Dropstone Farms

The chickens started laying about ten days ago. We have some ideas who’s laying, and I’m not sure it’s all of them. We built a little platform and put some Rubbermaid tubs on it, for nest boxes, but the chickens go under the platform — the gap is only about 4 inches — and lay underneath. So we have to go in a team to collect eggs, and one person lifts one end of the chicken tractor while the other rummages underneath.

So far we have had exactly one dozen eggs. The first one was funny and capsule-shaped, and turned out to have two yolks. The rest have been mostly regularly egg-shaped, but smallish; I tried to take a picture just now but my camera is crashy, so maybe I will add one if it comes back to life.

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1. Can we dry overripe shelling peas, which are too starchy to eat fresh, and use them like split peas?
2. Is there any use for the fibrous but still fresh and juicy shells of the peas that did not get overripe? Make stock maybe?
3. If one boy duck is picking on the other boy duck, pulling his feathers out and whatnot, and we want to get rid of one and keep the other to breed, do we keep the aggressive one (to breed strong babies) or the passive one (to breed docile babies)?
4. Where in the world am I supposed to find time to post more often?

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Sometimes someone writes a really well-researched and well-written book on our relationship with food and sometimes someone draws a smart-assed web comic about the same thing.

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The other day (by which I mean exactly two weeks ago) we were tagged by Laura at (not so) Urban Hennery for a meme about six random things. It was very exciting, as it is the first time our tiny new blog has been tagged by another blogger, and we were so overwhelmed that it has taken us a long time to get around to it, obviously, but here we are with six random things!

1. We found a stray dog on Saturday, with no collar, running around on the road. We brought her home and are hanging onto her until we hear something. Any Bainbridge Island readers should see if she looks familiar. She is very sweet, and old and floppy, and we are calling her Penny (aka noob) because she is copper-colored. But while we like her, we already have two dogs, and a third was not really in the plans and presents all sorts of challenges.
2. Our attention spans have been ruined by Netflix; we can’t make it through a whole movie anymore, but instead watch a lot of TV. Currently on rotation are Buffy (Season 6 for story arc continuity, but any random disc for general entertainment); King of the Hill; Six Feet Under (Season 2); Battlestar Galactica (Season 3); Veronica Mars (Season 1); and the X-Files (Season 1 — it’s so nostalgic!); and any random disc of Futurama, Deadwood, or Firefly.
3. One of Garth’s co-workers was developing a new version of an internal software program. It was released recently, and one of the new features that this co-worker built into the software? Was Tetris. From scratch.
4. We are big nerds: we met in graduate school, getting our library degrees, and ended up in related, yet non-library, fields. We both especially like metadata. Garth’s new favorite thing is The Electronic Scriptorium, a bunch of monks who do metadata consulting and are awesome. I just found, today, the E-MELD School of Best Practices in Digital Language Documentation, which is about how best to maintain metadata and data about preserving endangered languages. Super cool.
5. For Christmas, I got Garth the Bacon of the Month Club from Grateful Palate. It’s So Awesome. He gets a pound of different delicious bacon each month. And I get to share!
6. It is my understanding that many people enjoy sneezing, but I hate it. Right now I am very allergic to something (an extra dog? whatever delicious pollens they are bringing in? who knows) and I am sneezing like mad. I find it very unpleasant. And with that, I must go shower and find an allergy pill and try not to lose my mind.

We’re supposed to tag six other folks, but I have never been very good at continuing chain letters or tagging for memes, so, if you want to do this meme, you should. It’s surprisingly challenging to come up with anything approximating random. The mind wants to categorize. I struggled to make the stories not all about puppies, for example.

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Rare Crowing Hen — $5.

I haven’t been able to stop giggling since I ran across this ad. (Reproduced here in case the ad goes away)

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Quick post now before I run out to help Garth hill up the potatoes. Too good not to share.

On May 29:

The exact same location on June 29:

As Garth said, hoophouses are awesome.

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