Maybe we’re just proud poultry owners, but we think our turkeys have something going on in the brains department. Not the kind of thing that gets you into Yale early admission; more like street smarts.

Smart enough to find the sunny spot

The first day we brought them home, they were on the lookout for an escape route. Now, you could argue that escaping from a warm, predator-proof brooder into a cold, predator-rich world, won’t score you an 800 on the turkey SATs, but we thought that finding the biggest hole in the chicken wire and managing to scramble through it was a notable accomplishment for a bird a week old. Our chickens never showed that much initiative.

They also seem to learn from each other. There’s a lot of turkey-see, turkey-do, whether it’s a new behavior, like jumping up on the roost bar, or something they already know how to do, like eat. If one starts, the others tend to follow suit. Sure, it’s groupthink, but that’s better than no think at all.

They’re alert, aware of what’s going on around them, and engaged with the other creatures who populate their world. When we had them in Turkey Day Camp, they’d hang out on whatever side of their enclosure was closest to the action, whether the action was us watering the garden, the chickens taking a dust bath, or the cat … well, doing what cats tend to do around small birds.

When nothing was going on, they’d peep and peep and peep, but stop immediately if they heard or saw us. Or if they got tired.

But it wasn’t until Kevin finished their new, grown-up pen that we saw their true mettle.

It took us a while to decide just how we were going to house them, but we finally settled on something significantly more permanent than what we had originally envisioned. But we knew our construction plans would be opportunistic, and it happened that opportunity presented itself in the form of cattle panels.

Cattle panels are pieces of galvanized steel fence 16 feet long and 50 inches high, with holes that are 6’x8’. There are a couple extra wires near the bottom that divide the bottommost holes in half so small things can’t escape (or enter). Cattle panels are strong and cheap – about $28. each.

The problem with fences isn’t the fencing; it’s the fenceposts. To keep fencing from falling over, fenceposts have to be big, sturdy, and sunk deep in the ground. But ask yourself: what’s big, sturdy, and already sunk deep in the ground? Trees, of course! We don’t need no stinking fenceposts. All we need are trees that are exactly sixteen feet apart.

We went in search of a spot that was clear of brush, sheltered by leaf cover, and big enough to hold four turkeys. At least, I was looking for a space big enough for four. Kevin was looking for a space big enough for eight, or even twelve.

“Twelve?” I asked.

“Turkeys are pretty easy so far,” he said.

The turkey pen, still under construction

We found a spot just off the driveway, next to where we keep our mushroom logs. A couple of rhododendrons had to be sacrificed, but it was otherwise ready to be turned into a pen.

We bought five cattle panels from Cape Cod Feed and Supply, and a scant two days later Kevin had enclosed the pen, gate and all. The treehouse that will be their nighttime roost isn’t finished yet, so they still go in the brooder at night, but we shut down Turkey Day Camp and put them in their new home during the day.

Yesterday was their first day in the pen, and they seemed to like it. They have room to run around, and they like to fly up to the platform that will be the floor of their treehouse. (They also enjoyed using it as a jumping-off point to fly over the fence until Kevin blocked their escape route.) They scratched and explored, ate leaves and bugs, and seemed curious about their new environment.

The turkeys got the idea that this was their pen and the chickens were intruders.

They weren’t the only ones. As Kevin was taking tools in and out of the pen, he left the gate open and a couple of chickens wandered in. For a while, all the birds went about their business, but then the turkeys got the idea that this was their pen and the chickens were intruders.

They went after them in a posse. They corralled them into a corner and started pecking at them.

The chickens are easily twice the size of the turkeys, and have the wisdom that presumably comes with maturity, but they didn’t even try to exert their superiority. They fled.

I didn’t witness this. Kevin told me about it afterward. But I was there when the cat went into the pen.

She wandered in like she owned the joint, and the turkeys were on her tail immediately. They didn’t seem overtly hostile, more like curious. But the four of them backed her into the same corner the chickens had ended up in, and it seemed to me that no good could come of this stand-off. If the turkeys started pecking at her, it was certainly possible that she could remember that she eats things like them, and we’d have nothing but heartbreak.

I stepped between them, and the cat made for the door.

