Twelve Days of Christmas at Glean Acres

I must admit, December 25th came and went in our home without much hullaballoo. In fact, I just finished wrapping presents today. With our parents in other countries and other relatives in other states, and without a T.V. and trips through cities and malls, we find ourselves blessedly removed from holiday madness. That, and because the Orthodox church celebrates the nativity of Christ on January 7th, so we’re still looking forward to our holy day. That  usually involves a midnight mass the night before, followed by a day with family and rich food, maybe a few small gifts. Nevertheless, on December 25th, Amir and I exchanged cards and cookies and what not with our neighbors and friends, and set up a little Christmas display and gave each other token presents lest we be accused of being scrooge-like.

The 2011 Christmas Display at Glean Acres. That's Father Charlie Brown, with Farmer Santa, adoring Mother and Child along with the other critters from the farm.

Amir gave me a state-of-the-art compost pail for the kitchen counter. It has DOUBLE charcoal filters and is stainless steel (See I finally have a stainless steel appliance!) and EXTRA large! But I’m too frugal to part with my old standby jumbo Maxwell House coffee container. It will now serve to hold scraps for the chickens, while the refuse unworthy of the chickens, such as eggshells and coffee grounds and hot pepper seeds, will be relegated to the new pail.

Old Maxwell House composter has turned to the wall, feeling humiliated by its designer replacement. I'm just too sentimental to let it go, so will keep it around for chicken scraps.

Last year, I got a big pressure canner from my beloved, in anticipation of all the abundant produce from our yet-to-be-determined farm we would need to put up. Optimists to the end, and we did in fact put up 20 quarts of green beans and quite a few jars of jams and relish and tomatoes and even some okra! I got him a pair of heavy duty BOGS muck boots. We didn’t even know what county our farm would be in, but we knew it would probably have mud and chores.

This year I got him a bag of birdseed. You see, I figure he’s part of God’s plan in looking after the birds, who afterall, don’t hoard their food in barns.

Come cardinals, come finches, come bluebirds and sparrows!

Other than that and a few phone calls, it was just another day around the farm. Around this time of year that involves doing some of the fall chores that didn’t get done in the fall. Good thing we’re having a mild December! Still time to transplant those remaining blueberries and peonies.

Maybe the row of blueberries will straighten out once they grow.

We got the hen house winterized last week, thank goodness. Amir did his part by installing a solid wood floor, roof, and wall. It was up to me to fill in the irregularly shaped spaces. Which I did with bubble wrap. Hey, it makes for insulation, right? And it’s so stylish.

Bubble wrap walls! Let's the light in, keeps the wind out.

There is still a small problem to be solved with our chickens, however. See, we have about one too many roosters in with our hens. Two roosters to our six hens.  Well, old Roo has a bad limp and at the tender age of eight month isn’t much of a ladies man anymore. Back in his adolescent days, Roo used to have the ladies lined up for him. Now he’s enough of a gentleman to delegate the deed to six-month-old Buddy, who was only too happy to take over.  Too happy, perhaps. The problem is that Buddy has a couple of favorite ladies. Marilyn, of course, with her long legs, ample cleavage, and platinum feathers, is his number one gal. Followed by Dottie, the other blondie in the flock. It’s not easy being a beautiful chicken. Sure, you may get top pecking order, but you pay for it with a bare back from that randy rooster jumping on it all day. Poor Marilyn and Dottie are getting scratched up to the point where we have to intervene.

Marilyn shows the scars from being Buddy's favorite.

Buddy and his harem, with Roo relegated to the second fiddle in the back row.

We knew Buddy as a lovable little companion to little Angel, the runt. They never left each others’ sides for the first three months of their lives. Then Buddy discovered other hens. And Angel read “The Daring Book for Hens” and embarked on a life of independent exploring, returning to the flock only for meal times and lights out. It seems like only yesterday that they were fluffy little things.

Buddy and Angel in June of this year. They grow up so quickly!

So now we have another project on our hands, one we will have to enlist our sewing friends to help with. See, seems like our beautiful hens aren’t the only ones being worn down by randy roosters. It’s such a widespread problem that there are special products to buy to ease their suffering and let their feathers heal. They’re called Chicken Saddles. Get it?

Here's a hen with her saddle. Festively designed to resemble a cute country apron! Maybe I can make a matching one for me! Not that I'm missing any feathers or anything like that. I also saw some chicken saddles in camouflage patterns for sale online. For those times when love is war, I suppose.

But since we aim to be as self-sufficient as possible, I’m gonna see about making one, with a little help of some friends with sewing machines, that is.

When I’m done with that, I’m gonna see about clearing some vegetable beds of their summer plantings. Ahem. Like the towering forest of okra. We finally wrested them out of the ground, but they still have to be hauled away. Somewhere.

The felled okra forest awaits clean up.

And meanwhile, there are turnips to harvest. Or is it Raab? So far, the books can’t tell us for sure, nor can the seed supplier.

Is it a turnip? Is it Raab? Nevermind, it's good eating!

And arugula to enjoy fresh from the cold earth, along with carrots and cabbage.

Arugula keeps going through the freezing nights.

Little upstarty garlic! They came up before the carrots were all harvested! Time to mulch.

Then there’s the 1000 onion sets we planted a couple of weeks ago. I carefully laid down a thick layer of straw mulch, which was quickly and gleefully discovered by our free-range laying flock! They set about scratching and nesting and leaving bare patches in the straw. I pile it back together. They tear it apart. We have an understanding. I’m not sure what it is, but they seem content with the arrangement.

All that straw... The chickens must think it's a giant nest box/buffet!

We’re hoping that by the time the 12 days of Western Christmas are over, and by the time ours has just begun, we’ll have figured out all the pieces that will add up to a 2012 Glean Acres business plan. For now, we’re just trying to wrap up 2011. I wish all we needed were ribbons and shiny bows.

And hopefully, thankfully, in the midst of this life that makes it so easy to be grateful, we’ll focus on the work of Christmas, so eloquently stated by one of my father’s heroes, the theologian/activist Howard Thurman:

The Work Of Christmas

When the song of the angels is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with the flocks,
then the work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal those broken in spirit,
to feed the hungry,
to release the oppressed,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among all peoples,
to make a little music with the heart…
And to radiate the Light of Christ,
every day, in every way,
in all that we do and in all that we say.
Then the work of Christmas begins.

Top Ten Clueless Farmer Blunders from Season One

It’s December 10th. Our last market day of 2011–our first season as farmers. While we sold out of most of our goodies, we left loaded down with gifts of greens, sweets, and festive greenery from our fellow farming buddies. For the first time this year, we can glance at our “To Do” list without our stomachs knotting up. The chickens are nestled all snug in their freezers, while visions of hoop houses dance through our heads. But before we get ahead of ourselves and into the wintry days of the planning season, it’s time to reflect on the lessons learned this year.  Otherwise known as the Top Ten Blunders of the Clueless Farmer. Go ahead, learn from our mistakes!

This was a lovely sunroom with tiffany lamps and braided rugs. We set it up as a greenhouse, but will settle with it as the all-important mud room.

1o. A sunroom is the same as a greenhouse. Not! Sure, it may have windows all around and look quite suitable for starting seedlings. But if those windows are the energy-efficient kind that are treated to screen out UV light AND have screens, the amount of photosynthesis going on in your little darlings’ cells will be minimal. Screens block out at least 50% of the available light. And who knows about those windows. Scraggly, leggy transplants were the result of our oversight. We got them in the ground and they grew, yes, but with twisted stems, and not as vigorously as they might have. One of our winter projects is rigging up some cold-frames lined with heat mats on our southern-facing deck.

