Brains!

OK, not really. It's actually a little loaf of paneer I made today using the blessed produce of the Fountain of Eternal Milk that I recently discovered down in the woods. I haven't made cheese in years, and I am so pleased to begin again. The smell of milk heating is simply divine.

Cider

My son is off school today and the apples set really hard this year—to the point where enormous branches are breaking off because they can’t hold up all the fruit—so we went out and picked five gallons of apples, mostly windfalls, to make cider. His processing job was to hack the apples to pieces, which he enjoyed very much. My job was to run the pieces through the food processor to turn them into tiny bits. Then we fed them into my grandmother’s old juice press, taking turns twisting the augur and holding the press on the countertop (it’s inclined to torque around and fly off). And shazam: in ninety minutes we had turned five gallons of fruit into exactly one gallon of cider. And this cider is delicious. The flavor is not over-sweet—it is tart and sweet both, and just right.

GOOSE FENCE UPDATE

The Administration advises you to leave your geese alone. You can spend as much time as you want, devising ways to improve their lot, and five minutes later they will discover that badly patched place where you overlapped the ends of two short pieces of fence, and they will all start coming and going that way in perfect happiness.

The Brain Trust

Here are some of the new fowl from this spring, cleaning their feathers. As it turned out, we did not have trios (one male, two female) of Pomeranian geese and Toulouses, plus five Blue Swedish ducks. We had one Pomeranian (female), three Toulouses (all female) and seven ducks (not all female), two of whom could be charitably construed as having once had Swedish relatives. Being unable to sex a goose—I can forgive this. Having white fence-climbing ducks running loose in your blue breeding flock, and packers who are not perfectly clear on the whole species difference between ducks and geese? No wonder the feed store changes the subject every time I go in and try to pay for the order.

And as it turns out, “silly” is a charitable epithet for a goose. We have had some enjoyable times lately watching the ducks and geese turn their baby pool into a mud bog is under five minutes using only their personal filth. It is mightily entertaining. But I would not ask them in for chess. I would not even ask them in for tic tac toe. The turkey has turned out to be not only more courageous than the rest, but an intellectual powerhouse by comparison. The other day I found her up in the Hen Room, quietly cleaning out the hanging feeder while her friends on the ground slugged it out with the sheep for the last three layer pellets.

Now I am pitting my wits against the Brain Trust’s lack of them to devise a way to get the birds through the summer pasture fence, somewhat torn up and no longer electrified, without getting the biggest Toulouse fouled helplessly and hopelessly in the wires. I do not especially want them outside the fence, but the apples are falling and no one can really expect them to keep away from that fabulous bounty, even if it is right at the edge of the fox-filled woods. So instead of keeping them in, I want to devise a way for them to pass in and out easily without letting the sheep go free. That way if the flock is pursued by predators, they can flee to the barnyard, where the sheep will rise in curiosity, thereby frightening off the goose-eating varmint by dint of the sheer size and hellishness of a Jacob. My first Goose Gate design involves a broken chair under the fenceline to create a little fence-tent passageway. I’ll let you know how it works. 

Unfree Enterprise

Enterprise has demonstrated yet again that wisdom is the better part of valor; she got herself trampled by the sheep in her exuberant love of chicken feed and her reckless unconcern for the hooves of the animals who tower so very many stories above her. Consequently, Enterprise is confined to quarters by herself until her busted foot mends.  Nothing is more irritating than the peening of an unhappy turkey, so it is lucky for me that the ducks and geese tend to hang around the range pen anyway, so the turkey can feel she is part of the flock.

I don’t think Enterprise will be very long getting better, but in the meanwhile, she missed the goxen’s first real juvenile delinquent activity. Last night, as my daughter so neatly summarized it, instead of the ducks and geese going to bed, they left. They slipped out through the rut under the barnyard gate and were discovered steaming down the driveway past the house, discoursing at length about their big adventure. My husband heard them and he and my daughter rounded them up and drove them back to the barn.

Part of me would love to have them out eating slugs in the flowerbeds, but not at dusk when the foxes were probably lining up in the hedgerow, drooling, waiting for them to come just one foot-slap closer before they pounced. 

I Know Why The Caged Bird Stinks

This morning the Biblical plague of flies in the house told us it was time to move the baby chickens off the kitchen porch. Between the pen of geese and ducks and the turkey, and this pen of seven assorted bantam chickens and six younger Maran hen chicks, the main entry into the house has been one giant stinky drift of flung feed crumbles and wood shavings for about a month. And whoo-ee was it time for those birdies to remove from the premises.

The goxen have grown enormously since they moved out to the barn a few weeks ago, and now the bantams are standing in the doorway of Hen Cottage, considering the outside world and the large-sized chickens that already live there. Except for a little curious pecking and some strong-arming of the duck crumble by the older birds, who consider anything besides layer pellets to be the height of luxury, things seem to be going OK.

If you could not see the backstage machinations around here, what a bucolic paradise it would seem. Ha!

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.