So Hurricane Sandy has come and gone. She brought many hours of wind so loud that it sounded like an ocean inside my house—ironic given how many people ended up with actual ocean in their homes from this storm. Just before four on Monday the power went out as I had anticipated it would.

Except for the awful wind noise outside, I was pretty cozy with the Jotul fired up for the first time this season. The wind blew rain down the chimney, rain penetrated the seal between chimney and roof and ran down the front of my fireplace, inside. All night long I listened to rainwater sizzle as it hit the hot stove pipe. Thankfully the blizzard warning my area was under never amounted to any snow, but from my house I can see snow in the Blue Ridge mountains to the west.

In the morning I went out to survey the damage. The well house lost quite a few more shingles from its roof, a trend begun with the derecho in June. Tree branches fell, screens flew out of windows, the garden was smashed.

I’d come home from my trip to the prettiest stand of snow peas I’d ever grown, just starting to form pods and full of flowers, underplanted with thriving arugula:

After Sandy:

And my dahlias are toast. Before the storm, that orange one below stood taller than my 5′8″ height.

After Sandy:

Compared to many other folks, I got off easy with this one and have no right to complain. Twenty-four hours without power was no big deal, and nothing but the garden suffered irreparable damage. It’s the end of the season, so it’s only a matter of days until frost blackens most of those plants anyway. But it is my favorite season in the garden, when moisture tends to be plentiful, heat and bugs relent, and most crops and flowers are on autopilot and keep surprising with unexpected last-minute gifts made all the more precious because I know that each harvest could be the last of the year.

Anyway, Sandy has cleared out and now it’s time to go pick up tree branches, fix the blackberry cages that were leveled, collect the well house shingles that are scattered about the yard, and see what I can salvage from the garden.

I hope that wherever you are you weathered well.

I got up this morning and, all inspired by the things I learned from Patricia Foreman at the Mother Earth News Fair, decided to turn my chickens loose in my garden. There’s not too much in it now other than flowers and some last-ditch attempts at peas, beans and greens, and I figured that if the chickens took a shining to any of those it’d be no big loss. What I’m really after is pest control.

I caught each bird in the coop and plopped them in the garden, which when closed up in a fairly predator-proof arrangement. I wasn’t too worried about hawks as the dahlias and zinnias were tall and thick enough to provide good cover. Plus, I have a farm dog who took it upon himself to add “vigilantly defends against threats from the sky” to his long list of qualifications.

I checked on the birds throughout the day while I did one of my least-favorite farm chores, mulching around my trees. I wanted to make sure Lilac, who until now had been confined in a dog crate in the coop because she showed murderous tendencies toward Cora, was playing nicely. Everyone was fine all day.

Around five tonight I realized I’d better figure out how to get the birds back in their coop. Now, seven of my nine birds had never ventured further than their little redneck chicken run, and I couldn’t expect to just open the garden door and have them know how to find home. And chasing—and most likely losing—birds that had no ability to figure out how to get to bed before dark induced cringe-worth flashbacks to all the drama suffered with my guineas. I needed another plan.

So I did what any scrappy homesteader would do and looked around for something to repurpose for my needs. I found what I was looking for in a roll of  netting that’s usually used to protect bushes from browsing deer. It’s much finer, and therefore easier to handle, than the heavy-duty plastic deer fencing I used around the garden and to make the chicken run. Plus, in addition to an almost new roll, I even had some already used netting balled up in a corner of the garage. I’d stuffed it there after I’d found it in the wellhouse, where it served as a  death trap to what was by now a well-dessicated black snake. It’s been long enough that my memory of cutting that rotten snake out of the netting has faded, so I grabbed that piece as well.

A few clothespins later and I’d fashioned a corridor from the garden door into the chicken run. I opened the netting that serves as my garden door and within a second Cora and Calabrese strutted home.

The rest of the birds took a bit of convincing, with Iris and Lilac, who are used to freeranging (and begging for scratch feed) bringing up the rear.

But they too joined the flock in the run, and from there they jumped back in their house to gorge on chicken feed like they hadn’t just spent eight hours enjoying all the wild delicacies of a late-summer garden.

I’ve left left Lilac loose with the flock instead of returning her to her punitive crate. I hope that she decides to be a get-along gal, or she may need to find herself another home. It will be another nerve-wracking morning when I open the coop tomorrow, unsure of what I may find. Let’s hope it’s nine nonbleeding chickens.

In other chicken news, I put a timer on the coop light this morning to artificially extend the hens’ day, thus inducing them to continue to lay through the winter. When the length of daylight slips below about fourteen hours, most hens will stop laying. Last year I didn’t use a light, and Lilac and Iris took a break from laying during the darkest part of the year.

