Crazy Honest Chicken

I've always been one of those people that prefer the truth, no matter how unpretty, to falsehoods.

Tell me the truth and I will deal with it; force rose-colored glasses on me and I'm totally unprepared to deal with the world once the spectacles are ripped away. I so very very much hate that feeling of the carpet pulling out from underneath you; when you are left viewing the world from a much different perspective after a violent readjustment.

I believe that living wide awake and facing the grotesque with the beauty is an honest, just way to live.

So when the big factory farms try to sell me packages of meat with images of happy farms and chickens living their lives in sunshine and glorious fields of green I get very pissy. The real reality includes enclosed, crowded chicken houses that require the chickens to wade through inches of fecal waste to get to automated food troughs. And then the insane assembly line at the slaughter houses, well...it's absolutely horrifying.

I don't want to support that reality. I don't want my money to tell the proprietors that this is all okay.

"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

So, friends, a few weeks ago - for the first time - we slaughtered a chicken.

It was the first time in my life that I willing chose to end of the life of anything bigger than a spider (that squirrel on 10th Avenue three years ago sooooo doesn't count - I swear it was a kamikaze squirrel).

The deed had been on the radar for several weeks but we were, well...chicken. Choosing to take knife in hand and kill an animal you've raised since its early days is not an easy thing. The animal knows you, knows that you are a provider. And there's a reluctance, because the burden of making it an ethical, humane kill is solely on your shoulders.

It wasn't technically a spontaneous act, but one Sunday a few weeks ago TMOTH and I screwed up our courage enough to proceed with plans. And once the decision was made we got down to business quickly.

There are plenty of websites out there, dear reader, that go into the nitty-gritty details of how to slaughter and butcher a chicken, so I won't bother sharing the technical processes.


I will, however, tell you it was a wide-awake experience, with sounds and smells which are etched in the surfaces of our memories. The girls were present during the entire activity and participated when appropriate (mostly when it was time to pluck). It was a very quiet time, but there were no tears.


In the end, we had a seven-pound (dressed weight) chicken. Since Rock Star was a meat bird, she had met her market weight of three to four pounds at around six to eight weeks of age. Because we had been dragging our feet about the slaughter, she had managed another six weeks of growth beyond that. She was big.


When folks who were in the know later asked, "How did she taste?" my reply was always, "Honest." Crazy honest. There was no trickery or deception in that chicken meal.

Rock Star had a good life. She always had access to food and water and friends. She was often given treats and and had a clean coop. She was never fed the remnants of other animals, and she was never injected or fed antibiotics while in our care. Her slaughter was swift and done out-of-sight of her coop-mates. Her carcass wasn't injected with solutions of sodium nastiness.

She was an honest chicken.

Thank you, Rock Star.

--Rational Mama

It's a Dirty Job: Cleaning Out the Chicken Coop

Lately, the sun has been shining and daytime temperatures have gotten well into "shorts weather," as the girls refer to it. We've been listening to the woodpecker pecking away at a new nest opening and at night (and sometimes during the day) we could hear frogs chirping down in the dry creek. Clearly, spring was here, which could only mean one thing...
It was time to clean out the chicken coop in preparation for our own chickens.

Grade A spiderwebs, no?

I knew this wouldn't exactly be an easy task, since, based on the accumulated..."debris"...in the coop it appeared that the previous owner postponed the last scheduled cleaning of the coop in anticipation of his own move. Now we were stuck with an overdue coop and when I mentioned cleaning it to TMOTH he said, "Have fun with that."

Whatever, the girls were excited about getting chickens so I knew they would help me. Right?

In light of the thriving population of mice inhabiting the coop (and the possibility of hantavirus) I decided safety was the best approach and declared that anyone helping with the coop clean-out would need to wear a long sleeve shirt, long pants, a handkerchief over their hair, washable shoes, eye protection, work gloves and a disposable face mask. I take contactable zoonotic pulmonary viruses seriously.

Ready for hantavirus...and Ebolavirus, just in case.

Unfortunately, I chose the warmest morning in nearly six months to undertake this project, which meant once I announced that today was THE day for the project the girls were no longer interested in helping me and instead decided the rope swing was feeling neglected.

Funny that I should feel like the Little Red Hen while cleaning the coop, no?

Today is a good day to shovel.

Anyway, I started by using a broom to sweep down the copious amounts of spider webs (and dust) and then moved on to the shoveling. I began shoveling next to the coop door, and the loads had a certain satisfying cleaving pattern. Based on how quickly that section went I was sure I'd be done in no time.

Of course, since I'm new to chickens it never really occurred to me that the worst part would be under the roosts. By the time I got back there I was melting and the goggles were fogging up (not to mention, the claustrophobia was kicking in). Unlike the area near the door, under the roosts was a good five-to-six inch moist and smelly layer waiting for me. Ugh.

Suddenly the shovel loads were not quite as satisfying.

I had been placing my shovel loads into our old plastic wagon, which straddled the coop door. We don't yet have a wheel barrow so this was the next best thing. Unfortunately, I filled the first load so heavily that the wagon's bulging sides lodged the wagon in the door frame. So...I had to squat (nearly putting my face in the wagon contents) to lift the load up and over the door threshold.

