Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Fall approaches and we wait.

Cute picture of Claire taken on Liberty Island, NY a few weeks ago


I just wanted to put up a post for my regular readers who may be wondering why I haven't posted in so long. First of all, my book review of a Nation of Farmers is not coming along all that well. It was a great book, but I have some serious issues with some of the suggestions in the book and I'm having trouble getting the review just right. So I hope to get it worked out and up here soon.

Also, I have put my job search in high gear. I found a job I really want and I've been working on that process non-stop. including a very intensive interview process which just wrapped up this morning. I survived 5 interviews for this job, and I'm on the short list. They told me today I will hear something from them one way or the other by the end of this week. So I wait.

On the farm, we have little news. We have a ton of pumpkins out there in the patch, but suddenly all of the leaves turned yellow and the I don't know if the plants are dying or what. The pumpkins themselves look ok, but the plants are no longer green. The corn has tassled and we have little ears and they have about a month to get to full size. I've been told by some local farmers they need to be off the stalks by the third week of September. So we'll see on that. The tomatoes are not turning red yet, and the chickens are eating them green; they don't care. So I am not sure we will end up with any tomatoes at all once the chickens are through. Speaking of the chickens, they are still sick. They finished their course of antibiotics and now we just have to wait and see how they do. We did lose one chicken in all of this, our sickest one. The others seem to be doing ok, but recovery has been slow. The good news is that we have successfully prevented the turkeys from getting sick, and they are doing very well. It is amazing to us how fast the turkeys are growing. We have to find new accommodations for them quickly. Also since we could not eat the eggs of the chickens while they were medicated, we allowed two chicks to go broody and sit on the eggs and we have an incubator for the overflow. I have no idea if this will actually yield new chickens, but on this too we just have to wait and see.

I will update again on all of these wait and see things going on for us as they shake out.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Pumpkins and Chicks

Pumpkin in flower

Everything on this farm is a mixed bag. The pumpkins are doing amazingly well, the chickens are doing terribly. I suppose this is just the way it goes when you are dealing with living things. Let's start with the good news, the pumpkins. I planted 24 seedlings (sprouted from seeds that are two generations from that one Wal-Mart purchased pumpkin three years ago). They appear to really like the rain. I have now got countless pumpkins out there. Of course, not all of them will survive, but a good number of them should.
Young pumpkin

The bad news on the farm is the chickens. They are all sick. You may recall that we bought some new chickens a few weeks ago that were in very bad shape when they arrived. They were missing a lot of feathers and a number of them had their beaks clipped. Well caveat emptor was never so amply demonstrated as here. They brought some disease with them, unfortunately, now the entire flock, both chickens and ducks alike are sick. They have a respiratory infection of some kind. Their chests rattle when they breath and they all have runny noses. We are treating them with antibiotics, but it is possible that we will lose the entire flock. Thus far the Guinea Hens seem unaffected. Some chickens are worse than others, but one of our healthiest laying hens is presently one of the sickest birds. I feel sick watching her suffer. Neither of the roosters can crow with all the phlegm in their throats. The one good thing here is that the turkeys (we are now down to 11 from 15) have been kept segregated and seem unaffected. We are giving them a chick-dose of the antibiotics in an effort to protect them as the germ could easily travel to them from our hands or whatnot. We have been careful to stop handling the birds and we are washing out hands a lot. The good news, is that despite the sickness, only the very sickest birds are inactive. We have two that are laying down for most of the day, otherwise the majority of the flock is continuing their regular daily activities despite the chest and nasal congestion. It could just be a garden variety cold that they will all get over. I sure hope so. I would hate to lose all of our girls.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Farmer's Reading List

I just wanted to give you all a heads up that I'm planning to write you all a book review of the new book by Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton called A Nation of Farmers. I have been waiting for this book to be published since I read Depletion and Abundance and I'm thrilled to be reading it now. I have recently discovered two writers of whom I was previously unaware, Gene Logsdon and Vandana Shiva. I have books from each of them in my reading pile and I will report to you on them as I get to them.

I know a number of the regular readers of this blog are just becoming aware of the food issues we are facing here in the good ol' US of A. I know many, many people have read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollen and Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. Recently, someone very dear to me told me she was only halfway through The Omnivore's Dilemma and it had changed her eating habits already. I am guessing that this response to the book is quite common, but I wonder, as people begin to become more and more informed about food issues if they might actually get overwhelmed by just thinking about all of it and throw up their hands and say forget it. I know, for my part, there are days when, as I told you in the previous post, I find myself in the McDonald's drive-thru. How is that for a locavore? Not very local is it? But I think the important thing is that we start somewhere and do something, even if you can't do it everyday. In our particular case, with 5 kids and a highly fossil fuel dependent lifestyle, we do indeed find ourselves at McDonald's more than I would like. But our trips to any restaurants are vastly less frequent than they were five years ago. One of the things that I enjoy so very much about Sharon Astyk's writing is that she is all about meeting people where they are now is space and time and mindset. She knows not all of her readers are persuaded by the peak fossil fuels arguments or other environmental considerations, and yet her message manages to touch those people as well because food is something that transcends pretty much every other consideration; we all eat.

One thing we have held the line on in our family is eggs. We never, and I really mean never, buy eggs at the grocery store anymore. We have our laying hens, and when they don't produce enough, I have nearby farmers that sell theirs. If I can't do that, we will simply go without. The last time we purchased eggs from the grocery store was a couple of months ago and I bought organic ones; they were a huge disappointment and that day we said, "never again." Why eggs? Well, in our family, we feel strongly about cruelty to animals. We are disgusted by the descriptions we have read about factory farms, and this is one change that has actually been essentially painless for us to make. Now that it is settled our next big change is going to be beef. I am equally disgusted by what happens in cattle CAFO (confined animal feeding operations). Beef is a more difficult change for us because we are a meat and potatoes kind of family, and locally raised beef is very expensive. But we did find a solution. We have plans to buy a beef cow (a Hereford heifer) that we are going to pasture raise ourselves. We can't go without beef until then, so we are still buying grocery store meat for now. We are also still buying more than half of our chicken from the grocery store, but soon we'll begin harvesting our own chickens. I just have to get the gumption to slaughter and clean one myself.

