Impulse Buying

When I was in law school, my classmates were forever using the Send To Everyone e-mail option to promote their ideas for the betterment of the world. We were urged to boycott military recruiting (no problem), hang our laundry on a clothesline (good idea) and, for one day honor National Buy Nothing Day. The last suggestion came a week in advance of the holiday and came with a list of helpful ways to get through the day as well as the promise of raising one's consciousness by spending 24 hours outside of the retail universe.

I had to laugh, and once again shake my head at Vermont Law School and its environmentally-minded student body who, for the most part, just liked the idea of the environment and had spent precious little time out in it. There were Masters Studies in Environment Law (MSEL) students who had never, not even once, slept anywhere but in a building with road access. Apparently, there were also students who, since becoming independent commercial units, had never gone a whole day without buying anything.

For me, right now, I haven't been buying much of anything. I ordered some school clothes for the boys and I took Jackson and Harley to the general store on Friday to spend the money Cliffy gave them for dressing up as stripes of the Neatherlands' flag for his soccer camp tournament. (Oliver, the blue stripe, performed gratis.) Our daily needs right now are being met by the flour I buy in 25 lb. bags, the beef in the freezer, and the garden, creamery and laying hens. For years, whenever I would ask Earl if he needed anything at the stupidmarket, he would say, "Milk? Meat? Eggs? Maple Syrup? Nope. Can't think of a thing." This, of course, was his cutsie tactic for avoiding spending any mental energy on the pantry, but it highlighted the point that we didn't actually NEED any food. The last few years, the un-shopping list has included potatoes, frozen corn, and carrots. We've also stopped buying heating oil for the house, running all our heat and hot water off the outdoor wood boiler.

I like living like this, of course, but I was raised in The Land of Commerce where hardly a month passed without at least one day of recreational shopping mall time. So sometimes it's like a timer goes off with me and I just sort of feel like buying something. Last night, that something was chickens.

Yup. Chickens. As if I don't have enough chickens already. We have seven old-past-laying Rhode Island Reds that Berry gave us when he gave up chicken farming in February 2007. We have seven should-be-laying-in-their-prime chickens who are good for maybe three eggs a day, collectively. Maybe just two. We have Buster, the rooster, whose internal clock is apparently floating in the middle of the Atlantic, where dawn is heralded in at 3:30 am, our time. We have a young rooster, a young hen and a sex-yet-to-be-determined chicken from the thirty-one eggs I tried to hatch in the incubator this Spring. And we have thirty-six meat chickens who should be fattened and moving to the freezer in about six weeks.

Six weeks from now is four weeks from the next ship date for McMurray's Hatchery's Rainbow Layer Assortment. Four weeks is about how old chickens should be when they're ready to move out to the coop. And the Barred Rocks, whose black-and-white variegated feathers I have always admired, were available too! Doesn't that seem providential?

Well, last night when Earl was at the barn and the kids were playing with Legos and supper was cooking and my e-mail inbox was empty for the second day in a row, it seemed like such a good idea. I love fresh eggs. The birds who are supposed to be laying really well aren't and, if I had some big baking projects to do, I might have to, gasp, buy eggs. Now, you might reasonably ask if maybe the reason that these birds aren't laying so well is if perhaps they are getting somewhat less than optimal care. And yes, it's true that they are eating 10% protein dairy pellets instead of the 18% layer mash that would be best. And sometimes their water gets empty. But they're running all over the farm and it's not like they can't find bugs to supplement their protein needs or water from a puddle. And the truth about their laying is that it's entirely possible that they are, in fact, laying an egg a day each. They're just laying them in some tucked-away spot that we won't find until we're feeding out hay and come across a clutch of forty frozen eggs, like we did last winter.

But these next chickens will be better. They'll live in the Moop, a mobile coop that Earl's dad, Woody, designed for Berry a few years ago. It's on skids and Earl pulled it over here with the bulldozer to put the meat birds in. It has a built-in grain bin, laying boxes, roosts, and a whole slanting wall of Phylon translucent fiberglass that makes the Moop like a little greenhouse. It has an automatic waterer that will work for the non-freezy months and twelve laying boxes with a drop-down back door for easy collection. Isn't that perfect?

Well, we'll see. I entered my shipping and billing information and they're coming the week of September 8th.