The Peepers, their pasta and future

Around about the time these tackers were little, I fell off the blog, much to the consternation of my regular readers (sorry, Mum). 

The threesome formerly known as The Peepers, on account of the fact that they, erm, peeped. For a long time we couldn't tell them apart,  so individual names were pretty useless.

So the internet missed out on hearing about the rambunctious youth of the Peepers. In summary: they grew in stature and wisdom, discovered where the earwigs live, developed an enthusiasm for sow-thistles, ate what I thought was the chook-proof society garlic down to its bulby bottom, befriended Great Aunt Agatha (our seniorest chook), and gradually, somewhere around their thirty-fifth week, started laying eggs, which has only increased their enthusiasm for things they think they can eat.

They are now resplendent young persons in full-fledged chookhood.

Albert the Light Sussex, with Mama Esme:

And Victoria the Coronation Sussex, looking winsome:

And Marigold, the other Coronation Sussex, in between Albert (left) and one of me mum's flock (right) on holidays in the electro-netted fox-proofed paradise-pastures of Bright:

These chooks are the loveliest of birds. They gallop up to us, in a sort of undulating wobble-run, and test out our clothing for tastiness. They're a threesome of equals (I'm sure there's some Latin-based collective noun for the equality of three chickens: triumgallate?). They are also producing a lot of eggs, one each, most days. The senior hens, Esme and Shirley Australorp, and their Welsummer henpanion, Cecily, are producing an additional one to three eggs per day. Agatha remains steadfastly non-ovulatory, as she has been since we stole the cache of nine eggs she was hiding under some garden junk in November 2011. The situation, in short: we've gotta lotta eggs, after not having a lotta eggs for a couple of months (E & S were moulting, C, A, V & M were too young).

A lot of eggs is a good problem to have, really, and we're not lacking for ways to eat them (if we were, we'd give them to neighbours and/or boil them and feed them back to the chooks), but of course I know that this situation is temporary. At least one, probably more, of the hen posse will go broody in late Spring and stop laying. I doubt we'll lack for eggs, but our current ridiculous abundance will surely have to give sooner or later.

Eggs aren't preservable in many forms that I'm prepared to work with. My new go-to exception, though, is ye old egg pasta. I mix one egg with one cup of flour (and some nettle purée, in this case), and end up with enough fettucine for a two person dinner.

Nettle-egg fettuccine with nettle pesto, broccoli, pine-nuts, and, um, that famous Italian staple, smoked tofu (as you do).

Once the pasta's dry, which happens over-night with the aid of my trusty clothes-horse pasta drying rack, I figure any bacteria sitting around have no way of surviving (because bacteria notoriously require moisture, right? Right?). And so - voila - or viola!, as we like to say in the string section - present egg abundance is turned into future egg-pasta abundance, in what I choose to believe is a completely sanitary and non-salmonella-poisoning system of excellence. Thank you, the Peepers.

That old yarn

I haven't been to an agricultural show for at least a decade, and last time I did I was too old to get excited about showbags, rides on the whizzamagig and foodlike substances on sticks, but, on the other hand, I hadn't yet settled into my early-onset nanna-esque enthusiasm for produce displays and vintage machinery. Thirty-six, it turns out, is the perfect age for enjoying agricultural shows, and the Whittlesea Show today was a delight. I got to witness from afar the latest fairground cuisine (variations on deep-fried fairy-floss). The arts & crafts competition displays were glorious, esp. in the Best Decorated Orange or Potato category, the Fair Isle sock display, the carrot cake competition, and the great Orstrayan backyard dunny division. There were fewer exhibits of baby animals being terrorised by kids than I'd feared, and the weather was on the chilly side of 15ºC (thank you v. much, southerly change), which meant that the handsome, hand-brushed Poll Herefords standing around with no shade or water weren't suffering unduly. And - finally - there was an alpaca display, including a coven of spinsters transforming alpaca fluff into a very respectable yarn.

