A Photo Journal of My Spring Break: a Garden and Egg Obsession

I have already shown you the faux stone duck eggs I dyed for Easter, and your well-feigned enthusiasm toward these has inspired me to show you more of the weird things that I spent my spring break doing, rather than writing for you. (At least after I had recovered from the Ebola.) This will bother my teenager because he says that he doesn't want any of his friends "to know that we are hippies." Hopefully, then, none of them read this blog.

The day after I had dyed all the other eggs using smelly vegetable matter, I was getting ready to make good on my promise to dye some more with the kids. Having not purchased a PAAS dye kit, I realized though, that I lacked one of those wire egg holders for dipping eggs in the dye. This lead me to Google in search of a solution to my egg-holding problem. There, I accidentally discovered that I could do something much, much  cooler. My kids had friends over again, so I went into he living room and said to two teenage boys,

"I have a scheme for dyeing eggs using flowers and pantyhose. You are going to love it!"

The boys looked at one another with an expression of stifled mockery and continued silently eating banana muffins. However the eggs, which I did mostly on my own, with limited interest from my own children and one sweet young girl who was there to play with my youngest, were super-cool.

In addition to dyeing eggs, which one might easily assume took almost my whole spring break in and of itself,  I started several gardens. Here is the short story on those. If you don't care about gardening, you should skip this part. It will bore you to death.

We planted Adirondack blue and Yukon Gold potatoes into straw bales. To do this, you wet down the straw bales thoroughly, and then dig holes straight down to the ground and fill them with compost, into which we planted the seed potatoes. I very much hope they will grow because I cut and dried the potatoes way earlier than I was supposed to, when I saw that they were rotting in the bag and making my kitchen smell like dead cats. I suppose if they don't show growth soon, I will buy some starts, if I can get them, and replace the shriveled seed potatoes with those.

This raspberry bed has been sitting over winter, stewing compost and pine needles, getting ready to be planted.  It is just downhill from a duck pond so that I can take advantage of run-off. These particular berries are summer-bearing Lathams. Our native soil is alkaline, and so I hope the compost and pine will help acidify it enough for the berries.

I planted twelve ever-bearing strawberries in a 4 x 4 space by my front door, which will be much too hot for them this summer unless I do something. There is still danger of frost here until May 19–in fact, it snowed just five days ago–so I am covering these with a frost blanket every night. It's an experiment. Also, just behind this bed you can see our clean-out, so, in the event that our drain is irrevocably clogged, a sickening morass of sewage and Drano will enter this berry bed and render it a toxic waste area. My hope is that this will not happen.

Here is where I planted out snow peas in my east-facing garden bed. I also started lettuce and purple kohlrabi seeds. I still need to get my radishes, calendula, cabbages, carrots, and spinach in the ground, too. Truth be told, I am having a hard time nailing down planting dates. Mother Earth News gives me one set, Farmers Almanac another, my southwest permaculture book another, and locals I talk to are all over the map. At least, growing from seed this year, I am not spending a great deal on plants, so I can experiment and learn what is too early. Not that I won't be homicidally angry about any failures.

I still need to start seeds inside to be planted after all danger of frost has passed: small watermelons, pumpkins, delicata squash, lemon cucumber, strawberry popcorn, purple tomatillo. I already have three varieties of tomato resting on my windowsill, preparing themselves for the moment it will be safe to venture outside enshrouded by walls of water.

The neighbor who lives in the other half of our duplex had donated two raised beds in the front of his house to our cause. With a southwest exposure, they should be perfect for the cucumbers, tomato, tomatillos and herbs. Hours of labor removed hopefully all (or enough) of the root systems of weedy yarrow, clumps of grass, and dandelion with roots driven into the soil like inoperable tumors. We sifted rocks using an old screen door, turned in compost and laid straw on top to discourage neighborhood cats from viewing our beds as "pimped out litter pans." (I have to credit Rowan with that moniker.) This was the point at which my children, who had been forced to labor all day pulling weeds and moving compost, starting saying "permaculture" the way that one normally says "dog turds."

I am dying to tell you about the plans for my three sisters garden bed and more straw bale raised beds for the melons and squash, but I will wait until there is something interesting that I can take a picture of.

On Easter, we had some good friends over for dinner and served the duck we had slaughtered last fall, after finding him injured in our backyard.  He was huge when he was alive–by far the biggest duck in our yard, but by the time we had slow cooked him, stuffed with onions, apple and thyme, he turned out to have been anorexic. There was hardly any meat on him at all, and it was a very good thing that I also had cooked ham. It really makes me wonder about the poultry I buy at the supermarket and what it actually looked like as a living beast, if that giant, oafish duck amounted to only a couple of slivers of brown meat.

I guess this whole thing does make me sound like something of a hippie, but I want you to know that during our Easter dinner, my hyperactive male children were running around with our guests, engaged in pitched Nerf battles on a 16 foot trampoline, the part of my earth mother sensibilities that involve peace, love and wooden toys having been beaten to death many long years before.

I hope that you too had a spring break (if you got a break) filled with the sort of bizarre adventures that make good blogging material. I will try to write an actual post at some point in the near future, since there are no more eggs to dye.

Here is Mikalh hunting for Easter eggs on the pretty side of my front lawn, while his big brothers look on.

Like most artists, my work is not always understood.

Right now it is spring break for me. Day seven of my ten days off of work. (This is one of the major benefits of working in education.) However, I spent the first five days of this break suffering from either the stomach flu or Ebola–I'm still not entirely sure–and so yesterday, when I finally felt only mildly queasy but basically energetic, I did what any normal person would do, who is just clawing her way back from the brink of death, and dyed Easter eggs in eight kinds off natural materials.

I have been collecting duck eggs for this purpose for a couple of weeks and I decided to get going right away. First, quite practically, with the aid of my eleven year-old I prepared a slow-cooker dhal for that night's dinner and cleared that away. Having done that, I gathered my dyeing materials, as follows.

