Fiacré's spade: Peach madness

Summer is the most glorious time of year. Also the busiest. We do farm-to-table dinners every night. I love it. When I got home after my first day of classes, I walked out to the garden, picked four ears of corn, shucked them, put them in the microwave, and had them on the table in the space of 20 minutes. It’s true what they say—corn is sweetest when it’s fresh. I served the corn with thick slices of an enormous dead-ripe tomato and chicken from our own broilers. It was lovely.

The chicken was leftover from dinner with Pat and Nancy yesterday. Hilda fried the chicken. I made peach pie for dessert. We had corn and tomatoes too, as well as sliced green peppers and cucumbers with sour cream and dill. A whole meal from the farm. It makes me very proud.

Fried chicken from our own broilers--this is just one chicken, BTW

Sweet corn picked from the garden just moments before

Peach pie

The peaches (since I seem to be going backwards) were our very own. If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might remember that last year, we had exactly one peach. It was beautiful, but not something we could share. This year was good to us. On Tuesday, Terry and I harvested 95.5 pounds of peaches—77 pounds were from a single Hale Haven tree, the same tree that gave us the one nice peach last year.

77 pounds of Hale Haven peaches from one tree

Ninety-five and a half pounds of peaches is a lot of peaches. We’ve been eating peaches three times a day. I feel as if I am more in touch with my ancestors. Back in the day, I imagine when a particular food item came into season, you ate it until you were ready to spew. Fortunately, we have better preservation technology and have been canning, freezing, and drying, taking the pressure off eating all of them before they rot. It is much easier to give away peaches than eggplant, although I have been including a disclaimer that I cannot guarantee that the peaches are free of insect larva. I recommend cutting the peach open before eating it. As the old saying goes, the only thing worse than finding a worm in your apple is finding half a worm.

And the raspberries are ripening faster now. We harvest by the quart rather than the dozen.

Raspberries

The laying hens are molting. The chicken run looks like someone had a pillow fight. Most of the feathers are white even though our hens are a variety of colors. Are they not all molting? Are their underfeathers all white? Who knows? Egg production is down while the girls grow new feathers. We hope it will increase again soon.

Feathers everywhere!

The goldfinch chicks grew up fast. On Tuesday, their flight feathers were coming in, but they were still looking pretty downy.

Tuesday, Aug 12: Goldfinch chicks are getting their real feathers.

By Friday, the feathers were well-developed and the poop was piling up outside the nest.

Well-developed feathers showing on Friday, Aug. 16

Poop piling up below the nest

I took Pat and Nancy down to see the nest yesterday. Pat reached in to hold the leaves back so I could take a picture and all four chicks (one of the five eggs must not have made it) fluttered off in all directions. We were concerned that they would not be able to fly well enough to make it back to the nest, so we chased them around a bit, picking them up and putting them back in the nest. Every time we got one in, the one we’d put up there before would fly off. They were very cute, and Nancy was excited that she got to hold them. In the end, it seemed like they were reasonably capable of taking care of themselves. By the time we got done picking raspberries, they were nowhere to be seen.