A Fry Baby is the world’s smallest deep fryer, and we got ours at a Yankee swap hosted by our friends Tommy and Ali, for which all the guests were instructed to bring something that’s been lying around the house for ages but never used. We brought a platter we’d bought at a yard sale a few years back, but somehow never warmed up to. But one couple brought this 1970’s-era miniature deep-fryer. Imagine! They had it for years, and it was still in the box! There’s no accounting for taste.

A Fry Baby, with jam for scale

It’s not really called a Fry Baby, but Kevin started calling it that and the name stuck. It was made before we had all these pesky safety regulations, and there’s no visible means of controlling the temperature of the oil, and no automatic shut-down if you forget to unplug it. It’s clearly a house fire waiting to happen, and perhaps it’s the element of danger that endears that little appliance to Kevin, who’s been deep-frying anything that’s stopped moving.

If you have a Fry Baby and you have chickens, it won’t be long before you start wondering just what would happen if you tried to deep-fry an egg. You’ll go to the Internet, and you’ll see all kinds of videos of people trying to do it, with results that range from failure to tragedy. Than you’ll eventually stumble on one of Jacques Pepin doing it, with perfect results.

The lesson you should take from this is that you should only deep-fry an egg if you’re Jacques Pepin. The lesson we took from it is that, hey, we can deep-fry an egg!

Pepin does it in a shallow pan of oil, and uses two wooden spoons to gather up the white as it spreads. But, before he does, he gives the critical piece of information. Make sure, he warns, to refrigerate your eggs so the whites don’t spread so much.

Anyone who’s ever opened an egg just out of the nest box knows that, the fresher the egg, the more coherent the white. As eggs age, they ooze carbon dioxide and the whites lose their viscosity.

So, we figured, if a cold egg is good, a fresh cold egg is better. So we heated the oil and, when it was hot, we took a couple eggs right out of the 38-degree chicken coop.

I broke an egg into a bowl, and slid it into the hot oil. I had my two wooden spoons ready, but I didn’t need them. The bubbles that rose up around the egg had the effect of keeping the white close to the yolk. I flipped the egg over mid-fry, but it’s not really necessary. There’s enough oil on the top that it cooks pretty evenly. When the white began to brown, about 45 seconds in, I took it out with a slotted spoon and drained it on a paper towel.

It was perfect, with whites completely set and a liquid yolk. There was a little crispy edge on the whites, like you get with a pan-fried egg.

The sandwich was better than the picture

Kevin had found another way to do it, and we tried that, too. You soft-boil an egg, peel it, and then coat it with flour, then eggs, then breadcrumbs. Then into the oil for about thirty seconds. It works great, but I don’t think it’s worth the extra work. Kevin, who can’t resist a crispy panko crust, disagreed.  Which is fine by me, because it means he may occasionally make one for me.

We made open-face sandwiches of crusty bread, goat cheese and bacon, sautéed beet greens and garlic, and topped them with the eggs. They were terrific.

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Which raises a very important question: What on earth is the point of an omelet?

Not for omelets, please.

I certainly see the point of mixing eggs with things like cheese and onions, mushrooms and ham. But it makes so much more sense to simply scramble all those things together.

It starts with the pan issue. If you’re making an omelet, you either have to use two pans, or use one pan serially, first to sauté the filling and then to cook the omelet. A scramble uses one pan, once. Cook your onions, add your sausage, finish with spinach, then mix in the eggs and cheese. No getting bowls dirty with fillings, no worrying about little bits in the pan that will interfere with the omelet-making.

But that advantage pales in comparison to the other, more substantive advantages. It’s not easy to make an omelet so the eggs are cooked properly all the way through. Generally, you end up with a tough skin on the outside and an undercooked layer on the inside. But, even if you get it perfect, the eating experience is suboptimal. You get bites of all egg and no filling around the outside, and bites with too much filling and not enough egg on the inside.

And then there’s the texture of the egg. Eggs are best when they’re cooked in soft, creamy curds, not firm, spongy pancakes. The egg in omelets is the equivalent of well-done meat.

