I discovered this great blog, Madison Street Art, just this minute.
I’m posting it in the Prairie Buzz section of this site even though it has nothing to do with Prairie. Or Sauk.
Our scheme for next summer is procure some chickens and keep them in the pen behind the garage. For fun and for eggs.
The garage is not actually a garage, but an old carriage house with a hayloft on top and a concrete-bottomed enclosure right behind it. It was originally built for chicken husbandry, we think. We’ll return it to its original use.
By “we” I mean my son John Dollar and me. He has wanted to have chickens for a long time. Since he lived at home, which was years ago. I wouldn’t accommodate him back then because we used the pen for dogs. But the current wave of dogs barks too much when penned outside, so we might as well convert it to a chicken palace. Chickens couldn’t be as loud as Jimi the dog, who can bark for several hours without stopping when penned outside. John will come out and help with the chicken project.
I don’t know anything about raising chickens. I grew up in a subdivision. We bought our eggs at Albertsons.
John has done a fair amount of chicken research, but our chicken scheme still has to start by learning a lot more about how to do it.
I went on Amazon and ordered this book from a used bookstore. I love that about Amazon – you can get out-of-print books with a couple of keystrokes.
When I ordered this book I didn’t really know what to expect.
What a cool surprise! Minnie Rose Lovegreen’s Recipe for Raising Chickens is short book filled with sweet advice:
“Sometimes a hen will only have about 3 or 4 chicks, and you’ll say, well, I’m not going to let her waste her time on these 3 or 4 chicks. I’ll give them all to the other one. Well, you can’t do that, unless you make the room dark and give the chicks a good chance to get acquainted with the new mother’s voice. And put the first mother far enough away where the chicks can’t hear her voice. Because if they can hear, they would remember. It’s remarkable the memory that they have.”
And:
“The main thing is to keep them happy.”
Also Recipe for Raising Chickens is entirely hand-rendered. That’s maybe the best part. The illustrations are brush-and-ink, and the text is either brush-and-ink or pen-and-ink. Some examples:
The copy I bought has this inscription:
Good luck to us, too!
BTW, Nancy Rekow and Claire Frost edited Minnie Rose Lovegreen’s Recipe for Raising Chickens and Nancy Rekow also did all the hand lettering. Elizabeth Hutchinson did the lovely illustrations.
That was really fun.
For a couple of years now, the city of Reedsburg and the Wormfarm Institute (an arts incubator and working farm) have put on the Reedsburg Fermentation Fest in October.
The Fest is a “Live Culture Convergence.” For two weekends and the week in-between, it focuses on fermentation and cultures in the literal sense, and also fermentation and culture beyond the literal.
For example, there was a sauerkraut-making demo by Adrienne Fox of Powerkraut, a fermented-food business based in Viroqua. Powerkraut is delicious, made of organic cabbage and sea salt. You can buy it in places like Willy St. Co-op.
But the Fest also featured the Farm/Art DTour – a 50-mile loop drive dotted by installation art and performances. In other words, you drive around the corner and see giant art in the fields, or hanging from the trees. Or you see people sitting on hay bales, watching a performance of an original music/theater piece on the porch of an old house.
All the installations fit in. Katie Schofield’s Come what may installation, for example, was lovely and breathtaking. But it also merged with the landscape so well that I found it comforting. As if, “Ok, that’s what was missing. I’m glad it’s there now.”
I worked on the Fest’s website and some of the printed material. Good times.
The photos above, in order are of Breathing Room, by Laura Annis and Alexis Ortiz,
the Powerkraut workshop, and Come what may, by Katie Schofield.
More photos here, on my flickr page.
Hey, all. I’m taking a vacation from Facebook for a month. I feel that I’m losing an important part of myself – the elderly shut-in part. Facebook is just so social.
I want to take a break from liking things and go back to yelling “Get off my lawn!” to the neighborhood kids, in real time. I want return to the days when I didn’t know what anyone had just eaten. Just for a month.
So, if you’d like to be in touch: annfoley.com. See you in July!
We have three sets of car keys and only two work. Today, while I was in the middle of doing tax prep, my husband needed car keys. I couldn’t find either one of the working sets. I looked in all the places where they should be. No joy.
So I said the prayer, “Tony, Tony, turn around, something’s lost that must be found.” Then I looked in the bottom of my pink bag and there they were! St. Anthony, you rock.
It’s a Catholic thing, praying to St. Anthony. He’s the patron saint of lost articles. When you’re having a panic attack because you’ve lost something crucial you ask him to help out and it always works. My protestant husband laughs at me, but it still works.
I have appreciated St. Anthony for a long time. I’m usually multi-tasking, doing one thing and thinking of something else, and I lose important stuff. So St. Anthony and I are buds, truly. I did the above illustration of him a few years ago because I overwork the guy and I owe him.
I hope he gets a good night’s sleep. My Windows password disappeared and I’ll need some help with that tomorrow. All the tax stuff is in my PC.
