Between Semesters

So…there hasn’t been much to report lately, kids. I finished finals and am in my week between old and new classes, but I’m working! The antisocial computer nerd chicken farmer is at the reception desk at TSTC. Go figure.

Hubby posted this image, which…well, all I have to say about it is I’m starting to think her pregnancy is a figment of our imagination. I’m waiting for Morpheus to step out and give me the red pill because the Agents have programmed my recent existence around this purportedly pregnant ewe, but have suddenly realized that they don’t know the code to make her give birth.

Ahem. Anyway, you can see how rounded her lower belly is, and Rob says her udders are swelling. That, in human terms, heralds impending doom birth. I guess that means that after months of thinking we’re days away, we’re actually days away?

Stupid sheep.

The silkies grow every day. They are big and fluffy now, and in the evenings when they’re cuddled up in a corner of the henhouse, I reach down and pet them. They don’t like it yet, but I need them to know me as the big friendly thing with the food. Right now I’m the big scary thing with the food, and that’s not nearly close enough.

That’s really all I’ve got for now, unless you want to hear me geek out about my GPA or the fact that I was inducted into Phi Theta Kappa. Naw, you don’t need that. This is a chicken blog.

Chicken Sociology

I need to start carrying my phone out there with me so I can take notes. Maybe I need a new tab.

The chickens are fascinating. I never thought I’d say that. The most to pass for chicken psychology when I was a kid was the little red and black banty rooster killing the big white (I think it was) leghorn. That wasn’t so much psychology as it was psycho, and I think a hawk got him, or my dad had to take care of him because we didn’t need a bird that killed other birds. Maybe we didn’t know enough about chicken sociology. Maybe we should have recognized that having two roosters isn’t a good idea. (Not to mention that the white one was so massive that when he’d hop up to get a little sump’m, he’d squash the hens flat. At the time, I thought it was funny, but, you know, maybe it was a little horrific, too.)

Clockwise from top: Goldie, Shadow, Rhiannon.

Hubby had told me when we bought the silkies that the woman from whom he’d purchased them would trade back once we determined gender. Apparently that can’t happen (he has no idea who she is–good job, slick!), so he said “Are you going to be able to eat one of them?”

“Sure,” I answered, and I mean it, “but then that means we’d be down a chicken.”

“He’s not a producing chicken,” Rob insisted, which is true, and if we have two roosters fighting, that’s not good. Hence my wanting to trade for a hen.

Anyway. Sociology.

Shadow is emerging as the blue-ribbon standard in chicken protection. Goldie started picking on Ri-Ri today, and Shadow manfully placed himself between them. There is very little that he does without absolute purpose. Once the little altercation was over, he went back to eating–and then, seemingly out of the blue, darted all the way across the hen yard to get a piece of grain or grass or a bug that forced him to stretch his neck out over #2 Dude’s head, effectively pinning Dude beak-down in the dirt for a few seconds. That was a bold play, Shadow. Way to exert your dominance.

I think I just named the second rooster. Because the Dude abides.

In another instance, Shadow spotted one of the cats just outside the fence. Her name is PITA, and yes, that stands for exactly what you think it does, and she really is a mostly-blameless cat since we threw her out for peeing on the laundry. Well, no cat is wholly innocent when there’s prey to be had, but I really think she was just waiting for me to come out and give her scritchins. So there she was, and very abruptly, there he was. He hunkered down and darted across to her, then immediately stretched his neck up tall and did a very macho teenage-rooster cluck. He didn’t, of course, scare the cat off, but once again, it’s a fine example of him being completely unafraid of something that could maim him horribly.

I managed to grab Ri-Ri and cuddle her for a minute. She trembled, then stopped, and I talked to her and petted her. She is, as these chickens go, kind of an ugly duckling. They are all sporting these gorgeous fluffy feathers, and here she is with her half-naked head and her skinny body and her footie feathers not coming in right. I wonder if it’s possible that the stress of the predator attack has stunted her growth. My intention is to get her used to me so I can give her treats and pamper her. She deserves a little favoritism, and I don’t care what Goldie thinks with her little blonde cheerleader self, Ri-Ri is a beautiful little chicken.

