Dropstone Farms

We pasture our chickens with a combination of a chicken tractor and electric mesh fencing. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get a good charge on the fence and, in combination with the dogs being friendly with the chickens and keeping predators down, we don’t turn the electric fence on. It’s just a big mesh pen.

However, in combination with the dogs’ fondness for chicken feed/poo, this can lead to some entertaining antics.

See below.

Ruby's life is extremely hard.

I helped her out as soon as I managed to a) stop laughing and b) take a picture.

Poor Ruby.

Update: Famous dog is famous.

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The other day we were looking through my “chickens” tag on Flickr, reminiscing about how cute they were when they were tiny. I realized I haven’t taken any pictures of the chickens in a good long while, even though I (we?) spend a lot of time thinking about them and checking on them. They have grown up into adult lady chickens, are producing a lot of eggs (and poo), and are generally awesome. They are so funny! They run and flap their wings, and they are quite clear about what they like and what they do not like: they like chicken scratch (cracked wheat and corn) and they do not like Mr. Klassy; they like kale stems with bits of kale leaf attached but they don’t seem to like scraped-clean artichoke petals.

Chickens are chickeny, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Look at them, all gossiping and suspicious like "what the hell does she want."

Don’t they look like chickens?? It’s awesome!

Mr. Klassy is ready for his closeup, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

His neck and beard (?) have gotten bigger since we got him, about six weeks ago.

Wilhemina “pretty chicken” and Little Red, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Chickens are great. Everyone with even the tiniest bit of yard should have them. They are the best.

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So the other day the girls laid only a single egg. It was bizarre. Then, the day after, we got five eggs. We normally get between three and six eggs per day, so having an egg-free day out of the blue was kind of bizarre. Everything seems to be back to normal. I guess they needed a break.

In a perfectly reasonable segue, I built a new anvil stand today. My old stand was built of a mess of 2×12s glued and bolted together (see figure 11 on this page). It was unstable on uneven ground and I never felt really good about it. Also, even with a mess of silicone caulk on top my anvil, being an old Peter Wright, rang loud enough to require earplugs. So I built a new stand out of 2×12 by screwing together four lengths and making a box with either end open. Then I filled it full of dirt.

The silver-grey stuff is scale that forms on iron when it's being worked. It then flakes off and makes a mess. I don't know if the resolution is high enough to see the earwig that ran out when I moved the anvil, but it's there.

I call it my Rammed Earth Anvil Stand on account of I compacted each layer of dirt with a chunk of 2×4 and a sledge. It came out rather well, I think. It’s much more stable than the old one because the dirt inside conforms to the grass and soil it’s resting on. Also, the much greater mass means that my hammer blows move more metal and the anvil doesn’t hop around when I’m working. Best of all, the column of dirt damps the anvil and it’s not so freaking loud all the time. As a further upside, I can tell the relative temperature of the iron by the changing sounds as the metal cools. Nifty, eh? Also, very cheap.

This is my anvil. You can see the dirt it's resting on. It's like a raised bed for metalworking.

My only concern it that the weight and the hammering will cause the screws holding the whole shebang together to pull out. If this happens, I’ll just run some bands around the outside for strength and hope it holds.

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We made a lot of progress on the expanded chicken coop this weekend! Its name is now Chicken Bunker, on account of how cozy and built-into-the-hill it is. All that’s left to do is get the roof on and wire up the sides, which is only a few more hours of work. The old coop will need mucked out and composted, and the whole thing re-lined with hay, and then we can deploy the chickens! We are well ahead of schedule to have it finished before we go to the Tilth conference; now I don’t feel bad about asking the neighbors to check on the critters, as they will all be in one place and will not need to be let out and put away.

Chicken bunker in progress, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Last weekend I broke my glasses, but I got new ones!

Nose Tomato models my new glasses, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

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So it turns out that I deeply, deeply love preparing seedbeds. I love double-digging and broadforking and cultivating soil. An I love creating a nice, smooth, enriched bed to plant starts in. It’s as satisfying to me as sweeping a concrete floor. And I love sweeping concrete floors.

Here’s most of the former tomato beds. I took out the plants and the weeds and fluffed up the soil with the broadfork. Where the soil was really choked with weeds I double-dug and hopefully it’ll be better next year. Our plan for the winter is to sow crimson clover because it’s a little late to sow anything that’ll yield over the winter and one can never go wrong investing in one’s soil. And hey, look at that fluffy soil. It’s soo much better that when we started less that a year ago. It makes me really, really proud that we’re improving the soil in our little farm.

