Pending Abundance

Summer isn't technically here yet, but the garden is getting ready to explode. Two days ago, I was weeding around the tomato plants, and I saw this:

I was excited, because I've been looking forward to eating fresh tomatoes since I planted these seeds back in late January. Today, I got home from sumer school with one thought in mind - BLT's for lunch! I picked the 3 that were most ripe, and there were 4 more that will be good in a couple of days. A quick look around the tomato plants show that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

My blackberry plants that I put in 2 years ago are loaded with berries that are just now starting to ripen.

This is Das Cluckhaus 2. It is currently housing the 10 chicks that came from 2 different kindergarten classes this Spring. The 4 older ones are 7 weeks old, and the younger 6 are just over a month. I plan on butchering all of them (assuming the roosters don't get too noisy before that point). I've read that they should be good to go at 3-4 months of age, so that puts D-day sometime in early September. Good thing I don't have anything else going on that time of year...oh, wait.....

Hatch day update

Today is the official hatch day for the eggs that Tater Tot's class were incubating. Renee called this morning to let me know that when she dropped Tater off, 5 of the chicks had hatched, and 2-3 more looked like they were in the process. So this Friday, we'll be getting another shipment of up to 8 more chicks. It's a good thing that the earlier batch were moved out to Cluckhaus 2 yesterday. It's an A-frame tractor style coop that should serve as a good transition home for the new chooks. Once I get the roof shingled this afternoon, I'll post some pictures.

Back in (the egg) Business!!!

As previously mentioned, our hens survived a near miss possum attack a little over a month ago. Since that time they had not laid a single egg. During the 41-ish day egg drought, we became reacquainted with the inferiority of store bought eggs. Gak!

Yesterday, however, as I was giving the chooks breakfast, a brownish orb caught my eye in the corner of the run. Sure enough, it was a fresh egg courtesy of Scratchy. It seemed like a silly thing to be excited about, but I was jacked up. My threat about the new chicks laying eggs and a soup pot wasn't made in jest. You can argue about the economics of store vs. backyard eggs, but non-laying hens are pretty much a sure fire money sink.

Things continued to improve today when I found an off-white egg in the girls' coop. That means that either Cookie or Carmella has also gotten over her traumatic experience. In short order, we should hopefully be back to our previous 2 egg-per-day average. No more concentration camp produced eggs for us. Sweet!

This is where the "farm fresh" eggs in the grocery store come from.

This is where my breakfast came from.

Frühstück von heute Morgen.

Spring Chickens

A few weeks ago we got 10 little chicks from the kindergarten class at the boys' school. They quickly outgrew the rubbermaid tub in the kitchen, and have since moved to a temporary chicken shack in the back yard. I'm going to move them into the big chicken coop this weekend. So far, they've free ranged in the backyard with the big chickens a few times. Scratchy, the boss chicken, wasted no time waddling over to the chicks and asserting her authority. Aside from a few disciplinary pecks on the head, things weren't too violent. I'm hoping that it will stay that way once they're in the confines of the coop/run. I also hope that the stress of new coopmates won't further hamper their egg production. 4-5 weeks ago I managed to fend off a possum attack in the wee hours of the morning. (My neighbors were treated to a sight of me in my tiny shorts running around my yard with a flashlight and a stick). The chickens escaped unscathed, but the ordeal apparently stressed them such that they stopped laying eggs. I expected this for a week or two, but it's been over a month. I told them that if they didn't get their act together, it would be the soup pot once the chicks start laying. We'll see how that brand of motivation works.

Counting our Chickens (now that they've hatched)

Back in January, I noted that of all my goals for the coming year, acquiring more chickens was probably the least likely to happen. Life, however, has a quirky sense of humor. It started when the kindergarten teacher at the boys' school asked if my parents could get her some fertilized eggs for her class to hatch. When she also asked (knowing that we already have some chickens) if we would be willing to take the chicks when they were done with the project, Renee surprisingly said that would be ok.

Wow, that was easy.

This all was a little over a month ago. On Friday, we became the proud owners of 10 little chicks. I'll have to check with my parents to see what breed(s) of chickens they might be. I also have no idea about the sex of any of them. We employed the "Ok, who just tried crowing?" method of rooster identification last time around. Because we live in the city, all of the boys get shipped off to my parents' house once they get noisy. Statistically, we should wind up somewhere between 4-6 pullets.

