Egg bound hen at the Earthship

My initial query into what was wrong with my hen included responses such as "this does not look good" and "would you be willing to take her to the vet?" So when she was still alive a few days later, I was very relieved. At that point we had reached a general consensus that the hen had Coccidiosis, a parasitic infection.

Then her bottom cleared up, she still isn't acting "sick," and there are still no eggs. Today I noticed that her bottom area is distended. Her belly seems normal, but the area right around her vent is puffy. This was resolving into an egg issue. We decided she must be egg bound.

When we don't give them enough calcium, the egg shells are very thin and break easily. I think our hen tried to lay an egg that shattered on its way out; the mess on her bottom was the broken egg. All I know about eggs is that the hens need calcium to make them. So I plied her with corn and oyster shells.

As it turns out, calcium deficiency is the number one cause of an egg bound hen. I was very pleased with myself that I intuited this on my own. I felt like a Real Farmer. Too bad for the hen that my super farmer intuition didn't kick in before she got egg bound. I found a reference to treating an egg bound hen with liquid calcium. We're going to try that out.

Do adult layer hens get pastey butt?

We're down to getting one egg a day ever since a local fox made off with all the rest of our hens. For the past few days, we've had no egg at all. I chalked it up to transition stress; Tina brought us two of her surplus silkie hens a week or so ago. The past few days she was making a lot of noise. All day.
Bawwwwwwk bawwwwwwk baaaaawwwwwwwwwk.
Craaaaaaaaa craaaaa craaaaawwwwwwwwcaaaaaaaa.

Today I noticed her very messy bottom half. I can't tell if the stuff stuck there is shit caked straw or something more sinister. Could this have been caused by having to handle all of the roosters needs herself? Was my hen over-mated to the point of injury? I've got some emails out to my more knowledgeable homesteading friends and will update when I know what is going on.


UPDATE 08.23.2008
Our hen is egg-bound. Read the follow up post.

Earthship permaculture garden totally ignored

A productive garden, even a marginally productive garden, requires daily attention. At least an hour or so in my case. And for the past week, no, for the past ten days I've completely ignored my garden except to harvest a huge sunflower and moderately sized pumpkin. And two tomatoes. I have another crop of soy beans to harvest. I use the word crop loosely to describe a row of 8 plants which I have basically disregarded since I picked the last bunch of beans off .

I think about my garden a lot. Not one of those thoughts inspired action on my part. The garden has not been watered, weeded, de-pested, or attended to in these ten days. I've been buying my vegetables from a family up the street. Last week Tina brought me a bag full of her delicious tomatoes. I keep meaning to garden. I get sidetracked with things like family visits and summer camp. I always have time to go to the grocery store. But not enough time to tend the garden. If I thought of my garden as my grocery store, as my primary food source, I would act differently. Instead, my garden has a fuzzy place in my world. Is it a hobby? A location I want to landscape? A source of food? An obligation? Something pretty to look at?

And then there is the Great Mystery of Gardening: how do I know when to water?

My garden is a source of confusion for me. I don't understand how it works. I don't understand why the tomatoes I planted got eaten all to hell but the ones that spontaneously grew in the compost pile are bearing fruit. I don't understand how sometimes a yellow plant means too much water, sometimes too little water, and sometimes something else entirely. I don't understand what to do with all my soy beans. This idea of growing food seems further and further away from reality. Even when I do manage to grow stuff, which is not as easy as the books say, what do I do with the surplus? If I want my garden to feed me, do I also have to get into canning and drying and lacto-fermenting? Can I go back to the fantasy garden, the one that has just the right amount of ripe vegetables for dinner? The one that grows year round? The one that has no bugs? The one that looks, you know, like the grocery store?

In order meet my goal of getting 30% of my calories from my land I will have to change the way I think about my garden. Until I start gardening differently, the garden will stay just how it is now: sort of neglected, misunderstood, not watered properly, and filled with beautiful but inedible wildflowers. I miss my grandmother! She lived off her garden. She knew when to water, when to add magnesium, when to harvest. She knew how to dry tomatoes in the sun. How to go weeks and weeks and weeks without going to the grocery store. How to tell the difference between a baby weed and a baby food-plant. In my family's evolution to educated professionals from literate farmer-peasants, all that knowledge vanished. Somewhere along the line, my family stopped growing its own food. Stopped knowing how. Like many of my peers I have lost touch with my agrarian roots.

