Update on the chicken children

The baby chickens have been with us for six days now. They’re thriving. They live in the warmest spot in the house — inside the south-facing bay window in Ken’s room.

Keeping them in cardboard boxes just doesn’t work very well. It’s hard to keep things clean, and the babies can’t see out. So I splurged on a bird cage at Pet Smart. It was on sale, but still the cost of it is something that will have to be justified over many years. All future generations of baby chickens will be able to use it. I’ll just wash it and put it in the attic between generations.

The new chickens are Golden Comets, like Ruth. Ruth is a better layer than the two Barred Rock hens, and laying is what it’s all about.

Baby chickens

Yesterday was baby chicken day, a day we’d been waiting for since the note appeared on the bulletin board at the roller mill giving the date — April 4 — when this year’s spring chickens would arrive from the hatchery.

We had talked a great deal about how to encourage one of the hens to adopt the two chicks. But no one was interested. Patience and Chastity were curious but aloof, and Ruth even got hostile at one point and pecked at one of the chicks. Nobody got hurt, but nobody got adopted. We’ve fallen back on Plan B — raising the chicks indoors in a box with a heat lamp until they’re big enough to take care of themselves.


Chastity is not sure she approves.


The big girls show the little girls how to drink.


Yum. Well water.


At the roller mill. Photos by Ken Ilgunas

Why I'll never have a B&B license

Not that I’d ever want Acorn Abbey to be a bed and breakfast, but even if I did, the health department would never give me a license. Cats are not allowed in B&B kitchens.

Lily is almost as nosy as Ruth, one of the chickens. I easily convinced her that she doesn’t like spinach, but she still wanted to watch and get in the way.


Photos by Ken Ilgunas

The young may apple in April

Yesterday, while looking for a place down by the woodland stream to plant pawpaw trees, Ken and I came across two big stands of may apple. Though may apple is not exactly rare in the Appalachians and foothills, it’s an honor to have so much may apple growing down below the abbey, and it speaks well of the quality of the woodland soil. Though may apple also is called mandrake, I don’t believe it’s a member of the mandrake family that is so important in myth and witchcraft.

There are two separate stands of may apple, totaling 3,000 to 4,000 square feet. The leaves are still immature. I’ll make more photographs as the season progresses. The may apple should have blooms later in the spring, and it should bear fruit during the summer.

Every spring, I am amazed at the variety of habitat and micro-climates around the abbey. I have only five acres, but into those five acres are packed a sunny acre with house, garden, orchard, and chicken lot. I have quite a lot of grass (some of the yard will soon be converted to wildflower patches). There is almost a thousand feet of woodland boundary, facing south. This is where the rabbit patches, the fox den, and the groundhog holes are located. Lots of things love to live at the edge of the woods, especially with a view to the south. The land falls off steeply below the abbey, and a little stream winds through four acres of woodland, which I have not and will not disturb (except to plant pawpaws, which are native to this area). On the lower end of the property, the little stream merges with another little stream in a moist bottom that loves to grow mushrooms. This is where we’ve put the shiitake mushroom logs.


A stand of may apple. This is only a small part of the may apple area beside the little stream.


The grass is green at the abbey and getting greener.


The daffodils are fading.


Snow peas in a raised bed


I’m awfully proud of the cabbage and can’t stop photographing it.


Young day lilies. They’ll bloom prodigiously in May.

Typewriters: A new symbol of cool

Back in November when I had my IBM Selectric III reconditioned, I speculated that there ought to be clubs for typewriter enthusiasts. As I posted at the time, “I’ve been thinking that there ought to be typewriter clubs these days — for people who still have and use typewriters and who send each other typewritten notes in the mail just for the heck of it.”

Today the New York Times confirms that this is the case. Nor is this a case of old folks like me being sentimental about old technology. Today’s typewriter clubs, according to the Times, are mostly young folks, members of the literati and technorati. They have typewriter sales, as well as “type-ins,” and they send each other notes by snail mail (as I have been doing with a few old friends).

