New Old Hens

The "free" section on craigslist gives rise to all kinds of craziness.

Yesterday I saw an ad offering two 3-year-old hens, still laying, along with their coop. Thinking how our little chickabiddies won't be laying for a while yet, I figured it would be nice to have eggs this week. And although they probably won't keep laying for long, these new old hens look healthy and happy for now. Later on maybe they will make a nice stew. Besides, having full grown hens will spur us on in our efforts to create an outside chicken habitat. (Penguin and Dundee are still box-dwelling birds, pooing on old socks for bedding and basking in the light of my mother's hand-me-down heat lamp.)

So early this morning Chris and I tossed a couple of hens in the trunk of the car to wait for us as we dismantled their chicken coop. We made a little tarp tent to keep them from getting into the back seat and turning the car into a latrine. It was effective at keeping the car clean but also fogged up the windows. I think the chickens could breath all right through the gaps, and hopefully they enjoyed their chicken sauna.

After removing a few dozen rusty screws from the rotting wood of the chicken coop, we had the roof separated from the sides. We bundled it on top of the car and rolled back home. My grandmother would be livid if she saw the things we put her car through. Sorry Boo, we know you wouldn't approve. But we are very, very grateful!

Once we had unloaded everything else into the backyard, we gave the chickens free range to explore their new digs. And dig they did. It must be nice to never doubt your purpose in life; if you are a chicken, it's all about scratching about in the dirt for grub.

The coop went up more easily than we had feared. Chris still complained that I have turned him into my farmhand, but at least we finished before I had to leave for work. And I don't think he was really too put off by it. After all, he got to name them: Swinkles and Turnip.

New old hens in their new old house.

A couple of years ago, I would never have thought we could do this, all in a days' work. Not that there isn't a long way to go, of course. There are a couple of gaps in the chicken wire that I want to fix, and we'll have to figure out a new housing situation once Penguin and Dundee move outside. And there is always the to-do list, all my mantenimiento that cries out to be dealt with. But it gives me hope to think that just by saying, "yes, let's do it!" we can be on our way to where we want to be. It just takes that spirit of possibility to take off running with a project and end the day feeling satisfied.

Forest Salad and Kefir Cheese

Yesterday my partner Chris and I drove to a farm outside Sandy, OR to pick up some raw milk for ourselves and a group of friends. I felt I was being initiated into some kind of secret club; people who drive out to farms to buy milk seem to be in their own category of sustainable foodie extremeness. A club open only to the radical, privileged elite who can and will spend an afternoon trucking out to the country on their quest for real food. I guess I'm not sure how I feel about that. It makes the carbon footprint of a gallon of milk all too tangible, and puts me one step closer to being part of a character sketch on the show "Portlandia."

We took the trip as an excuse for go for a hike on Sandy Ridge, up a winding trail more geared for mountain bikers than for the likes of us. It was spring in the woods. The sun was showing through occasional showers of rain, the new leaves of the Indian plums were a brilliant green, and we were dawdling along our way, nervously peering up the trail so as not to be run over by Mt. Hood's two-wheeled thrill seekers. I gathered some miners' lettuce and oxalis. Picking baby greens is a tedious task any way you cut it -- they're so tiny, it takes ages to pick enough for a salad. But it's all worth it when you sit down to dinner for the first fresh greens of the season. (After excessive photography for bragging purposes, of course.)

The rest of our dinner was a bread and hummus extravaganza inspired by some kefir cheese that I had preserved in salt and olive oil last week. The whole process needs some tweaking; I didn't realize that the kefir cheese would continue to ferment and expand, dripping olive oil all over our cabinets and giving the cheese a bit of carbonation. Next time I'll leave more room at the top of the jar! The cheese came out well though, despite the mess. Kefir is amazing. Life is delicious. Food is heavenly.

Dinner pallet: Homemade sage-sea-salt-sourdough bread, cucumbers, tomatoes, pickled onions, and salted kefir cheese in olive oil. Just don't tell anyone we got the veggies and hummus from Safeway . . .

Mantenimiento

It's hard to focus on writing when I'm at home - ironic since I'm supposed to be writing about home - but my thoughts are scattered by a to-do list that will probably never end: unpack, do laundry, clean the chick's bedding, clean the kitchen, make bread, fix my banjo neck, practice the banjo, plant snow peas, water the seedlings in the greenhouse, pick more nettles, fix my sewing machine, mend a scratched-up armchair . . .

But then again, this is what home feels like these days: an endless procession of tasks. When I'm feeling defeated by what feels like a daily grind, I often think of a book I read a couple of years ago called Zapotec Science. It's a book about subsistence agriculture in indigenous communities, where people use the term mantenimiento (maintenance) to describe the daily tasks and rituals involved in sustaining their way of life on the land. I don't know why that word resonates so much with me, but I think of it often.

For me it has come to mean that there is value in the daily rhythms and routines, in just keeping on keeping on. In a society obsessed with forward motion, mantenimiento is a reminder that the most profoundly powerful forces are not linear but cyclical. Spring blooms into summer, explodes in fall, decomposes in winter, only to be born again. Rain turns to oceans that fly into the sky and become clouds, only to fall again. I cook to clean to cook to clean to cook.

Making it Happen

Enough hemming and hawing -- I'm just going to write.

I was going to call this blog "Oekologie," the original Greek spelling of the word "ecology," which literally means "study of the house." I like that definition because it explains why the natural world is so important to me; it is my home. It also affirms my current obsession with self-sufficiency and my efforts to nourish my own immediate ecosystem, justifying why my living room smells like worm compost and deer hide, my fridge is full of stinging nettles, and my kitchen countertops are a mini-laboratory of culturing kefir and rising sourdough bread.

But a quick google search revealed that there's already some kind of blog festival called Oekologie, so I had to throw that title out. It was a premature title anyway, since at the moment I don't feel I have a very complete home to study yet. I'm more in the process of creating my ecosystem, deciding where it is and what it means to inhabit it, and how I can economically (another oeko-word . . . curious) support myself while I putter about planting garlic and pickling fiddlehead ferns.

In college I studied ecology, but now I'm searching for home. I'm an Oekoseeker. I'm sure my writings here will wander outside of any parameters I might set for myself, but they will all be, in some way, an expression of my oekoseeking.

Chicklets Dundee and Penguin, the newest additions to my oeko-system.