Egg salad and fried egg sandwiches, brownies, several batches of chocolate chip cookies, and lots of pancakes: Since our chickens started laying on June 28, we have collected 37 eggs — and for the last 11 days straight we’ve gotten at least two each day.

It took a few weeks of fits and starts for the laying to become regular, and I don’t know when we might expect to start getting an egg a day from each of our four chickens (I think it took Bailey, our Rhode Island Red and first layer at least two weeks to become consistent). There was a stretch of five days in early July when our chickens laid no eggs that coincided with the first days of letting them range, so we kept them in the coop until we could determine that our pullets weren’t secreting eggs throughout the yard (They’ve only done this with one egg, left just outside the entrance to the coop).

But, despite not being up to full production, what we do get keeps us in eggs — excellent eggs.  What I initially took for tiny practice eggs turned out to be just eggs — our chickens lay in several sizes, from a tiny, just bigger than an olive variety, to the large eggs typical of a supermarket (though these arrive less often, and occasionally double yolked).  The eggs come in various shades of tan-brown.  Regardless of size, the quality is high, with firm, vibrant yellow-orange yolks so potent they color the pancakes we cook.  Definitely Grade AAA, a ranking that has little to do with size, though I always thought it did since at the market it seems to correspond with gargantuan eggs.

The biggest difference between our homegrown eggs and the store-bought kind is in shell strength: It takes a good, forceful smack to crack them enough to pry open.  This quality is essential since our birds continue to empty their nest boxes of all bedding so that they lay on bare wood.  The eggs end up dropping several inches and hit hard — but they all end up whole.  We’ve only lost one egg this past month, a large one I suspect Kate (the Dominique) of pecking open and eating.

The upkeep for our flock has become a bit more sustainable as the ranging allows much of their diet to come from the yard.  I’ve noticed a 25 percent reduction in their feed consumption … so in just four months the chickens have been able to meet and surpass my own eating-from-the-yard objective.  Perhaps we should consider bugs and grass as a bridge to 15 percent of our annual calories.  Perhaps.  Another perk to the free-ranging pecking is that the chickens take their waste with them and distribute it as fertilizer throughout the yard (and less beneficially on the porch), rather than concentrating it all in their coop, which means fewer cleanings.  And we get these funny personalities clucking around.

Lots of positives, but most of all good eggs, made fresh daily 50 feet out the back door.

Insects have ceased to be a serious threat, including the grasshoppers that proved such trouble in early spring.  A lot of hands contributed to this success.  For my part, I noticed where new grasshoppers tended to emerge and returned there daily to crush the nymphs.  The praying mantises I released are rapidly maturing based on the few I’ve encountered, and I can only assume they’re doing their share of the pest control since other insects are all they eat.  And we’ve begun letting our four chickens range and eat what bugs they will, turning problems into eggs.  I also distributed 50 feet of floating row cover around sensitive areas of the yard, which seems to have given the seedlings in those plots time to mature unimpeded and uneaten.  However, the heat the covers trap tends to wilt the plants during these hot days of July, so I’ve begun phasing them out.  But they did their part and will be key to next season’s success in the cooler months of early spring.

Nature has finally begun to work with us, or the other way around.  Several pairs of birds are nesting in our yard, including a set of Orioles, and I have watched on several occasions as a bird has swooped in and plucked a caterpillar off a broad squash leaf.  And I haven’t seen the gnawing, strawberry devouring rabbits in weeks.  They used to make daily forays into our yard, but no more — prey to something, I assume.

I have also been fortunate in keeping the powdery mildew that plagued seasons past at bay by treating outbreaks immediately with a spray of one part milk, 10 parts water.

That just leaves the squirrels.

Right outside our property line a colony of California Ground Squirrels took up residence, and the eight or so animals seemed to feed only on our edibles, chewing the growing tips off of every vine, eating new sprouts into the ground, pulling down wheat and rye stalks, biting into immature squash, melons, and almonds, and generally ravaging plots in our lower, upper, and front yards — including those planted right up against the house.  The row covers seemed to provide a bit of a temporary obstacle, but the fencing that kept the rabbits out sure didn’t.  Marigolds and other defensive plantings proved ineffectual.  I put out packs of pelleted fox urine in an attempt to make them fear fear itself, and this worked, except on windy days, of which we have many.  The scent deterrent was most effective on days when it could just hang in the air.  But the squirrels only needed one breezy afternoon to devour weeks of progress.

