Hey….

Where are you going?

June?

I managed to fix the solar charger that powers the portable electric fence surrounding the Hen Hut.

I followed the advice of a farmer named Charlie, who raises the best beef I’ve ever tasted.  Charlie said that the reason the fence wasn’t holding a charge is because the ground has been so dry — you may have heard about this little ole heat wave sweeping the nation? — there’s no current running through the grounding rod.  It’s funny, it never occurred to me the word “current” when applied to electricity actually relates to moisture, but there you go!  No current, no charge.

To fix, Charlie recommended I pour a 5-gallon bucket of water over the grass where the grounding rod is —  you can just make out the grounding rod in the upper right corner of the photo above — and sure enough, the charge meter sprang to life when I switched the fence back on.

It’s been holding a steady current for the past day and a half.  I’ll  add another bucket of water today to ensure it stays that way.

I admit it, I got a charge — har, har!– from knowing I could fix this farm problem myself without calling someone over to fix it for me.  Thanks to Charlie.

This morning I discovered the electric fence surrounding the Hen Hut isn’t holding a charge.

The fence is powered by a solar charger attached to the Hen Hut.   The sun is shining.  So…..what is the problem?

And that concludes my knowledge of this matter.

Geez, I really miss Jake.

Update:  When I got home this evening, there was a note from my friend Marnie who had stopped by this afternoon and seemingly fixed my solar charger. I don’t know how she did it, but she did.  (Well, I know how she did it….she’s one of those women who just know how to do most things I some of us expect menfolk to do for us.   Thanks, Marnie.

Update:  And…it’s broken again.  It may be that the ground is too dry or the grounding stake isn’t shoved far enough into the earth to hold a charge. These are the days I crave an electrical outlet.

The other day I noticed one of our hens looked swollen and draggy.

Her comb flopped in her face.

Her tail feathers drooped toward the ground.

She looked like she had seen better days.  I picked her up and inspected her backside. Her opening was swollen and puss-y.  She was egg bound…a condition in which hens can’t pass their eggs.  The eggs get stuck in the vent and can sometimes break, causing the hen to bleed to death from the inside.  It’s a horrible, awful condition.  The only way to alleviate her suffering is to carefully insert your fingers into her vent and extract the egg manually, a risky procedure that may cause the egg to break anyway, killing her.

In the end, I couldn’t bring myself to perform the avian C-section.  I was afraid of causing her more harm than good.   The vets around here don’t really work on chickens.  I guess they’re considered too low on the food chain in farm country.  I asked my neighbor Gerald, who works with cows and horses, if he’d come over and put her out of her misery.  He did, swiftly and cleanly, which is never an easy job, no matter how long you work with animals.

And now my ever dwindling flock is another bird short.

I’m reminded of Jake every time I look at our flock’s McMansion; he built this mobile laying fortress.

I’ve finally cleared out the last of Jake’s food.

I call it “Jake’s food” because the man has a tendency to eat a lot of processed food-like substances.   You know they say you have to choose your battles in marriage?  This is one I had to abandon a long time ago.  I tend to eat like a whittler in a fantasy novel: a crust of bread, a morsel of cheese, two hard boiled eggs tucked in my magical leather pouch.  While Jake eats like the Quickie Stop is a grocery store: a sleeve of Nutter Butters here, a canister of Pringles there.  This used to make me crazy!  ”Think of the chemicals!” I’d scream.  ”Think of the preservatives! Think of what you’re doing to your seed!”  He’d look at me quizically and shove another Almond Joy into his mouth.

Granted, he is the rare human who can eat a lot of Nutter Butters and Ben & Jerrys and Bojangles drive-through and not gain an ounce; he’d probably actually lose weight doing this. This is because as a fencing contractor, a most labor intensive profession (which he adores), he burns thousands, perhaps millions of calories a day.  It’s a struggle for him to keep weight on.

But after he left our home a month ago, he also left behind a veritable Costco of chemical-laden victuals:  hydrogenated peanut butter, Pringles, Cheez-Its, more hydrogenated peanut butter, Walmart’s Great Value “Mountain Mix” (yeah! like it was packaged on a mountain! as if!), and I knew that if I kept this stuff around, he’d resume eating it the day he returned and it would still be as fresh and chemically wholesome as the day he left. Only by the time he gets back, June will be old enough to notice each and every Nutter Butter that goes down daddy’s gullet.