Which was just what I needed, being myself a struggling novice in the alpaca-yarn spinning department. I made some inroads about a week ago, after watching several bajillion instructional youtube videos on setting up my spinning wheel, carding fleece, making rolags (rolags!), and spinning itself. But even so, this meagre length of yarn -

- was all I could make before I stopped in frustration. The yarn kept breaking, and, uncoordinated at the best of times, I was finding it nigh impossible to pedal with one foot, use both hands to pinch the rolag into something finer and threadlike, not slow my pedalling down so that the wheel started going backwards, deploy my third hand to grab the next rolag and introduce it, scratch behind my ear etc, and remain upright. Hand-foot-eye-machine synchronisation, never my strong suit.

At some point in this dogforsaken initiation into spinning I gave up, grabbed an old ball of  Patons 5-ply and started knitting this bedsock, on which I made tremendous progress at last week's poetry-at-the-pub, with the aid of my trusty book of sock patterns, I Can't Believe I'm Knitting Socks.

If only there were a companion volume, I Can't Believe I'm Spinning Alpaca Fleece.

So, anyway, it was very comforting to speak to the alpaca spinners today and discover a few things: (1) everyone finds spinning hard at first; (2) noone learns to spin from youtube; (3) alpaca wool isn't your optimal beginner's fibre, given its tendency to break, whereas sheep's wool consists of cells that make the wool stick together (or something); and (4) there is such an institution as the Hand Weavers and Spinners Guild of Victoria, headquartered in Melbun, and I could take lessons or join a local group and bludge lessons for free. So I think that's now my plan: I will put the gigantic sack of alpaca fleece back in the cupboard, wait until the new year when the next term of Wednesday evening spinning lessons start, and in the meantime, if I'm stricken down with yarn nerdery, I'll use up some of the commercial wool I've been accumulating over the decades in a flurry of sock manufacturing. I might try treadling my spinning wheel at the same time, just to get my foot in.

Meanwhile, in other news: Spring! The season of empinkification in the front yard.

The season of bees in apple-blossom (except for the apple-blossom that didn't eventuate because the earwigs of doom climbed up the trunks in the night and ate the unopened flower buds ... bloody earwigs).

And t'is the season of Esme Australorp deciding to incubate the next generation of chooklings with her whole soul and self. Esme can't be photographed, because she has planted herself in the darkest farthest corner of the coop and will be enormously disaffected if I open the portal that lets light in on her (whirr, fluff, dinosaur impersonation). We procured for her eight fertilised eggs last Sunday, so that the sitting could produce something other than rotten eggs; she broke two by accident on her first day, settling in, but all's gone well ever since, and she's almost a third of the way through the incubation now with six eggs still intact. She is a model of endurance. The whole incubation involves 21 days of sitting, turning the eggs over now and then so the embryos don't stick to the shell, holding in her poos, her thirst, her hunger, her need to stretch, her desperate need for a dustbath, until that brief moment in the afternoon when it's warm enough to leave the eggs and she can dash out and get a day's worth of living compressed into twenty minutes. Puts my frustrations with the alpaca fleece and the spinning wheel of contrariety right in their place.

A month

Good Dog, a whole month seems to have slipped by with nary an official despatch to HQ. It's been a month, this month.

1. We lost two dear hens. The first to go was Pamela, the sweet housechook who came into our lives earlier this year. She disappeared one early morning from the front garden, having spent the night safely tucked up on her perch in the laundry. We knocked on neighbours' doors, and phoned the local pound and the vets, searched for feathers, kept hoping that she'd turn up. Pamela was our survivor. She'd lived in the battery cage, survived (we think) a culling, got brought to our frontdoor by a neighbour who thought the best way to carry her was upsidedown, with his hand round her legs. Her first week at our place she barely left the patch of newspaper in our living room where we'd stationed her food and water, but within the month, she'd perfected her digging skills by turned our metre high frontyard compost hill into a minor valley. She'd sit next to Tim while he typed at his desk. She laid an egg, in the soft centre of an armchair. She liked to perch on an arm and fall asleep with her body pressed against a human torso. So, you can imagine, we've been missing her and furious with ourselves for not keeping her safe.

