Chicks, and other distractions

I got a call Thursday telling me that my three Buff Orpington pullets had arrived, so I took my life in my hands, walked into a little small-town hardware store, and picked them up.  Look closely at the upper left corner of the box and you will see Gabe staring down at my flock.  He checks on them constantly.  And no, I don't trust him.

I'm afraid if he were left alone with the chicks, he'd just make a snack of them and be done.  (Obviously I hadn't combed my hair yet in this picture, taken Friday morning.)

My mother kept chickens until I was 12 years old; then we moved to Kansas City.  On alternating years, I believe, early in the spring, she'd order 100 straight-run chicks from a nearby hatchery.  I'd ride along with Mother to pick them up.  They'd be in a box with holes in it so they could breath, and their cheep-cheeping got louder all the way home; I'd stick my finger into a hole in the box and feel their soft, fluffy heads, and maybe feel a curious little peck.  We lived in old two-story houses in Iowa:  Mother get out the brooder and cleaned it up before we went to get the chicks; she always started chicks in the brooder, which she'd put upstairs in my room, so the smell didn't invade the whole house (didn't bother me); there was a metal sheet on the bottom of the brooder you could line with newspapers, like any ordinary bird cage you've seen . The brooder was heated with light bulbs:  Chicks ideally need a mother with warm feathers or a heated brooder for the first couple weeks.  You started out with the brooder at 95 degrees, and lowered the heat five degrees each week.  The one pictured below is similar to the one my mom used.  It was good for 100 chicks, and when it got too crowded, it was time to move them outside to the brooder house, where they would still have a heat lamp they could run under if the weather got too cool at night.  Most old farm houses had a hen house for egg-layers and a smaller "brooder house" for chicks.  I recall one year the rats found a way to get in with Grandma's young poults and killed several of them. Uncle Leo, or maybe Uncle Carl, helped her rat-proof the brooder house.

I have no idea what the temperature is for my three babies, but if they aren't making unhappy cheeping sounds, that usually means they're content.  The picture at the top of this entry shows what my chicks are living in:  a box!  Gabe checks them out often.  When there were chicks upstairs, I would lay on my stomach on the floor for an hour at a time, and talk to the babies.  I'd often reach in and grab one or two play with and cuddle under my neck to keep them warm... obviously, I didn't worry much about getting pooped on, back then.    Mother butchered the roosters when they got to the right size, and the pullets would join the egg-laying population when they were grown.  I played with the laying hens, too, although they didn't always appreciate my attentions.

The chicks are on my lap in this picture.  They are on a towel because they poop.  Gabe is right there, awaiting his chance to get a taste of chicken if one of these gets closer to him.  I want to handle them a lot because I'd like them to be tame.  This morning, Easter Sunday, I spread a towel over my chest and huddled the girls together right under my chin, petting them and baby-talking to them.  Gabe actually laid down beside me and relaxed, after giving them a good, lengthy  sniff.  

Before I paid for the babies, I was relieved to spot garden seeds of all kinds and asked an employee if they had Topcrop green bean seeds: they did!  That made it a perfect ending for our chicken run.  Topcrop is an older strain, developed by the USDA in 1950, so many seed catalogues don't carry them.  I know there have to be newly developed strains that are superior, but I'm being true to my mom and my Grandma Stevens.  Topcrop became their favorite kind of green beans when it was first introduced, I imagine, and they never tried any other.  A man standing nearby overheard me asking about it and inquired if that was a good green bean to plant.  "Oh yes," I told him enthusiastically, "My mother and grandmother used them, and that's all I ever plant."  

The store gave you a choice of half a cup of seeds for $2 or a full cup for $4.  I got half a cup, and the man said, "That sounds like an awful lot of seeds."  I assured him they'd still be good next year and the next, if he had any left.  Then he inquired how far apart to plant them, and I realized I was talking to a first-time, Coronavirus-induced gardener.  I told him I was pretty sure you plant them two inches apart, then thin to 4 inches.  "Do you have Internet?" I asked.  He answered affirmatively, so I told him he could find answers to all his gardening questions using Google.  I wish I had remembered to tell him to make sure he got the planting times for our area.  I didn't even think to tell him you wait until the danger of frost is past to plant green beans.  Oh well.

So there you have it:  I have chicks and green bean seeds.  Unfortunately, we have a hard freeze coming tonight into tomorrow morning, so that will freeze the peach and pear blossoms on my trees, and there won't be any fruit.  I wonder if this will ruin the biggest part of our local commercial peach orchard's crop.

This is sort of a rambling entry I've been trying to finish for three days.  Every time I was working on the entry, there would be an interruption  I'd come back hours later and struggle to pick up the thread of the story I was trying to tell.  That is not the best way to write anything, but that's what you're stuck with today.  

Easter blessings to all my friends out there.  Stay safe, won't you?