Autumn eats

Autumn goodies

Just a day's harvest around our mini-farm. You don't really need a lot of space to at least start feeding yourself.

Upper left, clockwise:

1. Blue eggs from our four little Easter Egger (Amaracauna/something-else crossbred) hens.

2. Raspberries that took over the sunny side of the shed.

3. Red Flame grapes from the greenhouse.

4. Chanterelles, cleaned, and simmered with butter.

Dinner and desert, for at least a couple of days. Remember, hunter-gatherers worked about 3-4 hours a day. Which is about how long an artist working color can do before the eye perception grays out. The Work Ethic was invented by the people who wanted to do nothing themselves, so they could work everybody else do death. Yes, it was.

If you don't have to kill yourself getting the necessities, you can work all day on what you really want to work on - and working on what you want to work on makes everything work better. There is plenty of food and surplus for everybody, including the young, the elderly and the ill. PLENTY. Enough to go to "waste" and rot back into the earth to feed the plants. I've seen it happen, if we just let nature work. 

Watch the animals in the autumn - they've pretty much done raising the young, and now it's time for food and fooling around, before courtship kicks in. They get vacation, as much as a couple months. They weren't put on the earth to work themselves to death. 

(If you mention honeybees, the workers are clones of the Queen; the Work Ethic works for HER. But you're not a worker bee.)

Big Mo's First Egg

Big Mo's very first egg. Bowl for scale.

Big Mo's First Egg is a Double Yolker!

Mo's the eldest. This is her first egg, and - it's a double yolker!

It looks small, but the first pullet eggs are always small.

Yay! Clean, healthy protein!

Mr. Kate Goes To The Farm

Mr. Kate has a new home.

Oh, those of you with chickens KNOW why he's called "MISTER" Kate. Now go ahead and laugh.

He was sold to us by a feedstore in Port Angeles as an Amaracauna hen. Obviously, he's an Easter Egger - you can't see it, but his legs are green. Easter Eggers are Amaracauna/Other crosses. That looks like he's got Leghorn in him. He's tall and heavy, even though he's only learning to crow and only has nubs for spurs, and he has a wide stance. His daughters are going to be top layers.

Now, since we run this place like a ship - including having only room for the four laying hens - and he's too big and rough for the small space, he's gone to Joe Gregory's farm. Where he shall be placed in a cage with 15 Amaracauna hens. Oh, boo hoo for him, how awful.

And no, Joe's not going to eat him. Everybody knows Joe doesn't have a farm - he has a petting farm. He refers to his animals as "cute."

Chickening In

"I don't need chickens. I can buy the few eggs we need."

Not.

There's nothing like the luxury of having all the eggs we want, for cooking and distribution (I'm a publisher - we use publisher words). I'm spoiled. I want my hens back. I originally dreamed of having bees (like Sherlock Holmes?) but I have to face it - I'm a chicken farmer. We should do what we're good at.

"Food dish? No, it's a nest. Because we think so."

So here they are from the Airport Garden, five little Ameracauna hen chicks (99% guarantee from a nice bunch of people who keep love-me cats in the shop). The young man who sold 'em to me could talk chickens all day. Green eggs, evidently. Cool. I like color in my shells. Nothing as huge as the big pink eggs laid by old Rhode Island Red, but not quail eggs, either.

The first day, two chicks would fit in the feeder. Not the next day.

The five little chicks were given working-horse names. You don't give working farm animals - or goldfish - fancy personal names; it's a jinx. So meet Goldie, Blackie, Brownie, Pinkie and Stripes. The names might as well be yelled by Andy Devine in Stagecoach.

Yes, they're in the bathtub. The young man asked where I was going to keep them.

"In the bathroom."

"Oh. You're smart."

Most people must stick baby chicks out in the shed with a light. How am I going to get them friendly by picking them up and talking to them, if I can't drop in on their heated room whenever I feel like it, instead of putting on a coat and boots and finding excuses not to? Besides, they're so darn cute. 

Hey, I'm not the only one. The old farmer up here never talks about how his back-bred Jersey calves are successful, or his little Devons are blocky or milk well. They're "cute." He doesn't have a farm, he has a petting zoo. And is successful with all his beasts. Love = success? What a concept.

WTF is THIS thing?

Body of the beast.

Ah, the mystery of the sea. Somebody up here must know what this thing is. We found two of them on the beach. It seems to have - um - feelers, and perhaps a mouth on the opposite end, and are those guts? Animal or plant? You tell us.

Head or tail or something.

I just received this email. I suggest going to this gentleman's site, which is full of wonderful photos, as well as contact info for diving services. The skate backbones had been washing up on the beach of late, so yes, this is very likely one of their egg cases, in a very degraded state.