That was four month-old turkeys, chasing a cat out of their pen. That’s pretty ballsy, I think.

What is it about Kevin and poultry?

It’s possible that we’re so impressed with our turkeys because the many stories of their stupidity had us anticipating four avian idiots. It was the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Our turkeys have turned out to be much better company than we thought they’d be, and we probably spend a little too much time hanging out in the pen watching them watching us. They come over and peck at our toes, and roost on our arms if we sit down. One hopped on Kevin’s shoulder and closely examined his ear.

It’s possible that, because our turkeys aren’t the broad-breasted kind bred for the Thanksgiving table, they’ve hung on to some of the native intelligence of their wild ancestors, but it’s also possible that stories of turkeys’ stupidity are wildly exaggerated.

The chickens haven’t given up on peaceful coexistence, and they seem to hang around the pen, taking dust baths outside the gate. The cat has extended her policy of ignoring the chickens to all poultry. We’re busy making sure our turkeys have a congenial environment, conducive to intellectual achievement.

They're scarier than they seem

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Whitest sheep on earth

I’m not sure I appreciated the extent of the whitewash until I had real, live livestock in my care. We’ve only got chickens and turkeys, but even those gateway livestock are constantly reminding us that animals are one part wholesome cuteness to seventeen parts poop.

This past week, Kevin and I spent a few hours manning the beekeeping stall at the Barnstable County Fair. In between helping kids find the queen bee in the observation hive and directing people to the bathrooms, we got a chance to wander through the livestock barns and watch some of the animal judging.

First, we saw some of the world’s cleanest sheep, putting their best hoof forward while the judge evaluated their lines and felt their hindquarters. Then we saw some of the world’s cleanest goats, quietly munching hay while children petted them. We moved on to the world’s cleanest cows, watching us through the boards of their pens, not daring to mess up their hair.

The bobble-head llama

Then there was the world’s cleanest llama, with a ridiculous, undignified haircut that made it look like a bobble-head doll.

When I was a kid, I don’t remember thinking that the animals at the fair were particularly clean. I must have assumed that they just came that way. I didn’t give a thought to the behind-the-scenes bathing and scrubbing and brushing and trimming that turned a real-life sheep into a county-fair sheep. Now, as a livestock-owning adult, that’s all I see.

Not that I want to bring the filthy, shit-caked sheep to the fair. It wouldn’t be in the spirit of the thing. The fair is for the wholesome cuteness component of animal ownership, and the kids who pet the nice, clean goats have the rest of their lives to figure out that filth and shit are part of the program.

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All the chickens seem normal and healthy.  They’re eating, and pecking, and dust bathing.  Nobody’s obviously at death’s door. 

But this clearly came out of a chicken, and we don’t have the foggiest idea what it is.  Do you?

The mystery in the nest box

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They named the 20%, which were, of course, chosen at random. At the end of the year, though, the spurters showed significantly more improvement than their peers. Their teachers’ expectation of better performance seemed to result in actual better performance. Rosenthal and Jacobson called this phenomenon “the Pygmalion effect,” and published their results in their 1968 book, Pygmalion in the Classroom.

Well, if it works for third-graders, I figure it’ll work for tomatoes.

Kevin decided that, rather than using tomato cages, which are difficult to get into rocky soil and insufficient to the support requirements of large tomato plants, this year he would build a trellis for our 24 plants. Our friend Ed has a big bamboo patch in his back yard, and he generously donated a landscape trailer full for the trellising effort.

One day last week I was out running errands, and Kevin was putting the finishing touches on a tomato trellis a good ten feet high. Ten feet!

Kevin's tomato trellis

“That’s a big trellis,” I said.

“Last year, our biggest plants were easily this tall,” said Kevin.

And it’s true. Last year, our biggest tomato plants were ten feet tall. I think that’s why we got a decent tomato crop despite getting the blight, which starts and the bottom of a plant and works its way up. It takes a while from blight to climb ten feet.

So, this year, we’re quite literally setting the bar high. I’m thinking that the tomatoes, seeing that bar, will understand what’s expected of them and strive for achievement. Pygmalion in the Garden.

