What Housework?

Scapes and strawberries and poultry, oh my

SCAPES

 It's a crazy time of year. I'm learning, as we head into our sixth summer on this property, that June and October are the craziest months of the year on the ol' homestead. Not much spinning or knitting because I don't sit down, except at work, from 5 a.m.-10 p.m. Tired. But in a good way.

I've got a ton of pictures.

For starters, we've got garlic scapes, perhaps the coolest looking item in the garden.

These are the stems that grow from garlic, at least the hardneck variety. I am obsessed with the look of them.

If you keep letting them grow, they will eventually flower, but that doesn't do your garlic bulb any favors, so when they loop around, you trim them off and eat them.

Last year I only had a few, so I cut them up small and used them in omelets and salads and soups and such. This year, I had more. Here are just a few:

I chopped them and then blended them with a hearty amount of olive oil and salt. I didn't have any pine nuts or even walnuts so I guess I can't really call it garlic scape pesto, but I created a fabulous fluorescent green paste that, combined with a pile of grated parmesan, turned a bowl of linguine into a night on the town. (And I sauteed broccoli with some tonight. Awesome.) I failed to take a picture. The flavor is sort of garlicky but not the same as a garlic flavor, maybe a bit more subtle and just plain new, different and delicious. Too bad it's in such limited seasonal supply. I got about a 12-ounce jar all told.

STRAWBERRIES
Our own strawberry beds have yielded approximately 110 strawberries so far (yes, still counting them individually), with another dozen or so left to pick. That's a lot more than I expected but not enough to keep us in smoothies and jam all winter. 

So we went to a local u-pick place, Douglas Orchards, and got these:

That haul, 26 pounds, was three of us picking for an hour (with the adolescent doing more sighing than picking). Then there were two hours I spent washing and trimming. The going rate is $1.75 per pound. I have no idea if that's a decent price, but the way our beds are exploding with new vines, this may be the last year we need to buy berries. I threw most of these in the freezer, ready for me whenever I get motivated enough to make the jam. The rest became really awesome strawberry shortcake.

POULTRY

So I woke up at 2 in the morning Saturday in a panic. I knew that my husband had ordered 40 or 50 day-old meat birds a month or two ago but in the craziness of spring we had forgotten when they would be coming (and he failed to mark the date on the calendar). This year we wanted a portable coop so they could go outside and have a chance to act like real chickens, rather than factory birds, sitting in a room in our barn next to a trough of feed, getting huge and immobile and pathetic.

In the morning, we found out that the birds had actually arrived that Friday (!) but the sighing adolescent had failed to take a message. So we picked them up and put them in temporary housing, a tub:

Considering that Cornish Rock crosses grow exponentially, this was not a long-term solution. So Mark set out to find one.

Sunday morning, he drew up his plan...

(The thing at the top is for a roof vent for better air flow to keep the birds cool.)

Then he got to work.

It was a gorgeous, breezy, low-humidity blue-sky day, which we haven't had many of this year. And I'm not going to lie: I think Mark is looking pretty hunky these days, and I enjoyed the view all day.

He worked for about 10 or 11 hours straight. Here he's laid out an 8 x 12 foot frame with pressure-treated 4 x 4s and 2 x 4s in between.

 

Then plywood:

A chick or two came to check on the progress.

Mixed in with the meat birds are five araucana chicks (the egg layers that lay blue eggs), extras that the feed store was trying to get rid of. They look like chipmunks at this age.

Anyway, work continued.

Uprights made from some random spare wood we had. (People driving by thought we were building a tee pee.)

Roy, Bo and Ed found the nail gun noises captivating.

The chickens offered their advice and encouragement.

Our quality-control hen:

Our OSHA hen:

So ended Sunday.

I went to work the next day, and when I came home, the thing was finished. Mark dragged it out back with the tractor, and the chicks got a new home.

The vent works amazingly well. Even when the sun is beating down on the tin, it's cooler inside than out. I don't know if that will continue if we get super-hot weather, but so far, so good.

The purplish tin was leftover from one of Mark's construction jobs.

 

Mark built them an 18" high chicken wire fence for their run but Lily immediately came by, thinking it was an all-you-can-eat buffet, so we've since upped it to 3 feet of plastic mesh over hog panels. It seems pretty cat proof. Netting over the top (not installed yet) might help with hawks.

