathers, feathered feet .......

I have tried various things to mitigate the problem, but the fact is, she will always be at the bottom of the pecking order. Unless ......... she has some company in her smallness. So I decided to get her a pal, another bantam, with the idea that she would have someone to hang out with in the flock. Babe spends a lot of her time all by herself, a pariah, which saves her from constant pecking, of course, but I can see she is lonely.

Two, I have a new run, so there's a lot more room for all the girls to wander, peck and scratch. Room for a couple of new cuties to flit here and there and find safety from the big girls.

Thus the bantam chicks. Why three if I only want one pal for Babe? Other than chick lust, I am hoping for at least one hen amongst these little guys. Standard chicks are either sexed at the hatchery, or are sexable by color (in the case of sex-links), so when you buy chicks you are about 90-95% sure of getting all females. Last year I got 1 rooster out of 6 chicks -- bad luck, but not unheard-of. But bantams are too small to sex, I guess, so they come only 'straight run' from the hatchery. The chance of getting a hen is only 50/50, so I decided to up my odds by getting three.

These little peeps are already 2 weeks old -- getting a few feathers already on their wings -- but still tiny, compared to the newly-hatched standard chicks. I haven't named them yet, but can already see personalities developing. Again, I couldn't resist getting 3 different breeds, though this was more because these were what the feed store had, than choosing these exact kinds.

From left to right, we have a partridge cochin, a mottled cochin (I think -- the lady in the feed store was a bit vague), and a mille fleur belgian d-uccle (how's that for a mouthful). They should all be beautiful when they grow up, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I will get as many as 2 hens. Any roosters will have to be warranteed back to the feed store.

So the metal wash tub is back in the garage, the heat lamp suspended from the overhead ladder track, and the wee feeding and water dispensers are back in action. Peeping abounds. Cuteness rules. Aaaahhhhhhhhhh.

Instant Gratification, Small Recompense

2011-03-26T20:58:00.000-07:00

It's still doing this most mornings:

Just a skiff of snow, the overnight temperatures right around freezing, or a few degrees below. As soon as the sun comes up, the snow melts and the spring day proceeds as usual: sunshine ..... clouds and a breeze ..... more sun ..... corn snow..... sun with corn snow ...... rain ...... dark clouds and gusty wind ....... sun ........ snowflakes ........ and so on. This is March -- the cruelest month (except for April, also cruel, and even sometimes May, and quite often June too) in Bend's spring season.

I don't know why anyone is surprised. It's the same very year. I guess it's just that by now, we are all pretty sick of grey and brown and nothing green for months and months and months. Deciduous trees don't leaf out until late April. Spring break, usually the 3rd week in March, is particularly evil. Traditionally -- and trust me, I've kept track -- it has the worst weather in the whole month. Why? Because innocent children all over the county (and their not-so-innocent but ever-so-deserving teachers and parents) have the week off for 'vacation'. So the weather gods, with whom I am normally on quite friendly terms, give a gleeful little giggle and send rain, snow, wind, hail, and many other kinds of wet, cold dreck to pummel Bendites.

Many head for warmer regions -- Hawaii is popular this time of year. My sweetheart heads to Majorca to ride his bike amid blooming almond orchards along the Mediterranean coast. However, for those of us who once again have plans to Get The Garden Going During Spring Break Week, we stay home, with hope -- foolish foolish hope -- in our hearts. And either break out the waterproof jackets and mud boots or dress in multiple layers of wool, including hats and gloves, and spend our days going inside when the rain/snow starts, then back outside when it stops -- over and over throughout the days.

I did get my raspberries pruned. And that is probably the only time I will feel smug until sometime in the fall. After March, I am always behind. I realize every gardener is always behind, because there are just too many things to do in the spring than there is spring to do it in. But still I feel guilty and rushed.

It wears on a person. It really does. BUT!!!!

My personal salvation often comes from the annual seed catalog-a-thon which takes place anywhere from mid-February (good Ned) to early April (bad Ned).

When I started gardening in 1971, I somehow hooked right into the seed catalog gardening lifestyle. Local nurseries had only minimal options and besides, I loved mail order. It seemed so .... pro ..... so 'in the know' -- something that I, as a newbie gardener, was desperate to achieve. The first catalogs arrived right after Christmas, and I spent months happily circling things, making lists, pruning them, adding things back on, and finally, writing checks, stuffing my precious orders into the mail and waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

Most of the places I ordered from were on the east coast, and it took a minimum of 2 weeks to get anything. Some companies were even slower.

In 30 -- no, 40 years (!!!) of gardening, all that has changed. Local nurseries have much better options for seeds of your average vegetables and flowers. But even now, if I want tomatoes that really will bear fruit in our short growing season, I rely on my faithful catalogs to get the seed. What has really changed is the whole catalog thing.

First one, then another, then a few more, seed companies began creating websites. At first, there were holdouts. Even some of the companies that had websites didn't offer online ordering. You could browse, you could admire, but you still had to fill out that printed order form and join the ranks of the waiters. But I am here to tell you, online ordering is the best thing to happen to mail order nuts addicts like me.

ONLINE ORDERING! Oh heavens. Forget 2 weeks. Most places now have an envelope full of seeds in the mail by the day after I order. Instant gratification -- especially good for people like me, who tend to procrastinate. Even if I don't order until the day after the Spring Equinox, I still have my tomato seeds in time to plant them in my greenhouse before the end of March. Sweet!

So while the weather does its thing, I sit at my desk during the worst stormy moments, and fondle my new seed packets. Better than gold doubloons in a pirate's chest.

Signs of the Season -- waxing philosophical

2011-03-20T19:28:00.000-07:00

Since becoming a chicken rancher last spring, I have started observing seasonal cycles in greater detail than ever before in my life. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in a beautifully mild Mediterranean climate, I pretty much took the seasons, such as they were, for granted as a backdrop for kid activities.

When I began gardening in my early 20's, I was living in the rainy, foggy, perpetually damp redwood belt much farther north. My main focus was keeping the banana slugs out of the garden patch and coaxing reluctant tomatoes to bloom in the overcast summer months (definition of summer: fog instead of rain). I looked at the morning fog each 'summer' day and assessed the possibility of its melting off. It rarely did, but I did begin keeping an eye on the weather in a way I never had before.

Fast forward to my first garden in Bend a few years later. Suddenly there was snow in the winter and plenty of sunshine in the summer -- with frost possible any day, including summer. I became expert at checking the outside temperature before retiring to bed. My rule was, if it was 55 degrees or lower at 10:00 pm, with a clear sky, I covered things. Gradually I learned freezing was unlikely unless it was 45 degrees or lower. But still -- once those tender babies were in and growing well, I watched the weather like a hawk. And I acquired a good understanding of the word 'microclimates' as I learned the warm and cold spots of my south-facing, sloping yard.

In my 30's I became a serious student of astrology, and my knowledge of seasonal energies and plant growth gave me a quick and powerful grasp of the principles of the turning of the seasons from a more cosmic perspective. The symbolism of the various signs, planets, angles, and transits made perfect sense to me on a deep level. I reached out to the stars and looked at the night sky with new eyes.

As I turned to a more conscious co-creative gardening partnership with nature in my 40's, my perception of the seasonal energies deepened further. My 50's were an inward time in many ways, and a decade when I both integrated all that came before, and let go of a lot that was no longer useful, in my personal life and in my garden.

And then came chickens!

Suddenly 'daylength' meant a lot more than, "wow, cool, it's the Winter Solstice, the days will be getting longer from now on". Now the shortening days of late summer meant I needed to decide if I was going to install lights so my chickies wouldn't molt and stop laying in the short days of winter. Now I understood why ancient Celts celebrated the early February holy day of Imbolc (which morphed into the Christian Candlemas and the modern joke-holiday of Groundhog Day), with its 10 hours of daylight in early February, as a time when 'the back of old man winter is broken'. Plants, if protected behind glass or cold frame plastic, resume growth after a winter of stasis. And chickens, within a week of our reaching that magical number 10, began laying more regularly. Even with the lights in their henhouse, set at 13 hours of light, the girls had slowed down over the winter.

Back to plant world, see those cute little yellow crocus up at the top of the page? They are always the first to bloom in my garden, usually by mid-February or a little sooner. With our crazy out-of-sequence winter --- early fall snow, cold snowy November and December, 6 week balmy spell in January and early February, followed by two huge snow dumps and a third spell of temperatures hovering around 0 degrees F, this year they didn't bloom until early March (when the photo was taken). A few days later I took this photo:

Still, the clearest harbinger of equinoctial energies occurs every March in my kitchen. On March 18, it looks like this:

On March 19, we see this:

Overhead is the cause:

Due to the serendipitous placement of this skylight, just over the peak of the roof on the north side, we get a beam of light on the kitchen floor beneath it, 2 days before the spring equinox. Being close to 45 degrees north latitude, the sun reaches just high enough on that day each year to give us a taste of living inside a prehistoric stone circle. Floorhenge. The beam of light reappears near the fall equinox, and then disappears for the winter.

It's a pretty magical planet we live on, and it's good to have these reminders throughout the turning of the wheel of the seasons.

A study in contrasts

2011-02-17T09:48:00.000-08:00

In a frenetic but obviously cosmically-aligned concantenation of events, I spent the first part of last weekend in periods of contrasting elements, arranged side-by-side. On Friday I presented a program for our local independent music teachers' group on 'internet resources for music teachers' which went as well as could be expected. Of course there was a technical glitch just before it started, which was resolved with a bit of sweat and desperate quick-thinking. The second technical glitch occurred in the middle of the talk, and went unsolved.

I am far from an expert on all things digital, cyber and electronic, but I had a good time putting a lot of information together and sharing it with my friends and colleagues. So, the first contrast was the information itself (high-tech) presented to a bunch of teachers of acoustic instruments, mostly piano (decidedly low-tech, even we could say, gravity-powered).

Then I threw some clothes into a suitcase and headed north for a music technology workshop, some 3+ hours away by car. My guide was Grace, my birthday GPS smartypants phone, decidedly high-tech

Poor Grace. Although I had put in my destination point (Cascade Locks, Oregon, on the Columbia River) there were 2 possible routes, and she chose the most obvious one, which goes over 2 mountain passes, while I planned to go the less obvious way, up and across the high desert plateaus to avoid traffic and potential snowy roads. I'm sure there's a way to specify a particular route but I don't know what it is. Thus Grace was quite determined to get me to the other road, once I got to the junction point.

One of the things I like about Grace is that she doesn't really 'argue' at times like this. But she is VERY determined and persistent in the face of what she is undoubtedly thinking is sheer human idiocy. Once I turned off onto my chosen route north, she continued for at least 20 minutes to find roads that would get me over to her chosen route. I tried to reassure her that I knew what I was doing, I had been this way before, I knew the territory (I have switched her voice over to 'Australian English' so of course I know the area better), but she was having none of it.

It was a relief to get beyond the last possible turnoff and get her resettled into MY route. Which, to give her credit, she did without a single complaint. After that I attempted without success to engage her in conversation to help while away the 2 hours of driving that followed. I think the next generation of GPS's should include a social interaction program.

Alas, when I reached Cascade Locks, I realized I had accidentally programmed in the wrong address so that Grace took me first to the local school (high tech failure due to low-tech human error), then a rather seedy motel with a name similar to the correct one (human error again), and finally, to my nice clean Best Western, which I spotted with my own low-tech human eyes, down the street from the parking lot.

We were running a bit late now, it was getting dark, and I still had to check in, eat dinner and get to my workshop by 6:30. Grace couldn't help me navigate to this, since the workshop was being held at a teaching center in the middle of the woods, and she really didn't know where it was. I had to follow good old-fashioned printed directions (low-tech) snail-mailed to me (low tech) by the instructor, by the fading light of a short mid-February day. First I had to cross this cool bridge (over the mighty Columbia River), right next to my motel:

This is the Bridge of the Gods, named after an older natural stone bridge (lowest of natural low tech) from 'Indian Legend', long since washed away (like the Indians.....). We made it, Grace and I, and the evening session of the workshop, an introduction to Sibelius, the coolest music-notation software ever, was wonderful. Very high-tech.

The setting, just a few hundred yards above Bear Creek outside Carson, Washington, not so much

Finally, the drive home Saturday afternoon. Back to low-tech, I crossed the bridge for the final time,

paying my toll of $1.00 to the friendliest tollbooth person I've ever met. When I had first crossed the bridge, she was so friendly and relaxed that I made bold to ask her, 'so, why IS it called Bridge of the Gods?' and she smiled, leaned out the tollboth window and told me all about it. 'Have a nice evening' was her parting comment.

Cascade Locks is a small place, and everyone I met there was super friendly. Then, before I headed for home, I had to check out the mural painted on the bridge support on the Oregon side:

It goes from left to right in chronological order, and I liked this side because it shows, from the top down, all the original inhabitants of the area: eagle, coyote, bear, mountain lion and (look closely) sasquatch. :)

Here's the main body of the mural. Not your average bridge support.

Here's a photo of the mountains in the background of the mural, just beyond the bridge. Apparently the rockslide that formed the original rock bridge calved off from these mountains.

The Columbia Gorge is an incredible place, and I am sorry not to have photos of the more spectacular portions. The most famous sections, with waterfalls and towering basalt walls overhanging the road, are west of here. The day was cloudy, and I speeded east with the aid of a powerful tailwind, with the storm gathering behind me.
i

Once out of the gorge, the road rises to a high plateau and for miles and miles, I drove by winter-greening hills of wheat, flaxseed and fruit orchards.

After that, I re-entered my familiar high desert, still up high. To the west, over the Cascades, the clouds continued to roll in,

getting closer and closer, until eventually the mountains themselves were engulfed. Here you can just see Mt. Hood, cloud banners streaming by, about to disappear.

At last, the road heads back down towards home ground, below 4000 ft of elevation. It's a long hill!

I arrived just after dark, as the storm winds hit Bend. Sunday was more low tech. Stay tuned. The story ain't over.

Snowed in? How to be happy ......

2011-02-15T12:23:00.000-08:00

........ if you are a cat,

keep an eye on it:

find a basket by the fire

take a nap with a friend

...... if you are a chicken,
get some fresh grass,

share with the other girls

fresh straw for scratching

..... if you are a gardener,
do research

or rest

...... if you are a human with Bicycle Disease,
you just go to work

Chicken Talk - Part 1

2011-02-01T11:37:00.000-08:00

Before I got chickens of my own, I had never stopped to think about how many, many words, common expressions, figures of speech and sayings we have in the English language, related to chickens. One day last summer, I started a casual list of such things, thinking, well, I'll bet I'll come up with 20, maybe 25. I kept the list on a small pad on my desk and whenever I thought of another expression, I added it to it. To my amazement, the list grew to ........... well, what do YOU think, fair readers? Take a guess, right now. Make your own list, if you're curious. In the meantime, let me begin sharing my list with you. Hint: it's going to take more than one post. Ready?

