Mean Girls 2

The reign of terror continues in my backyard. Of course it does. Chicks thrive on drama.

Left to right: Maran, Rhode Island Red, and two Buff Orpingtons.

It's been two weeks since I integrated my ten week old pullets with my existing flock of one year old laying hens, and I first understood with drastic certainty what exactly the term "Pecking Order" meant. As with popular teenage girls there was absolutely no maternal instinct from the Queen Bees to the Wannabes; my redhead, a gorgeous, slender Rhode Island Red that had previously been my favorite chick quickly transformed herself into my most despised as she showed her true, vile colors, snatching one of the new girls bald headed and leaving her in a bloody heap.

You think you can sleep on my roost and just walk into my coop like you own this piece? This is MY HOUSE! MY HOUSE!

I had read extensively about techniques to integrate new pullets into an existing flock (see chapter one of the Mean Girls Saga) but I was utterly unprepared for exactly how vicious the Queen Bees were going to be, and how committed they were going to be to continuing their enduring reign of terror. For the first weekend I kept my newly integrated flock (a black and white Maran, Rhode Island Red, and brown and gold Welsummer, with two blonde Buff Orpington pullets) in a large fenced off portion of the back yard, probably three times the amount of space they had access to in their range, with plenty of greens and flowers from the garden, sunflower seeds, extra food and scratch, and all the caterpillars I could find. Even with all this entertainment to keep them busy--a virtual ASB smorgasbord of spirit week activities!--the Queen Bees continued to torment the new girls mercilessly. The pullets huddled miserably in corners around the yard behind potted plants and between fence posts, anywhere they could squeeze themselves in that the other hens couldn't get to them. The smaller of the two Orp pullets took to just squawking in despair, digging herself a belly hole and hiding her head.

I can't see you, you're not there, this is my happy place. THIS IS MY HAPPY PLACE!

The bigger of the two teenagers every once in a while would go for some food or water and one or the other of the big chicks would peck her mercilessly back into her corner and peck at her head while she shrieked in terror.

Yeah. It was a little disconcerting. 

Worse was night time. The big chicks refused to allow the littles onto the roosts and drove them, screaming into the space under the feeder. For the entire weekend I woke up in a cold sweat at 5 a.m., hurrying down to the coop to try to beat the sun and the chickens' internal alarm clock to the next installment of "Saw VII--Feathers and Blood". If I was slow I'd come down to the coop shaking off its supports as the big hens kicked the living crap out of the little ones. I'd let the big ones out of the coop into the yard. The Rhode Island Red would linger inside the coop, violently teaching the little ones painful lessons, about, you know. Living, or breathing the same air, moving, continuing to exist...

Did I SAY she could drink out of the waterer that I. DRINK FROM? 

The littles took to hiding in the relative safety of the nest box, where they would continually be brutalized by the older hens but at least they could stay out of sight and mind for most of the day. When I went to check on them on the third day both of the littles had free bleeding wounds on the back of their heads and over their beaks and the bigger of the two baby chicks was missing huge patches of her feathers. When the littles did emerge from the coop it was because one of my three formerly beautiful, gentle, beloved cooing adult hens would transform into a brutal, cruel and merciless sadist, sauntering up into the coop to drive the littles out where the other two were waiting in a horrifying gauntlet. The ringleader, almost always the Rhode Island Red, would drive the baby chicks down the line and the other two would viciously peck her until she made it past them into a corner; but with them blocking her exit, she'd have no choice but to run past them again into the abattoir, where the Redhead was waiting to turn her around and make her run back in again under the knife-sharp beaks. When the little chicks weren't out the big ones LITERALLY SHARPENED THEIR BEAKS on the concrete.

Not only was the Rode Island Red asserting her dominance over the little chicks, she had taken to letting us know that she was the boss over EVERYTHING, including me. When I broke up one of their gang fights she stalked over to me aggressively and angrily pecked at me. I reached down to thump her on the head but she dodged and pecked my foot hard enough to draw blood. 

You just did what?! Oh, no, sweetie. It just got a whole lot easier to talk about culling. 

I knew there was a pecking order being reset and the birds had to figure it out; but it was only as I started another day listening to the bone-chilling Screaming of the Chicks that realized just how little information there was in the books I'd read about chicken care on integrating new pullets into an existing flock--all variations on the same theme. "Little chicks will have a hard time of it, there's no way around it." Uh...ok. But how many days do I have to listen to them screaming? Two? Twenty? The rest of my life? WHEN? The books were silent on the timeline. 

