Dropstone Farms

We moved the chicks to pasture on Sunday during a slight break in the rain. They’d been on grass in their brooder, at home, but it’s been so cool and rainy that we kept them at home longer than would be ideal, and the grass at home was mostly gone — eaten, dug up, pooped on. So when we moved them, they were SO excited! They immediately started running around, digging holes in which to take a dust bath (that’s why there’s a chicken on its side in the foreground, with its foot on its neighbor — that is imminent dustbathification), and going crazy eating grass and bugs and whatnot (like the first two in the front).

Looking for tasty morsels of grass and bug. In the next 3 minutes I witnessed 2 games of keep away, once with a small slug and once with a worm.

We moved their chicken tractor on Monday evening and then again today, Wednesday — we were both busy out of town all day on Tuesday, and they are so small yet that the grass can take a bit of fluctuation in their schedule — and they have already gotten it down: when someone smacks on the back of the tractor, run a couple feet away from that, and then when fresh new grass appears ahead of you as the tractor moves, run towards THAT and eat it!! Moving them is now easily a one-person job — no need for a noisemaker behind as well as a tractor-pulling person in front.

Stay tuned for processed poultry orders to open very soon. If you haven’t signed up for the official email list, please do so!! The official list will get the, well, official notice when we are accepting reservations for chickens and turkeys. Sign up here: Subscribe to our poultry notification list.

And, as always, you can read more about our preferred breed of chicken, Colored Range/Freedom Rangers, and why we like them so much, here. I recently learned via Facebook (!) that Polyface Farms farmer Joel Salatin (the farmer in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, featured in the movie Food, Inc., and an all-around totally insane fantastic farmer) is trying some Freedom Rangers this year, and seems pretty pleased so far. I’m excited to see these healthy, happy, delicious birds getting some attention.

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First the good news! We’ve been getting back in to the swing of things gradually (or abruptly in some cases — when the baby chicks show up at the post office, you’d better be ready!). We’ve gotten rehabituated to the morning routine of opening the greenhouse, watering seedlings, and gathering eggs, and I’m doing better this year about staying on top of upgrading seedlings to larger pots or planting them out. The tomatoes we started from seed in March are planted out under plastic and are starting to flower already. The squash plants are still in pots, but are huge and the pattypans are already forming tiny tiny little fruits, so little that they are still fuzzy — I’ll transplant them this weekend and try to avoid damaging the teensy squashes.

This year we cleaned out the greenhouse, which is 10×20′, and moved all the seedstarting tables to one side in order to build a raised bed in the other half. So we now have a 4×20′ bed across the whole length of the south side of the greenhouse. For the summer, it is holding eggplant, hot peppers, cucumbers, a French melon, my Moon & Stars watermelon, and two luffa (loofah) plants that I am not sure will thrive, but I’m going to try. If they fruit, I’ll try eating them once maybe but mostly I want scrubbers. In the fall we’ll turn the bed over to winter leeks, lettuce, radishes, etc.

The disappointing news! Although we didn’t anticipate the demand for meat chickens from our usual hatchery — we left it too late and weren’t able to get our preferred chickens for the dates we wanted — we were able to place an order for some slow-growing red broilers from a different hatchery, with which we’ve had good luck for laying hens and turkeys. I was really excited to let everyone know about this first batch of chickens, which arrived about a month ago. It quickly became apparent, though, that the hatchery had sent us not the slow-growing red broilers we ordered, but some white chickens … after several phone calls, we established that there was apparently no way for them to say with confidence whether they were their slow-growing white broiler, or their fast-grower — which is literally (truly literally) the same type chicken you get at the grocery store, and the type we emphatically do not want to raise. So we sold them to Pheasant Fields Farm for the cost of feed, got credit from the hatchery, and sighed and wrote off Batch 1. So there’ll be no chickens in mid-June, as we’d planned.

Back to the good news section! Batch 2 of chicks has arrived and are about a week and a half old, and ~60 of them are scheduled to be ready for sale in early July. Batch 3 (fifty chicks, probably taking reservations for 35-40) will be here in a couple of weeks, and the turkeys are coming soon too!

The chicks are JM Hatchery’s Freedom Rangers — the same chicks as last year, although they used to be called Colored Range Chicks. The turkeys will be 10 Broad-breasted Bronzes and 40 Narraganssetts. Turkeys are more fragile than chickens, especially as babies, so we’ll take orders for 30 turkeys and keep a waiting list for the rest. We may also have a wide range of weights, so we’ll try to fairly allocate big turkeys to people with big Thanksgiving dinners, and smaller turkeys to those with smaller parties.