Pamela, learning the art of chook 

 Pamela in a sunpuddle on local newspaper

Pamela being lovely 

Pamela laying an egg on Harriet the Cat's blanket

A few days later, we called the remaining flock out to the green-patch behind our back fence for some supervised grazing. The green-patch behind our back fence is every chicken's favourite place, and when we open the back gate and call, everyone leaps from wherever she happens to be and gallops to the gate. And so it was, only halfway through her sprint across the backyard, Griselda fell over dead. Just like that. Gris was one of our first two chooks, sister to Daisy, and only three and a half years old. We didn't have the stomach for an autopsy, so have buried her and her mysterious cause-of-death in the front yard, plonking a just arrived barerooted peche de vigne on top of her.

 Daisy and Griselda ascending the potato patch protector in hopes of sneaking into the raised veg bed of temptation.

 Griselda, supermodel.

Griselda, in younger days, giving the poorly citrus an encouraging word. 

Griselda, upstaging the pea teepee.

2. And then I found out I was pregnant, only to find out a week later that I wasn't pregnant anymore. So that was a thing. In the intervening week, I had alerted half the town, so I had to unalert everyone (and so that's why people wait a month or three before disclosing up-the-duffitude ... not that I have learnt the error of my ways, being a serial overdiscloser on matters uterine). I was leaking half a ton of blood when I got home to a letter from the IVF people congratulating us on our pregnancy and advising the delivery date: 7th April, 2015 (W. Wordsworth's birthday, give or take a couple of centuries). This was splendid timing from the IVF people, who I have to say are pretty weird, what with their muzak-accompanied embryo transfers and their hey-here's-a-photo-of-your-blastocyst-to-help-you-get-even-more-emotionally-invested-in-this-highly-likely-to-fail-procedure.

3. Tim's ma visited from Newcastle. Somehow her presence caused us to be driving up the damp ferny foresty side of the lovely Mount Donna Buang. Halfway up, we slurped 40 litres of Donna Buang spring water into our jerry cans. Locals allege this water has travelled over a thousand years and many thousands of kilometres from central Australia. Hard to say whether this is so or not, but this water tastes sweet and clean and (I let myself imagine) sort of sacred, and beats our normal options: i.e., (a) scungy bird-poo-ridden roof-water stored in our watertank and not entirely recommended for human consumption and (b) chlorinated eau de tap, the anti-bacterial properties of which are not excellent for some of our projects, like seed soaking and sourdough propagating. (Oh, and, snow! It was snowing! There was snow!)

Mount Donna Buang in her least photogenic moment of all time, with dag in fluoro jacket, muddy road snow and 4WD hatchbacks.

4. Yesterday we set out along the outer northern suburbs' most poetically named gutter, Henderson's Drainage Trail, in search of tasty weeds for a tasty weed pie. It turns out that if you get carried away walking up Henderson's Drainage Trail, you end up at Henderson's Lakes, walking along a contrived water-front promenade thingo in South Morang, where your presence will only serve to taunt moor-hens and wood-ducks and swans with the false promise of tasty bread-crumby stuff you don't happen to have with you. If you veer off to the West, though, you find yourself in Wuthering Heights. There's this brisk, windswept hill that carries you up to a peak from which you can look down on all of Melbun. On the way down the other side, we interrupted three reddish roos, who hopped down to a fence line and then - bound - over the fence (the biggest one, anyway, cleared the fence like is was no higher than a toothpick, though the littlest sniffed along it looking for a way through rather than over). Further along I spied three seconds of fox, making a dash across the path and into a copse of gum trees. We ambled through paddocks, possibly illegally, until we got to Darebin Creek, and made our way home - with a bagful of plantain leaves, nettles, cardoon stalks, wild brassicas, chickweed and mallow for our pie.

