Peepsters on Parade

Hmmm, doesn't look like the sunbathing session is going to pan out today. OK, I'll clean out the brooder instead.
'Brooder' being a ten dollar word to describe a large (free) cardboard box filled with wood shavings, and with a heat lamp suspended above it, in our garage.

I consider the whole setup fairly professional. First, the overview:

Girl Scout knot, possibly a half hitch. Whatever that is. Height adjustment achieved by moving rolling ladder.

Rope cleverly looped over ladder track.

When I got my first peeps 2 years ago, I was going on book larnin' and internet research. I was pretty tentative when it came to 'taming' them. When they all ran away from me, cheeping in terror, on the first day I brought them home, I assumed they would get used to me in time, sort of by osmosis. That didn't happen, though, and it wasn't until they were sexually mature and started laying, and went into "I am a hen, this tall being must be a rooster, I will submit" was I able to touch any of them again.

Since then I have learned a few things. Mainly, entice them with some irresistible food from the very beginning, and they will think I am the hot ticket. Baby chicks aren't interested in much yet -- mine showed no interest in minced hard-boiled egg, fresh weeds from the garden, or chopped nuts. But I had an ace up my sleeve -- something I learned about long ago, that chickens go apeshit over:

I only recently found these 'freshly oven roasted' (ie dried) mealworms at the feed store. Before that, it had been expensive little tubs of live worms that I kept in the frig and doled out like gold coins when I needed to lure the girls back to their coop. I haven't tried the live ones on these peeps yet, but they go like crazy for the dried ones. Love this on the package:

You mean, like blue jays, woodpeckers, and chickens?

So today I took the peeps out of their big box and added fresh wood shavings, water, etc. while they roamed around the garage. I've been letting them out for a little while each day, just for the cuteness of it, and so they don't have to spend 24 hours a day staring at a brown cardboard wall. Now that they are onto me as Mealworm Provider, I have to step very slowly & carefully to avoid squashing them -- they are right at my heels most of the time.

When I sit down to watch their antics, they come running/flying/scooting over and jump up into my lap. Oh, the cuteness.

I think it also helps that I didn't get 4 chicks all at once. I got just two at first, and had a whole week to get them used to me (ie excited about mealworms) before I got the second two. The new babies just follow the older, more experienced babies and they are all confirmed mealworm addicts at the ripe old ages of 19 and 12 days old.

The difference between the two pairs of chicks, only one week apart in age, is amazing. The older ones are probably twice the size of the younger. Here they are, side by side.

I was worried the older ones might pick on the younger, but haven't seen any evidence of that at all. This time I decided to get two of each color, so as to minimize 'differentness' -- something I didn't know would be a problem when I picked out my first flock 2 years ago. In my lust to have as many different breeds as possible, I got one each of 6 different breeds, and the pecking order thing boiled down instantly into 'everyone whomp on the one who is most different' -- which turned out to be my poor Babe. She had 4 strikes against her: she was black (everyone else was striped, speckled or light-colored), she was a bantam (I learned later that bantams do tend to get bullied in mixed flocks), she was a frizzle (feathers turn outward instead of lying flat against the body), and she joined the flock almost 3 weeks after the other girls, so was always behind.

I have two Rhode Island Reds (Rosie above and Pippa below)

one Australorp (Sam, for Samantha)

and one Black Sex Link (not named yet -- I need something sweet and unassuming, like this chick's personality so far) -- both of these last two will be all black.

Here you can see that Rosie, the older chick, is already developing pinfeathers, entering the early stages of that awkward teenager-with-zits look chickens have between newly hatched cuteness and almost-mature, ready-to-start-laying, yes-I-am-a-pullet phase at 4-5 months old. Like many teenagers, both the older chicks are all legs.

while Pippa and ??? are still adorably round and downy.

Even at this young age, they have dinosaur feet!

Mealworms eaten, chicks returned to their box, I have one more little task:

Peepster Poop Patrol.

