I’ve always felt like homesteading is sometimes about orchestrating order out of constant chaos.  You go left, the chickens and dogs go right.  You create order, or so you think, and they create chaos!

We have two dry seasons and two rainy seasons in my neck of the woods. The dry season runs from January to early April, when the long rains start.  These go on until June, when it dries up and gets cold.  By September, it is dry, hot and sweltering.  Come the end of October, and the short rains season kicks in and this lasts till December – and the cycle continues.  Stick with me, this will make sense.

The rains came a little early this year and they were very welcome.  It had been insanely hot and dry.  The kind of heat that desiccates everything in its path and leaves my poor chickens panting with their wings spread out for extra cooling.  The rains were heavy – not the usual torrential downpours, but respectable enough for one to take notice. 

It seems I was not the only one taking notice.  Two days in and the bugs showed up.  Every kind of flying critter you can think of.  There is a particular beetle that shows up when it rains; Light brown coat, about the size of a bean.  The inner wings are frail looking and clear.  They don’t look like they can take the weight of this beetle.  The outer wings are rock hard, and that’s what you need to take note of.  They have a knack for flying right into your forehead with that outer shell knocking you so hard it gives you a headache. They were everywhere.  Outside the house, they congregated around the security lights, which meant by morning, they all dropped to the ground.  And then the chaos from the chicken would start.  They scratched and dug up the ground underneath my security lights looking for the bugs.  They dug up my potted plants and ate bugs. The worst of the chickens were three of them.  One young rooster, and two hens who look like they spend their evenings knitting sweaters for the eggs they are sitting on and cluck-clucking about the dogs and other chickens. 

One particular hen somehow knew she was the color of my pots so when she heard you coming to chase her away from the bug foraging in my pots, she would duck down and hope you don’t see her.  Many a time we did not, and she did some serious damage with a lot of the plants ending up back in the nursery.  How did she know she was the color of my pots?  Does she have a mirror in the hen den where she checks herself out and knows her color??? Speaking of mirrors, a moth had also shown up in one of the pots and was lying in the pebbles, very well camouflaged – it was the color of the pebbles.  The only reason I knew it was there is because I have moth-radar!  My skin crawls in their presence – whether I can see one or not.

Mooshoo tried to do her bit and chase the chickens away.  It was too much for her.  In a fit of rage, she found a weak looking chicken and killed it!

My groundskeepers and I had a meeting.  This needed to be stopped.  So, we came up with a plan.  A fence to keep the chickens away from my plants.  We bought the supplies and we put up the fence! There!  Problem solved. Or so we thought.  That very night, what we had not bargained for happened.  The hyenas came calling and in a fit of rage, the dogs took off at top speed for their usual fence bickering episode with the hyenas.  In their rush, they forgot we had put up a fence and they ran straight through it.  My dogs are big and the fence was meant to keep chickens at bay, not withstand the weight of four young and hefty German shepherds and a Rottweiler.  The fence went down! Back to square one!

The following evening, as I sat in the house thinking about the chaos of the previous days, the usual house lizard that calls out to me started its mating call.  I have repeatedly told that lizard I am not girlfriend material for it.  Well, this time I was tired and upset and used some choice words at it.  Would you believe it!  The silly little critter turned its back at me, “mooned” me, then went ahead to poop as I watched!  Well, I never!

We’ve re-built the fence, but the other brand of chaos goes on.  The squirrels continue to scratch out the germinating maize, beans and sunflower.   What they scratch out, we re-plant.  The sunflowers that have matured are being attacked by the birds, so we decided to harvest them early and feed them to the chicken, otherwise we will have nothing left of them by the time the birds are done.

This is homesteading! Creating order out of chaos, and accepting there may never be order!