The last of the flock block

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.

Freedom!

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.

Chickens dustbathing from Tamar Haspel on Vimeo.

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.

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.

It all started at Agway.

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!

They don't seem to mind guests

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.

Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick

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.

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.

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.

I'm sorry, Baldie

Many years ago, I interviewed a nutrition scientist who gave me the most cogent explanation I ever heard – before or since – for our obesity epidemic.

He’d done some work at a zoo, and he had a problem with overweight orangutans. They’d gotten used to eating foods other than the fruits and greens that are their native diet, in part because well-meaning people wanted to donate food to the zoo rather than let it go to waste. Give orangutans papayas and tree bark, and they regulate their own diet. Give them donuts, and they get fat.

Like us, the apes recognize that donuts taste better than what the rainforest has on offer, and the genes that evolved to give them a preference for fruit go into overdrive when presented with a chocolate cruller. Not only that, when you try and get them to go back to tree bark, they throw tantrums and start winging poop around.

Humans evolved to eat a diet not dissimilar from that of our closest cousins, and Krispy Kreme has been our undoing just as surely as it ruined the girlish figures of apes in captivity.

We’re orangutans with donuts, and the ready availability of high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar (read: delicious) food seems to throw all our self-regulatory mechanisms out of whack.

Small children have been shown to regulate their own intake, and can effectively keep their energy intake and output in balance. Once they hit the ripe old age of three, though, all bets are off. From toddlerhood on, food palatability (and its partner in crime, portion size) strongly influences how much we eat.

Animals, by contrast, are pretty good at self-regulation. Fat chickens are a product of science, not gluttony. The birds had to be genetically manipulated to eat a lot and grow quickly. Even so, the only way to grow meat birds economically is to keep them confined and feed them high-protein, high-calorie food. If you let them out, they’ll revert to their calorie-burning, grass-eating selves and self-regulate you right out of economic feasibility.

All cooped up

I’m worried about precisely the reverse. Our chickens free-ranged all summer and fall and, although they always had pellets, I trusted their chicken instincts to eat what they needed. I didn’t have to pay attention to their diet because they did.

Because it’s winter now, we keep our chickens locked in their run almost all the time. The smorgasbord that is our property is barren – no bugs, no greens – so there’s no point in exposing them to do the danger of predators. That means it’s up to us to make sure they have everything they need.

In theory, the layer pellets we feed them provide the full nutritional complement. In practice, I worry. I’m sure they’re getting plenty of protein and calories, but I’m concerned about calcium.

Humans need calcium for (among other things) strong bones. While chickens also need strong bones, they also need strong eggshells. Kevin thought that our chickens’ shells seemed to be getting a little fragile, so we decided to give them a calcium supplement.

Our shell pile

The calcium supplement of choice is crushed oyster shells, and it runs about $8. for a small bag at our local feed store. Uncrushed oyster shells, by contrast, are free for the taking in the giant shell pile that we’re amassing behind the compost.

Kevin dug through the pile to pick some oyster shells out from among the clam shells. Although I don’t know why people don’t use clam shells for calcium supplementation (Lower calcium content? Difficulty in processing?) we went for oyster shells because that’s what everyone uses. There must be a reason.

Kevin, having long anticipated the day we’d want to crush oyster shells for our chickens, had been keeping his eye out for items that would function as a giant mortar and pestle. When the window-treatment store downstairs in his office building closed, he appropriated a steep-sided concrete planter that was left behind.

Here’s where it gets embarrassing. All my life, I’ve been under the impression that the bowl was the pestle and the stick was the mortar. I even told Kevin, and he came up with an easy way to remember it: “The pestle is the vessel.” Turns out, though, that the pestle isn’t the vessel. The mortar is the vessel. The pestle is the stick. Sigh.

Anyway, we had a mortar, but we needed a pestle. Ideally, it would be a foot-long stick with a hard, rounded, heavy end. Kevin couldn’t find one of those, though, so he went the Paleolithic route and used a rock.

A crushing blow

We put a handful of shells in the mortar and took turns pounding them with the pestle. Before long, they were a mix of crumbs, pebbles, and shards. Some of the particles were very small. Others were still quite large.

I was in favor of more pounding. “Some of those pieces look too big for them,” I said.

“They can swallow pretty big stuff,” Kevin answered.

I was still concerned. “I don’t know,” I ventured, “I think some of them could be a choking hazard.”

“A choking hazard?” My husband looked at me incredulously.

“Like with babies,” I said.

“You realize that they free-range all summer,” he said, clearly referring not to babies but to chickens. “And they encounter particles of all sizes, yet manage not to peck at things that will choke them.”

Oh yeah. I’d forgotten about that.

A chicken treat. No donuts.

We mixed the shell with corn and some cooking oil we’d used to fry shrimp fritters, and brought it up to the coop. The chickens wolfed it down, big pieces and small. I subsequently learned that larger shell particles are better for eggshells, apparently because they spend more time in the chickens’ digestive tract, giving the birds more opportunity for calcium absorption.

All in all, I’ve been struck by the chickens’ ability to figure things out for themselves. They know what to eat, and eat the right amount. Once we configured the nestboxes correctly (our bad), our flock laid almost all their eggs in them. They know enough to come into their coop at night and roost up high, where they’d be safe from predation. As long as they’ve got an appropriate habitat – lots of space, the right kind of food, plenty of water – they know what to do.

I, by contrast, am an orangutan with donuts. I’m still trying to ditch the ten extra pounds I’ve acquired over the last year or so, but it’s very hard to do in a world full of things like the chicken liver mousse Kevin made for the Super Bowl party we went to. Any day now, I’ll hit the poop-winging stage.

Back in 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and Mark R. Lepper of Stanford published the results of an interesting study that shed light on how people make choices.

