The Wisdom of the Radish

by Lynda Browning

  At the market, Emmett and I packed up the leftover cucumbers and summer squash for the last time this year. Other farmers would continue to carry these relics of summer for the next few weeks, but not us.

  When we got back to the field, every member of the cucurbit family was toast, the morning’s silvery scene replaced by a despondent field filled with brown, collapsed vines. It was as though a fire had swept through and left behind femurs of forest, house ribcages—a miniature version of familiar Southern California firestorms without the ash rain.

  Freezing isn’t unlike burning. As water crystallizes, it expands: hydrogen bonds straighten out and lock into place. The individual cells of plants are comprised primarily of water. When they freeze, their rigid walls shatter. When they melt, the thawed, life-giving water leaks uselessly out of the broken cell—evaporating into a gas, which is just what happens in a fire.

  And as it turns out, experts agree that you’re supposed to harvest winter squash before the first frost; the bit about ease of harvesting is true, but with the usual catch-22 of any old wives’ tale. Specifically, while the gourds are easier to pick out in the field, they don’t keep as well if they’ve been frosted.

  Not wanting to leave them out for another night, we gathered our weapons. Confronted with buck knives and pruning shears, the fruits easily dissevered from the vines. We placed them in piles by type and ferried armfuls to the back of the truck. A quarter of the field filled the pickup’s long bed and heaped high over the rails.

  So much of the farmers’ market is about summer. Bright, bold fruits and flavors—color and crunch and panache. We’d earn less now that these sexy moneymakers were gone, but somehow I was okay with the trade. It’s fine to revel in the bounty when you have it, but revelry doesn’t get you through the winter. Storage does.

  And right now, we had three pickup beds’ worth of winter squash to get us through the winter. Round, oblong, short, and squat, they’d join their cousins to keep us fed until spring rolled around again. The tomatoes had been skinned, deflated, boiled, acidified, and crammed into a jar. The cucumbers and beans, ensconced in apple cider vinegar and garlic, were discolored and softened. The potatoes—which under perfect conditions could keep for months—would soon start to sprout, sending long, skinny tendrils out of wooden boxes in the basement.

  But the last miracle was this: Without any preservation effort on my part, frost damage and all, the squash would keep through winter, spring, and summer, well into the following fall.

  Chapter 9:

  BUM NUTS

  And Other Chicken Firsts

  As soon as I saw Hope in the coop, I knew what it meant. I walked purposefully back to the house and opened the front door.

  “Emmett!” I shouted without entering. “I think Hope’s about to lay an egg!” I slammed the door shut and sprinted back to watch.

  My chickens wouldn’t be caught dead in the coop during the day. As soon as I’d open the doors in the morning, they would fly out—an exodus of feathers, pine shavings, and dust—and spend the day roaming the pasture. They entered the coop only if they were craving a midday grain snack, or when it was nearing sunset and time to lay claim to the best sleeping spots.

  It was winter, and the sun was low enough in the sky that direct light shone through the old, southern-facing window we had framed into the coop for this very reason. Although the glass was dirty, the light that shone through was crisp. And there Hope stood, in the coop in broad daylight, framed by clean light slanting through the dusty window. It was as though she was caught in the spotlight, and even her shadow was nervous about it. She had a bee in her bonnet—and, I was wagering, an egg up her bum.

  I picked her up and placed her in one of our newly minted nest boxes. She settled right in. After a few minutes, she got up, perched on the edge of the box, and peered down at the nest as though wondering whether it was a worthy spot for whatever grand occasion was about to take place. A Rhode Island Red hopped up and cocked her head, one eye squarely facing Hope: whatcha doin’? With that, Hope settled back into the nest, fluffing her feathers and flattening her body into a position I’d not seen her assume before. When I nudged in for a closer look, she raised her feathers like hackles and emitted a draconic roar. I decided that, given the circumstances, permitting her some privacy was appropriate.

