Bathroom crunch

In our house we have two full bathrooms and a powder room. For a couple of women that should be plenty. But we're currently experiencing a crunch: bathroom square footage has turned into the most valuable real estate in the house.

The powder room has been out of commission for a year. If there was a show about home renovations that got started and then . . . well . . . never finished, it could star our powder room. We are going to finish it, but right now it's home to our sixteen chickies. It's a happy room, full of peeping and flapping and eating and pooping, but it ain't a bathroom.

The master bath is also being renovated, and work is actually progressing on this room. But a functioning bathroom it ain't.

That leaves the bathroom downstairs, the one we actually renovated ourselves (and finished!). It's pretty darn small: there better not be anyone sitting on the toilet when the shower door opens, that's for sure. We were already feeling a bit grumpy about having to make do with this bathroom while the master bath is out of commission, especially since if we have to pee in the middle of the night we have to go down two flights of stairs.

And then William had a little adventure.

William is a wild wanderer at heart, and despite his advanced age he really just wants to be outside. But sometimes that leads to trouble, as happened the other night when he got caught in our neighbour's raccoon trap. It's a humane trap, so it did no damage, but it meant William spent the night outside in the rain. Not good for a senior citizen. And we don't know whether he hurt his mouth trying to get out, or if he had an abscess brewing anyway, but a day later he had a swollen mouth that necessitated a trip to the vet. He's healing, but the upshot is we need to keep him inside, somewhere where he would be warm and not bothered by the rest of the menagerie. Ergo, the bathroom. Now we can't make a step backwards while brushing our teeth without putting a foot in the litter box. Ick.

This all reminds me of the story about a woman who was feeling very crowded in her house, what with her husband and kids and all. So she climbed to the top of a mountain to see a guru who told her to get some chickens. She did, but of course it made the crowding worse. So she went to see the guru again, who told her to get a pig. Then a goat. Then a cow. Finally the woman hiked to the top of mountain one last time, and the guru told her to get rid of the chickens and the pig and the goat and the cow, so she was down to just the husband and kids, and all of a sudden the house didn't seem so crowded anymore. Go figure.

Nine + one + six

We added to our chicken family today: six Red Rock Cross pullets. More chickies!

They came from Rick, a chicken farmer who lives near Qualicum Beach. We had gone up island to see our chicken mentor, Ev, not planning on coming home with any chicks. But she mentioned that Rick had some new hatchlings and Kim's eyes started to shine. She had been thinking of adding Red Rock Crosses to our flock because they are such good layers. We love our Buffs and Australorps, but as dual-purpose birds they can't match the egg production of some other breeds. And we needed to think about diversifying the ages of our laying flock, so they don't all run out of steam at the same time. Red Rock Crosses are great, because the cockerels are born with a white spot on the top of their heads, which makes it really easy to select only pullets if that's what you want.

The Buffs that came from our incubating adventure were always going to be sold, probably at the next chicken swap at the end of the month. The addition of the Red Rock Crosses will make it possible for Kim will keep the lone Australorp chick if she decides to - when we managed to save only one it looked like she would have to sell it, too, because it wouldn't be fair to the chick to raise it alone. But she has a hunch it's a cockerel, and we certainly don't have any room for any more of those, so she may end up selling it, too.

The chicks we hatched are growing so fast, and although they're a day or two younger than the Red Rock Crosses, they're noticeably larger. And they're starting to use the roost, even though it is still set at big chick height from last year's batch of chicks. Despite their tumultuous beginnings, they're doing well!

We're off

Today was a big day at Mucky Boots. Today was Day 1 - demolition day - in the great, long awaited Master Bath Renovation. We have been waiting for this day for a long time.

We knew it was coming. We knew because the verandah was starting to look like the warehouse of a plumbing fixture store. Then this morning Wayne and Jason arrived and not long after our verandah looked like this.

Goodbye, old shower with the cheap brass finish that peels off like tape. Goodbye, toilet with the permanent iron stains. Goodbye, old sink with no place to put a toothbrush. Goodbye nautical-themed tile and mirrored shelves.