I…might be projecting my own psychology. Just a little.

Pregnant ewe is still pregnant, and that’s all the news that’s fit to print, kids.

Creepy sheep!

And chickens with laser eyes.

I’m going about my business: seeing that animals have fresh, cool water, feeding the chicks again, making sure I can get a head count on the hens. I rustle a bit through the row of food bins, close them up–and I turn and almost jump out of my skin.

There’s Sass’p, about ten feet away. Mere seconds ago, she’d been across the yard; abruptly she was standing there like one of those seemingly-innocent, but actually very creepy, Japanese ghosts.

Staring at me.

I almost expected her to phase through the air in a blur of television static and eat my face, moaning  “Graaaiiins.”

(Wish I could say I was clever enough to have made up that “grains” part, but I yoinked it from my friend Pat.)

In other, less creepy news: coming from my perpetual interest in reconciling computer nerd and reluctant farmgirl, I am working on building an app. It’s my final project in Android class (sorry, iPhone users, I don’t know that platform). If it’s anywhere near good, I’ll publish it just for giggles.

Also, some form of straight-to-chickens.com is coming soon!

Rhiannon it is, Shadow boxing, and other news

Ruby  gave some insight into Rhiannon, the bird and horse goddess of Celtic mythos.  She said that Rhiannon’s birds were known to possess healing powers. Good enough for me! Little Rhiannon is my birdie of the day.

Shadow and one of the other silkies (obviously a rooster as well) were doing the aggravated “come at me, bro!” dance this morning. They’d run at each other, wings flapping, and bumps chests. It’ll be interesting to see which one comes out on top. Also a little sad, because…well, chicken people understand that broods don’t do well with two roosters. He will have an honorable death. Or he might get traded back to the farm from whence he came in exchange for a hen.

Shadow is also emerging as the great protector. I reached down to pet him the other day, and he decided that my hand looked like too much of a threat and advanced on it. Never mind that it was attached to something roughly 20 times his size, he was going to GET me. I was amused and charmed (but not enough to leave my hand down there). Lil Dude has some serious bravery.

“Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night…” You’re welcome.

 

Fine Upstanding Fluffies

Because you needed a chicken update today. I can tell.

These are the chicks. The one nearest POV is Goldie. The big black one is Shadow, whose name Priscilla came up with. Whose name with which Priscilla came up. (See why we subvert grammar? It’s just awkward sometimes.) He’s very protective of the one all the way at the back by the board; I haven’t decided what to call her yet. I’m looking for the name of a bird goddess, which might come off as a little heavy-handed and pretentious for a chicken, but given that she survived a predator attack, I think I’ll go with it.

I considered calling her Rhiannon, given that some historians view her as the goddess of birds and horses, but then others say she was merely the human mother of a great warrior, and I realized I don’t know anything about Rhiannon beyond the earworm I just gave you.

Ideas for names? I’m listening.

Shadow, appropriately, shadows her. He’s protective. If she wanders from the group, he follows. That little girl took many days to get to where she wasn’t too sore to extend her neck, so seeing her standing straight and tall makes me very happy.

Today’s a quick one. I need to be writing game code for a final project. I’ll be back at it when the semester ends. Thanks for reading!

It’s not a food blog…

…But this is some seriously good food.

Rob and I are a little sad right now. Our two children, Kelsey 17, Garrett 15, are in England right now visiting their aunt, uncle and cousins. Oh, and Paris. And some other stuff. Anyway, for six weeks, the lights of our lives are gone. We can Skype them, of course, and they’re having a blast; this is a golden opportunity I would never, ever deny them. But they’re not here. And I mean, Rob and I are the lights of each others’ lives, too, but I’m not an ebullient, amazing little singer with pink hair, and he’s not a super-witty gamer nerd who flails his arms when he gets excited. The house is lonely.

What do I do when I’m lonely? Or stressed, angry, sad, bothered by anything?

I cook. I cook a lot. I am my grandmother’s granddaughter, and my mother’s child. I love food. I love to present it. I love it when people go “Oh that’s good” and their eyes roll back in their heads a little. I think I love seeing people’s reactions to  my food more than I love eating it. Maybe. That could be a toss-up.

