Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
Here’s a good sign that backyard chickens are going mainstream: Leonard, a maker of prefabricated outbuildings, is making chicken houses. I saw this chicken house in a shopping center parking lot in Winston-Salem. This building is particularly stylish and is a very practical design. The front lid covers six nests. You lift the lid to take the eggs.
I rarely post photos of myself, but today I’ll make an exception. James-Michael, a friend visiting from California, took this photo of me mowing beside the driveway.
It’s amazing how weather makes all the difference. Mowing the grass in the heat of summer is a miserable job. But when it’s 69F out, mowing is a joy. The area behind me, by the way, is what I call the rabbit patch. The area used to be covered with pine trees, which I removed in February of 2008. The area is very steep and very rough, so I’m letting it go back to woods. I planted four arbor vitae trees below the driveway. They’re doing well, and the deer leave them alone.
The Snapper mower, by the way, does a beautiful job mowing the steep and uneven grounds of Acorn Abbey. It’s the Jeep of lawn mowers.
The SafariCookies control panel
I have been carefully watching, and manually managing, my browser cookies for quite some time. It’s quite a lot of trouble. And it’s also disturbing. Most disturbing is that I’ve found that cookies have been regenerating, even though I never visited the site that the cookies belong to. I’ve also found that Flash cookies keep reappearing even though I went to Adobe’s web site and, supposedly, configured Flash on my computer not to use local storage.
What’s going on? I’m not sure. We do know about the existence of “zombie cookies,” because several evil Internet companies have been sued by privacy advocates because of them. Zombie cookies come back after you delete them because they’ve stored copies of themselves somewhere else — usually Flash storage. We also know about Samy Kamkar’s “Evercookie” and the new tools available to evil web sites in HTML5.
I recently downloaded and installed two Safari plug-ins that are a must-have for Safari users on Macintoshes. The first is SafariCookies, which makes it much easier to monitor and manage your cookies, including Flash cookies. The second is Safari AdBlocker. Both are free.
After I installed SafariCookies, I found that I still had more than a thousand Flash cookies and Flash “databases,” even though I thought I had locked down Flash and deleted all the Flash cookies from my file system. I don’t know where this stuff was being stored in my file system, but I had SafariCookies remove them.
If you are using other browsers on Windows, I don’t have any recommendations for you at present. But I’d recommend that you do some research to find what’s available.
Privacy advocates take the position that it is illegal for Internet sites to defeat your efforts to refuse and delete cookies. After all, your computer belongs to you. But corporate America has declared war on Internet users. Their intent is to make the Internet into a place where they can make money any way they can, while strangling any use of the Internet that isn’t about making money for corporations. To keep the upper hand, corporations are using both technological development (as in HTML5) and the usual political dealing and payola (as in their attempts to strong-arm the FCC and buy off the Congress to defeat net neutrality).
For some background on this, see my new category “Internet privacy” over to the right.
Ken and James-Michael pick mustard greens. The chickens want to know what’s in it for them.
Ken planted the fall garden, so I was very happy that he was able to be here for the first harvest. He has a short fall break at school, and he stopped at the abbey while on his way to go hiking in the mountains.
Neither the fall greens nor the sweet potatoes are fully mature, so we harvested only enough for a fall-feast supper. After supper, Ken built a bonfire. Fall bonfires, like pumpkin pie, are a sacred ritual. James-Michael, a friend from California, was here to share the feast and the bonfire.
Ken with a sweet potato
Turnip, mustard, and beet greens, washed and ready for the cooking pot
All done.
Fall is probably my favorite time of year. Making pumpkin pie is a sacred ritual. Cooks who I would have sworn knew better sometimes tell me that they make pumpkin pie with pumpkin-pie filling bought in a can. They probably buy frozen crusts, too. There is no excuse. Pumpkin pie must be made from scratch.
I always cook my pumpkin by baking it. It’s not a big deal. This is also the method that Irma Rombauer describes in The Joy of Cooking, 1943 edition. That’s my standard reference for traditional cooking, though I rarely follow her recipes exactly — rather, I use her concepts. Actually, I don’t think much of Rombauer’s pumpkin pie recipe. It produces what I would call pumpkin-flavored custard, because it contains less pumpkin and a cup of milk or cream. I prefer a more dense, pumpkiny pie. All I add to the pumpkin is a cup of sugar, a couple of eggs, and cinnamon and nutmeg.
Here’s the process.
Find a nice pumpkin. Next year I will grow some.
Cut it in half. Scoop out the seeds and pulp and give it to the chickens.
Put the pumpkin in a roasting pan and put it in the oven at 325 or 350 degrees.
By the way, I found this Williams Sonoma roasting pan at a local junk shop for $10.
In about two hours, the pumpkin will be tender. You’ll have clear liquid standing inside the pumpkin shells.
Scoop out the pumpkin flesh. You must remove the liquid, or your pie will be soggy. I squeeze it out while the pumpkin is in a bowl, but you can also use a collander. Save the liquid for soup stock.
Add the sugar, eggs and spices and pop the pie in the oven.