9. Storing seeds in a sauna. Since we were using the sunroom as a greenhouse, and doing all our potting there, we naturally kept the seeds handy there as well. Pretty little packets of them sitting in a basket on a table by the sunniest window. Even when July turned the room into a 100-degree sauna no matter how many windows were open. The sauna continued right through August. About that time we thought, “Hey. Aren’t we supposed to store seeds in a cool, dark location?” So we moved them to a dark cool drawer in the back room. When September came and we started some spinach, is it any surprise that we had a rather paltry 15% germination rate? We could blame the seed company, or the fickleness of spinach in general (it’s true, spinach has germination whims according to our umpteenth generation farming buddy, Max Lacy!). But I have the feeling it might have been the sauna storage scenario. Which leads us to the next blunder…

8. Starting Spinach, and all other manner of “Fall Crops” in September. Because Fall Crops are planted in the Fall, right? Granted, I came across some written advice to get Fall stuff in the ground in July, but we were in the middle of a heat wave and drought in July. I figured that advice came from folks who were farming up in Maine or something, where the season was always cool and short. The ground in our parts at that time was like asphalt covered in dust. Tilling was not an option. So the broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, and spinach went in the ground in September. And we dutifully covered the broccoli and cabbage with row covers, initially not to protect them from the frost, but to protect them from the cabbage worms. November came and went without broccoli or cabbage. But finally, this weekend, we managed to harvest a whopping SIX POUNDS of pristine, unravaged little broccoli heads from our 125 feet of broccoli beds! We’re still waiting, patiently, for our cabbage to head up. Stuff don’t grow too fast when the days are short. (Except maybe arugula.)

Enough talk about vegetables, you say, you want to hear about chicken blunders! Where to begin?

Scruffy Bird! Hen or rooster? Too early to tell.

7. Getting emotionally attached to broiler chickens.  Nursing ailing broiler chicks in our spare bedroom? Paying a vet to euthanize a broiler chick?Naming our favorite broiler chicks? Sparing deficient roosters from the chopping block because, well, they have “personality?” (The same goes for our friendly neighborhood dog, who would never ever harm one of our

Scruffy is slowly integrating into our laying flock. We hope he will be come a "Scruffilina!"

chickens, so why not feed him  raw chicken necks on processing day? Was I ever surprised to find him hovering around the flock in our pasture later that day–the pasture that contained a bird missing its head. What was I thinking there?  “Gee, this friendly dog has not yet developed a taste for chicken and is leaving our livestock alone. I will help him develop a taste for fresh, warm-blooded chicken and maybe then we’ll have something to worry about.”) You would think, even hope, we learned our lessons on being sentimental about meat birds. But see, now we have “Scruffy,” a runt from our last batch of the season who was just too small to butcher when the time came. We’re hoping Scruffy turns out to be a hen, then we’ll call her “Scruffilina” and add her to our layer flock. But we saw him raise his hackles today and do a lot of strutting about, and there is some iridescence starting on his feathers. We only have six hens in our laying flock, and they barely put up with the virile antics of the two roosters already in with them. We really hope to report that Scruffilina has joined the flock. Optimism dies hard around here.

6. Taking the rototiller to a patch of wire grass. We’re not sure what the right way is to break ground for new beds where a thatch of wire grass is entrenched, but we’re pretty sure breaking wire grass up into little pieces that reroot is not it.

5. Basing entire profitability of farming enterprise on a faulty calculation. See, to figure out how much money we were going to make on our chickens, one of the factors is how much feed they would eat on average, and how much that feed would cost. Based on my research, it looked like we were set to make enough money to pay our mortgage and then some with just a few hundred chickens! Hooray! Let’s quit our jobs and become full time farmers! But I forgot to multiply when doing the figuring. Math wasn’t my strongest subject in school. It turns out  feed costs are about 4-5 times more than that number in our draft business plan. Oopsie. But hey. At least we can pay our electric bill with the profits.

Really, we're farmers, not gardeners! Don't let the garden plot fool you!

4. Not having a vegetable growing plan. As much edumacation and planning expertise as Amir and I have, we were simply rookies when it came to growing vegetables at any kind of scale. We knew people who were making a living growing vegetables on small acreage for market, and that was enough for us. We ordered a large variety of seeds from a local organic seed company, figured we’d grow as much as we could and sell as much as we could, and we’d have thousands of dollars. With everything else we were trying to accomplish in the spring, including packing up and moving to our new farm, we ended up with about 1/20th of an acre planted to vegetables this season. Not quite the scale one needs to eek out a living as a vegetable farmer.

3. Having high expectations of the responsiveness of chefs. In the beginning of the season, I dutifully compiled a list of restaurants that might reasonably be expected to have an interest in serving local, high-quality, fresh, unique food. IHOP was not on the list. I sent emails on behalf of the farmers at the Madison Farmers Market, and myself, raising awareness of the availability of our products. When I got no responses, I followed up with phone calls. When I got no responses, I followed up with visits complete with customized brochures and a whole chicken as a sample for many of them to try out.  I followed up with emails and phone calls.  Our customers acted as our agents, infiltrating restaurants as diners, complimenting the chefs and telling them about our fabulous chicken that they really should serve at their restaurants and handing out our business cards. So far, these efforts have come to naught. It seems the only occupation that may rival farming in terms of how many things are on your plate at any one given time is Chef. But I haven’t given up. I’m cultivating perseverance!

2. Nothing screams “ROOKIE” like not recognizing the difference between a tulip bulb and an onion. But in my defense, it was the tulip planting season. And the onion planting season. And because Amir was doing some work exchange with our friends at EcoTulips down the road a bit, our sunroom (which was now chilly at all times) was filled with plastic shopping bags containing an assortment of both tulips and onions ready for planting. We had “walking onions,” “multiplier onions,” “Old-timey” onions, and about 1,000 onion sets. All of them looked different. Some of them were the same size of the 100 or so various tulip bulbs we had laying about. So I grabbed some bags of bulb-y looking things and planted them out in the beds I had cleared and prepared for onions. “Hmm, these look funny. Don’t smell like onions. Must be them “Old-timey” onions,” I thought. And I buried them just beneath the surface. Wasn’t until the next day that I happened to glance inside a clearly marked bag of tulips that I realized my error. My ever supportive and slightly concerned parents were visiting when I announced my latest blunder. I’m not sure I eased their concerns about the potential success of our farming venture much. But at least I didn’t put the tulips in the stir fry.

And the number one Clueless Farmer Blunder from Season One is:

1. Thinking, at times, that we were in control. It rained when it was supposed to rain, and the irrigation was there for when it didn’t happen when we wanted it to. The sun shone almost every single day. Our neighbors came to our aid without asking and offered no end of assistance, from tools and machinery to labor, plants, sustenance, and Good Advice. People with resources to help fledgling small farmers like us came to us with offers of support to help us succeed. Our plants grew, and some of them even thrived. Same with our chickens. Our circle of friends grew, and some grew closer. At times, our home is a respite for visiting world-weary souls.  We are well fed with nourishing home-grown food and well watered with our own sweet untreated well water. Our pantry is full with much of the abundance of our summer garden, and our freezers are filled to overflowing with our own birds and wild game shared by friends. We were never too hot or too cold for comfort this year. We really can’t take credit for much of what happened this year at all.  It turns out our little blunders didn’t stop God from fulfilling His promises. We have new-found appreciation for the wisdom in Proverbs 15:16-17:

“Better a little with the fear of the LORD
than great wealth with turmoil.”

“Better a small serving of vegetables with love
than a fattened calf with hatred.”

The thing is, we actually have a lot with the fear of the Lord, and prodigious servings of vegetables with love, along with lovingly-fattened meat.  Plus some really good books on business planning for small organic farms. Blunders or no blunders, things seem to be going according to somebody’s plan.

Who’s afraid of Big Chicken?

I'm a big chicken when it comes to Big Chicken.

Chicken has been in the news lately, and to be honest, it’s making me a little nervous. My big sister, ever looking out for me, first brought my attention to an article that came out in late July. Entitled “DC Farmer’s Markets highlight an array of food safety issues,” the three budding journalists working as fellows in a journalism program seemed bent on flexing their exposé muscles and set up a Marine-cum-farmer named Jordan to be the fall guy for local chicken. The story has been recently picked up and recirculated with expanded reporting by several other media outlets.

