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Gardening, Chickens and Can You Really Eat This?

I was bent over weeding when I heard a noise. I turned to see a doe leap straight up and over the seven-foot-high fence and land three feet from my bent back. I leaped out the open gate in startled panic. The high fence all around the planted area was ostensibly there to keep the deer out.

I was learning how to garden. Ray and Ruth had a great vegetable and fruit garden that required constant care. Ruth was a kind and caring matronly woman who was generous with her knowledge. I helped with the work and learned a lot from them both. My only previous experience with gardening was with an oversized bag of English pea seeds that my big brother gave me when I was ten years old by way of an apology for dragging me around the house by my hair. I planted them in the semi-shade at the side of our house and enjoyed raiding my very own garden a few weeks later. I also picked lilacs in the back lane and sold bunches of them to unsuspecting people walking past our house. Though that might be considered more entrepreneurship than gardening.

The underbrush from the surrounding forest on Addenbroke was relentlessly trying to take back the land. I was constantly pulling little salal plants out from where they had popped up after creeping underground five, ten and sometimes fifteen feet into the garden. I felt right at home—weeding, raking in nutrient-rich seaweed and compost or helping to tie up the beans and raspberry bushes. It didn’t matter what the job was, I dug in and enjoyed it all. Except for the slugs—great big banana slugs. So disgusting. They stampeded in from the forest. One night I walked out onto the back deck in bare feet and stepped right onto a huge squishy, slimy one. It popped under my foot and oozed between my toes. I let out a blood-curdling scream that brought George running, terrified that I was being electrocuted. He was relieved to see me hopping on one foot very much animated and alive. Ruth and I sharpened the ends of a few sticks and marched up and down the rows of vegetables poking the sticks through the slugs. We had to de-slug the garden every day. Every once in a while Ruth, Lorna and I walked around the extensive front lawns with our sticks. We each called out the number as we poked into them. “125,” “126,” “127”! When there were six or seven slugs on a stick we would fling the slugs over the cliff at the bottom of the lawn and into the ocean. One morning we poked over four hundred giant slugs onto our sticks.

Ruth gave me broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and tomato seeds to plant in flats in the basement. There was lots of light downstairs since the generator ran all day 365 days a year and, because it was diesel, we needed to leave all the lights on for a more even load on the engine. (If we weren’t using enough electricity, the exhaust pipe would throw out thick black smoke and all the pipes and anything nearby would get gummed up with oily sludge.) The seeds sprouted quickly, and in a few weeks I planted the seedlings outside. My garden would provide an important part of our diet on the island since we couldn’t be sure that we would receive fresh produce more than once a month. This was serious business. There was not a little green grocer around the corner. I added peas, carrots, lettuce, spinach, radish and kale seeds to my next grocery order. I also sent for several gardening books from the library in Nanaimo. The long-distance library service was my new best friend. I studied the gardening books and several seed catalogues during my late-night shifts and acquired a lifelong love of working with plants.

We had brought a dear little sheltie dog named Kobe with us. Friends of ours from Vancouver were going to be out of the country for a couple of years, and we said we would look after him. At first he tried to herd the chickens, but they didn’t react the way his dna told him they should. We told him not to chase them. Then he spied the seagulls flying overhead and became obsessed with getting them into an organized flock. He loved to chase after the seagulls right through a bunch of chickens, scattering them in all directions as they squawked and complained. What? I didn’t see them! There were a few deer that came down to eat the grass but he learned very quickly that he wasn’t allowed to chase them either. He often ran right past the deer as he was looking up at the seagulls, and the deer would then chase him for a few steps reaching to hit his back with their deadly front hooves. He did a great job of chasing the seagulls away from pooping on our roof and therefore our freshwater supply, but we had to keep him in the house part of the day because he couldn’t stop chasing after them, and they were everywhere and completely impossible to herd. He would crawl exhausted onto the porch, foaming at the mouth, but if a seagull flew overhead he would take off at full speed and once again try to take control.

We built a makeshift chicken coop after Ray and Ruth gave us a dozen bantam chickens. They had been running free but they settled down quickly and were producing eggs within days of their move into a huge unfenced area behind the house that we covered with fishnet. The net draped over salal bushes and around cedar trees and over stumps and fallen logs. The chickens were comfortable and I’m sure they soon learned that they were much safer under the net. There were eagles and hawks in the area that often helped themselves to the chickens that were loose. Also, the free-range chickens tended to hide their eggs, and when you found them you had to put them in a bowl of water to see if they sank or not to check if they were fresh. You don’t eat the ones that float. But sometimes they kind of stood on end and I am here to tell you not to try opening an iffy egg.

