Sustainable living – Page 44

Garlic harvest

It looks a fright, but there are couple of pounds or more of good garlic in there.

I had been waiting for a cool morning to harvest the garlic. It was a chore. It would be nice if one could just pull it up by the stalk, but the stalks were too dry and weak for that, and the roots too strong. So each bulb had to be excavated with a garden tool.

I planted the garlic in, I believe, late October. I pulled it in mid-July, so that’s almost nine months to grow. I was tempted to wash it and make it look like the Sonoma County fair, but I didn’t think getting it wet would help preserve it.

There will be something very garlicky for supper tonight, using the bulbs that fell apart while I was pulling them.

How the garlic looked in early May

Chapati bread

The dough, kneaded and resting

Those of you who’ve been reading my scribblings here know that two tenets of my theory of cooking and health are that we should all eat like diabetics, even if we’re not; and that the elimination of simple carbs is the key to maintaining body weight.

The problem is, bread is probably my favorite food, and hot homemade bread is something I’d rather not imagine living without. So I’m always thinking about breads that are as easy as possible on the carbs and as low as possible on the glycemic index. That’s a short list of breads. But one such bread is whole-wheat chapati bread. It’s a dense, unraised flatbread. Google for recipes. I make it with King Arthur whole-wheat flour, water, and a bit of coconut oil. That’s right, not even any salt. For years I have noticed that unsalted bread can be much more interesting than bread with salt in it, with an eerily old-fashioned taste. I have no idea why. Anyway, like all wheat breads, the dough must be kneaded. Cook it well-floured on a dry griddle or pan.

Chapati bread goes exceptionally well with the curries of fresh summer vegetables that are my default supper this time of year.

Rolled and ready for griddling

Cook them hot so they blister and brown, but don’t let them smoke.

Chapati bread, curry of squash and peppers, and zingy peanut sauce

Chicken news

Behind the new defenses

My hens will soon be five months old, so they should start laying before long. I decided to go ahead and switch them to laying mash. Until now, they’ve been eating a Purina starter mash. I was delighted to find out that the roller mill at Walnut Cove, where I buy chicken feed, mixes their own laying mash. It looks like a good mix, because it has a calcium supplement and no animal byproducts.

I found one of my hens dead Saturday morning. She was inside the wire with no broken skin but with clear signs of neck trauma. I’ll never know what happened, but I think she probably was strangled by a raccoon that reached through the wire and caught her by surprise. I spent the day Saturday putting up 1/2-inch hardware cloth. I also doubled the electrical defenses and installed a higher-power, always-on fence charger. Poor chicken. The only good to come of it is that, with four hens, there’s more room in there. Given the quality, and the cost, of the chicken defenses required around here, I don’t think I’ll be able to build them a larger coop any time soon.

The Walnut Cove mill’s homemade layer mash

The Monitor Roller Mill at Walnut Cove. It’s an institution in these parts.

Inside the roller mill

Critters seeking habitat 9,462; David 1

My new neighbor’s new digs, just up the hill from my side porch

This evening I went out to the deck to dump some supper scraps in the compost bucket. I happened to look up the hill. I saw a groundhog sitting on a newly excavated pile of dirt. I got the camera and went to check it out. He’s made himself quite a nice new home there.

I give myself a score of 1 because, for now at least, I appear to have driven off the five-foot blacksnake that was getting into my chicken house looking for eggs. I didn’t hurt the snake (unless it got zapped by the fence charger after I threw Listerine in its face), but either my fighting back against it, or the rather expensive snake repellant that I put out, or both, seems to have persuaded it to move on.

All the other critters have won: The doe with her little Bambi who completely wiped out my garden beds last night, the swallow with the nest in the basement, the lizard on the porch roof that almost fell on my head when I was screwing down roofing, the wild turkeys, the rabbit (he’s quite welcome, but I’ve only seen him once); the hoppy toad on the front walkway (he’s welcome too), the pigeon that slept on my roof for a week or so before something got him (probably an owl), even the little green snake, which doesn’t scare me and which doesn’t eat eggs. I had seen the groundhog before, closer to the woods on the lower side of the house. Either he’s decided to move up the hill, or this is a groundhog family.

