Posts from — May 2009

Thanks a billion to our new friend Nels for some awesome photos from the “not a potluck” BBQ and dance party at the A-frame on Saturday night.

As I’ve mentioned, most everything out here is a potluck. Even the “not a potluck” BBQ turned into … you guessed it… a party where people bring food to share: also known as… well you get the picture.

Anyway, at least this party was unique in the unusually high proportion of meat-to-veggies up for grabs. There were – count them! – at least 5 kinds of meat:

• steak
• lamb roast
• hot dogs
• unidentified white fish
• salmon

Yummy! And also Cheese-its, or some organic equivalent that tasted very close to the real deliciously processed thing.

Lucy poo-pooing the cheese-its.

Any excuse to get closer: massage circle around the kitchen island.

Getting the party started, slowly, slowly.

Me and Steve the Geologist, tearing it up.

Lucy looking happy, staring out at the awesome starry sky.

What does this have to do with farming, you ask? Well, not much, only it proves that farmers really do have the most fun.

I’m taking a page out of my beautiful sister Becky’s Parisian adventure log and counting down the days to the arrival of my beau.

It wasn’t actually this hot dog. But you get the idea.

It was noon, and I was at a festival of sorts, and the hot dogs had perfect grill lines and they were offering stone-ground mustard, and no food politics, no knowledge of factory farming, food safety (or lack thereof), or the ethics of meat eating could stop me from buying and chowing that $2 all-beef Polish sausage.

It’s amazing how much community pressure can change the way you feel (and, in most cases, act) when it comes to food. The word around here is almost always POTLUCK, and at said potlucks, there are generally not too many hot dogs to be found. More likely, you’ll come up on a big bowl of quinoa tossed with cucumbers, or marinated tofu, or brown rice with carrots and onions, or a big batch of stir-fried kale.

I’m baking my own bread and making my own granola and yogurt. For the first time in my life, I know exactly what it is I’m eating pretty much all of the time and it feels natural and easy because I’m living on a farm and getting most of my food here, and I’m around a lot of people who live on farms and also care a lot about good, whole, real foods.

I’ve listened to a lot of talks like this one and read a lot of books like this one and this one that lay out logically the many reasons — nutritional, environmental, ethical, aesthetic — to eat more greens and to eat more simply, more locally, more seasonally and I’ve changed my habits some, but coming here has changed my habits dramatically.

I still ate that delicious hot dog, but I felt like a sneak and a rebel. The same way I feel when I bring home non-organic butter from Marketplace. Probably America could use a little more of that kind of healthy guilt for all our own goods.

* Delicious, juicy hot dog photo courtesy of “Mike Johnson – TheBusyBrain.com“

Today Pritha and I went by University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Marine Station Labs to check out the open house.

We got to hear a rockin’ presentation on the effects of CO2 on ocean pH and the role of phytoplankton in carbon sequestration. We got free popcorn and we got to pet a sea cucumber. But the best part was checking out the diatoms in the room with the microscope.

These two guys were unstoppable. They showed us baby clams, baby jellyfish, copepods of all sizes, crazy worms; swimmers, floaters, predators, prey, and the prettiest of all, the amazing pillbox-shaped diatoms. Diatoms alone, diatoms in crazy stacks just like in the cartoons when someone piles up ice cream scoops to the sky.

They captivated the little girl below in the lifevest and it made me remember the day when I first unwrapped my microscope when I was 9 or 10, and looked at a drop of water from my grandma’s fishpond.

Sometimes I wish I was a scientist.

Spinach, Black Beans and Sriracha

Saute a big bunch of spinach in a pan (4-5 cups). Season with black pepper. When almost done, add a cup or two of leftover black beans, boiled the night before. Squirt liberally with Sriracha Rooster Chili. Make a hole in the middle, fry an egg, over-easy so the yolk runs out all over your beans… Scarf.

I don’t know if it’s totally by chance that JH Kunstler made it twice into the category “people saying smart pithy things.”

I found this interview the other day and loved it not only for what he says, but also for how much my circle of acquaintances here on the island unwittingly (?) embrace his verging on tongue-in-cheek exhortations to a simpler life (emphasis mine):

“Worry about [...] the need to find new ways to be useful to your fellow human beings (and incidentally perhaps earn a living). Worry about finding a community to live in that is cohesive enough to stave off anarchy at the local level. Worry about building the best garden you can and making good compost. Worry about how difficult it is to learn how to play a musical instrument at age 47.”

You just wouldn’t believe the number of ukelele players you’ll find around here.

Broiler chicks around 6 weeks, heading outside to sun

As Susan likes to say, our chickens have a very very nice life, and one very bad day; in the case of this batch, that day’s already decided: next Sunday, May 24th is chicken processing.

So I figured before that day rolls round, I ought to pay a little homage to our brood and the life they’ve led.

We have three sets of chickens here on the farm right now, all pastured, which in our case means that they not only have access to fresh green grass, but (as I can attest) they go out there and really use that grass up — picking worms, foraging greens, digging up holes for dirt baths — until the plot is grass has been dominated and we move them on to a new patch.

