Crouching Pullet, Hidden Huevo

Following the monumental event that shall forever be known around here as Egg Day, our chicken fortunes have been fickle. We were blessed with two gorgeous eggs in one day, then nothing at all for two days in a row. As of this morning, the mystery has been solved. Check out my sneaky chick –



That’s my Annabel, who typically, when let out of the coop to graze, either heads straight for the garden to devour my infant peas & arugula, or follows me around like a lost puppy. However, yesterday upon being sprung from the run, she high-tailed it straight over to the woodpile/junk collection area behind our garage and mysteriously disappeared for a few minutes. This morning, she did the same, and being a little slow on the uptake, I finally figured out why –



She seems to prefer her little dugout to the nest box in the henhouse. This little henny has gone from barren to broody in the space of a week! What I’m wondering now, is whether or not I should slip one or two of my dummy eggs into her hidey-hole after I collect her eggs? I don’t want to squash her motherly instinct by raiding her “secret” nest, but I’m too nervous about predators getting wind of our eggs to risk leaving them there for any length of time. If anyone has any thoughts on how to best handle this, I’m open to suggestions.

EGGS!

Hallalujah! While checking on the hens this afternoon, I discovered our first egg. I'd been pretty worried that we weren't going to get one before the laydies closed up shop for the winter, but I guess we lucked out. I decided to let the girls find the egg as soon as they got home from school, and when Scarlet opened the nest box door, lo and behold there were two eggs in there! Both were small and a lovely pinkish brown, and must, therefore be Annabel's, she being our only non-Americauna (blue egg) hen. Behold the proud Grannies -



:)

The Apple Man Cometh...

...tomorrow! Mom & I ordered a 40-pound box of Fuji apples as part of a Lions Club fundraiser, and they're due to be delivered tomorrow. I'm thinking applesauce for sure, but does anyone have any other tried-and-true canning or freezer-friendly recipe suggestions for an abundance of apples?

Sauerkraut für doof Leute

I don’t speak German, which is probably very obvious to those of you who do, considering my hastily translated title; roughly, Sauerkraut for Dummies (That’s me!). Even so, I am proud to be of German heritage. My great-great grandparents emigrated from the town of Chemnitz, coming to this country in the 1880’s and settling amongst many of their countrymen and women in northern Minnesota. Over a century later and several states west of where they started, our family is trying to recover some of our German family history and traditions. Project number one – sauerkraut.

After doing a little research on making sauerkraut, I was pleased to find that the process was relatively simple. In fact, I found that I already had everything that I’d need, minus the cabbage, already in the kitchen, owing to my zeal for winemaking and canning. Here’s what it takes –

-Cabbage (or carrots, turnips, apples, etc. – kraut is a process, not a specific food)
-Canning salt
-A good sized crock with a lid (I used my 6-gallon food grade wine bucket instead. You can pick one up at any homebrew store.)
-Kitchen scale

That’s it. Seriously! The recipe/process that I used is an amalgam of the many recipes I found in books and online, with a generous sprinkling of advice from my far more experienced sauerkraut-making friends at KitchenGardeners.org. Essentially, you clean and core your cabbage, and slice or grate it as thinly as possible (we cut sliced ours with knives, but kraut cutters or mandolines are also good options), with one recipe calling for the cabbage shreds to be as thin as a quarter. Weigh your shredded cabbage as you go, adding roughly 1.5 tsp of canning salt per pound of cabbage. The salt will soften the cabbage and cause it to release much of its liquid, thus creating the brine in which the cabbage will ferment.

At this point, you’ll begin putting your cabbage and brine into your crock or bucket. It will likely take a little muscle to get the cabbage really jammed down into your container tightly, well below the level of the brine (4-5 inches is recommended), for which some folks employ a pounder our a stout mallet. My husband just punched and pressed ours down with his fists. After beating your cabbage into submission, a plate and weight must then be placed inside your fermentation container to hold the cabbage down, lest it float around and encourage funky molds to grow. We used a large salad plate that is just a little smaller around than the inside of our bucket, topped with a very heavy stoneware bowl for weight. Slap a lid on that puppy and you’re done. Mother Nature then steps in and if all goes well, fermentation begins. We are only on day 3 of our kraut, so I have no results to report at this point, but we are checking it daily for signs of progress or distress. No scary smells or mold, so I’m optimistic that we will have some edible sauerkraut in around 4-6 weeks. I’ll let y’all know how it goes!

In the mean time, here are a few pics of our cabbages’ journey thus far, from field to bucket, with more to come as things move along.

Are you there, God? It's me, Chicken.

I am a mother of two young girls. A job that has always been complicated, nerve-wracking and amazing all at the same time.

Girls with throw you for a loop. One day they’re digging worms and climbing trees, the next they’re telling you who they have decided that they’re going to marry, and how that, when they’re finally allowed to wear makeup, they’ll be caking it on “just like a Bratz doll”, (I think I’m having chest pains.) All this, mind you, by the age of nine.