We have some work ahead of us. Wayne and Jason are doing the bulk of it, but when the demo stage is done they'll leave us with the first coat of drywall mud on and fresh plywood on the floors. Then they will go on to another job while we finish the walls and paint, and install tile on the floor, at which point they'll come back to finish up.

Yes, we've got a way to go, but I can just feel the hot water slipping over my shoulders as I sink down into my first hot, fragrant, steaming bath in more than two years. Soon, soon, soon.

Nine + one

Yesterday was a crazy day. Kim and I both had big performances last night, in separate concerts. We had pre-concert dinner party plans, and snow to deal with, and our absent neighbours' chickens, geese and cat to look in on. And through the entire day, the ongoing drama of the hatching/not hatching chicks.

The dust has settled, and here's the tally: the concerts were a success. The snow is melting. And we have ten successfully hatched chicks: nine Buff Orpingtons and one Australorp. The remaining eggs in the incubator are quiet - no pips, no peeping. We'll wait until tomorrow morning, just in case, but we're pretty much resigned that these ten lovely chicks are it, out of the 25 we had hoped would hatch.

This little one - the last one - almost didn't make it. It pipped about 10 am on Friday, and by the time I got home from the concert last night, it hadn't made any progress beyond that initial break in the shell. The chick's beak and some lusty peeps were coming from the small hole, but with no progress in 36 hours, I knew it couldn't last much longer. So I took a deep breath and broke it out of its shell.

I went very slowly and carefully, but there were no problems: no adhesions of the membrane, no bleeding. I broke away about 2/3 of the shell, then put the whole thing back in the incubator and watched over the next few minutes while the chick quickly kicked away the rest. If a chick can't make its way out of the shell it's usually a sign of a significant underlying problem, so I wasn't sure if I had done the right thing - especially because the chick seemed to have badly bent feet and one wing that didn't seem quite right. But now we're thinking it might have just needed a bit more time than its siblings to uncramp from being in its shell for so long, because this morning its feet seem pretty much normal. We're still not sure about its wing, but if there's one thing we're learning from this experience, it's patience. So we'll give it more time.

Kim is happy about having managed to save ten, given the power outage, but sad there weren't more Australorps - she was really looking forward to adding to our little flock of three. For the last week she has been collecting eggs for a customer looking for three dozen fertile eggs for hatching (which is a pretty good proposition, since eggs for hatching fetch about four times as much as eggs for eating), but after that I think she'll power up the incubator again and have another go. And in the meantime we have all the joys of a new channel on Chicken TV.

Looking up

We woke this morning to three more beautiful newly hatched Buff Orpington chicks, and just returned home from running errands to see another one almost fully out of its shell and, most special of all, a newly hatched Australorp chick - Gertie's offspring, according to our records!

It's like Christmas, over and over.

Thank you for all your kind and hopeful wishes - they're working!

Disappointment

It looks like our dream of a brooder full of newly hatched chicks isn't going to happen. We're not throwing in the towel yet, but it's not looking good.

You might remember we started 31 eggs in our new incubator about three weeks ago, and were looking forward to a hatch date of March 4 (today) or 5 (tomorrow). We candled the eggs at about 10 days and had to discard 6 of them - 4 of which hadn't been fertile to begin with, and 2 that showed the telltale ring of a failed embryo. Then on Tuesday we candled them again and took out 2 more that had failed. All of that is quite normal.

What wasn't normal was the massive wind storm we had on Wednesday. It knocked out power to most of Vancouver Island - in our case, from about 10:00 am until 10:00 pm. Under normal circumstances, a power outage would be an inconvenience (when we don't have power we don't have water, which means we don't have toilets), but with an incubator full of chicks in lock-down mode, we had a problem.

Lock down happens for the last three days of incubation: eggs are taken off the turners, so the chicks can solidify their sense of up and down, humidity is increased, to make sure the inner membrane of the egg doesn't dry out, making it more difficult for the chick to escape the shell, and the eggs are left strictly alone, and not disturbed.

Unless a power outage happens. Fortunately we had a backup plan, that had its inception in the days when Kim was thinking of building her own incubator: we used a cooler we were given a number of years ago, that plugs into the cigarette lighter of a car and that can be set to either cool or heat. So very, very gently we moved the eggs to a rack in the cooler, set over a pan of water for humidity and some hot water bottles for thermal mass, put the the temperature and humidity probe from the egg-o-meter inside and then transported the whole apparatus to the car. And then Kim parked herself in the car to monitor the eggs.

