Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

Granny Jessie kept chickens during the Depression – quite a lot of them, if my childhood memories of the huge and by then crumbling and disused chicken-wire enclosure, the adjoining hutch and the nesting boxes are anything to go by.  Some of her neighbors went on keeping backyard livestock well into the 1960s – we occasionally sampled goose eggs at Granny Jessie’s house where we could hear a donkey braying now and again. Mom had to help care for the chickens, as child and teenager – and wound up detesting them so much that this was the one back-yard DIY farm element that we never ventured into when we were growing up. Mom hated chickens, profoundly.

 

But my daughter and I were considering it over the last couple of years, along with all of our other ventures into suburban self-efficiency – the garden, the cheese-making, the home-brewing and canning, the deep-freeze stocked full, the pantry likewise. It seems to be an on-going thing, especially in periods of economic distress and unrest.  I put off doing anything about chickens until two things happened: we finally encountered the woman in our neighborhood who keeps a small flock of backyard chickens, and she took us to see her flock. She told us that it was not much trouble, really, and the eggs were amazingly flavorful. In comparison, supermarket eggs – even the expensive organic and supposedly free-range kind were insipid and tasteless.

The second thing was spotting a ready-made coop at Sam’s Club a good few months ago. We kept going back and looking at it, whenever we made our monthly stock-up. It had a hutch, an attached roofed run with open sides secured with hardware cloth, and an appended nesting box accessed through a removable roof. But still … the price for it was what I considered excessive. Then, at the beginning of the month, the coop was marked down by half. Seeing this, we transferred some money from the household savings account, and with the aid of a husky Sam’s Club box-boy, stuffed all 150 pounds of the box which contained all the necessary flat-packed panels into my daughter’s Montero.

I put it together over Mother’s Day weekend, painting it the same colors as the house: sort of a primrose-peach color with cream trim. The coop and run was constructed of rather soft pine, with some kind of greenish wood-stain slathered over it all, which took two coats of paint to cover entirely. I wish that I had gotten out the electric drill with the screwdriver attachment a little earlier in the game; the side and roof panels were all attached together with 67 2-in and 2 ½ inch Phillips-head screws. Yes, I counted; I did about the first forty by hand … sigh. The remains of half a can of polyurethane spar varnish went on the roof to make it entirely waterproof. We topped it with a wind vane ornamented with a chicken, and it all went together on a bedding of concrete pavers set in decomposed granite, wedged underneath the major shade tree in the back yard. By municipal guidelines we are permitted up to three chickens and two of any other kind of farmyard animal: goat, cow, horse, llama, whatever – as long as their enclosure is at least a hundred feet from your neighbors house. The chicken coop may not, strictly speaking, be 100 feet from the next door neighbor’s house on the near side, but he is the one with the basset hounds, one of whom can hear a mouse fart in a high wind, and can be heard about a block away when he really puts his back into his bark.

We went out to a feed store in Bracken for feed pellets, bedding chips, a feeder and a water dispenser.  The feed store also had artificial eggs made from heavy plastic, but so cunningly textured they looked very real. The feed store manager said that what they are also used for is as a means of dealing with local snakes that prey on chicken eggs … they slither into the nesting boxes, swallow an egg whole and slither away. If you suspect your nest is being raided in that fashion, you bait the nest with a plastic egg. Snake swallows it, but can’t digest, pass or vomit up the egg and so dies, in the words of one of Blackadder’s foes – “horribly-horribly.”  (Ick-making to consider, but then I’ve gotten quite testy about critters predating on my vegetables, and set out traps for rats and dispose of dead rats without any qualms.) From many different places; Sam’s, our local HEB which now offers stacks of chicken feed in the pet food aisle,  and now the semi-rural feed store – we are getting the notion that keeping back-yard chickens is getting to be a wide-spread thing. I wonder how much Martha Stewart is responsible for this development.

Saturday morning we were off to the south of town, to a small enterprise in Von Ormy for three pullets. We had wanted Orpingtons, but they weren’t available at any of the close-in providers, and the owner recommended Barred Rocks – those are those pretty black and white chickens with bright red combs. My daughter wants to name them Lorena, Maureen and Carly – Larry, Moe and Curly, feminized. They are supposed to start laying when they are mature, in about late summer, according to the owner of the bird-providing enterprise. Our three pullets are about ten weeks old, and somewhat timid yet – little knowing that they have won the grand prize in the chicken lottery of life. Eventually, they will have the run of the garden; we are assured they will brutally diminish bugs of every sort, gratefully fall upon green vegetable scraps, and come to be quite friendly with us. Early days, yet. And that was my week. Yours?

