This morning I brought in some peppers and tomatoes from garden. I simmered them in olive oil, along with an onion I grew earlier this year. Then I scrambled in a couple of eggs that I gathered from the henhouse. While the veggies were simmering I went out to the garden and picked a cantaloupe. I sliced it up while the eggs were cooking and made some toast.
Dang. I could have had a pop tart.
Love Wins
Love Wins
Getting our chickens to hatch their eggs properly can be pretty frustrating. If they go off into the woods or an out building to sit, all is fine. Eventually the hen will come back, with a bunch of chicks trailing her. But when they sit in the henhouse, confusion reigns. After leaving for a drink of water, the sitting hen will often get on the wrong nest when she returns. Hens will lay fresh eggs in the clutch that is being incubated. Eggs get broken. It is rare that more than one or two of the eggs in a henhouse clutch actually hatches.
When Jude was here she told us that her grandmother in Saudi Arabia used to tie the hen in the nesting box, making it impossible for her to leave. She would give her feed and water, and keep her tied there until the eggs hatched.
This idea intrigued me. I wasn’t interested in tying up our hens, but I wondered how we might keep them where they were supposed to be.
Jude and I came up with the idea of using a box. We put the sitting hen and her eggs in the box and shut the lid. Sitting hens like to be isolated and during their 21 day sitting they rarely leave the nest. So while a chicken would normally protest against being shut up in a box, a broody hen prefers it. Every morning I open the box for a while to let her go eat, drink and do her business. Then, when she gets back in the box, I fasten the lid. No more hens squabbling over the nest and messing up the hatch. And she likes the privacy.
I’m excited to see how the hatch goes. If it is successful, I’ll get more of these boxes and this is how we’ll do it in the future.
Love Wins
Our son got married last Saturday. With a beautiful ceremony in a beautiful place on a beautiful day, two beautiful people bound their lives together.
I wish I had a better picture to share, but until I do this one will have to do.
We are especially blessed to be gaining not only a daughter (Sarah), but a sweet adorable granddaughter as well (Rayne). One of the most moving parts of the ceremony was when Will vowed to take Rayne as his own daughter. He called her over, bent down and handed her a necklace (which was a gift from me to Cherie many years ago) and announced his love for her.
We’re filled with joy for Will, Sarah and Rayne and we hope and pray they’ll be showered with blessings and love.
For Cherie and I it is naturally bittersweet. Even as we share in the joy of our son, we are reminded of how quickly his childhood seemed to have passed.
And now, as grandparents and in-laws, we step further down the path to which our journey has brought us.
May it keep leading us to happy places.
Love Wins
This is Betsy. If you look carefully you will see that she has a grasshopper on one of her horns.
Love Wins
Like the okra, this year’s crop of eggplant is the best we’ve ever grown. Surprisingly, our Japanese eggplant was the first summer vegetable to come in, and the Italian eggplant came in much earlier than usual as well.
We don’t usually expect eggplant until late in the summer, but we’ve already had a good harvest. And now it’s really starting to arrive and the plants are still blooming.
The only thing that bothers eggplant much are the flea beetles. They do a lot of damage to the leaves of the young plants, but once the plants begin to grow they quickly outgrow anything the flea beetles can do.
We’ve been enjoying lots of eggplant already this year. Cherie makes an excellent eggplant casserole and we also enjoy it in ratatouille. Jude made a great eggplant dip which we had with pita bread. Of course that just scratches the surface of things that can be done with it.
On a diversified farm like ours we don’t fret too much over a failure. This year our cucumbers failed, for reasons I still don’t understand. If we had a cucumber farm, we’d be in deep trouble right now. But because we grow so many things, we can just shrug off the lost cucumbers and enjoy our bumper crops of other things, like the eggplant.
We like it that way.
Love Wins
We enjoyed learning about Saudi Arabian culture from our intern Jude. She blessed us with her cooking skills and were privileged to enjoy some great food she prepared for us, including homemade hummus, a wonderful lemony okra recipe and shakshouka, a delicious egg and tomato dish.
Shakshouka. Tomatoes, eggs, paprika, cumin and olive oil. Delicious.
Learning about the culture in her country was also fascinating. There are some terrible injustices there. There is religious discrimination, not only against non-Muslims but also against the minority Shia Muslims, such as Jude’s family. There is also serious mistreatment of women. Women in Saudi Arabia aren’t allowed to drive cars, for example. So when Jude had a job there she had to spend half her salary to hire a driver to take her to work and back. Women can go nowhere publicly without a male guardian/escort. In our 21st Century American culture these things just seem bizarre.