As far as I can tell, there is one, and only one, advantage to omelets. An omelet is an opportunity to show off. You get to demonstrate your professional technique and slide the perfect yellow semi-circle out of the pan and on to the plate of a suitably grateful diner. Well, bully for you.

I’ll take the scramble, with eggs just barely set, and cheese distributed evenly throughout. Every bite has a little onion, a little sausage, a little spinach. I’ll take my scramble over your perfect yellow semi-circle any day. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that omelets top my list of over-rated foods, a list that also includes cupcakes, vegetable juice, marshmallows, and the downright disgusting Philly cheese steak.

I wonder if being an unyielding absolutist has anything to do with my not having all that many friends.

Nah.

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And you’re studying Henderson’s Handy-Dandy Chicken Chart to figure out how to pick your breeds.

Henderson’s Handy-Dandy Chicken Chart is indispensable for anyone considering keeping chickens. It’s a comprehensive list of breeds, with their origins, egg-laying potential, heat- and cold-tolerance, and notes on their behavior. I love Henderson’s Handy-Dandy Chicken Chart, and I encourage you to spend time reading about your many choices.

When it gets serious, though, and it’s time to actually buy chicks, I can help you cut through the indecision. There is one chicken breed that’s beak and wattles above all the others.

You will be tempted by the breeds, like Brahmas, with froo-froo feathers, but those feathers decorate chickens that have less in the way of brainpower than your average chicken – and that’s saying a lot.

Pretty is as pretty does

You will be tempted by the ones with the big floppy combs, like Leghorns, because they look like Elvis. But those combs get frostbite instantly.

I'm all shook up

You will be tempted by the ones that are docile and friendly and good with children, like Orpingtons, but you will get very tired of the frequency with which they go broody and have to be kept in a cage for a few days to be convinced that, no, they’re not going to hatch a brood of chicks.

You will be tempted by Araucanas and Ameraucanas, because they lay eggs in pastel shades of blue and green. And they do – every other Thursday. They are freeloaders.

The go-to chicken – drumroll, please – is the Rhode Island Red.

These plain brown hens are barnyard stand-outs. They lay big brown eggs, practically every day. They’re curious and engaged, but not needy or clingy. They don’t bully, and they don’t tolerate being bullied. They never get sick and they never go broody.

It makes sense that it should be that way. If you’re doing the selective breeding, it’s much harder to get feathers and combs and Easter eggs coupled with temperament, egg production, and disease resistance than temperament, egg production, and disease resistance all by themselves. Focus on what’s important, and you get a plain brown hen.

George

The favorite in our flock is George, who’s always the first to come investigate when we’re working in the yard. She’s friendly and calm, and she hangs out near us, scratching for bugs and clucking. If she decides nothing interesting is going on, she rejoins the rest of the flock.

There’s a lot to be said for a mixed flock, with its quotient of stupid ones, flighty ones, and broody ones. We love our motley crew and, if you’re just now venturing into chicken-keeping, I’d encourage you to go that route. It makes watching them and caring for them more interesting, and it sure makes counting them easier. As much as we like them, I don’t think we’ll ever have a flock that’s all Rhode Island Reds. But we’ll never have a flock without them.

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Until now, we’ve had a pretty good record protecting chickens from predators. This year, we lost our runt chick, Rocky, to a hawk, but that’s our only casualty. It’s possible that Baldie, a full-grown buff Orpington, died of post-traumatic stress disorder about six weeks after she had the feathers off her back ripped off by what might have been the same hawk, but we don’t count that as a predator death.

We’d like to keep our streak alive, so we kept an eye on the gnawed spot. It didn’t seem to be getting any bigger, so we didn’t worry much.

Then, last week, we walked around to the backside of the coop. There, one of the battens had been almost eaten through. A two-foot section had been scratched and bit to splinters, and the nails were sticking out.

