Lipitor Custard

"Hey Mom, what's for dinner?"

"How about breakfast for dinner?"

"We just had that last night and the night before."

"Well then, maybe some quiche, tortilla, frittata, french toast, deviled eggs, flan, or avgolemono?  I know! Let's get out the ice cream maker and whip up some chocolate ice cream!  You know, the recipe that calls for 10 egg yolks.  We can also use up those egg whites with a nice angel food cake.  It would be delicious with the ice cream."

Remember when I was complaining that I had all of these chickens but  still had to buy eggs at the grocery store?  Well, not so much anymore.  I am getting about twelve a day now. The whole family is going have to start taking statins.  My doctor is in for a shock.  The last time I went for a physical she told me to keep doing whatever I was doing because my cholesterol was great. Of course, at that point I was probably eating AN egg a day and not six.

We now have over twenty chickens.  I think it is twenty-five, but since it got too cold to stand outside plucking feathers off of the rest of the meat birds, those ladies are all in with the layers and well, I just lost track of numbers.  All I know is the chicken coop is no longer the pristine little home that smelled of fresh hay and menthol due to my fanatic cleaning and the various potions I would rub on Chicky Rivera's chest to avoid upper respiratory infection. It now smells like a chicken coop that has over twenty chickens in it.  I failed you again Martha.

Our new menagerie of birds is quite interesting to study.  I feel like an ornithologist and social anthropologist all rolled into one. There are definite "clicks" in the hen house.  Most of these divisions fall along breed lines. The Black Austrolorps tend to hang together or sometimes with the Cuckoo Marans and the Golden Comets are all pretty tight.  The one bird who seems to transcend these social and ethnic barriers is my puny Favarolle, Fifi.  She flits from group to group throughout the day and aside from incurring the wrath of Chicky Rivera on a daily basis, seems to get along with everyone.  She has even joined the rogue group of three Austrolorps and a Maran who have forsaken the safety and warmth of the hen house for the freedom of sleeping in the trees at night. Watching Fifi try to fit in with the cool girls is kind of like watching Sandy with the Pink Ladies.

I have a nightly stand off  with our rooster, Gregory Peck over whether or not he is going into the chicken house. I say,"Yes." He says,  "No."  I would not have a problem with him standing watch outside all night because (insert PETA inspired gasps here) I don't  give a rat's ass if he becomes fox food, but the one night we left him out, the cock-a-doodle-doing started at 3:00 am.  So now every evening I find a big stick and push and prod him off of the fence and into the coop where he squawks and paces frantically for five minutes or so before he heads into the house.  Why don't I just pick up the little three pound rooster and place him inside?  He scares me.

In keeping with the Grease theme, our barnyard, "Danny" is an even bigger ass than Kyle.  It is embarrassing to admit I still don't really understand how the rooster/hen sex thing works, but I do know he climbs on the back of many an unsuspecting girl; grabs her neck with his beak for all of three seconds and then steps on her head as he dismounts.  I think this makes him not exactly, "The one that I want, who who who."

There are a couple of positives about Gregory Peck:  He hasn't attacked me yet and he keeps the ladies in the yard, unlike Kyle who always had them in the middle of the street.  It seems Kyle has accepted the fact that he is now the omega rooster and mopes around chicken coop, never attempting to fly over the fence.  Despite the fact that both Chicky Rivera and Jonah can easily fly over the fence to roam, they stick close to Kyle which helps him save face.  As the saying goes, the rooster you know is better than the rooster you don't know.  That's not the saying?  Well, it should be.  Any metaphor about messed up social interactions should reference the chicken coop.  I think I see a PhD dissertation in my future.  Eat your heart out Jane Goodall.

How Not to Garden With Your Cow

The one good thing about taking on twice as much as you really can deal with while still maintaining your sanity,  is that when you finally go back to the normal chaos, life seems much slower.  A few weeks of pretending to be the perfect mother who never yells at her children for the benefit of a fifteen year old French kid, combined with transporting and entertaining said French kid, throwing a Halloween party, working, caring for the critters on an increasingly cold farmette and trying to explain elapsed time to a confused James Dean without totally losing my shit, has made me seriously consider sewing my mouth shut and tattooing the word, "NO" across my forehead. I really need to stop agreeing to everything people ask me to do.  The frosting on the cake was that the husband decided this was the perfect time to renovate the living room.

It is now Saturday of a long weekend.  The French have left, Halloween is done and the living room is shaping up.  It is cold and grey outside which makes this the perfect time to get back to writing about my farming life.

