I marvel at how many people think chickens have no character, are largely interchangeable. We have four girls, all a year old, and each of them has a personality all their own. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t similarities.
The biggest similarities are apparent in the area of our garden previously known as the lawn. It was, to be fair, not much of a lawn. I preferred the weeds over the couch grass. Couch grass is almost the epitome of capitalist society. It takes water, it takes soil, it takes nutrients, and turns them into something shallow-rooted. It looks green, but unlike native grasses or clover or dandelions, it’s all on the surface. Despite this, the roots form an almost impenetrable mat. You try to dig it out, but it just takes an overlooked inch of root below the surface, and the vile stuff springs to the surface again.
I am aware of those who claim it has miraculous medicinal properties, but remain doubtful. It could be an ideological position rather than a position of reason, but I’m not budging.
Chickens, however, make short work of couch grass. With all those succulent roots just near the surface, and plenty of time to hunt out every last inch, the couch grass disappears. And I have a warm fuzzy feeling that it could be gone for good.
What is left, however, is equally unedifying – again, the parallels with what will be left behind once capitalism has been rooted out springs unbidden to mind. Bare dirt, fertilised with a layer of chicken poop, it could support life, if only given some time to recover from the fowl depredations.
With that in mind, today the assignment I gave my children was to erect a shelter for our lawn, a shelter where it could recover from the girls. We filled up some pots with stones (the we meaning the kids filled the pots with stones, while I suggested it might be a good way of ensuring the chickens couldn’t knock them over), using them to both hold the nets down and keep them away from the ground, so that the girls couldn’t peck and scratch.
We spent twenty minutes on the contraption. We let the girls out. It was, of course, Voldy. Voldy, short for Voldemort, is the chicken my son refused to name – She Who Must Not Be Named. Voldy has, as a consequence, a bit of a chip on her shoulder. She’s the chicken who is always the first into the netted-off vegie patch. She’s the one who has taught the other girls to graze through the nets. She’s also the one terrified by the scent of the next-door neighbour’s dog, so we have this huge clump of weeds just near the fence, in one corner, because if she won’t lead the other girls there, the other girls aren’t going. Which, on balance, is at least good for my broad beans. So within five minutes of girls-on-the-dirt-patch, Voldy has completely destroyed our net contraption.
Ah well, we’ll try again tomorrow.
