A rat in the chicken coop

Last week I had a chance to let my inner hillbilly out for some fresh air and rat poison. I discovered her identity recently when my son, the lucky one, found one of our chickens dead in the coop and freaked out. Hillbilly mom to the rescue. Now it was my hillbilly alter-ego's second chance for freedom and Clampett-esque fun. This time, my inner Ellie Mae was charged with eliminating rats from the chicken coop. Ellie is freaked out by rats, so this was going to be interesting. 

     When dealing with rats, one needs to reconcile one's desire for organic, natural, non-toxic solutions with one's desire for complete freedom from rats in the chicken coop. According to my neighbor and experienced farmer, Mr. D, you really can't have both. I was resolved to give it a shot, anyway. So I started researching ways to keep critters out of the coop. I think you can see where this might be heading, but let's journey together anyway. 

     First I tried bird tape and wire mesh. When my husband, Farmer Turnipseed, built the coop for me, we envisioned this fabulous chicken ark moveable coop. I have my pockets of farming in raised boxes. Oh Let me digress for a moment and say that I have major raised box envy. My best friend in the whole world other than my husband has these amazing raised boxes and I want them. Would steal them in fact, but they will never fit into my Prius. Anyway. Back to the coop my husband built. The plan was to move the coop and perch it over the raised boxes and let the chickens make my garden soil so fertile I could grow mutant tomatoes (like my friend with the fab raised boxes). In order to keep out the local fauna, he built a mesh botton on a frame that we thought was rat-proof. We'd been warned by Mr. D that we'd have rats. We should've listened but no, we thought with our new organic farming methods and superior research capabilities and modern technology and hermetically sealed chicken ark we'd be able to escape infestation. Hah. 

     Apparently, the rats burrowed beneath the chicken coop and squeezed themselves through the mesh on the bottom of the coop, and helped themselves to the chicken feed bounty. Weirdly, my 2 remaining hens do not seem too bothered by this. At least not as much as I am, which is so freaked out that I carry a hoe when I go get eggs now just in case I am ambushed by giant mutant swamp rats. They grow in your imagination. 

       Our first line of defense, once the mesh didn't work and the bird tape was useless, was to try radio noise. Mr. D swears by this, but for raccoons. It seems to work well for the coons, but the rats either are having a party to my irritating techno station and news, or they don't care. The lure of cracked corn is stronger than the deterrent of disco and static. 

       Next, when ignoring them didn't work either- they just got more bold and started leaving droppings in the FOOD can- I tried cayenne pepper powder. The kind person who gave me the chickens in the first place and who has a really cool sheep farm (ranch? would you say ranch?) told me that she uses the hot pepper powder in her coop and it works great. I didn't listen. I thought I wouldn't need it. Instead, when I finally tried it I successfully gave myself an asthma attack by breathing it in and inadvertantly wiped it in my eyes -thus igniting a 3 day long crying spree- not recommended. However, the rat droppings in the food bowl dropped off considerably. Apparently the chickens don't taste the pepper powder, but like humans, the rats don't like it in concentration. LOVE that as it doesn't really hurt anyone wearing a full biohazard suit and respirator. So far our rats haven't stolen our apocalypse gear.

     However, when my son came screaming into the house one evening- it is his daily chore to put the chickens to bed and gather up eggs- that he'd seen 4 rats in the coop, that was almost the final straw. The final straw came zinging along and zapped me when I was on the deck and discovered rat droppings all around my WINDOW and up my wall toward the attic vent. going INTO MY HOUSE. GROSS. That was it. Total WAR. 

     My husband bought rat poison, spread it around strategically, I kept up with the cayenne pepper, and we learned that whatever your organic and natural intentions, if you live in an area infested with rats, sometimes you have to use poison. And it works better than anything else. 

Homegrown tomatoes (and some family thrown in)

I haven’t planted my tomato pocket yet because I can’t decide where they might actually prefer to grow. Perhaps the raised box in my front yard. The one currently filled with snap peas, lettuce, spinach, and some stray mystery beans that my sons stuck randomly in the ground.  Or maybe I could plant my tomatoes in the raised box on what I fondly call the Rose Terrace, which is really an old side-yard gravel driveway with roses planted around the perimeter.  One thing I know for sure my outsourced tomatoes will blend into my homegrown gardens just fine.

This week as I watched the spindly new tomato plants bending in the spring monsoon (or gully washer, as Mr. Wonderful calls it) it occurred to me that my tomatoes might need some shelter.  Shelter. For a bird, that could be a nest. For a squirrel, it might be a den underneath my deck. For a child, the most precious shelter is the shelter of a loving family.

                There is a lot of talk in the media right now about what exactly constitutes a family; but if I look at it through the lens of Pocket Farms it seems obvious. Take my tomatoes for instance. They are still in the pots in which I bought them. Yes, I BOUGHT plants instead of being all earthy and starting my own in egg cartons in the dining room window. And yes, I bought my plants a couple weeks ago and haven’t planted them yet. But I will this weekend and I know exactly what they need.

Garden bounty from 2009- the  'poop garden'
(see Pocket Farms posting from May 2012)

                First, like my kids, my tomatoes require a rather marked level of simple acceptance. I accept that my tomatoes are hybrids and probably not organic. Still, they will produce sweet tomatoes and pretty yellow blooms all summer. Well same thing with my kids! In the case of my home grown daughter, I know where she came from and so does her daddy because he caught her when she entered the family. My 2 adopted kids, on the other hand, are hybrids and really, I don’t know that much about their stock. Their roots. I know a little bit, but they don’t have the family tree stretching back centuries that I can document for my homegrown child. But we accept them for who they are and all 3 of the kids are blending right in to our garden of family. Which, by the way, they all 3 take for granted- and I count that a victory!

                 My kids, I can tell you for sure, require regular watering and feeding. So do my pets, and so do my tomatoes. Although now that I think of it nobody eats as much as my soon to be 11 year old son. That kid can put away the food! The conditions for optimal growth for all take some work and some research to figure out, but once we get it right (sometimes after much trial and error) all of our children- the transplants and the homegrown- are able to thrive.

                So what about shelter? Its function is so mundane. It keeps us safe, it keeps us warm, it gives us a defined space away from the rest of the world. It is our own place. The place where we go when we need to get out of the monsoon and have daddy give us a bandaid or mommy tie our shoe. It seems to me like that’s what we’ve created here at our home. A loving shelter for ourselves and our children. A place where we can all safely thrive and grow without being bowed by the monsoon. A home with farm-able pockets.

                Family, like shelter is a basic human need. In our family we’ve invited biologically unrelated children and even non-human beings in to our fold.  If you were to see us driving down the freeway, you’d see us driving the Big Stinky Beast with our human and non-human family members peeking out the windows. Kids, dogs, cats, grown-ups sheltering and nurturing each other. Thriving and growing.

                If people can provide a great environment for tomatoes, it doesn’t really matter whether the plants are adopted or homegrown. It doesn’t matter what religion the people are or whether they are bio-intensive or laissez faire gardeners. It shouldn’t matter whether they are married, single, purple, green, straight, gay, or questioning.

                And you could say the same thing for families: if people have defined, created, or lucked into their family, and if they can provide a loving shelter for children to thrive and grow- for all of the family to thrive and grow- then nothing else should matter.  

                I’d better gather up my kids and see about recycling some plastic to create a ghetto greenhouse for my tropicals. Then we’d best get those tomatoes planted. After all—the store-bought hybrids have the same needs as my homegrowns.