 

One of the things that my daughter and I have considered – now and then, and in a desultory manner – is the matter of keeping a handful of chickens. For the fresh eggs, mostly; I suppose this is a natural development to having a vegetable garden, and to experiment with home-canning, home cheese-making and home brewing. Likely it is all of a part with keeping the deep-freezer fully-stocked, and having a larder full to the brim with non-perishable food supplies; beans, rice, flour, sugar, bottled sauces, milk powder and the like. In the event of an event which keeps the local HEB/Sam’s Club/Trader Joe’s from being stocked … we will have our own food-banked resources to rely on.

But having only a sliver of suburban paradise acreage and an 1,100 square foot house taking up at least three-quarters of it, means that mini-farming can’t go much farther than chickens. No, not even a goat; which one of our neighbors did have, back when I was growing up in a very rural southern California suburb. They had chickens, too … and the people across the road kept domestic pigeons – but these suburbs also featured half-acre to acre-sized lots and the biggest of them corrals for horses.

And then, three things happened: several weeks ago, we made the acquaintance of a neighbor who does have a small flock of chickens – and a rooster, too – which is how we knew they kept chickens for months before we actually met up with them. They showed off their flock, and the morning harvest of fresh eggs … and we began to think of it as a possibility for ourselves. The fact that the local HEB is now carrying sacks of chicken feed in the pet-food section is an indication that other people are keeping chickens. If anything, I imagine that the great brains at HEB who decide what local demand is and stock the outlets have twigged the popularity for keeping backyard chickens, and that our neighbors with the flock are not the only ones.

This very spring, Sam’s Club added a chicken coop to the aisles with the seasonal merchandise; the tents, barbeque grills, camping gear and gardening supplies. My daughter looked upon it wistfully, whenever we went into Sam’s: it was an attractive thing, with a gabled roof, and a lower gable-roofed enclosure with hardware cloth sides, so that chickens could be somewhat sheltered. We talked about it, each time – but the price of it always put us off the notion. Until the first of May, when we noticed that the coop had been marked half-off. Yes – that was doable. We bought the coop, and a sturdy box-boy helped us stuff all 150 pounds of the box that it was in into the back of my daughter’s Montero. (We had a hand-truck at home, so it wasn’t necessary to beg for any help in getting the box around to the back of the house.)

It was in my mind to site the coop under the mulberry tree, where the soil is so intermixed with roots it is difficult to plant anything there in the first place. It’s also so shaded in the summer that anything sun-loving which can be planted has a tough time. It was also my notion to paint the coop the same color as the house: a sort of primrose-orange with cream trim. That was what took the most time – painting twelve out of the sixteen panels that made up the coop and run and letting them dry. The wood was lightly stained a dusty green, and it took two coats to really cover adequately. Well – that and setting out the concrete pavers to set the whole thing upon, and filling the interstices with decomposed granite. I really should have unleashed the screw-driver attachment for my electric drill earlier on: that would have saved some time and sweat. (The whole thing is held together by more than 70 Phillips-head screws of various lengths.)  I did the touch-up paint work this morning, and re-sited some plants – and all but finished. The roof will have to be painted with waterproof varnish, but I have half a gallon left from doing the front door, and tomorrow is another day.  And doesn’t it look simply palatial, as chicken coops go?

 

Next week – the chickens: the Daughter Unit has pretty much decided on Orpingtons, since they are good layers, friendly and fairly mellow.

This is, of course, the carved, solid-wood front door that I bought at the Daughter Unit’s urging last weekend at the neighborhood estate sale. Said door was one of the items crammed into the house formerly owned by an elderly couple with hoarding issues. The estate sale managers told us that they had to fill and empty an industrial dumpster three times, just to get to the sellable stuff. Which, as it was all crammed together in a dingy, airless and dark house, did not show off at it’s very best; honestly, there were some rather nice items available, but a lot looked like several aisles worth of the Dollar Store jumbled in with random contents of the marked-down shelves at Walmart. The blanc de chine lamp was one of the random nice ones – the door was another. It’s some kind of oriental sycamore wood, with four inset panels carved with a sort of lotus and leaf design. It was completely unfinished, and never had been installed.

My daughter called our next-door neighbor as soon as I had paid for it: he has a pickup truck, and I think feels rather guilty about how his basset hounds sometimes start barking in the middle of the night. Anyway, he came at once – so did the guy who does all kinds of neighborhood handiwork. All agreed that it was a very nice door – albeit heavy enough to require two or three persons to lift and carry. Well, we had planned and budgeted to replace the front door this year, but some piece of contractor  leftover from the Habitat for Humanity retail store was what we originally had in mind. The day after we bought it, the Daughter Unit and I set to with steel wool and a bucket of polyurethane varnish; three coats to the front, two on the back, and oh, my – did it come out well. There is a thin veneer front and back, which looks very much like something called ‘lacewood’ – a kind of rippled gold and brown effect. The Daughter Unit fears that someone will break into the house someday and steal nothing but the door.

