Chicken Woes: Part 2

…or Chickens in an Alaskan Winter..

Update from my last blog: Our little depressed chicken lived out the rest of her days next to our heater eating triangular tuna fish sandwiches. We never did figure out what her ailment was..

As winter progressed and the temperatures dropped to -40F our chicken coop construction was put to the test. We built the coop from all reclaimed materials and managed an R20-30 value for the walls, ceiling and roof. The results are that it takes 500W in heat lamps  to keep the indoor temperature around 35F and additionally a 60W heating pad under the water dispenser to keep the water from freezing.  Even with all this rigged up the coop was covered in frozen poopsicles that didn’t thaw until spring and whenever a hen was brave enough to leave the warmth of the heat lamp and venture into the nesting boxes to lay an egg, the egg would freeze within the hour.

A frozen egg is still edible but frozen egg-insides crack the shell, so it needs to be consumed asap. Frozen egg snack anyone?

When the temperatures hovered above 0F the cooped-up (literally cooped up – get it?) chickens were straining to go outside to chomp around on snow and get some fresh air. Chickens have the unique ability to not feel cold – eventhough their limbs are turning blue and falling off. This means they are extremely prone to frostbite. Trust me, we found out the hard way…  Once I noticed little black and blue bits on their combs and wattles I turned to trusty google. The solution is simple: lube their non-feathered parts up with udder butter before sending them outside. So that’s what I did – every morning before going outside, I smeared a healthy dose of udder butter on their combs and wattles and frost bite returned to our coop no more!

And on really cold days (see picture below) – Fairbanks had a record low winter with temperatures down to -60F ….

All the ladies survived the winter.. minus 1 toe. In the hubbub of udder butter and heating pads little attention was paid to chicken toes.

Chicken Woes: Part 1 (there may be many parts to this series…)

I had started this blog post 7-8 months ago but never got around to publishing it..so while a little outdated it is still a relevant and entertaining story from our life in the subarctic.

Chicken woes abound! Where to begin, before we even hit the 6 month mark of living with chickens we experienced almost every single chicken trauma there is to experience…here we were 3 chicken newbies thinking all we had to do was pick out 6 hens, build a coop, stick them inside and we all live happily ever after. Not so…

We lost one hen to a fox in our front yard while I was there watching over them! Alaskan foxes clearly have no respect, otherwise they would have at least waited until I wasn’t looking before snatching the hen.  Lost another one to a mysterious cause of death, thought the whole flock had mites at one point (which requires spraying down the entire coop with bleach), and two to the fact that they turned out to be the wrong gender.  You may recall that 2 of our hens morphed into roosters, which at first we did nothing about still living in the happily-ever-after bubble.  Once the roosters matured and attempted to share 4 hens between the two of them  it all went downhill.  Turns out rooster are horny little suckers mounting hens anywhere from 5-10 times a day (ours anyway, maybe there is something in the water up here…). Those poor 4 hens quickly got sick of all that commotion! With heavy heart we decided we’d need to part with our roosters as the hens became more and more unhappy. One of them even started showing signs of depression!

Never having been confronted with a depressed chicken before, we read all the chicken blogs and chicken advice columns we could find.  The websites recommended such a large variety of cures that it left us a little confused, completely baffled and with this hodge-podge of home remedies that will surely cure the chicken, if not of depression then of ever wanting to be taken care of by humans again. Here is the list:

1. Take chicken and stick its butt over a steaming pot of water for 30 minutes. Repeat as needed.

2. Take apple cider vinegar and lube it up (we didn’t catch what exactly needed the lubing).

3. Feed chicken cayenne pepper (this will definitely cure lethargy if nothing else).

4. Take chicken indoors and hold it as close to fire as possible (roast chicken?).

5. Make chicken a tuna salad sandwich, cut into triangles and feed it to chicken (no kidding, this was one remedy. Wonder if it works as well if we cut it into squares instead of triangles..).

6. Call vet and have X-rays taken and operations done (vets in Fairbanks probably would laugh at this option).

7. If nothing else works cull chicken because it stopped laying and is of no use to you anymore.

Taking some (NOT all) of this advice into consideration, we now have a little depressed chicken living with us inside a cat crate, drinking water laced with Dr. Bach homeopathic rescue remedy, eating oatmeal, rice and bananas and having 6 pairs of cat eyes watching its every move along with 4 human eyes that worriedly appear every 15 minutes and shove food under its nose. How could any chicken be depressed in this situation? Anxious, paranoid …maybe, but surely it’ll cure depression.