Henderson's Drainage Trail, with Free-range Shopping Trolley

5. The almonds started blossoming. Springy!

Swallow Impersonators and almond blossom. 

Eggswax

You know those pairs of photos that appear now and then on the internet: the first one depicts an award-winning baby, cooing and gurgling as she leans out of a perfectly chiseled pumpkin; the next one is an attempted replica - a grizzly infant looking like he's just been bottle-fed lemon juice and fish oil, covered in the disintegrating gloop of a mismanaged cucurbit? This kind of thing. The moral is: if you're not a professional baby/pumpkin wrangler with a top-notch camera and a lot of clean cheesecloth wherewith to conceal the less photogenic aspects of your house, do not try citrouille au enfant at home. And if you do try this at home, do not display your attempts on the internet, unless you want to propagate international mirth, which is quite a reasonable desire. (Alternatively, the moral is: do unto babies as you would have done unto your good self on an equivalent scale, which might mean not imprisoning your naked infant within a giant fruit.)

So, this is one of those blog posts. I show you someone's stylish craft project, and then I show you my surely-I-can-do-that attempt, which, of course, falls pretty flat.

Here is the stylish craft project, Easter egg candles, ftw, all the way from Lithuania:

Artful photo of pastel vegetable wax candles in eggshells from here.

I saw these candles in my daily Etsy digest a few weeks ago, and realised immediately that not only did I possess a goodly supply of eggshells (thanks, Shirley Chook, our champion layer of the month), and a goodly supply of wax (thanks, bees), and a goodly supply of devil-may-care crafty can-do pluck, but I also had an Easter coming up, and various dear relations, who would surely appreciate receiving some stylish, handcrafted Easter table decor, made from eggshells and beeswax. Because nothing says hope and resurrection like an ovum membrane filled with stuff from the abdominal glands of insects.

It turns out not to be very easy to hold a bit of wick right in the middle of half an eggshell while pouring molten beeswax around it, so some of my wicks are sort of akimbo. It's also quite hard (given our amateur wax rendering skills) to completely rid beeswax of all the non-wax gunk that comb accumulates, so my wax is not so much golden, as baby-poo brown - caramel, if we're feeling charitable - and it contains bits and pieces of bee residue you'd probably rather not know about.

So them's my candles. They'd probably look a bit better if posed in the presence of cinnamon quills and raffia, and they'd probably look a lot better if I too had used vegetable wax in various alluring shades of pastel rather than beeswax in various unalluring shades of slumgum. In the end, I decided not to impose them on my dear relations, because I want to keep them sweet for the cat hair textiles I'll be knitting them all for Christmas.

From the KierkeGaarden

Long skinny eggplants from an eggplant that overwintered in a pot against the house (as opposed to eggplants I tried to grow from seed sowed in August), basil fino verde, tomatoes-of-survival, Shirley's ovum, Golden Queen peaches, Tuscan kale (the least cabbage moth-molested of our Summer brassicas), and the pumpkin de resistance, Golden Nugget (first of many).

Nashi pears and rhubarb. Dessert material.

The head of John the Baptist. 100% organic.

The motherlove of Esme, the masculinity of Geoffrey, and the unexpected arrival of Pamela

Last November, our darling Esme, all of eleven months old herself, decided it was high time for her to propagate some youngsters. She sat for weeks, a devotion that finally culminated in Geoffrey. Just three months later, with Geoffrey now an independent young person of almost 11 weeks age, Esme has decided to give parenting another red hot go. She is sitting, as I type, on a pile of straw, fluffing herself up ferociously whenever anyone tries to steal the nothing from beneath her. I made a token effort to get her some fertilised eggs. In fact, I phoned these breeders, idly imagining Esme mothering a clutch of Barnevelders and Coronation Sussexes, but the fertilised egg people advised me that it was too late in the season: the roosters can't be relied on beyond early February to do their roostery thing. Which makes me wonder why noone sent Esme the memo.*

Shirley offering family planning advice; Esme facing the wall.