I'm happy to report that these birds are loving life right now. We've never tried putting meat birds on pasture; we've been told, and it certainly appeared, that they are too lazy and too heavy to move around. In fact, many people have given us ideas to make them get bigger even faster (birth to slaughter in six weeks, just like Tyson does it!). But we're actually trying to slow them down, to try to minimize health problems, such as broken legs, which have happened in the past. It's very sad and not at all the way I want my food to be raised.

These chicks are out pecking at the dirt, eating bugs and running all over the place, more so every day. They are definitely programmed to eat all the time but we are throwing a lot of their food on the ground so they have to scratch for it, and we're not keeping so much on hand as we did last year.

They're a lot more fun to watch than last year's birds.

I'm interested to see how they end up, both in size and in flavor, not to mention in health. And I should mention that the feed store had more birds to get rid of, so Mark stopped by and bought 50 more, which means we need more housing... They are, however, all spoken for; we're only keeping 20 this year.

And finally, here's Sam. I know, I know, he's not poultry but I didn't think one picture was enough to earn him his own heading.

The Buzz

So we have a lot of tall black locust trees in our yard.

Last week they came into bloom. They get white flowers that smell absolutely wonderful. And the bumblebees love them. Some years, we get thousands of bumblebees all bumping around in the trees and the sound is so loud at first you can't tell that it's just bees.

This year was not a huge year for bees, but every evening for a few nights, you could definitely hear a low buzz. And if you looked up, you could see them bumping around up there.

My husband enjoyed the view from the best possible angle.

The coolest thing we learned this year is that at a certain time of night, the bumblebees decide to catch up on their beauty sleep. I assumed they lived in hives like regular bees. But, at least at this time of year, they apparently fly solo and "roost" in the trees.

Looking closely at the bark of these black locust trees, which forms deep inverted-V-shaped grooves, we discovered that the bumblebees fit right in.

They stay there all night and are fairly late sleepers. I get up at 5:15 to let the birds out, and they are all still sound asleep in their little nooks.

They pollinate the trees and the trees provide bumblebee cozy, sheltered, rain-free lodging. Pretty cool.

*******

Now, in case you didn't know, it's been rainy in Vermont. So rainy that farmers were very late putting in corn and cutting hay and so rainy that gardeners got a really late start. Most people around here in zone 4 feel safe putting in the most delicate plants by Memorial Day, sometimes the weekend before. Not this year. Things would have floated away.

So we worked last weekend (about 10 hours on Sunday alone) and managed to plant the whole garden plus the pumpkin patch. It doesn't look too promising yet:

But here and there, things are coming up. In just a few days, the beans and the butternut squash made their appearances. I will never get over the joy that this gives me:

And this:

I love that things grow. (Sometimes I change my mind about that at harvest time, but still.)

Meanwhile, in the raised beds, established plants are growing quite well. Our first crop of strawberries is looking good:

In the past two days we've picked a whopping 17 strawberries. They're huge -- a bit tart -- but still delicious and juicy. I'm guessing we'll get maybe 2 quarts this year. Next year we should have nearly four times as much garden space just for the strawberries, so I expect an actual yield, one not measured in individual berries.

We have equally tiny but satisfying harvests of blueberries and black raspberries expected.

Someday there will be jam.

*****

I caught a random shot of cat and chicken on the porch. This is a common sight during the day. It makes me smile. The hen is hoping I'll bring her a treat. Milo doesn't trust her.

Lily chased a full-grown turkey the other day, which begs the question what she would do with it if she actually caught it. She has been a very hyper but standoffish cat (except with my husband) until this weekend, when she voluntarily fell asleep in more than one non-Mark lap, including mine. This never happens.

Exhibit A:

Now, I've been processing two fleeces as time permits, and then I was given two more last week (Cotswold, if I remember correctly). In truth I have a lot more fleece than I have the time or need for. Some of it isn't soft enough to use for sweaters or hats, so I've been thinking about different ways to use it. I could card some up thin to use as quilt batting, for instance.

Then another idea struck me, and I ran with it.

Step 1: Dye up some wool in great colors.

(This is actually some very lovely Romney from 2010 that I would use for sweaters and hats. But it was all I had that was already scoured, and I was looking for quick results.)

Step 2: Spin into a super-bulky yarn. So far I've spun and chain-plied five of these little bumplets.

Step 3: It's a secret.

I want to give this a try before I share what I'm doing. Stay tuned...