And though this recipe has never had an egg (or lamb, damn it–though it could, oh yes, absolutely it could) anywhere near it (until the end; you’ll see), it bears posting because it’s one of our favorites. It’s creamy, melty and smoky, with just enough meat to satisfy. It’s also NOT diet friendly. I have puttered with low-cal adaptations (fat-free sausage, low/nonfat cheese, skim milk), but if you’re going for comfort food, this is the stuff right here.

Notes: If you’re going to use bacon, I’d fry it up first and drain the grease. If you want a hit of extra umame, fry up whatever you’re using for meat first. Anything you get golden brown and a little crisp is going to add to the flavor. I was lazy, so no browning for me.

You could cut this recipe in half, but it wouldn’t feed the entire National Guard that way. Besides, this makes amazing leftovers. Also, I always forget there’s half an onion I didn’t use and then it goes bad.

Scalloped Potato Dinner:

2-3 lb (about 6-8) yellow potatoes, scrubbed and thinly sliced
1 large sweet onion, thinly sliced
1 pound of your choice of pork and/or beef product (kielbasa, smoked sausage, bacon, those large Eckridge franks with the cheese inside, that stuff from Canada that is called “bacon” but is really made of lies, prosciutto, pancetta, ham), thinly sliced

Cheesy white sauce:

4 tbsp butter
6 tbsp all-purpose flour
3 cups milk, heated almost to boiling
1 1/2 lb (that’s right, POUNDS) of good, sharp cheddar (about 6 cups), shredded
salt and pepper to taste

Oven preheated to 300F or slow cooker

Melt butter in a largeish pan until the sizzling stops. Stir in flour to make a paste and cook over medium heat for 2 minutes, stirring constantly. Kill the heat and whisk in hot milk slowly. Continuing to whisk, heat sauce to a simmer. Slowly incorporate 3 cups of cheese, a small handful at a time, until melted and smooth. Add salt and pepper to

Random picture of a cat

taste.

Into the bottom of your hopefully very massive slow cooker or dutch oven, ladle about a cup of sauce. Add a layer of potatoes (they can overlap a little at the edges, it’s not rocket science), a layer of onions, a scattering of meat, and a sprinkling of cheese. Continue layering in this way until you’re out of ingredients. I ended up at the top of my slow cooker with one more ladleful of sauce. Onto that I laid some prosciutto I had to use up; woe is me, and a final layer of cheese. Lid that bad boy and either set your slow cooker on low forever or on high for about 4 hours. When it’s done through, take off the lid and pop your cooker’s pot under your broiler for about 2-3 minutes. If you’re using the oven, be prepared to wait about 2, maybe 2 1/2 hours. Remove the lid the last 30 minutes and allow cheese to brown.

When you can easily push a butter knife all the way down through the potatoes, your cheese and meat bomb is done. Serve with some kind of vegetable or a salad, for Pete’s sake. Or do what we do and eat it with fried eggs for breakfast.

Oh, and the sheep still don’t like me. I sat out there the other day with a little scoop of grain about five feet from me. The b– er, Sarsaparilla had the nerve to actually stamp her foot at me because I wouldn’t go away. I could see irritation in her eyes. She wanted to kick me, but she was too much of a chicken–har–to try.

Next time, I will let the hens eat it in front of her face.

 

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Phew! and other relieved noises…

Had a terrifying moment of and then there were three settle in this morning. Boychild reported the headcount last night when he put the Ladies to bed, and one of the hens was missing.

They’ve done this before. Barred Rock hens tend to be very adventuresome, so on occasion they might split up. That’s…unusual for hens. I’d always thought they’d just be running around each other all the time, lost in their little chicken brains without all being present at once, like a Borg collective member being cut off from the hive mind. At the very least, they tend to wander in pairs. The first time one really wandered off, she made it into the dog run, which…did not end well for Lady Rogue. (That’s what we called her, “Rogue,” because she was the first one out in the morning, the only one to figure out that she could fly to the top of the fence and escape the hen yard.)