We did source a latch set from Habitat, anyway – I am almost certain that much of what we use for renovating and replacing certain elements of the house will come from there, if not the marked-down section from Home Depot or Lowe’s. A small bit of panic upon trying to assemble the latch set, when we realized that it was set for a left-hand side opening and not a right-hand one, which was what we needed. Nothing about this in the box, and instructions were there not: It also wasn’t returnable. The three of us – me, Daughter Unit and the neighborhood handyman finally figured out that we could disassemble the latch mechanism itself and convert it to what we needed.

Oh, and the existing threshold needed to go, as well as the inside door trim, but we had pretty well written that off. Of course now the danger is that this bit of renew-replacement will make everything else look tatty. I’m almost a hundred percent certain that we are due for another inside paint job…

‘Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind,’ as the philosopher Emerson observed, and as I was reminded every time that I changed assignments at the bidding of the Air Force. Having to shift all your personal household ‘things’ every three years or so meant that the acquisition of ‘things’ was kept to a dull roar. Yes, there were the usual artistic souvenirs … and in my case, books without number … but on the other hand, the 220V appliances, transformers, and potted plants usually were handed off upon scheduling of a pack-out date; extraneous clothing and other ‘stuff’ usually had a date with the base thrift store, and what couldn’t be sold or donated was dumped. I couldn’t help observing, though, that my own ‘things’ went from a couple of B-4 bags, a duffle and a suitcase, to a single van-load in the space of three years, and multiplied exponentially in the years thereafter. (Still – in spite of all the books, I was still under the weight limit on the last PCS move.)

But – in 1994, I bought a house, and moving into it constituted my very last PCS move. (Although I never have thrown away the stereo boxes. They’re still stacked in the garage.) My daughter finished her last hitch in the Marines in 2006, and came home to roost with her ‘things’ which went into the house or the garage. We added to the mutual household ‘things’ over the following years, leavened and reduced by the occasional garage sale, or natural household selection. Yes, things wore out; china and glass items hit the floor and broke, I upgraded certain household items like pots and pans, computers, major appliances … but certain things were added to the household, either by my daughter or myself; pictures and books, nice bits of china and glass. That kind of careless collecting of ‘stuff’ might soon slow to a crawl, though, owing to an experience this last weekend.

So, we have always rather enjoyed yard and estate sales. Great was our rejoicing on Friday to discover another one, not three blocks away. There was a good crowd outside, and a huge quantity of tools and boxes arranged on racks in the driveway, and cars and pickup trucks parked on both sides of the street for a block in either direction. This was a most promising development, so we hustled the dogs home and drove back in my car. There was a line to get in – as the sale manager minding the door explained with a terribly harassed expression, there was so much stuff inside the house they simply had to limit the numbers of people coming inside for reasons of safety. The owners of the house had been hoarders. I mean, they had hoarded to the point where the house had been entirely packed. The team managing the disposition of the sale had filled several industrial-sized dumpsters of junk, before they could even begin on the sellable items. There was a storage shed out in back, and apparently some storage units also filled with ‘stuff’ for which there was no room until what was in the house could be sold.

We waited for about half an hour, rather intrigued. We had heard about this kind of thing, but never actually seen it first-hand. The elderly couple whose home this had been were said by the neighbors to be absolutely wonderful, sweet people, and generally good neighbors, but the house had a definite air of neglect about it. And once we did get inside – oh, my god; the house was even more dilapidated on the inside; dusty, unkempt and as dim as a cave. There was no bannister on the upper part of the staircase, and in one room, a massive roof leak in the ceiling had eaten away the ceiling drywall, and spilled dirty insulation into the room – there was, however, a plastic wastebasket wedged between the top of a tall bookcase and the ceiling in an attempt to catch water leaking through. The house, and the back porch was crammed, every corner, nook and closet with stuff; for some unfathomable reason, mounds of luggage. Camera gear and accessories, stereo components and laser printers, most of them new and untouched. Lamps and knickknacks, box after box of sets of china, toy trains, Madame Alexander dolls, still in boxes, much of it covered in dust. Books, of course; one whole walk-in closet lined with shelves of DVDs and VHS tapes.

I came away with a pierced chine de blanc lamp, which had no shade and wiring so ancient that the plastic practically crumbled in my hands as I took it apart. It must have been in storage for years, for it was absolutely filthy. I’d always wanted one, as they sold them in all sizes in the BX in Japan, but all I could afford back then was a small one. As I waited to pay for it, my eye fell on a a Kodak EasyShare camera, just about the same make and model as the one I currently use – which barely works any more. This one was a slightly older iteration, but unused – still with the protective film over the view-screen, and even had the instruction manual with it. The camera I got for $5 dollars. The estate sale people, I judge, had gone past trying to get fair market value and were just pricing most items to sell as fast as possible to anyone willing to take them away.