Hi Donna,

Thanks for the comment on the site.  It is a labor of love. 

It is hard to tell from the pics, but if I had to guess I think what you found is an egg casing for a shark or skate.  It looks fairly deteriorated as it has long ago hatched, but unhatched ones look like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_case_(Chondrichthyes)

Thanks for sharing!

Keith Clements

Emerald Diving, LLC

www.emeralddiving.com

Discover the beauty within Pacific Northwest waters

Fried Mushy Peas and Eggs Sunny-Side Up

FINALLY got it right.

Like crispy green mashed-potato cakes, with tender-cooked home-laid eggs, drowned in Tobasco sauce.

Go ahead, laugh; it's delicious.

Chicken Report

Moved the chicken tractor this morning, to a more sunny location, because their water was skinned over with ice last night.

Red, who has been twice caught under the slats in a move, decided to get up in the nesting box and ride.

They've started laying again -- two eggs yesterday.

Black Gone Broody Mad, Bitch

Our black hen, Black (yes, it's a food-animal designation) is brooding her brains out.  I even had to go get her some fertile eggs to brood, so she'd get off the nest once in a while.

Now I'm having to lift her up to check she's not brooding Red's eggs, too.  

Bad news; they managed to discover eggs are edible.  I'll go have to look up something on that.

The Next Chicken Step

Now we've got the egg production up and running -- 227 eggs as of today -- it's time for the next step.

Rebuilt the bigger cage to make it easier to access for cleaning, and got three nice new chicks (featherball stage)  from the Triple Nickel Farm on Highway 112.

The process now is:  buy new chicks when the older hens are cycling down (not yet, but will come soon enough), get a big rooster for the older hens and let 'em go on the hill behind us to have a few days/weeks/months of freedom.  Better than being slaughtered for soup or braise.  

The hill is the breeding home of eagles and other predators.  They don't hunt near their nesting area, and they keep down other predators.

I was perfectly willing to try slaughtering chickens, but when I was talking about the whole recycling process, Dan's face crinkled up in distress.  He was raised on a chicken farm, and had to kill a lot of them.  He just doesn't want to do the same with two hens he considers family pets.  So the girls will get an end-of-life vacation.

The new chicks are mixes; a black Arucana mix, and a couple of red/gray mottled things.  They cost two bucks apiece.  They're still scared, but they know where their compfy grass-lined nest is, as well as the food and water.

After a lifetime of not really eating eggs because Dan can't eat store eggs, we don't really eat a lot of eggs ourselves.  Most of them are now part of the swap system  with our neighbors, for cleaned, packaged salmon fillets and elk-burger and trout and ling-cod and halibut. Both sides of the swap think they've made out like fat rats and gotten the better end of the deal.

I'm going to check with the co-op and see if we can't just trade for milk, cheese, butter and  yogurt.  If you've got chickens, you've got a cow.

Land of Eggs and Honey

     We have a problem; too many eggs.

     We can't eat more than one a day each, in whatever form -- they're just too rich -- and the girls are out-laying us.  We'll have to take the excess to the folks who give us salmon.  Poor us.

     The eggs are color coded; the two pale yellow-green (bottom left, top right) are from White.  The large pale brown (lower right) is Black's.  Red lays the dark red with white speckles (upper left).  Black's eggs are the richest -- but she's by far the fattest.  Lift her up and feel the rolls of blubber and all you'll think of is duck-style-roasted chicken.

      After feeding them for a year, was thinking of just buying grown layers next time, but now realizing the rich feeding while they're growing up is what's making them good layers, despite their youth and the season of winter.  We've discovered a source of great calcium; dried-out sea-urchin and crab shells from the beach.  It's where we get the good grit, too, with the addition of sea minerals.  Fat hen + loads of calcium = loads of fat eggs.  Well, d'uh.

     Speaking of feeding animals right to get a return: after years of thinking and research, finally bought a beehive from Sunny Farms.  It has two fully-framed brood bodies and a honey body.  All the amateur -- and I do mean "WTF are we doing?" amateur -- beekeepers up here are listening to me when I tell 'em NOT to feed the bees crappy sugar and corn-syrup to get them through the winter.  Hello?  Colony Collapse Syndrome?  The bees are having enough trouble without being given crummy ersatz food.  Or, to quote, "Thou shall not muzzle the ox that treads the corn," if you need something from that antique-science book. The local Olympic Grays ("Pioneer" bees from Caucasian stock brought in by white settlers over a century ago and gone feral) are pumping out honey and white wax -- from the Douglas Firs, would you believe! -- like little machines.   One keeper has over 100 pounds of honey on one hive. Imagine what fir honey tastes like.  If you like pine-nuts....  At least I'm imagining it; nobody's tasted it yet.  

