Julia Hollander

chicken korma

julia — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:40:52 +0000

From this –

- to this, in 8 short weeks –

SOLAR POWER

julia — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:07:39 +0000

Like wild birds, chickens are highly attuned to light. Wrap a wing around her face and in a couple of seconds she will be fast asleep, such is her sight’s sensitivity. Which is why she is so much more efficient than my children at putting herself to bed at night. The only problem is that whilst she is snoozing on her perch, Mr Fox is out and about looking for his dinner. So we chicken keepers have to shut her in, safe. Even worse, we have to get up as close to dawn as we can bear in order to let her out again.

Until now.

This photo shows my clever friend Stephen’s new invention – his entirely home-made, low-cost labour-saving device….an automatic pop-hole. No more blurry-eyed trips to the allotment to let the chickens out – their door simply slides open and closed on its very own solar-powered, light-sensitive winch system.

It’s a strange thing, only having to visit once to a day to check water and food, and nick their eggs. I feel that somehow I should be putting in more effort.

post-tragedy

julia — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 09:12:53 +0000

A couple of months after her first family went to chick-Heaven, Peaches dared to get broody again. Frankly, I had imagined she would go for it earlier, but something must have told her not to take the risk. Not to spend another exhausting three weeks incubating before she felt really strong.

This time, I took the precaution of scattering her nest with anti-mite powder. Then off to the University farm I sped for another half dozen fertilised broiler eggs, which I sequestered (as before) under her butt as she slept. I also checked in my favorite chicken-keeping book (Rosslyn Mannering’s FOWLS AND HOW TO KEEP THEM – charmingly pompous 40’s tome – Duchess of Devonshire’s fave) about sprinkling the eggs with tepid water on day 19, so as to soften the membranes and give the chicks an easier escape. Three days later – at 22 days – the miracle happened again.

This time, all five chicks were sturdy (no mites to drain them). As it was the end of August and the nights were getting cold, I put the whole family in a cardboard box and brought them indoors where their home became the recycling box. I was determined to keep a close eye on them. And so were my daughters – utterly charmed, of course, by their cheeping yellow pompoms.

Day three, and the cheeping had become a cacophony, their box was stinky and they looked as though they needed room to roam. Ceremoniously, we carried them outdoors again and transferred them back to the run. It didn’t take long to realise how Peaches’ previous babies had managed to escape – under that lovely custard-coloured fluff their bodies are absolutely teeny – teeny enough to squeeze through the mesh of an eglu run. I had somehow thought a vulnerable chick would think twice before leaving its mother, but watching these babes ease their heads between the bars, I realised that inquisitiveness is an even more powerful instinct than safety. The solution – a line of boards around the bottom of the run to hem them in until they’re bigger.

Tragedy

julia — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 08:51:38 +0000

I should have posted earlier, to describe the terrible demise of my first family of chicks. Well. Peaches’. Five of them hatched. Three were really sturdy and on day two were out on the lawn, learning their mother’s old-fashioned scratch-n-peck form of feeding by watching her and imitating her gestures. So charming. That night I went out after dark and shut the eglu door, assuming the whole family to be snuggled up together in the nesting box. Next morning I went out to release them and out stormed Peaches, but no sturdy babes. I rushed to open the keeper’s door, and found only two teeny, peaky fellows floundering in the wood chippings.

Where were the three strong ones? I searched hopelessly under the roosting bars; in the droppings tray – were they so small they could have got trapped there? No sign. No fluff anywhere. Could a cat have got into the run? Or a stoat or a rat or something able to shrink itself small enough to squeeze through the bars?

To compound my loss, I saw that not only had the two remaining chicks been abandoned prematurely (put your money on the fittest – Peaches knows her Darwin), losing vital body-heat during their very vulnerable early hours of life, but also red mite had invaded the nest, sucking their life-blood. By the end of the day, they were both dead – all curled up and lonely, never having left their nest.

I cried.

But Peaches didn’t. She was already pecking around outside, making up for three weeks’ starvation and stasis. No indulging of her loss. She was focussed on the future – already ready to try again.