In the order they occurred to me, here they are:

1. Pecking order.
Everyone has heard of pecking order, and in fact, I have used this expression on many occasions myself, referring to everything BUT chickens, up until last spring, when I first got my girlies and started seeing it in action. I was shocked to find out that a) they really PECKED and that b) there was no arguing or fooling around or 'teaching' them not to be 'mean' to the peckee. Pecking order is immutable and has to be dealt with. I expect other birds also have pecking order, but I am quite sure this expression came from humans' longtime association with domestic fowl.

2. "Chicken!!"
As in, 'coward!'. To my surprise, I haven't found chickens to be particularly cowardly. Instead, they seem sensibly cautious about trying new things, including going into a new space, eating an unfamiliar food, and seeing large animals (and strange humans) coming towards them. They are prey animals, and it makes sense to duck and cover, retreat, squawk in alarm (ooh! ooh! there's another one for my list!) when facing potential threats.

3. 'Chicken feed.'
Said disparagingly about an unexpectedly or disappointingly small amount of money. "Aw, that's just chicken feed...."

4. "I ain't got scratch"
Similar to 'chicken feed' -- "I have no money". After observing my girls literally scratching away, often over ground they have already scratched away at for the last 6 hours, or in the case of their covered run, the last 9 months!, it is obvious that scratching is life to a chicken! To not have even one crummy seed or bit of food is poverty indeed.

5. 'Chickenshit'
Similar to #2, calling someone a chickenshit is an even ruder way of saying they are cowardly.

6. 'Bantam weight'
As in boxing or wrestling. After watching my tiny bantam hen bobbing and hopping around the standard size hens, I have a much better feel for this description of the smaller fighters. Ya gotta be plucky if you're that small. Sometimes you get beaten, but you have to get right back up and rejoin the flock.

7. "feeling a bit peckish"
Another reference to pecking. I first heard this expression in English tv and movies, probably initially on Monty Python. It tickled me no end, even as a girl, because it seemed such a clever, urbane, cool, understated English way to say, "I'm hungry".

8. 'getting up with the chickens'
Well, yes. Even without a rooster, the girls are up early and they are NOT very quiet. As soon as the sky lightens in the pre-dawn, they are talking, scratching around in their house, and soon, bawwwkkking away. This winter, they have a light on a timer in the henhouse, which goes on at around 5:30. This time of year, that is almost 2 hours before it gets light outside, but there they are out in the back yard, demanding treats! playtime!

9. 'something to crow about'
This expression implies that roosters crow for joy, which I don't think is exactly the case. But still, that crowing is a boisterous, exuberant sound and anyone watching a rooster strut around the yard, crowing, feels certain something important is being announced.

10. 'ruler of the roost'
Another rooster-related expression. (I wonder how many refer to roosters, vs how many that refer to hens. I'll count.) Another assumption, that the rooster is king. I haven't had the pleasure of living with a rooster, since they are forbidden in the city limits. My chick that turned out to be a guy had to be warrantied back to the feed store. However, from what I have seen and heard, roosters seem to consider themselves the rulers.

OK, that's the first installment. There are lots more chicken words to come. Stay tuned.

How Are You Going to Keep Them Down on the Farm .....

2011-01-23T12:42:00.000-08:00

......... Now That They've Seen Paree?

It's my own fault. I felt sorry for the poor chickens last month, stuck in their tiny little house and run while the snow fell and the days were short and dark. Their run was covered by opaque plastic on the top and all but one side, so they didn't even have a view of the rest of the world. I had the best of intentions. I also had extra motivation in the fact that poor little Babe, my only bantam, was getting pecked unmercifully. They were bored, they were cranky, they were a bit crowded. And when chickens are bored, cranky and crowded, they start picking on the lowest hen in the pecking order. I didn't realize the immutability of 'pecking order' until I got chickens. I actually isolated Babe for a while, but it was tough in mid-winter where I had no place to put her outside the henhouse.
Here she is, still incredibly cute, but bald as an egg and pretty scraggly-looking all the way around.

So it all started out innocently enough. First I created a little mini-yard out of the portable dog pen I used last year for the chicky day-spa.

Then I thought, that's not much room. Maybe they'd like to get out into the garden. I shoveled the snow off the paver path to the chicken coop

and then up to the vegetable garden space next to the house.

There's snow everywhere except under the house eaves -- they will be safe and protected there and they can scratch around in the dry dirt. Uh huh. I was right, they loved being out in the garden. They scratched around in the few bare places and had a fine time. They hated the snow and stayed inbounds.

Until the snow started to melt. More and more of the garden was revealed, and opened to the increasing depredations of: Destructo Chickens! Scratching around the empty vegetable beds was one thing. But as the warm days revealed a few perennials, my dianthus became their new favorite. Before they completely demolished them, I managed to cover them with burlap.

But eventually all the snow melted and now how was I going to keep them out of the garden?

Yet another visit, in an ongoing chicken-related series of visits to the hardware store, yielded a 50 foot roll of 48" fencing, which stretched out to corral the girls into the lower portion of the vegetable garden. This holds the chicken house and run, a couple of small fruit trees and not much else. It is completely shaded by the boundary fence in winter, and nothing much grows there in the summer. They can't hurt anything, because there's nothing there.

Of course, since there's nothing there, they get tired of scratching in the bare mud and cast their beady little chicken eyes longingly back at the vegetable garden and perennial beds where they were wont to play in days of yore, ie last month. Here they are inside the new 'yard', squabbling over some grass I have just dug up in another part of the yard and dropped in.

That worked well. For about three days. Then one of the chickens managed to sneak through a hole in the raspberry bushes and out they all came, joyfully exploring (destroying) new floral horizons.

Up went more fencing. That was this morning. It worked for about an hour. Then I found Hawkeye, the most adventurous hen, out in the garden again. She had discovered she had wings. I picked her up and put her back in the pen. Next two different hens had flown the coop (meanwhile Hawkeye had forgotten how, and now it's obvious I'm going to have to think of something else. Once the days get a bit longer, we are planning to re-locate the henhouse and build a secure and larger yard. Meanwhile, what to do.....

Interestingly to me, newbie chicken rancher that I am, the biggest draw in the garden is not the greening weeds or even the tasty perennial plants. It's the Dust Bath !!!!

ed

Garden Helpers

2011-01-19T07:45:00.001-08:00

Indoor plants need extra help, especially mine -- as I related in my last post. Outdoors during the growing season, we have the odd bit of garden 'art', and various animal-type creatures (cats, chickens, bees and other insects) moving about to re-arrange and harmonize the garden chi. But the houseplant scene is pretty static, even occasionally desperate, during the cold winter months. Thus I try to incorporate a few smaller assistants for plants on windowsill and sunporch.

Gnomes (above) are obviously quite well-known as helpers. This one seems to be saying, "shhhh! don't disturb the plants!". He is encouraging my only currently blooming ladyslipper orchid, and obviously having some success. In addition, I have a whole extended family of these wee ones, lurking about the place. It being the off season, they are taking a well-earned break, standing around in front of the pumpkins, chatting and telling gnome jokes.

The grand-daddy gnome, Hamish, looks out from the greenhouse window, keeping an eye on the weather. He is actually an authentic Scottish gnome (made in China), so he is perfectly suited to weather-watching. They know weather in Scotland.

Looks like someone needs to clean that window.

Standing by, also off duty for the winter, is my cast-iron flying cat. I bring her in for special-needs situations.

Here is the plastic frog, standing in for the real Mr. Frog, who lives in the wall but is too shy to come out for visual admiration.

This little bird -- I think he's a junco -- is off duty, hanging out with the orchids and waiting to go back out to the miniature tree shelf on the back deck. I love juncos.

The Flying Pig is new, and has never really been tested in action. I think he has great potential. He is currently overseeing snow shoveling activities outside.

For the tropical set, Gorilla reminds me to keep water in the pitcher plant bowl.

Hanging above the orchid section is a scary Green Man figure, reproduced from the ceiling of Roslyn Chapel.

Back in my office, my own personal windowsill gnome quietly encourages my garden-planning efforts.

It is good to know I have lots of company in the garden.

The Poor Orphan Child(ren)

2011-01-17T10:31:00.000-08:00

The words to an old Carter Family song have been running through my head of late. Many of the garden blogs I follow have had recent posts about house plants -- that being the only thing green going on in most northern gardens. Much eloquence and obvious horticultural skill is displayed in many of these blogs, and many have gorgeous photos of, currently, happily blooming orphans, I mean orchids.

Well, in my house they are truly orphans, which is why the Carter Family song springs to mind, slightly modified to fit the (botanical) circumstances:

I hear a low faint voice that says
'My caretaker seems dead'
And it comes from the poor orchid child
That must be clothed and fed

I love my orchids, I really do. And I have the very best of intentions to coddle and spoil them as they so richly deserve. But alas: my choice of indoor plants has increased in difficulty (and cost) in inverse proportion to my level of consistency and commitment as the decades have passed.

In the first youthful days of my gardening passion, I cooed and petted each tiny sprout and shoot and proudly dragged each passerby out to admire my latest efforts.

This must have been my first pot of forced bulbs. Notice the attractive 'curtain' (an old wool blanket inherited from my grandmother) behind me and the hideous sofa/daybed (our sole piece of furniture besides a piano). We were living in our first nonrental home, a 50 foot-long pink trailer (the term 'mobile home' was a bit grand for it), parked on a hillside in the middle of a clearcut redwood forest...... but that's another story.

About 5 years ago I fell in love with orchids and decided I was old enough, responsible enough and knowledgeable enough to deal with what I perceived as inevitable failure. Orchids were 'difficult' 'demanding' and probably, 'impossible'. But after becoming acquainted with terrestrial orchids through my work with flower essences, and after learning that there are a lot of hardy orchids that -- gasp --- grow out in our very own forests and bogs -- I decided, hey, they can't ALL be overly sensitive prima donnas.

Well, to cut to the chase here, I found that no, they aren't all fussy, they aren't all demanding, and they bloom for a really, really long time. BUT! I don't really have the winter light to produce blooms on the more tender kinds, ie I have lights, but they are in my cool sunporch and I'm not going to spend lots of money heating it for the oncidiums, cattleyas and other tender, complex hybrids.

The heroes of my orchid clan are phaelonopsis (moth orchids)

and paphiopedilums (lady slippers).
They are as bullet-proof as orchids get in a cool house/sunporch. That being said, I am totally intimidated by the whole drama of repotting and tend to let my plants go for years and years without repotting. Also, I totally lose interest in anything other than the outside garden from March through November, thus consigning my orchids to pretty much pure neglect.

The result of this bad bad, unplantsmanlike behavior is that I lose a few of the toughies every year to neglect. I lose almost all the finicky ones to neglect plus unoptimal conditions. And I buy a few new ones every winter whenever I come across a good deal at the grocery store or nursery, a 'good deal' being under $20.

Orchids are amazingly cheap considered as extremely long-lasting 'cut flowers'. And considered this way I can rationalize buying a few new ones every year while the old ones either dwindle away or tough it out. And I am always pleased when they do rebloom.

But this is a new year! It's time for gardening resolutions! Inspired by Kate of the High Altitude Gardening blog, I am going to soak my orchids for 30" every Sunday. Yes, I am. Well, just this once on Monday instead. I have brought in a plastic tub and they are in there right now. Aren't they excited? And if I never do it again, at least they had Paris. Just this once.

1-1-11

2011-01-01T22:21:00.000-08:00

Who could resist those numbers? It feels like a real 'starting over' year already. Already a whole decade of the 21st Century under our belts and so far things seem mostly to have fallen apart. I'm for a new start. With all those ones, anything seems possible.

I really meant to write a post earlier in the day, but it was just too ...... soon. Now it's bedtime. But I have great plans for 2011 bloggation, so I will content myself just now with a final look at 2010. Well, probably not the final look, but a big overview look. There were lot of big changes in Arabella's Garden -- some traumatic, some exhilarating. The biggest new thing in the garden, and certainly the most surprising and entertaining, was that 2010 was The Year of the Chicken. Or chickens. On that note, we have these images to ponder, from Betty, the day she laid the first egg (my best birthday present ever)

to Betty, making her appearance on the Christmas pie

Here's to 2011 BAWWWWWWWWWWKKKKKKK!!!!!!!

Personal Pie Man

2010-12-24T11:37:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, I was the (reluctant and unskilled) pie maker in the family. Then, one fateful day, I was saved. On that occasion I was under pressure to get 'er done, and the crust was not behaving. In fact, it was being impossible, as only pie crust can be impossible. I was younger then, and less philosophical about cooking. I was, in fact, very impatient when foodstuffs did not behave according to my express command. Silly me. So there I was, wrestling with a recalcitrant crust, getting madder and madder as it got less and less crusty, flaky, and light. And then, just like that, I snapped. I picked up the offending dough and hurled it across the room, where it landed -- thump -- against the dining room wall.

My sweetheart, observing this outburst with alarm, took quick, decisive action, and rushed in to stay my hand, which was reaching for the dough, preparatory to stomping it into the floor. "I'll take over from here," he said with a soothing, manly tone, and thus I was saved and so were all future family pies.

He took over all crust-making duties and I happily fell to filling-maker. Eventually he took over that as well, and nowadays I merely decorate the crust, as the occasion demands. We are not a cake-eating family, so whenever a dessert is needed for potluck, party or family feast, out comes the pie dish, the rolling pin, and the apron. His pie-making renown has spread through our circle of friends, bike teammates and other eclectic groups. He taught a local baker how to make crust, and now she too is noted for her crusts and delicious pies.

Mostly we stick with cherry, since that is my personal favorite and it is quick -- no slicing of fruit or fussing with custard or meringue. The crust goes on the top and I go into artist mode. Well, I'm no artist but I can sense a theme.

And so, with no further fanfare, here is a short history of pies around Arabella's Garden, over the past couple of years.

Thanksgiving 2009 -- my first attempt to use food coloring. Mixed success, I would say.

Mother's Day

Cyclocross Nationals 2009 --this one is a bit abstract, but bicycles are tough! You can see the riders, the crowd, and the characteristic smokestacks in the Old Mill District behind.

Christmas 2009

4th of July party

Bike shop play day retreat in the Ochoco ranger cabin

Cyclocross Nationals post race team party. They were all stars!

Tomorrow is Christmas, and yet another pie will be born. What inspiration will overtake us?

Wifely duties

2010-12-08T08:31:00.000-08:00

You can't really go on what you think 'marriage' is going to mean, starting out in the wedded state as a sweet young thing. It never turns out to be just the big things like 'sickness/health' 'richer/poorer' and so on. Oh, those things are mentioned in the traditional vows for good reason: that stuff happens! But really, that stuff happens whether we get married or not. It's called Life 101. It's just sometimes a bit dicier with a life partner.

But there's other stuff never mentioned in any books I've read about marriage. I suppose it's different for everyone. I for one never expected to need a degree in safety pinning. Who knew my sweetheart would decide to take up bike racing? And keep racing, and keep racing.