You may think that’s far-fetched, but I don’t think it’s less reasonable than some other gardening theories out there. Take companion planting, for example. Can you seriously believe that your corn will grow better if it has a pet parsley? And then there’s this crazy biodynamic theory that says – I kid you not – you should determine when to plant, cultivate, and harvest by the phase of the moon.

You laugh (or at least I do), but Fiona at Cottage Smallholder, one of my favorite bloggers and a better gardener than I’ll ever be, has started using the system and swears by it. Go figure.

Gardening lends itself to crackpot theories because it’s profoundly mysterious. Every year, some things thrive and some things fail, and they’re never the same things, and it’s never for the same reasons. Humans are hard-wired to look for causality, but it’s hard to find in nature because there are simply too many variables.

I like problems with well-defined parameters and one correct solution. A quadratic equation, say, or a crossword puzzle. Problems that involve nature aren’t like that.

I like problems with well-defined parameters and one correct solution.

And it’s not just gardening. Look at fishing. Fish behavior is a function of water temperature, salinity, the presence of food, the tide, the weather, the fish’s birthplace, the sea bottom terrain, and, for all I know, the Dow Jones Industrial Average. But, even if you know all those things, you can’t predict fish behavior with certainty because there are other factors that we don’t even know enough to consider. And that’s even if fish don’t have free will, or enjoy sightseeing.

Gardening, though, is even worse. Trying to figure out how to make a plant thrive is hopelessly complicated because everything from tiny insects to global warming seems to affect what grows and what doesn’t.

Sometimes, you can isolate a problem. Last year, like everyone else in New England, we got the late blight on our tomatoes. The slugs found the collards. The chickens dead-headed the fennel. I get that. But why did nothing grow in a whole strip on the left side? Why was the garlic so puny? And the potatoes – they didn’t even sprout.

The eggplant and squash, though, did well. And the basil we planted in every available space delivered all summer. Why, why, why?

It’s so hard to get at the truth of gardening that I understand why we grasp at causal straws like the phase of the moon. I’m almost ready to start praying to the ancient pagan god of gardening, assuming there is one.

Almost.

First, though, we’re trying soil amendments. We seemed to have a pattern of leggy plants with a sub-optimal foliage-to-fruit ratio, which, I’m given to understand, is a symptom of too much nitrogen. So we tilled in phosphate and greensand to beef up the P and the K of the N-P-K. We got three yards of compost from Watts Family Farm, which is said to have the most nutrient-rich compost on Cape Cod.

This year, the sugar snap peas I lovingly started from seed in the cold frame looked like jute twine with a couple of yellowish leaves glued on until they died altogether. The eggplant, usually insect-free, has depressingly lacy leaves. The fennel and beet seeds, which I planted directly in the garden, have produced anaemic little seedlings that hold little promise.

Is it the N? The P? The K? The Dow Jones Industrial Average? Damned if I know.

They know what's expected of them

One bright spot, though, is the potatoes. Kevin planted two kinds – Kennebec that we ordered from a fancy-pants organic catalog, and fingerlings we bought from Costco and left too long in the bin. Both kinds seem to be thriving and the Kennebec, in particular, have sent up big thick stems that Kevin mounded soil and mulch around.

The leaves are, so far, almost free of insect damage. The flowers are just beginning to bloom. We don’t know what the crop looks like, of course, and it could be that we have all leaf and no tuber, but it’s reassuring just to see the nice big patch of healthy green.

Is it the weather? The sunlight? The compost? The companion garlic?

My theory is that it’s my husband, who’s full-blooded Irish. Centuries of subsistence farming have encoded an indigenous understanding of the variables of potato growing into the Irish genome, and so it’s quite reasonable for him to expect much of them.

So, what explains last year’s crop failure, you may ask.

Damned if I know.

But if you need help with the crossword puzzle, I’m your man.

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It started with yesterday morning’s fishing trip. We went out at about 7:00 AM, in search of scup, bluefish, or both.

Scup fishing and bluefish fishing are very different. Scup feed on the bottom, and eat crustaceans and miscellaneous invertebrates. Bluefish feed on the top or in the middle, and eat pretty much anything that swims, including other bluefish. For scup, we use squid for bait, weight the line, and jig it off the bottom. For bluefish, we use popper lures that float on the surface and jump when you give the line a tug.

