Which Has The Higher R-Value? Dead Mice or Cat Food? Discuss.

In designing the super-efficient country house of the future, architects must keep in mind the R-value of two substances that pack the walls of every domicile in the Endless Mountains and, I can confidently assert, all mountains everywhere apart from the moon: cat food placed there by mice, and dead mice who have gone to their heavenly reward in a heaven of their own making. Leaving aside the deceased little greedikins who blocked the opening of the birdfeeder with his portly form last winter, the dead mice in my walls have come to a place that could not be more perfect to spend eternity: dark, winding, free from predators and packed with an excellent brand of dye-free, additive-free, naturally preserved cat food. If only the mice themselves were naturally preserved. Summertime dead-mice-in-walls for 24 hours smell like a garbage container truck that was en route from the slaughterhouse to the landfill on an August afternoon but lamentably broke down and therefore was held up at a roadside rest area for two or three days while parts where shipped in from the Midwest, but then their smell is gone. It burns itself out in a horrific maelstrom of stench, localized to a part of the wall where hopefully you do not have to go that day. By contrast, wintertime dead-mice-in-walls are more the Peruvian Ice Maiden of unreachable rodents. They start out cute little thieves intent on tanking up on the burned oil residue under the stove burners before making the big climb up to the cat bowl on the counter to ferry its contents away into the superstructure. Then they take their time over the cold, dry months turning into tiny mouse mummies who may not be wrapped in nice textiles (or who may, actually, if you consider the state of the fabric storage drawers upstairs) but who are lavishly supplied with food for the afterlife, which, since they are mummified, is going to last as long as this house stands. Which is why it is important to include their R-value in your home designs.

You may think that the heat produced by the composting process might give the dead mice an edge over the room temperature cat food, but in fact the heat is short-lived and the only way the decay process advances the mouse’s cause is by compacting him, which improves his R-value because it allows the walls to be filled with a far greater number of his deceased relatives over time. The fact that our house is almost 100 years old and still filling up with mice shows the efficacy of this process. Meanwhile, the cat food has a distinct advantage because it is smaller to begin with and therefore packs more closely. Whereas dead mice are the open-cell spray poly of organic insulations, cat food is the closed-cell: inherently more of a barrier. However, in the final analysis, we recommend that you design to make the best of the diverse heat retention qualities of dead mice and cat food used in combination. In particular because, if you live on Earth, you don’t have any choice.

P.S. The illustration shows an oxalis demonstrating heliotropism and indoor air quality management in a south-facing window during the heating season in the North. Because inside of a wall, it’s too dark to illustrate.

Whooperere Salutorum

So here we are on the penultimate Saturday before Christmas, a scant handful of days before the solstice, and just now as I was walking the dogs amid the snowflurries and brisk breeze, I saw 3 Vs of geese probably totaling 500 individuals heading south at a hot pace. A day late and a feather short, in my opinion, but this mild autumn and early winter encouraged all sorts of lassitude. And now, my friends, those of us not heading south at a hot pace are, I think, about to get our butts whooped in a seasonal kind of way. Because what else could induce the migrating classes to rise up from their downy waterbeds and git while the gittin’s good? Winter, that’s who. Real winter, not this globally weird travesty of a mockery of a sham we’ve had so far.

Thanks to Kevin Shea of the Commonwealth of Virginia via the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for the beautiful picture.

The Realms of Glory

Today is the first day of deer-by-rifle season, and the sunrise was glorious. Like my late lamented terrier, I was not bothered by gunfire most of my life, but these last few years it has started to unsettle me, as though I had developed a sensitivity. I do not mind the fact that people eat deer; indeed, somebody has to do it. A few weeks ago when our resident bucklet killed the main trunk of my new tulip magnolia by flossing his antlers with it, I was ready to snap off those handsome decorations and use his four points to stab him through the heart.

It’s the noise that bothers me, and the suddenness of it all, the fact that sometimes you are standing around minding your own business, and then there is a loud noise or a soft noise or no noise at all and a second later you are dead. Surprise! You’re dead! Or the deer standing right next to you is dead. Or you hear the noise over the hill and know that somebody you probably knew, a cousin maybe, is dead. This is what bothers me.

However, a sunrise like this does seem to say, as the Navajo do, “This is a good day to die.” If I were going to be shot at the breakfast table, I would like it to be on a mild morning like this one, looking at a sunrise like that.

Does This Straitjacket Make Me Look Fat?

