Rituals

Another grey day. The slush from last night's little snow squall remains on the ground, making walking over the icy driveway to the barn carrying buckets of water for Buttercup into an extreme sport. But it is February and Groundhog Day has come and gone. Before we know it, it will be mapling time and Westchester will have its annual pancake supper. Our seed group meets next weekend to order our seeds for the garden and we are planning our order of spring chickens- or chicks actually. All the familiar rituals of spring.

For the past 2-3 years a few of us have gotten together to order from the seed catalogues. Oh, the seed catalogues! Harbingers of spring. Glossy purveyors of hope. The glorious vegetables; the exotic foot long beans, Japanese radishes, okra, eggplant, 50 varieties of tomatoes, greens, celeriac, corn, -and the flowers; climbing, blossoming, hummingbird and butterfly attracting- our garden is going to be wonderful! (several months later, when the bugs and weeds have had their way, a very different reality will be recognized)

Now on to the fowl. This year we are ordering some heritage breeds of poultry. Our old hens are getting very old indeed. We worked out the other day that aside from the 2 young hens hatched this summer, the rest of our flock is over five years old. Considering commercial laying operations 'retire' their hens after one year, ours are very elderly indeed. In fact this winter, with 25 layers, we are lucky to find one egg in the nesting box each day. One of the most expensive eggs in the world. Time for new birds.

For years we have had some Araucana mixes from our friend Harris McCormick. Harris' birds are cute and sprightly, a mix of the Araucana and some kind of bantam. They lay lovely little blue eggs, mostly only in the summer, but we can put up with that. What is harder to take is the fact that they really don't like laying in the nesting boxes. No, they much prefer using clumps of weeds or grass. Many a time we have come across an attractive clutch of blue eggs nestled under a shrub, waiting for their mother to go broody and start sitting on them. Occasionally we are even slower finding them and the mother is half way through incubating them. Once we were even later than that and we lifted the broody hen to move her and her eggs to a safer place only to find several fluffy chicks and more eggs hatching. This renegade hatching of babies would not be such a problem, except we are really trying to end the bantamX line of birds, hoping to actually get some of the eggs our hens lay.

So this year we decided to do some research and buy some varieties of hens for their egg laying abilities and characters as well as their looks. So many options! We do want some more blue egg layers, but let's go for the purebreds. We'd like some of those Marans that lay very dark brown eggs, some Buff Orpingtons who are lovely, fat, gentle hens that lay well in the winter, some Chanteclers, the old Quebec breed, and... well, the list goes on. But our hen house is small, so decisions have to be made. Choose only a few of each and kill off the old girls, or... build a bigger hen house. Time will tell.

Then there are the turkeys. For the past couple of years we have raised a few turkeys. Kept a couple for ourselves and sold the rest to friends. Turkeys are great birds. They travel in a herd (flock, I suppose). They are curious and like to follow us around, or follow the dogs, cats, horses, whatever. And they are very easy to keep. They have been very popular and very tasty, but we haven't been very happy raising those big white birds that are used commercially. They have their beaks trimmed, which we are dead set against, are started on antibiotic laden food and as importantly, are kind of ugly. We want pretty ones, the old fashioned Pilgrim kind of turkeys. So we will order some of them. Minimum order 15. Oh well, we'll find space. The larger varieties of turkeys don't breed naturally but John Dynesveld says he knows how to do AI with turkeys and is trying to convince us to keep a breeding pair. We are not sure that is such a great idea, but are easily swayed so we may well end up with a permanent pair of turkeys.

For years now, I have thought how nice it would be to have a goose at Christmas. What could be more traditional? Louise has been very much opposed, remembering the attack geese her father kept some years ago. But with all this searching through hatcheries, we have found a nice variety of geese- the Embden. They are meant to be quite gentle and will eat all the grass on your lawn- no more lawn mowing- and Christmas dinner to boot. What more could a person want?

Spring is looking very promising.