Kevin rigged up both kinds of rods, and we set out.

Our scup fishing grounds are in Nantucket Sound, off the coast of Mashpee, which is the town just to the west of us. To get there, where have to go through our bluefish fishing grounds, which are just outside Cotuit Bay. Our plan was to head out for scup, stopping for bluefish if we saw any.

We did see bluefish, and we managed to get eight small ones before the school disappeared. Mixed in with the bluefish were a few schoolie stripers, and Kevin caught one that was about eighteen inches, ten inches short of legal.

Fishing Trip Lesson #1: One advantage of top fishing is that, when a fish bites through your line, you can retrieve your lure because it floats.

When we lost sight of the bluefish, we headed out for scup.

The bluefish were in a relatively sheltered area, but the scup were in open water. The difference between a relatively sheltered area and open water became immediately apparent as the boat started rocking and plunging in three-foot seas.

We reached our spot, baited our hooks, and let the boat drift.

Fishing Trip Lesson #2: To minimize seasickness when drifting on a significant swell, face into the wind so you can see the waves coming at you. Keep your eyes on the horizon.

Fishing Trip Lesson #3: Keeping your eyes on the horizon while baiting a hook is an enterprise fraught with peril.

We started landing scup and small sea bass almost immediately, but none were big enough to keep. Then I felt something weird on my line. It was definitely a fish, but it didn’t pull like a scup. It also felt bigger than anything I’d pulled in so far. I kept reeling, and as soon as Kevin caught a glimpse of it in the water, he said, “That’s a fluke!”

My trophy fluke

The fish flashed its underbelly. “That’s a keeper fluke!” he said, and went for the net.

We’d heard that the fluke were biting all over the Cape, but that most of them were under the 18.5-inch minimum size for taking. A keeper fluke is a prize fish.

I reeled, Kevin netted, and we landed a beautiful 20-inch fluke.

By now, you’ve probably forgotten that this is a story of something I didn’t screw up. In case you haven’t, let me assure you that landing the fluke was not it. That was an accident – maybe that’s why they call them ‘flukes.’ The part I didn’t screw up comes later.

We managed one keeper scup to add to our stash, and I also got my first look at a sea robin, a weird fish with legs that walks on the seabed. Then we headed back, into the wind and the chop.

Our boat is a fairly dry ride, but nothing stays dry when you’re riding plunging into three-foot troughs while the next wave comes over the bow. Somehow, though, it’s easier to brave the sea when you’re headed in with a cooler full of fish.

Fishing Trip Lesson #4: Tan nylon shorts become perfectly transparent when wet. Wear underpants.

We made it home just fine, and unloaded our cooler. Most of the bluefish were small, and destined to be lobster bait, but I fileted the biggest two for us.

Then I tackled the fluke.

I’d never fileted a fluke. In fact, the only fish I have fileted are bluefish and striped bass. The principle’s the same, though, so I laid out the fish and started cutting.

There’s a certain amount of pressure in fileting a prize fish. While I know a fluke isn’t so special, it was the only one we caught, and possibly the only one we’ll catch all season. Kevin is very fond of fluke, and was looking forward to eating it. I didn’t want to botch it.

I went slowly and carefully. I felt for the bones and the body cavity. I took shallow passes with the knife, and peeled up the filet as I released it from the body. I did the thick side first, and then the more difficult thinner side (flat fish being comically asymmetrical).

OK, so it's not a Pulitzer

I didn’t screw it up. My filets were beautiful. Not perfect, but definitely better than good. And I took an absurd, unwarranted, disproportional amount of pride in them. I mean, really, for chrissake, it’s not such a big hairy deal to filet a fish.

So why did those filets matter so much to me? Dinner would have been just as tasty and nutritious if I had butchered them, and nothing would change the fact that I’d caught this fish myself and was feeding my family with it. I think, though, that being able to process a fish with some modicum of skill made me feel competent, and competence is something slow in coming in most of what we’re doing out here.

For the meta-skills involved – gardening, fishing, hunting, animal husbandry – the acquisition of competence is a long process of education, trial, and error, and I am unlikely to master any of them in what’s left of my lifetime. But if I break those skills down, and try to master discrete sub-skills, one at a time, small triumphs are within my reach.

