Thursday, September 23, 2010

Chickens

Tomatoes and chickens have been everywhere we went, except there were no chickens on the homestead at Refuge Cove.   So here's what I know and have learned about them so far.

Chickens are gross and dumb.  They will eat basically anything, so if you keep chickens you can keep two types of compost:  One with egg shells and other things that chickens shouldn't eat, and one that isn't actually compost because the chickens will eat it--rotten tomatoes, y'know, whatever you have.  Besides that, they need store-bought type food:  scratch, for throwing out into their pen and having them peck at it, and a grain mixture called mash.  The type of mash depends on the age of the birdies, e.g., laying hens should be fed "lay mash", and early babies should be fed "starter mash."  For hens that are laying eggs, we would throw in crushed oyster shells, which would increase the strength of their eggs.

Some chickens are nice.  Some chickens peck.  Some chickens are pissed off all the time.  According to rumour, there is a positive correlation between how much space they have and how nice they are, which would make sense, but even then you are going to have easily irritated ones who peck your hand when you try to reach under them for eggs.  In this case, stick something over their head.  A largish yogurt container works pretty well.

More on chickens being gross.  Chickens will poop all over everything, including their eggs, even if you try to collect them every 12 hours.  You have to do this because otherwise the chickens will attack their or each others' eggs, I'm not exactly clear on this.  Also, once one chicken starts laying eggs somewhere, all the rest of the chickens jump on the egg-laying bandwagon and try to lay their eggs there, even if it is a really filthy corner behind their feed barrels.  This is why you'll find a bunch of eggs under one hen in the evening--she didn't lay all those in the last twelve hours, she just was the most recent one to jump onto the eggs and start laying there.

After you collect the eggs, they are covered in dirt and chicken poop and who knows what else. However, they have some sort of magical air-tight coating that will keep them sterile for three weeks, unrefrigerated.  This is because a chicken wants to have a whole bunch of chicks at the same time, but isn't going to lay all the eggs in one day.  She'll lay eggs, then wander off, peck at food, lay some more, etc... and then when she decides that she has enough egg, she'll actually sit on them and heat them up to the point that (a) the air-tight coating will disappear and (b) they'll start incubating into chicken-babies.  (This is also why you want to take the eggs away from her every 12 hours, before she does this.)  So once you collect the eggs, they can sit out in their basket for a few days before you wash them with no ill effects.

Then you wash them in warm water and allow them to dry.  If they aren't dry before they go into the egg cartons, then they'll stick and crack when you try to take them out.  Then you have a carton of eggs!  Horray!

Chickens are still gross.

The way that I've been told to deal with the baby chicklets is "feed them and leave them alone," more or less.  So I don't know much, but I do know:  You can order day-old chicken babies in the mail.  In the mail!  For like $1.50/each or something.  Turkey babies are more expensive, like $4/bird because turkeys are so retardedly inbred that they do not know how to mate and must be artificially inseminated.  (At this point, the species should just die.  Seriously, them and pandas too.)

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Pender Island

We woke up in Courtenay, after I stayed up past 3am sending out messages to new WWOOF hosts.  Later, when I thought about the fact that no one checks their e-mail and responds to it early in the morning before check-out at the hostel (10:30), so I set Tomko to making phone calls to some other host listings while I took a shower.

Shower was a general fiasco (dropping my magic soap in the hallway, spending a lot of time diluting it enough to mop it up) and the manager just said to shove our key under the office door and make sure the main door was locked on our way out.  Thanks, awesome manager boy!  Their British WWOOFer hostel-monkeys were also very nice.  A++, Cona.

When I arrived from the shower, Tomko had two sort-of successes:  A woman from Pender Island and a man from Quadra Island had both said, "Maybe, I need to check my computer to see what other WWOOFers are coming by."  When Tomko named the farm that the man came from, I recognized it on two counts:  (1) they're friends of the Parkers (from Refuge Cove) and (2) their profile says no smoking on the property.  (Most profiles pick the "on the property but not in house" option.)  I did not think that option appealed to Tomko, so I called the other person.

Ellen said that it would be fine, but she had two WWOOFers already... oh, and a third one just walked into the door.  Paul, who we met later, had just landed on Pender Island the day before, bought a Westphalia, logged onto the internet from the library a mile from Ellen's house, saw her profile, drove up to her gate and called to see if she wanted extra WWOOFers.  Sure, why not!

So we packed up from the hostel and headed south for our next ferry from Sidney.


View Larger Map

I indulged in sushi to improve our day, and we made it to the ferry with two hours to spare.  I spent those two hours sitting in the ferry lane, pulling everything out of Byzantium and re-packing, since things had become pretty discombobulated with all our moving around and I hadn't re-packed properly since crossing the border.  Now everything has a place and is where it goes.

Once off the ferry, Ellen's house was just as easy to find as she said it was.  We pulled up to the gate around dusk and I called the house, where Ellen's partner, Rob, explained how to open the gate.  He called it a cougar gate.  Apparently there are cougars around these parts.  (We had been warned of cougars before.  If you see one, look big, spread out your jacket, and don't make direct eye contact, they say.)

Ellen and Rob had a couple over as guests for dinner, in addition to the rest of the WWOOFers--Paul, who I mentioned before; Remy, a boy from France, and a Quebecouis girl whose name I haven't quite figured out.  Frank, who lives a 20-minute walk down the road, arrived during dinner preparations and displayed a newly-acquired black widow bite.  "Did you go to a doctor?"  "No?"  Well, uh, okay dude, but that looks pretty unpleasant.

