Updates!
Thursday, 17 April, 2008
Updates to the farm blog about last weekend’s weather, chickens, ducks, seedlings, etc. Click on over there to read; too long to reproduce here.
Updates to this blog, just so stupid shoe angst isn’t at the top of the page anymore.
I work from home on Thursdays, which I probably don’t deserve but for which I negotiated when I was hired (and for which I am very thankful). Today after lunch, I moved the chickens from the coop out to their temporary pen in the middle of the yard. Later, I was chatting over IRC with a co-worker about a project we’re on, which led to the following conversation:
[14:10] lauren: i keep trying to come up with a nice graphical way to display it
[14:10] lauren: so as to avoid duplicating the tasks
[14:10] lauren: it seems that the task:goal relationship is many-to-many
[14:11] lauren: escaped chicken, brb
[14:13] lauren: back now
[14:13] < coworker >: haha!
(I sent it to G. and he said I should blog it, so here it is. Plus I really wanted the shoes to go away. Anyway I kept the green shoes; they are awesome.)
Posted by Lauren at 9:52 pm |
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In the catalog under geeky; farm; farm/chickens
Red clothes + green shoes = anguish.
Monday, 31 March, 2008
Last night we had eventual-local-celebrity friends C. & T. over for dinner. They are vegetarian, and she is pregnant, so I appreciated the challenge of making something that did not include wine, sausage, bacon, bacon fat, or the frozen cubes of condensed beef/turkey/chicken stock that we make when we get bored and want to clean out the freezer. (These are great, though, to have around. They are awesome for dropping into soups or sauces or risottos, etc. Not quite demi-glace, but something quite similar, flavor-wise.)
I had been perusing Apartment Therapy: Kitchen, as I tend to do when it comes into my RSS reader, and this recipe for calzones caught my eye. For some reason I felt like a make-your-own-pizza-ish-thing party was very high school, but it also sounded fun — like very little else in high school, really — so I was decided.
We headed in to Seattle on Saturday, to the U-District Farmers’ Market, and picked up some sausage from Sea Breeze Farm on Vashon, who we love, and some mozzarella from a cheese vendor whose name I don’t know, and some fresh arugula from someone else, and some garlic from someone else. And some tulips, because I am so happy for spring. Yay.
(Sunday morning to mid-afternoon was spent working hard in the garden; we are both sore now. I dug up ~3 inches of the floor of the chicken coop, wiped down all surfaces with a 3:1 water/vinegar solution, laid down chicken wire, and re-inserted the old dirt. We’ll cover with straw and pine shavings when the chicks move in. Garth moved several square yards of compost from the delivered pile to the garden area, and spread it around, and also put up a deer fence. So we got to cross two big things off our list.)
Washed up after yardwork, I sautéed up some leeks and some mushrooms from our CSA. Toasted some pine nuts. Blanched some arugula, chopped some basil (early! from the CSA) tossed it in the food processor with pine nuts and some parmesan and garlic. Roasted some small-cut broccoli and some garlic cloves. Made some tomato sauce (from canned, not ours, unfortunately). Made some ricotta, using Meyer lemon juice, which didn’t curdle it like I expected; we theorized it was due to lower acidity in the juice (not sure if that’s true) so added a few glugs of white balsamic vinegar. Still resulted in deliciousness. All of the above worked well in calzoni (?), in various combinations.
The leftovers from the fun mix-and-match dinner became tonight’s frittata
, with leftover broccoli, sausage, ricotta, and pesto. I also used the whey from making the ricotta instead of milk in the egg mixture. Topped with some pesto and pine nuts, and served with some delicious local greens that G. found at the grocery store.
