Category Archives: Sustain

Animals, Edible, Farm life, The Recipes

Jumbo Eggs & Chicken Collectibles; Plus A Cabbage Recipe & A Candle for Sixburnersue

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Merrily skipping outside with my camera this morning, I had visions of writing about hope and rebirth (jumping right past St. Patrick’s Day to Easter), so I started snapping photos of chives and daffodils poking through the ground.

Then down to the hoop house I went (again) figuring I hadn’t yet inundated you with enough baby seedling pix.

 

Oh, and the first true leaves on the tomato seedlings under the lights—you’d have to see those.

But very quickly I got distracted. I went to check the nest boxes and found a lovely egg in a sunny bed of straw.

And then I remembered that every night while we’re washing and packing the eggs, I marvel at how striking they look in their almond and apricot and melony hues, so tidily arranged in their cartons. I wanted to show you our cool product.

 

And then I remembered that I keep meaning to photograph the jumbo and miniature eggs we get. The jumbo eggs, mostly double-yolkers, are so huge (sometimes more than 3 1/2 ounces) that it makes you wince thinking about those 4-pound hens laying them. We get three or four jumbos every day. The minis are more of an aberration. (The egg in the middle, below, is normal sized.)

Off I went to photograph eggs, and in the process, I added a chicken to one of the photos (see top of blog). We have a lot of chickens. Not just live chickens…

…But wooden chickens, china chickens, iron chickens, chickens on dishtowels and pot holders, chickens on plates and mugs. We are guilty of collecting them, and friends and family give us more. (Roy already had the one below when I met him. He and Libby bought the one above for me a couple years back.)

 

My friend Eliza gave us these great hen and rooster salt and pepper shakers.

 

My friend  Heidi dropped by yesterday with a cool hen tote bag and some produce bags from her sister’s company, Ecobags.

 

My mom recently passed along this lovely Nicolas Mosse plate and the great Barred Rock look-a-like (at top).

 

Our friend Mary gave us this wonderful Bridgewater chicken mug.

 

Roy’s mom found us an old egg carton stamp in an antique store…

 

…and Roy picked up this old egg scale at a tag scale.

 

One chicken-y shelf in our mudroom includes Roy’s egg cup from childhood and a little wooden toy rooster from Portugal I had as a child.

In the end I decided to share our chicken collectibles with you in the blog today. But then I figured I shouldn’t ignore St. Patrick’s Day altogether, so I found the link to this fabulous cabbage and potato gratin I created and posted two years ago. Reading that post, I realized (yikes) that St. Patrick’s Day is Sixburnersue.com’s official anniversary. Apparently you folks have been putting up with me and my rambling blogs for three years now—wow!

I have to thank you for that. And for helping me get through a nasty winter. Whether it’s shamrocks or garlic chives, fresh eggs or baby lambs, there’s plenty about spring to jump start our spirits.

 

Animals, Edible, Farm life, Sustain

Ruffled Feathers

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Believe me, I did not want to write about the weather again. I know, if you’re like me, you could really care less about what the weather is in, say, Charleston or San Francisco or Denver, if you’re not there. And don’t plan to be there any time soon. And I’m pretty sure you’re not coming to Martha’s Vineyard, what with the ferries docked and the planes grounded. Yes, we’re pretty much marooned. This time, a storm off the New England coast has been spinning around in a circle for three days. THREE DAYS of nonstop wind, and over the last day or so, spitting sideways icy icky precipitation. Every time we walk out the door, which we do, uh, a lot, what with 250 chickens to feed, water, let out, let in, etc., we get pummeled. What a winter.

There’s a lot to be grateful for, I know. We do not have 34 inches of snow on the ground. Our house is not falling into the sea (unlike some on the New England coast this week). We have heat. And food (of course). And power. So I have no business being so cranky. (The hens, on the other hand, have every right to complain, which they don’t, even when they venture out of their coops to try and scratch around in the mud, which is pretty futile. Their feathers flip up and around and backwards, making it impossible for them to puff up and keep warm. Ruffled feathers indeed. They march back inside pretty quickly.)

Instead of the weather, I’d wanted to tell you about all the lovely seedlings we’ve got going in the hoop house. But I’ve sat frozen at the computer, thinking if I do that, the one big mega-gust is going to come along and finally blow the hoop house down. (As it is right now, when you’re inside the hoop house it’s as loud as a helicopter landing pad. We open and close the door as quickly as possible so that the wind doesn’t rip it off.)