Dinner was amazingly delicious, conversation was nice, and everyone seemed pretty fabulous.  Frank showed us the caravan where we are staying--small room with electricity, lights, and a space heater that only kind of works, but about twice as good as sleeping in a tent.  (We may be sleeping in a tent later when more WWOOFers show up, since they pre-arranged and therefore "called" it... although maybe Paul will let us sleep in his Westy?  Endless possibilities I am sure.)

In the morning, we learned the morning feeding routine for the animals:  half a bale of hay and two buckets of barley with added minerals for the goats (about 15-20), half a Folger's can of Llama Tex for the llama, more barley for the sheep (5 of them), water and chicken feed for the laying chickens (about 80), special baby chicken food for the three-week old chicklets (swarming everywhere in their heated coop, numbers unknown).  Eggs are collected and washed.

Then our activity for the day was getting two large Douglas fir trees worth of logs from where they had been cut down to the wood shed where Remy could split them with the gasoline-powered splitting machine.  This involved getting into the goat/sheep/llama pen (which covers enough area that I can't see far enough to tell you how big it is), throwing them down the hill until they hit the fence (or careen off and roll somewhere further down the hill where you don't want them to be, dammit), then unhooking part of the fence that connected to the garden, pushing them through one-by-one, and then walking backwards to roll them carefully down the garden path without smashing the tomatoes.  There are many tomatoes.

We were amazing and then had lunch followed by delicious baked apples with walnuts and vanilla ice cream. Mmmmm yeah.

Monday, September 13, 2010

Refuge Cove

When we left Herbwise, this involved a bunch of ferries.  We drove north up the coast to the town of Campbell River, and took a ferry to Quadra Island, drove across it, took a second ferry to Cortes Island, drove across it, and parked at a government dock called Squirrel Cove.

Squirrel Cove has a dock and a general store.  The general store is very general, containing a liquor store, laundromat, shower facilities, and so on.  When we parked, we went to its parking lot since the dock is not exactly something I felt I should be driving on.  We were opening up the car and looking at its contents and wondering what we should bring with us when someone walked up to us.

"I can't see your license plate," he said.

"Oh, sorry," I said without thinking, and pulled my trunk down so you could see the back license plate.

"Kylara?  I'm Jim Parker."

Oh!  That was why he wanted to know.  No-one else would have Maryland tags.  He explained that I should, in fact, drive my car down the dock and then we could unload into his sailboat and then we could be off.  We did so, and then I had an adventure trying to turn my car around in the narrow dock without killing myself or running into anything at all rather than just trying to back up very very straight for 150 feet.

Eventually we got underway.  After a few minutes, he handed the tiller to Tomko and told him to figure out how it worked.  When he did (hint:  It is opposite of how non-boat-thinking people may think), they gave it to me.  It was explained that we should know this for just in case there was an emergency, as there is no such thing as a hospital or fire department or, in fact, roads on West Redonda Island.

Actually there is one road.  Jim made it.  It goes from the beach right next to their dock up to their house.  There are trails and other things, but that is the only one that you can drive a normal vehicle on.  Jim uses it for his excavator and four-wheeler since I don't think the rest of the vehicles are workable.

The area they live in, Refuge Cove, is 183 acres owned by 18 shareholders of a co-op.  Sherry is one of them, and has lived there for pretty much her adult life.  Jim has been there more than 20 years.  They have a pretty awesome house and a number of out-buildings:  the outhouse, of course; and also the triangle-shaped barbecue hut for cooking over a fire in the rain; the hot tub and deck where Jim watches the boats and smokes cigarettes; the washhouse where the laundry, shower, and sauna live; the wood shop; the metal working shop; the bathhouse which is more like a processing place for the graywater from the house to be used for watering plants.  I am probably missing something.  But basically that is it.

While we were there, we did many things!  Mostly we pulled up infinite plants from the ground.  We cleared out the entire orchard perimeter so that a new fence could be put up, and also the ditch on the side of the road.  (The road used to be a dry river bed so it wants to flood every time it rains.)  Also some other places.  It was an impressive feat and I learned about some of the fauna but I think I destroyed a lot more than I can identify.  There are outrageous amounts of moss.  All sorts of different kinds of moss.  Fuzzy moss, spikey moss, furry moss, and so on.  Fern-like moss.  Moss that probably has its own time-share in some other appropriately wet, moss-inhabited place.

I may describe more of this later but really, I am tired from today.  Today, Jim had to go to a doctor in town (a boat ride and two ferries away) so he dropped us off at our car in Squirrel Cove before jumping into his own van and leaving.  We realize:  Tomko left our keys sitting on a nail in the bathhouse, back on Refuge Cove.

I run into a guy, Tom, that we had met a few days before while helping another resident of Refuge Cove move.  He was heading back and gave me a ride.  I walked up to the house and got my keys.  Sherry walked me over to "downtown Refuge Cove", which includes a general store and some floathouses (like, maybe five) and a dock.  I was told that some people were going around 2:30pm, tried to fiangle some other rides, then gave up and waited.  Now there is no way we can make the ferry to our next destination today.  However, if we want to make the ferry off this island, we need to leave in about ten minutes.  So I'll have some more internet later.