We made it comfortable for her: book, cup of hot soup, blankets and pillows, and a walkie-talkie to call me in case she needed anything. Kim monitored the eggs and I trotted in and out, monitoring Kim. After a while we figured out the cooler was doing a great job at maintaining heat and humidity, so Kim could come back in the house for 30 minutes at a time, just going out to check and adjust, and sometimes to run the car so the battery wouldn't be drained.

When I left about 2:30 to tutor and then attend a rehearsal, we were expecting the power to come back on at 6:00. But when I got home at 10:30 that night, the power had just been restored, and Kim was in the process of moving back into the house. And she had exciting news for me: the eggs were peeping!

This (like most things our first time around) was confusing to us, because it was Wednesday, and the hatch date wasn't supposed to be until Friday at the earliest. Could the disruption have caused an early hatch? Kim got up once or twice in the middle of the night to check on the eggs, and we woke up Thursday morning to a newly hatched chick. Yay!

But as the day progressed there was bad news, too: a second chick hatched but seemed stuck to the shell by what looked like an umbilical cord. We did some emergency reading and placed an emergency call to our chicken mentor Ev, and finally sterilized some scissors and cut the chick free. It was probably just some of the inner membrane of the egg, which dries out easily and then can get stuck.

And later, more bad news: another egg was hatching, but seemed stuck. The shell was cracked all the way around, and the chick inside was rocking and rolling, but not making any progress. When I left that afternoon for more tutoring, Kim was worried. When I got home that night Kim had performed a chicky-otomy, and had carefully freed the chick from the egg. We knew it's sometimes done, but you have to be really careful because tearing the membrane of the egg too early on can cause the chick to bleed to death. But it was a good thing Kim intervened, because the membrane had dried and stuck the chick to the egg, and it would never have been able to free itself. Kim also had to carefully cut away some of the dried membrane that was preventing the chick from moving its wing.

And then things just ground to a halt. No more peeping eggs. No more little beaks poking through shells. The one Australorp chick that had broken open a small area of its egg had stopped moving, and we now know it died.

We don't know what to think. All of this has happened before any chicks were supposed to hatch at all. At this point there are two more eggs that are peeping, so maybe the three chicks that hatched are the anomaly, and all we need to do is be patient. But Kim is swearing she's never doing this again - she takes it all so much to heart.

While we wait and try to be patient, there's joy to be had in watching the three survivors. They are active and vocal, and amazed us by pecking at spots on the incubator walls when they were only hours old. What an instinct! They're in the brooder now, staying warm under the heat lamp. You can see the chick that got stuck in her membrane - we're going to wait a day and then clean her up with some warm water.

And hopefully there will be more healthy chicks to add to the brooder soon!

I hate snow

Warning: this post is one long, annoying, self-pitying rant.

To begin with, I need to establish my snow credibility. I grew up on the prairies. I began driving in Calgary, and learned so well how to pump the brakes on ice that I have had to avoid cars with ABS ever since. I spent more years driving in Ontario, in more blizzards, and on more ice.

But here's the thing. Ten years ago I moved to southern Vancouver Island. And now - now, I hate the snow. I really, really hate the snow.

I should be more specific. If I didn't have to worry about going anywhere, I would be fine with the snow. It's pretty. It makes everything so much brighter than our usual winter-cloudy-grey. Frankie likes to play in it. It can be an adventure.

But there are three things that make driving in that lovely snow a huge pain:

(1) Our snow really is different than the prairie snow I grew up with. Really. It's very wet, and the temperature is always around freezing, so the weight of a car turns it instantly to ice. I learned that the hard way my first snow storm here - same car, same tires and same driver as had just gone through an Ontario winter, but there I was, sliding and turning down a hill in a slow motion auto ballet.

(2) We live in the country and don't have a 4-wheel drive. Country roads aren't plowed as often and don't get as much traffic, so they're usually in a lot worse shape than city roads. And we don't have a 4-wheel drive. I'm starting to think a 4-wheel drive should come with every rural property. After the big snows we had in January we borrowed my dad's 4-wheel drive, and it didn't snow again. Until we returned it a week ago. It has snowed almost every day since.

