Many of our blog readers have probably met Garth’s good old dog Oscar, who trotted around happily and healthily until he suddenly didn’t, and couldn’t, because he’d stopped eating. After several visits to the vet, [...]]]> We’ve been quiet for a while because we’ve been busy (as usual, I know) with lots of things.

Many of our blog readers have probably met Garth’s good old dog Oscar, who trotted around happily and healthily until he suddenly didn’t, and couldn’t, because he’d stopped eating. After several visits to the vet, it was established that he had both pneumonia and lung cancer, and we decided we’d treat the former, for quality of life, but not the latter. For a while his appetite picked back up and he was eating the delicious homegrown-lamb-and-carrot-stew that we cooked for him in the crockpot, plus the fresh king salmon from Pike Place Market, and homegrown chicken, etc. But eventually he stopped eating again. We made an appointment to take him in for his last vet visit on a Monday a few weeks ago, but the Sunday before, he decided he didn’t want to wait. We were with him when he died.

We haven’t posted because it’s been hard to talk about. We miss him a lot. He was a really good dog. The best dog.

Portuguese-ish clams and sausage, except I basically barely followed the recipe. I used soft, [...]]]> I have all these tabs open so I don’t lose track of the recipes, but my browser is starting to drag … so that I can close them, here is what we have been making, in no particular order:

Portuguese-ish clams and sausage, except I basically barely followed the recipe. I used soft, not cured linguiça from Uli’s, and more sausage and fewer clams, and I added kale. It was delicious.

Leibovitz’s marshmallows!!! with the egg whites left over from …

Goat milk ice cream, sweetened with honey, with a strawberry swirl. Except I am not very good at using the ice cream maker, so it isn’t really very icecreamey. But it is super tasty. I added some freshly ground white pepper to the strawberry mixture, which is pretty awesome.

Candied ginger (Leibovitz again) so that I could make …

Blueberry ginger jam, which turned out pretty dang good too.

Ramp greens kimchi, except I used onion greens and a bit of garlic scape, because that is what I had. I haven’t tried it yet, but it smells fantastic, and Garth made some fried rice with it and pronounced it “omg noms.”

Rhubarb liqueur, still steeping, and strawberry vodka (Lebovitz *again*!).

Garth’s home-cured and home-smoked bacon.

Garth’s home-cured and home-smoked HAM.

We’ve also frozen about 10 lbs of cherries, with more coming soon, and yesterday we blanched and froze a GIANT cauliflower in florets. A few weeks ago we had a good canning day, with pickled asparagus, cherry jam, strawberry jam (which didn’t gel, so it’s strawberry syrup), strawberry-rhubarb jam, pickled scapes, and sweet and spicy pickled rhubarb. There has been beef jerkying, and marinated and grilled top round made into burritos, and short ribs on the grill with homemade cherry-rhubarb barbecue sauce, and roasted chicken that later turned into chicken salad and also a tortilla soup with last year’s frozen corn and the last can of home-canned tomatoes. Fried chicken. Fresh potato and homegrown fava bean salad. Fresh cabbage and carrot coleslaw. And tonight, our four tiny ripe tomatillos from the garden, combined with with storebought avocado (only way we can get it), Laughing Crow garlic and Persephone onions (from the handy farmstand at Bay Hay), home-grown and -pickled jalapeños, and Laughing-Crow-intern-grown cilantro all combined to become approximately this avocado salsa verde, which we put on our grilled scallop tacos.

Oh yeah, and we’ve been gardening too. The fall brassicas are in, along with the winter’s carrots and leeks (I hope). If all goes well, there are 3 pigs coming in a couple of weeks (alive!).

— 1. Yes there will be broilers, process date June 18. Order form coming … eventually. Another batch will be arriving on the 8th, so ready mid-August. 2. More hatchery drama this year — the [...]]]> We’re still here, just swamped with chickens¹, turkeys², goats³, the garden such at it is⁴, Grandma⁵, and Oscar⁶.