He's been through all the versions of the sport as it has evolved in our lifetimes. Road racing, then mountain bike racing, and his current and longstanding love, cyclocross (CX). A slightly wacky, spectator-friendly, late fall/early wintertime sport combining riding, running & leaping over things as an excuse for boys (and girls) to go out and play in the rain, snow, hail, and mud. Hugely popular in Europe since early in the 20th Century, popular and growing in the US in the last 15-20 years, particularly on East and West Coasts.

But back to being a wife. Being a CX wife calls on all my years of experience pinning on numbers. Yes, that's right. All those years of piano lessons, advanced university studies in teaching, on top of my gardening skills, cooking, and brilliant conversational abilities come down, at this time of year, to my ability to pin paper numbers onto a skin-tight lycra racing suit quickly, accurately and without sticking the wearer. I did stick someone, but good, once. It was not my sweetheart, but some hapless guy at a race long ago, desperately looking for someone in the crowd to pin on his numbers before a road race. When I finished, he straighted up with a really strange, wan look on his face. "Did I get it on right?" "Yes, but I think you pinned it to my SKIN........" Oops.

Here's what it looks like, when done correctly, during this morning preparation for CX Nationals, held in Bend this weekend:

Each racer's packet includes 4 numbers, 2 small ones for the shoulders, 2 larger ones for the hips. These go on either side, for the cameras & officials to be able to -- if the CX gods smile -- read the riders' numbers as they cross the finish line covered in mud.

Then out comes the junk drawer's box of safety pins and other objects. The race packet provides 4 pins for 4 numbers. Go figure.

Next, standing by the nice warm fire, the racer-to-be assumes the position.

Pins in hand

the Wife begins her onerous task. The final result

checked in the bathroom mirror

Next comes the embrocation -- heat-infusing liniment to protect bare legs from the cold. Sort of. Very pungent!

Socks

Super secret shirt

Wool shirt

Tricky arm movements needed to get skin-tight suit over all these layers

Jacket

Raincoat for warmup

Happy racer, headed for today's seeding Time Trial

Early morning rainbow: a good omen?

Air in tires

Bikes on the car

Away he goes

Perfect race conditions?

He races at 10:01 this morning PST. Wish him luck? The big race is tomorrow at 8:30 am. Stay tuned.
Follow the action on Don's own blog at right: Don's Sunnyside Blog

Rebloggification

2010-12-08T07:02:00.001-08:00

If a blogger doesn't blog, does anyone notice? Two months is a long time for anyone, especially Li'l Ned, to be silent. Changes in the garden, changes in life, inner changes. Though I am normally a fairly communicative person, when emotional waters run especially deep, I tend to hunker down and become hermitlike. We've had some big changes here in Arabella's Garden, in the last couple of months. Integration is still happening. It's all good, no worries --- but I've been pretty quiet on the blogosphere during that time.

All the more reason to get back and do some updates!

First, an apology of sorts.

When last we visited the garden, there was a *&^%$@#%^& deer in the middle of it, munching on the beans. Ned had some pretty hot words to say about the neighbor lady who feeds the deer. However, further research and journalistic honesty compel me to reveal that said neighbor is no longer feeding the deer. My apology is only half-hearted, however, since the deer are still around, cruising the 'hood in search of their former food supply. Grrrrrrrrrr......

Since then, we've had late season harvest:

early snow (again!):

fall hiking:

a bit of fun with the gang in the Ochocos:

miracle chickens!

and, most recently

Stay tuned for details.

Busted

2010-10-05T07:05:00.001-07:00

Yesterday evening, near the end of my final piano lesson of the day, my student, who was facing the window, suddenly got all wide-eyed and distracted. 'There's a deer in your yard!' she finally exclaimed. 'What?!!!!!!!' I turned and looked, and there, standing not 10 feet away from me on the other side of the glass door, marching boldly across the patio towards the previously sampled squash patch, was Bambi Junior. I rushed out the back door and chased him out of the yard. Yes, there he went, galloping through that narrow gap between the car and the house. (I had moved the ladder so my students could get to the door.)

Not 15 minutes later, my teaching finished for the day, I looked out the window on the other side of the house, and there he was again, now standing calmly in the middle of my vegetable garden, munching on my bean vines. I ran outside again, this time with camera in hand. Thus the fuzzy quality of the photos: I clicked with one hand and brandished a broom with the other. He looked only mildly alarmed, perhaps just surprised to see me back again so soon.

Here he looks downright disapproving. 'Lady, what's the problem here?'

but did make a pretty fast move towards the exit once I got out of the way. I clicked wildly as he ran past,

The sound of his wee deerish hoofbeats on the pavement made me think briefly of Rudolph ...... but then I remembered Rudolph was a reindeer and their feet make a different sound. With great satisfaction I watched him heading up the street, perhaps to sample the delights of my neighbors' yards. Not that I wish them ill, but they're on their own with this guy.

I wonder if I could train the girls to be Attack Chickens ........

Grrrrrrrrrrrrr

2010-10-04T09:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning I walked out to the back patio and saw this .......

That's odd, I thought.

But the next thing I saw was this sad sight, previously a lush pot of sweet potato vines ....

and suddenly I knew the Neighborhood Doom had fallen on my garden.
Further evidence?
Munched squash vine leaves:

Tracks:

The culprit? A fine large specimen of the local creature I have named Bambiciferus horribilis, but which I more commonly (and rudely) refer to as F...... Bambi. (Feel free to add your own favorite Anglo-Saxon swear words to my own.)

Thanks to the idiot woman up the street who feeds the damned things, we have a fat, happy, herd of deer roaming the neighborhood, alternating her regular rations of 'deer-chow' from the feed store with the tastiest and most beautiful plants in her neighbors' gardens. I have made myself (mostly) immune to their depredations by building a tall fence around my entire back yard. However, there is one gap in the barrier: the open-ended carport separating our house and the garage/MIL apartment, which leads directly into our backyard, where I grow my tender and tasty garden crops, as well as flowers. Roses. Perennials. Fruit trees.

Most of the time the MIL's car is parked in the middle of the gap, and that is enough to deter deer. But every now and then, in late summer or early fall, when native browse is presumably dried up or simply not as alluring as the lush greenery in well-watered gardens, one or more bold baddies will thread the needle between car and house and make its evil-intended way back to my little Eden.

Don't try and tell me the deer were here first. In terms of the literal truth, no, I was here first. I have been gardening in this very spot for far longer than any of these deers' little deerish lifetimes, or their ancestors', back at least 20 generations. Besides, they wouldn't be hanging around the 'hood in the first place if people like my *%$#@!%# neighbor (possibly a perfectly nice woman in other ways, I haven't met her) hadn't started encouraging them to abandon their native fare.

'Deer chow' is apparently bad for deer anyway. Deer, like cows, are ruminants though they are browsers (designed to eat shrubby twigs, leaves, bark, etc) rather than grazers (designed to eat grasses and more tender green plant matter). Deer chow contains grains, seeds and sweeteners such as molasses, none of which are digested well by ruminants. Just as cattle fed on corn and other grains are basically sickened by such a diet (thus the quest by health-conscious eaters for 'grass-fed-only beef'), so are deer. And, when deer eat this highly addictive 'food', not only does it replace their normal diet, but it also disrupts their bodies' natural enzyme production so they may not be able to digest their natural winter diet later on. Grrrr. Feeding the deer is bad for the deer AND bad for the neighbors -- so why do it? Don't get me started.

Oh. I already am started. So I'll leave off my ranting and cut to the chase. Namely, my first attempt at a cure:

So far, no deer has been able to scale this ladder. I'll keep you posted.

Girls! Girls! We're famous!

2010-09-22T18:51:00.000-07:00

If all works properly in my version of cyberspace, clicking on the link below will take you to the webpage of one of our local TV stations. A reporter for the Green Life segment of the evening newscast arrived at my place yesterday morning, filming a piece on the 'backyard farm movement'. I and my chickens, were here.

Perhaps in honor of their new stardom, 2 new hens -- Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Olive -- each began laying today. Woohoo -- 4 eggs a day and rock star status. I suppose they will be wanting mealworms every day now.........

http://www.ktvz.com/greenlife/index.html

2010-09-13T07:11:00.000-07:00

We did it! From 10:07 am to almost 4:00 pm (45 minutes over) they came -- young, old, and every age in between ..... newbie gardeners, experienced gardeners, and nongardening relatives of local residents visiting from Kansas ...... Central Oregon oldtimers and newcomers....... new friends and old. The backyard farm was toured and admired by -- I don't know, really, I lost count after the first 10 .... maybe 75-100 people! People actually asked if it was ok to take photos. Are you kidding? I was honored that anyone would want to take pictures of my garden.

It was SO FUN I could hardly stand it. I've never opened my garden to visitors before, and I was a bit nervous about it. But once we started, I had a ball. I got compliments on my signage

my display of books, catalogs and gardening resources

and my flowers

Many visitors were interested in my fruit trees -- but all politely refrained from sampling.
Oddly, I had more questions about this plant (behind the green 'fence' on the right)

than anything else in the garden. 'What is that ferny plant with the red berries?' they wanted to know. Apparently a lot of people who buy fresh asparagus don't realize that what they are eating is the first spring growth of a perennial plant, and it grows out after cutting stops, into a lovely ornamental. Here it is, fully leafed out, and restrained behind a 'fence' to prevent it from flopping across the path. After frost, it will turn a beautiful orange-yellow, making it a nice backdrop to flowers or other vegetables..

People were interested in everything.

I made a few signs.

The garden looked just fine. Weeds? What weeds?

After it was all over, I strolled around the yard and tried to see everything from an outsider's perspective. I tell ya, the garden itself was proud and smiling, The whole place was ....... shiny! Plants love to admired as much as the next person. I think they want me to do it again. Whew. Until then I'll be resting and planning.

Farmers: On Your Marks, Get Set, Gooooooooo

2010-09-11T05:11:00.001-07:00

Well, I've done all I can do, short of a few last-minute buffings and fluffings that will have to wait until the sun comes up. My garden is as ready as it can be for today's Backyard Farm Tour. The pigs are washed, the barnyard is vacuumed, and fields are newly laundered and pressed. The girls are dusting inside the henhouse and the worms in the worm bin are arranging the shredded newspaper for best viewing. My only comment at this point is -- to quote the Cowardly Lion,

"Somebody talk me out of it!"

There are 20 gardens on the tour, most in actual city yards, along with a couple of community gardens, one restaurant garden, and one elementary school garden complex. I wish I could go on the tour myself. We need a round-robin garden visitation period for the garden owners so we can see what everyone else is doing.

In my imagination, everyone else's garden is weed-free and neat as a pin. Our local garden club recently held an Open Garden at a neighbor's home, and I was amazed (and intimidated) by the absolute neatness and landscapingly brilliant perfection of her flower garden. I don't mean that as a criticism -- it was a beautiful and inspiring garden. But in comparison with my small, out of control vegetative jungle, it was quite daunting.

After the last few days of full rampaging cleanup around my place, both by myself (beavering away in the backyard farm area) and by two wonderful manly helpers in the front, nativey plant area, things are looking a lot better -- perhaps the best in years, in terms of getting ALL the weeding done at one time (never before in recorded history). Still there are things I wish looked better, or that are still in the 'mid-project' mode. But with only 5 hours left before the first tourist walks down my driveway, I know I'm not going to get everything done. Regarding that, I do have a couple of reassuring thoughts. One is an old Chinese proverb that I cling to, year in and year out, when I find myself measuring my garden against my own impossible standards of orderliness, perfection, and diligent, timely execution of all Must Do tasks, and of course, coming up sadly short, and that is:

"A good garden may have some weeds."

I need to have that on a plaque for the garden.

The other thought is, hey, this is a backyard FARM tour. Every real farm I have ever visited has more than 'a few' weeds -- in addition to animal manure and other unspecified and oftentimes smelly debris lying around, there is always a certain amount of miscellaneous stuff spilled and sprouted and springing up everywhere you look. In fact, if I want this to be a real 'farm' perhaps I need to spend the rest of my morning making it more farmlike -- dragging in a rusted tractor or ancient car body, possibly renting some sheep or goats for the day from a (real) local farmer, or at the least, stacking some twisted rolls of old chicken wire in a back corner.

Yeah, now I'm feeling better. I'm ready. Bring on the hordes! Me and my garden are ready and waiting. Wish us luck.

Garden Tour Insanity

2010-09-07T10:57:00.000-07:00

What was I thinking, agreeing to be one of the stops on the first annual Bend Backyard Farm Tour? It's all Duane's fault. A week and a half ago, he came to deliver my new cold frame. After we carried the cold frame in through the carport and next to the vegetable garden to await final placement, he spotted my raspberry vines loaded with fruit (which he sampled), my jungle of cherry tomatoes (which he sampled) in the greenhouse, my apple trees with fruit falling on the ground (which he sampled), not to mention my chicky girls in the run he had built ..... he turned to me and said, "wow, this is a real urban farm. I want you to be on the tour!" Blinded with flattery and a completely unreasonable concept of how much time was left to get things looking presentable and how much there was to do, I said, well, um, ok.

http://celebratetheseason.net/upcoming-events/

One of the things I have since realized is how many unfinished projects I have accrued, through the, er, years. Another thing is how much of a difference it makes, being 60+ years old, and not 20 or even 40, when doing formerly easy tasks as hauling and setting 1/2 ton of rocks for a sitting area ...... cleaning out grassy perennial beda ...... or just plain weeding for hours on end. Yikes. I have been taking a hot epsom salt bath nightly for days now and the end is still not in sight. My hands are sore, my back is sore, every muscle in my arms, neck and upper body is sore, but I can't stop yet. I used to whip such tasks off in half a day and never feel a thing. I guess I've been procrastinating on some of these jobs for longer than I thought -- the decades seem to be flying by. But it's amazing what fear -- and the expectation that possibly hundreds of people are going to be traipsing through MY garden in just a few short days -- can accomplish.

I have to admit I have never thought of my garden as a 'farm' before this. Well, we have joked about it being a farm since the chickens arrived. But I have read Nigella Carpenter's book 'Farm City: the Education of an Urban Farmer' - and that is not me. To me, it's just my garden. I love it, but it seems very ordinary to my eyes. And weedy. But maybe not everyone has all this stuff I take for granted in my yard: vegetables and fruit trees and chickens and herbs and the 30+ years' worth of composting that has created some amazing (for Bend) soil. It all started as lawn, with a few overgrown trees and shrubs around the edges. In those 32 years we have buried, ripped out and just plain starved out all the grass, built terraces and built paths and beds everywhere. And, probably the biggest factor is that, I talk to my plants and the garden itself, and I listen when they talk back. It's a lot easier to figure out what to do when you have the biggest garden expert of all (Nature) on your team.

Here's the latest progress on the biggest current project (also the biggest current source of sore body parts):
This is the ultimate 'before' photo: the weedy, rocky plot planned as a gravel path with flagstone sitting area

Here it is last week: rocks gone, weeds out, soil leveled and smoothed:

Here it is a couple of days ago, covered with the horrible plastic weed barrier that set back my environmental conscience at least 25 years:

And here is the beginning of the sitting area, with official tester.

Stay tuned. And if you're in my neighborhood between now and Saturday, stop by and I'll hand you gloves and a garden tool. I need all the help I can get!

