Organic Free-Range Fresh Eggs Daily

This is a valuable bit of info I just learned about chickens. (This will only be of interest to people who now have — or are comtemplating obtaining — chickens.)

We have had chickens, in varying numbers for over 30 years. They are the one species left over from the ’70s and ’80s when I put a lot less time into publishing and more time into raising food. In those years we had goats, bees, and chickens. I eventually abandoned goats (SO much work!) and bees (I’ll get them again when I’m 90, I love working with them, they are an 85 million year old species) but we’ve still got chickens, as the time spent is well worth it in fresh eggs daily. This time we have bantams — Rhode Island Reds, and Auracanas, which lay green eggs.

We get day-old baby chicks express mailed by Murray McMurray Hatchery out of Webster, Iowa. This is a great resource, beloved by homesteaders for the quality of their chickens, and their service:

https://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/

1-800-456-3280

I ran into a problem with too many of the bantam hens setting. (This is when genes — in some breeds — kick in, and a hen will go “broody,” fluffing out all her feathers, and sitting on the biggest batch of eggs she can find in the nests. Her intent is to stay on them for 21 days or so until they hatch.) It’s a hassle because the other birds have a hard time getting into the nests to lay eggs. Here’s some good info for people with chickens:

Rhode Island Red Bantams vs. Auracana Bantams

I wrote McMurray 6/03/06:

We’ve been getting chicks from you for 30 years. We could always count on Rhode Island Reds not to set. When we got RI bantams a few years back, we found out that they set like crazy. In other words, the non-setting genes didn’t get carried over into the bantams. Auracana bantams, on the other hand, are like the full sized birds in that they don’t set.

Are you aware of this characteristic in the Rhode Island bantams?

Do you have a list of hens, both bantam and full sized that do not set? (I know white Leghorns don’t set.

I ask this because dealing with a half dozen setters is a major hassle. It upsets the other chickens, you have to isolate them, etc.

Thanks for the great birds through the years!

“Good Setters,” “Non-Setters”

Pat from Murray McMurray Replied 6/05/06:

Lloyd,

As a general rule, bantams do tend to be better setters that their standard

counter parts. I have very little information on bantams as to which birds

are good setters or not.

The hatchery supplies us with some additional notes on birds that are not

included in the catalog. The following standard sized birds are listed as

“good setters”:

Buff Orpington

Partridge Rock

Buff Rock

White Orpington

Turken

Speckled Sussex

Columbian Wyandotte

Columbian Rock

Light Brahma

Dark Cornish

These birds are listed as “non-setters”:

Silver Laced Wyandotte

Black Australorp

Rhode Island Red

Araucana/Americana

Red Star

Black Star

Blue Andalusians

Red Leghorn

Anconas

Single Comb Brown Leghorn

Rose Comb Brown Leghorn

Breeds that are not listed in either group are listed as “sometimes will set”

or have no notes at all regarding setting.

MMH

OK, I’m 71, not the typical age for a blogger. Not exactly the right temperament either: I don’t live and breathe computers. I’ve loved and hated blogging like I loved and hated computers when they came along and superceded everything I’d so painstakenly learned about book production. So I got into blogging mildly kicking and screaming. I liked what it did, but not the time it took me to do it. I already spend more time in front of a screen than I want to. I need my time at the beach and in the woods. But in the last few days I may have seen the way to post stuff more often. I’d like to, because it seems that in my peregrinations I’m constantly runnning across people and things that interest the heck out of me, and I have this compulsion to tell people about it. In fact more than once I’ve worried that I should be more “in the moment” wherever I am, rather than filtering what I’m seeing through my reporter’s brain. How am I gonna tell people about this?

I think (at least tonight) I’ll blog more often. For one thing, yesterday was the first time that I wrote within Blogger.com’s template rather than writing stuff in Eudora and then copying it into Blogger. It was much quicker. And it’s always a kick to see what you’ve just written come up on the web, nicely formatted: a unique immediacy. Like right now I’m about to hit “Publish Post,” and in seconds it’ll be worldwide. It occurs to me that coming from the Old World, as it were, makes all that’s happening now (electronically, not politically) all the more wondrous. Hell, I still can’t believe what a fax machine does, when I really think about it.

My Career: From Builders to Jocks Back to Builders

The first books I published (starting in 1970) were on building. I published two books on dome building and then, when I found out domes didn’t work (as homes), I published. along with Bob Easton, Shelter in 1973, on building all kinds of homes, all over the world. The book sold over 250,000 copies and (from continual feedback) has provided guidance and inspiration to countless people. I did another building book, Shelter II, in 1978 and then, starting in 1980, by some quirk of karma, I ended up publishing fitness books for almost 20 years. See our website for the books we’ve published (about 26 in 30+ years): https://www.shelterpub.com/

About two years ago I felt I’d done all I wanted to in the fitness field and returned to my first love, which was hand-built housing. In this new phase we’ve published The Septic Systems Owners Manual, Home Work: Handmade Shelter, and most recently, Mongolian Cloud Houses, about building your own yurt.

