Made from Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life

by Jenna Woginrich

Overview

In a hectic world of mass-produced food, clothing, and entertainment, it’s easy to miss out on the simple pleasures of doing things for yourself. Young web designer Jenna Woginrich chronicles her adventures as she learns to embrace the idea of self-sufficiency in all aspects of her life, including sewing her own clothes, growing her own food, and creating her own fun outside of the mainstream. Woginrich’s hilarious, heartbreaking, and soul-satisfying journey will bring joy and inspiration to those who dream about a more independent lifestyle. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781603422567
Publisher:	Storey Publishing, LLC
Publication date:	04/30/2014
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	775,015
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jenna Woginrich is the author of An Absolute Beginner's Guide to Keeping Backyard Chickens, Barnheart and Made from Scratch. She blogs at coldantlerfarmny.com, as well as for the Huffington Post and Mother Earth News. She shares her farm in rural New York with chickens and geese, sheep, a hive of bees, and some amiable rabbits.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

CHICKENS

The most exciting backyard accessory since lawn darts

My first hands-on experience with my own laying hens happened on a snowy March morning. Everything outside seemed heavy and wet, and the boughs of cedar trees along the road buckled under the uninvited weight of snow. Regardless of the miserable conifers, I was giddy. I was listening to bluegrass on the car stereo and singing along in the annoying way that makes other drivers stare at you at red lights. I didn't care — it was chicken day! I was driving south on Highway 95. My destination: a rural post office a few miles outside of town. I had been instructed to drive around back and knock on the steel door, where apparently some postal worker would hand me a box of fifty chirping day-old chicks. I couldn't decide whether I felt like a seven-year-old on Christmas morning or an agent sent on some kind of agrarian secret mission. After years of dreaming about farm animals, I was finally moments away from having my own.

Most hatcheries ship in the spring and require a minimum order of twenty-five birds, which seemed like too many for a beginner like me to take on. Fortunately, when my friend Diana was ordering her first batch of chicks for the year, she invited me to tack on my humble order. For the unbeatable price of $2.85 apiece, I purchased five Japanese Black Silkie Bantams. I chose Silkie Bantams because I'd read that they were gentle with people and also amazing mothers to their young. Some farmers have been known to take eggs from other breeds and slide them under Silkies to ensure decent parenting when the chicks hatch. Bantams are also smaller than the average, seven-pound chicken, some weighing as little as two pounds and standing half as tall. As someone who might be packing up her flock in cat carriers if she moved, I appreciated their compact size.

Besides their smaller stature and gentle demeanor, Silkies lay perfect little light brown eggs that are about half the size of the ones you'd buy at the store. Five hens meant I'd have well over a dozen quaint eggs a week — more than enough for a single-person household. As an added bonus, the hens look hilarious: pitch black through and through, with a clownlike poof of feathers on their heads (and they weren't anywhere near being the silliest-looking birds in the hatchery catalog, either). They looked nothing like the generic farm chicken, and that suited me just fine.

After a few songs, I arrived at the post office. It was a small building you could've mistaken for a storage shed if you drove by too fast (which I did, and had to turn around). When I knocked on the back door, an old man with a basset hound greeted me and handed over the loudest cardboard box ever. I placed it in the backseat of my toasty Subaru and continued down the road to Diana's homestead — Floating Leaf Farm. A steep hill and some twists and turns later, I pulled into the driveway of the cedar-shingled, log cabin–style farmhouse. After all the snow we'd had recently, it would've passed for something on the label of a maple syrup bottle if it weren't for the year-old steer walking down the driveway to join the rest of its gang.

Diana, who reminds me of a mother hen herself, met me with a smile at the basement door, and I handed her the fifty-bird box. I followed her into the boiler room, where she'd already prepared a brood box for her new arrivals. The room was so warm, it felt like a natural incubator for the new kids. My birds wouldn't get such grand treatment until I took them home, so for the meantime I had brought a small cardboard box with cedar shavings and a hot-water bottle to keep them warm. My Silkies wouldn't be ready for another road trip, though, until they had settled in with some water and snacks after their long journey to the Pacific Northwest from the hatchery in New Mexico.