It’s a dangerous thing, having dogs first and then getting livestock. The dogs are not used to the chickens or the sheep, and as an aside, it’s a damned sight better to have two yards than one. We wouldn’t even have the yard next door had I not insisted that it was a good investment (which, on the whole, makes this whole chicken and sheep thing…my fault? Oh, boy. I just can’t parse that right now…).

This would be Merlin. His previous owner once said, upon seeing him after a long absence, “What are you feeding him, cows?!”

Anyway, the dogs did not grow up around stock of any kind. It’s taken them years to get used to the cats, and the cats were here first. But then take into consideration that we rescued Lucy as a stray with absolutely no clue as to her early background.  I have caught her in the act of terrorizing a chicken, though, so we are on point when it comes to her.  Her offspring Dexter is a massive, hairy coward of a Wookiee , so I think he’d probably run away if a chicken so much as bocked in his direction. Blossom is as laid back as they come, but I don’t know that she’d sit idly by if she had actual access to the chickens. What amuses me no end–and I’ve been trying to get a picture since I first saw it, believe me–is the fact that Merlin, our massive black longhaired cat, will lie down in the grass in the middle of the chickens while they scratch for bugs. It’s the most fantastic image, primarily because he’s the only cat in the yard big enough to take down a chicken if he wanted to. But I think he likes them.

When I do get that snapshot, I’m going to caption it, “We get along–what’s your excuse?”

At any rate, I got out to the hen yard after my walk, fully expecting to see Mz. Thang waiting at the door to the henhouse. She wasn’t. For an irrational moment, I hoped the boychild had miscounted, or just not seen one of the hens when he put them up last night. That, too, was not the case. I opened the door to three Ladies and five chicks.

So I started calling.

You know, the instant we got these things, the chicken call came right back to me from my teenage years. The inflection, the speed, the tone…My nerdy writer and gamer friends would laugh their butts off to hear me out in the yard yelling CHIIIIICKchickchickchick. But yell, I did.

No dice.

Crap, I thought. Lost another one. So I fed the babies, watered the babies, put the hens out, fed the sheep. Called some more, but by this point it was a little despairing, and then my morning routine was done; #4 Lady did not come.

I gathered yesterday’s eggs and made for the gate–and then, like the lover running down the airport terminal for a tearful reunion in a stupid rom-com, here she came. She’d been in the front yard, and, well, you’ve seen chicken feet. They only move so fast. But boy, she was hauling little chicken butt for me, and I’ll tell you what, I was bloody overjoyed. I let her in the gate and watched her reunite with the others, but that was a little anticlimactic after watching her book it for her usual corner of yard.

The sheep watched, too, with some consternation, but they watch everything, all the time, with some consternation. It’s their state of being. It must really, really suck to be them.

In other news, what is THIS below? Abandoned chickens? The horror!

NBC blames hipsters, news at 11.

Related articles

• Backyard Farmers Keep Abandoning Their Old Chickens (motherboard.vice.com)

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Quickie Post: Not So Great, Actually

The other day, a predator of some kind (I suspect a fox) got three of our silkies and injured a fourth. The fourth is doing okay–that is, she’s very skittish and moving very slowly, but she’s keeping hydrated and well-fed, which is a good sign. There is a problem with her right eye and her neck, and she stays huddled up. However, chickens don’t do well with stress, and the fact that she’s made it this long is very encouraging.

I’d ask what they’re good for, but I don’t want them taking on a large predator, either.

I’d suspect cats, but whatever the animal was, it was got into the henhouse and out again without leaving any detritus behind (see how politely I put that?), and none has been spotted in the yard, either. This was a thief.

Have no fear. While we were sad and rattled, the henhouse has now been reinforced six ways from Sunday, and the Ladies and other babies are doing okay.

It has been suggested that we need a goose, to which I say no. No.

Don’t make me get the squirt bottle.

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Eggs! And a tomato.

