Food, where did you come from?

Okay, so I didn't have a day of super local foods. Our daughter is sick with a nasty bug and the day was cold, rainy and frankly, uninspiring.
Yesterday was better. Warm and sunny. We ate fried egg sandwiches (eggs from the ladies), bread from Zingerman's. Also had sauteed spinach and onions, both from the garden (the few leftover onions from last summer) and steamed fingerling potatoes from Shannon's gifted CSA share of the week (thank you, Shannon!), topped with Calder Dairy butter and chives from the back door! Very yummy!

Today I made a scrap-together sort of casserole consisting of onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, corn, and red lentils. After cooking all of the above, I put it into a casserole dish and topped it with a cup of fresh bread crumbs mixed with a 1/2 cup cheddar cheese shreds and chives. Baked at 350* for 30 minutes and had a lovely, filling dish that makes for good leftovers.
The bread crumbs came from the end of a home made loaf, flour from Westwind.

Also made scones with raisins today. Topped with a coffee glaze-- one tablespoon of incredibly strong hot coffee mixed with 1 cup powdered sugar. Made a lovely stripey glaze on the scones. Ate only one, the rest I took to the Ypsi Food Co-op's Community Meeting potluck. Unfortunately, I was too stuffed from my own dinner to partake in the potluck action. Such a shame! I live for potlucks!

At any rate, things are taking off in the garden thanks to all the rain. It's so lush and crazy out there. I hard boiled eggs today to enjoy with tomorrow's salad from the backyard! Can't wait!

Wet Garden and New Awning

Getting excited over small sprouting things. It's so nice when plants out-grow weeds. The teepees have just the beginning of pole beans. In front of those are 3 rows of Vermont Cranberry beans. To the right of that are 6 rows of potatoes. In the very back are our two compost piles. They've very small now due to plentiful rain and warm weather shrinking them down. The compost on the left is full of potato sprouts. We put the freakish end-of-the-year root cellar spuds in the compost and now they're doing their thing. The plan is to leave that pile undisturbed and let it grow as it will. Who knows what kind of potatoes we'll get out of there!

Again, wee growing things. Tomaotes, greens and very wee seedlings. The garlic and the caraway are the largest things out there right now.

Chicken condo awning. Frame was originally supposed to be about 6-8 feet long. G (as usual) got super ambitious and made it 16 feet long. The wood is ripped 2X4s and the cover is old vinyl wall covering (think institutional 1970s decor) that we scored at the Recycle Reuse center, only $3 for 20 yards.

The completely covered awning. It felt like a Wright Brothers original when we carried it out back.

The finished project, providing shade and partial shelter from the elements. Special thanks to my brother who came over to help us lift it and screw it to the garage. It was too much for this lone pregnant chick to hold overhead! And a very special thanks to G, for putting so much time and love into this project!

I really want to get some sort of tiki lamps to string along the edge of this awning! I swear it looks like one of those massive roll out awnings you see on campers in RV parks. Next week, the chicken shuffle board deck installation!

Life in the Backyard

Last year's potatoes (the few we must have missed), are showing themselves in various places around the garden. Here's the lettuce that is not quite big enough yet. My fierce desire for green things these days make me feel like a goat. Even the grass looks tasty.

As we were stringing the hops today, we found this cute little bat hanging out on the south side of the garage.

Food Roots Thursday...
what did we eat today?
We ate our very local eggs, foccacia from the River Street bakery, and salad greens from the Tuesday farmer's market that were topped with fresh, local goat cheese. Later we ate tortilla chips and salsa from Hamtramck, with locally made cottage cheese and sour cream.

I am anxiously waiting for our pipsqueak plants to get large enough to eat from, tho I know that time will be here soon enough. The basement shelves are full of the ever-growing population of canning jars of all sizes-- all but 12 or so are empty. The jars that still contain something are there for a reason. They hold the things we'll probably not make again. So if any of you want some "Chow Chow Relish" ala the Ball canning book (like a picalilly, if you know what that is) and a few jars of "Summer Salsa", from the same book, just let me know. The summer salsa is your typical tomato, onion, garlic, cilantro deal, but with mint, pears, and peaches thrown in. It would've been fine except for the mint. I like the fruit with the salsa, but the mint over-powers it all. Live and learn, right?

Little Green Things Heal

Comfrey
Amazing healing herb

Once you plant seeds in the garden, you walk around every day scrutinizing every green thing that pushes up from the earth.
I've been doing this for the past 3-4 weeks. Today, it seems I can finally differentiate seedlings from weeds, grass and wiley Creeping Charley. The potatoes are popping up, the broccoli, collards, turnips, carrots and beets are showing themselves to be just a little taller than their invasive neighbors that I am now gleefully stripping away. The thinning process has begun!