5 bags Red Zinger Tea=Violet

Red Onion Skins=Red

Red Cabbage Leaves=Blue

Spinach Leaves=Green

5 bags Green tea=Yellow

Espresso=Brown

Yellow Onion Skins=Orange

Beets =Pink

To each of these materials, I added 2 cleaned duck eggs, a splash of white vinegar and enough water to cover the eggs. I brought them to a boil, then simmered them for 15 minutes. At this point, I checked colors, discovered that all the eggs were still abysmally pale and decided to leave them sitting in the dyes all day. By the end of the day, I had the following results:

• The spinach water wasn't even green, and the egg was still white. I got pissed off and added a couple of drops of green food color.


• The yellow and red onion skins had produced identical results–a deep burnt sienna color.


• The Red Zinger eggs were not violet but grey.


• The espresso eggs were brown. I wouldn't recommend eating them, though.


• The green tea eggs were more olive than yellow. Maybe I left them in too long. 


• The beet eggs were white. I added red food color, after all the others were done (which is why they missed this photo shoot.)


• The red cabbage eggs actually came out blue. Hallelujah!

One interesting problem was that, since these were homegrown eggs, cleaned by mere mortals, some of the protective  bloom had remained, and this caused them to dye unevenly and to peel in an odd way. I decided to work with it by taking the paper towel I was drying them on and using it to scratch designs into the eggs to work with the odd markings. They now resemble oddly shaped stones. 

When they were done, I summoned the kids to look at them. My six year-old had a friend over to play, who looked at them sympathetically and explained that his family every year dyed eggs using small plastic cups and dye tablets and that this was both simple and produced beautiful results.

"Who wants brown Easter eggs?" said my fourteen year-old.

I hoped perhaps that my mother might have a more favorable impression of them, age and experience informing her ability to appreciate their unique beauty. 

"Those are some hippie eggs, Tara.," she tells me.

Like most artists, my work is not always understood. This is all right. I did other useful things yesterday anyway, such as plant out potatoes in straw bales, set raspberries and strawberries in their respective beds, sow snow peas, and begin writing a play for my second graders to perform. Just the normal things you do on your first day back to good health.

And I wonder why I never get 'round to cleaning the baseboards.

Poetry in the Garden: Growing Food and Hope and Purpose

Poem is the theme.

I could wax poetic for the entire NaBloPoMo month of April, on gardening. I am a total, unapologetic idiot about this—shouting and gesticulating wildly about the presence of ordinary things, like my youngest son did as a toddler every time he saw a truck. I can't get over the miracle of it. Scraps left dying in the ground, brought newly to life, volunteering to be awake again. Here is a Brussels sprout, beheaded in late September, that the following April 1 has shot new life from the stump of its neck and is thinking about trying again to wage war against the cabbage moths.

And here is an asparagus, badly photographed. Last year a fern, this year it pokes its tiny phallic head up through the mulch and announces the onset of the growing season. I will leave out several sentences on erections and vegetative Nature Gods that occur to me.

Garlic, which I simply stole from the contents of my CSA farm box and set in the ground. It appears fragile, green and sylphlike, but its purpose is to stand as sentry against various pests, holding the line for my major crops, along with herbs and companion plants.

In the front yard, daffodils unfurl and waken, like ancient faeries, long-underground, who have waited for this moment to re-emerge from hiding. I can hear them speak the Old Tongue on the whispers of the breeze.

My husband and son planted only half our yard with tulips last fall. Now, finally, the section of yard to the left of my garden path has erupted into life and is looking scornfully at its twin–a mirror that reflects the side of my family which cannot get its act together no matter how hard we all try.

I want to grow us food. And hope. And purpose. My children, recently buried under heaps of textbooks and bubbled answer sheets should feel the honesty of a spade in their hands and the accomplishment of a berry picked that was truly earned. My yard, if a riot of hummingbirds, bees and living edibles, cannot surround the house of dead souls. And so I will garden, though pain may beat me down by end of day, because the meaning in the soil, the shoots, the rot, the produce–is a poem I can't stop recanting under my breath.

It All Comes From What Died Before.

Photo Credit: Flickr by Vanessa Vancour 

I have been very productive today. The sun is out, my yard seems ablaze with the possibility of springtime, and I am shrieking with childlike delight at each earthworm I discover in the leftover decay of winter. Because I practice permaculture–or try to–piles of leaves that have fallen on everything and degenerated under a heap of snow and ice are not a problem for me. Rather than coming in like a maid after a drunken party to clean up the vomit and broken bottles, I am an archaeologist searching for treasure that was left by the world while I waited, snug in my house. Winter has been sitting on my eggs.

Underneath the thick mulch of rotting aspen leaves which I laid on my vegetable bed last fall, there is soil as dark as coffee grounds. And as I lift a handful, worms thick as small ropes slide out from the loam, tiny soil organisms writhe in the embarrassment of sudden light. I am laughing, jubilant. I get it. All possibility is born of decay. It all comes from what died before. I am full of life, writhing with the inner action of soil-turning worms making my waste into fodder for new growth. The world knows, for the most part, two paradigms–rot and cultivation–but this speaks to another.

Putrefaction. The smell of wasted talent, days of usefulness that lie behind one, dreams that will now go unfulfilled. The necessity seems that I lie rotting on the ground, overcome with my pain. "Tara is ill now. Tara is in pain. She can't be asked to make this difference, contribute this service, offer this opinion. She has fibromyalgia and suffers with it terribly." Born of compassion or born of the easy, simple neglect we often show a friend whose illness has taken them from the sphere of our common activities, these thoughts turn me to something corrupted by my illness, unusable as a piece of moldy cheese left too long in the refrigerator. I want very much that the world should notice my need for a comfortable chair, or a call to ask how I am doing, but I never wish that the world would leave me alone to wane quietly in a corner. I am not ready, at thirty-six, to rot.