The point of all this: something profound has started happening to us in the last year or so. We have been deluged with emails, letters, and phone calls from people telling us how Shelter changed their lives, or how Home Work is like nothing they’ve seen before. Even more wonderful is the fact that I seem to talk to people every day who love our building books.

Two things caused me to sit down this afternoon and write this:

1. We got a letter today from a couple, Eben and Aña Pyle, who had the first edition of Shelter in the ’70s and ended up using it as inspiration to build cabins and homes in Alaska, Colorado, New Mexico and Kansas. They concluded: “Aña and I want you to know that Shelter has been an important and enjoyable part of our lives and wish to thank you for the work you have done that has made our lives and the lives of others much richer.”

I mean, wow! I know I’m walking the thin line of self-aggrandizement here, but hell, I want to tell you about this. We are getting a phenomenal amount of feedback like this, and it seems like we’re on the right track. We’re photographing people who do things for themselves, with their own hands, and it’s inspiring others to do the same.

I mentioned all this to my wife Lesley today and she said “You’ve dialed back in.” I’m back in touch with the building world and it’s a new exciting phase for us. We’ve reestablished our network of builders, except this time around the internet has put us in touch with a much wider audience. It’s great to be back in touch with builders and craftsmen.

Septic Systems 2006

I’m talking to a national magazine about writing an article on two aspects of septic systems in the US:

a) How small towns are being forced into overblown, overexpensive high-tech wastewater disposal systems by corrupt engineers and fat-fee-collecting bureaucratic officials.

b) What you can do if your septic system has failed. Simple relatively inexpensive fixes as opposed to engineer-mandated $30,000 fixes. Firstly, don’t ask your local health officials what to do…

Micro Architecture

It looks like we will be publishing an English language edition of Micro Architecture, by Japanese publisher Kesaharu Imai of World Photo Press. Here’s a review I wrote of it for Amazon a few years ago (the cover shown on Amazon doesn’t do the book justice):

“Every architect should own this book. There is no other book like it. Be aware that most of the text is in Japanese, but It contains thousands of photos, as well as drawings, imaginative collages, and unique layout. It covers mostly small buildings – homes, barns, sheds, yurts, treehouses, tipis – and just about anything visual that caught the photographers’ and editors’ eyes. The layout is imaginative and stunning. The book makes the reader wonder how anyone could gather so much information, and then assemble it into a cohesive whole. In addition to architects, I’d recommend this book to builders, designers, artists, photographers, and anyone fascinated with the visual world. Unique and inspirational.”

World Photo press has translated both Shelter and Home Work into Japanese and will do a Japanese version of Builders of the Northwest Coast when we get it done.

Barefoot Architect

We have just finalized plans to publish a wonderful book from Brazil, originally in Portuguese and just translated into English, called The Barefoot Architect, by Johan van Lengen. It reminds me of Ken Kern’s ground-breaking do-it-yourself book of the ’60s, The Owner-Built Home. It shows you how to do your own design, how to build, and has lots of stuff for “underdeveloped countries,” as they say, or in other words how to build where there’s no plywood or nail guns or double-insulated windows or building codes, where you’ll be working with materials like adobe and bamboo. Drawings are clear and simple, great info on natural cooling, a great resource for building with low-cost (and natural) materials.

I’m pretty much a country person. Not like on a 40-acre homestead down a dirt road 10 miles from town, but on a half-acre homestead in a community of a few thousand people, on the edge of a national park. Our town and its environs are an interface between paved civilization and countryside.

I’ve been reflecting lately on all the critters we deal with in our daily lives:

-Aphids, earwigs, sow bugs, and the gamut of creeping/crawling/sliming garden pests

-Ants

-Termites

-Mice

-Bats

-Rats

-Birds that eat our strawberries

-Gophers and moles

-Red-Tail Hawks (after our chickens)

-Blue herons nab fish in our pond

-Weasels (rarely)

-Possums

-Skunks

-Racoons

-Foxes

-Deer with big appetites

What else? I’m mentally walking around our place, thinking of all the fencing, netting, chicken wire, traps that are part and parcel of living on a piece of land, however small (half an acre is about 100 x 200′) on the edge of wilderness. These are just the critters we have to deal with because they want to eat our garden, kill our chickens, establish a food line to the sugar bowl, nest in the woodpile, eat the roses, burrow into our rafters, nest in the attic of the tower, shit all over my woodpile, eat our wheat berries. You get the idea.