I must have faith that nothing is going to happen to the kale and chard and spinach and mizuna and tat soi and mustard and 12 kinds of lettuce seedlings we’ve got started—or the beautiful lettuce we’re already harvesting in the raised bed. And that the soil in the garden will dry out enough to get our peas in the ground in a few weeks. And that the sun will come out.

In the mean time, I sometimes just go down to the hoop house and stare at the incredibly beautiful colors of that lettuce—it’s the perfect antidote to the gray skies—and pinch myself that we have all this opportunity, all these possibilities, before us. And daffodils already poking up in the maple grove. Spring will come—on its own schedule.

And for now, at least someone in the household is enjoying the snow.

 

 

Animals, Edible, Farm life, Sustain

About Those Piglets, Honey

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We talked to a man about a pig the other day. At the grocery store. Not in the pork section, but over by the front door, where the newspapers and flower bouquets are. It may seem an odd place to discuss livestock, but our town is small, there’s only one grocery store, and in the winter, you know or recognize most everyone in there. Business happens between the curly kale and the navel oranges.

When we walked in, I veered right to look at O magazine, while Roy moved on down the produce aisle to talk to someone. I looked up and saw that it was the pig man. “We’ll take four,” I heard Roy say. Luckily, I put the magazine down in time to walk over and say, “He meant two.” More is always better, if you ask Roy, but if we are going to raise piglets for the first time, then I say start with two, not four. We’ll get them in the spring and it will take six to seven months to raise them to slaughter weight (250 pounds). They’ll need a pen and shelter, not to mention food. A lot of food. And a lot of water. And then of course, we will need a big freezer, which we don’t have. (One can only hope that our luck with free appliances continues.) These are Berkshire pigs (like the black sow above, right), known for very tasty bacon.

It is no secret that I am crazy about pigs. (That’s me in the  top photo, five—yes, five—years ago in my first few months on the Vineyard. I was developing recipes for my first book and feeding leftovers to some friendly sows owned by my new friend Liz Packer. I subsequently went around taking photos of pigs all over the Island. My favorite is below.) So this is surely going to be interesting. Both Libby and I have suggested that maybe one of the piglets should be a female. You know, just in case we decide to keep a breeding sow. I’m really not sure who is crazier, me or Roy. It’s kind of a dangerous combination. Will keep you posted.

In the meantime, just to gear myself up for all this, I’m going to make these delicious spareribs from Fine Cooking magazine for the Super Bowl. Or maybe these meatballs. Or this ragu. Yeah, I know, yikes.

 

Edible, Farm life, Sustain, The Recipes

This Business of Eggs: Green Island Farm Grows Up

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Four years ago, Roy and I (newly besotted), rented a little plot of land on a Vineyard farm. We grew vegetables and sold them at the farm’s roadside stand. Living in a tiny apartment over a general store, we shuttled back and forth to tend our plot.

That fall, our friend Joannie tracked us down one day, took us by the hand, and led us to a little farm house on two acres of land. Right on the spot, she introduced us to the owners and insisted that they rent the farm house to us. I’m not sure if the owners knew what hit them, but in about an hour, we had all shaken hands and Roy and I were packing up the apartment. Our new landlords said, “Sure, grow whatever you want here.”

We moved into the little (uninsulated) 1895 farm house a few weeks later, and by spring we were turning over the soil and putting up the fences for our first vegetable plot. Roy built a little farm stand, and we stuck a sign out by the road. One summer, then two summers went by. We got 8 laying hens, and then 50 more. The garden doubled in size, and we built a hoop house. We made a tiny bit of money off our tiny farmette, keeping the farm stand open almost every day while writing books and building houses (our real jobs), too.

Then one day Tom came by. Tom and Roy talked, like men do, standing next to their trucks, arms folded. I watched from the kitchen window, my hands covered in olive oil and salt. Tom and Roy walked down to the fence line at the bottom of the farmette and looked out over the fields beyond, fields that have been in Tom’s family for hundreds of years. Tom and his mother Druscilla (yes, our landlords) lease some of that land to Morning Glory Farm to grow corn and squash. But there are eight grassy acres spiked with pines and cedars right behind us that long to be farmed.

