Scrap Cedar for Squash Vines

It seems my reputation for welcoming stuff other people regard as useless is now well established.  My parents refurbished their deck over the summer, replacing the old boards with rot-resistant cedar planks.  My dad had set aside all the end pieces he trimmed off, none of them more than about 12 inches long.  There were about two dozen of them.  He asked me recently if I wanted them.  I said yes immediately and with such enthusiasm that he asked me what my plans for them were.  With this year's winter squash crop failure much on my mind, I'm already dreaming of a bumper crop next year.  Good pieces of rot-resistant wood will be ideal to place under next year's developing squash fruits.  They take such a long time to reach ripeness that moisture from the ground has plenty of opportunity to hasten spoilage.  These little pieces of cedar wood will be just the right size for tucking under next year's crop as they grow.  Redwood would do nicely too if you happened to come across it.

Cedar is expensive, and I'd never buy a new piece of wood just for the purpose of cutting it up into short lengths.  But the chance to put this scrap wood to good use was far too good to miss.  I love all the many ways that the garden turns trash into treasure.

Converted any trash to treasure lately?  Do tell.

Turkey Update

It's been almost four months since I accepted a three-week-old, one-eyed refugee turkey poult from farming friend.  I thought an update might be in order.  To make a long story short, when the turkey first arrived, it was a pale, shy little thing... 

And now it's grown into a shy, bigger thing that shows the full colors of its heritage breed - Bourbon Red.  (Sorry there's not much there for scale.  It's exceedingly hard to take even a decent picture of this turkey.)  If you want more detail, read on.

We had hoped the suggestive power of the male pronoun would influence it to grow into a large tom turkey.  Turkeys are evidently not biddable that way: it looks as though we've got a hen.  When we called her anything besides "he," we've called her Thanksgiving.  But between her sex, the slow growing habits of her breed, and the fact that she was a runty sort of bird to begin with, she's almost certainly going to get a Thanksgiving reprieve.  We're hosting the high holy day for extended family this year, and there's no way she'll begin to feed the 17-23 people who will likely be attending.

This doesn't mean of course that she's now a pet.  No, the plan is to have her on the table for New Years.  We considered Christmas, but I hold my holiday meal traditions dear.  Very dear.  At Christmas it has to be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.  That leaves only New Years, which, in our house, to this date, has no traditional meal associated with it.  The problem which presented itself when we realized Thanksgiving wouldn't be ready for Thanksgiving, is where to house her when the weather turns really cold.

The chickens will go into their winter quarters sometime between mid-November and early December, depending on weather, and when we get our act together to rebuild their pen in the shed.  Then we have to decide whether to put the turkey in with the chickens, or keep her out in the cold weather on her own.  I tried a few times over the summer to introduce the turkey to the hens.  She certainly wanted to be near them, and when her pen wasn't in viewing distance of them, she would start up her distress peep, and keep it up for an hour or more.  But the few times I introduced her physically to the hens, they pecked at her viciously and immediately.  So those attempted introductions didn't last more than a few seconds.

But the turkey's slow growth has nonetheless been steady, and just recently I tried introducing one hen at a time into her pen.  The visiting hen immediately tried to assert herself with Thanksgiving, but Thanksgiving is now having none of it.  Up went the tail feathers and out stretched the wings.  Thanksgiving still doesn't weigh very much, but she looks mighty big when she puffs herself out like that, and it doesn't take much to outweigh a laying hen.  She went right after the hen's comb and kept after it as well as a one-eyed turkey can.  (Which is to say, only moderately well. It was actually a tiny bit comical how Thanksgiving would momentarily "lose" the hen anytime the hen was to her left.)  Each visiting hen quickly discovered the utility of hiding under the hanging watering can, and no serious harm was done.  Now that the fear of turkey has been put into each hen individually, methinks that if I do need to house them all together, the hens will have a healthy respect for Thanksgiving.  And Thanksgiving will promptly be a little overwhelmed by trying to track four darting chickens with only one good eye.  That's the hope anyway - that detente will be reached due to instilled respect and a natural handicap.

