Chicken- the Gift that Keeps on Giving

I've been talking about ending the lives of our hens for at least a year. They were quite old, as laying birds go. We had 5- of those, 4 of them were almost four years old, 1 was 2 1/2. Last Friday, we finally did the deed.
A little chicken info:
Laying hens typically start laying eggs when they're 4 months old or so (provided it's not the middle of winter). From then they usually lay one egg a day for their first year or so, until winter comes (less light means no eggs, unless you provide artificial light, as they do in factory-farmed chickens) or until their first moult. During moult, the bird loses much of its feathers and doesn't lay during that time. When their feathers grow back, they lay less often. For us, that meant we received maybe 3-5 eggs a week from the older birds.
One of our chickens never laid, but we kept her around because she was sweet (this is not acceptable chicken farmer behavior!). In fall of 2009, we added the two Black Australorps, who were pullets at the time (chicken teenagers, ready to lay). They were quite productive for some time. Well, that is until a crazy dog broke into our yard and mangled one, making it so my husband had to finish her off in a snowy compassion killing.
It seemed the older girls went through two, if not three moults, and over this past summer, we were getting one egg a day from five chickens (!), that egg coming from the remaining two year old Black Australorp. All summer  and fall we fed them. Letting them out in the morning, locking them in their coop each night. A habit, I'm finding now that they're gone, as ingrained in me as brushing my teeth before bed or seeking the press pot for coffee each morning.
Part of putting it off for so long was me trying to get over just killing them ourselves. Greg has processed dozens of chickens (we've done meat birds a few years in a row. The first time, he processed them. The next year we put them in  a dog cage and took them to be processed.). I'm still squeamish, which given my profession, seems silly. But during birth, blood is in a totally different context, and I can recognize normal and what is not normal in that scenario. Ending a life, even that of a chicken was just too much for me. If I had to, if my kids were so hungry that I needed to do so to feed them, of course I could do it. That not being the case, I finally ended up deciding to take them into be processed at a mere $2.25 a piece. Drop them off in the morning, pick them up in the afternoon, each wrapped in their own plastic bag to be tucked into the chest freezer.
I was interested to see what shape these birds would be in once they free of feathers. Greg made me laugh saying once they scalded the feathers off, they'd be shocked to find that they were suddenly holding an old brown football. When one raises meat birds, those chickens are usually killed at 6-8 weeks of age. They eat like gluttons and grow huge very rapidly (this is how they've been bred). Our laying hens were four years old! Would they be tough as old footballs?
Yesterday we ate one for dinner and it was pretty darn good. Granted, I first slow cooked her for 12+ hours before taking all the meat off that I could. (Such a tiny chicken! Maybe only 2-3 pounds? I forgot to weigh her.) Then I slow cooked the meat in a home made bbq sauce for another 4-5 hours. We ate pulled chicken last night, with Parker rolls and coleslaw and frozen summer corn. It was quite the July dinner in December- and very, very good.
After cutting off all the meat I could from the chicken, I then boiled the carcass in a large pot for stock.
Eating dinner last night, I was definitely filled with gratitude for all those chickens have given us. Years of eggs, then the meat, and finally very rich and delicious stock which will continue to feed us. Amazing. And totally worth the feed and the rituals created by keeping chickens.
If you see me walking over the frozen grass of our backyard in the early morning, only to see me abruptly stop, shake my head and walk back into the house, you'll know I'm still working out my habits of the past few years.
In the Spring, we'll start all over again.

Fall slipped into Winter

Challah loaf made for Thanksgiving in a very Easter-ish bird's-eggs-in-nest shape!

As usual, when I don't update for a long time, I rely on pictures hastily taken on my phone to help document our life. El, at Fast Grow the Weeds wrote this piece titled, Is blogging dead? Or is it just dying? In it she wonders why so many of her favorite bloggers have dried up, or at least seriously dwindled in their blogging. She blames Facebook, and I definitely agree. I miss blogging, but know that I am guilty for relying on Facebook's ability to grant me a fast check-in with the world and even my community. Not only do I hardly blog at all, I also rarely check in on my favorite blogs anymore, and I don't like that. Part of that is I rarely sit down to a computer. I check and write emails through my phone, and of course, check Facebook through my phone.Sitting down to an actual keyboard is rare. Part of that is because I now have a two year old who likes to help me type or when she sees the laptop open, begs to watch Caillou episodes on You Tube (a sometimes bribe to help buy me peace when I'm cooking dinner). At any rate, I miss the way blogging would slow me down and help me write about our household, our garden and what we're eating. Typically I would write when the kids were all sleeping, or otherwise somehow not needing my attention (which is rare). I'd like to blog more. We'll see how I can make that happen. 