The Real Arabella

It must be time to introduce this blog's namesake, Arabella Branan Genge Gault -- my paternal grandmother. I chose the name 'Arabella's Garden' for this blog partly because it started with 'A' and thus would head any imagined favorite list of blogs, and partly because my first choice of name 'The View From Home' was already taken. But the biggest reason was that my grandmother was a huge influence on my life as a gardener, and I still think of her often when I admire my asparagus bed, or watch my chickens. However, it wasn't until long after I planted my first garden (see previous post) that I thought back and realized how much about gardening I had absorbed from her in my earliest childhood.

This photo shows her as I remember her first and best, probably in the late 1950's, when she was in her late 60's.

When I first remember her, she was living on a farm in Illinois, whence she had moved after my grandfather LEFT HER FOR ANOTHER (YOUNGER) WOMAN sometime in the 1950's! Fairly shocking in those days, particularly for people in their 60's, but at my age I was oblivious and thought nothing of it. Although she loved her farm, and all her animals, she suffered terribly from arthritis even then and the winters were hard on her, so she began escaping by traveling during the coldest months. She took several ocean cruises, though, unlike the luxury liners of today, these were mostly simple accommodations aboard commercial ships. I'm sorry my memory isn't better -- or more likely, I just wasn't paying attention because I just accepted what I heard without questioning. One trip was on a Norwegian freighter, with just a handful of other passengers -- all single, older women, I believe.

**** Ha! I lied! Paging through her trip journal from 1961, I found a newspaper cutting from the L.A. paper, about her cruise of that year. It says: "(headline) Norwegian Tour Ship to Be Welcomed Here. "Elaborate welcome is planned at Los Angeles Harbor today when the Norwegian cruise ship Bergensfjord arrives between 8 and 9 am on a west-bound cruise around the world. The ship, carrying 371 cruise passengers, will embark 87 more tourists here at Berth 232 D, Terminal Island before leaving at 4 pm for Honolulu." I wonder where I got the idea these were budget trips? I would have been 11 years old and obviously wasn't paying attention to the details. Also had no clue about money. ****


She made long-lasting friendships on these trips, and kept in touch with them long after her traveling days were over. I remember one trip she decided she was going to learn to knit, and, optimistically, she took along needles and a big ball of black yarn to practice. She came home with a big ball of yarn, stretched limp from being knit, ripped out, reknit, ripped out, over and over again. She was not a crafty person, and gave it up, gladly, long before she returned to the States. I'm pretty sure I inherited her lack of knitting talent.

Here are a couple of photos from a Mediterranean trip she took in 1959, at age 67, visiting such ports as Funchal (Madeira), Rabat (Morocco), Tangier, Malta, Alexandria, Naples, Capri, Dubrovnik and Cairo. Here is a great photo of her in Casablanca

Don't you love the faces in this photo? Grandmother, gazing off into the distance, probably thinking about the beautiful tiles in the wall behind her. A rather furtive-looking Arab guy, looking at the camera, and two heavily veiled women, one of them looking up curiously and am I imagining it -- mischievously?

Here's another, obviously from Egypt. Presumably the two other ladies were her traveling companions, but who is the guy in the fez on the fourth camel?

Grandmother loved riding, and had horses at home on the farm. I wonder what it was like for her to bestride a camel? Showin' a bit of leg, there, Billy!

I don't know how many of these trips she made in all -- my memory is, only a few. After that she began coming out to California to stay with us over Christmas, which evolved into her renting a room in a house nearby for the entire winter. Eventually her arthritis became so bad she couldn't manage the farm at all, so she sold it and moved out to California for good. She moved into a nice retirement home and 'farmed' her back patio. More on that another time.

Recently I unearthed some old family papers, and found this photo of Arabella much earlier in her life. No date on the back, but her married name, so possibly after 1913, the year she married my grandfather. Does she look 22?

