Monthly Archives: June 2008

On water life

Posted on June 30, 2008 | 7 Comments

For about the last two months, there’s been an American toad looking for love in our pond. This guy has a call that is like a long, low, trilling whistle; one note (or near enough for my ears), somewhat insistent. People would think it was a cricket, but it’s lots louder than that. There have always been somewhat raucous chorus of green frogs in the pond too. I am not so sure if they’re looking for love or just being bellicose. Either way, they’re welcome to do their shouting.

There are still a few green frog tadpoles in that pond now. We’re slowly watching their legs sprout. There must have been two batches of tadpoles, as there are a bunch of tiny green frogs in there now too. The new froglets, including their soon-to-be-lost tails, are about 4″ long. Lose the tail and they’re about 2 1/2″. The adults are 6-7″ if you stretch their legs out.

I love the pond. It’s outside our dining room, about 12′ from the house. It’s not too big, but big enough to support quite a slice of water life. I like encouraging this little slice of biodiversity.

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Posted in nature

More fluffy cuteness

Posted on June 28, 2008 | 10 Comments

You know, they only are cute and fluffy for such a short period of time!

The typical scene.  What you are not hearing is me doing the mothering harangue.  “Honey, don’t squeeze them.  No, you should put that baby down.   Honey, he’s cheeping, he’s scared, please set him down.”

Chick complete with egg tooth

Ducklings on 11 June

and one baby on 27 June, with tree sap on his belly.

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Posted in Uncategorized

On new fowl

Posted on June 27, 2008 | 10 Comments

So yesterday we rounded out our meat-bird experiment with the early-morning phone call from the post office. There are now 22 birds chirping at my feet in my office on the back porch.

My gosh, are baby turkey poults CUTE! It’s their wild googly eyes, I think. The goslings do not so much cheep as twitter and sing. And the baby meat chickens are, well, quite adorable too. (For those who care, the turkeys are Bourbon Reds, the goslings Toulouse, and the meat birds are a slow-growing Cornish Cross.) I will be keeping the poults with the goslings for a while. The poults think the goslings are their parents, and peck at their bills for food. The goslings groom them, and then they all fall asleep in a pile. The chicks, well, the chicks eat drink and then fall asleep in place.

The ducklings at 2.5 weeks are quite huge. I think they are Pekins after all and not a Pekin/runner mutt as I previously supposed. These guys are doing time in the chicken run, and seem to adore trying to swim in their water bowl. So far their chicken/guinea room mates don’t seem too terribly bothered about them. The ducklings are terribly skittish, though. Tom has taken quite the fancy to them (always a good thing). I promise to get more pictures of them today. The battery in my camera died before I could take them.

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Posted in chickens, etc.

On the canning season

Posted on June 26, 2008 | 18 Comments

This is the time of year the above two devices get found in the junk drawer, washed off, and used.

Marital aides? Child behavior modification tools? Nope. These are a cherry pitter and a strawberry huller.

It’s funny: we went to three stores before we found the cherry pitter. It was in a local hardware store, and had a pricetag on it from the 1980s. The thing was rusty so they just gave it to me. Of course and as a joke Tom now buys me every cherry pitter he can find: notice the next picture. Lovely German engineering.

It is not fully cherry season, so I haven’t busted out the cool pitter. We’re in the earlies now, with the more tart and bigger ones coming around the beginning of July. But wow, is it strawberry season! We’re filling ourselves, and now I am filling jam jars too. Last night I made a lovely clafoutis of cherries and strawberries, befitting my adoration of the egg and All Things Custard.

Note: slapdash clafouti recipe is now in the comments!

Tell me this, though: why is it that every time I begin to can stuff I feel the urgent need to also dirty every dish, pan, bowl and pot and practically every dishtowel we own? I really need an adjustment period. Hopefully it takes me only one day’s worth of canning madness (but that is unlikely). It’s just wild to think I do some form of food preservation every night until mid-September. Tonight, it took too long. Tomorrow? I guess we shall see. It’s like anything, I guess. It takes the time it takes, and with a bit of practice, less time will be needed.

But inevitably I always forget how darned fussy jam-making can be. Luckily, the payoff is tay-steee.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Flowers in the veg garden

Posted on June 24, 2008 | 11 Comments

I confess the last two seasons I have spent zero time with the perennial beds around here. It is quite shameful, really, but my pursuit of subsistence farming has been…all-encompassing, let’s just say. I do, however, have some ornamentals growing in the veg garden for their ability to attract polinators. Some of them are even edible. Most self-seed readily: a great thing for someone who tells herself she’s got no time for flowers ;)

Angelica: One evening I counted 16 different insects visiting its flower umbrels. Blue bottle flies, mason bees, honeybees, bumblebees, little gnatty things: all this for something that (to me) smells like gin and tonics. It is huge. This picture doesn’t do it justice: they can get to be 8′ in height and diameter so make sure you have the space for it. Here, it’s growing with potatoes and asparagus. It’s a perennial, and mine’s about 7′ in height.

Calendula: A new thing to me last year, it does self-seed readily. It hates being transplanted but you can if it’s really small. Its flowers are edible and flowers way beyond frost too.

Coreopsis: The orange/yellow kind are rather tall and weedy, but they continue to show up in the garden and I do let them come.

