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.)