NEST

What Are You, Chicken?

You heard it here, if not first, then perhaps with the most enthusiasm: A Backyard Chicken Craze is Sweeping the Nation! Inspired by the Slow Food movement, the spreading (and, unfortunately, true) rumors about the conditions of factory chicken farms, and—I'm sorry to say—nostalgia, city dwellers are once again starting to keep chickens in their back yards. Also, I would not be surprised if the return of burlesque theater is causing a spike in the demand for feathers.

Friends of mine will tell you that I've been clucking about this for a few years, but I am happy to be beaten to the punch, as I am far too lazy to be a trailblazer in this regard. In fact, I am thrilled to have so many examples to follow.

For several years I heard tell of this only through assorted green magazines and the odd local newspaper article ("Neighbor Plays Fowl"). Imagine my delight when my brother mentions that his friends are starting a Chicago Chicken Co-op (not to be confused with Coop). But were they serious? These kids are full of fun. But evidently a few of them have actually been keeping chickens for several years. My brother belongs to the social milieu who seem to like stuff just before it becomes into a major trend, so I knew it was a good predictor of things to come. And when I saw the phenomenon written up in the New York Times this summer, I knew it was a done deal. Hardly even news anymore, really.

My friends Julia and Brian, two of my great role models for sustainable living, recently built a chicken coop in their back yard in Minneapolis. He posted the pictures on Facebook. Brian was very encouraging, saying that the chickens are really very easy to care for on a daily basis. And you only have to clean out the coop twice a year! This I found shocking, but Brian is very clean and conscientious, so I believe him. He said the hardest part was building the coop; he himself went the Fancy route (as the pictures attest) but recommends taking an easier route, like repurposing a dog house or, better yet, finding someone else's castoff coop.

Foodies and hipsters aside, we should also acknowledge that many immigrants have been quietly keeping chickens in their yards all along without any fuss. Well maybe a little fuss: in 2007, Chicago Alderman Lona Lane (D, 18th ward), tried to pass an ordinance banning chickens from her ward, citing health and sanitary concerns. One source in this article from the Chi-Town Daily News attributed some of the resistance to anti-immigrant feeling. The ordinance did not pass. If anti-immigrant feeling was not enough, one wonders if a rising tide of anti-bourgeois-foodie-hippie feeling might eventually become a factor? Actually, I think we will be fine until the avian bird flu strikes.

If you are ever looking for an enjoyable way to pass an hour, visit Backyardchickens.com. There you can find all manner of information on coop design, chicken care and feeding, as well as some pret-ty cute photos. But the best is the BackYardChickens Forum, where you can find out what makes a chicken-lover's heart go pitter-pat. Turns out they are quite a passionate bunch.

At the moment I am still too nervous (I hope you appreciate my restraint with the puns), or maybe just too lazy, to get my own chickens. My yard is not that big and I'm not sure how much precious space I'm ready to devote to a chicken run (although Brian tells me they don't need much). Also, what about my neighbors? On the one side they definitely wouldn't care (in fact, I'm sure it would win me favor with the little kids). When I mentioned it to my other neighbor in passing, he shrugged mildly and said something about rats. I think he already has his reservations about my compost piles (which also generally merits a roundabout mention of the rats). Roberto is a great neighbor and I would prefer not to alienate him.

Do they stink? Sometimes a little, says Brian, on a hot day.

But boy, that guano makes some great fertilizer.

 

The Good Olde Days!

When you're in the business of tallying the dangers of our industrial way of life (pesticides, toxic cleaners, overuse of antibiotics, auto pollution, habitat destruction, etc.) it is easy to grow nostalgic about the pre-industrial era. This nostalgia sometimes inspires us to make our own pickles, read Beatrix Potter, buy butter churns from estate sales, and name our daughters Alice, Emma, or Evangeline.

At garage sales (or in alleys) I can never resist the charm of yet another old-fashioned wicker basket (great for shopping!) or an impractically heavy rustic wooden stepladder. I have fallen in love with vinegar, the all-purpose solution good for cleaning wood floors, rubbing the cat puke out of a rug, and clearing a slow drain. Every once in awhile, in a fit of virtue, I even look up a recipe for vinegar, thinking to save myself the $2 a month and save the world from an extra plastic jug, although I have yet to make it. (I'll be sure to let you know how it goes.)

