Our Vegetables Learn to Swim

We've always grown a few tomato and basil plants, but this year we put in a more significant vegetables garden. We filled in our 20 by 40 foot in-ground pool last fall, so we have a flat large area right outside our kitchen door -- perfect for a garden.

Our serious gardening friends wanted us to turn the whole thing into a garden -- 30 by 50 feet or more -- which we thought was probably overly ambitious to start out with. So before the excavator arrived to seed a lawn on the newly-spread top-soil, we covered a 15 x 15 foot area with the pool cover, so no grass or weeds would grow there. This spring, Jordan rototilled a boat-load of purchased compost into four long rectangular beds, and Margy began to plant.

There's been only one hitch: it has rained just about every single day since mid-June. We're not just talking about sprinkles; we got three inches last night. As a result, parts of the garden have been underwater for hours at a time, and a mushy bog most of the time. The worst spot is the center bed, which is directly over where the deep end of the pool used to be and has probably subsided an inch or two.

The tomatoes, peas, lettuce, artichokes, eggplants, onions, and basil are undaunted. (Of course, none of them are growing in the boggiest bed.) But four out of the eight brussels sprouts have folded their tents, and hot peppers don't appear to be growing at all. Naturally, the zucchini are soldiering on in the swamp. (Typical!)

Kabob One, Margy Zero

I went out to feed the chickens and collect eggs yesterday, wearing the loose garden clogs we use so that we don't get chicken crap on the soles of our regular shoes. Kabob has been feeling pretty feisty since the sudden disappearance of the other two roosters. Sometimes he raises his hackle feathers and tries to drive us away from his hens. Jordan thinks he's more likely to get defensive if you look him in the eye. I've certainly noticed that on the occasion that a hen holds still long enough for me to pet her, he's not happy about it.

Today I don't know what got into Kabob, but he started jumping at me with beak and claws. As usual, I kicked at him to push him away. This time, my clog flew off and landed behind him. Now hopping, I used the egg collecting basket (containing eight eggs) to fend him off. Naturally, he attacked it, and six of the eggs fell to the floor and broke. Damn!

I gave up on self-defense, hopped around him to get my clog with a flurry of angry rooster around my legs. I held him off with the basket while I retrieved some eggs and ground the shattered ones into the wood shavings so that the chickens wouldn't figure out how delicious they are and start eating their eggs. I don't know whether it was Kabob's claws or beak that got me, and it's lucky I was wearing thick pants, because I've got big round bruises all over the back of one calf -- he even broke the skin in one place, right through the pants.

I'd be pretty ticked off if it weren't so funny. Where's America's Funniest Home Videos when you need them?

Kabob Rules the Roost

The time came to off our two young roosters, before things got ugly in the hen house. Normally, I hold the bird with its neck over an upended log, and Jordan swings the hatchet. However, a friend had told us about the value of a rooster's neck feathers (hackles) for fly-tying -- people pay $20-$60 per rooster for its hackles.

We called our fly-tying friend Dave and offered him two roosters worth of hackles if he could kill them without ruining the feathers. "No problem," he said. "When you hunt, you have to learn to wring a bird's neck in case you injure one without killing it." Perfect.

Dave came over one night, because it's more or less impossible to catch a chicken when they are awake -- you can do it, but you feel a perfect fool running around after them, grabbing and missing. At night, they are drowsing on their roosts (horizontal poles about 4 feet off the floor), and you just pick them up.

Jordan and Dave headed out to the hen house (former pool house) and did the deed. It took longer than we expected, because it turns out that a rooster's neck is a lot harder to wring than a pheasant's; Dave just kept twisting and twisting until the bird went limp. Red, and then Blue, were finally lying dead on our kitchen counter. We felt pretty bad about it, but Dave didn't.

The next step was to skin the birds; Dave's plan was to remove the entire skin, not just the neck skin, and we found out long ago that plucking a bird is way more effort than it's worth. Again, skinning a chicken, or a rooster anyway, turned out to be a lot harder than skinning a pheasant. "With a pheasant," Dave said, "you just cut open the skin, yank their legs, and the whole bird turns inside-out." The roosters refused to do so, and Dave had to cut a lot of skin to get it off. By the time it was over, both Dave and Jordan had band-aids on their fingers.

I'm not so sure how thrilled Dave's wife Diane was to receive an entire rooster, but both she and we made coq au vin the next night, since what else do you do with a coq? It wasn't bad, and the meat wasn't as chewy as I had feared. But raising chickens for meat rather than for eggs certainly isn't at the top of our list.

Kabob is once again the sole rooster, and the remaining chick, Curry (renamed from Yellow) has been accepted into the flock. Happy Ending, except from the point of view of Red and Blue.

Three Roosters Is Two Too Many

Our three chicks have grown up -- they are the same size as the 12 chickens that we started with. The chicks are all half Araucana, half something else, since our original rooster, Kabob, is an Araucana (the green egg chickens that come from Chile). We refer to them as Red (red-brown, actually), Yellow (gold speckled), and Blue (black). We don't consider these names, since we don't want to eat something that we've named.

Unfortunately, two of the three are roosters. We were hoping for hens, since we keep our chickens for eggs, not meat. But at the age of about three months, Red and Blue started sprouting beautiful black tail feathers -- a sure sign. The three chicks are social pariahs, staying in their own small group and roosting on a separate roost at night. A few weeks ago, Red and Blue starting jumping the hens, another pretty clear indication, and one that seriously annoys Kabob. Tensions in the hen house are high, not helped by being stuck indoors because of the cold and snow, with regular scuffles if no fights with visible injuries. It's time to do something about those extra roosters. No one wants layer-breed roosters, though. Their days are numbered.