Dancin'

The chickens are right at six months old now. We're getting just over a dozen eggs every day from our hens. Two or three of those are full-sized eggs, but the majority are smaller, and some are quite small. So they're exactly what we expect pullet eggs to be. 

We still have 23 hens and 5 cockerels. While the rooster roster hasn't changed, we've seen several developments in the social order. Barred Rock Hudson is certainly at the top of the pecking order, and King Louis is at the bottom. The three New Hampshire cockerels are harder to pin down. Rooster Cogburn was for a long time the largest of the roosters, and he seemed to be vying with Hudson for the top spot. But Cogburn has fallen at least one rung on the social ladder now. The other two New Hampshire cockerels, Little Jerry and Cosmo, are a mystery to me. Little Jerry is now the same size as Cogburn, slightly larger than the dominant male. Cosmo is slightly smaller.

Uncle Harvey contrasts "dancing roosters" with "rapist roosters." The former perform a chicken mating ritual, dancing around the hens to invite them to mate. The "rapist roosters" simply grab hens that catch their fancy and try to forcibly mate them.

Rooster  Cogburn was the worst of "rapist roosters," actually lying in wait around corners for a hen to pass, then grabbing her and mating with her while she shrieked and squawked indignantly. Cogburn was so bad, even my most tender-hearted daughter reluctantly agreed we needed to cull him. But two amazing things occurred to keep me from culling him, and I'm glad they did.

First, Barred Rock Hudson took control of his flock. Hudson spent at least a few weeks entirely devoted to rescuing hens from Cogburn. A hen would cry out, and Hudson would charge over and attack Cogburn. Cogburn would then typically run off, away from the flock, and wait for another chance. Strangely, both Little Jerry and Cosmo began to act as Hudson's deputies, chasing Cogburn off whenever a hen would cry out.

Second, Cogburn learned to dance. Cogburn was the first of our roosters to start dancing for the hens, who would generally ignore him. But one day, I noticed that there was a Barred Rock hen hanging around with Cogburn away from the rest of the flock. He started dancing for her, and she accepted his invitation without the slightest fuss. I started paying attention at that point, and saw the two of them go through this ritual at least four times over the next hour.

As Victorian as it sounds, Cogburn got a girlfriend, and she reformed the rake.

Chicken Salad

This spring I ordered 27 birds from Murray McMurray Hatchery. They added two to the order, and 29 were delivered near the end of April. We lost one on the fourth day, but the rest are doing well – 28 nine-week-old chickens living in our backyard.

Our attempts at landscaping around the coop haven't been very successful yet. I'm seriously considering dumping foot-deep mulch all around the outsides.

There's one barred rock cockerel who seems to be growing up fast. At nine weeks old, he practices crowing every morning around 4:30. We call him Barred Rock Hudson. They're still very young, and barely adolescent, but Barred Rock Hudson appears to be the dominant male.

The second-in-command is a New Hampshire cockerel who's significantly larger than Hudson, but seems to back down whenever they have a confrontation. I've taken to calling him Rooster Cogburn.

Murray McMurray includes a "Bonus/Free Exotic Chick" in their orders, so we have a Polish cockerel as well. When he was only a couple days old, he looked like he a pre-revolutionary French courtier in a ridiculous wig, so we took to calling him King Louis. Now he honestly looks more like a punk rocker, so perhaps he's more "Louie" than "Louis". The poor guy has his head pecked mercilessly by the others, but we're afraid seperating him will do more harm than good, so we keep coating his head with balm.

All told, we have five cockerels, although it's possible another is lurking in there. But Hudson, Cogburn, and Louis seem to be the three at the top. There are two more smaller New Hampshire cockerels, but they seem to be pretty timid.  Louis is definitely lower on the pecking order than Hudson or Cogburn, but I've seen him stare down almost everyone else.

The plan is to let the chickens roam freely during the day, but so far I've been limiting their "free range" time to a couple hours in the evening. The cockerels are still quite small, and still don't seem to understand their role in the flock. There's a lot of predator pressure out here, and I'm not quite ready to delegate the care of the flock to them yet.