(3) We live at the bottom of a big hill. Lovely for coming down, but impossible to get up until it has been plowed or the snow melts. It's actually worse than that: from the end of our driveway we have to go up a not-so-steep hill, then make a right-angled turn and go up a long, steep hill. There's no flat bit to get up enough momentum to make it to the top. The best we can do is open our gate, gun it down the driveway and up the first hill, carefully gauge how much to slow down for the corner (skidding out and oncoming traffic being the two chief dangers) without losing so much hard-won momentum that we don't make it to the top of the hill.

Have I mentioned that I hate snow?

For example, here was my day. We woke up to about 3 inches that had made no appearance in our local weather forecasts, so I didn't have a chance to prepare by parking the car at the top of the hill rather than the bottom. And sure enough I had an appointment I had to get out for. So I dragged Kim out of bed (it takes two to drive the car up the hill: one to drive and one to watch for oncoming traffic) and we tried, but couldn't get the car even halfway up the hill before it came to a halt and started sliding back down. But the sun was out, so two hours later I tried it again and made it. I thought that would be my snow experience for the day, but this afternoon during a tutoring session I looked out the window and saw nothing but a wall of blowing white. 5 minutes later it was clear. 20 minutes later I passed through another blizzard on the way to my next session. 20 minutes after that it was raining. By the time I left it was snowing again, but by the time I got back into town it was raining. Then snowing. Then the sky was clear. Then I drove to choir rehearsal and 7 minutes down the highway I was driving through a blizzard so dense I couldn't see the road, so I turned around and came back home. At home the sky was clear and I could see the stars.

I hate the snow.

I really, really need the spring.

Incubator update

You may remember that we started 31 eggs in our new incubator almost two weeks ago. From the very beginning the big question has been: how many are fertile?

The process that's used to figure this out is called candling. It involves holding the egg to a bright light in a dark room, to get a view of the contents. There are lots of websites with photos showing eggs at different stages of development, but there's a big difference between reading a book or looking at some pictures and figuring it out yourself with a flashlight in one hand and an egg in the other.

Kim and I gave it a try the other day. I was in charge of the record keeping, light switch switching and second opinion proffering, while Kim did the candling. What we were looking for was the air sac at the bigger end of the egg. In the photo you can see it on the left. That sac will get bigger as the embryo continues to develop. We were also looking for veining (visible at the top in the photo) and a dark mass that could be the embryo.

The air sac turned out to be a really easy thing to spot. Quite a few of the eggs had visible veining, and in some of those the embryo was very distinct. It was thrilling, actually. We were especially happy to find that most of the Australorp eggs were fertile - there was a time, after all, when we thought that Hector might be a gay, mute rooster. But he's doing his job - good Hector!

By the time we were finished we had decided that six of the eggs weren't fertile, so we took them out of the incubator and disposed of them - gently, since they were likely to be smelly if broken. So we're down to 25 eggs. There are still things that can go wrong before the hatch date of March 4 or 5, but we're excited to have made it this far.

Image from here.

Chickens on the run

Notice anything unusual about this picture? Extra points to you if you spotted that the chickens are outside the chicken yard.

Yes, Kim gave them their freedom yesterday. Maybe it was the sunshine, or the happiness that came from a morning of sifting compost, but for whatever reason Kim opened the gates to the chicken yard and let the birds roam free.

And oh, were they ever happy! The orchard is a great place for them to graze, but it's familiar territory. When the gates opened they ventured forth onto untouched ground, digging and scratching for all the bugs just waiting for them.

We kept Pee Wee in the chicken yard, but Hector was allowed to roam free with the girls. He took his guard-rooster duties seriously, even butting chests with Frankie when he got too close to the hens.

After an hour or so Kim decided it was time to round them all up and get them back in the orchard. All it took was a bit of scratch and a few calls of "chickie, chickie" and they all came trotting back. Even the scatterbrained crazy hen who is always the last one in.

Butchart gardens

My mom and dad came for a visit this past weekend, as a way of helping me feel better about missing out on the family Christmas. It was lovely to see them, and fun to pretend it was Christmas even if we couldn't find a restaurant anywhere serving a roast turkey dinner.