While planting a last effort at a late-start warm season crop in June, I felt I had little choice but to get rid of the squirrels.  Trap and release is no good.  In California it is only legal to trap them, not release them, because they carry diseases and are classified as agricultural pests.  Shooting them with a .22 is only recommended in rural areas, and would likely be ineffective and time consuming.  They won’t scare easy with a scarecrow or other predator mimic.  Natural predators and domestic pets can’t control their populations, typically.

I decided to poison them, which infringes a bit on the permacultural ideals I’d hoped to establish here.  And it’s hard to say how it’s much different than the poisoning practices of industrial agriculture.  I find arguments of scale and magnitude self serving and unconvincing.  It’s clearly an industrial move.  But, at the same time, I found the prospect of harvesting no warm season edibles for a second year unacceptable.  Resources are wasted on an organic, super-local effort that yields nothing.

Poisoning is not a friendly, humane enterprise.  I chose an anticoagulant bait, which is housed in a feed station only squirrels and similar animals can access, rather than a pelleted poison broadcast on the ground.  This minimizes the collateral damage like a smart bomb does.  It’s also a low-dose poison that must be eaten regularly over several days to kill — again to reduce the likelihood of a non-target animal dying.

But, in the end, something does die.  Horribly.

An anticoagulant prevents blood from clotting, so a bruise or a bump turns into an internal (or external) hemorrhage that never stops.  I have no fantasies of squirrels curling up in warm dens and drifting off to a peaceful sleep from which they will not awake, none the wiser, because I have found them immobile, panting, and scared, the ants already upon them.  And I should find them and see it, and own the decision, so that next season it doesn’t come to such a false dichotomy: food or squirrels.

I haven’t seen a squirrel in weeks.  The garden flourishes.  Next year we’ll do better.

Despite industrial agriculture’s co-opting and subsequent diminishing of the descriptor “free range”, it is rewarding to be able to describe our chickens as such and mean it.  They aren’t limited to a euphemistic “access to the outdoors” — typically a meager chicken run meeting the minimum USDA standard and meant to dupe consumers.  Our pullets can roam where they choose in our yard, eat what they like, and defend themselves (or not) as needed from the wild animals that share their space.

They can be chickens, every day.

So far, they use their new-found liberty to scratch and peck from morning to evening in an unrelenting march about the yard.  They are particularly fond of the compost piles, perhaps having longed for these stacks of edible refuse that sat just out of reach for as long as they can remember.  They spend half their time there, as I’d hoped, fertilizing and turning the piles in exchange for the bugs and scraps they get to eat.

Bailey (Rhode Island Red), Seven (Barred Rock), and Justin (Buff Orpington) cruise together, with Kate (Dominique) almost always on her own.  It’s not clear by whose design this is, but I find it hard to believe either party would exclude the other as a result of Kate being added to the flock a week after the others.  She is also one week younger.  But the disconnect is hard to disregard.  At least they get along like acquaintances, if not sisters.

In exploring the yard, they’ll peck anything once: grass, sandal, flower, cement.  They don’t seem opposed to eating the spiny, mature growth on our squash plants, unfortunately, so they’ll have to be kept away from most of the vegetables, even if they do ultimately turn havoc in the garden into eggs.  Their powerful scratching — the yard at the end of the first day of ranging looked like it had been hit by a hundred tiny tornadoes — also poses a problem for delicate or shallow-rooted plants, as many edibles are.

However, we could hardly confine them any longer.  Though our coop is sized with the requisite four square feet of floor space and 10 inches of roost per bird, we would have built it bigger if our intent was to always keep them in.  As it was clear when they needed to move from the brooder to the coop at six weeks, it was clear they needed to range at 20.  They’re big, and they look bigger, more real for some reason as they trot, scratch, and peck across our view out the back door, and add their clucks to our morning breakfast — providing a novel, yet natural backdrop to our every day.

Since sowing our first sets of Contender bush beans on March 12, I have reconstituted our warm-season plantings four times, resulting in a landscape completely different than that of early March — and certainly one far removed from what I conceived in winter, when all there is that needs doing is cooking up best laid plans.