We composted everything until we got the chickens. Then we fed everything to the chickens and used their manure in the garden. Straight chicken manure is too strong to use right away. I had a lesson in manure-tea brewing from Ray and could safely use the brew to water and fertilize the plants, skimming the “tea” off the top and leaving the manure on the bottom of the five-gallon bucket.

We took turns picking raspberries. Ray and Ruth let us pick the berries from their well-established and amazingly prolific bushes every second day. They were like manna from heaven. I made raspberry jam for the first time ever and can wax poetic about how wonderful it was with butter on fresh bread right out of the oven. More about the bread later.

During the summer, two of the young chickens turned out to be roosters and started fighting. They were vicious when they fought and gouged great tears into each other before one would back down. Ray said the only way to stop the fighting would be to chop their heads off. Ray was not a romantic. He and George went out one day with an axe and caught both roosters. They walked with them over to a stump by the garden. I didn’t watch but was there when George came back to the house looking rather pale, with two dead roosters in his hands. Ray had instructed George on what to do with them. We couldn’t waste them. He set up a plank outside between two chairs to use as our worktable, and I boiled a big pot of water in the kitchen. We dipped each headless body in the hot water then ran outside, laid the birds on the planks then began plucking out the feathers. This was not something I had ever pictured myself doing but it was easier than I thought it would be. Then we had to clean the guts out. George made a cut into the first rooster and tentatively put his hand into the cavity. His face quickly turned the colour of the bright green grass we were standing on. When he started to gag I told him to go away, and I finished the job. It was gooey, it was smelly and it was disgusting but I figured that somebody had to do it!

I put the roosters in plastic and then into the freezer. I wanted to distance myself from them, and from the smell of innards that I couldn’t get out of my nose, before I would be able to think about eating them. It was months before I had the nerve to cook one. I made the mistake of baking it in a pan in the oven. The poor thing was so tough that we couldn’t get the meat off the bones or even the skin away from the meat. It was like trying to eat an India rubber ball. Another few weeks had to go by before I cooked the other bird in a pressure cooker and we had a wonderful chicken dinner that was tender and oh so delicious.

One morning there were suddenly thousands and thousands of herring in the bay where the wharf was. Ray showed us how to use a small net to scoop quickly through them and drop our catch into a bucket. We stood in knee-deep water with the herring swirling all around us and scooped up several buckets full. I cooked a pan of them for dinner but we decided that we didn’t like eating fried herring—way too many bones. Ray suggested that we could turn them into chicken food by boiling a bunch with oatmeal. I made a huge batch of herring porridge and after it cooled threw glops of it to the chickens. They loved it, and over the next few days they ate every bony lump. But after the second day, we noticed that the eggs were taking on a distinctly fishy taste. Who knew this could happen? It’s one thing to eat fish and eggs, but quite another to eat fishy eggs. The mind boggles at the possibilities here … oatmeal and bacon porridge for bacony eggs, or oatmeal and mushroom porridge for an instant mushroom omelette? I was more careful about what I fed the chickens after that.

Coast Guard ships and helicopters delivered our supplies at Addenbroke Island. Shown here is the buoy and lighthouse tender Alexander Mackenzie. Freight day at the lighthouse was always exciting. We received mail orders and letters, care packages from our families and groceries that had been ordered a week before, including frozen meat and fresh produce.

The herring had come to lay their eggs on the kelp in the bay. A few days later Ray took us down to the wharf, waded into the water and reached for a strand of kelp that was covered with eggs. He put the kelp in his mouth and pulled the strand out between his teeth, snagging the eggs as it went. Such a funny texture. Like fresh, salty, fishy Rice Krispies. The eggs popped in your mouth in a not unpleasant way. Not my favourite seafood experience, but there would be others that would be worse.

George and I went back down to the bay the next day to try the herring eggs again. I brought a washtub along in case there was something interesting to put in it. Suddenly George shouted, grabbed the gaff and leaned out over the water. I could see an octopus gliding around in the shallows, probably after the same thing we were there for. George snagged one tentacle and started pulling the rest of it toward him. It was looking at us with one huge unblinking eye. He had it almost within reach but the beast wrapped several tentacles around a rock. I was jumping up and down with excitement banging the washtub on the rocks because it just happened to be in my hands. Every time the octopus seemed to be coming closer, it would reach out another tentacle and suction-cup itself onto the rock. George had a good hold of one tentacle but more and more of its appendages wrapped around the rock. George put up a good fight, but the octopus was in its element. Eventually the gaff slipped through the octopus’s flesh and it swooshed off into a cloud of deep inky black water. We were not going to have fried octopus for dinner that night. I can’t say that I was disappointed.