Cultivation. The tilling of soil, the turning of earth to loosen it for planting, to add fertilizer, to remove rocks, to rake. We have all been doing it as long as we remember, we know how to do it and know that it is right. The work of it seems somehow to be God's work, in particular. And yet, and yet...Just the same as we know, we know the necessity of a positive attitude, a forceful insistence on taking the bull by the horns, conquering indecision, being the author of our own lives, advocating, pushing forward, coaxing the plants to produce. And yet...

I let things lie. I let them compost in place. I cut down the vegetables of last year's garden and leave them scattered about the soil, as messy as the floor of a child's room. I layer down compost, manure, straw, leaves, water. And I practice faith in Nature, which has been making things grow, unaided by humans, for time immemorial. I simply help by moving Her ingredients to the right place. The mistakes of last year–the odd tomatoes, the funky asparagus, the Brussels sprouts that didn't produce in the first year–they are all still there, making that soil richer and wiser. That soil will have a history that can be read in the deep blackness of its crumbly soft meal.

I let myself lie. I makes decisions slowly, letting all of the scraps of consideration slowly turn into something fine enough to use. I am composting everything I ever was, wanted to be, or planned and failed at all the time. No dreams are swept away, just tucked under a protective layer of mulch. The girl who wanted to act, the woman who first married then divorced, the mother who thought she could protect her firstborn son from the world through her vigilant insistence on wooden toys, the runner, the vixen, the addict, the student. They are all in there, steeping in the mingled history of my terra firma.

Because I have swept no parts of myself into the corner of a landfill, I remember what it was to be a teenage addict, and I love addicts, as well as teenagers. Because I have not scorned the twenty-two year-old child who brought my first son into the world, full of ignorance and theory, I remember that I do not know how hard the parents of my failing students may be trying. Because I remember living through a divorce, I stop, catch my breath and try again in my current marriage, over and over and over. Because I have failed and not forgotten, I have humility in my roots, nourishing the leaves and flowers I dare to put forth anew.

I am not better than I was. I am just a product of the power of sunlight and water put to organic matter. I am proof that humanity always moves, transforms, wakens, alters, when we make full use of ourselves.

The War on Women Moves into My Duck Yard: a Video Documentary

I must confess that I have lost my cool. Recently, my adrenalin has surged more than once as I have heard the deluge of news detailing exactly how old white men around the U.S intend to make my life more difficult. Apparently, some of their plans include legislation to interfere with my right to obtain contraception that will prevent me from producing hordes more male children with attentional problems, and other insulting things. I promise, though, that I won't go too far in this vein, since I have no intention of researching this post well enough to make a well-reasoned political argument, and I want all of the lovely Catholic women, who offer to pray for me, to continue reading my blog. We all know where I am headed with this, anyway.

I am going to talk about ducks.

While white men with power and influence are bossing women around all over the U.S., white ducks are doing the same thing in my back yard.

In case somehow you didn't already know, we have pet ducks–two males and two females. That is at least one male too many. Let me explain their living arrangements. They have a fenced area of my large back yard, which they have entirely purged of grass. There are two coops built back there, which were intended as ladies and gentlemen's quarters. They choose, however, to sleep in the same one, all together, every night. In the summer, we fill up two or three baby pools in our side yard for them to swim in (and drink from) which need to be replenished with fresh water every day. In winter, when we can't use our hose outlet, they get no ponds and we have to fill large thermoses from our sink and hang them on nails for them to drink. Ducks don't need to swim, they just like to. During this pond-free time, they grow to resemble waddling cotton balls that have been used to clean someone's butt.

We had to turn the water off in late October this fall, five months ago. So yesterday, I looked at my four white ducks, who have been happily sloshing around in puddles of their own feces for the last few weeks, since things have begun to thaw, and decided that they could really use baths. This was how Project Empower the Duck Hens got underway. It began innocuously enough. The hose which extends out to our side yard, where the ducks live, is currently frozen just under the surface of the ground so I had to lug around my good garden hose from out front and use it to fill their turtle sandbox pond.  Naturally, it got all covered with poo. (Duck husbandry is not the romantic avocation you have been led to believe.) Having done this, I decided to sprinkle my oldest duck a little. Usually ducks like this, but today, having seen no hose water since 2011, Aflac had forgotten what it was and decided it was probably battery acid. He ran away, quacking in terror. (I have written his very funny history elsewhere, and you should read it.)

The systematic oppression which I have intimated is going on this mating season is being perpetrated thus: In the video below, please meet Nibbles and Sweet Pea. Currently, Sweet Pea, who is the bustier, larger duck, is being confined to the "non-bedroom" coop by Q-Tip, one of our two male ducks. I believe this is a misguided attempt on his part to compel to produce ducklings, much as the GOP is apparently compelling women to bear young. (Whoops, sorry.) Sweet Pea is laying eggs, but she is doing it only at night, in a separate coop, so he has her sitting all day in a coop on some utterly imaginary eggs, and for this she is denied food and water and, today, a bath. Men.

Observing this situation, my eldest son and I started guarding the pond so the poor girls could take a bath. Here, poor little Nibbles, my runty female with a voice like a squeaky toy, is attempting to get clean when she is rudely chased away from the bath which these asshole males clearly believe is theirs.

Understandably, Sweet Pea was a little too scared to get in, even though Rowan was holding the males at bay. Finally, we got her into the pond (which I couldn't film because of the water and feathers flying everywhere), but the boys escaped and bullied her and her sister back out again.

At this point, we got fed up with the Patriarchy of the Pond. Here you see Rowan, removing the offenders and my youngest, attempting to restore justice to the world. (Note Rowan's coldly delivered scientific explanation of the natural scheme of things and Mikalh's deeply empathetic reaction to the situation. That's my kids, in a nutshell there, in case anyone cares.)

