180 animal, vegetable, miracle
/In summer a young rooster’s fancy turns to... how can I say this deli-
cately? The most ham- fisted attempts at courtship I’ve ever had to watch.
(And yes, I’m including high school.) As predicted, half of Lily’s chick
crop was growing up to be male. This was dawning on everyone as the
boys began to venture into mating experiments, climbing aboard the la-
dies sometimes backwards or perfectly sideways. The young hens
shrugged them off and went on looking for bugs in the grass. But the
three older hens, mature birds we’d had around awhile, did not suffer
fools gladly. Emmy, an elderly Jersey Giant, behaved as any sensible
grandmother would if a teenager approached her looking for action: she
bit him on the head and chased him into a boxwood bush.
These boys had much to learn, and not just the art of love. A mature,
skillful rooster takes his job seriously as protector of the flock, using dif-
ferent vocal calls to alert his hens to food, aerial predators, or dangers on
the ground. He leads his wives into the coop every evening at dusk. Lack-
ing a proper coop, he’ll coax them up onto a tree branch or other safe
Home Grown
Oh sure, Barbara Kingsolver has forty acres and a mule (a donkey, actually).
But how can someone like me participate in the spirit of growing things, when
my apartment overlooks the freeway and other people’s windows? Shall I raise a
hog in my spare bedroom?
How big isthat spare bedroom? Just kidding. But even for people who live in
urban areas (more than half our population), directly contributing to local food
economies isn’t out of the question. Container gardening on porches, balconies,
back steps, or even a sunny window can yield a surprising amount of sprouts,
herbs, and even produce. Just a few tomato plants in big flowerpots can be sur-
prisingly productive.
If you have any yard at all, part of it can become a garden. You can spade up
the sunniest part of it for seasonal vegetables, or go for the more understated
option of using perennial edibles in your landscaping. Fruit, nut, citrus, or berry
plants come in many attractive forms, with appropriate choices for every region
of the country.