Borage: Plant it once and it will always come back! Luckily its seedlings are easily recognized and can be uprooted easily. It’s prickly, though. I put the flowers in salad. My very first blog post was about borage.

Nasturtiums: Another orange/yellow sprawler, its flowers are likewise edible.

Marigolds, zinnias, snapdragons, stock: I do seed these in a row in early spring and then spread them around the gardens and yards. They stick around, often into late fall, and the old-flower lover in me just adores them.

Man, even writing about flowers makes me tired. I had better stop now.

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Posted in seeds

The greenhouse in early summer

Posted on June 23, 2008 | 11 Comments

6/14/08: It’s an issue of timing: the big things going to seed need time to do so (leeks, left; beets, right; parsley, rear right) and the little things need time to get big.

I spend a little more than a usual amount of my worry-energy worrying about the soil in the greenhouse.

Without the cleansing benefit of fresh rain and direct sunlight, the soil in the beds will eventually need to be replaced. Hopefully, I will not have to do this for another couple of years, but yes indeed I do still worry about it. I water from the hose and I can definitely tell that the top layer of soil is getting mineral stains: either the water itself, which is pretty “heavy” with iron and calcium, is leaving this stain or the soil itself is leaching it out. Either way, it will eventually affect the soil fertility, and it is something I need to keep an eye on.

A partial answer to this would be to gather rainwater to water the beds. I do this, on a hackneyed basis; in winter and early spring, melted snow or fresh rainwater are the only way the garden gets watered. The heat of summer means I need a lot more water. Until we get a load of rainbarrels lined up and connected, the hose is the way to go.

Another partial answer would be to mulch as intensively as I do outside in the main gardens to conserve that water. Let’s just say I am afraid to do that. We have slugs and sowbugs aplenty in the greenhouse: they do lots of damage to new growing things, so I really do not want to encourage them further by making their lives any more cushy than they already are.

Big tomatoes (rear), slug-eaten Cranberry bean seedlings, and a handful of clover seed

So here’s my partial answer today to the fertility/soil quality question. I underplant the tomatoes with beans, and then underplant the beans with a sowing of white clover. The clover and the beans are both nitrogen-fixing legumes: nodules on their roots make nitrogen, a plentiful airborne element, readily available to the soil, especially after the plant dies. (Green manures generally are in the bean family for this reason: the other things I use (oats, rye) are used for their sheer mass of greenery that the heavy clay soil needs.) It becomes a matter of timing, then, for what I do in the greenhouse in spring/summer: tomato plants first (planted into their permanent places at the beginning of May), beans planted in early June, and now once the beans are tall, the clover. The beans will get harvested and the tomatoes will get harvested and pulled out and then I will till under the clover and bean plants, add more compost and grass clippings, and then plant out everything for the fall/winter.

Right now the peppers and eggplants are not tall enough to be undersown with clover. Bean plants are too tall to underplant with these two.

Oh, and reason #859 why I love this greenhouse? It’s shaving a month off of the first tomato harvest! The early and determinate plants of Bellstar Paste are just loaded with fruit right now. Great for instant gratification gardening, I will admit.

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Posted in greenhouses

On tradition

Posted on June 21, 2008 | 4 Comments

Leek blossoms

When I was young(er), I spent long hours in my post-work world doing things like home renovation. Having neither spouse nor child, these hours, spent sometimes with a friend or significant other, were usually fun but exhausting: it was usually around 11 that we (or I) would call it quits and order a pizza and open the first beer. I thought about my past life tonight when I finally pulled myself out of the garden at 10:00, sweaty and mud-caked, calling to Tom to order a pizza and let’s open a beer.

The child was away this evening, spending one of her first nights ever away from us, safely being sugared up by her Nana (my mother). Such time I had available to me! I got home from work, changed into the garden gear, and headed out: hours ahead of me, nothing but the projects at hand, no other draws on either my attention or time. This hearkens back to a simpler life, I think.

I thought about the difference between parenting and gardening when I was out doing my evening battle with the weeds. I would say, and maybe it’s just me, that gardening connects me more with the great “out there” of tradition, of history, than any other activity I do. Considering that archaeological evidence states that we have been gardening for a mere 11,000 years or so, and we’ve certainly been parenting much longer than that, it’s quite odd that I would feel the way I do. Maybe it’s a question of immersion: I am not a gardener 24/7, but arguably motherhood is full-time. Maybe it’s the matter of precedents: I have no known farming ancestors. Maybe it’s my being American that kind of messes things up. In this country we have psychologically done away with the yoke of tradition in many respects. I could therefore say that gardening, or parenting, is some new river which I am fording alone, the first to do so. But is this the case? Hardly!

Granted, even home renovation and my other great love and time-suck, cooking, can claim to be traditions long pursued by humankind. I do feel a connection with cooking, and yes, even with getting out a hammer and a saw, with something that’s gone before, that great Tradition (sing to yourself now, Tevye: Tradition!!) to which I am just another link in the chain. I don’t, say, feel so nostalgic about laundry. But there is this draw, very primal, about putting a small seed into the ground that is so…very…OLD to me. And enjoyable, too.

Holy Cats, girl, you say. Just go open that beer already! Beer will surely chase these thoughts from my head.