I’m not much of a gardener, but I know how to fight late blight on my tomatoes. I’m not too good with chickens, but I know how to break a broody hen. I’m nobody’s mycologist, but I know a bolete when I see one. I’m a novice fisherman, but if anybody asks, the answer is yes – I can filet a fish.

I can filet a fish.

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I couldn’t tell you a single activity, my age at the time, or even where the camp was. All I remember was that I was excited when I learned there was spaghetti for lunch – until I tasted it. It was vile. Mushy, bland, and disgusting. It bore no resemblance to the spaghetti I had at home, spaghetti with my mother’s tomato sauce.

I didn’t eat it. And for me to not eat something, even then, was a big deal. I ate everything.

Turkeys, one month old

It’s embarrassing that the only thing I remember from day camp is the food. Day camp plays an important role in socializing a child, and I should remember seminal childhood experiences like being picked last for teams, being made fun of, being ostracized by my peers. I’m sure all those things happened, and I think it says something about my psyche that what sticks in my mind is the Chef Boy-R-Dee.

I’m now having a second experience with day camp, and it’s also about food.

In the two-and-a-half weeks we’ve had them, our turkey chicks have gotten big enough that they seem a little cramped in their brooder. The pen we have planned isn’t yet set up, so Kevin decided he’d set up Turkey Day Camp in the upper garden.

The upper garden is a patch about ten feet square. Half of it is filled with potato plants, and the other half has the sad remains of our failed overwinter garlic. There’s a lone rhubarb plant and a clutch of catalognas across the back. Most importantly, though, there’s a chicken-wire fence.

Although the fence is only eighteen inches high, we thought it would be sufficient to keep four month-old turkey chicks confined. We were wrong. We had an escapee in the first hour. We solved that problem by putting a clam net – the commercial kind, used to cover clam beds on the sea floor – over the entire garden. Always useful to have a clam net lying around.

We put their food and water in a corner, and Kevin put a bedsheet over the section of net covering them so there’d be some shade.

Voila! Turkey Day Camp.

Camp Wattle

The turkeys seem to be enjoying themselves. They run around and peck at the bugs and the grass. They’ve started to practice being adults, fluffing out the their wings and raising their tails so they look like small scraggly imitations of picture-book turkeys. They chest-bump. In short, they spend the day being turkeys. At night, we put them back in their brooder in the garage, where they’re safe from predators.

A camp follower

The cat and the chickens have been around to investigate, but there haven’t been any fireworks yet. Since the cat and the chickens have gotten used to each other, they seem to be able to take a third species in stride.

What surprises us most about the turkeys is that they seem to enjoy human company. When they’re in the brooder in the garage, they often peep loudly and insistently, but settle down immediately when we come to visit.

At Day Camp, they tend to crowd against whichever wall is closest to where we’re working, running back and forth. We worry that they’re not eating and drinking enough, but when we go sit outside the corner with their food and water, they inevitably come over and partake.

Turkey Day Camp won’t see them through to Thanksgiving, but it’s buying us some time to get their adult pen set up. Meanwhile, they’re giving every indication of enjoying day camp a lot more than I ever did.

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We’re making a similar deal with our turkeys, only without the egg part. It would be the same with any other animal we raise for food. We provide food, shelter, and, we hope, some modicum of happiness. They take advantage of these amenities, and then ultimately give us back the life we gave them in the first place, sometimes providing eggs or milk along the way.

Big Bee, trying to stay cool

The animals, though, have no say in the matter. If they don’t like the deal, there’s not much they can do. It’s like one of those elections in totalitarian countries – we’re the only choice they have. They can’t really make a break for it, since they’re poorly equipped for life in the wild, and when the time comes for making the ultimate sacrifice, there’s no negotiating. There’s no appeal to a civil court system or board of arbitration. However good a deal it is, it’s a deal we enforce by fiat, despotically.

Totalitarian, indeed.

Bees, though, are different. They can survive perfectly well without our intervention. In fact, if it turns out that the captive breeding of bees (which has only happened in the last fifty-some years), has some role in colony collapse disorder, we will be able to say that they survived much better without us. There’s nothing we do for bees that they can’t do for themselves.