In their experiment, the choosers were customers of a grocery store in Menlo Park, California called Draeger’s. (They bill it as “upscale,” and I’ll vouch for that. When I lived in northern California, I’d drop by every now and then to see how the other half ate.) What was being chosen was jam.

Specifically, the researchers set up a tasting table offering samples of “exotic” varieties of jam from Wilkin & Sons (Purveyors to Her Majesty the Queen, no less). One day, they offered six varieties. Another day, they offered twenty-four. They tracked how many people stopped by, who those people were (by observation), and, ultimately, whether they bought jam.

Of the people who had six to choose from, thirty percent bought jam. Of the people with twenty-four choices, only three percent bought. Variety of choice, in some circumstances at least, inhibits purchase.

It’s a bloody miracle that anyone, ever, buys seeds.

Have you ever looked at a seed catalog? Take a gander at Fedco’s. There are forty-five – count ‘em, forty-five – varieties of tomato. Twenty-one of cucumber. Even the vegetables you thought were pretty straightforward, like eggplant, can flummox you. Do you want the Black King, the Swallow, or the Pingtung Long?

If you think reading the descriptions can help, think again. Catalog writers are supposed to make you want to buy whatever it is (trust me on this one – I’ve done some catalog writing), so each variety sounds tastier, more insect-resistant, and easier to grow than the next.

The bottom line: it’s a crap shoot. You just pick one and hope for the best. If it works out, get it again next year. If it doesn’t, try something else.

Unfortunately, that strategy doesn’t work so well with trees. The selection problem is the same, but it’ll be a good ten years before you find out whether you chose wisely.

And choosing is particularly hard for apples. There are 2500 varieties of apple grown in the United States, and estimates put the worldwide tally at 7500. That’s just a wild-ass guess, though. Because apples are heterozygous, the real number is probably closer to a zillion.

Heterozygous means that they have dominant and recessive alleles for the same trait. An apple tree that produces large, red, sweet fruit may have offspring the produce small, green, sour fruit, depending on which alleles make it into the particular seed from which the offspring grew. It’s just like in humans – you start with my parents and you might get me but, if you’re really lucky, you get my brother.

This means that apples, left to their own devices, are almost as variable as humans. Which is why growers don’t leave them to their own devices. Instead, they take a cutting from the tree they wish to propagate and graft it on to a rootstock. When you’re choosing an apple variety from a catalog, that’s what you’re looking at. Which means that the number of choices is significantly lower than a zillion.

In my case, it’s sixty-one. We’re going to get our trees from Fedco, a garden-supplies place in Waterville, Maine. We chose Fedco because gardeners we know swear by them, and their location indicates that they know a thing or two about growing fruit in our climate. They sell apple varieties running the gamut from the familiar, like the Macoun, to the obscure, like the Esopus Spitzenburg (an apple of “unkown parentage,” made famous by Herman Melville in Bartleby the Scrivener, when Turkey and Nippers, the two coworkers, “were fain to moisten their mouths very often with Spitzenbergs”).

Picking from sixty-one wouldn’t be quite so daunting if we were only picking one. But we want four, each a different variety. That means we’re faced with over 12 million possible combinations. I wonder how that would go over at Draeger’s.

To help us narrow it down, we’ve asked every recreational apple grower we know for advice. Turns out, everyone’s got a favorite, and everyone’s favorite is different. In the end, we made our choices using a combination of research, nostalgia, and voodoo.

We’re getting a Baldwin, because it’s supposed to be both disease- and insect-resistant, although it has the disadvantage of being biennial (which means it tends to overproduce one year and underproduce the next). We’re getting a Cortland because Kevin likes them. We’re getting a Chestnut Crabapple because we really liked the description. (Yeah, I know I warned you about copywriters, but we couldn’t resist). Our fourth is going to be a green variety (we’ve been told that insects tend to pass them over), and we’re deciding between the GoldRush and the Grimes Golden.

If you want to know how we did, check back in ten years. But I’ll let you know about the eggplant in September.

When the cold weather set in a couple months back, we knew what to expect. Our chickens would need more calories to be able to keep themselves warm, so we gave them corn and seeds mixed with fat. They’d need water that wasn’t frozen, so we brought their two waterers indoors in shifts. They’d need air flow in the coop, so we cleared the snow away from the vent. Although we knew they’d be prone to frostbite on their combs, we didn’t cover them with Vaseline because we’d read that this strategy, while widely deployed, didn’t help at all.

An egg-laying machine, and dignified to boot

And we knew we’d get fewer eggs. There might even be stretches when we’d get none at all. Chickens cut back on their production in the winter, in part because there’s less light, which plays a key role in governing their laying cycle, and in part because they often molt in the colder months, and that’s a drain on the resources otherwise devoted to egg manufacture.

Some chicken owners put lights in the coop to prevent the downturn in the cycle, but we figured we’d let nature take its course, and let chickens do what comes naturally in winter. I don’t know for sure that keeping lights on all year stresses the birds, but I know I certainly wouldn’t like it. Besides, there’s no electricity.

It has been one of the surprises of this enterprise that our chickens haven’t slacked off the pace at all. We have gotten at least five eggs from our eight chickens every single day, and six or seven is the norm. I’m sure we can attribute this, at least in part, to the fact that they’re nine months old and at the beginning of their peak laying age. But still.

“Why do you suppose our chickens are still laying all those eggs?” I asked my husband. “Is it because it hasn’t been that cold? Is there something in the food?”

“Nope,” he said, with perfect confidence, almost swaggering. “It’s all about the husbandry.”

Sheesh. He takes credit for everything.

It was shortly after Kevin and I first started dating that it became apparent he’d be a regular visitor to my apartment – the kind of visitor who needed a toothbrush, a razor, maybe a change of clothes. One sunny Saturday afternoon, we wandered up Broadway to find what he needed.

There was a large drugstore, one of a now-defunct chain, just a few blocks up, and that’s where we headed. We got the toothbrush, the razor, and a few other necessities.

