The Garden, Chickens and the Kids

Where we live most gardens are done or mostly done.  We stuck a fork in our patch in the ground, but for the eggplant, a week ago.  Pulled up stakes and harvested the last of the carrots.  Rubbed dry dirt off orange roots on a hot day.

Good kitchen garden this year but I've never viewed it as important, just fun.  Now, of course, food costs more and it cannot be assumed to be safe.  Did I mention fresh eggs?

Between the backyard garden; our laying hens; some local farms pushing out well-raised meat, fruit and vegetables; and a thriving farm market community, it is now possible -- at least here in northern Vermont -- to supply ourselves with a healthy portion of what we eat through the year.  By April, true, I will be pretty much sick of parsnips, but overall there is enough of interest to feast on.  We are in hearty and interesting meals all winter long.

The laying hens are all proud now because of the bad egg scare chasing the nation.  The kids sell what we don't eat, teaching them enterprise if not economics (I am certain my input costs exceed the output value, making the farm more soviet than all-American).  We do sell a lot of eggs.  Who can turn down two smiling kids selling fresh eggs?  So far no one.

We also buy meat-bird futures from a good friend and neighbor.  Any day now we'll get a call and will collect twenty frozen local treats.  We buy as well local lamb and a share of a cow out of Montpelier -- grazing today but in our freezer tomorrow.  We are raising a brood of omnivores and they are comfortable with their food being produced locally.

Our son learned the difference between livestock and pets when he was about 4 years old.  He was arguing with me one cold winter afternoon.  I was reading the paper after loading a massive roasting hen into the over.  I had spackled the bird with olive oil, sea salt, crushed pepper, cumin, and fennel seed.  I stuffed her with lemons.  She was cooking away in a hot hot oven as I sat, warm, before the wood stove, in the cuddle chair by the window.

Cal walked in.  "Dad," he said.  "My chickens are my pets."

"No they're not."

"They are."

We vollied back and forth and then I dropped the paper to the side and he plopped into my lap.  (How the chair got its name.)  "Here's the difference," I said.  "Look in the oven."

He turned his head and stared.  I could see him thinking.

"What's in it?"

"A chicken," he said.

"That's the difference."

"Oh," he said, and that was that.

I am looking forward to our beef cow coming.  This grass-fed, organically fed and lovingly pampered bovine (at least until judgment day) will taste great.

That's the bottom line, really.  I wish I could say I am focusing on local because I want to save the planet.  I want to live in a community with lots of people working and living good lives in rural communities surrounded by working lands and supplying us with great food.  If, as a side-dish, meeting these goals happens to save the planet and our food supply I will not complain.


David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2010 David Rocchio

The Crowd, The Game, The Surprise -- Radio

Here is my second broadcast -- sorry, podcast -- again courtesy of WDEV Radio Vermont; all you need to do is click on the headline, which will take you to another website, which will allow you to download my podcast and then listen to it.  I would like to know what you think -- both content and mechanics of getting the content.

You will want to open the link in a new window -- so you don't leave this blog -- and then download the file.  Mine opened right away when it downloaded and it started to play.  I'd prefer the file to sit in a player so it just broadcasts when clicked on.

I'll keep working on easier ways to make the audio files available, including turning this into my own private BBC Radio4 (it and locally owned and operated WDEV are the best radio stations on the globe (and maybe KCRW, too)).  Any ideas or comments leading me to make the audio files easier to use will be much appreciated.

I think I will like radio.  I'll keep you posted.

Thanks,

Rocchio

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2010 David Rocchio

Summer's Close -- Radio

Here is my first podcast, courtesy of WDEV Radio Vermont, where I am now a commentator.  Let me know if this works and let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Rocchio


David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2010 David Rocchio

Summer's Close

The calendar says there are four weeks left to summer but the rituals and customs of life say summer is closing. 

We picked our boy up from camp this past Sunday – big embraces, long looks to note the growth and scrapes and wisdoms picked up through new experiences.  First time having one of the wee ones out of the nest.  Two weeks, at that.  All to the good, the camp was awesome and the reports back all positive.  He looks great, if not a bit older, bigger.  It is a start of a process, which will be as hard as it is rewarding.  A passage like a season, but with more sting.

It is time to pick up supplies and clothes to make both kids shiny and presentable for the first day of school.  Talking with school age children in town is all about which teacher and what grade and who is in who’s class.  Good thing about it is landing a good teacher is like looking for weeds in a garden.  Easy.  Schools are all shined up too.

