The Chickens

One spring a friend incubates a clutch of eggs for you, and on a rainy Earth Day you bring home a baker’s dozen balls of yellow fluff and place them in a cardboard box near the wood stove. Your children gather around, holding the downy babies, listening to them peep, lying eye-to-eye with them on the floor, laughing hysterically when they poop. When the chicks sleep, they lie face down in the wood chips, looking dead, so you poke them and they wake up cheeping, which makes you feel bad and reminds you of how you used to wake up your own newborn children from naps because you were worried they’d stopped breathing.

I've been working my way through the "Writing" folder on my laptop, dusting off and finishing up old, neglected essays and sending them out into the world. A little piece about the sad saga of our chickens found a home at Mutha Magazine this week. If you'd like to read on, you can find it here.

Corn-mazin'

Sometimes I overthink things.

Sometimes, I think, "Oh, we should go do such-and-such," but then I can't quite triangulate the two free days a week to fit such-and-such in.

And though most of the time it's nothing very important, or life-changing, like a corn maze, it's nice to get out of my own way now and then.

The last time we went to a corn maze, M was three years old. The next fall, I had two babies. A corn maze was out of the question. And all the falls since, I just never could get around to it, even though there's a farm with a corn maze only fifteen minutes away from home.

Then a friend suggested we go to a different corn maze--one an hour-and-a-half away--on Halloween.  And because that was way more daunting than the corn maze down the road, that I hadn't mustered the energy to go to in then years--and, let's face it, because I like to be in control of the situation and do everything on my terms--I got it together and we headed out one late Sunday afternoon. 

The boys got their money's worth--running up and down the rows of corn with their friends for nearly an hour, eating ears of roasted corn, making friends with the chickens that free-ranged in the maze. I wandered the rows, a bit in awe of this grass--grass--growing higher than my arm can reach. It's not much of a corn patch, by Iowa standard, I suppose. But it was a pretty amazing place to spend an afternoon.

Garden Roulette

Gardening seems to me like some kind of elaborate game of chance, into which you insert seeds in the spring and then spin the wheels of sun and rain and bugs and at the end come out with some mysterious combination of vegetables and failures.

Every year, it seems, our jackpot is different. Like the amazing pepper crop four years ago (which we've never replicated). Or like the year it rained nonstop and the only thing to come out of the garden were big, beautiful onions. Two hundred dollars worth of big beautiful onions. Can I make a recommendation? Don't ever compare how much you spend on seeds with what you actually produce for crops. Especially if it rains all summer and all you get is onions.

Of course I know there's a such thing as planning, and controlling with things like irrigation and pest management, but around here we pretty much leave it up to chance (I should probably not speak, since I'm not the actual gardener, but I am not complaining, just observing).

This year we got some lovely potatoes; approximately exactly as much poundage as the seed potatoes we put in. We had great and early peas (but just enough to eat fresh; which is OK since we're not huge frozen pea people). We got a good crop of garlic, but left it in the ground too long so that many of the cloves split out of their skins. We have a gorgeous row of Russian kale, which we mostly admire from afar, rather than actually harvest and cook (although a gardening friend says it's sweeter after a frost, so perhaps we'll just pretend that we were waiting for that all along). And amazingly, we have had almost no slugs, thanks to the chickens, despite their untimely demise. C accidentally killed many of the seedlings he started (don't ask––let's just say it brings up the sticky and irreconcilable topic of whether or not toxic chemicals should be kept in containers intended for beverages; you can guess which side of that argument I am on), so our tomato and pepper and tomatillo crops were small, and the tomatoes, as usual, dropped from the vine due to some mysterious blight.

Z and E brought home seedlings from school in little cups, which we unfortunately did not attend to quickly enough, so they died off, but then after a few days of rain, one revived and Z and I planted it quickly in a corner of the garlic bed, not knowing what it would become. It turned out to be a very prolific slicing cuke, and Z proudly harvested two or three green fruits each day for the month of August. Our pickling cukes did well, too (unlike the year when from all the cucumber plants the only thing that emerged was a single, golf-ball-sized cucumber; but oh, what a delicious little green ball that was!) and I did up a quick batch of Catherine Newman's refrigerator pickles. I had to use dried dill, because dill was another crop failure this year (mainly because we didn't plant any), so I'm afraid the results aren's as good as could be (but I keep thinking I could add some later). I don't know how long they last in the fridge, but they take up a crapload of space, so we need eat them up quick, regardless (M can be counted on to down four or five pickles at a sitting; E and Z have developed an unaccountable aversion to them).

We're still waiting on the second crop of beans, which C planted in early August, of all times. He claims they'll be ready before the frost, but now they're on a race agains fall. I'll let you know how it goes.