One of those necessities was, of all things, a hair styling gel. To see my rough-hewn husband now, you’d never believe that Kevin ever used anything beyond the bare minimum in hair-care products. Back in the day, though, when he had to show up on the exchange floor every day, split ends were an issue.

He used something called Sebastian Potion 9, and it wasn’t cheap. It came in two sizes: a tube that held about three ounces, and a tub that held at least sixteen. Now, Potion 9 is the kind of stuff you use sparingly, a dab at a time. A sixteen-ounce tub would certainly last six months, maybe longer. We’d barely been dating that many days. I remember thinking the tube would be the way to go.

Kevin, though, held up the tub, which had a price tag in the vicinity of twenty-five dollars. “I think we should get the commitment size,” he said.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s what he’s like. He simply decides what he wants, and forges ahead. In that case, in my most incredible stroke of good fortune ever, what he wanted was me. Now, he wants apple trees.

Our fig tree in its snowsuit

We’ve talked about fruit trees many times, and we even planted a brown turkey fig last year. I have to confess, though, that I don’t think of fruit trees the same way I think about vegetables or mushrooms, chickens or bees. Vegetables, mushrooms, chickens, and bees are relatively short-term projects. The payoff is, at most, about a year away. Everything you do can be undone.

A tree, though, is forever. Maybe not end-of-time forever, but forever in the sense that it will last longer than we will, which is all the forever I’m willing to contemplate. I’m perfectly comfortable planting tomatoes because I’m pretty sure I’m going to be living here, doing this, in six months. Apple trees, though, are commitment-size.

“Do you balk at all at the thought of embarking on something as long-term as planting fruit trees?” I asked Kevin today.

I should have known what he’d say. You probably know what he said, and you’re not even married to him.

“No,” was what he said.

Each of us still has one foot in New York. Because this is by necessity – we both have business there – I’m spared the trouble of asking whether I’m also still tied to Manhattan by inclination. As happy as our lifestyle makes me, I can’t say with certainty that it’ll make me happy until hell freezes over, or our apple trees mature, whichever comes first.

Right now, though, I absolutely want to be living here, doing this. And if I start hedging because I’m afraid that, some time in the hazy distant future, I may want to live somewhere else and do something else, who knows what I’m going to miss out on?

So I’m happy to say that we’re going ahead with the apple trees. After all, the Potion 9 worked out pretty well.

Two weeks ago, we went to our first night of Bee School. What we learned about bee habits and feeding had us wondering whether, with our wooded property, we were a good candidate for a bee hive. After a site visit from Andy (one of the instructors) and a canvas of our holly tree population (bees love holly), we determined that we shouldn’t get a hive – we should get two.

Two hives means twice the chance for a successful colony. It means being able to compare hive behavior and habits. It’s means twice as much honey. The only downside is the money.

I have provided insect housing before, but this is the first time it has cost me. I’ve certainly paid to get rid of them, but never to put them up in the first place. They’ve come, of their own accord, to live in my pipes, or my collard greens, or my corn flakes.

Bees, though, aren’t content with stale cereal or household crevices. They need a hive, and hives are expensive. With the boxes, the frames, and the accoutrements, you’re looking at $250. per hive, easy. And that’s without the bees! You wouldn’t think it would cost so much to house something, which, left to its own devices, lives in a hollow tree.

A bee brush

Since we were looking at a bill approaching $500., I started scrutinizing the list of equipment, looking for anything we might be able to do without. There wasn’t much. The list was put together by the Barnstable County Beekeepers Association, and they tried to keep it to the bare minimum necessary for a new beekeeper to get started. Still …

“Do you think we need the bee brush?” I asked Kevin. A bee brush is a soft-bristled brush that you use to remove bees from a honey-filled frame so you can put it, bee-less, into the extractor.

“Of course we need a bee brush,” he said. “What are you going to brush them off with, your bare hands?”

An ice scraper brush

“We could use the brush from the ice scraper we keep in the car.” I asked. “It looks just like it.”

Kevin rolled his eyes. “The scraper brush is a hard brush.” He picked up the sample bee brush to show me. “A bee brush is a soft brush.” He brushed it on my hand to demonstrate.

“We could use it gently,” I suggested.

“It’s $3.95!” he exclaimed, with more than a little exasperation.

I gave in on the bee brush, but I’m sticking to my guns on the bee suit.

A bee suit

A bee suit is a full-body, white zip-up number that, with hat and gloves, is supposed to keep bees out. The full suit wasn’t on the BCBA list, but several people suggested that we get at least one, and preferably two. A quick Internet search revealed prices in the $100 – $200 range.

“It looks like a Tyvek suit,” I told Kevin, who was marginally more receptive to this suggestion.

“Tyvek suits cost six dollars,” I went on.

“They’ll be really hot in the summer, and I’m not sure I want to tend bees while I’m sweating in a Tyvek suit.” He was still skeptical. “Maybe bees can smell discomfort the way wolves smell fear.”

“I don’t think the heat will be that bad,” I said. “I’m at least willing to try it.”

A Tyvek suit

“You are SO getting stung,” Kevin told me.

“I’m getting stung?” I exclaimed. “Why should I get stung? You’re the one who’s going to get stung.”

“You’re going to get stung because you insist on cutting corners on the equipment,” Kevin said, irritated. “Why do you think I’m going to get stung?”

“You’re going to get stung because you’re careless?”

“Careless!?”

“Honey, you’re covered with cuts and bruises you get from doing ordinary household chores. A few months back, you put a nail through your finger with a nail gun. Your nickname is Crash.”

He had to concede that there was something in that. My husband isn’t known for following, or even reading, instructions.

“Bees are different,” he said.

“And why are bees different?”

“Bees can sting,” he explains. And that, presumably, makes them scarier than nail guns, or chop saws, or boats. Oddly, I think we’ve found the one thing that scares Kevin more than it scares me.