Betsy with Sophie watching over her (literally).

Oh the jobs in Alaska..

The sad news is that I haven’t been able to secure funding to continue my PhD next year (yet, there is still hope I suppose)..

After a short period of devastation I realized that this also means that the whole world is open to me again, and I have the freedom to do whatever I like and be whatever I want to be!  Now if only I knew what that was..that would make my life easier. But looking through the job classifieds for Alaska has given me some ideas. Here are some of my options (I did not make these up, I swear):

1. Ship Captain

2. Adult Film Star (18-55)

3. Paranormal Investigator – unfortunately the link expired

4. Wood Cutter

5. Assistant Chimney Sweep

6. Tree Climber

7. Gold Mining Partner

8. Driller

or I could be 9. Female Talent for a Local Video Producer…uh-huh

I’m tempted to be a gold mining partner for sure, but the ad says I must come with my own equipment. Let’s see..I have a Jeep, a rake and a shovel, and some unused flower pots (to put all the gold in of course), wonder if that’ll do?

Boiling Water at -40F

Happy New Year!! After living in Fairbanks for over a year now we finally decided to throw boiling water into the air at -40F – something that seems to be mandatory to do if you live in Northern Latitudes. Here are the results.. ;).

For an explanation of why water evaporates at such cold temperatures check out this posting.

And here is the bloopers reel…

Water Evaporation Bloopers

Fishhead Adventures

Warning: This post contains gory images of fish corpses.

And here’s the first one –

There's a fish in my kitchen sink!

Everyone (except for vegetarians, vegans and myself) fishes in Fairbanks. And who can blame them, we do have the world famous Copper River Salmon in their natural element, aka the Copper River, up here, a mere 6 hour drive from Fairbanks.

Since I did not in fact have the gumption/heart/mindset to club the fish over the head myself, this following story is hearsay.  On a rainy Friday night 3 brave boys set out on a smelly, muddy, exhausting trip to Chitna to dipnet in the Copper River. First stop was to acquire fishing permits, for a mere $20, the limit for Salmon up here is 30 per household. Imagine 30 15lbs salmon…that’s a lot of fish. Needless to say most people have freezer trunks outside – which incidentally don’t even need to be plugged in for most of the year.

Back to Chitna, the boys spent one sleepless night, 12 hours of driving and 8 hours of sticking a giant net into the river in the hopes a salmon would jump straight into the net and then gutting and hiking the fish back to the car.  As the river is rather wild, you can’t drive straight up to it, so you have to park and then hike to the river and tie yourself off while dipnetting so you don’t fall into the river.

In any case, let’s speed forward to the part I was involved in… the boys returned with roughly 10 salmon between them and after a sleep and several hot showers the butchering could begin!

Can I just say that 10 fish, their blood, juices, fins, skin and flesh bits and other random things that sprayed from them equal a very messy kitchen! While the boys knifed, filet, skinned and vacuum sealed the girls fluttered about with their cameras shrieking at the all the appropriate places and tried their hand at lighting the BBQ to produce a decadent meal of freshly caught Alaskan salmon. The pictures below speak for themselves..

Last but not least there remained 10 fishheads, sad and lonely and without purpose. But alas, quick on my feet, I thought of a fabulous purpose for them: the star attraction in a legendary fishhead drop! From the second story window – with a countdown – splat to the porch.

Canning: You want me to do what?!

The fine art of American-style canning has clearly been around for many years, yet somehow in the 15 years (yikes!) that I have now lived in the US this concept and knowledge thereof has completely eluded me.  Mind you it’s been 15 years on and off that I’ve lived here, so maybe that’s my excuse.

In the past, when someone would mention canning I would conjure up this picture in my mind of a regular tin can and someone at home with a welder, welding the tin can shut after stuffing food into it.  While at the time this seemed a bit extravagant to me – just to preserve some food – I would just scratch my head at these crazy Americans with the certain knowledge that surely I would never attempt such a thing myself…

Well, here I am in beautiful, sunny Fairbanks with 5 gallons of wild, freshly picked blueberries and cranberries doing the math that keeping these guys frozen would only work if we didn’t need to put anything else in our freezer – ever again (or at least until it is -20F outside, then we just keep the contents of our freezer outside..eh voila).