If it doesn't work out that way, well, something I heard not long ago from a turkey hunter makes me think she might fare outside in the cold weather just fine.  Did you know that hunters aim for the turkey's head when hunting them?  I was astonished and asked why in the world they'd aim for such a tiny target on such a large bird.  Apparently the .22 is the rifle of choice for turkeys, and the bullet cannot penetrate the turkey's feathers.  They act as armor!  Now if I hadn't seen the feathers developing on Thanksgiving as she grows, I wouldn't find this remotely plausible.  They are awfully impressive feathers, thickly layered and tough.  So maybe it's true.  I know there's no logical parallel here, but I figure if those feathers can stop a bullet, they can probably keep a turkey pretty warm through early winter as well.

Anyway, that's the plan: to have a minor turkey feast about five weeks after the major turkey feast.  I haven't decided yet exactly how to handle the slaughtering.  Novella Carpenter swears by branch loppers for the killing, which we have.  On the other hand, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall hangs his birds, both domestic and wild, for up to a week.  As I understand it, a bird for hanging shouldn't have any exposed flesh, which would rule out the loppers, though I could be wrong. I must admit the idea of hanging intrigues me, particularly since it's going to be a very cold part of the year when we slaughter Thanksgiving.  There won't be any flies to worry about, and the outdoor temperature will be roughly that of a refrigerator.  We could hang inside the shed, so no animals to worry about.  I like gamey meats, and hanging is said to enhance the flavor of game, so it all sounds good in theory.  Still, I have no experience at all with hanging birds, which makes me cautious.  I wouldn't want to ruin our very first bit of home-raised meat.  If you have any input about techniques for slaughtering a turkey, or experience in hanging game birds, please chime in with a comment.

First Frost Warning

We had our first chance at a frost last night.  It came on a day of such autumnal sweetness that we couldn't bear to spend much of it indoors.  We divided the day between attending to frost-prep chores and lazing on the hammock in sheer worship of the glorious weather that will soon be only a memory.

There were things to pick from the garden and an urgency about the harvest that surpassed even that of the summery days of glut.  Eggplants, cherry tomatoes, chili peppers and cuttings of tender herbs came in.  It was a tough call which to incorporate into our dinner.  In the end we opted for the last of the tender sage leaves with a lovely winter luxury pumpkin given to me by one of the farmers at our local market.  She claimed she couldn't sell it because the stem was missing, and added that the seed would breed true because the pumpkin patch was set back from all the other squashes.  "My" farmers just rock.  (And yes, I did buy some of the same pumpkins from her, with stems intact.)  We dined on pumpkin-sage pasta, most welcome on an evening with a nip in the air.

But before that there were bed sheets and row covers to excavate from the shed.  I chose the basil to cover up with the bed sheet, reckoning it the most tender of our herbs.  The sage still looks green, but the older leaves have already started to toughen up, so it lost out.  The peppers and eggplant each got a row cover cloth laid over it, though the plants are so large that we couldn't make the cover reach the earth on both sides.  We did what we could for them and wished them the best.  I rummaged around in the garage until I found the storm windows that fit our two cold frames, and laid them over the frames just as they slipped into shade.

I watched from the hammock as the last sunlight to reach our garden played over our sole remaining colony of honey bees.  The golden ladies were illuminated by the slanting light as they winged homeward from their last foraging flights of the day.  The cats came and threw themselves down under my suspended body.  It was a good feeling to lie on the hammock and look at my homestead.  There are so many things yet to be done here. But I felt I had earned a moment of luxurious idleness on a glorious afternoon.  And I could see the beauty my hands had created all around me.  The lovely honey bee commute ended just as the last sunbeam winked away from our yard.

Then it was time to bring in the potted rosemary, lemon grass, and our lemon and lime trees.  The living room now looks a bit like a nursery.  We'll see whether I have any luck keeping the rosemary alive through the winter this year.  I'm hoping to use it on many loaves of focaccia all through the baking season.