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Posted in sweat

On fencing

Posted on June 19, 2008 | 7 Comments

Barbarians at the gate

One of my biggest problems in the garden is not simple weeds taking over the beds. Oh no, as that would be easy to remedy. Nope; my biggest problem is the meadow keeps wanting to reclaim the garden.

Gene Logsdon (whose The Contrary Farmer is a great read for anyone considering an agrarian lifestyle or even just a good read) says that good fences make lazy farmers. I think what he means here is that you shouldn’t take for granted that all fences will hold. I fenced in my vegetable garden a few years back to keep the chickens out: I hadn’t minded their raids until almost all of my Brandywine tomatoes had large peck marks in them. It was a huge irony, that I would have to put up a fence to keep domestic creatures out!

Before, on the south side

This polycarbonate fence has done wonders keeping all manner of creatures out of the garden. But it’s done diddly at keeping that nasty rhizomatous grass out, as that grass’ runners creep under the beds and it is within the beds it goes nuts. And it’s nearly impossible to get all the little runners, and each little runner is a new meadow entire, such is its potential for mayhem. You can’t weed-whip a plastic fence, folks. So yeah, replacing the fence with a metal one is on the list of Must Be Dones.

After, on the east side

In the interim, I undo the fence, till, handweed the runners inside and outside the beds, and put the fence back up. One side at a time. Each side is 50′ long. Ugh. Two more to go!

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Posted in sweat

On helping along the little seeds

Posted on June 18, 2008 | 9 Comments

I’ve told you what a bear our clay soil can be. It’s especially tough on small seeds, like carrots and onions and almost any herb. Surprisingly, though, most seeds are pretty tough: there’s a lot of energy needed to break out of the tough shell and sprout, and even more needed to break through this clay soil of ours. I try to help by keeping the soil moist, or by planting things in shaded conditions to prevent the bed from baking in the sun, but it’s still hard work.

I’ve mentioned before that we bought the farm from the original owners. Actually, we got it from the son of the original owners, and he was 89 at the time and had lived here since he was three. This was a thrifty family: nothing was thrown away (that I could tell, anyway; we filled a 20 yard dumpster with such “treasures”). Well, we’re thrifty too but I do draw the line at packrattery. However, there is one item I saved from the dumpster: a whole bunch of burlap potato sacks. These were 50# bags for seed potatoes, most dating, from evidence of their tags, to the early 1970s. And I have found many garden-related uses for the things.

Cut a bag open and lay it atop a newly-seeded bed of carrots and parsnips, as shown here: keep the bag moist and voila! almost every seed has a chance to sprout. Granted, not everyone has old burlap sacks lying around (or do they?). I think this trick would work with old sheets or towels, too; you just need to take a peek pretty frequently to make sure you’re not squishing the sprouts.

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Posted in seeds

On doing without

Posted on June 17, 2008 | 17 Comments

Gratuitous cute-ducky photo

Monica tagged me for a meme that I have seen a few other bloggers respond to lately. It has to do with what is it you would refuse to do without, should things really take a bad turn. I have read hers, and mostly agree if one had to make choices, hers are definitely reasonable ones to choose.  I think, though, that the meme is entirely wrongly directed. No offense to Monica as hey: she was tagged too; she didn’t make the thing up. It should not be the X Things I Cannot Live Without but How In the World I Can. That is the ultimate question, isn’t it, in any worst-case scenario?

And it has been my journey, upon moving to Michigan, to see how much we can do ourselves, without resorting to huge extremes of time or cash outlay. I have made it very plain in the entries in this blog that Rome is burning. You can either fiddle, or you can grab a fire extinguisher.

And these are my discoveries. Your life on this path need not be dire, or even wanting in any particular way: there is a world to be discovered when you bake your first loaf of bread, plant your first garden, taste your first egg from a little chicken under your care. You may even like the way your laundry smells when you hang it out to dry. Those are simple transitions anyone can easily make. The harder leap is one of degree. What would I do if gas jumps to $10/gal., as it inevitably will? How about heating our house without heating oil, or getting our water out of the ground if the electricity goes out? I know the answers to these last three, and while Rome is burning, we are working out ways to do them.

As it is now, so many of my transitions are gradual ones that it’s kind of hard to notice over time. We long ago stopped buying stupid stuff that is used and thrown away. Paper towels are now washcloths, purchased from Target by the dozen. We have always had paper napkins. Leftovers? They go in glass canning jars and then into the refrig, and not into a wasteful and never-to-leave-us plastic bag. We do still have garbage bags but it is crazy considering we have almost no waste with which to dispose. I never get the stand mixer out if I can grab a whisk or a pastry blender, and hey, I have the best-looking biceps of anyone I know because of it. In other words, any area of our lives (and in this paragraph I only focused on the kitchen) can see the easiest of changes undergone, changes which are NOT “living without,” just living differently. Am I wanting for anything? Maybe a little more time, but any parent of a young child would likely say the same thing.

So sure, I could play along and say I really do not want to give up coffee. But to be completely honest, I really do not want to give up life on this farm!

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Posted in soapbox

On coming around to a point of view

Posted on June 16, 2008 | 12 Comments

About 8-9 years ago, I was helping my friend Jason in his backyard NE Minneapolis garden. The yard was an interesting one: sloping steeply up to the alley, it had been filled by a previous owner with all manner of garbage like railroad ties, broken-up concrete, bricks and pavers. We could only speculate it was that guy’s attempt at terracing, but it was so chaotic that it was simply unclear. It took him (and friends like me) a long time to make it a productive garden again.