They can also take off, and head from greener pastures, any time they feel like it. Successful beekeeping is all about providing a more hospitable home than your bees could find in a hollow tree. They need to decide to stay.

It’s lucky, then, that they don’t know what those two little boxes on top of their hive are for.

A hive frame. The white cells on top are honey. The darker cells below are brood. The fuzzy spot is on the camera lens.

One of our hives, Big Bee, is doing so well that we added two honey supers a couple of days ago. (Little Bee seems to be fine, but it’s a bit behind.) We’d added the second hive body about a few weeks before, and when we checked it last week the frames were almost all drawn out with comb, and the center seven or eight were quite full with brood and capped honey.

That’s the point at which you’re supposed to give them a new area in which to store their honey, and the two shallow boxes on top of the hive serve that purpose. The bees naturally fill the upper combs with honey and the lower combs with brood, so we can expect that the two honey supers will have almost nothing but honey in them.

Better than a hollow tree, we hope

Many beekeepers use a queen excluder – a screen that workers fit through but the queen doesn’t – between the top hive body and the bottom super to make sure no eggs are laid upstairs. Our local veteran beekeepers work successfully without one, though, so that’s the route we’re going.

Because there aren’t many plants that bloom in July, it’s late for optimal honey flow. We’re not sure how long it’ll take the bees to fill out the supers, and we’re resisting the urge to check on them every few days.

Right now, I suspect the bees are thinking their accommodations are pretty luxurious. We’ve given them two completely empty boxes in which to store their honey – that’s like giving a packrat a shed. When we wait for them to fill those boxes and then take them away, though, I wouldn’t blame them for hightailing it to the nearest hollow tree.

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Over the course of four days, the camera snapped 824 pictures, making our compost pile, I’m sure, the most photographed on the planet.  Here’s what came to visit.

A raccon, something we seldom catch on film

An opossum, a frequent visitor

The squirrel went for the cantaloupe rinds

This could be the same chipmunk who lives in the raspberries

That's a wren, in the left foreground

I'm pretty sure that's a mouse -- the gray thing sticking up on the log

That is most definitely a rat

A rabbit, at the crack of dawn

And a crow, looking like something out of Edward Gorey

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I have a cement mixer

And I suppose cake batter is a little like concrete. You take an amalgam of dry ingredients, mix it with water, and it hardens as it dries. That, though, is where the similarity ends. The thing about cake batter concrete is that, if you add back the water, it turns back into cake batter. Not so with actual concrete. And a good thing too, or our bridges, roads, and buildings would wash away in the first rainstorm.

What’s interesting and valuable about concrete is that, once it hardens, it’s hard for all time. You can pour it into a form when it’s wet, and then, when it’s dry, you’ve got what is essentially a rock in the shape of your form.

Astonishingly, both the Romans and the Egyptians figured out concrete thousands of years ago, and it figures in the pyramids and the Pantheon.

It’s astonishing because concrete is complicated.

The key ingredient in concrete is cement. The most common kind of cement is Portland cement, so called because the guy who invented a process to make it, a bricklayer named Joseph Aspdin, thought that the concrete made with it resembled limestone quarried from the Isle of Portland, a little landmass in the English Channel.

Cement starts by heating rock to something over 2500 degrees (F). But not just any old rock will do. It has to have the right balance of calcium and silicon, iron and aluminum. A mix of limestone and clay is a good starting point.

When you heat limestone and clay, you end up with a lot of complicated chemical reactions. I wish I could boil them down for you here, but my I’m afraid my chemical education isn’t up to the task even of understanding them, let alone explaining them. After those complicated chemical reactions have taken place, you end up with a substance called clinker, which looks like little stones. Grind those stones to a powder, and you’ve got cement.

But the chemistry doesn’t end there. When you add water to the cement, there are yet more complicated reactions I can’t explain, and some molecules bind to other molecules and you end up with something resembling stone.

There! Got that?