My books failing me, I remembered a friend who also had chickens, and who I recalled had put down one hen for (killing?) another in the flock; it occurred to me it might have been during flock integration. He had a ton of great suggestions including something cool called a Flock Block, basically a suet cake filled with seeds and treats to keep the big chicks busy; but I had already spent a week throwing out everything I could think of into the chicken yard and it hadn't stopped the Queen Bees from thrashing the little guys into quivering messes. He did say though that if the little chicks were bleeding, the other chickens would respond to the color red and wouldn't be able to resist pecking at it; and he suggested trying to isolate the ringleader to see if that would force her to have to get back into the pecking order herself. 

It was hard to isolate the little chicks, knowing they'd have to start their horrors all over again once I integrated them again, but time to heal and grow bigger seemed like an okay temporary plan. In the morning I let the big hens out of the coop and then closed the coop door behind them, sealing the little chicks safely inside. That night I let them all out to free range but isolated the Rhode Island Red. She was frantic, running back and forth inside her enclosure furiously pecking at the wire and squawking indignantly. Her little pal the black and white Maran immediately took up the mantle of the Queeniest Bee and started harassing the little chicks on her behalf, going so far as to lunge at me while I was locking the run. I knocked her out of the way with a nudge and she looked up at me balefully, but backed off. In her little isolation box the Rhode Island Red watched it all with malevolent intelligence, plotting and planning, watching and waiting. That night, we waited for full dark before letting the hens into their coop (chickens have a powerful roosting instinct that drives them toward high shelter when dusk falls and become frantic when they're denied it), and when we finally did let them inside, they went in quietly . We only heard a single alarmed squawk from one of the littles and then everything was still except for their sweet cooing. 

Could it be that easy? Isolate the ringleader and take away her power? God. They should make a movie out of this...

Well, it wasn't quite that easy. It took almost two weeks for the little guys to fully heal their open wounds, and the feathers are just starting to come back on the little girl that was snatched bald, leaving her head looking a little scabrous. But this week for the first time, although the little chicks still took care to stay well out of the way of the big ones, the little chicks actually ventured out into the main area; partook of some of the greens I'd thrown down for the whole flock; walked around in the sunshine; generally lived with some semblance of normalcy. The Rhode Island Red is still the boss bitch but she's reclaimed a healthy respect for humans and after being ungently disciplined for her naughty pecking behaviors she stays out of our way; while the other two adult hens are even more submissive to us, dropping down into a squatting position and spreading their wings when we approach. For the most part they ignore the littles and bedtime is a quiet affair, no more knock down, drag out chick fights. We even managed, finally, to get the big hens to stay on the roosts when we set the little ones up there with them. If you're keeping track, that was one week of failure, two weeks of recuperation, and one week of growing pains to a sort of uneasy truce. No one's bleeding, and I only occasionally have to close my windows because they're screaming at each other. 

Yay, success. No one's dead. 

Level One Pumpkin Latte

What is it about pumpkins that makes us personify and yet mutilate them, dress up as them, fill our perfectly good lattes with their guts? What is the strange hold they maintain over autumn-crazed white girls that allowed Big Pumpkin to make this kind of madness possible?

Every year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere and allows himself to be transformed into these convenient pocket packs.

Like all white girls in season-starved Southern California, I admit I go a little crazy for the orange chalkboard penned menus in Starbucks around October. Add in the little green vining curlicues and something primal inside me rises up to order a pumpkin latte.  If I can get it in the last week of September I feel smug that I've beaten the system and have stolen a tiny bit of the perfect ambrosial flavor of the autumn they get to have for free in--I don't know. Maine? 

It's all SOOOOO easy when you have deciduous trees and a temperate continental climate, isn't it. Smug.

Pumpkins were one of the first things I tried to grow in my urban farm. I had visions of fields of curling pumpkin vines, the likes of which I had always hoped to see at the so-called pumpkin farms that dot San Diego county but which are typically parking lots covered in straw bales and cardboard crates of the same pumpkins you can now just pick up at Vons. Even the mythical "Big Max" pumpkins, those huge monsters that grow to a whopping 50-100 pounds and you could conceivably sit inside (not that I was entertaining ideas of making myself a fairy tale carriage...really...) now wait patiently in piles right outside the local big box grocery store. The mystery of the growing pumpkin is stolen from us. I want to pick my pumpkin off the vine, not off the shelf. 

The other thing that increasingly troubles me with pumpkins is that even the fresh from the farm pun'kins are bred specifically for carving and not for food anymore. Open up a typical "Jack o'Lantern" pumpkin and you'll find specially selected innards that are stringy, not goopy, and easy to remove; almost no seeds, and nothing inside that you could make into a pie.

Or into Pringles. 