We haven’t gotten the bee suit, yet. We won’t need it until April, when our bees come. And then we’ll see who gets stung first, the cheapskate or the daredevil. My money’s on the daredevil.

It was an accident that we ended up with two different breeds of chicken. We’d planned on eight buff Orpingtons because we’d read that they were friendly, docile, and cold-hardy. When we showed up to pick up our chicks at Cape Cod Feed and Supply, though, there was a run on Orpingtons. This had the two-fold consequence of making me act like a jerk and forcing us to integrate our flock, which is four buff Orpingtons and four Rhode Island reds.

Everyone should have an integrated flock. Having more than one kind of chicken has a couple of advantages that we, as first time chicken owners, hadn’t foreseen. For starters, they’re easier to count. You can also compare breed personalities. The Rhodies are more outgoing and, we think, smarter than their Orpington cousins, but the Orps seem a little less greedy and demanding.

We had read that the Orps were easy-going to the point of being a target for bullies, and we were afraid that the Rhodies would pick on them, but we’ve never seen it. At feeding time, on the roosts, at the waterer, there has never seemed to be any tribal animosity between the buff chickens and the red chickens.

It is, of course, ridiculous that we take pleasure in the fact that our chickens seem blissfully unaware of their feather color. When we watch them pecking at a pile of corn – red next to buff next to red – we have a sense that all’s right with our peaceful, colorblind barnyard community.

On Martin Luther King Day, though, when Kevin went up to close the chickens in for the night, for the first time he found a segregated coop. Buffs to the right, reds to the left. We figure, though, that as long as we stick to one drinking fountain, they’ll get over it.

Calling Rosa Parks!

Lots of things come in indoor/outdoor varieties. Furniture, activities, cats. Herbs, though, don’t seem to.

Sad-sack sage

When we decommissioned our garden back in October, we had the bright idea to put some of the herbs in pots and bring them inside. Parsley all winter!

The parsley had other ideas. It immediately started to yellow. The chives started to wilt. The sage started to brown. I thought they were all having separation anxiety from the outdoors, and they’d recover as soon as they got over the shock to their system. But now, three months later, they’re still struggling.

The parsley, particularly, has begun to act strangely. It is sprouting new growth, but the new leaves are different from the old leaves. Instead of being parsley-shaped, they’re longer and pointier, and they don’t taste nearly as good.

All you gardeners out there, can you help me figure out why my herb garden is such a bust? Is there anything I can do to resuscitate it?

What's wrong with this parsley? Old leaf on the left, new leaf on the right.

It was just a couple weeks ago that I made a big hairy deal about the fact that the only part of self-sufficiency that interests me is the food. No knitting, no soap-making, no finish carpentry.

Today, I’m using home-made toothpaste.

There is a food connection, though, in the form of wintergreen. I’ve had some leaves steeping since last winter, and we’ve tried to use it in food but, as a flavoring, it has a serious drawback: it makes everything taste like toothpaste. So, for almost a year now, we’ve been wondering what to do with these two little jars of toothpaste flavoring. Kevin was the first to see it.

He started browsing the Internet for toothpaste recipes

Anyone who’s ever browsed the Internet for a recipe has to wonder why anyone’s worried about those explosive-making sites. Internet recipes, particularly from crackpot sources, are notoriously unreliable, and the proto-terrorist who reads online that he can make a bomb out of anchovies and deodorant is unlikely to get very far.

If you’re looking for a recipe for something straightforward – zucchini bread, say – you’ll probably do pretty well. But once you leave the well-trodden path and start looking for things like mortar, or dishwashing detergent, or deep-tissue massage oil, it gets a lot dicier.

Toothpaste recipes run the gamut, but most are some permutation of the same six ingredients: baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, glycerin, salt, non-sugar sweetener, and flavoring. The only one of those we didn’t have in the house was glycerin, so we picked up a bottle at the local drugstore and Kevin went to work.

How do you get it in the tube?

A little of this, a little of that, a taste, and a little more of the other thing. Mix it up with an absurdly tiny whisk that was intended to be decorative, and it was ready for its inaugural brush.

Kevin took the bowl into the bathroom and dipped his toothbrush in. He scooped up a daring grape-sized globule and started to brush. I watched carefully for his reaction. Nothing.

To understand what “nothing” means in this context, you have to understand my husband. He’s as tough as they come. He’s capable of withstanding pain and hardship – physical or emotional – that would have me running for the hills. The day he put a nail through his index finger with a nail gun while putting together a raised bed for our friend Linda he barely flinched. Then he pretended it was only a scratch, partly because he didn’t want Linda to feel bad and partly because he felt stupid for exercising insufficient care with a dangerous tool.

He's going in ...

As he tested his toothpaste, he certainly would have nodded and smiled, or given the thumbs up, if he had liked the taste. But, if he hadn’t, nothing on god’s green earth would have induced him to make a face and spit it out, or even grimace in displeasure.

“How was it?” I asked, after he’d rinsed.

“It was OK,” he said. “A little too salty, but OK. You should try it.” He proffered the bowl to me.

I dipped my toothbrush in, and took a less daring, pea-sized globule. I started to brush.

Without a doubt, this was far and away the worst toothpaste I’d ever tried. The worst I’d ever heard of! It was nasty and salty and gritty and absolutely not something you wanted in your mouth. I brushed long enough to be able to say I did it, and then spat and rinsed. And rinsed some more.

Kevin’s going to tweak the recipe. Meanwhile, I’m sticking with Tom’s of Maine (fennel flavor).

This experience has reinforced my determination that, when it comes to self-sufficiency, I’m sticking to the edible. And I don’t think it’s just me and my priorities; it has to do with the nature of food itself. Food is fragile and perishable, and handling it, transporting it, and processing it in a factory somewhere is unlikely to do it any good.