  If you haven’t raised chickens, this probably seems like much ado about nothing. After all, every schoolchild knows that chickens lay eggs: it’s what they’ve been bred for seven thousand years to do and why I brought them into my home in the first place. But those who share my poultry addiction will understand the intense anticipation. I had waited six months for this moment—no, I’d worked six months for this moment, from the first slice of the saw through a two-by-four to form the skeleton for the first failed chicken coop, to the weeks spent constructing the second Fort Knox, to the hours spent feeding, cleaning, caretaking, and generally obsessing over my brood. Not to mention the hundreds of pounds of organic chicken feed I’d gone through to reach this moment. (Another author spoke of a $64 tomato, and I refused to actually perform the math on my eggs so as not to vindicate Emmett’s skepticism about my fledgling chicken business. Still, I can safely say that between the coops and feed, this would be somewhere in the ballpark of a $1,000 egg. In my defense, my chickens would earn around $100 a week after they hit full production.)

  In a couple of hours, Hope had disappeared from the coop and nest, and in her place sat a tiny, sky-blue egg. It was so small, in fact, that after we brought it into the house for safekeeping, we couldn’t quite figure out how to display it best. We tried showcasing it in an eggcup, but it settled down into the hollow, not even protruding above the ceramic surface. Placed in a basket, the egg looked laughably lonely. And still I couldn’t stop admiring it. It was five months’ worth of hope, after all.

  Our new layer didn’t miss a beat. She cranked out tiny blue eggs every day. After we’d amassed four, although they probably added up to only one grocery store extra-large, we figured it was close enough to a meal. We fried them and ate them on toast with an air of ceremony. They may have been small, we noted, but they packed a punch: they stood up pertly in the pan, and when we forked into the yolks and they bled out onto the bread, the color was a brilliant orange tending toward red. And they would get bigger with time, too. Pullets (young hens) start out laying small eggs, but as they mature, their eggs creep up in size until they resemble those from the grocery store.

  In another week, a second Ameraucana joined Hope in the nest boxes, and soon we found ourselves gifted with two eggs nearly every day. Then a Rhode Island Red came into production, adding brown shells to our colorful collection. Perhaps incensed by her new competition, Hope found a way to out-do them: she started on an every-other-day double-yolker schedule. Double yolkers are the avian equivalent of mammalian twins—but because the logistics of breaking out of an egg are considerably different from those of giving birth, these eggs would never hatch naturally. There simply wouldn’t be enough room for both birds to fight their way into the world. Double yolkers don’t make it in the commercial food world, either: grocery stores hinge on standardization and packaging. They’re too tall to fit in standard cartons, so the simple pleasure of cracking open an oversized egg and finding two yolks is one known to backyard keepers alone. And although there are plenty of arguments to be made against keeping chickens—they’re dirty, they eat everything in sight, they tie you down, they’re prone to dying just as soon as they grow on you—it’s the double yolkers and the delight of gathering still-warm eggs from a straw nest that make it worthwhile.

  One of our first double-yolk eggs towered over its singleyolk counterparts.

  And at first, I was oddly hesitant to share these joys. Intellectually I knew that the chickens would keep laying—we were now past the solstice and as the days grew longer, they’d only produce more—but still, I had a hard time trusting that they would. I fought the urge to hoard my golden eggs. It hadn’t
quite hit me that, like the responsibilities, the gifts of the chicken are a daily act.

  “We’ll keep getting more,” Emmett told me, after I expressed regret that he sold a precious dozen to one of our farmers’ market customers, who made a special trip out to our farm to pick them up.

  The man had never spoken truer words.

  I had a theory: if twenty-five chickens were fun, then fifty chickens must be twice the fun. I’d been assured by local egg sellers that although it wouldn’t be twice the work—certain chores, like tucking the chickens in at night and letting them out in the morning, took a fixed amount of time—it would mean twice the number of eggs to sell.

  I’d been ruminating on this theory for a couple of months. In those two months, diving deeper into the addiction, I’d become a bit of a (dare I say?) chicken snob. Right now, I only had hatchery birds—which, according to poultry fanciers and PETA (one of the few subjects on which they agree), is the equivalent of a puppy-mill purebred. These birds are often mass-produced in large warehouses without much individual attention given to the characteristics that count on a small farm: the number of eggs produced per year, the age at which the bird reaches maturity, its longevity, personality, feed consumption, and ability to forage.

