Chicks are appearing in local feed supply stores and at Renfrow Hardware in downtown Matthews, and hatcheries such as Murray McMurray Hatchery  and Meyer Hatchery are shipping now.

If you’re new to backyard chickens, here’s a cheat sheet to get you started.

1. Know the law.

A growing number of towns, including Charlotte and Raleigh, let you keep backyard chickens as long as you build your coop to certain specifications and keep it a certain distance from your property line (in Charlotte, that’s 25 feet). For details on Charlotte’s animal ordinance, click here. Note: If you live in a neighborhood with a homeowners’ association, chances are it prohibits chickens.

2. Get the chicken housing set before you bring home the birds.

We can’t stress this enough: Chickens have enemies everywhere. If you bring them home and hope to get by with a dog kennel or some other less-than-secure arrangement (such as a coop with an open top or unsecured floor), you will lose birds to raccoons, opossums, hawks, and owls. Plans for coops and runs are available in books and online. Here’s just one example.

3. Keep the babies warm.

Baby chicks need a secure, indoor place to live until they feather out. A back porch or garage is fine, and they must be in a container (such as a washtub or bin) with an attached heat lamp. They’ll need clean water and a kind of feed called “chick starter.” Clean the straw in their bin as needed. Remember to sanitize your hands after touching chicks.

5. Watch for feathers.

Once the chickens are fully feathered, they can move to their permanent lodging. If you buy your chicks this spring, you will be eating their first eggs at the start of fall. For more backyard chicken tips, see previous articles on getting started and things to know. 

Children love to wander the yards and woods this time of year, seeking signs of spring. And how much more fun is it when you can find safe spring treats growing wild?

Blossoms of Eastern redbud.

Violets are blooming right now through the Charlotte region, and you can turn their shy purple petals into brilliant syrup and rosy jelly. In addition, the fuschia-colored flowers of the native understory Eastern redbud also are beginning to bloom. Scatter their blossoms across a salad for a subtle but beautiful burst of springtime.

You can make syrup and jelly from any type of violet – and here we mean real wild violets, not violas or pansies purchased for the garden – but only the blossoms of the sweet violet, Viola odorata, are going to have that elusive violet perfume. Be sure to pick from unsprayed areas. You can sugar the violets – an old-fashioned confection – by painting their blossoms with (pasteurized) egg white and then dipping in sugar. Laid to dry, they will become hard and can be used to decorate cakes. Violets frozen in ice cube trays of water are another fun idea.

To make your own violet syrup, take the stems off two cups of blossoms. Pour three cups boiling water over the flowers, cover and let steep for two hours. Strain out the violets, add to pan and boil with 1 3/4 cup sugar. Add the juice of one lemon – here the syrup will turn a deep pink. Reduce the heat and simmer on low until it reaches the thickness you want. This makes a nice drink base, and can be used over pancakes or ice cream.

There are many variations of the violet-jelly idea, and here’s just one recipe. -Amber Veverka

Spring gardening season is just weeks away and it’s time to think about boosting your soil’s fertility to get the best potatoes, pansies, snap peas and more.

If you’re still tossing lettuce leaves, carrot peelings and eggshells into the garbage and hauling leaves to the curb in bags, why not turn all that waste into vitamins for the dirt? You can do it with a cheap compost bin that takes less than an hour to set up.

Some city dwellers may be nervous about composting because they worry all that decaying stuff will attract rats, raccoons and other unwelcome backyard guests. Carol Buie-Jackson, who owns Birdhouse on the Greenway in Charlotte and has taught composting classes tells people they have little to fear.

“If you do it right, you’re not going to attract raccoons and vermin,” she says. “If you’re using leaves and garden debris, raccoons are not going to be attracted to that. If you’re putting in scraps from  your kitchen…the secret is burying it well so it doesn’t attract anything.”