Ironically enough, they targeted the farmers’ market run by the USDA itself, right in its parking lot in D.C. They bought a chicken from vendor Jordan, popped it in a cooler, and then dropped it off at a lab for testing, along with a couple of other chickens they had picked up at supermarkets.

The whole thing reeked of “Big Chicken” to me. I can just imagine some Big Chicken public relations guy planting the bug of a story idea in the ear of  one of these journalism fellows. Heck, maybe they even offered to foot the bill for the lab testing.  Because even though sales are up, the image of Big Chicken continues to suffer from the exposure it receives on documentaries like Food, Inc. A little comeuppance wouldn’t be beneath them, I’m sure.

But that’s just the creeping paranoia of a clueless farmer wrangling with seemingly intentionally murky poultry regulations and the cryptic responses of USDA officials charged with explaining them. “That’s an interesting question,” one of the officials said to me repeatedly throughout the conversation I had with her last month about our chicken operation. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you for sure,” she added more than once.

Back to the story. So Jordan’s chicken turns out to have a bit of salmonella on it. Turns out so do the other two samples from the grocery store. But the spin of the story takes the tone of, “See, local food is no more safe than conventional food!” Ta-dah!

The fact that all samples are tainted is cause for concern. It’s why those “safe poultry handling” instructions are on all packages of chicken nowadays. A 2010 Consumer Reports article shared the results of lab tests on nearly 400 whole broiler chickens bought from 100 supermarkets in 22 states:  two-thirds harbored salmonella and/or campylobacter, the leading bacterial causes of foodborne disease. It hasn’t always been that way. Why now?

My bedtime reading this month has been a book called  “Spoiled: The dangerous truth about a food chain gone haywire.”  It was written over a decade ago, when the Jack-n-the-Box outbreak brought food safety to the national stage. The author spells out in great technical detail the whys and hows about bacteria in our food. Here’s the scoop on salmonella in poultry, in a nut (or shall I say egg) shell: Intensive chicken farming practices enabled the rapid spread of bacteria through thousands and tens of thousands of birds at a time. The bacteria got so cozy in this environment that it made itself at home in the very ovaries of chickens, to the point where many chicks are born infected and live quite happily unaffected by it.  It’s why we suddenly are not supposed to lick the cookie dough spoon or order our eggs sunny side up.

Regardless of where you get your chicken, make sure to cook it to 165 degrees F, and wash everything that raw poultry has been in contact with thoroughly. Picking up your chicken last at the farmer’s market, just like at the grocery store, is also a good idea.

It’s true there is no inherent reason that your local pastured poultry producer will sell you a cleaner chicken than Big Chicken. We get our chicks from a hatchery in Pennsylvania, and the owner, Kendall, told me that they place thousands of chicks a month. It stands to reason that some of those chicks are going to carry some bacteria, because it’s present in the environment, in wild birds and animals as well as those raised for consumption.

But it also stands to reason that raising just a hundred–or even a few hundred–birds at a time, outdoors on fresh pasture so that they are never on the same ground for longer than a day or so, may contribute to lower infection rates. The sun is a strong disinfectant, and on our farm,  pastures renew themselves for at least six months before chickens run free on them again. We also wash down their moveable coops between flocks, and clean out their waterers and feeders frequently. We can do that because we keep our chicken operation small and manageable, which we do precisely because we want to keep our chickens safe, happy, and healthy.

Freedom Ranger chickens free-ranging at Glean Acres in the Coupe de Poop!

I was thrilled to see Jordan’s cutting response to the article on their website. As a former Polyface intern and U.S. Marine, he articulates the trials and joys of being a pastured chicken producer better than I can. For he and his wife, as well as for Amir and I, it’s not just about safety, it’s also about respect for the animals that feed us that is a driving motivation for what we do.

As our friend Margaret Hutcheson of Sunrise Gardens shared, “The chickens have a happy life and one bad day.” I don’t think the same can be said about the chickens in Big Chicken confinement houses. In the meantime, I still lick the spoon from my cookie dough. Afterall, I can see the hens that laid the eggs for it right out of the kitchen window. But then, I’m a risk taker, otherwise I wouldn’t be in this clueless farming business, right?

And Jordan, keep up the good fight. We’ve got your back, friend.

Enough is a Feast

Mary: “It’s time for our outing in the park. “
Michael: “ I don’t want an outing. I want to tidy up the nursery again. “
Mary: “Enough is as good as a feast. Come along, please.”

Amir and I were watching a video (yes, a video) of Mary Poppins last night.  Michael had so much fun tidying the nursery with magic that he wanted to do it again.  To which Mary Poppins, in her transcendental and infinite wisdom, replied, “Enough is as good as a feast.”

I also noticed that I somehow missed the arrogance and vanity of Mary Poppins' character when I watched it as a child....

Now why hadn’t that line jumped out at me before? It could be because I haven’t watched Mary Poppins since I was about 12, and decidedly unenlightened, all claims to the contrary aside.  But this time the line delighted me. Because with all the scrimping and saving and cutting back we’ve been doing around here, we are finding ourselves satisfied with less and less. Not just satisfied, actually, but increasingly satisfied.

Because I enjoy picking on Starbucks as much as the next person, I’ll start there.  Growing up in surrounds of Berkeley, California, we had our pick of atmospheric coffee shops serving proper coffee drinks. Peet’s Coffee, of course, being the precursor to Starbucks. I spent a couple of summers in my college years working at Ortman’s Ice Cream Parlor on Solano Avenue. The venerable, aged and spry Mr. Ortman would be there before opening every morning in the back room, making up the batch of the day and then some.  Old timers and local merchants filled the parlor for lunch, sitting on ornate wrought iron chairs around linoleum-topped tables, ordering delectables such as grilled cheese sandwiches and egg salad on rye from the equally old-timer waitstaff (with the exception of a couple of whippersnappers like me), most of them finishing off with a scoop of ice cream–butter pecan being a favorite.

Ortman’s seemed like it would be there forever. But within a few years, it was a Starbucks. And in true Starbucks fashion, it was also right across the street from their inspiration and competitor, Peet’s Coffee. This made me mad. Partly because my mom, who is Dutch, was friends with Alfred Peet, who was also Dutch. And because something old fashioned and good and true was gone. I vowed never to drink Starbuck’s.

I probably liked Simonds in Cairo for the way it reminded me of Ortman's in with its old-fashioned decor. Or maybe it was the 50-something barista who would stare at you silently with a poker face until you ordered, making you wonder if you were really welcome there at all, but then deliver the most perfect cappuccino with a little flourish on the foam with a wink as he placed it in front of you.

But that was the nineties. And before I left California for Egypt, where there was yet no Starbucks, and only one or two slightly decaying European-style coffee shops from the old days where you could get a decent cappuccino in a thick porcelain cup and saucer. I started looking forward to downtime in international airports on my trips to visit family abroad so that I could sneak a forbidden latte–from Starbucks. But I still refused to use their pretentious vernacular for cup sizes, always ordering a “medium” latte, and having the barista confirm my order with a call of “Grawn-dey.”

The Java Shack is a refreshing piece of authenticity in the middle of Clarendon. Plus there is an awesome massage therapist upstairs.

When Starbucks came to Cairo, I knew the end was near. The next year, I found myself ensconced in Northern Virginia, the home of my sister and her family, where all things were shiny and new. I quickly discovered one of the area’s few independent coffee shops and was reassured by the quirkiness of the clientele there. One guy, an ex-electrician, showed me the scar on his leg from when a few thousand bolts of electricity had shot through him. Shortly thereafter, during therapeutic art classes to heal his brain, he discovered his artist within and left his job to become an industrial artist. He also showed me a picture of an old-fashioned fighter plane that he was commissioned to paint, you know, with snarling teeth and everything, as a lawn ornament for some military establishment. Pretty cool.