We’ve been here over 30 years, and a host of animals and insects are continually trying to move in with us. Skunks spray some nights under the bedroom window, I once trapped 13 possums over a 2-week period (Have-a-heart trap & released 3 miles away, they’re too dumb to make it back here); bats getting inside the tower (took months to block them); raccoon getting into chicken yard; rats/rats/rats (maybe 30 trapped per year – I’m the only rat trapper in the neighborhood; termites in rafters persistently, and since I won’t tarp the place and use poison, it requires constant “Electro-gun” zappings. It goes on.

Those are the varmints. There are also the good guys. Canadian geese that have multiplied here lately, in fact birds/birds/birds. I take my paddleboard down to the narrow channels in the lagoon, paddle along, and get to look closely at egrets, herons (very wary), ducks, seals, the occasional osprey swooping down to snatch a fish. We put out seeds for doves, quail, and finches. Lately a very spooky flock of maybe 20 pigeons has been eating seeds out the window from our breakfast nook. Hummingbirds, smart-ass blue jays. Crows that I try to imitate (they think I’m an idiot!)

Running out in the hills I’ve seen bobcats, deer floating over fences, coyotes slinking around, and on two occasions mountain lions — formidable!

Ten or so years ago there used to be a lot of red foxes here. One started coming around when we’d barbecue and we’d give him scraps of meat. He didn’t lose any of his wildness; he’d keep his eyes on us humans intensively and was always ready to bolt. I loved seeing him, he was beautiful and sensitive, it was rare to get close to such an elegant creature.

I was thinking of animals this morning as I drove into San Francisco along the coast. I wrote most of this at Cafe Roma in North Beach. Couple of other notes from today:

On The Importance of Havin’ That Swing

Recently I said to a friend, “It don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing.” I had just heard the Mills Brothers versiopn of the song in the ’30s.

“You know what Sharon Stone said about liking men better than women?” she said to me.

“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that schwing…”

Words Of The Day

Succés d’éstime, told me by Bill Newlin. In my line of work, it can be applied to a wonderful book we did on symmetry that sold poorly. An artistic but not commercial success.

The German word lebenskunstler, meaning “Someone for whom life is an art form.” What a wonderful word! Told me by Hans Frey.

Bumf, meaning promotional crap in the pub business. Also told me by Bill Newlin, who also said, in explaining it to me, “It’s a print version of tchotchkes.” From the American Heritage Dictionary: Chiefly British Slang 1. Printed matter, such as pamphlets, forms, or memorandums, especially of an official nature and deemed of little interest or importance. 2. Toilet paper. ETYMOLOGY: Short for bum fodder : bum + fodder.

New Info On Septic Systems

The above reminds me to announce that we’re doing a revised version of our book on septic systems, The Septic Systems Owners Manual showing people how to avoid unnecessarily high-tech, high-cost systems, new state-of-the-art hardware for failed systems, and how towns can cope with corrupt engineers.

Book Hoves Into View

I’ve been working on a book on carpenters of the Pacific coast for the better part of a year now, but puzzling over what the book will look like (in spite of a mass of material). Last week it, the form that is, materialized in my mind. Whammo! I could (can) see the pages. Lew has been telling me to go big with the graphics and I’ve started doing some preliminary layouts and do they look great! (The material is a graphic designer’s dream to work with.)

Builder Sun Ray Kelley’s temple, still under construction in the California hills, is 50′ by 80′, with yurt construction: inner steel compression ring, outer steel tension ring

The world has not seen these builders (to any extent), and their buildings are unique. One thing all these buildings have in common is the rare coordination of design, materials, construction (craftsmanship), and harmony with site.

The focus of the book will be the builders, but it will also be the story of my road trips shooting the photos. I’ll bring the reader along with me, riding shotgun. Conversational. Other stuff I saw on my photo-shooting trips up north. A caboose turned into a cappuccino stand in Washington, a downhill skateboarder in Portland, a good-vibes back-to-the-50s breakfast place in Medford, an old blues nightclub in Vancouver, orcas seen from a ferry crossing the Georgia Straits, boats of all sizes and shapes and uses, etc. — these things will be threaded in with photos and interviews of the builders.

Kayakers Get Handled by Mother Nature

I took a kayak trip down a local creek with a friend last Sunday — not a smart thing to do, it turns out. For Marin County locals, it’s Paper Mill Creek on the road between Fairfax and Olema, and we put in by the bridge where Kent Lake creek crosses the road. We left my truck about 5 miles downstream, just past the bridge west of Tocoloma. I’d run the creek by myself about 10 years ago, but the flow was a lot less than this Sunday. My friend Clark and I both have 12′ Scrambler sit-on-top kayaks, so it’s fairly easy to get off the kayak when necessary, and they don’t fill up with water like regular kayaks).