When I wander through my garden, I feel the empty space where my agrarian knowledge would be. I feel my confusion about living things. I feel unsure about what is safe to eat and what is poison. I feel clueless about how to coax calories out of the ground. It is a sadness, a pain. A clear sensation of having lost something Really Important. I feel the same way when I look up at the sky and struggle with orienting myself to the stars, or my complete bafflement at the cycles of the moon. I am aware how profoundly out of touch I am with the natural phenomenons of my environment.

Gardening is helping me to fill in that empty space. Little by little, I am learning. I learned about horn worms. And potato bugs, and parasitic wasps. About insecticidal soap, earthworms, and the importance of watering on a schedule. And now I am learning about making the time to attend to my garden. Time to be with in and in it. The garden is a living, breathing thing. Unlike the grocery store, my garden will not sit there waiting for me at a perfect 68 degrees.

My new mantra: My grocery store is my garden, my garden is my grocery store.

Earthship permaculture gardening: attack of the horn worms

I've come a long way in my 4 years of gardening experience. Far enough to know when to rip out and start over, which is what I did when I discovered all my early plantings were destroyed by bugs and/or failure to thrive. Far enough to focus on the things that are actually working in my garden: horseradish, herbs, wildflowers, soy beans, nasturtium, sweet potato.

I've discovered that nothing is working quite like it said in the brochure. My beans didn't climb up my corn. My densly planted variety of early blooming things all died. My wasps didn't control my hornworms. My layered lasagna beds didn't make the biggest harvest I've ever seen. I've had some good permaculture lessons- the wildflowers bring in predatory bugs, mixed plantings held reduce pest attacks, planting stuff from seed each spring really is a pain in the ass. And I've greatly increased my understanding of why people use chemicals. All the "successful" gardeners I know, successful meaning that they have enough produce to share with me, are using chemicals of one kind or another.

I know it must be possible to support my caloric needs off my land without using chemicals. There is a steep learning curve between me and my goal, though. Here's how it is going so far.

Year one

• All our top soil is scrapped off in order to correct a grading error, leaving us with a one acre field of red clay.
• A fig stump is planted in the red clay.
• We buy boots from WalMart so the kids can play in the mud outside.
• Harvest: nothing
  

Year two

• We spread hay over the red clay.
• The fig stump grows a leaf.
• A 5' row of tomato and corn is planted in the red clay.
• We buy boots, one size bigger than last year, so the kids can keep playing in the red clay.
• Harvest: nothing
  

Year three

• We throw bags and bags and bags of grass seed on the hay that covers the red clay.
• The fig stump grows lots of leaves and 3 fruits that die.
• Three 5' rows of tomatoes and corn are planted.
• The kids pretend that the green fuzz they are walking on is grass.
• We plant 4 trees.
• We fill planter beds with livestock manure from MT Bar Farms.
  
• Harvest: nothing
  

Year four (that's now!)

• We have grass.
• We mulch and add more horse shit.
  
• The fig has leaves, new branches, and ripening fruit.
• The garden skeleton is landscaped and planted with a variety of things. The first planting of the season is eaten alive by bugs.
• The kids play barefoot outside in the grass and we build them a play area with sandbox, trampoline, balance beam, and swing.
• All our trees survive the winter and bloom like crazy.
• We successfully grow a wildflower patch.
• I remember to look for hornworms and start finding almost 10 per day.
  
• Harvest: 2 quarts of soybeans; 5 small pumpkins; 3 sunflower heads; lots of basil, rosemary, and edible flowers

watch the permaculture garden slideshow

The thing about living in the country...

The garden. The garden I planted at the right time with the right plants and the right irrigation and all that jazz. The bugs really like it, too. A lot. Very few things are surviving the affection off the bugs: the garlic, the onions, the horseradish. The rest is pretty much eaten up completely or not thriving. The bugs I can't really do anything about- I am not willing to use chemicals so the solution is better varieties of plants. The not thriving I can do something about, but I have no idea what. First step is to get my soil tested at the cooperative extension.