How did your garden grow this summer?

June Notes & Musings

1.  Summer came suddenly yesterday (ya know, on the summer solstice), with temps going from 60s during the day and 40s (brrr) at night to the 90s with Iowa-like humidity and hazy ozoney air. Hello summer!

2. E found this moth on the sunroom door this a.m.:

I believe it's a rosy maple moth (Dryocampa rubicunda) of the Saturnidae family. At first I thought it was the primrose moth, which I often find (aptly enough) hiding inside the closed blossoms of the evening primrose. But I that has a different pattern of coloration, and a different body shape, and it's in the Noctuidae family. The sherbet pink and yellow are the same, though. Interesting example of convergent evolution, doncha think? And just plain pretty (we moved it to a less sun-baked location after its photo shoot).

3. I finally finished reading Harry Potter #7 to E and Z last week. We started the series back in September (with a few side forays into the Wind in the Willows and the Magic Treehouse, among others)!! So what did they want to do immediately? Start Harry Potter #1 all over again!!!!! It has provided an interesting opportunity to discuss foreshadowing with M. Like when Hagrid says you'd have to be mad to rob Gringott's. M claims that JK Rowling didn't know what was going to happen at the end when she started (though I heard that she'd had it planned out from the beginning). Regardless of what she knew and when she knew it, it begs the question: is foreshadowing only foreshadowing if the author plans it that way? Or is there serendipitous foreshadowing (or more likely, unconscious foreshadowing)? I only write short stories, which don't provide a lot of room for foreshadowing, which is a good thing, because that would only provide one more opportunity to do something badly.

4. Baseball is finally over!! I would be hooting and hollering, but M's team lost the second playoff game last night and my normally stoic boy spent the rest of the night sobbing. I did my best to hold his sadness and disappointment for him, even though he just wanted me to go away. I think he was probably mostly upset about striking out three times and being tagged out on first the one time he hit. Maybe also about being sidelined from pitching for the most of the season. Maybe that's just me projecting. Anyway, I tried to remind him that "It doesn't matter whether you win or lose, as long as you tried your hardest and had a good time," which has been my mantra since Farm League. Of course, I could point the finger of his misery (or his desire to wallow in it) directly back at myself, because just hours earlier I received an email from a former professor who is at Rio+20, where he ran into an old friend of mine, whom I have lost touch with, mainly because hearing from her was terrible for my self-esteem: she was always doing something amazing with her life, and it always reminded me that I was not quite measuring up to my expectations for where and who I wanted to be (this is totally my issue, not hers, and it's not that I cut off contact her because of this, but I've never gone to great lengths to maintain contact because of this). Anyway, hearing that she's in the midst of the climate talks (even if everyone thinks they'll go nowhere), while I'm at the lowest ebb of my not particularly illustrious career turned my mood very sour for the rest of the evening. So perhaps I should remind myself that it doesn't matter whether you are successful, as long as you try your hardest and have a good time (hmm...cold comfort).

5. After I finished/gave up on comforting M and crawled into bed, I heard a noise outside that sounded like someone (thing) moving rocks. Then I heard peeping/cheeping like chickens. At 9:30 p.m., I had the crazy thought that the two or three chickens whose carcasses did not seem to be among the fallen had somehow hidden out in the woods for a whole week and now were home looking for dinner. I went out on the deck and some large animal (dark, but short. A fisher perhaps?) slunk away and the peeping became louder and more insistent. I called C (who was at his radio show--don't ask) to see if he bought more chickens (even though we had agreed to wait until we had a safer coop) and he said his mother had dropped them by earlier. I looked into the mobile coop and saw chicks running around on the bare ground cheeping loudly. Even though it was a hot night, they were probably cold with no bedding and no light. Not to mention scared sh*tless by the big hairy thing trying to eat them. I spent the next hour outside in the dark with mosquitoes dive-bombing me, trying to coax seven chicks (apparently there had been ten originally) out from under the extremely heavy chicken ark through a gap in the wire fencing. I was not worried about the predator--I was cursing loudly enough to scare away a pride of lions. Sticking my head and arms into this coop--that was still splattered with blood and strewn with feathers (and probably chicken bits that I missed when burying the corpses) by the very dim wind-up flashlight was the last thing I wanted to be doing at 10 p.m. C arranged for his mother to come and get the chicks today, so that we can replenish our flock at the right time, on our own terms--when we have a proper coop that will not serve as a buffet table to hungry predators, and after we've taken the time to mourn our first beloved flock. I don't really think the best response to loss is to get a replacement, and I don't want my kids to grow up seeing animals as disposable, even if they are just chickens.