This couldn’t be allowed to continue. I decided that whatever was trying to get at my chickens was going to be in for a rude shock. I took one of the super-duper fiery habaneros from our hydroponic system, and put it in the Vita-Mix with some water and cornstarch to make a slurry. Birds don’t taste capsaicin, so the peppers wouldn’t bother the chickens, but most mammals (I think) are pepper-sensitive, so I figured I’d be able to deter whatever it was that trying to get in.

I painted the exposed wood with my slurry, set up the VarmintCam, and waited.

The first couple of nights, I got nothing. And then, when I checked it this morning, the drama unfolded:

At 9:12 PM, a rat comes and cases the joint. He walks around, and maybe takes a tentative gnaw at the wood.

At 9:51, he gets a real taste of the habanero. Or at least that’s what I picture.  Doesn’t that look like a rat trying to get the taste of pepper out of his mouth?

At 6:26 AM, he’s back. Or maybe it’s his friend. Either way, he’s not what I’m looking for.  A reatively small rodent couldn’t eat away a 1×2 piece of wood three feet off the ground unless he invited seven of his friends and they stood on each other’s shoulders.  While I wouldn’t put this past a rat (I don’t put anything past rats), I didn’t see any evidence of it.  

The next morning, at 3:36 AM, I got a more probable culprit.

Two minutes later, he’s back with his friend. These could be the same two who were robbing our turkey feeder a few weeks back.

But then, two minutes after that! Could this be a picture of a raccoon in pain?

The only other raccoon appearance that night came at 4:51 AM, and if ever I’ve seen trepidation written across a a furry face, this is it.  He never came any closer.

I think maybe, just maybe, he’s reconsidering.  Or maybe not.  In any case, it’s reassuring that they seem to be after the chicken feed, which is directly inside the gnawed batten, and not the chickens themselves.

I know better than to chalk up a victory in the raccoon wars; the best I can say is that I didn’t suffer a shattering defeat. But they’ll be back. Raccoons always come back.

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First we had our sick chicken, Flopsy, who couldn’t seem to stand on her own two feet. Then we had my father, hospitalized with an EKG that looked like one of those seismic meters during an earthquake. Then the cat, who’s become decidedly indoorsy in her old age, disappeared on, of all things, a rainy night. To cap it, I went out this morning and counted five turkeys instead of the usual six.

Flopsy, much improved

Today, though, all is well. Although Flopsy is not one hundred percent, she’s doing much better. She started eating, drinking, and clucking, and stopped nestling down in the straw lining her cage. We took her out today and reunited her with the flock. She’s still slow on the draw, but we have high hopes for her recovery.

My father is out of the hospital, pacemaker/defibrillator successfully installed. He can boast a steady pulse of 60, something he hasn’t seen in at least a decade. His career as a porn star, however, is definitely over.

The cat simply reappeared, pissed on the floor, and left again. We’re thinking it’s the beginning of the end. It is, at any rate, way past the end of the beginning.

And the turkeys? Well, seems I can’t count. When Kevin came to check them mid-morning, they were all there, present and accounted for.

It was the trifecta of crises: livestock, pet, family. I’m happy to report that we’re all stable and optimistic.

The car, though, is making an ominous creaking noise.

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Afternoon update: Six hours after I posted this, our chick is no better.  She can’t stand up, and just collapses where you put her down.  Kevin held her up to the waterer, and she did drink. A rectal exam yielded a discharge of yellow liquid and grass-green solids.  I couldn’t feel an egg, but I don’t know that I know what to feel for.  We’ve sequestered her in a cage with fresh straw, food, and water with a little apple cider vinegar in it.  I suspect that, by tomorrow morning, she’ll either be dead or better, but I suspect the smart money’s on dead.  Sigh.

A chicken is sick, and I am no help at all.

She’s tail-down, and she nestles down wherever you put her. Kevin found her in the coop yesterday afternoon, and we tucked her away in a nest box. She was still there this morning, and I took her down to see if I could get her to drink water. She took one sip, and then hunkered down next to the waterer. I put her back in the nest box.

Sick.

She’s a light brahma, and it’s just possible she’s at the point of laying her first egg, although 18 weeks is very early. Her vent seems to be closed and clear, but it’s hard to get a good view because she’s very fluffy and clearly prefers that you not pull her tail up.