We came back on Saturday, just to see if anything interesting was left; there was – enough to carry on the sale through the following day. This time my daughter suggested that we look at the tools and stuff in the garage, which we had not done on Friday. Most of the good power tools and camping gear had sold, but my daughter spotted a carved wooden door. Solid wood, un-finished and for an extremely reduced price … we had intended to replace the front door anyway. So, I bought it, while my daughter called our chivalrous next-door neighbor with a pick-up truck. It’s out in the shed right now, awaiting application of stain and varnish.

Good purchases all, and at excellent prices, but I am resolved after this that any purchases of anything other than books will be on a replacement-only bases. Something coming into the house will necessitate something going out of the house. Whatever the future holds for my estate and home, it should not involve multiple dumpsters.

Or, at least, it has sprung in this part of the world: the wisteria bloomed, the Spanish jasmine is blooming, everything but the gherkin cucumbers that I planted several weekends ago has put up little green blades, pairs of leaves, or as in the case of the potatoes – whole clusters of green and greenish-purple leaves. There are even embryonic apples on the two trees – clusters of three or four little green marble-sized things, which is gratifying. We were worried about the apple trees being suitably pollinated, but the one from Lowe’s three weeks ago and the lonely one planted last year both look to have been visited by bees, the breeze, or whatever. And the peach tree has several long green things that might eventually become peaches in the fullness of time. Over the last weekend, we took some time for retail therapy and purchased some more things for the garden; potting soil, a better grade of garden soil than the unimproved clay normally on order in this neighborhood, some bulbs and roots and corms to improve some of the unimproved corners. Hauling heavy bags and pots hither and yon, scooping up last years’ leaves … well, that proved pretty exhausting. But at least, I now have a back yard that I’m not embarrassed to invite neighbors into. And at the very least, we will have some produce and herbs out of it, although I am still in two minds about chickens.

My daughter has spotted a chicken coop at Sam’s Club, you see; quite a lavish one, as these things go. The last excursion into Sam’s we went to look at it again, and struck up a conversation with a woman who was also looking speculatively at the display coop. She turned out to be an artist, a neighbor of Victoria’s Black Swan Inn on Holbrook Road, and a friend of Howard the glass artist … so anyway, she talked up the Starving Artists Show in La Villita this weekend. She and my daughter swapped pictures of their creations on their cellphones, and we talked shows and budget shopping and scrounging, the best thrift shops around. It turns out that we are both fans of Thrifttown, and the conversation reminded me that I really ought to stop by there and get some new jeans. The one comfortable pair was pretty close to disintegrating, and well … we were going to hit Rainbow Gardens again, so why not check for any bargains to be had as long as we were going that way?

My daughter is always on the look-out for quality crystal and vintage glass, which sometimes show up in venues like Thrifttown, so we did a spin through that section – but on the way from there to the other side of the store, I spotted something oddly familiar, on a shelf with the usual assortment of battered pots and pans; green and pristine, with the glass and metal lid taped securely together. Was it … could it be? Why, yes it was – a classic Chantal enamel small stock-pot with the full-depth metal insert for cooking pasta! You can’t even get that kind or color of Chantal any more, save on Ebay for prices very close to what they would have been when new. I know this, because about fifteen years ago, I upgraded from the budget set of Revere-ware pots and pans that I had bought when I moved out of the barracks. I picked Chantal because they were nonreactive enamel, nicely styled, had a narrow metal rim around the edges of the pots and pans where the enamel would be most prone to chip, came in a pleasing number of sizes and colors, had glass lids (also edged with metal), and were of high quality but not so expensive that they were out of sight. So I upgraded and was totally happy with cobalt-blue pots and pans, which have served admirably, with hardly a chip or crack among them, although the metal rims of the most heavily-used pots are rather dinged. Alas, like picking my everyday household china from Reading China and Glass at the outlet mall in San Marcos, and thinking that they would be in business forever endeavor and I would be able to replace broken pieces and perhaps enlarge on what I had … Chantal stopped manufacturing that style, and all colors except for bright red and steel-finish. Well …(insert colorful oath here) I suppose I can always trust to luck on Ebay when I want to add another small saucepan or two, but here was a lovely pot to cook pasta in (or even to use as a canning kettle) for the not unreasonable price of $15.

Yes, of course I grabbed it. Even being green instead of cobalt blue, I’d have been kicking myself from here to Waco and back again, if I hadn’t.