Don't overfill your wagon or wheelbarrow, people. Lesson learned.

My plan was to dump the wagon contents in a corner of the back half-acre, since the manure was still too "hot" to add directly to a garden. Unfortunately, the path required for that plan meant that I would have to pull the 100+ pound wagon of manure uphills several hundred feet.

Change of plans.

I decided to dump the wagon contents at a closer corner of the back half-acre which would require uphill pulling only after the wagon had been emptied. Genius! Well, genius except for the part where I forgot to get my foot out of the way before switching directions.

After getting the first load dumped (and being thoroughly drenched in sweat and dust by now) I decided that my goal to finish emptying the coop that day may not happen. Instead, I resolved myself to get at least three wagon loads out.

And three loads it was because after the dumping the third load I realized that a wagon wheel had broken. Sometimes the universe helps you stick to your plans.

Wagon broken. Watch out for the cholera.

A week later (and on a much cooler day) I finished up the worst of the coop cleaning. Now we just have to hose everything down, replace the roosts and get bedding, feeders and waterers installed.

And, of course, get chickens. Which we may or may not already have...because sometimes I'm not a very patient person.

--Rational Mama

The Spread...and A Little Help Needed

Hello, readers! Ready for the tour of the new place?

The general description of the new spread is that it is a backwards-L-shaped lot, encompassing 2.58 acres which host a small house, detached double garage, potting shed and chicken coop. This land, north of the Kansas River, was once under several hundred feet of ice during the Quaternary glacial period (we've found several exposed Sioux quartzite stones on the property, deposited by said glacier).

The acreage is divided roughly into three sections, which we generally refer to as the yard, the west acre, and the back half-acre (we need to work on some creative names, huh?)

"The Yard"

The yard is roughly an acre in size and is bordered on the south by the road which serves as our entrance to the property. There is a modest front lawn between the road and the house where a nice, large sycamore dominates the view.

The House

Just to the west of the house is a detached two-car garage with a small workshop area. On the west side of the garage is a trio of walnut trees and the large oak tree that supports the rope swing.

The back lawn sprawls out north behind the house and garage and is dotted with cedar and redbud trees (and mole holes).

The back yard, as viewed from the back door of the house.

A small potting shed sits halfway between the house and the chicken coop, which is sheltered by a mulberry tree.

The chicken coop.

To the east of the chicken coop is the established garden area, which is roughly 25 feet by 12 feet. In general, the yard has a gentle slope down towards the west acre.

View of the backyard from the north (looking back towards the house and garage). The garden is in the foreground.

"West Acre"
The west acre is an expanse of pasture that slopes downhill towards the western border of the property, which is a dry creek. There are more walnut trees and saplings in the dry creek (along with some frogs).

The west acre. The row of trees in the middle of the picture marks the location of the dry creek.

The dry creek becomes a wet creek when the watershed pond just barely north of our property fills with water. We hope to turn a significant portion of the west acre into space for blackberries and apple trees.

"Back Half-Acre"
The back half-acre is another pasture zone that is completely fenced in four-wire barbed wire and accessible by two gates. It sits directly north of the yard.

The back half-acre, as viewed from the eastern border. The clump of trees on the right marks the location of the watershed pond.
(The blue tarp is for a gardening project)

The back half-acre, like rest of the property, slopes gently towards the west and the dry creek. There is a small lean-to shed in the northwest corner (just beyond which is the watershed pond mentioned above). TMOTH has big plans to sculpt and mold this area into a series of raised-bed gardens spots with paths and benches.


"The Name"
Most folks who have a small homestead come up with some sweet and/or clever name for their property. We've tried, but not generated any tag or title that we all really love. "Dry Creek Acres?" Boring. "Glacier Hills?" Hmm... "Victory Acres?" Pulls in the rationing project but sounds like Amy Winehouse's next stop.

So, dear readers...any name suggestions for the property?

--Rational Mama

Moving On

We did it.

This was the week we made the big move to the little homestead.

Moving is always such a mixed bag of emotions...the purging of belongings, packing of memories, and finding closure with the old in the midst of excitement for the new.

And in the middle of all that poetry there's boxes, boxes, boxes. Boxes to find, boxes to move, boxes to haul up/down stairs, boxes to stack in tipsy-turvy Dr. Seussical fashion and boxes to (eventually) unpack.

We're dealing with those last two descriptions right now. Oh, how I loathe the house when it's in that "forest of cardboard" phase. It's a disaster zone that gets my special kind of crazy going. We spent 15 minutes this morning searching for clean socks and underwear. Seriously.

I've managed to get a few things unpacked, but there are still plenty of boxes to go through. And some things have made it out of their boxes but haven't yet transition to their permanent homes.

Everything is in transition, really...and that includes this blog.

Over the next few weeks you'll notice some changes to the Rational Living blog. Topics du jour will begin focusing on our efforts to live more sustainably on our small acreage, rather than our rationing experiment. There will still be plenty of history lessons as we learn how to expand our home canning, make cheese, raise chickens, make household goods rather than buy them new and the like.

Over the next few weeks, though, we'll be attempting to conquer the cardboard forest. And I imagine that one of the first "new" posts will review the in's and out's of downsizing from 1620 square feet to 940 square feet.

Possession purge, anyone?

--Rational Mama