Now for the important part, all of the chicks have been named. Identification for some of them is a little sketchy at this point. The roster is as follows:

Fireball - bright yellow with a sorta orange-ish head

Sunshine - bright yellow

Pikachu - also bright yellow

Mr.Peepers - bright yellow, but louder

Dot - bright yellow with a tiny grey dot on its head

Spot - dark grey with a large yellow spot on its head

Tuxedo - black with white/yellow marks on its chin and belly

Darth Vader - black with an orange face

Ashes - mottled grey

Bones - also mottled grey

I'll give a fabulous prize the the first person who can use those descriptions to correctly identify all of the chicks in picture below. Good luck.

Goals for 2011

Ok, so 2011 is a week and a half old now, and it’s time to get organized for the coming year. There are plenty of things that need to happen around the ‘Burbstead. Some of them are exciting, new projects, some of them are lingering from last year. Rather than calling these resolutions, we’ll say that they’re goals. Goals strike me as something that you can chip away at a bit at a time, rather than something that has to happen all at once. I’ll try to check back in a couple of months to see how my progress is coming.

Garden:

1. Grow an “Egg Patch” in the garden. This coming Spring, will make two years that we’ve had chickens here. We give them every opportunity to forage in the yard and are constantly feeding them kitchen and garden scraps, but the bulk of their food still comes from the feed store. While the eggs we get are of a noticeably higher quality than store eggs (a fact made obvious when I happened to use one of each in a recipe recently), we’re essentially buying our eggs from the feed store. In an effort to increase our degree of self-reliance, I’m going to dedicate a portion of the garden this year to growing food for the chickens. At this point, I plan to plant Mangel Beets, Danvers Carrots, and Turnips (for roots and greens). I also want to include cracked corn and sorghum seed from my parent’s house. The root veggies will be shredded or chopped somehow, and mixed with the other stuff.

Goal: Grow ½ or more of the feed my hens eat this coming year.

2. Get serious about season extension. I’ve dabbled with cold frames and low tunnels in the past, but it has certainly been nothing to do my collection of Eliot Coleman books proud. I currently have lettuce and spinach under cover, and it has supplied me with a couple of salads this winter. I plan to use it along with my cold frames to get an early jumpstart on the garden this Spring. The bigger plan, however, is to try to complete the larger hoop house that I’ve been planning for a year or so now. The idea is to use the frames from a couple of old trampolines to build the hoops, and use lumber (1x4’s) to connect them. The end result would be 12’ wide and about 20’ long. I have one trampoline now, and I’ll need 2 more. I’m keeping an eye on Craigslist, as people occasionally list them in the free section.

Goal: Maximize my existing season extenders, and complete work on a 12x20 hoophouse.

3. I need to grow more herbs. Thus far my herb growing hasn’t extended much past cilantro, basil, and a bit of oregano. I have seed for a variety of different things, I just haven’t made planting and using them a priority. This year I want to expand my garden beyond just vegetables, and then learn how to the things I grow.

Goal: Grow more herbs than I have before, including a traditional herb spiral somewhere in the garden.

4. Documenting my harvest. For the past couple of years I’ve kept a garden journal of sorts. I generally start off keeping pretty specific records of what varieties I’m planting, planting dates, where things are going in the garden, the progress of different plants, etc. By the time that the end of summer rolls around, my record keeping is much more sporadic, and by the end of the fall, it’s fairly non-existent. These records have been helpful from year to year, but I’d like to have a more concrete idea of how much we’re actually getting from the garden.

Goal: This year I need to keep up with my garden records better than I have in the past, specifically tracking the amount of produce that we harvest.

5. Planting in the front yard. 2011 is the year that my garden is going to break out of the back yard. The front side of our house faces west, so parts of the front yard get decent mid-day to late afternoon light. However, there is an enormous oak tree right in the middle of the yard, so a lot of space is in pretty constant shade. The challenge will be to find a mix of partial sun and shade loving plants that are edible and landscape well. Also, I’ll have to figure out how best to keep wascally wabbits out.

Goal: Plant/install edible landscaping in front of the house that is aesthetically pleasing, productive, and compatible with the front yard’s microclimate.