It occurs to me that my grandmother is almost exactly the age of the daughters in Downton Abbey -- probably Mary's age, the oldest. Though a middle class American rather than an English aristocrat, her life would have encompassed the same kinds of social and economic forces that were opening up for people of that era: women's suffrage, labor rights, etc. She too lived through the Spanish Influenza epidemic, which killed her future brother-in-law, my grandfather's younger brother, in 1919. It's only 100 years (next year) since she married!

How strange a thing is time. As a child, I certainly never imagined looking like my grandmother, that old, old woman. Yet this photo shows a strong resemblance to a younger me, and, now that I am approaching the age Grandmother was when she began her travels, I marvel at her courage and sense of adventure, to set out to see the world in her 7th decade.

Bloggers' Luck?

In my everyday life, I don't win things. Contests, sweepstakes, drawings. I never win them. In this I am following in the footsteps of this blog's namesake, Arabella -- the original Arabella, my grandmother -- who claimed to have only won one thing in her entire, long life. At the tender age of 5 or so, she correctly guessed how many jelly beans (or other Victorian era items -- did they have jelly beans in 1896?) were in a big glass jar at the county fair, and won a wonderful music box. It is still in the family -- my sister currently has it, but we have discussed trading off at some point. A fine thing to win, if you are going to win one thing.

Since I began reading blogs, though, specifically garden blogs, I have won 3 (three!) separate items, in different blog giveaways. A year or two ago, when I first discovered my favorite garden blog, Garden Rant, I won a pair of gardening gloves.

Last December, I won a most excellent book, which I quite need -- having nothing but dry shade in my yard. (Except of course for the dry sun.)

Now comes word that I have won a copy of the most excellent, latest, hot-off-the-presses edition of the Sunset Western Garden Book from yet another fine blog (Gossip in the Garden). This book is The Bible for gardeners in The West, and I have personally owned every edition since the 1967 version.

I discovered the (probably) 1959

version as a newlywed in 1971, as I was rifling my mother's bookshelves during a summer visit. I was spending the summer at a US Forest Service guard station (as devoted new wifey to my firefighter/sweetheart) 30 miles from a paved road and after only a few weeks I was desperate for reading material. I borrowed it on an impulse, despite never having had the slightest urge to garden up to that point in my life.

Once I got home to our little plywood home in the woods (fire guard station) I opened it and was instantly captivated. I still don't know why, but possibly it was a newly-awakened nesting urge, due to my recent entrance into the married state. All I know is that, once I got my nose into that book, I became aflame with the desire to dig.

Come September, I left my sweetheart in the mountains to finish up fire season, and returned alone to our crummy rental duplex next to the McKinleyville exit off Highway 101 (northern California coast, 'in the redwoods;), and started creating my first garden. I dug a small flower bed in front of the house and planted daffodils and crocus -- which did well.

I spaded a huge area in the side 'yard' -- really just a weedy, grassy area used by former tenants to bury their garbage. And I do mean garbage. This being the pre-recycling era, I was digging up not just rusted cans and broken bottles, but potato chip packages, old toothbrushes, clothing --- ewww. I persevered, though, and proudly showed my sweetheart my neatly planted rows of leeks, carrots, lettuce, onions and more when he returned a few weeks later.

Alas, most of the seeds did not come up -- I had planted them far too deeply, and the carrots, strangely successful, were eaten over a period of several days by gophers (as I watched in astonishment from the window). No matter. I was hooked. And I am still planting carrots and co. in my garden, with better success and fewer pests. My sweetheart is still a bit shocked that I garden -- he doesn't get the 'fun' of it. But he gladly eats my successes, and realized the time I spend in the garden is time I don't spend getting into all kinds of other trouble.

OK, what other garden blog contests can I enter?

She's Doing It Again

Two years ago I was a novice. Nervous. Excited. Well-read but with no actual hands-on experience. The Six Chix Mix took me by storm through cuteness. There was peckage, coop-building, and eventually, egg-laying. I became enchanted by chickens. Fell in love with their dinosaurean legs and feet, their beady eyes, their dorky walk and constant busyness.

Last year was a flock reshuffle and expansion of quarters. Coop tourists. Health dramas.