Pumpkins have become kind of like turkeys. Over the last century we decided that we didn't need turkeys to taste good, particularly, we just need them to be big. Selective breeding gave us turkeys that gained weight quickly, even if it does sometimes outpace the ability of the bird to support that weight. Since turkeys don't need to brood their eggs, and a brooding turkey hen actually has a lower laying rate, no one bred for maternal instinct and for the most part it has disappeared from commercial turkeys. The new shape and size of that turkey, with its heavy and muscled frame, make it almost impossible for adult turkeys to complete the mating act, and as a result the fertility of commercial turkeys is so low that most turkey farmers use artificial insemination to fertilize their eggs. What we're left with is a commodity that has been so uniquely bred for its singular purpose that what remains is little more than a cheap corn-to-protein engine.

Pumpkins are no different--a holiday novelty used far more often in decorative piles stacked up by the doorstep in the Barefoot Contessa's flawless Martha's Vineyard colonial, or carved up into dizzying Pinterest-inspired monuments to insanity before ultimately being smashed on the streets of the suburbs, than they are ever as a food source. Pumpkins were crucial for the pilgrims, man! This was the gourd that kept Native Americans fed through the winter and eventually kept the British colonists from starving during their lean times. Given our propensity for pumpki-fying everything in sight (I admit it, I had a pumpkin-spice facial at a spa in Palm Desert), shouldn't we at least know what a pumpkin seedling looks like, and show people who carved pumpkins after 1997 what a goopy pumpkin that you could potentially make a pumpkin latte out of looks like?

Pumpkin latte, step 1. 

Pumpkin seeds are super easy to sprout indoors; a fresh packet of seeds will pop up strong, waxy leaves with satisfying reliability, cracking through the seed shell from the inside and bursting into life. The seedlings, started in February or March, grow slowly at first, but then explode into gargantuan leaves of amazonian proportions and myriad brilliant yellow starburst flowers by May. The vines start creeping over the sides of raised beds, tiny crazy curlicues corkscrewing up retaining walls and rocky slopes and fences. Mine mingle among the sunflowers and climb the sturdy stalks, blossoming under the canopy of the sunflower seed heads.

In my early attempts, like so many things with urban farming, I assumed that because the seeds were so easy to sprout, pumpkin growing would be easy. I mean, in Laura Ingalls Wilder's book "Farmer Boy" Almanzo is, I don't know. seven? And manages to use some kind of milk-feeding technique to grow a prize-winning monster pumpkin that beats all the adult farmers at the fair. I guess I thought if a little kid could do it, how hard could it be? I conveniently glossed over the fact that at seven Almanzo cut ice, dug potato vines, drove a team of his own oxen, and broke a colt, having come from one of the most prosperous gentleman farming families in the East. This is a kid who comes from a farming community where the teacher literally, LITERALLY used a bullwhip to discipline the hard kids.

"I SAID, 'I' before 'E' except AFTER 'C'!"

Sure. That kid's experience was basically the exact same as mine, since I did drive to the fancy nursery and pick through the prettily illustrated seed packets and buy one.

Pumpkins were one of the first things that I actually researched before planting, although not enough to realize that I didn't need to sprout the entire packet of "Big Max" seeds. I ended up with twenty seedlings that all needed to be set out at crazy distances from each other in full sun and quickly realized I had spent weeks nurturing pumpkin-lets I was now going to have to kill, always a hard pill for me to swallow. But I dutifully selected the toughest seedlings with the strongest true leaves and planted them in holes along the side of a sunny slope like the seed packet suggested, with a scoop of compost in the hole. They grew quickly and expanded into vines of about a foot and then suddenly, sullenly refused to grow any further.

Shoot. Back to the web. Aha--squashes, and pumpkins in particular, are notoriously greedy feeders. I followed a recipe to make compost tea and started feeding my little vines regularly. Soon after they sprouted a handful of flowers, and about three of the ten developed into little yellow pumpkin babies.

The humble start of my pumpkin farming empire. 

The flowers kept coming but the pumpkins didn't, and even though I fed the vines with increasing frenetic regularity, the pumpkins didn't reach anything close to their promised size of 50-100 pounds. The seed packet promised that some record holding pumpkins had reached 300 pounds! Mine were about 5 pounds. Still--they did turn orange and it was fun to watch the vines climb up my rocky hill.

The next year I found a few pumpkin seeds in the bottom of the seed packet and threw them in my sprouting pods with the rest of my spring starts. Only one popped, so I figured I'd still get at least one nice pumpkin. I fed it better this time, planting it in a nice compost/garden soil mixture to begin with and adding vegetable fertilizer on top of the compost tea. I'd also read that when bees are scarce squash and pumpkins can be artificially inseminated (shades of the noble turkey!) so I watched to see when the female flowers appeared so I could pollinate them from the males. 