In my last post, I mentioned that one of the casualties in the barnyard this summer was Bull, my favorite sheep. It has taken me two months to mention this because the event cast me down to an extent which you probably wouldn’t believe, and which I really do not understand. He was a nice sheep and all, but he was a sheep. Losing him should not send a person into the kind of tailspin that, in fact, ensued.

In the third week of August, Bull started hanging around the barn instead of going out with the other sheep to graze. He may or may not have been acting a little strange weeks before; I remember seeing him standing alone for a long time inside the branches of a reclining apple tree, which is not a real sheep-like behavior. He had stopped coming to scarf up the cup of chicken feed I throw out the door of the Hen Room every morning for the entertainment of the grazing classes, but I assumed that that was because Joshua, the sheep with the stand-up horns, had taken to using those horns to, as the capitalists say, maximize marketshare. Still, Bull was acting fairly normal until one particular week when John went to Colorado to travel and work, and my parents came up and stayed with me and the children for a few days so we could visit and do fixer-upper projects together. That Thursday Bull started not leaving the barn much, and I saw him drinking water from the barrel, which is unusual—they seem to get most of their water from the grass they eat. But he wasn’t really eating. I stayed overnight with my college roommate and came home and Bull was still odd but no odder. Mom and Dad left on Saturday, and Bull ate a little strip of leftover grilled zucchini I gave him because it was slicked with olive oil, which I thought might help if he was plugged up inside. Sunday morning he was wider than the other sheep. He was always wider than the others, possibly because he was the greediest damn sheep in the world, but Sunday he was wider than usual. I went on the Internet and found advice involving the gargling of mineral oil by sheep with bloat. Juliette de Bairacli Levy, the great barnyard herbalist, counseled dill seed. I started thinking about the ice pick scene in Far From the Madding Crowd. But none of these remedies seemed possible without John there to restrain the sheep. And it was Sunday, when it seemed criminal to call Dr. Mike away from the family dinner table because my sheep had gas.

I guess I should have called. On Monday morning just before full daylight, I went to the barn to open the hen door and check on Bull before I darted off to serve breakfast at the B&B. He was lying in his usual spot along the wall, his head curled down alongside his flank. He was still warm. His eyes were closed. He looked for all the world like a sheep sound asleep.

After I laid out the coffee and juice and cereal and pastry at the Inn, I called my friends on the next hill. Bill understands tractors, and was willing to come dig a hole for me. The kids helped me drag Bull out of the barn and into the tractor scoop. We buried him down near Dermott and Sterling and Dolly Madison, the turkey. Phyllida put some goldenrod in the grave. Everybody got poison ivy.

All the rest of that day, I couldn’t stop crying. Pretty soon little whispery voices in my head started making accusations about care that could have been given, actions that could have been taken, choices that could have been made that would have saved that sheep. The rational assertions of my friends—that Bull had lived about six times longer than sheep normally get to live, that he had had a really nice life, that he was a sheep, for God’s sake—had no effect. By Thursday, the little voice had turned from angry to vicious. Sheep killer, it whispered. Sheep killer. It wasn’t this bad when I had to send Rocco, the fourth lamb, to the slaughterhouse because he had become violent. This time, the little voice was carrying a torch and a pitchfork, and you could tell that after dark there was going to be trouble.

This worried me enough to call in the Cavalry. I told my friend Paula in Vermont what the little voice was doing. Paula ordered me to tell the little voice that if it said another word on the subject of sheep, now or ever, she would come down here, and it would be sorry. She meant it. Don’t push her.

That was it. Like all bullies confronted by a person of courage, the little voice shut up. I started feeling a little better and sleeping at night. On the weekend I told more people what had happened. My friend John, who has spent a good deal of time in Ireland, said, “He might have had that thing sheep get where their stomach flips over and there’s nothing you can do to save them.” It had never occurred to me that maybe there was nothing I could have done.

Seven or eight weeks went by. I wondered why I was not writing about Bull. Then at the feed store I ran into my friend Margaret, who sold me the lambs three years ago and maintains her own large flock. She is so sensible she actually eats some of her sheep, and sells them to other people to eat. Margaret is wise and good, and as I confessed to her what had happened, how I had taken one of her lambs and heedlessly thrown it away, I watched her reaction. She stood with her hands in her jeans pockets, tapping her Muck shoe, which was held together with duct tape. When I finished speaking, she gently shrugged thin shoulders under her ever-present flannel shirt. “You do what you can for them,” she said. “But the time comes when only they can decide whether or not they are going to live.” She added, “He probably ate something bad.”

