Spring Chickens

Spring bulbs are up!

The first signs of spring have arrived in Santa Fe.

 Yesterday we got a nice layer of snow to soak the ground a bit and today the sun is shinning, a light breeze is blowing, and the world is beckoning us gardeners to get started.

My family and I are coming upon six years on this land and it's funny how the list of projects never gets shorter. It's like your skin cells, the skin is always there, but the cells change every seven years. In this case, the list is always there but the projects change every year.

This year I have an extra incentive to take the yard work up a notch. Our house is going to be on the Santa Fe Kitchen Garden Tour, along with two of my neighbors in this wonderful little neighborhood La Resolana. This is now an annual event that HomeGrown NM and Edible Santa Fe co-sponsor. Last year was the first year and I gather that 350 people went on the tour. I'm glad the tour is not until July as I have a lot of work to do before they come to inspect my yard for kitchen garden goodness.

Luckily the rest of my family is out of town this weekend so I could actually put together the year's garden plan. This year I am going to focus on only the foods that we regularly eat and that are low-maintenance to grow in this climate. Last year I expanded the garden by about 700 square feet. 150 of that was for Clayton - my then 3 year old son - who chose to plant sunflowers, corn, and pumpkins. His garden is right out my bedroom window so I had a splendid view of sunflowers and lots of birds snapping up the seeds through the growing season. The rest ended up being too much space for me to grow into in one year, a lot of the food went to seed...or actually to the chickens.

Three years ago we decided to start raising chickens and I have to say it has been the best addition to our backyard homestead we have made. I'm pleased to live in Agua Fria Village with Santa Fe County zoning codes in a neighborhood with lax covenants, so almost anything here goes. Chickens, horses, dogs, llamas, donkeys, all a-okay. It's worth the extra 10 minutes to town to have the semi-rural experience and semi-rural rules.

I call the chickens my "ladies." And quite the ladies they are, all 17 of them. They happily live in our front yard in their chicken palace under two juniper trees, an apple tree, and a pear tree. They have a chicken coop which they use almost exclusively for egg-laying as they prefer to roost in the juniper trees outside which provide them plenty of branches and protection. We set up a viewing bench in front of the coop and spend warm summer afternoons watching their antics and trying to remember what we names them.

Chicken entrance

The chicken palace

Under the juniper tree.

My favorite lady is the Barred Dominique. She is smart and sassy, true to her french name. She was the first chicken to figure out how to fly over the fence to get the juicy grubs in the garden on the other side and has successfully fended off two coyote attacks. Plus her sassy french name harkens back to my own french heritage on my mother's side.

Dominique. Isn't she lovely? And smart too.

And of course, I can't leave out a picture of the polish bantams. They make most humans laugh. This one is named Elvis, for his later years' hairdo of course. Not the smartest breed in the coop though.

Polish bantam

All our chickens are heritage varieties: Brahma, Cochins, Wyandotte, Araucanas, Columbians, Mille Fleurs (with the feathers on their feet), and mystery chickens I am still trying to identify. 

And wow can these chickens lay! The best layers are the Brahma hens which we bought as young adults from a farmer in Espanola. They laid their large brown eggs all winter long. We haven't bought eggs for ourselves in over a year. 

Now as spring is beginning and the days are longer (most chickens stop laying eggs when there is less than 13 hours of daylight) we are overwhelmed with eggs. I've started to sell eggs for $4/dozen to help cover the cost of their expensive but nutrient-rich organic feed from the local Feed Bin to neighbors, colleagues, and friends. I know this may seem pricey to some, but it doesn't even cover our costs. My "consumer base" is still less than the amount of eggs we have, but marketing and building consumer loyalty is a bit out of my capacity at the moment. I'll just keep putting the word out there and maybe a sign on my fence "eggs for sale" in hopes that they sell themselves. I'll continue to donate the surplus as hard boiled breakfast to the day-laborers in Guadalupe Park until then.

About a days worth of blue, white, green, brown, and pink eggs. Each variety of chicken lays a different colored egg.

As we don't need any more layers this year, we are investing in the Cochin Frizzle ornamental variety instead. I'm sure you can see why! Purely for fun and because our four year old loves these.

How could a chicken be cuter than that?!

We are ordering twelve baby chicks as last year more than half turned out to be roosters. We are told we can expect the same ratio this year. I hope so, or we'll have to raise the cost of our eggs just to pay for these pretty ladies. Their specialty is being pretty, they don't lay many eggs to earn their keep.

I personally enjoy hearing roosters crowing at dawn (and sometimes at all hours of the day) as it reminds me of the three years I lived in Panama in the campo. However, if you want to maintain good relationships with your neighbors, in a backyard coop, roosters are good for only one thing:

Cock-a-doodle-doo! Rooster Stew!

Rolling on a River of Love

The first Sunday in February 2012. A new year, a new day.

It's been over a year since I've been in this blogging world. As you can see from my last entry, I got a little discouraged by the locavore life attempt. This morning I am reflecting on how my locavore experiment exploded in my face. The experience was like jumping into the icy waters of Lake Michigan where I grew up in the middle of February. The stinging reality of that cold water was just a little more than I could handle. (I'm not a big fan of cold plunges by the way.)