Garden

I was too busy to check the garden for a few days, and suddenly the zucchini were a foot long. I hope they’ve not turned to seed. The oversize cucumbers are great, though. Some of the zucchini will go into a curry for supper.

Busy, busy, busy

I haven’t had much time to post lately. I’ve been busy with a long list of things that need to be done to get the house ready for the final inspection. Plus I had a visitor from California last week. Above: A new chicken feeder ordered from Randall Burkey has made it much easier to keep the chickens’ food clean and cut down on waste. Floor level troughs don’t work very well. This one is suspended from a wire.

The baby squash are coming along.

Basil, a bug, and a squash tendril

The view toward the North Carolina Piedmont from Fox Hunter’s Paradise on the Blue Ridge Parkway. My friend from California and I went for a little road trip to the New River Valley of Virginia.

Chicken gym

Formerly I had a ramp, with toe-holds, for the chickens to move from upstairs to downstairs. But, for whatever reason, they would use the ramp to go up, but they would refuse to use the ramp to go down. So today I put in small pine limbs arranged as steps, hoping that the limbs feel safer and more instinctive for them. They used them to go up this evening. I guess we’ll see in the morning whether they’ll use them to come down.

The chickens love to perch. They also are fascinated by anything new and interesting that shows up in their chicken house.

Sunbathing

Their egg nest has been installed now. The hens are supposed to lay when they’re five months old. Eggs in August!

The chickens' first day out

The chickens are now big enough not to get through the wire, so today I let them go downstairs and check out their small coop for the first time.

They were nervous at first, but soon they were contentedly pecking at the ground.

Yesterday I installed an electric fence wire around the bottom of the coop to provide some extra defense against night predators. I don’t think predators could break into this coop anyway, but it’s best to teach them to stay away, lest they make a habit of coming back every night and digging and worrying around the coop.

I tried to keep the hot wire as close to the ground as possible.

Lily sees the chickens for the first time and starts to stalk.

Closer…

The chickens see her. Heads up!

The chickens run to the other side. Lily quickly lost interest. I think she realizes that she can’t get at the chickens. Plus, she’s probably heard them and smelled them for days and days. The electric wire is turned off, by the way. Lily is not in danger of getting zapped.

What's growing at the abbey, May 2, 2009

A green exuberance returns to the area around the house which a year ago was bare after the elderly pine trees were removed.

The garlic bed

The chickens are growing a new set of feathers and look pretty ratty at the moment.

“Knockout” roses

Blackberry blooms

Carnations

Purslane, to be eaten for its omega-3

A deciduous magnolia in a sea of fescue. At the bottom of the sea of fescue is a layer of clover.

Red clover

A day lily strains to get its head above a sea of fescue.

Catnip, which grew from last year’s roots

A baby apple tree inside its deer cage

A day lily, which somehow survived the ditch witch when the water pipe was buried

The magnolia grandiflora puts out new growth.

A vegetable bed, just getting started

Chicken house move-in day

The chickens pose for a picture shortly after moving into their new house, before they had a chance to dirty it up.

The chickens moved into their new house today. They’re now 12 days old. They’ve spent the last week living in a box upstairs in my unfinished house, where they got in the way of all the work that was going on this week. Now that they’re older and the weather is a bit warmer, I’ve moved them into their new chicken house. They still have their heat lamp for cold nights.

My brother built the chicken house. We considered a number of designs for backyard chickenhouses, but we liked the house-on-stilts design the best. It affords some extra protection from predators and easier access for human caretakers. There’s a screen around the bottom, and a door in the floor of the chicken house. There will be ramp stairs between the two levels soon.

I’m still thinking about security from predators. I may put a run of electric-fence wire around the base of the chicken house and have a timer turn it on from dusk until dawn.

The plywood panel in the front is temporary, covering the spot where the nests will be. The nests will extend out from the front of the chicken house, with egg-robbing doors on the outside.