Can you espy the cat? The photo was taken at dusk as I was returning from shutting up the chickens. Lily doesn’t like it when I go out of the house and leave her.
Solution below.
She’s standing on her hind legs with her paws on the windowsill.
It’s acorn season. I’ve long been curious about foraging for acorns, learning how to prepare them to be eaten, and seeing what they taste like. During October, a small troop of children probably could gather bushels of acorns in the woods around Acorn Abbey.
I’d like to find a good anthropological history of the acorn, if such an opus exists. It would be fascinating. For those of us whose ancestors are from northern and western Europe, or from North America, acorns are in our DNA. Acorns as a foodstuff were critical to migration and survival. If you go into the woods today and gather acorns for a while, it’s easy to imagine how the acorn economy would have worked. The gathering, almost surely, would have been children’s work. Then I can imagine the whole tribe sitting in the afternoon sun and cracking out the acorn meats as they talked. A huge amount of labor was involved, but acorns also are an abundant source of food that come just at the right time, before winter sets in. The gathering actually is a weeks-long process. You go out and gather every day during acorn season, so that you pick up the acorns soon after they fall. If they stay on the ground too long, they’ll become wormy, or the squirrels will beat you to them.
I’ve posted in the past about going foraging with Euell Gibbons many years ago. Gibbons’ now-classic book Stalking the Wild Asparagus has a section on acorns. I have other books on foraging which include sections on acorns. The Internet also is rich with how-to articles on acorns. The problem with acorns is that they contain tannic acid. There is so much tannic acid in some acorns that it would injure the kidneys if you ate the acorns without removing the tannin. There are two basic ways to do this. You can boil the shelled acorns for a couple of hours, with several changes of water. Or you can grind and soak the acorns in cold water. The American Indians used to put their acorn meats into some kind of sack or skin and leave them in a cool, running stream for a few days.
I’m planning to process my acorns with cold water. Though it takes longer, less energy is involved, and I feel sure it was the method that our ancestors used. After I’ve done this and eaten some acorns (that may be a week or two), I’ll post again.
Every year at this time, I discover more wild persimmon trees that I previously hadn’t noticed. Persimmon trees are easily spotted this time of year not only for the persimmons hanging on them, but also because the leaves redden and develop interesting spots and patinas. I found this young tree just today at the edge of my woods. I flagged it with red tape so that I can clear around it this winter and give it room to grow.
Above: Ken sowed beets, turnips, and mustard in the raised beds before he went back to school. The greens are now almost big enough to start harvesting. Former colleagues of mine from the Winston-Salem Journal, who live about five miles from me and who have been gardening in this area for over 30 years, say that February is probably the only month that they’re not eating fresh foods from their garden. I’m quickly beginning to realize the importance of the early spring garden and the fall garden. It’s more fun to work early and late gardens, because the work doesn’t have to be done in the heat of summer. Also, the rain here generally falls more reliably in the spring and fall. This year’s fall garden will have beets, turnips, mustard, the greens from those three, and some sweet potatoes.
Above: Mustard.
Above: The raised beds. And, yes, I hang my laundry on the side porch. I still don’t have a dryer. It hasn’t come up on my priority list, and I haven’t felt any great need for a dryer. I greatly prefer air-dried clothes. And air-drying them is free.
Honeysuckle
Above: After Ken and I built the garden fence last June, we planted climbing roses on two sides of the fence. The roses are coming along well, but it probably will be two more years before it looks like a rose-covered fence. On the other two sides of the fence — uphill from the abbey in the work area, and the side of the fence that’s up against the woods — I’m letting nature take its course. It’s the honeysuckle, of course, that seizes the opportunity to grow on a fence. In several spots, the honeysuckle has already climbed six feet up the fence. I hope I don’t regret letting honeysuckle grow on the fence. Its vines are extremely aggressive. But it sure does smell nice.
The gauge shows the 3.5 inches that fell last night.
To me, few things are as disturbing as a drought. And few things make me feel more secure than the sound of water rushing in my little stream. I can hear the water now through the upstairs open window that faces the woods. The remnants of Tropical Storm Nicole just put an end to the drought that developed in North Carolina during a hot and dry September. A total of 6.2 inches has fallen here in the past few days. Areas to the east, closer to the Atlantic, had much more rain. Wilmington, on the coast, had almost 21 inches of rain from Nicole.
For those of us who want to turn our backs on the corporatized, consumerist lifestyle, few things are more important than water independence and water security. My goal is to live to be at least 100 years old. If I succeed at that, that’s almost 40 more years that Acorn Abbey will need to sustain me through global warming and economic and political changes that I’m probably not going to like. One of my daily reads is James Rawles’ SurvivalBlog.com. Rawles is a very intelligent and knowledgeable man, and his daily links are often very useful. But Rawles’ blog has a strong right-wing tilt. He still believes, because of right-wing ideology, that government, rather than out-of-control corporations and the corporate takeover of our government, is the problem. He’s very big on guns and defending one’s retreat as though it’s a fortress, though, to his credit, he also completely understands the necessity of sustainability. He sells his services as a consultant for people who are looking for retreats. He prefers the western United States, because of the sparseness of the population, weaker local government, and the prevailing winds carrying fallout if a big East Coast city was nuked.