Ghosts or Guardians?

2010-09-07T10:21:00.001-07:00

These ghostly figures descend upon my garden every fall. In a normal year, we don't see them until late September or early October. This year, however, they have come early. Three times in recent weeks we have seen frost on the rooftop of our house in the early morning. A couple of days ago the forecast was especially grim, and I gave in to my fears, dug out my supply of old sheets and row cover, a new package of clothespins, and set to work crafting protection for as many of my late-ripening tomatoes as I could. Thankfully, the temperature at garden level didn't drop below 40. But it will. This early trial has shown me that I need to invest in more row cover, or head to the thrift store for more bedsheets.

Traditionally we have a long, gorgeous, 'Indian summer' here. With the exception of a few nights in the low 30's or high 20's, the garden grows happily on well into November. But those little dips in temperature spell doom for the tender likes of beans, squash and my zealously-nurtured tomatoes and melons. So I take the trouble to cover them with ghostly raiment and I usually harvest a huge crop in early October. I don't know about this year, though.

It has been a terrible year for tomatoes and other warmth-lovers here. Late, late arrival of warm weather, many cool nights all summer long. Wah! After last year, the greatest tomato-growing year I can remember in 30+ years, a lot of us longtime Bend gardeners were spoiled. I, for one, thought, 'well super -- here's a side benefit to global warming' ......... but I guess it was an anomaly not to be relied on for future years. Back to frost covers and ......

.... well, I recently splurged on a cool new lean-to cold frame/hoophouse, built by my friend Duane. Duane is a local cabinet-maker who got creative during the downturn in the building boom, and began creating custom chicken housing, runs, and superstrong hoop cold frames/mini hoop houses for local gardeners. He built my chicken house and run, and now I have this beautiful little cold frame to play with. The commercial grade plastic should be good for 10 years or more, and the house itself is well-crafted and strong. The front cover rolls up by day and folds down to fit snugly at night.

With the assistance of 2 manly neighbors, we managed to slip the whole thing down over a pre-existing trellis full of cucumber and melon vines. We didn't rip the fabric and the plants are quite excited by their new home. It was 95 in there yesterday morning when I went out around 8:00 am to lift the cover.

I am already thinking ahead on what to plant for overwintering.

What do they do?

2010-09-01T07:12:00.001-07:00

The girls get up early in the morning. We know this because the lights in their henhouse turn on at 5:00 am. We know this because we set up the lights and timer, about 2 weeks ago, to compensate for the shortening days of late summer. It seems that a chicken's natural laying cycle naturally tapers off and stops in the fall when they molt, and begins again in the lengthening days of spring. 14 hours of daylight is the minimum amount needed to insure continued laying, which occurs around August 15 in our latitude. As much as I would like to give the ladies their natural winter break ...... we have a farm to run here. Well, ok, it's a bit of a stretch to call it a farm. But the fact remains that 4 out of the 6 girlies have not even started laying yet -- though I expect they will be mature enough quite soon. And I don't want them all to quit before they have fairly begun. Plus, I'm thinking chicken feed. Which is not super expensive, but on paper, anyway, we did get these chickens in order to provide us with some food. I would rather not support them purely as pets for a whole year before we get a good supply of eggs. Thus the lights.

But the mystery remains: what do they do out there, in the early mornings, when it is still dark outside, but the lights are on in the hen house? I get up early too, and can see the house and run from my desk. I see movement going on inside the house, through the little access door at the bottom. Farmer Don and I have been discussing this lately, and have come up with a number of theories.

I'm sure the ladies were as surprised as anything when the light started going on so bright and early. I'm sure the first few days, they hopped down from their perch, all ready to go outside and start scratching for bugs (their motto: We Are Always Busy!). But wait -- what's this?! It's DAAAAARRRRRRKKKKKKK out there. Now what?

We pictured them scratching their little heads (with their feet -- I have seen them do this, really I have) and talking it over. My first thought, being a knitter myself and having serious thoughts of winter scarf creation starting in my own head, was that they had taken up knitting. Farmer Don pointed out that they have no hands, and there is no evidence of knitting needles in the henhouse. Plus, it has probably occurred to them that their own feathers will keep them warm, thus they have no need for a wool scarf.

Our next idea was that they might have started some kind of discussion group. Possible topics of discussion might include:

Tasty Bugs I have Eaten ("I don't know about you girls, but I just LOVE earwigs!")
Food ("Wow, that new layer feed is great, isn't it? I just LOVE the pellets.")
Weather ("What's with the rain? -- this is supposed to be summer.")
Eggs ("Did you see my eggs? Bet YOU can't lay a green one")

But it seemed limited. By now, they may have moved on to philosophy: Hegel vs Kant. But in my honest opinion chickens are far smarter than that, and have far better things to think about. And we are pretty sure they don't speak German, so it's probably not that either.

Bible study? Just what we need: born-again chickens! Quickly we searched the henhouse for the King James Version but didn't turn up anything, nor did we find a Koran or any other religious literature, so we don't think that's it.

Finally, this morning, I think I have figured it out. They really are moving around in there. So I'm pretty sure our chickens have an early morning exercise class: chick-aerobics! or possibly Pulletes......

Uh oh, gotta go now. The most spoiled chickens in the world are calling me outside for their morning treats. Oh, and did I mention that we are now getting 2 eggs a day? Hawkeye, our Ameraucana, started laying nice green eggs a couple of days ago. Here's a comparison photo of one of Betty's first efforts and a regular grocery store egg. Yes, Betty's egg is small, but look at the orange yolk and tall, perky white! Neener!

Rain in the desert

2010-08-30T10:08:00.001-07:00

It is raining today. Not a summer thunderstorm. Not a misty desert drizzle. A really basic, settle-down-and-rain kind of rain, something we get only once or twice a year. Certainly not in August, in the normal cycle of the seasons. But this year has been off-the-charts nutty, starting with the winter that never ended but morphed without preamble into a long, soggy, Willamette Valley-style 'spring' and then continued (winter) all through June (frost!), and reluctantly turned into summer only in July. This is fall weather -- does it mean our summer is over? Hey weather dudes, this is simply not on!

Still, the sound of rain is always lovely to me. Except for my college years, spent in the redwood jungle of northern California, I have always lived in dry climate zones: from Mediterranean to High Desert. I've traveled a bit in the MidWest in summer and can't say I could ever live in that kind of humidity. So the sound, smell and sight of rain is welcome to me, always.

The kitties are disgusted and have settled happily into warm nooks indoors. The chickens are having an indoor 'time out'. My girl Betty has laid an egg a day (with one day off) since she started laying on my birthday. Hawkeye, my Ameraucana, laid her first (green) egg yesterday, alas, on the floor of the henhouse rather than in a nice nest box. But still, it shows a proper spirit of henliness. Nothing so far today, but it's a start. As for the other girls -- ahem, ladies -- can you read my lips? can you say ' we are slackers'? I'm hoping that spending a day inside, staring at Betty's latest effort, will inspire everyone else to get with the program.

I have a lot of indoor jobs I could be doing. Phone calls. Lesson planning for the upcoming year of piano teaching.

Or I could look through some of the books I recently checked out of the library for inspiration in designing a new garden border.

Oops, Alix doesn't approve of any activity that doesn't involve adoring (and petting) her.

But ok, blogger full disclosure forces me to admit that, yes, after I went outside to take photos in the rain, I came inside and ....

built a fire.

Is it a trend?

2010-08-18T08:28:00.000-07:00

Day 2. Egg 2. Hen 2?

Being fairly new to the chicken ranching biz, I am still figuring things out. Quite often during the whirlwind of the past months, I have found myself -- or more probably, put myself -- in the mode of scientific researcher. Although I have read everything I could get my hands on about raising chickens, I have attended classes and visited other people's coops, and talked up every feed store employee I could drag into my clutches, there is still a lot I just don't know, and will have to wait to see for myself, about chickens.

This makes it all the more enjoyable for me, as I have a slight scientific bent, at least for small personal things in my own world. As far as 'The First Egg' goes, I know that new hens take a while to get the egg-laying thing sorted out. The first eggs are often small and/or oddly shaped. But there are other mysteries yet to be seen and questions yet to be answered.

The girlies have 2 nest boxes, and the straw bedding in both boxes has been trampled down by ???? hens unknown over the past week and more. The first wee egg was laid in the right hand box, and I know it was laid by Betty because she has been quite conspicuously hovering around the place and looks, to my admittedly novice eye, to be the most sexually mature (ie ready to start laying) of all the girls.

But yesterday there was a second egg, laid in the left hand nest box. It is about the same size as the first, maybe a little bit larger, and a slightly different color. The question is, is this Betty's second egg, or is it someone else's? Do hens usually lay in the same place, or do they vary their nest? Does each hen lay a particular hue of egg, or does that vary?

Time will tell, I am sure. And I am quite curious to see where today's egg (see how confident I am that we are well-launched into the full egg-laying mode?) is laid. And if it will be larger, or a different color?

Too much fun.

High-Tech/Low-Tech Birthday

2010-08-17T08:52:00.000-07:00

Here it is in a nutshell. Er, eggshell. I had a most satisfactory birthday yesterday, consisting of heights of high-tech and the most basic of low-tech.

It started out with a spot of electritioning by my sweetheart. The most spoiled chickens in the world now have a light in their henhouse, for egg-encouragement during the shortening days of fall and oncoming winter. I don't want them to stop laying before they even start, do I. So they have a light and an automatic timer to turn it on for a few extra hours in the morning and in the early evening. High tech.

They also have a remote sensor for a 'weather station' (fancy name for a thermometer readout) which sits on my desk. When I get up in the morning I want to know how my girls are doing! More high tech. When I took this photo around 1:00 pm it showed it was 102 F in the henhouse! Poor dears! Maybe a little fan or mini AC unit is needed?

Just kidding.

Meanwhile, I was down at my local acupuncturist's office, getting a special birthday treatment. Definitely low tech.

Then my boon companion and I set out to pick out rocks for a garden project I have been stalled on for a couple of years. Namely, turning this mess

into a nice backyard oasis, with gravel paths and a flagstone-paved sitting area.

Rocks. How low-tech can you get? Especially since they will be installed by hand. Hands. My hands.

But then, instead of heading back towards home, my chaffeur for the day pointed the car east, towards one of the ubiquitously ugly local big box store shopping centers. He was looking forward to setting me up with a cell phone made earlier than 1806. I have had my current cell phone -- begrudgingly -- for about 5 years. I say begrudgingly because I didn't really want one in the first place, but accepted a hand-me-down phone (I was its 3rd owner) only because I was going on a trip without my ace travel companion and needed to be able to call for moral support, etc.

I admit I am still baffled when I see people walking around, talking all the time on their mobile phones. I barely want to talk on the phone when I am home -- why would I want to be pestered by the damn things when I am out in the world? I know that attitude makes me a dinosaur, and I'm ok with that. So it has been perfectly appropriate that I have been using a dinosaur cell phone all this time too. Witness my 10-year old cell phone -- battered, hard to use, and possessing only three functions. Making & receiving calls, sending & receiving texts, and something else.

Since I got it, it has boldly proclaimed, on its front display, the cryptic word 'Meeting'. I have asked everyone I know, I have searched the manual 3 separate times, and have never been able to remove it. Ironically, and not too surprisingly, once or twice a month, I actually do have a meeting, but of course since I haven't input that information into the phone, I ignore it.

I think we can agree to put this in the 'low tech of high tech' category.

We emerged from the T-Mobile store an hour or so later, with a coolest-of-the-cool, newest-of-the-new (until next week), smarter-than-I-am smart phone. Here's the fun part for me -- aside from the colorful icons which I adore. It not only has a GPS in it -- it IS a GPS. This is one of those epic, life-fulfilling moments one gets if one stays around long enough and is lucky, I suppose.

For the last decade or so I have watched with amazement, I suppose along with everyone else my age, the leaps and bounds forward of all things digital and cyber. But one of the cool things that has managed to sneak up on me is this whole GPS phenomenon. You see, I am responsible for it. Not directly, but through 50+ years of wishing, hoping, fantasizing and just plain magic. I have had a terrible sense (ie no sense) of direction my whole life long. When I was a kid this only resulted in my losing my family now and then on vacations or in large department stores. Nothing too scarring.

But beginning when I got my driver's license I became more and more aware that what the world needed was some kind of device in the car that would have a map in it, know where the car was, and could then show you the route in live-action visuals. I admit I didn't go so far in my imaginings as to think there would be a voice attached to it. If I had, I would have expected an exasperated male voice saying things like: 'no, no, not THAT way. Turn around right now and go back to where I told you to turn.' or 'you IDIOT! why are you taking this exit? you're going to end up on the wrong side of the river -- again!'

And here I am 61 years old, and I've managed to live along to the day when there is such a thing. I tell ya.

The smart-ass phone has a little mount for the dashboard, and it is easy as anything to tell it where you want to go. You clip it in, and out comes a soothing female voice that never calls you names, never loses patience, and never accepts defeat. She didn't know about a couple of recent changes, but we'll give her a chance to learn. I've named her Grace. Highest of high tech (for me).

And then, for the final glorious moment of the day, we returned home to find out that my favorite chicken, Betty

had laid the first egg in our happy new flock.

I think the day definitely ended with low tech. Happy birthday!

And now back to our regularly scheduled summer programming

2010-07-19T08:02:00.000-07:00

The piano frenzy is over. July is half gone. What's a neglected garden to do with itself?

Water, water and more water. The temps have been in the high 80's and low 90's for a while now, after the longest, wettest, coldest spring I can remember in decades. We essentially went from winter to summer, with no spring to speak of. I didn't water some parts of my garden until late June, which would normally be a death sentence for plants in our dry climate. But this year it just kept raining and raining forever. Many Bendites were heard bemoaning the fact that they might as well be living in the (green, wet) Willamette Valley.

However, even though many years we don't get summer until July, once it comes it stays and stays. Day after day, week after week, month after month of clear, warm (usually not too hot) sunshine, perfect for bicycling, gardening, and one of my favorites: Home Improvement Days.

Since my sweetheart and I work completely different days and hours, we have managed to set aside only one day that is sacred to Married Togetherness, and that day is normally Thursday. In summer it's a bit whackier, but we usually manage. Often Thursday becomes Home Improvement Day. Before our garbage & recycling company offered curbside yard waste pickup (three cheers for Bruce and Betty) our HID's often revolved around festive yet romantic runs to the landfill, using a friend's borrowed truck. Festive because, well, going to the dump has always been a sort of secret pleasure for me, ever since childhood.

In my earliest dump memories, Mom would load us kids up in our '46 Ford pickup and off we would go to the dump, which was, in those pre-environmental-awareness days, located in the salt marshes of San Francisco Bay. It was a scary yet enticing place to a small kid: both bleak, with giant windrows of burning garbage, and rich with the smells of rotting garbage, marsh grasses, and the cries of the wheeling sea gulls. It was smoky --ha! Imagine open burning in a modern landfill! We were absolutely NOT allowed out of the truck....... but more than once we sneaked out the passenger side door while Mom was occupied with emptying the truck bed. It was probably truly a dangerous place, but we couldn't resist a quick scan of the ground next to the truck before scurrying back in to Mom's yells. Once I found a tiny plastic doll which I kept for years.