Growing food to meet our needs in the southwest is just REALLY difficult. Way more difficult than doing it in the bread belt of the Midwest where my formative years were spent. Sure, Native peoples feed themselves successfully for hundreds or thousands of years in the southwest on a diet of squash, beans, corn, wild edibles and bison. But the other piece of that puzzle is they didn't do it for very long -- they had a life span of 30-40 years on average. As I am 37, I would be dead or well on my way there with that diet. A fact I could handle if I hadn't already been expecting to live until I am 80.

So what did I learn from my locavore experiment and where am I now with all of this you ask? Let me fill you in...

1) TIMING IS EVERYTHING and DO THE RESEARCH FIRST

My advice for you all is not to start the desert locavore life in Februrary. Get your feet and your pallet wet by starting at the height of the growing season when the successes are many and the research not so hard. Having said that, whatever time of year you start, do the research before you begin being a locavore at all, otherwise it is just an experiment in frustration. Trying to find a source  of local wheat may take you a few weeks, so if you don't want to give it up, or do not yet have the cooking skills and knowledge to work with the limited alternatives, you'll want to know where you can get it before you engage being a locavore. Otherwise you'll get discouraged at how many trips to the grocery store for wheat shipped in from Egypt you'll have to make.

Luckily, I work at an organization where researching being a locavore is part of the work that we do, so I put my staff on creating a locavore guide. Unfortunately, as none of them had themselves dived deeply into bring a locavore, the end product wasn't super useful to me. But we are working on improving it. So, you may want to wait to enter the locavore world in Santa Fe until we publish that guide if you don't want to spend months doing that research yourself. Otherwise, give yourself a couple months to do the research before you jump in. Start by going through your cupboards and deciding what you can and can't live without. Then make a list of those things you need or want. Then start by educating yourself on seasonal availability of foods. Visit the local co-op, see what they have available at any given time of year, talk to the produce and the bulk departments to see what else they might be able to get you on a seasonal basis. Visit the farmer's market and talk with the farmers - especially those that have fresh produce in the dead of winter. Research the farmer's market website for clues on which farmers are part of their network and what they offer. Ask your friends, call local food-related organizations. Keep in mind that condiments and grains tend to be the hardest to source. Learn how to make your own ketchup.

2) JOIN A CSA
There is no substitute for growing your own food as that is really the only way to know where your food is coming from and how it was grown. But, Steve Warshawer of Beneficial Farms now has me convinced that backyard gardeners and local farmers each have a role to play in a local food system -- and we can't, and shouldn't do it without the other. Gardeners can focus on the specialty items they can grow more easily in the microclimates they are able to create in their yards like tomatoes and herbs. Farmers than can be freed up to grow those items that need a lot of space - like grains, protein, etc. Together we might be able to come up with a complete diet a la MyPlate -- the new and much simplified nutritional guide recently released by the USDA. That said, join a CSA that specializes in local food. I joined Beneficial Farms CSA a few months ago. It is a co-op CSA utilizing farmers within 300 miles -- meeting my desert locavore standards for food miles. This has provided me with a supply of organic wheat and quinoa that I had no idea where to get on my own. It has taken the pressure off of me a bit in terms of sourcing local food as they are doing a bunch of it for me and 50 other families at the same time. I highly recommend joining a CSA as part of your locavore package.

3) COMMUNITY

George Strait is singing to my heart this morning from the playlist on the iPod my husband left in my car for me to listen to. I'm in a very different place this morning...rolling on a river of love really. Although there is still no water in the river near our house this year, I have been blessed with a growing connection to my community (specifically my neighbors), lots of learning, and patience. Find a few like-minded home/land owners and plan with them on what crops you can each grow and share with each other. Share bulk buying and split up the consumer research. Enjoy meals together and plan impromptu potlucks from whatever is available in the garden. You'll grow more food and grow life-long friendships in the process.

2) SOIL and WATER

A friend of mine who is an ecology professor at UWC here in Las Vegas, NM believes that the carrying capacity of this desert region won't even provide for the number of people that currently live here. So there is that when considering building a local, sustainable food system. Our two big limiting factors are soil and water. We don't have much of either of those, and without them growing food for a state of even 2 million is challenging. The reality of soil building in Santa Fe at the moment, is that it is entirely dependent upon the input of materials from the industrial agriculture system. Not to mention when you lay it down in the spring, the wind blows it away almost immediately (be sure to cover your compost with heavy mulch immediately). Readily available sources for compost in Santa Fe include horse manure and kitchen waste. Most kitchen waste originates from imported food sources, and horses are fed a steady diet of alfalfa shipped in from Texas or even farther away locations. Part of being a locavore requires going against the grain and being limited by the status quo food system. Get comfortable with compromise and do the best you can.

At this point in time, I am not working exclusively on being a locavore. I'm am attacking the whole sustainable lifestyle one piece at a time. Last month my husband and I had a successful buy nothing month. When practicing buy-nothing, you really have to watch yourself with online shopping. I somehow blanked out that I am actually shopping when doing it online as I am in the comfort of my living room rather than in a store with beeping of the cash register to awaken my senses as to what I am doing.

Working on living sustainably in the United States is a life-time endeavor. My main focus now if to make sure I am enjoying the ride!

I hope you will share the tips and wisdom have you learned on this journey in the comments.

Christina