So when I got married and started farming, the world of leisurely hours at quirky coffeeshops became a thing of the past. That was just not something farmers did. Besides, we were saving up to buy our farm.  That’s when the lessons in frugality began. First, it was never going out for coffee, and satisfying myself with brewing up the gourmet supermarket brands at home for $8.00/12 oz, which would last us about a week, brewing just under a pot a day. “That’s like $0.25 per cup!” I reported proudly to my husband, adding that the same money would only buy two cups at Starbucks.

Then we discovered Walmart. And that Walmart had a fair trade blend of gourmet coffee for $5.99 a pound. I was giddy with pride at my ability to save money. My husband, who had been out of work for over a year before we married, gave me a version of a supportive smile which suggested incredulity at my naivety.  And after we bought our house and both became full time farmers, we discovered Maxwell House, in jumbo plastic containers, at $12.99 for 44.5 ounces. That’s like 100 mugs of coffee for the price of 3 Starbucks! And you know what? It’s actually pretty good. I don’t have any cravings for coffeehouse coffees.

But here’s the cool thing. Now, instead of using Starbucks as a barometer for coffee savings, I’ve finally transitioned to rational thinking. It’s not what I can save by buying for less, it’s what I can have by not buying it at all.  When I don’t need to have coffee, TV, new clothes, new books, dinners out, gourmet cheeses, groomed hair, fancy phones, and luxury linens, then I can have a chance at having peace of mind.

So while Amir and I had a good head start on living a frugal life as new farmers due to a combination of generosity from friends and family–which left us with a down-payment, plenty of furniture, a lawnmower or two, and a bunch of good clothes–and decent-paying office jobs that led to money in the bank, we have come a long way on the path to self-sufficiency that starts with frugality. And here is a list of our favorite frugal actions:

1. Minimize driving. Gas is expensive, as is car maintenance.  Make a plan for what you need and find a way to combine errands. Why, I haven’t left the farm since going to the Market on Saturday! And it’s Thursday today. That’s typical. While you’re at it, stick with your old car. It’s cheaper to insure, and cheaper to fix than getting a new one for sure! But don’t worry about fixing every little thing NOW. That exhaust system I was supposed to replace to the tune of $1000.00 last year on my 2001 Subaru according to the mechanic? Still intact.

2. Do it yourself. My husband and I had virtually no experience with tools of any sort, beyond using a hammer to bang a nail in the wall to hold up a picture. But rather than pay someone, my husband quickly learned to use a drill, skill saw, miter box, level, hammers, screwdrivers and other manly items, while I mastered chickenwire and staple guns, and we’ve built us three very decent chicken coops. And he repaired broken legs on tables, hammered in warped deck boards, and replaced the blades and changed the oil on the riding mower, and reinstalled the baffle on the mowing deck (after I ran over a 6 x 6 hidden in the tall grass, before I was banned from using the mower). Meanwhile, our neighbor is installing a hardwood floor in his home. Amir is eager to help so he can add yet one more DIY skill to his burgeoning repertoire. I’ll stick with home canning and berry winemaking.

3. Keep your thermostat high in the summer. We kept ours at 80 degrees, and believe me, it felt refreshingly cool coming in off the 100 degree fields! For the winter, we’re planning on closing off rooms, using space heaters, and keeping the thermostat down in the 60s.

4. Don’t be afraid to ask for things you need. I have gotten great furniture from Freecycle, as well as books. This weekend, I hope to get a bread machine and some tomato stakes from some kind souls who posted on Freecycle.  But more important than receiving from strangers is becoming a part of a giving community. Have a spirit of service and give your time helping out and sharing with others. And if you find yourself needing something, like say, some empty plant containers, an old mower, a chipper-shredder, some accounting advice, it’s likely that someone in your circle of community will be there for you. Accept it with gratitude, the close cousin of grace. And keep giving back.

5.  High deductible health insurance. Let’s face it. Health insurance is one big racket, and a messy one at that. If you are lucky enough to be relatively healthy and eat right and stay in shape, then don’t be paranoid and  fork out hundreds of dollars every month “just in case.” Put some money aside each month for that high deductible, but pay “the man” his share just in case you shatter many bones from falling out of a tree or some genetic or chemical time bomb goes off in your system. Make sure you get your money’s worth by getting that  annual physical check up that the insurers have to pay for out of the money you gave them.

6. Pre-paid cell phone service. My husband just downgraded his phone and phone service. He now has a “dumb” phone with pre-paid service.  We don’t use our phones all that much, even though we don’t have a landline at home. Savings per year: About $500.00!

7. Bartering. How great is it to trade some produce you have an abundance of for something different your neighbor has an abundance of? Pears for beans! Chickens for heirloom onion sets! Molokhiya for eggs! Tomatoes for homemade wine! Chickens for beef! Squash for blueberries! And my favorite: Chickens for volunteer laborers on processing day.

8. Eat what you grow. And make your own bread. We haven’t paid for a vegetable since April. And we eat plenty of them every day. Fresh from our garden. With plenty left for freezing and canning to get us through winter. Why, we’ve got 18 quarts of pole beans in our pantry, and in our freezer, 6 quarts of molokhiya, 2 quarts of raspberries, 8 quarts of yellow squash, 5 quarts of pureed canteloupe, 6 quarts of romano beans, 3 quarts of sweet and hot peppers, and 8 quarts of pureed tomatoes.  All from our garden. Not to mention the 55 whole pastured chickens, all manner of livers, hearts, and necks. (We hope to sell most of those before too long, though!)We also make our own whole wheat bread, the nice artisan crusty kind that fills and nourishes. The kind that would cost about $3.99  or more in stores, but we make at a total cost of about $0.70.

9. No TV. This is actually of paramount importance.  You would not believe the FREEDOM you have when you are freed from the tyranny of TV and those incessant ads and hyped up news stories! We barely realized it was the anniversary of 9/11, or that a hurricane was passing through. Does that make us bad people? We didn’t install our digital converter box on our 12 year old TV, nor did we spring for cable or satellite or whatever it is.  In addition to the monetary savings, we have more time,  without the temptation of distraction. This means time for cooking good meals, making bread, canning produce abundance, reading books. But it’s not like we’re monks or something. Monk is our latest favorite TV show, though. Because we have Netflix. Yes, for less than $20.00 a month, we have all the movies and old TV shows we want delivered to our mailbox for our ADVERTISEMENT-FREE viewing pleasure. And so shows that used to take an hour to watch because of annoying ads, which would prompt you to rummage around for an unhealthy snack or ice pick to stab yourself with,  now can be enjoyed thoroughly with no nerve-wracking cliff-hangers before ads. And in about 40 minutes. (In our neverending quest to downsize–to give up everything and follow Jesus is how we try to look at it–Amir has broached the subject of cancelling Netflix in favor of borrowing DVDs from the local library. He’s such a radical, that one! Why I married him.)

10.  Eat less. This was going to be a “buy in bulk” tip, but that’s too obvious to be worth a mention here. I was intrigued to see this tip mentioned in an other blog, and it was an “aha” moment. Let’s face it, most of us modern Americans overeat. And then punish ourselves by trying to go without for a day or two or sweating it out at the gym.  But now that we are homesteaders, we know the real value of the food we grow and prepare, and don’t gulp it down mindlessly or needlessly. My husband has made the ultimate sacrifice and even cut down on his serving size of pasta.  (We used to go through an entire pound, just the two of us, in one meal. Now we have leftovers!)    When the body has high quality food, it is satisfied more easily with less.

Enough really is as good as a feast. Bon Appetit! (And city-dwellers: support your local independent coffeehouse!)

Drinking the Good Life

We’ve been having a little too much fun these past couple of weeks. First, there was the Madison Farm 2 Table dinner down the road at Prince Michel Winery.

The classy dining room at Prince Michel Winery looked fit for a wedding. How's that for a Farm 2 Table venue?

How many times does the help get to lunch on fresh crabs while preparing a five star meal for 125 diners expected to arrive in a few hours?