Meanwhile, there's Geoffrey. Geoffrey has been quite a shy chick, certainly when compared to Henry, a wee bantam cockerel who grew up in our backyard, spent his youth sitting on our heads and teapots, mating with my hand (true), and generally being Captain Charisma. Geoffrey, on the other hand, still refuses to take delicious kale from my hand and requires me to tear it into small pieces and toss it in her/his general direction. It's this shyness, and the fact that Geoffrey still has no comb at 11 weeks (Henry had the first signs of a comb at 18 days), that has made us suppose Geoffrey's a young pullet. Only, this morning, Geoffrey crowed. The briefest and most un-voice-broken of upple-doodle-ups, followed by another attempt half an hour later, but still, not the vocalisation of a hen in the making.

Geoffrey, perching with great aunt Agatha.

It's not easy finding good homes for young roosters. We're not allowed to keep one in the 'burbs (sadly), and country people with chooks usually can only keep one rooster at a time, because roosters (as my mother discovered when she had a few young cockerels cohabiting in her garden) have a tendency to kill each other, bloodily and brutally. We found a wonderful home for Henry in Tyaak, where he inherited an instant family of 12 hens and won the hearts of all who met him, but at that point I think we exhausted our rooster-rehoming options.  So we made a decision, when we gave Esme her eggs in November, that we would give any little boys who hatched as good a life as we could, a life of being raised by a loving parent (or two, given Shirley's and Esme's co-parenting program), of foraging, and delicious vegetables and insects and branches to perch on, and when they started to crow, we would kill them, swiftly, by night when they were asleep, and Tim and/or Harriet and Bea Cat (the three resident omni-/carni-vores) would eat them. Now that it seems like we're going to have to follow through, of course, the thought is appalling, as I guess we knew it would be. I am keen to put it off as long as is neighbourly. The crows so far have been scarcely loud enough to trouble neighbours - quieter than a hen announcing that she's laid an egg - and I think we can let Geoffrey stay a little longer, take a bit more time to peck at grass and chase earwigs and become a little bit less the baby of the backyard. But all the same, typing this, I know it's time to start preparing mentally for her - his - end.

In further chook news (yes, indeed, there's more), last night a couple of neighbours knocked on the door** and presented me with this lovely bird, who we're calling Pamela:

Pamela spending her first night on top of the washing machine.

Pamela was found not very far away in a sidestreet consisting mostly of auto-repair yards. Tim walked up to investigate while I acquainted our starving visitor with food and water. We now think that she might be an escapee from a cull. She's a former battery hen (as her blunted beak indicates). One of the mechanics in the street is known to have had "about thirty chickens" (in the words of an informant), but when Tim peeked over the fence there were no chickens, just a large empty roost. I'm guessing that a flock of "spent" hens were bought from a farmer, kept for perhaps a year for eggs, and then, their egg-laying dwindling, killed for soup. Our heroine somehow escaped and wandered the streets until a neighbour stumbled upon her.

If she does stay, then she'll have come to the right place, I think. Our post-henopausal chooks lead a leisurely retirement, supping meditatively on dew drops, snaffling magnificently just-ripe raspberries from the cane, meeting regularly with the Senior Hens' Synchronised Sunbathing Guild.

L to R: Daisy, Griselda, Agatha

They haven't been very hospitable to Pamela so far, so for now she's hanging out in the living room while I type, pooing on a temporary carpet made of local newspapers and Mega-Supa-Shoppo-Fun catalogues, and gobbling down chook crumble like she hasn't eaten in a week. Which, besides dinner last night, perhaps she hasn't. When she's less disoriented and more herself, I hope she'll be able to meet the others without being put in her place too aggressively.