On Sunday we went to the Butchart Gardens, a world famous 100-year-old garden built on the site of a old limestone quarry. When the family is here it's a tradition to tour their 12 Days of Christmas light display, so of course we had to go. There's not much in bloom in mid-February even here in Lotus Land, but it meant the bones of the garden were the stars of the show.

It's easy to imagine the old quarry in this photograph. This deep pool is the site of the "5 golden rings" verse of the Christmas light display: each fountain is circled by a ring of golden lights that shine in the dark.

Each generation of the family that owns the gardens has included beloved dogs, so leashed dogs are welcome to visit. Lucky Frankie.

For me the highlight were the garbage cans. I know that sounds a little odd, but they were quite beautiful. Each was housed in a cedar box with a lovely planter on top. I went around taking pictures of them all, watched by some perplexed Japanese tourists.

Tincture

As my near and dear ones know all too well, I suffer from...well, snot issues. I am the world's leading producer, and single-handedly keep the Kleenex company in business. If I could find a way to invent a super glue from snot, or a way of using snot to power internal combustion engines, I would have enough money to end world hunger.

Chronic sinusitis and rhinitis are pretty minor as health issues go, but still, they're a bit of a pain. My sinuses are so clogged I sound like a labouring steam engine when I sleep, and sometimes my poor nose gets weary of all the blowing.

I have spent years trying to find a cause, and a solution. If I can stick to a diet free from gluten, dairy, sugar, eggs, some nuts, caffeine and alcohol, it makes a difference. But man, is that hard.

Some of you may remember my herbal experiments from last year: I used comfrey, calendula and lavender harvested here at Mucky Boots to make a salve for insect bites, scrapes and burns. That got me interested in the idea of growing and using more medicinal herbs. I'm going to try out some new herbs in this year's garden, and in the meantime I have been reading lots of books about growing and using medicinal herbs. And didn't my eyes light up when I read that elderflowers and elderberries are good for reducing mucous production. Just what I need.

So about six weeks ago I put about 4 ounces of dried, organic elderflowers in a big mason jar and covered it with 100-proof vodka. I have faithfully stirred and shaken it every day since then, and finally, a few days ago, I decided the tincture was ready. I strained it twice, once through a fine colander and once through cheesecloth, then bottled it in a dark-coloured bottle to protect it from the light. A dose is supposed to be an ounce, but I see that as a bit of a problem: taking a few doses a day of 100-proof vodka could amount to a drinking problem. Especially since I'm not supposed to be drinking booze at all, never mind booze made from grain. So I'll stick with one or two eye-droppers as a dose instead, and see how that goes. While I see how that works, I'll investigate how to make a tincture without alcohol.

I've got another herbal experiment on the go: an elderberry "elixir" made with dried elderberries, brandy and honey. This one is beautiful - deep purple and a bit syrupy. It's not ready yet, but once it is I might be tempted to forget about its medicinal benefits and just serve it over ice cream. Soy ice cream, that is.

The next generation

Big news: the next chicks are on their way! We now have a toasty warm incubator loaded with eggs, scheduled to hatch around March 4 or 5.

First off, some of you may be wondering why we don't just let the hens do all this for us, and save ourselves the expense of an incubator. Well, there are an awful lot of things that can go wrong in the time between laying and hatching, which is why hens lay so many eggs. Most people at all serious about hatching eggs end up getting an incubator, to properly control the conditions that affect successful hatching.

We learned very early on that there are incubators, and then there are incubators. There are really cheap do-it-yourself models and there are ones that cost $1000 and look like sleek, stainless steel wine coolers from the future. At first Kim thought she would build her own with found materials, but the technical requirements for maintaining precise temperature and humidity, plus the need to regularly turn the eggs so they develop properly, were off-putting for even someone as game for a challenge as Kim.

