Awkward Bombshell Tries to Neighborhood

I am, objectively, the worst. I mean, I didn't spend my childhood being fat and watching 90s movies full of sassy-mouthed brunettes insulting the hot motorcycle guy before he ultimately falls in love with her to not become a sarcastic anti-social bitch myself. Life in the suburbs is a study in contradictions for me. The houses and properties touch each other! but we build fences between them. I don't know what to do with that. Are we supposed to talk through them, as I sometimes do with my neighbor (ala Wilson and Tim from "Home Improvement")? The one time she poked her head around the corner of my fence and made herself visible while saying hello I screamed like I was in a slasher film because it startled the living crap out of me. Yep. Bad enough the shrieking opera singer that lives next door to you has chickens in the yard, an apocalyptic lawn, and lettuce growing in the roses, but if you try to say hello to her she'll scream in your face--and, you know. Opera singer. Good lungs.

I am so sorry I exploded your head with my big fat voice. For reals, you seriously startled me though.

I don't know how to live in the suburbs. Is it a competition? My street is full of mommies that are better than me in everything. They volunteer as room moms, pull wagons full of Girl Scout cookies, coach soccer, do Pilates and Barre and run and train their dogs like boss bitches. My dog looks at me out of the corner of one rolled eye and mind melds with me so he can mentally flip me off. Are there expectations? Pretty sure there are a minimum set of expectations that, like, the hoarders across the street are definitely not meeting, with the shredded tarp half covering the four hundred year old sedan --but my fence hasn't been painted in, like, ever, even after we had it sand blasted five years ago. In preparation to paint.

Every once in a while I get it into my head to make community, and obviously, as a woman with deep roots in both the Catholic church basement potluck casserole tradition (hot noodles with cottage cheese) and the midwestern "Bring a Dish to Pass" picnic summer salad tradition (cold noodles with mayonnaise) I understood. Community starts with food.

I decided I was going to make special little rice krispie treats for all the kids in the neighborhood my children knew for Halloween. I made the rice krispie treats. They were FREAKING. FANTASTIC. The stuff you get in the packages in the vending machines is not a real rice krispie treat with butter and soft marshmallows. Yes, I realize it's not cooking, but it is iconic American mixing. And it's delicious. All of this to say that after I tasted the first bite that I spooned into my buttered casserole dish I immediately started thinking how much the parents were not going to want their kids to have a non-packaged snack for trick or treating. I flashed back on a TV show episode where the mom painstakingly made home-baked treats for all the kids in the neighborhood and one of the parents rings the doorbell to return them. When the mom confusedly says, "But we've been handing them out all night!" the other woman raises an eyebrow derisively at the lawn, littered with the discarded treats the other parents had immediately pitched. I didn't want my rice krispie treats to get thrown away on my lawn when they were this delicious! I should just eat them myself, right?

What? No. I'm not eating CHILDREN'S HALLOWEEN TREATS.That. Would be wrong.  

I stopped myself. Ok. My children could go deliver the little treats to the houses of their friends early on Halloween night. It could be a little neighborhood thing. The kids would do it, obviously, since it would be weird for an adult to just show up at people's houses with creepy little gifts for their children. Totally different from the same children coming to my house and begging for creepy little gifts. I sent my kids off with the little packages. They all came back to the house--everyone was already out trick or treating. "We should eat them ourselves, mommy. Right?" My youngest was always perfectly in tune with my own dark desires, but I staunchly resisted temptation. I was just going to have to give out. The treats.

When the first kid I knew came to the door I gathered my courage and looked for the parents lingering in the back of the crowd. "I..uh...I have a little treat for...you know...the kids that know my kids...if that's ok...he's in Christopher's class at...uh, at school, and I thought it'd be nice, but if you don't want to let him have..." The dad laughed, reached past his kid and took the treat.

"Of course. Thank you! Nice to see you, Sarah, say hi to Chris."

Oh. You know my name.

Am I trying to create community? Or just finally forcing myself to join it?

I kept trying. A friend of my husband's moved in down the street to a house with a lemon tree. He sent over a big sack of lemons he didn't want. I got inspired to use them all to make a big carafe of homemade lemonade and sent it over to him in a pretty glass container, thinking it would start a back and forth where he sent us all his unused lemons and I made huge vats of lemonade to split them between him and us.

No, he just kept my pretty glass container.

I...don't understand why you didn't anticipate what was in my brain though.

Ugh. I don't even like people. 

Ok. I tried one more time. I made candied apples and sent one over to my neighbor with small children. It was in the worst possible taste and literally made of fruit coated in corn syrup and red dye and it was delicious. 

She accepted it. And sent over an apple pie. 

Wait. 

I think that was it. This may be how that was supposed to go. Ok, I'll try a box of cookies to the next door neighbor whose head I exploded with my "American Horror Story: Garden" screams. She sent back a banana bread covered in delicious toasted walnuts. 

What has happened to me. I know people's names that live on my street and sometimes call them by that when I pass them on the sidewalk, or even more against my nature, I don't quickly look away to avoid making eye contact when I'm backing down the driveway. These are great skills, because now people stop all the time to ask me about my chickens and the garden and find out what we've got growing. I try not to be the worst person and hide behind my fence gate when I see wandering groups of polished professional ladies power walking past my house in their coifs and their Coldwater Creek coordinated ensembles because these glamour pusses are exactly the people I should be selling on the Gospel of Dirt. I mean...I try, but sometimes I pretend to myself that I haven't watered the alpine strawberries that happen to be behind the fence gate, and it usually takes about the same amount of time as the Coifs take to pass my house. 

