There’s been some activity in the flock the past few months. Thought I’d give you an update, since the chickens and their antics are quite popular on the blog!
First, this chicken, who I’ve been calling Beauty for obvious reasons, took up residence in a small nest by the front door, sitting on a rock day and night. She’s been broody since the beginning, but I hoped she would set up shop in the coop after we moved the chickens from the barn to the new coop.
Actually, I hoped she would LAY EGGS, but OK.
This lasted for weeks, though she often left her nest in the morning for about an hour to eat in the coop and take a dirt bath to cleanse herself of mites. She’s healthy and I got used to her being there, though I felt awful for her on those days when the air conditioner was running right beside her.
Meanwhile, the other three chickens were delivering two eggs a day. Not too shabby. And best of all, they laid them in the fenced in area, under the coop, every day. In other words, I could always find them. Bonus.
But I really want more eggs. I am still buying eggs to cover us through the weekend, since Steve eats two a day during landscaping season.
My friend Scott Pauley, who is a master seed saver and has in recent years gotten into bird breeding, had a bunch of chicks in June and offered me three hens once we could tell them from the roosters. I said I had one real criteria: good layers.
So last Sunday we picked up these lovelies. They are small, which is quite nice. The fathers were jet black Australorps. The mothers were a Rhode Island Red/White Rock cross called Tetras. All three breeds are excellent layers. I have high hopes for these girls.
So far they stay in the fenced area during the day. But the second and third evenings, two of them slipped out and slept somewhere in the wild. The third one slept alone in the small coop, while the Americaunas claimed the big coop.
Then, something amazing happened. We have a housepainter here, Richie Palmersheim. He’d made some comments about telling Beauty that her rock had hatched and she could go now. When he got to her area he tossed the rock away and flattened the ground that was her nest, covering it with arbor vitae leaves.
And Beauty was free! She rejoined the flock! And now she roams around all day eating bugs, and sleeps in the big coop. So heartwarming. I had no idea. From now on I’ll give her a couple weeks on an egg or rock and then “hatch” it for her.
The past few days I’ve shut the door in the late afternoon, before the white chickens slip out, and they’re bonding with the small coop. I don’t expect to get eggs from them this season, but come spring, OK! And I’m going to try my best to bond them to the laying boxes (see how I used dish towels to make them think they were private??) so they’ll lay inside the fence.
So now there are seven. And the disrupted Americaunas, who couldn’t get access to the coop for one day while I kept the whites quarantined, have set up a secret nest somewhere in the prairie.
Which means, of course…. zero eggs.
It has been a long, cold winter. We would have liked significantly more snow than we received, and significantly fewer days below zero. But now I’ve set up my first tray of seeds: leeks, red onions and garlic, on the growing table. Steve is building me a larger, new-and-improved chicken coop so my chickens won’t have to go to the barn in winter but can live full-time in my backyard. Then it’s on to repairing machinery and getting the greenhouse ready.
I went straight to the nearby gym, though, signed up and got myself a physical trainer. I knew I needed to keep building, slowly, and needed accountability. We have had two sessions and she is delightful. She is the 13th of 15 children, grew up on a nearby farm, and she is also a cancer survivor, soft-tissue sarcoma. We share an oncologist.
I like this gym because, unlike the college gym that is 5 minutes from my house, this one is full of middle-aged and older people like me. The college women are very friendly and kind, and it is fun to see what they are about (they know what they are about, those women). This gym is shabbier, and has ’80s music playing constantly, and the clean-the-machine etiquette is not so great (though Dr. U. had perfect etiquette, of course). I run into a lot more people I know at this gym, which has its ups and downs.
Meanwhile, over in the cookbook aisle, I was making my own observations. Mostly, I was noticing that paleo is way, way in, and that 1-pot cooking rules. A large part of the side wall closest to the in-store Starbuck’s is dedicated to cookbooks. Last January it been full of gorgeous books with artistic photos of interesting cuisines and restaurant-inspired dishes. Yotam Ottolenghi still ruled with his Jerusalem cookbooks.
But I am also, as the weather turns, cooking up a storm. In fact, yesterday and today I tackled a project. I made beef broth from marrow bones I got at the meat market and a bunch of vegetables from the garden and farmer’s market. It was something I wanted to do last year, when I read about it in The Cancer Fighting Kitchen. I got 5 quarts after 12 hours of simmering. And this stuff is gold. In addition to the marrow, it calls for sweet potatoes and for konbu, the seaweed used in miso soup. Carrot and potatoes and celery and onion of course, and garlic and peppercorns and allspice. Even a leek, which I had from the garden. I packed the quarts into my freezer, which is so full I had to take out a loaf of zucchini bread to fit everything. Which is no bad consequence.
Because this is America, we can start by the industry it has generated. I’m not talking about the treatment industry, which is in itself gigantic, and includes several options for implants and reconstruction. But if you don’t want breast reconstruction, there is a piece of the industry for padded bras/prosthetics. And the industry we’re talking about here is the beauty industry. Because: women. The industry tells you two things: you can (still) be beautiful and/or you can be/are brave. Beautiful and brave. Brave in your baldness– but with many beauty options. For me it is encapsulated in the American Cancer Society’s “Look Good Feel Good” event I attended in April 2016. What was interesting to me was that only one of us out of the five was actually there for the make-up. I gave mine to Steve’s aunt afterward. We were subjected to videos by a national make-up association and a fashion association with advice on how to buy clothes now and encouraging us that proper make-up could help us continue to look beautiful even as chemo took our hair. (It also severely compromises your skin, so using those cosmetics was out of the question for me.) The event was a way for several of us in treatment to meet each other, which allowed us then to check in with each other when we had treatment on the same days. It’s where I met my 
And that, I think, is the real area to focus on. If 1 in 8 women experience a year or more of discovering how strong their bodies really are (to fight it) and are opened suddenly to receive care and love from others, and to express love for others, all of which they continue to carry with them throughout the world, well– what does that do?
Dear Reader,
