Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Bad dog.
In the interest of public policy discussion, I am disclosing something here that we’re not particularly proud of, or happy about…. but we had a mishap last night that underscores one of the issues that I haven’t really seen adequately discussed in the whole “bring chickens to backyards in Vancouver” movement. That is: the high density of dogs in this city.
When I got home last night, Brian told me that our dog Charlotte had somehow got out the back gate. She’s not a jumper, so we don’t have to worry about her going over the fence – but the gate was locked only partway and so when she thrust herself against it, the latch slipped and she was able to get out in the alleyway. In the last year, she has escaped about three times – mostly because someone comes into our yard and doesn’t shut the gate, this time because the latch wasn’t all the way in. In any event, her normal pattern is to be gone for about six hours and then return of her own accord.
So we decided to go out for dinner because I had planned a date night for B. and I since we’ve been working so hard and haven’t had a lot of relaxing, connecting time. We rode our bikes down to the Drive and got sushi and then meandered home. Gone a total of an hour.
When we arrived at our back gate, our neighbours from two doors over were looking in our backyard trying to see if anyone was around. They introduced themselves to us and told us that some psycho guy had been in our yard kicking at doors and windows on the house and screaming about our dog and his chickens. By the time we got there, the screaming guy was long gone, and our neighbours told us Charlotte had been in the yard but now they didn’t know where she was. As we were putting our bikes away, our roommate D. came out from downstairs and said that this guy was trying to hurt Charlotte and yelling about how she got into his chickens (we don’t exactly know if she killed any, but I’m guessing she did) and he was going to kill her if he ever saw her again and he was going to come back to our house with his brothers and on and on. He was banging on all our doors and windows, freaking out until D. told him that he was calling the cops if he didn’t get off the property. We later heard from our next door neighbour R. that she also came out and yelled at the guy because he was moving towards hurting our dog. It sounds like quite the scene anyway with a lot of yelling and our neighbours were all out warning us – “Watch out for this guy, I’ve never seen anything like it.” Great.
D. had brought Charlotte into the house so she was there, and acting like she knew she was in trouble but we didn’t see any blood or feather traces on her, nor did she smell of chicken-killing (which is a really distinct odor) – but who knows, she could have just ran off any traces when she was being chased back to our house. We waited up for quite awhile, hoping the guy would come back (calmed down) so we could find out exactly what happened and pay him for any damages because we know how awful it is to have an animal in your care killed. But so far he hasn’t showed.
One thing I do know about Charlotte is that she isn’t a fence jumper and I’ve never seen her dig under a fence or much try to – and she was gone less than an hour and a half when she was chased back – so I do wonder about this guy’s chicken set-up a little. I know from other friends with chickens in both city and country that predators are the major concern and so coop and fencing structures are key to keeping out stray dogs, raccoons, rats, and coyotes – which are the uncontrollable wild cards of any type of domesticated poultry and livestock management.
Which is not to say our dog should have been running around in the first place! It was really just an accident that she got out of the gate, and being part lab (bird dogs, they are apparently prone to chicken-killing) she just did what came natural to her when she came across an (open?) yard with chickens in it. And now we have to be extra careful – keep her in more, fix the back gate latch – because I’m afraid if she gets out again she’ll go right back to that same place and help herself again and then that would really be trouble because this guy sounds like he might kill her if he caught her. (Or kill us, our neighbours were all quite concerned for our safety and I’m glad D. was there to get him out of our yard).
As sad as this tale is, I’m pretty sure it will not be the last we hear this summer of dogs killing chickens as home owners across Vancouver take advantage of new bylaw allowing chickens. We had no idea our dog would do such a thing if she got out, and I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t think their little cutie was capable of the same. As much as it is our responsibility to keep our dog on-leash and in the yard, chicken-owners should also be aware of this as a potential issue (there are lots of strays running around this city at the height of summer) and do whatever it takes to secure their birds. Despite the fact he tried to hurt our dog, I feel really bad for this guy who maybe lost a chicken or two (again, we have no idea what actually happened) and I’m hoping he will let us attempt amends. For our part, Charlotte is going to be under house arrest and only out in the yard when we are with her. We just can’t risk her going after anyone else’s chickens.
