Beautiful day!

We’re getting 6 to 8 eggs a day now. We have enough for our needs and are able to give eggs away to close friends by the dozen. The weather is in the 70’s today. The girls love it! Ellie plastered herself against the side of the coop and stretched her wing out to sun herself. By the time I got my camera, Clarissa had gotten too close, so I wasn’t able to get a picture of the outstretched wing.

Ellie suns herself by the coop.

I have a billion things to do as usual today, but I could not help but spend some time just watching the chickens enjoy the afternoon. Here’s a little video of Jennifer taking a dust bath and Ingrid stretching:

 

Hilda and I pulled the rest of the carrots today. We have enough for several weeks. Some of the carrots grew too close together and wrapped around each other.

The rest of the carrots

Carrots in love

Not much other news here today. I’ve just been really busy with work. Ptui.

Production steps up

Last Tuesday, the girls produced 7 eggs—2 green and 5 brown. There were 4 Wednesday, 6 Thursday, 3 Friday, and 8 Saturday. EIGHT! Three of them were green.  Soon we will have more than we can use.  Eventually, we should have an equal number of green and brown, if all hens lay at the same rate. We’ve gotten 4 so far today (one green).

Saturday's harvest

Yesterday while I was making a fascinating video clip for my students on meiosis, Hilda canned the sauerkraut. I wasn’t sure it was done because it was not very “sauer”, but it wasn’t bubbling. I’m sure it will be fine. I believe that is the last canning for the year. I put the canner back in the box.

Sauerkraut ready for storage

We’ve been a bit lax harvesting the carrots. Some are fine; some are enormous; some have several roots; some of these are downright obscene.

Nude carrot dancer (male)

We’ve had two rainy days in a row, praise be. For all that, it hasn’t added up to much. Today is very pleasant, in the 60’s, and the moisture makes the air feel like spring. As if! The chickens have loved being out in the drizzle. In anticipation of the rain coming, I went out Friday to pull up the last of the landscape cloth. It’s backbreaking work to put it down and pull it up. It’s usually about two days on either end, and it saves a lot of backbreaking work pulling weeds all summer long. Rolling it up on Friday was nasty, dusty work. I am still blowing dirt out of my nose (TMI, probably). But as I keep telling myself, dust trumps mud!

Po-tay-to, po-tah-to

It's time to clean out the gardens and get ready for winter. Hilda did most of the work cleaning up the tomatoes. I helped her finish on Friday afternoon. Saturday we worked on the north garden. We got all the drip irrigation lines rolled up for storage. I cleaned out the peppers, beans, cantaloupe, and zucchini. I had big plans for continuing the work today, but after rolling up the landscape cloth from the potatoes yesterday, my back told me I’d better wait a bit before doing any more of that.
We did get two major chores done today. The rest of the potatoes are dug and the garlic is planted. We've been harvesting potatoes since July, and made a good dent in them while they were at their best. My experiment with planting whole sprouted potatoes from last year was a failure. The seed potato apparently rotted, and the rot spread to this year's tubers. Living and learning.
Here are some pictures from the potato harvest.

The potato harvest. Top row, left to right: Red Pontiac, Superior, Kennebec. Bottom row, L to R: Viking Red, Gold Rush Russet. For scale, my feet are off to the right, and the Kennebec are in a paper box.

Tiny and damaged potatoes for immediate use.
There are always some that get cut by the shovel.

The "dog head" potato

The "rubber ducky" potato. Or is it a chicken?

This is probably more potatoes than we can eat before they get all sprouty and wrinkly. As Terry often reminds me, potatoes are commercially available. I get into a mindset, though, where it doesn't occur to me that I can buy produce. Last winter, for example, it struck me as a new thought that I could buy lettuce. Imagine! A salad in February! I just get caught up seasonality. Not only do I not think about buying produce out of season, I get irritated when I see recipes for, say, asparagus and cherry tomatoes. Come on! Those two are NEVER available at the same time.
We have had as many as 4 eggs a day, still mostly brown. The Aracaunas are taking their sweet time at maturing. We have one green egg about every other day. When I get impatient, however, I remind myself that we will likely have more eggs than we can handle in the blink of an eye. We had the smallest egg yet a few days ago—0.8 oz. It was so cute!

Left to right: Grocery store large, teensy-weensy egg (0.8 oz), our usual pullet egg.

Hilda thought that I should have the teensy-weensy egg. She wondered if it was yolkless. When she was growing up, their young chickens sometimes laid eggs with no yolks. The egg had a yolk, but no yolk membrane! How odd.

Clockwise from top: Pullet egg, teensy-weensy egg with no yolk membrane, anemic grocery store large egg. The downside of blogging is that I overcook my eggs.

Sauerkraut Sunday

September 30 was Sauerkraut Sunday. In preparation, Hilda watered the cabbage on Saturday. We are still woefully dry. The cabbage needs to be well-hydrated so it will give up enough fluid to cover the leaves during fermentation. The first time we made sauerkraut way back when, I did not understand that it was an anaerobic process. The sauerkraut was not completely covered with brine, and it rotted.
Pat and Nancy came over to help. Hilda put all the leaves in the dining table so we could set up an assembly line.

 

Production line

Hilda trimmed off the outer leaves and washed the cabbages at the sink. She piled them up for Pat, who cut them in quarters.  Hilda also took the pictures, which is why we don’t have one of her.

Pat cuts the cabbages in half

I put on my wire mesh glove and sliced the cabbage on the sauerkraut cutter. It’s like a mandolin with three blades and high wooden sides. It came with a tongue-and-groove safety box, but it is cumbersome to try to keep ones fingers behind the box while keeping the cabbage correctly oriented over the blades. The glove is way better. Pat can’t do the slicer. Despite showing gruesome training videos for the Red Cross for 19 years, the risk of seeing actual blood gives her the willies.

I slice the cabbage with my hand protected by a glove woven from plastic-covered wires

Nancy weighed the cabbage one pound at a time, which is all that would fit on the scale. When she got 5 pounds in a giant bowl, she added the salt and mixed it. The salted cabbage was packed into a crock.

Nancy mixes the cabbage and salt....

...and packs it into a crock.

We put 20 pounds of salted cabbage in our big crock. Pat and Nancy put 5 pounds in one crock and 2.5 pounds in another to take home. We weighted the top with zip-top bags filled with water.  In a short time, the salt pulled water from the cabbage (a process we call osmosis in the business), and it looked as if there would be plenty of brine. The bubbles that signaled successful fermentation were evident before bedtime. Now we wait until the bubbling stops.
After we got the sauerkraut processing all cleaned up, we adjourned to the deck for nachos, salsa, and guacamole. It was nice to be out on the deck, even if a bit cool. We hardly used the deck all summer long because of the heat. The chickens wandered around in their run, keeping us company with their gentle chicken noises.