The result of this twenty-minutes-long line drawn in the sand was, basically, that the girls got to bathe at least long enough that they now resemble ducks and not pieces of wadded up cotton stuck to a tush. We couldn't really keep the boys at bay for any length of time. They were hellbent on making sure the girls could not have access to the water, the food or their freedom.

What instinct governs this behavior in male ducks, and male humans, is difficult to say. My assessment is that we must remain forever vigilant, protecting our sisters in their baths from the nefarious attentions of misogynist and power-hungry white drakes, who wish to stand on our backs and crush us, to prevent us from bathing or from leaving our coops.

It takes a village to protect the liberty of one waterfowl. We are all of us, sisters.

The Quackers: From back L:-Sweet Pea, Q-Tip, Aflac. R-Nibbles.

Weirdly, my mother has also written on this subject this week. Apparently my ducks inspire writers in much the same way that that the Madonna inspired painters of the Renaissance. They have their own genre.

The Collected Works of Duck (all on the subject of these particular ducks)

By me

Animal Lover Part II: The Empire Quacks Back
The story of why the Hell I have these pet ducks and how this proves I am crazy.

Animal Lover Part III: The Duck Wars (or Our Adventures in Omnivorous Pet Husbandry)

Why it's OK to kill your pet, as long as it's a duck.

Duck Rental
A business enterprise I am thinking of starting.

By my Mom

I Don't Get It
Humans have a tangled relationship with animals. (Reflections on why her daughter–me–killed the duck.)

Ducks are Not Nice People
Thoughts on why ducks are really not as you have been lead to believe.

Duck Rental

One of the travails of duck husbandry turns out to be travel. When we are planning to go out of town I inevitably end up realizing, with horror "Oh God, we have to find someone to take care of them again!" It is difficult to imagine that any neighborhood child, for ten dollars a day, would enjoy dealing with feces-infused duck water, an electric fence and four feathered nincompoops that thinks he's a murderer. However, we have always found such a person. Some kids seem to think it is fun.

This has lead us to a new line of thinking entirely. Perhaps, what we need to do is work the supply side of the equation instead. My husband thinks that what we need to do is sell the whole situation as a "duck rental." The ad might look something like this:

DUCK RENTAL: Risk free– play small-scale urban farmer right here in beautiful Northern New Mexico. For one week, you can enjoy duck ownership with no commitment. Relish hours of amusement at their playful antics. Take advantage of great photo ops. Take home free fertilizer and eggs. At the end of one week, walk away with no major investment of time or money spent, and no ducks. The perfect scenario. Bring the kids.
WARNING: Some risk of Salmonella. All liability assumed by renter.

What do you guys think? You in?

Animal Lover Part III: The Duck Wars (or Our Adventures in Omnivorous Pet Husbandry)

I originally published this post back in September, when no one read my blog but my parents and three personal friends. I am now re-publishing it because of the enormous demand for human interest blog pieces about ducks. I think it can really make a difference. (It can't, but you should read it anyway.)


This post is Part III of my pet saga. Parts I and II can be found here.

We have pet ducks, which live in the fenced side yard of our half-duplex suburban home. These ducks are a cross between pets and a sort of fucked up 4H project gone awry.

The rationale for that situation is explained in Part II of my pet saga, so I won't bore you with it. Suffice it to say, I have a few screws loose in the pet department. Long story short, we ended up with three male ducks and two females, which is somewhat like keeping a low-security prison shower with three testosterone-driven convicts on PCP and two witless pacifists who keep dropping the soap.

The suggested ratio of males to females in a flock is actually one to six. Siren, the third and last-acquired of these males was immediately placed on Death Row at the time his gender was identifiable, since having more male ducks, we knew, was not advisable. Female ducks, it seems, are sometimes "mated to death" in these types of circumstances. So much for the romanticization of Nature.

Ultimately, though, I wouldn't let my husband kill him. In theory, I didn't have an ethical problem with this idea. We eat meat, and I am not stupid or unconscious enough to be interested in pretending that it isn't, in fact, flesh that we are consuming, and flesh, at that rate, which generally once belonged to an animal living in very unhappy circumstances.

Xavier, worshiping us.

However, I had raised the darn duck almost from birth and, for purely emotional reasons on the part of myself and my two youngest children, I withdrew my yes vote on culling Siren. The measure died on the floor, to the extreme irritation of my dear husband, also a former vegetarian, who had, and has, a serious interest in raising animals for meat and killing them himself, so that he can feel more comfortable about eating meat. (This may hearken back to some sort of male, hunter-gatherer imperative still in his DNA, or it may be because he doesn't really love any of our animals, besides the dog, who worships him with a comically abject devotion.)

It is actually very strange that I should end up even considering committing pet homicide. I became a vegetarian, on my own, when I was six, due to my gradual discovery of the obvious hypocrisy involved in both loving animals and eating the bodies of other animals. I maintained this custom my entire childhood, despite the fact that no other member of my family ever became vegetarian until I reached adolescence, and none permanently. I was even vegan for a time. I stopped being vegetarian when I was twenty-eight, at the point when I realized that I no longer felt that the rationale I'd once had for being vegetarian would endure my entire adulthood, and when my body seemed to be demanding a higher protein diet.

I still felt, and feel, that we have an ethical responsibility to consider the conditions of animals that are raised to become meat for us. I dislike factory farming, and we inch every year closer to our goal of buying meat only from ethical sources. This year we are buying half of a local cow, whom we will meet in less than two weeks, before her death. I no longer feel uncomfortable with the food chain aspect of meat consumption. I don't necessarily feel that this denotes a lack of compassion on my part, and I say that having stood on both sides of this argument. I think life is infinitely more complicated than almost anyone will admit (hence my faith in ambiguity, I suppose). At any rate, the beneficiary of this cognitive dissonance, the duck lived on unharmed.

Our adolescent ducklings, being menaced by the mean adult ducks.

