Farm News 04-27-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 64°

Weight: 208, no progress

Barn News

The black rabbit that escaped several weeks ago decided that freedom was just too much trouble. Monday morning he was waiting at the door to the rabbitry and was quite happy to be picked up and put back into his cage.

One of Jesse's geese hatched a gosling Sunday. Jesse stole her baby from her, hoping that she will begin laying again if she doesn't have a baby. He asked me to keep it in my brooder and I agreed, of course. We named it 'Bobby', figuring that could apply to either sex. Sexing an adult goose is difficult, and impossible with the young.

Bobby went to school on Wednesday and Thursday to meet the little kids. On Wednesday he was friendly, but by Thursday he was objecting to being held. Mainly, though, he was interested in picking the crumbs off the rug where the children sat in a circle.

Sally has a nest box full of fur and bunnies. They arrived Saturday and I'll wait a few days before I disturb them, but there are more than three in there, I think.

Bebe goose is sitting on a nest with about a dozen eggs. The eggs, however, are all duck eggs. It will be interesting to see how baby ducks respond to a mother who is gigantic and speaks a different language.

The peach trees are in peak bloom. Lovely pink clouds on the landscape.

Starting with Chickens

Dr. M. had some questions about starting with chickens. Here is my reply.

The eggs you buy in the store are produced by chickens who have about one square foot each. Chickens need about four square feet each to not look crowded. That's indoor space, not outdoor space. They need a house that can keep out the winter winds but still be well ventilated. They will also produce more if there is a light in the house that keeps adult chickens on a fourteen hour day. Baby chicks will grow rapidly on a twenty four hour day.

They need about the same amount of space outside that they have in their house. Their outdoor run can be your compost pre-processor, also. I put about four big round bales of cheap hay in our chicken yard each year and five chickens can reduce a bale to little pieces of leaf in about two months. The bales are the great big ones that can be moved only with a tractor. All the garbage goes into the chicken yard, also.

Inside, I use shredded paper for floor litter, spreading it 12" to 18" deep. Outside I use old hay, straw, garbage, grass clippings, leaves, and just about anything else organic I can find, and I try to keep the bedding 18" to 24" deep. Covered cat litter boxes make excellent nest boxes. A dozen chickens can use two or three nest boxes.

They need access to green grass at least once per week if you want eggs with nice orange, high carotene, yolks. You can give them the grass by trading eggs for lawn clippings, perhaps. Chickens generally love to eat Styrofoam. It doesn't seem to hurt them but I doubt if it provides much in the way of nutrients.

We are sold on the virtues of Golden Sex Links and Red Sex Links. Are those hot names? They're heavy brown-egg layers who will earn their keep for several years before their laying drops off. For us, the cheapest place to buy them is the weekly farmer's auction in Perry, but we usually end up buying one day chicks from the local feed store. (I recommend locally owned feed stores over Farmers' Co-op stores, Co-ops tend to serve commercial farms, not home flocks.)

Baby chicks are usually sold in groups of twenty five, either pullets, cockerels, or 'straight run', i.e. mixed sexes. I prefer to buy pullets. Hens do not need a rooster to lay, only to be laid. Some people say fertile eggs are more nutritious, but I don't think there is much data to support this. There does to be some data to support the notion that feeding hens seaweed helps reduce the cholesterol in the eggs.

Starting day old chicks is easy. Give them food and water. They will need baby chick grit (a pound will last for years). Sprinkle a tiny bit of food on the water to attract their attention, and you might have to dip their beaks in water to get them started drinking. Once one chick figures it out the rest will imitate it quickly. Hang a 150 watt light bulb in a reflector in one corner. Watch the chicks, if they are huddled together under the light they need more heat, if they are scattered around the outside edges they need less. Warm, happy chicks are quiet. Cold, unhappy chicks tell you about it loudly.

I say, "Chick, chick, chick," every time I give food or garbage to the chickens. They soon learn to come when called, which is very handy when they start finding ways to escape from their pen.

