We have one nice brooder house (the milk house next to our old dairy barn) and two horrible old ones that are supposed to be pasture houses, but were pressed into service more or less at random.

We're replacing the two horrible old houses with one big new one, building it on a pair of concrete slabs that have been here for decades (which, oddly, touch each other but are not at the same level.) Here are a couple of pictures of the brooder house under construction:

You can see the horrible old brooder houses in the background of the second picture.

Features of interest:

• We're using three courses of concrete blocks to make the house rat-proof and rot-proof, even with more than a foot of deep litter on the floor. This is essential. Not that we have a rat problem all the time, but even "once in a while" is way too often.
• We found a four-foot-wide exterior door, which makes it easier to get a wheelbarrow into the place.
• The three windows wouldn't provide anywhere near enough ventilation for a henhouse, but this is used solely as a brooder house, with the chicks removed to pasture houses once they no longer need heat. Smaller openings are adequate. (See Fresh-Air Poultry Houses for a complete treatment of this topic.
• A brooder house can be designed so it can be used later as a shed or studio or whatever kind of outbuilding strikes your fancy. In this case, the two-level floor would be a bit of a nuisance, but that could be fixed with more concrete.
• It's as close to our house as we can reasonably make it. It's good to be able to hear a commotion in the brooder house without going all the way out to the back forty.
• We'll be insulating the roof. This isn't strictly necessary in a well-ventilated brooder house, but is a nice touch.

[Here's a brooder house update, showing the house in a nearly-finished state and giving some more helpful hints.]

Mother Earth News has featured my Electric Fencing FAQ in the Happy Homesteader section of their Web site. Check it out! No, not just my FAQ, but the whole section. It has a lot of good stuff in it.

Mother Earth News has been a great resource ever since I was a kid, with lots of hands-on practical stuff that you can cut out and paste down. It's one of the few print magazines I still subscribe to in this Internet age.

Electric fencing resources:

• My Electric Fencing FAQ
• An electric fence blog entry that extols the virtues of one-wire fences for chickens
• Another electric fence blog entry with more information about single-wire fences, plus a funny video.

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I've stumbled upon a lot of articles about "urban farming" recently. They take one of two forms:

1. Articles written by people who have never heard the word "garden," and call ordinary vegetable gardens "urban farms" if they're inside city limits.
2. Articles written by people who think that skyscrapers ought to be built especially for farming.

Just Google "urban farming" and you'll see what I mean.

All of this is very weird. How did people forget about vegetable gardens, to the point where they felt compelled to coin a new word for an ancient concept? And has anyone priced floor space in the city recently? I mean, yes, growing crops in concrete-and-steel buildings would put the capstone on industrial agriculture, finishing the job that was started by high-density livestock confinement. I can see that. But why would anyone think it desirable or environmentally sound?

I don't have the answers, other than a gnawing feeling that people are even more disconnected from the land than I thought. People yearn for the land. I think that people who haven't spent time in the country feel this deeply, but aren't sure how to act on their feelings. So you get some unusual behaviors, like calling a riding mower a "lawn tractor" or an ordinary vegetable garden an "urban farm."

I wonder how one might encourage people to channel these yearnings into actions that will give them as much of a genuine back-to-the-land experience as conditions allow. Gardens are a good start, of course, even if they are being called by a silly name.

In a recent post about electric fencing, I talked about one- and two-wire electric poultry fences, but not how to go about making or using them.

Plus, I found a funny video that features a simple electric fence (though with a high wire for horses rather than a low one for chickens).

Benefits of One-Wire Electric Fences

• You can step over them -- after all, they're just a single wire five inches off the ground -- no gates required!
• You can drive right over the fencewire without turning the fence off. The wire will spring back.
• If a predator gets inside the fence, the chickens can't be cornered by a one- or two-wire fence: they pop right through. Usually this means that the flock scatters and the predator kills only one. With a conventional fence, the chickens can't get away, and predators keep killing until they run out of targets. That's a tragedy waiting to happen.
• If a chicken ends up outside the fence, it will eventually work up the nerve to cross the fence to get home. Regular fencing leaves the chickens stranded outside.

One-Wire Electric Fences: Materials

• A fence charging unit. I use AC-powered units from Parmak. The bigger, the better. Chicken fencing shorts out easily against molehills and growing grass, so you need a lot of zap.
• Step-in fence posts. These are plastic fenceposts with an iron spike at the bottom. As the name implies, there's a little step on them so you can plant them in the ground with your foot. Get one for every 20-30 feet of fenceline.
• Aluminum fence wire. Aluminum fence wire is the good stuff. It stays bright and shiny forever, so the chickens (and other critters) can see it easily and avoid it. Galvanized wire becomes dull and invisible over time. Polywire sags too much for low-wire fences and is annoying to work with.
• Insulators to carry the zap from charger to fence. It's convenient to put the charger in a barn or shed and then run the high-voltage wire along a fenceline. At gates, some people use heavily insulated wire buried slightly underground, but I prefer to jump the fence on ten-foot poles (rot-resistant two-by-fours are okay). Use insulators anywhere the wire touches something.
That's about it. I used to use metal T-posts at the corners, but I don't do that anymore. Lay out the wire around the perimeter of your fenced area, and add fenceposts. Tension the wire by moving the fenceposts in or out until the wire goes tight. The wire should be 4-6 inches off the ground. A second wire at about 10 inches is a nice touch but isn't absolutely necessary. The fence works best if you enclose a large area and keep the chicken houses some distances away from it. My fence encloses several acres. If you want to fence chickens tightly, you need something more substantial.