Alas, my pumpkin vine that year was an all-boys club. Even though I watched it like the hawks that circle my chicken coop, no female flowers ever sprouted. Boy flowers, in abundance. They had a full parade of sassy male flowers, showing off their gaudily dressed pollen sticks. But no girls showed up. I suspect they may have realized what I read, too late, that pumpkins aren't self-fertile, so even if the female flowers HAD sprouted, I wouldn't have been able to use the male flowers from that one lonely unicorn of a vine to make little incestuous pumpkin babies.

A story about a pumpkin vine that didn't know it was related to itself. 

Failure again. I tried for the third time this spring with "Spookie", a food and carving pumpkin that is supposed to have great flavor for pies as well as a strong shell for carving. Though I did discover all new ways to fail (putting seedlings into sunny but newly energy efficient windows that filter out UV light isn't a super successful strategy) I did use my past failures for good instead evil (plant more than one, plant in a good compost/manure/soil mix, fertilize fertilize fertilize through the flowering season) and to my delight, I got the chance to swallow my pride and artificially inseminate some pumpkins this year because the girls came out to play!

All the single ladies, all the single ladies...

Hey gurl, how YOU doin?

Female flowers have a little clearly evident circular ova, as in the top picture, while male flowers have a very prominent stamen they like to show off. The stamens are abundant with huge almost cartoonish pollen grains; it was quick and easy to play bee and use a cotton swab to gather quite a lot from the stamens, and from there do a little match making.

Cue the slow saxophone music. 

The female flowers start with little swollen round bellies under the petals to start with, about the size of a walnut, but once they've been pollinated they immediately start to grow like crazy sci-fi pregnancies. This little alien baby is only a few days old.

My pumpkin patch isn't the typical one, I suppose. Huge volunteer sunflowers came up from the compost I planted my pumpkin seedlings in, and since I like things a little out of control and overgrown, I let the sunflowers grow up above my head and shade the soil in a forest of stems and amazonian leaves; bachelor buttons are coming up at their roots with more bright yellow blossoms to attract the bees. The pumpkin vines twine up the thick sunflower stalks, creep up my fences and anything the iconic curlicues can grab onto, popping out flowers like fireworks at every height, and spill out over the sides of the raised beds; and this year since I fertilized and composted well enough the vines are growing in every direction with enormous spade sized leaves. "Spookie" comes out with a striped green rind a little like a watermelon and quickly grows from walnut to apple to a thick, dense grapefruit size within just a few weeks; and it's small, only about 6 pounds and probably more suited to the nutrition I can reasonably supply using my own homemade compost and chicken manure, without adding a lot of expensive packaged fertilizers.

Depending on your zone, "Spookie" can be planted between April and June and ripens fast, only around three months total, which can seem early; but once the pumpkins are totally orange and resist fingernail pressure (and the vines die back), cutting the pumpkins and letting them cure in the sun for ten days or so will make sure they last for the months we have to wait until reasonably indulging in pumpkin flavored Listerine. I always wondered how the fakey-fake pumpkin farms kept their pumpkins in huge piles sitting in parking lots or in cardboard boxes without them rotting--because one of the reasons they were truly the perfect food for both the Native Americans and the early colonial settlers was their perfect suitability to long-term storage. I can't wait until mine start to orange-up and start on the pie-making and the latte syrup and, obviously, come up with my own artisanal recipe for hand-baked pumpkin Pringles. 

The Neighbor-Beast

I finally encountered that dreaded beast, that most dangerous and destructive pest to urban farming, He-Who-Limits, The Witherer, the Engenderer of Store-Bought Eggs: the complaining neighbor.

IIIIIII. SEEEEEEEE. YOUUUUUUUU.
"I know. You live next door. Also, P.S., your dog is loud as hell."

Letting our lawn die in anticipation of putting in raised beds was not too bad, since most of the neighbors didn't know our plans and we had just entered the worst drought in California history. All over the neighborhood, people were ripping out their lawns and planting rock gardens, laying down artificial grass, and putting in succulents. Even people who weren't planning on trading in the grass for a food forest were letting their grass die--it just wasn't worth it to spend money on watering on such a tight schedule, since the little water we were allotted wasn't really enough to keep the grass Kardashian green.

The concept of drought shaming was literally invented for this estate. 

So when we let the lawn die, even though we live in a nice neighborhood with a lot of beautiful landscaping, we weren't vilified, we were lauded as eco-heroes. Luckily for me I live across the street from a hoarder, and the shards of shredded blue vinyl tarps he uses to cover his graveyard of junked out cars detracts from my apocalyptic front yard.

