An Egg In the Hat Is Worth Two In The Nest

So with Red the Rhode Island Red chicken gone to the winery to live and doing OK there, I have had a chance to analyze how well Ellen and Portia are laying right now, and the news isn't good.  They are averaging only 2 - 3 eggs a week, between the two of them!

I have also been chicken-sitting for the couple across the way, and have found their 2-year-old hens are doing about the same, with the exception of their Americauna, who seems to lay almost every day. But since they started with more hens, at least they still have enough eggs to keep themselves in omelettes, if they wish.

For any chicken neophytes out there listening, is this the take-home lesson from my mistakes:  Add a couple of new hens to your flock every other year. Waiting until every third year will leave you virtually eggless during that third summer, when your old girls are barely laying but your new girls are still too young to lay. Oh, sure there are exceptions to the rule, but the fact is, by most hens' third summer on this earth, they have slowed down on the egg production considerably.

And since I'm currently on a kick of having Egg In The Hat for lunch every day, eggs are pretty important.

Haven't had Egg In The Hat, you say?  Here's the recipe:

Take a piece of your favorite whole-wheat bread, and cut a hole in it, using a small-mouth lid jar, the top to a can of PAM, or something else about that size.

Take one teaspoon of butter and melt it in a frying pan (I use a small Lodge pan).

Once the butter is melted and the pan is hot, place the bread with the hole cut in it into the pan.  After a couple of minutes, crack the egg -- don't stir it -- just let it fall into the hole and cook until the egg is almost done.

Once its almost done, flip it to cook the other side and, if there's room, add your circle that you cut out of the bread and brown it, too.

Your egg is done when the yolk is solid and the bread is a lovely browned color.

Add a little ollalieberry jam to the circle once it's done and you have a perfect lunch and mini-dessert!

Watermelon and other stuff

Here's a great recipe for a summer night....a nice, ripe watermelon, balled or cubed, and splashed with  1/4 cup of good, white balsamic vinegar and mixed well.  That's it.  

A lot of people will add some fresh spinach, mint and basil with feta cheese to make a meal, but to me just the watermelon and vinegar is fine on its own. You don't need the oven, you don't need the stovetop, just the ingredients and a place to cut your watermelon up!

Amazing how good quality balsamic vinegar makes things taste sweeter and not more bitter. And speaking of bitter, it's with no small pang of buttersweetness that I go back to work, after a week off from the winery.  I got a lot done around the house, including adding some fireproof venting to the attic, painting the chicken mansion, picking berries (this is winding down now) and doing some office work.

Today I will be doing an off-site wine pouring on a train heading down the coast, which is stressful (because I've never done anything like this and want to do a good job) but also fun because, hey, wine on a train, right?

Wish me luck!

Swimmer

A Pacific Tree Frog.  Found in the toilet.  This morning.

For all the times I rescued frogs from our old swimming pool and they immediately peed on me, let's just say there may have been some accidental retribution this morning.

The only thing I can figure is that he got into either our well line or septic system somehow.

No worries, he has been washed off and safely re-homed near a neighbor's pond.  And in time, his stories of his time in the mythical, Great White Porcelain Pond will become the stuff of legend in the greater frog community.

Flinchy

One of the best things about working the land is that it gives you time to think.  Most of my chores around here do not involve any higher-level thinking activities, which leaves my brain free to ponder whatever it desires as I dig, churn, stir, walk or pick.

Something that occurred to me today is that there are a few things I'm "flinchy" about, meaning I flinch, emotionally, sometimes when thinking about them. Flinchy is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Lite ...  it's not traumatic enough that you can truly make the PTSD claim, but it's something that messed with your head nonetheless.

I have found, for instance, that I am flinchy about bosses, which may be why I love being my own boss as I work on our property.  I had a couple of truly terrible bosses in my past, and they've left me in the position of being at work sometimes and wondering when the other shoe is going to drop, and it's all going to go to hell.  

Petty tyrants left in charge of staffs of people will do a lot of similar things.  I've experienced all of them in my working life -- for brief periods -- before I (and in most cases my fellow co-workers) would inevitably make for the higher, saner ground of a new job.