Phew

julia — Tue, 31 May 2011 17:22:48 +0000

So – that scrawny little thing eventually made it out (five hours later). And I’m proud to say I resisted the temptation to prise away the shell….It is flailing around quite horribly now, and its proud Mum is nudging it around with her beak – ‘Come on, matey, get your act together!’. I had somehow expected more billing and cooing from her – ah well, my own will more than compensate. By the way – this chick (a boy – my hunch) has the toughest, chunkiest legs and feet you ever saw. Ancient, like a flying dinosaur or a long-lost Dodo. Those Uni breeders are onto something, I reckon – however fast he grows (the expectation is that he will make it to a couple of kilos in 9 weeks), unlike the usual commercial broilers he will still be able to walk around. Hurrah for genetic engineering.

Birth pangs

julia — Tue, 31 May 2011 11:05:32 +0000

OO la la, sometimes life in chickenville gets seriously exciting.

Peaches, our darling little Pekin – so docile, so pretty – got in the mood for babies a month or so ago (inspired, naturally, by my putting three white plastic eggs in her nest). Being in the mood means said hen won’t come out of her nest, growls uncharacteristically whenever you come near and expands her plumage into a hot blob of obsessive motherliness.

My friend Mike at the University farm said I could have half a dozen of his A1 broiler eggs (they’re experimenting on creating ‘higher welfare’ broiler chickens – ones that have legs strong enough to take their own weight, unlike the usual miserable creatures we eat). I took seven for luck and eased them under Peaches’ bottom while she was sleeping (removing the plastic ones). Since then, she’s been spreading her pretty form Oh so-cleverly to keep all seven eggs warm. And today is the day, three weeks later, they are scheduled to hatch.

Mid-day and still no pretty yellow head poking from under her; I’m impatient; I’ve done all the reading-up on chick-parenting; I’m raring to go. So I do what you’re not really meant to do…I pick her up off the eggs and have a look. Nothing. Weird, because I can hear a cheep-cheeping somewhere. Is it a blackbird’s nest nearby? Certainly Peaches has numerous wild friends and neighbours…I get the kettle I have brought with me and sprinkle the eggs quickly with warm water (as advised in my marvellous 40’s tome – FOWLS AND HOW TO KEEP THEM), to loosen the membrane that might be holding back those sweet babes.

And then I see it – a little hole in the centre of one of the eggs. The cheeping must be coming from there. Swiftly I put Peaches back ontop, and force myself to retreat, so Nature can take its course. Fingers crossed that baby wasn’t calling out for help.

song

julia — Mon, 09 May 2011 10:31:02 +0000

“You can muffle the sound of the drums, you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who can stop the skylark from singing?”

Kahlil Gibran

I haven’t posted for a while, because my creative energies have been elsewhere. Particularly in enjoying singing – for local churches, round campfires, with friends and family. I’m preparing 2 concerts for July – the first, a lunchtime 40’s Jazz-fest (including some daring improvs) and the second an evening of Romantics like Brahms and Schubert, plus a few Jazz numbers sneaked in at the end. So when I found this quote from the Prophet, I thought it would make a good segue from the chickens. The opening chapter of ‘Chicken Coops’ contains a section on chicken calls (Gallus gallus has, according to the experts, a greater variety of calls than any other bird). Each chapter opens with a song-quote about chickens. Though the wild birds in the garden may claim to own the more melodious voices, my humble chooks still offer a link to the glorious power of song.

What Gibran’s quote is about, I think, is the truth of song – the way that voices (including humans’) connect us with nature and with the greater cosmos. We clever humans can create all sorts of sophisticated sound-machines – from drums and lyres it is a short journey into MP3-players, i-pods, mobile phones and all. But they are still vulnerable to neglect (that un-tuned piano in the corner of the living room; that old i-pod already stashed at the back of a drawer), or worse still to repression from those who regard music as a threat. I have had the privilege of singing in environments where the drums have been muffled and the lyres unstrung in this way.

