The Naked Bird Blues

The hennies and roos have undertaken their annual molt in earnest, and man are they looking ROUGH these days.

One sad-looking Polish hennie, our Gracie-girl,  mid-molt.

Beyond the sorry look of them, chickens in molt are also non-layers. It has been over a week since we've had an egg from them. My Fall weather-induced baking binge will have to wait until the gals are feeling more forthcoming, because the idea of buying eggs has become downright, well...

... inconceivable!

And the irony of feeling thusly about the lack of a good egg is not lost on me.

Homegrown Lavender Soap

Bill and I made our second batch of soap yesterday, we're calling it Homegrown Lavender.

The soap is still caustic, so I can't poke and prod it like I'd like to, but I can smell it and take its picture, so viola.

It looks like most of the poppy seeds have floated to the top, so there'll be a scrubby side and a non-scrubby side to this soap. Interesting...

As you can see, the color is not perfect. We chose to use all-natural scents and tints in our soaps, so they tend not to be the technicolor explosion that synthetically colored soaps are. I'd rather err on the side of boring at this point. Trying to imagine myself standing behind a product made with laboratory-designed scents and colors makes me squirm. Our beautiful goat milk deserves better than that!

As much as I'm not crazy in love with this color, I have to concede that it has improved drastically overnight. When we first poured it into the mold (a fancy term for a cardboard box lined with visqueen), it was the brownish-grey of elderly oatmeal.

Six more weeks until it's ready to use and sell. We'll be right down to the wire as far as selling this at our bazaars. I'm going to buy some pH strips at the homebrew store so that I can make doubly sure that this is completely saponified and 100% safe and gentle before offering it for sale. And while I'm at the homebrew store I might pick up a little citric acid, so I can give these homemade bath bombs a go too. They use a lot of the same ingredients that we already have on hand for soap making, and I think they'd be a neat complimentary product to offer alongside the soap and knitted washcloths and scrubbies.

It's a little weird that my Postmodern Milkmaid ventures have taken a toiletry-esque turn, after having been pretty much all about apparel last year. Hopefully, using the lessons learned from last year's sales, and the unique resources that are available to us through our little farm (goat milk, homegrown botanicals) we'll get a little leg up this year, and set ourselves apart from some of the other makers and crafters.

Six weeks until we know for sure if any of this worked, let alone whether or not people find it appealing. That niggling little worry should be great for my insomnia!

Back to knitting my face off in the meantime. ;)

Can-o-rama, the Second Act

My homegirls and I started an informal monthly food preservation-fest last Fall that we dubbed The Bitchin' Kitchen Collective. I think we met maybe three times last year, before scheduling conflicts, Holidays and general chaos tore our little gathering asunder.

I'm bringing sexy jammin' back.

Yesterday, my girl Kristin and I had a little fiesta de salsa. The 25 pounds of free tomatillos that I was able to get via Craigslist were our launching point. She and I both hunted around for a good salsa verde recipe that could be made with the hot water bath canning method, and settled on this one, with just a few minor tweaks. Our bounty of tomatillos meant that we had enough veg to make eleven batches worth of salsa. Dios mio! Times like these are when it is especially handy to have a hubby who is into home brewing and willing to share his giant brewpot and propane burner with you. I also owe my guy some serious props for being willing to shuttle jars back and forth from the kitchen to the water bath canner bubbling away on the covered porch because a) it was raining, and b) he had to bob and weave past two very excited and curious Great Pyrenees both ways. Canning is not for sissies!

Our efforts yielded 10 pints and 36 half pints of salsa, over the course of a 7 hour-long, mellow Sunday spent with one of my bestest girls, drinking wine and shooting the breeze. Life is pretty darn good. :)

Next up - more jam and jelly and probably a little wine as well, made with apples, pears, rose hips, hawthorn, rowan berries, and whatever else we might forage or stumble upon.

The Weekend Loometh

Maybe loometh is too dark a word? The weekend... cometh aggressively(eth)? Let's just say we're packing a whole bunch of homesteady-type activities into the next 48 hours.

On Saturday - We're trying our first batch of homemade goats milk soap. I'm still on the hunt for the perfect recipe. I'm leaning toward something creamsicle-ish with sweet orange oil and vanilla beans. We'll see if chemistry is my friend!

Also on Saturday, we'll be planting a few trees and medicinal perennials - Beaked Hazel (nut), Echinacea, Yarrow and a few others. I scored big at a closeout sale on water-wise plants. Not that a shortage of water has ever been a problem here (this is Boggy Hollow), but plants that don't mind a little accidental neglect on my part will most definitely do better in the long run.

