Jake in Iraq in 2005

My husband, a captain in the army reserves, is leaving to go, as he says, “blow stuff up” somewhere in the south.

His unit gets to spend four days launching missiles at tanks, firing semiautomatic weapons of every description and tossing grenades like a game of hot potato. Sounds like every dude’s dream weekend.

Every time he goes away on these quickie weekend deployments, I can’t help but wonder when — not if — he’s going to get called up again. We generally refrain from discussing this subject unless we have to, but it’s always looming, however faintly, overhead.   He’s already served a year and a half in Iraq, and he deployed for six months a year and a half ago to head a basic training unit at a base in Kentucky. I can’t help but wonder if it’s only a matter of time before his ticket gets punched for Afghanistan.

Jake’s commitment to the army used to trouble me because I couldn’t quite square up how it was conducive to raising a family.  But I’ve since had to accept that marriage — or love, for that matter — isn’t necessarily convenient.   You take the good with the bad and the inconvenient.

In the meantime, I’ll keep my fingers crossed he doesn’t have to go anywhere too soon….especially since we have a baby on the way.  But if he has to go, he has to go. I’m resigned to my fate as — and it still shocks me to say this — an army wife.

Though being an army wife does have it’s privileges:   I once got to shoot a semiautomatic AR-15 at a Barbie doll.  Disintegrated it.

A dill head

I know, I know. It’s a little premature to be posting about this mid-summer canning staple, but it’s never too early to start strategizing  about how to go about it.

It’s been my experience as a canner that the tastiest dilly beans use fresh dill heads – the top of the dill plant after it’s gone to seed – because the flavor of the herb is that much more more pronounced and concentrated, even sharp, than tamer dill sprigs.

Unfortunately, most people don’t have access to dill heads unless they grow the herb themselves, which is why most recipes calls for dill sprigs.

The problem is that dill is a cool weather plant. It’s usually planted in April and peters out by mid- to late-June. Beans, meanwhile, adore heat. They’re planted in mid-May (after all danger of frost has passed) and harvested sometime around mid-July.

So the dill misses the beans and the beans miss the dill.

There is a way around this canning kerfuffle, according to my friends and master dilly bean makers Brendan Perry and Susan Guida, farmers at Stone House Farm in VA.  They recommend planting the herb and beans simultaneously in mid-May.  This way, the herb will be ready to go to seed right about the time the beans are harvested mid-July. If you don’t have a garden, bring home several potted dill plants from the nursery and let them go to seed in their pots.

Hello, delicious dilly beans.

I should point out that dill does tend to grow better when planted in the cooler month of April. But for the purpose of making dilly beans, a May planting is fine. If you want, stagger plantings at two-week intervals beginning in April to May, so you have fresh dill all season long.

And really, is there such a thing as too much dill?

Expect a killer dilly bean recipe from me sometime this spring.

This is where the chickens have called home since January (the mobile Hen Hut turned out to be way too cold to properly house them over the winter so we moved them to the coop/barn.)  I like to keep a clean, sparse coop. Here, you’ll notice the stacked laying boxes, a hanging feeder and their makeshift wooden roost. The white bucket is full of poop. The floor is covered with fresh cedar chips.

If you’ve ever spent any time in a chicken coop, you’ll notice that some coops have a very strong ammonia smell. This is not healthy for the birds. It could even be toxic. It means that their poop is off-gassing; there’s nothing to absorb the noxious fumes of the turd build-up, which could make the birds sick.  This is why it’s essential to layer wood chips or some other source of carbon to facilitate the breakdown of the poop, which also absorbs the chemical smell. And wood chips mixed with droppings are really, really good for a garden.

A 2-for-1 chore: Cleaning the coop AND collecting compost for the garden

Chicken droppings are among the best forms of compost there is; vegetables need nitrogen to grow, and chicken scat is positively loaded with it. In fact, chicken poop is SO nitrogen-heavy, it can actually burn the plants if the poop isn’t given a chance to thoroughly dry out first.  To be honest, I’m not sure the chicken scat I collected was thoroughly dried, but I took my chances anyway. (That’s the one thing I’ve learned about gardening: You can read all the books you want, and listen to all the advice in the world, but at the end of the day, you gotta go with your instincts and work with what you have when you have it!)