The first was just after leaving University, visiting the Czech Republic (where my father had come from in 1938) in the 1980’s when the Soviet regime was still in place. My friends working in the Prague Opera House were perfectly accustomed to delivering quality renditions of operas by Janacek or Dvorak (the political messages therein carefully edited, in keeping with Communist ideology). But away from the cities, in their country dachas where they grew their vegetables (few being available in the Prague grocery stores), they dared to create music forbidden by the authorities. Early on a Sunday morning, I followed the small crowd, walking in silence to the dilapidated village church where we sang High Mass in fulsome nineteenth-century Czech settings (I understood only the gist, because I was familiar with the service, but managed to sight-read a convincing-enough rendition of Czech). And at night I listened to the same people singing Czech folk ballads around the camp fire. It was in these second settings that I heard their stories of loss and repression – after a long, melancholy song (intricately harmonised), someone would break off and tell me how they longed to travel to America to get better training as a Chorus master, how their grandfather’s great novel had lain unpublished for fifty years, or how they had been forced to join the Party in order to qualify as a doctor. I didn’t know how to help them; I cried.

Then all of a sudden the Velvet Revolution had happened. The Pope was in Prague, overseeing a mass, mainstream conversion from Communism to Catholicism and my friends were all rushing to leave the country. Soon enough, Latin Mass was being sung in all the churches and somehow the heart-felt passion had left it. Over time the traditional folk songs were replaced by Simon and Garfunkel and Bob Dylan.

Music is all over the place in twenty-first century Britain; even if we don’t actually make it with an instrument, we still reckon that we ‘own’ it in some way by listening to it. In our overtly consumer age, the whole ‘favorite music’ thing is essential to our idea of ourselves as individuals, as creative beings. Are you into Lady Gaga or Katy Perry? With the first you identify yourself as quirky and alternative (if not downright rebellious), with the second you show you are fun-loving and unthreatening. Musically, I’d say, there’s a surprisingly small gap between the two artists, but then it’s not only music we’re talking about…

Which provides another angle on Gibran’s words: when all the production-value thing is removed – the costumes and the props and the audio-conversion paraphernalia, what do we have left? Who knows? No-one has the least idea what Lady Gaga would sound like if she had to stand up, unaccompanied, on some silly TV talent show. Most likely she’ll never suffer that humiliation. But what does it say about our culture that our music cannot exist without the huge great machine surrounding it?

I think it means we have lost that authenticity, that survival-instinct that Gibran hears in bird-song. Perhaps we have lost the life-force itself.

How to feed ourselves?

julia — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 13:53:24 +0000

Seems a silly question, I know, when there’s so much of it about, when we’re burdened not by hunger but by obesity and early onset diabetes. It’s only the crazy doom-mongers with nothing else to worry about who nag about our importing more grub than we have done for more than half a century…not being able to produce even half what we use (not eat – oh no – our current habit is to throw away at least a third of it, just to prove how extremely cheap it is). Surely there are more important things to think about than the fact that, given a terrorist attack or a major transport crisis, we only have enough food to last 2 days…

Today’s empty shelves at the Co-op are quite something, though. No milk – sorry. No fresh veg either. No crazy doom-mongers here, just a spot of bad weather which meant the delivery lorry couldn’t get through. And not just the delivery lorry – there are apparently only 10 producers of carrots in the UK, and they’re all snowed in.

The atmosphere reminds me of visiting Kiev in 1991, post-Chernobyl, when all that was to be had in the supermarkets were jars of grape juice too large to lift from the lino, and big, greasy bars of smoked cheese. In the display cabinets, families of cats had taken up residence, stretching their lissom limbs in celebration of all that space. People wandered about in a haze, made tired and numb by hunger. Might it be worth waiting, just in case a local farmer happened to turn up in the next hour or two? If not, what tins still sat in the larder back home?

Down on the allotment, there are carrots and parsnips galore, but it is impossible to uproot them, fixed as they are in rigid clay. The cabbages too – stuck fast; I take off my slippery gloves and with raw hands try to twist them free at the stem. But the woody framework is as tough as treebark, all I achieve is a slight cracking of the iced juices inside. As I retreat empt-handed from my plot I notice that the purple sprouting plants are bent double under the weight of the snow. That’s no good – they need to get upright again; given a chance now, come the spring they will be producing delicious flowers. Even though right now I can’t make out which end is the root and which the head.