Looking back, I jumped the gun planting so early this season (an overreaction to planting so late last year). I stuck my first seeds in the ground when the temperatures were too low for the young sprouts to thrive.  This lack of vigor left them vulnerable to the woodlice that were still thriving in the spring rains, as well as to the numerous young grasshoppers whose voracious nibbling the first-round edibles were not able to withstand.  Several attempts to reign in the grasshoppers failed, and the second round of plants followed the first into a hundred tiny bellies.  By April the weather had warmed sufficiently to coax the rabbits and squirrels out of their winter burrows, and the third wave of plantings, having had no time to mature, got eaten up after just a few days of foraging.

Thus, version 4.0.

The latest iteration differs from those that came before, having acquired several key adaptations in the grueling march of natural selection that has dominated this growing season.  Whereas my first and second attempts involved direct sowing of seeds in the ground, much of our current garden is potted so it could be grown close to the house, tucked into the zone we most frequent and can closely guard.  While little of the initial plantings were located in our front yard, much of the current garden resides there — far from the canyon and near where the frequent traffic of people and pets and cars deters the rabbits and squirrels.  And those plots that have been replanted in the upper backyard (we have yielded the lower yard, for now, to the varmints) are made inaccessible with floating row covers, which, while unattractive, have succeeded in keeping out the squirrels and insects where the fencing we’d used in earlier plantings failed.

At this point, it’s not about aesthetics.

I have also introduced a few new varieties of squash, including several heirlooms that are native to the west, in the hope that an uncommon, traditional type might prove resilient and endure to harvest — perhaps possessing an adaptation that can compensate for the slow evolution of a novice grower.  These include Sibley and Golden Hubbard squash, as well as Calabasa de las Aquas, Mayo Kama, and Navajo Gray Hubbard.  These last I acquired through Native Seed Search, a site that specializes in “aridlands-adapted heirloom crops”.

So far, so good — though I hesitate to tempt fate with such a rosy assessment.  Many of the vegetables I have recently planted need 100 days or more to mature, which puts a lot of time between now and picking and eating.  But in many other climates we’d be working against a hard deadline of declining temperatures, and at least in San Diego we hardly ever do that kind of deadline.

There’s still time.

With just two weeks to go before, by most measures, the egg laying should commence, our four chickens have become decidedly anti-nesting in their dispositions.  At 18 weeks they are full grown, combs and all.  They just don’t seem to possess a nesting bone between them.

I have been waiting expectantly for some sign that their nesting instincts have kicked in — assuming that this set of behaviors will precede the first eggs dropping.  But these pullets appear to be going their own way, perhaps staging a quite impractical rebellion.  Maybe I’m associating these chickens too closely with my wife when she was near-term and nursery focused, but doesn’t the description of a pregnant woman having a “nesting instinct” originate with chickens?

Not with our chickens, at least.  If my wife had followed their example, our month-old daughter might still be sleeping on the floor of an empty room.

Each week — but particularly these past few as the time to eggs has grown close — I end my coop cleaning by carefully repacking each nest box with straw, ensuring a soft landing for anything laid.  And each week our chickens pick and scratch every shred of it out of the boxes and onto the coop floor.  Within minutes.  Justin, the yellow Buff Orpington, is always the first to redistribute the nests I’ve carefully constructed.

It would be one thing if they were relocating the nests to another part of the enclosure, knowing better than I where they’d prefer to lay.  But repurposing the provided nesting materials doesn’t seem to be their aim.

I built their nest boxes according to the characteristics and specifications about which I read: at least 14 inches square with one open side, located in a dim, high, and secure location.  While the books recommend one box for every four or five hens, these girls have their choice of three (though they’re likely to choose the one they all snuggled in when they were first transferred to the coop).

Maybe our chickens are just immature.  By my count they have two weeks to 20 — two weeks to sync their bodies and minds before we have eggs who knows where and in what condition.

The 67 square feet of red winter wheat I planted last November finished a honey-yellow and the tall stalks for months undulated in the every-day, afternoon wind — but I could hardly characterize the little plot as “waves of grain”.  The description seems better suited for a vast expanse beyond our yard’s capacity.  The not-far mountains that line our horizon do take on a purplish tint in the evenings that one might describe as majestic, though.

Seven months ago when I sowed two pounds of seed, my primary purpose was to begin the process of rebuilding the soil on the north-eastern side of our property.  The area had been compacted by regular foot traffic and polluted by frequent back-washings from our pool by the previous owners, which likely left traces of diatomaceous earth and chlorine in what was awful, rocky clay earth to begin with.  Only determined weeds grew in the space.  A nearby plum hasn’t produced fruit in two seasons.  So I tilled in a few inches of compost and broadcast the seed.