Next, I turned my gardeners loose on the raised beds. Chickens love, LOVE, LOVE to kick and scratch in dirt looking for all sorts of yummy larvae that have bedded down for the winter. Not only does this action aerate the soil — nature’s way of tilling — but the chickens rid the beds of beetle eggs and other nasties that might otherwise invade vegetable plants.

(FYI, the protein from bugs are what makes farm-fresh eggs taste so good and give the yolks that deep golden hue. Factory farm birds, on the other hand, don’t get to eat their natural diet, which is why their eggs taste so bland and watery and the yolks are the color of margarine.)

While the birds went to town on the beds, I dug up in another bed 6 fat parsnips and 3 huge turnips I planted LAST FALL, which we roasted for dinner last night. Mmmmm.

Each bird claims her own bed.

After the chickens had their fill, I then tilled in a few shovelfuls of my scat compost to each raised bed.  I tried not to add too much just in case some of the poop was still too fresh.

I’m going to give the soil a few days to rest, then I’ll plant my spring garden:  Sugar snap peas, snow peas, kale, spinach, leeks, turnips, radishes and onions.

I can’t believe it’s garden time already. Hooray!

Allow me to set the scene. I was waiting online at the self checkout stations. I was at the head of the line. I positioned myself between two of the stations, figuring whichever one opened up first was the one I would use.  I have long used this system not only because there is no “line system” at Walmart, but I find this strategy most efficient; you and the people behind you never get stuck behind the poor schlub who takes 20 minutes checking out  four items because he’s too clueless to find the bar code on the back of a can of Tang.

Several people had lined up behind me. Suddenly, some redneck lady marched up to the front of one of the stations I was commandeering.

“Excuse me,” I said. “The line is back here.”

“What line? I don’t see a line.”

“You see all these people behind me in a string? That’s ‘a line.’”

“Well, then  line up behind one of the machines!” she yelled. “You can’t stand all the way back here” — indicating the four foot distance between me and the machines — “and call it being in line.”

“Really? Where am I supposed to stand?”

“You have to stand right behind one of the machines.”

“Why?” I asked. “Who says?”

“Because that’s not fair, that’s why. You have to pick one machine and stand behind it.”

I’m not normally combative. I actually hate confrontation of any sort.  But for some reason, it really chafed my nerves that her argument boiled down to some perceived notion of “fairness.”  Like this was just another example of the cruelty of the universe.  And I noticed she had a case of Dinty Moore chili in her cart.  Oh, it was on.

“Really? It’s not fair?  What makes you an authority on the fairness of Walmart line system?” I asked.

She stepped back toward me with her cart and looked me dead in the eye.

“Oh, I’m not even going to get into this with you,” she leveled in a thick southern drawl.

“You’re not?” My voice rose so that everyone around us could hear what was going on. “Because I’d love to get into a debate with you about this important issue. There’s so much to say about it.” I started to laugh and reflexively turned around to the guy behind me almost to guage whether he was hearing this. But he stared straight ahead like a deer caught in the headlights.  Wimp, I thought.

She backed down and went to stand on another line.

“Ma’am, is this okay with you?” She called facetiously over the other shoppers. “Is it okay with your highness if I stand on this line over here?”

“I don’t care where you stand, just don’t stand in front of me,” I hollered back.

I checked out my carrots and bok choy and exited the store, thinking how good it felt to wage a battle at Walmart. I have arrived!

Just because I haven’t been in the mood to eat eggs doesn’t mean I don’t want to rock with them.

She’s due sometime around July 4.  Jake has chores lined up for her already!

Yes, gentle readers, it’s come to this. I’m pushing middle age and I’m back to baby sitting. Funny how the more things change the more they stay the same. I’m hoping the money I earn will be enough to pay the phone bill, but I’ll settle for a tall Orange Julius at the mall.

I like to tell myself I’m in this situation because I’m a deep and tormented writer artist, frantically writing two books simultaneously and willing to suffer for my craft, but man, this blows.

