I see you shiver
So yeah, as it turns out, right after I finished my last entry and went out to clean the chicken coop, I found something in Smallville that doesn’t make me insanely happy. This thing just mostly makes me insane.
I got all the bedding out first with a bent pitchfork, pulling the poopy litter towards me out the door and onto a tarp I had spread out to catch it. Each time the tarp filled, I pulled the four corners together to create a really big hobo pack, then loaded it onto our wagon and pulled it out to the leaf/grass pile that I’ve been intending to turn into a compost heap someday. I didn’t bother wearing gloves because, well, I knew I was capable enough to pull the used bedding out without touching it.
I’m gifted that way.
Once the bedding was done I went around to the back of the coop and raised up the flap hiding the nesting boxes. Those are filled with straw, and though the chickens do like to go in them at night, they don’t poop a whole lot in there. It’s almost as if they understand what they’re for.
Right.
Every day after I’ve let the chickens out into the yard, at least one of them can’t figure out how to get back in the pen and ends up behind the open gate, running back and forth in a panic and squawking at the other chickens because she can’t figure out to walk around the end of the gate. There’s a reason we use the word “birdbrain” to describe a less-than-intelligent person.
But I digress.
I pulled the straw out of the box—again with my bare hands—then swiped around the bottom quickly to pick up the stray clumps.
When I saw what was there under the straw I’d been rooting my hand around in, the joy just sucked right out of me:
Latrodectus mactans: the bitch.
Words cannot convey how much I hate these things.
To my credit, I didn’t scream and flail and run around the chicken yard like a chicken with its, well, you know, but I wanted to. Instead, I just paused for a small shiver of revulsion and reflected on the time when I was a kid and one of those went skittering across my hand and up my arm.
Then I went and got a stick so I could take it out for better pictures.
Obviously I need a new camera, so I can get better pictures than this.
I was about to kill the widow when I remembered then inevitable how do you know that was really a black widow, Fred? I’d be hearing unless I offered absolute proof. I’ve been known to mislabel snakes before, true enough, but I don’t think it’s possible to mistake a black widow. At least not here in the southeast; there may be lookalikes elsewhere. No other spider around here is fat, shiny, jet-black, and looks like evil personified. They’re that distinct.
But, here’s the capper:
The telltale mark
Reckon I’ll wear gloves next time.
Oh, and here’s what the coop looked like when I finished:
Finding that in the nesting box certainly doesn’t make me look forward to fetching wood from the woodshed this winter. Black widows LOVE to hide in piles of wood and underneath things, where they can stay out of sight and scare the bejeebers out of froofs like me who are scared of them.
As I mentioned last time, our hens turned eighteen weeks old this past Monday. For the last week, several times a day I’ve schlepped my way out to the coop, filled with an anticipation so strong it’s nearly palpable.
I crawl inside and root around in the pine shavings and poop; I open the back hatch and check all the nesting boxes, cleaning out any poop I find; I get on my hands and knees (mindful of the poop that seems to be everywhere) and peer intently into the spidery darkness underneath, where the girls like to cluster in the heat of the day.
No eggs yet.
I check all around the pen, looking by the food and water, in any weed clumps, and in all the corners by the fence posts. Nothing. I go out into the yard in the evenings, because I let them out for a few hours after work, and I look in all their favorite spots: by the old cedar stump where they bathe in the dust, in the cast-iron pot that belonged to my great-great-great grandmother which now holds the remnants of some iris my father gave me (remnants because the girls have uprooted most of it so they can sit in the potting soil), in each of the patio chairs where they like to leave me presents of a different sort to sit in, over behind the air conditioners where they gather to gossip about all the damn cats.
No eggs yet.
It’s like they’re taunting me with every cluck, every squawk, and every excited cackle. I hear them making a ruckus and race outside thinking this is it, this is the time I’ll find my first egg because I read that they like to trumpet it to the world when they’ve laid one. But when I get out there I find that they’re just arguing or fighting over a bug or scrap of tomato.
Or stuck behind the open gate.
The anticipation is killing me.
“I’m going to can all day today,” Robyn said to me yesterday morning. “Go out there and pick everything.”
My pleasure. [insert evil grin here]
I think she ended up canning and freezing stuff from about 9:30 until 6:30. I’m really starting to think there’s no way we can eat everything we’re putting back.
Someone didn’t know I had the camera.
Our puny cukes (which also have some squash bugs) don’t produce a lot,
but it’s more than we can eat. These all went to pickles.
One of the biggest yields of okra yet. For reference, the pitcher in the back is a gallon.
A mess of black-eyed peas. As the official sheller, I’m about ready to buy an electric one.
She froze six bags from this. If you’re unfamiliar with the awesomeness that is
black-eyed peas (they’re a southern thing), you don’t know what you’re missing.
This became three pints of pickled jalapeno slices, perfect for nachos.
Another insane amount of green beans. We get this 2 or 3 times a week.
And that second row (now blooming) hasn’t even started yet.
There is no way possible for us to eat all the beans we’re going to have.
Miss Mama loves nothing more than to lay in the shrubbery and snooze all day.
I started our official compost heap yesterday by pulling as much of the uprooted corn and squash plants off the burn pile as I could. Next, I got a few loads of leaves and chicken bedding from the pile off at the perimeter of the property and added them to the mix. Finally, I went to the other side of the property and got a load of already-decomposing weeds I’d pulled from the garden.
I piled everything in the back forty in full sun, right where the original burn pile the original owners started was:
Then, I started thinking maybe I should go read up on compost heaps instead of flying by the seat of my pants, so I came inside and read a few things. Notably, I read that heaps shouldn’t be in full sun because they’ll dry out too quickly. Also, the fancy-schmancy page I was reading had a “recipe” for good compost, but Jesus Christ, who has time for that kind of effort? The big pile of leaves was just dumped there and forgotten, and it’s turning into some lovely stuff that’s dark and rich and looks like potting soil. It did that without a “recipe.”
I went back out, climbed on the tractor, and pushed the compost heap over closer to one of the giant oak trees. Now, it’ll get full sun until about 2:00, then it’ll be in shade.
The other main thing a compost heap needs is water to start the decomposition process. But how to get enough water for a eight-foot-wide and three-foot-high pile of pre-compost?
With Bertha, that’s how.
Side note: I can only imagine what the traffic going by thought of me taking that picture. The bucket of the loader was about seven feet off the ground, so to take that shot from above I had to climb out onto the lift arm and position myself in a pose that looked like I was trying to sex up the arm. Come to think of it, the thrum of the engine felt pretty good.
These are the things I go through to share my life with you.
Once I’d gotten the water I drove it out to the compost heap, sloshing it every which way, and dumped it:
Bigger version, because I think the shot
through the water is cool.
I continue to believe that the tractor is the greatest thing ever invented.
Hopefully we’ll get some good compost out of this.
A cool-looking storm came through yesterday afternoon.
Frick sure manages to look dorky.
They sure look like they want to lay eggs, don’t they?
Finally, some proof of my previous comment that I don’t think we’ll be able to eat everything we’ve put away for the winter:
The mantel is full.
And the floor is filling up. To answer your question: tomatoes, ripening.
The table we no longer eat at usually holds the most recently canned stuff.
We had to buy a bigger freezer because our little chest freezer wasn’t cutting it.
Know what’s cool? Often, when I go to the corner grocery for ice, the owners (especially the wife) comment on how nice we’re making our property look. Especially the back forty, which was a chest-high jungle under the care of the previous owners but now looks like a big expanse of lawn.
Makes me feel like we’re adding to the community when they say things like that.
