First day of summer, and the day before the arrival of 25 20-week-old, ready-to-lay Shaver Red Sex Link CHICKENS. Clearly, time to begin building out their new home. It shouldn’t take too long! :) Working on and off through the day, the frame went up, and by early evening, the plywood flooring is down, the door is built (on the right) and even a first plywood panel is up. A little more work tomorrow, and we should be good to go. No problem!
Year: 2009
Early season harvest day
It’s a harvest Friday, second for the farmers’ market, and first for CSA, but the load is still light. After picking snap peas, we spent the day doing other field work. In the photo, Libby, Jordan and Michelle are hand-weeding the small strip of spring-planted garlic, and we spent some labor-intensive time thinning a 400′ (122m) of carrots, and several beds of beets (the thinnings were the beet greens harvest). In late afternoon, time to cut greens: spinach and mesclun. Plus a little parsley.
Checking back over the last four years, at this time, we had broccoli once, radishes usually, baby Swiss chard a couple of times. And, of course, garlic scapes. And, a couple of years, no peas yet. So, all in all, with the slightly slower planting schedule in this start-up this garden, and all the cloudy weather, we’re doing pretty well!
Local beef
A cool change with the much bigger farmers’ market we’re at this year is the easy access to lots more local food from other market vendors. We’re there every Saturday, and so are they! (Nothing better for really appreciating a farmers’ market than being both a seller and a buyer…).
The biggest change for me is, suddenly, there’s all sorts of LOCAL MEAT. There’s beef, bison, chicken, emu, rhea (ostrich-like), plus a cured-meat-and-sausage vendor, a butcher, and more (venison and elk, I think, and there must be pork in there as well). Still haven’t gone through it all, but I have started to taste my way through the beef. This week, I’m on to a second beef farm.
My sampling approach is simple: buy a steak cut (I prefer rib) and some ground, expensive and…less so. In the first taste test, the beef was certified organic and 100% grass-fed. Today’s, also certified, is fed a combination of grass (pasture in summer, hay in winter, of course) and corn silage, all grown on their farm.
The meal is pretty local: rib steak, grilled to medium-rare and lightly salted, topped with grilled garlic scapes, tossed in a salt, pepper and olive oil, and our all-lettuce mesclun, just cut, with a drizzle of olive oil and a splash of apple cider vinegar.
The scapes are from our market stand neighbors (it’s so sad not having our own fall-planted garlic in the garden this year!), happen to be organic, gotten on a trade for mesclun. The beef was purchased for full price (vendors give each other a 10% discount here, but I didn’t bother to identify myself just for the savings, I’m sure we’ll get to know each other over the summer…!).
All in all, totally tasty, and even easier to buy and cook than to write about! :)
Farm eggs with hot sausage
A week after arrival, the 25 Shaver Red Sex Link ready-to-lay layers are starting to lay. That’s good. We’re up to 7-8 eggs a day, and most are just shy of Small (on the official egg scale), but the numbers are improving daily. Much watching and counting…you can easily get kinda obsessed by it all. Getting up to speed!
Meanwhile, after three months without, fresh-daily eggs are back on our farm menu! Today, my first taste: 4-5 small eggs, scrambled with olive oil and salt, topped up with chunks of semi-dry Hungarian hot sausage from the farmers’ market. Pretty good!
Spring-planted garlic…
This first spring-planted garlic experiment is coming along just about as I imagined it would, from what I’d heard: slower and smaller. It’s 3-4 weeks behind where fall garlic usually is at this point, scapes are just emerging. Then again, everything has been growing slowly in the cool and cloudy weather we’ve been having. Plus, they only went in at the end of April, could’ve been a couple of weeks sooner. Earlier in, in better weather, maybe they’d go a little faster. Then, they’re SMALLER, and I don’t think anything would change that. At least half of the stems look pencil-thin. Well, like FAT pencils. In case it makes a difference, I snapped a shot of one that’s…bigger (below). Positive thinking! Anyhow, they’re planted in 3 rows x 35′, 6″ spacing, not mulched, been weeded a couple of times, and that’s about it for the spring-planted garlic so far!
Another rainbow
It’s almost “yet another rainbow,” but not quite. We’ve seen a good collection so far this season, including quite spectacular horizon-to-horizon double rainbows two nights in a row. Which means there’s been lots of rain, and all the cloudiness that goes with it. It’s nowhere near as miserably wet as last season, though—rainfall this year has actually been great, averaging around the golden inch-a-week (2.5cm-a-week)—but 4-5 mainly cloudy days out of 7 is slowing things down.
How slow? The first summer squash that should’ve popped in size in a few sunny days, has been slowly expanding for well over a week. Root crops like beets, carrots, potatoes, aren’t affected as much, and seem to love the rain. But toms, peppers, eggplant and the whole cucurbit family (squash, melons, cucumber) are in slow motion, maybe a week or two from where they’d be with lots of sun.
Still, all in all, everything is growing along well enough, and we’re bound to hit a sunny stretch. Right?
In the photo, a third planting of green and yellow snap beans, with scare ball in place to scare off birds (it seems to work). To the right, a freshly tilled section, waiting for a third planting of spinach… This weather’s great for summer spinach!
Chickens: ranging too far
These guys, the White Rock Cornish X meat birds, have free-ranged too far, making it to the edge of the veggie garden in the big field. Luckily, although it looks good in the photo, this all-lettuce mesclun is done, cut at least twice and now too full of damaged and crowded, stretched leaves to make harvesting for market worthwhile. So, the chickens are actually putting it to good use. But of course, they won’t stop here.
So far, they’ve been completely free to roam during the day. I count and shut ’em in out of harm’s way at night, and pop open the door soon after sunrise. If they found farm life dull, they could hit the road and head to town, just like that. Instead, they tend to wander further from home bit by bit.
I’ve been watching their circle of foraging territory gradually expand away from the chickenhouse. A few advance scouts lead the way, sometimes alone, or in twos or threes. Eventually, over a couple of days, more follow. It’s fun to watch the process, and they seem to appreciate the freedom (since they use it), but it’s still three weeks to Processing Day, and they’ll keep on exploring right into the garden. Time for some fencing action…
(In front, pieces of old hose and water pipe are being sorted out on a clear patch of ground.)