Eighth of an Acre Bounty

Hows that for a title? Sums up this week pretty good. Our cat Bukowski has gone missing and we are both desperately hoping he turns up fresh from a walkabout. He is chipped and we haven’t received any calls yet. Earlier this week we went down to the Animal Control shelter just to double check that they hadn’t picked him up and not scanned him. The shelter was horrifying and  traumatic, so many animals without homes. They are stuffed to the gills and to the point that they are creating extra rooms to house the animals in the parking lot with straw bales, tarps and space heaters. Let me underline once again how important it is to fix your animals. And if you are even considering getting a pet, please get one from rescue or the shelter.

Ok – end of plea/lecture. Unfortunately after going through 8 or 9 rooms full of cats, we didn’t find Buk. I am hoping this means that someone has just taken him into their home, not realizing he already has a home. He is such a sweetheart and although he is our most recent addition (showing up on our driveway about a year and a half ago injured, skinny, stinky and with all his manly equipment) we have grown quite attached to him. Watching an animal go from a half to three-quarters feral state, to cuddling on you lap in the morning sun does something to ya.

In other news, Dahl – the queen bee chicken had an impacted crop. Turns out she is a straw eater (nobody ever said chickens were smart, but c’mon!). Her crop swelled to about the size of a tennis ball this past week, was not reducing and was hard to the touch. My research on the subject indicated that there were essentially 3 methods of alleviating the condition 1) Use a dropper to squirt oil down into the crop to loosen things up (downside: if you didn’t push the dropper far back enough you could suffocate the chicken by dropping oil down the trachea). 2) Massage the mass in the chickens crop back up the throat and make her puke it out (downside: a big risk of suffocation due to sticky nasty masses of stuff covering the trachea). 3) Slit a hole in the chickens breast skin, directly over the crop, then slit through the crop and pull out the nasty stuff – then let the chicken heal. Strangely enough, this third option seemed to have the least number of downsides or horror stories attached to it. I read the forums and a number of people had killed their chickens using the first two methods, but there wasn’t a single chicken fatality (reported) going the surgical route.

I decided to try and find a middle ground before chicken surgery or a several hundred dollar vet bill. I soaked a bunch of breadcrumbs in copious amounts of canola oil and hand fed them to Dahl. I then went out to massage her crop, trying to assist in the breakdown of the mass several times. The following day we created a separate pen inside the regular chicken pen and put Dahl in there with more oily breadcrumbs and water. I removed the regular chicken food at night so she couldn’t sneak anything and continued the several massages a day. As of yesterday her crop was noticeably reduced and she seems to be on the way to a free flowing system again. Now I need to rethink my mulching material for the garden if the dumb chicken insists on gobbling straw and stuffing herself up!

And peppers! I mentioned in my last post that we were just headed out to the last farmers market in Columbia City. One of my favorite farms (Alvarez Farms) has a stand there and they were selling their ristras of peppers. Every year this family grows the most amazing variety of peppers, it makes me homesick for of New Mexico just looking at the colorful tables. I bought several milder varieties of peppers for a batch of mild salsa I will make with the last of the tomatoes. But I also decided to buy a ristra of hot peppers for this winter.

Not only is it beautiful, but these peppers will dry within several weeks (while retaining thier color) and I can harvest off it for the winter anytime something needs a bit of spice. Food as decoration is a burgeoning theme around here, more due to lack of space than anything else. We have winter squash and sugar pumpkins sitting on side tables in the living room too. I get a lot of joy out of the aesthetics of squash….is that wierd?