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.