You can buy a composting container, including high-end models that spin so you don’t have to stir the contents yourself. But you can also do it economy-style, with nothing more than heavy-duty wire from a hardware store

Hardware cloth or other wire is easily secured with zip ties to form a simple compost bin.

secured into a cylinder with zip ties. Or use a plastic trash can with plenty of ventilation holes drilled all around the sides.  Another homemade option: A three-sided bin made from discarded wooden pallets secured at the corners with heavy wire or screws.

Once you’ve got the container, locate it in a sunny spot and add your material. You want to alternate “brown” ingredients – leaves, straw, some shredded paper or cardboard – and “green material” – vegetable and fruit scraps, coffee grounds, eggshells and poultry manure if you have chickens. Leave out dairy, meat and greasy foods and avoid heavy loads of grass clippings as they smell very bad when they’re rotting. A good rule of thumb is to have anywhere from twice as much “green” material to “brown” or a 50-50 ratio, according to the Clemson Extension Master Gardener Program.

“Get re-bar or a broomstick in there, poke a hole about a foot down and put the scraps in there and cover it well,” said Buie-Jackson. “It’ll decompose really rapidly.”

Wet the pile so that it feels like a wrung-out sponge, and keep it that moist when there’s no rain. Churn the pile around with a rake, shovel or pitchfork every few weeks and when it’s a brown, crumbly mixture and you can’t recognize individual bits, it’s time to add it to your garden. If you live in an apartment or don’t generate that much kitchen waste, you may want to try vermicomposting – composting with worms. Read here about how to make a low-cost worm bin.

Learn more:

Check out Buie-Jackson’s how-to video on composting.

School’s out and at last kids and families have daylight hours together to enjoy the outdoors. Here are seven ideas for ways to enjoy the natural world during the winter break. The weather may be brisk at times, but in the South, that’s not bad: It means no bugs, no poison ivy, and few allergies.

Go geocaching.

This treasure hunt combines easy walks in the woods and parks with the lure of technology. Using GPS, geocachers seek out hidden objects – stashes of inexpensive little toys, keepsakes and other items – and typically can remove a “treasure” if they replace it with one of equal value. There are hundreds of hidden geocaches in and around Charlotte, including many in the county parks and nature preserves. Learn more at geocache.com, the official site for global GPS geocaching.

Plant a tree.

It’s not too late to plant a tree, a memory-making activity that, especially if you go with a native hardwood, will pay dividends to generations to come. The key is regular watering the tree’s first year in the ground. The N.C. State University Cooperative Extension provides great tree-planting tips.

Visit one of the area’s lesser-known nature preserves.

Many Backyard & Beyond readers spend time at Mecklenburg County’s major preserves – Latta, McDowell and Reedy Creek – but have you visited the ancient, nationally recognized rock formations at Big Rock Nature Preserve in south Charlotte? Or you can see a beaver pond in action and walk amid the silvery splendor of 100-year-old

Beeches at Ribbonwalk Nature Preserve

beech trees at Ribbonwalk Nature Preserve. Or check out out what Charlotte birdwatchers love about Evergreen Nature Preserve, located in the heart of the city.

Create a holiday decoration out of natural materials.

Younger children especially love gathering natural “treasures” from walks around the neighborhood or in the backyard. Dried leaves, English ivy strands, lichens, seed pods and fallen nuts, with the help of clay or an adult-wielded glue gun, can be turned into figures, animals, or abstract art. Use clear contact paper to sandwich pressed ferns or leaves and tape to a window for an easy, pretty sun catcher.

And old peach basket, fallen bark, clothespin figures form this Nativity scene.

Close-up of the Nativity figures, made with leaves, acorn caps, a milkweed seed pod.

Make casts of animal tracks.

The hoof prints of deer, the muddy imprints of neighborhood cats and dogs – all can be turned into permanent records of the animals that passed. Make a stiff collar of cardboard, held in place with staples or paperclips, to press into the soil around the track. In a Ziploc plastic bag, mix plaster of Paris and water to a pudding-like consistency (or follow the directions on the package) and squeeze the mixture into the cardboard-enclosed area. Assuming no rain, the track should be ready to pry out in a day or two.

Star watch.