Farming, even on a small scale, is work–and I’m not even talking about the “up before sunrise to milk the cows” kind of work. Granted, I’m a lucky woman with a husband who, since this was his idea, does most of it. He does the repairs and improvements on the chicken house. He handles all of the aquaponics; I have no idea about any of it beyond “Ooh! Fishies!” and “Can I pick that yet?” If a fence needs to be fixed, a new watering system invented, that’s him. By and large, he does it with stuff he has lying around, too, on the cheap. He’s so thrifty and handy that way, whereas I…well, I go outside and step into the sunlight and am immediately hissing, “It burns us, preciousss!”

Observe: the waterer is a Christmas tree stand with a carboy upended into it.

I digress. Tomato.

From the aquaponics garden…

Let me digress some more. Aquaponics.

For the uninitiated, aquaponics  is a system that is very similar to hydroponics. However, where hydroponics uses water with chemical nutrients to fertilize the plants, aquaponics uses the effluvia that is pumped up from a fish tank.

Effluvia is a great word, isn’t it? Effluvium, singular, is “an unpleasant or harmful odor, secretion, or discharge.” Yes, kids. Fish poop.

From the Internet, here is an aquaponics diagram that tells it like it is. The fish live their lives. They eat. They “produce effluvia.” The water is pumped out into a grow bed in which plants are supported and growing in smooth gravel. Just gravel! That’s it. The plants filter out the bad stuff like nitrates and ammonia, and beneficial bacteria do their thing to assist the process; the newly-cleaned water drains into a tank and is then pumped back in for the fish. It’s ingenious, really, and is something like 96% water efficient, far more so than conventional farming. Successful aquaponics farms can produce thousands of pounds of food and fish a year, completely organically.

And oh, my goodness, the produce. I’ve mentioned my insanely fat mint plants. Rob’s grown basil that continued to yield long after the season was over. He’s also done a lot of experimenting with heirlooms and that kind of thing, and so now we have tomatoes. When he first started playing around with this, we noticed an asparagus plant growing something like four inches over a 24-hour period. It’s crazy. But when the plant has to produce fruit rather than just stalks and leaves, that takes a little more time, and of course it depends on the type of  tomato.

Look at all that mint. That’d go great in Leilani’s mojitos.

The eggs are bigger than the tomatoes. That amuses the hell out of me. But that’s okay, because small tomatoes pack a lot of big flavor. These particular plants produce a lovely, compact tomato that’s red and green in color, oddly enough, when perfectly ripe. We have exactly two of them right now. Naturally, something had to be done with tomatoes and eggs.

Lovely.

When you have a new, novel thing, like cute chickens that produce lovely eggs or a lonely, lovely tomato plant, you value that food like gold. A good friend said something along the lines of, “You don’t put farm-fresh eggs in stuff. You eat them basted in butter.” And that is a damned fine rule of thumb. You treat those single-celled organisms of deliciousness with the reverence that they deserve, and only when you have an abundance do you put them in stuff. Not to say you should be any less reverent when making pancakes with your eggs, or using an egg to bind a meatloaf, but you take my meaning. We are still working on stockpiling an abundance (because we’re too busy eating them basted in butter, I guess), so for the most part, each egg is handled like the lockless, lidless treasure that it is. Ditto the tomatoes. So where I would have gone with some kind of Italian egg tart involving the basil from last year (I’ll take a food dehydrator for the win, Alex), eggs, fresh parmesan and tomatoes, I didn’t quite have enough tomato to do what I wanted, which would be something like a layered garlic and cheese tart bound together with eggs. So I went simpler.

I have a few specialties that I excel at. At which I excel. One of them is a really, really nice shepherd’s pie. I can’t wait to do that with lamb, I am just dying for it. Another is lasagna. It’s an event when I make lasagna, and it always produces about ten pounds of leftovers, or “food of the future,” as Rob says. But the daily special, as it were, is a fried egg sandwich with bacon and cheese. American cheese, to be precise. Don’t you judge me; it’s classic, it’s comfort food, and it’s breakfast, and all bets are off when it’s breakfast. Creamy, melty, crunchy, with juuuust enough of the yolk left soft. Yum. And only I can do them. If he so much as spreads the mayonnaise (Hellmann’s, thank you very much), it’s not the same.

Beautiful slices of tomato.