The jury is out on whether it’s “good” or “bad” to have hens lay throughout the winter, with some camps claiming that the hens need the winter to rest even though the original chickens lived near the equator, where daylight hours don’t expand and contract with the seasons they way they do in Virginia. Several variables factored in to my decision, the first being that last winter when my hens weren’t laying I was buying eggs from Joel Salatin’s operation, Polyface Farm. If he was doing something to keep his hens laying in winter, why wasn’t I? Somebody’s hen, somewhere, will have to work through the winter so it might as well be mine. Second, the cost of feed has risen to more than $15 per 50 lb. bag. With each hen eating about a quarter pound of feed a day (thus my experiment to have the chickens forage for a larger percent of their diet), it doesn’t make economic sense to not be getting something out of the bird. As much as I love my chickens, they are not freeloading pets. And even my house pets, a dog and a cat, work for their food in myriad ways. Finally, I got a late start with chicks this year and have six hens—two lavender orpingtons, two black copper marans, a barred olive egger, and a wheaten ameraucana, who have yet to begin laying. I don’t really want to wait until next spring to see the rainbow of eggs they’re expected to produce, so I hope that extra light in the winter will get them in to production before next spring. That light’s coming on in the coop starting at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow, so we’ll see what happens!

May you have pollinators in your flower garden, a smiling dog on your front porch, and beautiful early fall sunsets wherever you are. Enjoy your weekend!

Never ceases to inspire me.

Photos from late May, 2012.

Since three p.m. today:

I’ve jury-rigged an outdoor pen for my fifteen chickens, fighting to pound t-posts into rock-hard dry ground though I wanted to give up, and my reward was watching young birds safely explore the outdoors and find their way back into the coop at sundown.

I have a story told in cuneiform on my shoulder, written by the claws of a terrified young cockrel who sought shelter on my body when I tried to integrate him with a flock of larger birds.

I’ve cut my loses in the garden, accepted that a week without power and water plus half a month’s vacation neglect during a drought added to hundreds of marauding squash bugs equals a big fat zero for my garden. I ripped out three rows of pumpkins, eggplant, kale, chard, zucchini, beets, and radishes.

I ferried three heaping wheelbarrows full of my former garden to the compost pile, then came back and took my flamethrower to the insect-infested soil.

I dumped another wheelbarrow filled with fly-infested chicken manure on the compost pile. Green, brown, green, brown. I felt the heat rising as I wrenched the wheelbarrow end over end, green briars drawing blood on my legs.

I took six brushloads of hair out of my unkempt dog and learned that painful grooming is more easily tolerated when done by a pen full of young chickens. It’s like t.v. for dogs.

At nine p.m. I came inside to shower, and when I peeled off my sweated bikini top it left dirt outlines on my skin.

Two weeks ago I was in London wandering the Damien Hirst exhibit at the Tate Modern, appropriately grossed out by his maggoty cow head and formaldehyded farm animals. It makes me wonder: If that’s considered art, then what is it that I do?

Let’s pick back up with what’s kept me occupied every weekend for the past month:

I leveled the mulch and topsoil piles.

Just like with the azaleas, I am on a mission to clean up the extraneous piles and anything that gets in the way of easy mowing (all the trees I keep planting notwithstanding). The tarp-covered piles were just as attractive to snakes as they were to a hot dog on an 80+ degree March day. In fact, last fall I found a five-foot snakeskin in this mess.

But really it was the sight of the Katrina chic blue tarp on the latest satellite map shot of the farm that finally embarrassed me into action. Got to have this place looking good, even from the air!

Now, it’s much cleaner! I spread the extra mulch around trees and used the soil to fill in more low spots around the house.

Finally, I dug out the previous owner’s boulder collection and leveled “forsythia ridge.”

April 2009, the first day I saw the property

There was an old stepping stone path from the wellhouse to the big oak tree behind it. At one time I suspect the path traveled to a clothes line, but now it didn’t do much more than beat up the mower blade. My dad popped the stones out with the backhoe and we tipped them in the bucket. Turns out the “little” stone were actually huge. They had just been in place so long that grass had grown over them! They’re nice stones—and waiting in a pile in the woods to be called into service again.

With the boulder collection gone, we knocked down a high spot in this area to greatly improve the levelness of the ground. This ridge was left over from the previous owner’s forsythia installation, which was actually a couple of sad little bushes intermixed with honeysuckle and wild blackberries that were choking out a big old Rose of Sharon. I am not a forsythia fan, so we dug them out and now Rosie has room to breathe and there’s nothing blocking the pasture and mountain view.

Of all the work that I’ve done this spring, cleaning up this particular section has been the most rewarding. When I bought this property, this area—which is in direct view out the kitchen window—was full of junk, including a huge satellite dish stand, a couple of termite-infested rotten whiskey barrels full of dead plants, the remains of a giant stump that no one had bothered to remove, and—oh—a giant electrical pole. Then I added a satellite internet dish. The human junk along with the misplaced bushes and uneven ground pocked with huge rocks always made this little patch feel forsaken. It’s taken three years to remove all of the above and more. Finally having this small area stripped to clean dirt area makes me feel like I am erasing the abuse and neglect heaped upon this property by previous caretaker and replacing their story with mine.

