Ken Ilgunas – Into the Woods

An abbey literary update

Ken’s third book, This Land Is Our Land, has been in the final editing stages here at the abbey and is due at the publisher, Penguin Random House, next week. The book is scheduled for release in March 2018.

When the idea for this book was hatched last April, Ken was here at the abbey, traveling through on book tour for his second book. He had just published a piece in the New York Times, This Is Our Country. Let’s Walk It. After that piece was published, it was apparent that Ken had become the honorary owner of a “right to roam” movement in the United States and that a book on the subject was needed. Ken had no trouble at all selling his agent and his publisher on the idea, and in no time he had a contract to write the book.

A year ago, I would have assumed that this book would be a fairly bland and somewhat academic — but necessary — reference book for a new movement in need of a manifesto. But having read the manuscript twice during the past two weeks, I was reminded how Ken’s books always exceed my high expectations. It’s not just his superb research and the charm of his writing that make This Land Is Our Land such a good book. It’s also the way he surprises me, when I finally see the manuscript, with how deeply he delves and how high he flies, even though I was in on discussions about the book from the beginning. Though this book’s topic is seemingly narrow, Ken also has produced an incisive snapshot of contemporary American culture through the lens of our attitudes toward the land. And he has laid out a lion-hearted vision of a future America that is less insular and more benevolent.

If you’re not certain what a “right to roam” is, I’d suggest the New York Times link above. It’s not as radical a right as you might think. The people of England, Wales, Scotland, and Sweden have generous roaming rights, and even countries such as Lithuania and Latvia are far ahead of the United States with the right to roam.

This Land Is Our Land will be the fifth book to be born here at the abbey during the last four years. Ken’s other two books are Walden on Wheels (2013), and Trespassing Across America (2016). There also are my novels Fugue in Ursa Major (2014) and Oratorio in Ursa Major (2016). Symphony in Ursa Major is in progress and should be out next year.

2014 garden, off and running

The long-range forecast calls for normal-ish temperatures and above-normal precipitation, so Ken planted the early garden today.

Spring has sprung.

I hope.

About those $10 eggs

Last week, Ken told me that he saw eggs at Whole Foods that cost more than $10 a dozen. I just had to see that for myself, so today I looked for them in the egg section. The most expensive eggs I saw were $7.99 a dozen. But, luckily, Whole Foods’ egg guy was there refilling the shelves, and I got to ask him some questions.

Yes indeed, he said. Last week they had eggs that cost more than $10 a dozen. But they already had sold out! I asked him what it was about the eggs that justified the price. He called this the “resume” of the eggs. The $10 eggs, he said, were (if I and he understood correctly) from grass-fed hens. Both he and I found that a bit strange. Grass-fed cows are a good thing, because cows are ruminants, and grass is their natural food. It’s different with chickens, though. Chickens do love grass, but it’s not something that they want to live on exclusively. From my reading on chicken husbandry, I understand that chickens will happily derive about a third of their calories from grass. But they also want seeds and any tasty worms, grubs, or insects that they can find. Not to mention kitchen scraps. So I’m skeptical about the concept of grass-fed chickens.

Today, the most expensive eggs at Whole Foods were the $7.99 eggs, and I understood that the $7.99 eggs came from the same North Carolina farm (in Durham) that the $10 eggs came from.

But this is amazing. People will pay more than $10 a dozen for eggs! Ken and I really wanted to sample those eggs, because we both believe that they couldn’t possibly be superior to the eggs laid by Acorn Abbey’s happy pastured hens. But that test will have to wait. So far, the Whole Foods guy said, they have not been able to get more of the $10 eggs, though they’re trying.

Ken keeps a spreadsheet that he calls “Abbey economics,” and in the spreadsheet he tracks the cost of keeping our hens vs. the value of the eggs. One thing is for sure. The abbey’s economics look a whole lot better if you value our amazing eggs at $10 a dozen. At that price, we’re probably saving money by having our own hens.

Feeding the worms

The garden plot with compost freshly tilled in … and the chickens working it

Increasingly we think less in terms of fertilizing plants and more in terms of feeding the worms, on the grounds that if your worms are abundant and well fed, the plant life will flourish.