Projects

1. Rain catchment. It was just about a year ago that I got a 275 gallon tank from a guy off of craigslist. It was purchased with the intent of running a gutter downspout into the top, and putting a spigot for a hose in the bottom so that I could water the garden with rainwater when things got dry. Somehow, it has not managed to work its way to the top of the priority list in the past 365 days. I need to get off of my ass and make this happen this Spring.

Goal: Finish the rain catchment tank…pronto.

2. Clean out the chimney. For right now, the wood stove thing doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. We do, however, have a perfectly good fire place right here in our living room. I hadn’t had a fire in it since we moved in almost 2 years ago, and when I tried to start one in early December, it clearly wasn’t venting properly. A trip to the roof plus some climbing into the fireplace revealed that there is an undetermined amount of leaves and sticks in there. I recently borrowed my uncle Randy’s chimney sweeping tools so I can clean it out, and use the fireplace again.

Goal: Get the fireplace up and running in time for it to help heat the house this winter. Also, scrounge up enough free wood to make this worth while (no $5 bundles of gas station wood for me)

Food Storage/Prep

1. Get organized. I’ve been canning for 3 years now, a little more each year. This year I’m going to try using one of my mom’s pressure canners. Last Fall I bought a dehydrator, and I have an upright freezer in my basement. I’ve used all of these food preservation methods in varying capacity, but I haven’t really pushed myself on any of them. This year, I’d like to really work at filling my storeroom. I want to start my food preservation earlier in the summer, and put up food in quantities that are going to have an increasingly meaningful impact on our food security.

Goal: Preserve more food than I have in years past. Utilize freezing, drying, and canning to maximize my food storage; and look to farmers markets and grocery stores – as well as my own garden – to find food to preserve.

2. Solar cooking. The use of solar and haybox cookers is a practice that goes back over a hundred years. While I don’t figure they will replace our stove or oven any time soon, I think it’s a smart thing to investigate, and a useful skill to have should the need ever arise. I don’t currently own a solar cooker or a haybox, but both can be built fairly easily and inexpensively.

Goal: Build a solar cooker and haybox. Learn how to use them proficiently enough that Renee and the kids will eat meals I cook with them.

3. Meat chickens. Oooh boy. Of all these goals, this is the one that is most fraught with marital danger. I purchased our initial flock of chickens at the Baker Creek spring planting festival in 2009. I did so without consulting my wife first. To say that she was not thrilled would be a gross understatement. Over the course of the past year and a half, she has wasted no opportunity to remind me of the time I “drug home those damn chickens”. To be honest, they don’t really affect her day to day life that much. The kids and I feed them and check for eggs. Occasionally she will help me move the coop. Nevertheless, that initial shock of finding poultry in our house has put a bad taste in her mouth with regard to further chicken ownership. Still, I think anyone who has ever seen the conditions in which industrial chickens are raised and processed has to at least consider raising their own birds. Sure you can buy free range chicken from local farmers at the farmers market, but to be honest, that stuff is always way more expensive than I can afford. Will I be able to convince my wife that it is a worthwhile investment of time and money to raise our own meat chickens? I don’t know, but after the last time, I’m certainly not going to buy them without asking first.

Goal: Expand our small livestock operation to include meat chickens. If they get the ix-nay, plan B is rabbits. Wish me luck

Butchering Day 2010

Last year on the day after Thanksgiving, my family revived a tradition that I remembered from my childhood: A family hog butchering. We hadn't done one in 20+ years, and it was a ton of fun. I was happy earlier this year when my dad talked about making plans to butcher again this year. We butchered 4 hogs this year instead of 3. It made for a full 1 1/2 days of work, even though we had a local processor kill and gut them for us. In spite of all that had to be done, it didn't feel like hard work, and it certainly wasn't drudgery. Instead, it was a day of telling jokes and old stories, giving each other a hard time, and doing meaningful work together. Und viel Deutsch gesprochen wurde. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't easy. Friday lasted from 6:30am to 9:30pm. By 10pm, we were tired. But it was gratifying to know what we had accomplished.

This year's work netted us the following: 8 hams, 8 huge slabs of bacon, 60 lbs of pork steaks, a tub of pork chops, 4 big packs of tenderloin, 175 lbs of pork sausage, a few ham shank roasts, 9 sticks of liverwurst, about 100 lbs of gritswurst, and 4 1/2 gallons of snow white lard. Not too shabby, if you ask me.