It should be no wonder, then, that my heart did a little jump when I came across Roberts' Guide for Butlers & Other Household Staff. This handy little tome by a man named Robert Roberts was first published in 1827. God only knows how long it stayed in print before the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie made butlers—and this book—obsolete. Regardless, it was reissued in 1993 by Applewood Books, and given at some point by my father to my mother, who is similarly afflicted with nostalgia, although it's safe to say that she yearns for civility and moral purity more than for vinegar.

Robert Roberts's book is small but dense. The table of contents features a range of entries:

• The benefit of rising early to servants
• On dress suitable for their work
• Regulations for the pantry
• Regulations for the dinner table
• Cleaning polished steel grates
• To revive the colour of cloth
• To turn good wine into vinegar in three hours (!)
• To restore that same wine to its first taste
• To preserve milk for sea that will keep for six months.

What a bonanza! I turned right to the recipes, which make up the greatest portion of the book. I found the recipe for turning wine into vinegar:

Put into any quantity of wine you choose, say one gallon for the experiment, one red beet, and in three hours, it will be sour and true vinegar. By J.R.W.

and vice versa:

Take out the beet, and in its stead put a clean cabbage root, and it will return to its primary taste in the same space of time.

Fascinating. I love beets, but who knew they could be so useful? And what a crazy trick with the cabbage root. I could easily follow this recipe although I don't generally keep wine around the house since I am allergic to it. And it's true that red wine vinegar might not be the best choice for cleaning cat puke from a white rug.

I pressed on, certain there must be a lot to learn from these great men who kept their households running cleanly and efficiently without relying on detergents with phosphates or other nasty cleaners that should really be kept under lock and key.

This one was nice:

62.—TO TAKE OFF SPOTS OF ANY SORT, FROM ANY SORT OF CLOTH
Take half a pound of crude honey, the yolk of a new laid egg, and then the bulk of a nut of aromatic salt, then mix well together, then put some on the spots; having left it there awhile, then wash it off with clean water, and the spot will immediately disappear. . . .

Perfect! I'd have to make do with a somewhat older egg (at least until I get my own chickens) and perhaps improvise on the aromatic salt (like for the bathtub?), but I could see that I was getting somewhere. I admit I was having a hard time recognizing some of the ingredients, such as isinglass, bullock's gall, and Florentine orris.

I just loved the recipe for preserving milk for sea, which operates on the same principles as canning tomatoes: sterilize your bottles, pour the fresh product directly into the bottle (in this case, milk straight from the teat), and cork the bottles, creating a vacuum seal with a boiling water bath. Then pack in straw or sawdust, wait six months, open, and enjoy. Knowing how it's nearly impossible to get fresh, unpasteurized milk in the city, I figured I could tote a pallet of Mason jars with me the next time I go to Wisconsin and come back with enough milk to last me to Christmas! Perhaps give it away as presents?

And I really got a kick out of the cure for drunkenness that involved putting three live eels into the drinker's favorite bottle and letting them die there, only to be discovered by the unassuming drunkard, who would naturally be so disgusted and reviled that he would never touch the stuff again. (Who needs AA?)

It all went south, however, when I looked up Another Beautiful Polish for Black Grates:

Take the whites of six eggs, beat them up to a froth, then add half a pound of black lead, mix well together, then add spirits of turpentine until it is to the consistency of boot blacking; apply it with a brush as you would black a boot. Polish with a hard brush, and it will become a brilliant polish.

It turns out that lead was a popular ingredient, useful for any number of grate applications as well as hair dye. Yes, you heard that right. I began to question Roberts' dedication to the principles of sustainability; further searching revealed a prevalence of other familiar dangerous chemicals: mercury, ammonia, turpentine, and vitriol (sulfuric acid).

So while industrialization has made us dumber in some ways, it's only fair to acknowledge that we have also gotten at least a little smarter. After all, we now recognize the importance of bathing, the power of germs, the role of rats in transmitting the bubonic plague, and that it really was not a good idea for the Elizabethan ladies to paint their faces with white lead. And although it took us awhile, we have even figured out to stop painting our houses with the stuff.

Fine. I will humbly accept this caution against blind nostalgia, but I ain't giving up my butter churn.

