Home and Garden

Chickens, a winter update

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winter chickens

A lot of people have been asking me how our chickens have been coping with the winter weather. To be honest, I had been a little worried about keeping them safe through the cold months. We’re not exactly Minnesota, but we do get snowy winters. Last year the snow didn’t seem to stop coming until April.

IMG_0144And as for this week … yes, it has been cold (see left). The current cold snap may be an outlier, but it’s still a serious threat to your health if you spend too long outside in it. I was half-inclined to make the chickens a little winter palace in the basement, but to be honest, they wouldn’t be that much better off inside.

The house we’re renting is, let’s say, insulation-ally challenged. The old half of the house has new windows, but cold floors. The new half has old, draughty windows and inefficient baseboard heaters. When it reached -5F last week, it was simply impossible to keep the ground floor heated. Both the cold AND the hot taps in the kitchen, as well as the pipes to dishwasher and washing machine, froze up. We rounded up every blanket in the house and kept ourselves warm with maple syrup old-fashioneds.

 

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That’ll do, hen.

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Egg One
Egg One

It’s been an exciting sort of week in the world of chickens around these parts.

First, we started getting eggs last weekend. I might have mentioned in our first chicken post that we weren’t exactly sure how old our hens were, but breath was baited, fingers were crossed, wood was touched, and, more practically, I purchased a couple of small plastic eggs from Amazon and set them in the nesting boxes, as if to say, “Look. You see that? That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

The days are getting shorter. My research suggested that hens need about 14 hours of daylight to lay, so I had also run a light into the coop and set a daily timer to come on at 4.30 every morning. (I’ve since relented a little and given them a little lie-in; it now comes on at 5.30 every morning. I’m not a monster.)

Whether any of the above helped, or whether it was just their time, our first small, brown, speckled egg appeared on the morning of Saturday 12th October, exactly six weeks after we first settled the chickens into their new home. The next day, one more, and the next day, two. That day I also found one of the hens crouching at the corner of the garden, and when I investigated, found it had created something with a soft shell.

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Aw, nuts.

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Arya with Walnuts
Arya with Walnuts

I like to tell people that growing up in England, and particularly in the Garden of England™ that is the Kent countryside, you naturally absorb, as if by osmosis, an understanding of the ways of nature. You find yourself in easy harmony with the plants, and the trees, and gardening and horticulture come as easily to you as walking, or talking. (But not walking AND talking together, let’s not fly too close to the sun, Icarus.)

It’s all bollocks, of course. My Nan loved to garden, my Mum loves to garden, I had a Big Book of British Trees (“Number 4: The Larch. The Larch.”), but other than that, the very few nuggets of natural lore that still rattle around my skull are things I remember from Scouts. (For example, did you know you can tell compass directions by looking at the moss growing on the side of a tree? I’m pretty sure it’s the north side, unless it isn’t.)

Moving back to the countryside after so long, we’re forced to cram a lot of greenery know-how into our increasingly osssified crania. For example, we have two large black walnut trees, laden each summer with green, perfumed globules, which, come the autumn, are released from their arboreal prison and sent careening into the ground. Or into a face.

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Black Walnuts
Husked and Unhusked Walnuts

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Garden Fall Wrapup

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Garden potatoes

It’s October, and the bulk of the vegetable garden is finished for the season. Of course, our herbs are still going strong on the deck, and we’re still pulling out ripened tomatoes, but the soil beds are now empty. For our first year, we didn’t do too badly. Here’s a recap.

Although last winter wasn’t particularly cold, it was really long – snow persisted through March, and this meant that nothing happened in the garden until early April, when I built the raised bed. Emily’s mom Diane had given us a gift certificate from White Flower Farm, so we ordered potatoes, leeks, zucchini, cucumber, garlic, shallots, and a selection of herbs. I also picked up some carrot seeds from the supermarket. The farm sent us plants when they were ready, so from early April I planted each set of vegetables as they arrived.

The garlic and shallots were apparently doing very well, until we returned from our three-week trip to the UK and found them rotted. Our theory is that they got too wet. I do want to try again with both of these, since we use them all the time in cooking. Garlic can certainly be planted in fall for an earlier harvest, so I’ll get the raised bed ready to plant again probably around late October. We picked up a few bulbs of hardneck garlic some weekends back from the Cold Spring farmers’ market; I’ll try diverting these cloves from the kitchen table to the garden bed in a few weeks. (What’s funny is, some of the “failed” garlic I abandoned in June is now re-sprouting there. I don’t know if it will yield anything, though.)

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Arya’s Kitchen Chair

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IMG_2248 - Version 2Like most dogs, especially rescues*, Arya likes to be around us. A lot. Usually that’s A-OK because look at that face. Look at it!

But… doggie in the kitchen with heavy pots, hot pans and poisonous ingredients (for pups. I don’t cook with arsenic…much) is a recipe for trouble. Oh dear, cooking blog humor.

Luckily, little miss crazy eyes has become obsessed with a counter stool we bought at Ikea a while back. Occasionally we’ll have people over and they’ll think, “Hey, that’s a nice chair. Maybe I’ll sit in it so I can chat with Emily and Matt while they cook”. Arya will then launch herself onto it first, so they awkwardly end up perched on a corner while she innocently tries to look like she’s been sitting there for hours. Or, even better, she’ll let them sit for a fraction of a second before she leaps on to their lap, requiring them to hold her or she’ll slide off their legs while they look on, mortified. Either way, she ends up with the chair. 

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