Counting on Ducks

19 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by Jodi in Farm Improvements, Farm Life, Farm Produce, Gardening

Early Friday morning I went for a drive along the quiet roads, my first outing in more than a week, to pick up a few Muscovy duck eggs from a pony-tailed young mom with a baby strapped to her chest. We did the Covid dance, she advancing and laying the egg carton on the ground, then retreating, then me moving forward to carefully pick it up with gloved hands and slide it into a bag. Swing your partner do si do.💃

I haven’t hatched duck eggs before. I tried once with eggs shipped from Manitoba, but none even started and the breeder graciously gave me a refund. So this should be interesting.

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We have been pondering ducks for a few years now, to help deal with our somewhat dire slug situation, but have never quite committed. This is because we know that ducks are talented mud generators, and we have quite enough mud in our valley already. We also worry that they would destroy our lovely pond. But the garden is bigger and more important this year, and RG is tired of midnight slug hunts, so we’re finally ready to take the plunge.
Plus, we have a disaster readiness plan firmly in place. If it all goes sideways, we shall eat them, and thereby exact our vengeance. Apparently Muscovy meat is tasty, very lean, and red, with some gourmands comparing the breast meat to sirloin steak, or expensive ham. Not what one would expect from poultry.

A duck with secrets that only science can uncover.

A kind neighbour gave us the five foot t-bars we shall use to stand up their run, to be fashioned from a roll of welded page wire that was hanging around looking for a job. The old mobile rooster tractor, to be parked near the pond, will be their abode. Unlike other ducks, Muscovies like to perch, so the tractor should work well. First their brooder, then their coop, the rooster tractor will be the only home they will know. Hopefully, once they are grown, RG will be able to wheel them at night to wherever she needs help with slug control, let them out in the morning to do their work, and they will docilely go to bed in their tractor each night, safe from predators. This may be a bit of a pipe dream, we will find out eventually.

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Other than the fifteen bucks I spent on the eggs, we haven’t shelled out a dime so far. We will have to pick up some duck food I suppose, but that should be our total cash investment.

I am looking forward to ducklings, but I had better not count them before they hatch. To achieve my efficient feathered slug patrol, I have to get them out of their shells and raise them first.

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Autumn Leaves

06 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by Jodi in Chickens, Farm Life, Farm Produce, Gardening, Seasons

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846E8DA0-25C2-4465-8FCA-56317AA65FFC The weather has been wonderful so far this fall, cool and sunny, perfect for producing great drifts of sun dried leaves. The drier the better. Each year I gather as many as I can store and put them under cover; less moisture extends their shelf life. Leaves are so useful and the chickens enjoy them so much.

A thick layer gets spread across the entire silkie pen, it does a fine job of keeping the mud at bay even after the rains start. In the main coops, I’ll dump a tote full over the fresh wood shavings after I clean each week for as long as they last, for feathered tidbit-hunters to avidly scratch and peck through. Woe betide any little bugs who have made their homes in those leaves.

Momma Barred Rock vacated her room at the hen hotel yesterday, taking her seven children, now ten or so weeks old, back to live with the flock. Good timing Momma! That gives me a good sized leaf storage room for this year. It can hold many wheelbarrow loads, there are four in there now and still a ton of space.

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Of all the things we grow here in our muddy valley, the autumn leaf crop is one of my favourites. Looks gorgeous through spring and summer, and more so when it “ripens”. Zero effort to tend all year long, no seeding or weeding or slug war or watering or deer fencing required. Heck, leaves are even easier to grow than garlic!

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Invasion of the Cucumbers

17 Saturday Aug 2019

Posted by Jodi in Farm Life, Farm Produce, Gardening, Preserving

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Our resident gardener planted lots of pickling cukes this year, and they all grew. We are absolutely inundated! Every few days, the garden disgorges another big basketful, as RG discovers another plant twining along in some random corner. The enthusiastic tone of her “I found another patch” announcements has steadily diminished over time. One can only use so many pickling cukes.

D8ECA2A1-EC8B-438B-BCD7-5540F0E5146E Mason jars full of fermenting salt brine pickles are stacked all over my sewing table, friends and family are sharing in the bounty and the chickens are enjoying the ones that grew too big to pickle before they were located. And they Just. Keep. Coming.

Last night, in an attempt to gain the upper hand over the cucumber avalanche, RG gathered up every cuke on hand and came next door to use our big kitchen. It was time to scale up she decided, and make a whole crock full of pickles. After a bit of thought, we pulled out our tall glass kombucha vessel. It would do quite well. We have lots of big pots, but metal won’t work for making pickles. She scrubbed the kombucha vessel thoroughly and filled it with a big batch of pickles, topped and bottomed with fresh grape leaves for tannin (to keep ‘em crispy).

