And A Turkey Shall Lead Them

As promised, I picked up a box of ducks and geese from the feed store in early May. “How many ducks come in a box?” quipped a friend. The answer is, like chocolates, it depends on the size of the box. In our case, the number kept growing and growing, because the hatchery kept re-shipping parts of the order to replace birds that had not survived the ill-fated first shipment. They kept shipping and shipping until I had four Toulouse geese, 3 Pomeranian geese, 7 assorted bantam chickens (including the one I bought on purpose and six more to keep him company after his original companion succumbed), a white turkey and five Blue Swedish ducks. When they shipped the absolutely-never-to-be-available-again-this-year half dozen Cuckoo Maran hen chicks and five more Blue Swedish ducklings, I had to cry uncle.

            The white turkey started off about the size of the leg of the original Toulouse gosling, Miranda, who was already two weeks old when we got her. But the turkey has an adventurous spirit. After a couple weeks stinking up the kitchen porch, slinging water everywhere and attracting a lot of flying insects, the goxen—as my son helpfully named the duck-goose-turkey community—moved to the sheep room of the barn, where they have their own calf hutch and fence so that they can run around the back of the barn during the day and get locked into the hutch at night as protection against marauding raccoons and possums. When I open up the hutch gate in the mornings, the ducks and geese, growing quickly and already getting pretty big, hang back, beeping in alarm. The turkey, who barely scrapes the top of Miranda’s shank at present, comes charging out to hop into the feed tray and commence breaking her fast. Because she will boldly go where none have gone before, I called her Enterprise. And, thus inspired, the flock comes beeping after her.

            I can’t seem to take a picture of the goxen in which Enterprise does not turn out to be posed dramatically at the center of the group, under a blinding down-spot of heavenly glory. And by this photograph you may also see what a dozen goxen can do to a fresh pen in 12 short hours. There is a reason these creatures are not typically kept in the house. But the sight and sound of them slapping their bills sociably in the waterer and nibbling each other’s down is about the most fun you can have without breaking the law. 

Journey Into the North Orchard

Today I began, in addition to this blog, a second one, devoted to the Japanese form of prose poem/haiku called haibun. The blog, which I hope to update more or less weekly, lives at Journey Into the North Orchard. If you have an interest in nature writing or poetic form, I hope you will stop by.

And if you don't, do not be concerned. I have a box of ducks and geese on order. Heh. Heh. Heh.

Angel In The House

I cannot say enough good about the after-Christmas sale bin at the Agway. It is especially productive of effective remedies for days when you can’t believe you have to pay for yet another tank of heating oil; you look out the window to discover you are not suddenly going blind, it is snowing again; you find yourself inclined to kiss the muddy boot of teenage firewood cutters who have the decency to trim to office-stove length; and you anticipate that like as not your taxes will be late arriving in Washington because they are trapped on the Maryland border in a blizzard.

This amaryllis did give me an appreciation, also, for how nice a white flower is with some variegated foliage in the rear, and I would like to try this out in the perennial borders, or perhaps in my new latest, greatest invention—the shade bed, which I have to build to bring the earth up to the standards of the housing inspector, or risk having to rail the summer kitchen deck. Which I am in no wise doing, because it would impair my diners’ view of Brewster Rooster and his lady friends. So, shade bed full of interesting white/variegated contrast it is.

Felix Non Gratis

Last Saturday I got to go to the Philadelphia Flower Show for the first time since the year I was pregnant with my son, who is now in high school. I was so happy to be there I was literally hopping up and down inside the front doors of the exhibit hall. The Flower Show is such a wonderful combination of fantasy, amazement at what people can get to bloom in winter, and admiration for the patience and passion of people in various extremely small niches of the gardening world—somebody built a Hogwarts greenhouse a foot tall, and really, who could have known there were that many cactuses from outer space, even in the glass rooms of the greater Philadelphia area? It was delightful, and I took photographs both for friends who could not be there, and of clever structures that I must needs build in my own garden. To top it all off, the Make & Take room was creating fascinators to order (this year’s theme being England), so numerous ladies were in attendance sporting headpieces that varied from a single stem of grass to veritable Carmen Mirandas of piled-up plant material. And this, my friends, is not something you see every day.

After I had viewed all the exhibits, I did my best to gratify my good husband’s interest in buying me plants. Contrary to popular belief, I was able to carry it all to the car by myself, though my arms hurt. I like to buy small specimens at the Flower Show, so that if I am not able to make them happy, I have not lost a huge investment. Which means I get to buy a lot of them. But I also always buy one showstopper orchid, in this case Bl. ‘Morning Glory,’ a cross between Brassavola nodosa, the Lady of the Night, and a cattleya/lailea species, both of which, believe it or not, run wild in the jungles of the New World.

This handsome article has been sitting in a cachepot on the dining room table since the show, entertaining passersby. This morning, however, I discovered that it had not just been entertaining but also feeding some bastard housecat. Those lovely rays radiating from the lip, I am sorry to tell you, have been clipped off midway, and in all likelihood we will never know the identity of the culprit, unless we catch him in the act of barfing up this glorious wonder of breeding.