The same can’t be said of soap, or furniture, or clothing. People with industrial-strength tools, and vast experience, and economies of scale, are invariably going to turn out better versions of those items than I can make myself. There are lots of things that factories do better than people. Sure, a proficient knitter can turn out beautiful things, but there are a lot of misbegotten socks between here and proficiency, and even the best knitter can’t knit me a new pair of Wellingtons.

Tom’s of Maine makes better toothpaste than I ever will, but I make better chili than Hormel ever can.

We won’t discuss my root beer.

Many years ago, when I lived in California, my friend Greg came to visit. I knew, at the time, that Greg played a mean game of ping pong, but I didn’t know he was interested in competitive table tennis. I didn’t know there was competitive table tennis. But we headed over to Berkeley for a tournament and the scales fell from my eyes.

A semi-final doubles match at the 2009 World Table Tennis Championships (photo borrowed from Kiyoshi Ota/Getty Images). Note shoes, shorts, and focus.

The tournament was in a huge, open room, set up with ping-pong tables as far as the eye could see. They were spaced father apart than I would have thought necessary, but that was because the players, as I later learned, stood a good six feet back from the table.

That wasn’t the only way in which this kind of game did not resemble the rec-room ping pong I’d occasionally dabbled in. For starters, there was the concentration. The players were every bit as focused as Serena Williams or Rafael Nadal.

“Didn’t anyone tell them this isn’t real tennis?” I whispered to Greg. He kicked me and told me to be quiet.

They had super-duper paddles that, judging by their cost, must have been made from titanium. They had special shorts that allowed them freedom of movement. They had ping-pong shoes that gave them the right kind of grip. Many of them looked like serious athletes.

I found it fascinating. And it wasn’t just the game, although I found myself drawn in. It was the idea that there was an entire table-tennis subculture that I knew nothing about. I’d probably passed some of these players on the street, having no idea that they had secret lives as competitive ping-pong players.

A glimpse into someone else’s subculture, previously unknown, is a reminder of all the things you might be doing with your leisure time if you didn’t squander it all on Facebook.

Since we’ve been here, I’ve discovered that there are groups – some loosely organized, some formal enough to be incorporated – that have coalesced around every activity we’ve undertaken. There are not only gardeners, there are shellfishers and bird-watchers and mushroom foragers.

And beekeepers. Monday was our first night of Bee School, a class intended to help rank novices learn how – or whether – to keep bees. It’s put on by the Barnstable County Beekeepers Association, which has a fifty-year history and a robust membership. Beekeeping is very popular on Cape Cod, and more of our fellow citizens than I would have suspected have hives in their backyards. Who knew?

We’d been planning to get a hive in the spring, but our first class gave us pause. In order to thrive, the instructor pointed out, bees need an abundant supply of nectar. At some level, of course, I knew that, but I’d never stopped to consider the implications for our situation. We live in the woods, and are nectar-challenged. I looked at Kevin in alarm. “We’re nectar- challenged,” I said.

He scoffed. “We have 120 rhododendrons.”

It’s true, we have 120 rhododendrons. I’d forgotten about them because they flowered months ago. Out of sight, out of mind. But they’re only in bloom for six weeks. What are the bees going to live on the rest of the year?

After class, we explained our situation to Andy, one of the professional apiarists teaching the class. “ Will the rhododendrons be sufficient?” we asked.

“Rhododendrons are no good for bees,” he told us. “They don’t have nectar.” He saw my look of disappointment. “What else you got?” he asked.

We have exactly what he’d already said was, from the bees’ perspective, a barren wasteland – oak and scrub pine. And nasty prickery vines.

One of our holly trees, probably 50 feet tall

“No linden trees? Or black locusts?” he asked.

I couldn’t say for sure, but I didn’t think so.

“How about holly?”

Bingo! Andy told us that holly was almost as good as linden, with nectar-rich flowers. And holly, we’ve got in abundance. Not only that, it turns out we live about two miles from a decommissioned holly farm, which still has many acres of mature trees. Since two miles is well within a bee’s foraging radius, things were looking up.

“Do you think we should do it?” I asked Kevin. The initial investment is in the neighborhood of $400. so, although we’re both very interested in bees, I didn’t want to try it if we were doomed to fail.

Kevin shrugged. “Sure.” He’s more sanguine about these things than I am.

“It might be worth it just for the endless stream of bad puns,” I suggested.

“Might bee,” said Kevin.

Ugh.

Next week, at our second class, we’ll be picking our equipment and signing up to get a colony delivered in the spring. Success isn’t guaranteed. But, as Andy pointed out, very little in life is. If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.

Part of what characterizes a subculture, whether it’s table tennis or beekeeping, is enthusiasm. You just gotta beelieve.

There’s oystering, and then there’s oystering. For me, oystering involves wandering around in the shallows at low tide with a rake and a bucket, looking for specimens over three inches long. For my friend Florence, oystering is an entirely different proposition.

Florence suiting up for oystering

Florence has an oyster grant, a two-acre parcel in the flats of Barnstable Harbor earmarked as her oyster farm. It’s dry at low tide, underwater at high tide, and marked out by buoys. She grows oysters in part because she owns The Naked Oyster, arguably the best restaurant on this end of the Cape, and in part because she’ll do anything.

Florence is French, but not in an effete, Chanel-wearing kind of way. Florence is tough and intrepid, both of which qualities come in handy for oyster farming, especially this past week.

This was the week the oysters had to come out of the harbor. Because the water generally freezes over the course of the winter, and the ice floes can crush both the oysters and cages used to contain them, the whole shebang has to come out before winter hits in earnest.

For Florence’s operation, which only uses a small portion of her two-acre allotment, that’s about three days of cold, heavy work. Two of them had been done when she called Monday morning to see how Kevin was.

