Why I’m not cut out to be a “real” farmer.

This morning, when I went out to feed my chickens, I discovered that something killed one of my leghorn hens. More accurately, it beheaded it. 

When I’ve gotten newly hatched chickens, I knew and expected that some wouldn’t make it. I was prepared for that and cried just a little when I found ones that didn’t survive. This is different, though. I raised these chickens since they hatched. And some stupid animal had to kill it for no good reason other than… well, animal instinct I guess. 

I hate nature. 

This is the first time I’ve lost a grown chicken and I think it’s fair to use the loaded term “hysterical” to describe my response. I cried until I threw up. Logically, I know that this kind of things happens on farms, but we worked so hard to reinforce the fencing and make sure nothing could get in. I don’t know how a predator got to them. I mean, I’ve literally checked all the fencing 20 times. I guess it’s going to have to be 21.

I don’t know what it was that could have gotten in there, but it would have gone in solely for the chickens and was small. We don’t leave feed out and it seemed to have pulled her out of the hen house, which has a very small opening. I’m surprised it got a leghorn, though. I also have bantams and jungle fowl, both small breeds that I would suppose to be easier targets.

I guess there’s no need to ruminate on this. Instead, I need to be mending fences. 

I can’t help but feel like this is my fault. 

Books by influential psychotherapists + roosters

This has little to do with my general small farm life/DIY theme, but I have to share, and then will cleverly segue seamlessly into talk of chickens, referencing yesterday’s post.

Last weekend, I went to the Hem of His Garment, one of my favorite thrift stores. (They have free bread, as much as you can take, plus a huge book section and great retro/vintage furniture and housewares. I also got my pristine vintage ’70s wedding dress there for $50. Definitely worth a trip if you’re near Swansboro, North Carolina.)  Anyhow, I picked up a few books, including Irvin Yalom‘s Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy. I read his textbook on existential psychotherapy in graduate school, which was a huge influence on my therapeutic approach and overall outlook on life. I never read his fiction.

Last night, I finally got around to looking at the book and saw a letter inside. As a used book hoarder collector, I love finding letters, cards, and hand-written inscriptions that give me clues about the book’s history. My former favorite was a copy of The Bridges of Madison County sent as a peace offering to an estranged and recently widowed sister. This one blew that out of the water, though.

 

I had to do a double-take when I saw that the letterhead was really Irvin Yalom’s. As you can see, it’s a letter to one of his former high school classmates, whom he had recently seen at a reunion. So. very. cool.

___________

Okay, I totally lied when I said the segue into chickens was going to be seamless, but this next part is remotely related to psychology.

Elvis. My rooster. The yard still isn’t dried up yet so I had to go through the fun of going in the big chicken barn this morning. Instead of wielding my PVC pipe, I thought going in unarmed might be a better approach because I didn’t want Elvis to go on the defensive automatically. Really, since he’s working off of pure instinct, he has no way of knowing whether I want to fight him or whether I’m holding the pipe for protection. His feelings are neither right nor wrong; they just are. (There. Chicken psychotherapy. And yes, chickens do have feelings. They’re capable of experiencing empathy.)

I took about five minutes of waving my hand and repeating “Chickens, out!” before they finally got the idea that I wasn’t going to feed them until they all left the barn. Elvis complied, without any aggression or feather ruffling. Chickens have a remarkable capability for learning. I’m going to work on more verbal commands with them and see what they’re capable of.

Roosters and Rain Suck

Well praise the Lord! Such lovely clouds! Oh wait, no, those are impending rain clouds. Clouds that foretell lots of rain, rain that will flood the yard and all the chicken pens.

Whomever it was that built our house thought it would be prudent to dig a ton of dirt out of the yard to make it lower. I just… I, I don’t understand. He didn’t need it for another project; he just stuck it in mounds elsewhere. I’m not going to spend unnecessary time grappling with his sordid logic, but I would like to meet him and shake my head at him in dismay because I’m really sick of wading through water up to my calves every time I go out to feed the chickens. Swamp wading was one of my favorite hobbies as a child. My dad and I would go waist deep in muck and take pictures of flowers and just enjoy some messy fun. Even as an adult, in Florida, I used to love to wander barefoot through the mangrove swamps as a respite from civilization, of which I’m not a big fan. But this is different.

I ended up having to hand feed all my chickens, with the exception of Roid, Mr. Jerkface bantam rooster. Roid got his name two days after hatching, as he went on a rampage and trampled the other chicks, as though he had ‘roid rage. He was kind of a sweet chick, despite being a little feisty.