Maiden Voyage of the Resurrected Coronet

Ever since we moved here and I found it hiding in the barn, I have wanted to resurrect and use this wood-fired cookstove, which I take to be original to the kitchen of Wren Cottage. It is a Sears Roebuck “Coronet” of uncertain vintage, and based on the number of men it takes to carry it, it can’t have come from very far away.

The memory of the oldest living previous inhabitant, my friend Pat who grew up here and next door, only goes back as far as a coal-fired cookstove that I take to be the reason this one got the boot. But the hearthstone and chimney access in the kitchen remain and are used by our Harmon heating stove, and various cast iron implements like a two-burner grill that I found down in the cellar fit the cook top as though made for it, which I expect they were.

Three years ago when John and I got married, we spent our honeymoon drive to the elk herd of scenic Western Clinton County, PA, brainstorming about a summer kitchen, primarily as a potential home for the cookstove.

Well. Three years later, the epic construction process has finally drawn to a close, and about the last thing to get done was the plumbing in of the chimney for the cookstove, which just happened two weekends ago. And then Hurricane Sandy came and everyone got sick, so there was no Ceremonial Firing for an entire week.

On Saturday morning, however, we struggled to light a fire in the rather tiny firebox. It took some doing but eventually when I ran to the edge of the porch and looked up at the shiny new silver chimney, there was smoke pouring forth! John said, “Do we have a new pope?” And I said, “Yes!” and we hopped around for joy.

I had not planned to cook the day of the Ceremonial Firing, but I couldn’t stand it. First I boiled the kettle and made a cup of ginger tea. This was so satisfactory that I threw a bunch of white beans and water in a heavy pot and set them on to soak in the warmth. Then I went off to walk the dogs in the orchard and when I came back, a delicious scent drifted over the wall of the summer kitchen and up the new stone path, and I quickly realized from the cloud of steam rising through the rafters that THE STOVE WAS COOKING THE BEANS. I was practically frantic with happiness. So I dashed inside and stirred up a batch of granola, the most harm-proof baked good I could think of, threw it in a casserole and popped it into the oven. And although the end next to the firebox burned a little—hence the injunction to turn baked goods periodically throughout their baking time—it came out actual granola, not sticky nasty raw burned oats.

So. Although I have been planning and desiring this for many years, no one is more surprised than I that it has come true and it actually works! The very next thing that happened was that November came and now it is snowing in the summer kitchen, but I am really looking forward to figuring this out next summer.

What Light Through Yonder Jelly Breaks?

The harvest was largely compromised this year, giving us an excellent opportunity to support our neighbors who actually grow stuff for a living, but I did put up a batch of crabapple jelly this week. Our friends, Betty and Tom, have a wonderful, decorative workhorse of a crabapple tree that always fruits during Artists Open House Weekend, when nobody has time to harvest the apples. No artist, that is. Fortunately I am a writer instead, so I get them. Ha ha! And Betty and Tom get some jelly by way of rent.

I don’t eat jelly straight up, or even on toast, but I do make a kickass jam tart, which requires me to amass a lot of interesting candidates for the jam layer—thus, this veritable Notre Dame rose window of sugary tart bliss.

Pollo de Janeiro

As you can see, my contribution to urban planning so far consists of a slum in my back yard known as Pollo de Janeiro, because, as my daughter said, we have individuals equal in the eyes of God living side by side, some in splendor and some in squalor. Appropriately enough by international standards, the mansion belongs to Paco Negro, aka Paco Tercero, the deposed former benevolent dictator of the henhouse, who was run off a couple years ago by the younger roosters and had to go into the Rooster Protection Program (RPP) because nobody would let him back in the barn, so he was standing miserably in the rain at the foot of the barnyard, looking to die of exposure. I like Paco, and as I said he was a nice, gentle rooster with beautiful feathers, so now he has his own coop, where he goes by the RPP cover identity of Brewster Rooster. His neighbors believe him to be a New England native of a family rumored to have been represented on the Mayflower, but they understand that he could not have retired this early unless he had hit it big in Silicon Valley, which they assume accounts for the wild feathers. California, don’t you know. It’s going to fall into the sea some day.

So a week or two ago we moved the range pen, which is that flat-topped item next door, from the barnyard to the back yard so I could keep an eye on a hen who had gotten a late notion to sit on a clutch of eggs. It was necessary to remove her from the barn because That Black-Hearted Bitch of A Black Hen (who murdered the one and only chick of the little English hen earlier this summer) had moved back into the barn with her seven thriving adolescents, and there was no way I was letting anybody hatch out new chicks in her homicidal vicinity. So the single mom moved into the range pen.

Where, I am sorry to tell you, she leapt straight off the nest she had been sitting on for 2 weeks and began clucking and running up and down inside the screens, provoking the ire of the corgis, who made everything a hundred times worse by running up and down outside of the screens, barking their fool heads off.

Suffice it to say there will be no more baby chicks at Wren Cottage this season.

This is good news in a number of ways, because in addition to not wanting to worry about new babies in increasingly cold weather, this development also opens the door to a new autumnal activity: slum clearing. This repressive, CIA-backed zealot—it’s true, the CIA leaves peanut butter sandwiches in my mailbox every day—is going to brutally and without compassion move the empty range pen back into the barnyard for next year’s baby chicks to live in, as soon as I can conscript some teenagers to carry it.

The corgis may die of boredom, but I am a brutal zealot, so whatevs.