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1. Yes there will be broilers, process date June 18. Order form coming … eventually. Another batch will be arriving on the 8th, so ready mid-August.
2. More hatchery drama this year — the bulk of our order, 50+ birds, just “didn’t hatch out well” so they didn’t ship them — but we found a guy breeding Narragansetts in Kingston, which is a huge relief. Wish we could get some Bourbon Reds though.
3. Mama Goat was tetchy about her left teat for a while, but it appears to have cleared up and I got 2+ lbs of milk on Sunday.
4. There are happy robust tomato, squash, pepper, and tomatillo starts in the greenhouse that are antsy to get outside, but it persists in being willing to go to, or below, about 40° here at night, and pouring rain during the day. Nothing else is planted except some lettuces and one potato box. I am behind on beans, corn, herbs, brassicas, and successions of lettuce and radishes and green onions. It’s hard to get motivated to plant the next batch of stuff when the first batch isn’t growing because it’s too cold and wet.
5. Pocket Grandma in Reno is pretty much at the end. We were able to get down to see her midweek last week (thanks Teresa and Lilach for covering the farm) and we are really, really, really glad we did. We love Pocket Grandma.
6. Oscar has lost 20 pounds in the last month or so. This is Not Good. Vet today, waiting on bloodwork. Could be simple, could be cancer. We’ll find out more tomorrow.

Also, yes, I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace‘s newly published unfinished novel … why do you ask?

Hmm, why on earth would there be a mouth-shaped chunk taken out of my Small-Scale Goatkeeping book?

The culprit

Her accomplice aka baby

Upcoming new newses: bees tomorrow. One more goatlet on Sunday, a yearling who we’ll breed as soon as she’s [...]]]> Here’s what’s up in Spring 2011.

Hmm, why on earth would there be a mouth-shaped chunk taken out of my Small-Scale Goatkeeping book?

The culprit

Her accomplice aka baby

Upcoming new newses: bees tomorrow. One more goatlet on Sunday, a yearling who we’ll breed as soon as she’s ready.

G: Prefer garlic scapes to turkey ‘scapes. Less hurty.

L: Yikes!!

G: But they got a size on them and hella vigor.

Should store h2o2 in the truck I reckon.

(On edit)

Lauren suggests that I clarify that h2o2 is hydrogen peroxide and that I include the photo I took [...]]]>

G:
Prefer garlic scapes to turkey ‘scapes.
Less hurty.

L:
Yikes!!

G:
But they got a size on them and hella vigor.

Should store h2o2 in the truck I reckon.

(On edit)

Lauren suggests that I clarify that h2o2 is hydrogen peroxide and that I include the photo I took mere seconds before the opportunity to photograph turkey-inflicted carnage presented itself.

The entirety of that email was the subject line “Large Turkey is Large” and the following photo.

We are down to one laying duck (from four) — they took one on Sunday, one on Monday, and one on Tuesday. So the hens and remaining survivor duck are all staying inside the coop until we can figure out [...]]]> It’s our third year with poultry, and the raccoons have finally found us.

We are down to one laying duck (from four) — they took one on Sunday, one on Monday, and one on Tuesday. So the hens and remaining survivor duck are all staying inside the coop until we can figure out another solution. It’s a bummer; I like seeing them free-ranging around the yard and I definitely like the tasty rich orange yolks they lay because of eating so much grass and weeds.
Also, while the hens slow down their laying in the winter, the ducks are champs and keep laying an egg a day each, pretty much all winter. So we’re looking for some more Khaki Campbell ducks on Craigslist and such. Let us know if you know of any that are available.

Then on Monday night, the dogs woke us up at about 1:30 and we ran out to see a couple big raccoons around the brooders that hold the turkeys (4 weeks old), batch 2 of our broilers (also 4 weeks old), and batch 3 of the broilers (like 5 days old).
We think there should have been 23 turkeys; there are 15 left. There should have been about 58 broilers from batch 2; there are 45 now (though to be fair, we couldn’t count them before and they escaped a lot when they were small, and we might’ve lost some before). The small broilers seem to have been undisturbed.

Raccoon carnage is particularly icky to clean up after, as they often don’t eat the whole bird or carry it away, and in fact if they can reach through the chicken wire and grab a bird, they’ll just gnaw on it through the wire and leave the rest of the body inside the brooder for you to find in the morning.

We have put up electric fence around the brooders and the greenhouse too, where the 30 turkey poults that arrived today are brooding.

Tuesday night we were woken up at about the same time, and the dogs barked a bit then quieted down and seemed confused. The brooders were untouched. I hopefully infer that the dogs were barking at the sound of raccoons learning about electric fence, and subsequently taking off in the other direction.