Our slab frame, holes plugged with those all-purpose materials, newspaper and duct tape

Not understanding the chemistry gave me pause. I thought our chances for a successful concrete pouring would be vastly increased if we actually understood what was going on. But ignorance hasn’t stopped us from launching into chickens, bees, mushrooms, or, most recently, turkeys, so why should it stop us from building a concrete pizza-making edifice?

We forged ahead.

To make concrete out of cement, you mix it with aggregate. Now, although aggregate sounded to me like something technical and specific, it turns out that ‘aggregate’ is just another word for ‘rubble.’ Even, colloquially, ‘crap.’ The point is to mix in a bunch of little hard things that the cement then bonds together, and just about any little hard thing will do.

The little hard things can be very little, like sand, or much less little, like rock and pieces of crushed brick. Usually, a combination of little things and less little things is what’s recommended.

Beyond the size of the aggregate, we had another concern. Since what we were pouring was the base for the deck of an oven, we needed some degree of heat-resistance. Ordinary concrete is good up to about 800 degrees (F), and then it starts doing things like cracking and, more alarmingly, spalling. Spalling is when a piece of the structure separates from the structure itself, sometimes explosively. It’s profoundly undesirable.

I read up on heat-resistance and found very little – ahem – concrete information. From what I could glean, it was generally made of a lightweight, insulating aggregate like perlite.

Okay, I reasoned. We have a supply of kiln bricks, which are lightweight and insulating. They crush relatively easily. Wouldn’t crushed kiln brick make a nice, heat-resistant aggregate?

I haven’t the foggiest idea whether this is true. I know you can’t reason out chemistry. But I had the kiln brick and I needed the heat-resistant concrete, so what the hell.

We set about crushing the kiln brick. When I say it crushes easily, I mean that if you drop a sledgehammer on it, it breaks into pieces. Drop it again, you get smaller pieces. You have to drop several times to get the crumbs we were looking for, and crushing enough kiln brick for our oven deck was a daunting task.

We looked for a way to mechanize the process, and found it in the form of a bedsheet and a truck. We wrapped the bricks in the sheet, and then ran over them, and over them and over them, with the truck.

When we unwound the bedsheet, we found that there were still a lot of pieces that were too big. Since this was going to be the base on which we put the kiln shelves that will be our oven floor, we needed a relatively smooth surface, and big chunks just won’t do. So we got out the compost sieve and ran the crushed brick through. What we ended up with was a mix that went from dust up to the size of peas. It was good enough.

This was the mix we used, a bastardization of a mix I read about on a wood-fired oven site:

3 parts crushed kiln brick
2 parts sand
2 parts Portland cement
½ part lime

There’s a good chance we used the wrong kind of aggregate, the wrong kind of cement, and the wrong kind of lime (we used whatever it was they sold at K-mart’s garden department). The only other mistake we could make was using either too little water, or too much.

I suspect we did both. Because we had to form a flat slab on an irregular surface, we made a wooden frame the size of the slab and set it on the stone base. Invariably, it wasn’t level and there were lots of gaps underneath.

To make sure the concrete didn’t leak out the gaps at the bottom, we made the first batch very stiff. We forced it into the places where the frame didn’t meet the stone (having stuffed newspaper underneath to prevent escape). Then, though, we needed to make a mix that was liquid enough to make a flat surface. We did that, and poured it on top. Will the two layers bond together properly? Who knows.

The finished product

What we ended up with was a decent approximation of what we were trying to build, but I am not sanguine. I’m convinced that, at the first firing of the oven or the first frost, the whole thing is going to crack and collapse.

Kevin, on the other hand, is convinced that it’s way overengineered, and that when aliens land on the planet, long after humans are extinct, they will find our wood-fired oven base and believe it was some kind of altar for religious rituals.

All I can say is, this pizza better be good.

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Not that I can’t see its utility. Here’s a cooking technique that renders just about anything not only edible but delicious, which is a real boon in time of scarcity. If you’re stranded on a dessert island with nothing to eat but tubers and shoe leather, all you have to do is fire up the deep fryer and you’re good to go. It’s the only thing on this earth that will turn tree bark into dinner.

It’s also the thing on this earth that will make tree bark bad for you. The only problem with the deep fryer is that the things that come out of it are A) absolutely irresistible and B) woefully unhealthful. That’s a dangerous combination.