Seed bed. I love it.

In other adventures I built a hoophouse over some of the winter beds. I cannot stress enough how awesome hoophouses are. When I was putting this one up I stuck my arm underneath and it was already 10 degrees warmer than ambient under the plastic. You cannot argue with that.

So I stuck my phone underneath and took some random photos. You certainly can argue with my photography and, if we don’t get anything from this bed come spring, feel free to argue with me on that. I’ll blame myself and not the hoophouses though. Learning is hard but it surely is fun.

Look! It's Lettuce!

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Lately we have been making a lot of dishes that will last a long time, because we have also been canning, and the prospect of cooking anew each evening is too daunting. So it’s been soups that last for days, for convenience’s sake.

Recent eatin’:

• Eggs! omg eggs.
• Frittata with green and white things (zucchini, leeks, fall peas, mozzarella)
• broccoli and cauliflower cheese soup (veggies from the market; secret to success of a cheese soup is to make a mornay sauce first and then thin it)
• Potatoes in various ways
• Tortilla soup featuring zucchini, potatoes, tomatoes, corn
• Corn on the cob!

Upcoming very shortly:

• Eggplant — probably miso-marinated and then roasted
• Artichokes — steamed as usual, unless I can learn how to grill them
• More corn on the cob

Coming sooner than I am really ready for: greens, greens, and more greens, thanks to winter.

Things we have canned: that’s another post for another day.

Projects we are currently in the middle of:

• Expanding the chicken coop, as Garth mentioned
• Making a makeshift above-ground straw bale root cellar, as Garth also mentioned
• Getting some cards printed up to hand out at the Tilth Producers conference
• Getting some mushrooms going (will be getting spores from Fungi Perfecti)
• Figuring out if we will actually build a greenhouse this winter

… and so much more I am sure I am forgetting about five things. And that doesn’t even include the basic things like “make sure I have clean clothes” or “do not let the bathroom be overtaken by mildew”! But those are overrated, right? Right?

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Inspired by Throwback at Trapper Creek’s straw bale root cellar, we’re going to take a crack at building our own to store potatoes and all the apples that blew down in last night’s windstorm.

We went to the feed store and picked up “as many straw bales as will fit in this truck”* and I asked Lauren if I was allowed to buy a hay hook because, well, I am no longer twenty and bucking bales does not come as easily as to once did. She said yes but, due to lack of hay hook at the store, I was foiled.

And then I remembered I have a forge! And a pile of iron! So after I got home I cranked out the following local-heritage-artisanal hay hook (Appellation My Backyard).

I am reasonably pleased with it. I hammered and twisted it, aligned everything perfectly, and quenched it in water to test if it was the right shape. I was pleased with it and decided to anneal the tool. The process of annealing is used to soften a piece of metal. When I quenched the hook in water to check the fit (*ppsssshhhhh*) I set the molecules and it became brittle. To cure this, I needed to heat the metal up and let it cool down slowly.

So I returned the perfectly aligned tool to the forge to let it heat up. Unfortunately, I left it in the heat to long and it got all saggy and crooked. Oops. Oh well, at some point I’ll heat it up and straighten it out again. In the meantime, I can report that I’ve got a perfectly functional tool, if somewhat lopsided.

* Six bales in a Toyota pickup with a topper. Topper, for the record, is what Wisconsinites call a canopy. Also, we eat frozen custard.

April 2009 UPDATE: We noticed a lot of folks are finding this post via Google, so we wrote an update on the success — lack thereof — of the straw bale root cellar. Read it here.

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I have taken eggs to coworkers a few times already, and I will again, but today we got our first non-acquaintance/friend/coworker customer. A friend of our neighbor, or maybe a friend of a friend of our neighbor, she has food sensitivities that don’t allow her to eat chicken eggs. She emailed to say “is it true you have island-grown organic-fed duck eggs??” Happily, it is true, and we now have a regular customer, and she gets to have delicious non-sick-making eggs! Win all around.

One thing we currently do not have, unfortunately, however, is power. Farm blogging from (admittedly a hand-me-down) iPhone: what sort of person does that make me?

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