Be joyful though you have considered all the facts
What with the four pullets moving in, it was time to build a new roost. This one should house nine chickens.
Next up: add a nest box and an automatic door opener. The racket now starts at 6 am, and seeing as I go to sleep around midnight, I’d dearly love for the door to open by itself. We might build one ourselves, or buy a kit, don’t know yet. There are many choices out there!
It’s getting a little repetitious, but there were again many more tomatoes. The warm weather continues and there are still many fruits on the vines, so this may not be the last of ’em.
I’m looking forward to next summer, when I’ll have the super sunny front patio to grow tomatoes, peppers (can you spot the red one) and eggplants. The crew starts work on it in a week or two.
I went into the bees just now and found very little honey, just four or so full frames. There are lots of frames half-filled, half-capped. The bees were hard at work there, though (at least I hope they were, and that they weren’t gorging on honey in preparation of a swarming!). So perhaps I just need to be a little more patient and I’ll get another ten or so frames from both hives.
The generation of hens – three two -year-olds, one one -year-old and four 6-month-old pullets – have been combined into one coop. There’s a quite a bit of pecking, but not too much. The poor one-year-old gets the worst of it. No eggs from the pullets yet.
I am so thankful to these chickens for many reasons, one of which follows. Amie had her kids’ birthday party on Sunday (we postponed it because in Summer many of her friends aren’t around) and I promised to make the heatwave cake. I had bought a dozen organic, free-range, extra large eggs at While Foods. What junk that was! The egg whites were like water, one whipping and the yolks turned beige. The first roll wasn’t up to my standards, so I made another one with an extra egg (that one failed because we just got a new-to-us range, and I must have pushed the wrong button; it was yummy but impossible to roll up). After french toast that morning, we had only 2 homegrown eggs left, but the hens laid three more, just in time for me to make one more roll, which was perfect. I’m happy I made that many, because the nine kids ate ALL THAT CAKE. It went so fast I didn’t get to take a picture.
School has started up again, which might mean that I’ll be able to blog more. No guarantees.
In the meantime, we get a harvest like this one almost every other day.
I’ll have lots of elderberries to make syrup from, and the cukes and zucchinis will — be –pickled. The tomatoes are still going strong, and with this current unseasonably hot weather (90 F on Tuesday and again tomorrow, and nothing much lower in between) I may still be looking at lots of big fruits.
We also harvested our first grapes. Not much, and tiny, but o so sweet and flavorful!
Spot the chicken.
They are jungle fowl after all.
Amie to the rescue.
And after that, we had dinner.
And then dessert.
Ironic, that I didn’t intend to grow tomatoes – getting plenty of them from a local farmstand and from our CSA box – but that I put in just a few seedlings that a friend gave me, and some seedlings I grew to give away but never got to, and that now tomatoes are my most successful crop!
Today’s harvest:
That big one weighs a pound and a half! All three ripe ones are Paul Robesons, officially the only big tomato I’ve ever been able to grow to maturity. A day or two on the counter will bring out their blush. They’re divine raw, sliced, with salt and pepper, or mixed into a cucumber salad.
I keep finding lots of green tomatoes on the ground. They don’t go to waste: I fry them up. There is also always a ripe or near-ripe one that is half eaten. Those go to the chickens, who love them.
We had the clothesline out on Sunday to dry out some tarps, and it was graced by two dragonflies who really liked their perch: they let us photograph them from pretty up close, and whenever they flew off, they returned immediately, so we got to try the new camera’s macro function and lens.
Today we fired up the oven again and made pizza. We just wanted pizza so didn’t add the rocket stove to the mix for baking.
We found a good routine that doesn’t involve rushing. We burned a small fire for about 45 minutes, which was sufficient to bring the baking stone up to 850F: perfect for pizza! We then raked the coals to one side and made one pizza on the other side. When one side of the pizza was cooked, we rotated it. Then we took it out and, while we prepared the next pizza, we simply raked the coals back to the middle so it could regain a good temperature again.
We did that for three pizzas and it worked wonderfully. We could easily have made three more with that system and without having to add more sticks to the fire.
And here was today’s garden harvest:
Yesterday we built the rocket stove extension to our earth oven. The idea is to keep on pumping in heat after the fire in the oven has burned down to coals and you rake it aside to start cooking, and also to have more control over the temperature.
For the bottom part we just did what the Pragmatic Stoic did. Our only adjustment was an old grate that we had lying around instead of flashing.
Setup is gloriously fast: not counting our “Home Depot date,” where we had fun putting the chimney puzzle together, it took us fifteen minutes. And it was relatively cheap: cinder blocks go for $1.50 a piece, and all the chimney pieces came to about $30.
The cinder block part of the stove involves an open block, which they didn’t have at the Depot. So DH showed off his karate chop:
What do you think about that!
The top of the chimney has an inbuilt flue, which allows us to control the draft, and also to vent the first ashy smoke so it doesn’t go into the earth oven. It only takes a minute or so, though, to start burning really clean.