Bundle everyone up, throw some heavy blankets or sleeping bags into the bag of the car, and take a Thermos of hot cocoa. Lawn chairs and snacks are a good idea, too. Then head out away from city lights to an open spot. Stars in the winter sky are especially clear. Look for the constellation Orion the hunter, or, near dawn, spot the planet Venus. Get current starwatching tips at StarDate.

If you want to watch stars with a group, the Matthews Habitat and Wildlife Keepers (HAWK) is meeting at 7 p.m. Jan. 17 at Squirrel Lake Park in Matthews to check out the night sky and snack on hot chocolate and s’mores. They’ll be there along with folks from the Charlotte Amateur Astronomers Club.

Enjoy owls.

The Carolina Raptor Center is home to a wide range of owls, many of them recovering from human-inflicted injury. You can build a whole owl-centric day out of a visit to the center, reading a book about owls, and, for the so-gross-it’s-cool activity almost every kid loves: Dissecting owl pellets. Owls eat their prey whole, then cough up gray

Compare the contents of an owl pellet with a bone chart to discover what the owl ate.

pellets of undigested bones, fur and teeth. You can buy sanitized owl pellets at the Raptor Center or online at Carolina Biological and take them apart with toothpicks, then compare your findings to the handy bone chart. Older family members might enjoy building an owl box. Peek in at the daily lives of barred owls (a common Charlotte species) at this owl cam site.

For a few more child-friendly winter nature activities, check out a previous article on this site here.

“Wild Energies,” a wind-powered bamboo sculpture depicting a wolf chasing a deer, was installed Friday at Renfrow Farm in downtown Matthews. It’s the creation of NCSU Professor Will Hooker and his students.

By Craig Paddock

A new farm in downtown Matthews is now home to a running wolf and leaping deer – part of a large, moving sculpture that’s the creation of  N.C. State professor Will Hooker and a dozen students in his landscape design class.

The bamboo weather vane sculpture at Renfrow Farm – which depicts a wolf chasing a deer, balanced off with a smiling sun on one side and a whimsical frog catching a bumblebee at the bottom – is meant to provide a smile for passers-by, to be an educational project for students and to offer a lesson in turning natural materials into art.

“Wild Energies” was commissioned by David Blackley, owner of Renfrow hardware. He and his wife, Mary Beth, suggested the deer as part of the structure that would go up on their new urban farm, a 5-acre parcel off Charles Street. Hooker designed the farm’s layout for the family.

“We’d just put up a big fence to keep out the deer and thought it’d be cool to have at least one inside,”  Mary Beth Blackley said.

Hooker and his students took the design from there, adding a wolf – the mascot of N.C. State University — and the other characters.  Over a space of two weeks, they cut down the bamboo, split it, prepared it and started creating their figures. It was a trial-and-error process – “there’s not a book on working with bamboo,” said NCSU junior Hannah Simpson – but eventually the giant weather vane started taking shape.

Friday morning, they packed it in a pickup truck and hauled it over to Matthews. Most of Hooker’s structures are located in the Raleigh area, including one at the J.C. Raulston Arboretum, but others are scattered across the Carolinas. He’s been leading such class projects  since 1993 and figures he’s done about 35.

With the paint protecting the sculptures, Hooker figures they will last about five years.

“They’re ephemeral,” he acknowledged. “I started messing with bamboo when my daughter was 18 months old just to entertain her and I was flat broke and bamboo was free. And what I’ve found, since then, is that there is a lot of bamboo growing around almost everywhere in North Carolina. Almost all the people who own the groves want to get rid of it because it’s invasive. I knock on the door and say, ‘Can I take your bamboo?’ and they say, ‘Take it all.’ ”

While the bamboo structure eventually will rot away, Hooker sees the kind of urban agriculture that the Blackleys are pursuing as something more permanent.

“This is the future, urban agriculture is the future,” said Hooker, who is a recognized expert in sustainable agriculture. With fuel prices rising and making long-haul transportation of food more expensive, he says,  “we’re going to be producing close to half of our food in towns and cities.”

