Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Chick update


The chicks are eating a shocking amount of food and growing with amazing speed. We’ve been taking the food away at night to keep them from growing faster than their legs can support. They are ravenous in the morning. Jackie is holding his/her own amongst the larger chicks. She gets run over a lot, but she pops back up and escapes when she’s had enough. I don’t know if the size change will be visible in the pictures or not. The development of the wing feathers can be seen.

Broiler on May 22
Broiler on May 27
Jackie on May 22. He/she isn't growing as fast, although he/she did fly about  a foot off the floor this week. We put screens over the brooder box.

Pat, Nancy, and Jane came for a Memorial Day cookout yesterday. A good time was had by all. Jane visited the chicks before I had my camera. Pat and Nancy were good enough to pose.
Pat learns to keep the wings covered
Nancy looks a chick in the eye

Last week’s nature moment happened on Thursday, which is my day for chicken chores. It had rained during the night. I checked for night crawlers before I let the girls out. They love night crawlers and can find and dispatch one with lightning speed. Sometimes the early bird (with the worm) is briefly chased by others, but they seem to have learned not to dither. Grab the worm; run a safe distance; wolf it down.
Anyway, I found not one night crawler but two. They were mating. Night crawlers are reciprocal hermaphrodites—they have both testes and ovaries. When two of them hook up, they swap sperm. It’s quite efficient because it doubles the number of eggs produced. Funny it’s not more common in nature, really. .
Worms in love
It was a tragic story, though, although illustrative of the beauty of hermaphrodites. One of the two worms made it back to the burrow. Giada got the other one. The survivor will be able to produce eggs. Had it only had male function, the one that was eaten would be out of the gene pool.

Monday, May 20, 2013

New Chicks


This year’s project is meat chickens. Before you get all namby-pamby about how can you eat those cute little chickens that you have known personally, let me ask you this: Do you think chicken grows on Styrofoam trays? Watch Food, Inc. and get back to me. I will know that our chickens have spent their brief lives in the sunshine happily foraging grass and bugs in addition to eating their wholesome 21% protein crumble. I don’t know if I’ll have a hard time with it or not. I guess we’ll find out.
Neither Farm and Fleet nor Tractor Supply sells meat chickens, although Farm and Fleet has “dual purpose” birds, which can be used as layers (for about 3 years) or meat (once). We wanted the true meat chickens, eating machines that grow to butchering size in 6 to 8 weeks. We ordered 15 Jumbo Cornish X Rocks broiler chicks from Murray McMurray out in Iowa. We ordered “free run” which means they are not separated by sex, and you get some of each. The roosters aren’t a problem with meat chickens because they are ready to butcher before they are fully mature. We hope. After placing the order, Hilda noticed that we would receive a rare breed chick as a bonus. She was thrilled. I was skeptical. What if it was a rooster? It seemed more than likely, since pullets are in much higher demand.
I was excited that we would get to go to the post office at the crack of dawn to pick up a cheeping box of baby chickens. One hears about it in the farm lore, that magic moment in spring when new little babies come into your life. Hilda got an email yesterday saying that the chicks had been shipped at 4:00 a.m. Sunday and would arrive in Harvard Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday. “What happens if they arrive today?” Hilda asked. “Does anyone work at the post office on Sunday anymore? I thought they stopped that.”
Hilda proactively called the post office a little after 6:00 this morning to be sure they had the right phone number and my cell number as a backup. The woman who answered the phone said, “Hold on a minute. Let me check.”
The truck with our chicks on it had just arrived. I changed out of my chicken-chore pants into more or less clean jeans, and we headed out. We went to the back door as instructed. A sign said to ring the bell, but we could only find a hole where the bell should have been. We banged on the door. Just as someone came to answer it, I saw the bell well above my head to the left of the door.
The box
Inside the box. We guessed the foil pack shown at the right was for heat.

Soon we were in possession of a small box full of holes and emanating cheep, cheep, cheep noises. I held the box while Hilda drove home. Every now and then, I saw a beak or a foot poke out of one of the holes.
We had the box all ready for them. We filled the feeder and the waterer. One by one, we took the chicks out and put their beaks in the water. They get dehydrated on their trip sometimes (although the yolk sac is supposed to get them by for up to three days). Conventional wisdom suggests that they need to be taught how to drink. I’m not so sure. They have many good instincts.
Hilda gives the rare breed its first drink

Our rare breed is an odd looking little fellow. It has kind of a top knot on its head. He/she raced around and around, sometimes running right over his/her larger brothers and sisters. Hilda thought we should name that one. It would have to be something gender neutral. Terry suggested Jackie, for the Olympic track star, Jackie Joyner-Kersee. I hope it’s a girl. If not, I guess it will be for Jackie Robinson.
Jackie and the broilers hanging by the water cooler.