Fast forward a year and a half to last Thursday morning, and we find the duck in question, inside his electrified, predator-proof enclosure, with a severely injured wing, obviously broken and with an open wound, cause unknown. After this unhappy discovery, I suggested that my husband, who was home sick from work with a bronchial infection, call the kind and knowledgeable woman who had given us another of our ducks, and ask her for advice, while I went to work.

Thank God for poultry mentors.

While expressing no irritation at all at being disturbed in the middle of tending to her own menagerie of children and feathered friends, Vivian suggested that we might take Siren to a vet in Espanola, whose prices were not unreasonable, but that, following that, we would likely need to rehabilitate this drake in our house, perhaps all winter.

Upon receiving this news, without a tinge of angst or internal conflict, I declared that we needed to kill the sucker.

If you are one of my morally distinguished readers, who is a member of PETA, I must apologize at this point. My former self would be aghast at this decision, and so would many people who do, in fact, eat meat, if my casual acquaintances are any basis for judgment.

Here is my explanation, for what it's worth:

The duck was suffering. Or at least I assume he was suffering. Duck suffering is perhaps not very easy to distinguish from the absence of duck suffering, both involving the tendency to waddle around looking doofish and occasionally commence gargling water full of one's own feces. At any rate, I assumed that there was pain involved in the situation, as the wound looked relatively nasty. I really couldn't live with the idea that this animal should be made to feel continuous pain with no relief.


The second consideration was financial. A year or so ago, we paid close to a thousand dollars to treat our dog for a kidney condition. He is a member of our family, and I would do it again. However, we temporarily accrued debt to deal with him, and I hated that. When we acquired ducks, I knew that I wouldn't be willing to shell out big bucks for their medical conditions. I worked, while in my early twenties, at several vets' offices, and, during that time, paid out what must have been close to a third of my income, having various tumors removed from pet rats, spaying bunnies, and treating them for stomach impactions, which they suffered due to the unwitting consumption of non-food items such as candles. I carefully tended all my animals on my negligible wage, and made that care a big priority in my life.

And then I had children.

Following that series of events, I altered my financial priorities in favor of garnering every resource, often quite limited, to put toward their care and enrichment. I love my animals, but they are not my kids anymore because I already have enough of those. I was not going to pay out any considerable amount to care for an animal that was originally intended to be dinner for my husband. (A proviso: had this been one of the "pet ducks" which eats out of our hand and which we particularly like, I am not sure how we would have made this decision. It was made easier by the fact that it was this particular duck that was injured.)

The last factor we considered weighing against Siren was the fact that there is absolutely no damn way I was living with an adult duck in my house. Believe it or not, people do this . And more power to them. I once kept rabbits loose in my house, which I intended to litterbox-train. This project was not a success, as far as my carpet was concerned. Most recently, I long-term fostered two cats while friends were on vacation, which resulted in six or more trips to the vet with abscessed puncture wounds, a bunch of highly stressed cats, and a completely ruined carpet in my sons' room. This resulted in a great exhaustion for questionable house pets on my part. I'm kind of over it.

as posted here

Ducks poo a LOT. They are hands down the foulest creatures I have ever kept, with absolutely no regard for hygiene and a total absence of common sense. I am probably never going to be willing to raise ducklings indoors again, in an enclosed area, let alone a ten-pound adult Pekin . We have one bathroom, three bedrooms, a small galley kitchen and a living room which does duty as office, family room, dining room, and study. This was a straight-up no go.


I guess what I'm saying is that if we were rich and had a bigger house, and if my husband was somewhat more like Albert Schweitzer, Siren's life could have been saved. And I could also have had a separate room where I could keep hedgehogs hidden from Mike. But I digress.

There was, however, at least one problem with proceeding with a plan to humanely dispose of this duck.


Mikalh, my six-year-old, was distraught in the morning when he heard that Siren was injured and might need to be put down. So, telling him that we executed the duck was going to be a problem, if we went through with it. Here, I felt torn. I tend to believe that if you don't want to tell your children the truth about something, it may be that you should re-examine what you're doing, rather than tell the lie. That said, I don't believe that it is OK to traumatize your children in order to avoid experiencing momentary moral discomfort. Mike and I talked about it and concluded that we were willing to minimally evade the truth but not willing to tell a lie which would require an entire fabrication of the truth and become a false tale oft retold to Mikalh. We decided we needed to be forthcoming.

However, when Mike had gotten as far as saying "You know how Siren was hurt this morning...," Mikalh stopped him.

"Now you are going to make me feel sad."

He made clear that he didn't want to talk about it, and we decided to honor that. He still hasn't mentioned it, five days later, although we feel sure he generally understood what would happen.

Anyway, the end of the story is really the end of the duck.

Mike took him over to Vivian's house, where her husband very generously showed him how to kill and prepare the duck for consumption. My oldest son went with him, always having wanted to be a part of this long-awaited event. Later, the two of them came back with a smallish kitchen garbage bag filled with what remained of this duck we had raised from his second day of life and set it in the sink. I think I felt a little sad, a little conflicted. But not too much.

Devin (my eleven-year-old) cried when he first came in from soccer practice to see the bag, but then he took a shower and came down having quietly resolved within himself whatever grief he experienced, and reckoned with the reality of the situation. Mike talked with him about why we did this, and what it means to eat meat; the importance of confronting the truth of it, rather than blissfully ignoring it while we dine on the sundered flesh of an unknown animal whose life was a made a continuous misery for the sole purpose of our consumption. He understood, if only intellectually.

I think my take-away is that our human relationship with animals is tortured and strange, full of illogic and pretense. My mother, inspired by the same experience, wrote a blog post on the subject, more thoughtful and more comprehensive than what I have written here. (You should read it.) For myself, I feel somewhat more honest an omnivore today than I was before last Thursday. I know that Siren lived a happy life, even attaining the rank of patriarch during his time with us. I raised him, let him learn to swim in the sink, fed him every morning, changed his pond water, raked up tons of poop-sodden straw, and spent hours watching his antics as part of the flock.

