Bonafide Farm

Kindling and a blue egg

January 20th, 2014 § 0

All that pottering in the garden yesterday was barely enough to keep me warm. To get the blood flowing I split some kindling, enough to get a few more wood stove fires going. I tore into a few rounds of of choke cherry cut this time last year when I cleared my wood line. It felt really good to split this beautiful red wood that I knew when it was still a living tree, festooned with honeysuckle and girded with wild brambles.

I was heavily supervised by the quality control team, which didn’t seem too perturbed when an errant piece of cherry clocked one of them in the head. That Griz (rooster, lower right) really keeps an eye on everything. He’s a personable rooster if I ever saw one—maybe because as an embryo he was rescued from a refrigerator and I held him in my hand within seconds of him kicking free of his eggshell?

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That makes me think of one of the most unexpectedly wonderful, and sometimes heartbreaking, aspects of this whole farm life. Whether it’s working to turn a living tree into fuel to heat my house or raising generations of homegrown chickens, it is beautiful to see cycles, and lifecycles, complete themselves under my watch.

I started stacking the kindling and this one, my English shadow, maneuvered himself right into portrait position and smiled for the camera with no direction from me. The Cora photobomb was similarly unscripted.

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Speaking of Cora, she’s another country heard from with yesterday’s egg collection. Along with two small green eggs, and one large brown Dahlia egg, I found a pointy blue egg that could only have come from Cora. It’s one of less than ten that she’s ever laid in her life, which makes each of her eggs worth probably $100 when you figure in the cost of feed. If I hadn’t felt this little dear die and resurrect under my fingers, if I hadn’t become intimately acquainted with every muscle and vein of her skinless head as I fought to keep infection and fly infestation at bay, she would have long been Craigslisted by now.

But Cora still here, and once in a blue moon she lays a pointy turquoise egg. To my appreciation and great delight.

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Chicken love scratch

October 4th, 2012 § 2

In the last couple of weeks Cora, the maimed hen, has taken a shining to me. I first noticed when I was servicing the food and water in the coop and she ran across the floor and jumped on the roost to get closer to me. Since then she would try to follow me everywhere in the coop, even out the door, and when she was outside in the run she’d throw herself at the fence if I was on the other side.

Tonight I had taken care of the birds and was standing in the coop watching them. It was dusk and they were quiet and starting to roost for the night. Then all of a sudden Cora flew off the top perch of the roost straight for my arm, which is where I’ve let her perch in the past. She misjudged her landing by a few inches and scrabbled at me with her claws. So now my left arm looks like I’ve been in a bear fight, but I have no doubt of my chicken’s affection. I guess a scratched and smarting arm is what I get for saving her life!

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