——–
In other news, I am searching for some good summer shoes. I know that I am searching for good summer shoes because I have been staring at, and evaluating, everyone else’s footwear. I see a lot of people on the ferry and the bus every day, and they are people with similar needs to mine, so I consider them a good source of shoe inspiration. Currently I wear red Dansko clogs, which I like because they are comfy, and easy, and I don’t have to think about them — I just put on the shoes as I am going out the door, and they go with whatever. And they are supportive of my poor broken feet, which I have not discussed here yet. But I cannot do the clogs and above-the-knee skirts look — some people can, but I cannot — so I needs something that fills the same niche of comfy, all-purpose, easy, good for broken feet, allows my orthotic inserts, but goes with my skirts: lighter colored, not clunky, little or no heel. I got these green cute sporty things that will go with one skirt that I love dearly, but with which I will not be comfortable wearing red, which is approx 33% of my wardrobe. I can augment the green shoes with some lighter-colored (pink? white? tan? … ?) simple sneakers, like Keds or similar, but will they support my broken feet? And how do I find them? And will they go with my favorite red skirt/shirt/other shirt/other other shirt/sweater/other sweater?
Wow, shoe angst is boring.
Posted by Lauren at 9:19 pm |
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In the catalog under food; pictures; cookery; farm
Unexpected livestock
Friday, 28 March, 2008
Cross-posted from our temporary farm blog.
(Not everything will be cross-posted; farm blog RSS is here. Eventually will move to a real domain, but we’ll let you know.)
______
Just yesterday, we were telling Garth’s mom what a relief it was that the chickens are old enough to require less work now. We have elevated their foods and waters off the ground a bit, so they don’t scratch so much pine shavings into them. We have given them a bit of dowel to perch on, and we upgraded them from the bottom half of a dog crate, to the two halves of a dog crate zip-tied together (classy).
So it was sort of ironic (Garth says: “less ironic than a pain in the ass”) that he called me frantically from the feed store late this afternoon to tell me that they had four Khaki Campbell ducklings, exactly the breed we have been looking for. They were two females and two males. We wanted three or four females for eggs, and would take a male just to hang out (and breed, maybe, given the hard time we had finding these ducklings). Two males and two females is way different from the ratio we had hoped for, but the prospect of leaving one poor little boy duckling behind in the duckling bucket, all alone, was just not even an option. So Garth brought home four little ducklings, two boys and two girls.
For now they are in the chicks’ old galvanized tub, washed out (thanks Garth!) with vinegar. They are already displaying very different behavior from the chicks; they run and splash in the water, going in circles with one foot in the waterer.
So at this point we are looking at a future average of:
6 chickens = ~28 eggs/week
2 lady ducks = ~10-12 eggs/week
Yay!
More duckling pictures at flickr.
Posted by Lauren at 9:29 pm |
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In the catalog under pictures; farm/chickens; farm/ducks
Farm chores are fun!
Sunday, 23 March, 2008
Today is the first day in a long time that I have been able to wake up, look around, and decide what I feel like doing. I have plenty of projects and chores and things that need to be done, of course, but I don’t have somewhere to be, and I don’t have a homework deadline. It’s extremely exciting.
So we did outside chores — we are spreading the 10 cubic yards of compost that was delivered last weekend, and I am going to start preparing the chicken coop, and we need to start putting up the deer fence (but it started raining really hard). And there are inside chores — the chickens’ bucket needed to be expanded, and grow lights needed put up, and there is laundry and dishes as usual. And there is knitting and video games to play.
And I am cooking! We are going to G’s mom’s for dinner — his stepdad’s daughter & her kids are in town from Hawaii — and I am bringing this citrus parmesan farro salad. I was going to make buttermilk biscuits and/or sweet potato biscuits from Mark Bittman, but they have enough bread already. Now I have to find something else do with ~6 large-ish sweet potatoes. Anyone?
Posted by Lauren at 10:10 am |
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In the catalog under food; cookery; farm
We will arise from the bunkers
Sunday, 9 March, 2008
Today the chickens graduated from their 17-gallon galvanized washtub into the bottom half of a large dog crate. Now they have much more room in which to stand around all huddled together. They have been very busy growing new body parts, including combs on their heads, and shoulder feathers, and wing feathers, and, well, wings. Tall Chicken (”Necky”) can stretch her head up all the way to the top of the waterer, and they all like to run/hop and flap their new wings. They learned they could jump up on the edges of the bucket when we took off the lid (made of fencing) to clean, and so that is why they are graduated to a new taller house.