I woke this morning to find the temperature two degrees cooler than predicted, but no frost.  It feels like a lottery win to have dodged this first brush with winter, and if the forecast is remotely accurate, we have at least another five frost-free nights ahead.  The plants we pulled indoors will stay inside till warm weather returns in spring.  I don't fancy moving them again any time soon.

This will probably be the most gorgeous weekend of the whole year.  Two days of clear skies, light breezes, and temperatures in the low 70s.  Autumn is just too short.

Potato Bucket Results: Disappointing

This year I tried a variation on the potato buckets that did so well for me last year.  But 2010 was a very different growing season than 2009.  In fact, you could say the two years were opposite extremes.  And the method that worked well in 2009's conditions performed poorly in 2010's.

June of 2009 was a month of rain that was nearly Old Testament in its lack of moderation.  That led to all my potato plants in the ground developing late blight in early August.  But the potatoes in buckets, with their better drainage and higher elevation leading to better air flow around the plants, resisted the blight for an additional month after all the others were finished.  I saw pretty good yields out of those buckets. 

Not so this year.  We had hardly a drop of rain all summer, which is quite unusual for this area, plus heat that was higher than average.  I discovered that potatoes don't particularly love the heat.  The ones in buckets fared especially poorly.  In the beginning of the growing season I had situated them on the driveway.  My thinking was that I would be getting some production out of an otherwise unusable space. Of course, I couldn't know at the time what sort of summer was in store, but this was a bad move.  And I should have corrected the mistake by removing the buckets from the blacktop once the heat set in.  But - and I won't bore you with excuses - I didn't.

The yields I saw from these buckets were too embarrassing to report here.  Really abysmal.  Suffice it to say I'm glad that we had potatoes in the ground as well.  That said, I don't think the new design of my self-watering buckets was at fault.  I suspect the water reservoir was the only reason I got any harvest at all.  Had I avoided the foot infection that kept me from watering for several of the hottest days of the summer, yields might have been a bit better.  My feeling is that my real mistake was keeping them on the blacktop when it was clear that they were struggling with the heat.  Chili peppers or tomatoes might have fared better there.

I will certainly try potatoes in buckets again next year.  The harvest remains as easy as ever: tip the bucket into a wheelbarrow and pick out the spuds.  It's even possible that I might position the buckets on the driveway again if we were to have another atypically cold and wet year.  But in an average or hotter than average year in this region, my observations suggest they'll do better somewhere else.

Acorns as Chicken Feed, Revisited

Last fall I gathered acorns from a single oak that straddles our property line and used them as a feed supplement for my hens over the winter months.  This year I made it a formal goal to be a bit more ambitious about gleaning acorns.  So far this year I've collected over 65 pounds of them, and they're still coming down in my area.  I do think of them as booster fuel for hens during the coldest and harshest months of the year, so most of what I've gathered has been put up in buckets where they will, I hope, escape the notice of rodents who would love to help themselves to this caloric feast.  But I've also been feeding the less prime acorns to the hens as they come in, so I thought it would be a good time to post about some points that have come up for me as I've been gathering them and using them for feed.

First off, I've become rather selective about which acorns I pick up and bring home.  I gleaned a little factoid from the coverage of the recent recall of factory farmed eggs.  Namely that salmonella is carried by rodents, which can introduce the disease to previously healthy poultry flocks.  Squirrels are rodents, are abundant in my region, and show a famous interest in acorns.  Many of the nuts I find bear evidence of nibbling by squirrels.  I do not gather these acorns.  Some acorns have broken shells that may or may not be due to squirrel nibbling.  They may have taken the damage when they fell on a hard surface.  I err on the safe side and don't risk collecting such acorns.

Another type of damage common to acorns is a shell that has split along its grain.  This is clearly not caused by rodents, but it still presents a problem.  Acorn nutmeats are very high in fat, and they will turn rancid fairly quickly once exposed to air.  So acorns with split shells are not candidates for storage.  I do bring home a number of acorns with reasonably small splits in the shell and feed them to the hens very quickly.  It's a way of using up what I can, even if they can't be kept for storage.