So we’re attacking one area near the back fence, on the property line. He’s sawing the branch of a tree that has grown through the fence. “Damned weed trees,” said Jason.

Weed trees? (Such heresy, I thought.) “What do you mean, weed trees?”

“Damned maples. Any of them. Box elders, bur oaks, and don’t get me started about willows,” he said.

As a city person, he was obviously crazy. Trees, as weeds? Well, it took me a couple more years to come around to his point of view. My theretofore easy definition of weed = anything growing where you do not want it does now include trees.

Maples are our particular bugaboo here. Their little helicopter propeller fruit readily plant themselves any- and everywhere. I do get my revenge, though, on the saplings: they make great tomato stakes. Cheap tomato stakes, too, as it happens!

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Posted in nature, sweat

On clay

Posted on June 14, 2008 | 12 Comments

Clay soil: it absorbs water and expands, then expels water and contracts. This ability is called “plasticity.” I can’t throw a pot with the stuff, though, thankfully.

I thought rather naively that I would have sand at our farm. Being this close to the beach, I figured it was a part of the picture. Glacial movements are a funny thing, though, and I am sand-free here and instead have lots of clay.

This is both good and bad. Clay is wildly productive stuff. There’s a chemical reason for that: its tiny, flat particles, though notorious for other reasons, are great at binding with good metals in the soils itself through an electrochemical exchange of cations. Clay is negatively charged, the metals positive, thus the binding. Sure, we all need to go back to high school chemistry to understand it fully, but let’s just say if there’s some calcium or potassium floating around, the clay will get ahold of it and keep it.

It’s a bear to work with though as a gardener. This is Season #4 on the farm, so I have had three years of observation. Not nearly enough years, but…at least now I can at least speak a form of clay pidgin (har). My first year, I was so worried about the water-soaking potential of this soil that I did not mulch at all. Well, that was a huge mistake. Water from a hose or from the sky loves a plant-free (weed-free) bed of clay soil: it smashes the top layer into an amazing flatness that then gets baked by the sun. Nothing wants to go through that, and if you think of Death Valley you can understand what it begins to look like.

Clay is a problem because of how heavy it is: there is not much air in the space between the particles, unlike sand. Incorporating lots of stuff in with the soil is one way to lighten them, but in my experience it’s only a temporary fix. My first raised beds were made with a ton of compost, manure, leaves, grass clippings and then that native soil that I tilled beforehand, all mixed together. (Never work wet clay soil is another cardinal rule, incidentally.) These are still the materials I use to make new beds, but I tend to layer things instead: tilled earth, 2″ compost, 4″ dried grass, earth from the paths between the beds, more compost, more grass, and a topcoat of some of that big truckload of (clay) dirt I got earlier this spring. Unless I am planting seeds directly into the bed, the new transplants I stick into the new beds then get mulched to the hilt: 4-6″ of grass clippings, usually green. They turn brown eventually, and get refreshed every time Tom mows (which is about every 2 weeks).

Once the beds are made, I never till them again (a near impossibility anyway considering the beds are raised) and I never work them at all except to mix in the top inch or two in the spring. Vegetables are annuals in the main: in the clay soil elsewhere on the farm, perennial roots of grasses, trees and flowers (and weeds) are always present and thus humus is made in situ. Veggies are annuals, though. I tend to lop off the tops of my spent plants (not the brassicas or tomatoes but everything else) and leave the roots in place to rot and thus claw through that tough stuff.

Mulching is entirely necessary, however. It keeps the weeds down to zero, or near enough; it reduces my need to water down to near zero too. The worms and other wriggly things, which flee to subsoil level in an uncovered bed, are right under the mulch (and right at the top root zone) in a mulched bed. Last August we had so much rain that the beds DID drown, and I lost most of my cole crops; I pulled the mulch off to dry the soil out. I am not sure it worked, but the garden is now an island surrounded by a ring of perforated drain pipe, 300′ total, as a form of insurance. As I harvest the last veggies in the fall, I immediately sow green manures (a mix of rye, oats, hairy vetch) that will grow fairly slowly and will winterkill (sometimes). This creates a mass of vegetation a couple of inches thick. In the spring I use a three-tined cultivator and mix it in.

Can I say I love clay soils? Not really. Considering, though, that my kitchen garden is where there has been a kitchen garden for the last 90 years…and has not had fertility, rust, mildew, or wilt issues…I think I will keep it.

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Posted in nature, sweat

On sand

Posted on June 12, 2008 | 11 Comments

putting sand on the compliant pooch

Kind of like the tomatoes being in the greenhouse until last week, our dog has kept her winter coat until just recently. The spring has been that cold. “We need to wash that dog,” we said. Which means “let’s go to the beach.”

As the crow flies, we are a mile from the shore of Lake Michigan. We are not crows, though, so must commute 3 miles to get there. Did you know that Michigan has more miles of shoreline than any other state? Any other state than Alaska, that is, that great categorical bell-curve buster. Anyway, it’s true. We’ve got lots of shoreline, lots of beautiful beaches.

It was this lake that drew me back here. I grew up on this lake; having sand at the foot of the bed was just a huge part of my childhood. I wanted it to be part of my own kid’s life, so…here we are.