Fall gardens are starting and summer crops are mostly done.  If the weather holds we will have arugula and other greens for more than a month.  Trucks full of firewood and heating oil are starting to hog our roads.  And thankfully summer road projects are winding down.  Traffic control workers on construction sites – the most bored people in America – will soon hang up the yellow vest and lean the stop/slow sign against the work shed.

In Vermont we have the odd experience of a political primary in August, which is like hosting a football championship in July.  It’s hard enough to care about politics in September – it’s just not right to care about an election in August.  Another sign summer is done.

I voted early and am glad (at least for me) the election is over.  First, it will be good to know the main contenders in the fall madness.  Second, I will not miss the dozens of e-mails a day from people pretending to be writing to me but really just sending out virus-mail to advertise candidates.  I miss bumper-stickers.  Finally, I am looking forward to the end of lawn signs for a while.  We can’t make them illegal but candidates could agree not to plant them.  The candidates should hold a summit and agree to pull the signs:  they are ugly, ineffective and annoying.

I am not going to predict winners.  In a way I don’t care who wins, either the primary or the general election in November; I only care what they do.  As we head into fall I hope we get sense and reason, not bile and edge-issues, from whomever wins.  Wouldn’t it be great to have the vicious politics of the past ten years fall away with the leaves?  The problems we face can’t be managed to advantage for a candidate or party – they need to be managed for positive results for the nation.

Fortunately, we’ve had more important – or at least more interesting – things to focus on this summer than who will take the reins and try to get us out of the fiscal, policy and economic mess we are in.  Summer here is marked by events, as it is probably in most towns, and from the antique car show to the balloon-fest to the music festival the town has moved seamlessly from one crowd of enthusiasts to another. 

The balloon people come first and this year the weather cooperated.  We did not have a dawn landing on our barn, but we did see the sight and grace of hot-air balloons drifting across the sky. 

The antique car people walk through town with pride while their prize cars form a line up and down town.  Nothing makes me want a 1936 Packard Convertible Coupe more than seeing a mint condition forest green model parked, top down, on a crystal clear summer day.  (Okay, I honestly don’t know whether it was a 1936.  Or a Packard.  I think it was a coupe and am pretty sure that color is forest green. It was a convertible.  It’s interesting how we all claim more knowledge about cars when people who really know drive them into town.)  There is the Lamoille County Field Days -- rusted carnival rides, terrific livestock competitions, tractor and ox pulls and barrel racing.  All washed down with greasy food and milk.  We have too a summer music festival.  Ravello look out.

Summer is not all closed down.  A month or more of baseball; the chance to sneak away to the beach on warm September days; more gardening at least if the weather holds and chances for long weekend bike rides and hikes.  But the big markers are behind us and the early signs of fall are in front. 

I’ll be splitting and stacking firewood, breaking out the alarm clock and polishing the kids up for first day of school.  Not a bad way to mark the passage of a season.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2010 David Rocchio

Clouds In Motion: Summer In Full Swing

Summer is in full swing; clouds are wistful, not threatening.  Kids are burnt brown and live like the lost boys.

Driving dirt roads yesterday came upon these clouds in motion.  Snapped the picture through the windshield with iPhone, kept going, needed to get to camp, couldn't stop.


David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2010 David Rocchio

The Crowd, The Game, The Surprise

I knew about the surprise trip to see the Sox at Fenway Park.  My little girl had told me as only a seven year old can:

“Dad,” she whispered.  “Can I tell you a secret??”

“Well, shouldn’t you keep it quiet?”

“But!  Will you promise not to tell anyone else?”

“Sure.”

“We’re taking you to see the Red Sox for your birthday!”

I did not point out the thrill of this secret was pretty much gone once she told me.

The kids were not done.  “Just wait, Dad.  You’ll be so excited when you get in the park!”  Hmmm. 

A hot night.  Ninety-four degrees and no breeze at game time.  Humidity 1,000 percent.  Lester was terrible; we settled in for an anemic game; a rare loss on the Red Sox’s roll.  But the kids stayed on the edge of their seats!  “Just wait, Dad!”

And then, there it was.  Middle of the fourth inning.  Big scoreboard in Center Field.  In the lights:  “Happy Birthday David Rocchio; Love Callum and Antonia” 

All spelled right.  Kids jumping up and down. 

Other than the kids and an embarrassed grin from my wife, that was that.  The scoreboard went on to the next thing.  None of the beer swilling fans to our left or right, north or south, offered a ripple of recognition. 

I think the kids expected the crowd to stand and cheer – and I guess I hesitated for a second – my Ted Williams moment.  Did not happen.