The festivities around here this week include manly deeds of repair and womanly addition of new livestock to the urban farmyard.
First up was the all-important preparation for summer lounging. Don ordered a repair kit for our LaFuma chairs and restrung them. Ya gotta have a lounge chairs in a proper garden!

Then he changed the tire on my faithful garden cart, which had suffered a serious breakdown

Living with a bike mechanic has its advantages. And dudes, check it out -- the new tire is a whitewall!

Perhaps this would be a good time to put in a plug for Garden Way carts? My sweetheart, sensing early on in our marriage that this gardening insanity probably wasn't going to go away, bought and assembled this cart from a kit for me back in, oh, 1972 or so. It came with all the hardware -- all he had to do was buy and cut the wood and put it together. I don't remember the cost, but it was damned cheap, and the thing has lasted and lasted, outside in all weather, for all these decades. The fact that, 38 years later, one of the tires broke, does not upset me. The other tire, not pictured, has had a severe wobble since our friend Rod borrowed it to move bricks, about 30 years ago, but even my ace bicycle mechanic husband can't true it. Still, it works.

Meanwhile, I assembled a worm bin. It's my second time on this, and I confess that, now that I have the girls I probably don't need one anymore. But I had ordered the worms 6 months or so ago, from a local worm rancher and couldn't resist the chance to go out to their place, admire their giant worm bins, and pick up my new livestock.

First, an old storage container with a weather-wrecked lid:

Next, bedding for the kids: shredded newspaper, old dead potting soil and a few handfuls of straw

Enter, the worms, courtesy of Rockton Ranch

Dive, dive, dive! Must escape Mr. Sun!

Cover with a nice newspaper blanket

Put on the lid

And under the eave of the front porch they go. Surely it's good feng shui to have earthworms next to the front door?!

Our name up in lights!

2010-07-18T08:54:00.000-07:00

Well, it's all over but the shouting. Or rather, the resting-up. We came, we played, we were cheered, and the kids (and teachers) had a great time.

Here are a few scenes from the concert. This one was a piece called 'Agent 003' and as you can see, there are 3 players on each piano, making a total of 24 performers. Naturally, as secret agents, we all wore dark glasses.

Here I am with my good buddy, Patti.

Fun for all ages. And aren't these pianos beautiful?!

Here is the gang (I am 5th from the left)

Time to write thank you notes, get the DVDs out, make notes for next time, and put the monster piano concert garden to bed. See you in the (soil) garden.

"Oh, we'll just punt"

2010-07-15T11:34:00.000-07:00

or 'Piano Delivery Debacle Adds Drama to Dress Rehearsal'

Tonight is our concert. Yesterday was the dress rehearsal, scheduled to start at 1:00 pm in the Tower Theatre.

I arrived around 11:00 to witness the unloading of the pianos. I was greeted with the words, "oh good, you're here -- did you get the update?"

These did not seem like propitious words at the start of a tightly timed event involving 100+ people. Indeed, I then learned that one of the 2 piano delivery trucks was broken down in Madras, 40 miles away. The other had arrived with only 4 of our 8 grand pianos in it. The other 4 were stuck in Madras, with no ETA in sight. What should we do: postpone the rehearsal for an undetermined time? Start and bring in the second set of pianos when/if they arrived before dinner time? Our unflappable conductor summed it up: "Oh, we'll just punt." And so we did.

Luckily, along with the 4 grands, there were 6 uprights standing against the back wall, waiting for the piano sale that will follow tonight's performance. We pulled up 4 of them and, despite the fact that none of the kids behind them could actually see the conductor sitting down, we started the rehearsal only 10 minutes late.

About 2+ hours into the rehearsal, a loud rumbling was heard outside the back stage door. I rushed out to see ..... a very large tow truck inching up the alley behind the theatre

followed by another large truck full of pianos

followed by a third large truck -- the original unbroken-down one that had brought the pianos we were playing on. All of this end-to-end down about 70 feet of the alley.

Soon there were a number of large, beefy guys standing around in the hot sun, trying to figure out how to marry two delivery gates (one inoperable), a wimpy ramp for the purpose of moving several large, unwieldy and very heavy objects into the theatre.

Meanwhile the rehearsal continued uninterrupted inside

They got it sorted out, and soon we started seeing (but not hearing) this -- they were incredibly quiet bringing these big babies in.

We sent the mover guys on to their next destination (140 miles north of here) with fresh lemonade from the farmers' market (conveniently located across the parking lot) and hot, sweaty hugs.

We left the stage quiet and dark, ready for players and audience -- coming tonight.

If you're curious, tune in to our live streaming video broadcast at this link. Cameras should be live starting around 7:15 pm PDT. Enjoy (and wish us luck!)

http://bit.ly/BendMonsterConcert

Monster Music Gardening This Week

2010-07-13T09:01:00.000-07:00

Most of my energy and focus this week is on my 'monster music garden' -- the piano monster concert I organized and wrassled into existence last year, and which is happening once again on Thursday evening. I like to think of it as a garden, with planning, sowing, weeding, fertilizing and watering happening in the months between December and July. The harvest comes in two parts. First, the concert itself, which last year played to a spectacular sell-out crowd. Happy kids, happy parents, happy teachers, and happy random community members who stumbled upon this obscure event -- seemed to enjoy themselves hugely.

The second harvest has come gradually, and continues as the second concert draws near. That is the harvest of inspiration, determination and renewed interest in practicing, and in learning to think more deeply and consciously about music, that many of last year's participants are showing. One teacher told me her students have never counted so well, and that they ASK TO USE the metronome in their lessons. More students are willing and eager to play duets and other ensemble music with teachers, parents and their fellow students. Students are listening and watching better than ever before, as a result of having to follow a conductor, and stay together with other players. Pianists are notorious for ignoring everyone else when playing in groups, as a result of spending so much practice time alone. Playing with 7 or 15 or 23 other people requires good listening skills!

Here is our newest crop -- 9 brand-new-to-the-monster-concert performers -- waiting outside the rehearsal room and ready to play Giggle Bugs and Chocolate Fudge Swirls. Wouldn't you like to be there with them?

One of my favorite parts of the monster concert is the way young students play alongside older, longtime players. Making music together has no age boundaries

Who knows where these kids will go with music ..... in life ....... maybe they'll remember holding a conductor's baton and standing in front of a classroom full of their friends, leading the way?

Oh dear, it's July.....

2010-07-11T07:11:00.001-07:00

Once July rolls around, three things happen around here in quick succession.

1. Tour de France (first in the heart of my sweetheart). He dresses to match the flag

His shirt reads: 'Legendes du Tour' ......... a bit of tongue-in-cheek for him, as, at age 59+ (racing age 60), he is usually the longest-racing participant in state mountain bike races. The announcers have recently commented, as he crosses the finish line, "and here is one of the legends of Oregon racing......". I guess the difference between being a 'legend' and being a pretty good but not spectacular amateur racer is continuing to show up. 'Last man standing' might eventually apply here.

2. 4th of July burger bash at our friends'/partners' house, this year billed as 'Faceburger'. Pie Man Don makes another yummy cherry pie, and my crust decorating efforts this year resulted in a cheery scene of Mr. Sun, with a few clouds added to disguise, er, flaws in the crust. We are not Betty Crocker. The pies are fabulous, the crust flaky and good, but we're still working on crustal neatness.

3. And, starting well before July actually begins, the Bend Piano Monster Concert, 2010 Edition. Here I am, showing off our t-shirt, lime green in honor of one of our student participants. After playing in the concert last year, she reportedly wore her Monster Concert t-shirt to school every Tuesday, all school year long (presumably the day of her weekly piano lesson?). She told me her favorite color was lime green, so Rae Ann, this year's color is for YOU!

The Monster Concert consumes almost my entire brain mass, not to mention hours of the day, from mid-June to mid-July, and this year is no exception. I have so far managed to find 10 minutes each day to water my poor garden and take the chickens their early morning treat, but other than that the garden is in limbo mode. Somehow I forget how my time disappeared after the first heady days after school (and piano lessons) were ended last year, and this year was the same.

Spring was so long and so cold and rainy that I eventually had to choose between planting my exploding-out-of-their-pots tomato starts and having them freeze, and not getting them in until the middle of July. So they froze..... but survived with minor damage.

In typical Bend style, we saw frost on the roof of the house on Sunday, July 4, and three days later temperatures had hit the 90's. The poor plants don't know what hit 'em.

Here are annuals from the nursery, patiently (or not) waiting for me to have time to pop them into containers for summer. Once again, it's going to be a bit late. This is what happens to Monster Concert organizers who don't hit the ground running after the last piano lesson.

I left a shade covering over this same flat just one night, and this little guy snuck in a wee home for himself on one of the coleus starts

Thank heavens for perennials

which bloom beautifully despite neglect.

And here's something that always seems weird to me: peas in July

but that's when we always have them. These snow peas were planted in mid-April, and started blooming June 25 -- a bit later than normal because of the delayed summer, but not by much. The purple-podded ones are a centuries-old shelling variety, which I 'planted' from volunteer sprouting seeds, also back in April.
And here is climbing rose 'Claire Matin' which is blooming almost a month late, as are all my roses in this wacky year.

Good kitty!

2010-06-13T08:36:00.001-07:00

It's always best not to judge by appearances. Last week my beloved kitty (aka Small Portable Cat), Alix, single-handed-- er, single-catedly attacked and chased out of the yard a large dog (a bloodhound!) that was running around the outside of the chicken run, scaring the heck out of the poor chickens.

I was inside the house, doing something at my desk by the window. Hearing a sudden ruckus out by the chicken coop, I glanced out and saw the dog, barking and jumping around like a huge dork, causing all kinds of squawking and alarm among the chickens. I ran outside, still in my jammies and slippers, and grabbed the first 'weapon' I could find: a shovel. When I got to the coop, I could see Alix coming out from behind the run, fur standing on end, hissing at the intruder.

First I tried the "here doggy, nice doggy" ploy, hoping to entice the dog away without my getting bitten in the process, but it only distracted the dog for a minute -- then it went right back to barking at the chickens. But Alix the Fierce was not having any of it. She puffed up even bigger and advanced on the dog, which was completely oblivious to its fate. Suddenly, Alix jumped on the dog's head, hissing and biting and scratching -- much to the dog's surprise. The dog yelped, tried to back away, then fled for the exit -- with Alix the Hun in hot pursuit. Our big black cat, Rupert, who normally guards and protects us from the depredations of such villains as The Evil White Cat Across the Street, was just arriving along the dog's flight path, and although he puffed up too, he didn't join in the chase. The dog rushed out the carport and ran for dear life. The last I saw of it, it was halfway up the block above us, running as fast as its legs could carry it, howling 'arooo arooo arooo'. Alix watched it go, presumably in satisfaction for a job well done, while I nearly fell on the ground, laughing.

Good kitty!

Coop Tour Report

2010-05-27T20:42:00.000-07:00

Being new to chicken ownership, and having no firsthand experience using or even seeing much actual chicken housing, it was with a sense of great expectation and curiosity that I set out on the trail of the first-ever Chicken Coop Tour in Bend a few weeks ago.

With 26 coops on the tour, spread out over a good chunk of Deschutes County, there was obviously no way to visit them all in the time allotted. As best I could, from the descriptions of each coop, I carefully chose a route that would allow me to see the best-sounding 10-12, with minimal driving. Our town is surrounded by a lot of open space -- desert and forest lands with ranches, farms and small acreages in all directions, so most of the coops were in rural areas.

The tour confirmed what I had already suspected: that chicken coops fall into approximately three categories.

1. Slapped together out of whatever materials happen to be lying around -- cheap and easy and appearance not important. Hey, the chickens don't care, why should we?

2. Neat and tidy, a good-looking structure in the home landscape, safe and secure for the chickens and nice enough to be part of a home and garden but built as economically as possible.

3. Money no object. Coops with more square footage than my house ..... coops designed to resemble the Taj Mahal, a Western cowboy town, Martha Stewart's farm, miniature version of the family mansion, tile roof, wee chandeliers in the ceiling, etc.

I saw all kinds, and realized my ideal coop fell somewhere between 1 and 2 and probably closer to 2. Here are some of my faves.....

This one is built out of hay bales, underneath the deck of the house - how simple! The chickens have only recently moved into this space. If they were mine, I would worry about the big gap between the gate and the fencing. This coop is only 2 blocks from our house, and I'm sure the raccoons and skunks that visit us get over that way. There was also a cold frame built out of hay bales. Very basic and cheap.

This coop was only a half mile further away, and right on the street corner. Basic, not fancy but sturdy and practical construction. According to the owner, she lets the chickens roam the 'hood, and they haven't yet been hit by cars or chased by dogs. Amazing. She had a really nice garden too. At this point I realized a coop tour was actually a kind of stealth garden tour as well.

This one was purchased through craigslist -- the seller included the chickens in the price. Although it is essentially a chicken tractor set in a field, it has 2 small solar lights inset into the roof.

This one has a kids' playhouse on the top floor, chicken playhouse below. It is on the grounds of a small, family-operated nursery.

And I may be new at chicken ranching, but even I know this is not a chicken.

This coop was made from dog kennel fence panels, and the chicken shed from materials leftover from building the fanciest horse barn I have ever seen. The shed is insulated and has electricity inside. These are very spoiled chickens!

We had to go out in back of the barn and admire the new arrival....

This was the last coop we saw, back in town less than a mile from my house, and my absolute favorite. It sported wee little prayer flags on the side, and festive japanese lantern mini lights above the door.

It is set in the pines on a steeply sloping lot that also contained a greenhouse/potting shed I lust after..

In the end, I wished there were more urban-style coops on city lots, since that's my situation exactly. But I clearly see that chickens are adaptable critters, ready and willing to fit into a home garden.

My coop arrives tomorrow. Stay tuned for photos!

Travails of a Newbie Chicken Rancher

2010-05-26T16:05:00.001-07:00

Nothing serious, really, just a few minor worries for the nervous novice.
Worry Number One: baby chicks grow really fast! The Girlies have been here for a month and they are looking like miniature versions of official grownup chickens. They have outgrown their original rent-a-brooder and expanded into larger but still temporary housing.

Here are the two side-by-side, taking up almost the entire floor of my small greenhouse. My tomato starts are also growing at an alarming rate, but it is darned hard getting at them to water, stake, etc. Plus everything is starting to be coated with the fine reddish dust that seems to be exuded by chicken feathers. Ick.

Worry Number Two: The nights are still cold -- near or below freezing, and my official chicken quarters are still under construction. The Chicky Day Spa is still working ok, but it is not secure against night-time predators, so I have to move them back and forth between it and the greenhouse morning and night. Today we had a thunderstorm, and I hastily ran out and added yet more unattractive layers of protection to the already homely contraption.