Incidentally, blue heelers (which is mostly what Penny is, that, and a little neighbor dog thrown in) are not the greatest of water dogs. She’s enthusiastic, though, especially if heavy exercise is part of any project. That water Kong though is just great.

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Posted in weather

Chicken-ranching crossroads

Posted on June 11, 2008 | 20 Comments

Sometimes, the best-laid plans…

Actually, it IS when life throws you curve balls that the best learning and best decisions come about. There’s always a bit of a wrangle, though. Today I went to place my order for Round Two of the tractor inhabitants. I’d also planned on getting a few geese and turkeys…just because, of course. Actually, the meat birds (including ducks, geese, and turkeys) WAS on the plan for this year. But the hatchery is kind of on backorder with everything I want. I am too impatient a cuss to sit it out, so I will be making my order from elsewhere.

I read somewhere (on Garden Rant, maybe?) that chickens are like the new IPhone. Everyone has to have them now to be considered cool. If that were really the case, I would be delighted. As it is, an uptick in popularity means my hatchery is overtaxed.

Plans: The plan for NEXT year was much more aligned with “let’s put the money where your mouth is,” and establish a breeding program for some endangered species of domesticated fowl. Next year’s plan also includes some ruminants (hey: it is pure stupidity to mow all 5 acres, so we don’t. We mow 2 of it, and even that is rather dumb, but I need the grass clippings for my gardens) and some pigs. Big plans, in other words. Lots of big plans!

But maybe I will have to up the chicken/turkey breeding program to this year. I think I will go with Privett hatchery, though I am not terribly keen on shipping the poor babies that far (they’re in New Mexico) but their catalog is deep and their ordering policy is pretty loosey-goosey (i.e., I don’t have to order 25 of any one bird, which is the case with my own hatchery). SO: next up in the tractor? Twelve meat birds. Maybe 12 breeding chickens in another tractor, 6 meat/breeding turkeys elsewhere: and here is where I would love some input: I am thinking about raising Delawares (chickens) and Bourbon Reds (turkeys). And some geese, for the freezer: looking into Toulouse. So: any opinions out there? (hah!)

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Posted in chickens, etc.

Birds and more birds

Posted on June 11, 2008 | 7 Comments

Baby chicks are pretty cute, but ducklings…!

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Posted in chickens, etc.

On chicken-food thieves

Posted on June 10, 2008 | 9 Comments

Do I look like a wild bird to you?

I am not sure of the percentage of feed we lose, but we do have a number of critters, other than the egg birds, who love chickenfeed. Ground squirrels and sparrows are the main culprits, but on Thursday, a pigeon showed up at the feed trough.

I was alerted to the fact by the chickens. My office (AKA the back porch) is adjacent to their run (AKA the back yard) and all day I heard the birds trill out their soft alarming whistle which says “Danger From Above! Take Cover!” Ever alert myself, I would run outside to see if a hawk was making a sweep. It took about six tries before I noticed that it was a pigeon, eager for their food.

Pigeons: Historically, they have been useful birds. “Rock dove” is their more traditional name. Their poop is a ready and good source of nitrogen, so many farmhouses had dovecotes stuck into the gables of the roofs of their buildings to encourage nesting and pooping. In France, they were even regulated: you had to be a noble to have a dovecote. They are also good eating (squab) but of course we are taught that they’re city rats with wings, so you won’t find squab at the A&P.

I showed the kid the bird, as she has an affinity for the Mo Willems books. “Notice the bands around his legs?” I asked. “He belongs to someone. He’s probably a homing pigeon who got run off course.” “Can we keep him?” she asked. I laughed. With food this easy to get, I told her, he might keep us.

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Posted in nature

Yet another greenhouse rave

Posted on June 9, 2008 | 17 Comments

Okay, really now. I try to keep away from the recipe-and-food-picture circuit because I kind of find food blogs (with a couple of exceptions) braggard-y and full of puff. It’s one of the reasons I shied away from One Local Summer this year, too; I just was not comfortable with the format, for this blog, anyway; as a tipping point toward local eating, it’s really a great way to go.

But (but!) I must tell you about this harvest last night. Without the greenhouse*, all you would see would be the onions and the asparagus and some leaf lettuce. The head lettuce I seeded outside last August, and extended the season of that bed by simply laying a piece of leftover greenhouse plastic on top of the plants, held down by rocks. (Yep: call it the poor girl’s greenhouse, but obviously it worked, and it worked through a winter when none of my normal outdoor plants (kales, leeks) survived.) The broccoli I blathered about in the previous post.

And the garlic?

It’s from some very unpromising sprouty cloves I stuck into the greenhouse toward the end of January.

This is Michigan, people. Mih-chih-gaaan, where it’s cold and snowy half the year. Hopefully, this will be a bit more of a tipping point for some of you out there to get yourselves a greenhouse/hoophouse/polytunnel this season. It’s not too late!  I’m not showing you what I can grow.  I am showing you what you can, even with surprisingly unpromising garlic.

*Greenhouse-y, if I include the lazy season extension of the plastic on top of the lettuce bed.

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Posted in greenhouses

Another “I love my greenhouse” post

Posted on June 7, 2008 | 5 Comments

Reason #845 (if I were counting that is): it’s the first week of June and we had a monster harvest of broccoli for dinner last night.

