Dropstone Farms

We hosted Thanksgiving on Thursday for my mom and her husband and two friends of ours from Seattle and Port Hadlock. We had:

Turkey from Olympic Pastured Poultry
SMASHYpotato (Lauren’s name)
Buttermilk biscuits with homemade buttermilk
Glazed carrots
Green salad with pomegranate dressing from Butler Greens
Stuffing from our friend Skip.
Some sort of cucumber/dill salad from Finland that I don’t remember the name of.

Reactions to the menu:

Pastured turkey is something else. It’s more like duck than conventional turkey. There was a layer of fatty tissue on the front of the breast and the dark meat was a deep red like a fine duck. The drumsticks were shot through with heavily developed tendons that, I can only assume, arose from the bird running around doing turkeyish things. While I’m skeptical of Farmer Theo’s somewhat eccentric methods, I’m impressed enough with the product to start burying the occasional cow horn in my garden.

SMASHYpotatoes are, as they’ve ever been since we learned the recipe from Lauren’s Aunt Bonnie, just lovely. Potatoes and sweet potatoes combined with garlic and parmesan are such a satisfying alternative to marshmallow-coated orange potatoes.

I forget where Lauren got her recipe for biscuits, but there’s nothing like buttermilk biscuits to use up the leavings after making butter.

Green salad. What can I say? Every heavy meal needs a light course. Nom.

Stuffing a la Skip. He made two stuffings. One a conventional and delicious stuffing with mushrooms and sausage. The second had quince and cranberries and pecans. It was fantastic.

As I mentioned, I can’t recollect the name of the Finnish cucumber/dill salad, but it also was great. It was sliced cukes, dill, sugar, and vinegar. The fun part of this dish was that, in addition to being awesomely good, we got to discuss how cucumber salad with vinegar and sugar was reinterpreted in Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai cuisine. Some things have cross cultural appeal, I guess.

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Except, you know, I don’t think it was actually a killing frost. I love the pacific northwest.

There is also this potential guide to our being less utterly flawed. I’ve been wrong before, of course.

We also had our first frost of the year. The ducks ended up on the porch of the shop and one of them fell down. I like it when people/critters fall down. It’s high comedy.

The Fava Beans Have Some Frost on them

Peas with Frost

The Chickens Think Frost is Food.

The Ducks Commit Sluggocide.

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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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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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Impromptu harvest, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Garth’s mom was over and we were showing her the beets and the carrots, and we decided to pull some up for dinners and preserving.

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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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As I undertake the Great Mowing of 2008 my scythe and I are traveling the entire untilled and unwooded portions of our lot. I hadn’t realized how much I’d let my movements be hemmed in by the paths we’d tromped in the 3 feet (or so) of grass. So, as I was swish-snapping* along, I found myself under an apple tree along the edge of the property in a lovely cool, kind-of enclosed feeling space. It turns out that the tree made a cozy little room underneath it. How cool is that?

I took lauren out to show her the new “room” I’d discovered and she declared that we will come to this space to pick blackberries and apples and set up a table and eat dinner. I have no disagreement with this plan. I love that there are little nooks and crannies that I haven’t found yet. I also love that, trees being what they are, the nooks and crannies are going to keep changing. Plants are awesome.

*It turns out that, if you’re mowing with a scythe, every so often the general swishiness of the sound will be interrupted by a *snap* that sounds exactly like an electrical arc. I don’t know if grass has static electricity stored up or what, but I do know that hay burns down barns**, so I’m not putting anything past those sneaky-assed cover crops.

**Yes, it’s a footnote in a footnote, but I wanted to call your attention to the fact that Auburn University appears to have the URL “aces.edu,” which is at least four kinds of awesome.

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So, there are benefits to having a wife with a degree in linguistics. It turns out that, as I’ve known for a while, the name ‘garth’ is derived from an Old English word for garden and the name ‘lauren’ means victory. That’s right, when we got married, our names combined to form victory garden.

(image source) This gives access to some pretty cool iconography.

City Farmer News has a nice post about Victory Garden. The comparison has been made that the sacrifices asked of the public in World War 2 included recycle and food production. Our current government response to crisis is, predictable, “go shopping.”

The folks at Dervaes have adopted Victory Garden iconography as well. I have to say, I’m a fan of the graphic style and I’ve got a soft spot for politicization but it might be better to go with “kitchen garden” for mass appeal. I learned that the the medieval French referred to kitchen gardens and the everlasting soup made from the same as “Potage.” I like that. Also, a feature of the potage was a garth at the center. Win.

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Still no love for the bees in the Northwest. Colony Collapse Disorder is still affecting beekeepers. This is problematic in the extreme because, you know, no bees, no flowers. On the upside, bees managed in a non-industrial manner tend to be less affected by CCD. I’m not entirely convinced as the beekeepers on our island are still reporting problem and are responding with Russian bees and, according to the nice lady at the nursery, treating their hives with ever increasing doses of antibiotics. I’m certain that this will not result in hardier mites.

Annnnd, the salmon are dying. And not in the delicious way. Stocks of chinook are pretty much depleted and it looks like the season is going to be called off. “This will be devastating to the communities and families on the coast that rely on salmon fishing for their livelihood,” Oregon governor Ted Kulongoski said. While true, I can’t help but think about how similar this situation sounds to the ecological disasters I read about as a child in even-then-dated books on futurism (remember that?) from the 1970s. Seems like a bitter victory for them long-haired treehugger types, doesn’t it?

The New York Times reports that survivalism is quite the thing nowadays. I can’t say that this is a bad thing, especially in light of the response to Katrina. Anecdotally, I know that at an assembly of librarians in my grad school cohort, five of twenty-five people in attendance were making plans for some degree of social or infrastructural collapse. The winners were Lauren and I and a buddy of mine who’s a big fan of Burning Man.

I am, it seems, a little cranky. Fortunately, we’ve recently added a new book to our library that makes me happy. Also, the chickens have moved outside and having fewer livestock in the house will definitely improve my mood. Also, I got rid of the option to have my browser render all web pages with an enormous picture of Jakob Nielsen to every page I look at. It’s better this way.

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