Les Hemmila, oysterman, on his farm

It’s so dangerous that, for the first 47 years of my life, I refused to deep fry anything at all. Which is not to say that I refused to eat anything deep-fried. I’m particularly fond of fried shrimp, and I’ve downed my share of French fries – it’s just that I thought it was safer to keep that kind of thing out of the house.

But then we met Les Hemmila. Les runs Barnstable Seafarms, and grows beautiful oysters on grants in Barnstable Harbor and West Bay, off Osterville. If you farm oysters, you aim to grow them until they’re three inches long, which is the minimum legal size and also the size people want in a raw oyster. Inevitably, though, some get away. They get sloshed out of their trays and go rogue, and if they escape harvest for a season or two, they turn into big, hairy monsters that nobody wants.

Except me. Kevin sometimes helps Les out on the grant, and I occasionally come along. We were out there a couple days ago, and I marveled at the size of some of Les’s escapees.

“What do you do with these?” I asked him.

“Nothing,” he said. “If you want ‘em, you’re welcome to ‘em.”

Our dozen monsters

I wanted ‘em. I collected a dozen, and took ‘em home.

There are several things you can do with oversized oysters. There’s nothing to stop you from eating them raw, of course, but they’re better suited for other applications. One of which is deep frying.

It was a just a couple months back that we deep fried some oysters with our friends Doug and Dianne Langelend – inveterate eaters, accomplished cooks, and publishers of Edible Cape Cod. We shucked the oysters and breaded them (flour, then egg, then panko), and Doug set up an outdoor propane burner with an enameled cast-iron Le Creuset pot full of vegetable oil.

When Kevin saw the set-up, his eyes lit up. We have an outdoor propane burner! We have an enameled cast-iron pot! (Ours is a mere Lodge, not a Le Creuset, but the principle’s the same.) All we need is vegetable oil, and deep frying is within our grasp.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said to my husband, and I almost added something along the lines of “and you can forget about it,” but I stopped to consider.

Kevin and I each have three marital vetoes. That is, we can each put our foot down and put the kibosh on something the other wants to do a total of three times over the course of our married life. I have exercised one, and Kevin has resigned himself to motorcyclelessness. Kevin has exercised none. This could be because he’s more easy-going and live-and-let-live than I am, or it could be because I don’t ever want to do anything that has to be vetoed.

Regardless, I have two vetoes left. As I stood on the Langelands’ patio, watching the wheels turn in my husband’s head, I decided I wasn’t going to waste one on deep frying.

Our first deep frying ever

And so, yesterday, I broke my 47-year streak and deep fried at home.

Kevin set up the burner, and put about a half-gallon of canola oil in our cast-iron pot. We shucked the oysters (no mean feat) and drained them. And then we called my parents.

My parents love to eat, but they are also very careful about what they eat. The meals they have at home are invariably heavy on vegetables, legumes, and whole grains and light on meat and fat. They’re also very good – my mother is an excellent cook.

Although I tend to make reasonably healthful meals most of the time, it’s usually when we do something a little out of the ordinary that we invite my parents over. And “out of the ordinary” generally translates to “bad for you.”

I called my mother. “Hey, Mom, it’s me. We’re having crack for dinner. Wanna come over?”

“Sure! We’ll bring the wine.”

They arrived, with wine, and Kevin fired up the propane burner. We breaded the oysters (flour, egg, panko), and I made an aioli out of mayonnaise, garlic, lemon juice, and Tabasco.

Mom and Dad, blurry from all the excitement

When the oil was hot, we dropped in the first four oysters. They cooked in about fifteen seconds, and Kevin scooped them out and drained them on paper towels.

We each took one, and dipped it in the aioli.

There is nothing like a fried oyster. The outside is crispy and crunchy, the inside soft and creamy. It has the faintest brininess. It’s like deep-fried ocean.

There is no going back. We have crossed our deep-fried Rubicon, and are now thinking about chicken, shrimp, and even Snickers bars. Kevin pointed to the potato patch, one of our few gardening endeavors that seems to be succeeding, and said to me. “You see those? Those are French fries.”

I’m eyeing the tree bark.

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