We set the box on a countertop, and Diana cut open the straps and slowly removed the lid while I tried to contain my excitement. What lay within were the most adorable contents of anything I'd ever gotten from a post office: fifty meandering, fluffy little chirping chicks. It looked like the hatchery had sectioned the aerated box into four main compartments to keep the squirming, peeping poofballs from piling up on top of each other. Half of them were the kind of fat yellow chicks I'd assumed all chickens look like at that stage (these were Cornish roasters for the family's yearly meat supply), and the other twenty-five looked more like confused little sparrows: tawny, black-capped brown birds with black eyes. These were Diana's laying hens, a breed called Barnevelder, which would grow up into handsome brown-egg layers. I scanned the carton for my little black babies, but they were nowhere to be seen. Diana noticed my concern and moved a handful of Barnevelders to the side. In a cowering huddle below them were the tiniest black birds I ever saw — I could hold all five in one hand.

We had to get them out of that shipping box, and soon. The brooder Diana had set up was her own invention: a small, foot-high fence of chicken wire draped with old quilts and blankets. A heat lamp hung through the blankets into the brooder, where there were food and water stations and a comfy layer of cedar shavings on slabs of cardboard to insulate the cold concrete floor. One by one, we picked up each chick and dunked her little beak in cool water before setting her beside the tiny watering font (an upturned Mason jar with a screw-on attachment that allows water to be released slowly). The chicks opened and closed their little beaks and drank the water, which they had just realized they desperately wanted.

"Make sure each bird gets a drink and knows where the fonts are before you move on to the next one," Diana instructed patiently. I was lucky to know someone who was so willing to teach me this stuff. Learning from books is one thing, but actually helping set up fifty chickens for life on a farm was a hands-on lesson I could never forget. I treated my girls the same way and gave them a chance to stretch their legs in the warm brooder before transporting them to their taxi.

*
Within the hour, I was driving back to my farmhouse with a still-chirping but much quieter backseat. When I got home, I rushed them inside to a larger cardboard box on the kitchen counter. A brooder light shone above it, and the thermometer I had taped to the side of the box read 90°F. Perfect. Inside was a little plastic font and a similar contraption that held tiny starter feed crumbles. I gently placed the babies into their new home. For a few weeks, this would be their world. I watched them mill about, pick at their feed, and drink from the font, until finally they all piled together and fell asleep.

This was it. I was a chicken farmer. I spent the next few hours in the kitchen, watching them as if they were being interviewed by Charlie Rose. I was completely enthralled with their journey over the past few days and with having so far pulled off my part of the deal — which was making sure they stayed alive and happy. I sat there staring at them, and as corny as it may sound, I felt a little bit like a parent. A parent with a very specific plan, though. All I could think about was what the summer would be like with these girls strutting around the backyard, laying eggs for me every day.

Well, I'm sorry to say those little birds never did get to strut around my yard, or any backyard, for that matter. My otherwise sweet Siberian huskies got into the brooder box four weeks later when I stupidly left it, unsupervised, at their eye level. In the ten minutes I was gone from the room, they killed all five of the chicks. I had the small consolation of knowing my Silkies had a swift death, but it still had me crying and calling Diana. Sadly, losing livestock — whether it be at the jaws of predators, to disease, or to natural aging — is a reality that even a hobby farmer with a painted-cottage coop needs to deal with.

After some discussion, we decided that I would try again with new chicks when she placed a meat-bird order later that month. This batch of Silkies I would raise in the garage. So that I could have some chicken-rearing experience before they arrived, Diana gave me three of her adult birds for the backyard coop I had already set up outside my kitchen window. Kind of like training wheels.