It represented an enormous investment of time and money, if all we were going to take away was a duck roast. So, in some strange way it was possible to see him as both a pet and a commodity at the same time.

In the aftermath, peace has descended on the duck yard. My long-exiled, original duck, Aflac, is now waddling around happily with the rest of the flock, rather than having to maintain a safe distance from any giant antagonist. The females appear to have forgotten Siren. Or, at least, they behave, in every respect, the same way as if nothing had happened. We are thinking we can now get another female, which would be a lot more useful than our testosterone-mad prior flock. Life hums on.

I want to officially say thanks to Siren for the year and half of entertainment he provided. If there is an afterlife for waterfowl, here's hoping he will enjoy years more of gargling heavenly poop-water and chasing girls.

 R.I.P. SIREN 

March 2010-September 2011

Animal Lover Part II: The Empire Quacks Back

Devin, 2006

I originally published this post back in December of 2010, when no one read my blog but my parents. I am publishing it again now that I have some cousins who will read it, too. 


This post is Part II of my pet saga. Part I is here.

Our nickname for my middle son, Devin, has for a long time been Devy Ducks and later "The Duck." He is so into this that, two years ago, he actually dressed as a duck for Halloween with a homemade shirt that said, on the front, "Does the Duck Ever Stop?" and on the back, "No!"

Given this, I guess it is natural that a year and a half ago, a bit before Easter, he approached me and asked if perhaps he could have a pet duck this springtime. I dismissed this out of hand. Keep in mind that we live in a suburban area, in half a duplex in fact. Granted, we do have a large backyard, but this still seemed like sort of a bad idea. However, a couple of factors worked in his favor. The first of these is that my husband, who is usually very reluctant to acquire new animals, has always wanted a duck. He just thinks they are cute. The second thing was that someone offered an adult male duck on Freecycle a few days later. It seemed to me, faithless as I am, that the Universe wanted for us to have this duck. (Kind of like the aforementioned baby mouse, I guess.) 

So, naturally, my husband went out, bought fencing materials and a gate, a smallish pond and chicken feed, and spent a day or two and several hundred dollars preparing our back yard for Duck William Aflac the Third―Aflac for short. Apparently Aflac's previous living arrangements, with a group of hens, did not work out due to his tendency to corner and sexually assault them, which, for some reason, stressed them out. We really enjoyed Aflac, but he seemed lonely, always waiting outside for some attention from us, so later that summer, we acquired a Crested White Drake, whom we call Q-Tip. He has what appears to be either an afro or a small turban on the top of his head. He hated and feared us, and the turban of silly feathers is really his most pleasing quality. But he and Aflac loved each other. So that was all well and good. We built them a coop heaped with warm straw and enjoyed taking care of them. Their antics would provide hours of free entertainment for us.

And then winter came, with its attendant 7 a.m. sojourns to the duck coop to bring in their frozen-over water full of disgusting mud and poo, clean same in the kitchen sink and return this to our yard. The path to their coop became a sort of unnecessary slalom and this occasionally resulted in an unintended trip into the fence with great force. Given the real drag that this situation had become, the only logical course of action was to acquire three more ducks the following spring, and so we did that.

The thinking went like this: These ducks are really a pain in the ass to take care of in winter and they are both male, so they don't provide any real benefit in terms of natural resources, unless you like copious quantities of pond-scummy vile green poop (and who doesn't?). So, since we have them, what we really need is some females to produce eggs, thereby justifying this project and turning us from idiots with strange ideas of fun into something else―urban farmers. We would in fact become part of a movement that may well save humanity, by encouraging all of us to provide food for our families humanely and ethically and teaching our children to appreciate their connection to nature and the earth, to re-invest themselves in the ancient wisdom of small-scale food production. We agreed that we would buy three ducklings and cull any males that we happened to end up with, thereby increasing immeasurably our total coolness and environmental street cred. Then we would begin harvesting eggs.

Photo by Chris Sharratt

So, we went to a feed store in Santa Fe, and after doing hours of internet research on what would be the very best kind of duck to acquire, keeping in mind noise level, egg production, size relative to our existing males, and general temperament, we got three yellow ducklings of enigmatic lineage, which was the only kind that they had. We sort of assumed they might be Pekins, which is what Aflac is, so at least they would fit in. They were just about the cutest thing you had ever seen and would cuddle up right against us or walk around on a towel on the living room floor, peeping and generally being adorable. For eight weeks, it was necessary to keep them inside, in a fenced-in baby pool in the corner of my kitchen, so that the outside weather could get warm enough and they could grow thick enough feathers to survive outside in Northern New Mexico. During this time, they ballooned in size to ungainly creatures approximately ten times their original stature and proved that, indeed, ducks are the grossest animals alive. Upon returning home from work to check on them, I would discover their makeshift brooder smeared entirely with duck feces from end to end, their waterer turned over and food scattered throughout the area, intermingled with crap. It smelled like a barn no matter how many times a day I cleaned it, and by the end of the eight-week period, I had resolved never ever to undertake this project again.

Ultimately, we were able to move them outside to a brand new coop my husband had built, whereupon it turned out that Aflac and Q-Tip hated them with an animus heretofore unknown in the avian world. The new ducks were found trapped in a tiny corner of cement walkway, away from food and water, and quacking away with bewildered panic, while my two oafish male ducks patrolled the rest of the yard to assure their sovereignty over this entire area. I was advised by the online duck community to a) allow this matter to resolve itself over time b) house them separately or c) cull at least one of the now three male ducks, if not two, and allow peace to reign in the back yard.

Unfortunately, it became clear at this point that my two youngest boys would suffer lifelong PTSD if we were to proceed with our plan to kill even one single duck. I must also admit to certain maternal feelings toward each of them myself, so we installed Siren (the new male) and his female cohorts, Sweet Pea and Nibbles, in the backyard outside the fenced duck area until another solution became apparent. My husband then commenced extended sulking about the loss of his agreed-upon duck dinner and made it clear that this had been a case of bait-and-switch, for which he would not fall again. Somehow, however, our marriage survived.