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Ten days or so on the counter, then into jars and the fridge, and we’ll have healthy fermented probiotic pickles and pickle juice good for up to a year, if they last that long (they won’t). In the meantime I am enjoying the beautiful pickle tower decorating my kitchen, glinting green on the counter, filled with quiet purpose as a billion friendly bacteria do their job. Tiny bubbles forming and shifting as the fermenting process unfolds.

One of my cousins has been crazy about pickles his whole life. A true pickle connoisseur, he makes his own, he wins pickling prizes at the fair; the man even owns a pickle suit. If anyone can appreciate a good pickle, it’s cousin D. I will have to make sure he gets a jar. Especially since RG is already boasting about how her pickles are probably better than his. Are we on the verge of a pickle smackdown? Only time will tell…😘

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July’s Bounty

29 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by Jodi in Farm Life, Farm Produce, Gardening, Seasons

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July’s Bounty

I’ve been reading a barnyard vignette collection set on a small southern Ontario farm. The author is a hobby farming woman much like me, except sheep are her passion not chickens. I can relate to most of her adventures and predicaments, but not what she says about July. She claims that July is a calm, quiet time. A time of nothing-much-to-do on the farm after the rush of spring and before the fall harvest.

I don’t know what planet her farm is on, because around here in July, we’re canning and freezing and drying and jam making like crazy, afraid to slow down lest we stumble and be engulfed in a rising tide of produce.

My resident gardener is mowing and hoeing and watering and serving manure tea and hunting slugs and voles. I am tending the year’s chicken population boom; layers and grow-outs, broodies and their families and the freezer camp boys. The work involved is not insignificant. The boys in particular require extra care to fit them for their life’s purpose, to grace my winter table.

Here in our west coast muddy valley we can eat from the garden year round. “Vegetable delivery!” sings out my resident gardener as she dumps yet another armful on the kitchen counter.

Production really starts building in April and May with rhubarb, peas, chives, kale, chard, arugula, lettuce; then strawberries, garlic scapes, raspberries and garlic in June, and now blue berries, tomatoes, tomatillos, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, zucchini, cucumber and new this year…cucamelons (nut-sized striped melons tasting of mildly spicy cucumber).

We eat as much as we can fresh and prepare the mounds of surplus as quick as we can for the freezer, the dehydrator, the canner or the big sauce pot as required.

We’re watching the figs like a hawk and looking forward to much more deliciousness to come, carrots, grapes, peaches, apples, celery, beets, parsnips, cabbage, onions, leeks, to name a few. Our taste buds are happy, sampling July’s cornucopia, and our fingers busy preserving it.

Oh and the herbs! Cut in the morning for maximum potency, spread on stainless mesh racks and dried thoroughly in the spare room’s light summer air. Then tipped into my wide red fruit bowl, clean and empty at this time of year (because fruit flies). A gift from a young man who knows I love bright dishes, my fruit bowl is perfect for cleaning dried herbs. It offers enough elbow room that I can pull brittle leaves from stems without losing any to the floor, and then scoop them into jars with none left behind.

In July I like to lay in enough fresh lavender, oregano, sage, thyme, mint, cilantro, rosemary etc. to last through until next year’s growth starts. They are all at the peak of perfection right now, and the weather perfect for preserving them.

I empty my spice drawer bottles and refill them with fresh, saving the discards to sprinkle in my hens’ nest boxes. Herbs help to discourage bugs and I think the hens enjoy them too.

The rest of this year’s herbal bounty goes into a cool dark cupboard for now. It’s summer time, and the living is easy. So I’ll keep on wandering outside and collecting what I need for dinner, until I can’t any more. Then I shall crack open my jars, and all winter long, strew July’s savoury scents into rich soups, bubbling stews and homegrown coq a vin.

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Last Year’s Tomatoes

05 Friday Jul 2019

Posted by Jodi in Farm Life, Farm Produce, Gardening

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I froze about 20 lbs too many whole tomatoes last year. I noted this fact a couple of weeks ago as I was making room in the freezer for a few more bags of 2019 rhubarb and a flat of ruby red local strawberries. Here we were, starting to eat our first fresh tomatoes, sun-warmed and straight off the vines, and a bunch of last year’s frozen ones still hanging around. Hmmmm, what to do with them??

Give them to the chickens was my first thought. It’s handy having a flock of hungry omnivores in the barnyard, nothing even remotely edible goes to waste around here. But I still prefer to feed people food to people first if at all possible. So I pushed the problem to the back of my mind where it could stew for a while, and got on with life.