Within a week, a fine mat of inch-high blades covered the area like new sod.

The wheat grew rapidly to waist high, then doubled in height as the heads emerged, rose, and tipped toward the ground — weighed down with fat berries.  I waited a few weeks past when the stalks turned straw colored before harvesting — until the berries had a bit of crunch when chewed.  The squirrels and rabbits weren’t nearly so patient.

To harvest, I thought about a scythe, but in the end all it took was a pair of clippers and 30 minutes to bring in our small lot.  Now it will sit in a breezy, sunny location beside our back door to dry out for three weeks.  Then we’ll really see what we reaped.

The running joke has been that we’ll process just enough flour to make a pancake or two.  I have no experience on which to base an estimate for how many pound(s) our small batch will be comprised of.  I ran some numbers based on 42 bales of wheat on a typical acre, and if our crop density was about average, we likely ended up with about 6.5 percent of a bale, which could potentially yield 3.9 pounds of wheat flour and make as many as five loaves of bread.  This feels like a generous prediction, though our stack of wheat does weigh about 20 pounds, stalks and all.

What can I say, except to express the mantra of this effort: We’ll see.  Soon our similarly small plot of rye will be set for harvest as the heads have begun to droop.  We’ll see about that, too.

I’d settle for a cup of flour.  A pancake.  A single slice of bread.

Today we celebrate having grown, harvested, and eaten 1.009 percent of our annual calories from our suburban, less-than-a-fifth-of-an-acre yard.

To get to one percent (15,000 calories), we grew 33 varieties of 21 different foods.  Among those edibles, we ate 72 Husky cherry tomatoes and 14 heads of Little Gem Romain lettuce; 85 Snow Pea pods and 39 cups of raw Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard (netting just 272 calories — it’s worth more cooked, we’ve found); and four kinds of tomato, three kinds of carrot, and three kinds of potato.  We tried 12 varieties of vegetable we’d never tasted before.

We made jam.

Nearly a third of our overall calories, about 4,000, accumulated in the first half of June, a month in which we consumed bags of potatoes — with more still at the ready.  This month we’ve also eaten carrots (Purple Haze and Pink Dragon), green beans (Contender and Kentucky Wonder), Early Crookneck squash, a few strawberries and Anne berries, Mulberries, and Roma tomatoes.

And it all came without the baggage that trails industrial agriculture, the questions of where from and how dirty and at what cost.  Our property’s better for our sowing and growing, and with any luck our dent in the world’s ecology got a bit shallower.

Perhaps shallower still in these remaining weeks.

Last week I dug up ready potatoes that had been thriving in a small plot below our bougainvillea.  In the past two weeks the tops had turned yellow like straw and wilted to the ground.  I gave them one last watering, as recommended in various readings I’d read, and a few days later carefully scratched back the surface of the earth to reveal good-sized Purple Viking and Yukon Gold potatoes.  The sets of early March had in 80 days become about 15 pounds of good eats.

And eat them we have.  We pan-fried them in the mornings with butter, onions, and pepper.  We cooked and blended them with leeks for a fine soup.  We dribbled them with olive oil, dashed them with fresh rosemary (from the yard), and baked them.  We boiled them and diced them for crumbled-blue-cheese-prosciutto-dill potato salad, and tossed them in with a roast to soak and simmer all day.

We ate them baked plain because the fresh spuds are so flavorful they need nothing added.

At least as many potatoes still sit in the yard, ready for harvest.

This haul improves greatly on the six small potatoes we pulled last season (see “Small Potatoes” posted on August 20, 2009).  Poor soil and inadequate sunlight were the culprits then — problems that I remedied this spring by working plenty of mulch and compost into a fairly sunny plot before planting.  The 80 or so days they took to mature is about 20 short of expected, but done is done.  A new round of Yukon starters are in the ground for early fall eating, as well as a few rows of a russet-type potato we’ve never tried before called a Carola.

If this good return keeps up, we’ll have potatoes till Christmas.

The potato-surplus coincides fortuitously with our need to keep my wife off dairy till we can calm our mildly colicky baby girl.  We have plenty of potatoes to go with the meat in the mostly meat and potatoes diet that we’ll be sticking to for a few weeks.

It’s nice to find we have just what the doctor ordered right out the back door.