Overall, in addition to the turkeys, we hope to have four batches of 50-75 chickens at a time, ready in July, August, September, and October. If we time it well, we might have a fifth batch in late October.

You can sign up to be on our notification list for poultry news — that’s how we’ll get in touch when we are taking orders for both chickens and turkeys. Everything will be first-come, first-served.

More news soon, as I add “write blog posts” to my list of regular and semi-regular farm chores …

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Yesterday we spent the day preparing to have mushrooms in the fall. Friends Joanna (who interned at a farm out here last summer) and Jacob came out for the day, bearing safety gear and two giant bags of plugs (basically dowels) inoculated with shiitake mushroom spores from Fungi Perfecti.

The first step (after eating delicious cinnamon rolls) was to find and cut down suitable hardwood trees and/or branches of 3-6 inches in diameter. I stayed out of the way for that, so no dramatic photos of timber falling (also no photos of Garth in his silly-looking hardhat with attached ear protection). But there were no chainsaw-related casualties, so that’s good.

The process is simple, if somewhat time-consuming, but once you get a rhythm down it goes pretty smoothly, assembly-line style … though we learned it would work better with a corded drill; the battery life on our 3 drills was our limiting factor.

You take your 5/16″ drill bit and put a bunch of holes in your logs, about 4 inches apart, in a diamond pattern. After you drill up a log, hand it over to the hammering section, where the next person puts one little plug into each hole and hammers it in. This was my favorite job.

After it’s all full of plugs, the next person uses a little plastic syringe to suck up cheese wax from the dedicated wax-melting crockpot, and puts a little puddle of wax on top of each plug. This helps protect the log from being colonized by other, non-delicious spores.

And now, we wait, and keep them from getting too dry (water them or cover with burlap or shade cloth). And in the fall, we harvest (we hope) lots and lots of organic local shiitake mushrooms! I’m already planning lots of beef stew …

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We’ve been reviewing our successes and not-so-much-successes from last year, and our resources for this year (including personal levels of energy and time available, as well as space), and making some decisions about when and what and how.

One thing we know: we’re not going to grow produce for sale this year. We’ll grow to feed ourselves, as usual, but not worry about selling. This turns out to be very liberating! We can choose the varieties we want, rather than trying to make decisions based on what might be interesting and do well at market.

One thing we are pretty sure about (dependent on some decisions about pastures): we’ll be raising several batches of chickens and one batch of turkeys for sale. Keep an eye out here to hear more when we are ready to take orders.

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In a hot pan with bacon grease, started before the fish went on, went minced shallot and sliced asparagus and garlic scapes. We put the fat asparagus stalk segments in first, to get more cooking time than the skinnier ones, the flower buds, and the scapes. Partway through I decided it should have peas so I ran out to pick several pods, which I dumped straight into the pan as I shelled them.

Halibut cheeks went into another pan with melted butter. We worked from this recipe for the ‘but cheeks, lightly breading them with flour with salt, pepper, a bit of cayenne, and paprika. These cheeks were HUGE and took longer to cook than that recipe; I only bought three at the fishmonger today, and we only ate the two smaller ones, one each. The other will make fish tacos for both of us. HUGE. For reference, we often cook up 6+ normal-sized cheeks to make tacos — they are usually much, much smaller.

After frying and removing the cheeks, I deglazed their pan with some vermouth, lemon juice, and water mixed together, reduced a bit, combined that with the veggies in their pan, and plated (I’m like Iron Chef!).

All in all, a very successful meal. We are happy to have more than one way to cook ‘but cheeks now — previously we have exclusively grilled and served as fresh soft tacos.

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Here are some things that are new this year!

This year we are allowed to let our blueberries set fruit. We won’t get much, but I’m excited!

Our Wyandottes are fifteen weeks old, and all grown up! They are starting to venture out of the coop when we open it up to let them out. They have discovered they love the grass and the sun.

I sprouted these beans in a dish of water, which worked beautifully, and then I waited too long to plant them and I didn’t think any of them came up. I was sad. But then I noticed these lovely flowers! I know the replacement beans we got didn’t have beautiful red flowers, so I was very happy to know that I hadn’t killed the first batch.