Music

One of my favorite stations, which I thought was gone, is just under another name. Camera Portocalie is now Radio Alternativ, www.radioalternativ.ro. There seems to be a lot of interesting music coming through Romania.

Save Your Children

Again, a horrible cult-like danger is threatening our children. It's called Emo and this is what a TV station in Utah had to say about it: http://www.abc4.com/content/community/events/default.aspx. If you wish a more precise definition of Emo then go to the Urban Dictionary: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=emo, where you will find many things, including an album of 445 photos of Emos. After looking at 150 you will probably start getting the idea.

Totally irresponsible people have created a guide to becoming Emo: http://www.wikihow.com/Be-Emo. Read it to see if your child is in danger.

Books

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

Golden only had one book published, and it spent a year on the New York Times best seller list. I've been wanting to read it for years and, after picking it up at the library book sale, have finally satisfied my desire to read it. I enjoyed it and found it hard to put down.

Farm News 04-20-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 52°

Weight: 205

Grandson

Jake Dashiell Lubin was born Thursday morning, my fourth grandson. He is, of course, good-looking and very smart.

Barn News

Shotgun has kitties! Four of them in a hay feeder in an empty stall. She looked like she would have fourteen instead of four, but her four are all big, strong, and healthy. One is red, another is pink. One is a calico and the fourth is gray.

The goose egg in the incubator is due to hatch today. Incubation is not exact, so it might not hatch for several days, and it might not hatch at all.

There are six-packs of Hyacinth Bean and tomato seeds sitting on top of the incubator where they will germinate more quickly with the bottom heat. Hyacinth Beans are a very fast growing vine with pretty purple flowers. The beans are a flattened sphere, black with a white strip on part of the edge. The vines need sun, moisture, and rich soil to do well.

Central Pump & Plumbing

Wednesday I went to Central Pump & Plumbing for an annual pump check. Normally, I wouldn't think of going into that place without a bunny to provide protection, but Suzette's most recent litter is too old and Sally's aren't born, yet. The CP&P know, though, that I was a man with trained attack bunnies and they didn't give me too much trouble.

The pump mechanic, a weird old geezer, had the audacity to suggest that my plan of putting my weight at the top of the page each week wouldn't work. I think it's working fine: millions (well, ten or eleven, maybe) readers now know they are doing better at controlling their weight than is the famous barnyard writer. He has promised to email to me his guaranteed method for losing weight. I can't weight to review it.

There was one improvement, the pump mechanic couldn't access my records on his laptop last year, and this year he did fine, remembering to have his nurse bring up the records before he walked into the examination room. It made him look real professional and I was proud of him.

Leaving France

Fifty years ago I was desperately trying to leave France. I had been growing crazier steadily over the previous few months, and it was becoming a serious problem. At that time, in the Army, going crazy was an offense that could lead to stockade time. Time spent in the stockade did not count against your enlistment time, so if you spent four months in the stockade you had to add four months to the date when you could get out.

I was due to get out in August and was trying to get an early release in order to start college for the summer session. Obtaining an early release involved filling out lots of forms. Fortunately, I had been a clerk/typist for the preceding two years and was proficient at filling out military forms. Once the first batch of forms were filled out they had to be approved, which they never were, so you then started on the forms for the appeal. By April I was on my second appeal. If that wasn't approved, I wouldn't be able to get out until after summer school had already started.

Ten thousand kinds of bullshit were blanketing France at that time. Sputnik, the first ever satellite, had fallen to the earth in January, setting the tone for the year. Sputnik, by the way, was a Soviet satellite, the US first managed that trick at the end of January. Egypt and Syria had united to form the United Arab Republic, which scared the hell out of France and the UK, because they were afraid that the Suez Canal might be closed again. The situation in Algeria was going straight to hell, with the Algerian rebels about to win independence from France, and the French Fourth Republic was collapsing. Some people were seriously wanting Charles De Gaulle to become the King of France and others were wanting a Marxist revolution.

I read On the Road by Kerouac and decided I had better things to do than rot in France. The first American soldiers had died in Viet Nam and I was afraid that war might heat up and cause the Army to extend our enlistments. Finally, I knew I was going crazy and I didn't want to be in the Army if it worsened. Three good reasons to submit a request for an early release.

