The Urban Farmer's Almanac

The size of this egg that was laid today is ridiculous. It is at least twice as big as normal chicken eggs… there must be two or three yolks in there. The good news is, I think all of our chickens are laying again.

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This just posted on the Seattle Urban Farm Co-op listserv by Dave:

Here’s an interesting bit of chicken lore: Did you know that chickens can’t taste pepper heat? That’s right! You can feed a chicken a fresh habanero pepper, and it won’t even flinch. Lizards and chickens are alike in that manner.

Just in case you were wondering…

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We got a couple new chickens the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and I have to say it was a pretty ill-advised move considering the blood-thirsty raccoons that were still roaming the neighborhood. I spend nap-time the day before (if you don’t have small kids, that being my only free time of the day) completely securing the chicken coop. Or so I thought.

We bought the chickens at night — or something like night since it gets dark at 4 pm these days — and so we put them straight in their house and closed it all up. Much to my dismay, the next morning, there was evidence that a raccoon had indeed infiltrated the coop that night. Fortunately, the chickens were locked in their house and were safe, but it was a close call nonetheless. So I patched up the places where the defenses were breached and instituted a 4 pm “bed-time” for the hens.

The next day I had to teach all afternoon and evening, so Alicia was going to put the chickens to bed, as we call it. Her email to me explains it best:

“We need to do something about the chickens.  It took me almost 30 minutes to catch them and made Hannah cry (I made her help me and kept getting frustrated).  Our back neighbor came over and basically said the raccoons keep coming back and messing up his yard and they are coming because of our chickens.  We have to kill those raccoons.  What we have now is not a viable solution. I am sure the raccoons will be here in a matter of hours and will probably find a way in again.  Eventually they are going to get the latch open on the coop and kill these ones too.”

My response to her email was pretty classic:

“OK”

But then I decided to take her seriously (especially when she said the neighbor saw four raccoons on the coop the night before). So the next morning I called the fine folks over at Critter Control. Bob showed up with two traps, marshmallows and cherry puree for bait, and a plucky “Let the trapping begin.”

And let me tell you, leaving out marshmallows for raccoons seems to be like shooting at the side of a barn, because in the morning, both traps had captured their prey. Two down, who knows how many more to go. Bob said the record for a yard was 33 captures. (And all you left-of-left whiney Seattle liberals, present company included, don’t have to worry, because Critter Control brings the animals to a forest and does their best to reunite families once they’re captured.) While we were waiting for them to come pick up the two traps, the mother raccoon kept coming back to check on her trapped kids. This was kind of heart-breaking, but only a little. Hopefully she’ll get caught and be relocated to her kids’ new forest home.

And the upshot is, we still have two chickens that are alive.

Update: I just went outside to empty the kitchen scraps in the compost (10:14 pm) and there are two more raccoons trapped out there.

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It’s been a bad week for our chickens. A week or so ago, I walked outside to empty the coffee grounds into the compost and the chickens looked a little despondent and on-edge. I looked a little closer, and then my stomach tied in a knot — there was one of our chickens dead on the ground, with feathers scattered all over the pen. Closer inspection revealed another carcass back in the corner. It was frustrating because we had just moved the chicken coop, and I hadn’t had a chance to fully secure it with chicken wire across the top.

So that day I spent a couple hours in the rain getting everything secure, stapling chicken wire up to the fence and zip tying it together. I even buried a brick in a hole it looked like the raccoon had dug under the fence.

The next morning, there was another chicken missing. Chicken wire had been pried apart, and little openings where I wouldn’t think a raccoon could fit through proved to be ample room to invade through. There was even course grey fur on the chicken wire… evidence that the killer carelessly left behind. And the most unbelievable part was that the brick I had buried was pushed back out of the hole. Apparently those suckers are strong.

So we were down to one chicken (and it’s sad to admit this, but she was my least favorite of the original four). She took to hanging out on the porch and looking in the back door during the day when I would let her out in the yard.

Well, that daytime freedom soon became her demise a couple days later. I left to teach during the afternoon and didn’t think to close her in the coop — the raccoons had always come much later at night. Guess how that ended… Needless to say, I’m feeling pretty terrible about the whole thing. It sucks to have animals die because of my own carelessness. And I didn’t have to hear the chicken being eaten like Alicia did.

In the book “Farm City” I just read, the author catches a possum attacking her chickens and she kills it with a hoe. I can identify with that rage. I’ve been plotting borrowing the family .22 from my grandma’s house and sitting out on the back porch with a glass of whiskey and night-vision goggles; maybe some raw chicken in the coop as bait. But then I was talking to my friend Zack and he said that the legend back in Indiana is that large marshmallows will choke a raccoon. So maybe I’ll back off a little and just put some of those out in the empty coop and see if we can knock off one or two of them.

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Farm City by Novella Carpenter

Jared and Kris got me Farm City by Novella Carpenter for my birthday this year. It has a nice Bay Area connection for us, since the author is writing about her urban farm in the ghetto of Oakland, and we all met while we lived down there. It is fun to hear her talk about Berkeley and Oakland, BART and the bay, and be able to call it all to mind.

It was definitely an inspirational book; she starts off as kind of a hobby gardener taking over a vacant lot, and by the end she’s butchering pigs. The arc of ambition gains momentum, big time, and the farm seems to get away from her quite a bit (which I can identify with). Fortunately, winter comes, animals are butchered, projects completed, and things quiet down for awhile.

Reading this book makes me want to expand our farm into the livestock arena. I’ve been threatening to get some rabbits for awhile now, and Alicia doesn’t quite know what to make of it. Plus, it’s in my family heritage — my grandpa Vern raised rabbits for meat when my  mom was a kid. I love the description of butchering a rabbit in this book — you slit the throat, then pull of his pajamas. I can do that.

There are some real highlights in this book — reading about the author dumpster diving for 15 buckets of food every other day to feed her pigs, the description of pouring a box of bees into a beehive, and plenty of salivating descriptions of food (mostly meat) produced on the farm / vacant lot. Check out her blog… it’s a good read too: www.novellacarpenter.com

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