Jake fills the last few bottles of his skunky brew

My husband, man of many talents and limitless energy, brews a lot of beer.  We usually have at least 2-3 carboys fermenting at any given time. Most of his home brew comes out awesome — like a chocolate stout he made awhile back — but others, like the wheat beer pictured here, come out rank.

The problem is that beer, like wine, is tempermental. It’s fussy. It needs the right amount of light and air and warmth. You can’t just throw ingredients in a jug and hope they ferment like they’re supposed to. And my husband, because he moves at a million miles per hour, sometimes inadvertently skips over the finer points of the process  and ends up treating brewing like making a pitcher of Crystal Light: Dump and stir.  Sometimes this imprecise strategy works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

As the designated bottling wench, my job was to fill all 40 to 50 bottles of this skunky wheat beer last night. I made the comment that the smell sort of reminded me of urine. Jake, who sat at the kitchen table capping each bottle, said, “Yeah, that’s kinda what I thought too. But I’m hoping the finishing fermentation in the bottles take care of that.”

It may or may not. We’ll have to wait a month to find out. We think the problem is that we allowed the beer to ferment in a jug set before a window. Beer likes a warm temperature and darkness.We think the sunlight did something to the yeast to make it funky.

We gave the beer a taste last night, and the flavor was surprisingly benign. It just smelled bad. I’m not sure how to divorce smell from taste when drinking beer, but Jake said he’s up to the challenge of quaffing all 50 bottles no matter what they smell like.  I don’t think he can bear wasting his precious brew, no matter how it bad it may turn out. His get-it-down strategy:  Dose each glass with lots and lots of orange and lemon.

Waste not, want not, I guess.  But I’m glad I’m pregnant.  He’ll have to drink this stuff on his own.

See the bird on the left with the black striations through his wattle? That’s Adolph. One of two evil roosters in our flock of 29 (we have four roosters total, two of which are quite passive).  Adolph attacked me the other night with a viciousness I’d not encountered before.

I was exiting the coop, having collected that day’s clutch of eggs, when he flung himself at my legs with such ferocity that his claws actually punctured a tiny hole in the thick rubber muck boots I was wearing. It felt like I’d been bit by a dog.  Startled, I kicked at him. This didn’t deter him in the slightest because he lunged at me again, striking my legs with his long, sharp claws. So I kicked harder. On it went like this for three more highly tensed charges, and I found myself kicking at him as hard as I could — similar to the intensity of punting a football — because I honestly thought he was going to hurt me. I finally caught him good in the chest, which lifted him way off the ground and sent his body crashing into the feeder. It was quite dramatic. I never thought I’d do bodily harm to a chicken before. I never thought I’d have to do bodily harm to a chicken before. Adolph seemed dazed for a moment, which gave me just enough time to rush out of the coop and  lock the door behind me.

I found myself shaking on the way back up to the house.

That was two days ago. I was too afraid to perform my chicken duties yesterday so Jake did them for me. Today, I notice a bruise on the inside of my right ankle. If I hadn’t been wearing those muck boots, Adolph would have seriously messed up my legs. (I can’t imagine what this is going to be like in the warmer months.)

So….we’ve decided that if he attacks me one more time Adolph needs to go. I’m five months pregnant. I can’t be battling a savage rooster on a daily basis. Right? I’m sure some doctor somewhere would probably RECOMMEND AGAINST THAT. And Adolph isn’t even a year old yet. Which means he’s probably going to become increasingly aggressive as he ages. This does not bode well for my legs.

In the meantime, Jake has requested that I arm myself with a pitchfork before going down to the coop each morning.

I’ve come to terms with my ever expanding butt and thighs and tummy whilst pregnant, but what I cannot abide — and what I was unprepared for — was the appearance of leg fat.  I know, I know, I’m not supposed to whine about this superficial stuff because it’s all for the greater good, it’s all to support the growing  baby inside me, blah, blah, blah but ye gods, is it hard to look down and see an added wedge of beef extending from my groin to my knees.

I guess this means no shorts or mini skirts for me this summer. Only maternity capris. How glamorous.