I had this feeling today in the sun, as I took two large loads of laundry off the line (and realized I wan't internally grumbling about it), that regardless of the little stressors in our current life, here is where I want to be. Here is where I've wanted to be for a long, long time. Things feel right. I'm at peace.

And it feels really good.

The Ladies Have Arrived

Here are the four ladies new to our backyard. Hopefully they'll like their digs and spacious living quarters. These birds are nearly 2 years old. I couldn't deal with raising wee chicks this spring. Maybe next year.

We completed the run this morning. Stretching flimsy chicken wire as tight as possible is not fun. The twine strung along the top portion of the picture is to support the hops that are just beginning to grow toward the garage.

The number 34 ramp. Again, all wood is re-purposed. Only the hardware, chicken wire, feeder and waterer are new. So far, a very thrifty process.

The boudoir, complete with the chicken equivalent of silk sheets.

More Chicken Coop Updates

Blurry pic of the new gate installed yesterday. Will add chicken wire to gate and run this weekend.

This is the door within a door for the hens to enter/exit the coop. Tomorrow we'll probably build their little gangplank leading up to it. It has a Patrick (of Sponge Bob) knob on it.

Higher up on the big door we now have a vent of sorts. This is the material G used when he built a radiator box earlier this year for the upstairs radiator.

G doing the hard work of digging post holes. It really livens up when you hit the clay!

Small boy trapped in post hole.

Mama and boy hard at work watching the guy with the post hole digger.

Thanks to the complete Who the Heck Knows nature of The Big 3 (or Big 2, or Big 1 1/2), G has been off all week! It has started sooner than we anticipated, but fortunately, the call was made to Unenjoyment today to start the process. In the meantime, G has been crazy busy tweaking the coop process. If all goes well tomorrow, we may be able to bring some lady hens home by Sunday. Essentially all that is left is the run enclosure. We have the wire for that and I will definitely be home all weekend now that the last May mama had her baby Wednesday afternoon. I have a small break of being off-call--- which feels wonderful!

More pics to come!

Getting Ready for the Ladies

First, cut an enormous hole in the back of your garage.

Prop open the hole and create a big box insert (on an angle to muck the chicken shite from).

Long piano hinge for the top of big door ($8.42-Lowe's).

The box coming together.

Nesting box and two roosts.

Yesterday, G worked on the chicken coop. Using the back corner of our garage, he cleared a space and cut a big door in the back wall. This huge door hinges open to clean out the coop when necessary. We will be putting in a smaller hen door with a ramp for everyday use of letting the ladies in and out. The inside of the box will get a few coats of weather sealant with plenty of time to air before we bring the hens home. The chicken run itself will run most of the length of the garage, about 20 feet by 4-5 feet wide. We will be able to access the nesting box from inside the garage with another lifting door/hatch (sort of visible in the fourth picture).
So far, we have been fortunate enough to get a lot of scrap wood from my brother. We bought the piano hinge, chicken wire ($60), and posts ($18). The weather sealant we inherited a few years back when G's dad passed away. So all in all, an inexpensive project.
We can pick up the hens whenever we are ready. Good stuff.

G also made 3 wooden teepees for our pole beans. I usually plant bush beans, but after reading so many gardening books and seed catalogs that told me I was eating inferior beans, I decided to try pole beans this year. The bottom of the teepees are visible in the second picture. I'm excited to see those grow. They make really bright, pretty flowers and will look nice contrasted with the insane hops growing behind them.

Yesterday my Girl Scout co-conspirator and I took the girls on their last big field trip of the year- horse back riding. I forgot what a Little Lexington South Lyon is. There are dozens of horse farms. We went to Great Escape Stables. The women and girls there were sweet and great with our girls. We had a good time and it was judged best field trip of the year. Walking out of the barn, we spotted this enormous pile of horse manure. "You're sitting on a gold mine!" I told the woman. She said they were actually building a holding box of sorts for the manure, as they were selling it to a company that will somehow convert it into energy. Apparently, they need 4 months worth at a time before they come pick it up, which is why they need to house it somewhere.
I told her she should start selling it as compost too. She said I could come back and haul away as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted.
Never even thought of it, but I'm sure any one of those horse farms would happily give you their manure.
I probably won't take her up on it though. Soon enough, we'll have enough chicken manure to see us through. :)
More pics to follow as it comes together.

Food Roots Thursday

embarking on something new here...
my pal, S over at Nourishing Days has started Foots Roots Thursday where food/gardening bloggers are encouraged to write about the roots of their food. Or rather, where you food has come from.