And with all this newly bare dirt to cover, I am off to buy another 50 pound sack of grass seed!

It’s that time of year again, when writing blog posts about projects takes a back seat to the actual projects. Spring sprang in early March, more than a month ahead of schedule in Virginia, and with it came an onslaught of seasonal tasks that usually start ramping up in late April. So every nonoffice moment has been spent outdoors, primarily in pursuit of my spring goal, which is to tidy up the messes and impediments to mowing around the property. So in the past month I’ve:

Bushogged the front field.

This field hadn’t been cut in more than a year, and I was sick of the straggly grass and generous deer habitat uncomfortably close to the house. So much nicer now!

Seeded the worst bare patches with grass.

The worst part about mowing, which I otherwise enjoy, is going over bare patches. If it’s dry, the mower kick up so much dirt that I am blowing red boogers for days.

It took me six hours on a Saturday to seed all these spots, but if I can get grass to grow, mowing will be much more enjoyable.

Disappeared the dirt mountain behind the chicken coop.

This pile of dirt had been here since building the house. It was the soil excavated when the crawlspace was deepened. I was sick of looking at it and weedwacking around it, so with about six scoops of the tractor bucket the soil was gone and distributed around the fields, where I shoveled it into low spots. And I got a sweet new tractor parking spot out of the deal!

Got rid of the azalea pit.

This was where I had stored the big old azaleas removed from around the foundation of the house I tore down. But I’ve finally accepted that I don’t even like azaleas, and I was tired of mowing around this mess in the middle of the field. A few minutes of backhoe action and they’ve gone to a new home, a ditch out of sight in the woods.

Up next…the landscraping continues…

Our week of 80-degree days has me thinking, perhaps prematurely, of the garden. Part if me is raring to go, to poke seeds into soil and hope for the best, and the more self-preservative part of me is silently begging for another month of rest. I make half-hearted preparations, some lists, soon abandoned.

This winter hasn’t turned out how I planned, with big dreams and spreadsheets of goals and books read by the woodstove and inspiration filed away to use in warmer weather. I was looking forward to a winter of regeneration, but if anything, I am just happy to have survived what’s been a devolving spiral of doubt-tinged panic.

One would think that the longer daylight hours would bring hope—they have in year’s past. But instead it’s brought insomnia and this strange hot weather and mistimed growth is amplifying my worry. Between nightmares I lie awake and even the animals are upset—the hunt club hounds cry through the night, echoing the coyotes on the mountain. The guineas squack at three in the morning and the robin’s incessant songs sound desperately insane.

I wish I could fold the peach flowers back into their buds and slip the daffodil stalks back safe underground. I wish for more time to get my head into the gamespace required to run this place through the summer, and I wish for the ability to enjoy it all.

At the end of my driveway lives a wild beast:

I wouldn’t call this ornamental quince pretty, except maybe for a week or two each spring when it’s covered in coral blossoms. I’ve thought about chopping it down, but it’s big old shrubs like this that lend a sense of history to this farmstead. And I’d worked so hard two years ago to eradicate the honeysuckle vine that had overtaken the shrub. We had history.

(Above: Quince and honeysuckle in March 2009, before I bought the property.)

However, in our third spring of acquaintance, I wasn’t loving the looks of this monster and felt some pruning was in order. I wanted to thin out some of the older canes that had been flattened by the snow two years ago and yet still maintain the structure of the shrub and the height that conveyed its age.

Armed with a great article in the latest Fine Gardening (How to Prune the Unprunables, by Paul Cappiello), I unholstered my pruners and prepared to do battle.

And what a battle it was! This shrub is more than six feet tall, and dense with individual canes bearing inch-long spikes. If I ever need to guard a castle from marauding heathens, I’ll do it with quince beneath the windows. They’d beat a moat any day.

I had to basically climb into this medieval torture device to make some of my pruning cuts, and soon I was scratched and bleeding up to my elbows.

I had to lie down on the front porch to recover.

But eventually I thinned the shrub out by about half. It looks a lot more airy, and I am sure the postman will appreciate not having to scrape his truck against the bush each time he delivers the mail.

During cleanup I sure was missing the green tractor, which is on a winter rest cure at my father’s farm, where it’s receiving spa treatments and being coddled under roof out of the weather.

For a week after this job, broken-off thorn tips festered out of my thighs where they’d punctured through my jeans. But I have huge bunches of blooming quince branches in my house, and they sure are pretty!

But riddle me this: The blossoms that are opening inside are very pale pink or white, quite unlike the blossoms that opened dark pink outside. Does anyone know why this is?