Oops, I did it again

In my last post, I shared pictures of a beautiful white Romney fleece I had recently acquired, though I do not want for fleece.

The very next weekend, at our annual perennial swap, the previous owner of that fleece brought along another, to share in lieu of plants. I was the only taker.

This is also Romney, though with a more Romney-esque large crimp than the white fleece. It is huge. It is also just fantastic. I believe I need to spin and knit something with these fleeces for the woman whose sheep they came from. She has made me very, very happy.

The timing of once again having raw fleece on my porch is perfect: I have a back-page humor essay on the very subject, taken from an old column of mine, appearing in Spin-Off magazine's summer issue. Not sure when that hits the stands; it may already be out there.

The truth is I just love raw fleece. I love the way it smells, I love the way the lanolin feels on my hands, I love the crimp. The white fleece was so delicious I have started picking it by hand rather than with the Pat Green picker because I'm getting such a kick out of touching every single lock. And look how it cards up:

Now, before those two fleeces came into my life, I had actually been doing some other spinning. I got it in my head that I wanted to ply one strand of black alpaca with some of my hand-dyed Romney, kind of fine. (Both are local fiber, so points for that, right?) So I took this:

and spun it, and plied it with this:

to make this:

The skein came out better than the picture implies, but let's face it, I'm no stickler for perfectly even yarn. I also had to spin up more alpaca to have enough. I find alpaca to be soooo dense that equal weights of wool and alpaca don't match up yardage-wise. As it is, my 358 yards weighs 6.5 ounces, and this is sport weight!

Now I'm making the Argante shawlette, which I finally got a chance to start two nights ago. I'm hesitant to work too much lace with a barberpole hand-dyed yarn, but the bulk of this is garter stitch, which I think will be OK. It's really too soon to tell. Early-morning, flash photo, ugh:

I'm hoping to give this as a gift, so I hope it turns out all right.

**********

Now, this past weekend, my stepson's girlfriend turned 21 and we had a big bash at our house. One of her requests was that she have a cake shaped like a margarita; not flat, but 3-D, like a sculpture. Ah, young optimism. I said it couldn't be done; my stepson and husband said it could. So we had a "cake-off," whereby they would build this magical margarita cake, and I would bake something practical and edible.

They had great plans, a la Cake Boss, full of rice krispie treats and marshmallow and cake and eventually, when things got tough, plywood. The basis for the margarita "stem":

After many hours of failed attempts and repeated trips to the store for more marshmallows, they came up with this base:

Next came the tough part, the bowl. They tried sponge cake and pound cake and eventually realized that despite their rebel natures, they would ultimately have to obey the law of gravity. The final attempt was a giant rice krispie treat, molded in a large mixing bowl. Even that, however, failed to hold together.

They nonetheless entered their monstrosity in the cake-off to great applause, though it took third place to my chocolate 3-layer cake and yellow 4-layer cake with fondant. Two days of work and $400 or so in marshmallows and cereal were not going to be ignored.

Behold, a margarita:

Oh look, real cake:

All worries that the birthday girl might overindulge on the big 2-1 were unfounded. But we failed to consider that her devoted boyfriend -- that sweet guy who made her a real flower lei for the party --

might not know his own limits. A few innocent bottles of homebrewed hard cider:

soon turned this fine young man:

into this:

The day didn't end well for him.

But the rest of us had a good time.

*****

We have been a dogless household for almost two years. That is not going to change any time soon; however, my sister-in-law brought over her new bloodhound for a visit.

He's just a few months old.

He moves in super-slow motion even when running.

His name is Walter.

*****

And to wrap up

• Lily got into a clump of catnip I pulled from the garden. 

• We have two broody hens and a broody hen turkey. Two of three are on dud eggs but won't give up the fight. The third one might have a chance:

• And I went through a whole photographic journaling of a noble experiment -- making stinging nettle tea to cure one of my blueberry bushes, which is yellowing -- to no avail. It would have made a great success story, had it worked. Apparently nettle tea has iron and other things that can instantly fix a yellow blueberry bush, but I think my soil just isn't acidic enough, despite the leaf-and-pine-needle mulch.

At least the strawberries are looking good.

Here's to some good weather this weekend. Our corn is up (a miracle, given all the rain). But 80 percent of the garden has not yet gone in the ground. Ladies and gentlemen, pull on your boots and grab a shovel; it's time to plant.