Even when we filled up the backyard with raised beds and moved our food garden to the front yard, our neighbors seemed to approve. They stop to ask what we have growing; my weirdly prolific loofah gourd vines were especial rock stars, with their frenetic vining (they clung to my stucco and climbed six feet and more with no support), their spectacular brilliant yellow flowers, and the enormous loofah gourds themselves that look like gigantic cucumbers, defying physics by hanging weightlessly from vines far too delicate to support them. 

That was the first time the Neighbor-Beast opened its great eye and looked down on me. "Hey," he said, looking down on me from over the fence as I hand watered my blueberry bushes.

"Uh, hey." Hey, neighbor I've never exchanged a single word with in the ten years I've been living here. Okay, be nice. Maybe he wants to know more about the gospel of soil.

"How are you doing that? We've been wondering. Growing a garden. In the middle of the drought." Subtext, why are you doing that and who do you think you are, growing a garden in the middle of the drought.

"Oh. Well, actually once we stopped watering the lawn, we dropped the water use 1000 gallons a week; the garden only takes 175 gallons, and I get a lot of that from what we collected in the last rain, and reusing water I collect while the shower is heating up, pasta water, cooking vegetables, you know." Is that okay? Are you satisfied that I'm not contributing to the drought now? Because b-t-dubs, you have a pool.

"Hmm. Well, great. Good luck," he said, ending his sentence with that lilt people use when what they really mean is "that's NEVER gonna work, I would never do that, and I've lost what little respect I had for you by virtue of you even having an interest in such a stupid concept" and disappeared behind the fence.

Nice. Well, it's been great.

When we got chickens later that month, it was a little more worrisome. We knew people were going to think it was weird because WE had thought it was weird; but as we built the coop in the evenings out in the garage, neighbors stopped by to see what was taking shape and to ask us questions, take a peek at the baby chicks growing in the cardboard box behind us, and tell us how often they had thought about having chickens. Once our redwood coop was finished we hesitated, then plunged ahead with having the hens out in the front grass in their detachable run so they could free range. I worried about the random lady who had stopped by once, indignant about the hoarders across the street and demanding my help in starting a homeowners association. What would she think about chickens in the yard?

Turned out she and all the other coiffed Country Casuals ladies in their white capris and gold drop earrings loved them; the families that walked by in the evenings with their kids that ran to peer at the chickens through the chicken wire loved them; the old couple that power walked in the mornings as I carried the pullets out to the run loved them. On days we didn't have the chickens out, passersby asked worriedly what had happened to the chicks. In a neighborhood I had never really interacted with, I suddenly felt part of a community.

Enough of a community that there was gossip.

We heard through the grapevine that the Eye of Sauron was back upon us, that our uphill neighbor was unhappy with us having chickens because of the noise. Now, I'm the first one to say that roosters are annoying and they crow all day long--which is why they're banned in residential neighborhoods. We do not have a rooster. The chickens themselves let out a fairly loud squawking for about a minute once a day when they lay an egg; but for the most part they make little contented clucks all day. Their pitch is far lower than the screeching jays, crows, ravens, mockingbirds, and woodpeckers that live in the neighborhood; lower than the constant construction noise that seems to always be going on from one house or the other; lower than the motorized scooters that tear loudly through the neighborhood; and lower than the myriad of barking dogs. Ironically, The Eye of Sauron had a dog that barked all day for years, waking me and my baby from precious sleep in the early months when every minute counts, and continuing to annoy me throughout the day, disrupting my peace with a piercing yet booming explosion of sound.

My husband, ever the pacifist, saved eggs for a week and brought them up the hill as a conciliatory gesture. In exchange for the eggs, the Eye of Sauron let my husband know all about how annoying the chickens were, how the sound of their clucks traveled, how awful it was since he had chickens both below him (us) and his next door neighbor as well. I can only imagine. I once heard his next door neighbor's chickens cluck, once, in the early morning. That trebling contented warble was a lot to take in. Sauron also let us know that our dog's bark was piercing and asked us not to let him out before 7 a.m. Delivered kind of like a treaty: if  you keep your dog inside then I'll allow you to keep your chickens.

The next day, The Eye of Sauron began construction on what I can only assume was the armory of Mordor, because a banging, grinding, pounding, pinging cacophony that thoughtfully didn't begin until 7 a.m. emanated from Uphill.

It's not easy.