The incubator we ended up buying was a middle-of-the-road one: it has a heating element connected to a very primitive thermostat (no actual scale, just a lever you turn one way if you want it cooler and the other way for hotter), channels for water to maintain the humidity, an electronic thermometer and hygrometer, and a mechanism that automatically tilts the eggs one way and then the other, very slowly. What it didn't have was a fan, to ensure even temperature and humidity throughout the unit. So Kim visited a local computer store, where a nice young fellow whose mother also incubates eggs gave her an old hard drive fan for free, which she wired into the incubator. What a nice fellow. In all, the entire system cost about $155. Given that we paid $5 each for our day-old Buff Orpington chicks last year, and $25 each for the point-of-lay pullets we bought from Ev, we think this is a bargain.

Next Kim spent two or three days checking to see the whole system worked, and adjusting the thermostat and humidity until the fairly narrow specs for hatching eggs were met. Then on Saturday the eggs - 10 Australorp and 21 Buff Orpington - were loaded into the incubator and the 21-day countdown began.

You may notice that one of the eggs in the photo doesn't look like the others. It looks like a cyborg-egg. It's actually Kim's homemade egg-o-meter. No, I'm not making that up. Apparently the temperature inside an egg is not the same as the temperature outside the egg. So people buy fake eggs, filled with gel and connected to a thermometer, to put in their incubators. But they cost about $20, and Kim had read about a better idea on the internet. We blew the insides out of an egg, to get an empty shell, filled it with hair gel, and inserted the probe of a $7 thermometer we got at Walmart. We did have to buy the hair gel, since neither of us use it, but it only cost $1.99. What a deal, and it works great.

Being the ex-science teacher that she is, Kim is taking her record-keeping very seriously. That's half the fun.

She will candle the eggs in about 5 days (holding a bright flashlight underneath each egg in a dark room) which will allow her see enough of the inside of the egg to know if it contains a growing embryo. At that point, of the fertile eggs, we can expect about an 85% hatch rate. So, if all goes well, in three weeks we should have a brooder full of baby chicks!

Uniform

When I was in university I had a professor who was a legend - you know, one of those teachers who spawn stories that get handed down from one year's class to the next. This fellow was famous for having reduced the problem of dressing every day to a simple art: five white shirts and five different coloured ties, one for each day of the week. He probably had a few pairs of pants, too, but they must have been identical because we couldn't tell.

Well, I'm feeling really sorry for all those times I sat in a lecture hall and shared a "Red tie, it must be Tuesday" joke with my classmates. Not just because it was kind of mean. But because my own students, the kids I tutor, could be telling the same joke about me.

I used to make decisions every day about what I would wear. But somehow, at some moment after we left the city, the words "simplify my life" got applied to my wardrobe. I now have a uniform. A Mucky Boots uniform.

Blue jeans. T-shirt. Half-zip fleece. Puffy vest. Warm socks. That's it.

By my count I have four fleeces, identical except for the colour (grey, purple, navy and teal), and three puffy vests (navy, purple and fancy purple check). Not counting any variations in t-shirts, since they're invisible under all my layers, that makes twelve different combinations of fleece and puffy vest. Do my students say to themselves "Today is Thursday, it must be purple fleece and navy vest day"? Has my fashion sense been reduced to little more than a joke?

Here's the thing: I don't really care. There's a reason I have settled on this as my uniform for the cooler months - it's comfortable, functional, and it gives me layering options for different temperatures. Plus I like grey and blue and purple. I don't spend any time ironing, or fretting about what to wear. I can go to the hardware store, out for lunch, or to a tutoring session without feeling over- or under-dressed.

So I'd like to apologize to that professor from so long ago. He was on to something that in my silly, self-absorbed youth I missed. And I'd like to pass on these words to my own students: laugh at me now, if you like. I can take it. I'll just smile and wait for the day when you, too, will come to appreciate the beautiful simplicity of a self-chosen uniform.

Hector's bad day

Hector had a bad day on Sunday. We went out for a few hours in the afternoon, and returned to find Hector bloody and torn - specifically, his comb. After some expert CSI work by Kim the next day, we think the injury happened when he got his comb caught in the wire during a through-the-fence duel with Peewee.

Whatever the cause, we came home to Hector cowering on the roof of the nest-box shelter, shaking the dripping blood out of his eyes.

Poor Hector.

We scooped him up and brought him into the house for patching up and TLC. We cleaned up the mess, found the tear, cleaned it some more, and dabbed it liberally with antibiotic ointment, and through it all Hector stayed calm and patient and didn't try to peck us once.