Worry Number Three: Carnage in the Hen House. Due to overcrowding, boredom, nutritional deficiencies, basic chicken orneriness or all of the above, one of my chicks is getting pecked by the others. I found her one day last week, standing dejectedly facing into the corner of the day spa, with her wee chicken bootie bloodied and her nascent tail feathers sadly diminished. Oh Oh Oh. A quick trip to the feed store for some

I tell you, this is some excellent stuff. Thick purple glop that you slurp over the wounded area, it contains such ingredients as pine tar, aloe vera, tea tree oil and more. It is an all-in-one cure-all, serving to soothe raw bloody tissues, taste bad to would-be peckers, fight infection, promote healing and dye the area a nice dark color that doesn't attract chickens' eye. They are drawn to the color red, alas. This is Betty, my only reddish chick. I guess she is just different enough from the other chicks to cause them to peck. Bad chickens!

But it's working and I am keeping an eye out for further cannibalism. You have to love the brand name 'Rooster Booster', don't you? I bet it would be champion for all kinds of human ailments as well. I may add a bottle to my bathroom medicine cabinet. It would probably cure athlete's foot, head lice, hangnails, cold sores, possibly even malaria and cancer. Get yours now.

We are waiting with bated breath for the official housing. Our builder is finishing it up, and hopefully it will be delivered this weekend! The chickies are excited too, even if they don't know why. Here is a link to the place that is making our henhouse:

http://celebratetheseason.net/

Tomorrow I head to the paint store to look at paint chips. I'm thinking deep purple with green trim .......... forest green with brown trim....... It's going to be a yuppie hen house, so why not enjoy myself?

The Chickabiddy Chronicles

2010-05-23T21:00:00.000-07:00

For a gardening blog, there has been precious little gardening reported so far this year. I think I'm working too much. Plus the weather has been totally crappy all spring (after a balmy but useless-for-gardening-purposes winter) and we have had about 3 warm (as in t-shirt) weather since March. The plants waited and waited to leaf out, green up, sprout, etc. but have finally given up in disgust, waiting for sunshine and toasty temps, and are growing anyway. And freezing their little plant butts at night.

It seems like all of the semi-decently warm days have coincided with my heavy work days. I know I'm making excuses. And full disclosure forces me to reveal that, while it's true the spring has been cold and unfriendly, there is another reason I'm so behind in the garden: my chickens. Omigosh, they are such a distraction, I can't believe it.

I go out with excellent intentions to do 15 minutes of weeding. On my way out to the garden, I pass the chickens. Then I have to stop and er, make sure they're alright. Sit down and watch for a while. Eventually get up and actually go out and start weeding. Hmm, what's this: an earwig? I bet the chickens would like to eat a tasty earwig. Pillbugs? Cutworms? Centipedes? Even my precious earthworms? Yes, they all get collected in a bowl and thrown into the chicken box and instantly the mayhem begins.......

Personalities are developing. Hawkeye and Olive are the fastest at darting in first, and quickly snapping up multiple bugs. Betty waits for an opening, then dashes in and usually grabs something big and yummy and long. Lucy doesn't seem to bother much with pecking her own bugs -- she waits until one of the other chicks picks something up, then chases her around and around, trying to steal it.

After extensive reading, talking with friends who have chickens, and looking at a lot of coops in a local chicken coop tour, I finally decided on the kind of coop I wanted, and a friendly local woodworker is making it for me. Meanwhile, back on the (chicken) ranch, my chicks are growing and growing and growing -- I can't believe how fast. Outgrowing their borrowed brooder. Earlier last week, when the weather was (briefly) warmer, I created a sort of outdoor chickie day spa for my girlies, out of a second-hand portable dog run, some hardware cloth, a tarp, some cardboard, composter parts and boards.

As you can see from this interior shot, it is quite luxuriously appointed with actual soil, grass and exciting fresh, outside air.

It has a certain poor white trash look that really adds to the ambience of my weedy garden. I'm not the only chicken fan in the family, either:

After only a few days of 'warm weather', it got cold again -- hard frost at night and cold, blustery days -- so I kept the girls inside day and night. I borrowed an additional wire cage and split the chicks between the two, to give them more space. Am I spoiling them? Probably. Between anxious new motherhood and desperation at not having permanent quarters ready, I may be overdoing the 'keep chicks warm' aspect. It's so hard to know if the REALLY have enough feathers to stay warm when I've never had birds before, not even a parakeet.

It's pretty hilarious, trying to get them out of their night-time quarters and into the cat carrier I use to move them in and out to the day spa. They know I'm the bringer of tasty treats, and they really really want out of the cage, but I'm so big and scary when my hands come in and grab them that they just have to squawk and peep and run away. Sometimes they peck me, and this morning I am pretty sure I heard ..... a crow. Or at least the first attempt at one, by Maggie. Or should I say 'Max'?

I never suspected chickens would be so funny and entertaining. Dealing with Maggie, if she turns out to be a 'he' might not be so funny. We are allowed chickens here in town, but hens only. Roosters are deemed too noisy for the city. And I'm not sure I would want a rooster, either, though I would be willing to give it (him) a try if I didn't worry about annoying my so-far unsuspecting neighbors. My plan B for roosterization is a bit fuzzy at this point, but I may have to step up the planning. Keep your fingers crossed it was just galline laryngitis.

The Six Chix Mix Pix

2010-05-07T07:48:00.000-07:00

I know, you can only see 5 chicks in that photo. But there were 6. Or maybe the 6th one came later. I had to go to 3 places to fill my little flock. Why 6? After researching chickens until I had memorized all the books, I wanted one of each kind. Not having the space for any rare, endangered or strictly-for-show darlings, I still had a short list of 4-8. Maybe it's my personality. Last year I had Seed Greed. This year I had Breed Greed.

Want to meet the girls? Not all have been named formally -- some names may change as feathers come in and personalities develop. But here are the Final Six Chix, in all their original cuteness.

First is Lucy -- small but spunky, like my mom, whose name she bears. She is supposed to be a standard Columbian Plymouth Rock, but she is looking awfully small compared to the other girls, and I fear she may turn out to be a bantam. In my inexperience, I can't tell if she is just a lot younger than the others (ie a week) or truly smaller; time will tell. There was some confusion at the feed store about this. In the meantime, and regardless of her current smallness, she doesn't put up with any guff from the other chicks -- or from me.

Next is Olive, a Silver-Laced Wyandotte. (get it?) Olive is definitely bossy - I named her after a childhood friend. She is brave and not as afraid of me as the other chicks. Always on the lookout for food, and gets more than her share of any treats (worms! spaghetti noodles!), by nabbing fast and snatching away from others.

This is Priscilla, a Barred Plymouth Rock. Priscilla seemed like a good Pilgrim-type name. I definitely feel like chickens should have comfortable, old-fashioned names, and Priscilla fits the bill. In case she turns out to be a bit kinky, I can always think of her as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

This next chick may or may not be called Pinky, after a Canadian aunt of the same name. She is a Brit Red, apparently a Rhode Island Red hybrid, but I can find almost nothing on this breed on the internet. The feed store catalog had a vague drawing of one, and it looks like she will be a lighter-than-your-average-R.I.R when she feathers out. Meanwhile, she is quite blonde. My sweetheart, the newly re-instated Canadian/US dual citizen that he is, thinks she should be called Elizabeth, after 'his' queen. While I am all in favor of people in other lands having queens, I am not personally interested in having one. And I'm not sure I want to be calling a chicken 'Elizabeth'. I fear it will devolve into 'Lizzie' 'Beth' or hey -- maybe 'Betty' would be ok. (Old family joke.) In the meantime, here she is, the prettiest chick in the coop so far. She is not wild about me, except as a feeder.

This is Hawkeye, an Ameraucana -- she will lay green or blue-green eggs. Her name may change too, since I suspect she will lose her distinctive hawk-like patterning around her eyes. But maybe not. Ameraucanas come in several colors, and I don't know how she will look when she gets her adult feathers. She will have ear 'muffs' -- I can hardly wait. She is the biggest (oldest) and fairly dominant.

And finally, here is Maggie, an Australorp. I had to go to a third feed store to find her, and she is the scraggliest chick of the bunch. In my chicken newbieness, I didn't know whether she was actually unhealthy, or just at an awkward spot in her feathering-out. In the week that I've had her, she has calmed down and is looking a bit sleeker. I think she's ok. She is definitely the wildest, thinks I am Satan Incarnate to Chickens whenever I enter the room. Sigh. I guess they can't all be pets. Australorps are famous egg-layers, and she will be a green-tinted, iridescent black all over.

That's my little flock. And, as these photos were taken an entire week ago, they are now completely outdated. The girls are much bigger, and a couple are nearly feathered out. I can't believe how fast they are growing and changing. I am excited to see the new feather colors and patterns coming in. I am also getting nervous because my outside coop is not yet built. But plans are afoot and I go on a city-wide 'tour de coops' tomorrow, for ideas and inspiration.

And here they are in action:

Buk?

2010-05-01T10:54:00.000-07:00

Did I mention chickens? After 35+ years of pent-up chicken lust, I finally have chickens. Almost since the beginning of my gardening life, almost 40 years now, I've wanted a small flock of hens to complete the picture. To be honest, my personal experience with chickens up to just recently, has been minimal. Various relatives on both sides of my family have had chickens, but in my childhood visits, they were just part of the scenery to me.

My grandmother (Arabella - this blog's namesake) lived on a farm in Illinois, and during her annual escape-the-snow-in-winter visits with us, she told us many stories about her horses, sheep and other livestock. My favorite stories were about her pet chicken, Chick-a-biddy, that used to follow her around, 'just like any dog would'. I was quite charmed with this idea and vowed that someday I too would have such a chicken, and would name it Chick-a-biddy. Growing up in suburbia, there were no chickens anywhere close by, but once we left home and the parents moved to a more rural area, my mom, perhaps returning to her hillbilly roots, got some chickens, which produced the first blue-green eggs I ever saw.

When we first moved here, there was an old couple living on a small farm, right in the middle of town next to the main highway, who sold cut flowers. It was the kind of place with a hand-painted sign next to the mailbox, where you pulled off onto their dirt driveway and chose your flowers, which were sitting in metal cans full of water, and left money in another can on the same table. One time I drove all the way in to meet the owners and they turned out to be these darling people with wonderful old-fashioned names (Casper and Grace?). They showed me their flower beds, their vegetable garden, their barn and their whole place, and all the while banties were skittering here and there, pecking and chuckling around our feet. I fell in love with bantams at the moment.

For many years my chicken dreams stayed in the background, since I assumed the city didn't allow backyard chickens, and my sweetheart expressed a strong desire NOT to 'live on a farm.' However, several years ago I found out that indeed, one could have chickens in town (no roosters) and a few friends began to get hens. I was increasingly jealous. Then, last spring, 'eat local', 'grown your own organic food' and 'backyard chickens' all came together in my life when suddenly, without warning, Don changed his mind about chickens.

I nearly crowed with delight, and started making plans. 3 people at the bike shop have chickens and they all encouraged me to go for it. In the end, though, I realized I was just too busy with a couple of huge projects that wouldn't be coming to fruition until mid-summer, and I didn't have the time and energy to also deal with starting chickens until it would be too late to get chicks locally. Reluctantly, I decided to wait a year.

In the meantime, I did research. I read books about chickens and coop design. I visited friends' coops. I subscribed to Backyard Poultry magazine (I know, that's really nerdy). I scoured the internet for sites about chickens. I read chicken blogs. I ordered chicken supply and hatchery catalogs. I took copious notes. I attended a showing of the wonderful documentary film about backyard chickens, Mad City Chickens. I met a whole bunch of 'chicken people' and found they were just my kind of people. (Who knew?) I took a class on chicken-raising from the county extension service. In short, I went chicken crazy.

Pretty early on, I realized I needed an additional reality check. Yes, I wanted chickens -- but my own in-person experience with chickens was pretty much nil. What if I got chickens and then didn't really like being around them? Maybe I was only in love with the IDEA of having chickens? Time for a field test. On a blistering hot August day last summer I went to the county fair and scoped out the poultry barn. I always love going to the fair, especially seeing the 4H kids with their pigs, goats, sheep, llamas, calves and horses. But I haven't hung out much with the poultry end of things, so that was my mission.

Wow, I never knew there were so many kinds of chickens. Being a show, there were a lot of more decorative types of chickens, and lots of gorgeous roosters, which of course I can't have, but also lots of regular old laying breed-type chickens. One HUGE rooster (a cochin, I think) was the size of a small dog. In the end, I came away with some definite opinions about what breeds I wanted, and the assurance that I really would like to hang with some chickens.

This spring I'm super busy again, but the chickens have risen to top priority as I realized the feed stores probably wouldn't have chicks for much longer. Armed with my Top 6 list of Best Chicken Breeds for me, I headed out to do serious chick availability research at all the feed stores within 15 miles.

Right. What was I thinking?! I never got past the first place. The minute I walked in the door and heard the cheeping in the back corner, I was a goner. I emerged an hour later with a box full of chicks, a feeder, a waterer, heatlamp and a sack of feed.

I rushed home to set up my 'brooder' -- a galvanized metal washtub rescued from the garden, full of -- ta da -- chips from the remnants of the birch trees that were cut down recently. Once I got them in there, they look mighty cute, though a bit stunned by their traumatic journeying. Hmmm, that box looks awfully small......

And then I started to worry. What do I know about birds? Practically nothing. I've been around cats my whole life, and they just naturally tell you what they want. They also cuddle right up and purr. Chickens don't purr. They don't cuddle. They just sit there, looking scared, peeping faintly.

Worse yet, we had to leave for a dinner date an hour after the chicks arrived. I could hardly bear to leave my babies. When we returned home after a really nice time with friends (our hosts have chickens too so I at least got a short chicken fix while I was away from my own wee darlings) I rushed to the garage with great trepidation. I was afraid they would all be dead of roasting (heat lamp too close), freezing (heat lamp too far away) or just sheer trauma. But there they still were, perking up a bit now and pecking cutely. Still, although I had a strong urge to sleep with them, my sweetheart refused to leave me there in the garage overnight.

The next morning they were still fine, and so I think we are all going to be ok. Meanwhile other members of the family are also taking an interest:

Cuteness

2010-04-19T08:33:00.000-07:00

Cuteness abounds around here, throughout the year.........

Human

Wildlife

And of course in the garden. Especially in spring, I cannot resist wee little plants. Nor can I resist enameled metal plant containers in soft, pastel colors. After the fiasco of last year's attempt to grow peppers in the Topsy Turvy

and my longstanding ill luck with growing you-name-it in a classic strawberry jar, you might expect I would have given up on the idea of growing things in tall containers with holes on the sides. But no. Last week I ventured out to my favorite nursery to see what was growing in the early early greenhouse -- and to see about 'borrowing' some herb plants for a class I'm teaching next week at the local community college. Sure, they said, take whatever you like. And meanwhile, have you seen these cunning new planters? So CUTE, filled with sweet little johnny jump-ups.........

I succumbed. I planted it tenderly and hung it outside my back door. This time will be different.

Lazy or Brilliant?!