  Hatcheries commit other sins disavowed by poultry snobs. They often sell blue egg–laying birds as “Ameraucanas/ Araucanas,” which is approximately the same as labeling a dog a Golden Retriever/Chihuahua and calling it a purebred. The birds they sell are often similar to Ameraucanas but don’t meet the color standard for the breed. And they’re nothing like the bizarre Araucana—a truncated, rumpless chicken with feather-covered fleshy protuberances sticking out of its cheeks. The Araucana is extremely rare, partly because the rumpless characteristic can be affiliated with a lethal gene, and many eggs fail to hatch at all.

  The point being: my Ameraucanas, including Hope, were mutts. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my mutts, but if I was really committed to heritage livestock and the promotion of small family farms—not to mention humane, small-scale raising of poultry—I couldn’t source solely from hatcheries.

  So I took the advice of my addiction-enabling online friends, and ordered purebred heritage eggs from farms across the country. Other chicken-fancying farmers collected the eggs from their heritage flocks, lovingly packed each egg individually in bubble wrap and newspaper, and then mailed them a thousand miles to California—where I unpacked them, placed them in an incubator, and began to wait.

  For the first eighteen days, there were plenty of ways to keep busy. Fortunately, my incubator came with an automatic egg-turner so I didn’t need to rotate the eggs three times a day. However, once a day (and sometimes more), I slipped a digital hygrometer into the warm, humid incubator and waited for the temperature and humidity to level out on the screen. The automatically controlled temperature always hovered around 100 degrees F. The humidity, however, was a manual job and would fluctuate wildly if I wasn’t careful. I had to figure out just how large a puddle in the bottom of the incubator was required to maintain a constant 35 to 40 percent humidity—and of course, as the puddle evaporated, I had to add additional liquid. After much debate, I decided to use the “dry incubation” method, which called for increasing the humidity in the room and using smaller puddles inside the incubator for a lower humidity. To Emmett’s great amusement, I draped wet towels everywhere, and once a day I boiled a kettle of water and placed it, still steaming, near the incubator.

  On day fourteen, I candled the eggs. A pretty verb, to be sure, but more accurately I headlamped them. With a proper setup, you can actually see the embryo moving inside the egg. Since mine was primitive (me and an LED headlamp in a darkened room), I saw one of two things: a translucent egg, or one whose embryo was sufficiently developed to block some of the light. I left the translucent eggs in the incubator for a few days more, just to be safe, and after headlamping them a second time on day eighteen, I removed the blanks.

  On day eighteen, I was supposed to increase the humidity substantially and—perhaps the most difficult direction of all to follow—not open the incubator again until all the chicks were finished hatching.

  According to my obsessive-compulsive research, this could be a long process. Sometimes a chick breaks the shell—the first little tapped-out hole is called a “pip”—and then waits twenty-four hours before undertaking the second part of the hatching process. During this time, the nervous human mother hovering over the glowing incubator worries that the baby has died. She frets, she fidgets, but she must not open the incubator—losing humidity at this crucial step could be fatal to chicks still in the shell.

  The second step in the hatching process is called zipping, for good reason. Baby birds are very careful. After a chick pips, it waits until it’s absorbed the last of the yolk—until the blood vessels that have connected it to its life support system for the last three weeks have all dried down. If the chick hatches before this happens, it can literally bleed to death. But once it’s ready for the world, it begins methodically tapping out a line of latitude around the egg. Its little egg-tooth (a sharpened point on the beak that falls off shortly after hatching) breaks through the eggshell while a lack of oxygen triggers the bird to kick, which helps it rotate neatly around the egg.

  The trouble is, if you’re using an artificial incubator, you might not have the humidity quite right. If it’s too humid, the chick can literally drown. Over the course of the twenty-one-day incubation period, approximately 15 percent of the egg’s water content must evaporate so that when the chick pips, it pips into an air cell—something that enables it to breathe just enough until it manages to break out into the greater atmosphere.