Granted, I feel like I only recently made an ode to the last of the greenhouse broccoli…I figured it would be a while before we supped again on its crunchy green spears. Nope! I planted these babies under the lights in the basement on Feb. 23rd, then out into the greenhouse in March, then into the garden at the end of April. And this, when all that’s ready out there are onions, salads, asparagus and flowers on my peas: great, but nothing that sticks to the ribs, you know?

Perhaps broccoli is a symbol of my vegetarian past. It’s entirely possible it holds my esteem so readily because I have eaten so much of it over the years. But I do swear that transferring things from a little pot to real dirt in the greenhouse, and not some half-step single pot still under the basement lights, makes all the difference. You know how plants love rainwater much more than water from your hose? I swear the microbes in the soil and the light of the sun in the greenhouse are manna from heaven to them.

(And it’s made a difference to my tomatoes, too. Dang, I only yesterday got around to putting many of them into the new greenhouse beds: the puppies were pushing 30″ tall and were full of blooms! Oops. Bad gardener.)

But back to the broccoli. I will continue to harvest these guys until mid-July. I will then direct sow new seeds in the beds for a fall harvest. I will then sow more seeds in mid-August, transferring these babies into the greenhouse in October for winter eating. I do agree one must eat seasonally…but I swear broccoli (and raab, and Chinese broccoli, and flowering turnips…) are just as big a staple around here as potatoes! Yum.

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Posted in food, greenhouses

Attention beekeepers!

Posted on June 6, 2008 | 8 Comments

Hum a bum buzz buzz

Holy Crap!

Just walked into my potting shed (also known as Shed of Dreams, like, I better get this x farm implement for future use and store it in said shed) and I’ve got bees!

I stopped (backtracked, blocked traffic) a couple years back to grab a super I saw on the side of the road. This was before all my research that says things like “don’t reuse old hive equipment ever,” etc. So I have it, in my shed, and overnight (literally) there are now bees in the super. And in the shed. And chasing me all over the place should I go near the door.

I am overjoyed, of course. I planned to get a nuc last year but CCD killed my bee guy’s hives. I am overjoyed likewise that bees are so numerous here that they’re finding an old super squirreled away in an old shed. It’s great news, mostly…

Well, folks: but how do I get my tools out of there now? What do I do? Especially since I have a load of new chicks coming!! help! move the super outside at night? what? buzz buzz

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Posted in Uncategorized

Happy Friday

Posted on June 6, 2008 | 4 Comments

Here’s to the end of a very trying week. Amongst other woes, I got a new laptop, as my six year old model is slowly giving up the ghost. Unlike a new car these things magically don’t just, you know, start working on their own. Considering I have the patience of a gnat regarding technical glitches, its arrival, and our daughter’s continued slow recovery from getting her tonsils out, have made this a week I will be glad to get behind us!

So…here’s hoping there’s a happy weekend ahead for us all.

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Posted in Uncategorized

The meat bird wrap-up

Posted on June 5, 2008 | 18 Comments

Note: I will be describing, without pictures, the methods I use to butcher in this post. Come back later if you don’t want to know!

The chicken tractor. You can see the blue tow-rope I have attached to the front. There’s a PVC pipe “runner” slipped on the back frame so I can drag it it fairly easily. These blokes poop a LOT so I move it twice a day. I set the rope around my waist and walk backward slowly. They’re now old enough (smart enough) to just follow me.

This is the Food Bong. PVC pipe, funnel, duct tape, 30* elbow at end. It helps, as lifting the tractor up to slide the full food trough one-handed is tricky (especially if they’re hungry). I bring it out with their food; it’s not a permanent fixture. We widened one hole big enough to stick it through the chicken wire.

So: On April 7th, 26 day-old fluffball White Mountain Broiler (CornishX) chicks awaited me at the post office. I spent $42.50 for a straight-run (nonsexed) shipment of 25 birds, plus $8 in shipping. I had had brooder equipment (lights, box, towels, bottles, feeders) from previous chicks so I did not need to purchase anything new, *but* I did get medicated drops from my feed store to put in their water. I purchase 20% protein broiler-type feed from a feed store that mixes their own; it is not organic, but I would buy some if it were. Each 50-lb. bag costs $15. As a point of comparison, 50-lb bags of comparable feed (20% protein) at the farm stores around town, from another Michigan-based feed company, is $11.50. The feed store I go to is 20 miles east, a direction I never drive, so I get four bags at a time. At the time of final butchering, they will have eaten most of 12 bags, plus lots of table scraps and home-made meals of eggs, ground-up eggshells, oatmeal, and milk. I ration their consumption. Always letting the food bowl go empty for an hour or two, I feed them twice a day. I make sure they have enough food to last through the night, but I always ensure they have plenty of water.

The birds moved into the tractor when they were four weeks old. At four weeks they’ve got quite a few feathers. Our very cold spring though made me regret getting them so early. We ended up putting two lamps in there and turning at least one lamp on for a few nights afterward. The tractor cost us just under $100, including the tarp. I did have to buy a bigger waterer and feed trough for them; the waterer was $22 and the feed trough $12. “Incidentals” in cost were the Food Bong Tom made for them and the PVC runner that aids in moving the tractor over the grass.