My folks headed off for a doctor’s appointment at 9:15. At 10:30, I checked on the chicks. Hilda had put on both heat lamps and the chicks were as far as they could get from under the lights. Geez! It was 85° today. I guess Hilda wanted to put the “broil” in broiler right off the bat. I unplugged one light. When I came back a little later, it was nap time. All the chicks were lying about under the lamp, just as they should be. I remembered how we obsessed about every little thing last year. Now I know exactly what to look for. Plastered to the sides of the box = too hot; huddled together under the light = too cold. Easy peasy.
A new adventure begins!
Nap time. We take out the paper tomorrow and give them wood chips.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Suddenly summer


Terry reminded me this morning that just seven days ago, it was cold and cloudy. We had a frost that froze a fair number of his trees. He is watching them anxiously to see if they will come back. And today it was hot, sunny, and windy.
Hilda cleaned out the raised beds that are now inside of the chicken yard. I thought we’d move the fence so that we could use the raised bed. Hilda is inclined to leave them to the chickens. They do love them. They eat the sweet grass that still comes up in one of them and have made dust baths in the one that formerly had her roses. They love their dust baths.

All of our friends are back. I’ve seen the white crowned sparrows, but I couldn’t get a picture. Same for the chipping sparrow. The goldfinches, rose-breasted grosbeaks, and orioles are more cooperative. I saw the first hummingbird two days ago. I filled a feeder immediately. The hummingbird buzzed my elbow while I was putting it up, then disappeared. I finally saw it again this morning. 
Male goldfinches in various stages of breeding plumage hanging at the feeder

Mr. and Mrs. Rose-Breasted Grosbeak

Mr. Oriole eating grape jelly (you can see it in his beak)

The trillium that I brought back from camp years ago is still alive! The penstemon (not yet blooming) has fully recovered from its relocation when we moved last year and is proliferating like crazy. The wood phlox and Jacob’s ladder are blooming.
Trillium

I spent some time cleaning out the asparagus bed, replacing the landscape cloth between the rows, and spreading mulch between the crowns. We’ve had asparagus twice so far and have more for tonight.
I whacked back as much garlic mustard as I could back by the creek. It was in flower. I hope I got it soon enough to prevent the seeds from forming. It’s a losing game, I realize.
Phlox (left), penstemon (behind phlox, not blooming), Jacob's ladder (right of penstemon), trillium
After all that, and hot as it was, all I got done in the garden was to mark out the rows with stakes. Terry brought the tomato cages around from the “bone yard,” as he calls it, which is a spot behind the wetland where all of our junk is hidden from view by the willows.

Garden with stakes along the side and tomato cages stacked in the foreground

Tomorrow is another day. Maybe I’ll plant the onions.

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Mother's Day


It seemed a lot like spring early last week. We’ve had a cold wind for the last two days, but the weather has been sunny. It’s nice in the greenhouse. Last Sunday, I got a little over half of the north garden raked, and we planted the potatoes planted. Hilda and I shoveled out all the wood chips that the chickens had kicked out of the coop over the winter. It was bad enough that Hilda had to clear them away to get the coop door shut every night. We filled up six muck buckets!
Buckets full of wood chips

Julia inspects the cleaned out area

The girls were very excited to see the ground again. I noticed that they were hollowing out dust batch behind the windbreak this morning. I would have taken a picture, but they spotted the carrot peels that I was delivering and ran to the fence.
I spent a little time outside today. I raked the rest of the north garden and weeded the garlic. I spent most of the day baking and cooking. I made apricot muffins for my breakfasts this week, a brisket for Mother’s Day, and a rhubarb cake for dessert.

I chose brisket because when we got the beef this year, the brisket came in one giant piece about two feet long. Needless to say, it didn't fit in the freezer very well. I was getting tired of shuffling it aside every time I went foraging. I started defrosting it in the refrigerator Friday morning. I used a recipe from Sara Moulton Cooks at Home. I had to cut the meat in half to fit it in my Dutch oven. After browning the brisket halves one at a time, I deglazed the pan with onions and garlic, added an entire bottle of Shiraz, evaporated nearly all the liquid, added chicken stock, and braised the brisket all afternoon. I threw some carrots in for our vegetable. The brisket was awesome, if I say so myself. Sara included a recipe for a marvelous sauce made of horseradish, chive, and sour cream. Thanks, Sara! I rounded out the menu with cheddar cheese polenta.
Big ol' hunk of meat for Mom

I love spring. Life just gets easier when you don’t have to bundle up every time you go out. I can do my morning chicken chores without freezing my fingers. I like that.

