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Things I would like to buy with $400

1. A secondhand cookstove



2. An extra large garden cart



3. A practice set of Uillean pipes (Pronounce "Illin'")



4. An iPhone.

Warm weather weekend

It was 70° here on Saturday, which is approximately late June weather, rarely in mid-April. It was also the first day of the Bainbridge Island Farmers' Market, so we rode our bikes into town in the morning and did some shopping. I had my bike all tricked out with my removable wicker basket on the front, and my new REI-dividend-purchased pannier on the back. We strolled around for an hour or so, had lunch at the pub, and returned home with my front basket full of seedlings, pannier full of groceries from the regular store, and Garth's messenger bag and front basket full of veggies and eggs from the farmers.

When we got home, we immediately took advantage of the heat -- seriously, it was actually hot -- to bring all manner of poultry outside. Chickens were in the electric fence, until we discovered they could get through the holes of the fence regardless of zapping, so we moved them to a smaller, but still large, area with a smaller-holed. It was pointless, really, as they huddled together in one section for an hour or two, although it was definitely above 70° at that point.

Our charming young next-door neighbor Calvin, who is almost four, inquired with volume and frequency as to the location of the very cute ducklings. So we brought them out to enjoy the sun too, though Calvin was napping by the time we wrangled them outside. Turns out ducklings like a dog-dish full of water and bits of weeds and grass nearly as much as a four-year-old likes ducklings.

The chickens spent their first night in the coop on Saturday, but we didn't get much else done. Saturday was poultry day, I guess.

And Sunday was planting day. We had bought broccoli, chard, and onion seedlings at the market, and we picked out three kale seedlings from our seed tray. Chard (multicolored) and kale (1 Winterbor and 2 Nero di Toscani, I think) went in between the two rows of peas (Oregon Trail and some Sugar Snap, both of which have germinated almost 100%, which is awesome). The greens should keep sort of shady there, and not bolt too quickly, I think.

Broccoli went sort of alongside the rosemary bush, which we had to trim to get the deer fence in place. I don't remember which variety it is -- the broccoli, that is -- but I remember it was from Persephone Farms, so I'll ask them when we go again this weekend.

The onions are Egyptian walking onions, which are funny looking and awesome. Instead of making a bulb underground and a flower on top, they make a group of small bulblets on top. If you don't harvest them, the weight gets too much and the stalk bends down to the ground, where the bulblets plant themselves and grow. Hence, walking. The 4-H kid we got them from at the market said they make good scallions, too.

Earlier this week, Garth planted potatoes, too. Rather than marking them with the little flags, he drew a map in his notebook. He says it's "four plants of everything, and six of All Blues." I don't know what "everything" means, but I'll find out eventually, I'm sure.

As always, pictures are up at Flickr: Chickens; Ducks; Little farm (not very up-to-date).

LAUREN + GARTH !!111!!1<3<3<3

So, there are benefits to having a wife with a degree in linguistics. It turns out that, as I've known for a while, the name 'garth' is derived from an Old English word for garden and the name 'lauren' means victory. That's right, when we got married, our names combined to form victory garden.



(image source) This gives access to some pretty cool iconography.

City Farmer News has a nice post about Victory Garden. The comparison has been made that the sacrifices asked of the public in World War 2 included recycle and food production. Our current government response to crisis is, predictable, "go shopping."

The folks at Dervaes have adopted Victory Garden iconography as well. I have to say, I'm a fan of the graphic style and I've got a soft spot for politicization but it might be better to go with "kitchen garden" for mass appeal. I learned that the the medieval French referred to kitchen gardens and the everlasting soup made from the same as "Potage." I like that. Also, a feature of the potage was a garth at the center. Win.

Oh look, it's the apocalypse! LOL.

Still no love for the bees in the Northwest. Colony Collapse Disorder is still affecting beekeepers. This is problematic in the extreme because, you know, no bees, no flowers. On the upside, bees managed in a non-industrial manner tend to be less affected by CCD. I'm not entirely convinced as the beekeepers on our island are still reporting problem and are responding with Russian bees and, according to the nice lady at the nursery, treating their hives with ever increasing doses of antibiotics. I'm certain that this will not result in hardier mites.

Annnnd, the salmon are dying. And not in the delicious way. Stocks of chinook are pretty much depleted and it looks like the season is going to be called off. "This will be devastating to the communities and families on the coast that rely on salmon fishing for their livelihood,” Oregon governor Ted Kulongoski said. While true, I can't help but think about how similar this situation sounds to the ecological disasters I read about as a child in even-then-dated books on futurism (remember that?) from the 1970s. Seems like a bitter victory for them long-haired treehugger types, doesn't it?

The New York Times reports that survivalism is quite the thing nowadays. I can't say that this is a bad thing, especially in light of the response to Katrina. Anecdotally, I know that at an assembly of librarians in my grad school cohort, five of twenty-five people in attendance were making plans for some degree of social or infrastructural collapse. The winners were Lauren and I and a buddy of mine who's a big fan of Burning Man.

I am, it seems, a little cranky. Fortunately, we've recently added a new book to our library that makes me happy. Also, the chickens have moved outside and having fewer livestock in the house will definitely improve my mood. Also, I got rid of the option to have my browser render all web pages with an enormous picture of Jakob Nielsen to every page I look at. It's better this way.