Weekend disasters.
As tempting as it is to deny mistakes, it wouldn’t be very fair or helpful if I only posted here about the progress of my garden – so I’m going to bare my failure-fearful soul to you all with a tale of two woes, one involving tomatoes and one involving bees.
The tomato story isn’t all that dramatic unless you consider that for almost three months I’ve been raising up a few different kinds of tomato starts. You know, trying to get an early start so I would be ahead of the game come mid-May. Of course, I’m no expert with tomatoes, and my starts though beautiful were a a bit on the gangly side of health. But no matter, I decided this weekend was the time to start hardening them off, bring them out of their sunny window and into the actual air!
Which was awesome and all (they looked beautiful), until I left them out too long on Saturday when I was running errands and they got scorched in the afternoon sun. Scorched! And looking so sad after all the attention I put into them. Honestly, I felt like such a cruel bitch when I came home and saw them all wilted there on the side of the patio. And not just wilted – but visibly burned. I just didn’t think that one afternoon in the sun could produce such damage, otherwise I would have put them in a different spot in the yard – but I suppose it’s just one of those live and learn moments. Good thing we’re not relying on my gardening skills as our sole food source.
Perhaps five of them are salvageable, I’ll have to wait and see how they react in the next couple of days….. but in the meantime I’m buying some properly-raised starts that are a lot more likely to produce fruit.
That was only my first weekend failure.
Now, the reason we were out running around all day (thus ignoring my tomato starts roasting in the hot sun) is because on Thursday I had got a call about a bee swarm that we could have from a yard about nine blocks away from ours. While we have been talking about bees, we weren’t at all ready in terms of site prep to take them, so on Saturday we started early and went out to get trellis and plants for the back fence, and a bee smoker (not to mention a hazelnut tree off Craigslist for the font yard). You can see our handiwork in the photo above, not to mention the bee box that we successfully transported on Saturday evening with help from the friend who was giving us the bees.
All good, right? Sunday morning we got up, the bees were happily buzzing around, and throughout the day we would stop to marvel at them going about their business around the hive box and in the yard, thinking that things were looking pretty good over in that corner of the yard. Around 2, we got a phone message from our bee-giving friend asking if we had noticed anything strange with our bees because over at his place he was experiencing another swarm and wasn’t sure where it had come from. Not fifteen minutes after we received that call, our suddenly (and without any provocation on our part) started pouring out of the hive and forming a bit of a cyclone over our back fence before heading westward towards the house where we had got them from originally.
I’ve got to admit, that I would have been way more enraptured with the bee swarm (it’s amazing to see) if I wasn’t so worried about one of our neighbours coming outside right at that moment. People get really irate about bee swarms in their neighbourhood. Fortunately, no one was around to witness our hive taking off down the alley.
From what we can piece together from a late phone conversation last night, our bees likely joined up with the other partial swarm at our friend’s house, who by this time had gone out and bought additional bee boxes in order to capture the swarm that had settled on his patio chair. But by the time he got out to capture them, they rose up from his yard and took off!
We were pretty sad about it, of course. And at first I thought it was somehow my fault for working in the backyard when they were just getting settled – but it wasn’t as though we were working on their box or making loud noises or anything. It was later, reading about bee swarms that I realized it was very likely that the bees were not settled in the box when we moved it, only temporarily nesting while the scout bees were still out looking for a better home. All the bees that converged on our friend’s place were basically just having a meet-up so they could head out to their newly scouted home, and our bees were part of that process. Talk about magic!
So I don’t feel bad about the bees leaving because I now understand it had nothing to do with us, but the experience of witnessing all this bee craziness has intrigued us. Particularly as we are now set up for them. It sounds like our friend has a set of boxes to sell us and at the end of this week hopefully I’ll be installing a full hive and sourcing some bees for it by the end of the month. I might have to resort to mail order this time, but I’m okay with that since swarming bees are a tad unpredictable.