Baby Roid, snugging up to me during a late winter storm.

Roid’s current hobby is trying to attack my hand. Luckily, he doesn’t have spurs yet, so really, all he can do is peck at my hand and fluff his feathers. And crow so loudly that you can hear him over a mile away. Not kidding. We were having a wholesome family afternoon of shelling beans at my father-in-law’s house a couple weeks ago and heard him, clear as day, quite literally over a mile from home. Moral of the story: Hand-feeding him today wasn’t exactly fun.

Present day Roid, screaming his head off because he can.

Feeding the “big chickens” in the flooded yard was an even more perilous adventure. We have ten 2-year-old chickens who live together: one gold lace hen, one silver lace hen, two leghorn hens, five gold comet hens, and a silver lace rooster, Elvis. I don’t have a picture of Elvis easily accessible, but he stands higher than my knee and will mess. you. up. I was free ranging the big chickens one afternoon not that long ago and had an encounter. Usually, we have  mutual understanding: I feed and water him and he leave me alone. But that day, he decided to fight with me, while I was barefoot, and that wasn’t exactly fun. I managed to fend him off with some general kicks in my general direction, but not without getting a few cuts on my leg. My saving grace that probably kept me from stitches is that we trim our roosters’ spurs. It’s a totally painless process and keeps them from inflicting serious injury because roosters are no joke. We might not be so vigilant about it, but with a little-too-brave 11-year-old, we want to err on the side of caution.

Elvis hasn’t messed with me in a while. For the past few rainy days, I’ve had to feed them in the 10’x10′ chicken barn and he’s been just fine. But today, as soon as I opened the door, dude was is fighting mode and din’t want to let me in. I grabbed a piece of PVC pipe just to push him back, but he wanted to fight with that, too, which more or less consisted of him fluffing his neck and crowing into the pipe and me. (Ooh, I’m scared.) Finally, I went into crazy chicken lady mode and had a talk with him. I’ll admit it: I cussed him out and told him to get outside, wade in the water for just a minute, and just let me do my thing. It worked. Still, that turned my 30 minute chicken chores into a solid hour of annoyance.

My sweet barred rocks make all the work worth it, though.

 

 

Paint it Green

Paint color for the house has been a big issue of debate around here. Rooster Man was set on red and although it wasn’t my first choice, I thought I could go with it. My first choice was green because that’s my color. (See also: Ikea Hell.) I’ve been notorious for having lime green everything, to the point where I’m often able to do an entire load of green laundry. We never touched on color psychology in graduate school, so go ahead and infer whatever you want about what my propensity for green says about my personality.

So I get to the point where I’m adjusted to red, and then Rooster Man sees the picture of my 2004 apartment and gets excited about the green. After showing him swatch after swatch of green paint and him rejecting every one, he finally decided agreed to go with my old colors.

Fortunately, I have a good memory and I remember spending months picking out Behr Carolina Parakeet and Bamboo Leaf.

My early 2000s paint: Winner winner chicken dinner

Even better, Home Depot still carries those colors. I’ve watched tons of online discussions of what people will get tired of and I figured if I haven’t lost my almost-frightening enthusiasm for Carolina Parakeet and Bamboo leaf after 11 years and what feels like four lifetimes, then it’s a good choice. I don’t know if lime green is trendy right now, but I do know that whenever I go to Lowe’s and look at paint, I move the little “customer favorite” flags over the lime paint, so there you have it: One small step toward pushing Pantone’s purple (orchid?) of the year out of office. I don’t know who made Pantone the “authority on color,” but that’s how they advertise themselves. Color doesn’t need an authority. Moreover, I’m scared that people feel as though they need a color authority.

I started my Paint it Green campaign with our mismatched set of well-worn dining room chairs. The look I’m going for is “weathered,” which is perfect, because my paint jobs keep getting rained on. They’re still a work in progress and are going to require some sanding, repainting (I’m using Krylon spray paint), and distressing until I come up with something I like.

The original chair’s twin.

Spray painted black. I would have almost been happy with it this way.

With a thin coating of neon green over the black.

With some of the lime sanded off. It’s still a work in progress.

 

Today in Chickens

One of the inordinately friendly and curious barred rock hens.

Barred rock in the “chicken jungle.” We don’t free range because of predators, but we try to make their habitat as large, green, and interesting as possible. This weekend, we’re getting some more fencing and adding about 6’x70′ to their space.