I started watching the scoreboard.  I saw an anniversary announced.  Another birthday; this one for twins.  They’d been going up all during the game; I had not noticed.  Except for localized bursts each announcement was met with, well, nothing.

The thirty-seven-thousand-nine-hundred-and-four souls at Fenway Park that night were not interested in my – or anyone’s – personal milestones.

The Crowd.  Of course each one of us sitting in that park had stories.  Including the birthdays and anniversaries blaring from the scoreboard, but also bigger personal stories: a new job, a lost job; a graduation, an engagement; a big move, a deadline; a loss, a gain of this kind or that.  Every one of us could have turned to the person to the left or the right and talked for hours.  Each story would be different, but we’d all be in the same ballpark.

The refreshing thing was to The Crowd the only interesting people in the little bandbox (to borrow a phrase) were those who could throw a baseball ninety miles per hour, hit a baseball traveling ninety miles per hour or catch a ball so hit. 

Maybe that’s really why we go there:  we all have stories but none of us can hit Bard or Buchholz.  The game gets us out of ourselves.  We get to put life aside and pull for the extraordinary.

Comfort in a crowd, my kids excited beyond belief, life put in perspective.  Maybe Sox tickets are not too expensive after all. 

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2010 David Rocchio

Late Summer Marks A Turn

Already there is a red-leafed maple tree.  Some of the swamp maples behind our house are turning their canopies into that funky shade of brown and yellow.  Some high hills are showing shades of red.

Our short summers even in the best of years are only one hundred days wire-to-wire.  One frost ends and it seems we wake up a day later and the next frost is here.

I try every year to grow eggplant.  We start them as early as is possible in cold frames; I weed and lay down compost and nurture the plants along; I get a beautiful purple blossom.  And then, wham.   A killing frost lays itself down in my garden.  No eggplant.

After that first frost in fall the sun stops coming and then the leaves change their colors and drop to the ground.

Although I usually don’t notice the change of season until too late, I have noticed this early August the sun does not climb so high in the sky.  The mornings are darker longer; sunlight is softer and the sharpness of the heat of the hottest days is dulled a bit.  Evenings come sooner, which is a big loss.  The long summer nights are perishable and going.

Pretty soon the woods will be gray and the ground covered with a thick mat of organic fodder.  The lawn will brown up and die.  The air will smell not of hay fever and dust but of wood smoke and rotting leaves.

The coming of fall is predictable to a degree and mostly the same each year.  The differences are in the details – the pace of the foliage and its brightness, the times of the last blooms.  Seasons matter here – they are sharply different.  They give a good tool to measure time.  They provide ready analogies to life.  They give us stuff to do.  

What I now need to do is get the wood in and pre-buy my heating oil, pay attention to the eggplant and be prepared to cover them, and make sure to savor hikes in our forests while the canopy remains mostly green.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2010 David Rocchio

I Need The Eggs: Trials and Life With Backyard Chickens

We've had laying hens for years now.  It started as whimsy: A woman I worked with, Helen, started to raise chickens and goats and rabbits to make extra money for herself and her little girls.  She was a strong woman.  She was raising these girls on her own and did not make a lot of money.  Her life seemed chaotic but terrific too.  The selling of livestock -- sort of a small animal for hobbyist operation -- seemed illogical and a bit nutty, which I loved, and so I bought some hens.  I admired her simply for taking the plunge.  

I do not farm and had no reason to buy the birds but for friendship. I do have a big barn and a nice big yard and field, but that's no excuse for coming home with a box full of small chickens, two galvanized pails, heat lamps, feed, feeding troughs, watering troughs and hay.  My wife, Jackie, refrained from comment (she is English).  She simply walked away.  For eight or more years now she has ignored the flock.  

The life cycle of a chicken is simple: chick, peeper, pullet (or cockerel), hen (or rooster), supper (or soup). My friend sold me Bantam peepers.

Peepers are small, not many weeks old. They peep, obviously, and school like fish as they run around their quarters in the barn. Bantam's fly more than larger chicken breeds and Bantam peepers roost as high as they can, tucking as tightly as possible against the ceiling of a coop. Our coop at the time sat in a corner of a cavernous second story of our old barn.  Peepers crowd together and sit on each other.  They know they are alone in the world and find great comfort in piling on top of each other, huddling, hugging.

Our barn, I’m told, dates from the 1840s. Its clapboards are worn and gray, its windows long blown-out. It has three tall stories with a cavernous middle, and it is now mostly vacant. The posts sit in the ground and there is no floor, just dirt.  The elements flood in.  It will cave in one day if I don't work to stop it.  But that's a different story.