I am not ready to exonerate myself of this sheep’s death. But it does occur to me that Bull was the greediest sheep alive, and if he did in fact eat himself to death, there is a metaphorical elegance in that which I think reflects the deep structure of the universe. I believe in that structure, and I believe you can read the fitness of an event—how necessary it was—by how fully it conforms to the deep elegance. So while I am not yet ready to get down off the cover of the Autumn 2011 Triple Harvest Issue of Bad Farmer magazine, it is possible that I was a bystander at the wreck of this hay train, and not the one who blew up the tracks.

Dead or Broody?

Back in the day when I was in college and MTV was the coolest thing anyone had ever seen, we used to wile away the time between study groups playing Dead or Canadian? This week at Wren Cottage, we are updating that game for the 21st century farm with the action packed puzzler Dead or Broody?

I guess the photo gives away this week’s answer.

One of the black hens, the youngest, spryest, egg-producingest part of our flock, went broody early last week. This is not the most convenient time of year to have tiny defenseless infants, but what the hell. It’s her life.

I have been leaving for work before daylight lately, so the chickens get fed in darkness, and the few eggs that are still being laid are collected in darkness, by feel. A day or two after the hen went broody, I was feeling around for eggs and accidentally jammed my hand into the broody girl’s back. I apologized. But the next day I had the chance to visit the barn in broad daylight, so I thought I would do some visual recon on the mother-to-be. And guess what? I guessed wrong. Not broody. Dead.

At least her eyes were shut. I hate when creatures die with their eyes open and then they get dirt in them. Who wants dirt in their dead eyes? When my favorite sheep, Bull, died this summer, he died in his sleep, his head curled gracefully down to the hay bedding and his eyes closed as though in repose. Ditto the black hen. I am a tiny little bit tired of my animals dropping dead this year. But I am glad that none of them have been smashed open, and their eyes were all shut.

White People Get Stranger & Stranger

I have always loved that line from The Brother From Another Planet, and today I am it.

These are four fleeces from my Jacob sheep, drying on the roof of our house. I went to skirt them yesterday to send to the carding mill, and lo! They were soaking wet! Because in what was admittedly not my finest hour as a logician, I laid the fleeces on a tarp in the garage after shearing…right over top of the floor drain. In which location they got soaked by the very many, many torrential rains we have received this summer. A-doi.

The roof was so hot it was burning my feet, so I hope I am today redeeming my reputation for solutions crafted using just what’s available in the Magic Cellar. With better attention to detail than I displayed in June, we will hopefully toast the fleeces just enough to be perfectly dry and not so much that they get all brittle and unspinnable.

And P.S. Happy Birthday, Eileen Flanagan!

Rosefugee Camp

My friend and gardening role model, Rodrica Tilley, she of the amazing paintings, many of which have depicted the citizens of her garden in Montrose, PA, is moving away to Vermont, where her gardens will be smaller and less sunny. She has generously given me lots of cool plants over the years, and now a set of potted roses (including the tea rose ‘Inkspot’ pictured here) which never made it into the ground, and which are not making the move to New England. Even though I JUST finished swearing that I was done expanding my perennial beds because I want to have time some day to hike and kayak and so forth in the summer, I am choosing spots for these new roses, and since the existing beds are crammed beyond full, some of these pioneers are venturing forth into new parts of the property, like the orchards. I see no reason why a rose should not be happy as part of the brush island around the base of an old apple tree.

In addition to the bougthen roses in my rosefugee camp, there is also a piece of the rugged old thing that grew over Rosebush Cottage, the decommissioned chicken coop Roddy used as her girlhood playhouse. This rambler is renowned for its insouciance, fragrant pink blossoms and complete indifference to neglect. I am so touched to have a piece of this lovely and historic rose; Rodrica just explained to me that when old rose people come upon a plant they cannot readily identify, they give it a working title until its true identity comes out; hence my new plant is named Rosebush Cottage, and probably always will be, even if we find out what genetics it has, because whatever its original name, it cannot be as charming. I am going to plant Rosebush Cottage next to the self-sown sweetbriar in the North Orchard beside which I intend to build my little writing room some day, and in whose dooryard I intend to have my ashes planted at some even later date. The fact that the garden is preceding the building may be the cart before the horse, but in this case it means that from the very first day it is inhabited, Orchard House will have an excellent rose garden.