Early days of autumn

It felt like fall this morning, chilly, gray, and blustery. It rained hard during the wee hours and may rain off and on all day. Warm weather is supposed to return for a couple of days tomorrow. A cold front will then bring us more rain. Sooner or later, the warm weather will be gone for good.

We moved the chickens up to the winter run last night. When day length drops below 14 hours, they don’t lay as often. We’re lucky to get three eggs a day from the five mature hens we have. One egg is not uncommon. They love running around the orchard, but we don’t feed them so they can have fun. They have a job to do. The pullets should begin laying soon.

Sadly, Bianca did not rally after her tormentors were removed from her life. We took her out of the little red barn as soon as we sent the mean chickens to the butcher. For two nights, she went under the coop at bedtime. I had to reach down there to pull her out and put her in the coop. Then she bedded down in a nest box for a few days. When she moved to the floor, I thought it was a good sign. Perhaps she was transitioning to the perch. I was wrong. She was on the floor because she lacked the strength to climb into the nest box.

One morning, I saw her lying by the feeder in the yard. I had to go out somewhere, but made a mental note to try to get her to eat more when I got home. Typically, by the time the errands were run, I had forgotten. Hilda found her dead when she went to get the eggs. As I said before, it is hard to tell what a chicken needs. I suppose we should have gotten therapy for Bianca. I don’t know any chicken therapists. Early in my chicken ownership, I learned that there aren’t even any veterinarians that treat chickens in this area. Chickens are considered dispensable.

With mean Juanita gone, Rosa Dolores’ tail feathers are finally growing back. She has a ways to go before her feathers are as long as Amelia’s.

Rosa Dolores' tail growing back

Amelia's normal tail feathers

Simone’s backside is looking less red. I’m not sure if the feathers are growing back. The bald spot may be getting smaller.

Simone's bald spot on her back seems to be getting smaller.

New England aster is the last flower to bloom. As the goldenrod fades, New England aster is the only game in town. On a sunny day, it buzzes with honey bees, bumblebees, solitary bees, flies, butterflies, beetles, and moths.

As much as I would like to think that my efforts to introduce native flowers has increased the diversity of pollinators, I have to acknowledge that these insects might seem new to me because I haven’t been paying attention. This beautiful butterfly is a common buckeye, although it is not common on our property. I’ve only seen one at a time.

Uncommon common buckeye

Painted ladies are everywhere.

Buckeye and painted lady

As are Sulphur butterflies.

Sulfur butterfly

This is the fiery skipper. Attracting Native Pollinators describes the way it holds its wings as a “double V.” It reminds me of a paper airplane. I had inferred from observation that skippers were named because they fly even more erratically than true butterflies. The Golden Guide to Butterflies and Moths says the name is because of their “skipping flight.”

Fiery skipper

This is a honey bee with leg baskets full of pollen.

Honey bee with leg baskets full of pollen

This metallic green insect might be a mason bee, a sweat bee, or a Chrysidid wasp. So many green insects!

Metallic green flying insect

I saw two flies mimicking bees. One way to tell them apart is by the eyes. Fly eyes are large enough to touch each other. Bee eyes are smaller.

This fly is a bee mimic, even though the stripes on its abdomen don't show up well in the picture.

This fly has fancy stripes on its thorax.

There were many other pollinators that would not hold still long enough for photos. We are all frantically putting up food for the winter.

Floods and sauerkraut

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating—I am not liking this new climate. We did go all summer without a flood. Last weekend, we got 8” of rain in 48 hours. The first 3” filled the creek. The second 5” went everywhere. The field was covered with water Saturday morning.

Shortly after Terry went outside, he called to tell me here was a dog penis mushroom growing under one of the oak tree. That’s really one of the common names for Mutinus caninus. It’s also known as a dog stinkhorn. I don’t make this stuff up.

The water receded fairly quickly. Once I started looking, I realized that the flood crested in the middle of the night. The bottom row of solar panels was covered in silt to a depth that measured to the top of my leg, just about 3 feet. The garden shed showed a waterline above the lower shelf. The wooden bench on which the row cover rested had floated out of place; the row cover was soaked. The kitchen-sized wastebasket in the corner was filled with water to the top.

Terry brought down the saw horses and some boards, and we commenced taking everything out to dry. Flood damage is profoundly demoralizing and emotionally exhausting. While this would have been a good opportunity to clean the whole shed out and organize it, it was all I could do to find the mates to each of about a dozen pairs of gloves. One might think the gloves would live happily in pairs. I feel like I usually take them off and put them together on the shelf, but the evidence did not support this. Sure, two or three pairs were together, but it took some looking to find the right and left of all the gloves. I took them in the house and put them in the washer.