Most of the renewed interest in typewriters seem to be focused on manual typewriters, particularly portables. But it’s the Selectrics and the office-size typewriters that I really love.

Be sure to look at the photo side show attached to the Times article.

My faith in the younger generations just went up a couple of notches.

Radiation report

I am measuring slightly elevated background radiation today. There is a random factor that makes short-term measurements unreliable. A more reliable reading would average radiation levels over, say, an hour or so, and I’m not equipped to do that. But it does appear to me that background levels are trending more toward .03 and .04 milli-Roentgen per hour, as opposed to the .02 that I measured eight days ago.

That’s nothing to be alarmed about, but since the Associated Press is reporting that this radiation is coming from iodine-131 blowing in from Japan, it could do no harm to start taking a kelp-based iodine supplement now.

The real lesson here, though, is to start thinking about being more prepared for future radiation events. Sooner or later it will happen. Take a look at the Radiation Network web site. It shows radiation monitoring stations around the country. It also shows the locations of nuclear plants. Here in western North Carolina we are particularly exposed to nuclear plants in eastern Tennessee. Prevailing winds blow this way.

I’m guessing that iodine supplements including kelp are sold out and hard to find right now. But as soon as you can find some kelp tablets, I’d recommend buying it.

Cabbage report


Ken with our organic cabbage. The seeds were started 49 days ago, and the plants have been in the ground for 11 days.

The cabbages were transplanted outdoors on March 15 and have now been in the ground for 11 days. They are doing really well. It was hard going at first. When we planted the cabbage outdoors (they were started from seed indoors on Feb. 4), I thought that our main concern would be cold weather. Cabbages can stand a frost, but not a hard freeze. Instead of cold weather, we had hot, dry weather. There were two days in the cabbages’ first week when the temperature was over 80 degrees. I had to carry water to the cabbages to keep them from wilting.

The cabbages are much happier now that they’ve had rain and established some roots. With any luck, they’ll be water self-sufficient from here on out.

We also started our tomato and pepper plants from seed today, in the grow-light system. The plan is to plant them outdoors around the first of May.

All in all, the garden is going well. The snowpeas are five inches high, and we also have some onions (started from sets) coming along.

A Chinook helicopter

I’ve commented before on how much helicopter traffic there is in the sky above Acorn Abbey. Usually these helicopters are Huey-size military-looking helicopters, dark gray. Yesterday while Ken and I were working in the yard, there were three Chinook helicopters. We were not able to get a photograph.

This morning, though, I heard a helicopter approaching and ran out with my camera. I caught this Chinook helicopter seconds before it vanished behind the trees.

These helicopters always fly at very low altitude, usually east to west.

That military helicopters frequently fly over North Carolina is not surprising — there are three Air Force bases in eastern North Carolina. But what puzzles me is why we see them so frequently at low altitude over the abbey.

My best speculation is that the helicopters are on training flights, on visual flight rules. We usually see them in good weather. The sky is overcast this morning, but the ceiling is high. When pilots are casually cruising on visual flights rules with no particular place to go, they like to fly toward what is visually interesting. So my guess is that they’re attracted to the unusual mountains in Stokes County — Pilot Mountain, Hanging Rock, and Sauratown Mountain. Also, from looking at a map, it seems to me that if a helicopter from, say, Pope Air Force Base wanted to fly toward the nearest mountains, it would head northwest toward Stokes County.

I found a news report from 2009 about Chinook helicopters landing in a rural field near Raleigh. The military bases said they knew nothing about it.

Getting ready for the asparagus

We ordered 3-year-old asparagus crowns online from AsparagusGardener.com in Tennessee. They should arrive any day now. Ken is digging a bed for the asparagus and amending the soil with compost, sand, and organic fertilizers.

Asparagus is a perennial and will come back year after year, but there’ll be no asparagus to eat until next spring at the earliest.

The chickens go crazy whenever he digs.