The chicks. Which vanished overnight without even a trace feather. All six of them. The neighbor spotted and killed a fox at his coop, but we'll never really know what happened to our chicks. Gabriel was devastated. Then we lost one chicken a night for three nights in a row, despite closing them up in their coop. There were feathers for them, I guess because they were big enough to put up a fight. We're down to two hens and the rooster. One of the hens is broody, so who knows? Maybe she'll hatch some chicks for us. I'm not holding my breath. I've not mentioned this to Gabriel. He hasn't wanted to come with me to feed the chickens since the chicks went missing. All that guarding them from the cats, from the cold, from the bigger chickens. All that energy he put in, gone, *poof* just like that.

And then there are the hicks. The ones down the road with the Confederate Shrine on their front yard. The ones across the street who informed us, when we first moved in, that "We don't want to be friendly with you people." The ones further up the road who have NO TRESPASSING signs and chain on their driveway. The ones in town who rev the engines of their souped up gas-guzzling trucks and shoot eat-shit-and-die looks at brown faces. The ones who pull the Wall-Mart Yank-and-Spank on their screaming two year olds. The ones who look at me blankly at best, and suspiciously at worst, when my Jewish heritage comes into the conversation. The farmer next door who keeps mowing on our side of the property line, right before he sprays chemicals all over his land. Chemicals that don't stay on "his" side of the line, but drift all over my house instead.

And last on my (current) list of Thing I Didn't Know About Living in the Country is: the driving. A lot of it. Driving to friends because none of the kids' peers live in the neighborhood. Driving to classes. To co-op. To the grocery. To Chinese. To everywhere. I don't usually appreciate the news spin of CNN, but this article on the New American Dream, Walking Urbanism, really caught my attention. Added to this is the newly acquired knowledge that we live within 100 miles of an active nuclear power plant.

I am feeling, suddenly and without warning, that I don't want to be here anymore. Is this feeling real? Or am I bored and fabricating a thing to focus on? Is there anywhere that is really any better than this?

mushroom and bug ID for Suffolk,VA permaculture garden

I asked Mother Pat, my neighbor and local naturalist, to help me ID these creatures.

The caterpillar turns into a monarch and will decimate dill and parsley unless physically removed and squashed. Yuk.

The mushrooms love the manure I have in the garden and are not terribly poisonous, but they are NOT edible.

First garden harvest!

My lettuce looked hardy enough to harvest. It was a lovely salad, complimented by wild edibles my daughter picked from the yard. A year (or maybe more) ago, Tina organized a wild foods class. At this class, my daughter learned how to identify miner's lettuce, which I still confuse with clover. It has a lemony flavor with beautiful edible yellow flowers.

Tossed in with a bit of rosemary (also from the garden) this was the perfect green salad. It felt weird to think of my garden bed as the produce section of the grocery store, but also totally exhilarating. I just went outside and clipped my salad right out of the ground. No plastic containers, no gas for the trip, no wilted slimy greens. I guess a garden is the ultimate convenience food!

My chicks got pasty butt

Who knew that baby chickens get crusty feces when they are slightly chilled? Apparently, everyone but me. This condition is colorfully known as pasty butt, and my chicks got it after their first night. The term pasty butt describes the condition perfectly. No one is exactly sure why pasty butt seems to happen with chilly chicks. My theory is that if the chick is too cold, it will not assume the proper defecating position: standing, with legs slightly spread. Instead, it will opt to defacte whilst still snuggled up in the warmth conservation position: curled up. Curled up right along side the poop.

If you don't clean the paste, then the vent becomes clogged and your chicks will shit themselves to death. So it was with no small sense of urgency that I proceeded to bathe our chicks.

Just like fluffy cats and dogs, chicks look completely pathetic when wet. A small bowl served as our spa. We got them all cleaned up and then lowered the heat lamp to prevent re-occurrence. The chick butts were decidedly UNpasty this morning, and for this I am quite grateful as picking off dry, crusty feces from their impossibly delicate down is not my idea of fun.

Mail order chicks

We just got our day-old buff Cochin hatchlings in the mail today. Everyone is eating, drinking, and pooping so I think their journey went ok.

They are SO CUTE. I want to SQUEEZE THEIR LITTLE HEADS.

How do chickens go from being these cute little balls of fluff to being big fat hens who'd just as soon pluck your eye out as lay an egg?

Garden slide show

This slide show covers the creation and growth of our food gardens. The planter beds are located on top of our French drain, which helps keeps them evenly watered. Some of the beds are irrigated directly with greywater from our shower.

