Hatching Eggs and Seed Onions

This past Sunday evening, at around 11:40 p.m., I, Jason, retrieved twelve precious fertile chicken eggs from a cooler where they had been snuggled up with some containers of hot water to get them as close to a hundred degrees as possible without going over that mark. I then grabbed a flashlight and tiptoed out to one of my portable coops, where a Buff Chantecler hen was quietly nestled onto a clutch of 8 eggs, settled into the ancient, instinctual three-week egg-warming trance we humans have named "incubation." I don't pretend to know what it's like to be a chicken (although a friend recently dubbed me "The Chicken Whisperer"), but I imagine the time of incubation to be a focused, relaxed, and peaceful time for a hen. But the spell of immobility is immediately broken when anything approaches the nest. Try to reach towards the nest of most broody hens only at your peril! Swift pecks will greet you.

For that reason partly, but especially because I so wanted this to work, I was a bundle of nerves as I toted my little carton of hatching eggs out to the hen where she sat in the quiet, humid darkness. As it turned out, she did not attack my hand but only growled as I slipped it under her several times to remove the eggs and then again to replace them with the valuable ones. Feeling satisfied that she had not been scared off the nest and that all twelve were covered by her spread-out belly feathers (it's startling how flat a broody hen can appear), I replaced the coop lid and stole away.

It was a strange feeling that was coursing through me as I made my way back to the lighted rooms of the house. Sort of an empty, vulnerable feeling. Hm. Odd. Why should I feel that way?

Well, I'd been babying those hatching eggs for over two weeks, carefully labeling each one in pencil with the date it was laid, then [usually] remembering to turn them once in the morning and once in the evening each day. They also represent for me the start of a dream, because they are the "love children" of a neighbor's handsome Rhode Island Red rooster and a favorite Black Java/Americauna crossbreed hen of mine (also originally from the same neighbor). This is the beginning of a breeding project that may amount to nothing special or may, if it works, be a pretty clever minor innovation in free-range egg production for small, sustainable farms in the Valley and elsewhere. What this amounts to is that I had just taken the hard-won hatching eggs from the first mating of my master breeding plan and gave them to one of my CHICKENS for safekeeping. I must really trust that chicken.

It reminds me of the process I have engaged each fall now for two years, and plan to continue indefinitely, which is the selection of the ten or twelve very best onions out of my summer's onion harvest, and their subsequent burying in the soil. No, this is not a first-fruits ritual sacrifice! It is what it takes to breed onions. The would-be onion breeder must know his or her breeding goals, be able to select specimens that meet those criteria, and then be willing to commit the resulting cream of the crop to the soil for the winter. I plant mine with the garlic at the end of September or so. After a generous layer of hay mulch to moderate the hard freezes of winter, my job is to leave them alone until spring, when their vigorous green leaves sprout up through the mulch and into the light. Here at the beginning of May, the flower heads are just starting to develop. By the end of summer I will have another year's supply of onion seed, if all goes reasonably well.

Despite the above disclaimer, I could see how these processes could give rise to first-fruits rituals! I find it to be a powerful personal and spiritual exercise to take something precious, on which we are staking hopes, dreams, even our chances for good nourishment, and to give them over to their place in the whole. It is a mental segue for me into the reality that permeates our existence on this planet. Truly, this is the essence of life for us and all other creatures. We depend on each other, and we have no option but to do so. Every single bite we take, we take by way of the successful functioning of a complex of natural systems, each of which is composed of countless biological, physical, and social interdependencies.

By surrounding ourselves with our invented hardscapes, making our artifacts nearly our entire physical landscape in many cases, we remove this reality from our spirits and minds. By disguising food as just another artifact, we can ignore our utter dependence on nature without apparent consequence.

I have been unwilling to live my life that way. I wish to inhabit my days with a tangible, intimate knowledge of my connectedness to and dependence on the healthy functioning of my biological surroundings. Hatching eggs and seed onions are a start.