Usually, when I auction books on eBay, they sell for a pittance, but hope springs eternal, and I try again from time to time. So, please, take advantage of my unwillingness to learn and bid on my book auctions! You'll get a real deal this way, most likely.

All my most popular books are here, including "Fresh-Air Poultry Houses" and "Success With Baby Chicks." As I write this, the prices are a penny apiece.

I'm back from Kumoricon Portland's big anime (Japanese animation) convention. Don't know how many attendees there were, but it was probably in the 5,000 range.

Karen and I have been anime fans since we discovered the work of Hayao Miyazaki in the mid-Eighties, first by accidentally stumbling upon his amazing (but never released in English) Future Boy Conan animated TV series in Spanish on Univision.

We caught the anime wave when it was just starting. It's gotten awfully huge in the meantime. I can't even keep track of the names of all the animated movies and TV shows coming out of Japan, let alone watch all of them. (I'll make some recommendations in a minute.)

Anime differs from American cartoons largely through the concept of "more": more violence, more romance, more elaborate costumes and settings, more character development, more plot, bigger explosions -- and more viewers.

The assumption is that people of all ages watch anime, so the themes are much more like prime-time shows than Saturday morning cartoons. Anime has a strong element of love interest. Even kid shows tend to revolve around a complex web of crushes and unrequited love, which I find charming. Shows aimed at older viewers add sex appeal, which to me has a Fifties/Sixties retro feel, like Diana Rigg in her skin-tight jumpsuit in black-and-white episodes of THE AVENGERS. And all this means that romance is in the air in most shows, whether open or implied. I think it's the romantic elements that make anime so much more popular than mainstream science fiction with female viewers.

In anime conventions, it's more or less expected that you will be in a costume representing one of your favorite characters.

This year I have chosen to be an air pirate from Porco Rosso, a film I despair of describing, other than it involves fictional air pirates off the coast of Italy in the late Twenties, who are constantly threatened with being put out of business by the main character, Porco Rosso, a bounty hunter and reluctant hero.

The air pirates were on the whole a middle-aged lot, I came to the con dressed as one of them. This choice also had the advantage that it could be put together from off-the-shelf items: a flight suit, leather helmet, goggles, silk scarf, military shoes, etc. Many fans take infinite pains to make costumes from scratch, but I'll bet they don't have a farm!

In addition to wearing costumes evertwhere, there is a great deal of picture-taking at anime cons, with everyone striking their best poses or demonstrating their trademark moves. As an air pirate, I of course posed with my "captives."

This con has everything: masquerade balls, role-playing games, multiple video-viewing rooms, panel discussions, workshops on a zillion topics, a dealer's room with all sorts of merchandise, an area for artists to hawk (and create!) their wares -- you name it.

It was in the Portland Hilton, which was a shame, I thought, because I hold a grudge against the Hilton for living in the Dinosaur Era and not having wireless on every floor, just so they can stick you for ten bucks a day for their pathetic single Ethernet cable per room. This is the 21st Century, guys! Among the four of us, we had five WiFi-equipped devices. Dinosaur hotels like the Hilton compare poorly with, say, Motel 6, which seems to have had free WiFi forever.

WiFi aside, it was a lot of fun, and I'll probably be there next year, and take an artist's table while I'm at it, with stacks of my books -- One Survivor (my science fiction novel) and Through Dungeons Deep my book on fantasy role-playing games, plus whatever wares we come up with from our Artsy Android T-shirt and gift venture.

Recommended Shows

Among my favorite shows are:

• Anything by Hayao Miyazaki. Start with Totoro if you like children's movies, or Castle in the Sky otherwise.
• The Big O. Possibly the most incompetently-named show ever (the show's creators had no clue that the phrase, "the big O" actually meant something), this show falls into the genre of film noir, along with The Maltese Falcon and Bladerunner. Deeply textured, with lots of mystery, double-dealing, beautiful settings, femme fatales, giant robots, you name it.
• Cardcaptor Sakura is completely charming and very well-written. The main plot (Sakura has to retrieve all the magical cards before they cause trouble) is almost overshadowed by love-interest subplots. Everyone in Sakura's class has a crush on somebody. This show is aimed squarely at the tastes of ten-year-old girls, and has a very different feel from the more macho shows aimed at boys.

When we started out at the Farmer's Market in 1996, a customer asked, "Do you accept checks?"

I thought about it for about a second and said, "Sure!"

My reasoning was this: I'd accept checks until one bounced, then I'd think about what my policy really ought to be.

That was thirteen years ago. Still no bounced checks. Are farmer's market customers great, or what?

All this confirms my policy of "intentional innocence," where I try things and see what happens, rather than fretting about all the things that might go wrong. Of course, sometimes things blow up in my face this way, but usually they don't, and you discover that the people around you have been fretting over nothing.

Don't use this approach when betting the farm, but it works in any situation where you can afford to take it on the chin and write it off as a learning experience.