So because I care about my husband and child so very much, I tossed it.  All of it.  Every last bit of it.  The recipients of the ADHD primer were the chickens. Here, my adorable little bird brains feast on the last of the Cheez-Its.

Good riddance.

As part of an amazing community-wide effort to help our family during Jake’s deployment, four young cadets from the storied military college here in town, plus one other young man who is a whizz with heavy equipment, came over yesterday to help me move the Hen Hut.   The Hen Hut is one of Jake’s finer, more insane construction creations.  Moving it is no easy feat because as you can see from this picture above it resembles a Winnebago for the Beverly Hillbillies (can’t you see Pa cruising on I-95 in this thing?).  The Hen Hut is surrounded by a portable electric fence that is staked into the ground.  The fence must be picked up and re-staked around where ever the Hen Hut is moved.

To move the Hen Hut requires the use of our commercial lawn mower that is backed up onto a hitch.  If you want to buy the Hen Hut, I’ll sell it to you for $550,000.

The cadets came over in their camo uniforms.  It was quite a sight watching these five young guys move quickly about the yard.  I thought, Wow, this would make a great picture for the blog.  Alas, I didn’t have my camera. And I was too nervous to ask lest they think I was some lonely, uncomfortably forward crazy lady who puts random pictures of things on the Internet.

The whole operation took about ten minutes. Which made me feel a little bad because they had come all this way in their camoflauge and jaunty chapeaux and I didn’t have more “man chores” for them. So they graciously helped me stack some firewood near the outdoor wood furnace just in case there’s a few more 30 degrees nights in the coming weeks. And that was it.

As people age, there’s a tendency to issue phrases along the lines of, “Young people today! Always on Internet playing video games! It’s a damn shame!”  Yet here are five young dudes who volunteered to come over on their one day off  to help move a chicken palace, a poultry monstrosity.   They weren’t conscripted.  No money exchanged hands.  I don’t particularly know them.  They don’t know me.   It’s a testament to the generosity of strangers….or their overwhelming desire to flee their school-slash-prison for a few hours.    Whatever the impetus, next time I’m going to try to have a few more jobs lined up so they feel like they’re really being taken advantage of not wasting their time.

And hopefully next time there will be pictures.  Thank you, guys!  Thank you Jim and Linda for organizing!

Much of my marriage to Jake — a.k.a. my lovable Choremaster 5000 — has been defined by manual labor, so it’s fitting our last Sunday together was spent clipping chicken wings. It’s the end of an era.  And the dawn of a new one (?).

It’s necessary to snip wings to prevent birds from flying over enclosures.

Snipping isn’t painful for the birds. They act as if it’s no more harmful than clipping fingernails.

But I hate doing it because it’s like declawing a cat or dog — I feel like I’m denying their creaturely nature.  Then again, I’d rather keep them alive and safe than free and dead at the hands of a raccoon.

After a three and a half month hiatus, the hens are back to laying. Yesterday I collected a hat full, plus one absurdly small specimen I find extremely puzzling.

Who laid this little guy? (And sorry about the band-aid. I cut my finger shoveling compost yesterday.)

After much deliberation, Jake and I decided to off-load our thirty new chicks to our neighbors.

I decided that trying to raise a bunch of chickens and a six month old baby by myself  while my husband is deployed for a year and a half in Afghanistan is too much work.

I can’t handle it.

Is that bad?

If June could walk, I could do it.  If she could crawl, I could do it. But trying to collect more than 30 eggs a day, and washing, storing and selling all those eggs — not to mention the work that goes into cleaning the coop, feeding the chickens, carrying the bags of feed down to the coop, and pulling the coop around the yard with the lawn mower and keeping the coop surrounded by a portable electric fence — is an incredible amount of work for a single parent — a somewhat feeble single parent, at that — of a small child.

We still have 20 or so adult layers who lay sporadically, but even those may prove to be too much. I feel terrible because as much aggravation as the chickens bring me — down with egg eaters!! Up with coq au vin!! — they are rewarding in their own sick and brutal way.  I kinda love the little buggers. And I don’t know how I’m going to get along without farm fresh eggs.

I fear my chicken rearing days may be coming to an end for now…