Life on the Unfarm: an illustrated account

Beauty and Daisy enjoy a break in the rain and take a stroll through the garden. They may look innocent enough but it will only be a matter of time before they are terrorizing small plants or kicking mulch everywhere except for where we intend it to be. A garden with chickens is never without a little chaos.

Who rules the roost?

I think the term "owner" in relation to pets is outdated. I know that many animal lovers prefer the term "guardian" which I don't generally use, mostly because I am lazy: "guardian" has three syllables and "owner" only has two. But the main reason I no longer think "owner" is appropriate is because it seems to carry with it a sense of control over that which is owned. And as almost any pet owner can tell you, we are not the ones holding the cards. 

Maia, for instance, has decided of late that the living room carpet is the appropriate place to go to the bathroom, ensuring, perhaps, that Mighty Mouth, our industrial carpet cleaner (yes - we named him, it seemed appropriate after all the time we've spent together) earns his keep. Do we want Maia to pee in the living room? Of course not. Do we have much say in the matter? Of course not. In an effort to prevent any further affronts to our carpet we have now set up a system of gates blocking both living room entrances. The gates are low enough for everyone but Maia to get over so they have not proven much of an inconvenience (unless, of course, you happen to forget they are there and trip over them.)

The chickens have very little say with what goes on in the house (not that they don't try - they run into the kitchen any chance they get, looking for crumbs on the floor) but they do exert a fair amount of control over the garden. Contrary to what my mom thinks - that I am the one making all of the decisions when it comes to the garden, whether she likes them or not (a large honeysuckle vine is the current bone of contention between us) - the real rulers of the yard are the chickens. Mom wanted rhubarb - the chickens wanted it more. It is now a small, raggedy plant barely hanging on after merciless grazing courtesy of the ladies. I managed to clear enough space in my garden for a winter daphne plant but the chickens were convinced that I had hidden some delicious treat underneath it and scratched around the roots determined to find it. Needless to say I had not hidden anything underneath it but did that stop the ladies from digging my poor daphne out until it was too far gone to save? Yeah, right. And I was so looking forward to it blooming next spring. The chickens were also responsible for polishing off every grape within their reach last summer. I suspect the wild birds and squirrels finished off the rest. Total grape harvest: zip. 

I expect the ducks would go after the grapes too, but they are unable to climb the arbor the way the chickens can. That doesn't stop them from going after the blueberries, however. They are so fond of them that they eat every berry within two feet of the ground (the approximate limit to Maggie's reach.) They don't even wait for them to ripen. As soon as the berries appear the ducks are down there, plucking them off the branches.

And then there are the rabbits. The cute, fluffy, bouncy little bunnies. The chewing, scratching, biting little bunnies. If they aren't scratching up the carpet, or marking their territory by peeing on the floor (a practice I try very hard to break them of), they are chewing. Their cage, their litter boxes, the deck, the door frame, the wicker baskets I store my fabric in, paper bags, books, and the cute wooden desk I picked up at a garage sale. Oh, and cords. Rabbits love cords. Telephone cords, vacuum cords, iron cords, lamp cords, and cable cords. The only weapons I have in the war with the rabbits are gates to block off furniture I don't want them chewing and a squirt bottle of water that is sometimes effective, sometimes not. Rabbits are stubborn creatures.

So, "owner." I think not. We are hardly in control of the situation. The main purpose we humans serve seems to be damage control. We roll out Mighty Mouth whenever Maia decides to pee in the living room, and follow the chickens around the yard, replanting what they dig out. We hide cords and fence off enticing furniture. Other than that, we have very little say in the matter; around here, the animals rule the roost.

A series of unfortunate events

Where to start? To begin with, I stink. I reek, actually. I was working in my garden earlier - which, by the way, I am beginning to doubt I will ever finish - digging a hole for the rosemary plant that has been languishing on the deck ever since I bought it approximately thirty seven weeks ago. (I may be exaggerating a bit - perhaps it was only thirty three weeks ago.) At any rate, as I was widening the sides of the hole I noticed a smallish rock lodged in the dirt near where I was digging. Not wanting to hit it with my shovel, I reached in to take it out. It was upon touching the rock that I came to the sudden - and rather unpleasant - realization that what I had thought was a rock was actually an egg. Or, to be more specific a rotten egg. It must have been one of Minna's eggs - in addition to the eggs that she's laid in various places all over the yard, I've also buried some of them (they are fertilized so we don't eat them.) I came to the conclusion that this was a rotten egg and not a rock when touching the object caused it to explode a foul smelling fluid all over me. My previous experience with rocks tells me that they neither explode nor contain fluid, that's how I knew it was an egg. And this was no normal rotten egg, this was a rotten rotten egg. Needless to say, having rotten egg fluid sprayed all over you is a less than agreeable situation.

