Enough Chickens!

Enough Chickens!!

Could this be the March Lioness?

March and its lists have begun.  March came in like a lion, but today was a lamb day, soft tendrils unfurling in breezes just strong enough.  “Enough” is the root of this day.  Just enough sweat, and just enough dirt under these nails grown too long in the winter pause.

Pause interrupted

The starter cord snaps back over and over, and the tiller is declared “unresponsive.” "Till Garden" is item number 1 on the list.  Last Fall, in a fit of focus, 10 wheelbarrow loads made it to the garden filled with stems and various poops from the barn floor.  According to the USDA guidelines for Good Agricultural Practices, 120 days is the minimum recommended decay duration for uncomposted manure to be in place before being bacteriologically safe for planting and especially harvesting food crops. 

Food for thought?

The industrious chickens, who aren't even supposed to be in the garden, spread the piles into a perfect blanket over the sleeping earth.  The dog thinks she helped, but eating the assorted poops really doesn't count.  There's no better nourishment for the garden than a veggie-poop blanket.

Today, the plan was to till that blanket and awaken the dark and crumbly - stir it into life.  Alas, the back up plan; the sturdy wheel hoe that never fails to start - unless I fail to start.  Raking, hoeing, sun soaking me wet, this is freedom after a winter suffered indoors.

Runs on muscle

The list says to get ready for planting peas and lettuces.  Instinct drives me to mark off five 30 foot rows for peas, but the sense of this new life, the existence where I'm not selling produce, tells the overachiever that only one row is necessary for peas and a very shortened row is all that we need for lettuce.  The days of washing 20 pounds of lettuce at once and picking 30 lbs of peas in a day are gone.  This is a happy departure. 

Letting go of 12 years of expansion goals is work. Obsessions of growing more in less space, growing up and out and down like a skinny-pathed Eden on 1/4 acre hang leech-like onto the gray matter. There is such mental struggle in growing less - insidious arguments that arise between myself and the newer self.  It's a power struggle plumbing self control to new depths. 

Often times I think about what my efficient and focused husband would do next.   He wouldn't be using the wheel hoe.  He would have fixed the tiller.  He also wouldn’t be making lists, but I'm list driven and I live for the hash marks checking off the “to dos.”  So despite reason, the 2 rows are readied with muscle and not so much ingenuity.  This is what ages a farm hand, brute stubbornness.

Grubbing for grubs

Item number 2 is to fix the fences so that the chickens can't get into the garden anymore.  They are so focused on the quest for insects, they trample plants, and scratch out seeds and seedlings eating what they mine like crazed archaeologists.

Ignore the hype about chickens being good for the garden as if there are no repercussions. There are conditions attached to that concept.  

Chickens must be excluded from the garden unless certain conditions are met:

Condition 1:  All plants are secured by long tap roots or are surrounded by protective barriers.   Frugality, not logic, has driven me to spend hours collecting sticks and jamming them around precious plants.   There are prettier options out there, for a price, or you could use what is within scrounging distance, but also for a price.  “Time vs. money, chicken vs. egg?”  The two concepts that drive man mad.

stick-henge fortress

Condition 2:  You desire the annihilation of

the garden to a flattened monolayer of detritus, or you wish for every larvae to be excavated from your planting rows after you have cleared them of vegetation.  This is a decided bonus and the reason why chickens in moveable pens are deemed “chicken tractors.”

 Condition 3:  You desire exactly one chicken sized bite out of each and every tomato, pepper, eggplant…you get the picture.

Condition 4:  The damage being inflicted by insects exceeds the damage that a chicken can do.  Watch out Japanese Beetles and stink bugs!  I have an army of

chickens that are on to you!  They are focused and merciless killing machines.

Did someone say stink bug??

 

Condition 5:  You really love the companionship

of the chickens so much that any damage they inflict is worth the sweet company they provide.  They talk to you in the garden and honestly ask questions. I'm

not making this up.  A few years ago, a chicken friend let me know very loudly that I had dropped a large piece of root crop.  She used the sound that roosters use to let his hens know that he has found food.  It was a Dr. Doolittle moment, and still unsettles me a bit.

So the garden chores of today end with an unfinished list, an unwilling tiller, two open rows ready for planting, some very happy and completely free-range chickens, and a dirt laden, sweaty, and satisfied farm girl who has had enough in the best sense.