Anyway, the second floor, at least a corner of it, was a perfect place for a large, warm coop. The size of most living rooms, that second story coop held roosts and nooks and crannies and was full of light and air. 

I've since moved the coop to the first floor.  The barn is getting too old to have us walking around the second floor.  Falling through the barn floor while hauling fifty pound bags of feed is not my idea of a good way to go.

During the day we let the birds out.  They are free to roam, and scratch their way over our lawn and the wilderness and brambles around the house.  They all but graze, like a herd of feathered, winged sheep.  But each night they return to their roost, secure from the world. One could set a clock to their commitment to being home as day turns toward night. If they could think about it (which they don’t), I believe they’d like the barn and the coop.

Watching the birds grow is always fun. Our son Callum, then just small, would stand stark still for minutes – hours to a wee one – and watch the flock peep and eat and scratch the floor. To watch Callum watch the birds, to see him stand so still for so long, was a wonder in its own right.  

Some developments we didn’t expect. Roosters. Two of them. Spurs on their legs and wattles under their chins. They had tall feathers called sickles that rise from their main tails, creating a sense of height and strength that is all bluff. With strong lungs, they crowed at all hours of the night and morning – not just at dawn, shattering a poultry myth.


My learning about raising poultry began that first fall, when one of the birds hurt its leg and developed a limp, raising a fundamental farm question: To meat or to mend? Ambivalence can be bad for a bird.

I called a vet who I know. 


“I’ve got a bird with a bad leg. Should I bring it in or just kill it?”

Silence for a minute on the phone.

“Dave, it’s a chicken.”

Agonizing still, I bundled up the bird early one morning and gently put it in a cat carrier. I drove it to a farm close by. I grew up in a town that was mostly farms, and I knew that a vet’s opinion was one thing but a farmer’s opinion was different. A young farmhand stepped from the barn as I walked up, and I asked what he would do.

“Is it getting food and water where it is?” he asked. It was. “Don’t do a thing,” he said. 
“Wait and see.” He looked at me and paused. “It’s a chicken.”

The bird recovered and  towered over the others.  He was no bantam. A proud Colombian Wyandotte.  And she turned out to be a he, one of the boys, certainly high in the pecking order, by all appearances happy to be alive. Of course, no one needs two roosters and we should have killed one but we didn't, even though we eat chicken at least once a week. So he stayed, taking up space and feed and crowing through the night.


That first flock of five hens and two roosters lasted a few years. They waited each morning for us to open the coop door, and then flew down from the second floor of the barn to scratch at the dirt and bits of left over snow below. Sometimes they would be in the driveway when I drove home from work, scattering like mice when I pulled in. 


We have covered many generations since that first flock.  We do not raise bantams any more -- the kids wanted to be able to collect and sell big brown eggs -- and usually have five to ten ladies and one boy to keep the flock going.  We've lost birds to fox, raccoon, fisher and dog.  


And until writing this, I never really thought about why I am raising chickens. The simple goal of keeping the group watered during a cold winter adds an hour to each day. The feed is expensive. Cleaning the coop is not, to say the least, fun. Given the time and effort, the way I figure it, we’re paying about three dollars an egg to keep these birds. There’s plenty to think about without them, balancing family and work and friends.


There is something simple and direct about raising chickens that makes it worthwhile. We give them a clean, well-lit space, room to roam, food and water. They give us a handful of eggs, with thick, hard, calcium-rich shells the color of a dusty barn floor.  I had the joy of watching my little boy and then his sister, when they were still very young, cup pale blue Bantam eggs in their tiny hands. Now, about five generations of chickens later, they have learned a bit about life and death and caring for things through the birds.


Woody Allen tells a joke to end one of his films, 'Annie Hall.' A man visits a psychiatrist. His wife thinks she’s a chicken. The doctor tells the man to bring her in, offering to help. The man says, “That’s the problem, Doctor. I need the eggs.”


Raising chickens might make no sense, but that could be the point. Whatever happens in the house or at work or in the world, there’s still the need to feed and water the birds and muck out the coop. And I need the eggs.


David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2010 David Rocchio

Of Milestones and Birthdays

My turning fifty is rolling in like a menacing ocean fog.  A thick, obscuring, cold sea fog.  It is a false marker but here it is nonetheless.

I call it a false marker because rarely is anything different one day to another or one year to another; it is all usually much more subtle than that and to treat an otherwise ordinary day as an acute angle misses the whole point of the journey.  There are few days in a life when the change is sharp or dramatic and therefore worthy of specific note.

