If you've read my memoir, Together, Alone, you know that for years, we raised chickens here--broilers for the freezer/table, laying hens for eggs. When the China Bayles series gathered readers and I began to travel to promote the books, we had to stop. It's hard to manage animals when you're a thousand miles away. But I've missed them. And since I've recently cut back on book travel (for reasons I describe in An Extraordinary Year, my journal for the years 2008), I've decided to start raising chickens again. It's another one of our efforts (along with the garden) in the direction of food self-sufficiency. We love the idea that these chickens will be raised here, with affectionate respect for their needs and comfort. We also love knowing what they're eating, because, as Michael Pollan puts it so succinctly, "we are what we eat eats." Simple as that.
We're sharing this batch of 26 (there will likely be another batch later in the year) with our friend Dolly, who shares her ranch-raised beef with us. These are Cornish Roasters from Murray McMurray Hatchery, which sent us our baby chicks back in the 80s and 90s. The old catalog has become the website, which is much more convenient. An eons-old practice, raising chickens, now facilitated by a new technology, the Internet. The chicks arrived yesterday morning, 27 of them. One was a casualty of the journey, but the others are healthy, full of cheeps, and fun to watch. They're also eating their heads off.
The chicken coop is finished, more or less, but these little guys will be spending a couple of weeks in our bathtub, which serves very well as brooder until they don't need such constant temps (90-95F the first week) and can graduate to the coop. They'll be plenty toasty out there, too--yesterday, it was 102, just another day in a string of 100+ degree days, breaking all records for the first week of June. Which is a whole other story, of course. The story of global warming, which is certainly having an effect on the garden.
Garden report. Briefly. We have tomatoes, green beans, onions, eggplant, and more summer squash than anybody deserves. The tomatoes are Porters, which are small but do well here in the heat. The green beans should have flourished through the end of June, but the temps are a challenge for them. They'll do better in the fall garden. People often think that there's one long growing season here in the South, but that's just wrong. We have two short seasons (Feb-June, mid-Aug-early November), separated by a fierce, unflinching July. This year, it looks as if June is joining July. Let's hope not. Let's hope that this isn't a harbinger of things to come.
Book report. Moving forward on The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose. Which I need to get back to right now. Thanks for reading--more later....
Reading note. As a responsible omnivore, I need to know where my food comes from and understand and respect the needs of the fellow creatures whose deaths make my life possible. The chickens that gave us eggs and went into the freezer were treated with care and concern; they had the run of the meadows, with all the green grass and grasshoppers they could eat... What's more, all these animals came from this place, or nearby. They shared the soil with us, the water, the weather, the air. In that, there is a certain deep integrity, a wholeness, a relationship which I find richly satisfying.--Susan Wittig Albert, Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place