June 2010
June 11, 2010
Weed wars. Joshua and I will have to dedicate one hour a day to weed elimination. Not that they are offensive- most are daisies. the whole operation looks like a flower farm specializing in wild daisies. You can see the sugar-snap peas but not much else- the Fava beans show a nose here and there, but the rest are obscured unless you're walking through. So it's weed wacker and perhaps a layer of newspaper with the wacked weeds tossed on top to hold them down. We haven't bought a flamer yet, but will probably have to. Among the weeds are wild yarrow and since we've got a recipe for yarrow beer and they are in flower, we'll be making a 6 gallon batch next week-probably in between bouts of heavy bed-building work. Fenced in the field behind the chicken coop and let the birds fly, which they did. As soon as I opened the doors to the pens the big ones came flapping and dancing out- boy were they excited. The teen-agers not so much. 4 of the 90 plus ventured forth- the rest didn't know what to do. A couple of days later though, things had calmed down- especially after the big ones decided to commandeer all of the food bins- but once everybody figured out that foraging was a fun chicken thing to do, food no longer became an issue. Yesterday eve I threw in s bunch of wilting bok choi and by this morning it was all but gone. Of course I still have to kick the teens out of the coop every day- many would rather just hang out there and have their food delivered than have to go get it themselves...
June 12 New Market
It's late (10:30), hot and I won't be able to sleep awhile- will get through a few more pages of Michael Pollen's "The Omnivores Dilemma"- really interesting reading. Earlier I'm sitting in the chicken field on the old pick-up bed-cap with my drawing tablet trying to sketch a chicken. The chickens are eyeing me too- or my shoes or shoe-laces or maybe the tick-tocking of my pencil as it works out the silouette of a head- but it's not quite right and I'm distracted by their displays of bravura on moment to their goofy attempts to eat the tiniest bits of food left on one of the red platters... I give up, find a photo, do a sketch, make some adjustments so it looks like one of my chickens, go back, rework the head successfully this time and then cut out the drawing with sissors so I can sketch it onto the new chicken door I'll install tommorrow. Did you know that you can label a chicken as "organic" if it's being fed organic feed in a shed with 20,000 other chickens? It's "free range" if for a week or two- about twenty minutes a day (or week?) it can walk on a grassy area. At age 8 (weeks) it is then slaughtered. My chickens are happy. I mean it. They are in their element. they forage all day and run to me when I've got the bucket of feed. They are still dinosaurs- that hasn't changed but they're happy dinosaurs. You might be bigger than they are but they still check you out in case you might be a potential meal. True omnivores, just like us. Sorry to keep going on about the chickens- I'll do a soliloquey on spinach at some point I promise except that I have trouble growing it. I met Sunil Patel at the New Market today and rubbed shoulders with a number of other interesting people as well. I was in no mood to be there. I had reluctantly scrawled onto 4 small blackboards with light green chalk what I had for sale. Sugar Snap Peas $3 for 8 oz, Romaine lettuce, Spectrum Greens (spicy asiatic lettuce/greens mix), and Pastured Chickens ($3.25 a lb). I sat down in my chair and hoped people wouldn't notice that I was there. I sold lots of stuff, considering. it's going to be a very good market. So Sunil and I introduced ourselves and he again expressed his desire to come out and see what I was doing. I suggested in a couple of months- emphasising that most of what I was doing was still in the "conceptual but I'm getting to it" stage. Come next year- I promise I'll be ready. Well, I did get one chicken door built tonight and will install it tommorrow. At the end of market, I was talking to Dana of Jade Family Farm- and the conversation got around to their loss of the sugar-snap peas and my bountiful crop. So we exchanged a little- my peas for some of her beets. I like this idea of exchanging in general- and perhaps having other CSA's or organic farms as a back-up resource when problems arise. We are going to be short of produce over the next 6 weeks- we'll always have some but not quite enough until the remainder of the fields are developed so working out exchanges will benefit all and may help set a precedent of cooperation. I don't feel that Howard's end is in "competition" with anyone- on the contrary, I think we should all keep in touch, learn from one another and share resources when the occasion arises. Following market, I get home, my face and head is burned (because I couldn't remember where I had put my hat), but I get the truck unloaded and put everything away (unusual for me), take a nap (somewhat unsuccessfully), head to Lowe's to get the wood for the chicken doors. Tommorrow it will be an oven so an early start is the only option if I'm gong to get the remainder of the peppers in and at least half the tomatoes in. More beds too. Need to start Hakuri turnips and get the other bed of Royal Burgundy beans planted. 120 Broccoli seedlings cry out to be established as do the 30 or so fennel I haven't done. So mid-day, when I'm being basted in the sun, I'll work on the chicken doors. And at night, when the second one is done- I'll take the walk from the End down to the Big House and watch the little flaming comets flaring all along the way making the magic that only fireflies can make at this time of year.
June 17
It's 7:30 a.m. and I'm putting 12 week old chickens in the carrier crates. I want to get 30 of them but an hour later, settle for 26 or 27- not sure how many I get. Hard to count them after awhile and since these are their last hours, I'm grabbing them as gently as I can- not by a leg to swing them upside down, or with a fishing net. Two hands on the back- at the wings so they won't flap and then calming them by saying "calm down, calm down". Joshua, goes and gets the girls- he starts on a new bed up at the top of the hill- near where the vineyard will be and Susie and Sarah pick sugar-snap peas. Meanwhile, I get to the Beiler Family Farm and after a few minutes of watching some kids play house in a ramshakle out-building, Jonas, his son and a trio of his daughters show up to set up shop. I put the headless chickens into a very hot bath for a couple minutes to release their feathers and then they go into a plucking machine which makes a constant whirring sound as the birds are spun around in kind of a spin-dry cycle while I, or Jonas' son, spray them with water. Then to the cutting table, into a cold water tank and a quarter hour later they'll be in a walk in cooler to drip dry (for half a day) before being vacuum wrapped. Jonas says to me during all of this- "you read books- I don't have time so tell me what are the ideal conditions for a cheese cave? I reply: 52 degrees constant temperature with 93% humidity. Jonas: I just made two 40 pound wheels of cheddar and I put some shelves down there (his cave is 30 feet down a ladder, through a narrow squeeze into a small room) and there's mold on the wheels. I say: wipe them with a brine solution once a week and you should be o.k. Jonas: What else do I do? I say: let me do some research and I'll tell you tommorrow when I come to get the chickens and grain I ordered. I did a quick google this afternoon and I was wrong. I'll call Jonas tonight and tell him to wipe his cheddars once day with a dry,clean cloth and turn them. Do this for 5 to 10 days then cover them with wax. The heated wax will kill any molds on the rind and protect the cheese until the aging process is completed. How long to age a chedder? In a hurry- minimum: 60 days (by law no less). Maximum- skies the limit- in Europe, some cheddars are aged for years.
June 22
Rain falls for a half-hour on the fields and give a much needed quarter inch. Nevertheless, we begin installing a drip irrigation system tommorrow. Hoses and brass "v" split junction-valves will allow us to control which soaker hoses the water will flow to. We will complete the planting of the tomatoes and peppers and start shungiku, New Zealand and Malabar spinaches (neither are a "true" spinach ), Hakurie turnips (if they arrive from Johnny's) and Purple Mizuna. Radishes, too will go in- I think. The Daikon radishes are flowering so I have to check to see if they should stay in or be pulled. Perhaps let them seed. Distributed 30 more chickens between this past saturday's market at the Home Depot and todays on Locust Lane. Last saturdays' market was our best to date- we made about $250 in sales. Not much really but we finally had extra produce to sell to the public (after our CSA distribution) and those at the market were ready to buy. We nearly sold out. So we're making progress with our fields. We continue to add a few hundred feet of raised beds a week and I think in six weeks we should have enough for a wide variety for the CSA members and the two markets as well. Last year our gross reciepts came in around $16,000. This year they look like $34,000 at least. I had hoped for nearer to $50,000 but that was something of a dreamy projection. Seventy percent of our time is spent on building beds I think. We have a cheese cave to build and an outdoor "processing" area next to the hothouse and the water spigot. I think we can start the cave by mid-July. That's when we should have the fall crops started. Even though we will still have hoop houses to build, they won't take too long. by then, all of the berries should be in place- if not, they could wait until the end of September. I'll have to let the girls go at the end of August due to financial restraints but Joshua and I should be able to carry on well enough. There's another reason for getting to the cheese cave and it involves Jonas's cheese. Jonas said to me the other day when we were picking up our chickens (vacuum sealed, etc), "why don't you take my wheel (40lb of Swiss which he had just made) and put it in your cave?" He'd b e glad to make the cheese it turns out, if I wouldn't mind finishing it. This sounds like a great idea and I plan to pursue it with him. Jonas is of the mind that since I read books (and he doesn't have the time) that i know more about cheese-making than he does. I seriously doubtr this- since he was trained by a cheese-master and I have only read a few recipes in a book or two and garnered bits of information on line and attended a seminar of cheese-cave building at this past February's PASA conference. I think the jist of it is that I can get the information together to result in a finished product- Jonas is already producing Swiss and Cheddar cheeses among others but he's not doing it traditionally and objects to having to spend $4,000 on a vacuuming machine to press everything into plastic. At least in jest he does. Sometimes I can't really tell. But a collaboration I think would be really good for the both of us. As a result, we might even create a few cheeses that will be original to this area! Why do the French have so many cheeses? I think because there are so many caves, and cellars with so many slightly to greatly different conditions throughout France and of course, many official "correct" French opinions as to the proper way of doing things et voila you have a ton of different (and many very smelly cheeses). Turns out that chickens like to eat cheese (Jonas tells me this)- even the cheddar that he made that smells like rotten eggs. They love that one in particular. Perhaps the chickens have some French ancestry or something... Finally, there is no seed-savers' exchange in central Pennsylvania so I'm going to start one. I'll begin by buying a book and doing a bit of a google on "seed saving" and "seed exchanges" and see if Joshua can set up a web-site for it. I've got French sorrel seeds to collect and brussels sprouts seeds to dry and I notice the parsley is going to seed as well and that Daikon....
June 26 Heat
Back home from the market by 3 p.m. and I am so exhausted I decide to take off until 5. I get a drink (juice) and sit down on the couch to watch the US- Ghana soccar match and fall half asleep. by the time I'm feeling semi-anything it's 5:30 so I head up to feed the chickens and cats- the chickens following me around- always crowding my feet when I've got the feed in hand and continue to do this even when I've put feed down. They just like following me around. They're waiting for that special treat which they are convinced I have I guess. The last of the first 100 will go for processing on Monday (about 25 birds) and I've already filled orders for 19 of them. the birds are getting all kinds of greens (bolted lettuces, flowered broccoli raabs, sugar snap pea vines) and I notice that their poop is a somewhat emerald green. Van Gogh would have been inspired. Now it's 7 p.m. and I've got to get over to the Glick's for 8 gallons of milk which I need to make ricotta cheese on Sunday. Sunday will be a marathon. not only is there a full schedule of planting but irrigation has to be half completed, and beds for the artichokes and squash brought up as well. Olivier is coming and we are going to try our hand at making a batch of Yarrow beer. I learned today that you can eat the yarrow flowers- but them in an egg batter and pan fry them. We'll have to try that for lunch if there's time. The ricotta is for the ravioli that all the members are going to recieve for the July 6 distribution- a asparagus and ricotta ravioli with a hint of cheese-truffle, etc. We are "low in the patch" as Daniel Glick said today- not much produce ready for harvest. We've pulled all the spring and switched to summer heat loving veggies and now must wait for them to start. We'll have some here and there- but will have to buy from other organic farms and CSA's. I'm going to lay off the girls for the next three weeks so I can afford this. The good news is that we are getting close to having enough beds for a decent year-round operation. I think by July 15- intime for the beginning of the fall planting season that we should be there. Not that we won't continue developing beds- we still have all the berry beds to do, an expansion of the strawberries and 6 hoop houses to raise and the worm farms to start too. But we can get to work on the cheese cave some time in July which will be a happy cool break from the relentless sun. Seems I have to drink a quart an hour just to be able to keep going. Was faint a couple of times yesterday and hate the thought of losing time to heat exhaustion. Tommorrow will be a challenge because that work has to be done... and it's going to be 90 or above. The chickens aren't going to like that at all. Emma Glick said perhaps they should "hang me on the fence" when I mentioned my exhaustion complaint and I said yea, and maybe then it'll rain and I won't smell so much. They thought that was funny.
:)