She doesn’t protest when we lift her, which I’m taking as a bad sign. The rest of the chicks squawk bloody murder when you pick them up.

I don’t have the foggiest idea what to look for, or what to do. I’ve made her comfortable on a bed of fresh straw, and I’ll try to get her to drink periodically. Beyond that, I’m at a complete loss.

Any ideas?

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There’s also this idea that chickens and gardens have a symbiotic relationship. The garden waste helps feed the chickens, and the chicken waste helps feed the garden. Plus, the birds can help till the soil and keep the insect population in check. Together, they form a functioning backyard ecosystem that will keep you and yours in eggs and produce.

This is all stuff and nonsense.

Not that it’s actually false. It’s just very selectively edited. The whole truth is much more disagreeable.

Argh!

The whole truth is that, when you have chickens and you have a garden, the chickens will expend all their time and energy, as well as whatever intellectual horsepower they can coax from their seven brain cells, trying to get into the garden.

And, no, they’re not going to eat the waste. Or the bugs. They’re going to eat the tomato that’s one day short of perfect. When that’s been pecked to a seedy red pulp, they’ll start on the tomato that’s two days short of perfect. And so on.

There are some things they don’t like to eat, but the only way they learn that is by taking a bite. And then, because their gastronomic memory has a half-life measured in seconds, they’ll come back for another bite the moment they can’t find a tomato that has even a hint of blush. Only after they’ve done irreparable damage will they figure out that they didn’t want to eat the thing in the first place.

Not that I’m angry or anything. I tell you this in the spirit of sharing, so that you new chicken owners will know what to expect.

Specifically, expect to lose tomatoes as a matter of course. But also expect that your first winter squash, a beautiful specimen of a variety whose name I can’t remember but whose fruit can approach thirty pounds, will have a big hole pecked out of it when it is still weeks away from being ripe.

In the spirit of fairness, I will point out that it might be, at least in part, your own fault. Particularly if you, like me, are something short of vigilant in the fence maintenance department.

Argh!

Our garden is fenced in with – ha! – chicken wire. At some spots, that chicken wire is only eighteen inches tall. Generally, this is sufficient. We learned early on that chickens weren’t watching Sesame Street the day Grover explained the prepositions. “Up,” they understand. “On,” they understand. “Over” is beyond their ken.

If the fence were eighteen inches high with a bar at the top, they’d fly up to the bar, and then into the garden. But if the top of the fence isn’t something they can roost on, they can’t wrap their minds around the idea that they can simply go over it.

On!

Now, if natural selection were left to take its course, I would think that any creature that can fly would have a very well-developed sense of “over.” One of the wonders of domestication is that we can breed birds that simply have no idea that they have all the necessary equipment to breach a fence.

So, although an eighteen-inch-high fence will keep them out in theory, it will only do so in practice if all the fence posts are secure and straight. If one of them gets loose and leans in, the chickens will simply start walking up the fence until their weight flattens it and they can stroll right in.

Since our fence posts are just bamboo sticks hammered into the ground, this does sometimes happen.

That’s when we lose our tomatoes. And that’s when we got the hole pecked in our squash.

I was pissed about the tomatoes, but I was really pissed about the squash. It was the first obviously set fruit, and I wasn’t expecting too many over the course of the season. When a plant yields a squash that weighs thirty pounds, you can’t expect it to yield a dozen of them.

So I’d been watching this squash carefully. I mounded the marsh hay under it so it wouldn’t touch the ground, and I tracked its progress as it went from just a bud to a promising sixteen-inch adolescent.

Its adulthood was still a long way off, and I worried that the crater our chicken had pecked out of it would let in rot, or insects, or both. Should I just keep it dry and expect it to heal? Should I cover it with packing tape? Should I try to cauterize it somehow?

I would like to say that I came up with the solution myself. That I thought the problem through, considered all the factors, took inventory of the materials at hand, and voila!

Plan A

But I didn’t. Kevin did.