NCSU Horticulture Professor Will Hooker

Hooker likened the trend toward self-sufficient, small-space agriculture to the “Victory Garden” movement during World War II.

“We’ve done it before and we can do it again,” he said, taking a break from installing the sculpture. “We’ve got to do it if we’re going to eat.”

Pressly Blackley, daughter of Mary Beth and David, may be running Renfrow Farm after her graduation from N.C. State. The family intends to sell the produce through the hardware store plus offer classes in gardening and canning at the farm site.

And why add art to a functional farm?

“I think just because,” Hooker said. “All our lives should artful. So I think no matter what you’re doing, there should be some sort of joy associated with it.”

YouTube video:  Learn more about Will Hooker’s method of creating outdoor art with bamboo here.

Research shows time spent outdoors in nature improves kids’ confidence, ability to learn and behavior. But you don’t need a study to know what many of us realize intuitively: That children belong in the fields, woods, streams and shores, and that a few more hours in the yard instead of in front of a screen would benefit everyone.

For more information, go to the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences “Take a Child Outside” site.  -Amber Veverka

By Amber Veverka

Paw paws- those mysterious forest fruits that taste like part-banana, part-mango -  are ripe across the Carolinas Piedmont.

The fruits look a bit like knobby, misshapen mangoes, and when ripe are quite soft. Inside, they have a custardy yellow pulp with large, shiny black seeds.

“These are an understory forest tree with a very distinct leaf and distinct fruit. They are a favorite fruit of many wildlife, including raccoons and opossums,” said Stephen Hutchinson, nature center manager at Latta Nature Preserve. “I tried the fruit for first time last Friday. One of our staff prepared them. It kind of reminded me a little bit of a mango – I loved it.”

Sharp-eyed hikers can spot patches of the trees in the moist lowland areas of woods – yes, there really are paw paw patches, just like the old folk song says – which are easily identifiable by their long, drooping oblong leaves. The fruit clusters are beneath the leaves, and green until ripe. As long as the fruit has a bit of give to it, it’s fine to pick. Ripe, they have a rich scent of pineapple.

On the forest floor, they turn brown quickly. Their perishable nature is one reason paw paws are rarely grown commercially.

The fruits grow throughout the South and Midwest – another name for them is Michigan banana or Hoosier banana – and the botanical family the fruits come from is actually a tropical one, with the paw paw its only northern member, according to Magicland Farm in northern Michigan, which grows the paw paw commercially. While in the north, paw paws take until autumn to ripen, in the Charlotte area, you can find and eat them by late August.

It’s possible, but difficult, to get a patch of your own started, says Charlotte native plant expert Carol Buie-Jackson.

Paw paw trees have large, drooping leaves.

“They’re notoriously hard to transplant. They’re a great native [tree]. If you have one naturally occurring, well done,” said Buie-Jackson, head of Habitat and Wildlife Keepers in Matthews. “It’s just a wonderful Southern tree and fruit and one of the things that for people who grew up in the South we remember, because we ate them as kids. They’ve kind of been forgotten about.”

Paw paw trees are the host plant of the striking zebra swallowtail butterfly – and a great place to view the butterflies is the Broad River Greenway near Boiling Springs, N.C.

Watch a Youtube video of someone singing “Way Down Yonder in the Paw Paw Patch” while standing in an actual paw paw patch.

If you find the fruit and want to do something more with it than eat it out of hand, Kentucky State University has a collection of recipes to try.

Fully ripe paw paws won’t last more than a day or two on the counter but will keep a bit longer in the refrigerator.  You can freeze the pulp to cook with later. Paws paws are very nutritious: According to Purdue University, they are high in vitamin C, magnesium, iron, copper, and manganese.

Picking up paw paws, but without a pocket.

By Amber Veverka

State scientists say they’re seeing a surging number of western North Carolina deer dead or dying of hemorrhagic disease, a condition transmitted by biting gnats.