Today I was backing out of my driveway, on no particular hurry, and a woman came running up to the car, waving her hands to get my attention. Dammit, I thought. Did I run over a cat just now? Dammit! She signaled to me to roll my window down, gesturing wildly. God. Do you want to sell me something? Because I already have all my magazine subscriptions, plus the ones I paid for and never received, and I'm not really down with buying meat off the back of the refrigerated truck. I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and rolled down my window.

"I'm sorry," she said cheerfully. "I see you're leaving. Could I take my granddaughter onto your lawn to look at your chickens?" 

A tiny girl with black curls, maybe three years old, popped out from behind her grandmother's legs, bouncing a little as she held onto her grandmother's hand and looked up at me excitedly. 

"Sure," I heard myself say. "Do you want to hold one?" I parked and turned the car off. Delighted, the beaming little girl ran ahead of us to the chicken coop and put both hands up to the chicken wire, peering in at the hens. I kicked off my heels, opened the coop and took out the friendliest and most personable hen, my redhead Maisie. "Would you like to touch her first?" I showed the little miss how to gently stroke the front of Maisie's chest instead of the top of her head, the way she liked it, and then held Maisie's wings at her sides and deposited her into the little girl's lap. She giggled and then her mouth formed a huge round "O" and then she giggled again, still gently stroking Maisie's chest feathers with one tiny finger. 

"Thank you so much for stopping and visiting with us," her grandmother gushed, and held out her hand to me. "It's so, so nice to meet you. I'm Deborah." 

Hi. I'm Sarah. Won't you be my neighbor?

No, I know. I hated how that sounded and I wish I hadn't said it.

Power Heels

"I have a subversive plot. It is so subversive, in fact, that it has the potential to radically alter the balance of power, not only in our own country, but in our world."

Soft spoken, diminutive and amiable evil genius, Roger Doiron beams as he says these words, to titters from the audience at his TedTalk "My Subversive (Garden) Plot".. He raises his eyebrows with a mild expression of amusement and flashes a picture of Dr. Evil. "I know I sound a little like [him] right now but trust me, we have very little in common. His plots are all about destruction. Mine...is about creation." And the picture changes to a patch of grass; and then the same patch of grass covered in huge heads of cabbage, corn stalks, bean vines, and squashes. "I'd like to suggest that gardening IS a subversive activity."

"Mild mannered? I got the president to plow up the White House lawn and plant a garden, bitches. Judge me not for my short sleeved button down. Imma subvert the hell out of this piece."

Food, he urges, is energy, and in that energy is a form of power. When we encourage people to grow their own food, they begin to take that power for themselves.

Well, sure. On a basic level, I now have the power to go out to the yard and get my own lettuce. In a few months I'll have blueberries and I'll have the power to go eat those too, and I'll have the power not to go to the grocery store for those things. I suppose I make my own bread, too, so I have the power not to buy that at the grocery store. For that matter, I have the power not to pay the prices Target and Vons charge me for those items. I can return the power to my pocketbook.

When I grow my own food take infinitely more care with how it's prepared. Does the meal highlight those tomatoes that took me months to grow and I've been checking every day to see if they're ripe enough? We finally had enough green beans for the first meal of the summer--I'm not going to risk drowning them in butter or boiling them to a mush, but make sure they're perfectly, deliciously prepared. I have the power to eat well.

The blueberries and tomatoes I grow in my garden are much more packed with flavor than anything I can buy in the grocery store, too. I didn't realize blueberries could have flavors as wildly varied as grapes and as bright, complex, or subtle until I had the blueberries from my backyard last year. These blueberries are completely unlike anything from the big box store, those flavorless imitations bred for transportability and not for taste. Strawberries from the Farmer's Market are better than the ones at the grocery store, but the ones in a simple pot in my backyard are even better than that, warmed with the sun, sweet and amazing and delicately melting in my mouth. The mammoth monstrosities from the grocery store are more suited for staunchly holding up after being dipped into a half inch layer of chocolate--those strawberries have more in common with a spoon than an actual strawberry. If I grow my own food, I have the power to have strawberries that taste like summer; to eat blueberries that burst on the tongue with such complexity, such freshness, boiling them and putting them into a pie would just be sinful; to eat tomatoes that perfume the yard with the ambrosial scent of their leaves and taste like a bite of Italy itself, warm and juicy and delicious. I have the power to say no, I want better.

"I am not grotesque, I just have curves, you bastards!"

Box stores pitch "ugly" fruits and vegetables daily, relying on a handful of varieties that have been bred for bright color, transportability and uniformity of size, but are utterly lacking in vitamins, minerals and flavor. The apples we picked in Julian this fall had rough brown patches on their skins. They were lumpy and ill-formed, and all sizes, and not very pretty. I have never, NEVER eaten an apple so delicious, or drunk juice so sweet; in fact, the lumpiest, ugliest apples were the tastiest. When I grow my own food I have the power to say no, I will eat everything, no matter whether the food I touch is imperfect--and more than that. When box stores discard ton after ton of visually imperfect produce, they waste: calories that could be used to feed the hungry; the resources of soil minerals and water that went into the production of that produce; and worst of all, the labor of those farmers. Every pound of produce that they turn down as unsaleable is a pound of produce the farmer won't get paid for, a pound of labor that ends up being thrown away for free, a dollar closer to having to fire workers or lose the farm. It's a dollar more that certainly gets passed on to us when we're paying $10 a pound for cherries; $4 a pint of blueberries; $7 for strawberries that taste like nothing. When I grow my own food, I have the power to say no. I will not contribute to the death of the farmers that feed us; I will not support a broken system that leaves me paying more for inferior produce.

