FRESH Eggs!

Breakfast this morning included two fresh eggs for each of us. We are talking still warm from the chicken here. The whites are thick and the yolks are firm and round and deep orange. The flavor is great -- we had them over easy with not so much as salt and pepper and they held their own just fine.

Last week I started to have two eggs for dinner and ended up having four. I had them with Roasted Roots -- in this case a yam, a double handful of red potatoes, and a yellow onion, all cubed, tossed with lemon juice and olive oil, sprinkled with salt, pepper, and an Italian herb blend, and spread out on a foil-lined baking pan. Bake at 350 until tender and just starting to caramelize.

If you are thinking it might be nice to have a couple of chickens in your back yard, even just for the eggs, the answer is yes. Once you get set up with housing for them, their care takes minutes a day: Check that there is enough food & water, toss them food scraps from your kitchen and any weeds you've been pulling from your garden, and bring in the eggs. Most people end up hanging out with the chickens a bit more than that, though, because they are amusing. You'll want to really clean out the coop once or twice a year, say on some nice spring day as part of gardening. Other than that even cleanup is minimal (scatter food grade diatomaceous earth & wood chips once every week or two or three). All in all, a flock of chickens is much less work than a cat or a dog. And they do a great job on those garden weeds.

I've started selling eggs, too. Himself, watching the egg cartons pile up in the fridge, was threatening to serve chicken dinner if I didn't start selling eggs to subsidize their upkeep and housing. Our flock of twelve is producing almost five dozen eggs per week. So I ran an ad on Craigslist, and now have a few families that I'll be supplying on a regular basis.

Of course, that's encouraging me to get MORE chickens. I'll be putting in an order soon.

We have GOT to get that coop built. The big girls are OK in a sheltered run, but babies need better protection in the late winter and early spring.

The creek is rising

There is a lovely little seasonal creek just behind our house. It usually runs from late fall to mid or late spring, maybe until early summer if it has been a wet winter.

At the moment, it is running the highest I've ever seen it. It's making a wonderful noise, and it's flooding much of the back yard. We've been clearing branches from the culvert to make sure it doesn't flood near the house.
 


The winter has, so far, been pretty extraordinary. A dusting of snow or a freezing night is usually a big deal here. We had snow on the ground from December 19th until this morning, and it was below freezing for most of that time. Here are some pics from the snow.


 

Now, of course, we have the high water (with plenty of rain coming down to join that snow melt). It's only January; we are getting into the winter weather season. I'm glad we have lots of firewood, and a generator.

The Year of Prompt Solutions

The new year sputtered to a start in our neighborhood -- the pump went out on the community well sometime New Years Eve, and we all woke up to no water. Happily, it was fixed and the system recharged before nightfall. Maybe 2009 will be the Year of Prompt Solutions.

I've got some serious must-do items for the coming year: I need to get my house in order, literally and figuratively.

Literally:
We are still sorting through all the stuff -- from Jim's business closing, from my folks downsizing, from plain old unexamined accumulations. I am starting to see the light at the end of that tunnel, and that helps.

We still aren't really set up for the critters. We put temporary insulated walls up on the back porch to see the goats through our extra-severe winter weather. Gigi was still recovering when the cold hit and we really needed to keep them warm. We need a real goat shed for them. They won't appreciate it, though. They've gotten used to watching us in the living room at night. The chickens will appreciate a proper coop. They did amazingly well through the cold, partly by eating heroic quantities of layer pellets. But now the runoff from the melting snow is invading their run, and damp is worse for them than cold. Well, at least it is well-ventilated.

We managed to tear up the yard, front & back, last summer. Now we need to landscape and plant.

Figuratively cleaning house, now that's harder. I need to sort out some new directions for my work. I'm burned out on the kind of writing that has been my bread & butter for so long. Really, really burned out. It's a bit scary. So I'm looking at other ways to make a living. Faux finishing... I'm pretty good at it but this is not the economy to build a new business like that. (But, oooh, I do want to get into those traditional lime plasters. Beautiful stuff, natural materials, and it makes for a healthy indoor environment. That is what we will be wanting in our homes.) Writing is still my mainstay. I'm looking at ways to make money writing about things other than computers and software.

With the house clean and tidy, the animals properly housed, and work in front of me that doesn't constantly remind me of difficult times, I expect to have a lot more energy. Enough to get paying work done and still have the time and enegy to work in the garden and with the animals, doing the things that light me up.

I don't know how long your "must do" list is for this year. But I know we are all apprehensive about the economy, the ecosystem, etc. So let us raise our cups to the Year of Prompt Solutions.