Good Hector.

He spent the night in a cage in the infirmary (otherwise known as the yet-to be-finished powder room), which meant we woke in the morning to the distinctive sound of his Baroquely ornamented bass crow coming from downstairs. What a lovely alarm clock.

One night in the infirmary was all it took. To welcome him back to the chicken yard, Kim treated everyone to a round of fresh spinach in the new hanging feeders she fashioned from thrift store grilling baskets.

Happy Hector.

Snowdrop-mageddon

My beloved Toronto-dwelling sister is a little irritated with me. It has to do with a reference to spring in one of my recent blog posts, at a time when most people in Canada were (still are) dealing with blizzards and white-outs and frozen cars that won't start. Well, darling sister, you might not want to read any further, because we're having a snow-mageddon here, too. Or, rather, a snowdrop-mageddon.

Yes, the snowdrops are magically lifting themselves out of the ground - here, there, and everywhere. In the perennial beds where they're supposed to be. In the lawn. In the vegetable garden. We're very glad to see them, because even though our winter wasn't that bad, relatively speaking, it felt bad. And besides, they're beautiful little things, even though you have to bend down really far to see just how pretty they are.

Other early-comers are appearing, too. Like our old friend the winter aconite...

...and in one of the perennial beds, right by an emerging forest of snowdrops, the first sign of rhubarb.

Spring! Almost...

Diatomaceous earth

You all know Kim works hard to keep her chickens safe, healthy and well cared for. She has a small library of chicken books on the shelf and the phone numbers of a handful of experienced chicken-raisers in her phone book for consultations. She is always reading, reading, reading.

One of the things she has learned is that late winter and early spring are a time when lice can be a problem for chickens. Not evil blood-sucking lice, but the relatively innocuous kind that nestle in among a chicken's tail feathers and snack on dead skin cells. They don't cause a chicken real distress, but still...yuck.

Chickens naturally combat insects by having dust baths, but if you want to help them with this, an organic way to prevent and treat lice is to use diatomaceous earth, which is often also used to control slugs and other pests in the garden. For those of you who are not gardeners, it's the powdered form of a sedimentary rock made up of the skeletons of lots and lots of little diatoms. It works against insects by drying out their exoskeletons. So I've heard.

So this week Kim made a trip to the feed store to get a few bags of the stuff, we did some poofing of the powdery stuff into the tail and underwing regions of each chicken, and we sprinkled more along the roosts and in the bedding in the coop. And as a piece de resistance, Kim added some to the chickens' favourite place to take a dust bath: a spot in Chicken Alley, against the wall of the coop.

So there they were this afternoon: soaking up the sun, fluffing up their feathers, flapping dusty pine shavings all around, and giving themselves a spa treatment all at the same time.

Construction

Another sign that spring is on the way is the evidence of raised bed construction in the vegetable garden. As well as adding new beds (like last year's blueberry beds) we have been slowly reconstructing the existing beds, built from inexpensive but short-lived spruce, with big, beefy, durable cedar. We got another one done this week, and doesn't it look nice?

We're getting pretty good at this: we made sure to do it when the ground was soft and soggy to make driving in the posts much easier, and our corners are the tidiest yet. Even the chickens passing by in Chicken Alley were impressed enough to slow down for a closer look.

Nest boxes

Spring is getting closer by the day, and that means babies of all kinds will not be far behind. Kim is quite keen to start raising chicks this year, which means collecting fertile eggs and incubating them. More on her incubator plans in a future post. But unless we're looking for some interesting cross-breeds, this means the Australorps and the Orpingtons need to be segregated for about a month before fertile egg collecting begins.

To that end, Kim has turned over two linked enclosures to the Australorps. But because they won't have free access to the coop during the day, she had to build a new set of boxes just for Gertie and Alice.

She started with the extra set of boxes we pulled from the coop when we got it ready last summer, replaced the panel at the front with a taller one to keep the wood shavings from spilling out, and added a rail for roosting and a metal roof with a generous overhang all around to keep off the rain. We raised it to a good height on cement blocks and then turned it over to the hens.

Kim wasn't sure how they would take to their new box, so she planted a fake egg in one of the boxes to give them the right idea. [The egg came with the antique egg scale I got her for Christmas, shown here with a real egg.]