After a spell, Roy and Tom walked back up to the house. I wiped my hands and stepped outside. “We’re going to be chicken farmers, dear,” Roy informed me, Tom smiling beside him. They’d made a deal.

At that moment, our fuzzy dream snapped into focus and took on the shape of reality.

With the extra acres Tom would lease us (four to start), we’d be able to turn the farm into a real business. Roy knew he wanted to spend less time on big building projects and more time farming, and we knew from a bit of number crunching that laying hens would be profitable. We played the numbers out a bit more and decided to make a phone call. To our surprise, we hung up the phone with (gulp) an order of 200 16-week old pullets scheduled to be delivered to the island in only a few weeks time. That was late October.

While Roy and our friend Scott quickly built the new coops and erected the huge (60′ x 90′) initial yard for the pullets, I worked up a real business plan, shopped around for insurance, filed the LLC paperwork, got a Tax ID number—and ordered a whole lot more egg cartons!

Since the day the pullets arrived, Roy has worked feverishly to get all the systems in place—watering and feeding, cleaning the coops, haying the nest boxes, collecting the eggs, washing the eggs, packaging the eggs, marketing the eggs, delivering the eggs. He is Mr. Egg Man. (I have been conveniently “on deadline,” though I am told that when the next 200 chickens arrive this spring, my duties will be, ahem, changing.)

Mr. Egg Man and I are celebrating today, celebrating the end of our first real week in business. All our paperwork is complete. Nearly all of the pullets are laying, and Roy collected more than 1300 eggs this week. We have new customers—a restaurant, a grocery store, and a market; the farm stand cooler is stocked every day. Best of all, not a single one of those 1300 eggs is left in the fridge. All sold. Today, there will be 18 dozen more to pack up. And 18 dozen more tomorrow. Whew. Well, you can’t have a farm business without a farm product. Which is why I am off to transplant lettuce seedlings in the hoop house. This is the coolest part about the dream—coloring in the lines you’ve sketched for yourselves.

 

 

 

Edible, Farm life, Sustain, The Garden

Forty Days on Green Island Farm: A Year of Moments

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January 22, 2012

February 9

February 23, 2012

March 17, 2012

March 18, 2012

March 19, 2012

April 6, 2012

April 11, 2012

April 29, 2012

May 4, 2012

May 10, 2012

May 28, 2012

June 14, 2012

June 16, 2012

June 17, 2012

June 20, 2012

June 28, 2012

June 29, 2012

June 30, 2012

July 18, 2012

August 2, 2012

August 5, 2012

August 21, 2012

August 24, 2012

August 30, 2012

August 31, 2012

September 6, 2012

September 7, 2012

September 9, 2012

October 6, 2012

October 22, 2012

October 23, 2012

October 24, 2012

October 28, 2012

November 10, 2012

November 22, 2012

November 23, 2012

November 24, 2012

December 13, 2012

December 16, 2012

Happy 2013 to everyone, from Susie, Roy, Libby, Farmer, Cocoa Bunny, Ellie the Love Bird, and 254 hens!

Farm life, Sustain, The Recipes

The One-Dollar, Five-Minute Christmas Wreath…and Other Small Takes on Joy

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All I want to do this week is eat chocolate and go for walks. If I’m to be completely honest, I’d say both of these things have something to do with firing up the endorphins. Thankfully, I’ve always been a bit of a hedonist, so I know how to cheer myself up in small ways when the darkness seems a bit too ever-present.

The sun sets a little after 4 o’clock around here—at which point I feel compelled to curl up on the couch with a good book and not move for five hours. (Well, okay, maybe not five hours, but after we eat supper and put all the chickens to bed, we do seem to auger into the couch.) Fortunately, we did wander out and cut down a Christmas tree last Sunday, so the living room feels at least a little festive with sparkly lights and candles in the windows. We moved the old ship-board pine table out of the living room and into the mudroom, and Libby and I set up the nativity scene with hay from the barn and some dry fountain grass for palm trees. I arranged three Waterford crystal votive candle holders (left over from my old life!) around on the table to light the scene like twinkly stars. With the rest of the lights turned off in the mudroom, the effect is breathtaking and more than anything reminds me that Advent is about hope.