There were Ridiculous Rules.  There were Reprimands for Things Beyond My Control.  There were Threats of Dismissal, Unrealistic Expectations, Useless Paperwork, and Morale-busting Decrees.

In my current job at the winery, I have no such issues.  The winery is, as the kids who work there like to say, a very "chill" place.  There are no demagogues, no bureaucrats, no politics, and no ridiculous decrees. The owner came from a corporate environment and seems to have figured out that if you give people what they need to do their jobs and give them encouragement, they will give you 120 percent and do it quite happily.  

But this does not stop me from occasionally worrying that I'm going to be called on the carpet for absolutely no reason other than the fact that it's a Tuesday and my boss hates Tuesdays.  Because I'm flinchy, you see.

I am also this way about friends.  I had a best friend dump me unceremoniously and suddenly about 20 years ago, and I carried the scars with me for a long time (perhaps even into present day).  Mainly, I sometimes manifest an uncertainly about making female friends, thinking they will, at some point, send me a letter telling me exactly what they think is right about their life and wrong with mine, and tell me they never want to speak to me again.

What happened with my ex-friend was a freak occurrence, having far more to do with her than me, and it never happened before or after that, with any friend. We've even since gotten back into contact and made some rudimentary stabs at re-friending each other, although there are walls up on my end that will probably not be completely surmountable (and maybe that's a good thing). Yet, even with friends I trust, I occasionally still find myself evaluating my behavior and asking myself if some decision I made about my work or personal life might render me unfit to be someone's friend.  

We all have some areas of life we are flinchy about, based on our past experiences.  Time on the homestead provides a wonderful opportunity to ponder these questions as one digs the pumpkin patch, churns a batch of soap, and picks the berries. 

For me, it also offers a literal point, standing on the physical terra firma, where I can take out my flinchy points, examine them, and remind myself they are in my past, and the ground beneath my feet is my present. As are the pumpkins, soap and berries in my hands.  They are real in a way the flinchy thoughts are not, and they ground me in physical reality, instead of the emotional traumas of the past.

When they say the land can heal you, that's no lie.

Time, transitions and tasks

I just realized I addressed a very similar topic in a previous post called "The Simple Life."  Forgive the repetition.  Obviously this is something on my mind a lot these days!

The other night I started reading a journal I kept during the junior and senior year that our sons were in high school.  It's been a very enlightening walk down memory lane, and coincides perfectly with the upcoming anniversary of my husband and I moving to this area and our sons going to college. 

Children leaving home is one of those events that you know is going to change your life, much the same as giving birth does.  And just like giving birth, what follows is a period of readjustment -- of schedules, lifestyles, and interests -- and one's general happiness depends on how well we transition.

It took a few years for me to make the transition, but I think it's safe to say now that I have successfully transitioned now and am no longer mourning the loss of my role as a hands-on Mom to a family, and no longer wondering what comes next. What comes next has been happening for some time now. In fact, I've noticed that my social calendar is more booked with work, dinner parties and events than it has been in probably 20 years.

But within that change, or any change we go through in life, for homesteaders the question can become one of integration.  For much as I learned how to integrate my homesteading activities with the kids' schedules when they were in school, I have now had to learn how to integrate them as a working, mostly-empty-nester.   

For me, it means I've had to learn to say "no" again. Frequently. Last Wednesday, for example, Big Ag and I were invited to a dinner party.  the same day, a family friend wanted to come up for a visit.  A group I'm active in scheduled a board meeting that night.  And a couple we like to socialize with came into town and wanted me to go wine tasting with them during the afternoon.

I said no to all of those lovely happenings except the dinner party, because there is only one of me and only so much time in a day.  And more than just having things that I also needed to do here, there were things I wanted to do here...things that I consider part of the good work and the good life we live.  And I wanted to be here doing those things more than I wanted to be doing any of the other things (although make no mistake, all of the aforementioned social activities would have been fun.)

