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.

Comments

[Jennifer]

$1.75/lb. is a great price! DH just went picking with the kids in Hardwick and paid twice that.

I love scapes, too! I made nut-free pesto in the past and it turned out great. I haven't seen any scapes at the farmer's market here yet. Next year we'll grow our own garlic and harvest our own.

[trek]

Did you come by the blog and see where our chickens had to go away?

Yours are so cute looking and that is one fine coop.

[diane]

Wow, I'd say spring has sprung in many ways out your way.
Strawberries were @!# 5.99/pound here in Storrs! and the scale was off in their favor! Only satifaction was that we had eaten our weight's worth while picking. Have a great summer.

[Kitten]

I remember the days of the spring construction project.

[AnnaMarie]

Great price on strawberries, it's $4.99 for a quart of day old at the farm stand here.

A friend of mine puts the water as far from the food as she can with her meat birds. She says it makes them move about more. Just a thought.

[June]

Can I just say, without sounding skeevy, that your hubby is H.O.T.? LOL. Those biceps!

Awesome portable coop, too. You must have read Joel Salatin's stuff about rotating chickens after cows in the same pasture? Are you going to try that?

[Caroline]

What a project! Backyard chicken are still on my "dream" list. Ha, ha, I agree with June. I do have to admit that I noticed your husband's biceps too.

[paula]

That is one cool coop! We had some houdini chickens that kept escaping out of the pen & dh put them in the barn with the meatbirds. Poor girls! ...that's a fate worse than death! (it desperately needs to be cleaned out!) They were so happy = laying their eggs out under the spruce trees or who knows where?

[Abby]

I raised Cornish Rock cross birds once upon a time. They had a coop with a roost and were allowed to roam, but after a while, they were content to lay in their own waste. They did grow fast, though. Good luck with yours. Making them scratch for their food is a good idea.

[Abby]

P.S. Just finished a pair of socks using A Piece of Vermont yarn, and started another right away. Love that stuff!

[Spinningfishwife]

Yup, your OH is a nice sight to have in your back yard. But I'm even more impressed at his woodworking skills. To be able to design and construct that sort of thing in a weekend is most impressive. My OH can't even assemble an Ikea flatpack bookshelf, sigh.

[gayle]

We've definitely had fewer leg problems with our meatbirds since we gave them a nice yard to play in. I think that keeping them walking around at an early age helps their muscle development as they gain all that weight. That's my theory, anyway.
And they seem much happier, waddling through the grass, chasing bugs (rather ineffectively, but at least they're trying) and taking dust baths.
Love your new coop!

[Mia]

Um, Lily will still try to find a way into her all you can eat buffet. Cats are smart. At least she will have to work for it!

I have not tried it since I can't get garlic scapes at my market, but I have read you can pickle them. Might be worth trying if you get extras.

I am no help with the price of strawberries since I am allergic to them and avoid them like the plague.

And nice that you have managed to find homes for the extra chickens. I wish I could have a few. Darn living in town!

[Kristen]

Sadly, our local pick your own strawberry crop was wiped out by Japanese beetle grubs, and we have to buy pre-packaged unless as I don't feel like driving to another.
That is some project. It's nice the chickens can enjoy semi-freedom before, gulp, you-know-what.
Love the chicken inspection crew!

[Tiffany Larsen]

Wow, cool! This is exactly like the chicken coop we had in our farm when I was a young girl growing in Minnesota, haha. My dad built it using scraps of wood and chicken wire. I think it's still there in the farm. I haven't seen it for a long time, unfortunately.