Being that it's May and things are just beginning to sprout in our gardens again, we don't have anything fresh to eat from our plots except for chives and dandelion greens!
Eating Local Last Year, What a Blessing
Being self-employed, my financial life is typically made up of feast or famine periods. It's all good and we get through both just fine with money savvy and lots of faith that it will all work out. Last year was a feast year, albeit, unintentionally. While I have always kept a good-sized garden, I never took on growing all that I could until last year. We took the Eat Local Challenge, although it ended prematurely when I was completely sick with first trimester nausea in February and desperately craved Cheerios and Lay's Potato Chips. :) We made it 8 months.
We learned a lot in those 8 months. We canned a ton of food and also invested in a 1/4 cow, 1/2 a pig, 1/2 a lamb and our typical 25 chickens, plus our year-round eggs. It worked out great. The freezer was full of meat and a ton of vegetables and frozen fruit.
In March, I had to go full-on grocery shopping for the first time since May of last year. I spent $150 and nearly cried walking out of the store. I used to spend that much nearly every week before we started the uber growing. Not long after that, I finally did our taxes. Since both my husband and I have radically changing paychecks (me because of my self-employed status and he because he works within the auto industry-ack), I never can depend on an average amount coming in from week to week. I was shocked to see that he had actually made $20K less than he usually does and I made a little more than I did last year. If someone had told me at the beginning of last year that we would have such a huge income flux, I would've had months of anxiety and probably would have rushed out and found 3 part time jobs. Instead, I was blissfully unaware. I can only contribute this to growing as much of our own food as possible. Outside of our mortgage, our biggest source of money going out would typically be food.

The only thing I didn't like last year was the sudden increase in the amount of meat our family was eating. I had been a vegetarian for 7 years. Our daughter didn't have meat until she was nearly 6 years old. I started off slowly with eating meat again. We would have the occasional chicken, or sometimes turkey sausage. Last spring we jumped into having a deep freezer full of animal, which we ended up using nearly every day. So strange and also something I didn't feel totally comfortable with.

This spring, as our freezer empties day to day, we've decided to return to more of our former vegetarian ways. Both for health and financial reasons. There will be no 1/4 cow this spring. There will be chickens to be processed at the end of summer once again.

It appears we're looking at a 3 month lay-off for my husband this summer and this new baby will be due in early October. I'm still fine to work and plan on doing so until the first contractions set in. :)Am I worried? Not so much. I am thankful that last year we learned how to do so much to change our eating and shopping habits to save a lot of money. Last year's Eat Local Challenge proved to be a hidden blessing for this year and years to come.

So what are we eating today?
Potato, lentil, onion, carrot, collards soup with bread from the River Street bakery. Only the carrots and onion are locally raised/bought, and the collards are from last fall's garden. Oh yeah, it's being cooked in turkey stock, from last Thanksgiving Day's turkey, which we raised ourselves. Not bad for early May in Michigan. Had pancakes this morning with flour from Westwind Milling Co. with homemade yogurt, last summer's frozen strawberries and local honey. If it's not grown in our backyard, then we try our best to get Michigan-grown. The closer to home, the better.

Plant Potatoes When Dandelions Bloom

I've been a black-nailed beauty this past week. As I planted 6 rows of potatoes (Rose Apple Finn fingerlings and Russets this year)-thanks to my lovely Mr. Workhorse, and rows of collards, radishes, various squashes, beets, carrots, and much more, I laughed as I remembered a pregnant woman who didn't hire me as her midwife (but still I ended up assisting that birth) because as she said, "You're small and I can't imagine you ever getting your hands dirty."
One, I am not "small" and two, my hands feel like they're only clean between November and March. It still kind of makes me twitch when I think of it, but oh well. Clearly, she didn't know the hands of which she spoke.
If it's not someone else's bodily fluids (and yes I wear gloves), then it's dirt, mud, compost and more. (I do not wear gloves in the garden!)

At any rate, I feel like we've gotten a lot accomplished over the past 5 days, including a couple of babies being born. :) I told G I just might have to be pregnant every summer to get out of all the shoveling and hoeing that I've been happily handing over to him.

That blue box thing is our first raised bed in the front yard. It may be the only one this year. The box itself is actually the old trundle bed S used to have under her old day bed. Before it was a trundle, it was actually her loft bed. That box of painted blue pine has been used in so many ways, it makes me happy to see it in the front yard full of dirt (and various herb seeds and Egyptian onions).

I was looking online at Fedco's tuber information page as I was reviewing potato planting information, and liked how they described when to plant potatoes: generally, when the dandelions are in bloom.
Perfect, I'll remember that simple sentence for life. I've not quite totally wrapped my lazy self around really getting to know soil temperatures. I figure when the ground isn't sopping wet and the dandelions are in bloom seems a fine time to plant.

We shall see.