Without getting too soapbox-y, I daresay that I am not alone in my concern that our daughters’ innocent childhood years are becoming less and less so with each passing year. Thanks for everything, Paris Hilton!

Keeping all that in mind, when it comes to my other girlies – the chickens – I find myself actually rooting for puberty. Their fuzzy babyhoods were a lot of fun. Their awkward “tween” phase was very awkward and also pretty funny. To look at them, you’d swear that they were mommas in the making, and yet, our flock has yet to bless us with so much as a single egg. El zilcho. With fall coming down hard and fast here in Western Washington, I’m concerned that my hens will go dormant for the winter before we’ve ever seen our first egg.

How can I get these chickies across that magical threshold called puberty and into the egg business? I’ve been so busy shutting down this premature “maturity” thing around here, that now I haven’t the slightest clue about how to actually encourage it. Maybe if I hang a few posters of hunky, misunderstood roosters around the coop and pipe in some Marvin Gaye tunes…

End of Season Numbers

Since most everything in the garden has lately (or very nearly) given up the ghost, I’ve decided to go ahead and tally up my harvest totals for the spring and summer seasons. My numbers are very approximate being that I am far from perfect in the recordkeeping department, and taking into account kid and chicken pilferage…my totals are of the more or less variety.

Anyhoo, here we go-

Rhubarb – 5 lbs, 2 oz
Cilantro – 6 cups
Mints – 3 cups
Strawberries – 6 pints +/- (These have also just begun fruiting again, but these latest berries will be included on my Fall/Winter totals)
Shelling Peas – 3 cups +/-
Lettuce/Arugula – 7 cups +/- (Most went to seed very soon after planting.)
Kale – unrecorded – but still producing
Wild, foraged cherries – 7 lbs, 5 oz
Basil – 3 cups +/-
Baby Yukon Gold Potatoes – 2 lbs, 11 oz
Wild Foraged Berries (Huckleberries, Salmonberries, Trailing Blackberries) – 1 lb, 4 oz
Zucchini – 24 lbs, 10oz
Blueberries – 1 lb, 10 oz
Raspberries – 3 oz (this was a really bad year for my raspberries)
Delicata Squash – 11 lbs, 8 oz
Vidalia Onions – 8 oz (This is my second year of utterly pathetic onions. I think I’m done with them.)
Hazelnuts – 1 lb, 2 oz
Wild Himalayan Blackberries – 4 lbs, 8 oz
Concord Grapes – 51+ lbs!!!
Cantaloupe – 12 oz (This was our first try. They were tiny, but SO good!)
Tomatoes by type-
Slicing – 32 lbs, 9 oz
Cooking – 30 lbs, 14 oz
Tomatillos – 9 lbs, 8 oz

For a grand total of – 172+ lbs grown and 13+ lbs foraged. These totals don’t include our very modest seafood take for this year, two pink salmon, five red rock crab, plus the odd trout. This being my first year or recordkeeping in detail, I don’t really have anything to compare these numbers to. However, I am certain that this is the single best year that I’ve had for both tomatoes and grapes, both of which went bonkers. Besides being the first year that we have kept detailed records of our garden’s yield, this year’s garden was also a learning experience in that we tried quite a few new crops, used primarily our own compost as soil/fertilizer, and began chicken keeping. We’ve learned at least as much about what doesn’t work in our garden as we’ve learned what does. For instance, tomatoes and squash are obvious shoo-ins for next year’s garden, whereas onions and brussel sprouts will not be returning, due to their disappointing yields.

As a continuation of this year’s experiments, I have, for the first time, planted a few late summer crops for a Fall/Winter harvest, including carrots, arugula, cilantro and snap peas. So, God and weather willing, we will have some fresh veggies and greens to brighten out days in the depths of winter.

I will continue to keep records of my slowly trickling-in fruits and veggies, because my inner Geek compels me to do so, but for all intents and purposes, I consider the garden wrapped up for the year, and not a moment too soon – I’m whooped. ;-)

Attack of the Fruit Flies

One of the few downsides to having a nearly nonstop stream of fresh fruits and vegetables in your kitchen is the appearance of the very persistent fruit fly. Try as I might to take the compost out daily, the fruit flies always seem to find a way to hang on. Our recently adopted hobby of winemaking has not helped. I see fruit flies buzzing around the airlocks on our jugs of wine, presumably drowning their sorrow over their inability to reach the sweet, sweet wine itself, and instead huffing up the powerful fermentation gasses that are regularly belched out via the airlock.

In essence, our kitchen is now an extremely popular fruit fly singles bar.

I have tried good old fashioned fly paper, with some success, and gave one of these traps a whirl, with decent results, but the surest way to catch them still seems to be leaving my cup of coffee unattended for 5 minutes. I tip my cup up to take a drink, and if I'm lucky, notice that I have a passenger in my coffee just in time to abort the sip. If I didn't already have it in for these guys, that'd do it. Not cool, flies, not cool.