Dropstone Farms

I’m not really one for resolutions, but I did get a nice Moleskine calendar notebook with room to write some basic notes on each day. I’m hoping to take notes each day about what went on — what was planted, what was harvested, how many eggs, etc. I forgot to do it the past couple of days but today I noted down 2 duck eggs and one chicken egg when Garth went out in the morning, and two more when I put them to bed when we got home from Seattle. Also, Stripes and one of the reds have bald butts for some reason; their butt fuzz has apparently fallen out. But today I noticed that Stripes’ butt fuzz feathers are coming back, so I wrote that down too. (Red was facing the wrong direction on the perch and I didn’t want to crawl around in the dark and freak the ducks out. I’ll check her butt tomorrow.)

Anyway, I don’t figure I’ll transfer the daily notes here, but on the other hand it may provide a handy outline for quick weekly updates, or ideas for bigger posts, etc.

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My camera is obviously not intended as a video camera, so the video quality is not great — at times the chickens appear to be made of lasers, zooming around very quickly — but the sound is pretty much exactly what we live with, all the time.

(For treats they are getting kale stems, parsnip tops and peelings, and some stale corn chips from last week’s tortilla soup.)

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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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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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Hey new chicken! Let’s have cuddles!, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

This is Mr. Klassy. He is a Polish rooster. He came from our friend in Seattle, who cannot have roosters due to noise. He is not crowing yet, but he is trying …

I am on my way to a Kitsap Community & Agriculture Alliance meeting right now. Local readers should read their blog and get involved! Meetings are the second Tuesday of the month in Bremerton. If you’re coming from Bainbridge, or anywhere in between, let us know and we can see about a carpool situation.

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So in response to Monday’s semi-cryptic post, the full story is that Monday I went over to Shannon’s (of Red Barn Farm) place and helped her process the batch of birds from which we’d purchased a half-dozen a few weeks before. I emailed to see if we could help with the processing and the answer was an enthusiastic yes. So I took a few days off and, with a certain amount of trepidation, drove over to the peninsula to dispatch some birds.

We set up a processing line under the guidance of Nikki of Pheasant Fields Farm. Nikki also supplied a mess of equipment and a neato keano eviscerating table. Eviscerating tables are awesome. It’s just a seamless stainless steel table with a hole in the middle you can use to wash away… let’s go with “material.” My contribution was enthusiasm and a Granton boning knife.

The transition from animal to food was surprisingly quick, I’m relieved to say. Processing chickens is an unpleasant and pretty distasteful chore, but it does not entail either cruelty or untoward angst.

Some things that I’d recommend for processing chickens:

1) Wear rubber boots. There is a lot of water sloshing around.
2) Bring more ice than you think you’ll need.
3) Bring more cutting boards than you think you’ll need.
4) Sharp knives. More humane, less work, safer.
5) Bring pliers for plucking feathers. The plucker won’t get everything.

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There are 64 fewer chickens in the world now than there were this morning. I didn’t bust a single gallbladder or cut myself once. I’m pretty pleased. Word of advice, prior to gutting chickens, cut your fingernails as short as possible.

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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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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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I finally got a new Eye-Fi card, which is a super handy thing in that it lets me skip the exact steps where I always get hung up when taking and uploading photos. Getting them from the card to the computer and then to the internet is hard for me for whatever reason. The card, though, is camera storage card and ALSO a wireless card, so when it’s on its home network, it sends them automatically to my computer and to Flickr! Which is incredibly convenient. So, I hope to have more pictures available more quickly, in the future.

I’ll not put too many here, but you can click over to my Flickr to see everything that’s new; don’t forget to click to the next page (or two; I took a lot of pictures). Or you can scroll down to the bottom of the “Little farm — getting started” photoset.

We harvested our first meal ingredient from the garden. Swiss chard risotto for dinner!

The little broccoli starts we bought at the market about five weeks ago are starting to make little broccoli sprouts.

We made a hoophouse of PVC and clear plastic, and the tomatoes, peppers, and basils are happily growing in their little warm house. I hope this will help ensure we have a better tomato harvest that last year — it rained all summer, yeah, but still, we only got like four tomatoes, and we would have done a lot better with some sort of home for them.

This is most of the garden, looking South. Directly in front is the cabbage-like-things section, with some cabbages and some brussels sprouts and also some cauliflower and broccoli. On the trellis is 2 kinds of beans and 2 kinds of peas, with greens (lettuce, arugula, mustard greens, kale, chard) planted in between so they will be shaded and not bolt. Potatoes are to the right of the trellis. The hoophouses have the hot plants (tomatoes, peppers, basil). Not pictured: carrots; beets; squashes; onions; corn; more beans; fava beans; cucumbers; watermelons.

The only reason Little Red stayed up there long enough to let me take pictures is that she doesn’t realize she can fly down. She was very skeptical of being up so high.

Chores this weekend include figuring out how to keep bamboo from spreading, so we can plant some to use for trellises, hoophouses, etc. next year, and thinking about building chicken tractor(s) and a solar food dryer. AND blogging more. I have a book review to write!

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So, whilst cruising craigslist for livestock, I came across the following ad for a Purebred Delaware Rooster. Being me , I misread the ad, first interpreting it as an ad for a “Self-propelled Delaware Rooster” and the for a “Purebred, Self-aware Rooster.” It could just be the Battlestar Galactica talking, but I do *not* need self-aware livestock.

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