This affects our turkey availability, obviously, though I’m not quite sure yet how we’ll work it out. Due to some procrastination on our part combined with a really bad experience with Privett Hatchery, we are taking a gamble that the poults that arrived today will be big enough in time for Thanksgiving. We may have only smallish (8-10 pounds) turkeys. If they are really small, we may only sell the fifteen that are left from the first batch for Thanksgiving — they will be a month older — and do today’s 30 for Christmas. Or I guess we could do whoever’s big at Thanksgiving, and give the rest another month to keep growing.

In any case, I’m not sure yet how to take orders for turkeys. I know people will want to secure their turkeys early, so I hope we don’t have to wait too late; I’d be sad if folks waited for us and didn’t order from others, and then we couldn’t deliver and they had to use a storebought bird.

To that end, please put your name and email address if you want to be on the non-binding list of interested people: http://tinyurl.com/turkeyinterestlist. We’ll go down the list first-come first-served, and contact folks as we have birds, and if you have found another source, we’ll just move on to the next person.

The chickens (affectionately known as nuggets) moved to pasture [...]]]> So, we really dropped the ball on keeping everyone updated on the broiler chickens via the website. We really intended to, but it turned out that 150 chickens took up kind of a lot of time. So, here’s a retrospective of their lives …

The chickens (affectionately known as nuggets) moved to pasture the last weekend of September, just before the TWL Harvest Fair. Thousands of people attend the Harvest Fair so the chickens had a busy first day, and it seemed we prompted a lot of family conversations about where meat comes from (which I think is good). From there, we moved the tractors the hill towards the top, then over towards the orchard, then back down into some extra-delicious juicy green grass, then sideways towards the cropland area — basically in a big rectangle to avoid some trees and some really hilly areas.

By the time we got back to our starting point, about 6 weeks later, and looked at the path up the hill that we had already grazed, we realized that the grass where the chickens had been (scratching, pooping, scratching, eating, pooping) was greener, thicker, and taller than the paths we had left between the tractors. Part of the reason we do chickens in tractors — aside from the extremely important fact that it’s the most humane, safest way for the chickens to spend their lives — is the soil improvement that comes with rotating poultry through a pasture. It was really gratifying to see it in practice. We were able to re-graze them on the land they had already passed through because the soil and grass had improved so much.

One of the first times we moved them, shortly after the Harvest Fair, I noticed one chicken with some sort of morsel that he had just found, and everyone else was chasing him around to try to get it. Kids at the Harvest Fair had been running around with balloons and I heard several of them pop, so I went in to chase him around to try to get it, too, to verify that it wasn’t balloon. It was a little salamander or newt. I felt sorry for the little guy but he was already beyond help, so I left the birds to finish their game of keep-away.

Never let anyone tell you chickens are naturally vegetarian. If you see “vegetarian” on the egg carton, you know those hens were never outside.

It only took a couple of days for them to realize that when we started pulling the tractors forward, instead of running away from us (towards the back), they should run forward to the nice fresh grass that we were dragging them towards. Chickens love grass.

We lost a few of them here and there, a couple for reasons we could identify (ate too much) and a couple we couldn’t. We had one bad day when the biggest tractor blew down the hill and ran over a couple of guys partway, leaving them pinned under the end — one was gimpy but still getting around OK enough to not let us catch him easily, so we left him; the other had a broken wing and a pretty mangled leg. He was big enough to keep so we processed him and were able to keep all the meat except the bad leg and wing. Poor guy.

This weekend we processed everyone who was left, minus the one little girl who was too small and cute to process, who we will keep until she gets bigger or starts laying. We had lots of helpers (though many novices — not like we’re experts!) and we processed all day Saturday and Sunday. By midday on Saturday we got into a rhythm and everyone was pretty comfortable doing all the jobs, so we were able to take breaks and work in shifts and move around between stations for some variety. It was great to see customers again — lots of people were really excited — and to hear about how folks are going to cook them. Lots of barbecue and roasting (my favorite), and some folks with Romertopfs, plus some recipes that might get me eating liver yet … breaded and fried; sauteed; pâté …

It certainly doesn’t make for a good day, and it shouldn’t be, but it’s a day of completeness. It’s thanksgiving all the time on the farm.

Thank you, chickens.