So I end up doing some of their free ranging for them: pretty much every weed I pull up I toss into their coop to see whether it interests them. They definitely won't eat thistles (which is a pity), but they love dandelion, milkweed, and clover. The jury's still out on sourgrass, and as much as they like hawkweed, I'm letting them find it themselves: it's too hard to pick.

I now spend a lot of time making salads for my chickens.

They do seem to love their salads. And it's not too hard to figure out what they don't like – they leave that on the floor of the coop.

+2

So we finally went back to the nursery where we bought that Green Gage plum last year. I couldn't find any more Green Gage trees, so I asked. No, they didn't have any Green Gages this year. So we thought we'd perhaps pick up something else.

While we were outside, the young woman who seems always to be there came up and told us she had found two Green Gage trees in their clearance area. And of course I knew exactly which trees they were...

Last fall we visited the nursery in mid-October, just two weeks before they closed for winter. They had three of the Green Gage trees I wanted, priced at $89 each. Since they were about to close, they had marked them down 25%. So I bought one, and kept wondering if I should have bought two. And all through the winter, I'd see the two trees I hadn't bought, standing tall and alone in the cold...

So this week, those same two trees had been marked down to $20 each. They were in full bloom, and had a lot of bees buzzing around them. They were bursting out of their pots, but they had made it through the winter.

So now they're in my back yard. They seem to be in decent shape, despite having been brutally root bound. They're at least ten feet tall, so I'm not fearing for them as far as the deer are concerned. And I got both of them for less than the discounted price I would have paid last fall.

Of course they're probably more stressed than they would have been had they been in the ground all winter, but they seem to be doing fine.

So that's a win.

Attrition

When I was growing up, my dad had something like 14 fruit trees in the back yard, not counting nuts. There was an Italian prune plum tree, a Green Gage plum tree, a couple cherry trees, and several apple trees. My two favorite apple trees were the Northern Spy and the Cox's Orange Pippin.

Now that we're living in the middle of nowhere and have a little more room, I've been working on planting a small orchard of my own. We've planted a couple Italian prune plum trees, a couple Cox's Orange Pippin trees, and even a Green Gage plum tree. It's been very exciting.

I would have saved time and energy if I'd just have taken a couple of those trees, chopped them into small pieces, and left them out for the deer. They ravaged the Cox's Pippin tree we planted, reducing it to a bald stick with a few pathetic, broken branches. They ate most of the branches off the MacIntosh tree, leaving it sadly unbalanced. The Italian prune trees seem to have survived the best, but even they ended up with just a small handful of leaves. They looked like spindly skeletons.

Interestingly, the deer seem to have done almost as much damage in the spring as in the winter. The trees looked much better in March than in July.

So last fall, we planted a couple more trees, which we protected with "fences" made of hog panels. Those have fared better (so far). The Green Gage was by far the most mature tree we've planted, and the deer appear to have left it alone entirely. We planted a second Cox's Pippin and a cherry, both in wire fences. Both have been left alone.

To be fair, we've had a mild winter (so the deer haven't been desperate), and we now have a dog. I think the dog has had a bigger impact on deer raiding our trees than I have realized.

So now I realize I'm in a war of attrition with the deer. I'm going to have to plant trees in great enough quantities that I can afford to lose one or two to the deer. Most of the varieties I've been planting require at least two trees for fruit, so I've been budgeting at least three trees per variety. That means I can lose one to deer and still get fruit. And when deer season rolls around in the fall, I'll try to recoup some of my losses in venison.

So yesterday we planted a couple Northern Spy trees, and I have a couple more cherries to plant over the next few days. That brings the tally up to eleven trees total, but I want to get at least one more Green Gage and another Cox's Pippin before it gets too warm. I'm hoping to get the total fruit tree count up to 15 by fall.

I haven't given up on the trees the deer ravaged: we fenced them in and fertilized them and mulched them. I'm hoping they recover, but I also realize we've lost at least a year or two of productivity on them.