A few days later, I had it! Ketchup! We were almost at the bottom of our current bottle, so the timing was good too.

I’ve been buying organic ketchup for as long as it has been available. It was the first organic product I splashed out on back in the day. I figure that the tomatoes had best be pesticide-free when they hit the kettle, since any residues would only concentrate during processing. It’s expensive though. So I was pretty chuffed at my genius idea.

Good old Google gave me a million recipes; I combined a couple and after two days of simmering followed by two days of dark closet fermenting I had a nice stash of homegrown organic fermented tomato ketchup. Full of probiotics and with a delicious zingy taste, fermented ketchup aids digestion too. It even achieved the DH stamp of approval.

My ketchup will keep for six months in the fridge, longer if frozen. One jar for each daughter and one and a half for us is just about perfect. And 20 pounds of last year’s tomatoes transformed into deliciousness is the icing on the cake.

Scape Season

19 Wednesday Jun 2019

Posted by Jodi in Farm Life, Farm Produce, Gardening

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Garlic scape season and what to do with five hundred scapes, all ready at once?

Other years, I’ve chopped and frozen them in ziplock bags, grabbing handfuls all winter long for stir fries and spaghetti sauce. Or I made and froze pesto in ice cube trays (water based and olive oil based, the water based was better). This year, inspired by my sister who used her dehydrator to make garlic powder last year, I dried them and made garlic scape powder.

It’s really good! A more subtle garlic flavour that, as DH says, “creeps up on you”. I imagine it would be great on popcorn, as well as making a good cookery seasoning. Two big brown paper grocery sacks full made about six cups of powder. That means it takes up WAY less space than my other methods. Plus it doesn’t depend on a freezer.

And if we don’t get through it all before next spring when the scapes are ready again, it will be great to sprinkle over my chickens’ food as a spring tonic.

Plastic Buckets

12 Sunday May 2019

Posted by Jodi in Farm Improvements, Farm Life, Farm Produce, Gardening

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I love using our big sturdy plastic yogurt buckets around the place. They’re endlessly useful for toting all sorts of things both solid and liquid. One in each hand, equally loaded, adds valuable equilibrium to any heavy carry. Sadly the cheap plastic handles get brittle and snap after a few years. A pity, when the buckets themselves still have years of life left.

So I have a hack for that. Putting together my 1970’s macrame skills (jute owl plant hanger anyone?), a broken-handled bucket and 15 pieces of baling twine, I can fit a new handle to an old bucket in about 20 minutes.

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My earliest prototype is a few years old now, left out in all sorts of weather, and still going strong. The baling twine won’t rot and the knots tighten with each use.

I choose nine lengths of twine with their ties near one end and trim those off. Then I knot them at the end and slip the other end through a one inch hole I drilled in the top side of the bucket, knotting on the inside. I divide the nine into three groups of three and tie the same simple macrame knot over and over again. This creates a fat corkscrew that’s comfy in the hand. You could instead use sets of two, or even one, to make a thinner handle. You could do a flat braid too but I think the corkscrew is prettier.

When the side strings get short I tie a new length on each and that is enough to create the handle you see here. You could go longer or shorter depending on your needs and your baling twine supply. When I am done knotting I push the ends through a second hole I drilled on the other side of my bucket and knot on the inside. I trim up any loose ends, and voila, a fully functional portable container.

Plus I guess I can cross “repurposing waste plastic into something useful” off my bucket list!

Yes I washed it before I put food in it lol!

My Dodecatheon is Blooming

04 Saturday May 2019

Posted by Jodi in Farm Life, Gardening, Seasons

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My Dodecatheon is Blooming

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It was always a race. Whose dodecatheon would bloom first? Mom’s? Or mine?

We had bought each other one on our annual just-before-Mother’s Day garden centre meet-up. Took them home and potted them up, a shooting star each to decorate our decks. And then for all the years we had them, until she died in 2012, we would compare bloom dates. She usually won since her’s basked on her south-facing back deck, and got more love than mine which was left to fend for itself in among the chives and tulips in a pot by my greenhouse door. Mine was always a more vivid purple, perhaps due to it having to fight a little harder for survival.

Thanks to Mom, I know exactly when we started this annual garden shopping trip, during which I would buy her a plant of her choice, and she would buy me one too, for Mother’s Day. It’s crystal clear, the picture in my mind. So sharp I feel the achy possibility I could scan it, print it, and hold it tenderly in my hands, placing it once again in front of, instead of behind, my misty eyes. May 12, 2002. Mom was 62 and I was 41.