Now, I had to incorporate that beautiful tomato. I hate to say “elevated” when it comes to food; it’s a meaningless term. I mean, I get the implication, but I hear it so much that I have to interject my own mental image of food going up on an elevator that you’re desperately trying to catch. “Hold the door!” you yell as your snobby, pretentious food sneers at you.

So this is not an “elevated” egg sandwich. It’s just a different one. I wouldn’t be in the mood for it every day, and I don’t think it’s really any more pretentious than a regular egg sandwich. But it came together beautifully: crisp toast,creamy and savory mayo, rich egg yolk, tangy cheddar, sweet tomatoes, crunchy, smoky bacon. It was a thing of beauty.

The next time you have a beautiful tomato, try this. I promise you won’t regret it.

Have you ever found a fantastic way to use one lovely, precious piece of farm-fresh produce? What did you do?

(Trying out a new feature: those are not inserted ads; I hand-picked those two blog posts in case anyone wants to read more.)

Related articles

• Aquaponic Gardening: Frequently Asked Questions (tazzamaru007.wordpress.com)
• Mojito, Anyone? (clydewoman.wordpress.com/)

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More history, and some current chicken events.

This would be an album cover.

Now that you’ve had the “How the hell does this happen to Hilary the Wonder-Nerd?” story, let’s give you a little idea of the makeup of this geeky farming situation. I went into this under protest, but let me assure you it’s not because I don’t love animals. I do. I adore them. We have…well, I’ll just say a lot of cats, who will be named as they come up in our adventures together. We have three dogs, who are Lucy (because when Rob found her one day wandering the disc golf park, he thought she looked like a Lucy, and she took to it), Blossom (named for a Power Puff Girl when the kids were little), and Dexter (named for the great, hulking, four-armed cook in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, who was probably the best bit of acting we saw in the whole prequel trilogy). We have a pet fish in the house (a betta who is named Mr. Fishy, because…well, I don’t know) and we have several tilapia outside in the storm cellar underneath my husband’s aquaponics system. That, my friends, is a whole ‘nother blog post, but let me tell you what, I am drowning in the biggest mint plants I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen mint take over a garden. Aquaponics is the wave of the future, right up there with Google Glass.

We have four adult Barred Rock hens (those were the ones who came software-bundle style with the sheep) and eight silkie adolescents. I call the hens “the Ladies,” and yes, the “L” is capitalized. I call the silkies “the chicks,” even though technically they’re in between chicks and chickens. I still call our pushing-11-year-old dog Lucy “PUPPY!!” Though the cats, they are cats. I don’t know. You can examine the psychology behind my naming conventions another day, if you want.

Imagine my joy–and skepticism–when I heard “No shearing.”

I call the sheep the b– well. Not the Ladies.

Why the animosity? Well, I suppose I just can’t quite get over it. I have sheep. I mean, when I sold my last lamb at the county fair and hied myself off to become a soldier, the great thing about it was I’d never have to take care of sheep again. I’d never have to clean chicken coops. I’d never have to haul five-gallon buckets of water, milk a goat, assist the birthing of an animal in the snow in the middle of the night. Yeah. That one was a fun one. But the sheep…I am, and have been for about 25 years, completely over the sheep.

The thing is, the sheep I dealt with were primarily Suffolks (this one you’re looking at, if you clicked on the link, is a HUGE example of a show Suffolk, either some kind of gargantuan spring lamb or a very tall breeder adult) and Hampshires. Suffolks have white wool but their legs and faces are black. Hamps tend to be white (or at least the ones I raised were), but they’re often cross-bred with Suffolks and end up with fuzzy gray faces and legs.