Monsanto has made a lot of decisions for the country, and would like to get its hands on the power to make those decisions for other countries. The farming of wheat, soy, and canola--the staples for almost everything we eat, hidden in every processed food in some way--has in large part been reduced to just a handful of strains manufactured and patented by Monsanto. Their brutal legal practices of crushing competition from local competing organic farmers by suing them should any cross-breeding occur through pollination from neighboring farms have gradually made it all but impossible to farm organic canola in Canada, and now Monsanto threatens to gain a monopoly on the other seeds that supply the bulk of our calories in the United States. If the wind blows the seeds into your organic farm, if a bird, a bee, or a butterfly carries those seeds to your organic wheat, or canola, or soy, and you save what you think are your own seeds from your own plants, growing on your own land, if those seeds happen to have been fertilized with Monsanto seeds you are committing patent infringement and technically stealing the genetic patent to those seeds. Farmers who buy Monsanto
 seeds (the only seeds available except to certified organic farmers) are forced to sign contracts stating they will not save or reuse any seeds from their crops; as they creepingly take over the market in non-organic farming (spreading slowly but surely into produce like apples), the use of their biggest seed-partner, Roundup, becomes more and more a staple of farming practice, with plants being doused in the stuff since the seeds are bred to resist the herbicide, and weeds evolving to be more and more resistant. What's the point? Monsanto's farming practices slowly but surely reduce the diversity of viable strains of the staples we rely most on. As Barbara Kingsolver says in Animal, Vegetable Miracle, Ireland once relied upon a single strain of potato--until the blight changed history and truncated entire family trees. Without a diversity of seeds we are at the mercy of the Monsanto scientists to keep up with the ever changing weed population with ever stronger versions of Roundup and more and more modifications to keep anticipating plant disease. What happens when one slips by them?

When we grow our own food we remove ourselves from the commodities market. We become a provider and no longer a consumer. We are not at the mercy of the people who expect us to be obese, lazy, and apathetic. We can choose health, choose flavor, choose better. We can choose an ugly apple that tastes like heaven; we can choose to get wrecked on hard cider we made ourselves; we can choose to compost our waste right back into our own land instead of contributing to our landfills. we can choose to live, sustainably. We can choose power.

Where else do you find Power Heels, but in a Subversive Garden Plot?

Peeps--Axis of Evil? Or Subliminal Message to Pick Up Chicks?

I realized today that Peeps, that quasi-food monstrosity that multiplies like Tribbles all over the check stands every spring, might actually be more than just an electric pink sin against nature.

Try me, lady. I wish you would. I WISH. YOU. WOULD. 

In general, the traditions behind the mountain of goo that ends up in our Easter basket have very little to do with religion and a lot to do with symbols of spring. Jelly beans were actually sent to soldiers during the Civil War, but it wasn't until sometime in the 1930's, that their egg-like shape linked them to Easter. Eggs?--well, any fowl-connected peasant family would have been well acquainted with the egg as a very real symbol of life and rebirth, not to mention springtime, since chickens don't lay regularly during the winter because of the shortened days. As for rabbits? Well. Some sources say that the hare is a symbol of Eostre, goddess of spring, but my favorite story is one I came across where Eostre found a bird dying of the cold, and to save it, transformed it into a hare with fur for warmth. Except the hare still laid eggs like a bird. Which...then became the Santa Claus of Easter, policing little girls and boys with--what, black jelly beans if they were naughty? Carrot shaped bags of Reese's pieces if they were good? And Peeps...well, you decide whether those are a punishment or a reward. 

Peeps season, though, is more than just "eat fake marshmallow and hope it's stale enough to be palatable"; it coincides with real life actual chick season. While it's true you can get chicks almost year round, it takes from four to six months (sometimes longer, depending on the breed) to start laying; and, again, winter's shortened days often coincide with a decrease in egg production. Chickens also lay the most in their first year, with a marked tapering off after about a year to 18 months when they molt. Blah blah blah if you want a decent number of eggs in the first and only good year you need to get chicks around Eastertime. 

What if you do want chicks in your life, but you still have residual guilt over the drawer full of dead Tamagatchi you let starve to death in the bottom of your backpack?

I'm still here, and sentient, you bastard.

The good news is that real chicks take even less work than a Tamagatchi and are so stinking cute you'll want to go look at them every day, which should remind you to feed, water, and otherwise take care of them. They also, rather than just beeping or faintly vibrating, actually peep to remind you to not let them starve to death. Really, skill level: Parakeet.

Here's what you need:

-25 lb bag of chick feed for every two chicks. Lucky you, most feed stores give away two chicks for every 25 lb bag at this time of year! The cost of the chicks themselves is the least of your worries. You literally could not buy a stuffed animal version of these chicks for any less than the chicks themselves. Most feed stores only sell the most reliable egg layers because that's what urban farmers want them for, so you can really go wrong but you're looking for: Americauna (sometimes called Easter Eggers, since they lay blue green eggs); Rhode Island Reds (super prolific medium egg layers); Australorp or Orpington (great layers of large eggs); Barred Rock, Wyandotte, Welsummer. Marans aren't the most prolific (mine was the last to start laying and gives four a week) but Maran eggs are considered a delicacy among some French chefs, who will cook with nothing else. 