Sunday, May 5, 2013

April in review


Early in April, one of the chickens produced a very tiny egg. It turned out to have no yolk. A late April Fools joke, perhaps?
Tiny egg among the usual sized ones

For our cooking project this month, I chose a country pâté for two reasons. First, I had a package of beef liver languishing in the freezer from last year's beef (I wonder why). Second, I have a memory of a country pâté we had in France at Le Faisan in 1980. It had a meatloaf-like texture with a distinct liver taste and was excellent when served with cornichon. 
The obvious source for a recipe was Julia Child. Sure enough, my copy of From Julia Child’s Kitchen had a recipe for pâté de champagne. So did Hilda’s The Way to Cook. We picked the latter without comparing the two recipes or even reading the recipe very closely. When we got down to it, The Way To Cook’s version used 1 ¼ lb of pork sausage (which was something else that was getting old in my freezer), ¾ lb chicken breast, and only ½ lb of liver, all ground together with seasonings. When we had it all assembled, there we were with a whole lot of liver left.
We looked up the recipe in From Julia Child’s Kitchen. That one took 12 oz. of liver, 8 oz. each of pork, pork fat, and veal or chicken. The chicken wasn’t a problem since I’d defrosted a whole bird for the first recipe. We found some raw pork. We didn’t have pork fat, so we substituted bacon, both in the recipe and for the lining of the baking pan. What’s not to like? For this terrine, the liver was cubed and folded into the other ground meats before cooking.
The bacon-wrapped terrine before baking
The terrines had to bake in a bain-marie (water bath) for hours and then rest under weights for two days before unmolding.
Weighted down for cooling
In the end, the one with the sausage tasted like sausage. Terry loved it. The one with the bacon tasted like bacon, although the liver taste was detectable. I sliced both thinly and put them in the freezer, separated by wax paper.
The final product
I posted a picture of the flood we had on April 18 shortly after it happened. On April 20, we had snow.
A dusting of snow on April 20
The chickens eating their beloved carrot peelings in the snow
Spring finally came in the last week of the month. On April 27, a flock of turkeys showed up. The toms were amorous. As far as I could tell, the hens were less than impressed. As I watched the toms displaying together, I wondered if this is where the term “wing man” comes from.

Turkey flock

Wing man












Hey, baby!

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Costa Rica Days 7 and 8, March 30 and 31

 There isn’t much to write about on the last two days. We were up early for showers and packing. We had our last breakfast at the lodge and settled the bar tabs. We asked Jess to take a group shot with each of three cameras, one per couple.
Left to right: Me, Barbara, Terry, Jerome, Tom, Diane

The staff picked up our luggage at the rancheros and delivered it to the boat. The process was, predictably, the reverse of our arrival. The water landing was now familiar. We bounced to the grassy airstrip in the Land Cruisers. The “airport” was an open shelter with a few old and dusty wooden benches. The scale worked, though. Can’t have mistakes with that. We weighed our bags and ourselves again. I don’t think they even bothered to write out a boarding pass.
Drake Bay "airport"

I took a couple of pictures on the flight as we passed over plantations butting up again rainforest and awesome alluvial fans.
Palm plantation and rainforest
Alluvial fan
After a couple of stops, we arrived back in San José. The taxi vultures awaited us here also, although they were fewer in number and a tiny bit less aggressive than at the big airport. We found the driver from Casa Bella Rita very soon and were on our way.
No one was feeling very motivated that afternoon. Some of us were hungry, though. Rita recommended a restaurant nearby where they made excellent roast chicken. Terry was still not feeling well (Rita graciously volunteered to pick up some medicine for him at a pharmacy when she went out to do her shopping). Barbara, being a vegetarian, didn’t figure there would be much for her on the menu. Jerome was tasked with bringing back something she could eat.
I speak no Spanish. Diane and Tom did their best to get us through the ordering. I must say I still dream of that roast chicken. Following Rita’s recommendation, we got the combination platter that came with five or six sides and took the leftovers home for supper.
Jerome and Barbara left for the airport at 3:00. I was jealous. I was ready to be home, and it was going to be another horrible, long day of travel for us the next day. Diane and Tom weren’t leaving until Monday.
The rest of us hung out at the Casa, reading, checking email (Rita and Steve provided a computer), napping. Toward evening, Diane and Tom opened a bottle of wine from the well-stocked refrigerator in their room. We drank it in the sitting room upstairs. We went downstairs to microwave the leftovers. We ended the evening in the relative cool of the outdoor patio around the pool.
It was a short night for us, you bet. We had to be at the airport at 5:00 for a 7:00 flight. Rita was up and had packed up some banana bread and bananas for us to take with us. She put us in a cab, and off we went.
I’ll cut to the essentials. We flew to Mexico City, killed a couple of hours, flew to Guadalajara, killed a couple more hours, and finally few home to Chicago, arriving at 1:40 a.m., April 1. We went through customs for the last time. I panicked briefly when I couldn’t get my cell phone to work. The plan was that I would call Jane, who would be waiting at the nearest rest area, to come and get us. But my cell phone kept giving me error messages about needing international access. Granted, I was not at my cognitive best at that hour in the morning. I turned the phone off and on several times before it occurred to me that what I needed to do is leave it on long enough for it to “find itself.”
When all was said and done, we were home at 4:30 a.m. I got a couple hours of sleep, got up, showered, and went to work.
It was an amazing trip, but I’d never try to do it over spring break again.