BB’s Amerucana (Easter Egg) rooster, Bruce.

Bruce is all about the laying mash.

 

 

We try to hand feed our young chickens as much as possible, which keeps the roosters (largely) non-aggressive.

Summer in Pictures

My DIY Manifesto

For a while, I had considered abandoning this blog because of our slow progress on the home renovations. The exterior paint job that we were going to have finished two months ago? We got as far as going to Lowe’s and picking out the shades we liked.

Golden Butter siding with Deep Space shutters.

We have a living room wall that’s half textured and has been that way since February.

Texturing is also a good way to get rid of Valspar #313043434345906 – 1B: Bile

I guess you could say that I got the home renovation version of “Facebook Syndrome,” that insidious disease where you compare yourself to others and hold yourself to a standard that’s unattainable. I look at other bloggers—for example, Young House Love, a blog I used to love and gave up on—and  I wonder how they manage to create magazine-perfect before-and-after shots within what seems like a matter of days, when neither blogger has a job outside the home.  I know in my world, when you have a lot of time off work, there’s less money and when you’re working a lot, you don’t have the time or energy to put up tile or texture walls. I have a feeling that’s how it works in most people’s worlds.

I’m sure that when you bring in a team of contractors, it’s easy to finish things quickly, but at our house, everything from sheet rock to electrical work to turning 2x4s into baseboards is DIY. Both Rooster Man and I grew up in houses where you didn’t call someone to fix something; you did it yourself. It wasn’t a matter of not being able to afford professionals, but that was just something our respective families considered superfluous. If you have the skills, do it yourself. We carried that same mentality into our home.

We have a similar philosophy when it comes to decorating and buying things for our house. Rooster Man and I share a love of antiques and heirlooms or, if it’s something we need, trying to make it ourselves. I can’t speak to why Rooster Man feels this way, but for me it, came through a process of horrible consumerism. I began to reflect on it a lot lately after reading a thread in the Get Off My Internets forums (one of my favorite sites. Yes, I’m a GOMIer).

When I was in my 20s, I was obsessed with Ikea and cute-but-meaningless junk from Ikea. I married young and wanted a “real home” with matching everything and I wanted it to happen right away. Then my divorce happened and my soon-to-be-ex and I had to split up all this stuff. At 24, I found it worthwhile to litigate over the discontinued yellow Ektorp, the two black Half Laks, and some dusty paper lamps.

Ikea Hell, 2004, Washington, DC

Most of my marital property went to storage and has been sitting in boxes since 2005. I went through a drastic overhaul somewhere along the line and let go of my emphasis on stuff. My anti-consumerist mentality intensified as I reached my 30s and pursued my passion of expanding mental health services to underserved rural areas. This took me to sub-Saharan Africa, as well as some extremely under-resourced areas of North Carolina. My privilege slapped me in the face and left a permanent mark. There was no need to fill my life with more things that amounted to nothing. If you were going to put my life in numbers, all the junk and shopping felt like a times zero. The 0 of consumerism multiplied by the 100 of a good day of counseling left me with a 0 when it was all said and done. It robbed me of perspective.

So with all this said, the question remains: Why do I want to redo my whole house, change every floor covering, paint every wall and make everything look shiny and nice? I live in a house that’s perfectly functional in every way. I have two answers to that: I like the art of decorating and DIYing. (Is DIY a verb now?)Plus, I want a nice permanent backdrop for my life.

I’m not here to advertise or to get picked to decorate the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Dream House. I just want to share snippets of our DIY journey and the little things we love.

Seriously, y’all.

This is an original General Lee, from the show, and it’s just sitting on a side street rusting and broken down.

Someday it will be mine. Oh, yes. We’ll have the best of times, especially on days like today. We’ll fly down country roads, outrunning the law, and tear into parking lots with the Dixie horn blaring.

Someday.

Outdoor Cosmetic Renovations: Planning Stages

I’m going to just say it: the first time I looked at Rooster Dude’s house from the outside, I was running through a Jeff Foxworthy checklist in my head: Old car parked on blocks? Yep. Broken appliances. Those, too. Add in chickens running around, and various junk that never made it off the porch and I thought the house was beyond all hope, at least from the outside. (The inside wasn’t bad at all, thank God.) I guess it’s a single country guy thing.

When this became my home, too, I started pushing for the de-cluttering. Now that we’re almost completely finished with that, we’ve started with the landscaping and planning some of the easier cosmetic fixes.