Enter Bertha the Buff Orpington, Astoria the Australorp, and Glowbug the Light Brahma. By cover of night, when Diana's two hundred chickens were sleeping on their roosts, we snuck in and kidnapped the three giant, heavyset hens. Apparently, transporting chickens at night is the only way to go. They seem to be calmest and most comfortable on a new roost when they wake up there. With little trouble, we settled the three girls into a carrier and put it in the Subaru. I drove them the twenty miles to my place, where we took them behind the house to their new coop — a raised hutch, lined with hay and stocked with a sturdy roost and laying box. After we settled the birds in, I closed the wire door and latched it. Within minutes, they were fast asleep.

Well, I didn't have much luck with those hens, either. Astoria took off for the woods as soon as I opened the door to the hutch and was never seen again. The other girls stuck around but just freeloaded. They didn't lay a single egg. I thought the purpose of having laying hens was, well, laying. But those biddies were more interested in pest control than production. All they did was cluck around the pine trees, eating bugs and snapping at flies. After a few weeks, I sheepishly approached Diana about a trade for some younger birds. I felt guilty, after all she'd done for me, but she just laughed. I guess when you have hundreds of chickens, you don't take individual character analysis personally.

Bertha and Glowbug went home to their old roost and three new gals took their place: a Red Star, a Buff Brahma, and a Welsummer. These girls didn't come with names, but it was pretty easy to hand them out the following morning. I woke up to such a clatter I thought they were being ripped apart by a coyote and ran outside in my pajamas. Inside the safely latched coop was the screaming Welsummer. She was ticked off to wake up in a smaller, less fancy space, and she wasn't going to take it quietly. I didn't know what to do. She didn't want her feed or water. She just wanted to carry on. I thought the neighbors were going to call the police, so I opened the coop and scooped her up in my arms like a kitten. She defecated all over me. Fine. I set her down to explore the yard. That didn't help at all. She just kept walking around screaming even louder. I named her Ann Coulter.

The other girls were quickly named as well. Veronica was the proper name for the quiet and cooing Brahma. A real sweetheart, that one. And Mary Todd Lincoln was the name for the crazy Red Star. These girls turned out to be champion layers, each of them laying a different color of egg. Mary Todd's were a classic warm brown, Ann's were a dark, speckled chocolate, and Veronica's were a classy cream. Sometimes I'd get the coveted trifecta: all three eggs waiting in the nest box when I came home from work.

Having chickens was so much fun and so rewarding, I wanted more. Soon I had the new Silkie chicks in the garage and my convent in the backyard, but I wanted to add some middle ground to the mix. With young chicks inside and my used birds with their own levels of personal mileage already established, I thought it would be wise to get a young laying-age hen to join the menagerie.

So, I ordered an eighteen-week-old hen from a hatchery. These adolescents are called "started pullets," and if you want eggs soon, they are the way to go. I named the new hen Mindy. She was a pretty red production layer like Mary Todd; in three weeks, Mindy started laying tiny pullet eggs, and a few weeks after that, she was churning out a whopper a day, some with two yolks inside!

That's one of the perks of having your own chickens: you get to see all the crazy egg mutants that aren't sold at the grocery store. There are giant double eggs that can't fit in regular cartons, and flat-sided eggs, and bumpy eggs that came out too fast. Some are dyed only halfway by the bird's vents, as if they'd been dipped in varnish. (Vents are chickens' all-purpose exit chutes. They lay eggs from vents, and other necessaries exit that way, too, if you catch my drift.)

By high summer, my little flock was producing up to eighteen eggs a week. They ran around the yard happily clucking; the Silkies, now old enough to join in, scratched around, tapping out Morse code to the big girls' more elegant prose. Friends who stayed over woke up to juvenile Bantam rooster crowing and could be introduced to the exact source of their French toast and scrambled eggs. It felt good knowing that some of my food was coming from such a healthy, happy source. The flock was less work than a house cat and cost less to acquire, set up, and feed than buying a new iPod. I didn't understand why every backyard in America didn't have a flock of its own. They were quieter than any of the neighbors' dogs and just puttered around the garden eating slugs and bathing in clouds of dust. I envied them every day I drove off to work.