The chives overwintered, though I thought they hadn’t, and now they have beautiful purple blooms that the bees love.

This week we got the first batches of chicks and turkey poults (babies) that we will raise for meat and ultimately slaughter. They are awful cute but I am fairly confident that we will be able to dispatch them when it comes time.

The turkeys, pictured here on their first day home, are so funny. The yellowish one in the front has learned about reflections!

Our first batch of meat chickens arrived on Friday, and Garth took this lovely video of the box before opening it. Starring: Ruby dog; box of peepers.

SQUEAMISH VEGETARIANS may not want to proceed — there are some non-graphic, at-a-distance pictures of chicken slaughter day below.

Laura at (not so) Urban Hennery raises a flock of chicks a couple times a year, and before ordering chicks she puts out a call to interested folks who can claim a few chicks. The deal is, you pay some deposit money for feed, and then you come help out on slaughter day too, and at the end pay a total for average weight minus the deposit you paid. It works pretty well. Slaughter day was this weekend, and pictures are below.

This weekend, we went up to Arlington to help slaughter some chickens that were raised by Laura. I did a lot of gutting, but I took a break to take a photo.

While we were gutting and finishing up, the guys were plucking and queuing up birds for us.

Phew! We’ve been busy.

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I have been taken to task by more than one person for the lack of duckling photos. So here are some ducklings!

Most of the photos have notes in Flickr — click through and mouse over the photo to see them.

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The asparagus is coming up! We won’t have very many spears, but I didn’t think any would come back at all after the multiple sessions of scratching the chickens gave the asparagus plot. So I am happy to see these little spears!

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We have been meaning to write about this for a while, and today friend and blog-reader Melinda provided the impetus when she emailed to ask how our hoophouses are constructed. I know they are working with a raised bed, so I took some photos to illustrate how we have ours set up!

It was warm and sunny today, and when I looked under the hoophouses to see what was up, I was hit with a blast of glasses-fog. So I opened them all up to get some fresh air inside and reduce the moisture levels, since too much moisture leads to mold.

As you can see/guess, our raised beds are constructed of 1×12s. Due to paths and other constraints, many of the angles aren’t right angles, so we did our best to support the corners by screwing into sections of 2×4.

The hoops of the hoophouses are 1/2- inch PVC pipe (in varying external widths) in 10-foot lengths. Any size of pipe works fine, as long as you are using clips and pipe sized to suit each other. The hoops are held on with some brackety things that are very simple — just one screw on either side.

Anecdote time! As we were building the first hoops on these raised beds, last fall, Garth said, “I am envisioning a small bracket that holds the hoops and costs 25¢.” Then he went to the hardware store, and seemed a bit sad when he returned (though his pockets were full). I asked, “Did they not have the brackets you were envisioning?” He said “No, they had them. They were 29¢ each.”

The brackets are easier to apply if you put one on each side, insert the PVC pipe, then have a helper hold it steady while you add the second bracket on each side according to where the PVC hoop wants to rest.

The plastic is just a clear-ish plastic dropcloth or tarp from your local hardware store. Ours come from Ace or whichever store we are standing in when we remember we need another one.

The plastic is held on the hoops by some very handy hoophouse clips that can be obtained from various sources. Territorial Seed has them, but only in 20 or 50 packs; Peaceful Valley has 1/2 inch and other sizes that are cheaper in large amounts. (Garth wants me to note: if any readers need a dozen clips, let us know, and we will give you some in exchange for coffee or beer next time we go out. If any readers need more than 50, let us know, and we will go in on an order of clips.)

Pro tip! If you put the two hoop-holding brackets far enough apart, you can put one of the plastic clips in between the two, as above. This clip, snugged up against the side of the raised bed, provides extra security, especially when it’s windy.

On our non-raised beds, we buy a larger diameter (1 inch?) of PVC and cut it into 12-16 inch sections. We drive these into the ground until about 3-6 inches are sticking out, and place one approximately parallel on the other side of the planting bed. Then we put the 1/2 inch pipe into each of those and bend it over into the other side. The hoops and plastic and clips are the same as above.

If it’s windy, you may need rocks on either end of the tarp to secure it. It will let you know by making a lot of commotion and flapping around in the wind.

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Local food friends Anne & Ryan got us a packet of crimson-flowered fava beans from Seed Dreams, a small seed company in Port Townsend. Yay! I have put them in water to chit, also known as pre-sprouting.

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