MINNIE ROSE'S CHICKENS AND LIFE

Gorgeous aren’t they?  Fabulous feathers!  Eye-​​catching colors! Substitute alarm clocks!

But also often…arrogant, noisy, obstreperous, feisty and oversexed.  Especially if you have more than one rooster.  Many chicken-​​lovers who phone  to order our book describe their rooster problems.  Most agree it’s tough to have more than one rooster.  They fight.  They compete.  They exhaust the hens.  (Though they also sometimes guard and protect the flock.) 

So maybe keep only one rooster? Good to consider.  Recently Lee-​​Ellen, a chicken-​​loving friend, phoned rather desperately.  Her 3 roosters kept chasing the hens and pulling their feathers out.  Those hens were exhausted.  So she’d decided to give those roosters to a friend.  However, she couldn’t catch the lightning-​​fast roosters!  What should she do?

I suggested she get a big, long-​​handled fishnet to catch them.  (A technique we’d used before.)  So she tried that.  But meanwhile the rooster-​​wanting friend backed out. 

Then later another friend, highly experienced with chickens, said he’d take the roosters-​​no problem.  That night, after dark, he drove over and got the roosters with no fuss at all.  How?  Because it was dark, all the hens and roosters were sleeping up on their roosts.  So he simply reached up gently, lifted each rooster down, put him into a sack, and drove home.  Try it.  It works!

Readers:  do you have rooster secrets to share?  Or other chicken-​​raising secrets?  If so, please send them in.                       (from Nancy)

by Elizabeth Hutchison Zwick, our intrepid illustrator

Late winter, 1975.  Early February.  Wet and cold. Because we had so little time to put together the book, MINNIE ROSE LOVGREEN’S RECIPE FOR RAISING CHICKENS, Elizabeth, our illustrator, was forced to improvise:

 Since Minnie Rose said in the book that “Chickens like to take a dust bath every day,” Elizabeth clearly had to draw chickens taking dust baths.  But where was any dust?  This was late winter in the Northwest.  After months of rain, all the ground was soggy, puddley mud.  No dust whatsoever — none of that wonderful dry stuff chickens like to “bathe” in. 

Undaunted, Elizabeth set up a heat lamp under her barn to dry up a patch of that gooey ground.  When the ground  finally got dusty dry, she sat on a chair there under the barn and drew those chickens joyously taking dust baths. 

In another part of the book, Minnie Rose began a paragraph with the words,  “If two roosters get fighting hard.”  Obviously that called  for an illustration.  But Elizabeth had only one rooster, so how could she draw two roosters fighting?  Undaunted, she set up a mirror under her barn, sat on that chair again, and drew her one rooster fiercely fighting his own reflection!

by Elizabeth Hutchison Zwick

 But those weren’t the only ways Elizabeth transformed the book.  Tune in next time for more.…

This letter arrived today from Andy Enefer in England, a distant relative of Minnie Rose Enefer Lovgreen.  He’d seen  MINNIE ROSE LOVGREEN’S RECIPE FOR RAISING CHICKENS mentioned on the web, and ordered a copy.  This is his response to the book:

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Hi Nancy & Everett,

      Thanks so much for sending me the Chicken Book. It arrived safe and sound and is a great read. I really appreciated your comments.

      I love Minnie Rose’s observations, many of which are very familiar to me but many are also completely new and explain behaviors I never really took the trouble to understand or analyze. It also explained why we looked after our own chickens in certain ways — ways I never questioned and therefore my parents never told me the reasons — I now know! It is truly a remarkable book and thank heavens you recorded it. So much of our precious knowledge is lost in these technological times. 

      I am really excited about Minnies Rose’s life history (FAR AS I CAN REMEMBER)  when it comes out. It is one thing researching ancestors from censuses and certificates but quite another to hear their stories direct. 

       I will recommend the book to other Enefers and any chicken owners I come across! 

      Thank you so much,

            Andy Enefer 

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Thanks,  Andy, for your wonderful letter.   You understand so well why we published the book, preserving Minnie Rose’s wisdom gathered over a lifetime.   Really glad you like it (though have never yet received a customer complaint).   We’ve just this moment changed the website so folks from overseas can order more easily — both RECIPE FOR RAISING CHICKENS and (pre-​​order) Minnie’s life story, FAR AS I CAN REMEMBER.  And we’d love to hear from more folks in England — whether or not they’re related to Minnie Rose!             (Nancy) 

     * Note:   The postcard pictured above is one I sent to Minnie Rose when we visited England in 1971, because it resembled the farms she described from her childhood.   (Nancy)

Roses, by Elizabeth Hutchison Zwick

February, 1975. Cold and rainy. Minnie Rose was slowed down with cancer so we all took turns helping her. One day Elizabeth Hutchison Zwick – the heavy-​​sack-​​hoisting farmwoman/​neighbor – asked me a question.  Would I come look at her drawings?  She’d like to illustrate the book. The book I’d tape-​​recorded from Minnie Rose. The book I was madly rushing to put together.

Wow!  Was I ever surprised!  Could Elizabeth really draw? She already excelled at so many things — chicken-​​raising and children;  farm work and gardening.  And endless energy!  Would I come look at her drawings?  So I did.   There in her old white farmhouse, surrounded by barn, creek and fruit trees, she showed me her drawings.  Some pen and ink. Some pencil or charcoal.  Chickens, children, dandelions, roses, fields, fir trees, mountains, water. I couldn’t believe it. They were alive. And they were beautiful — graceful but strong; dreamy but real. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’d love to have you to illustrate the book.” 

Little did we know how that would change our lives.

Grandma Moses paints on her farm.

And surely Grandma Moses would have raised remarkable chickens!….But Elizabeth Hutchison Zwick, who illustrated MINNIE ROSE LOVGREEN’S RECIPE FOR RAISING CHICKENS, actually did both — was an artist AND raised chickens!  However, that took some time to evolve.   In 1973, when I first met Elizabeth, she was easily hoisting 80-​​pound bags of chicken feed from a truck to Minnie Rose’s chicken coop. Intimidating!

Elizabeth lived on an old farm, with chickens and fruit trees, close to Minnie Rose’s farm. Gradually we became friends.  Our daughters, age 2 and 3, loved playing together. They rode Minnie Rose’s tire swing, helped feed her chickens, made up songs, and flew all over the place. We drove them to play at each other’s houses.

Still, there was plenty Elizabeth and I didn’t know about each other. (Nor did we know ourselves too well back then.) And we were both wildly busy. Elizabeth had 2 young children and I had 4.  But for both of us, and for many others, Minnie Rose served as chicken advisor, babysitter, and overall wise woman.

Then came the winter of ’74 -’75 when  Minnie Rose was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I went into her hospital room and tape-​​recorded her advice on raising chickens.  (She’d always wanted to write such a book, but was always too busy babysitting, working on her farm, etc.) Every day, after tape-​​recording, I’d go home and transcribe her words, then next day read them aloud to her so she could add more.

Right from the start I knew Minnie’s words would make a wonderful book, with her time-​​tested advice and her lively, storytelling voice.  But it was full of word pictures.  It needed an illustrator. Good grief, how could I find an illustrator – expecially one who knew about chickens?  I was stymied.

(to be continued)

Grandma Moses’ painting