In the end, Siren swelled to become an ungainly creature twice Aflac's weight and, when reintroduced into the duck yard with his female minions, proved that he remembered how Aflac had treated him and was ready to kick some ass. This began a period during which Aflac was put in his place―almost all of his back neck feathers pulled out and free reign of the back yard now denied to him, he was consigned to a life of lonely repentance, while Q-Tip was accepted into the newly dominant duck colony.

Finally, at great length, relative peace has been restored to the duck yard, and each duck now has his or her rightful place in the consortium of waterfowl, Aflac now being allowed amnesty in return for the understanding that he is to eat last and have only provisional access to any female partner.

These ducks, which we have tenderly raised by hand, regard us, naturally, as maniacal axe murderers and avoid contact with us as much as possible. It amuses my husband to pass through their yard with his bicycle on the way from the storage area to the front, in order to watch them quack in prolonged dread and race, as fast as their little webbed feet can carry them, to the gate to escape this monstrosity. Unfortunately for them, the gate is of course where he is heading anyway, to their total shock and dismay. Discovering that the beast with two wheels and a man attached is headed directly toward them, they attempt to fly away, crashing repeatedly into our juniper bush, the lilac, and the fence.

So, in the end, they are wonderful pets, and they say that a playful, close relationship with such a pet can lower your risk of depression, diabetes, Ebola, and diarrhea. And we have lots of eggs.

Don't think I don't know what I’m doing.

Tune in next time for the true story of how we murdered one of our ducks, and why. Please don't call PETA before I can explain.

Lock Me Up Before I Start Acquiring Hedgehogs

On Hedgehog Central , I found the following:

"Because they are quiet, they are very easy to travel with. Most people aren’t even aware that a pet hedgehog is nearby. Many hotels that restrict other animals such as cats and dogs will allow hedgehogs."

SOLD!

Now I just have to figure out how I can get my husband to let me have one, so that we can go on a road trip and stay at Motel 6 with it.

I will need to come up with a permaculture or urban homesteading sort of justification. Perhaps, if we needed bristles, say in order to make our own....toothbrushes.

I'm not holding out much hope. Mike seems to have decided that we can't have any new pets that he won't get to eat eventually (a longer explanation of this will follow in a later post). I'm pretty sure people don't eat hedgehogs, and I don't think I would want one if I had to stick it in the crock pot.

But just look at that face.

How can you say no to THAT?

UPDATE 10/1:

Save the hedgehogs from global warming!!!! Now it is more important than ever that I take care of the hedgehogs. Just look what global warming has done to them!!!

Because Really Everyone Needs A Pig-Shaped Jello Mold, Right?

Why, you might ask, do I now have a beautiful radiant copper mold in the shape of a pig? To this, I retort, "Why don't you?"

This weekend we stopped by our church rummage sale on the way to a waffle breakfast. The breakfast was put on in order to raise money for the local schools to buy Xerox copy paper, which, I promise, is necessary, since last February I received a work email stating that at the current rate of copying, we would run out of paper by spring break, and entreating us to , in some unknown way, stop needing to copy things for our students to work on. The rummage sale next door was put on in order to raise funds for the replacement of our church signage.

Unfortunately for us, Mikalh (my six year-old) was in tow. He is remarkably cute, even for a child of an age typically distinguished by great charm, and, alone among all my children, has a real fixation on the acquisition of material goods. While my older two children, at his age, were known to request for Christmas "green presents" and to spend all day happily playing with two sticks, Mikalh has, at all times, a growing mental list of items which he really "needs". Having him at a rummage sale is something of a disaster. After my mother had purchased him castle blocks, a gyroscope and an iDog at sharply discounted rates, he continued to be interested in various items which we encountered, and to feel that it was only good and right that he be allowed to have these at once. We managed to escape without purchasing anything else but only with a very firm approach and the promise of waffles.

However, when we returned the next day to attend Sunday service, a wealth of rummage items remained to be sold at very low cost, and , from these, my husband selected cross country skis and poles at a dollar each and loaded them happily into our van. Mikalh was getting himself buckled in when I noticed that he had acquired a copper pig-emblazoned pan, which he had settled next to him in the car. When questioned, he pointed out congenially that this item was only two dollars. So we just bought it. (My friend, Robyn, who put the sale together, suggested that I might use it make an aspic or, perhaps, a large pate'. Her faith in my general level of acculturation is reassuring but misplaced. I do, however, think that it may prove useful if we want to set a pig-shaped Jell-O for any reason, perhaps, as part of a barnyard-themed birthday party. Mike thinks we could add in either bacon or ham. Yummmm.)

Initially, I couldn't really imagine what use we might find for this item, but now that we have installed it above my kitchen sink, I have to say that "it really ties the room together".

I will not add any more detail to the story of how I spent my weekend, lest it come up that, despite having a crushing migraine on and off all the time and Mike's suffering from a cold, we bought and set up a small greenhouse, and afterward purchased multiple accessory items, such as soil, brick pavers for thermal mass, planting containers etc. to accommodate the fact that Mikalh had, without asking, selected four packages of seeds which he intended to plant immediately despite the imminent onset of winter. He is engaged in a project-based learning unit on gardening at school and this has fired his imagination to such a degree that one rather felt that refusing to purchase these seeds and attempt to create suitable growing conditions for them would have been tantamount to canceling Christmas.


So look out for our bacon-flecked pig-shaped cherry Jell-O at the next church potluck, and perhaps, if we are lucky, a nice dish of roasted beets, carrots and radishes tended and harvested by our little maharajah.
Recipes to follow.

Green Chile and the Quest for Human Fulfillment

For many years now, I have watched with great interest as customers lined up outside of Smith's each fall to have their boxes of Hatch green chile roasted. I do really like green chile. I get some delivered each season in my farm box from Los Poblanos and I use it to make green chile stew (the recipe for which appears on a link under the banner above).