Terry swept out the shed. We didn’t have to hose it down because it wasn’t very muddy. Upon reflection, I thought that this might be because this flood happened when the crops of the fields around us were full grown. When we had floods earlier in the summer, the crops were not big enough to prevent the top soil from washing away.

When we were done with the shed, I walked down to the creek. Terry had walked into one of his nurseries earlier in the day. While we were cleaning the shed, he told me that he had sunk in the mud to the top of his Wellies. When he tried to extract his feet, he landed on his butt. He instinctively put his hands down to lift himself up and went in to his elbows. He didn’t explain how he got himself out, but I found the prints in the ground, sort of like the lower half of a snow angel done in mud.

The imprint of Terry's legs in the mud

The flood had knocked over a deer fence.

Flood damage on the deer fence

I saw a yellow composite flower that I didn’t recognize. The composite (or daisy) family is huge, which makes species identification a challenge. The best I can do is that it is some kind of bur marigold, a.k.a. sticktight.

Putative bur marigold, covered in mud

There was an odd patch of smooth stones on the bank above the creek. Floods usually leave behind sandy silt. These rocks seemed too high to have been deposited by the flood. Perhaps the stones had once been the creek bottom. The recent flood, then, had merely washed the silt off the top of the rocks. Very weird.

A patch of smooth stones amidst the sandy silt

Detail of the stones

The only obvious survivor of my woodland garden is Joe Pyeweed. I must clean out all the weeds before next spring in case some of the other perennials survived my neglect.

Joe Pyeweed, the apparent lone survivor of my woodland garden

Sunday morning, the turkey hen came around with her poults. They still didn’t get near, but the light was better. I got a photo that was clear enough to count 5 younguns.

Turkey hen with 5 poults--there are two close together in the front, as evidenced by the two tails

Sunday was sauerkraut day. Hilda asked me if we needed to buy sauerkraut. I gave her an emphatic no. We only had 5 cabbages, but they were huge. I estimated an average of 5 pounds each. Plus we still had a good deal of sauerkraut left from last year.

Pat, Nancy, and Jane came out to help. This was Jane’s first sauerkraut experience. Hilda was running behind with her preparations for dinner and had to excuse herself. We took our usual positions, with Nancy cleaning the cabbage.

Nancy cleans the cabbage

Me slicing the cabbage.

I sliced the cabbage, wearing a protective glove

And Pat weighing, salting, and packing the cabbage in the crocks.

Pat weighs the cabbage

I assigned Jane to take pictures and count how many half-pound increments Pat put into the large bowl. Each 2.5 pounds of cabbage got 1/8 cup of salt.

At the end of the day, our crock had 20 pounds of cabbage, and Pat and Nancy went home with 10. The cabbages weighed, on average, 6 pounds, and that doesn’t include the cores and outer leaves that we put in the compost bin.

In honor of Pat’s birthday as well as raspberry season, I made a raspberry pie.

Raspberry pie

Here’s the birthday girl enjoying her dessert.

Pat with her birthday pie

By the next day, the sauerkraut was bubbling nicely.

Sauerkraut fermenting

We’re in for another heavy rain tonight. We took the precaution of moving the storage bin that we keep the chicken food and wood chips in to higher ground outside the orchard. I checked to be sure that everything in the garden shed was well off the floor.

Terry picked all the pumpkins and squash that were ready. He didn’t want them submerged again.

I picked all the red and yellow bell peppers and poblano peppers yesterday. I started two chimneys full of charcoals to roast them. It was not enough. I did the poblanos first.

Poblanos on the grill

And then the red and yellow bell peppers.

Sweet peppers next

Conventional wisdom suggests that when the pepper skin is well-blackened, one should put the pepper in a paper bag to steam. Over the years, I have discovered that a stock pot works just as well. It holds a lot of peppers and is reusable.

About 40 minutes into the process, the coals suddenly disappeared. The grill still seemed plenty hot. I tried moving the remaining coals together with the charcoal shovel, but only succeeded in knocking them through the grate. I got the last batch mostly done and hoped that the skins would come loose in the stock pot.

I had to put everything in the refrigerator and rush off to a meeting. I had a busy week. This morning, I tackled the task of skinning and deseeding the peppers. My, there were a lot of peppers. As I always do in these situations, I thought back to an important lesson of dissertation research: as long as there are a finite number of things, if you do one at a time, you can finish the job.  After two hours, I was done.

All the peppers skinned, deseeded and stacked for the freezer

And then I had to take a nap.