So if you've been interested in making some changes with regards to your food sources, start out with something you can do. For some people giving up all fast food permanently might be pretty painless, or maybe you can start going to your local farmer's market, or you can start making your own bread. Just do one thing at a time and don't beat yourself up if you can't radically alter your habits all at once. Send some comments to the blog and let me know if you've changed any of your eating habits lately. I'm curious what other people are doing and eating.

Livestock headcount:
We lost another turkey so we now have 12 turkey chicks. Everything else is the same. The chickens that arrived last week all beat up with missing feathers and clipped beaks are starting to show some signs of improvement. Their feathers are growing in, albeit slowly, and they come in to roost every night now. I don't know what sort of life these poor chickens had, but from the looks of the things, we freed them from hell itself.

What we're eating now:
Watermelon in large quantities, green beans, corn on the cob, green peppers and we've been having salad almost every night. Other than herbs, which we are getting from the garden, this is all from the farmer's market.


Yesterday we took the kids to visit some friends and spend the afternoon swimming in a lake. The ride in the car was a little over an hour, so Mike picked out a movie for the ride. In his infinite 12 year old wisdom, he selected Super Size Me (for those of you unfamiliar with this movie, it is a documentary by Morgan Spurlock on the effect of McDonald's food on the health of the people who eat it.) I explained to him that although he might enjoy the movie the other kids would be bored to tears. Well it just goes to show you that with the increase in age, there is a proportionate decrease in wisdom. To Charlie's and my shock, the kids were riveted to the screen, even down to 4 year old Claire who certainly couldn't have understood a fraction of what was going on. I suppose this proves just exactly how well done the movie is. Every time Claire's attention started waning, they would cut to a fast-paced catchy song, and she would be interested again. Also there is a segment in the middle of the movie on the subject of school lunches which the kids found particularly interesting. We actually had intended (before Super Size Me was selected to be the movie) to actually go to McDonald's on the way, so it was with an incredibly laughable amount of irony that we pulled up to the drive through with that movie playing in the car. When I asked the kids what they wanted to order, for a moment there was silence, then Joseph broke the silence finally by replying "a bottle of water."

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

New livestock and continued work in the garden

Photo: tall corn on the right, shorter corn to the left and pumpkins in the foreground.


I regularly read a few other blogs and recently The Crunchy Chicken had a link to this article from the New York Times on turkeys. The Bourbon Red Heritage Turkeys won the taste test for best tasting turkeys. This is fabulous news for us here at Cipolla's Gardens because it just so happens that we recently purchased 14 Bourbon Red Turkey chicks. I'm really excited to know that somewhere in the world...oh yea, in NYC, which is only about an hour away, people have been known to pay over $100 per 10+ lb. bird. Maybe we could make a living farming. Turkeys are delicate creatures. They are well known for high morbidity. We have been told to expect only half of the chicks to survive. Maybe we should order more. If you, dear reader, would like to pay me $100, I'll produce a turkey for you. It will be free range, fed on bugs and grass and a supplement of turkey feed. I cannot, however, guarantee Thanksgiving delivery. I have no earthly idea how long it will take these tiny chicks to get to 10+ lbs. As I've said before everything here is a learning experience which is what makes this place so fun.

There is a lot going on in the garden right now. The pea pods are just starting; the green beans are getting ready to be picked. We have tiny green tomatoes, and if we were one bit conscientious we would do a better job of staking the tomatoes; they are growing despite our neglect. We planted a few more seedlings (I know, I know, why even bother planting them this late? But they were started and ready to go in the ground, so in they went, if we yield nothing so be it. If we have and Indian Summer, we'll be the luckiest farmers on the planet.) The pumpkin patch is doing great! I'm thrilled with the condition of the pumpkins. They have huge hearty leaves and every plant has multiple flowers. The corn, having suffered late planting and various levels of neglect is a beautiful case study in what happens when you fail to weed the garden properly. Notice in the photos that the tallest corn has a nice layer of newspaper and hay below it. No weeds ever got a chance to take hold there and nice strong stalk grew up. Move over a few feet were the farmers ran out of energy, and you see shorter corn that was papered and hay-mulched later. Lastly see the sad little seedling looking things, this is where we still have not papered and mulched. We figure that the upside of this situation is that now we will not have all the corn maturing at once.

Livestock headcount

1 cow
13 Turkey chicks
27 Chickens in various stages of maturity
6 ducks
7 guinea hens
1 puppy
2 cats

Wish list

We have a Hereford heifer that is set to be delivered sometime this month, perhaps next week. We are getting her from the same person who sold us Josie. Herefords are a meat breed, so we are going to make every effort not to get attached to her. Josie, however, will probably be another story. She will probably very much enjoy having another young girl to hang out with and chew her cud with. Our plan is to breed this cow one time let her raise the calf then, eek! send her to the meat packer.

Charlie would still like some Tamworth hogs. As of now, these are not on the agenda, once we get a hog the farm will be pretty much complete. We made the decision earlier not to get goats or sheep.

What we're eating:

Lots of peaches, plums, corn and a few early tomatoes. I bought some haricot verts at the farmers market last week that we have not eaten yet, and the green beans in the garden are almost ready for harvesting. We have harvested several pounds of blackberries but we are on a small canning hiatus right now, it just makes the kitchen so hot to do all of that boiling.