2010-04-12T07:38:00.000-07:00

You just never know when higher education will come in handy.

40+ years ago, when I suffered through (squeaked through) my required Economics 101 class, freshman year in college, I would have sworn I was acquiring absolutely no concrete knowledge or understanding of the subject at hand. I was left with the impression that 'economics' was basically voodoo -- which, come to think of it, seems to have been proven right, the past few years. And I also first heard the phrase: 'laissez faire' -- which, being French, sounded quite important and elegant, if somewhat suspect as an economic system, if I remember correctly.

When I graduated, I thought I was leaving 'higher' education behind. But no. I was only letting go of a few rulebooks, and starting a life of 'trying it out in the real world' -- in both my work and in my newly awakened passion for gardening. For many years I ruefully thought of myself as a 'laissez faire' (defined as 'fairly lazy') gardener, as I attempted to keep to a certain standard of planning and order in my garden. I read a LOT of how-to books, and sought to emulate the energetic, well-organized work of their authors. I rarely succeeded. Too lazy!

Or so I thought. What I can now appreciate is that in truth what I have learned, through a combination of procrastination, inspiration, confusion, intuition, stupidity, dumb luck, and sheer gardenerly laziness, er.... I mean brilliance, is that nature is The Dude of balance, order and 'economic systems' in the green, growing world. All I have to do is listen some, plan some, do some minimum input, then stand back and admire.

Recently I thought to look up the actual definition of 'laissez faire' and found that it literally means 'to allow to do.' By mid-summer, this approach leads to waist-high weeds. But in early spring, when the silly snows and frosty days prevent much active gardening, my 'allowing Nature to do' produces a lovely early harvest.

Exhibit A: Kale

A hippie friend introduced me to kale 30 years ago or so and I have grown it in my garden ever since. It is probably my favorite vegetable of all time. Lately I see it trumpeted as high in calcium and of course all the other green veggie benefits. Here's what I love about it, besides all that: once you grow it, you never have to plant it again. This plant is a volunteer, one of many dozens that sprout each spring in my messy garden. I pull most of the sprouts as I prepare my beds for planting other things. But I leave the ones that aren't in the way, like this one, and come springtime, they feed us wonderful greens and eventually, sweet, delicious flowerbuds for a couple of months before anything else is edible.

Last year I dug up several plants in midsummer and crammed them together into a small bed, which I later covered with a small, portable cold frame. To use another excellent French word: voila! They stayed green and yummy all winter and currently they are bursting forth with new growth as the days grow longer. I will (accidentally) allow a few plants to go to seed this year, and the cycle will continue indefinitely. I also have several kinds of Chinese greens that self-sow around the garden.

Here's a volunteer that makes me laugh every time I see it:

Although Bend is a pretty happenin' place as far as foodiness goes, it wasn't until about 10 years ago that a server in a fine restaurant proudly presented me with a plate of these 'weeds', braised to a fine turn and nestled up to some fancy-schmancy French lamb dish. I say 'weeds' because I recognized a pesky little annual that had mysteriously turned up in my garden a few years before, and which I had never been able to identify from 'Weeds of the West' or any other resource. "What is THIS?!" I asked the server and learned that it was --- ta da --- a Gourmet Vegetable known in France as 'mache' and elsewhere as 'corn salad'.

Hmm. I could have sworn I planted mache in my garden years ago, but it never came up. Or so I thought. Laissez faire strikes again? The instructions for planting mache had all stressed the need to plant it very early, while the soil was still quite cool. Apparently I had planted it too late, and those dear little seeds had just hung out, through a whole summer and fall, and come up obligingly the following spring --- but by then I had forgotten all about them and didn't recognize them. Stupidly, I had been pulling them up as weeds. I had even made a flower essence from them, labeled 'tiny white-flowered mystery plant'. hahahahaha

Nowadays I am a big mache fan -- it really does start growing very early, and is the mildest-flavored green out there. Another early early green I grow is claytonia, better known to Western wildflower lovers as 'miners' lettuce'. Also very mild-tasting, with sweet, yummy wee flowers coming up through the center of each leaf.

Another laissez faire trick I have stumbled upon is allowing the garden to tell me when to plant certain crops. For instance, peas are a tricky thing to grow in our climate. Plant too early, ie when most garden books advise (St. Patrick's Day) and they often rot. Plant too late, ie in mid May (when the local Extension Service advises) and they tend to get blasted by an early heat wave and fizzle out in an explosion of mildew without producing much.

So I keep a close eye on last year's pea patch as I wander through the early spring garden, and when I see this:

I get out my seed packets and plant.

This is an old variety of purple-podded drying peas, called 'Blauwshokkers' in Dutch, which I have grown for several years. No matter how carefully I pick, I always miss a few pods, and they happily hang until dry and then launch themselves into the surrounding soil in expectation of spring. So every year I have this handy 'pea clock' waiting for me in early April. This year, in a fit of scientific alertness, I have noted that the first dandelion blossoms are just now appearing, in synch with these pea sprouts. There is a nice scientific word for this, which I forget -- for timing the planting of certain crops based on simultaneous events. Like, 'when the first robin arrives, plant spinach' or 'when the lilac leaves are the size of a mouse's ear, plant carrots' etc. One of the benefits of living and gardening in the same spot for many years is that one can make up a version of this kind of botanical/zoological clock that is exactly tailored to the garden.

I have always taken comfort from an old Chinese proverb: 'a good garden may have some weeds.' In my case, maybe it should be: 'a good gardener may eat some weeds.'

Yet another festive spring day

2010-03-26T10:10:00.001-07:00

So much for my plans today for pruning my apple trees

root-pruning my raspberries

uncovering my artichokes

or working on my rock border

Honestly, what's a person to do with a weather forecast like this?

a) notice there is no mention of snow
b) notice it's predicted to be 61 tomorrow. This will probably happen. It is a nutty climate we have here.
All I can say is, it's a good thing I watered last weekend.

Goodbye to the Three Sisters

2010-03-18T22:05:00.001-07:00

No, not The Three Sisters, the familiar mountains seen on our evening skyline about 20 miles west of town. They are still there, in all their snowy winter whiteness.

The Three Sisters I refer to are -- or were -- three tall white birch trees that we inherited with the rest of the plantings, when we moved into this house 32 years ago. We loved them, with their graceful, pendant branches of bright green leaves that turned a glowing yellow in the fall; their white papery bark that contrasted with summer grass and shone silver on sunny winter days.

European white birch, Betula pendula, was a popular landscaping choice in Bend gardens in the first half of the 20th Century. The previous owner of our house probably planted these three, nicely clumped together in the middle of the lawn, in the early 1960's, right after our house was built. Birches are not long-lived trees at best, and have their character flaws. As we discovered soon enough.

After our initial oohings and aaaahings over our beautiful trees, we discovered that birch trees are messy and brittle! They drop a continuous litter of twigs, branchlets and alas -- aphid rain. Better known as honeydew. I think it's really aphid pee. This falls as a continuous light spray on anything and everything (and everybody) standing within range of the branch canopy. It creates a clear coating of sticky stuff which then turns black. Charming.

Still, as a true laissez faire (ie fairly lazy) gardener, I learned that if I just waited a month or so, the local ladybugs would crank up on laying eggs, babies would hatch and soon devour most of the aphids by summer's end. Plus, the honeydew is basically sugar, so it rinses off with a stream of water from a hose.

And so the seasons came and went, all of us happy here in the forests of Northern Russia. I mean, here in the desert of Central Oregon. Hmmm -- what's wrong with this picture? Let's see, how are those two climates similar? Siberia: long, cold winters with cool, wet summers vs Bend: not-so-long, dry winters, with hot, dry summers.......

The trees did ok for a long while, but a few years ago they began to get The Dwindles. Branches started turning black and dying, every year a few more. Our tree guy, Andy, came out to prune off the dead branches (before they fell on us) and look for causes. No bugs, no obvious diseases.

Year by year the branches died, and then the tops starting dying. Bronze birch borers struck the county hard, and countless huge, mature birch trees around town died practically overnight and were cut down. Andy looked and looked but couldn't find any borers in our trees. The mystery deepened.

Finally this year I had had enough of the increasingly pathetic-looking trees. All three tops were dead and their demise seemed inevitable.

We concluded that the trees had suffered stress over the past 10 years, following a careful, but apparently not quite careful enough, house expansion which put the walls within 10 feet of the tree trunks. They looked lovely through the living room window. But alas, the trees were not happy.

So we called in the tree wizard and his crew (Andy's Gang) and they arrived bright and early yesterday morning to take down the Three Sisters. One last shot of the trees, from garden level:

Then the lads put tires and plywood sheeting over the garden and windows.

One down, two to go

It was quite exciting to watch. Mark, up in the tree, tied each section to a rope before cutting, then lowered it, using a pulley attached to the other tree, to Steve, the catcher, below.

It was messy

a giant pile of pick-up-sticks?

Steve cut up the logs into rounds

stacked them for firewood

and hauled the branchlets to the chipper (aptly named 'Tornado' brand)

Not everyone was pleased with the events of the day. The Brave Rupert hid under the bed. Alex went under too, to see what was happening.

Andy (our hero), still looking unsuccessfully for birch borers

The results? Here are some Before and After photos for comparison.

Before

After

Before

After

The verdict? I LOVE the new look! Lots of light, lots of space, and hmm, a new place to play.

Glovey..... oh, Glovey......

2010-03-01T09:07:00.001-08:00

I started gardening by accident, and it didn't take long for me to realize I had to do something about my poor hands. My mom was the gardener in the family when I was a kid, and my unconscious role model. She never wore gloves that I remember.

I am a pianist. And while I am not the least bit vain about my hands in the conventional sense (fingernails as short as possible, no paint) I find gardening is probably not the ideal sport in terms of presentation and preservation of my physical apparatus. And while I love the feel of mud squidging through my fingers -- I then want it off my hands ASAP.

So. Gloves seemed like the answer. I started with el cheapo green and yellow canvas gloves from the hardware store. In my first garden, in the perennially wet clay soil of the redwood forest, gloves were soaked through within a minute. Being a bit slow to grasp the possibilities of owning multiple pairs of gloves, I philosophically gardened with my single pair of wet gloves.

When we moved to Bend, my garden soil changed to dry, abrasive, volcanic sand. Canvas gloves now stayed dry but the fingers wore through in a week or less. Thinking leather gloves would be sturdier, I visited the small local glove company ('Hunters: we'll buy your deerskins!') and bought a delightful pair. They lasted no longer than the canvas ones. I tried heavier leather, but I couldn't grab things and after they got wet, they dried stiff as boards

Through the years I tried various kinds of other gloves, some suggested by friends,

constantly trying slight variations on the basic two kinds, but never really satisfied.

It wasn't until about 10 years ago, during a house renovation, that I spotted the gloves of my dreams. The builder boys all had these great-looking work gloves: knitted backs and rubber-coated palms. "Do they come in size Small?" I asked and found that they did. All those years, the perfect gardening gloves had been hiding in the building supply store!

At this same time I had a secondary revelation: I could own more than one pair of gloves at a time! Think of it: wear one pair until they get filthy, then pull a new pair out of the drawer and wash the first. I felt like quite the spendthrift, heading to the checkstand at the hardware store holding 3 (three!) pairs of new gloves at a time. (Can you tell I'm not much of a shopper?)

A few years later I was given a free pair of nitrile-coated garden gloves at a garden show. Same tough-as-nails palm and finger coating, but light, flexible and thin enough to almost forget I was wearing gloves. Eureka!

I continue to adore my Atlas gloves, while occasionally using something warmer for cold weather garden tasks that don't involve actual contact with the soil

There's one slight issue I haven't fully resolved. Can you spot the problem in this photo?

Due to my being right-handed, I guess, I tend to wear out right gloves at about twice the rate of left gloves. What to do with the orphans? I have yet to find a use. But I can't bring myself to throw away these perfectly good gloves.

Yesterday I received a new pair of gloves to try. I won them in a contest on one of my favorite garden blogs

http://www.gardenrant.com/

They boast 'Toughtek-reinforced palm and fingertips ..... a carabiner hook ...... ventilation panels that wick moisture'. Made by a company called Womanswork ('custom fit for women'). I'll give them a try and keep you posted!

Imbolc

2010-02-07T12:35:00.000-08:00

Most people I know, gardeners included, tend to think of March 20/21 -- the Vernal Equinox -- as the 'first day of spring', just as June 20/21 is thought of as the first day of summer, and so on. We gardeners, at least, should know better. Especially for those of us who live in a climate where 'spring' is of necessity a rather elastic term for the several months of .... varied .... weather leading up to summer, a keener eye set to subtler signals than a mere calendar date are needed to track the seasonal changes.

When I started gardening, I certainly thought in these more traditional terms. I read books and made my plans and charts based on what I gleaned from their pages, not having had any personal experience of gardening as a child, other than eating what my mother grew in the back yard. The urge to start gardening hit me quite suddenly and unexpectedly, just a couple of months after getting married. I was going through some of my parents' old books that summer and found my mother's copy of the Sunset Western Garden Book, probably the 1933 edition. Like lightning, I was struck with the nesting urge and proceeded to draw up the first of the possibly hundreds of garden plans/seed lists/planting schedules that have filled my garden journals in the nearly 40 years since.

For the record, said 'nesting urge' resulted in no human children, but I have had plant babies in abundance. Here's a photo I sent to my grandmother (Arabella, this blog's namesake) entitled 'your first great-granchild and me' in January 1974.

I was as proud as any parent of my darlings, which I always thought of as my children. Many early photos of me in the garden show me in similar embrace -- with tomato seedlings, fondling my first ear of corn, hugging a sprig of apple blossoms. My poor sweetheart soon became resigned to being dragged out in freezing cold or rain to gaze upon a field of freshly dug soil, then pulled along, foot by foot, to admire 'this will be carrots ...... over here will be onions ...... this is where the tomatoes will go next month ....'

As the years have passed, if I have shown no signs of waning enthusiasm for gardening, I have at least stopped pestering him like this. Well, not often. Now I take my wee digital camera out, point, shoot and pester YOU, dear readers, with such shots! Hahaha

The photo shows a wee, wee spinach seedling, just popping up in the garlic bed a couple of days ago. On a whim I had thrown some spinach seed in an empty space at the end of the bed, after planting the garlic and shallots last fall. Being either lazy or wise, I have learned that the easiest way to gauge planting dates for early vegs like spinach, peas and hardy greens, is to pay attention to when overwintered volunteers germinate on their own, and then plant more ASAP. Here's the result:

If this first sowing freezes or rots, it doesn't matter. It's certainly not taking the place of anything else, at this time of year. I never seem to plant spinach early enough, so maybe this year I will be lucky.

The point is, for me, and in my garden and climate, the old tradition of honoring the four other seasonal markers -- the so-called Cross-Quarter days, or Celtic Fire Festivals -- makes more sense as a garden planning device than the more obvious and well-noted Equinoxes and Solstices. Imbolc, the first festival of the ancient year, was celebrated at the point halfway between Winter Solstice and Vernal Equinox, on February 4 or 5. I have heard this described in other traditions as the time when 'the back of Old Man Winter is broken.' Modern American pop culture has trivialized this as 'Groundhog Day' but ignoring this silly, shallow media non-event, I am reminded to stop my winter dreaming and get on with serious garden planning for the new season just ahead.