-Waterer. Yep. It can be a dish. They will knock it over all the time though and kick litter and poop in it. Best is a tall quart jar waterer with a little trough around it made for chicks. Plastic is cheap and durable enough if you only plan to have one batch of chicks. Galvanized steel for an extra five bucks is an investment for future broods. Be warned: even if the chicks were already drinking from the exact same waterer they are sometimes so silly you will have to show them how to drink. Dunk their little beaks in the water until you see them chirrup up a few drops. You'll need to change this and wash it out every day, and check it twice a day since chicks love to kick litter into their water source. 

-Feeder. Same thing. A dish, a plastic feeder with several little stations, or a galvanized steel one 

for durability. Fill it when it's empty. 

-Pine shavings to use as litter. It's sometimes listed as hamster bedding, but the feed store should have it in big cheap bags. Put down a handful every week on top of the first initial layer. Pull out any that gets wet from the water source and throw into the garden. If it stinks, add more. Change completely when chicks are old enough to go outside (five weeks). 

-Heat lamp with a red Pyrex bulb for the first five weeks. Depending on your climate and when you get the chicks you may only need the heat lamp for four weeks. A good rule of thumb is if the chicks 

huddle under the lamp, they're too cold and you should lower it closer to them; if they consistently 

hang out at the opposite end of the brooder, they it's too warm and either raise it or turn it off if 

they're getting close to a month old. 

-Brooder. There's a ton of expensive options but really if you have a spare bathroom, a bathtub is perfect. Put in the drain stopper and put down a layer of shavings. Make sure you keep the toilet seat down, as little guys are ingenious about jumping up on top of the waterer or feeder and out of the tub. 

-Large tall box of some kind (cardboard is fine) for the four or five week old chicks to live in once the bathtub becomes easily escapable. If you have a coop already (and it's warm enough outside) they will be ready to move outside no earlier than five weeks; if you don't have a coop you'll be thinking of where they are ultimately going to live! A little unused playhouse can work, a shed, etc as long as the chickens can be locked in at night and safe from clever predators with finger-like hands (I'm looking at you, raccoons). You can find decent deals on Craigslist or Costco but be prepared to pay in the $500 range; you can build something yourself for that much or cheaper that suits your specific needs if you're handy.

I couldn't find any history on when the tradition of putting live chicks and ducklings in Easter baskets began, though stories I've heard come from my mom's generation when they were children. During the Depression regular households would have added chickens to help sustain the family, so it makes sense that parents might have added spring chicks that would ultimately be added to the family flock to Easter baskets.

The tradition endures in several places around the country--Pinterest crazed mommies drew attention from PETA when live chicks dyed in bright colors started showing up in Easter baskets in 2012. At the feed store where I got my chicks, there's a big sign warning the casual Easter chick-buyer that baby chicks are live animals and not recommended as toys for children--whether it actually happens anymore or it's an urban myth like the razor blades in the Halloween candy, it's hard to say. But I realized on Sunday how lucky I was to have chicks this year, and how a little package of yellow Peeps in my Easter basket next year just might remind me of stroking the fuzzy tummies of the little fluffy yellow live versions. 

Reading in Heels

I think I really knew that I was too far gone to come back when I started going to the Williams-Sonoma website exclusively to look at the Agrarian section. Before then I had been obsessed with their food section: with the holiday cakes in the shape of Christmas trees and gingerbread houses made of black velvet cake and fondant; pumpkin flavored marshmallows and brownies from San Francisco shaped like vampire bats; and Blue Foot chicken, whatever that is (better than anything I could buy there that's for damn sure). I had visions of some insane Christmas season when I'd order a full menu for Christmas brunch that would all arrive Christmas morning by special delivery (yay! Salted with the tears of the delivery persons and pilots forced to work the holiday!) that I would just pop in the oven and end up with an effortless gourmet meal for no more than the price of a used car.

These are only $10 each? It starts to seem so reasonable. 

I was always a sucker for their awesome gadgetry too. Who doesn't love coming across stuff you've never heard of and realizing its absence leaves an enormous hole in your existence? Why haven't I heard of a salt plate--I mean, an actual square of salt crystal big enough to bake a pizza on? How can I have missed that and why. DON'T. I. HAVE. ONE. It was like this whole realm of gadgets that make it possible to luxurious do your stuff by hand. Want to make your own soda? Butter? Whipped cream in a can? You can buy. The can. You could have your own reusable can to make canned whipped cream. What's that flavor? Oh, my personal cartridge of nitrous oxide. I bought it in a pack of ten.

Mmmm. Nitrousy.

I started to find myself skipping past the sleek chrome smart tools and the fondant confections and the questionably-footed chickens to look through what's new in Agrarian. Where I once looked longingly at Nordicware mini-cakelet pans in the shape of Star Wars storm trooper heads, now I eagerly read the descriptions of reclaimed wood trugs, whatever those are, and top-bar beehives.

Trug. Starting at $12.95! Oh, no wait. That's for the plastic liner. The, uh, trug itself starts at around $300.  Wonder if there're plans online somewhere. Ah. Probably, since this arrives in pieces and you have to build it yourself. 