At least one of the praying mantis eggs I placed in our yard three weeks ago as a pest control has hatched — just in the nick of time, too.  In the past few days I have crushed dozens of little green grasshopper nymphs.

According to an article my brother passed along, this season the western states will face their worst grasshopper outbreak in decades.  The infestation is predicted to reach its dire height in July, despite the plague already visited on our emerging warm-season crop.

Luckily — if not strategically — our mantis nymphs should be fledgling everything killers by midsummer.

Over the weekend, I killed our third adult grasshopper of the season, the first since my 41-week-pregnant wife charged from the house to chase one down shortly before our daughter was born in May.  This latest sat in our orange tree, perched just above an as yet unscathed set of plantings: a Burgess Buttercup squash, a Cherokee Purple tomato, a pair Scarlet Emperor pole beans.  Hopefully its demise proves a good omen.  I crushed it with enough vigor to startle friends visiting the baby, and cursed it perhaps a little too viciously.

It was gratifying.

If all goes well, the grasshoppers of July will find themselves outmatched by the mantises, our newly-ranging chickens, and my sporadic victories.

Last spring I took a chainsaw to it, slicing clean through one of the trunks.  I intended to cut the whole thing down, but stopped short when the pile of trimmings got high and I realized I had no plan for what to do with the space once cleared.  I decided wanting to cut a tree down wasn’t a good enough reason to do so.

And it’s a good thing, too, because it turns out it’s a Mulberry Tree, likely a Riviera or Kaester (M. nigra) variety.

In the past I’d never thought much about the heavy load of long, deep purple-black fruits that weighed the wide canopy down between April and June.  I assumed — for no good reason — that the berries were nothing we’d want to eat and left them to the birds.  Perhaps I didn’t think of homes as coming with something so huge and edible.  My mom, who grew up eating mulberries from the trees in her neighborhood, suggested the type of tree it might be, and with a little research I found her to be right.

That was last year.  This year, we made jam.

Our mulberries are the first crop we’ve had that realistically calls for preserving some portion of the abundant harvest.  The 20-foot-tall and 30-foot-wide tree grows multiple clusters of fruit on every branch, so harvesting takes time and a ladder.  It also takes a gentle touch, since the delicate berries would just as soon squish as be plucked whole.  A better method might be to lay out a clean tarp or expendable sheet and then shake the ripe fruit from the tree, but our space doesn’t allow for this.  I filled a massive bowl in an hour of picking and didn’t even make a dent in the overall yield.

It took two tries to turn it into to jam.

The first batch looked like tar, spread like tar, and chewed like tar.  I ended up stirring the fruit-sugar mix for 45 minutes seeking the illusive “jelly-like” consistency the recipe said would indicate a finished product.  Turns out boiling hot jam doesn’t ever really look like jam in a jar.  Kind of like melted anything looks different than if it wasn’t melted.  “Jelly-like” comes 24 hours later — after the mix has cooled.  I also tried to use the fruit’s natural pectin this time around, rather than an additive, by including 15 – 20 percent unripened berries.

The second effort, after some additional reading, was at a boil for fewer than five minutes, just long enough to dissolve the sugar-pectin mix.  Overall, making jam is relatively easy … when done right.

1. Clean the canning jars with warm soapy water, submerge the jars and lids in boiling water, then turn down the heat and let them stand in the hot water.
2. Mix four cups of de-stemmed (this takes a while) and crushed fruit with 1/4-cup of lemon juice and one teaspoon of calcium water in a large pot.  Bring to a boil.
3. Thoroughly mix two cups of sugar and two teaspoons of pectin and stir it into the boiling fruit mix.  Stir for two minutes then let it return to a boil.  Remove the not-jelly-like liquid from heat.
4. Pour the jam into the hot canning jars up to 1/4 inch from the top, clean rims and threads meticulously, and fasten the lids.
5. Return the filled jars to the boiling water and submerge for 10 minutes.  Turn off the heat and let them stand in warm water for five minutes.  Let them sit for 24 hours out of the water before eating or saving.

We now have two jars of mulberry jam ready for eating — or storing.  Unopened, they should be good for up to a year.  Opened, they should last about three weeks refrigerated.  I tried some on toast today, and it looks, spreads, and tastes like jam.  The mulberry is a surprisingly sweet fruit, and the jam is no different.

We shared some of this second batch with mom, and will make more when the last round of berries come ripe later this month.