Despite it all, we had many weekend successes and got a tremendous amount done in our back and front yards – not to mention eating the first radishes and lettuce out of the veggie beds – so it wasn’t just all disappointment. I am really glad to have got the back trellis up for privacy purposes alone, and we’ve bought a trumpet creeper and a clematis that we hope will cover it in the next couple of years. In the front yard we now have a hazelnut tree and just that small addition makes such a difference to defining the space. Oh, and we finally put together a small water garden (above), which we’ve been meaning to do for ages, but went for when we realized that the bees like water close by. It’s all lovely out there in the yard right now. And I can always buy tomato starts and new bees.
First harvest!
Me, my, and I.
It seems that for some people, calling up their union rep is somewhat akin to answering an online dating ad. It’s the same refrain anyway – “I never thought I’d be doing this”, “I’m not really this kind of person, you know”. As though the union rep is going to judge them for requesting help or information, like the potential online date is going to think you’re a loser for answer their ad. How strange, the things we are embarassed by. In both these examples, it is the asking for something – assistance, a date – that shames the subject. As though we are supposed to sail through life without ever asking anyone for anything, and to do otherwise makes one weak.
It’s the sickness of individualism pervading every corner of our society that causes this of course – the same disease that shouts “pensioners are greedy!” and “I don’t want to pay for your kids to go to school!” The social doctrine of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” that’s impossible to avoid, coupled with the mythology that wealthy people (and corporations) got there through their own hard work rather than corporate welfare and inheritance. And it trickles down, of course, like a Regan-era crumb into every aspect of our lives so that many people from my generation no longer recognize that they owe something to their parents, or that at one time it was normal to converse with your neighbours across the fence rather than ignore them.
I’m ranting, I know. But it pains me to have someone come to me only when they are crying and at their breaking point because for months (or years) they have been harassed or denied benefits that rightfully belong to them. And it’s always the same thing – people don’t want to come and get help because they are afraid of being judged in their shakeiest moment – and so they wait until their health is compromised or their job is on the line before they make the call. In some cases they don’t call at all, and after the fact I hear about people who have been dismissed because they were too ill to come to work, or who could have stayed at work if they had been accomodated as required.
It’s just a basic point really – asking for help and helping others is a good thing and neither of those things makes you a loser. There is a time at which we all have to take responsibility to help ourselves of course, but it’s in conjunction with everyone else that we do so.
Bee Mama!
Quite unexpectedly, I am about to become a bee mama!
Last night, while I was working on preparations for a dinner party we’re having this evening, a phone call came to our house that Brian answered. It was a landscaper friend of ours who lives in a house I used to rent a few block away wondering if we were still interested in getting bees going in our backyard. Well yes, Brian said, but we weren’t really thinking we would be ready until next year…. you know, we have to build up our fence and all that. But there’s a swarm you can have right now! Our friend said.
And so I got in my car and drove the ten blocks to check out what he was talking about. When I got there, I realized that the swarm belonged to his neighbours, R&M who I also know back from my days in environmental activism around the Elaho Valley. Their hive had split and part of it had flown off into the neighbours yard. By the time I got there, these beekeeping friends had smoked the swarm into a box where they were clumping together and getting ready to settle in for the night. So as long as they don’t fly off again (which seemed unlikely from their behaviour) then I can pick them up on Saturday and R&M will lend me a starter bee box until I can get my own set up going. I’m partial to top-bar hives, so my task today is to track down the local expert on TBH and see if I can purchase a set-up from him and get some guidance on transferring the newly-forming hive.
This means a bunch of additional work on the weekend I wasn’t expecting – beyond picking up the bees, we will have to pickup and install some trellis atop our fence in the backyard to bring it to regulation height (something we had planned for anyway). This is on top of our trek to pick up a hazelnut tree for the frontyard and another trip to the homebrew shop to pick up some wine and beer-making ingredients. But really, I couldn’t pass the opportunity for free, local bees up! And I’m so excited to get going on all these weekend projects.
Red Cedar 