I was trying to think of what changed my point of view and I realized it started with that most infectious of virulent viruses, reading. I was already food gardening but had realized in doing some internet research on the reasons for my most spectacular failures (see also: Failure in Heels)that I was almost intuitively able to instinctively do the exact thing that would certainly kill the most basic and easiest of plants to care for. I put tomatoes in a strawberry bed (they kill each other). I planted only one blueberry bush (they need other blueberry bushes to bear fruit). I planted a single row of corn nice and spaced out (they need to touch to pollinate). I started a "compost bin" by basically just dumping fruit and vegetable peels into a closed garbage bin with no holes and adding water (predictably, it turned to a rotting, stinking, garbage soup). Who would have guessed? besides, you know, anyone with the ability to do even the most cursory google search?

In my search for reference materials I stumbled upon a pretty little book called"Little House in the Suburbs" . The two funny, clumsy, awkward chicks that wrote it, by their pop culture references, seemed to be about my age and had started with the same general lack of any kind of instinct for making things grow and I was immediately charmed. I learned how to compost properly and how to do it without any kind of expense, turning my existing rubbermaid garbage bin into a proper compost bin with just a power drill and a very large bit to ring the entire bottom 12" with drainage holes. Our trash consumption went from five bags a week to one, and the cost of the project, since I already had the bin, was free. I started getting excited. I'd just made a dent in our carbon footprint and I was cooking a batch of organic compost for free that had previously cost me $15 at the nursery. I read the book again. 

These girls were talking about not just food gardening but a whole lifestyle of trying to become fruitful. They inspired me with their failures and their stumbles and I started venturing into the other chapters about keeping goats and bees and chickens. I laughed at their anecdotes ("The Headless Chicken" and "The Hanged Chicken" being some of my favorite laugh-out-loud moments, when one of the authors describes her inability to save the chickens from their own stupidity and is too grossed out to touch their lifeless bodies until her hysterical six year old covers them with a towel) but really had no desire to go down that route. I mean, Jesus. What would the neighbors say?

That's how I remember it, anyway, but when I looked at my Kindle orders I see that a week later I ordered A Chicken in Every Yard. Hmm. Oh, right. I remember now. Deanna (of the Headless Chicken) had mentioned that at one time backyard chickens were common especially during World War II when rationing and Victory Gardens went hand in hand. I liked the thought of that. Three days later I ordered DIY Projects for the Self-Sufficient Home Owner because it had chicken coop plans. 

DIY Projects was a great book, with plans for a compost bin, a basic raised bed, planters, chicken coop, beehive...but it also had solar panels. It was the first book I saw that crossed that line from basically sane gardener to slightly paranoid survival prepper. Prepping for what? Why are you living off the grid? Why is the government after you? Why do you need to make a water reclamation system that can purify your own urine? It was literally a fine line in the gardening section of the Barnes and Noble shelves, where you could go from perfectly reasonable books about canning your own jam to 50 Proven Strategies to live in a Car, Van or RV. The covers were always gray and clouded with apocalypse smoke. The people when they were pictured looked like the type of person who would grimly blow your head off with some sort of shotgun unless they didn't want to waste the bullets. In which case they had a hard carved machete made from a radiator belt that could cheerfully take off your head in any case. Okay. Maybe time to head back into the gardening. 

I discovered the Storey publishing guides, helpful little pamplets on everything from growing strawberries to pruning apple trees to keeping chickens (with a rather large section on specific techniques for butchering) for $3 apiece. I kept the strawberry, blueberry, and tomato guides, and returned the chicken keeping book with a shudder. Meat birds? Uhhhhghlck. I smugly ate my burger and paused to feel superior to those monsters who raised birds for the purpose of killing them for their meat. Barbarians. Mmm. Meat juice. Since my tomato/strawberry murder/suicide beds had been a disaster, I read up on companion planting; to maximize our space, I looked into vertical gardening. Finally, exhausted with trying to keep up with my crazy eclectic choices, Amazon suggested a book that I think permanently reset my browser history--Animal Vegetable Miracle. 

I had read Barbara Kingsolver before and as I delved into this non-fiction memoir I realized quickly how many of her other fictional novels dealt with the subjects that she apparently had encountered in her day to day life--the preacher from The Poisonwood Bible with his faith in seeds and flawed farming methods, the old lady farmer in Prodigal Summer fighting her neighbor to keep his farm's pesticides from floating over to hers, the young wife in Flight Behavior realizing the dire effect our encroachment on nature is having on the pollinators. From the first chapter of Animal Vegetable Miracle, though, I was changed. 

Barbara Kingsolver told me about why we had such a glut of corn, wheat and soy in our country--nitrogen rich ammonia that had been used in munitions in World War II had to be used up, so they found a way to turn them into fertilizers. Bingo, unheard of abundance of the three crops that we're now choked with. Startled, I turned to google. It checked out. I read on.

Barbara told me about the topsoil viability fading; the pollinators disappearing, the plight of the domesticated turkey (now bred for such docility they have literally lost their mating instinct and are incapable of reproducing without human intervention). She calmly butchered a flock of young roosters for their meat; bought an Italian pumpkin in Italy as their souvenir, so she could return with the seeds for their garden; harvested cherries and pushed herself out of the house on frigid mornings to make it down to support the local Farmer's Market. She struggled to find local sources of her favorite foods and when she failed she gave up eating that food. In short she painted a portrait of a dream of living, neither off the grid nor entirely in the world but beautifully, humanly, flawed, failing and stumbling with the world--as it was meant to be, that is. It changed me.