At dusk, when I returned home, I spent more quality time with the birds. Right before dark is when they're the most active and fun to watch, so I'd go out with my fiddle and play to the crowd. I wasn't very good at first, but they never complained during those early squeaks and squawks. Annie and Jazz watched from the kitchen window, tails wagging. Some nights in July, the farm was an absolute paradise. The cool Idaho summer night had me wrapped in a warm fleece jacket while hens hopped around the backyard. Mountain music wafted from my beginner fiddle as the tree frogs and crickets started their backup tracks. The honeybees hummed as they headed home to the hive from the garden, which was rich with fresh vegetables and bright sunflowers. The sun set behind the Selkirk Mountains in a pink-and-purple western sky. On those nights, it felt like everyone and everything was in its proper order, living together in my own peaceable kingdom.

HATCHING A PLAN

If you're seriously considering getting a few layers of your own, find out what type of hens will work best for you. Take all the variables I've mentioned — climate, space, and eggshell colors — into account when making your decision. Many bookstores and feed stores offer breed reference help, and if you're not too shy, ask the people who are buying chicken feed what types of birds they have. (There's a great chance that they already did this kind of figuring for you.)

There are three main ways to go about acquiring chickens: adopting or purchasing birds from a local farmer, ordering day-old chicks from a mail-order hatchery, and ordering young started pullets.

HENS, READY TO LAY

Unless you happen to have a chicken-farming friend or coworker, you'll have to do some digging around to find quality birds. The two best places to ask are farmers' markets and gourmet restaurants. This might seem like an odd coupling, but hear me out. The reasoning is simple: farmers' markets have farmers, and many gourmet restaurants are joining the locavore craze, which means they need a local source for their eggs. Try the markets first. Find people selling free-range eggs and start talking shop. Ask what kind of hens they have and why they chose them. More than any other kind of hobbyist I've met, poultry folks love getting new people involved. As soon as you give them the green light to talk birds, they'll be telling you about coop design plans and winter feeding regimens. See if they'd be willing to sell you a trio of hens. If you have no luck at the market, call some high-class eateries and see who their egg suppliers are.

Adult birds need very little time to get used to their new digs, but there are still some tips that make it easier. The most important thing to do is to have their coop ready for them when they arrive. Wait until it's dark and set them up on their new roost. Chickens really do take better to their new homes if they wake up in them the following morning. If you live somewhere rural or have an open backyard, don't be afraid to let them live without a pen. The birds always return to their coop at night; all you need is a sturdy latch on the door. When they've all filed in, close it and your work is done.

PEEPS IN THE 'HOOD

Ordering chicks means you'll know the birds from day two or three and be able to watch them grow into feathery adulthood. You'll be able to pick exactly the kind of chickens you want, and in just a few months they'll be laying eggs and napping in the sun. The downside to this is that you do have to wait several months for eggs, and for those of us excited to have a healthy, fresh source of local food, raising chicks might be a sentimental extravagance. It's a really cute sentimental extravagance, though. I still have two of the Silkies I raised from chicks, and they're sitting on a pile of eggs right now. I might have a whole new farm-raised bunch of little babes soon, and seeing them grow to parenthood is nothing short of touching.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Made From Scratch"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Jenna Woginrich.
Excerpted by permission of Storey Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface,
Introduction,
CHICKENS,
GROW YOUR OWN MEAL,
BEEKEEPING,
THE COUNTRY KITCHEN,
OLD STUFF,
DIY WARDROBE,
WORKING HOUSE DOGS,
ANGORA RABBITS: PORTABLE LIVESTOCK,
HOMEMADE MOUNTAIN MUSIC,
MOVING ON,
Outside the Farm,
Want More?,
Research, Son,
Reading Group Discussion Guide,
Copyright,