I’m not sure which was more fun: Getting to hang out with all my farming compatriots and lunching on fresh crabs brought in by Robin Rider (because we farmers don’t mess around when it comes to lunch!), hearing our chicken complimented by a chef who uses Joel Salatin‘s chicken in his own restaurant in Harrisonburg,

All trussed up and someplace to go!

or getting to take home all the yummy leftovers.  Maybe it was just getting to see all us farmers dressed up.

Max Lacy listens attentively to instructions. But he already knows how to make people happy, so he's not worried about serving food.

Our very own Madison County Extension Agent, Brad Jarvis, has public speaking down to a science, along with crop rotation.

Meanwhile we’ve been enjoying the harvest. And getting creative with the fruits of our labor. (Who knew that okra could be enjoyed au gratin in a casserole, stuffed with feta cheese, stewed in chicken broth, and served over rice, rotelli pasta, or quinoa? How about okra on toast for breakfast? Maybe tomorrow. ) But the real star performer of our  first season is also the most exotic one: Jute Mallow. What’s that? Never heard of it? Well, maybe if we called it by its Arabic name, it would be more familiar: Molokhiya. Well, if you’re from the Middle East or North Africa it would be anyway. Or Japan. Because they love their “molohiya” there as well! Here’s a picture, if it helps.

Molokhiya! The national dish of Egypt right here in Madison County, Virginia.

I grew to love this stuff when living in Egypt, and Amir, being from Egypt, grew up on it. So we knew we wanted to grow it when we became farmers. We had no idea how well it would do in our climate in our soil, but now we do: It thrives! We’ve been bringing it by the bushel to our church, St. Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Church in Fairfax, where it is received lovingly and offered to the thousands of members with Egyptian roots who know exactly what to do with it. (Which is strip the leaves off the stems, cut the leaves up into tiny tiny little pieces, cook it in chicken broth for about 5 minutes, and stir in a whole mess of garlic sauteed with freshly ground coriander seeds and serve over rice or with pita bread.)

It is received a little more tentatively at the Madison County Farmer’s market, though I have been pleasantly surprised that the few who have ventured to try it usually come back for more. I was even more pleasantly surprised when an older couple at the market, after hearing all the nutritional benefits contained in this healing food, wondered whether they might just add it raw to their smoothies. What a terrific innovation! “This is the ticket,” I thought to myself. Because jute mallow is LOADED with  iron, protein, calcium, thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, folate, and dietary fiber, as well as other trace minerals and antioxidants. It is being studied for use as a staple food in African diets.  Egyptian lore has it that it “cleans the blood” of heavy metals. I don’t know about that, but they are on to something about it being extremely healthy. And what other way to enjoy the nutritional benefits of a plant than to consume it fresh and raw, in easily digestible form?

Thus, I offer the recipe for the ultimate health drink. Like most recipes, this one doesn’t have to be followed exactly. It may need to be adapted to fit your local and particular circumstances. The instructions below are just how I do things here at Glean Acres.

Molokhiya Super Smoothie

1. On your way back in from watering the flock of chickens in the mid-afternoon, realize that your energy is lagging and you might benefit from a pick me up snack. Stop by your garden bed and pick off a few handfuls of molokhiya leaves.

2. Wander over to the melon patch and select the ripest cantaloupe. Pick a few pattypan squash that need picking while you’re at it.

3. Set the molokhiya and cantaloupe down in kitchen, grab a small bucket and take it along with the squash over to your neighbor, who has a ginormous blueberry bush. Present squash, and hold up bucket with inquisitive look and glance over at berry bush.

See that shrub with a height of 10 feet and a circumference of about 15 feet? That's a New Jersey Giant blueberry bush. It just keeps going!

4. Run back to house to grab camera because you see exquisite swallow tail butterfly frolicking in berry bush. Take pictures.

Blueberry Butterfly on New Jersey Giant in Leon, Virginia.

5. Return to house with a little pail of blueberries and assemble ingredients in the blender. This involves scooping out a half of a still-warm-from-the-sunshine cantaloupe, adding the pile of molokhiya leaves, and topping off with two handfuls of blueberries,  about a cup of water and some ice from the industrial ice machine in the chicken processing area.

Nutrition goes well with the Good Life.

6. Pour into glass and bring outside to husband, who is now coming off the field after checking on the chickens again. “Needs more sugar,” he remarked. Reblend his glass with sugar. Enjoy yours out on the deck, in pure unadulterated form.

Innovation on a food enjoyed for millennia. Easy nutrition in a glass!

7. Drink up the Good Life while taking in the view of Thoroughfare Mountain and watering the broccoli and cabbage seedlings in their little starter trays. Ponder the marketing opportunities. Feel remarkably better in the morning due to superfood smoothie! Post gratuitous picture of Marilyn, the laying hen, perching on her coop.

Guest post: Mary Ruth’s Garden Newsletter

Amir and I find ourselves shaking our heads in wonder a lot lately. Not just at the gorgeous sunsets and moonrises, amusing chicken antics, and sprinting pace of spiny pigweed going to seed, but mostly at the plethora of good people that make up this little county of ours. And even more so because of their amazing, God-centered, smart, skilled and wholesome kids. It’s like living in the land of Little House on the Prarie, only without any Nellies or Mrs. Olsons. (I’m pretty sure we’ll meet them soon enough, though.)

These are kids without ipods, who have hobbies that involve building, growing, or raising things, who go on service trips instead of summer camp, and know how to butcher animals. And if they don’t, they are eager to learn. Thus we were blessed by the presence of none other than Mary Ruth Kipps and her youngest daughter, sixteen-year-old Catherine, for yesterday’s chicken harvest of 94 birds. (For non-locals, Mary Ruth runs one of the most popular stands at the Madison Farmer’s Market, with her assortment of colorful eggs, delicious baked goods, berries, vegetables, and flowers. Her beaming smile and humble daughters add to the overall appeal of her stand, I’m quite sure. )

Catherine is quite the budding writer. She had taken over writing the weekly newsletter to all the market fans and has turned it into a delightful journal of her experiences on the Kipp family farm, with its many enterprises and siblings. Opening up my email on Thursday nights to find that newsletter is one of the highlights of my week because it always leaves me with a beaming smile. So you can imagine how thrilled I am to have gotten a mention in this week’s newsletter! Without further ado, here is Mary Ruth’s Garden Newsletter, of August 12th, 2011, by the soon-to-be-famous author, Catherine Kipps.

Several years ago, I was walking through a creek and saw a relatively large shell. At the time, I found great joy in collecting anything and everything, so I picked it up and washed out all the dirt. Most of the little shells are just white on the inside, but this one had the most beautiful coloring I’d ever seen, with blue fading into pink and all the shades inbetween. And y’know, that’s the exact same color of a clear sky just after sunset. I know I’ve probably said this before, but in my opinion, the sky is the most beautiful part of God’s creation.

The clear weather has kept our family outdoors for the majority of this week. Daddy and Mamma have been working in their fruit trees and gardens. Jonathan’s doing a lot with the machinery at the farm and today he busted his head a little when he was driving the pick-up truck through a field. He hit a hidden rock and stopped suddenly.  He thinks he blacked out for a few minutes, and when he woke up, he put his hand to his head. When he saw all the blood, he thought, Oh whoops! Naturally, Mamma’s more concerned than he is. Stella has been rooting a lot of cuttings and she roped me into helping her, because she thinks “this will be good experience for me”. We don’t see much of Walter, between his work and his girlfriend. He comes in with his boots and straw hat from making hay and goes out all dressed up for a date. Rebekah is babysitting a couple days a week and is loving it. Around sunset, Nathaniel can be seen with the garden cart, hauling bottles of milk to the bawling calves behind the house.

After market on Saturday, Rebekah said something about a baby squirrel on the deck, so I went to check it out. It definitely wasn’t on the deck, so I figured it must have fallen off. Sure enough, it was squeaking it’s little lungs out down in a clump of grass. I took care of it for several days, and then on Monday, Stella, Rebekah, and I took our cousin from Iowa on a hike up Old Rag. When we got home, the squirrel’s nest of rags was empty, so we searched under chairs and around bookshelves and finally decided he must have dropped through the railing into the plant area. That’s exactly what he did. He dropped directly onto the cement floor and we thought he surely was a goner, but he only seemed hungry so I took care of him for another day. By Tuesday evening, he decided he’d had enough of this life and so he died. I think it had something to do with his addiction to falling (Jonathan suggested we call him Geronimo), first from his tree, then from the deck, and finally from our living room, but I guess we’ll never know. He was fun while he lasted.