Seasonal abundance

The harvest is reaching a crescendo. We dug the potatoes and pulled the onions ahead of a week of rain. We got three inches last night and woke to a flooded field. At 3:00 a.m, I saw water standing in the south garden as well, but that had drained away by the time we got up. A great blue heron stalked back and forth through the water much of the morning. I can’t imagine what it was hunting. Toads? Worms? Mice and voles swimming for their lives?

Great blue heron looking for God knows what in the flooded field

In the natural world, the acorn drop is an opportunity for many animals to fatten up before winter. The three tom turkeys make the rounds every morning, looking for all the world like the hunchbacked old men drinking their coffee at McDonald’s.

Tom turkeys looking like grumpy old men. Hrumph, Hrumph.

The turkey hens with the poults are more wary (or weary, as my students wrote). They never come close enough for a good picture. Here are some bad pictures when they were on the north side of the farm, heading for the road.

Turkey hen with poults oh, so far away

Watch out for the car! Move away from the road!

One morning they were under the fifth oak.

Hens with poults a little closer

A doe brought her twin fawns to the fifth oak to enjoy the acorn bounty.

A doe keeps watch while her twin fawns forage for acorns

My dad had raised beds on the deck and by the garage for his flowers. Now that he’s gone, we have taken over the space with strawberries. Some bear fruit only in June; others are “ever bearing.” We left them alone for the first 6 weeks to let their roots develop. Yields are not high, but there’s  enough for an occasional breakfast. Hopefully we can make jam next year.

Entire strawberry harvest on a good day

We had our appointment with the butcher last Wednesday. The meat chickens were 12 weeks old. The catalog said that’s when they were ready to be butchered. They looked huge and took up most of the space in the coop.

Big Red Broilers at the outdoor feeder

It's getting crowded in the coop

Even though the Big Red Broiler meat chickens take twice as long to get to “market size,” I am willing to raise them again. They are so much healthier than the Cornish x Rock, which just waddle to the food on legs that will barely support their weight and otherwise lie around in their own poop. The Big Red Broilers, while huge, run around behaving like normal chickens. It is very hard to get a good video of a rooster crowing when any one of a number of roosters could be next. I tried to get a chicken fight as well. This video is the best I could do. You can see roosters with their neck feathers ruffled, running while flapping their wings.

We paid a higher price for all-male meat chickens as well as for all female laying hens. Males grow faster, making them more valuable for meat. The premium on female laying hens should need no explanation. As long as we’ve been ordering from Murray McMurray, we’ve gotten the sexes that we ordered. Note, however, that we got “straight run” (males and females) Cornish x Rock meat chickens in previous years. Sexing chicks is notoriously difficult, so it was only a matter of time before we got something that we hadn’t ordered. As luck would have it, this year it happened twice. We had one female meat chicken.

Male Big Red Broiler in front; female in back

And one Whiting True Green rooster. We had our suspicions when he grew a larger comb, wattle, and tail feathers than the hens. Still, he didn’t crow, so we couldn’t be sure. Meanwhile, Bianca continued to be sullen and withdrawn. We put her back in the little red barn and gave her vitamins in buttermilk every afternoon. She liked the treats, but did not seem to improve in her disposition.

We had to take the food away from the meat chickens and the hens we were rotating out 24 hours before taking them to the butcher. Instead of depriving everyone, my thought was that we could move the pullets to the orchard and the old hens to Coop 1 Monday night. We would have Tuesday to be sure we had everyone in the right spot.

Tuesday morning, Hilda opened the coop and let Bianca out of the little red barn. The suspected Whiting True Green rooster jumped her immediately, pinning her down and having his way with her. This settled the question of gender. Hilda grabbed him and put him in the little red barn with no food. He was going to the butcher too.

Poor Bianca. She lay on the ground listlessly. Hilda thought she was dead. She picked her up gently and put her in a nest box, fully expecting to find her stiff later. Later in the morning, however, I looked out my kitchen window and saw Bianca running around the orchard.

In Coop 1, the old hens were up on the perch to keep from getting jumped by the roosters. We had to deliver the chickens between 6:00 and 7:30 Wednesday morning. We were up long before the crack of dawn to load them into cages. We put the hens in a separate cage for fear that the lusty roosters would kill them before we got to the butcher. Terry watched the door on the cage. Hilda opened and closed the coop door. I did the transport. The only mishap we had was when I blinded Terry with my headlamp, and a rooster jumped to the ground. I grabbed his leg before he could get far.

The next day, we went to pick them up at the crack of dawn. Despite our fears that we would end up with behemoth chickens, the dressed weight was between 5 and 6 pounds. Perfect.