I've been searching for book like Animal Vegetable Miracle for a year now as I supplemented my inspiration with real non-fiction; I potted solid blueberry bush rows, mulched with pine needles from the tree down the street, companion planted the perfect strawberry-mint bed, harvested a few hundred eggs from my chickens, and composted gallon after gallon of apple cores, carrot peels and cardboard. Now when I go to the agrarian tab of the William's Sonoma website I see chicken coops and beehives I know how to build myself; a carbonating tool that seems silly when I know how to make homemade soda; gorgeous vegetable trug planters that I know now wouldn't hold enough strawberry plants with enough space for them to send out runners. Still, even though I'm not really a beginner anymore, I'm looking for the book that can make me feel the way these books did--an author who can talk about the satisfaction of making sandwich bread your family craves so much you have to make a double batch every week; how you start watching the rain forecasts to see if there's any chance of filling the rain barrels and looking at people's grassy lawns thinking of how much your chickens would enjoy that bluegrass feast. I'm looking for the absolute fascination of watching how baby chicks seem to double in size overnight, how they scream bloody murder if they're separated from the other hens in their little flock, and laughing watching an adult hen run at the babies on the other side of the chicken wire with her wings spread like Steven Spielberg's version of a dilophosaurus.

Back off, chickies, you're effing up the pecking order.

I guess because something in me, now that I've started, gets annoyed when I'm reading about urban farming, when the chicken litter could be composted; new seedlings could be started, the raised beds need to be weeded, I should put out some sweet peas to climb the fence and attract pollinators, I should be building a new raised bed. I should be turning the compost. I should be pruning the roses and planting more garlic in the rose bed to keep out the aphids. In fact I should be digging up last year's garlic and dividing the bulbs to get more. 

That's the problem once you start reading. Inspiration starts burning a hole in your pocket, begging to be spent. 

The Chick Life

So, you know, my neighbors now walk by my house and just interact with me in neighborly ways, like we live in 1950's Minnehaha or something, and I don't entirely know what to do with it. I get the feeling sometimes that my neighbors have been watching each other watch me, and deciding whether or not to receive my flock of chickens in the spirit with which they were added to my household--that Barbara Kingsolverian aesthetic of eating whole foods, eating locally, reducing fossil fuels, enriching the topsoil, composting waste, preserving heritage breeds--and not the hillbilly hicktown yard full of tires scenario a bunch of plywood and chicken wire can evoke. Obviously my mental portrait of myself and my chickens--me, floating around in my fitted waist 1950's organza dress, perfect for 1950's Minnehaha suburbia, laughing melodically as I curate my flock of exquisite fowl with their delicately patterned plumage, transforming humble patches of wild clover into golden-yolked pods of pure, ethereal nourishment--is not always and entirely in sync with reality.

Sometimes there are pencil skirts.

But for the most part my neighbors seem to have decided that chickens are "so hot right now". Everybody that stops to talk has thought about having chickens of their own and wants to know how you go about it. It doesn't hurt that it's almost Easter and there are literally chicks in the pet store that you could take home and put in a basket, Ala 1950's Minnehaha. And why shouldn't you? chickens are awesome. Besides the obvious, get eggs without driving to the store, thing, chickens:

--Eat weeds. I never realized how satisfying it would be after a lifetime of battling dandelions and spurge and chickweed (ah, that's why it's called that) to watch chickens chow down and devour literally every blade and leaf of a huge patch of dandelions. They are voracious and ferocious and descend upon those weeds with the exact murderous passion I feel for those weeds, except that my hen assassins take weeding one step further and transform those weeds into eggs that I can make into cupcakes. 

--Are entertaining. Who knew scratching chickens could evoke a Zen trance state? Since we put the pullets out into the backyard, every dinner party we've had, no matter how highly educated, fascinatingly well-read, and articulate the guests are has degenerated into a bring the margaritas out into the backyard and, fascinated, watch the chickens scratch for bugs in the dirt-stravaganza. It's so peaceful, it's hypnotic. I often push their movable coop to a different patch of clover in the front yard and suddenly realize I've been sitting in the grass watching them graze without moving for an hour. This can't have been a thing with prairie people. It has to somehow be a commentary on our stressful lives but I can't think about that at the moment, the hens just found a new patch of crabgrass.

--Lay eggs in the tall grass. I pasture my hens in a movable run and let them hang out in the front yard all day eating my feral lawn, which means they lay their eggs right out there in the grass. Since
fresh eggs have a "bloom" or a protective membrane on them (commercial egg farmers clean this off so the eggs are shiny) they stay fresh without refrigeration, so I usually collect the eggs in the evening when I put the hens to bed in their coop. Since it's dusk, it becomes a bit of an egg hunt, looking around to see if I can find the coppery, chocolate colored eggs hidden in amidst the green grass; they're cool to the touch from the soil and the dew-damp grass, and comfortably solid in the palm of my hand. 

--Put themselves to bed. Chickens have a strong roosting instinct that kicks in at dusk. Their movable run has a little ladder and if darkness fall before I have a chance to send them to their coop they will all climb the ladder and snuggle together on the top step in a huge fluffy pile. Otherwise I open the door to their run and they take off in a mad, zig-zag dash like they're avoiding sniper fire, making for the backyard gate and the safety of their coop. They look for all the world like extremely short, comically pudgy women with ruffled petticoats running with their arms glued to their sides, frantically shrieking to each other, "The Darkness! It comes!"