This morning, Mamma and I headed over to Amir and Diana’s to help them butcher chickens. I never butchered chickens before and I think I was expecting something very gruesome, but I had a lot of fun. I killed my first chicken around mid-late morning, and I had some first-rate teachers and I even had Mrs. Caldwell look on and cheer for me! It was a wonderful, beautiful day, spent with wonderful people.

Our green-beans are producing very well right now, and we canned several batches. Mamma has fed us green-beans for supper almost every night for the past week. Stella worked up some corn while we were gone today and Mamma and I worked up a small batch earlier this week. The tomatoes have been dribbling in, giving us enough for sliced tomatoes whenever we want, but not enough for processing. The carrots and red beets we planted a couple weeks ago are coming up with gaps in the rows where there wasn’t enough water. An apple tree I grafted this spring looks like it grew six inches since I last looked at it, which really wasn’t that long ago. We found a garter snake in our basement yesterday but it didn’t want Nathaniel to catch it, so the last we saw, it was hiding out under the boardwalk in the plant area.

We’re making all the usual baked goods for Saturday, and we’re planning to bring more grapes and apples. We brought two pies back from market last weekend, but Stella stuck them in the oven on Sunday morning to crisp them up and forgot about them. When we got back from church, they were still edible, but definitely overbaked.

See y’all Saturday,
Catherine Kipps

Vegetable vernacular

A little over a year ago, way back when my farm dream was confined to the the small 4 x 10-foot patch of weeds between the driveway and the entrance to our apartment, I called my Aunt Joy in Georgia to ask her which kind of bean my uncle used to grow in the garden that cooked up so good, string beans or runner beans?

She paused, being a genteel Southern lady, to collect her thoughts to answer without directly calling attention to the error inherent in my question. More on that later.  “Well, I guess you would want pole beans,” was her answer. “But he also grew bush beans. Both are good.”

So I bought some pole beans and hoped for the best in my little patch of weeds amended with garden soil. Hope apparently wasn’t enough, nor was hope and water.  For about this time last year, I harvested exactly two beans from the one scraggly little five-leafed plant drooping on the ground from the nine seeds I planted beneath three perfect bamboo tipis, ready to support the abundant crop.

I also got about six cucumbers and two zucchini plucked from an elaborate trellis constructed of bamboo and twine engineered by my husband to maximize airflow to keep mildew at bay. And six tomatoes from our three heirloom plants, one of which towered NINE FEET HIGH all the way to October, before grudgingly producing two small fruits. We also had a fine hot pepper crop from our three plants, along with plenty of arugula and parsley.

Our practice garden in Salisbury, MD. We're ready to farm!

We were very inspired. “Let’s become farmers and grow vegetables for a living!” we exclaimed. My husband was very emboldened by my previous gardening successes as well, as back in my California days, my garden once produced enough to make a gourmet salad for three people–at the same time!

Our perseverance drowned out the chorus of polite naysayers and eyebrow raisers. Farming was a calling. The idea of Glean Acres was born, with our mission to grow food, faith, and the good life.

Besides, we reasoned, I was practically an expert in vegetables, since I worked the farmstand at Greenbranch Organic Farm. I could identify at least seven varieties of heirloom tomato and at least that many of squash and peppers. Plus I watched the comings and goings of tractors, transplants, crates of vegetables, compost, farmhands, and actual farmers from my little doorway to the barn and the fields. I was also quite good at watering raised beds of herbs and picking off those smelly little parsley worms. (Nevermind that they turn into gorgeous swallowtail butterflies! Go eat some wild carrot or something!)

You can't have these gorgeous swallowtail butterflies without the crop-damaging caterpillars. I think it's a fair trade-off.

So once the chickens were safely in their handmade coops out on pasture, we set about growing vegetables for market, with enough left over to feed ourselves. The existing raised beds proved mighty handy for getting our first plants out before mid-summer. All we had to do was fill them with proper dirt–8 tons of it– and nestle our transplants in.  That done, we moved on to tilling up some new beds in what used to be a paddock. We were followers of the WORD contained in the Vegetable Gardener’s Bible, which advocated wide rows, organic methods, raised beds, and deep soil. We act like we’re on a first-name basis with the author, Edward Smith. “Well, Ed says to pick them off by hand,” says Amir when we investigate options for the eradication of squash bugs. Looking around after we shaped our first couple of beds, I realized this was exactly the way my grandpa and uncle gardened. (With the exception of the occasional spraying of a chemical or two.) With lots and lots of leaf mulch on the beds and pine needles in the walkways. Our radical farming method was suddenly very homey and familiar.

But as more and more rocks were unearthed by the shiny brand new tiller–imported rocks, not the native ones,  we gradually came to understand that we were tilling in our drainfield. Oopsie.

If we dig our garden beds in the drainfield, they'll have better drainage, right?

So we kept tilling until Mid-July. Then we had to stop. The drought-hardened clay soil was merely amused by the spinning tines of the tiller.

So the hundreds of struggling transplants, still in their little pots, begging for ground, were planted out one by one, all of them just inches from their neighbors. Spacing recommendations are merely suggestions, right?

Twenty tomato plants in 40 square feet. That's not crowded or anything, right?

72 muskmelon plants. 75 square feet of garden bed. Welcome squash bugs!

These were the transplants grown from seeds we selected back in January, when the snow was still on the ground. Seeds chosen for their whimsical and artistic-sounding names more than for their hardiness or potential yield.

Thus, we grew Black Prince and Garden Peach tomatoes. Texas Honey June sweet corn and Chires baby corn, Cossack Pineapple ground cherries, Sweet Chocolate bell peppers, Golden Bush Scallop squash, Jericho lettuce, Star of David okra, Blush eggplant, Black Beauty zucchini,  Garden Oasis Mediterranean and Green Fingers Persian cucumbers.

Creamy white deliciousness prospered despite the earnest efforts of the flea beetles.

Volunteer corn in the chicken manure compost pile. We think it sprung from the organic chicken feed.Apparently, now we can grow vegetables without even trying! That's what faith can do.

Guess who lives in the okra flowers? Our little pollinator friends!

Sometimes the lines between land vegetable and sea creature gets blurred. We sure wish we could grow kelp on our fields, but we'll have to be content with jellyfish blooms.

This little guy is not a friend, and as the wasp eliminator had not shown up yet, he became a tasty treat for the chickens!

And guess what? Much to our constant amazement, and despite the relentless attack of the squash bugs and borers, cucumber and Mexican beetles, tomato horn worms and flea beetles, ladies and gentlemen, we have vegetables!

And that's just the stuff we didn't eat ourselves yet!

Now about those pole beans and my Aunt Joy’s consternation over answering my question about the right bean to grow for that good old-fashioned hearty bean flavor. You see, string beans is the old-fashioned term for snap beans. Clever seed scientists have managed to breed the stringy part out of the common green bean and thus we entered the new era of the snap bean. But most people just call them “green beans,” though that doesn’t necessarily mean the bean is green, just that it is usually picked and eaten young, before the seeds inside have matured all the way, and while the pod is still tender and edible. Because you can have yellow green beans, which some people call wax beans, as well as other colors, like red green beans. But these are distinct from shelling beans, which means the choice bit is the mature seed inside which is dried and stored for later enjoyment. You know, like kidney beans and pinto beans.  But some beans are dual purpose, meaning you can enjoy them young and “green” or wait for them to mature and shell them.

But it also turns out there are pole beans that are string beans and pole beans that are snap beans and pole beans that are shelling beans as well as pole-type bush beans. Rather than try to figure that all out, I picked out my bean seed based on its name alone: Lazy Wife Greasy Pole Bean. There I am below, being a decidedly lazy wife harvesting pole beans without even troubling myself to bend over.