One week before the deadline the early release request was approved. Whew. Next, I had to get out of there. I wanted to ship my car back to the US, but that would leave me without transportation. Finally, after many bi-lingual telephone conversations, I arranged to deliver my car to a shipping firm in Paris who would haul it to a port and put it on a ship bound for New York. The Army was going to fly me from Paris to New Jersey.

About five kilometers from the main gate of the post I came to the first road block, this one manned by local Gendarmes. After some shouting and hand-waving they passed me through, and that was the way it was all the way to Paris. There were French Army road blocks, police road blocks, and rioter road blocks. That was the first time I saw burning barricades in the streets. It was all exciting, but, dammit, I wanted to get to Paris and then out of France.

It was a very long drive that day, but finally, late in the evening, I reached Paris. There were sandbag machine gun emplacements on the street corners, and the Metropolitan Guard troopers were driving their blue vans on the sidewalks at high speeds. I holed up in a bar for the night.

The next morning I was able to deliver my car to the shipper and then deliver myself to Orly, the airport, after going through many, many roadblocks. That evening at Orly I got the final good news: all US flights were canceled. Shit. I tossed my duffel bag on the floor, tossed myself down beside it, and, like a good soldier, went to sleep. At about 3:00 am somebody shook me and said, “There is a flight to the US here, and there are a couple of empty seats.”

It was a nice, reliable old turboprop Air Force plane, and it was going to the Canary Islands before it went to New Jersey, but I was on it, and I was thinking that I might be able to retain some sanity, after all.

Books

I'm surprised. I didn't finish a book this week. The May issue of Scientific American arrived and I read that, but the two books I'm reading, one fiction and one non-fiction, are both somewhat slow going.

Farm News 04-13-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 36°

Weight: 208 lbs.

Barn News

Does Shotgun have kittens hidden somewhere? I think so. She wasn't waiting to walk to the barn with me yesterday or this morning, something she has been doing amost every day, even when there was fresh snow on the ground. For the past three weeks she has been looking like she had swallowed a cannonball, so I think she now has kittens hidden somewhere. They will open their eyes nine to fourteen days after they are born, so it would be good to find them before they are two weeks old. If they are handled a bit before they open their eyes they will socialize with humans much better. Perhaps some neighborhood girls will help look for the kittens.

When I used to stack bales of hay in the hayloft in preparation for winter, I liked to leave cat passages between some of the bales. Stacking hay is more fun if you create a cat maze in the stack, one that will be run in the dark as the cats seek out rodents that fail to look both ways before crossing a dark alley. Cats often hide their kittens in a deep, dark, dead end passage, safe from prying children and right next to the haystack supermarket. One year, when living on L.E.'s farm near Vinland, we almost filled the loft with bales of oat straw and lespedeza. The mice raised lots of babies in this nutritious environment, but never were able to increase in population. It was, basically, a cat mine that produced litter after litter of strong, healthy, half-wild kittens. The hay was fed to dairy cows and goats, and a small amount of fresh milk each day was used to bribe the kittens into tameness.

Wednesday I spotted a Bald Eagle. Most of them have gone north by now, but some of them still have chicks in the nest. Eagles lay their eggs early and as soon as the chicks can fly they usually go north.

The geese are back home. They had been at Jesse's place to mate with his ganders. Now they are all back home, along with Jesse's most obnoxious gander. The gander likes to chase ducks and, when penned up with the ducks, killed one of them, so Jesse sent him into exile at my place. I keep the ducks and geese in separate pens at night, so there isn't much of a problem here.

Jesse has gone to Florida with his classmates on the senior trip.

Warthog

Why do we consider warthogs ugly? Why do I say ducks are stupid? Warthogs are neither beautiful nor ugly, and ducks are neither stupid nor smart, they are just what they are, the results of millions of years' accumulations of minor adaptations to changes in their environments. Warthogs look like they do because their ancestors who looked like that were more successful in producing offspring than the ancestors who didn't look much like warthogs. Ducks act stupid because they were bred to produce eggs, not literature.