Freezer heaven

It is the time of year when nearly every flat surface in the house has a tray full of tomatoes on it. There was a day when I planned to bake tomatoes for pasta sauce, but I also needed to use up the rest of the zucchini and pattypans in a batch of roasted ratatouille. Before starting my kitchen work, I planned to spend 30 minutes pulling out the pea plants and taking down the trellis.

As soon as I got to the garden, I saw that the Scarlet Beauty beans had not only reached maturity and dried, but also collapsed to the ground and started to rot. Dammit. I picked the beans and pulled the plants. With the beans picked, I had to put the drying screens in the greenhouse to dry the beans. But the screens were full of dust, mouse droppings, and even bird poop. Must have had a bird in the storage shed. So I propped up all the screens on the side of the greenhouse and turned the hose to “jet.” I pulled the peas and rolled up the trellis while the screens dried and then spread the pods on a screen inside the greenhouse.

That all took two hours. Time for lunch. After lunch, I got the ratatouille in the oven. Next task: pick melons. I love cantaloupe, and they are at their best when they stay in the garden until the vine comes loose. Which happens pretty much all at once. I took a wheelbarrow down and filled it with 17 cantaloupe and a dozen or so Golden Midget watermelons. I scrubbed off the mud and rind-invading picnic beetles outside and set them on the patio chairs to dry. Hoo-boy! Where will I put 30 melons? In the process of rearranging the overflow refrigerator to make room, a wine bottle fell out of the door and shattered into one million pieces. Because I didn’t have enough to do already.

I had most of the wine blotted up and was starting to pick up the larger pieces of glass when Terry came in. “Let’s not put wine in the refrigerator door anymore, okay?” I said.

Terry offered to finish the clean up so I could take care of the ratatouille and fix dinner. What a day. I did not get to the baked tomatoes. That’s the good thing about retirement—there’s always tomorrow.

After two batches of baked tomatoes, I made tomato confit. Like the more familiar (or not) duck confit, tomato confit involves slow roasting in lipids--duck fat for duck confit, olive oil for tomato confit. It takes hours. Two half-sheet pans of tomatoes reduces to about 2.5 cups of intensely tomatoey goodness.

Tomato confit before slow roasting

2.5 cups of tomato confit ready for the freezer

I was able to find good homes for many of the cantaloupe. The Golden Midget watermelons were an experiment. It’s an heirloom variety that I ordered from the Seed Savers Exchange because it was supposed to mature in (if I remember correctly) 90 days and, as a bonus, changed from green to yellow when ripe. It did, in fact, get mature and turn yellow within our growing season, but it just wasn’t as sweet as I would have like a watermelon to be. Since I was disappointed in the quality, I chose not to give many of them away. 

Golden midget watermelons. Cute, but not very sweet

What does one do with too many not-very-good watermelons?I first had watermelon juice in Belize, and I can’t think of a more refreshing beverage. I got out my tomato press and put some watermelon through it. The juice tasted sweeter than the melon! I took the rind of the rest of the melon and made six quarts of juice. I put it in the refrigerator overnight to chill thoroughly before I put it in the freezer. The following day, I learned that watermelon juice is highly perishable. It had developed off flavors which were not improved by the addition of rum. (A good scientist explores all possible solutions.) The watermelon juice went to the compost bin. Living and learning, as Manolo (a fellow graduate student) used to say.

Juice comes out the front, seeds spit out of the chute on the side.

The Sandwich Fair

Last Thursday, we all went to the Sandwich Fair. The Sandwich Fair has nothing to do with sandwiches. It is, in fact, the DeKalb County Fair, which is held in Sandwich, IL. The first fair was in 1888. At the time, Sandwich was an up-and-coming town. The Sandwich Manufacturing Company made agricultural implements that were shipped internationally. In the present day, if Sandwich isn’t the end of the Earth, you can see it from there. Because the region is still primarily agricultural, and the original purpose of a county fair was to show of agricultural products, the Sandwich Fair has stayed true to its mission.

Jane proposed the trip because Fay’s Barbeque was going to be there. Fay’s used to do all sorts of fundraisers but has cut back in recent years. The Sandwich Fair is one of the last events they go to. I needed to get my annual corndog. We skipped the McHenry County Fair due to insufferably hot weather. We picked Thursday to go because it was Senior Day, and everyone over 55 got in for $6 instead of the usual $10 for adults. My first senior discount!

On the drive down, Jane said she’d never had a corndog.

“How can you use those words together in a sentence?” I asked. Never had a corndog? Seriously?