For the first five years that we lived in New Mexico, we didn't have a chest freezer, although we badly needed one. That being the case, I never went and got all that green chile, since the idea of keeping all of it in my under-sized frig-top freezer, alongside numerous loaves of bread, bags of shredded cheese and other oddments, seemed irritating. This summer, however, we went ahead and bought a chest freezer from Lowe's, which is now already almost all the way full, setting aside the fact that we are receiving half of a butchered cow some time in October as well. My understanding is that this will be an extremely happy cow, and therefore, the meat will fill us with great happiness. Anyway, I digress.

The point is that I have, up to now, been frustrated in my efforts to be the right sort of person, which is, of course, the sort of person who buys locally harvested chiles and cows and keeps them in her freezer. So, I thought to myself, smugly calling to mind my new chest freezer-NOT anymore!

My mother lives across the street from Smith's, and is now retired, so I felt she would be in the unique position to do reconnaissance and determine when one might undertake to have their chilies roasted without waiting in a line fifteen people deep for over an hour. I tasked her with the mission of retrieving the chile and having it roasted.

I, quite naturally, failed to give any other specific directions as to whether the chile should be mild, medium or hot, since this hadn't occurred to me. My mom went and selected a random box of chile, which the checker then told her was "hot". She replied that this would have to do and took it to be roasted.This blog entry would not be complete without adding that my mom ended up having to wait in line for at least half an hour anyway. Such is the advantage of motherhood.

Happily, I arrived home Friday to discover a black garbage bag on my counter filled with warm green chilies and a house redolent with the aroma of New Mexico. Now, all that remained was to peel, seed, chop and store all of this chile before it could go bad. Easy.

Being no idiot, I donned vinyl gloves to do this job. (Actually it may be more accurate to say that I was once idiot enough to process quite a bit of chile with my bare hands, and that having hands that burn for hours with an invisible fire may be a wonderful home remedy to cure nail-biting and masturbation, but I have not felt the need to repeat the experience.) Hardly having stopped long enough to hang up my purse, I  stuck my hand deep into the womb-like warm garbage bag to retrieve one large handful of green chilies which I ran under cold water in a large bowl in my sink. I painstakingly doffed as much of the skin as I could manage, and virtually all of the seeds. This took about ten minutes, and only needed to be repeated thirty-four more times.

Interestingly, green chiles omit something like a toxic gas that causes one's throat to tickle incessantly, so, for approximately three hours, both before and after preparing dinner, I coughed and retched my way through the entire bag of green chilies, with the added steps of running each small batch through my Ninja food processor and filling Zip-Loc quart bags with approximately a pound of chopped green chiles, squished flat to freeze. A gas mask would have been useful.

The Ninja lid won't seat well on the blending container and I am contemplating throwing it out the window.

Since I had no choice but to labor through the entire process myself, I forced my mother, who was suffering from a mild stomach flu, to stay in the kitchen through the entire process, so that I didn't die of boredom, and also so that anyone who had to deal directly and immediately with my six year-old was not completely covered in capsacin.

At the point that I had to interrupt the chile production line to serve dinner, my kitchen looked somewhat like a chlorophyll bomb had been set off. Bits of green chile pulp and skins clung to every surface and were intractably cleaved to the tile, as if an entire legion of flu-ridden kindergartners had wiped boogers on the floor and left them to dry for several hours.

The thing I really found striking about this is how many people do it. The conversation between my mother and me centered around our disbelief that anyone not completely hamstrung by outdated notions of Protestant work ethic would undertake this project in their spare time, merely to avoid having to pay slightly more for green chile which has already been processed and frozen for them in convenient tubs. But, then again, it is a peculiar blind spot of mine that I tend to be shocked that anyone else is willing to do foolishly difficult tasks that I perform myself. (For instance, I continue to be shocked that lots and lots of women bear children, despite the obvious discomfort and work involved.)

Somehow, I seem to have arrived at full-fledged adulthood continually surprised and appalled at the amount of actual work that living requires, as if I had very recently been rudely awakened from a prolonged daydream wherein servants attended to my every whim. My natural tendency to eschew work is, however, at odds with my continual pursuit of attaining Perfection. Not that I'm ever actually striving for perfection. I set what seem to be modest goals, and then either abandon them or somehow enlarge my goal, so that I have never quite arrived.  I believe both that this is a somewhat dysfunctional state of affairs and that it is an inescapably human thing to do, and that either I can play along and keep myself entertained with the pursuit or face the consequences of a life lived as a series of half-measures.

As pertains to cooking, I am not the sort of person who would end up being interested in trying to make Beef Wellington or Baked Alaska. I have somewhat less than the necessary culinary fortitude and a great deal less than the required amount of interest. I am willing to spend hours making Christmas dinner, but, on a regular basis, meals must be produced in an hour or less and be something that children will probably eat. That said, I do enjoy cooking, and I am excited by fresh, high quality ingredients and variety. So I tend to pay a fair bit of attention to food and food preparation, which is why I would end up doing something dumb like processing green chile into the evening at the end of a long and overwhelming work week.

I once (well, three times actually) made red chile sauce from scratch using the dried red pods I bought from Los Poblanos . These needed to be seeded, de-veined, roasted and then processed through a blender (which, strangely enough, I still possess ten years after the lid went permanently missing) before being set in a slow cooker with cubed pork loin to make carne adovada. On that occasion, my kitchen looked less like a booger bomb and more like an especially bloody battle had recently taken place. The carne adovada was delicious, but hardly so much so that it justified the ridiculous labor involved in making it.

Anyway, the green chile finally got done, I got to use both my new freezer and my new food processor (complete with lid) and, happily our major weekly housecleaning was scheduled for the next day. Last night I used it to make green chile stew. It was hotter than Hell, but it tasted both of New Mexico and of the pursuit of human fulfillment.

And I have twelve more bags of it for later.