--Are themselves the source of all chicken-related idioms. Birds of a feather flock together. Yep. Chicken scratch. Yes, it is cheap as hell. Bird brain. Ruffle your feathers. Pecking order. The sky is falling. Dumb cluck (I'm sorry. I love my black and white Maran but she is just dumb as a rock). The only one that doesn't apply is Mad as a wet hen. They don't seem to care if they get wet and will stay out in the rain all day even though they have shelter.

Not to mention their poo, which is a compost kick starter and makes amazing manure in the garden; their eggs, which are far more flavorful and have beautiful golden yolks. They require about the same amount of care as a parakeet--fill the feeder and waterer and once a month (once every few months if you use a deep litter method) muck out the coop. They are sweet and personable and funny. 

But I recently read a book called "Make the Bread, Buy the Butter" that left me furious when the author disparaged backyard chickens as little more than pets. In summary, she had bought a half dozen chicks on a whim and ended up with a flock of over a dozen, some ridiculous ornamental breeds which don't realistically lay in any proliferation, and set them up in an old playhouse as their coop without a protected run. Needless to say, she lost ten of the original flock when dogs got under her chain link fence and into her flock in a bloody rampage. In response, she put up a $3500 redwood fence to surround the property--and with that as her startup cost, she warned her readers away from thinking backyard chickens would ever be cost effective. 

Look. 

Chickens on the urban farm definitely have a higher cost than just the $5 chick you buy. Equipment includes their waterer and feeder, litter, and of course their feed. We didn't buy a special brooder but just used a heat lamp in our bathroom for them until the chicks got big enough to hop out of the bathtub. The biggest cost was the coop and their movable run, which we built ourselves but probably would have been cheaper to have made. All told, those three $5 chicks cost us $700 in start up fees. But this year, when we bought our new batch of chicks, we had all that stuff and the chicks only cost us $10. In fact every year from this point on...and we plan to have chickens for the next ten, twenty years. If you don't blame your desire for landscape architecture on your chickens, the costs over time stay pretty darn reasonable and actually do start making themselves back in the ratio of eggs to feed.

The other detractor to backyard chickens is a pretty common conversation I have with people who don't know that in San Diego at least, the zoning laws restrict homeowners to no more than five chickens. Chickens lay well for their first year, which actually only starts at 4-6 months (one of ours didn't start laying until the end of her sixth month) and start to taper off after that, like Henopause. chickens live much longer than that, 5-8 years and sometimes as much as 12-16 years if they're, say, pasture raised on good food and live in a humane hygenic environment like an urban farm. so if a person like myself wants a steady supply of eggs, I can alternate years of getting chicks, as I did--my new babies won't start laying until my first group of hens are going through their molting period--and I can keep them laying longer by not forcing them to overlay with weird medicated feeds and lighting their coop at night so their bodies are tricked into constant production; but ultimately my hens are going to stop laying and I'm going to be feeding a crowd of weed eaters with no eggs to show for it and no ability to get new hens to replace the ones that aren't laying. 

"Can you give them to a farm?" one of my well meaning friends asked. Absolutely. What farm wouldn't love the privilege of feeding my spent hens, at no cost to me, with nothing to show for it? There must be some lovely places that would board my old hens, where they can go and retire in style and drink crabgrass juleps on the porch and bawk about the snails they've eaten. In fact another chicken owning friend of ours generously asked if we might be running such a place, and whether we would like five of their hens, who were two years old and coincidentally mostly done with their egg-producing years. 

Nope. We are not running such a place, and therein lies the biggest drawback with chicken ownership. If you want eggs and there's a limit on how many hens you can have, you have to do what's kindly termed "culling". 

"Oh my God," more than one of my friends has said in horror. "I could never kill a chicken." 

Yes, it's pretty horrible to think about until you take a look at how a commercial chicken lives its life, packed into a battery cage with the space of about a letter sized piece of paper, its feathers falling out from the stress of such terrible confinement, in a windowless room without ever feeling the sun or tasting anything but commercial chicken feed. Commercial chicken feed, by the way, is anything from corn to chopped up fish, beef and chicken remnants--yes chickens eat chicken. Even a so-called cage free chicken can just live in that same windowless warehouse, crowded into the same amount of space but without cages, walking in the feces of a thousand other chickens daily, certainly ingesting those feces in the air and in their food and putting that right into their eggs and the meat we all eat. Not to mention the inhumane treatment of birds who are debeaked, and the disgusting ways in which they're killed--electric shocks, gassing-- and processed (I'm still haunted by the pink slime video that shows how Mcdonalds mcnuggets are processed, beaks, entrails, blood and all, and bleached into something resembling white meat). Commercial chickens could also live to 5-8 years but rarely are allowed to live past one year because they just don't lay reliably after that. Meat chickens make it to about six weeks when they've been force fed to the point their weight exceeds their ability to stand. 

My chickens will have lived every day in the sunshine, eating what nature intended them to; they'll have been together in a flock which they love, in peaceful companionship, in an enriched environment, healthy and happy. When the time comes for them to be culled it'll be quick and humane. When you think of the misery that had to happen for the nugget in your hand to get to you...what's really worse? 

For me, taking responsibility for the eggs we eat is one small thing we can do to live more sustainably. The shiny white eggs Vons peddles certainly come with the same price tag attached, we just don't have to look it in the face. Frankly if I have to look anything in the face? It should really look like this.

The Death Bed

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

Well, it looks like crap, if you must know.