She was concerned about him because, in the course of helping her son Julien with the oysters the day before, he’d fallen in the water and come to the brink of hypothermia. I’d put him in a hot shower as soon as he’d come home, and put clothes in the dryer so they’d be warm when he got out. In an hour or so, he’d been fine, which is what I told her.

“Don’t you still have work to do out there?” I asked her.

She told me they did. And that, given the weather forecast, this was probably the last day to do it.

“Do you need help?”

She told me, essentially, that our household had already made the maximum allowable contribution to the oystering effort. I told her that was nonsense, and I’d be there, suited up, when she was ready to go out.

We set off at about 1:30 in the afternoon. It was me, Florence, and two young, strong, boat-savvy guys, Jeff and Drew, recruited for the purpose. We took her boat, a small Carolina Skiff, as well as a slightly larger one she’d borrowed from a friend, and went out on the meandering path to the grant.

Barnstable Harbor is shallow, and its many sandbars make it difficult to navigate at low tide, even in the flat-bottom skiffs used for oystering. We took a serpentine route around the shallowest spots, and we probably only drafted a little over a foot, but we still had to tilt the motor up several times to get through. We did get through, though, and arrived at the grant some time around 2:00.

Then we had to make a decision about where to put the boats. The central conundrum of this kind of oystering is that low tide is the best time for the work, but high tide is the best time for the boats. The oysters are on dry land at low tide, and you can walk around the grant, doing what you have to do. You want the oysters on dry land. Not so the boats.

When we got there, the oysters were high and dry, and we could get the boats within about thirty yards of them. But the tide was still going out, and the spot where we had them would be dry soon.

“We should keep the boats floating,” Florence warned.

I’d checked the tide, and dead low was at about 2:30. I thought that, if we left the boats where they were, we’d be significantly into the flood by the time we finished the work (which I thought would take about an hour and a half), and the boats would be afloat again, even with their heavy loads.

If we wanted to keep the boats afloat, we would have to put them about twice as far from the oysters, which had unpleasant implications for how far we’d have to carry each load. We left them where they were, and started loading.

Oysters at low tide

There are several different techniques for farming oysters. Florence begins with the seed oysters in bags. When they’re big enough, she transfers them to flat wire trays, each about two feet by three feet and holding several hundred oysters. The bigger the oysters are, the more the trays weigh. Most of the oysters we needed to move were approaching legal (three-inch) size, and the trays probably weighed between twenty and forty pounds each.

The work didn’t take as long as I thought, though, mostly because I didn’t factor in just how much lifting and carrying two young, strong guys can do. Florence and I aren’t sissies, but we are middle-aged women There’s just no substitute for being male and twenty-three.

By 2:45 we had the oysters and cages stacked in the boats, ready to go. But something was wrong. The tide was still going out. How could that be? Tides have been well understood for centuries. Tide charts aren’t wrong.

“How could the tide still be going out?” I asked Florence, with some indignation. “The chart said low tide was 2:30.”

“It depends on exactly where you are, and the wind,” she told me, with a shrug. “It’s unpredictable out here.”

“We should have kept the boats floating,” I said ruefully.

There was nothing to do but wait.

If it hadn’t been getting darker and windier by the moment, waiting wouldn’t have been a problem.

Fully loaded, high and dry

We watched the water, we watched the sky. Finally, at some time well after three, the tide turned. Ten minutes later, water was lapping at our stranded boats. The level slowly crept up until we were able to get the smaller boat to float. But the big one sat stubbornly in the sand.

We pushed it, we rocked it, we redistributed the cargo. It moved, but it was stuck on some kind of lump of sand that just wouldn’t give up its hold. The sun was setting, the wind was blowing. My fingers were beginning to get cold. We pushed some more.

Finally, it came loose. “Let’s get going,” Florence said, and she yanked on the pull-start of the motor. Nothing.

A litany of everything that could go wrong was going through my mind, and it started with a failed motor. From there, it went on to swamping, stranding, hypothermia, and even drowning. We’ve got overloaded boats in an increasing chop. It’s too dark to see the sandbars. The temperature’s dropping fast. We’re all wearing waders – which are the last thing you want to wear if you fall in because they fill with water and drag you down.

I knew at the time that most of my fear was unreasonable. We had two boats, and there were several others out there, so help would be at hand in case of a mishap. The harbor wasn’t more than about six feet deep at the deepest spot we’d be going over. The wind was behind us. Although it was getting cold, we were properly dressed and dry. The likelihood that something could go catastrophically wrong was very, very slim. But fear and reason are strangers to each other.

Florence pulled the starter again, and again nothing.

“Do you want me to have a go?” I asked.

She didn’t want me to have a go. She wanted to start the bloody thing herself. She hated the idea that she was having trouble pulling it hard enough, accustomed as she was to being able to do everything that needed doing. But this was the third day she’d been doing this work, and she was depleted.

“Give it a try,” she said.

I pulled, hard, and the motor turned over. She and I got in, and Jeff and Drew followed us in the bigger boat. It was slow going. The boats were heavy, and the prop on the other boat was so worn down that its top speed was about three knots. The water came within inches of the gunwales, and Florence was navigating from memory, since the water was too dark to see the shallow spots.

Not only was Florence in complete control of the situation, and confident in a successful outcome, she even had the bandwidth to reassure me that all was well. It’s not like I told her I was scared. I wanted desperately to be brave and intrepid, and I was doing my best to be cheerful and positive. It was probably the white knuckles that gave me away.

The oysters' winter home

I could see car headlights shining from the ramp at Scudder Lane, and it crossed my mind that Kevin might be there to meet us. I’d told him I was going out, and he would have known there’d be unloading to do.

He was there, and I was mighty glad to see him.

We pulled the boats in, loaded the oysters and gear into the three pick-up trucks we had, and brought them to the restaurant. There, Florence’s staff helped us get them into the refrigerated truck where they’d be dormant over the winter.