The last type of damage that causes me to reject an acorn at collection is a small hole that indicates a weevil has penetrated the shell and is currently feasting on the nutmeat.  If you see two holes (rare when the nuts have just fallen) the weevil has been and gone.  Now these nuts too could be collected for the hens if I were willing to segregate the ones with such holes.  Laying hens, after all, will just as happily eat weevils as they will acorns.  But if the infested acorns are stored with the pristine ones, the weevils will eat their way from one acorn to the next, and there is a net caloric loss with each step up the food chain.  So it's either segregate, or don't collect.  Mostly I opt not to collect those acorns.

Last year I used a small burlap bag to crush the acorns.  Each day I placed a couple handfuls in the bag and crushed them on a flat rock by using a 5-pound hand sledge.  The problem with that setup was that the burlap didn't hold up.  Fairly quickly I found that a glancing blow from the hand sledge could propel an acorn straight through the fabric.  This year I've upgraded to a denim bag crafted from a tattered pair of my father's jeans.  I just cut one of the legs off and sewed up the cut edge with some sturdy hand stitching.  So far it looks as though the denim is going to answer nicely.

A note on oak trees - Quercus is a big family, or more properly speaking, a genus.  (Isn't Quercus just about the best word, ever?)  I'm not going to tell you than I can tell any of the 600+ oak species apart by name, because I can't.  What I can say is that the size, shape, quality, and drop time of acorns varies considerably from one species of oak to another.  Acorns started falling here in August, and there are still oaks dropping their bounty now in October.  It pays to look around and keep looking.  If you don't find acorns of good quality from one particular type of oak, you may well find them from another type a few weeks on.

Storage was a problem last year.  Mice are quite happy to help themselves to any sort of seed or nut kept in our garage over the winter months.  I've taken steps to prevent this this year and recommend you think about how to keep any acorns you collect away from rodents, particularly in light of the risk they might transmit salmonella to your poultry.

I did a little poking around to find out what the value of my acorn gleaning might be in terms of feed for the hens. I have no clue what they do or don't contribute in terms of nutrients.  But the average laying hen needs - at an absolute maximum - 350 calories per day to maintain optimum laying rate.  Presumably this is for hens who live in Siberia and lay jumbo sized eggs.  Even so, let's say my hens need that many calories in winter.  After all, they don't get any supplemental heat, only shelter from the wind.  The other factoid I turned up is that acorns have 1700 calories per pound.  Now I don't know if that figure is just for the extracted nutmeats, or what.  Clearly the acorn cap and shell contribute nothing to the hens' diet.  So let's say that of the 65 pounds of acorns I've gathered so far, we have to eliminate a whopping 25% of that weight to account for the unusable portion. That leaves about 49 pounds worth of acorn nutmeats, which have an astonishing 82,875 calories.  Divide that by the maximum caloric needs of my four-hen flock (1400 calories per day for all four of them) and speaking very conservatively we're looking at a two-month supply of feed from gleaned acorns.

Now, as mentioned, it's not at all clear that acorns alone would give the hens what they need in terms of vitamins and minerals.  But I did lay in a supply of comfrey, dried from our own production earlier in the year, and I know that's a highly nutritious feed for poultry.  Between these two "free" feeds, plus our kitchen scraps, some recycled eggshell for calcium, and whatever mystical stuff chickens find in deep litter bedding, I would bet they're pretty well on their way to a complete laying hen diet.  I plan to use the acorns only as supplemental feed in combination with the locally grown and milled organic grains they normally get.  But it's clear to me that if it were absolutely necessary, we could probably get the hens through the winter with aggressive acorn gleaning (provided of course that the oak trees didn't take another gap year as they did in 2008).  If that were the case, we almost certainly wouldn't light the hens to maintain their winter laying quota, so their caloric needs would go down, which would make the acorns stretch even further.  And that's without even touching on hickory nut gleaning.

