Keeping chickens

"Keeping" describes exactly what we try to do with chickens. Not that chickens are difficult to care for: they aren't, but they are hard to hold on to. Two weeks ago, I heard an acquaintance lost all of her chickens except the rooster, and I saw this post on my facebook newsfeed this week:

I question why four people "like" this.

Watson does an admirable job keeping hawks away, so we haven't really had too much trouble with predators until this week.

Monday morning about 3 am, the dog must have heard something in the yard.  His whining woke Abe. Fortunately for our chickens, Abe is a light sleeper and got up with a sense that something was amiss. He went outside and sure enough, found a possum had been in the chicken coop.  Friendly (one of our very first chickens and a very sweet Rhode Island Red) had been frightened into a corner, wedged under some pressure washing equipment. That rotten possum had torn her tail feathers and left a serious wound on her (you know what?) chicken butt.

So Abe shot the possum with a BB gun, shushed the other hens and herded them as best he could back to their roost.  It turns out that our kitten-harassin' boot-lickin', chicken-chasin' coon hound loves our hens after all, and I am so thankful for my light-sleepin', BB-gun-shootin', possum-killin', chicken-protectin' husband. I don't even mind how redneck I sound to tell about it.

Friendly seems to be pulling through. So if I can have another moral to this story, it's to raise fat chickens.

• Fat chickens are harder for hawks to carry.
• Fat chickens can't easily fly or fit through fences (which, unless you leave the gate open - not that we know anything about that at our house - is how chickens encounter possums in the first place).
• Fat chickens don't have as many places to hide if they scatter at night and you have to search the yard in the cold looking for them.
• By the way, having a fat kitty has most of the same advantages. Get one!

Guerillas in your midst

When we first became interested in producing our own food, we guerilla gardened.  Abe (always the adventurer) discovered a floodplain behind the apartment complex we lived in.  Getting there involved a walk through the woods, a healthy respect for copperheads, and a balancing act across a creek (good practice, maybe?).  But it was land no one was using, and our narrow third floor balcony hardly had enough sunlight to grow a few cherry tomatoes.  We cleared a small patch of ground and dug in.

It wasn't exactly an ideal garden site. The spot was a trek from our apartment.  The land was swampy, and we got itchy red bumps to prove the gardening bug wasn't the only one to bite us. There was the chance of falling in the creek (Sorry, Dad). The area's deer had also discovered this little wilderness and helped themselves to most of what we planted. We may or may not have been voilating the city's flood plain regulations.  Still, we enjoyed a few skinny carrots and our first real taste of vegetable gardening.

Now, two years too late, I'm glad to have come across a land access toolkit by the East Bay Urban Agriculture Alliance.  They provide great advice on negotiating land use for those who might not already have access to a garden site.

Best farm picture ever, ever, ever