It seems like an interesting life, doesn’t it? It’s dark now (at four-freakin’-thirty) but I’ll post a picture when the sun comes up.

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.

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.

Today we went to get our turkey at the Port Townsend Farmers’ market, which was AWESOME. Someone there had this enormous bag of storage onions; we have been unable to get good storage onions at our market because of the wet summer — folks are selling eating/cooking onions but no one wants to say they will store. So I was super excited to find this HUGE bag for $40 (we didn’t weigh it but figure it is ~50 pounds?) that was advertised as storage onions. Now we have onions for the winter!

(And some to share … email or comment if you are local to us and want some of these. This is a LOT of onions.)

cross-posted to my silly personal blog; sorry for the repeat

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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.)

I didn’t take a picture of my haul but I got: plums; Asian pears; tomatillos (admittedly late-season — they are usually a summer-ish crop as far as I know); parsnips; shallots; cauliflower. I also stocked up on sausage, and got a goat shoulder roast, and a package of lamb chops as a present for G.

* Where “you” are a Pacific coast resident. I know we are super lucky to have the growing season we do, but that’s why we stay here … woo, privilege.

Beets, leeks, chanterelles, etc. (Day 16), originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Beets, leeks, chanterelles, cilantro. Carrots? Potatoes, onions.

Squashes, carrots, beets, tomatillos, green tomatoes, broccoli, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Delicata, acorn, and other squash; tomatillos, green tomatoes, purple potatoes. Carrots, beets, broccoli, and a smidge of kale in the frame.

Awesome turnips, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Does anyone have advice on cooking and eating turnips? They are so pretty; I would love to learn what to do with them.

So many squash!, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

The variety in the foreground is called Long Island Cheese Pumpkin! Apparently it is quite tasty.

Olsen Farms potatoes!, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

We love Olsen Farms potatoes! We got all our seed potatoes from them one year; it was great. They have a huge variety and they are so knowledgeable about all of the flavors.

Cabbage “flowers” for bouquets, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

(Cross-posted from my silly blog, where I am doing a silly photo-a-day-for-the-month-of-November thing.)

Scroll down and look at the picture of Ruby first!

A SONG ABOUT RUBY, BY TRENT.

The saddest dog I ever did see
Was stuck all in a fence
She had a searching, soulful look
But had not any sense

She only wanted chicken poop
Fresh steaming from the pen
And now she’s on the internets
Betrayed by her friend

Oh dogs, oh dogs, oh do not do
As that dog Ruby tried
For if that fence were lectrical
That dog Ruby had fried

Oh dogs, oh dogs, oh do not do
As that dog Ruby would
Don’t go a-eatin chicken poop
Like it was any good

Oh go on, go on, doggies dear
Don’t eat shit from the fowl
Or you will feel as Ruby feels
Too shame-faced for to howl.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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?

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.

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?

I found some neat little things to hold down floating row cover. They come in packages of six for $6 or three-hundred for $50. Oscar feels that I bought too many of them.

Oscar Regards the holdy-downy thingees with suspicion.

I am continuing to add to what I call Compost Island.

See? Piles of compost.

Here is my latest pile of grass and chickenshit and, in a maudlin touch, two bouquets of flowers. It’s already cooking around 125 degrees.

It rots using the magic of chickenshit!

Then I dug a hole to expand the chicken coop. Lauren helped some but, as the brains of this operation, she lost patience with the shovel and pickax pretty quickly. To rub salt in the wound, our neighbors demolished their chicken barn with the help of one of our other neighbors who, you know, owns an excavator. Heavy equipment is really something else.

It really doesn

Prior to digging the hole I had to clear a mess of brush. Oddly, it turns out that ferns have incredibly well-developed root systems.

My brush pile. Let me show you it.

Then I made a bold technological innovation. Instead of making multiple trips to feed the ducks and the chickens I realized that I could implement the Galvanized Pail® method wherein you fill a bucket with feed and carry it to multiple bird enclosures. I know what you’re thinking, but this is just the sort of out of the box thinking it takes to succeed in small-scale agriculture.

The chickens are distrustful.

Distrustful chicken wonders if the pail is edible.

And I’m working on a hooky hanging thing for hats and the like.

I made it. FROM METAL!

We’ve been processing tomatoes, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

… a little at a time. We don’t have a pot that holds more than four quart-jars anyway so it works out.

We have also slow-roasted and frozen a couple of pounds, and have dried some too.

Pictured: Green Zebra; Ananas Noire; Black Prince; Brandywine; more varieties whose names I don’t know; some basil; an apple.

Corn: garden.
Artichokes: garden.
Cabbage for coleslaw: garden.
Bread: homemade.
Burger: from our cow.
Ripe Green Zebra tomato on the burger: garden.

The Harvest Moon is full tonight.

Fortunately for me, I got two little lemon trees this spring, one a year-old Improved Meyer from Territorial, and one older/bushier one from the nursery. The younger tree is still growing its branches and leaves and whatnot, but the older one is pretty robust, except it lost a lot of its leaves when we first got it home. I learned it wanted to be fertilized! So I did that. Now it is happily leaved and it is growing me lots of tiny lemons.

My Meyer lemont ree, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Apparently it takes a long time for a tiny green lemon to turn into a delicious juicy cookable lemon, but it also (apparently) blooms and fruits whenever it feels like it, hence the tiny fruit, mediumly tiny fruit, and the blossom, all at once.

Both of these (as well as my fig and bay trees) will come inside in the winters, at least until they are bigger and hardier.