pickles, Pickles, PICKLES!!!

From talking with some of my friends, it's clear that this year is a good one for cucumbers!  This is my first year making pickles and I've tried a number of recipes.  I canned the batch I made today, but all the rest were "refrigerator pickles" - just put them in the fridge and they'll keep for a couple of months.

• First I tried the basic dill pickle seasoning from Ball.  It was very good.  Using a seasoning packet makes things easier - all you do is boil water and vinegar, add the seasoning, and pour into your jars of cucumbers.
• I made a Sweet Garlic Dill recipe from The Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving.  Honestly, I don't know why I made this one!  We don't like sweet pickles.  I guess I thought the garlic and dill would overpower the sweet, but they still tasted too much like bread and butter pickles to me. (blech!) Luckily, I found out that my neighbor loves sweet pickles so I gave her a couple of jars ... and then I made her a huge batch with cucumbers she had been given by another neighbor, so her sweet pickle craving has been fed!)  Making pickles from scratch as in this recipe is a bit more work but really quite simple.  You just have to measure out all of the individual spices.
• Next I tried a recipe from the same book called Favorite Dill Pickles.  This one is awesome!  These taste like authentic deli pickles.  When we first tried them (about a week after I made them) they were still a little bit sharp from the vinegar, but a couple of weeks later they are perfect!  Definitely worth the wait.
• Finally I tried another seasonings packet by a brand called Mrs. Wages.  It had gotten great reviews from a few websites, but honestly, we thought the Ball seasoning packet was better. 

This afternoon I made another batch of the Favorite Dill Pickles, plus a batch of Tangy Dill Pickle Relish.  Usually I don't like relish because it is too sweet, but this recipe uses lots of dill and garlic and is very good.  I can't wait to try some at our next barbeque!

Making these recipes was cool because not only were the cucumbers home-grown, so were the onions and the dill!  

Spawn of Crazy Chicken!

Looking down into the brooder - you can see
Crazy Chicken in her time-out corner!

A quick story.  Last year when we ordered our first batch of 12 chicks, I ordered two Salmon Faverolles.  They are a bit different from most breeds of chickens because they have muffs on their cheeks, feathered legs, and 5 toes instead of 4.  They are also supposed to be pretty shy, docile, and easy to take care of.  Unfortunately, one of the babies arrived very weak and died a couple of days later.  The other one seemed fine at first, but after a few days, she started beating up on the other chicks!  Literally poking at their eyes, and she drew blood on one chick.  The recommended approach for a naughty chick is to isolate it within the brooder for a while - kind of a "time-out" corner!  Well, I tried that and it didn't work. I ended up trading her for another chick from a friend of mine who had a batch of chicks that were older. We thought that if she were with bigger chicks, she wouldn't be able to beat up on them (for one thing, they could fly and she couldn't!).  It worked and she kept the bird.  She still had a weird personality and they called her Sammy, the Crazy Chicken.

Fast-forward to this year ... I mentioned in a previous post that my favorite hen named Hickety went broody this spring and wanted to hatch out chicks.  We don't have a rooster so I got some fertilized eggs from this same friend ... and it looks like Crazy Chicken was the mom of one of our babies!  I was pretty excited this morning when I realized that ... I kept looking at this chicken and trying to figure out why she looked familiar to me ... then I realized that she looks just like a Salmon Faverolle!  She has the right coloring, the side muffs, the feathered legs, and yes, she has 5 toes!

This is a typical Salmon Faverolle

The pullet on the right is the Spawn of Crazy Chicken!
This was the best picture I could get of her because she kept running away ...

It's funny too, because this chicken is definitely "weird."  She hides a lot and won't let anyone near her ... same thing her mom did over at my friend's farm.  We decided to name her Hedwig because she kind of reminds me of the snowy owl from Harry Potter.

I'm also glad that we got one of Sammy's babies because she was killed by a fox a few weeks ago :-(.  My friend has a few of her babies too, so her memory will live on!

My Christmas Gift

I got the BEST Christmas gift last year from Tim and the kids!  They hunted around all of the antique stores in our town (there are quite a few of them) and found this!

