Pasty Butt is where I come to gather my thoughts about chickens, and these thoughts began in the garden. I cultivate vegetables at high density and grow a large portion of what my husband and I eat. While this hobby was saving me money at the grocery store, it was costing me a small fortune at the local nursery, where I was spending ridiculous amounts of money on amendments. Like any serious gardener, I already composted yard and kitchen scraps, and my pile–which yields roughly 9 cubic feet of “black gold” per year–is no slouch. I also have industrious worms and a vermiculture bin that produces 10 pounds of castings in the same amount of time. Still, vegetables are heavy feeders and I needed more. When I started to think about how I could increase my own inputs, chickens, those adorable manure-making machines, were at the top of the list. And I like eggs.
My life hasn’t always been vegetables and chickens. I have a doctorate in American Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and wrote a dissertation on American Spiritualist literature. Religion and death are inextricably linked, and it was this connection that made my next career move seem–at least to me–completely logical: I became a funeral director. After several years in the death care industry, I decided to explore the cycles of growth and decay in another, more cheery context and took a job at a garden center. There, I developed my knowledge of plants and permaculture principles.
When I am not in the garden or the coop, I am cross stitching reproductions of early American memorial samplers, reading horror novels, or baking sourdough bread.