 The Thanksgiving turkey. Huge for our family. Bought from the farm whose name escapes me this morning. But you know, the turkey farm that the Ypsi Food Co-op gets their birds from.

 The first real snow last week. It's funny to see the Quidditch Stand from the street now that the leaves are gone. 

 Halloween. Have I posted this already? Forgive me if I have. It's such a great picture! E was a lego brick (I knew my stacks of Calder Dairy butter would come in handy some day!!), S is Victor- Victoria and M is a toasty kitty (she still asks me to draw eyeliner "kitty cat whiskers" nearly every day, even though it's December).

 I used the biggest garden potato in our Thanksgiving day mashed potatoes. Up until that day, when I'd get potatoes for dinner, I'd pick that one up and place it aside, thinking it too lovely and huge to use for an "ordinary" dinner! 

 My husband brought these home a couple weeks ago. We have an ancient sewing machine (think Triangle Shirtwaist Company!!) with a foot treadle and a broken  LEATHER band that turns the bobbin (easily replaced with a vacuum band). It's very cool but honestly we have NO room for it. The organ is a pump organ (see the foot pumps?) from around 1910 (?). The word work is amazingly intact and beautiful. There's another piece that screws onto the top/back of the organ not pictured here that makes it another 2 1/2 feet taller. That piece has lovely needlework flower squares in it. The valves are stuck, but we're told with G's handiness, he can easily repair it. Even so, none of us play piano, let alone a pump organ. Oh, and I did I mention we have NO room for it? Just the same, it's beautiful and fun and I'm starting to figure out where/if we can move it into the house. Fun and lovely, yes. But if you've got old stuff that is even only slightly functional and you want to get rid of it, don't ask my husband if he wants it, ok?

 Last week my mom, M girl and I went to Hamtramck to visit the Polish Art Center and to get delicious food from Srodek's market. I bought pierogies (kraut/kielbasa and potato/bacon) and also a pound of thinly sliced smoked Canadian bacon. Served with our counter-top fermented red cabbage/carrot sauerkraut it was AMAZING! Seriously though, what's not to like about dough fried in butter with onions? Srodek's smelled so good. I realized that the smell I had always associated with old people (ahem, my maternal grandparents) was actually the smell of kielbasa and various smoked Polish meat. Who knew?! There were sausages and hunks of meat hanging all along the back wall, and the women working there would just grab a hunk of dried meat with their bare hands (gasp!) and cut off whatever you needed. It reminded me of the guy at Whole Foods who has a beard and has to wear that ridiculous beard hair net because he works the pizza ovens. I don't like hair in my food anymore than the next person. And to be fair, the meat those women were handling was dried/cured/smoked. There was something kind of nice about seeing that though. 

Gloves. I have a love/hate thing for them. (Going off a tangent here...) I remember the first time I had to check a woman's cervix for dilation when I was a student midwife. I put my sterile gloved hand in and looked at my preceptor and immediately said, "I feel like I can't feel anything with this stupid glove on!!" Of course I had to quickly get over that for my safety and for the woman's safety. But it's fun to look at old obstetric/midwifery text books and see old photos of ungloved hands catching babies. It looks so strange! When baby M was born (she came really fast), I remember noticing maybe ten minutes or so after she was out that my friend and midwife didn't wear gloves to catch her. I apologized that she hadn't had time to put gloves on. She told me she had time, she just didn't want to  because it was me, my baby. And I so got that, and was so touched. (There was also no internal exams to be done, it was just catching a quick moving baby!) Gloves, no gloves. It can be a meaningful metaphor in my life. 

 And since we're talking a little about birth. M is all about PlayDoh these days. Being two, her favorite things to make are snakes. We make rows of them. We're not the sort of family who can keep PlayDoh colors from mixing 30 seconds after opening them, so they're constantly swirling masses of color until they just assume a beige tone. The "snake" above looked uncannily like a newly born umbilical cord. :)

Here's a little cabinet I bought last week at a local antique shop. I'm painting it a robin's egg blue, but it's drying very slowly in the garage because it's so cold out. It's very small, I believe someone's Papa crafted this for a child's play kitchen. I'm going to put new knobs on it and get load it up with utensils for M for Christmas. One of her favorite things to do (besides make PlayDoh snakes) is to play with cups, bowls and a cup of dried beans. They end up everywhere, of course, but it's a delight watching her transfer them from bowl to bowl, while stirring, singing, and hearing them Ping! off of things.