This weekend we:
- made some fertilizer
- built a trellis
- planted peas on said trellis
- bought lots of things at the farm store
- made bread (me) — very successful, thanks to Mark Bittman and the rediscovery of my spray bottle, which makes a good crust
- made butter (Garth)
- made 102 newspaper pots with my newspaper pot maker from Path to Freedom’s online store
- filled 102 newspaper pots with dirt
- filled 102 endirtened newspaper pots with seeds, including:
- tomatoes (8 kinds)
- leeks
- artichokes
- lettuce (several varieties, including arugula, which is not a lettuce)
- kale (2 kinds)
- broccoli (3 kinds)
- brussels sprouts
- cabbage
- peppers (2 kinds — pepperoncini and anchos)
- eggplant
- watermelon
- chamomile
- spearmint
- sweet basil
If you have any interest in starts of any of these plants, and it’s a reasonable idea for me to get them to you, shoot me an email at firstname dot lastname at gmail, and I’ll put on some starts for you.
There is more to come, of course; corn, beans, peas, chard, carrots, beets are to be started outdoors, and asparagus comes in live plants. We will also be doing succession planting — that is, planting every few to several weeks, as we eat the existing plants — with the crops that can overwinter here, like kale, broccoli, lettuces, brussels sprouts, leeks, the root veggies, maybe cabbage.
I still owe a post about what I read in February (not much), and what I am up to lately in terms of media
consumption. But don’t sit here and wait for it; go make butter! It is easy and awesome and delicious!
(Song: “Sons and Daughters,” The Decemberists. I love this song.)
Posted by Lauren at 9:29 pm |
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In the catalog under list/done; gardens; farm; farm/chickens
Baby chicks are on the way!
Sunday, 2 March, 2008
Chickens came home on Friday morning, probably about a day old. Today, Sunday, they are probably about four days old, and they are fascinating to watch. Today their posture has changed — they are standing up straighter instead of huddling like little fluffballs; I can see that they have necks, now. This morning they were not scared when our hands came down from above to change the water or to pick them up, and this evening, they are scared, and they run peeping in all directions from the scary hand. Then if the hand stays still, they get over it pretty quickly, and come to peck at the shiny ring. This evening they are very active and talkative, running around and over and under each other to very urgent business on the other side of the bucket. And they have more feathers than yesterday, and they are starting to show their patterns already!
They were housed in a cardboard box at first. I put two other cardboard layers underneath the pine shavings, but when we went to change it after ~8 hours, they had splashed so much water around that the bottom was soaked. We switched to a plastic Rubbermaid bin, which had the convenience of being plastic (washable) and also being readily available in triplicate (at least) in our house. I had it all planned out: I would rinse/wash one out, set it out to dry in the sun — it has been sunny here!! — and house them in the other, then take the freshly-dried one in to rehouse the chickens the next evening, and repeat the process. Unfortunately, the heat lamp tipped over a little too close to the side of the bin, and MELTED a big hole in it. On the good side, we discovered this as we returned from the hardware store with a new big galvanized washtub. This seems to suit, as it’s easily cleaned, though I wish we could justify two. Instead I guess we’ll just use two or three small boxes while we clean and dry their tub.
Chicken stats:
2 Rhode Island Reds, averaging 5 eggs/week each. One of them has already established herself as Miz Bitch Chicken, since she was pecking at everyone else on the way home from the store. She is the red without a small black stripe on the back of her head.
2 Black Australorps, also averaging 5 eggs/week each. They have fluffy yellow butts.
1 Dominique, averaging 3 eggs/week. I think this is the one with the racing stripes. I am advocating for her name to be “Racer.”
1 Silver-Laced Wyandotte, averaging 4 eggs/week, and which I find to be very pretty. Her name will probably be “Pretty Chicken.”
flickr for pictures, for now.