The one thing I really longed for in the frenetic pace of the last few weeks, was spending time outside just observing my little farm community.  Watching the chickens race around the yard to escape some phantom predator or feeling the warm sweet breath of a cow or horse on your cheek when you go into the pasture, is really the most Zen thing anyone could imagine.

Noelle was the animal I missed hanging with the most.  When I pulled into the driveway at 4 or 5pm, I  would call up the hill to her on my way in to start dinner and help with homework before having to get back in the car to take someone somewhere.  She would always turn and greet me with a low, "MOOO."  Despite her somewhat psychopathic behavior at times,   her slow calm hello warms my heart in a way the frantic needy greeting of the dogs could never do.  I am pretty sure the Cohen Brothers had a cow in mind when they created The Dude.

A couple of weeks before our French student arrived, I decided it was time to plant the garlic, mulch the garden beds and plant the winter rye.  It was brought to my attention by a much more knowledgable  neighbor, that I was about a month too late with the winter rye so I resigned myself to planting garlic and adding manure and leaves to the garden to compost over the winter.

In the past we have relied on neighbors for donkey, chicken and horse manure for this end of season job. This year, while we may not yet be self-sufficient in the food department, we are definitely self-sufficient in the manure department.

I brought the cart into the pasture and started shoveling.  Noelle and Cody Bear came right over to see what I was doing.  When it was discovered that it was poop I was putting in the cart and not a tasty treat, Cody Bear lost interest and went back up the hill to graze. Noelle on the other hand, decided she needed to help.  After having to block her from climbing into my tiny wooden cart about a dozen times,  it became apparent that gathering manure for the garden was going to take a while.  It was then that I had a brilliant idea.

It is my ultimate goal to have a no till garden.  It seems rather counterproductive and nonorganic to rototill your garden every year.  It adds gas, and destroys the soil.  I read about a farmer in the Midwest who uses cover crops and companion planting on a very substantial piece of land he never needs to till. Plus, weeding and tilling suck.

I brought my little wooden cart up to the garden with Noelle in tow.  I opened the garden gate wide and she and Cody Bear came in to devour all of the tall grass that had overtaken the vegetable beds.  I was a genius!  This was true sustainable gardening. They pulled all of the weeds, dropped their manure right where I needed it and even dug up the remaining potatoes without destroying or eating a single one.

I planted the garlic and praised my gardening companions.  I made plans to bring some of the chickens up as well so they could eat the grubs and help with all of the fine tilling work that my large friends could not accomplish.  I couldn't wait to get rid of that stupid little rototiller that is made for a right handed person with five foot long arms.  I think I have spent more time trying to get that thing started than I have using it.

Once the planting was done, I topped the bed off with a nice layer of leaves.  It seems Noelle likes a nice layer of leaves so she came right over and started stomping all over my nice fluffy garden bed.  I tried yelling at her and then pushing her away, but she kept coming back.  It was time for Noelle and Cody Bear to leave the garden.

Cody Bear went right out without any problem, but I had to chase Noelle around for five minutes until I got her out.  I closed myself in the garden and she stood there watching me with a confused look. She tried nudging the gate with her nose but couldn't get back in so she decided to just walk right through the fence.

There was a small rip in the fence next to the gate she was able to push her way right through.  She looked as shocked as I was that she managed to get in. The break in made her heady and she started prancing around the garlic bed in defiance.  She was not wearing a harness so trying to catch her was going to be tricky.  She dodged and weaved as I ran after her screaming obscenities. I finally managed to grab her by the ear and pulled her out with the help of a long stick.  Keeping her out was going to be tricky.

The good thing about Noelle is that she would rather follow you around in an intimidating fashion than ravish the garden.  I distracted her from her garden duties by running down the hill so she would chase me.  Luckily, I made it to the apple tree before she reached me.  I held on for dear life as she ran around in circles kicking up her heels.  Once she calmed down a bit, the two of us walked down to the barn and she munched on some hay.

The husband fixed the fence and I fired my bovine farm worker. I guess I won't be throwing away that rototiller quite yet.  Maybe I should get an ox?

Lots of Popcorn

Since it has been two whole weeks since I have had an hour to myself to write, my mind has been a flutter today over what topic to write about.  Should it be gardening with your cow?  How about what to do with 14 eggs per day?  Maybe it should be the Halloween party which kind of turned into Lord of the Flies meets a plot line for a Seth Rogan flick. Or perhaps it should be about the popcorn bowl moments our 15 year old French exchange student got to enjoy including but not limited to witnessing Scrappy Doo pee into a Wendy's cup on the way to NYC because there was no way the husband was going to pull off the Palisades.   

So many choices, but unfortunately dinner and homework must come first.  In the meantime,  I leave you with a few photos of some of my favorite critters and cowboy here at the farmette.