I have an old cloth Danish Advent calendar too, with little pockets for candy. Roy eats the candy every day, only he rarely takes it out of the right date pocket. That’s okay. Roy is in mourning. He lost a close family member last week, and we are just working our way through this with the grace of time. Processing sadness during the dimly lit days of early winter is hard, but somehow also allows for needed reflection.

Me, I am holding extra-tight to the gratitude I’ve got for my life. I’m feeling especially grateful for my sister, who’s helping my parents with a difficult move this Christmas. She is there for them in every way. I wish I could be more help, but I understand that right now my job is just to be supportive from a distance. And to be present for Roy.

My other job is to find (and make) small bits of joy wherever I can. Yesterday, I made shortbread cookies (very buttery!) and a cute little wreath. I bought a miniature vine wreath for $1 from the thrift shop. I came home, pulled my boots on, and hooked Farmer up to his leash. We trotted out to the far field where the bittersweet tangles up on the old cattle fence line. I snipped some bittersweet and on my way back stumbled across a Christmas miracle—a holly tree with red berries! Right there in the middle of a cluster of cedar trees. I’d never seen it before, but it was happy to lend me a few sprigs.

I took my greens back, finagled them into my wreath, and hung my little front porch decoration up on a rusty nail. Feeling festive, I took an extra piece of red ribbon and tied it around Sammy the Seagull’s neck. Having Sammy on your front step is only slightly more dignified than having a flamingo in your front yard, but what the heck. He makes me smile. Just like the little red hen who wandered by my window a minute ago (she takes herself out of the pen every day) and the sheep I can see grazing in our neighbor’s field. And the starkly beautiful frost on the garden greens this morning. And a spoonful of cocoa in my coffee. And a million other little sparkles of light in an otherwise dim December day.

Farm life, Sustain, The Recipes, Tips for eating green

Raising Dinner

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Our Thanksgiving turkey is walking and talking less than a quarter mile up the road. She is ranging around in a big pasture with a few hundred friends, enjoying the fresh grass, salt air, and rosy sunsets of rural West Tisbury. Even closer, a few paces down the road in the other direction, tasty lamb shanks graze in a spent hayfield. I drive by them every time I leave the house. Of course, I don’t necessarily think “rosemary and garlic” when I look at them. I think about how gorgeous their chocolate and cream-colored wool is and how funny their faces are, with their feral eyes and grinding jaws and devil’s ears. Baby lambs are cute; adult sheep can actually be sort of strange looking.

Cuteness factors aside, we are really fortunate to have uber-local, humanely-raised (delicious) meat available to us. And even though we can see how these animals are raised, they’re still living on our neighbors’ property—not ours—so we don’t have to deal with the whole personality issue. Yet.

Yesterday I was staring into the face of a charred pig with a spit in his mouth. It was the second Island pig roast we’ve been to in the last few weeks. As Libby and I nibbled on a particularly sweet and juicy hunk of pork, I said to her, “Do you really think we could do this—raise a pig and then eat her?” Libby just sort of giggled nervously. This is a girl who pays attention to what’s going on around her, and she knows. Knows how most meat animals in this country are raised (heard me talking about it enough) and knows what humanely raised animals look like (dozens of visits to Island farms, don’t you know). And she understands the difference between a farm animal (one that you spend lots of time and money feeding and watering in order to get a certain return on it) and a farm pet (like our dog Farmer, whose sole purpose in life is to be cute and provide lots of kisses and snuggles on the couch—and to chase chickens).

But still she is an animal lover. And she is 10 years old. I, on the other hand, am not 10. So I’m not sure what my excuse is. I’m just awfully afraid that we’re going to get piglets (already in the works for next spring) with the intention of raising them to slaughter weight (sometime next fall) but wind up with a couple of 600-pound sows (a decade from now) that have become the hugest hungriest farm pets ever. I keep thinking of James Taylor’s song about his pig, Mona, who he bought expressly to raise for meat and never was able to slaughter.  “Mona, Mona, so much of you to love, a little bit too much of you to take care of.” This famous pig actually lived on the Vineyard. Some of my friends remember her. And she was huge.

Not eating our own pork would be hypocrisy at its worst. I am (at least I think I am) 100 percent in favor of more locally, humanely raised animals. And 100 percent in favor of eating all the parts of those animals and making that meat stretch over many meals. Choosing to eat a little less meat overall and a little more locally-raised meat are the only ways I see to help fuel the shift away from factory farms.