I was obsessing over the problem, combing the Internet for ideas, worrying that I’d lose my giant squash, and Kevin looked up from his online chess game just long enough to say, “Drip wax on it.”

Drip wax on it! Now why didn’t I think of that? We took a tea light out to the garden, and the job was done inside five minutes.

It might not work. Moisture might seep in and get trapped there. Some bug might decide a nice wax burrow was just the thing. If the wound shows any signs of decay, we’ll have to move on to Plan B, whatever that is. Meantime, though, I’m much happier knowing that my squash has a nice wax seal on it.

While we were out dripping wax on the squash, we also secured all the fence posts and added taller chicken wire at particularly enticing spots, just in case. That chickens and gardens can’t coexist harmoniously is irritating, but we’re not planning to give up either one any time soon. Instead, we’ll have to learn to live by Rural Maxim #732: Good fences make good chickens.

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Until we moved here, the only battles I fought with rust were in the toilet, where the iron in the water left those nasty streaks. Now, though, I fight rust everywhere. Pliers stop opening and closing. Bolts become inseparable from nuts. What starts as a tiny chip in the paint on the truck turns into a gaping, corroded hole. All this, the moment you turn your back.

I fight rust everywhere.

The phenomenon of oxidation has turned me into stainless steel’s biggest fan. I look at the anchor chain on the boat, which is thoroughly coated with rust, and then I look at the cleats and fittings, which are shiny and smooth, and I am forced to conclude that no metal thing on this earth should be made with anything but stainless steel.

Things like chains, hooks, screws, nails, wrenches, shovels, anchors, and clamps, naturally. But I’m also thinking I-beams. Vehicles. Sculptures. Just think what a better place the world would be if nothing ever rusted.

The problem, of course, is expense. Stainless steel gets its stainlessness from chromium, which forms an invisible protective layer of chromium oxide when it reacts with air. The higher the chromium content, the better the protection. Low-grade stainless is 11% chromium. High-grade is 28%.

Carbon steel costs something like $700 per 1000 kilograms, which is 7 cents per 100 grams. 100 grams of pure chromium will set you back some $32. When you’re talking I-beams, it starts to add up.

Luckily, there is another way.

It wasn’t until embarrassingly recently that I knew that “galvanized” didn’t just mean “caught the attention of and motivated to action.” I thought crowds could be galvanized, individuals could be galvanized, even the electorate could be galvanized, although not lately. I had no idea that steel could be galvanized.

But it can, and it should.

Galvanization uses zinc to do chromium’s job, and uses it as a coating rather than as an integral part of the metal. It’s a three-step reaction: zinc reacts with oxygen to form zinc oxide; zinc oxide reacts with water to form zinc hydroxide; zinc hydroxide reacts with carbon dioxide to form zinc carbonate. It’s the zinc carbonate that forms the layer with the dull gray finish that protects the carbon steel beneath.

Zinc is cheaper than chromium, and dipping or plating is cheaper than alloy manufacturing, so galvanized steel is much cheaper than stainless. It’s generally only marginally more expensive than ordinary steel. Of course, it’s not as rust-resistant as stainless steel, but it’s leaps and bounds ahead of the ungalvanized stuff.

The temporary fix

We found this out the hard way, with the chicken coop.

Now, you’ve heard me say it more often than is consistent with modesty: Our chicken coop is all that. Kevin designed it, borrowing bits from various other coops and putting them together in a way that works for us and for our chickens. It’s spacious, convenient, and attractive.

But it was inevitable that we made a few mistakes. Our ridge vent faces the wrong way, so a heavy snow blocks it. There are a couple of places where the framing didn’t quite line up and we had to fudge it a bit. There are two lumps running half the length of the roof where I didn’t stagger the shingly things properly. (The other half, which Kevin did, looks perfect.)

The (semi) permanent fix

The biggest mistake, though, was using chicken wire that wasn’t galvanized. That was a mere two years ago, and now our wire has rusted clean through all along the bottom edge, just where a varmint would be looking to get in.