I believe that’s all wrong, that some people’s ideology and too much Ayn Rand has led them to think that rugged individualism, hoarding, and lots of guns are the best defense against what may go wrong in the future. But the western states (with the exception of Idaho and a few other areas) are some of the most water-stressed parts of the country, and the water situation is going to get worse. Given a choice between guns and water, I’ll take the water.
Before I finally made the decision to move back to North Carolina from California, one of the things I attempted to check was long-range projections for average rainfall in the face of global warming. I could find very little data in 2005, when I bought my land, though there seemed to be a consensus that hurricane-season storms off the Atlantic would be more common and more violent. Just this year, though, a research organization named Tetra Tech released a report combining projections from several different global warming models. They show this area of North Carolina gaining several inches of rainfall per year, on average. That is reassuring. One of the graphs from this report is at the bottom of this post.
In my attempts to model the future, it is silly to suppose that guns and hoards of food will get me through the next 40 years, should I be so lucky as to live that long. As I see it, sustainability is the key. Sustainability without rainfall and water is unimaginable. And though independence is a good thing, I also think it’s obvious that fortresses inhabited by rugged individualists with lots of guns are unsustainable.
What is sustainable, then? I think the answer to that is obvious, because that’s how it used to be done before we all became consumers in an economy in which people depend on corporations for everything. Farming communities are sustainable. To the right-wing mind, “community” is a dirty word that will always provoke a sneer. Even a very large farm is not likely to be completely self-sustaining. There are bound to be some things that one can’t produce and that one must trade for. When I was a child, I could hardly believe it when my mother used to tell me that, when she was a child, there was no such thing as a grocery store. A few times a year, she said, they’d buy flour, sugar and beans in 50-pound sacks. Everything else they grew. Those sacks, by the way, were often cotton muslin prints that could be made into clothing. I have a photo of my mother around age 16 in which I’m pretty sure the dress she’s wearing was made from a flour sack.
So, to me, picking a place for a retreat is not about totally getting away from people. It’s about getting into an area sparsely populated with the right kind of people. Those people are people who have tractors and fields and barns and pastures. Those people now go to the grocery store, for sure. But they have the option of going back to farming, and many of them still have the skills.
Acorn Abbey is a little less than 250 miles from the Atlantic. The North Carolina coastline sort of hangs out into the Atlantic. If you flew exactly east from Acorn Abbey, in about 250 miles you would come to the Atlantic around Duck, North Carolina. If you flew exactly south from Acorn Abbey, in about 250 miles you would come to the Atlantic around Charleston, South Carolina. This is good. Stokes County is far enough inland to be protected from the winds of a powerful hurricane. But the rain can get here in only a few hours.
Acorn Abbey’s water comes from a well. I have a small stream only a hundred feet downhill from the house, but that stream stops running in dry weather. The nearest stream that runs all year is about a hundred feet below my property line. The Dan River is two miles away. I could have done worse. But if there is one thing I could fix about Acorn Abbey, it would be this: I’d contrive to have some sort of reservoir of rain water that could be used to irrigate the garden. With limits, my well can do this. But the idea of using ground water for irrigation offends against my sense of sustainability. If there is a cost-effective way of impounding some rain water for summer irrigation, I will think of it.
This storm came straight off the Atlantic rather than from the Gulf.
Tetra Tech Inc. / National Resources Defense Council
Patience, back in the chicken lot after three months on the nest
One often reads that the broodiness has been bred out of modern chickens. Not completely. Patience, one of my Barred Rock hens, sat on the nest (on infertile, roosterless eggs) for three months. She finally ventured out yesterday.
While she was brooding, nothing but brute force could get her off the nest. For many days during the summer, Ken or I (usually Ken) would push her outside and close the chickenhouse doors. How she hated that. After Ken went back to school, I just didn’t have the heart (or the patience) to push her off the nest every day. Plus I didn’t want to have to close the doors to the chickenhouse, preventing the other hens from going in and out as they please.
Patience had hoarded seven eggs. I took them away and threw them in the compost. It’s not clear to me which hens laid the eggs Patience was sitting on. At least one of them, because of its color, clearly came from Ruth, the Golden Comet hen. While she was sitting, it was clear that Patience rarely laid an egg. She was out of production.
None of my other hens has been broody, so I don’t know how common this behavior will be. Come spring, I plan to get a couple of new chicks and give them to Patience. Maybe that will make her happy. And it will bring my chicken population back to five. The hens are about 18 months old. I lost one hen in the early summer of 2009. A predator (probably a raccoon) killed her from outside the chicken house by reaching through the wire and grabbing her by the neck. I lost a second hen this summer to a heat stroke. That was on the fourth day that the temperature went above 100 degrees.
Chicken breeds vary in how cold hardy they are. But it’s clear to me that my chickens thrive better in cold weather than in hot weather. The Barred Rocks laid more eggs last winter than they did this summer. However, Ruth, the Golden Comet, is a champion layer. She has laid a nice big egg almost every day, year round.