Who are you calling lazy? Just so long as you don't call me greasy!

Today, we rest, letting the ground absorb the five inches of rain we got last night, right after I had given up on the dark clouds that had been gathering all day and turned on the irrigation to the tomato bed. “Oh ye of little faith,” God bellowed. And he restoreth our soil and kept us humbly on our newly mulched narrow paths.

Behavior modification: for the birds

Two of our roosters spent the night locked outside the coop. They had been behaving badly. Running around grabbing other chickens by the back of their necks with their very sharp, strong beaks. I know how sharp and strong those beaks are because they frequently mistake my toe or a mosquito bite on the back of my leg for a choice tidbit when it’s feeding time. It leaves a bruise!

After nursing several beak bruises, a wise woman would learn her lesson and wear closed-toe shoes and long pants. Just like those roosters, who sometimes even get thrown entirely over the protective fencing for their anti-social antics (see how you like it when a fox bites you!), should learn their lesson and stop harassing their flock brethren. But I’m still getting pecked and those roosters are still attacking. I guess we’re all stubborn and foolish.

Or rather, I’m stubborn and foolish, and they’re chickens.

"We promise we won't poop in the feeder anymore. Now please let us have some food?"

“I left them outside the coop because I didn’t want them to maim or kill any of our other birds tonight,” my husband explained to me when I wondered whether he thought those roosters would change their ways as a result of being locked out for the night.

He wears closed-toe shoes, bug repellent, and gloves. And protective eyewear when power tools are being used. I’ve been compelled to pull up a particularly hateful spiny pigweed with my bare hands. More than once.

But both of us are riding that huge fast-moving learning wave of all things farming and our sentiments are having a hard time staying on board. It might have something to do with our coddling damaged or ill-adapted birds in our house. By birds, I mean broiler chickens that have a few weeks to live before we kill them anyway.

Remember Gimpy, the baby chick who had a hard time standing up and getting around?

Gimpy didn't make it to the dinner table, or even to our laying flock.

Despite our attempts with various splints and bandaging devices designed to help her get around, at 12 days old, she still was struggling. The chicken experts on the online forums all advised “cull, cull.” So we did what any responsible chicken farmer does with a disabled chick that can’t fend for itself. We took her to the Avian Veteranarian Specialist 45 minutes down the road.

Dr. Raab was very kind. “So, I understand this is a broiler bird?” she asked, lifting Gimpy gently from the embrace of the assistant, who had been cradling and comforting Gimpy against her chest while she went about some other clinic duties before the doctor appeared.

“Umm, yes. But she is like our pet now. We’ll keep her if she makes it through,” we clarified.

“Okay. I have to be honest, I’m not very familiar with treating broiler birds. Sometimes I see hens, but I don’t know much about the growth rate and development of broiler breeds,” said the good doctor.

“Oh. These are dual purpose birds, and slow growers by industry standards,” I clarified.

“Okay. I was wondering if she would be putting on weight too fast for us to be able to heal her leg to support her. Let’s see…” Dr. Raab gently palpated Gimpy head to toe. She moved her little legs around to see what they could do. The diagnosis: Double jointed in both legs, at the hock. Birth defect, likely.

“I don’t think I can fix her. Even if I did surgery. Which I’m not sure you would want to do anyway. It seems like you’ve done everything right, but I don’t think there’s anything we can do. At this point, you have to consider her quality of life. She is probably very frustrated, and it will only get worse,…” the doctor explained, her mouth twisted in regret, eyes big.

Killing chickens was a skill set I possessed. But killing baby chicks–on purpose–was another thing entirely. I didn’t think I could do it. Amir was not keen on the idea either. Dr. Raab offered to euthanize her.

“Peep peep peep” Gimpy protested.

The ridiculousness of our decision to euthanize our deformed broiler chick–at considerable expense–was clear despite our tear-filled eyes. The nice people at the vet clinic let us stay in the exam room to collect ourselves until we were all paid up, and the still warm and soft Gimpy was laid back in her shoebox for the drive home. I wouldn’t blame them if they all burst out laughing as soon as we were out the door. But I somehow doubt they did.

“We really can’t make a habit out of this,” I said.

“I know,” agreed Amir.

Wordlessly, we dug a hole under the rosebush in the paddock that would house our laying flock and buried our broiler bird, fashioning a cross out of sticks to mark the grave.  “It’s like this is the funeral and the place for all the chickens that die here,” I finally said. Because our grief for Gimpy was tied to our grief over taking the lives of the first batch of chickens we had raised earlier that week, and the many chickens who would die to feed us and our customers in the months and years to come.

You would think that would teach us not to get attached to our meat birds. But no. We still had our little Angel, and her companion, Buddy, in our back bedroom.

Little Angel was barely breathing when we scooped her up from the brooder and nestled her in the big box infirmary in the back bedroom.

Angel NEVER stopped peeping! “Peep peep peep! Peep peep peep!” she chirped incessantly. “What did I do to deserve this,” moaned Buddy, under his breath. Angel followed him around, cuddling up next to him when they slept, drinking when he drank, eating when he ate, peep peep peeping with every breath. And shrieking in horror when he finally grew big enough to jump up to the ledge of the box and try to escape. We always knew when Buddy got out.

Finally, it was time for their flock to move out from the brooder into their Coupe de Poupe outside, in the lush green clover. But it was too late for Angel and Buddy to grow up to be broilers. We were attached. They were destined to be our pets and join the laying flock.  They were too young to be put in with the adults, so we reintroduced them to their flock, but not after fashioning duct tape ankle bands for them so we could always tell them apart from the rest.

We needn’t have worried. Even among the hundred or so other chirping month-old chicks, we could single out Angel’s peeps. And Buddy’s bright red crown was never far from Angel, plus he usually wandered right up to us and stood there while the rest of the flock ran for cover.

First day out! Angel is the little one with the fluffy head on the left.

The two of them, having experienced more of the world than the rest of the flock, were brave and eager foragers from the start, and led the way for the rest of the chicks.

Brutus, Gimpy’s original companion, is in there somewhere, too. But there’s only so much sentiment we can have for one flock.

Meanwhile, the first of our about-to-be laying flock is made up of random misfits from the first flock.

Notice how Roobart positions them all as sentries facing different directions. He's a cautious one, that Roo!

There’s Roobart, the introverted (or is it cowardly) rooster who wouldn’t leave the coop and never even tried to crow. Now he acts like a nervous nellie moaning for the girls in his care to stay in the coop and sleep in the nest box all together. To his credit, he didn’t herd everyone back into the coop when a rabbit hopped by. Then there’s Shooshoo, the little spry hen who is too quick and too clever and too little to get caught. Finally, there’s Marilyn, the tall leggy blond who was spared purely for her looks. Angel and Buddy will join them in a few weeks when they’re fully grown.

As for that learning curve, Roobart learned to crow! He’s a full fledged (and full-figured!) Rooster now. Our girls are in good hands. And Amir and I culled our first bird yesterday. Even after it had spent many days in our basement and on our porch (not the back bedroom!), being hand fed and watered and named. It was clear that it was suffering and wasn’t going to get better. Rest in Peace, Bubbles.

Maybe I won’t have to change the name of this blog to the Sentimental Farmer after all.

Chick Infirmary

Poor Amir. He’s been doing all the heavy lifting around here the last couple of days, and tending to not one, but three gimpy chicks (myself included.)

The straw that broke this camel’s back was, well, hay actually. I was just hand gathering a bunch of long cut grass to throw in the chicken pens when something spasmed and wouldn’t stop, so I joined the other malingerers in our little household.

Sick chick number one is Gimpy. (Is that wrong?)

Gimpy has a box seat!

I noticed her resting alone by the brooder entrance on arrival day, while all her brothers and sisters were jostling together for the coveted corner space against the opposite wall. When I gently prodded her, I noticed she couldn’t stand or walk without plunging over. So she was removed to the private recovery suite at Glean Acres Infirmary. We didn’t want her to be lonely, so we plucked out a random, healthy friend for her, for moral support.