All those chicken metaphors - from "mother hen" to "pecking order" - they're happening right here.

* I have the same question apropos our Granny Smith, who, last Autumn, covered herself in blossom, which of course the bees fertilised, so that runty little nuggets of apples sat on the tree through the first half of Winter, before dropping off in despair. Could it be that the apple (and Esme) register the relief of rain and 20ºC weather after a droughty heatwave as Spring? season of chicks and mellow blossominess?

** which was wide open, of course, because, hey burglars!, would you like to steal our ... erm ... prize collection of jam jars? how about the coffee table I found on the footpath? or the CD player that's been kicking around since 1996? (All right, sorry. I'm showing off now.)

Lessons in chook husbandry

Sometime late last year, a young Australorp of our acquaintance developed an abscess in her foot. Her whole leg was burning hot, and I knew enough words like 'septicaemia' and 'raging torrents o' pus', to bundle her up, sore foot and all, and take her to our local vet. Our local vet confessed almost no experience of chickens, but she nonetheless valiantly palpated Esme's foot, agreed that Esme had an abscess, and estimated an appropriate daily dosage of penicillin. 

The penicillin tablets had been designed for larger animals, like dogs, or possibly diprotodons. They were huge, anyway, and there was no way Esme was going to eat them whole, or even halved (we tried, we really did, which was stressful for her and seventeen thousand times as stressful for us). Finally we realised that they had to be pulverised and mixed with something irresistibly tasty. Like yoghourt and muesli. Or like Esme's own eggs, which, having a penicillin allergy, I could no longer eat and which she was still laying like the frisky young chook she is. Twice a day, then, Esme was presenting herself at the backdoor for her delicious yoghourt avec penicillin, or penicillin omelette with smidgens of kale. She ate this inside, to prevent her fellow hens from getting an unnecessary dose of penicillin and if that meant chook poo on the floor, well, so be it. Meanwhile, instead of dining on penicillin cordon bleu, Esme's colleagues all stood by the backdoor, peering in with wistful expressions on their beaks.

A few weeks after her course of antibiotics ended, Esme started sitting on every egg she could muster, purring sweetly to the unfertilised yolks inside. We're pretty sympathetic to hens with parental urges, and I, for one, deeply regret our lack of rooster, so we rustled up some fertilised eggs, and the result was:

Geoffrey! who, six and a half weeks later, is showing every sign of being a young lady (phew), and possibly an Araucana/Australorp cross.

Esme didn't come to the backdoor for quite a few weeks. Sitting on the egg that became Geoffrey was a full-time job, with perhaps ten minutes smoko (grain-o, drink-o, poo-o, dust-bath-o) per day. Once Geoffrey was hatched, Esme was consumed with parental duties: sitting on Geoffrey to keep her warm; finding Geoffrey little green things to eat; finding Geoffrey little brown and pink and grey and red and black things to eat; showing Geoffrey how to scratch; purring and whirring at Geoffrey as Geoffrey said 'peep-peep-peep, peepy peep peep, peep'.

Sometime around Geoffrey's four-week birthday, though, Esme magically managed to delegate parenting duties to her sister, Shirley. Now it was Shirley who was finding things for Geoffrey to eat, Shirley who was making room under her wing for Geoffrey to nestle at night, Shirley who had even taken up the purring-whirring of mother (and aunty) chooks.

This gave Esme the opportunity to resume her activities as the gourmand of the living room. 'Don't give her an inch,' said Tim, as Esme poked her beak in through the tiny gap of the backdoor. Within minutes, she was on his knee, eating scraps of pancake from his fingers.

Then, not content with the limitations of his hand-feeding mallarcky, Esme took a flying lunge for Tim's plate, which didn't end for her as well as she had expected.

The moral of the story is: to avoid disappointment, give your chook her own pancake from the get-go.

This has been the Natural History and Antiquities of Lalor, with an impossibly helpful message about chickens.