We used the "lasagna" method of gardening (no digging, great if your soil is bad):

• create a raised bed at least 4" high
• line the bed with newspaper
• layer much, hay, manure, and peat
• plant!

We made our beds out of fire wood and cut logs and filled them up with horse manure from a friend's farm. We use bamboo harvested from next door as climbing poles. The newspaper for our beds comes from my mother-in-law's condo. Over all, most of our gardening supplies were local and/or free, with the exception of plants and trees.

Planting $400

I've been at this gardening thing for 3 years now. I use the term "gardening" loosely.

The first year, all we planted was a fig, salvaged from my sister-in-law's garden. The second year we missed Spring planting all together, and moved right into June tomatoes, which were all but decimated by horn worms. Last fall we planted shade trees, a persimmon, and a paw paw ($150) and got the happy satisfaction of seeing our trees bud this week, proof positive that we planted them properly and took good care of them over the winter. We are trying hard to plant things that produce food, grow well in our insect dense zone, and can handle the acidity of our area.

A few months ago we made 2 planting beds and filled them up with manure. We thought it would be clever to use the moisture wicking fabric left over from our sod roof to line the beds. This was a mistake and we ended up with 100 square feet of soggy horse shit. This week we added hardwood mulch, peat moss, and 5 hours of soil fluffing. The rest of the beds were marked, but had nothing in them but dead, red clay. Our soil was completely barren due to several years of non-stop comercial soy farming. And then we added insult to injury by scraping off the last bit of topsoil in order to salvage grading errors made by a previous contractor. Soil additives cost us $50.

I've planted the various cool season plants suggested by friends and the local nursery: various lettuces, cabbage, spinach, beets, brussel sprouts. I also planted some permaculture items: garlic, yellow onions, red onions. I have a flat of herbs, corn, beans, tomatoes waiting to outside on April 15th. And I have lemon grass seeds, red pepper, and green squash to grow in the greenhouse. This all cost me $200 and two full days of manual labor. I am exhausted. Is this what gardening is all about?

I thought, while I was reading many a glossy paged gardening book, that my garden would just sprout up out of my imagination and then re-seed itself while I admired it from the porch. All this digging and bending over and gardening is much more work than I ever imagined.

Earthship grows food year round in greenhouse

Gratitude to Mother Pat for helping my thumb turn green. These plants originally came from my summer garden. I never harvested any tomatoes from my summer garden due to tomato horn worms. Big green suckers. The only reason I have any plants at all is because Mother Pat, my botanist neighbor, came over one day and plucked all the horn worms off. There were 35 of them, give or take a handful. Chickens love horn worms.

Mother Pat was then good enough to explain to me how I can overwinter my tomatoes in the greenhouse:

• take a healthy looking cutting as long as your elbow to your finger tips
• bury it in a pot so that only the top 3" show
• keep it properly watered
• feed it regularly
• supplement with Epsom salt

I followed these instructions and got a beautiful harvest.

Work with existent irrigation instead of brining water to your garden

My daughter and I worked on digging a pond. We laid out EPDM roofing material (left over from our roof) and then folded the piece in 24" on each side to take into account the depth of the pond (12-16") and overhang of material. Then we (with lots of help from Mashi) cut a perimeter line with our shovels. Let the digging begin. Over the next few days, I went out and dug 5 shovel fulls a day, trying to break this painfully large project into something manageable. When my husband came home from work, I was eager to show him the progress. Oddly, although it was a scorchingly hot sunny day, one corner of the pond perimeter was drenched.

The water came from my shower. The master shower is plumbed to feed into a garden. This garden just so happens to be situated at the very start of our French drain. A French drain is a gradually descending trench that is filled with rocks and neatly tucked under the soil. It is invisible above ground. I turned to look down the length of the drain (it is about 100' long) and saw a swath of green stretched across my otherwise baked clay yard. Why hadn't I noticed this before?

Rather than design my garden and then design irrigation to service it, I've decided to place the garden right along the French drain. The French Drain Garden. It is already in direct sun, has fantastic drainage, and has a steady source of water. A permaculture dream. I'll get about 300-400 square feet of growing space, which is about as much dream as I can properly take care of. We'll let the rest of the yard develop into wildflower meadow in order to cut down on mowing.