One of the best changes we made was adding a picket fence to the side of the house to cover up the air handler and DirecTV dish, which we’re yanking up soon since we don’t watch TV. My house design pet peeve is having entire walls with no windows or doors. I don’t get it; there’s nothing appealing about a blank wall. At some point before the year is up, we’re going to add two windows to that side of the house. We also planted climbing roses on the fence and (as you can barely see) framed it with dwarf Japanese maple trees, which should be about 12-14 feet tall once they’re done growing. Still, I think this side of the house, is going to need something else for visual interests, I was thinking a house star. As I was Googling it to find a picture, I realized, however, that there’s a name for these: barnstars.

Until I just looked for a picture of one, I thought they were just cool, rustic stars, but (run get your pearls to clutch), it turns out they have a history and some, in certain shapes and contexts, are relaxes to folk magic. For me, as a Catholic, that makes them a non-option. While this type of star may have no real meaning other than an old-fashioned builder’s mark, I just don’t want any type of symbolism on my house that doesn’t reflect my faith.

So onward in looking for outdoor decorations. I found something I got really pumped about: An Our Lady of the Roses Iron Cross, which can also be wall mounted.

 

I showed it to Roster Dude, Not a Catholic (a non-denominational, specifically), I got this look, that went on for long enough for me to take a picture:

“People are going to think our house is a church and ask to bury people in the back yard if we put that up. I also still don’t get the whole devotion to Mary thing.”

So my cross was out. Finally, after a bit of searching, Rooster Dude found some videos on making rustic signs. I think we can both agree that a modest sized sign with our last name and house number might be good way to break up some of the blank space.

Our other big cosmetic decision for the outside of the house is paint color, but we agreed on yellow and blue right away. It’s just traditional enough without being boring. Right now we have a tan and burgundy scheme, which both needs repainting and isn’t quite to our taste.

Thanks to Exterior Medics Home Improvement services for the inspiration.

Our current exterior paint scheme.

I think these few outdoor cosmetic changes are going to give us some good momentum for the big changes we’re making inside. Short term, we’re texturing the walls, repainting, getting rid of the popcorn ceiling, and shifting our black and white checkered hall tiles 90 degrees. Over the next year (or two, depending on finances), we’re going to double the size of the house by adding an upstairs, which will be nothing but a huge master suite and en-suite bath and an extra bedroom (possibly to be used a birthing room/nursery, should I be able to get pregnant). Downstairs, our current master bedroom is going to be merged with the current living room to add a library area and we’re adding on a new laundry room and expanding the kitchen.

Welcome to Our Flock

Hey, y’all! Welcome to Cluckin’ Along. I’ll start by saying that this blog was a long time in coming. I was an old school blogger, starting in the late ’90s, as a college student, but shut down shop after seven years once I realized I was one of those bloggers, you know, the over-sharing kind that make people cringe with second-hand embarrassment? Yeah. Regrets, regrets. Still, I miss blogging. Cluckin’ Along is going a family adventure and we hope to share a small part of our lives with you–from our chickens, to gardening, to the major renovations to our home that we’re starting soon. To give you some background on our family, we live in the rural South and have about 60 chickens, four cats, and about an acre of property, but plan on buying three more acres so we can expand our farm to include horses and alpacas.

 

 

I’m Henface. By day, I’m a therapist in private practice as well as a legal writer and doctoral student in public administration. My love of birds started when I was about 13 and found a sparrow that had fallen out of his nest. I nursed him back to heath and have been a bird person since. I’ve always liked chickens, but have only gotten into serious chicken raising since meeting Mr. Rooster.

 

Exhibit A: Yep, that’s me.

Aside from chickens, I love to cook, having spent a good amount of my childhood in grandparents’ family restaurant. I specialize in making things with lard and butter. Although I’ll let my family tell their own stories, I’ll give them brief introductions. Rooster Dude. He’s like a redneck MacGyver and can make some amazing things out of practically nothing. By day, he works QA in a factory and is a machinist, but is studying to become a substance abuse counselor.  He’s been raising chickens for about ten years.

 

Exhibit B: Rock that scarf, dude.

Last, but most certainly least, this is BB. She’s made of awesome (as you’ll see from her videos) and wants to be a veterinarian and writer.

Exhibit C: BB with her aunt’s day-old lamb.

So that’s us. I hope you all stick around.  Tomorrow, we’ll be posting some videos of our flock, including our bitty chicks.