I enjoy calling one of my nieces Warthog, not because she looks like one, but because she is so pretty that calling her Warthog is ludicrous. Being a teenage girl and not yet certain of her beauty, she doesn't know whether to put her nose in the air and sniff or to run away and cry. She just had her 18^th birthday, so I imagine that the time is coming when she will laugh, realizing that being called Warthog is an inverted sort of compliment.

Last week I overheard someone say that he would like to be a teenager again, knowing what he knows now. Knowing what I know now is why I would hate being a teenager again.

The Ecstatic Umbrella

I think it was Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein, an atheistic right-wing kook science fiction writer, in which the central character makes a big spiritual production out of sharing water with people. There was a group living in KC who had read the book and adopted it as their official guidebook to things spiritual. Being more than a little off center, they frequently needed help in dealing with the rest of the world. They couldn't accept help, though, unless the person offering the help came to the apartment where they all lived in damp harmony and shared water with them. I was the only one at the Umbrella who could keep a straight face when talking to them, so I had to go help them when they were lost.

Seven or eight of them lived on the second floor of a building that should have been condemned. I would walk up the stairs, knock on the door, and then go through an interrogation through the closed door until they were assured that I was who I said I was, they person they had just called and asked to come over to help them with something. Once they were sure it was me, they would crack the door open just enough for me to slip through, then quickly shut it again, locking it with various bolts and chains. The security was necessary because if someone tried to rob them, they were prohibited by their vows of peace from resisting. There was nothing in the place worth more than 25¢, but, they were right, the neighborhood did contain some very stupid thieves.

The first time they called me I was able to help them with a very difficult question. When I finally made it through the door we all sat cross-legged on the floor in a circle like good little first-graders. The leader, who seemed to have that position because he had memorized the greatest number of passages from Stranger in a Strange Land, went to the kitchen and returned with a quart fruit jar half full of water. He lit a stick of incense, then took a sip of the water and passed it to the next person. Everyone was very quiet and spiritual while the jar of water slowly went around the circle. I dutifully took a sip along with the rest, glad that I had all my immunizations.

After the jar of water had gone all the way around the circle we all sat there for a while, silently grokking the ambiance. Then the leader spoke. “Can you find out for us if the city water has dangerous chemicals in it? We've been buying pure water, but it is expensive.”

Fortunately, I was able to immediately reassure them. I told them that, only a few days earlier, I had asked our consulting pharmacologist the same question, and he had assured me that if the water was left standing, uncovered, for at least twenty minutes, that any trace chemicals would disappear, and that being penetrated by pure vibes would clear the water of any impurities. “In South America,” I continued, “the medicine men take yohimbine, and then meditate in front of gourds full of Amazon river water, which becomes clear and clean after a few minutes.” I wasn't lying, I was helping. They were so full of shit that water-borne dysentery would have been curative.

Books

John Burdett

John Burdett, the author of the mysteries set in Bangkok (start with Bangkok 8), has an interesting essay at http://www.powells.com/fromtheauthor/burdett.html. Thanks, Dianne, for bringing it to my attention.

Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen is great, especially if you are having a gloomy day and need a boost. His books are full of round-heeled babes, bright kids, and weird good guys, all beset by environment trashing jerks. In this book, an old Bald Eagle lands in a tree, under which an environment trashing jerk is sitting. The eagle, being wise, shits on the jerk, providing the first of a series of events that bring the book to a satisfying close.

Farm News 04-06-08

Sunday Morning, after chores, 54°

Weight: 211 (grumble)

KU plays Memphis for the championship Monday evening!

Barn News

Jesse has put one of his ganders in my barn. It's a nice looking white bird with a foul disposition. After it killed one of Jesse's ducks he decided to put it in jail until he can sell it, jail being a stall in my barn. Unless ganders are hatched in an incubator and strongly imprinted with the idea that a human is mother, they can be very mean and hard to handle. This gander obviously thinks that humans are not mother and acts accordingly.