  If the environment is too dry, however, the chick can get stuck inside the shell. The membrane that lines the calcareous shell is soft and supple when damp, but dries into something like glue.

  Inside the Styrofoam walls of the incubator, a life and death drama waited to play out. The beauty is, chicks have been successfully hatching from eggs for thousands of years; life usually triumphs.

  It was three o’clock in the morning when I was awakened by a shrill, angry cheeping coming from the incubator room. Not wanting to wake Emmett, I left the lights off and slipped into the incubator room to huddle over its red glow. One egg had been neatly broken in half, and on the wire mesh floor beside it, a tiny wet creature was heaving—and screaming its tiny little head off. After it screamed for a few seconds, it contorted, kicking out its feet and legs and head erratically, and convulsed across the floor. Once the chick stopped, it started cheeping again as if to say, “All that work for this?”

  I couldn’t stop the grin from spreading across my face. Watching baby chicks make their way into the world was like Christmas morning. Where for three weeks there was a wrapped package, beautiful and whole, suddenly there were ribbons and wrapping paper everywhere—and a brand-new life rolling around the floor.

  I tore my eyes away from the angry little yellow thing to check the progress of the other eggs. Another chick was working its way out, and had zipped a quarter of the way around its egg. A third had broken out a little hole; its beak rested in the microscopic window, moving ever so slightly as it breathed.

  I wished them luck, and slipped back into bed.

  Twenty-four hours later, puffy chicks in black and dark gray and reddish-yellow and silver were careening around the incubator, bumping into one another in their attempt to find nonexistent breakfast. And that little beak was still there. I’d been checking on it, waiting for it to make progress; a few times I saw it moving in and out like a saw, but it seemed unable to go anywhere. It had been in the same position for twenty-four hours, the allotted time period for the second phase of hatching.

  I was pretty sure that the chick was stuck.

  Now, some chicken fanciers believe that chicks that get stuck are stuck for a reason—they’re not strong enough, they wouldn’t have hatched on their own, so it’s better to let them die. And then there are thos
e of us who are suckers for tiny creatures trapped in enclosed spaces, trying valiantly to make their way into the world. Call it compassion, call it claustrophobia, but the thought of dying dark and alone, tiny limbs trapped and intertwined, was too much for me to stomach.

  There were still a couple of eggs that hadn’t hatched; the “do not open” rule was still in effect. So I didn’t exactly open the incubator. I draped it in hot, wet towels; Emmett cracked the lid open the tiniest bit; I slipped my hand under the towels and grabbed the egg. At the ready was a hastily assembled chick birthing kit: tweezers, a few Q-tips, a bowl of hot water, and paper towels. Wielding tweezers and mimicking the zipping step, Emmett flaked off bits of the egg around its equator while I moistened the membrane beneath with a Q-tip. We turned on a heat lamp and cradled the egg beneath it so the tiny creature inside wouldn’t die of chill.

  After Emmett had completed his circumnavigation of the egg, we waited. At this point, the chicken message boards told us, the chick should be able to give a swift kick and finish the job, splitting the egg in two and making its grand entrance into the world.

  Nothing happened. The bird wiggled a bit, a tiny movement visible beneath the white membrane. All of our energy was focused on this tiny creature, willing it to kick off the shell.

  Nothing happened. “Well,” I said, “Let’s keep going.” Emmett continued to flake off bits of eggshell. I started to pull back the membrane. We looked anxiously for blood—there was none. We were safe.

  After another minute, I decided it was time to get drastic. This had taken ten minutes, and despite the heat lamp, the egg was cooling to the touch. I pulled off the top half of the egg, and immediately saw why the chick was so attached to his little window. A part of the membrane had dried on to his forehead like cement, completely covering his eye. Emmett pulled off the wet membrane covering the chick’s back and neck. Wetting the hardened part with a Q-tip, I winced as I slowly, steadily pulled it off, hoping that the eyelid wouldn’t come with it. It didn’t. Then I gently tipped up the bottom half of the egg.