Speaking of disagreeable situations, I experienced another one a couple weeks ago when I was awakened at two in the morning by an entirely disheartening sound when Maia's poor choice in diet finally caught up to her. A day or two prior to my early morning awakening, Maia and the other two dogs, Kita and Buddy, had managed to rip their way into a bag of chicken food and gorge themselves on a diet better suited to feathered creatures who lay eggs, both of which the dogs are not. So I was disappointed but not surprised when I discovered, at 2am, that Maia had had explosive diarrhea all over the wall and carpet in my bedroom. After spending a good twenty minutes vacuuming up Maia's mess in my bedroom, we then spent a week cleaning up after Maia all over the dog run. While Kita and Buddy showed no ill effects from their change in diet, Maia developed Clostridium and had to be put on antibiotics for a week. She has, however, finally recovered and we are now both able to sleep through the night uninterrupted.

And, finally, the grape arbor. The grape arbor is, at long last, finished. And, as is usually the case, it took three times longer than I figured it would, and was ten times more difficult. For the last several weeks I have spent every spare minute I could out in my garden, trying to keep everything (except, of course, the weeds) alive and salvage what I could of my grapes. What I thought would be a fairly straight forward project was immensely more difficult than I had planned. Why I seem incapable of learning from my past experiences (or, some would say, mistakes) I am not sure, but it seems to be a chronic problem with me. Here is a summary of what I had planned on happening, and what actually transpired.

Plan: Dig five holes, put in 4x4s, add cement. Reality: Move ten plants out of the way, work around three other large (read: immovable) bushes. Get out post hole digger and begin digging a hole only to discover that the arms of the tool run into the old grape arbor. Recruit brother to dig holes while I push the old arbor out of the way and hold back approximately 23 grape vines. Dig the two holes on the southern side, then start on the three northern holes only to discover that the arbor is leaning too far over for me to push it out of the way on my own. Search the less-than-organized garage for rope, then set up a system of three ropes tied around the arbor and fence to pull the arbor upright enough that it can be held out of the way of the arms of the tool. Finish digging holes, put in 4x4s, add cement. Add support beams. Find out I didn't buy enough 2x4s, then scrounge the aforementioned garage for enough wood to finish the support beams. Dismantle old arbor. Discover that in dismantling the old arbor the grape vines have collapsed into one another in a giant tangled mess of vines. Lose half of my grape vines - and thus, half of my grape harvest - in the process of untangling the plants, but finally finish the project, three weeks behind schedule.

Here's hoping the next few weeks are blissfully uneventful. I'll take boring over rotten eggs and diarrhea any day.

Of coyotes and weeds and grapes, oh my

Summer has finally - it seems - arrived. We have had sun and blue skies for the last few days so that we can, at long last, open the windows without first putting on coats. The peacock was calling a few days ago and at the moment the bunny room window is open and I can hear the coyotes calling over in the forest. I love to hear the peacock and don't even mind the coyotes, really, as long as they aren't eating my cats. Or anyone else's, for that matter. They generally aren't a problem during the day - or even during the night, as long as the cats are brought in. And the fact that we have three big dogs patrolling the yard probably tends to discourage the coyotes from coming too close at any time, day or night.

At any rate - coyotes or no - there is other news on the Unfarm. The garden, which is usually the picture of health, is suffering. The roses have developed powdery mildew and black spot, my honeysuckle is looking less than perfect, my anemone is falling over, the columbine are half their usual size, and my hostas are in the worst shape I've ever seen them in, with wilted, beaten up leaves. I can only hope that this strange affliction of my garden is due to the extremely cold, wet spring we've had, and that there will be no lasting damage. Sure, I could replace them, but any of the plants dying off sends me into a fit of anxiety that eats at me for days. So I am doing the only thing I know to do, and running around the yard frantically spraying the plants with compost tea and watering them with organic fertilizer when they seem to need it.

The only thing not suffering in the yard is the weeds. Some kind of plantain weed has sprouted up all over my garden, wild daisies are appearing in every corner of the yard - although I let them stay because I can't bear to take out anything with flowers, the thistles are three feet high, and the horseradish is getting so big that I think next week I will be able to build a tree house in them. On the plus side, I have always wanted a tree house - I just never thought I would build it in a stand of horseradish.

On top of all the other problems in the garden, the grape arbor is falling down. I thought I had built a fairly sturdy support for the four grape vines that surround the rabbit run, but apparently I underestimated the exuberance of the grapes. They've grown so much and so fast that the once upright arbor is now leaning at a 45 degree angle. I think the only reason it hasn't already fallen down is that the rabbit run is in the way. This failure of the grape arbor means that I will have to now perform the worrisome procedure of building a new, stronger (read 4x4's and 80 pound bags of cement) arbor around the original structure, and then carefully dismantle the old structure while simultaneously moving the grapes from the original support to the new arbor. All this is made even more complicated by the fact that each grape plant has approximately ten thousand new vines sprouting from each of it's branches. It will not be a pleasant experience, but I am looking forward to the day when the project is finished and I no longer have to worry about thirty tons of grape plants coming crashing down into my garden. So that is the goal for this weekend, and I have been doing the painstaking prep work of digging out all of the plants that are in the way and moving them to an area out of the way, where they will - I hope and pray - be safe until I can put them back in the ground later this weekend. And if I am to have any hope of completing this massive project by the end of the weekend, I should probably get off the computer and go to bed so I'm not waking up at noon... wish me luck.