More linkses

Grocery Guy

Another group blog about modern food systems and ethics and politics, and also deliciousness and eating. Vegetarians beware of pictures of pig parts.

Wooly [sic] Pigs blog

This guy is, as Garth likes to say, "a brilliant marketer." He is growing some extremely tasty Mangalitsa pork out in Eastern Washington. It's a breed imported from Europe. Watching the story of importing and creating a market here is really interesting. He sells at the U-District farmers' market.

Accidental Hedonist

A delicious food blog. The main blogger is from Seattle, and she is writing a book about whisk(e)y.

Unexpected livestock

Just yesterday, we were telling Garth's mom what a relief it was that the chickens are old enough to require less work now. We have elevated their foods and waters off the ground a bit, so they don't scratch so much pine shavings into them. We have given them a bit of dowel to perch on, and we upgraded them from the bottom half of a dog crate, to the two halves of a dog crate zip-tied together.

So it was sort of ironic (Garth says: "less ironic than a pain in the ass") that he called me frantically from the feed store late this afternoon to tell me that they had four Khaki Campbell ducklings, exactly the breed we have been looking for. They were two females and two males. We wanted three or four females for eggs, and would take a male just to hang out (and breed, maybe, given the hard time we had finding these ducklings). Two males and two females is way different from the

ratio we had hoped for, but the prospect of leaving one poor little boy duckling behind in the duckling bucket, all alone, was just not even an option. So Garth brought home four little ducklings, two boys and two girls.

For now they are in the chicks' old galvanized tub, washed out (thanks Garth!) with vinegar. They are already displaying very different behavior from the chicks; they run and splash in the water, going in circles with one foot in the waterer.

So at this point we are looking at a future average of:
6 chickens = ~28 eggs/week
2 lady ducks = ~10-12 eggs/week

Yay!

Blogs I like

Will be figuring out how we want to link out to our kindred-spirit blogs, but for now, here are some I like.

Path to Freedom and Urban Homestead

The Dervaes family, in Pasadena, has a yard consisting of about 1/5 of an acre, and last year they grew about 3 tons of food. This year they are aiming to grow 5 tons, and they have a lot of other projects going on that we will surely be mentioning here later.

The Ethicurean "Chew the right thing"

The Ethicurean is an excellent group blog about the politics and ethics of food.

... more to come.

Good Job, World! Solar is the New Cordless.

Solar hen house vents. Solar fence energizers. Solar everything.

It seems that at some point in the past few years we've reached a point where solar isn't an "alternative" power source, it's just the easiest way to do something. Why would I, for example, want to deal with a battery charger to keep my electric fence charged? Why would I want to run wiring to the roof of the hen house or greenhouse to power the ventilation? I don't. I'm a lazy man. It makes me wonder at what point it's going to be cheaper and easier to wire houses for solar and wind instead of dealing with hooking them to the grid. It wasn't long ago that the cool kids were wiring their houses with Cat-5 ethernet for their home networks. Then wifi became ubiquitous and that's just a mess of useless cable now.

In other news, we finally got real growlights installed for the seedlings. I ordered them over the internet. I'm hoping that the cheerful vegetables clearly visible from the outside of the house will at least give pause to the paramilitary DEA agents as they conduct a no-knock raid on my home in anticipation of finding a stray, growlight-enable mary-g-wanna plant.

On a related note, craft distilling is a lot closer to legal in Washington state. There is a lot of tremendously good work being done around food and small farming by Washington regulatory agencies.

Planting the First!

Did our first planting last weekend. We put in 20' of peas under the trellis. 10' of Sugar Snap peas and 10' of Oregon Trail. We till a yard-and-a-half of Whitney Farms compost and a gallon or so of complete organic fertilizer (a la Steve Solomon) into the soil. It's been raining and sunny off and on so our lack of irrigation system hasn't been a problem. We'll need to get on that sooner rather than later.

It's been a week and nothing has popped out of the ground yet. We've got a week for germination to take place so I'm not worried yet.

On the upside, chicks are three weeks old as of last Friday. They are no longer little fuzz balls and are starting to look like actual chickens. Gangly, half-feathered, awkward teenaged chickens, but chickens nonetheless. Lauren also started 102 plants in our greenhouse mudroom. She gets to blog that one though.

"But opponents contend the program sets a bad example by exposing children to alcohol consumption."

From here or, less pull quotably, here.

Turns out that the state of Washington is running a pilot program to allow retailers to offer samples of beer and wine. I approve.

On figures of speech.

(It's the first post to a new blog. Of course it sucks. It breaks the ice like an ice fisherman who tries to stretch the season too long.)

There are a lot of figures of speech that, when living on a farm, turn out to be more literal than not. Cases in point:

1) Keep the home fires burning.
2) Tough row to hoe.
3) Cocky.
4) Bitchy. (This is not technically farm-related, I learned it from Lauren's dog.)
5) Too many irons in the fire. (Again, not necessarily farm-related, but I'm reasonably certain my landlord and neighbors would have frowned upon a forge, propane or no, in my backyard.)