Will and Alston were walking around the abandoned property in front of ours, when they came across a peach tree. Sure, peaches aren’t wild, someone at some point planted the tree. But it was still found food, so I’ll consider it foraging.
They are tiny, as in golf ball sized. But they taste just like a regular yellow peach… sweet and wonderful. I’m not about to skin these minis to make jam or pie, but they are great snack peaches.
Posted in Food
Last night our future pigs were born. It was a litter of 8, and the farmer hasn’t determined the sexes yet, but says they all look happy. We’ll get two of them in 8 weeks, once they’ve weaned (that’s why they call ’em weaners… which only makes me think of hotdogs, which has to be wrong on so many levels). Here’s a picture of mama pig:
I am SO excited.
Posted in Pigs
If I’m the one on farm chores for the evening, they don’t start until Alston goes to bed, but normally Will heads out to tend to the poultry as I head upstairs for bath time (with Alston asking “bub bath? bub bath?” the whole way). Regardless, here’s basically what it looks like.
Grab the compost bucket from the kitchen and head down to the old chicken coop. Dump out the compost on the pile en route. Fill the two feeders (we keep the feed in a metal trash can in the enclosure, as we buy it in 50 lb. bags), and collect all the water-ers. Dump out the remaining dirty water (Will is so good he uses the left overs to water the fig tree we just planted… I just “water” the grass). Rinse out the two small water-ers ( 1 and 2 Gallon metal inverted jug) and fill them with the hose water in the bucket from the night before. Place them back in the enclosure, so as not to leave the ducks water-less while the 5 gallon plastic water-ers get cleaned.
Place both the 5 gallon-ers and the empty bucket in the wheel barrow and head up to the house toward the hose. Clean them out, and fill them and the bucket. Load everything back into the wheelbarrow and trudge back to the enclosure. Place one of the water-ers inside, and leave the other outside (so all we have to do in the morning is place it inside, instead of messing with all the schlepping and cleaning while trying to get to work on time). Leave the bucket and the wheel barrow by the enclosure, so everything is set for the next night.
Head back to the shed and change the water for the keats and ducklings, cleaning everything off in the utility sink in the basement. Top up their food and watch their cuteness for a moment as you try to ignore just how sweaty you are after water-boy duties in 98% humidity (gotta love the mid atlantic). Go inside and shower and try to muster the energy to eat dinner.
Total time: 45 minutes.
Check out my first attempt at pickles:
It was SO easy. I followed the Cook’s Illustrated recipe, although I didn’t trust their salt quantity, so I added more (turns out, that was probably a mistake… who would have thought 1 tablespoon could possibly flavor an entire pound of pickles? Yeah, I’ll just follow the directions next time). I am no longer intimidated by pickling. Next up, beets!
Posted in Food
The best part about the summer is that it’s SO easy to eat local, there’s really no excuse to consume California (or Chile) grown veggies. Here are some recent adventures in local food:
Pimento cheese and Caramont chevre. And no, the grapes aren’t local so I fail on that one.
Followed by a salad of heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, red onions, basil (all from our CSA with Appalachia Star) and feta from Caramont (sure it’s a repeat farm, but they are located right here in Esmont, and I swear this feta is fantastic, holding its own to most feta you can buy at a specialty store).
And you just can’t beat fried chicken in the summer, especially when the chicken is from Timbercreek Organics.
Lastly, we have zucchini muffins (zucchini, yogurt and butter from our CSA, flour from Wade’s Mill, and eggs from whichever local farmer supplies the Market Street Market).
Posted in Food
It turns out, we have a knack for timing shipments of poultry. With the chickens and the ducks, it was move in week. This time, we thought we were in the clear… because we thought the weekend when Will was out of town was next week. Opps.
So the morning after he leaves, while I’m attempting to juggle getting ready for work, feeding the peeps and quacks, and tending to a toddler who magically got a fever within hours of his father’s departure, who should show up but 30 day old guinea keats. Suffice it to say I was an hour late for work on Thursday.
I must say, considering how funky these birds look full grown, they rival the ducks for cuteness.
As I was in a bit of a hurry, here’s the best solo shot I was able to snap:
Note to self, buy a better camera for low light when I get the chance (hey husband, Christmas is only 4 months away, hint hint).
The keats (that’s apparently what guinea babies are called) are living in the shed along with the three new rouens that we ordered to replace the two that were eaten by a fox. Everyone seems to be getting along swell.