When the work was done, Florence made us drinks of whiskey, lemon, and hot water. “I’m sorry you had to go out on one of the hardest days,” she said.

“Hey, it was fine,” I told her. “We got all the oysters in, nobody was hurt, and I’m sitting here with a hot drink in my hands.” And then, after a pause. “Were you scared at all?”

She shook her head. “I don’t really get scared,” she said. “If I’m scared, we’re probably going down.”

Kevin’s that way, too. Are you born that way, or do you get that way? I want to be that way.

I can’t decide whether I want to stick with oystering along the beach with my bucket and rake, or get my own oyster grant in the hope that it will make me that way.

“Next time, we’ll go out in the summer,” Florence said. “We’ll bring a cooler full of ice, and some really good white wine, and we’ll sit out there on a warm, sunny day and drink wine and eat oysters.”

All in all, I don’t think I want an oyster grant. I just want a friend with an oyster grant.

Our driveway. See the truck at the very top?

Nothing like two feet of snow to bring home to you that it’s winter. And, in winter, our food procurement efforts grind virtually to a halt. The eggs keep coming, but after that the pickings are slim. We can shellfish year-round, an unusually nice day might find us going after trout, and I keep hoping Kevin gets a hankering to go rabbit hunting, but that’s about it.

I figured this would be a good time to take inventory. We’re not technically snowed in; the truck is at the mouth of our 500-foot driveway, and we can hike up there and leave the premises any time we want. But the hike is enough to make you think twice about going anywhere, so we’re planning to make good use of our laid-in supplies.

Which got me wondering. I’m planning to continue the one-food-a-day challenge into next year, and winter is the toughest time. Last year, it was all shellfish, all the time, but this year I’ve got a few items socked away. Here’s what we’ve got to see us through to spring:

The canned goods:

2 12-ounce jars of the blackberry/anise jam Mary and I made from Dianne’s blackberries
1 12-ounce jar of Jane’s raspberry jam
1 12-ounce jar of Mary’s rhubarb jam
4 12-ounce jars of red pepper jelly (which dates back to our Manhattan life)

The frozen goods:
(“Bag” means a 1-quart Ziploc bag. It may or may not be completely full, but let’s not split hairs.)

5 bags parboiled butternut squash
8 small smoked bluefish fillets
2 bags diced roasted eggplant
2 bags parboiled beet greens
3 pounds Linda and Dan’s cranberries
9 bags Christl’s Sasquash (a bland, orange squash), diced
7 bags diced tomatoes
1 quart prickly pear juice
1 bag chopped jalapeno peppers
4 bags parboiled collard greens
1 bag sautéed painted suillus mushrooms
1 bag sautéed hen-of-the-wood mushrooms
4 dozen oysters
1 pound Dan’s Alaskan halibut
3 pints chopped clams
3 bags smoked trout
1 pint strawberry-rhubarb compote, from Christl’s rhubarb
1 quart crab stock
1 bag Dianne’s raspberries and blackberries
1 pint clam sauce
1 pint clam juice

The indoor herbs, still hanging on

The living goods (which may or may not still be living in a month or two):

Parsley
Sage
Rosemary
Chives (no thyme)

The rest of the goods:

Sea salt
Bay leaves
A few dried jalapenos
¼ cup dried hot pepper flakes
Eggs
Wintergreen extract
1 bucket Geri’s herring preserved in salt, awaiting pickling
2 gallons of dandelion wine (we want to let this age, but if things get dire…)

It’s not a bad list, but when you think about how long it has to last, it seems a bit anaemic. Other than the winter fare, we won’t have any new items until April, when the first of the wild green edibles come up.

Although I did manage to dig up a sassafras root before the snow came, so I’m ready to try that root beer again …

Back in the spring, we embarked on our first mushroom-growing venture. So far, it’s yielded exactly one shiitake mushroom, but we have high hopes for a crop in the spring.

This is how you grow shiitakes: drill a bunch of holes in some oak logs; hammer in dowels infused with shiitake spawn (which you buy from Fungi Perfecti, or another supplier); leave logs in a shady spot. That’s it. Then you wait, and hope for the best.

What struck me, and might strike you, about this enterprise is how little work there is to be done. The only hard part is cutting down the tree. From there, it’s a cakewalk – and the mushrooms are supposed to keep fruiting for a good five years. As agricultural endeavors go, this one seems to have a very high reward-to-work ratio.

I’m sure it says something about me – something unflattering – that I choose crops to grow based in large part on how much work they are. True agriculturists, I suspect, enjoy the challenge of hard-to-grow foods and take pleasure in bestowing the attention required. But I’m not in it for the process; I’m in it for the food. Less process for more food is an unmitigated good.

Since shiitakes were so easy, I decided to branch out. Oyster mushrooms were reputedly good to grow at home, so I thought I’d tackle those. I bought myself a copy of The Mushroom Cultivator: A Practical Guide to Growing Mushrooms at Home, by Paul Stamets and J.S. Chilton and sat down to read up.

Let me summarize chapters 1-4 for you. Step One: Build a sterile laboratory.

Practical, my ass.

Building a sterile laboratory is way harder than cutting down a tree. Besides, it doesn’t play to my strengths. I’ve always tended to make hygiene – personal and household – a low priority, and that tendency has been exacerbated by living in the sticks, where I can go days without getting within three feet of another human being other than my husband, whose hygienic standards may be even looser than mine. (Still want to come visit?) A sterile laboratory is a pipe dream when you can’t even keep the bathtub clean.

I was thrown for a loop. Building a sterile lab is, for the time being at least, out of the question. Does that really mean that oyster mushroom cultivation is a non-starter?