Mortality, intentional and otherwise: These guys are not the hardiest of poultry. I lost one chick at two days, another at two weeks, a third of apparent fright at going outside for the first time at three weeks. I lost two birds inexplicably at Weeks 5 and 7. I am guessing these last two had heart/circulatory issues: their combs turned bluish purple and their breath was labored before they expired. Three others are not dead but are permanent Infirmary patients: they were not growing as fast and have always had problems with their legs. I have them on regular (egg-layer) feed so as not to beef them up; they are easily only half the size as the others, and probably will never walk well.

Harvest day, May 24th: They are just over 6 weeks old at this point. It helps to isolate those destined for the freezer and remove their food for 12 hours before butchering. This aids greatly in Poop Avoidance, but it’s not completely necessary if you know chicken anatomy. I get out my biggest canning pots and get lots of water boiling. I place the Killing Cone on the tree: my cone is actually a squared-off milk jug, neck and bottom removed, hung upside-down 24″ from the ground above a garden trug. I have my fish fillet knife sharpened and I also have a pair of metal snips handy. I have a galvanized tub (suitable for at least 3 cases of beer) ready with a hose nearby; I also have a large cooler half filled with water and some ice. A cutting board is on the table.

Selecting the biggest bird, I tuck him gently under my arm and talk to him. (I talk gently the whole time, mostly to calm myself I think.) I bring him to the killing cone and hold him by his feet upside down: the blood going to his head calms him somewhat; he is still agitated and tries to flap a bit. I hold him like this for about two minutes to make him woozy. I slide him into the cone, feet facing me, tail/head against the tree; I might need to pull his head through the bottom of the cone if he doesn’t just slide it in. The jug fits him fairly snugly so he is unable to flap his wings. I continue to hold his feet. I try to do what I need to do next quickly, but there is no avoiding the fact that I am going to cause him pain. I sever his carotid artery with the fillet knife; placing the knife on the ground I then grasp his head with the knife hand and still hold the feet with the other. I hold his head to keep him from shaking and panicking. Death takes about two minutes, more or less; there is always a last burst of motion as the neurons continue to fire and the life force makes its final stand. I leave the bird in there to drip some more. There really is not much blood: maybe half a cup.

I remove the bird, thanking him again for his sacrifice, to the ground. I widen the slit I have made to expose the crop; I then slit the skin all the way around, and sever some tendons on the neck below the crop. (I never seem to be able to go all the way through the neck with the knife, thus I use the metal snips.) Into the trug goes the head and then off to the table go me, the headless bird, and the trug. I set the bird on the ground and spray him with a hose, trying to loosen the matted poop on his breast. I go inside and retrieve the boiling water and a thermometer. Pouring the water into the galvanized tub, I add water from the hose to make it about 170*. I also squirt a dash of dishwashing detergent in there. Grabbing the bird by the feet, I swish him in the water. I am wearing clean gardening gloves: ones with rough fingers, dipped cotton gloves. These are great for plucking feathers. I begin to pluck with one hand while I hold and swish the still-submerged bird with the other. I put the feathers into the trug. It’s easiest to get the feathers on the legs and body first, the wings and tail last. I still might need a pliers to pull the tail feathers out. The detergent in the water helps you get to all the feathers, but it’s still a pretty dirty job, and that water is quite hot. It takes me a good half an hour to pluck the bird completely clean.

After he’s plucked, I remove the feet. Using the fillet knife, I bend the foot forward then sever the tendons at the knee. I remove all of his scaly skin at the end of the drumstick too. I hose him off and place him in the cooler, and then go on to Bird #2. I repeat the above steps until I have five birds in the cooler. Tom has brought me a big glass of water and a small glass of wine. He’s on deadline or he’d be helping more.

Gloves off now, I remove the first bird and place him on the cutting board. The table is on a slight hill, so the tail is on the downside, breast up, partially overhanging the feather-filled trug. I make a small incision through the skin just below the diaphragm/rib cage. I continue the slit until I can see the muscle at the diaphragm; it is at this point that I make a deeper cut to go all the way through the muscle and the membrane that holds the guts in. I then place both hands’ index and middle fingers in this cut and pull in opposite directions, widening the hole so I can slide the fingers of one hand under the ribcage. I loosen the innards all around the ribcage with that hand, pulling the liver then heart down in a clump with the rest. I reach way up and pinch to cut the trachea. I take the knife again and I slice through the skin and membrane only toward the cloaca/anus and then behind it: my aim here is to make a hole large enough where I can remove the innards in one sweep, including, with one cut, the anus and its attached intestine. Into the bucket they go. I do need to go back in and remove the lungs and, in this fellow, the testicles, which are mounted under the back pretty high near the lungs.

The innards are quite colorful. They are also mercifully cool after their trip in the cooler. Yes, waste not want not and all that: I have no time today to separate edible parts from nasty bits. I would love to recycle the parts but all I have time for after five birds is to put the blood, feathers and soft tissue into the compost in layers of hot grass, and bury the bony feet and heads. Microbes are the happy recipients of the bounty there.

With each evisceration I bring the body in for Tom to prep for the freezer. He weighs each bird and then marks on each bag droll witticisms like “Met Maker 5/24/08; 5lbs4oz” or “Offed On 5/24/08 6lbs6oz Big Boy!” Tom has the easier job I think, don’t you?