Part of this process is compost. The only form of compost easily available here at reasonable prices is leaf compost. This is a high-carbon compost and needs time to digest into the soil. But it’s good worm food if applied at the right time. Now is the right time. The soil is starting to warm up, and we’re a few weeks away from spring planting. Rain is forecast for Sunday. So Ken rushed to get several tons of compost spread around ahead of the rain. Then he tilled it into the soil. Given two or three weeks, a little rain, and a little warm sun, the compost will decompose into the soil before the spring planting.

My understanding is that high-carbon compost like leaf compost must be digested by bacteria before its nutrition is available to plants. While the bacteria are doing this work, they suck up a lot of nitrogen from the soil. Then the bacteria die, releasing the nitrogen back to the soil and making the nitrogen available for plants.

We also applied about 400 pounds of organic fertilizer this year. The fertilizer is made from chicken manure. But in addition to that, we use soybean meal (about 600 pounds this year) as fertilizer. The soybean meal has a decent portion of nitrogen, and it’s good worm food.

Each year, we add organic fertilizers and humus to the soil. And, each year, the plant life gets more lush and the birds and wildlife more exuberant.

Piles of compost ready to be tilled into the wildflower patches. The wildflower patches look nice, and the seeds the flowers produce attract birds.

New gate for the new chicken lot

As of sunset today, the chickens’ new habitat is ready. They now have three grazing and scratching areas, each separated by gates: the garden, the orchard, and a section of woods. Six chickens can do a great deal of damage to grass, and we want the strongest possible turf in the orchard. When it became apparent by mid-winter that the turf in the orchard was not going to be able to withstand a full winter of scratching, we moved the chickens into the garden to protect the orchard turf. The chickens soon wiped out the winter rye that had been planted as a cover crop for the garden and made a big mess. But at least, in the garden, no permanent harm was done.

Ken made the decision to extend their scratching area into the woods. That will give the chickens a great deal more space and relieve the pressure on the orchard turf. It also will provide a cool, shady area for the girls to hang out during the heat of summer. It also will make it easier to justify two or three new hens this spring.

This project cost several hundred dollars and a lot of time, but after we saw eggs for more than $10 a dozen at Whole Foods, we had no doubt that it was worth it.

The girls in the garden — now a muddy mess after lots of rain and snow and scratching

Spring fever

Picking up rocks in the garden

Winter’s back is broken. The temperature today reached 68 degrees. The daffodil shoots are a couple of inches high. While I have been recovering from minor surgery, Ken has a serious case of spring fever. This morning he washed all the windows, inside and out. Then we measured for an extension of the chicken fence into the woods, to give the chickens more scratching space and more summer shade. Ken wrote up a list of spring chores, including seeding and fertilizing the yard and orchard, mulching, and getting the spring garden planted. We’re a little late with pruning the apple trees. That needs to be done this week. The seeds for the spring garden have been ordered.

It was a harsh winter. Several times the temperature dropped as low as 4F. Most winters, the grass retains a strong tinge of green, but this winter everything went brown. The current generation of chickens (there are six of them) are the fiercest scratchers we’ve ever seen. They were damaging the turf in the orchard, so we allowed them only in the garden for most of the winter, where they could do no permanent harm to dormant growing things other than the garden’s cover crop of winter rye. Between the cold and the constant digging of the chickens, not a single sprout of the winter rye in the garden seems to have survived.

One couldn’t possibly have too much pasture for chickens. When growing conditions for grass are good, the grass can stay ahead of the chickens. But the girls can make a big mess of things in the winter. Luckily our chickens can be restricted either to the orchard or to the garden, with the chicken house in the middle. That saved the turf in the orchard this winter. The plan now is to add several hundred square feet of fenced area inside the woods.

When you’re committed to your chickens, the labor never ends. Partly this is because chickens become part of the family. And partly it’s because, once you become accustomed to home-laid eggs from properly pastured hens, there is no going back. No matter how much you’re willing to spend on eggs at places like Whole Foods, there is just no comparison.