Jude with the pigs. It is illegal to own pigs in Saudi Arabia.
On White Flint, Saudi women drive.
But lest we jump to the conclusion that American society is in all respects superior to theirs, we learned that there are ways in which Saudi society seems much better than ours. The disintegration of the family that we’ve seen in our culture has not occured in Saudi Arabia. Families are knit tightly together. They share meals at a common table. The idea of putting elderly family members in nursing homes is unheard of and if done would bring great disgrace to a family. Elderly people in Saudi Arabian families are honored and treated with great respect. There is a saying there that old people must be treated as prophets. Certainly our society would benefit from this kind of attitude and treatment of our elderly family members.
I imagine there are good and bad characteristics of all societies. Jude told us that in Saudi Arabia (as likely in most of the world), there is the sense that America is a fairy tale place, where everything is beautiful and everyone is happy and wealthy. Jude was shocked to learn that there are homeless and hungry people in our country, especially after she saw our grocery stores and the mind-numbing abundance and variety of food we have. She was also shocked to discover how bland our abundant food usually tastes and how little our culture seems to value fresh and delicious produce. But these realities are generally unknown to the rest of the world, who see America through the lens of Hollywood and our pop culture. Much of the world wants to imitate America and be like Americans. And in some respects that is good, of course. But in many respects we would be well-served to borrow from the best of their cultures, and to discourage them from borrowing from the worst of ours.
We loved having Jude here. She is a generous, compassionate and beautiful person. And likewise Jude loved her internship here and is inspired to continue to pursue farming and sustainablility. The experience helped inspire us to keep doing what we do and to keep trying to inspire others, while eagerly looking for inspiration from them.
Love Wins
Our pigs eat really well this time of year. Well, actually they eat really well all times of year. But they especially seem to love the watermelons and cantaloupes I bring them.
Every morning and evening I take them some pig feed, along with our table scraps from the night before. Most mornings this time of year that means that, at a minimum, they get some watermelon rinds in the morning. But I also try to take them something from the gardens around midday. That’s often a bucket of tomatoes that are going soft, a split watermelon or two, or what seems to be their favorite–some cantaloupes.
It’s a joy to see them come running from across the pasture when I call them. They squeal with anticipation as they run. As I watch them I’m usually reminded of the millions of pigs being raised in cages in American pork factories, who will never know what it’s like to run. Or to taste a cantaloupe.
Love Wins
Nothing is more refreshing on a hot summer afternoon than a garden-ripened watermelon.
Our chickens agree.
Love Wins
Once a year we celebrate Corn Day on the farm. It’s the day we have to dedicate to harvesting and putting away our sweet corn.
Corn Day for us is usually in mid-July. But the crows destroyed my first planting this year so I plowed it up and replanted a month later. After the crows attacked again, I resigned myself to no sweet corn this year. But we managed to keep the crows mostly away, the garden rallied and we ended up with a reasonable amount of sweet corn and Corn Day occured after all, this time in mid-August.
Knowing when to harvest the corn requires paying attention to your crop. When the tassels turn brown and the ears start to feel full, it’s time to check. I peel back a the shucks on a few ears and puncture a kernel with my thumb nail. As someone told me once, it’s ready if it “spits in your eye.” Put differently, if the kernel punctures easily and sprays out it’s milky goodness.
But many folks like to answer the question, “When should you pick your sweet corn?” with “Before the raccoons do.”
So a few days ago when I discovered the coons had been eating the corn, I realized it was time. I confirmed by having some spit in my eye and the next day we picked it.
Raccoon leftovers
I have to coordinate with Cherie since as I shuck it and cut off the ends, she is blanching it and preparing it for freezing.
We harvested on Friday and I took what we didn’t need for ourselves to the market on Saturday. Because we grow our sweet corn organically, there is an ear worm in nearly every ear. I was careful to tell everyone who bought corn from us that they could be sure to find a worm in the ear. To my surprise and delight no one was put off by that. As one woman told me, “If there isn’t a worm in it, you shouldn’t eat it.” Another person asked if I charged extra for the worm. Several laughed and said something like “that little worm won’t bother me.”
Behind me a chemical farm was selling sweet corn. Like everything else they sell, it was pristine and unblemished. Sure it had poison on it, but there were no worms. It felt good to sell out before they did.
Normally on Corn Day we take every ear in the field. But this year because we had to replant several times, it didn’t all come in at once. So we left plenty for later picking and I put up a fence to try and deter the coons.
Rowan, Juliette (and her kids) enjoying the shucks
So after a rocky start, we’ll be enjoying delicious Silver Queen sweet corn this winter after all.
Love Wins