Atop my neighbour’s abandoned bean poles perch a brace of pigeons, fluffed up fat against the cold. Intently, they watch as I unhook the purple sproutings’ protective netting from its stone anchors and shake at the snow, frozen to the mesh. At last the biggest lump crashes to the ground, ripping a great gash in the mesh. And the pigeons’ eyes sparkle – as soon as I’m gone, they will be down here, poking at the holes to lay claim to their dinner.

Ah hell. My kids don’t even like purple sprouting. Their preference is for frozen peas – those ‘farm-fresh’ ones sitting at home in my freezer – said freezer currently eating up energy in order to maintain a temperature not dissimilar from this one, outside. Apparently there was some problem with pea production this year – the dry spring, maybe. Ah well – even if the UK supply dries up, once the snow melts that delivery lorry will be sure to bring us something from further afield. Apparently the Chinese are managing to produce a lot from their poly-tunnels in Ethiopia.

let them eat milk

julia — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 11:13:15 +0000

Life’s hard for a farmer when the cold comes. And for us mini-farmers too. With the ground solid as concrete and the grass stiff and grey, I am painfully aware how dull life has suddenly become for my chickens. There they huddle on the barren ground, unable to scratch or forage. I crack the ice on their water-can and scatter their corn in the hope that they will peck around for it, warming up their bodies in the process. But somehow they are too depressed to care. Their pea-brains are telling them just to sit still and conserve energy. Like their wild cousins, they are programmed to put all their effort into simple survival and with, any luck, they will make it through this horrid dark time and into a warm new year.

But that’s not how I see it. My human (almost entirely urbanised) brain reckons that life should go on as actively as possible, even in a cold spell. And because I am human, I can’t help projecting my prejudices onto my pets. What I would want, were I living outdoors in this weather, would be a warming bowl of gruel. Ergo so must my chickens.

Each morning, coming downstairs well before the sun is up (and before my light-sensitive fowl realise the day has begun), my very first job is to cook for them. Piled in a large plastic bag by the back door are bread crusts from the local sandwich shop (donated tender-heartedly ‘for the birds’). These get torn up and added to yesterday’s leftovers – pasta and cabbage and apple cores – yum. For roughage (and probably the best nutrition) I pour in a cup of mixed corn. And over the top goes half a pint of milk.

And it’s milk that this post is about.

My rationale for keeping chickens rather than any of the cornucopia of pets available to me is that they are useful. I try not to indulge my very British inclination to spoil them with fancy stuff – and yes, there’s plenty of opportunity to get consumer-crazy, even over chooks – they could be on a diet of meal-worms (£11 for a small bag) and organic feed pellets (containing expensive soya meal from Italy rather than the rainforest-destroying cheap stuff). But no – these chickens of mine are out there in the garden to convert our leftovers into eggs.

My only concession when the temperature goes down is to warm up their food on my cheaply coal/petrol-powered electric stove and to sacrifice half a pint milk from my children’s breakfast (because actually it costs next-to-nothing and therefore might as well be leftovers).

Except that it’s a bit of a mess – this cheap milk business. All very well thinking the chooks are getting good winter fayre in this way, but at what cost? UK milk is not in a good state at all. Neither is it nutritious nor sustainable. And to add insult to injury, we are currently unable to produce all that we need, and instead import it from countries with even lower welfare standards than our own. Why’s that? Cos of the supermarkets, mainly. Interesting article about the current crisis in Farmers Guardian (don’t forget to read the comments) -

http://www.farmersguardian.com/home/business/business-news/paice-to-‘bang-heads-together’-over-milk-crisis/35921.article

Here’s my personal irony: I pride myself on being aware of the human suffering that goes into producing Peruvian asparagus (that stuff you buy between May and March) and Costa-Rican pineapples. I steer clear. Even in winter, I am feeding my children on home-grown salad, potatoes, onions, carrots and parsnips… My happy (cheap) chickens are part of my food-awareness – a defiance of the world-wide egg industry which, despite the endeavors of Jamie and Hugh and the RSPCA, still manages to destroy rainforest at a gob-smacking rate and gives its birds lives that are miserable and short.

So what am I doing feeding them milk from miserable, soya-fed, short-lived cows with even more miserable owners?

Woman’s Hour

julia — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 18:57:15 +0000

Nice promotional number recorded in London earlier in the summer -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00bf1jz