Why It Made Sense to Put a New Roof on the Garage

Having spent three years fixing up the inside of my house (in addition to the roof), this summer was to be the Summer of the Yard and, by extension, the Garage, and I guessed I might as well tackle the Fence while I was at it.

High on the agenda were a raised vegetable bed and expanded flower beds. But I was also moved to paint the garage by my friend Tony, who pointed out that all of this flaking paint was a sign of rotting wood. You better paint this, he said, or your garage is going to fall apart.

Then I received the gift of a lovely book called Private Places: Photographs of Chicago Gardens by photographer Brad Temkin. It includes photos of several garages with more personality than you'd expect (and by personality I mean color) and I realized that a freshly-colored garage can be quite a striking backdrop for a flower garden.

So I called in my brother Pete the Painter and said, we better do this now before I plant so you don't scrape paint all over my new flower beds. I was a little worried about the side of the garage where my compost pile is, as I knew that Chicago backyard soil tends to have a fairly high lead content; I was not eager to scrape many decades of paint into the compost that feeds my vegetable garden (¡Foreshadowing!). But he promised to use drop cloths, and so I sent him off to buy a couple gallons of Lewisville Green.

At the same time I began to cast a critical eye on the garage roof, which was flying off one stiff wind at a time. Ever budget-minded, I thought, this can surely wait. Yes, it looks like crap, but only when I look down from the second floor. And I'm sure my garage tenants can handle a little drip now and then. Wouldn't I rather put that money toward a furnace? Some landscaping help? A vacation?

However, Pete soon came to me and said, the wood is rotting because there is a hole in the roof. If you don't fix it, you will just have to paint this garage again next year.

A light went on: it turns out that the garage roof exists not only to keep the rain off the cars (of negligible value to one who believes that cars are overrated), but it helps to keep the entire building intact. A building is a system, and this one was failing. And my friends, there is nothing sustainable about painting more often than you have to or, God forbid, tearing down what was almost a perfectly good garage.

To me this served as a reminder of one of the blessedly simple principles of sustainability: if you take care of stuff, it will last longer, and you will save the energy, materials, and waste of replacing it. It may sound too simple to even mention, but in fact it is so simple that we often forget it. And if you're new to property management, you might not even think of it to begin with.

I am blessed enough to have not one but two handy brothers and both were available for hire. So Jim and Pete strapped on their tool belts and made me a new roof.

BEFORE (Summer 2008)

OFF WITH THE OLD (In case you are wondering: I did not manage to recycle the old roofing or do anything wonderful with it. I filled my trash cans with it for a few weeks and finally called a hauler to take it away to a landfill.)

INSIDE
If only I'd thought to call a barn dance.

STRETCH, HYDRATE

TARPAPER SHEATHING, THEN SHINGLES

HAMMER HAMMER HAMMER

FINITO

NEST: Season Two

Ah, readers. Despite the great reception to NEST's first season, the network has obviously taken its sweet time renewing my contract. Ahem. But we have finally come to terms and I am back, armed with enough stories, interviews, vexing problems, and cultural insights to carry us easily through Season Two. Also, I have a friend who knows Nora Ephron's cousin and I am pretty sure that if I am diligent and accumulate enough readers there is a good chance that she will get Winona Ryder to play me, or perhaps Maggie Gyllenhaal.

So I'd better get cracking.

What with the stimulus package and all of its enticements toward Green Improvements, our unbelievably sympathetic first lady with her talk of kitchen gardens, and the backyard chicken craze that is sweeping the nation, there can be no doubt that times are changin'. The consciousness is rising and the desire to live more sustainably is palpable and earnest. However, even the most well-meaning among us can be forgiven for not knowing exactly how to respond. New furnace? Solar panels? Toxic waste removal? Chickens?

I ask myself these questions every day. As I dig for answers, much as one digs for soil samples to send to the lab, I will do my best to come up with accurate data, place it in a meaningful context, and return the results to you in a timely and engaging fashion.

Coming Attractions:
• Why it's worth it to fix the garage roof
• Using old parts in a new fence
• Garden beds
• Old-fashioned ways of doing things
• Soil testing
• backyardchickens.com

I thank you for your loyal and enthusiastic readership and look forward to this next leg in our journey.