Sustainable Scientist

Hen-pecked

Posted on August 11, 2009 by jkmcintyre

Last year when we got chickens I tried to find out if chickens really would peck your eye out. Various search terms turned up nothing useful. I decided perhaps I was being overly nervous.

When I crouch down, Rocky, the Head Hen, wants to jump on my back and stand on my shoulder. I thought this was kinda cute, though obviously from my face I was still a little worried she might peck me in the eye.

Last week she did just that! Can’t say if she was being Dominant Chicken or just found it an irresistible target, but down came the beak. I shut my eye reflexively, but can’t say if it was before contact.

Nothing more than a little spot of broken capillaries, but no more hen-on-the-shoulder games for me.

My purpose in posting this is not to scare anyone that a chicken will peck their eye out (I now doubt they could – they can sometimes break eggs, but can’t break the skin of a green tomato). I’m just thinking that if some neurotic person is searching the inet with terms ‘chicken, peck, eye, out’, she might now turn up something useful…

Posted in chickens | 5 Comments

Big & Bright

Posted on August 10, 2009 by jkmcintyre

First raspberry! This off the Tulameen I planted in March from bareroot Raintree nursery canes.

Wowsers. Hidden against the bottle fence, behind the tomatoes, was the largest cucumber I have ever seen. This one off the ‘Sweet success’. Totally yummy, too.

Tiger’s eye heirlooms soup bean – so purty. As they dry, the white turns yellow.

The first crunchy carrots. Yum.

Posted in beans, cucumber, raspberry | 1 Comment

My fence is having an erection

Posted on July 30, 2009 by jkmcintyre

… or maybe my cucumber plant is just happy to see me?

Gardening isn’t often funny, so I couldn’t pass this up.

Posted in bottle fence, cucumber | 2 Comments

36C in Seattle – really.

Posted on July 29, 2009 by jkmcintyre

Damn it’s hot. Loving the heat pump that keeps our main room 76F. I’m actually loving the heat – it reminds me of other places I have loved – Ontario & Argentina – in the heat of summer. The smell of things growing, and almost burning. The nights warm and fragrant.

And still there is work to do outdoors. Last weekend when this heat spell really ramped up, we finally set in our brick walkway. Generously handed off from cousins Kitty & Jeff down the street, we’d laid out the brick pavers in May and have been tripping over them ever since – putting off the big job of digging down and laying in the necessary support.

Ultimate inspiration? The Edible Garden pre-Tour this past Sunday. With a handful of other hosts expected to visit our yard, tripping over bricks seemed the most obvious mishap we could prevent.

Bags of gravel, bags of sand. It looks easy cause I only took a coupla shots, but that actually tells you how hard it was. I missed shots of us digging down into crumbly hardpan. I missed the sand layer. And then leveling everything.

I like to build things and I like to learn new skills, but if I’d had the money to do it over, I’d have paid someone to do this for me. Unlike building the coop, digging the gardens, building the potato boxes, and constructing the fences, the only thing I enjoyed about building the walkway was _finishing_!