Hemorrhagic disease enters the deer’s bloodstream and causes emaciation, loss of motor control, fever, lameness, and swelling of the neck and head. Often the sick deer seek water and are found dead near streams. Some affected deer show no symptoms.

Humans and domestic animals cannot catch hemorrhagic disease from deer, biologists with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission say. To view the behavior of a deer with hemorrhagic disease, go to this Youtube video of a diseased doe in western N.C.

“Because the disease cannot spread to humans, hunters should not worry about dressing deer or eating venison,” said NCWRC spokeswoman Carolyn Rickard. “Deer that recover from an episode of hemorrhagic disease develop immunity to future outbreaks.”

Normally, hemorrhagic disease affects mainly coastal deer, but this month, scientists began getting reports of a jump in cases in western counties.

“We are concerned about the severity of the die-off happening right now in Caldwell, Wilkes and Surry counties,” said Ken Knight, NCWRC supervising wildlife biologist. “It’s too soon to say what the impact might be on the local population.  There is absolutely nothing we can do about it either – other than try to document the extent of the outbreak and educate the public.”

Knight has unconfirmed reports of hemorrhagic disease in deer in Rowan and Montgomery counties, but none from Mecklenburg County.

“We did have some cases in [1999 and 2000] in the Latta/Cowan’s Ford nature preserve area,” said Chris Matthews, Natural Resources Manager with Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation.  “Our annual deer hunts have helped tremendously in reducing/eliminating this disease from the Mountain Island Lake area.”

Hemorrhagic disease isn’t the same as chronic wasting disease, a mad cow-like illness that has swept across western and Midwestern states. North Carolina is trying to keep CWD out of its deer herds by prohibiting hunters and taxidermists from bringing to the state the heads of deer and elk killed in areas where CWD is present. For more on CWD rules click here.

Biologists are trying to track where hemorrhagic disease is occurring. To report sightings of dead or dying deer, contact the Division of Wildlife Management at 919-707-0050 or email wrccomments@ncwildlife.org.

More about the hemorrhagic outbreak:

“We see HD every year somewhere in NC,” said Ken Knight, supervising wildlife biologist with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission. “Because it is a viral disease, a deer that gets the disease and survives will have immunity to it for the rest of its life.  So the disease is somewhat cyclic since the immunity of a local deer population wanes over a period of years and makes the herd vulnerable again.”

The disease is transmitted by a biting gnat called a midge. Midges are most active in late summer and early fall, but this year, the disease outbreak began earlier, Knight said. “By late October when we’ve had some heavy frosts that kill the midge, we’ll see the disease taper off.”

A local branding firm has launched GrowCharlotte.com, a new website that ultimately will let users track locally raised fruits, vegetables and meats from their farm source to the market, store or restaurant where they’re offered, says founder Justin Giardina.

“I’m not a foodie, but I’ve learned a lot more about local food and have become more passionate about it,” says Giardina, who runs TakeRoot, a brand-building agency in Charlotte. “The idea is to connect community and educate people about why local food is better.”

The site is in beta form now, and features links to food blogs, lists of area farmers’ markets, tips on growing your own produce and a few articles about people in the business of local food. (Disclosure: The site also contains a link to Backyard & Beyond.)  Giardina expects eventually to host a farm directory and farmer profiles and to sell ads. “We’re all about letting people know where the good stuff is. Most of the information (on local food) is outdated – people don’t know where to find it; it doesn’t have good search engine optimization.”

Giardina says his team is talking with local businesses about sponsorships for the site, which got launch help from Cassie Parsons of Harvest Moon Grille, the Fruit and Vegetable Coalition and other groups.

“The original idea was to help promote Charlotte Farmers Markets and provide an online directory for members of the community,” says Giardina. “Since then, the idea has grown with help from community groups, food educators and locally sourced business owners.”

Kristin Davis, local food expert with the Mecklenburg County Cooperative Extension, who participated in early planning sessions about the site, said GrowCharlotte has the potential to become “a clearinghouse for all things ‘local foods.’”