Jesse candled the eggs in the incubator and found that only one was developing. These were early eggs and we didn't expect them to all be fertile. We'll add more eggs soon and see how they develop. Jesse candles the eggs by going into a dark room and shining a flashlight through the egg. After ten days in the incubator you should be able to see a network of blood vessels inside the egg.

Dr. M. News!

Dr. M, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and US Army Captain, now has another accomplishment: she is a mother. Friday, after a great deal of effort, she produced Zachary, a fine looking boy. Congratulations to Dr. M. and Andrew (who was involved in some manner).

Garden

Jesse did the bulk of the tilling and, as usual, Paula did all of the planting. There are onions, peas, and potatoes planted. More news next week.

The Ecstatic Umbrella

Even though the phone company wouldn't allow us to have an entry called 'Homosexual Services' in the yellow pages, we still had a lot of people of alternative sexuality coming through the door and on the phone. We hired Scoop, a cute gay guy, and he moved into the house with us and started helping deal with the gay people. It had an added advantage in that Scoop didn't have the same preferences in entertainment as we did, so Scoop could keep the lights on and the phones answered while the hippies all went to a rock concert.

For Paula and me, the annual Jefferson Airplane concert was a required pilgrimage, and White Rabbit an important anthem. At the first Jefferson Airplane concert we attended the entire audience seemed to be well stoned. When Grace Slick came out on the stage the spotlight lit her, and an audience member stepped to the foot of the stage and held up his arm. Lying in his had was a syringe, filled with something. Grace looked down at it, smiled sweetly, and said, “Not right now, thank you.”

The Velvet Underground didn't come to KC, so for that we substituted the American Ballet Theatre. Those who didn't understand how the American Ballet Theatre fit into it had never seen Swan Lake while on acid. Great ballet immerses you in beauty, a pleasant experience without acid and a mind-blower with it.

I stayed home and minded the store the night Jimi Hendrix came to town. Someone had a good sized delivery van which we filled with hippies bound for the concert. Everyone except the driver took a hit or two of LSD before leaving and they were all taking off by the time they got to the concert hall. Hours later, the van returned. I opened the back double doors and a cloud of hippies gently floated out.

Paula and I had close to the front seats for the Iron Butterfly. Again, we had prepared chemically for the experience, and when they launched into In a Gadda Da Veda we also launched. Forty minutes later they were still In a Gadda Da Veda and we were in a distant place.

There was more going on than just getting high and listening to the music. The music was our political speech. Young people were being killed by cops and national guard troops, not for throwing bombs, but for carrying signs or walking on the streets. They were being executed for not wanting to kill in Viet Nam.

Books

The Snake Stone by Jason Goodwin

This is the second book in the Investigator Yashim series, set in Istanbul in the 1830's. This guy is a good writer, and one with an amazing vocabulary. For instance, do you know what it means to riddle a stove? It means that he shook the ashes down through the grate into the ash box, leaving the coals on top. This book sent me to the dictionary, and beyond, many times. It also sent me to online maps of Istanbul and surroundings. I didn't have to do the lookups to understand the book, the book just kept piquing my curiosity. So, I finally learned that the Fener district of Istanbul used to be the Phanar district, and is the source of the term Phanariot, referring to Greek families that had resided in Constantinople from before the Ottoman conquest.

Byzantium was a Greek city, conquered by the Romans and renamed Constantinople, and then conquered by the Turks and renamed Istanbul. Modern buildings stand on streets that were laid out 2,000 years earlier. The book brings all that history into focus. Goodwin studied Byzantine history at Cambridge University and wrote a history of the Ottoman Empire before he started writing fiction. I think The Janissary Tree, the first of the series, and The Snake Stone are well worth reading (especially if you like Istanbul, Kate).

Sam Chance by Benjamin Capps

This is a different kind of cowboy story. It is told as a biography of a Texas rancher, without gunfights except for a few skirmishes with Indians. It's an interesting book with a few lessons for us about the problems we face today. Also, it's in large print.

If we didn't have large print westerns in the libraries half the old men in this county would forget how to read.