Rocking chair rehab

I apologize for going so long without posting. I’ll blame it on the weather — first freezing cold, with some water problems, followed by heavy rain. January has been dreary so far.

But today was fairly nice, and Ken got started on a project that I’m happy to see come up in the queue: the rehabilitation of the rocking chairs. I bought the chairs as a gift for my mother some years ago, and she gave them back to me when I moved back to North Carolina. The chairs are classics, made by the P & P Chair Company, the original maker of the Kennedy Rocking Chair. You can still buy these chairs, and they’re very pricey. Mine have been sitting on the side porch for five years, and the weathering had taken its toll.

I did not like the original finish on these chairs. It was that plastic-skin finish that everything seems to have these days. The finish does not soak into the wood, and over time it peels off in tiny flakes, leaving the wood unprotected.

Ken’s first step was to sand the chairs. That left the chairs with a silvery-gray patina that is quite beautiful. The next step will be to apply a new finish. We’ve chosen a deck stain, because it’s the kind of finish that goes on thin and soaks into the wood. And of course it’s a finish designed for protecting wood that is exposed to the weather. I’m hoping that it will protect the chairs better than the original finish.

And whose knows. After the finish is dry, the chairs may come indoors and sit by the fireplace for the rest of the winter. Life is hard for porch chairs.

In the photos below, the new finish has not yet been applied.

Vole control: the fire

A vole flees the fire in the wildflower patch.

There were two voles hiding under the brush pile when Ken lit it on fire. As soon as they perceived what was going on, they ran to another brush pile a few feet away that was waiting to be burned.

“Poor things,” said Ken. But we burned the brush in the wildflower patches anyway. The voles fled toward the garden when the last brush pile was thrown onto the fire. I would have preferred that they’d gone to the woods.

Vole control

A vole runway

Ken said that, when he was pulling up dead stalks from one of the wildflower patches yesterday, a vole sat and looked at him for a while, as though to say, “What are you doing to my neighborhood?”

Of all the many little creatures that live around (and off of) the abbey, the voles are the least welcome. They do a lot of damage in the garden. Their population can jump incredibly fast if the livin’ is easy. They’re verminy, though they’re also cute in a mousy sort of way. Their other name is “meadow mouse.” But somehow calling them by the more charming name of meadow mouse would make it harder to destroy their neighborhoods.

It was an extremely wet summer, which meant a lot of brush growth. The voles love that, because it provides them with cover. Ken has been clearing the area around the garden, and the voles don’t like it at all. You can trace their runways from the chicken house to the pump house, from the garden to the wildflower patches, from the wildflower patches to the grove of trees in front of the house, and from the grove to the day lily patch. They’re furtive little things, and though we see them often they’re hard to photograph.

As far as I’m concerned, they can make themselves a new runway from the garden all the way back to the rabbit thicket and the woods, where they’d be welcome if they’d stay there. I just hope that no one ever writes a Watership Down that’s about voles rather than rabbits. That would make it much more difficult to burn out their neighborhoods and turn them into little refugees.

The voles are not happy about this. It will be burned.

Ken clears wildflower brush.

It was a warm day, so Lily watched the proceedings from an open window.

Fugue in Ursa Major: now in the proofing stage

My novel, Fugue in Ursa Major, is now in the final stages of production. Proof copies are being printed this week. As soon as the proof copies arrive, I’ll immediately get them to my distinguished first readers. And are my first readers ever distinguished! They are:

— Ken, already known to readers of this blog. Ken is often referred to these days as a new literary sensation. He’s also a tough critic, which I know because we’ve watched many movies together, then reviewed them the next day.

— James-Michael, an old friend who holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and who works for the state of California.

— Dean, an old friend who holds a Ph.D. in media law and is an assistant professor at a university in North Carolina.

— Doug, a retired engineer.

From these four first readers, I’ll get some good advice that will go into the final revisions. Then the book will go on sale, probably in December and probably in time for Christmas. The trade paperback version will be available at Amazon, tentatively priced at $11.99. There also will be a Kindle version, tentatively priced at $1.99, and a version for Apple’s iBooks.

Update: I’ve added another first reader: Pam, former managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner.