I think it says something about the completeness with which I have settled into my new lifestyle that, for my birthday, I got a crewcut and a shotgun.
Okay, it’s not quite a crewcut. Kathy, at Salon in the Mills, gave me about five haircuts over the space of an hour. Each, obviously, was shorter than the last. By the time we were done, I was down to just a couple of inches. But I may go back for cut number six, so the full-fledged crew isn’t out of the question.
The shotgun, a gift from Kevin, is most definitely a shotgun. After spending two hours with Bob at the gun counter at Bass Pro Shops, we chose a Remington 870 pump-action 20-gauge combo, which comes with a 20-inch rifled barrel for deer and a 26-inch smooth-bore barrel for birds.
Fortunately, my parents are helping me maintain my hold on civilization. They sent me a case of really good wine.
This particular manifestation of his genius came about because I didn’t think ahead. I had the brilliant (!) idea of planting romaine lettuce in the cold frame. We could start it very early, I figured, and have our first crop in May, before some of our other plants are even in the ground.
So far, the lettuce experiment is going well. The seedlings are coming up, and some are almost an inch high. All is as planned. The problem is what wasn’t planned. It never occurred to me that, if I filled the cold frame with romaine, I’d have no place to start our other seeds.
Enter my husband, the genius.
We were in Home Depot looking at grinders. Once we determined that the only grinder powerful enough to do what we needed it to do (cut off large pieces of boat trailer) cost more than we were prepared to spend, Kevin brought me over to the other side of the store, to the aisle with vents and insulation.
Instant cold frame
I didn’t know where he was going with this, since we didn’t need any vents or insulation. But he went to the little section where they have window wells – heavy-duty pieces of semi-circular plastic that cover ground-level windows and the holes beneath them. Kevin took two of them off the shelf and then led me two aisles over, to the clamp section.
He put the two window wells on the floor, facing each other wall-side in, and put clamps along the top and sides where they met. Voila! A circular cold frame.
We bought the pieces for a grand total of some sixteen dollars and assembled them in the sunny spot right in front of the garage. It took about seven seconds, and another half hour or so to plant seeds for kale, arugula, fennel, and sugar snap peas.
One seed tray in, two more over the next few weeks
Our new cold frame is big enough to hold three standard trays of 72 plants each. It’s mobile, so you can put it somewhere that you wouldn’t use for a greenhouse or a stationary cold frame (like right in front of the garage). It’s easily stored because the two wells nestle together and can fit on a shelf. On warm days, you can prop it open with a piece of wood.
The only problem we foresee is wind, and so we tied it down with a piece of rope anchored to a brick on one side and a rock on the other (we didn’t have two of either within arm’s reach). There may be problems we don’t foresee, but it’s hard to plan for those.
Technically, the jury’s out on the jury-rigged cold frame. We can’t declare success until our seeds come up, but I’m voting now anyway. It’s genius.
Everyone should have to spend time in a room full of people who take, as an article of faith, a position opposite to that which you have taken as an article of faith all your life. In this case, the article of faith is gun control, and the room full of people was the basement of a church where the hunter safety class I attended was held.
Massachusetts law requires that, before you are permitted to buy a gun or possess one on public property, you must have a firearms permit. In order to get the permit, you have to take the hunter safety class.
The class runs some eighteen hours over several days, and covers all the topics you’d expect – firearm safety, gun laws, hunting basics – as well as some you wouldn’t. I enjoyed the module on orienteering, which had us navigating around the church graveyard with a compass.
All the instructors are volunteers, recruited from the community. They’re generally from the ranks of state and local agencies involved in environmental protection or law enforcement, but there are others as well. One such was a retired Air Force rifleman with extensive experience teaching firearm safety.
Bob’s module on the safe handling of guns ran four hours. He spent the first three handing a wide variety of guns around the class, explaining how they work and how to use them and store them properly. Then, with an hour to go, he put the guns away and set up an easel with a pad of flipcharts on it. Because Kevin had already taken the class, I knew what was coming.
“How many people here are members of the National Rifle Association?” he asked. About three-quarters of the people in the room raised their hands. He asked about other gun-rights organizations and expressed satisfaction about the high level of participation.
Then he moved on to the other end of the spectrum. “Are there any lawyers here?”
No hands went up.
“Any reporters?”
Again, no hands.
“Good.” He flipped to the first chart, which had the text of the Second Amendment
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
He glossed over that troublesome first part and then launched into an hour-long screed on Americans’ inviolable right to own guns. He quoted Aristotle. He quoted Charlton Heston. He made the case that firearm ownership is the only hedge we have against tyranny. He even raised the specter of communism, establishing himself as the last man standing in opposition to the Red Menace.
He had choice words for Obama, for liberals, and for PETA. The gun control lobby was peopled by people who don’t understand the fragile nature of democracy, and who clearly can’t read. What part of “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” do they not understand?
Kevin warned me that I’d have to keep my mouth shut during this presentation, but that wasn’t a problem. Engaging zealots is generally counterproductive, and it isn’t even fun. Besides, here’s a guy who has spent a lifetime developing a skill, and from whom I learned a lot. I honor his service to our country and I appreciate the time he spends teaching the class. As a firearms expert, he’s clearly formidable. To take issue with his constitutional scholarship seemed beside the point.
Although the maddeningly enigmatic Second Amendment is the rallying cry of the pro-gun contingent, I haven’t found a single solitary soul who believes that the right of the people to keep and bear arms should literally not be infringed. Even people who think Americans ought to be able to keep and bear assault weapons draw the line somewhere. Rocket launcher? Nuclear warhead?
Likewise, I don’t know anyone who favors an absolute ban on all firearms (at least, I don’t think I do – I haven’t polled my entire acquaintance). Bob’s tree-hugging, PETA-joining, Constitution-flouting antis don’t resemble the gun-control advocates I know. They’re just Bob’s straw men, set up so he can rail against the lunatic left, all the while breathing life into the stereotype of the lunatic right.
In my experience, most gun-control discussions don’t involve lunatics on either end. It’s never All Guns vs. No Guns. It’s about the degree of infringement on the right to bear them.
The article of faith for me is that more infringement is better. I think guns and firearms licenses should be difficult to get, which is why I didn’t mind schlepping to Dennis for five evening classes. I think all guns should be registered, and some kinds of guns should be flat-out banned. Handguns are the type used in the vast majority of gun crimes (the DOJ says upwards of eighty percent), and I think there’s a strong practical case (although a shaky constitutional one) to be made that they should be the exclusive province of law enforcement and the military.
But you don’t have to be a lunatic to take it as an article of faith that less infringement is better. The class was certainly a less-infringement crowd, but not everyone bought into Bob’s presentation, which happened to be given on the same night as the State of the Union. The next day, the guy sitting next to me, a funny, good-natured firefighter from Yarmouth, told me he ran a tape of Obama’s speech in a continuous loop for 24 hours as a kind of detox.
No matter what the tree-hugging, PETA-joining, Constitution-flouting anti-gun nuts tell you, the NRA isn’t populated exclusively by lawyer-hating, Heston-quoting, communist-fearing pro-gun nuts.
Most people in the class seemed to have grown up in a gun culture, enjoyed hunting, and took firearms ownership seriously There was the one teenager who smirked a lot and doodled “Kill! Kill!” on his class notes (yikes!), but almost everyone else in the room seemed to pay attention, to ask sensible questions, and to be committed to handling firearms safely and responsibly.
I ate donuts with them on the breaks. I made jokes with them during the boring parts. They weren’t the stuff that straw men are made of.
I keep hoping that animals will be curious about our Varmintcam. After all, it’s a strange black box that lights up when they go near it. I would think they’d get close, give it a sniff, walk around it – and I’d get some great pictures.
Instead, they seem to walk by, or walk away, and all I get are pictures of their butts. Here are two tails we got a good look at. One is clearly a raccoon, and the other looks like a cat, but it’s definitely not our cat. If you can tell me it’s the rare cat-like New England panther, I’ll be forever in your debt.
And they say you shouldn't wear horizontal stripes
Look in the lower right ... tell me that's not a housecat.
There is only one animal who strolls right up, and gives us a great view.
Friday evening plans made us move our Every Other Friday to Thursday, and it was my turn. I happened to have some ground lamb in the refrigerator, and it was calling out for Indian. The Every Other Friday rule is that we have to try something we’ve never cooked before, and I decided to attempt samosas. I had thought that any self-respecting samosa had to be deep-fried, but I read several authoritative sources who said that you can bake them.
I’m very fond of deep-fried things, but I’ve never deep-fried at home. There are two reasons I’m reluctant to start now. The first is that I’m intimidated by hot oil. In the olden days it was a weapon, poured over the ramparts onto whoever was trying to storm the castle, and I’m just not sure I want that kind of thing in my kitchen. The second is that I’m trying to rein in what seems like inexorable winter weight gain.
So, when those authoritative sources said I could bake them, I wanted to believe. I mixed my filling. I kneaded my dough. I rolled out my wrappers and formed the little stuffed triangles. I even pan-fried them to give them some crunch on both sides before I baked them.
I had high hopes as I slid the tray into the oven, but they were dashed when I took it out. My samosas were pasty. They were dry. Although the flavor wasn’t bad, they weren’t at all what samosas should be. They were a disappointment.
I now consider myself an authoritative source, and I’m here to tell you that you can’t bake samosas. You just can’t.
This was supposed to be a flock block update. And it was supposed to be written yesterday, when the flock block was down to the size of a baseball.
But yesterday got away from me, and today is too late for an update. The flock block, which was the size of a golf ball by the time we put the chickens to bed last night, is now officially gone. They went straight for it this morning, and it had disappeared in a matter of an hour or so.
Which means … drumroll please … the winner is Jen, who guessed March 11. Jen, please send your mailing address so I can send you a jar of genuine, hand-crafted, Cape Cod sea salt. Better than Christmas!
Thanks to everyone who participated. Blogs are so much better when people play along.
The last three days have been sunny and warm, with highs pushing 60. The chickens, who don’t seem inclined to want to leave their run when it’s snowy and cold, start a full-court press for freedom when the sun’s out and the ground begins to warm. They take up their little signs and pace back and forth along the side of the run. “Free range! Free range!” they squawk.
We want to let them out, but the risk-reward calculation is the same as it was a month ago. There’s still not much good foraging, and there’s no protective leaf cover under which they can hide from passing hawks.
What there is, though, is a garden full of the winter rye we planted as a cover crop. If we put them out in that, we can stay close enough to discourage hawks, and they can have a beautiful afternoon’s outing, eating some much-needed greens and taking dust baths on the perimeter. The grass is surrounded by a chicken-wire fence, so they can’t go rogue, and we can put them back in the run when play-time’s over.
I suppose there’s no real way to determine if a chicken is happy. They don’t smile or laugh, and they certainly can’t tell you. But, roaming around the grass field, eating their fill with the sun on their backs, they certainly looked happy. I know I was happy.
One day last fall, as we were coming off the clamming grounds at Bay Street in Osterville with a peck of quahogs, we saw two guys loading their pickup with two full baskets of steamers. Steamers, as all you clammers know, are generally harder to come by than quahogs. They bury themselves much deeper than their hard-shelled cousins do and, although they do blow holes in the sand that give their presence away, steamer-clam holes look a lot like sand worm holes. I have also spent more time than I care to contemplate digging under holes that have been made by no sea creature I could find, and could have been made by gas bubbling up from the center of the earth, or by somebody’s ski pole. When it comes right down to it, alll holes look pretty much the same.
And the finding of them isn’t the only difficulty with steamers. Once you encounter a bona fide steamer hole, you still have to get the steamer out without breaking its shell. This isn’t easy. The rakes made for steamer digging are short handled, with tines at a right angle to the handle. You kneel on the beach, dig out the sand in front of the suspect hole, take a layer of sand off right above the suspected clam (being careful not to go too deep), and then use your hands to try and locate the steamer. Once you’ve done that, you still have to pry the thing out of the wet sand, a hospitable home he has no inclination to leave.
I have only a tenuous grasp of the physical laws that account for the sucking vacuum behind a clam you’re trying to pull out of wet sand, but I have vast experience with the sucking vacuum itself. Electrolux should be so lucky.
All this by way of saying we had good reason to marvel at the two-peck haul of the guys at Bay Street.
Naturally, we struck up a conversation, hoping to wheedle their secrets out of them. One of their secrets, though, was lying in plain sight in the bed of their pick-up. It looked a lot like a toilet plunger.
“Hey,” I said, with the grace and subtlety that mark all my encounters with strangers, “What’s with the toilet plunger?”
This was one secret they were perfectly willing to share. They described how, when you get to a fertile steamer ground, you use the plunger to dig a kind of crater in the seabed (you use it under water), and the clams just drift up with with sand you displace. You scoop them up with a net, and Bob’s your uncle.
And just where was their particular fertile steamer ground? That, they weren’t telling. I understood.
Ever since then, I’ve been wanting to try the plunge method of clamming. It turns out that purveyors of shellfishing equipment actually sell something called a “clam plunger,” which looks suspiciously like a toilet plunger except that it has a longer stick and a net attached to the non-plunging end. Overall, it looked like the kind of thing we could improvise.
We have a stick. We have a net. And, of course, we have a toilet plunger.
Anyone who either knows me personally or follows this space understands that I am loath to buy anything I can cobble together out of stuff that’s lying around. The clam plunger was just begging to be cobbled. We had all the parts, and the duct tape to cobble them, but even I draw the line somewhere. Call me doctrinaire, but I think anything that’s used in the toilet should not be used in food procurement.
We bought a brand new toilet plunger, and headed out to our very own fertile steamer ground with it, stick, and net. We also brought our conventional gear, just in case.
We had discovered our steamer ground accidentally. We’d gone out for quahogs, but we kept spearing the soft-shell clams with our wicked, long-tined quahog rakes. Exactly where was that, you may ask? I’m not telling, and I know you’ll understand.
We got to our super-secret steamer spot, and Kevin waded out ankle-deep. We found an area that looked to have some steamer holes, and he started plunging. After two or three plunges, he came up empty. No clams, of course, but also no plunger. It had come off the aluminum pole and lodged itself in the sand. The threading on the end of the pole apparently wasn’t a perfect match with the threading on the inside collar of the plunger.
The same physical laws that create the sucking vacuum behind a clam apply to plungers, and it took a good deal of effort to dislodge it. Once we did, we put it back on the stick it came with, and tried again.
It works as advertised, more or less. The plunging creates a crater, and much of the sand and silt you dislodge floats away on the current. A great deal of it, though, seems to settle back in the hole, which we couldn’t make deep enough to reach the clams, which are usually about six to eight inches below the surface.
Whether the hole depth was the problem, or the clamlessness of the spot, we don’t know. We do know that we didn’t plunge up a single clam. We ditched the plunger and went back to the rakes.
Dinner, and then some
None of last year’s steamering excursions had been entirely satisfactory. The clams had been few and far between, and what there had been tended to be below legal size (two inches long). Although we’d never been completely skunked, the ratio of effort invested to clams harvested always seemed a bit high. This, our new fertile clamming ground, made for a much better experience — once we gave up on plunging. Most of the holes that looked like steamer holes proved to be just that, and Kevin and I both got much better at finding them and dislodging them without breaking their shells. Although we had a few casualties and a few shorts, we went home with five dozen steamers.
We had them for lunch, steamed and dipped in butter, accompanied by cole slaw and beer.
It wasn’t only the clams, though, that made it such a fine morning. There were signs that winter was finally on the wane — fish were jumping, trees were budding. It was warm enough that I didn’t need a hat. The sun was out. It was a joy to be on the beach, clamming with my husband, looking forward to spring.
Last May, we made our very first batch of dandelion wine. Up until then, the only fermenting I’d ever done was accidental, a result of leaving fruit juice, or black beans, or cooked barley sitting in the refrigerator too long. As this was our first attempt at deliberate fermentation, we followed the recipe from Euell “Try Anything” Gibbons pretty much to the letter.
At the time, I was unconvinced that dandelions had anything to do with dandelion wine. Oh sure, you start with a bunch of dandelions, but then you add things like oranges and lemons and sugar and ginger, which are all way more delicious than dandelions. I suspected that the whole dandelion part – which involves hours of backbreaking labor and many, many insects – was just inserted into the recipe to build character.
Now I’m not so sure.
The glass looked clean at the time ...
Last night, we broke out the dandelion wine, which has been aging for almost ten months. There are two gallon jugs of it in the basement, but we reserved one small bottle that we keep in the kitchen so we can taste it without disturbing the jugs. Or shlepping to the basement.
First, we took a good hard look at it. It’s not completely clear, although it’s clearer than it was when we bottled it. It could be my imagination, but there’s a faint residue on the sides of the bottle that looks remarkably like pollen. In color, it’s like the dishwater you washed the orange juice glasses in. Which is not to say it’s unappetizing; it looks like something you can drink.
We each took a sip. It has a faint effervescence and a pronounced (surprise!) citrus flavor, but it also has very decided vegetal overtones that balance the sweetness and fruity flavor. I was forced to conclude that dandelion wine does indeed require dandelions.
Which means, come May, we’re in for another few hours of backbreaking work. It’s not ready for prime time yet, but we’re happy enough with our 2009 vintage to want to try it again for 2010.
Today is the last day of February, and we planted our first seeds of the season.
Our cold frame -- that's our composter in the background
It’s just an experiment. We don’t know if it will work. We planted two kinds of romaine lettuce in our cold frame. One was a standard-issue Burpee, and the other was a fancy-pants organic Thompson and Morgan.
Last year, we used the cold frame for seed-starting, and we failed miserably, The cucumbers suffered a 100% mortality rate, parsley was almost as bad, and the few sunflowers that survived were destroyed by pests almost the instant we transplanted them. If that weren’t enough, we didn’t realize that you have to start root vegetables in situ, so the carrots and beets were naturally a wash-out.
It’s not that we’re giving up on seed-starting (although I can hear you saying that might not be a bad idea). We’re going to try and build a hoop-house for that, so the cold frame is freed up for our lettuce experiment.
We were concerned about viability because the cold frame, a rectangle of treated lumber with a glass door for a roof, was filled with some really crappy compost we got last year from a local supplier who shall remain nameless. (It wasn’t the dump compost, which we’ve been very happy with.) But last weekend we stumbled on an excellent estate-sale find that solved all our problems. It was one of those composting barrels that you spin on a frame.
At retail, one of those barrels could run as much as $200., but we got ours for a song – a mere $25. And, get this – it came with compost inside!
I have no idea whose estate the composter came from but, whoever he was, he really liked peaches. And hazelnuts. Regardless, we figured a stranger’s household compost would be a better bet than the stuff we had, and we wanted to use it, so in it went.
We put a thermometer inside the frame to see how warm it got, and the results were encouraging. Although the nights have been slightly below freezing, the temperature in the frame in the morning was almost 40. During the day, when the sun is out, it gets up to 70 or 80. Even on a sunless day, it’s in the 50s.
Kevin doing the first watering
The seeds went in today. We planted five rows, about a foot apart. We thought we had one of those watering cans with a showering spout, but we couldn’t find it, so Kevin improvised by pouring the water through one of those little plastic planters with a few holes in the bottom. We made sure the soil was wet enough, closed the cold frame, and crossed our fingers.
At night, we’ll cover the lid with one of those reflective screens you put inside your car windshield to keep your car cool. It’s not quite big enough, but we’re hoping not quite big enough is sufficient.
Our seeds are supposed to sprout in 7-10 days. We’ll see if they do. We’re by no means certain, but we’re cautiously optimistic. Experienced gardeners will no doubt have a good sense of whether this whole lettuce-in-the-cold-frame experiment is a good idea or a bad idea. If you think it’s a bad idea, you’ll do me a big favor by not telling me just yet. God knows, I’ll figure it out soon enough but, in the meantime, I’ll have at least a week of hope.
I know, I know – hope springs eternal. If only lettuce did.
It was Kevin’s turn to make our every-other-Friday dinner, and he turned out what may be, in my estimation, his biggest success.
Those of you who follow this space will know that our plumber gave us some venison in return for the use of one of our shotguns, and Kevin decided he’d make something out of the sausage. Now, when you think ‘sausage,’ you naturally think, ‘German,’ so he looked for a recipe from that part of the world.
Epicurious came through. Kevin tweaked the recipe, upping the caraway and including a some of the Cape Cod Beer porter we had in the fridge, and turned out something absolutely irresistible. So irresistible that I ate it all before I had a chance to photograph it.
I grew up listening to Tom Lehrer. My father was at MIT in the late fifties, and anyone who poked fun at Harvard was very popular with his crowd. When I was a kid, the regular record-player rotation seemed to be equal parts Weavers, Clancy Brothers, and Tom Lehrer.
Although I’ve always liked “National Brotherhood Week” and “The Elements,” my all-time favorite Tom Lehrer song has to be “Lobachevsky,” about the eponymous Russian mathematician suspected of stealing the concept of hyperbolic geometry from German mathematician Carl Gauss some 200 years ago:
Plagiarize,
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don’t shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please ‘research’.
Living out here on Cape Cod, though, I find that “The Hunting Song” is climbing the charts.
I always will remember,
’twas a year ago November,
I went out to hunt some deer
On a mornin’ bright and clear.
I went and shot the maximum the game laws would allow,
Two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.
I should have kept that song in mind when we got our Moultrie game camera a couple of months ago. I had visions of capturing compelling photographs of all our local wildlife and, while I did get some coyotes, I haven’t gotten a single raccoon, opossum, fox, or even skunk.
Lately, I’ve been leaving the camera pointed at the compost pile. Even though Kevin thinks that’s not sporting, I figure it’s my best chance at a decent wildlife picture, and all’s fair in love and photography. It had been out there for the better part of a week when I took the SD card out this morning to see what I’d gotten. Basically, it was two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow.
Our introduction to our plumber’s sportsman side came when he installed a tankless water heater for us, about a year and a half ago.
We’d only had the house for a few months when the seventies-era water heater, which we’d been warned about during the home inspection, crapped out. Enter Bob, the plumber recommended by the builder (also Bob) who rents an office to Kevin.
Bob the builder told us that Bob the plumber did excellent work, and knew a lot about tankless water heaters. When Bob the plumber came to take a look, he told us all about tankless water heaters, but he also told us that we lived on a great trout pond. He’s a fisherman, and he comes here all the time.
We knew it was a great trout pond, but we hadn’t yet had any success getting the trout out of it. We talked trout for a while, and let drop that we hadn’t caught one yet.
Bob installed the water heater (a Rinnai that we’ve been happy with once we got over the expectation that hot water would come out of the hot water faucet in the first forty-five seconds after you turn it on). When he dropped by with the bill, he also brought four beautiful rainbow trout, caught right in our backyard.
I’m sure he did this in part to soften the blow of a fairly substantial plumbing bill and in part because he’s just a nice guy. But I suspect there was also just a little bit of a sportsman satisfaction in having so many fish that he can afford to give four of them – count ‘em, four! – to the city slickers who bought the waterfront house but can’t hook a trout.
Bob’s certainly an excellent fisherman, and he seems to be an excellent plumber (judging by the leaklessness of the work he’s done for us). He’s also a hunter.
Bob’s main quarry is rabbits, and he has a stable of beagles he’s trained to hunt with him. When he found out that Kevin is also a hunter, they had a long talk about game and guns. Any discussion of guns naturally has an I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you’ll-show-me-yours component, and Kevin mentioned that we have a Remington 1100 semi-automatic .410 shotgun. It’s about 20 years old, in perfect condition, with a beautiful wooden stock.
Bob really likes that gun. He’d like to buy it, but Kevin also likes that gun, and is unwilling to sell. Lending, though, is another story, and Kevin has repeatedly told Bob that he’s welcome to borrow it any time he likes.
Yesterday, Bob took him up on the offer. He’s taking his son to their camp in Maine, and he asked if he could bring the Remington. But he didn’t just ask – he came bearing gifts.
I’d have been quite content with more trout but, this time, it was venison. I love venison.
Between Bob and his son, they’d shot six deer this past season. Six deer is a lot of venison, and Bob brought us two packs of steaks and a pack of sausage.
We’d have been happy to lend Bob the gun, venison or no venison, but the idea that we can trade its use for several dinners’ worth of wild game makes my day. Last night, we broiled the steaks in a cast-iron pan and served them with a wine sauce and potatoes roasted with Brussels sprouts.
I love barter almost as much as I love venison. Everyone should have a plumber like Bob.
If you’re not reading Cold Antler Farm, you should. It’s the story of Jenna Woginrich’s attempt to set up a small farm in the small village of Sandgate, Vermont. Jenna’s intrepid, and scrappy, and smart, and her blog is a pleasure to read.
Last week, she wrote a post called “Never Looked Worse,” in which she recounted some of the trouble she’d gotten into with her neighbors, and with the village, in the course of acquiring animals and growing food:
I went to a few of the neighbors to talk to them in person, and see if they felt I was in the wrong trying to start a small diversified farm in their village. I asked one woman her opinion and she sighed, looked off into the distance, and said “Well, you know Jenna. The property has never looked worse…”
That response floored her, as she saw beauty in the “sagging fences, the chicken poo on a stepping stone, the bags of feed behind the garage, the hay stacked on the porch.” She makes the point that farms are picturesque in our collective imagination, but much grittier up close.
As I read this, all I could think about was how glad I am that nobody can see our house from the road. Our property is piled with crap. There are the half-completed projects like the base for the wood-fired oven and the lettuce-in-the-cold-frame experiment we’ve got set to go on the next sunny day. There are branches that have come down in storms that have yet to be gathered into a brush pile. There is the brush pile, large even without those branches. There is the trailer chassis (trailer trash!) piled high with lobster traps. There is a very large boat, covered with a canvas tarp. There is ice. There is mud. And there is firewood. Piles and piles of firewood.
I know this is the look of a functional property, but I don’t see in it the bucolic beauty of Cold Antler Farm. I see piles of crap amid ice and mud. I can’t help thinking that the rusting carcass of a 1969 GTO would feel right at home here. Then all we need is a porch, a dog to go under it, and a still made out of an old washtub.
Jenna, tell your neighbors they have a standing invitation to come visit us. They’ll never complain about you again.
Since the Egg Pool was such a smashing success, I’m going to run another contest. Like the last one, this one involves chickens, and anyone with a thoroughgoing knowledge of them will probably have a leg up.
In general, I’m not much of a spender. While I certainly appreciate the charms of jewelry, and clothes, and electronics, I don’t often feel the need to own anything beyond the bare minimum. I don’t believe this is an admirable trait, and I don’t take any credit for being this way. I’m simply hard-wired not to care.
Until I go to Agway.
You can send me into Tiffany’s, or Barney’s, or Takashimaya and I’ll look around for a while, admire the beautiful things, and then start thinking about lunch. Agway, though, gets me every time.
Agway, as its name implies, caters to the agricultural crowd. It sells everything from utility trailers to lettuce seeds, and has sections for composting, fence-building, bird-feeding, gardening, and horses (horse owners, that is – I’ve never seen a horse at Agway, but I don’t think they turn them away).
Any chickens on your block?
Naturally, they have a chicken section. By the time we got to it, I’d already passed up the gardening clogs, rain collection barrel, and fatwood bundles, and my resolution was wearing thin. Once the Flock Block caught my eye, I was doomed.
A Flock Block is a 25-pound cube of compressed seeds, grains, and grit. It’s designed to supplement chickens’ diets during the winter, when they can’t range free. It also seems to provide entertainment. It’s so densely packed – it crams twenty-five pounds of feed into a cube about ten inches square – that the chickens have to work at it to get the food.
It was $10.99, about twice the per-pound price of their regular feed.
We’ve been feeling a little sorry for our chickens since they’ve been cooped up for the winter, and we decided they deserved a treat. We bought it.
On the way home, Kevin said, “Make me a market on how long the Flock Block lasts.”
Because Kevin is a commodity trader, trade-speak has become the patois of our marriage. When he asks for a market, he wants to know at what price (i.e. date) I would sell and at what price I would buy.
Say, for example, we’re meeting a friend who’s chronically late. We’re supposed to be at the restaurant at 7:00, but we don’t really expect our friend until some time later. “Make me a market on Joe,” I’ll say. “I’m 7:15 bid at 7:25,” Kevin might answer, meaning that he’d buy 7:15, expecting Joe to be later than that, but sell 7:25, expecting Joe to be there by then.
“Sold!” I might say, if I expected Joe to be earlier than 7:15. I’d buy if I expected him to be later than 7:25. Or, I might decline the trade altogether, if I thought it was a good market.
I did some quick calculations on the Flock Block. It’s half the weight of a bag of feed, and it takes them a month to go through that. That means that two weeks is the dead minimum. But they still have the feed, and they might not even like the Flock Block. But they’re probably bored with the feed, and anything new would be preferable.
“I’m 22 days bid at 27,” I said.
“Sold!” said Kevin.
Now you have all the relevant information about the Flock Block, and you even know that I think it’ll last longer than 22 days, and Kevin thinks it won’t last that long. I can also tell you that, when we gave it to them, they first eyed it suspiciously, then pecked it tentatively, and finally went at it with a will. They seem to enjoy it, but it does look difficult to dislodge the seeds and grains.
To participate in the Flock Block pool, all you have to do is pick the date the chickens will eat the last of it.
Today is February 20th, so if you think it’ll last four weeks, you pick March 20th. If you think the chickens will turn up their beaks at it, you might even pick a day in April, or even later. Leave your guess in the comments, and I will list them in the Flock Block Pool calendar on the left sidebar. Please don’t pick a date someone else has picked.
The prize — there’s a prize! – is a jar of our very own handcrafted Cape Cod sea salt.
And you thought Publishers Clearing House was exciting!
It was back in June that we set up our shiitake farm. We took about a dozen oak logs, drilled fifty or so holes in each, and pounded a wooden dowel impregnated with shiitake spore into each hole. We had been led to believe that the earliest we could reasonably expect a shiitake crop would be spring.
In November, though, lo and behold! There was our fall crop – a single mushroom growing out of the side of one of the logs. I harvested it and used it in a beef burgundy, where it made absolutely no perceptible difference.
Through the rest of the fall, I checked regularly for more mushrooms, but there were none. Once the ground was covered with snow, I figured we were out of luck at least until April, and stopped looking. Then Mylene and Brett came to visit.
Mylene is a veteran participant in our lifestyle, having visited last fall with her husband, Russ. This time, she brought their son, and I was showing the two of them around the place.
“And here,” I said, gesturing a la Vanna White to the propped up shittake logs, “is our mushroom farm.”
They nodded their approval, and we were about to turn back to the house when Mylene pointed to one of the logs. “Aren’t you going to take the mushroom?” she asked?
Mushroom? What mushroom?
There, on the underside of one of the logs, grew not just one but two shiitakes. They were shrivelled, gnarly little specimens, and they looked like they could have been there since Christmas, but they were undeniably shiitakes. In the dead of winter, the little triumphs mean a lot.
Who’s your candidate for greatest American writer of all time? It’s a tough call, and I think there’s a case to be made for Herman Melville or Edith Wharton. Other people think there’s a case to be made for Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Steinbeck. Still others say Kerouac, but that’s bananas.
For my money it’s Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn is usually on the short list of candidates for the Great American Novel, but one of my all-time favorite Twain scenes comes from the also-ran, Tom Sawyer. It’s where Tom has to whitewash the fence.
He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. Sighing, he dipped his brush and passed it along the topmost plank; repeated the operation; did it again; compared the insignificant whitewashed streak with the far-reaching continent of unwhitewashed fence, and sat down on a tree-box discouraged.
Tom first tries to talk Jim into helping him, but Miss Polly intervenes and puts the kibosh on that effort. Next, he checks his pockets to see what he could use to bribe one of his friends to do some of the work. He comes up with “bits of toys, marbles, and trash,” and abandons that strategy. But then, “At this dark and hopeless moment an inspiration burst upon him! Nothing less than a great, magnificent inspiration.”
Tom pretends that the task of whitewashing is so compelling, so absorbing, that he doesn’t even notice his friend Ben sauntering by, eating an apple and impersonating a steamboat. When Ben comes right up alongside Tom to get his attention, Tom manages to convince him that whitewashing a fence is the sine qua non of boyhood entertainment, and refuses to let Ben help. Only when Ben promises his apple as payment does Tom hand over the brush “with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart.”
By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair; and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat and a string to swing it with – and so on, and so on, hour after hour. And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth. He had besides the things before mentioned, twelve marbles, part of a jews-harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool cannon, a key that wouldn’t unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door-knob, a dog-collar – but no dog – the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange-peel, and a dilapidated old window sash.
It wouldn’t be accurate to say that I think Mark Twain is the greatest American writer because he wrote one scene that I think about every time I have a tedious, time-consuming job to do, but neither would it be accurate to say that it doesn’t factor in.
Hive frames, unassembled
In this case, the tedious, time-consuming job is beehive assembly.
Our beehives came this week, via UPS, in a shipment of five boxes that arrived over two days and weighed a total of 275 pounds. I knew the hives would come unassembled, and I knew assembling them would be a big job but, as I surveyed the huge piles of parts of frames, deeps, and supers, all gladness left me and a deep melancholy settled down upon my spirit.
Each hive consists of five boxes: three deeps and two supers. The deeps are the large boxes on the bottom, where most of the hive activity happens. The supers are shallower boxes that sit on top of the deeps, and the bees use them to store honey. Each box comes as four sides with dovetailed edges. For the parts to become a hive, the edges have to be glued, the boxes hammered together, and the joints nailed.
That’s the easy part. Between Kevin, me, and the nail gun, we assembled the boxes in about an hour. The hard part is the frames.
Kevin assembling the boxes
A hive is like a file box, with frames hanging from the sides like file folders. Each frame has a sheet of foundation – a sort of starter honeycomb – inserted in it like a picture in a picture frame. Two of the deeps don’t get frames (they’re spares that make working the hives easier), but every other box has ten frames.
That’s 80 frames, total. Each frame has four sides, one sheet of foundation, one bar that holds the foundation to the top, and four pins that hold the foundation to the sides. That’s ten parts per frame, 800 parts in all.
To assemble a frame, you glue the sides to the top, and then glue the bottom to the sides. You nail the joints to make sure the thing doesn’t come apart from apian wear-and-tear. Then you work the foundation into the slot in the bottom, and attach it to the top by nailing a wooden bar over the bent wires that stick out of the foundation at right angles. Then you insert these diabolical little bobby-pin-like pins through holes in the sides of the frame and position them so that the foundation is in between the two prongs of the pin.
Our first frame, with nail-gun damage
So far, we’ve only assembled one It took us about ten minutes, but that included time to bemoan the fact that the puff of air from the nail gun blew a hole in the foundation – twice – as we were putting the last couple of nails in. I think we’ll get better at frame assembly, but it’s still going to be tedious, time-consuming job.
Luckily, the bees don’t come until the beginning of May, so we have time.
I’m thinking we could learn a thing or two from the wood-fired oven workshop we attended last fall. We showed up in a stranger’s backyard, hauled the stones, shoveled the sand, and worked the clay required to build the oven, and paid hard, cold cash for the privilege.. It was straight out of Tom Sawyer, but I didn’t mind because we learned a lot about building a wood-fired oven (and because the stranger was Brewster potter Diane Heart, whose pottery we like and whose company we enjoy).
I’m figuring some of you out there are thinking about keeping bees yourselves, and it would be worth quite a bit to learn how to assemble a hive. Between now and the beginning of May, we’re happy to teach you – for a nominal fee, or even a dead rat on a string.
Ice fishing is an activity in which you risk your life by venturing out on ice which may or may not be strong enough to bear your weight, hack at the ice right under your feet with an ax to make a hole, bait and set a gizmo called a tip-up, and sit outside in the cold watching the flag on the tip-up stubbornly refuse to tip up.
The flag is attached to a spool of fishing line, which is attached to a baited hook. In theory, the flag will pop up when a fish takes the bait, or when hell freezes over, whichever comes first.
People argue endlessly about whether, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s there to hear it, it really makes a noise, but everyone seems to agree that when you go ice fishing and there are no fish to tip up your tip-up, it’s still called ice fishing.
This activity shouldn’t be called ‘ice fishing.’ It should be called ‘freezing.’
I’m pretty sure that none of my New York City friends can to do a chicken autopsy. It’s a pretty arcane skill but, if you need to do one, it’s very helpful to have a friend who knows how.
Enter Jen, from Milkweed & Teasel, who, with her husband, Mike, walked me through it.
The chicken (borrowed from freerangeeggs.co.uk)
Any of you who are serious about doing some of the things we’re doing (like raising chickens and gardening) or are trying to do (like keeping livestock and hunting), shouldn’t bother reading Starving off the Land. Just go to Milkweed & Teasel, and actually learn something. Anything I can do, Jen can do better, and Jen and Mike do things I’ll probably never learn to do at all, like raise flocks of sheep and train hunting dogs.
When she read about Baldie’s death, Jen volunteered assistance in doing an autopsy, which I took her up on. By the end of the day, she’d sent me an e-mail with detailed instructions, which I’m going to include here, along with an account of our attempt to follow them.
I should warn that this post is rated F, for explicit farm material. If you’re squeamish about the insides of dead animals, you probably shouldn’t scroll down much farther.
I’m a little squeamish about the insides of dead animals myself. The last time I opened a dead animal in order to examine its constituent parts was in seventh grade, under the tutelage of the estimable Mrs. Weiss. It was a frog, and I didn’t like it one little bit. But squeamishness about animals is something I’m trying to get over, and so I spread the newspaper on the table on the porch and steeled myself to the task.
Of course, somebody needed to take notes and pictures, and it doesn’t make sense for both of us to get our hands covered with potentially contaminating dead chicken guts, so Kevin ended up doing most of the actual handling. I was right there with him, though.
STEP 1) Check the carcase externally; feel the ribs in your hands (are they firm or crunchy & broken). Check the head & eyes: any swelling or discoloration, eyes swollen shut? Smell inside the mouth – any REALLY bad breath (=infectious sinusitis). Check for obvious swelling in leg joints.
Most of that was pretty straightforward. The ribs were firm, there was no discoloration or swelling. I don’t think smelling the expired breath of a dead chicken isn’t anybody’s favorite task, but Kevin sucked it up and pried open Baldie’s beak. Nothing.
The first cut
STEP 2) “Unzip” the skin from the top of the breastbone to her bottom and peel it back each side. You should be able to see breastmeat. You will also see if there are any eggs blocking or burst in her cavity (egg peritonitis)
So far, so good. No burst eggs.
STEP 3) Pull out the crop and check it – has she been eating? Are there any blockages. Any blockages in her trachea or esophagus?
She should have started this instruction with, “Find the crop.” I’d pulled up a diagram of chicken innards from the Internet, so I had some idea where to look. Somehow, though, the stylized chicken diagram didn’t seem to precisely match the actual chicken carcass. Still, we found the crop and opened it. It was full of recognizable food – pellets and corn. We did inspect her trachea and esophagus, or maybe it was her esophagus and trachea – I’m not quite sure which was which. In any case, she didn’t seem to have choked to death.
STEP 4) Snip the flesh at the bottom of the breastbone. Cut the lower ribs towards the wings. This should allow you to lift up the breast like a lid or trapdoor. Reveals the innards, in layers. You should be able to see the liver, lungs and heart at this point. (n.b. at any point if you find a pool of congealed blood, look for trauma in that area like broken bones. It will have pooled on the side where she was lying.)