Urban farmers are always at the mercy of the Eye. In a street of perfect lawns, my raised beds stick out, and never more so at the ugly end of the season when things are dying on the stalks while I let them go to seed. We don't get any lovely smiling neighbors passing by wanting to know what the fading, withered obelisks of lettuce are when they're turning into a forest of dandelion fluff. I've been coveting a beehive enough to find out about the zoning restrictions (two hives allowed in a residential property in San Diego!) but continuing relations with the neighbors on all sides give me pause. One of my favorite books on urban farming, "Little House in the Suburbs", relates the story of one of the co-authors' struggles to keep her mini-goats. Deanna checked the zoning ordinances for her city carefully before buying her goats. The city code stated: "It shall be unlawful for any person to keep or maintain one or more horses, mules, cows, or hogs in any residential section of the town within 300 feet of any residence and without the consent of the owner or occupant of such residence and permission from the board." No mention of goats. the title read: Requirements for Keeping Horses, Cows, Hogs, and the Like. A typical mini-goat is much closer to the size of a golden retriever than a hog or a cow. They can be lap-pets, and some people keep them indoors. She felt well within her rights to bring home two little nanny goats. Right up until she started getting a nagging feeling that maybe she was misinterpreting the code and decided to call the city and check.

Deanna was plunged into a maelstrom of media and bureaucracy. Animal control threatened to remove the goats. The local TV station loved the story of the cute, fuzzy animals and the movement toward sustainable living. In the end, the city allowed her to keep her goats as long as she obtained signatures from all of her neighbors within 300 feet--which she did; but her best advice in dealing with neighbors?

--Do your research. Read books, talk to people in your area that have done what you want to do, search websites and online forums, check the city and neighborhood association's laws.
--Communicate, participate, be a part of the community. Introduce yourself to your neighbors. Welcome new neighbors. Organize a block party. Learn to make amazing cookies.
--If you have an HOA, find like-minded members and form an alliance so you can effect change from the inside.
--Cooperate with the city but at the same time, the tide is turning for urban farming; now is the best time to try to change ordinances. Find a city official to get on your side and stick with it. It can take three or four hearings for the process to be complete.
--Educate! There are a ton of misunderstandings and misnomers. You wouldn't believe how many people want to know if we have a rooster and think that a chicken requires one to lay eggs. I thought that was silly until I realized I'd always thought cows and goats just gave milk automatically, without understanding that like humans, ruminants only give milk after giving birth. Bees aren't anymore dangerous living in a hive living next door than if they live in the canyon at the end of the street; leave them alone and they'll leave you alone. The Eye of Sauron wasn't the only person I told about the water savings on my food garden vs. my lawn. I also make an effort any time I see someone with squash blossoms peeking out among their nasturtiums to congratulate them and ask them what they do for pollination, or to tell people what I'm doing when I'm out collecting pine needles for an acidic mulch for my blueberry bushes.

At times of economic stress, neighborhoods all over America and Europe have traditionally turned to different versions of urban farming; chickens in the yard for garbage disposal in small villages in England; rabbits kept people in the French countryside alive after WWII soldiers swept through, taking supplies; American and British families took the strain off farmers and their own pocketbooks during the depressions and wars of 1893, 1914, 1930 and 1944 with versions of the Victory Garden. Although today's urban farming movement has its roots in a desire for a simpler life, a return to our roots, a search for more nutritive food and the preservation of the planet's resources; it's no coincidence that the revival of urban farming spiked at the same time as the economic crisis of 2007. Maybe that's why urban farming makes people uncomfortable. The advent of the green manicured lawn (and hedges, and ornamental trees, for that matter) was a manifestation of wealth, an outward display that a landowner was wealthy enough to divert the resources of their soil from vegetable gardens to purely decorative carpet of green. Farmers, despite the fact that our survival literally hinges on their knowledge and devotion to a physically demanding, financially unrewarding trade, have long been the object of our derision--"dirt poor", "redneck", "hick", "hayseed", "bumpkin", "yokel." We measure our success in this country in many cases by our wealth and accumulation, and even subconsciously, the proximity to urban farming and its disruption in maintaining the appearance of wealth (even as we struggle under our mortgages and our rising water bills here in California) is too much to take gracefully. It's a chink in the perfect facade we work so hard to create in the suburbs.

Maybe at its heart that's why I get dressed for work in pencil skirt and stilettos before heading out to water my pumpkins; why my watering cans are all enameled with a floral design instead of a more practical galvanized steel; why I turn my Meyer lemons into vanilla infused lemon curd to give as gifts rather than plastic Target bags of loose fruit. It's why we made our chicken coop out of cheap but beautiful redwood decking; and why when people come up to look at the chickens I show them what I find beautiful about the hens, the intricate designs on their feathers, their glossy coloring, the myriad of colors of their eggs, their brilliantly red combs. I want people to see that my urban farming doesn't mean I'm lowering the property values--that there's beauty and poetry in the companionship of plants, in the flowers that draw the pollinators and the hummingbirds, in the herbs that repel the bad bugs and attract the ladybugs; that there's humor in the bewildering antics of hens; that there's a gourmet sensibility in growing pumpkins that will be both jack-o'lanterns and sweet pumpkins pies, fresh butter lettuce you can harvest straight from the bed to the salad bowl, strawberries and blueberries actually sweeter and more flavorful than any you can buy. Urban farming may be muddy but it is still so exquisite. It is, quite simply, The Shire--the Hobbit villages from the Lord of the Rings, where life is an endless party and a quiet nap in the grass, happy healthy rosy-cheeks, the best food, the best wine, the biggest and most abundant flowers--the picture of heaven.