Herrick Kimball's awesome blog, The Deliberate Agrarian, had a bit about a webpage for the Virtz family who held an annual hog butchering. Mr.Kimball noted that all of the photos appeared to be circa the 70's or early 80's, and also that there were virtually no boys in the pictures, only grown men. When he contacted the family to see if they still butchered, they said that they hadn't done so since 1998. If the younger generation isn't taught how to do things and made a part of family traditions, then those traditions will die with the last people who learned them as children. I mentioned last year that I hoped this would become a regular event with my family. If we keep this up, instead of saying "I remember back when I was a kid..." my children will be able to say, "Butchering? We've done this ever since I was a kid..."

My mother wasn't her usual shutterbug self this year, so unfortunately there aren't the plethora of pictures like last time. I'll leave you with a picture of this morning's breakfast: 'Burbstead eggs, homemade bread with my brother's apple butter, and fresh gritswurst. Delicious!

Flashback: Hog Butchering 2009

The Crew: Buster, Jon, Uncle Rick, Me, Tater Tot, Dad, Uncle Dean, Wingnut, Alex, Jackson, Erik, Rob *DT is missing

Last Fall, on the day after Thanksgiving, while most Americans were participating in the vulgar ritual of conspicuous consumption known as "Black Friday", I had the pleasure of helping my family to butcher 3 hogs that my dad had been fattening up since the previous Spring. It was a lot of work, but it didn't seem hard working with brothers and cousins and uncles. I vaguely remembered butchering from when I was little, but that was almost 25 years ago. It was fun and gratifying to be involved in the process as an adult.

By the end of the second day, we had 6 hams, slabs of bacon, ribs, shoulders, a tub of chops, mountains of sausage, gritswurst, sackwurst, and a bucket of rendered lard. Everyone got to take some home, and there was a ton in my parents chest freezer. My uncle Dean smoked one of the shoulders for our Christmas get together. It was phenomenal. We've have the bacon a few times. It was good, fattier than most store bacon, but good none-the-less. My mom baked one of the hams for Easter. It was awesome. The sausage has made its way into breakfast and pizzas on multiple occasions. The lard makes the most amazing (if dietarily incorrect) fried chicken and pie crust. Theribs are going to be barbequed when school is over. As for Gritswurst, if you don't know what it is, then you haven't lived a full life.

All of the delicious food pales in comparison, though, to the great memories and sense of accomplishment that came from doing honest, meaningful work with friends and relatives. My children, who witnessed the entire process from start to finish, now have an understanding and appreciation for where their food comes from that virtually none of their peers do. Our culture's disconnect from the source of our sustenance is one of a handful of issues that form the root of most of the problems we face as a society. Giving my kids the chance to experience this sort of thing connects them to our family's history, and gives them the grounding they will need to thrive in a future where we will have a much more visceral connection to our food. I sincerely hope that butcher day (and things like it) be come a more regular feature of our family's life.

One last treat before the excitement begins...

The kettles were cooking early in the morning

The hogs were hung from a tree for skinning

Rob is trimming out a slab of ribs

The cuts of meat awaiting packaging

DT prepping a ham for wrapping

Yours truly sewing up a ham so it can hang and cure

Some of the fruits of our labor

Milking Goats

The kids spent the past four days down at my parents house. They had the chance to spend time with Grandma and Grandpa Lorenz collecting eggs, shoveling manure out of the mules' stall, and playing with farm cats. One of the highlights was getting to go over to some friends' house to help milk their 3 goats. The boys got to try their hand (literally) at milking and bottle feeding the baby goats. They had so much fun the first time, that they wanted to come back this morning.

Squeeze and Pull, Squeeze and Pull

Alex gets a turn

These kids are hungry!

They got to bring home 3 quarts of fresh goat milk. I thought it would have a tangy flavor, but it didn't. Tater Tot and Alex liked it. Erik thought it tasted like a goat (although he's notoriously finicky about his food). Even though we don't have room for goats at the 'burbstead, it was cool for the boys to get a chance to experience first hand where milk comes from. A big reason I'm interested in the urban homesteading lifestyle is that I want my children to have a direct and honest connection with an authentic food system. I want them to see beyond the grocery store and the over-packaged, over-processed food inside it. Little things like this can go a long way toward that goal.