Maybe I shouldn’t have been such a smart-ass and said “Rock & roll!” when I pushed off into the current, because within 30 seconds I was upside down. There were some pretty rapid rapids to contend with, and we started getting dumped, moi quite a bit more often than Clark. I noted this ruefully because I’ve been in the water – canoes, kayaks, surfboards — all my life, and here I was losing it. Typically the rapids would spin the boat around sideways and the current would turn it upside down. That wasn’t too bad, but the real danger, we soon learned, was a bunch of fallen trees completely across the creek in more than half a dozen places. A couple of times we didn’t make the right decisions and ended up with the kayaks pressed sideways against trees. One time I got trapped behind the kayak and tree, and the power of the water wouldn’t let me move. The only solution was to dive under the log and hope there were no snags to stop me from getting through to the other side. Not good.

We both ended up straddled across one big tree and had to work to get extricated. Clark was into enjoying the calm stretches, so we floated and watched dappled sunlight and birds high in the redwoods when we got into deeper, slower water. I kept watching Clark deftly glide around obstacles, guiding his boat gracefully, and I’d be climbing out of the water once more. A few miles into the trip I looked downstream to see him get dumped, and I hate to admit this, it just shows what a rotten person I am, but it raised my spirits a bit, misery loves … etc.

The danger in all this, and the reason it was dumb, is that we underestimated the power of moving water. The creek didn’t look that gnarly. We didn’t realize what we were into until we pushed off. It’s a powerful force and the danger is in getting pinned and trapped under water.

We were starting to get tired. I was ahead and came to the day’s hairiest rapids. By then I’d started attacking the rapids, trying to set a course so the current wouldn’t slam me into a snag or branch. I was surprised and exhilarated to get through. I decided I better watch for Clark and pulled into some still water and waited. And waited. I started to worry, realizing there was no way I could get back upstream to help him if he was in trouble. Pretty soon he came along and he’d broken one of the blades on his paddle. He’d also had a ranger (on the banks) tell him he was going to arrest us when he caught up with us at our takeout place. Jeez, there are so many people around these days telling you what you can’t do. Well, Clark couldn’t go on with half a paddle and, ahem — we might just be able to dodge the ranger if we bagged the rest of the trip then (we’d made about 2-1/2 miles), so we pulled the kayaks and hid them on the bank I hitchhiked (in wetsuit) to my truck, came back, we threw the kayaks on the roof and took off in the opposite direction, thereby avoiding getting tickets. Ain’t it always fun to run away from cops? We had Bloody Marys at Peri’s (old-time local) bar in Fairfax. In all. a good day.

Disclaimer: the above names, including mine, are fictitious. I would not break the law. Neither would Clark.

Attention kayakers & river runners: A couple of great publications:

1. Wave Length, from Gabriola Island, BC. Great magazine from people who love the water, and more kayaks (ads) than you ever imagined existed. Editor Alan Wilson says, about stroking out into the water: “No longer do the terrestrial rules apply…https://www.wavelengthmagazine.com/

2. NRS catalog: an awesome amount of equipment for kayakers and rafters, including inflatable whitewater catamarans and kayaks. https://www.nrsweb.com

Dipsea Race: Dumb & Dumber

I was training for the local annual Dipsea Race, 7 miles of uphill and downhill madness that takes place each June. I ran in a race on Super Bowl day and of course had to race another runner down a long hill, thereby screwing up my knee. and it is now, some 3 months later, too sore to run seriously. (Sad to say, but a fact of life that it takes a lot longer to get over injuries when you’re 70.) So I’m getting back into the water, paddling and surfing. Maybe train for the Dipsea next year, but you know, in reality, I may quit the pedal-to-the-medal competitive running scene, and just enjoy running for the scenery and good feeling. Doesn’t that sound sensible? Some inner voice has been telling me to do something sensible in the athletic realm, for a change.

Close Encounters With Raptors

In the course of a week, I had a bunch of encounters with hawks. First, I saw for the first time a pair of kites (white hawks) that have recently come to our neighborhood to make their hunting rounds. Then, a red-winged hawk snatched one of our chickens. A few days later I was staying in my friend Louie’s cabin in the woods, walked in, and something shot by me and there was a clunk. It was a small peregrine falcon, somehow had got into the room, and it was stunned from hitting the window. I picked it up carefully, took it outside, admired its beauty and let it go. It was thrilling to see such perfection up close. Then a day or so later I was driving at dusk and there was a blur of wings and a hawk barely missed my truck windshield. Bird spirits were with me that week. I guess if I fasted in the desert for 3 days I could figure out what it all meant.

End of the Rains

California has been hammered with rain this winter. Creeks and waterfalls are pounding, lakes and reservoirs full to the brim. The ground is still sodden and when th sun comes out, there’s an almost tropical humidity. Spring is starting to explode.