My husband came back down from Mordor Uphill with a plastic Target bag full of lemons from Sauron's tree--his own conciliatory gesture--two normal sized ones and about ten thumb sized inedible spheres. I realized that Sauron is (a) a secret urban farmer himself, since he has a fruit tree, but (b) probably moved into the house with the tree already mature, and doesn't know what to do with the abundance he's so lucky to have, if he's picking and giving away lemons of that size. Does he know it only takes six lemons to make a carafe of the best and most amazing fresh lemonade on earth? Does he know you can make lemon curd, lemon sorbet, lemon ice cream, lemon bars and lemon icing with only a few lemons? I don't know if Sauron enjoyed my golden backyard eggs, but I turned his teeny lemons into Mary Berry's Cherry cake and ate every bit of it, from the rind to the juice to finally recycling what was left of the peels into my compost, to rebuild the soil of my personal Shire. 

I don't always take life's lemons and turn them into lemonade.

It's okay that the Eye of Sauron is still upon us. Who could look down at the Shire every day and not have the desire for growing, living things start to take root?

Mean Girls

Just as for irritatingly thin-yet-buxum teen-aged mean girls with Youtube-tutorial makeup contouring and physics-defying short skirts, "Pecking Order" is a very real concept for hens.

We all lay slightly different colored eggs. 

When we first got our (feathered) chicks, they immediately started sorting out who was going to be queen bee and who was going to most likely develop an eating disorder and credit card debt in an attempt to impress the other two. Our Rhode Island Red quickly emerged as the boss bitch of our backyard clique and she kept the other two sharply in line with sharp pecks to the throat and, I assume, more than one well-placed passive aggressive burn to the self-esteem as they were all foraging during the day.

"I don't hate you because you're fat. You're fat because I hate you."

Whatever. They worked it out. The other two quickly ceded dominance to the red-head, as must we all at some point in our lives, and seemed relatively happy at having secured their places in the social order despite having to wear the same outfits day in and day out. My own backyard version of the Plastics ruled their empty high school, unchallenged, in perfect harmony, bullying sparrows and teasing them about their weight while keeping them from the choice grubs.

Until the new girls arrived.

Unfortunately, even Rapunzel-golden blondes are no match for an angry redhead.

My chicken bible, "A Chicken in Every Yard," cautions that when adding new chicks to the existing flock, as in high school, they are virtually assured to have a hard time of it. A single chick should never be introduced on her own and even in pairs they should be old enough to hold their own before coming into contact with the existing flock. Obviously.

Hi! It's almost certain I'll by crying by the end of 7th period. 

When I picked up the new chicks for this year I made sure to get a pair (I would have gotten three but zoning restrictions in San Diego restrict homeowners of our size lot to a total of five hens). When they outgrew their brooder I moved them into an enormous cardboard box and into the garage, and waited for them to get big enough to hold their own--whatever that would turn out to mean--so I could move them into the main coop. 

The new chicks, a pair of beautiful blonde Buff Orpingtons, grew quickly but sort of topped out their teen-aged pullet size at around six weeks and didn't seem to be getting any bigger. Meanwhile I felt increasingly guilty for cooping them up in a cardboard box with no windows and no access to the sky, like an endless standardized test; so I moved the little chicks out into a separated section of the run during the day. "A Chicken in Every Yard" had said that some people find success in integrating the new flock with the old by giving them a good look at each other every day, but keeping the little ones safe inside a gated area. 

Please don't criticize me, I can still hear you through the bars.

I spent about a month on this doomed plan even though it came with the caveat from Every Yard's authors: we find this strategy to be expensive and ultimately ineffective. Ultimately, at some point the chicks have to sort it out themselves with no adult supervision.

"Damn. Chickens. Let's stay on this side of the island."

That point came after I moved the little chicks box outside once the weather turned warm and sunny, hoping to give them some fresh air when they were confined, and of course, as it must, it immediately rained. The cardboard box was damp and drooping and really not suitable for the little chicks to sleep in any more. "Every Yard" suggested waiting until the chicks were at least eight weeks, and preferably ten to twelve weeks old, and by the calendar my little chicks were two days away from their ten week birthday; but I worried that they were still so small, only half the size of the adult hens. Still, I didn't have another cardboard box and the existing one was just not healthy for them any more, so I took the plunge. 