It is fair to measure some specific days – deaths, births, marriage, divorce, discovering a new love, graduations, moving days, winning an event at the Olympics, fighting a battle in a war – where real change provides a true marker or divide.  Whether tragic or bliss, crushing or soaring, the days which slam us are deserving of all the respect, attention and care we can muster.  Birthdays are odd because, to borrow from William Least Heat Moon, they are just the end of another lap around the sun.  Each lap is fun to celebrate but that is all.  Except by coincidence, nothing really changes on those days. 

When we see people all of the time – family, close friends, co-workers – it is all but impossible to notice physical change.  When we see each other only occasionally obviously people are traveling an arch.  In young people the growth can be astounding.  Like a field of corn in July, the change over two weeks can shock almost.  As we get older the changes are less.  More time must pass to see anything meaningfully different.  We note the round numbers then, to quote my daughter, ‘just because,' which is silly but real in a cultural sense: Yea! We are teens; Cool. We’re in our twenties; Oh God, we are thirty; Oh hell, we are forty.  Well, here comes another one.

To mark fifty as a milestone means the number is what?  Pretty?  Organized?  Half?  Half of what?  It is not half a life given life could (and likely will) end well before 100.  It is the end of any vague notion of youth but that too is purely external, physical.  We are who we are inside our own skin.  I am in most ways the same boy I was at nine or ten or twenty.

I have done a lot, or at least lived a lot.  Hopefully that means something.  So how to mark it?  I’d like to define for myself the meaning of turning fifty, rather than leave it to the greeting card industry.  To take such a stand could well be an act of delusion, but it is at least a stand against a relentless tide, making it worthy if not noble.

Here is one thing it means:  I have accumulated things: memories, good and bad; experiences, good and bad; people, pains, oddities, quirks, recipes, habits, books, albums (photo and record), dislikes, likes, ailments, fears, confidences, worries, perspective, clothes, weight, furniture.  So many things piled up in the attic of my existence.  There is no yard sale, barn fire, bulldozer, government action or natural disaster capable of carrying away most of these accumulations.  They are stuck to me worse than glue.  This is of course good and bad but it is mostly just true.

Having said that, some accumulations we can let go.  Fifty is a good time to rent a dumpster and spend two days hauling stuff out of the attic and having it rolled away.  I am not being metaphorical.  Literally, I am saying rent a dumpster and clean the attic.  The rest we cannot, maybe should not, might not want to discard.  Personal decision that, what to discard if you could, but not worth a lot of time given how little we can do to shake off the past.

Turning fifty is an excuse -- a command? -- to do many things:  Learn to play an instrument (or relearn one given up as a kid).  Talk intelligently.  Listen.  No, really listen.  Enjoy sitting.  Exercise.  Coach.  Read everything.  Mentor.  

Do this one.  Wisdom might be creeping in.  Spread it.  It is fertilizer, which is not an insult.  Fertilizer makes things grow.  

Fifty also means there are things we should not do: Fifty is a good age to stop pretending we are still in college.

                   There are a million ways to mark the false marker of completing fifty laps around our sun.  Finding them is like finding weeds in a garden.  Here are a few more.  They can apply really to the successful completion of any lap, and to the extent they are born of accumulated wisdom; I hope they might pull you in a bit:

·      Buy a book full of completely and utterly blank pages and fill them. 

·      Ignore obsequious and condescending people.

·      Don’t be obsequious.

·      Don’t be condescending.

·      Do what you want.

·      Know what you want.

·      Do what you want even if you don’t know what you want.

·      Sometimes doing what you want is not the right thing to do; defer.

·      Be kind and thoughtful with children.

·      Don’t treat children like children.

·      Be ready for failure, sadness, dismay.

·      Work hard.

·      Take your time.

·      Know there is nothing anyone can do to make things turn out well.

·      Things only turn out well if you make them turn out well.

·      At the end of the day, nothing turns out well; we live on a planet blessed with a state of entropy so it is not really worth fighting the constant, irreversible, inevitable and relentless decay of everything around us.

·      Fight entropy.

·      Travel.

·      Cook.

·      Spend time with people you love.

·      Nurture and cherish friendships based on love, appreciation and understanding.

·      Be tolerant.

·      Take risks.

·      Be careful.

·      Think.

·      Trust your instincts.

·      Trust your intuition.

·      Let life accumulate.

Knowing turning fifty is not an acute angle, my plan for the day is to go see the Red Sox with my family (same thing I did at forty, actually) and eat a hot dog.  A lack of judgment, a risk, another accumulation in an already cluttered life.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2010 David Rocchio