Lastly, we plan to list 3 or 4 of our goats for sale this weekend, which could translate to the unparallelled joy that is wrangling disgruntled goats during an epic downpour. Yay?

Sunday, it's salsa-jam 2012. My girl Kristin and I scored 25 pounds of free, perfectly ripe tomatillos via craigslist, so we're going to devote the day to making enough salsa verde to feed a small army.

Free tomatillos. Thanks, Kathy!

Spending the day chopping, stirring and jarring up salsa may not sound like hard work, but after 8 or 10 hours of salsa fest, me and my good friend, giant jug o' red wine, would beg to differ.

Here's to a rainy, drainy, productive weekend!

Waste

I've always been a frugal creature; not one to waste unnecessarily, and a bit of a pack rat when it comes to anything I perceive as potentially having a little life left in it. It's a blessing and a curse, really, in terms of the oddments and "junk" that I stockpile save. It is a relatively small percentage of the time that I end up doing anything with those spare buttons that come with my husband's work shirts, as he usually manages to wear the shirts out well before the buttons can go missing, but, even still, I can't just throw them away. I just... can't.

So I'm the first to admit that there can be too much of a good thing in terms of saving stuff. The HUGE exception to that rule in my book is food. There is always a body - be it human, chicken, ruminant, insect or microbe - that could use up that food's energy to a productive end and, in many cases, also produce a useful by-product (eggs, milk, compost, penicillin) besides. Therefore it pains me when I see any food irretrievably wasted.

To clarify exactly what I mean by irretrievably wasted, I'd define it like this - Useful potential energy that is irresponsibly cast off in such a way that renders it permanently unavailable for use by another living thing. Humans are the only ones who make waste like this.

If your family doesn't finish their dinner, saving the leftovers, composting them or sharing the food with critters would all be viable non-waste alternatives for taking advantage of the potential energy that is the raison d'etre, the very definition of food, and therefore a reasonable use of the food's energetic potential. Really, just about anything besides entombing it in non-biodegradable packaging and burying it 50 feet deep under thousands of tons of other trash, making it totally impossible to ever degrade, would be a reasonable use of the food energy. It's actually pretty easy to do.

Even so, it isn't unheard of to read tales of gross mismanagement of perfectly edible produce, as detailed in this story about an "unauthorized" public garden that was needlessly destroyed days before being harvested. As if that weren't tragedy enough, the ruined crops were then taken to a landfill and disposed of. I mean... why?

Irretrievable waste is hands-down the most complete waste of food, but there are others, though much less egregious, that still get under my skin. 

A major frustration that I'm experiencing a lot lately has to do with unharvested fruit trees. Washington state is known the world over for it's amazing apples. They grow almost effortlessly here, which is no doubt part of the reason that they are nearly as ubiquitous in our neighborhoods, parks and woodlands as the Douglas Fir is. But maybe having affordable, world-class apples available at the supermarket year-round has caused us to overlook the miracle of free food growing in our own front yards?

In Autumn, you can't help but notice all of the beautiful apples, pears, walnuts and hazelnuts hanging heavy in the trees, begging to be picked. And yet a vast majority of the time, the fruit will be left to drop and rot, perfect fodder for squirrels, yellow jackets and hungry deer, but seen as somehow less than their shiny supermarket counterparts, and therefore unfit and unworthy of human consumption. Have we lost our minds?

Yet another article (I've been reading a lot...) discusses just how much food we Americans waste on account of our acquired snobbiness and our reckless there's always more where that came from attitude. To illustrate just how insanely, ridiculously picky we've become as food shoppers, the article offers this bit of advice to producers and retailers for taking better advantage of "imperfect" produce -

Companies should look for alternatives in their supply chain, such as making so-called baby carrots out of carrots too bent to be sold whole at the retail level.

*Shakes Head* This is for real. People are going without and we're splitting hairs over carrot presentability. Phase two of my emotional reaction to this article (after weeping interspersed with multiple face-palms) was anger. I'm pissed, and that makes me loud, especially when it comes to things I feel passionately about. Taking care of people is one of those things.

I am only one person, but I am 100% responsible for choosing the food eaten by 4 people, 2 dogs, 20 chickens, 9 goats, 2 bunnies, 2 parakeets and one sassy turtle, therefore, my resolve to use food responsibly and with thanks has an impact that should not be, and indeed, is not taken lightly. I can participate in the system that keeps these problems going, or I can refuse, and take care of my family and farm on terms that both my head and my heart can live with.