Never know what I'll find when I download pics

I have never been so bad about downloading our pictures! I just did and realized our entire summer was documented in 50 or so frames. Seeing that it's only 35* out right now, it's very nice to see beautiful summer evening snapshots from the garden. Here's E, stealthily looking for lightening bugs, sometime this summer.

 And the legs of the Quidditch Stand in the background.

 Little M, looking quite babyish here (at least to me). I was just at a potluck this evening and I was laughing with another parent about these Little Tykes red cars. Everyone with a kid 3 or younger seems to have one, yet no one I know has actually ever bought one. They just keep getting handed down. Which is cool. It took us ten years to get one (never had one when S or E were toddlers)!!

 This made me laugh. I don't know who did this or took the picture. It's fun having kids who take your camera out for a spin. 

 Here's M on her second birthday a few weeks back. She does this cute thing where she bites her bottom lip when she's feeling shy, like when we whip the camera out. 

 We had a fair share of gorgeous praying mantises late this summer! HUGE and beautiful! This particular one hung out on the back porch for 5 straight days. I'd pick him up and move him to the nearby planting bed and he'd make his way back to the house and just hang out on the porch or the wall. I was nervous one of us would accidently squash him. I don't think we did, unless someone's not telling me something. They all know what a "save the bugs!" freak I am, wandering around the house with a glass and magazine postcard trying to catch and release spiders that are big enough to wink at you.

M continues to amaze us all with her stellar potty skills. There's always a stack of magazines to flip through in the bathroom. Here she's flipping through a Lego catalog. Big sister S caught her here. A child just can't seem to escape childhood without an embarrassing potty photo or two.

Nearly done...

I've had a small list on the fridge of things left to do before the gardens are *really* done. Now, I've only got one thing left to do, and that's pickle some more beets.
A local farm stand was about to close, so G and I snagged up another 5 dozen sweet corn, a 25# bag of beets and a huge bag of onions. We also had 8 cabbages to deal with in the garden and a couple rows of chard and kale. The last beastly groundhog took down the kale but seemed to leave everything else alone UNTIL Saturday morning when I went to let the chickens out and feed them and I noticed the biggest cabbage was half-eaten! I literally growled out loud and stomped over to the cabbages in my pink, fluffy slippers and scrappy bathrobe to inspect the damage. I growled again and began tearing cabbages out of the ground in a huff. Dirt was flying everywhere and my jammies got plenty dirty.

I came back into the house with 7 cabbages and threw them into the sink. I washed, chopped, and salted them (green and purple cabbages) and shredded several large carrots and threw them all in a crock for sauerkraut. I curse the groundhog, but at least he/she got me moving on the kraut I've been meaning to make for weeks.

Now that cabbages are gone, the groundhog has taken down most of the chard. That's fine, I processed most of what I wanted from it anyway. I'd trap the darn varmint, but I loaned our trap to friends who had a raccoon coming into their cat door every night to eat cat food from their mudroom!

I also had a ton of garlic to plant, both soft and hard neck varieties. I did that last night. Besides waiting for the leaves to fall and a few tomato plants to take down, I'm just about done with the garden. And that feels good.

Bring on the weather that pushes me to make bread and soup and meat pies and more. :)

Putting Things to Rest and Celebrating

I absolutely love this time of year.
As I was growing up my mother would always lament the end of summer and how dreary everything would become as autumn would begin.
I have never seen it that way though. There are so many new beginnings! Maybe it's because school begins in September and that always felt like the marker of the new year. My birthday was last weekend, so as an adult, that always feels a little like new years too. And even though I'm not Jewish, Rosh Hashanah just started yesterday.
It doesn't feel like the end of anything, instead it feels like now is the time to put down roots for new ideas and beginnings. We just bought 3# of rye seed to plant in the gardens for a cover crop. Typically we just mulch a ton of leaves on the gardens, but this year we've decided to do a cover crop in an attempt to pump up the garden. The one garden where the potatoes were this year has been used every year for the past 11 years. It's likely sort of tired despite chicken poo and on-and-off composting. I need to clean up/harvest stuff in the middle garden so that I can plant the rye there as well.
This past spring I won an auction "service" at the kid's school for S's teacher (who is a super cool guy, a great teacher, father to twin two year olds (!) and a Master Gardener) to come to our place and "assess" our gardens. We never got it together to have him visit this spring, so he brought his family over this past Sunday. Part of his consultation was collecting a big soil sample from all over the gardens to send away to Amherst, MA to be tested. He was the one to encourage us planting a cover crop. It'll be interesting to see what the soil results are like. I'm praying low to no lead since I've never tested it and this is a 160 year old property. Ay yi yi.
We also bought a couple of pounds of seed garlic yesterday. That makes for two hard neck varieties (one batch taken from some of what I harvested this summer) and one soft neck variety. If I weren't so lazy, I'd pop up and look at the varieties. I'll need to get that into the ground soon too.