Marigold Nurseries. Angle parking on the strip of gravel running between the chain link fence and the road. My slender, graceful Mom, monochromatically classy in her carefully chosen garden centre-ing outfit. Light blue high-waisted skinny jeans, a baby blue t shirt and an oversized faded blue Levi’s jean button down shirt. White purse and runners. A smoke in her hand. Walking towards me from her parking spot down the line. Heat squiggles rising from the pavement, distorting her figure slightly as if she were approaching through water. And her peculiar gait, listing a touch sideways though she was walking straight on. Dusty wind blowing, flaring her loose shirt tails. Our first time. She looked like a teenager until she got up close.

We’d had a fractious relationship when I was growing up, I frustrated her and she pissed me off. But we had learned to like each other (I mean really LIKE each other, aside from the deep abiding love that securely anchored our whole family) well before the turn of the century. Maturity and motherhood drew us closer I think. And it was her who first suggested we get together near Mother’s Day and shop for that year’s annuals to fill our deck planters. But, as she pointed out, not on the exact day because I should be able to just hang out at home and relax on actual Mother’s Day – not duty visit my mother – and besides, the garden centres are insane that weekend and who likes line-ups?

That first year, after we went through the checkout, she asked me to come to her car as she had a Mother’s Day gift for me. Opening her trunk, she presented me with a brand new shiny Sunset Western Gardening Book. THE book for serious gardeners. With a simple inscription inside the front cover. That I cherish.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. My frugal mother, splashing out on this wonderful book. When she died and no one wanted her Sunset Western Garden Book, I took it home and shelved it next to mine. I couldn’t bear to see it donated, full as it is with mom’s scratchy pencilled notes, plant tags and Helen Chestnut newspaper clippings. Maybe one of my kids will want it someday.

Every year thereafter we made the same trip, although soon it was a whole morning and afternoon and I’d pick her up so we weren’t juggling two cars, and we’d visit every garden centre on the peninsula. Pausing for a quick smoke in the parking lots before going in. Marigold, Elk Lake, the one near Pat Bay whose name escapes me, Brentwood, Cannor. Slowly piling my minivan, then my SUV, full of flowery fragrant flats. Heliotrope. Schizanthus. Petunia. Begonia. Impatiens. Alyssum. Lobelia. I would drop her off home, help her unload her flats, give her a big hug, and head home myself, to see what my family had all got up to that day. Then I would brew a cup of tea, put my feet up, and plan my potting up strategy for that year.

My dodecatheon is blooming, and I miss my mother. I think I will see if my daughters want to go to the garden centre one day soon. You know, just a quick trip, pick up a few annuals for the deck. The last couple years we’ve started going, and this year one of them brought it up before I did. ❤️

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Squirrelling Away the Sunshine

03 Saturday Nov 2018

Posted by Jodi in Chickens, Farm Life, Farm Produce, Gardening, Seasons, Weather

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Yesterday’s sunshine has given way to today’s west coast mist, so I am happy that I got out and raked up some relatively dry leafy sunshine for my flocks yesterday afternoon. That meant I had to hit the home office at dusk and work till almost seven, but it was worth it.

We are lucky to have lots of poplars, alders and hawthorns growing in our muddy valley. Unselfish creatures, they delight the eye all year, flaunting their fresh green garments in April’s spring breezes, perfuming the warm air with their snowy flowers in June, shading us from August’s glaring sun, shifting from green to gorgeous gold in September and sharing their leafy bounty freely in October.

I always harvest as many as I can, weather and time permitting, squirrelling them away here and there in unused coops and under eaves. I try to gather them dry, which is often a challenge in our rainforest climate.

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Dried, they make fresh, fragrant bedding, and even wet, the birds love raking through them for tasty morsels. But a wet pile of leaves soon becomes a slimy pile of compost, not much good for chicken keeping although excellent for garlic bed mulch, especially when mixed with liberal lashings of chicken poop.

Today at morning chores I happily scattered bright yellow leafy goodness all around the coops. I can tell my birds appreciate them too. Glowing as if lit from within in this dim grey weather, they brighten everyone’s day.

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And oh boy, just look at how many are still left! Golden riches, held in benevolent twiggy hands that can be counted on to share them generously, every last one, as our tall, slow living, quietest valley residents settle themselves down for another long winter nap.

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Garlic Is In!

11 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by Jodi in Farm Life, Farm Produce, Gardening

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Finished planting my garlic today in this years’ spot. Freshly cultivated and amended by K and the Kubota, it was a pleasure to sink all 587 cloves into the deep loose soil.

F1DD918B-A6C1-4F46-918B-6E1E64FB376E I can see my garlic bed from my kitchen window, should be fun to watch it grow over the winter.

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And what fun to just sashay out and do the fun bits, after others did all the preparation work.
George and the chickens supervised. The dogs did too but I didn’t get a shot of them.