For a couple months now we’ve been patching it with (galvanized) staples, but we were starting to worry that our stopgap measure wasn’t stopping the gap any more. When your chicken wire rusts through, the only answer is to tear it out and replace it. Which Kevin and his son, Eamon, did over the last couple of days.

Me, I’m still working on the streaks in the toilet.

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Rocky, our smallest chick, so named because she was both a barred rock and an underdog, got picked off by a hawk. She had a beak problem, either a deformity or an injury, that apparently made it tough to eat, and her development lagged behind. Still, she was growing. She was also feisty, and always gave us a hard time when we had to round up the flock.

How not to keep hawks away

The birds have been in Day Camp, an area in front of our house that we fenced off with chicken wire. We put them all out there in the morning, let them peck and scratch and run around to their hearts’ content, and return them to the brooder at night.

Last week, Kevin spotted a hawk circling overhead, apparently thinking about having chicken for lunch. To protect the birds, he put a net over their play area. Although the hawks could probably still see the chicks, we were hoping they wouldn’t have a trajectory in.

No such luck. The hawk went around and under, snatched up Rocky, and headed for the tall trees around the pond. We found some feathers around the back of the house.

That put an end to Day Camp. And, since the chicks were too big to spend 24/7 in their brooder, we implemented an Accelerated Chicken Integration Plan.

We’d planned to wait another week or so, and then sneak the chicks into the big-girl coop late at night, after the big girls had gone to bed. But a hungry hawk lent a certain urgency to our situation. Before it could come back for seconds, Kevin rounded up the rest of the chicks, corralled the five grown-up chickens, and put them all in the run.  Together.

We figured there’d be bullying and confusion and fear, but being bullied and confused and frightened beats being eaten. They’ll just have to learn to get along.

Now, if we can go a week or two with nothing dying, I’ll be grateful.

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While I have an abstract understanding that different people enjoy different pursuits, it still boggles my mind that something that bores me witless can fascinate someone else. Someone of the same species, someone whose DNA is virtually indistinguishable from mine. How can it be that a person who is the product of the self-same set of evolutionary forces actually enjoys nonrepresentational art?

What was that noise?

And if I can’t begin to get inside the mind of a fellow human, what hope is there that I can understand a chicken? Oh, sure, there’s less to understand, but there’s much less common ground from which to understand it.

This week, our chicks and poults graduated to day camp.

Day camp isn’t a step they tell you about in the chicken-raising books but it’s the one you inevitably take when the brooder starts looking a wee bit small for the chicks, but the chicks still look a wee bit small for the coop. A little fencing to cordon off a sunny spot is all you need to give your birds a taste of the great outdoors.

I watched as they felt the wind ruffle their feathers for the very first time. They got their first try at flying, their first feel of earth, their first taste of bug. Being outside opens up new vistas for our chickens and turkeys. It’s their first chance to engage in the full range of bird behavior. They run, they peck, they roost, they scratch.

I think they’re happier, but that may be because I know I would be happier.

At least in part. I do know that our grown-up chickens absolutely, positively prefer to be out of the run than inside it. They tell us so, loudly, every morning. But I don’t know whether a chicken kept in a box all its life would be unhappy. If the box had food and water, other chickens, and ample space, the chicken might live out its days in perfect contentment. It would never know about sunshine or inchworms or The Good Life. It would have clean litter, congenial company, and maybe a Rothko print. It might very well be happy.

Remember those Fancy Feast commercials with Morris the Cat? The one where the cat food went on a little crystal pedestal, and the announcer went on about all the ingredients that might sound appetizing to humans? I always thought they were silly because everyone knows a cat would rather eat mutilated chipmunk guts out of a hole in the ground.

Still, I’ve known indoor cats whose lives seem complete. I’ve known overindulged, undisciplined dogs to look as happy as those who lives are rigorously regimented. Pigs can thrive in sties, and pigs can thrive in forests. My chickens run around in the bushes, but I can’t conclude that there aren’t other ways to keep chickens happy. What I know for sure is that I’d be miserable if I were cooped up in the house, so I can’t leave my chickens housed up in the coop.

I draw the line at taking them fishing.

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