Not unlike the lack of association between chickens and bad smells, there also seems to be a lack of association between sheep and training. Yes. You have to train the creature that, if introduced to something new and tasty, will eat until it dies. This is not what we tend to call a smart animal. Yet this creature must be instructed in the way of the bridle (which really is as it sounds; like a horse, the sheep can wear a kind of harness setup that goes onto its muzzle and around the back of the head), the grooming table (which bridles the sheep’s chin into a device that holds her steady for detail clipping, wool-shaping and things like painting of hooves and coat forshow), walking with the trainer (for showing, whether it’s for display or sale), and positioning (ideally, the sheep must stand with its feet positioned in a perfect rectangle so the judges can adequately discern shape, muscle tone and quality when it comes time to rank the sheep for sale). If you Google “show sheep” or something like it, you will be gifted with many many images of young 4H and FFA members squaring off the stance of their lambs, gripping them under the jaw just right so that the lamb can’t helpbut allow itself to be tugged around the ring, strapping them onto those tables…

Can you believe how huge she is? Nobody’s strapping her anywhere.

Really, it’s barbaric. I mean, those poor kids.

Now. It’s not as though I have to do all of these things with the current b– sheep, or even most of them. I want the sheep bridle-trained because that makes them easier to get to the vet if something goes wrong. Otherwise, they’re so skittish that I’d have to hit them with a tranq gun before I could get close enough for an examination. I want the sheep to be comfortable walking beside me. I don’t want to have to grab the white one by the horns and drag her into the truck (as they did the day we brought her home). I certainly don’t want to have to upend the brown one (called Sarsaparilla, because she’s the color of the root beer Rob makes) and two-man carry her by the legs to throw her in the truck (as, yes, they did the day we brought her home).

The reason for the animosity is that when we got them home, I was a little excited. Believe it or not, it’s true. Oh, sure, I was grumbly, but I’m an optimist. I kept telling myself it could be fun. “It’ll be a few days before they warm up,” Terry of Slowpoke Farm warned. “They need to get used to you.” Okay, I thought gamely, I can wait a few days for animal nuzzles, for surely, they will nuzzle.

But they remain skittish, and it’s now been a couple of months. Why won’t they love me?? I go out there, I rattle the food, I make it clear that I’m the one providing the tasties, and the closest I can get is about five feet away. If I move wrong, they’re darting to the back of the yard again.

That’s disappointing for an animal lover, isn’t it? People who love cute things want to pet all the cute things. It’s in our nature to want to snuggle them, a biological imperative. And yet these sheep, they remain unconvinced despite my offerings of food and calm.

I think this is why my guilty pleasure is Farmville 2. Those Katahdins aren’t rude.

And this does concern me a little, because Sarsaparilla is about five feet wide. Seriously, it could be any day now, and I think she must be carrying twins. I don’t want her running off when we try to help her care for the lambs. I don’t want her conveying to the lambs, in whatever slow-witted mindspeak sheep use, that the two-legged food providers with the flat, disgusting eyes-front faces are not okay.

Bock!

But the chickens…they don’t do that. Not to me, anyway. I say “Good morning, Ladies,” and here they all come, trotting on their little hen feet to see what I’m sprinkling.  They will also eat vegetable scraps, day-old bread, old eggshells (don’t make that face; the calcium is good for them). I love it when I feed a thing my garbage and it feeds me back.

In reading about chickens, I’m discovering that there is an actual psychology behind their actions. Color me stunned, because look at that head-to-body ratio. Their brains are about the size of a peanut.

To my horror, one day I caught two of the hens picking on one of the silkies. They were plucking feathers out of his back, and s/he was making awful, distressed noises (as would I!). I shooed them away and fretted a good while. Why on earth would they do that? How are we going to prevent it? That’s terrible! Is that one male? Are they going to attack all the males? Is it because that one’s the biggest? How horrible!

Well, Rob found a way to separate the hens and the chicks as well as keep the chicks away from the cats. And in my research, I discovered that it is a thing. They do that. Sometimes, on a whim, a hen will just decide she don’t like yo chick face and will come after you. Chickens have been known to harbor these feelings of dislike for years. Is it shade? Gender? Size? Could be none, could be all. Maybe he smells different. But she might never get over the urge to attack him. I’m wondering if it’s some kind of old-lady “Hey, you punk! Get offa my lawn!”

Who couldn’t love that face? Rather, those feathers.

There. The dark underbelly of farm life. See? That’s another reason I’m better off programming computers. My keystrokes don’t randomly decide that they hate each other.

But my keystrokes are also not cuddly. Oh, the conundrum.

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