- liver: should be a healthy liver color, no staining (ignore any bile staining that’s on the back). Check for lesions, growth, spots or unusual shape or hardening.
- lungs – should be healthy “clean” pink, not too much blood.
- heart should be rounded, pinkish, & red at top with a good yellow fat line. Too much blood=heart attack. Grey= secondary infection. Any oedema=infection. No fat line=starvation.
The Blob -- there on the right
Even with the diagram, and culinary experience with chicken organs, it was hard to figure out which was which. There was a big, dark, blobby thing on the right side of her chest cavity. Lungs? Liver? In either case, something was seriously wrong. It wasn’t until Kevin just picked it up out of her chest that we realized it was that “pool of congealed blood” Jen referred to. I never realized blood pooled in a solid mass.
Once we got that out, the organs seemed to fall into place. Only the lungs seemed abnormal, with a large dark spot.
STEP 5) Remove liver. Be careful not to split the gall bladder behind it. Tucked up behind the liver adjacent to the GB is the spleen. Make sure it’s not got any yellow marbling. It should be liver colored.
We removed the liver, and promptly split the gall bladder behind it. I’m not sure we positively identified the spleen. We’ll do better next time.
STEP 6) Start unravelling the intestines gently to look for any blockages or parasites.
That, we managed to do. The intestines looked healthy, unblocked and uninfested.
Everything in its place
STEP 7) Remove gizzard. Check the outside of the gizzard is intact, no worms. Split open gizzard, check there is food & grit inside, no foreign objects.
The gizzard was much larger than I thought it would be, and jam-packed with food, grit, and oyster shell fragments. It’s all muscle, and was so tough that Kevin had trouble getting the knife into it. No worms, no foreign objects.
STEP 8) Check kidneys (stuck inside, either side of the backbone at hip level). Should be pinkish, with a white line through them. Look for discoloration or growths.
We couldn’t find the kidneys, I’m sorry to say. By this time all the innards were in disarray. Nothing was where it was supposed to be, and we could no longer trust the landmarks that should have led us to the kidneys. Besides, Jen told me later that kidneys aren’t kidney-shaped. Who knew? Anyway, if there were discoloration or a growth, we missed it.
The only real clue was the congealed blood, and that didn’t tell us much except that her circulatory system had been ruptured. Jen, after seeing the pictures, speculated that she may have been carrying too much fat (we’re going to cut down on chicken treats) and her heart gave out. We’ll never know exactly what it was, but we were able to rule out some of the things, like infection and worms, that would have posed a threat to the rest of the flock.
It also seems unlikely that I killed her by locking her out of the coop. In all probability, she didn’t go in that night because she was either already dead or seriously ill. If she had still been alive, and I had put her in the coop, she simply would have died there instead.
I don’t think it was that, though, that made me feel better about Baldie’s death. Doing the post mortem made me feel like we were responsible chicken owners. We did a job that wasn’t particularly pleasant because we thought it was our obligation to the rest of the birds. There was nothing we could do about Baldie, but there was something we could do about the other seven, and we did it. Or Kevin did it, and I watched.
I also found it much more interesting than I thought it would be, or than Mrs. Weiss’ frog had been. That hour was a more densely packed learning experience than almost any I’d had since beginning this venture. Not only did I get a graphic illustration of chicken anatomy, I got a better understanding of how each part works. I saw the mixture of food and grit in the gizzard, the progress of waste through the intestines, the eggs in development. Next time – and I’m sure there’ll be one, despite our best efforts – I’ll do the cutting and Kevin will do the note-taking.
There’s a danger, though, in my acquiring actual skills. If I acquire too many, I’ll have to re-name the blog. I’m thinking “Milkweed & Teasel” sounds good.
We had a snowstorm last night, and I had to shovel five inches of heavy, icy snow out from in front of the run door before I could go in and let the chickens out of the coop. I heard them squawking as I shoveled.
When the door swung free, I went inside and hung their waterer on its hook. I put a scoop of feed in the feeder, and tried to shake some of the hard snow off it so the birds could get at the feed. The wind had blown so fiercely that the run and everything in it had an icy white coating.
I opened the coop door and put the ladder in place. A few of the chickens stuck their heads out. One took a few steps down the ladder, and then tried to turn back. They don’t like snow, our chickens. At least not until they get used to it.
It was only when I lifted one of them bodily off the ladder and put her down on the run floor that I saw the dead bird. What had been a chicken yesterday was a crumpled heap of feathers against the back wall of the run. It was Baldie, the bird who’d been attacked by the hawk back in the fall.
I went back to the house. Stupidly, I ran. Like it was some kind of emergency. I told Kevin, and we went out together to collect the corpse.
We don’t know what killed her. It wasn’t a predator; there was no sign either of forced entry or of bodily injury. She was just dead.
Last night, I was the one who closed them up in the coop. It’s dusk, or sometimes downright dark, when we put them in for the night, and I had gotten out of the habit of bringing the flashlight and making sure they were all inside. Night after night, they’ve all gone up together. We’ve never had a holdout, so I just assumed all eight were in.
Baldie might have been dead last night when I closed them in. She might have been sick, and that might have prevented her from going in the coop with the rest of the chickens. Or she might have been fine, just tardy, and I might have locked her out.
It didn’t get very cold last night. The temperature hovered around freezing and, although it was very windy, there’s a sheltered area under the coop. I don’t think the conditions themselves could have killed her. But what if she panicked? What if she exhausted herself trying to get into the locked coop?
I’m not such a sissy that I can’t cope with a dead chicken. It’s sad to lose a bird, but if it’s too much to bear then you shouldn’t have chickens in the first place. What’s not so easy is coping with the possibility that I killed her out of carelessness.
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