Maybe not.  There are three basic steps to mushroom cultivation. First, you use a spore to grow the beginnings of the mycelium (that’s the shaggy white stuff that lives below the surface, from which the mushrooms sprout) in a petri dish of agar. Second, you create spawn by using slices of the mycelium-infused agar to inoculate sterilized grain or sawdust, in which the mycelium continues to grow and really takes hold. Third, you use the spawn to inoculate a mushroom-growing substrate, in which the mycelium will reach maturity and then, with any luck, fruit.

Steps One and Two do require a sterile environment, but you can circumvent those steps by buying spawn, ready made, from Fungi Perfecti. Step Three, incolating the substrate, might possibly be accomplished without the lab.

I checked the Fungi Perfecti web site, and found that they sell both sawdust and grain spawn infused with the oyster mushroom mycelium (Pleurotus ostreatus, that is). The site emphasized that these products do not come with instructions, that you had to know what you were doing, and there was a purchase agreement you had to sign before you could buy the spawn.

A purchase agreement? For mushroom spawn? I clicked on the link. This is what it says:

I, the undersigned, acknowledge that I am an absolute bonehead who is bound to screw up the growing of mushrooms. Once I do, I will not hold Fungi Perfecti accountable in any way.

Not in so many words, of course, but that’s the gist. So let’s just say I went into this with low expectations.

I ordered the sawdust spawn.

This is what's left of barley after the beer's taken out

One of the reasons I wanted to try oyster mushrooms is that I’d read on some crackpot website that you could grow mushrooms in the barley that’s left over from the beer brewing process. “Spent grain,” it’s called. I have the good fortune to know Beth Marcus who, with her husband Todd, runs Cape Cod Beer, and she told me that she’d love to see someone do something productive with the spent grain, and that I could pick some up any time.

Okay then.  Once the sawdust spawn was en route to me from Fungi Perfecti, I had six days to research spent grain substrate in earnest. There’s not much to research, it turns out. A few people have tried it, and there are some sketchy online accounts of those attempts. The upshot seemed to be that spent grain is excellent – as a supplement to some other, less nutritious substrate, like straw. Because there are so many nutrients left in the barley, it’s an ideal host for the kind of bacteria, mold, and other nasty creatures that contaminate mushroom substrate.  You shouldn’t use it by itself.

My best chance for success seemed to be mixing the spent grain with sawdust or chopped straw, but that brought me back to the sterilization problem – or at least the pasteurization problem.

If you’re not clear on the difference, you’re right where I was before I started reading about mushroom cultivation. Sterilization is heating at a temperature of about 250F, which kills everything known to man. Pasteurization is prolonged heating at about 170F, which kills most things that can contaminate mushroom substrate.

The key logistical difference between the two hinges on the fact that water boils as 212F. You can pasteurize stuff in boiling water, and that’s sufficient for substrate. Sterilization requires a pressure cooker or an autoclave (which is basically an expensive kind of pressure cooker).

Even though I do know how to boil water, pasteurization was one of the (many) steps I had hoped to avoid. Because the brewing of beer keeps the grain at the requisite temperature for the requisite time, I could get my substrate pre-pasteurized if I showed up at the brewery just as they were emptying the mash tun. If I had to combine the grain with another kind of substrate, one that needed pasteurization, I’d lose the advantage.

Best I could tell, here’s what I was supposed to do:

1. Build a sterile laboratory.

2. Arrange with Beth at Cape Cod Beer to arrive at the brewery to take the grain straight out of the mash tun. For this, I would have to bring a sterile container.

3. Obtain an equal amount of either straw or sawdust, and pasteurize it by boiling it in water in a large container on an outdoor burner for at least half an hour.

4. Drain the straw or sawdust, combine it with the spent grain, make sure the moisture content is somewhere around 65%, and wait for it to cool to 80F.

5. In the sterile laboratory, put the substrate in three-gallon plastic Ziploc bags. Wearing sterile gloves, open the package of sawdust spawn and distribute it through the substrate, at about a 1:10 ratio. Punch air holes in the Ziploc bags using a sterilized, stainless steel nail.

6. Put the bags in a dark, semi-sterile, climate-controlled room where the humidity is kept over 90% and the temperature is maintained at 80F.

7. Wait about a week for the mycelium to colonize the substrate, confident that you have done everything right.

Here’s what I actually did:

1. Cleaned the bathtub.

2. Arranged with Beth at Cape Cod Beer to arrive at the brewery to get a five-gallon bucket (theirs) of grain straight out of the mash tun.

3. Put the bucket in the bathtub, and transferred about a gallon of it to a three-gallon Ziploc bag, trying to take the stuff out of the middle of the bucket in an effort to avoid any contaminants that may have been on the bucket sides. Used my scrubbed hands and a thoroughly washed scoop.

4. Once the grain had cooled to about 90F, put the mushroom spawn bag full of sawdust spawn in the bathtub, and cut it open. Pulled a few cups of it out of the bag, using the same scrubbed hands, and distributed it throughout the grain in the bag. Punched holes in the Ziploc bag using a well-washed kitchen thermometer. In hopes of keeping the remaining sawdust spawn contaminant-free, re-sealed the special mushroom spawn bag with electrical tape.

5. Put the Ziploc bag full of inoculated substrate in a small cooler (to keep out the light, and to simulate the climate-controlled environment) and opened it periodically to let in fresh air.

My climate-controlled mushroom-growing environment

This procedure had not a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding. I was starting with the wrong substrate, and I it had many chances to pick up contaminants every step of the way. I was curious not about whether I’d get mushrooms, but just how the attempt would fail. Would it be mold? Would it simply be a failure of the mycelium to take hold? Would it be some strange bacterium?

That was four days ago. Imagine my surprise when I opened the cooler, took out the bag, and saw that the mycelium was beginning to colonize! There was white stuff in several patches of  my substrate! And no smell of mold or hint of contamination.

I’m not out of the woods yet. Contamination can happen at any stage, and the chance that I’ll actually end up with mushrooms is still pretty slim. But you don’t need a sterile laboratory to dream.