So, for me, the biggest lesson I've learned is that if I want to keep growing my own food and doing all the other homesteading activities I enjoy doing, I have to give it priority scheduling, which means turning down other things.  Unless I want to be making soap at midnight, or canning at dawn...slogging through chores during times I'm sure to not enjoy doing them.  

We choose our friends.  We choose our work.  And we also get to choose how we spend our time.  But in choosing the homesteading lifestyle, sometimes we have to choose our own homemade soap over a day of wine tasting, or a morning spent watering and weeding over coffee in town with a friend.  

These may not be easy decisions, but if you value what comes out of your kitchen or your garden, they are necessary.  And they carry with them a peace, a mindfulness, and a tangible reward that is extremely satisfying.

Because saying "no" to one part of your life can often mean saying "yes" to another.

Peep Show

We came up with a new chicken run design that will allow us to keep a few more chickens than we had previously thought.  So after a lot of jotting down numbers, estimating lifespans and laying years,  Big Ag made a trip into town last Saturday to catch the local Farm Supply's shipment of just-hatched chicks.  It was their last shipment of the year! We got an Australorp, a Silver Wyandotte, and a New Hampshire Red.  They will join Ellen, Portia, Cleo and Chloe in a couple of months, once they are bigger.

In other news, Red, our Rhode Island Red (who had been so aggressive with Cleo and Chloe) has now gone to live at the winery with about 10 other adult hens.  She will no doubt get on better there, as there are no youngsters for her to torment.  

She was particularly good friends with Ellen, and already Ellen has been looking around for her friend, but hopefully in a day or two everyone will settle down, the three babies in the brooder, our two juvenile pullets and our old golden girls in the new chicken house and soon-to-be-built new chicken run.

Berries and Mastodons

This week I came down with a weird summer cold, which I caught from my other son when he came to visit last week.  Much more of a chest cold than a head cold, but the main symptom which laid me out for a couple of days was a total, aching fatigue -- the kind that puts you into bed for at least a day, and on the sofa for at least another one after that.

While I was convalescing, Big Ag took over all the crop watering and berry-picking, which proved an interesting test to our marriage.  For while I was grateful for all the help he provided (which he did in addition to his own farm chores) when he returned the first evening after berry- picking, I was mortified to find he'd picked at least a pound of unripe berries, which would now be useless for anything.

I wanted to shout at him and then just cry when I saw all those beautiful, unripe berries in that big basket.  But instead, I just quietly threw them in the compost when he wasn't looking and thanked him for standing out there and picking all my berries after an already long day of work. I didn't shout or cry, because it would have been unkind and undeserved.

In the end, the over-picking actually worked out well, since it gave me a couple of days to convalesce without having any berries ready to pick at all, since anything close to being ripe had already been picked off.  And by the time I went back down to our rows of olallieberries, raspberries and blackberries three days later, there was a decent enough harvest that the ones we threw out won't matter in the end.

But this does prove my theory once again that most men are well-suited for big picture, stalking-a-mastodon-off-in-the-distance kinds of tasks, and most women are better suited to fine detail work, such as berry-picking or something like embroidery.  I don't understand how he could not tell the difference between the ripe and unripe berries -- both by sight as well as by the feel of the berry itself when you grasp it between your thumb and forefinger. But then again, sometimes he doesn't understand why I can't visualize a big-picture plan he has as well as he can.

This is not an across-the-board assessment, of course.  There are some men quite gifted at fine-detail work, so please don't think my theory holds out in all instances.  I'm the first to tell you it doesn't.  But in general, I have found it to be true ... perhaps 75 percent of the time?

Now Big Ag has my cold and is simply working through it -- perhaps because his big-picture mind doesn't focus on the fine-detail aches and pains of his ailment as much as I did when I was sick, and he's therefore better suited to soldier on, despite his discomfort.

But it also proves out another theory -- that opposites attract for good reason.  And whether you're picking a life partner from the opposite sex or your own, finding someone with a different skill set than your own is wise for many, many reasons.  

Not the least of which are berry-picking and mastodon hunting.