And I am especially excited about a movement on the Island to build a USDA-approved four-legged humane slaughterhouse. This would be a big incentive for Island farmers to raise more meat animals, because they wouldn’t have to take the animals on an expensive and stressful ferry ride to a facility hundreds of miles away (and wait weeks to get the meat back). And by definition, an Island animal is a pastured animal—there’s no such thing as a feedlot here.

Most ludicrous is the thought that I might disdain eating our own pig and then turn around and go to the grocery store and buy a package of bacon (which I will do—there is certainly no point in pretending that I will never eat bacon again). This would be like giving the factory farms a big thumbs up and poking a stick in the eye of all the efforts to return animal raising to a natural and sustainable system in this country.

And here’s the kicker. We wanted to be farmers. So we started to grow vegetables. Then we got a few laying hens. Then we got some more laying hens. Then we decided we might actually like to get serious about farming as a small business. Then, just a few weeks ago, our landlord invited us to use the three acres of fields behind us for farming. So now we have 200 more laying hens arriving here—tomorrow. And once you decide to make eggs a business, you really have no choice but to “trade in” your hens every couple of years, because their productivity declines. It’s way too expensive (and not a smart business move) to feed hens that aren’t laying many eggs. (No matter how much pasture the hens graze on, they still need supplemental feed.) So your two-year-old hens go off to slaughter. They become chicken pot pies.

Ah. It appears we have already crossed the line into raising animals for meat. Making the leap from a chicken to a pig shouldn’t be that hard, should it?

P.S. The three acres are the reason why the pigs are now a possibility. And stay tuned for more about the arrival of the 200 chickens and photos of Roy’s new coops. The chickens are 17-week-old pullets, so they’ll be ready to lay in a few weeks. We’re skipping the baby-chick phase this time, so at least we don’t have to deal with that cute fest!

And thank you to The Good Farm, Cleveland Farm, and Mermaid Farm for letting me photograph their turkeys and sheep on State Road.

 

 

Farm life, Sustain, The Garden

Waiting for Sandy: Hurricane Prep, Farm-Style

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I’ve lived my whole life within a few miles (sometimes a few feet) of major coastlines, so hurricane prep is something I’m accustomed to. However, the possible combination of frequent 70-mile per hour gusts, 60 live animals, and a recently constructed parachute-like structure called a hoop house is a new one for me. And I noticed yesterday that Roy was being particularly meticulous about nailing and weighting and tying things down. Hmmm. The last time we had hurricane warnings, he seemed fairly nonplussed. This one, not so much.

So it is safe to say we have a healthy degree of concerned anticipation (I wouldn’t call it anxiety) about what Hurricane Sandy might bring our way. Frankly, I’m more worried about my parents in Delaware and my friends in Connecticut, where the storm will bring much more rain and flooding. But we do have a responsibility to protect live critters. We’ve done our best to secure the hoop house, and even if the greenhouse film rips and writhes in the wind, leaving us with a mess, we can replace it and fix it, no problem. The hope is that no other supposedly immovable objects start acting like projectiles around the yard, with the potential to hurt us or the animals.

Moving Cocoa Bunny into the barn was the first and most obvious precaution. (We’ve done this with previous storms.) Her cage is easy to lift, and she will be happy and snug through the two days of high winds. (My lifelong friend Liz Pardoe Gray is here visiting and snapped the pic of Susie and Roy.) Also obvious this time was clearing the farm stand completely and turning it over before the wind has a chance to do that (like it did in last fall’s Nor’ Easter). We had to wait until later in the afternoon to do this, though, because we had the farm stand open to sell eggs today. We put out 7 1/2 dozen—everything we collected yesterday and today, thinking we wouldn’t put out any tomorrow or Tuesday—and they all sold. Not surprising, really—Vineyarders may be hunkering down, but they’re still going to eat well!

For the seven older chickens, we’ll let them go into their coop tonight, supply them with extra water and feed, and not let them out into their yard in the morning. They have spacious digs, so they will be fine hanging out inside the coop. This afternoon we corralled the bigger flock of 48 into the small permanent pen adjacent to their coop—much less area for them to roam around in, but also much less chance of breaking tree limbs crashing down on them. (Some of them needed more convincing than others to leave their new grazing area, so Roy helped them along.) We will probably let them go back out into that limited area in the morning, though we’ve put an extra waterer in the coop in case that turns out to be a bad idea. They’d probably rather wander in and out of the rain and wind instead of being “cooped up” together all day. We’ll also need to get in the coop to collect eggs and that can be difficult with all of them in there. But we’ll have to see what we think in the morning.