The puzzling word “canning” has come up in conversation way more up here then it ever did while I was living the urban lifestyle in DC – it seems people can everything here in summer (while stuff is available and fresh); moose, salmon, cabbage, zucchini, berries, apples..essentially anything that will fit into a “can” will sooner or later end up in one.

So I finally asked the ever important question: Where do you guys get the welder from??

Once it was all explained to me, I first had a good laugh that lasted a full 5 minutes… First of all, why call it canning if in fact it is glass jars NOT cans (and confuse the heck out of people such as myself)? And then boiling jars with food in them seems a bit..I dunno…icky?  Then you have double boiled food on your hands which reminds me a bit of old people’s home fare … And not only that but all the special equipment for all of this costs upward from $50 (a bit steep for a student stipend).

Growing up I know that I witnessed (from a safe distance of course lest I be recruited to be domestic) my German grandmother and mom make jams and jellies and none of it ever involved cans (welded or otherwise), special pricey kitchen equipment, or boiling food in jars. The German and Swiss way to preserve food is to cook the food, stick it in jars, turn the jars upside down, let sit on its lid for a few days (this creates the seal), store in dark cellar and give to relatives as Easter gifts. Ta-da!

But alas, I live in America now, so I shall attempt to can blueberry jam (possibly followed by cranberry-ginger chutney, depending on how the blueberry guys turn out). I have successfully acquired a pressure cooker, though not at all sure at this point about pressure-cooking my blueberry jam jars (she says while suspiciously eyeing the pressure cooker sitting on her table) and special glass jar tong thingies. All I need now is a glass, nay a bottle, of wine “und los geht’s.” (German translation: and let’s begin).

For kicks and giggles here’s my recipe – thought you may want to read it for comedic value but also this potential catastrophe didn’t turn out half bad after all:

Gluten-free (duh), Sugar-free, Spiced Blueberry Jam

4ish cups of blueberries

1/3cup + another “schwupps” (German for a splash) Blue Agave Nectar

juice from 1 lemon

handful of cloves

powdered ginger (to taste)

3 tbsp low-sugar pectin

 

1. Boil your glass jars for cleanliness.

2. Stick blueberries, agave, lemon juice, cloves, ginger and a schwupps of butter in a pot. Awkwardly mash blueberries somehow for a while (I used a spatula).

3. Continue mashing blueberries while bringing the mixture to a boil, once it’s boiling slowly stir in the pectin. Continue boiling blueberry mixture while boiling your glass jars. Stop all the boiling when you suspect your jars to be quite clean.

4. Take jars out, place on a towel. Use special canning tongs for this if you have them. While jars are still hot, fill them up with the blueberry jam leaving 1/4 inch space on top.

5. When the jar water has stopped boiling but isn’t cold yet, stick lids in for a few seconds. This helps soften the plastic to create a better seal, or so I’ve been told. Put lids on jars, after wiping the edge of the jars – for cleanliness and sealing purposes. I am noticing that almost everything with canning either has to do with cleanliness or sealing stuff.

6. Stick closed jam jars back into boiling water, covered with 1-2 inches of water above the lid. Boil the whole thing for another 10 minutes. Let stand 5 minutes. Take out jars, place on counter and wait for popping noises to know that the jars have officially been sealed. Do not open jars again until you are ready to eat the whole thing, even if you forgot something inside (like to take off the blueberry stems or to pick out the stray spider you know was in your blueberry bucket).

7. Not entirely sure actually what this step is. I don’t think you need to store these guys in the fridge, but it might be a good idea to store them in a cellar or similar dark, spooky place. Oh at some point I was also supposed to remove air bubbles from the jars – but that didn’t happen, there was too much else going on at that time to fuss with air bubbles…

Time to do a happy-dance because no one seemed to have been harmed in the making…

PS: I didn’t end up using the pressure part of the pressure cooker..it honestly scares me a bit, all that pressure. Instead I used it for what it is; a large pot and just used it open-lidded to boil water. Ha!

Summertime!

Back in Fairbanks after 6 weeks of traveling around the lower 48 and a fabulous family vacation in Tuscany. I was also honored to be in one of my best friends’ wedding in a redwood forest in California. Unfortunately, I didn’t take many pictures at the wedding, but instead am posting pictures of Alaska in the summertime!  Though I missed the 23 hours of sunlight on solstice I’m excited to still have 1-1.5 months of summer left, this means; hiking, kayaking, berry picking, fishing (if we ever get our butts in gear), collecting wildflowers, chicken coop building, music festivals and state fairs. Hoorah! (Oh and of course focused work on my PhD research..)