My math says that I will end up with 21 birds in the freezer that vary from 4lbs11oz to over 8lbs. Including unknown incidentals (gas, electricity, Tom’s food bong) and discounting things I already owned (fillet knife, pots, hose, cooler) my math says this first batch, including the tractor, was about $400. This comes down to $2.72 a pound. Next batch? No tractor, no waterer/feeder, same inputs: $1.93 a pound. Less early death? Less cost. With time, then, the cost will go down.

Trouble is, I am not expecting the same parameters next time. This is my last trip with these blobby meat birds. Their mortality rate is entirely too high for the money we small flockholders spend on them. Morally, maybe I could handle it if my name was Frank Perdue, but I’m El: every unexpected death was a hard knock to my conscience. Not a hard enough knock though to keep me from chicken ranching, though. Next up in the tractor? Heavy breeds of roosters (Orpington, RIR, Australorp, etc.), which will take about 16 weeks to finish out. Wish me luck.

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Posted in chickens, etc., death, food

On one’s food history

Posted on June 4, 2008 | 30 Comments

Mother’s little helper

NOTE: This and the next post go together.  They’ll be about the meat birds, but this one is not graphic!

“SURELY, there has to be an easier way to do that,” my mother said.

She had just come outside and has safely seated herself on the other side of the table from me, about as far away as she could. She brought me a pint-sized glass canning jar with two fingers’ worth of Cabernet in it. She thought it would be an appropriate way of serving me wine, considering what I am doing. I am leaning over a galvanized tub, removing the feathers from a meat bird.

“Why yes, mom, there is an easier way. But let me explain to you the concept of the $100. Chicken, and why we won’t be going there.”

I explain to her how a mechanical plucker works. I tell her more about the process of what it was that I was doing. (She had been inside the whole while, entertaining the patient, so she hadn’t seen a thing.) And then I asked her a pointed question:

“How far back in our family do you think we need to go before we find another woman who plucked her own chicken?” I asked.

This is a question we should all ask ourselves. (Let’s make it easy on ourselves and remove the idea of “want to” from “have to” pluck a chicken.) How far is it, really, before we find relations who grew their own food, raised their own animals for the table? We pondered the issue of our own genealogy for a while and agreed it was probably my great-great grandmother, back on the Old Sod, who probably did such a thing. That, friends, is a long time ago. Unknowable generations ago.

Now, my own mother has gardened, of course. She had us kids labor in the U-Pick farms around us to harvest everything from peas to turnips to tomatoes to blueberries to peaches, all destined for the table or for rows of gleaming canning jars in the basement: it was her attempt to extend the reach of a one-income household. Granted, she was an anomaly amongst her friends; it was the early 70s though so some hippie things (making your own wine, candles; brining your own pickles) was something my parents thought might be fun to try. She still makes her own jams. But true farming is a stretch for her, and her relations: even my great-grandmother had a college education. My mother’s family history is that of happy upper middle class life. No chicken plucking, ever.

There’s a similar story on my father’s side. I don’t know where I get this, in other words. I only know that, even though there’s a lot of sweat involved, this is the best food possible for me and my family. Surely, there is an easier way, Mom; it’s just not the road I’m gonna to take.

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Posted in chickens, etc., sweat

On geometrical tyranny

Posted on June 3, 2008 | 11 Comments

This is not where the bodies are buried…yet

Sunday was the Big Dig day around here: the day I set up the twelve new garden beds for the new greenhouse. They had to be level, they had to be equidistant from their relations, they had to be…well, they had to maximize the 16′w x 28′l square footage of the new structure.

Of course I say “had to,” when it’s only me who’s wielding the shovel and the level line.

As I grumbled, I thought about what it is I was doing. As an architect, I kind of have to have a huge respect for geometry, even if the architectural fashion of my schooling was antigeometric. And today I get paid to hew the straight line, to worship the 90* angle. So why, I thought, shoveling through the clay, does my work life have to creep into my after-work life? Why does my garden need to pay homage to the vector?

I was looking for an out, I suppose. The devil on my other shoulder whispered things like “Plants have no respect for geometry, you know. You put them in straight lines for your weeding convenience only. Left to their own devices they’d be a chaotic mess.” It was sunny out; I am a huge sun wimp. I was tired. I knew, though, that having (12) 6′x3′ beds in the new greenhouse would be the best use of the space, considering that clay, considering my experience with the first one.

But, in all honesty? Having this rigid geometry of these raised beds in the vegetable gardens is immensely pleasing to me. I suppose I don’t really care what the plants think.

I guess I can’t help myself

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Posted in greenhouses, sweat

More on surprising flowers

Posted on June 2, 2008 | 2 Comments

Who knew, did you?

On Sunday I was trying to find a bit of shade in the garden. I was taking a small break from digging and had an icecream bar in one hand (an upside of having a sick kid) and my jug of water in the other. The only mildly shaded area was next to the 3′ tall horseradish so I plopped on the ground next to it. I’d walked by this spot during my usual perambulations through the garden and had thought, a couple of times, that something smelled pretty good in this area. I didn’t put more thought into it than that.

Sitting next to the source of the smell, though, I have to admit it was the horseradish flowers that smelled so good! Goodness knows I hate the stuff but its flowers were surprising. Like horseradish (of course) only sweet.

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Posted in seeds