Aside from musing about strategies for maintaining my mini-flock in a worst case scenario, I see this as a social justice issue.  We in the industrialized countries "go to the table" ahead of citizens in the developing world.  We eat first, because we can afford to.  Not only can we pay more for the most basic foodstuffs, such as grains, but we choose to eat animal products which are produced at the cost of a huge amount of grain - further driving up global market prices for these commodities. And after we've eaten our fill of grain-intensive meat or dairy or eggs, we then feed our pets with meat produced in an identical fashion.  Thus we consume first, and consume more than the poor.  My flock and my pets are no exception to this reality.  Though they are pastured on our lawn, and we supplement what feed we buy with all sorts of food that would otherwise be wasted, our hens nonetheless eat grain that could have gone to the world market and contributed to lower prices for grain.  My hens compete with impoverished families and hungry children, and they win by virtue of the money I have at my disposal.

So whatever I can do to come up with free food  for my hens not only saves me money and makes my homestead less dependent on a fragile distribution system, it also brings a little more balance to the relationship between rich and poor countries.  That's a real motivation.  Gleaning acorns is fun for a while.  But when it gets a little boring, or my back starts to ache, I push on just a little longer with the acorn hunt.  Because I believe that actions - even small, imperfect, insufficient actions - have consequences.  Even if I never see the results, I know that gleaning this food is the right thing to do.

Rerun: Fall Compost Trick

I'm re-running this post from late last year as a reminder, so that some of you can take advantage of this quick-composting method. If you have a lawn and deciduous trees that will be shedding their leaves in about a month or so, you might want to stop cutting the grass right about now...



We live where green lawns are not capital crimes against nature. Rainfall can be relied upon year-round, at least in "normal" years. If you can say the same for your area, and you have lawn plus deciduous trees on your property or nearby, then I have a composting trick to recommend to you. Sadly, it may be too late for you to use it this year. If so, apologies, but keep it in mind for next year.

In late summer or early fall, stop mowing your grass. Let it grow out for at least three weeks, (preferably more) before the autumn leaves start falling. The grass probably won't grow rampantly in this late season. Let all or most of your leaves fall on the long grass. Don't rake them. Wait for a day when the leaves are as dry as possible, at least a few days after any rainfall. Cut the lawn using a lawnmower with a bag, running right over the fallen leaves so that they get chopped up, mixed with grass and saved in the bag. Dump this mixture in your garden, compost bin, or anywhere you'd like a new bed for the spring.

I've always been a lazy composter, and this tendency only got worse after we got hens and a worm bin, which took care of more than half the material that would otherwise be composted. So I've never fussed over the temperature of my compost pile, nor bothered with watering and turning the pile. Compost chez nous happens in its own time, which is to say, very slowly.

But the neat thing about the fall leaves and grass trick is not that it saves a good deal of leaf raking. No, the coolest thing is that dried leaves (carbon, or "brown" matter) and green grass (nitrogen, or "green" matter) are pretty close to the perfect combination of materials needed to make your compost pile decompose rather quickly. A pile of leaves alone will hardly decompose at all over a year's time. (Ask me how I know this some time.) The shredding action of the lawnmower blade helps break down some of the leaves, at least, into smaller pieces, further speeding decomposition. This mixture is ideal for the compost layer in a new bed that you plan to lasagna mulch (aka sheet mulch).

We keep a portion of our property in lawn for the benefit of our laying hens. All through the summer we cut that lawn without bagging the clippings. They sit on the ground to replenish the soil. But the manure from our chickens is also enriching the lawn month after month. A once-per-year harvest of that high-nitrogen content grass in the interest of the garden proper seems a good practice to me. While I'm sure that some of the nitrogen from the hens' manure can make its way from the grassy surround of the garden into the garden soil itself, it doesn't hurt to facilitate that transfer once in a while either.

We have only a very small bag on our push mower, so this is a tiring and time consuming task at a busy time of year. Even when I dump the contents into the wheelbarrow to make fewer trips, the wheelbarrow fills up very quickly. In all honesty, if I remember it in time, I may look to barter next year for a one-time lawn cutting with someone who owns a large mower with a bag, preferably one of those fancy mowers that practically pulverizes the clippings. However it gets done, adding all that organic matter to our garden is worth it.

Today I made the third of such piles in our garden. I stuck my hand into the middle of the one I made two days ago. It was too hot to comfortably leave my hand in there very long!