Once we’ve played around with it and see that it really does the job, we’ll include it in the third, decorative envelope of the oven. This will make the stove tighter as well as insulate it, giving it more oomph.
Then I lit the fire – I’m the fire starter and keeper in the family. It only takes sticks, burns hot, clean and fast, and unlike the earth oven fire, which uses larger pieces of wood, it needs to be fed constantly.
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We played with the draft, opening and closing the flue, putting the lid on the chimney. While getting the hang of it the heat did some more drying out of the earth oven, which is still pretty wet. For that reason, we also lit a a fire in the oven. The difference between the blast-off rocket stove fire and the ponderous Jabba earth oven is amazing.
This short fire brought the top inside wall temp up to 800 F. There was a marked difference between the south side, which is much drier, and the north side wall, which is still visibly wet. Anyway, a lot more drying is needed, and tomorrow we’ll make another fire. We have pizza materials on hand.
Amie during all this time had fun with her aunt, who was visiting. They harvested the abundant cherry tomatoes.
They also lazed in the hammock. Look at those toes!
Quickly.
Made 25 pints of blueberry jam from Farmers Market berries and another batch from 5 quarts of berries Amie and I picked at a very locally IPM place with friends one thunderstormy afternoon. We came out of the field drenched but happy and surprised we had been picking for three hours. Our tribe will be co-purchasing and canning peaches again.
Blanched and froze 4 lbs of green beans, half of these from our garden, half donated by a friend whose community garden plots are going wild. We’ve been sharing a lot of produce, one garden producing more of this than the other.
Put together two 3-gallon carboys of sweet mead with the winterkill honey, which I pasteurized. They’re bubbling away in the basement and should be done in few weeks – but that won’t stop me from going down there and thieving some for a taste.
We’ve been consistently harvesting onions, green beans, cherry tomatoes (the bigger ones are almost there), kale, chard, squash, zucchini, cucumber and tons of herbs from the garden. That plus our farm share is more than sufficient for our needs, and when I walk into the supermarket nowadays I skip the produce section altogether. I only (and rarely) mushrooms, but then I just spotted an enormous chicken-of-the-woods in the neighborhood, beckoning. Come to think of it, all I buy at the supermarket is the very occasional fish or meat and butter, and predominantly milk.
With our town’s Green Team had a booth at the Farmers Market yesterday. We displayed all the harvests from the school gardens – all of which went to the Food Pantry this morning – photos of our school composting systems, and talked to people. We also sold some of my Spring honey as a fundraiser, as well as purslane harvested (weeded) from all our gardens. We ended up giving lots of it away and having lots left over too. No worries: I brought it home and made it into potato-purslane soup, most of it for freezing. Yum!
The chickens have been consistent layers and we’re looking forward to the pullets starting to lay (in September or thereabouts)m at which point our bartering power will increase significantly. The two flocks are “together” – well, in the same shared space, namely the chicken yard – during the day, but at night they still retire to their own coops.
Lastly, how lovely, really, to get books delivered that you had forgotten you’d ordered. A big batch for me today: Pioneer Women by Stratton, Pioneer Women by Peavy and Smith, The Klamath Knot by Wallace, The Way to Rainy Mountain and In the Bear’s House, both by Momaday.
We demolished the Earth Oven because the inner earth layer was dropping too much dust and too many chunks into the food – we dubbed that “mushroom and mineral pizza”. There wasn’t enough clay in the mixture: too much sand. We saved and kept separate the two layers, bought 50 lbs moist potter’s clay and on a warm day, experimented with slip (clay and water), “clump” (slip and the earth mix from the inner dome we had saved), and builders sand. The clay/slip really made a difference. All our bricks held up better than the best brick the first time around. Choosing the optimal combination of clay (you don’t want too much of this as it shrinks), earth (which we didn’t have a lot of) and sand, we set to work.
Making the new mix for the inner layer was a tough job, since it involved getting the ingredients to mix really well, and one was very dry, one very wet, the other very gritty. My friends Andrea and R came over to help. A helped DH build the new sand dome, and R and I got our hands and feet dirty, mixing the clump.
Another day, DH and I built the first dome, the thermal mass:
Because our sand was wet, it added too much moisture and the clay got lazy and fat and started sweating and bulging. We call this the “Jabba Effect,” to wit:
(I was playing with an image of Princess Leia as well, but it was just too painful. But here’s a picture of DH being eaten by Jabba:
We weren’t too bummed about the Jabba Effect: it would settle eventually. Today we built the next, insulating layer and chimney. Amie and I had fun doing a mud dance.
DH added some clay+sand mix to the chimney, as it will be right above the food (an experiment):
We also left a hole in the back, for where we plan to hook up the rocket stove. Now there’s a part of the project we still need to think about.
Looks like we’ll soon be back in business. After this has dried out a little, we’ll light our first fire.