Country Dreamin’

Sunset, overlooking my neglected asparagus!

A bright, crisp midwinter day at Berryridge Farm…a red-tailed hawk sailing overhead, air so pure you can almost taste the sweetness, the peaceful quiet enfolding you…but right now, I can only dream about it.

I’m back to caregiving, staying in the middle of a bustling town. There’s a busy state highway only 2 short blocks away, and all day long you hear sirens, the rumble of trucks, the hiss of the tour bus as it squeezes down our narrow street. Less than 2 feet separates this house from the neighbor’s, and you can hear their dog barking through the walls. 

My least favorite part of city life: Tuesday is trash collection, with the banging and crashing of bins getting dumped before 7 am…but happily, that will soon be over. 

Any other January, I would be fretting about all the fall chores I never got around to. Beds unweeded, compost piling up that I didn’t get a chance to lay down, piles of leaves ready to grind up for mulch. But this year, heading into February, I’m eager to get to the jobs I couldn’t do earlier…and since I’ve been away so much, there are far more of these tasks than ever before:

Clear away the dead asparagus ferns, spread composted chicken January over the rows;

Weed the tomato beds, which have had exposed soil all through the worst winter weather;

Gathering up the brush from newly cleared ground, that we should have done last spring;

Clean the chicken coop and pen from stem to stern, and lay down fresh wood chips…

John took on the double Douglas fir

And that’s only the beginning. I should be stressed about all the work I’ve got to tackle, but I actually can’t wait! John bucked up the double-trucked fir that the winter storms took down, which created a new task. 

But that’s okay, because there’s tons of fir boughs to collect for the chipper. My coop housecleaning job will need LOTS of wood chips, and the fragrant fir will help freshen up the coop.

By the first of the week, I’ll be back in my tatty but trusty Carharrts, digging in!

Thanks to John for the pics!

Hen’s Winter Blues

Hens yucky pen 

Laying hens, as far as I can tell, do NOT like snow…Or cold!

I wonder if it’s because their feet are composed of only cartilage, without flesh or fat for insulation? Whatever the reason, hens generally will not even step on snow. 

Which creates a problem in winter!

Since the Christmas Day blizzard here in the Foothills, our little flock of five has spent most of their days inside the coop—which is a very unusual hen behavior. Their usual pattern is to leave their coop with the sunrise, staying outside until sunset. 

That all changed when we got about two feet of snow over the next week and a half, with temps in the teens and even single digits. One night, we hovered around 0 degrees. Which is a very severe freeze for our area. 

The girls would basically spend almost all their waking hours inside. A load of snow had blown into the girls’ pen just outside the coop, so they had very little roaming area that wasn’t pure snow and ice.

Scratch that: it wasn’t pure! 

Without roaming space, even milling around the pen for only a few hours a day, so few square feet of living space has meant wall to wall hen droppings. Despite my best attempt to clean up what I can, the “stuff” freezes right into the ice, and can’t be collected. 

The girls look pretty miserable, after weeks without their usual free-ranging. They sound a quite hen-depressed as well, making only a few little forlorn chicken noises. Ordinarily, I would cover up the frozen manure with wood chips…but with this long freeze, we’re nearly out of chips—and the snow has covered up all the brush we laid out for chipping.

Adding insult to injury: our new feeder (if you ask me, due to pretty poor design), fell apart. I found the hens one day standing right in the feed tray. Then the heated pet bowl failed too—John guessed it shorted out when water got into where it was plugged into the outdoor extension cord. 

So we thought we were all prepared for winter weather…but we clearly were not.

Interestingly enough, despite their yucky environment, the girls continued to lay eggs steadily during the worst of the freeze, and now, are giving us a couple of eggs every other day.

We’ve seen a bit of melting…our little flock now have about 3’x 8’ of exposed ground to scratch in. The melt also uncovered a bunch of sawdust sitting under John’s chopsaw. So the day before yesterday, I gathered up as much as I could, and got it spread around on top of the manure-laden soil.

If hens could plan ahead, they’d probably be chomping on the bit to get out of the muck, and back to scratching around the orchard. 

I can’t wait myself…as soon as it happens, I’ll be doing a thorough cleaning of the coop and pen!