We sadly underestimated Gertie and Alice's competence in all things egg-related: not only did they each lay a beautiful egg the very first day, they kicked the impostor out onto the ground. How did they know? Can you tell the difference?

Okay, so maybe it wasn't that difficult to tell. But still, we were impressed. And so were Pee Wee and the Orpingtons, who kept tabs on all the goings on from the other side of the fence.

All three Australorps are making good use of the boxes in other ways, too. On Saturday it rained all day, a soaking, persistent rain that made everyone miserable. The Orpingtons could let themselves into the coop to stay dry, but not Hector and the Hens. We needn't have worried: they snuggled under the overhang and stayed comfortably dry. One hen even bunked down underneath the whole structure, in between the two stacks of cement blocks.

What smart chickies.

Waffles

Breakfasts are a problem for me. No...let me put that a different way: breakfasts are a minefield for me. Between needing to avoid gluten, dairy, eggs, nut butters and sugar, and just wanting something warm and comforting, I end up with depressingly few choices. Just think about it: what do you eat for breakfast that avoids all those things?

The obvious choice is oatmeal, maybe served with some fresh or stewed fruit. But I don't even want fruit in the morning, on a regular basis - I seem to do better if I can avoid any kind of sugar at the start of the day. For a few weeks I was stuck on toasted gluten-free bagels, topped with home-made veggie pate, but I was getting more bored - and even more congested - the longer that rut went on. My reliable, good-for-me standby is rice and steamed veggies, but after a few mornings even that lovely feeling of being virtuous starts to fade.

And then, through some kind of serendipity (or maybe it's just a food fad) I started seeing recipes for waffles everywhere. Gluten-free waffles. Waffles that can be made with egg-replacer instead of eggs, and soy milk instead of cow milk. Waffles that have virtually no sugar in them. Waffles that have vegetables in them. Waffles that are hot and comforting and easy to freeze and reheat.

So yesterday I bit the bullet and bought an inexpensive waffle iron. I thought about this hard for a week or so, because I have been carefully avoiding acquiring more kitchen appliances for the last couple of years . But I decided that the benefits outweighed the downside: a nutritious breakfast option, the convenience of being able to make a big batch and freeze them for instant re-toasting, and the fact that given the outrageous cost of gluten-free bagels, a waffle iron would pay for itself in about a month of breakfasts. Plus, I could make waffles with vegetables in them. (Have I said that already?)

This morning was the inauguration of the new waffle iron, and the recipe I chose came from Quinoa 365: The Everyday Superfood. It uses extra-nutritious quinoa flour as the base, with pumpkin puree and all the right spices: cinnamon, ginger and allspice. The waffles turned out tender and tasty, even without any maple syrup, and even though I made a big batch I'm not sure there will be any left by the end of the day to freeze.

I'm thinking that a different recipe, with more neutral or even savoury flavours, would give me a nice alternative to gluten-free bread. Because even though I've tried about every gluten-free bread on the market, I have yet to find one that has a decent texture and doesn't cost six or seven dollars a loaf. (Actually I did find one I liked enough to pay that much for, but then the company stopped making it.) I have tried baking my own, and found one or two recipes that are okay, but they are very starchy, and the texture is still not great.

So I'm trying not to think that waffles are going to save my life, but can I be forgiven if I'm just a little bit excited about having a cheap, nutritious, bread-like option for breakfast?

Broom

I've decided I love our broom. For some reason, when the kitchen floor is littered with crumbs and flotsam and all those pine needles the animals track in I have never thought - until recently - of reaching for the broom. I've always hauled out the vacuum cleaner instead.

I love our vacuum cleaner, too. It's a great vacuum, and at the risk of sounding ridiculous, I can tell you that during our first dark days here when we were wondering if we'd made a terrible mistake, the one beacon of goodness and rightness was our new vacuum, that sucked up stuff like nobody's business.

But our broom is light and quick and agile...and quiet. It skims smoothly over the floor, restoring order and tidiness without fanfare, power cords or fuss. It lets me feel good about reducing floor pollution, noise pollution and my carbon footprint, all at the same time. It almost makes me feel like dancing...with my broom.