KRISHNA EAGLE AND FAMILY
(Page 3 of 4)
March/April 1972
By the Mother Earth News editors
"Sure, cut all you need. Thin 'em out . . . they grow even better." Further conversation revealed that Ed was about to leave for six months retirement vacation overseas.
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Zap! The wheels began to turn and when Ed realized that we needed a place to stay, he invited us to set our tipi up in the hayfield and told us that when he left we could use his cabin. Oh wow! . . . our wanderings were over!
We set right to work the first week of October, cutting, barking, trimming and smoothing the huge 30-foot poles. The finished tipi was a beautiful sight!
Then the winter rains began in earnest and Ed asked us to move into the cabin . . . which we shyly did.
Bear and I began to repair things around the place to sort of pay unsolicited rent, and before long we had put up a chicken coop made of clear plastic, chicken wire, logs and shakes.
Then we extended the wood shed another 13 feet, cut and chopped three to four cords of wood, moved a small tool shed out from town and helped Ed remodel the inside of the cabin.
By the time he left the first of November, we were comfortably chopping wood, bucketing water from the river, cooking and heating on an old wood stove and Marcia was sewing on an elderly treadle sewing machine she had found for only $15.
Bear and I next set out to extend Ed's 30' x 30' garden plot to 125' x 30' (over 1/4 acre). We got the fall rye planted before the snows began.
Well, we hadn't put that chicken coop up just for the exercise—we were getting plenty of that—and, well, you know, what's a chicken coop without chickens? So we got us six Red/Bantam hens for $1.50 each and two hens and two roosters, all Bantam, for another $1.00 each. The wire, feed and birds cost a total of $60 or so.
The birds didn't lay for over three weeks. Then the sun showed up, melted the frost and—lo and behold—must have melted the hens' hearts too . . . because from that time on, we've gotten two or three big brown, orange-yolked fertile eggs every day.
Little kindnesses such as warm water and cooked mash really do make the hens more contented and the eggs come sooner. Every time I compare our henfruit to the watery, thin-shelled, yellow-yolked storeboughts, I vow I'll never eat one of them sick-looking cartoned things again!
Well, our home-grown eggs worked out so well that we decided to get ourselves a goat or two.
Because there's a goat disease in the U. S., Canada has enforced a strict quarantine on American goats for the past four years so we began to look over the local Alpines and Saanens. We had a tough time finding any to buy at first because most goats around here are pets but we finally did find a couple of real goat people.