First there are the layers, who, as their name suggests, lay the eggs. They live in the chicken coop with daily access to a lovely green lawn via a guillotine door. The pullets, or layers-in-training, live in a hoophouse in the south pasture next door to their “big sisters” until after the big day when they replace the oldest cohort of layers who will be processed and sold for stew.

Finally, there are the broilers who live their 8 short weeks in two moveable hoophouses up in the north pasture near the farmhouse. These are the guys (and girls) who bred expressly for meat.

Still young in the hoophouse

We got our chicks in late March. They arrived just the day before I did. We bought a straight run of 110 Cornish Rock Cross chicks (Barred Rock + White Cornish), which means we got both the boys and the girls, and we split them into two houses. When they arrived, they were a few days old, and unable to do so much as drink for themselves. Before I arrived, Lucy, Colin and Peter had already spent the day before teaching the babies to drink by dipping each feathery head into the water trough. Despite the tutorial, three chicks ended up falling into the water, getting wet, and succumbing to hypothermia.

Little chicks need a lot of attention. In the first 3 weeks or so, before their feathers fill out, temperature is everything. The intern rotation put me on chicken duty, so in my first 3 weeks, I became responsible for monitoring and tweaking two heat lamps and an electric heater four to five times per day to make sure the chicks stayed at a toasty 90 degrees. During this time, the chicks stayed inside the hoophouse — grass and sunlight didn’t figure in until week 4 or 5.

One of the first days in the sun

A broiler has been bred for one main vocation: eating. And the daily chicken chores revolve around enabling this passion (and cleaning up after its effects). Refilling feed trays, refilling grit (chickens need sand or grit in their gullets to help digest grains), refilling waterers, and managing waste by laying fresh hay or moving the coop wholesale to fresh pasture — these are the main tasks of the chicken master.

Come and get it!

Sand helps the baby chicks to digest

The broilers’ personalities are very different than the layers. At the risk of being insulting, I will have to simply call it as I see it and say they’re stupider. They don’t get out of the way of feet moving towards them. They run into the plastic walls of the hoophouse when the door is open right beside them. And when a giant bald eagle landed outside the fence, the chickens were supremely unflapped until the eagle reached through the fence to grab one of their compatriots in its beak.

Trio of eagles, hovering over the coops

Even so, and despite my hardheartedness, the chicks can tug at my heart, like in the case of a “Limpy,” a hen that began its life with problems and continued to suffer “a Failure to Thrive.” She persevered for many weeks, until eventually she was separated for chicken hospice. Limpy, plus the three losses to hypothermia, and one gone to the eagle, made for a total of 5 casualties.

Limpy, RIP

For the past few weeks, we have been moving the broiler coops everyday at 4pm on a small red dolly to new, fresh grass. It’s a lot of work for a few chickens, but I am looking forward to eating some meat, and it’s nice to know that they really do seem to have a nice life — clean surroundings with enough to eat and drink and protection from predators (other than us). It will be very interesting to see how I feel after the day of slaughter. I’ve been eating a whole lot less meat lately, but I still don’t think I have any strong feelings against eating animals that are humanely and sustainably raised.

As my good friend Naree notes, there are lots of reasons for being vegetarian. Peter Singer and Jim Mason also make some good points in this book I just listened to. But for me, I guess there are just so many ways to become a more perfect person, and the difference between eating fewer animal products and eschewing them entirely seems personally very stark and unpleasant, but globally, pretty insignificant.

My sourdough starter is slowly growing in strength. I have to believe that the wild yeast you find on a farm is somehow much more vigorous than anything you could get in the suburbs (I know it’s ridiculous, but doesn’t it seem like more wholesome, hardy stuff would waft in on that sweet, sweet country air?)

Anyway, these boules were yummy, though still super-dense (and underdone).

I have finished reading the entire first section of Peter Reinhart’s The Breadbaker’s Apprentice and fee particularly ready to take on new challenges in breadbaking realm. Maybe nothing quite this intense and thorough (hat’s off to those who are taking this challenge), but some good, hands-on (mouth-on?) learning at my own pace.

I moved back to the US in December 2008. After 3 months in the hometown, I moved to a small biointensive, organic farm off the coast of Washington state to learn about how to grow things. You can check out the new digs here.

It’s late, but here’s a post in honor of my beautiful mum who inspires and sustains me and puts up with my craziness and loves me in spite of my psychoses, neuroses, and all other manners of -ses.

I guess mum and I have always been close — first daughter love with none of that crazy Joy Luck Club drama — but in recent years, we’ve found so many common joys: cooking, gardening, design, entertaining, organizing, that we can’t help but go crazy when we’re together. My mum grounds me. She reminds me to be happy. She understands how I think, and reminds me that my way isn’t the only way.

So here’s a 5-minute poem in honor of my lovely momma:

You know me,
love me,
because you’re part me
or technically, I guess,
I’m part you.

When I was small,
I slept like a princess in your high four-poster bed;
dad was away.

So I curled,
soundly, against you.
I dreamed
and woke up happy.

And now,
when I need something that I can’t find,
when

something’s

missing

I put my head into your shoulder
and find

something I need

just there.