Sure, we will have months (and months and months -- sigh) more of cold weather. But starting in late January/early February, we and the plants notice lengthening days. In the greenhouse, I begin fertilizing the wintered-over flower pots -- geraniums and other stalwarts -- and begin to take an interest in what might be sprouting out in the garden.....

Get a Grip, Ned....

2010-02-07T08:26:00.001-08:00

or, there's no need to panic just because I loaned my favorite seed catalogs to a friend, and am now going through withdrawal .......

When I first started gardening, at the tender age of 21, I was pretty much on my own for inspiration and information. No internet, no knowledgeable neighbors; just my mother (300 miles away and in a vastly different climate zone) and the garden books I found at the library. At the time I lived in a mild-winter area (northern California coast) and could pretty much plant year-round. I killed lots of plants and murdered a lot of seeds in my first stumbling efforts but had fun anyway. With the wisdom of hindsight, I can say that beginning gardeners should just plan on this happening, no matter where they live.

A few years later when we moved to Central Oregon, things got a bit dicier. The neighbors all said, 'you can't grow anything here' but I ignored them and planted anyway. A lot of things died as the local axiom 'frost is possible any day of the year' proved to be true. Blackened squash and bean vines in July -- oh my!

But I was determined and found a few resources for encouragement: legendary local OSU Extension Service agent, Marvin Young (with his list of vegetables that would indeed grow here), and a wizard gardening friend or two who astounded the community with beautiful perennial flower and vegetable gardens in the face of the common wisdom against such bountiful potential.

The only local source of seeds was the occasional rack in the hardware store, and there wasn't much of a selection, nor were most of the varieties particularly well-suited to our crazy climate. I became a seed catalog junkie, welcoming into my home the standard Burpee and Park seed companies back when they were still smallish and family-owned, along with a growing crowd of newcomers and new-to-me oldtimers: Johnny's, Nichols, Gurney's, Stokes..... I was soon able to turn up my nose at the pitiful local offerings, and order varieties that showed actual promise of surviving our short growing season. With the birth of the heritage seed movement, options expanded again: Seed Savers' Exchange, Seeds Trust (then High Altitude Gardens), and many more. Now there is an embarrassment of riches in the seed catalog world.

Early in December, I looked forward to the catalogs, which began to show up in my mailbox right after Christmas. They come earlier now, but I still feel a tingle of anticipation when the first one arrives. In my early garden journals, I noted the date of the first entry in what I thought of as the Seed Catalog Sweepstakes. I'm a bit more blase nowadays, but I still love to see them piling up on the shelf, awaiting the day I have time to sit down and start making lists of things I need. Want. Lust after. Whatever.

Luckily, I have help in sorting it all out.

A Walk in the Winter Woods

2010-01-31T09:18:00.001-08:00

We are so lucky to have a beautiful forested park right outside of town. Shevlin Park was gifted to the city of Bend by one of the big lumber companies in 1920 and most of its 650+ acres are undeveloped. Just the place to go on a sunny winter day for a walk with my sweetheart.

As we are in the middle of a classic El Nino winter (most West Coast precipitation occurs south of us, bringing torrential rains to California and a mild, dryish winter to the Northwest) there is very little snow on the ground at our elevation (4000 ft). Skiing continues to be great just uphill from town, but for a less strenuous outing on our Thursday day off together, we took ourselves here.

Winter walks are a time to see the bare bones of the landscape -- nature's hardscape, and the remnants of last summer's greenery as well.

The park consists of a long canyon, with a paved road along part of the valley floor, and trails along the creek, the hillsides and on the canyon rim.

It's a favorite destination for mountain bikers, runners, walkers, and people on leashes. Since it is a wildlife refuge, dogs are required to be leashed, but I'd say the majority of dog owners let their dogs run free as soon as they leave the entrance and simply carry the leashes, obviously considering the rules don't apply to THEIR dog. I don't quite get this, so I assume they know best: that it is they who need to be on the leash.....

There's a covered bridge, a large group area with big shelter, a couple of very low key picnic areas, including one in Fremont Meadow, named after explorer John C. Fremont, who camped in the area during his 1846 expedition.

There's a creek....

and an interesting cast of characters.

The Rock People...

(Bigfoot?!)

Trees with history...

and ex-trees.... This one fell across the trail during a big windstorm last winter.

These are all that's left of last summer's wildflowers...

Manzanita is evergreen...

I love its smooth red bark and sturdy round leaves..

On our way back towards the car, we took the trail on top of the rim, which goes through a burn. No pine needles underfoot, just mud and lots of tracks. Footprints of joggers, hikers, bike tires, dogs...

and these...

hmmmmmm, definitely not dog prints. Bobcat or a young mountain lion. There have been a lot of cougar sightings in the park in the last 10 years or so. My intrepid sweetheart, who rides there several times a week during the season, has never seen one. But he says he won't be surprised if and when he ever does. Conventional advice when coming upon a mountain lion is to stop, make oneself look tall, and slowly back away. I suspect it would be tough to ride backwards, so I hope the looking tall would be enough.

The day after we took this walk, it snowed several inches and the trails and park were buried under a new blanket of white. After a few warm, sunny days, it's clear again. We'll probably head out there again soon.

Technically gardening

2010-01-21T10:24:00.000-08:00

Unlike the rest of the country, apparently, we are having a (mostly) mild, dry winter. Well, we did have the weird 6" of snow on October 4 .... and the wee freez-a-rama (3 days of -10F-ish here in Bend, 5-10 degrees colder in neighboring locales) ... but other than that, it's been anywhere from nicely brisk (overnight lows in the high 20's) to downright balmy (days in the 50's). Sheesh. We haven't seen snow since just before Christmas. There's still enough to ski on (the local skiers are praying for more, though) but down here in the lower elevations, it's just like spring. Well, like spring in Bend, anyway.

The greenery I see sprouting in the garden is, alas, mostly weeds, sneaking in an early start (the little baggages!). Still, I have been strolling around outside quite a bit in the last week or two, cheering on the things I know are lurking underground: the garlic and shallot bulbs I planted last fall.....

and of course the spring bulbs: species crocus and tulips, miniature daffodils and all the usual suspects. Last week, after several days indoors with a cold, I just had to get outside. It hits me every spring, but this year it's coming on a bit early. In the early days of my gardening habit, I would I tell my sweetheart "I've got to outside and throw some dirt around!" and at first he was surprised. I guess he thought I was kidding? As the decades have come and gone, he has moved from amazement to chuckling (apparently it was cute there for a few years) to, nowadays, barely a head nod.

I could have done it too (thrown dirt around), since the soil is not frozen anywhere except where shaded by fence or northern exposure trees. But as I picked up my shovel and donned my gloves, I had a little guilt attack about the pile of mulch/compost which I had had delivered last fall, still sitting out by the street, partly encroaching on my neighbor, Stan's, front lawn. Oops. So I grabbed my trusty wheelbarrow and moved a few loads to the back yard:

I did three loads and then my cold-weakened limbs demanded a tea break, and that was it for the day. Still, it was very satisfying to be outside with my plant buddies. Today looks promising too ..........

An End to Pogonip?

2009-12-29T15:56:00.001-08:00

I know, I know, it doesn't look all that exciting. Just a cloudy sky above some vaguely snowy trees. But trust me: this is an exciting sight for us today. We've been experiencing the dreaded winter weather phenomenon known formally as a 'stagnant air inversion layer', more colloquially as 'freezing fog' or, as I have just learned, 'pogonip' -- a Shoshone word meaning, well, freezing fog.

Since the fog rolled in Christmas morning, we have seen neither the sun nor the sky. The fog has been so thick, and so settled-in, that it has actually been falling out of the sky and accumulating on the ground like snow, as well as the usual hoarfrost attached to tree branches, etc.

I actually had to shovel it on Sunday. Who ever heard of shoveling fog?!

Quite lovely for about a day, then we Central Oregon sunshine freaks start whining and feeling depressed. Conveniently, the fog ends less than 1000 feet above town, so skiers heading up for nordic or alpine skiing at Meissner Snow Park or Mt Bachelor hit sunshine within 5 minutes of leaving town, and come home with sunburns.

Winter for non-gardeners?

2009-12-10T10:20:00.000-08:00

What does the non-gardener in the family do during the winter? He switches from mountain biking to cyclocross (known to some as pscych(l)o-path) racing, and shovels snow as needed. This late fall, following a back injury, the sweetheart's CX training suffered a severe setback. Through hard work, a lot of physical therapy and acupuncture, and his own personal self-healing abilities, he is ready to participate in his age group race at Cyclocross Nationals this afternoon. I suppose if nats were being held in say, Kansas City (3 years ago) or Providence, RI (last 2 years) he wouldn't have made such an effort. But having these races right here in Bend has been a powerful incentive to heal and get back on his bike. He is my hero. (Insane, but my hero; what else is a guy with Bicycle Disease supposed to do?)

In this photo you see him, shoveling the front deck a few days ago, during Sunday's big snow dump. When I took this shot, he had just come out of the garage where he did some intervals (thus the garb), and was 'cooling off' while doing manly householder deeds. Note the wooden sign to his right.

A few years ago, when he started racing 'cross seriously, a friend cut this board from a hunk of lumber as a training aid for Don. This is the exact height of a regulation CX barricade (16 inches), which racers must get over by either dismounting and jumping over them while carrying bikes on shoulders, OR 'bunnyhopping' over them while still in the saddle. I'm not sure what you call a 55+ year old man learning to bunny hop: perpetual kid or nutcase. But he did it, and this sign sits on our front deck as a reminder to keep learning new things, to never give up, and to stay young at heart. (The other side says: 'Lift Off')

Greenhouse panic!

2009-12-08T05:39:00.000-08:00

Can you tell by looking at this photo that the temperature outside is 0 degrees F? When I woke up yesterday morning, as per usual I quickly checked the indoor (in the greenhouse)/outdoor (in the carport outside it) thermometer and was shocked to see a reading of 30 degree INSIDE the greenhouse. Uh oh. And this was at 4:30 am, so the temps were still going down.

Although technically an 'unheated' greenhouse ie I don't keep it warm enough to grow orchids, I do keep a small space heater in it in the winter, hooked to a thermostat which is set at around 38 degrees. Since the greenhouse is attached to the MIL apartment's south-facing wall, it normally stays well above freezing most of the winter, even without auxiliary heat. I overwinter my geraniums and a few other tender perennials in containers, on a tiered stand right next to the wall. Other plants that will take light frost -- cymbidium orchids, a California ceanothus, potted maple and larch 'bonsai' -- are out farther from the building, next to the outside walls.

But every 2-3 years it gets really cold here, and then that heater is Life to the plants inside. Years ago I discovered that leaving a small fan on, 24/7, keeps cold (in winter) and hot (in summer) pockets from forming, and works amazingly well to keep things from freezing, even when the outside temperature is in the 'teens. But below 10 or so, that wee heater is necessary to keep things alive.

So I rushed out to see what was happening, and could see that, although Herbie (the 20 (30?) year-old oil-filled radiant heater) was working valiantly, he just couldn't put out enough BTUs. I grabbed the spare space heater -- one of those cheap, stand-up, oscillating ones and tried to plug it in. And promptly blew the fuse powering the fan and light. S---! Now it was 30/0 degrees and dark, and I was still fumbling to plug in the second heater. The electricians who put in this electrical plug carefully covered it with a 'waterproof' metal sheath, which alas, makes it nearly impossible to get actual electrical cords plugged in. I'm still in my nightgown at this point, not feeling the cold in my worry about my darlings, but I ran inside to enlist my manly guy for advice and assistance. He, still in his bathrobe peacefully reading by the fire, protested at first. But nobly (and this is why we are still married and madly in love after 40 years) he got up, put some proper clothes on, and came out to help.

Each of us was hampered by a different problem. After watching years of sci fi movies and shows, he claims to have become quite expert on advanced technology of all kinds. Unfortunately, since we are not on Battlestar Galactica, the Enterprise, or moving through the Stargate universe, most of what he has learned is useless. A Level Three Diagnostic did not help. The forward naselles could not be located. The inertial dampeners were offline. He was left with only a flashlight and a simple electrical cord to save the day.

I suffer from a different handicap. Despite being 60 years old, and having lived my entire life (bar a great deal camping, backpacking, and living in various cabins, Forest Service guard stations and the infamous 2 years in the pink trailer) using electricity, I still don't really ... get it. It seems unnatural and probably highly dangerous to me. In fact, I am the spiritual descendant of James Thurber's grandmother, who ....

"lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. it leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on. She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up she would hastily and fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her (magazine), happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but a dangerous leakage. Nothing could clear this up for her."

This explains why I still have the uneasy feeling, whenever I plug something in, that I will be electrocuted. And fishing around in the (cold) dark bowels of the greenhouse, where there could also be huge, hideous spiders, trying to jam the 2nd heater into the plug, gives me the willies. Although I suppose the spiders have probably packed their wee spidey suitcases long since and headed south for the winter.

Anyway, the plug went in, and thankfully, that circuit did not blow. The extra heater did the trick, and the oscillating motion fills the need to circulate air. Nothing froze and this morning, despite the temperature having fallen to (so far) -7 outside, it's a balmy 38 in there. My darlings are safe.

Dark Days Challenge 2009-10 Week #3

2009-12-05T18:53:00.000-08:00

Since I only found out about the challenge and joined on Tuesday, this is my first week, but since everyone else is in week 3, that's my title too. I will try to do a couple of extra meals in the next week to catch up.

I made this meal on the same afternoon I signed up. I was excited, so I decided to just go for it. I had no time to do anything fancy because I was working (at home) all day and didn't have time to go to the store for any ingredients. I already had a pot of chicken stock cooking up from the carcass from our Thanksgiving chicken, so I did a very simple dinner using that, some vegetables from my garden and a couple of seasoning bits. I guess I could just call it

SOLE Soup

From my garden: (distance traveled, about 50 steps -- damn! that's LOCAL!)
Kale -- a volunteer, probably Red Russian
Potatoes -- Colorado Rose and All Blue
Onion -- volunteer, probably a multiplier onion

Chicken bones for stock -- Pine Mountain Ranch, Bend (less than 10 miles)
Additional chicken broth -- Pacific Natural Foods, Tualatin, OR (approx 150 miles)
Salt -- oops. Here's where the 'local' fell apart. I got out all my salt and realized that, although I am no foodie, I seemed to have 4 kinds, most of it not even remotely local. I had salt from New Zealand, France, Spain and Utah. I selected the 'Mormon Salt' as being the closest to local. How far is it to Redmond, Utah? 800 miles? Good thing we get to have exceptions.

To top it off I added a spoonful of Eberhard Dairy (local, natural but not OG) -- Redmond OR (18 miles) sour cream I happened to have lying around the frig. Oh yum.