Summit Lake with a view of a glacier (the white slide-type thing in the mountains)

Braided river along the Richardson Highway - supposedly there is a wild Bison herd that migrates along the river.

Wild Porcupine! These guys were all over our tent site. Needless to say, they are now my new favorite animal!

No caption needed. 😉

First round of wild Alaskan blueberries - about 45 min of picking got us this bounty. People collect 5 gallon buckets of berries during the summer here.

Beautiful clear mountain lake off the Denali Highway

Alaskan wildflowers - fireweed as tall as I am growing around our back steps.

The chickens have been growing over summer too - look at little Olive's fro!

Home Projects Abound: Tapping Trees and Cleaning Poop – Part II

Chickens!!! (or home project #2)

It amazes me at the outdoor animals people keep in Fairbanks; horses, goats, cows, ducks, geese and chickens.  Guess animals as well as humans can get used to anything, even -40F.  Supposedly..or so we will find out!  We decided to join the ranks of those crazy people and get some chickens.

Not surprisingly, same as with the birch tapping experience, we didn’t think this one through before diving head first into it – and that is how we ended up on a sunny Sunday afternoon with a box full of chickens and no where for them to go and at least on my part no knowledge about chickens at all other than; I think that’s where eggs come from! (don’t you love our gung-ho style of attacking home projects?)

The chicken co-op with our first egg from our layers; Betsy and Athena (not sure which one gave us our first egg)

And this is the story of how 6 chickens ended up living in an Alaskan outhouse for a week… you’d think this would be a brilliant idea, because outhouses are as big or bigger than traditional chicken coops and there is already human poop inside so why not add some chicken poop to the mix.  Well what we didn’t realize is that chickens somehow manage to spray their poop high up on the walls, peck at everything in sight, spill water a hundred times over leaving giant lakes behind and peck at human legs when humans try to use the outhouse.  Note to self: don’t put chickens in an outhouse.

Patience one of our "medium" chickens, i.e. she's a few months old.

Meanwhile, Nathan was busily building our ladies a coop, sourcing 99.9% of the material for it from the transfer station (aka the dump).  Fairbanks has an interesting “transfer station” culture – where your garbage becomes another man’s treasure.  The other members of the chicken co-op (we are 3 co-owners, with a 4th backup owner) – meaning Michaela and I – also wanted to contribute to building stuff for chickens and decided to tackle the chicken run.  Now Alaska is very well known for it’s chicken predators; hawks, ravens, foxes, bears not to mention our 3 cats and random hunting dogs that roam the neighborhood. Taking this into consideration we decided to build the safest chicken run ever – with fencing surrounding the whole thing, even on top, and screws and nails holding the it tightly together with no cracks for anything to get in.  After we built it, we proudly surveyed our work and thought of how much the chickens will like it when we realized – we built it to be so secure nothing can get in, not even the chickens!!!!  (Needless to say it’ll need some reworking this weekend…a door might be nice. Ha!)

Chicken coop in progress.

An example of my little to no knowledge about chickens was when one night I was hanging out in the coop and noticed that our smallest chicken had a giant lump on her throat. Alarmed I surveyed the other chickens to see if they had it too and sure enough 4 out of 6 had a lump varying in size under their necks! All a flutter I ran into the house thinking all our chickens got cancer over night and are growing crazy tumors and started looking up ‘chicken cancer’ online when I found out…. that that is completely normal for chickens! They have a crop under their neck area where they store their food and then digest it later.  So the more they eat in a day the bigger their crop will be.  Whew…so glad to have avoided chicken cancer. Wonder what other chicken mysteries we will discover in the next few months.

The peepers; Chanticlear and Potentially Olive (we haven't decided yet if her name is Olive, so for now we call her Potentially Olive)

By the way, if any of you reading this have any chicken advice for us (i.e. how to make them lay an egg, general chicken health, tips and tricks) please let us know in the comment section below, we would really appreciate it!!

She-Ra our other medium chicken...not drunk as you might assume but taking a sandbath (another thing I learned about chickens..)