G's days off have been switched from normal weekends to Thursday and Friday off. This was his first week on the new schedule and he got called in both days. Sigh. While it's good financially to have some over time, I always miss him when I plan on having him home with me. However, it's really the first time in 3 years that the opportunity for over time has been an option. We made up for it by going on a "date" sans children to the garden store while also grabbing a quick cup of coffee! It's the little things. I'm also so very thankful for a sweet grandma upstairs who said Yes when asked last minute if she'd watch said children.

Tomorrow marks M's second birthday!! So exciting!
And because I'm such a poor planner, other parties were put in front of hers! And by this I mean that both our older kids were invited to very-hard-to-turn-down parties tomorrow and my mother is going to a 50th wedding anniversary party for her brother. So we're having a little party for M on Sunday (even though her Daddy will be working). I'm planning on making my favorite challah recipe (New Years!), a big pot of soup, and having a LOT of apples around.

September Picture Update

 Oh, what a blog slacker I have been. Other more important things have been happening around here. And that's a good thing. As for the garden and food preserving, I admit to being a passive slacker. And that's okay. On the treehouse front, things have gone pretty well. G and S picked out crazy Brady Bunch material from Ikea for me to whip up into curtains. Above is the south wall with said curtains. The west window has the same (to the left in this frame). It's really lovely up there. Lots of light. You can see part of the roof on the above photo. For now, the walls only have single coat of white primer on. It makes my amazing, perfectionist (I say this with love) husband crazy that we can't make it as he sees it in his head (due to not being independently wealthy!)! He wants insulation, drywall, paint, window framing complete, proper furniture, etc... I keep saying, "Babe! It's a Tree. House. We've got years to make it how we want it!" It's hard to be patient with reality. I so get it.

 Here's G balancing precariously at about 18 feet above the ground putting the roofing panels in place. My most stressful day of being his assistant. I kept wondering how the ambulance would make it's way all the way to the back yard... fortunately, no one fell off the roof!

 Lacto-fermented pickles. FAIL. Okay, so actually this was the first time they stayed crunchy. I haven't tried counter-top pickles in at least 10 years due to soggy pickles. However, I clearly put too much salt in them. I rinsed a batch and tried storing them in a less salty brine, but then they got soggy. Damn. I should have just canned them. I know I would have wasted all that precious bacteria had I done so, but at least they'd be edible. Perhaps I can tie them to trees in the woods for winter time deer salt licks. Ack.

 S dressed as a maid in a mid-summer production with the local youth theater group. Always fun there! This was her fourth (or maybe 5th?!) time acting with them. Love it!

 Peaches! From our tree! This was the first year since we've planted this tree that we harvested peaches! Granted, not a whole lot of them, but still! Yum! We got a 9 x 13 cake pan of peach cobbler from this year's "harvest". Obviously there's other things in this basket that did not end up in the cobbler...

I've canned NADA this year. I processed and froze corn from a local farm. I've also frozen lots of cilantro, garlic scapes, and kale. I've dehydrated a ton of garlic, tomatoes, strawberries and currants. I made tomato glut this afternoon that is now in the freezer. I will likely make more sauerkraut when I harvest the cabbage. We've got tomatoes continuing to ripen out there, a lot of leafy greens, some beets and the entire potato patch to harvest yet. But that's it. See?
A very garden passive summer.

 Miss S turned 12 on September 1st. Holy cow, I've got a 7th grader! A very wonderful, amazing, funny, helpful, sweetheart of a girl, So sweet she's letting her little sister help her blow out the candles on her cake! She also decided to cut off all her hair in a decidedly brave move a few days before school was to begin. I love it! And more importantly, so does S!