Landline Goodbye…VoiP Comes to Berryridge Farm

 We thought the day would never come. The day we could finally ditch the phone company.

Almost everyone we know has let go of their landline, and simply uses their smartphone. Sounds like a no-brainer. But as I’ve mentioned before, John and I don’t have smart phones. There’s no cell signal for miles around, and we only go into civilization a couple of times a week, so why bother?

Our neighbors who have cut the cord go to work every day, and are frequently out and about so they can be reached away from home. The telecommunications conglomerate that originally serviced our area sold their phone division to a smaller company, who then turned around and created a new phone company—this one with legendarily bad customer service.

Every problem or line failure, this new company has blamed the customer, and refuses to make a service call unless you pay them the big bucks.

Our neighbor’s line had failed, but the phone company kept telling her it was her problem, not theirs. She had fought with these clowns for nearly a month, until she finally told them to &%*#@$!!

Over the years, our own phone line had become scratchier and scratchier. Adding insult to injury, the prices of the new phone company had been going up steadily for months. A dollar added here, another 3 bucks there, more fees, more taxes… A bill that had generally run about $68/month gradually ballooned—and last month it was $98!

But all these years, John and I figured we had no option but to stick with this outfit.

The last couple of months, we’ve been dealing with an urgent family matter. And right in the middle of it, weeks ago, we picked up the phone and had no dial tone.

A big windstorm had hit the night before. Our cable is buried on our private lane, so we figured a tree had come down on the lines somewhere in the area. We are pretty philosophical about outages like this, so we didn’t think twice about it.

A couple of days went by, but we still had no phone.

We talked to the one neighbor family who had a landline they hardly used. They had dial tone…clearly, it hadn’t been a tree after all.

So John went to the phone company website to report the outage. They had a phone number you could call—which obviously didn’t help us. And there was no email for reporting problem. You had to initiate a chat session with some bot. This automated system indicated that we should check our outdoor phone company box and plug our phone in there, to see if we had dial tone.

Out John went with his Phillips screwdriver to the side of the shop the box was attached to, and got it open. Well, the line was just as dead in the outdoor box as it was in the house. He contacted the company to let them know…and after two days, had still received no reply.

We had to ask ourselves: did we really want to pursue a repair? Almost certainly, we would have to go through what our neighbor had, going back and forth with the phone company for weeks while they shunted the problem aside.

And did we want to do this while we were already so anxious about our ongoing family crisis?

Surely there had to be another solution. We thought longingly of getting smartphones…but no cell signal was no cell signal.

Our neighbors had used Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology for years. I’d always figured it was a very high techie-techie process—so our satellite internet speed wouldn’t be nearly fast enough. "Even so," I said to John, "maybe it's time we looked into it."

John checked our satellite internet company, and what do you know…

They not only offered VoIP, but they were having a special! Going out of town for caregiving over the holidays, we had to delay the process a bit. But just 2 days after John requested the equipment from the satellite company, the package arrived.

It’s a little box with a phone jack that you connect via Ethernet cable to your internet modem. You can even use your existing phone. Once John went on the satellite company website to let them know we had all the parts connected, we were in business: with a live phone line and a temporary phone number!

We had heard VoIP sound quality wasn’t anything to brag about, but we’ve found it’s far better—no scratchiness—than our late, unlamented phone company’s. It’s true, that when the satellite dish gets snow-covered, the signal will be spotty at best, or disappear. Still, a good northeaster will blow the snow off, and when there’s no wind, John doesn’t mind clambering up on a ladder to brush the dish off.

We’re still waiting for the phone company to “port” over our original number to the satellite company. But it feels wonderful to deal with our satellite people, who’ve provided stellar customer service since the get-go. And don’t charge an arm and a leg for it.

It’s funny, that what you take for granted—like having a phone—can feel really special when you haven’t had one for over 3 weeks.

Forecast for rain…but we get more snow!

And today, after getting another 6 inches of snow last night, adding to the 2 feet that’s fallen since Christmas, we are snowed in. So it feels especially comforting to have a reliable link with the outside world.

PS…The bird-friendly garden is a gift that keeps on giving…Below: a chickadee dining on zinnia and hyssop seeds the northeaster blew off the seed heads!

Chickadee enjoying the winter garden!