Despite my vast library of books and my grand plans for a winter garden, (why shouldn't I?! It's Southern California!) I was defeated by The Death Bed.

Inspired by seasonal eating books that seduced me with magical promises of the unequaled sweetness of winter cauliflower and broccoli, fall blooming lettuce, and butternut squashes, I planted as soon as the days got short and the temperatures dropped. I dug out and filled new raised beds in the front yard so I'd have enough room and dropped in heirloom seed packets of broccoli de cicci, Toscano baby kale, butter lettuce, cauliflower, butternut squash and, for fun, loofah gourd seeds. I spent hours carefully measuring the distance between seed holes that I carefully dipped into the soil with my fingertip and lovingly covered with soil made from a mixture of kelp meal and homemade compost and chicken manure.

The Death Bed ate them all.

When nothing came up the first time I surmised that hungry autumn birds might have been at whatever seedlings were coming up, so I carefully replanted and netted the beds, supporting the nets with bamboo stakes I'd whittled grooves into by hand to make a perfect plant nursery. I watered my new set of seeds in with rain water I'd collected from the summer storms.

The Death Bed ate them all.

Not a single cauliflower sprouted or a butter lettuce or even a single leaf of kale. We're the birds eating them through the raised netting? It seemed impossible! I tried new seeds. Maybe my seed packets were too old to be viable. The Death Bed ate these too. Oddly, I started finding vining seedlings outside of the raised beds; demoralized by my failure  to obtain the mythical sweet winter cauliflower and broccoli I let them grow as they would, unwilling to root them up but also determined not to water them. If everything I had so lovingly planted would refuse to grow, I wasn't going to waste effort on these bastard vines.

Except the bastard vines grew and multiplied and holy crap they took over literally everything. Within a month the vines had covered the barren Death Bed and spread to the entire lawn. They grew up the side of the house, clinging impossibly to the stucco at crazy angles and blooming fantastic brilliant yellow flowers the size of hibiscus. Despite the shortage of bees the flowers fruited and started transforming into humongous watermelon sized cucumbers that pulled the vines down from the stucco. Undaunted by their thwarted journey to the sky, the vines settled and split and flowered again and fruited. Everywhere.

Yay. These were my loofah gourds. Because of course the only thing I'd be able to grow in my food garden was infinite quantities of inedible gourds. And I hadn't even planted them. The birds found them so inedible they'd spat or shat them out right next to my beds and even still they thrived better than anything I HAD planted, utterly without any help from me. Once they were dried and cut I had all the exfoliation I could handle. No food. But my skin was soft as hell, dammit.

Except...

Sometime in the middle of winter I noted that under the web of loofah gourd vines something was growing. Weeds? Crab grass? I was determined to just leave it there in the Death Bed, as betrayed as I was by the failure of all my educated efforts. Just take over if you want to, then. I don't care.

They did take over. Four months after I planted the seeds that should have sprouted in a week, impossibly, butter lettuce sprouted in the Death Bed. Higgledy piggledy, in nothing resembling the carefully spaced rows I'd planted, they sprouted all over each other, heads growing up over the other heads, leaves the most beautiful, bright brilliant green winter had ever seen. Darker, jagged edge leaves popped up between them and formed towers rising above the butter lettuce heads, shading their cousins, and soon sprouting familiar deep green clusters of broccoli. We ate butter lettuce all winter and when the spring came, too soon, bright and overly sunny, the lettuce and the broccoli faded and flowered and set seed.

This morning I went out to take a look: my lettuce heads have grown into purple tinted obelisks, ready to bloom and turn flowers into white cottony chaff that will fly a million seeds into the summer breeze. They are, objectively, ugly. The leaves are too bitter to eat, natures way of keeping the plant alive until it can reproduce. The broccoli grew three feet tall and faded as it set its yellow flowers, turning into ungainly stalks with tan leaves and flopped over into the soil. It is a mess. And yes. It looks like crap.

But to my surprise, this morning when I looked I found butter lettuce growing in the lawn. Seedlings are all over the Death Bed, churning the heat from the decomposing compost into bright green leaves two inches across, but they are in my lawn too, where a year ago, perfect bright Kentucky bluegrass grew in a straight flawless carpet of weedless  glory. A year ago there was not a clover to be seen, clover that fixed the nutrients in the soil and covers the bare ground to keep the more invasive weeds away, but now the clover is sheltering tiny lettuce seedlings in my lawn. A year ago we'd have sprayed them away or mowed them over, and maybe my neighbors will find little lettuce seedlings in their lawn and mistake them for the ugly spade shaped weeds we fight in suburbia and root them out. Maybe. Maybe life will find a way.




I bend over the bed, where nature has arranged the obelisks of the parent lettuce in a perfect way that shades and protects the baby seedlings from the birds and the sun. There are new broccoli seedlings, a few inches high already, crowded by the wealth of lettuce clamoring to live and thrive in this shrinking space. I slide my hand into the soft soil, warmed by the sun, loose and rich and crumbly from the kelp meal and the compost, and guess at how far the roots have descended. I'm right, and find the perfect scoop of soil that contains the new life and its nursery all in the palm of my hand. I dig out a new home in the other bed where it can set roots and spread out. I find a few others and add them to the broccoli bed--they do better together I think.






Nearby my chickens are greedily devouring the clover patch I moved them to this morning and I realize with a start of recognition those are lettuces they have found under the clover and are gobbling down to their roots. It doesn't matter. We have more than enough.