 All 3 kiddos at the "fish park". Can hardly see E, but he's there. :)

 I took the kids swimming at the local pool the day before Labor Day since Labor Day was going to be 64 degrees. Even though the temp was 70 or so, we were still the only folks there. The life guards were all wearing hoodies! I admit, I didn't get in either. It was windy and cold! The kids being kids, swam with blue lips saying, "Awww, Mom! It's not that bad! You should get in!" Instead I sat pool-side in jeans and t-shirt, wrapped in a towel!

Tree house. Windows are all in. Curtains hung. We just need to figure out how we're building the railing and then build the stairs. I love it. I'm thankful for a heck of a crafty husband. Ready though to start tearing down the garden and prepping for winter.

Tired of Wood and Grateful for Many Little (and not so little)Things

Forgive me if you're friends with me on Facebook and have seen some of these before. I'd much rather blog than post on FB, but it's always a time thing and how little there seems to be on any given day (and that's all right!). I love this picture of M- picking/eating strawberries and looking the epitome of summer and good eats. 

 On July 2 (our E's seventh birthday!), we had a crazy, violent summer storm blow through that made the sky various shades of Superman ice cream and trees to bend literally sideways- that is, until one tree in particular broke clear in half. It fell directly on our potatoes and I was just beginning to moan about my precious potatoes until I realized how much was spared in the actually very good landing of that tree. We've got a deep back yard but it's fairly packed full. The tree could have:

• fallen on the nearly complete tree house
• fallen on the power line that runs over the tree house, causing God only knows kind of damage/fire
• fallen on the wooden swing set
• fallen on the chicken run

When you look at that picture above, it's hard to see, but it's the yellowish spot half way up the tree trunk that marks the break. You can see the tree next to it continues well out of the frame. This tree was just as tall.

 Above is the top half of the tree. It did also manage to knock down my two pole bean teepees and uproot a couple bean plants, but I just replanted them and stuck the teepees deep in the ground again. Our neighbors were over the fence in a second, in the rain, with a chainsaw cutting the tree up to get them off my potatoes. Is that sweet, or what?! Really, we're surrounded by such good people. 

The potatoes were mostly okay. Some plants were broken off at ground level, but most just squashed a bit. We've let them be and everything looks to be sprucing back up nicely. And again, for all the things that could have been hit, I have no complaints.

 Last week I harvested the garlic. We got around 60-70 heads of mostly good size. Again, feeling super grateful for how well they grew. My friend A at Dragonwood Farm gave me the garlic to plant last fall. I'm a little wary of saving too many downstairs in our cool, though sometimes damp basement. Once we're well into October, the humidity is low enough for storage down there. I've never grown soft neck garlic varieties, but I'm told they store longer and better than hard neck types. Maybe I'll try those next year. At any rate, I wanted to see what I could do to preserve them a little longer. I decided to try dehydrating several cloves to use later in winter meals. Peeling fresh garlic is surprisingly easy and sitting on the kitchen floor for two hours doing so felt like meditation (similar to shelling peas?). Once I had a bowl of garlic cloves peeled, I sliced them in the Cuisinart processor and placed the slices single-layer in the dehydrator.

 It only took around 10-12 hours and then I had nearly a quart jar full of beautiful, dried garlic slices and pieces. It smells amazing! I think I'll do more, as I have plenty more garlic heads to use this way. This morning I roasted three full heads to add to a white bean dip with fresh basil and parsley. So simple, so good. Totally worth it to heat up the kitchen for a short while!

Here's Greg chopping down the rest of that mostly dead tree. We spent a good 5-6 hours outside yesterday dealing with all that tree stuff. It was hot as blazes but it felt good to work together to clear all that wood and branches and leaves. I often think about the pros and cons of city vs. country living. I day dream about moving to a farm in Vermont where it is legal and supportive to practice midwifery and to also eat/grow whatever and wherever.Yesterday as we worked in our urban/suburban back yard, it felt an awful lot like working on a farm. Sawing, bundling, carrying heavy pieces of wood while being covered in sweat and carrying around about a cup and half of itchy wood chips in my bra while children and chickens clucked all around us. It partly sucked, of course. But then you'd think, Well, who else would do this work? We can't pay someone to deal with all of this. Besides, their equipment would likely mess up the garden! I felt very grateful for the gift of labor yesterday. For the gift of our own little slice of earth to care for and maintain while also minding all the growing food out there. 

This will just have to do. 

And it does just fine.