Unfortunately, we’ve had our first casualty here at the farm (beside the fox murder). This morning, one of the guinea keats was just lying on the ground, not moving like the others who sprint to the corners when I change their water. I picked him (her?) up and his butt was all crusted over. I’d read about this with chickens, where sometimes the poop dries and clogs them up, and that you have to remove it or they die. I did my best at removing the crust, but it sure is difficult to find the butt hole of a keat and know for sure that it’s clean. Alas, my butt cleaning was to no avail (not a phrase I’d ever anticipated writing in my life), as later in the afternoon he was dead. Poor guinea peep – he basically died of constipation. That just sucks.
The other birds seemed completely unphased. Hmm. At least they appear to be thriving.
Posted in Guineas
A friend of a friend put us in touch with someone who has a small sheep farm that was a bit more productive than expected this season (every one of her ewe’s calved – some with twins). She’s looking to sell the extra lambs, so Will is going to check out her farm next week and get the scoop on what taking on sheep involves.
Right now we’re thinking 5 ewes, at the most. The plan would be to keep a few as breeding stock and slaughter two or three in the spring. I’m both excited and daunted.
And we still have pigs coming in about a month. Yeah, we are so biting off more than we can chew.
Posted in Sheep
The ducks arrived 2 days after the chickens, the same day the moving truck arrived, so it’s a bit of an understatement when I say the day was a blur. However, I did manage to get photographic evidence of how much cuter baby quacks are than baby peeps. Behold:
For lack of planning, we put the ducks in with the chickens in the basement, and they all got along fine. Especially since we were feeding them both the same food.
Watching the ducks eat is pretty much the best part. The food is a bit too dry for them (bills vs. beaks), so they run back and forth from the feeder to the water jug, where they do the same sort of slurping thing that wine connoisseurs do when they suck air in over the wine to aerate it (or at least that what it sounds like to me). The constant parade is adorable.
We stuck with this arrangement for about two weeks, but we started running out of real estate fast. Ducks grow remarkably quickly, so we moved the quack clan out to the shed where we could make a bigger circle, leaving the chicks in the basement.
At about 3 weeks, even this seemed crowded. The weather was consistently in the mid nineties, with evenings staying in the seventies, so we decided we could forgo the last week of living under the heat lamps and move them to the old chicken enclosure the previous property owners built from cedars they’d harvested from the woods at the back of the pasture.
We were excited because the ducks are super messy, spilling their water everywhere and making it difficult to keep things clean (and not horribly smelly) in an indoor space. While catching them was a bit of a traumatic experience for the quacks, they were thrilled to nibble on the fresh green grass and adjusted quickly to life outdoors. Unfortunately, they refused to put themselves away in the little a-frame coop, preferring instead to sleep underneath it. Also unfortunate, we failed to notice some holes in the chicken wire, and the second night a fox managed to grab two of the Rouens. This prompted a trip to Southern States to purchase coyote urine… yes, I said I bought animal urine. Being a rookie, I had no idea what to get, and I was honestly embarrassed about having to inquire about it, so I got both granular and liquid urine. That, and some serious patching, seems to have done the trick, as we haven’t lost any other birds since then.
And now, those ducks are huge!
Posted in Ducks
Check out what Will found near the old chicken enclosure:
Wild grapes! They taste like a super-tart Concord, and you have to eat them the same way (the skins are too tough and they have seeds, so decidedly not toddler-friendly). Not a bad find at all.
Posted in Food
Since we aren’t growing anything yet on the farm, we signed up for a CSA with Appalachia Star Farm. This is our third year subscribing to a CSA (community supported agriculture) and I couldn’t recommend it more for anyone looking to eat more locally, seasonally and healthily. The basic idea is that you sign up with a farm at the beginning of Spring for a share of whatever they produce for the growing season. Once the season “starts” you pick up your fruits and veggies weekly. I love it because it forces me to cook and eat vegetables I never buy on my own but that I absolutely adore; kale, lima beans, fennel, collard greens, sprite melons, etc. It also seriously cuts down on the Whole Foods trips (and expense).
This summer, I’m taking the opportunity to try putting up some of the share for the winter (last year, most of it became baby food so there wasn’t much to spare). The eggplants were starting to pile up, so I sautéed them with some onions and garlic and stirred in some diced tomatoes, resulting in a not too shabby sauce I’ll be tucking into sometime in the dead of winter.
Tonight’s zucchini bread wasn’t quite as photogenic, but it used up the final items from last week’s share just in time for this week’s pick up. Next week I’ll have to attempt bread and butter pickles, as there is no way I’m getting through all these cucumbers.
If you live in Virginia, check out the Eat Fresh Buy Local guide for a list of all the CSAs in your area.
Posted in Food
home growed 