Most importantly, Roy has filled a big trash can with water for the chickens in case the power goes out and we can’t use the well. Chickens drink a lot of water, and going even a day without is not an option.

There wasn’t much I could do in the vegetable garden. Nature will take its course out there and I am fine with that. I harvested some lettuce and arugula and green beans for our dinner tonight (first bay scallops of the season), and picked the prettiest zinnias, as I know those plants are going to get nailed. But otherwise, I mostly just picked up any tools or random stakes I could find and tucked them in the shed. I moved pumpkins and potted plants under the covered front entry, and I stacked random outdoor furniture in the outside shower.

With everything as secure as we could manage, Roy and I moved inside to enjoy the kind of Sunday afternoon only possible when a good friend is visiting and a hurricane is threatening (even the ferry boats to and from the Island have been canceled so we are essentially  marooned!). Being forced to slow down for a few hours is actually a gift for us; so no matter what Sandy brings, we are glad for the interlude.

 

Farm life, Sustain, The Recipes

Open House! The Hens Get a Preview

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The chickens got to see the inside of the covered hoop house before I did. While I have been otherwise occupied (a funeral, a photo shoot, a TV filming), Roy has been humming along on the hoop house. Maybe humming isn’t the right word–more like whistling. Last week he reinforced the ends, put in a door, and nailed wooden battens along the hoops, and this weekend he slipped the cover film on so quickly that I’m still not sure how he did it. This is a task that usually takes a few people. Hmmm. Anyway, he then moved the chickens’ temporary fencing so that they could wander into the hoop house during the day, cleaning up the weeds and kicking up the dirt in the process. A nosey hawk has been circling around lately, too, so it’s a good time for the hens to be under a little more cover.

Finally this morning, with no big task ahead of me, I was able to get out, poke around, and take some pictures. I never get tired of watching the chickens, and the light inside the hoop house was lovely on this clear October day. It feels cozy and peaceful in there. I can only imagine the life it is going to take on when plants and hoses and boots and trellises and pots and buckets take over. Nothing like an empty space for the imagination to fill. But in the meantime, the chickens get the honor.

 

 

 

Farm life, The Garden

Big (As in Huge) Things Happening on the Farm

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You know I have been talking about this hoop house for a long time, but I had no idea that Monday morning (Columbus Day), Roy would get up, head outside, and start building the thing. In fact, he got so much done that by the end of the day, all the hoops were up. I posted some pictures on Facebook and my friend Eliza said, “That’s huge!”

It does look big, but that’s what we planned—30 feet long. There will be a potting table running down the middle of it and two raised beds on either side. Roy is also planning some exterior raised beds on either side as part of the support structure. Staking is next; while it might look like this thing is ready for the cover film to go on, there’s still much to do. That’s no problem, I thought, we’ll finish up in spring. No, says Roy, he’ll have it all done by Thanksgiving!

In the meantime, just standing underneath the hoops feels special. They have a magical way of capturing the outdoor space without containing it. I really can’t get over how cool it is.

We picked this spot for the hoop house because it’s a little microclimate—sunny, warm and less windy. Of course that might mean that it will be extra-hot in high summer, but our big hopes for the hoop house rest in the shoulder seasons—seed starting in the spring and season extending in the late fall. But we’ve heard that heat-loving veggies like cucumbers and basil do well in warm hoop houses, so you never know—we may try that, too.

It’s safe to say now that we’ve had a good season on the farm (though it isn’t over yet, we have already met our goal for the year), and with the addition of the new chickens (all laying consistently well) and now the hoop house, it feels really good. It’s gratitude time, so I’m off to bake Roy (and Libby) a batch of sugar cookies!

And, oh, here are a few photos of how it came together. (Sorry, they’re not in order–couldn’t quite get that right!) One cool thing to note–the pole bender (also called a High Tunnel Bender, available from Johnny’s Seeds). This great tool makes bending electrical conduit (available at home stores) into hoops a breeze (says she who watched and took pictures!!).