I waited until nightfall and the adult hens had put themselves to bed on the roosts, as suggested, to gather up the little guys and gently put them on the roost where they would drowsily assimilate with the older flock while they slept. That was the idea. Hens are almost comatose once the sun goes down and their powerful roosting instinct drives them to seek the highest ground possible inside shelter and conk out, Ambien-style. I had often found my hens roosting on the top step of their little ladder if they didn't have access to get inside the coop, and they were like little feathered toddlers up past their bedtimes--just limp little un-resisting bodies that you could gently put into bed without waking them. I felt pretty confident with my ninja nighttime commando slumber party plan.

Yeah, no.

As soon as I opened the coop door with the little blonde chicks in my hands, the redhead woke out of a sound sleep, slasher-film-killer-come-back-from-the-dead-style, and leapt down, literally biting the hand that feeds her, namely mine, and then driving the freshmen out of her domain like an enraged prom queen. I thumped her on the head and went to go retrieve my little cowering pullets, and the redhead jumped out of the coop, nighttime terrors be damned, to follow us. "Knock it off!" I scolded her sternly, like the high school teacher I am, and picked her up and threw her back into the coop. I retrieved my little chicks but the redhead had jumped down out of the coop again, now flanked by the highlighted brunette Welsummer and the raven-tressed Maran, in a West Side Story triangle formation, ready to take me and my dedication to equal opportunity roost space on. 

For God's sake.

Okay. New strategy. I put down my pullets and gathered up the adult hens and threw them into their coop, shutting the door behind them so they couldn't get out. I went and got the pullets and craftily opened the nest box, through which I could see all of my hens sassily already settling themselves onto their roosts, satisfied after a thorough bullying. Normally I find my hens quite beautiful but they have never seemed so ugly than in that moment. I ungently shoved the Maran over from where she had settled herself in the very center of the nearest roost, and put the little chicks on the roost next to her. 

Sigh.

The redhead screamed with rage and leapt from one roost to the other and drove the little chicks down. One of the blondes jumped past me and out of the nest box, screaming and with feathers flying like a pulled out weave. The other one cowered on top of the waterer. The redhead, seemingly satisfied with the submission of the one on the waterer, ignored her and came after the one I was trying to prevent from escaping. Even with a thump on the head the redhead was undeterred and kept coming after her until the little blonde wiggled past me and found a spot on top of the feeder. The two little pullets squatted, terrified, in their corners, and the redhead stared them down with her baleful orange eye; but ultimately sashayed her way back into the coop and took her rightful place at the top of the roost. Goddammit, you little self-important alpha...

Hesitantly I closed the nesting box. The sound of the box shutting seemed to set the girls off again and I immediately heard the sound of a knock down drag-out cat fight. I jerked the nesting box open again to make sure the little chicks were still alive; they must have tried to get off their super low perches and hop up onto the roosts with the adults once the light was gone, because the redhead was chasing them around the coop and viciously backstabbing them. They finally made their way back to their little corners and she left them each alone, after a parting peck. I closed the nesting box again and the scene was repeated again, violently shaking the entire coop as the occupants screamed and shrieked at each other. My inner child started crying omigod she's KILLING THEM in there! but what steel I have developed as a pansy-assed urban farmer pressed back--they're birds. They will figure it out. At some point, they need to figure it out. 

I closed the nest box and locked it, and walked away.

I woke up at the crack of dawn this morning to let them out of the coop and scatter some treats on the ground while they free ranged with as much space as possible; the idea being that if they all had access to busy work , with their heads down next to each other, they would let the aggressions drop. As soon as I opened the coop door one of the blondes came shrieking out in terror with the redhead hot on her heels. The redhead chased her into the enclosed run and mercilessly back-stabbed her all around it before I could open up all the gates and let them free into the backyard, but once I got everyone into the open spaces they settled into their normal pattern of digging for bugs and pecking at blades of grass. Yes, the blonde pullets were again cowering, math-club-like, in the corner of the yard, and every time they ventured over into the sunflower seeds I had scattered the adults chased them out; but over the next hour they sort of found their own space and the adults largely ignored them. Once the adults had gotten bored scratching at what I'd thrown down, they wandered off to other areas and the little ones got to pick up what was left. 

"A Chicken In Every Yard" says that the pecking order of two integrating flocks can be completely upset, with the new hens assimilating into the clique in the bottom, middle, and sometimes even taking the boss bitch spot of the lead hen. I'm crossing my fingers that one of my little mild-mannered blonde nerds rises like a phoenix to throw off her glasses, shed her baggy clothes, and take down that redhead in an epic battle of wills that leaves her shattered, unhappy, and questioning everything about herself. 

I have confidence. 

(For more mean chicks, read "Mean Girls 2".)