I was starving by the time we got to the fair, but we passed several corndog vendors before selecting one. You have to be particular about where you get your corndog. A corndog absolutely much be dipped and fried on site. Watch out for the vendors who get their corndogs premade from a freezer. Finally, I saw some naked hotdogs on sticks behind one of the counters. The problem was that they only made foot-long corndogs. Well. Quality was more important than quantity. Terry got an Italian sausage sandwich. Hilda, Jane, and I got corndogs. They were delicious, but way too much. I had to throw away the last bit, and still I should have stopped sooner.

Hilda and I with our corndogs

Terry went off on his own after that. The rest of us headed to the Home Arts building to see a culinary competition. Just outside Home Arts, a mariachi band was playing. I love a mariachi band. They played a familiar melody, and one of the band members gestured to encourage us to sing along. I looked behind me and saw that there were some people in the audience who knew the Spanish lyrics and were singing. I did not join in. The only lyrics I knew were “Aye, yi, yi, yi, I am the Frito Bandito,” and that seemed culturally insensitive.

Mariachi band

The official Sandwich Fair souvenir stand was also by Home Arts. Jane bought a nice embroidered hat because she had forgotten to bring one.

Jane's new hat

This food stand was also near Home Arts. I thought I’d seen every possible food on a stick at the Minnesota State Fair a few years back, but this was a new one. Cookie dough on a stick has zero appeal to me. Ewww.

Cookie dough on a stick? No thanks.

The Home Arts building was crammed with quilts, clothing, and crocheted items on one side, and all manner of cookies, breads, cakes, and canned goods on the other.

Quilts and clothing in the Home Arts building

The culinary competition judging was going on at the stage around back. The judges were tasting briskets. It was very boring, but after one woman stopped yapping, another woman played the hammered dulcimer. We sat down to listen for a while.

We wanted to see the poultry and went there next. We marveled at how big some of the roosters were as well as how small the bantams were. Two bantams were for sale, $10 each. Hilda wanted to buy them because they were so cute. I didn’t think she should. The other chickens would probably harass them, and besides, did she want to carry them on her lap on the way home?

In addition to the corndog, Hilda had her heart set on a bucket of French fries. We found a vendor with boxes of Idaho potatoes behind the stand. When she saw what was available, she wanted the bacon cheese fries. I should have warned her. She thought the fries would be covered with grated Vermont cheddar and topped with recognizable pieces of bacon. In fact, the fries were covered with Cheez Whiz, and not even genuine Cheez Whiz, but a cheap imitation. I thought the bacon bits were some kind of meat product rather than salt-and-soybean Bacos, but it sure wasn’t Nueske’s. Did we eat them anyway? Yes, we did. The fries had good potato flavor.

Hilda and her bacon cheese fries

We met our friend Jan and her sister, Pat. They grew up in Somonauk, about 3 miles from Sandwich. Pat still lives there; Jan had driven down from Chicago. We sat in the shade for a bit to catch up. One of the best things about the Sandwich Fair is the mature trees on the fairgrounds. The good people of Sandwich protect the trees by putting lawns and benches around them as “Shaded Rest Areas.” Foot traffic does not compact the soil like cars do.

Jan and Pat’s family uses the fairgrounds for family reunions. “It’s amazing,” Jan told us. “This place looks so small when it’s empty but so big when the fair is here.”

According to the Sandwich Fair website, the fairgrounds is only 20 acres, which is smaller than our farm.

We went together to the Sandwich Fair History Museum, which was located on the fairgrounds in a building from 1892 that originally housed the Secretary’s Office. Jan explained that every year, souvenir items, such as coffee cups, were sold at the fair. Many of these items were on display. Several of her cousins served on various Fair committees over the years.

Our next stop was the train. “You should go,” Jan said. “It’s famous.”

While Hilda and I were looking for the ticket booth, we met Terry. The three of us rode the train together.

Hilda and Terry on the train

Jane's picture of us on the train

The train is a one-quarter scale replica of a “Class S-4 Hudson Type 4-6-4 Burlington Series 3000 engine” built by Augie Otto in Sandwich. The train debuted at the 1974 Sandwich Fair. “Both Bell and Whistle Tones are Authentic,” it said on the sign.

The train engine

We went to the the Antique Farm Equipment and Antique Trucks and Tractors displays next. One of the more fascinating pieces of equipment was a machine hooked to a two-man lumber saw. It was working when I first walked up, but it broke down before I could get a picture.

This display shows ice cream scoops from 1878 through the present.

Ice cream scoops through time

Terry liked this antique truck.

Antique truck

Jane took this picture of Jan’s grandfather’s tractor.

Jan's grandfather's tractor

We got four Fay’s dinners to go at the end of our day at the fair. There was enough food for two days in there. I also bought two bags of mini-donuts on the way out. Our fair food was complete.