“The sky’s the limit for it,” says Giardina. “We just came up with the platform for it. Hopefully we turn more people on to local food.” – Amber Veverka

Local food resources on the web:

GrowCharlotte

Edible Charlotte Magazine

N.C. Cooperative Extension

Slow Food Charlotte

By Amber Veverka

A curlicue of a trail winds around a ridge, skirting towering beech and red oak trees, leading visitors to a watery site rich with more species than any other wetland in the North Carolina Piedmont.

Welcome to the West Branch Nature Preserve in Davidson, the region’s newest nature preserve – and one that nearly didn’t happen.

The 91-acre site once was to become an extension of Davidson’s Summers Walk neighborhood. When developers sought a sale during the 2009 downturn, Davidson Lands Conservancy Executive Director Roy Alexander brought the site to the attention of Mecklenburg County, which bought it with voter-approved bond funds. The land, Alexander knew, was more than just open space. The site cradles a 23-acre wetland that is a rarity.

“It’s home to every single amphibian and reptile that belong to the N.C. piedmont,” Alexander said. And the wetland has one species, the Eastern ribbon snake, that has never been recorded elsewhere in Mecklenburg County.

The plan was to build residences right up to the wetland’s boundary and “lots of runoff would have gone right into the wetland,” Alexander said. “It would have taken away the breeding habitat for most of the amphibians and reptiles.”

Before Mecklenburg County stepped in, Alexander and the Davidson Lands Conservancy and town of Davidson were working hard on negotiations to save the property. “It was just an incredibly fortunate window of time we were working on it,” Alexander  said at the time. “The real estate market was causing the developer to be willing to sell.”

Now, the preserve boasts stands of paw paw trees, thick with green, oblong fruit this time of year, and slopes full of spring-blooming flowers. A grant from Carolina Thread Trail allowed a natural-surface trail to be built through the preserve.  During a recent grand-opening guided hike, local experts that included Mecklenburg County Natural Resources Manager Chris Matthews pointed out the diversity of plant and tree life in the preserve – everything from jack-in-the-pulpit to wild ginger to southern hackberry trees to stands of shortleaf pine.

Chris Matthews, natural resources manager for Mecklenburg Park & Recreation.

At the wetland, a bullfrog thrummed its rubberband-like sound while tiny mosquito fish darted among sedges. “This is the coolest spot in the whole place,” Matthews told the crowd of hikers.

The wetland itself is fairly recent. In the 1920s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers turned the meandering West Branch of the Rocky River into a straight-flowing water course, draining the surrounding flood plain, Alexander said.

As late as the 1990s, the area was a plowed farm field. Then beavers felled trees around the West Branch and the flood plain began to fill with water.

And somehow, Alexander said, the wetland-loving species found the site and made it their home. “To have it happen with such diversity in such a short time is just amazing,” he said.

Alexander said the West Branch Nature Preserve is “the most significant” piece of property the Davidson Lands Conservancy has helped save. “Wetlands don’t get nearly the respect they deserve,” he said. “For this area, it’s a huge one.”

Visit West Branch Nature Preserve:

From Charlotte, take I-77 north to exit 30 toward Davidson. Stay right at the fork in the road to Griffith Street. Turn right onto N. Main Street/N.C. 115. At Main and Concord Road in downtown Davidson, go  east on Concord Road 1.9 mi. to a roundabout. This roundabout is the confluence of Concord Road, Davidson-Concord Road, and East Rocky River Road. Continue straight through the roundabout onto E. Rocky River Road. Proceed for 1.3 mi. to Shearer Road. Turn right.

There’s no parking lot, but visitors can park along Shearer Road at the West Branch bridge near the road’s end.

You’ll see a sign for the nature preserve. Bikes and horses are not allowed on the preserve’s natural-surface trail and signs to that effect will go up soon. Ultimately a bicycle-friendly paved trail – the West Branch Greenway – which now ends where the nature preserve begins, will continue along the West Branch edge of the preserve into Cabarrus and Iredell counties. Also in the future: A nature center and parking lot, to be built on a part of the site that mostly scrub, away from key animal habitat.