Are you looking at me? Are you looking at me?

So Gimpy’s friend turned out to have problematic bedside manners. He took food from her beak. He stepped on her toes. He stepped on her. He, well, walked all over her, actually. His redeeming feature was that while we thought we were putting him there for “moral support,” and perhaps to model good chicken movement and appetite, Gimpy decided to use him as a little crutch. When he came near, Gimpy would muster all her strength to stand up next to him and lean, hoping he might move at a pace and to a place suitable for her.

But finally, we decided Brutus was too much for Gimpy, so we inserted a barrier so that Gimpy could rest without being stepped on. Though the barrier was porous and they could still see and hear and touch each other, now we were worried Brutus and Gimpy would not be company enough for each other. So we brought in what turned out to be a gentler chick companion for Brutus. They seem to get along well.

Gimpy's friends sleep huddled together next to the divider, with Gimpy nestled right on the other side. That's Brutus on the left.

A few phone calls and internet searches led us to speculate that Gimpy might be a victim of what is known as “spraddle leg.” If baby chicks can’t get their footing immediately out of the egg, their legs splay out and they can’t bring them back in. It happens sometimes, even in good hatcheries and brooder environments. It also could be a related injury due to being trampled or piled upon by the other chicks. Or it was a birth defect. On the chance it could be spraddle leg, we decided to follow the protocol for home treatment. That is, we hobbled poor Gimpy with a bandaid tied around her legs. I didn’t traumatize her again to get a picture of her, but below is a picture of another chick who is having the same physical therapy treatment. It’s from the poultryhelp.com website.

A certain amount of mortality is expected when dealing with batches of hundreds of chicks. In pastured poultry operations, producers expect anywhere from 6% to 30% mortality before harvest. Some are in the brooder, and some are in the pasture, if it gets too hot, or too wet, or too cold.  Or if the birds put on meat and fat faster than their organs and bones can keep up, as happens frequently with Cornish Cross breeds on pasture.We expect far less mortality with our Freedom Rangers.

With our first batch, we were eager to achieve 0% mortality. But we lost one at around 10 days old. Unexplained, but we nursed two other sick chicks from that same batch around the same time back to health. We lost a two-day old chick in batch two. Again, unexplained.  But considering that is out of a total of 275 birds, we’re still at less than 1%, so far. So we must be doing something right.

Now we have Gimpy, and today Amir checked another not-quite-right chick into the infirmary. Because we have small flocks of 100 or less, and these hundred are divided into two batches during the brooder stage, we can keep a pretty good eye on them and notice the welfare of individual chicks. It would be hard for a grower to notice an injured chick in a larger brooder with hundreds of chicks scampering around, until it was motionless and ready for disposal.

The other not-quite-right chick I call Angel. Because her wings are too big for her body. It seems her wings grew, but not her. We’ve been helping her drink water and made a pillow for her out of her food so she can snack easily. We think she might be feeling a little better. But it’s hard to know, isn’t it?

Our little Angel. Wings like that, she should be flying in no time!

We’re not quite sure what we’re going to do with our special needs chicks when they get all better. We’re already too attached to our flocks for our own good, seeing as though the chicken harvest is set for just 9 days from now. We have an introverted rooster out on the field who prefers to stay in the coop by himself while the rest of the flock enters into a feeding frenzy first thing in the morning when we let them out. We bring him his food separately.

Before I get all morose, I better get back to work. The labels for the bags the dressed chickens will be packaged in just arrived. And I have to go check in on our peeping patients. As for me, plenty of farm chores to be done that don’t involve heaving lifting. Such as seeding our ground cherries! This farmer wobbles, but she doesn’t fall down (for very long, anyway)!

Bad fences make good neighbors

When my husband and I were first toying with the idea of starting some sort of agriculturally-based enterprise and brainstorming names for it, we played around with the idea of Good Neighbors. Because we would like to be them. While virtually all forms of the Good Neighbor name are taken by all manner of businesses with good intentions, it turns out we’re surrounded by actual good neighbors, and our rickety, patchwork fence isn’t even between us and most of them!

Take our neighbors to the south, Lloyd and Diane. I said to my husband a couple of weeks ago, “Wow, we sure lucked out with them for our neighbors!”

“I don’t think it was luck. I think we were blessed with them,” was his reply.

When I spent the first two weeks in the house alone, I wore a path on the grass between our houses, borrowing tools, getting to know how to get things done in the country, figuring out how the heater worked. Mowerless, I watched helplessly as the grass grew several inches per day in the April rains. I had brooders to set up, feeding schedules to work out, seeds to plant, boxes to unpack.  But Lloyd had a riding mower with a mowing deck over four feet wide. And he took it upon himself to tidy up our front acre, and then worked his way through the lawn-cum-meadow a while later so we could put our first batch of chickens out without them getting lost.

When my mom saw him mowing our lawn again, she couldn’t take it. “You need to get a mower. I’ll buy you one.” And she did. We named it after her, kind of. Mom’s from Holland. Her name is Johanna, but everyone calls her Jopie.  So our shiny new red riding mower (No, it’s not a New Holland Tractor. It’s a Craftsman. Made in the USA.) is JopJop.  Here I am on her:

It looked so much bigger inside the show room!

Most importantly, Lloyd has berries. Strawberries, lots of them. “Help yourself anytime,” he said when I tentatively approached with an offer to help him harvest the berries. And his Jersey Giant blueberry bush is ten-feet tall, and loaded with ripening fruit.

You know you are living the good life when your husband says to you, “You smell like strawberries,” and it’s not your shampoo.

Most of all, I like shooting the breeze with them over the fence. Or on our side, with the weedy meadows and piles of dirt and rickety sheds and straggly seedlings in makeshift raised beds; or on their side, with productive strawberry patches, flat green grass, artistically designed garden patches with blossoming lilies set off by cedars, and perfect, brand new raised beds, all in a line, filled with evenly spaced, ready-to-bloom vegetables. Mostly on their side.

It's a long fence, but it's a low one, thank goodness.

Then there’s Mr. Rhodes. His property is behind ours. He has a tractor. With a bushhog. And he knows how to use it. All we had to do was ask.

A heavenly sight when you've got five acres and no ruminants or tractors of your own!

Mr. Rhodes and his big tractor could handle the large pasture, but for our small pastures, thank goodness for Margaret. Margaret is our beat up work-horse of a push-mower that dern well deserves to be called a bush hog, stuff that she took on!

Three foot high mixed pasture grasses are no match for me and Margaret!

This is my other friend Margaret, the one who gifted me the gently used push mower. Margaret the human is a work horse of a woman, though!

My first new friend in town, Margaret, of Sunrise Gardens, just down the road and then some.

If it weren’t for our neighbors, we never could have tamed our acreage. And our chickens would not be enjoying the life they have now:

Look, it's a feeder! No, it's a perch! No, it's a latrine! What a useful multipurpose chicken apparatus! What will they think of next?

Chickens may be raptors, and may have evolved from jungle birds, but they clearly like their grass mowed these days. Scare-dy cats, all of them. I mean, they're chicken and stuff!

Talk about your pampered chickens! They have a bed of soft, freshly mown grass, the shade of an old sycamore tree, views of the Blue Ridge, cold, fresh spring water. Kind of like me!

Without our neighbors, we could have never gotten to the stage of BREAKING GROUND for our GARDEN BEDS, with our new, rear-tine rototiller. We call him “Little Richard,” after my papa, (Big) Richard, who tirelessly tills for peace and justice in our world.  Our rototiller doesn’t have quite so long a row to plow.

We waited until it was 93 degrees outside before we decided this was the day we MUST break ground. We also waited until about 1pm. Because we're still trying to figure out that early-to-rise thing.

Thanks to our good neighbors, I think we are off to a good start on the Good Life. I’m off now, to get some mulberries from our giant tree And some more strawberries from our neighbors…I’m all out of perfume.