This year so far has seen flock reduction and the beginnings of what will be an invigorated egg-laying contingent.

So far we have 2 wee peeps, with another 2 slated to arrive a week later.
One Rhode Island Red (amazingly, wing feathers already, at the advanced age of 3 days old)

One Australorp

Further details to follow.

Resolutions

February 1. Time to make those new year's resolutions. What? I'm a month late? Not so. I will admit that everything in my life has been late, the last couple of months, starting with winter.

Winter? What winter? has been the topic of conversation around town since hopes of an early ski season died a-borning, right after Thanksgiving. After a promising skiff of snow in mid-November, we had no precipitation of any kind until the last few days of December, when it ...... rained .03" on the 28th. Pitiful. At least it saved December 2011 from being the driest December on record.

In December 1976, the infamous 'drought year', there was no measurable precipitation at all. That was the year we hiked into Chambers Lakes (7000 feet elevation, in the saddle between the peaks of South Sister and Middle Sister in the central Cascades on my sweetheart's birthday, December 21. Bare ground at 7000 feet in midwinter is unheard of in this latitude. The ground wasn't even frozen. I dug a couple of tiny wild huckleberry bushes for my garden. Shhh, don't tell anyone.

Finally, two weeks ago, on January 16 -- we got a real winter snow dump. Good thing too, as I was getting tired of watering my garden -- dealing with frozen hoses only adds injury to insult (we can talk about the evil agenda of hoses another time). The storm seemed to have caught everyone unawares. Schools were closed. The college was closed. Even Mt. Bachelor, our local ski area, closed. 72" of snow in 72 hours was just too much for even their snow removal equipment.

The chickens, as usual were unimpressed. I thought their new play yard looked quite festive in the snow.

The new girls were suitably shocked.

but a few tasty treats soon lured them all out for breakfast al fresco.

Alas, the new solar panels are not really operational after snowfall.

Now here it is, Feb 1 and it still feels like early November. But for us gardeners, it's time for new year's resolutions. Personally, I don't much bother with the usual January 1 kind of resolutions. 'New Year's Day' is a fairly meaningless thing in the real (natural world). A change of one digit in the year but nothing tangible to hang one's hat on. No wonder most 'New Year's Resolutions' go flop within a week or two.

I prefer to hang my resolutions onto something more tangible, or at least visible in my garden. Feb 1 is very close to that magical day (Feb 4 this year) when we hit 10 hours of daylength -- the point halfway between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox, traditionally considered the first day of spring. This is the time when plants resume active growth. Hardy greens like kale, mache and claytonia, which can sit dormant all winter in sheltered places around the yard, or huddled up in the cold frame, begin first spring growth about now. Depending on weather and temperature, we can start eating the earliest greens from the cold frame sometime in late February, and few weeks later from the open garden.

Admittedly, this (non)winter has been weird even with plant growth. Some of my earliest shade-loving perennials -- pulmonaria and hardy ferns -- sprouted and began showing new leaves in late December. On Christmas Eve I threw some old kale seed into the cold frame, and within a couple of weeks that was sprouting too.

Who knows what 'spring' will bring. Last year we had cold, snowy, frosty weather until nearly the end of June. Tomato plants that went in in mid-month sat there shivering for weeks as the longest days of the year passed by. Then, suddenly, as if waking from a dream, the weather seemed to straighten up, shake its head, and stand up, casting off the cold like an old coat, and begin blasting out heat and intense midsummer sunlight on every bedraggled seedling in the yard. I had sunburn on my tomatoes -- a first for me.

But that's a worry for the future. For now, I will take a good look at last year's garden journal notes, draw up my first seed orders, and get started on those resolutions. For now?

* Keep better records
* Plant fewer tomatoes
* Figure out a better irrigation system
* Fertilize more
* Skip the sweet potatoes. Really.
* Learn to espalier

* Order seeds NOW

Hint: these are my standard resolutions for every year. Wish me luck.

Oh, and one more:

* Blog often

thanks for reading!

BFF

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

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!