We haven’t had too many of these this month, but everything is starting to come up in the garden; the grass is green and the tulips are blooming. Hands on hips, taking a thoughtful survey of things to be tidied up, pruned, clipped, moved and divided, I’m always amazed how from one spring to the next I seem to forget which plants I planted where and which new flowers were added in the last season. I know I’m supposed to make a map, but this way it’s a lovely surprise every spring...”oh yes, I forgot I had planted that beautiful new iris, and that creeping phlox; strange, I thought I put it in just a little more in that direction, over there to the left. Now where is that new brilliant blue perennial geranium? Vanished! Into thin air.....the garden fairies have been at work again shifting things around. Garden fairies my sweet patootie! This can only be the work of the fastest claws in the west, able to scratch up an entire bed in a single afternoon – the Chicken Gang.The war begins each spring. I erect my small wire fence around the perimeter of the garden, leaving no openings, and once the garden really explodes into bloom, there is no room for the chickens to get in and root around. Until that happens, they are finding some way in most days and the garden currently has large dirt craters where they like to sand bathe. I think the biggest fattest hen just stomps down on the wire with a big scaly claw and holds it while the others hop in and get to work. Mostly it’s my fault because I can’t bear to keep them in their coop on such beautiful days as we’ve been having this spring. Yes, this means hunting for eggs outside and only getting maybe three out of five hens’ eggs, and dealing with the torn up garden, but there must be a balance somewhere. When they are shut in their coop, I can hear their angry calls from my studio upstairs in the house and while I’m trying to be creative it’s most distressing to hear the tin cup clanging across the bars out there.
I was sitting in the sun this morning on my chair outside the barn door waiting for senior horse to finish his breakfast, when little red hen came back to the coop after some early morning bug hunting. I was guessing by the way she seemed almost frantically searching for something, that she was looking for a nice spot to lay her egg. Into the tack room she went, scratched around in there a bit and came out again. Passing me in my chair she let out a squawk , went into the coop and jumped up into the laying box on the far left, missed and landed in a pile of hay below. She was really pissed off now by the sound of things (I knew she wouldn’t go for me scooping her up into it). She went for the next box and made it but the shifting around, facing first this way then that, then settling down , then shifting around again made me wonder if she would ever get around to business (finally I would see which egg little red hen was going to lay). By this time senior horse was finished and junior horse came in hoping that I would let him snuffle up any leftover crumbs. I let them out, went back to the house for more coffee and forgot all about red hen’s egg until later when by some miracle there were four different ones in the same nest. I still don’t know which one is cheating me!