     My hive is actually painted; I found some neutral base, so the hive can have that nice raw-wood look and still be protected.  I'm not going to buy bees; I'm going to ask one of the local keepers if I can put one of my hive bodies next to his until we get a swam to inhabit it.  Maybe offer him some eggs.

Hector's still here, and has stabilized. He's slipped into a weak, thin, but interested old age. So far, his water bag IV is set at two units (about an inch) of water per day, he gets Diazepam (Valium) twice a day, and while he usually eats a dry kidney-support diet, we let him have anything he wants. What can it hurt, now? Knowing he has purr-ogatives lets him know he's still top cat. Or, officially, Top Cat Emeritus. Leo is Top Cat, now, sort of. Living with Leo is like living with Denny Crane, but without the penis comments.

Chicken emergency resolved. As the hard rains of the El Nino came in, the chicken cage became unbearable. It was originally built for security, but this made it almost impossible to clean. So for about a week, I threw myself into building an actual mobile cage -- a bit too heavy to be an actual chicken tractor -- to get them out of the filthy, muddy, ammonia-reeking trap their home had become. Red, the hen as tall half-way up my thigh, and the boss chicken, was yelling for help.

Yesterday I ignored the lashing rain, each hammer-blow splashing water as though it were coming down in a puddle, and slammed through the project until the cage was at least sturdy and completely enclosed. The neighbor was so upset at seeing me soaking wet in the rain she brought me a nice red rain jacket. I tried to tell her I had spent much of my childhood in the cold rain. My father was injured and in pain much of my early life, and mom just threw us out in the rain to fend for ourselves. We didn't know we were abandoned; we had woods and beach and fields to play with, ponies and peacocks, seagulls and wandering hounds. But we did spend most of our time soaking wet, sometimes just stringing our tennis shoes (we got one pair a year) around our necks on our shoelaces and running barefoot.

But, back to the present. I ran in the house and changed my sloppy sweatshirt so I wouldn't get the nice red jacket wet on the inside and dashed back outside before I warmed up; it's running in and out of heat and cold that makes a weatherproof person sick. By the time I got the cage finished, it was the hen's bedtime, and no time to move them. Red did lay her first egg, however. A PINK one. White's are yellowish, Black's are light green. Easter eggs!

This morning Dan helped me move the hens. Red was squawling to us to come rescue them, and came to my hands to be handed out of the hutch. While Dan ran with her to the new cage, Black came in to be caught, too. My God, is that a fat hen! She's rather gorgeous -- in the sun, shimmering black/green with black edges on each feather. White was an idiot -- white chickens usually are -- and had to be cornered and caught in the muck.

The moment they were all together in their new hutch and cage, they happily started scratching the grass. This is growing over a concrete-tile path that is nearly covered over. Let THEM clean the damn' weeds off the path. Then we'll roll the cage to the next patch on the path and sow the edges with white Dutch clover. Ha! They can replace the nasty thin grass with nice rich clover while they're at it -- and they lay just enough eggs for us to have scrambled eggs twice a week.

Rebuilding the chicken tractor, or building a new one. The old one turned out to be too heavy to move!

I'd had the new one partially built, for light weight and security, but it didn't pass the waterproof test. So I had to tear it apart and start again.

Part of the problem is building with junk materials; this is actually much harder than starting fresh with a plan. You have to play jigsaw, and the stresses and balances are much more difficult.

I'm glad I'm stubborn.

Two more eggs since the last one -- one pale brown, the other more yellow. So all the girls have had their first period. If these are the pullet eggs, then the adult eggs should be a very nice size.

I haven't posted on this blog in a long time, but I'm going to start using it again for actual posts about our non-art life. The farm stuff, sort of.

Here's the first egg, laid by White (the other two are Red and Black; I don't name anything we may have to eat). This egg -- with a tinted shell reflecting White's ArAmerican blood -- was micro-poached, served on homemade bread. The shell was quite strong, from all the crab shells I pick up on the beach and crumble. The yolk was orange, not yellow, and sticky-rich.

Am building a new cage, one I can actually MOVE. I figure it will be better to have an actual chicken tractor, to clean the garden at end of season, get the weeds out of the walk, and not get nasty. It’s made of junk lumber and nails, so it’s not at pretty as the ones at the Chicken Tractor site. I have a terrible time visualizing where boards will end up, so of course it will be a bit crooked and ugly. But the hens will be happier. Happy hens = more and better eggs.