Therefore, I resolve to grow, buy and use food even more responsibly than I have. I will buy less, grow and forage more, preserve more and use the food we do buy, find and grow as fully as can be done, and with all the respect it deserves.

Please join me.

Puppy Love

Our sleeping beauty, sweet Celeste

Growing up, we had quite the assortment of dogs come into our lives through the years. Our family opened our home and hearts to everything from a Bull Mastiff (a lumbering, gentle, ox named Red), a goofy, deceptively fierce-looking Doberman (Rip), a sassy, self-possessed Lhasa Apso (Yoohoo), a Terrier/Shi-tzu mix (Mikey) to a very unprissy toy Poodle, Gee-Gee. All were rescued.

So I grew up with no leanings toward a particular breed or type of dog. I also didn't grow up with the notion that many people seem to have, wherein "getting a dog" means that you get a brand new, unnamed, history-free puppy. All of our dogs came with names, quirks and histories, for better or worse.

So it wasn't really a surprise that last year, when we decided that our farm & family were ready to add a dog to our ever-expanding brood, that we immediately looked into adopting. I did my due diligence in researching dog breeds that were a good fit for life on a farm - protective yet gentle. My research lead me to a class of dogs that, up until that point, I'd never heard of, Livestock Guardian Dogs, (LGD's). 

The general disposition of an LGD hit exactly the right notes in terms of what sort of dog we were seeking, a defender or critters and kids alike, sweet-tempered and smart. How I landed on the Great Pyrenees specifically, I don't remember, but boy am I glad I did. :)

In addition to adopting our boy, Rex, (a Great Pyrenees mix) last December, this past weekend we took in our first foster dog, Celeste, also a Great Pyrenees. She and Rexy fell in like peas and carrots! She didn't have much in the way of attention or socialization in her previous life, but she is all sweetness, and as Pyrs are known to do, is learning a lot from Rex's example. It has been impossible not to fall in love with this little girl.

That being said, we do not have any plans to adopt Celeste ourselves. We'll miss her terribly when she finally moves on to her forever home, but, for now, we've decided that keeping our home open to fostering one (or eventually, multiple) pups in need is a higher priority than adopting a dog outright. Rex is a very accommodating boy, and a really good Alpha for our fosters to learn from, but he has first claim on our time and resources, and we don't want to overwhelm him or take any time or attention away from him. So far, it hasn't been an issue - he's loved having a playmate again! - but we're vigilant about making sure that he remains secure in his place as the big cheese around here. 

These past couple days have really affirmed that fostering is for us. Celeste has given us, especially Rex, so much companionship and love already. Being able to share our lives with these amazing critters is one of the greatest gifts of this farm life we've embarked upon.

If you're interested in learning more about LGDs, Great Pyrenees dogs or pet foster and adoption in general, I've included a few links that might help sell you on the idea, but be warned - once you open your heart to a pet in need, you kinda-sorta become addicted to being surrounded by fluffy little lovebugs all day.

Consider opening your home to a rescued pet. Be each other's miracle. :)

Great Pyrenees Rescue Society

Saving Pyrs In Need

Petfinder

General foster dog FAQ's (courtesy of the Seattle Animal Shelter)

The Case for Foraging

Harvested on a 90-minute walk in the woods with my 9 year-old:

Organically grown* Bosc Pears - $5.98/pound (8 pounds, 8 ounces = $50.83)

Organically grown* crab apples - $1.00/pound (10 ounces = about 63cents)

Organically grown* mystery apples - $1.00/pound (4 pounds, 12 ounces = $4.75)
{In season, in Washington state, apples can get pretty cheap, but this would still be a very hard to find price for organics.}

Organically grown* rose hips - $3.00/4 ounces (4 ounces = $3.00)

Organically grown*/Wild rowan (ash) berries - $4.00/pound (8 ounces = $2.00)

Organically grown*/Wild hawthorn berries/haws - $5.50/pound (4 ounces = $1.38)

Market value of fruit harvested today** = $62.59

Washington state minimum wage as of 9/29/12 = $9.04/hour

Amount of hours (before taxes) needed to work at minimum wage to earn $62.59 = 6.9 hours

*This assumes that since these are in the middle of the woods, that they are organic/unsprayed. Unless, of course, Montsanto has Round-Up ninja lumberjacks on it's payroll, which is certainly possible.

**Prices per pound are based on the most conservative prices I was able to find per item per pound on the interwebs.