Home Projects Abound: Tapping Trees and Cleaning Poop – Part I

With the jump in daylight hours (for about 2 weeks now we have lost all darkness and have transitioned to the realm of neverending daylight), the melting of snow, break-up of river and lake ice, and wonderful 70-80F degree temperatures it is finally time for outdoor home projects again!!

Alaska’s version of maple trees (aka maple syrup) are birch trees (aka birch syrup). End of April/beginning of May is when birch sap flows for about 10 days.  A friend of mine is an avid birch tapper; she gave us instructions, a demo, birch syrup toffee and a tap and off we went in search of the perfect birch tree to tap. As it turns out we live in a spruce forest, and not very confident of how spruce sap would taste, we wandered over to a friend’s house and sure enough found a birch tree to tap there.

Now, tapping a tree is not easy, it’s a bit of a science.  In our first attempt we had the tap, a drill, hammer and bucket.  All well and good. Except when I went to check it the next day (birch sap only stays good for 24 hours, so either you have to drink it, boil it or freeze it within that timeframe) it had rained over night and the tipped-over-bucket contents I excitedly brought home that day tasted a lot like rainwater and forest debris.  Wiser now, the next day we brought foil to cover the bucket and stabilized it with rocks and wood to keep from tipping over.

The other rather important part of tapping a tree is to have a plan in place for what to do with the gallons of sap that will come spewing out of the tree. We didn’t have such a plan. At the end of the 10 day period what we did have was a severe lack of tupperware and a freezer bursting at the seams with frozen birch sap.  Luckily, we only tapped one tree this season…can’t imagine what would have happened if we had tapped 5 like originally planned, our house would have become a birch sap sanctuary.

When the time came to actually put human food in our tupperware and freezer again, we stuffed all the frozen birch sap into our slow cooker and cooked it for about 48 hours. Since the sugar content in birch sap is rather low, it is easy to just burn the whole thing off and not end up with syrup or just with burned residue, so it has to be watched pretty closely.  And the end of this fun home project we ended up as proud owners of a quarter cup of our very own birch syrup (with added forest debris flavorings, because while we did think of straining it there didn’t appear to be a right moment for it, can’t strain it in frozen format and then it already started becoming gooey-syrupy). Ta-da!!

(Part II to follow…)

Our first attempt at birch syrup (+ forest debris flavoring)

You know you live in Alaska when…

… it’s 35F outside and you feel it is so warm you don’t even need a jacket! (to my defense, compared to -40F, 35F IS warm)

…at 40F it is a normal sight to see people in shorts and tank tops.

…it’s light out until 11pm in APRIL! Hoorah for long daylight hours!

…your cats think it’s time for breakfast at 6am because the sun already rose at 5am in APRIL.

…something called “breakup” occurs, which means all the snow and ice that has accumulated over 9 months of winter starts to melt and creates giant puddles and mini-lakes everywhere. Every store sells rows of ‘breakup boots’ – that is their official name and a necessity.

…Alaskans far and wide get excited for the Nenana Ice Classic. This seems to be the Alaskan version of state lottery, the entire state bets on what month, day, hour and minute exactly the ice on the Nenana River breaks-up. They measure it by sticking a tripod into the middle of the river, attached with strings to the shore. The minute the ice breaks, the tripod will move and will trigger a timer. You may be smirking right now, but this event is actually taken quite seriously. The jackpot last year was $200,000! http://www.nenanaakiceclassic.com/

…it is no problem at all to have a chicken coop in your backyard, even if you are just renting and don’t even own the property. Gotta love the absence of homeowner associations! Let the animal sanctuary/zoo accumulation begin!! I’m thinking chickens, ducks and geese to start with….let’s see what else Nathan will let me get away with, mwahahahah!

…it seems like your life revolves around weather. Ha! I feel like all my blogs are about weather and temperatures. A little personal update: the end of the semester and my first year as a PhD student nears.  This means two things, first I am completely overwhelmed and stressed out by everything that still needs to get done in the next 3 weeks (as you can tell I took a procrastination break by writing this blog) and I am one step closer to figuring out what exactly my thesis research should be about. My topic as it stands now is on community disaster resilience in Small Island Developing States (SIDS). I am hoping to do an internship in the Caribbean this summer (poor me – I know, but hey after surviving a winter in Fairbanks, I think I deserve 2 months in the Caribbean this summer).

Ok back to work..