What woman wouldn't LOVE a rooster weathervane?!?  Tim snuck it into the house and wrapped it to drive me crazy since it was such a funny shape.  Una, who is a TERRIBLE gift secret-keeper, let it slip to me that it was "something to do with chickens" but I still didn't know what it was.  I was so surprised and I just loved it ... but we didn't get to install it until July.  Now, every time I walk outside, I am reminded of what a thoughtful hubby and kids I have!

Reducing your household waste

When we got chickens last year, I was so happy that our leftover or scrap food could be fed to them.  I really hate wasting food, and I didn't realize just how much food was routinely thrown out until we started saving the leftovers for them.  (Mind you - we eat leftovers for lunch during the week, so I am talking more about scraps).

Composting was another challenge.  Over the years, we had tried to be true to composting uncooked kitchen waste.  We bought the cute ceramic container that is supposed to make it so convenient to compost.  It ended up not getting dumped often enough (yuck!) and then one day one of the ceramic knobs broke off. We tried different types of containers but nothing really "stuck."  Usually each spring, we would compost for about 1-2 months and then give up.

This year was different.  We did a couple of things to keep us motivated - maybe some of these ideas will help you too!

• First, we moved the compost pile closer to "home."  We used to have one large pile out in one of our back fields and it was a good 8 minute trek round-trip.  Now we have three smaller bins right near the chicken coop.  Since we walk out to the coop a few times each day anyway, it is no big deal to take the compost out.
• I keep two small containers in one of the wells of my kitchen sink - one for the chickens, and one for the compost.  They are open so that I can see what is inside and they get emptied when they are full or have been there a while.  The rule is they get emptied at least once a day!  Nothing is left there overnight.  This keeps the grossness factor way down!

Here is a list of things that you can typically put in your compost pile from the kitchen:

• fruit/vegetable peelings
• coffee grounds
• tea bags
• overripe fruits and vegetables

This compares to what you might give to your chickens:

• leftover raw or cooked vegetables or fruits
• dairy - yogurt, cream cheese, sour cream, etc.
• breads
• cooked meat - beef, pork, fish, chicken (yes, it sounds gross, but they love meat ...)

You can see that between the two bins, hardly any food is thrown away!  There are a few things that you shouldn't feed chickens - onions and peppers (strong flavors might affect the taste of the eggs) and avocados (makes them VERY sick), to name a few.  They also don't usually like citrus fruits, but maybe there are some chickens out there who do.

When there is something from the kitchen that could go in either bin, I always choose the chickens, since it has a more direct benefit to me.  Feeding them kitchen scraps lowers the amount of commercial food that they eat, which helps to save money!

It's funny ... because now that we have greatly reduced the amount of unused waste from our kitchen, I am struck when I am visiting other people's houses at how much is thrown away.  I can't help but think "if only my chickens were here!" 

We have had a great cucumber harvest this year.  We planted 6 pickling cucumber plants and 2 seedless cucumbers plants.  I love a basic tomato-cucumber-red onion salad, but THIS recipe is my new favorite for those seedless cucumbers.  Try it!  It is from www.allrecipes.com, with a few small modifications.

Creamed Cucumbers

Ingredients

• 5 cucumbers, peeled and thinly sliced
• 1 bunch green onions with tops, chopped
• 1 cup mayonnaise
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1/4 cup lemon juice or white vinegar
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 2 drops hot pepper sauce
• 1 teaspoon dried parsley flakes (or 1-2 T fresh)
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/4 teaspoon onion powder

Directions

1. Combine cucumbers and green onions in a large bowl. Cover and let stand for 1 hour. Combine all remaining ingredients; pour over cucumber mixture and mix well. Refrigerate for several hours.

It's a Boy!

Meet Stewie

At least, I'm pretty sure he's a he.  My favorite hen, Hickety, is an Australorp who keeps going broody (meaning she wants to hatch out chicks).  Since we don't have a rooster, that just wasn't going to happen!  A friend of mine gave me some fertilized eggs to set underneath her.  Hickety hatched out 5 babies in June and was a great mama hen to her babies.

So when you hatch eggs, you get a straight run - some male, some female.  Out of the 5, I think one at least is a cockerel.  He is huge compared to the other babies, and I'm pretty sure I can see the beginning of the spurs that they get.  I found out yesterday that he's got a pretty good bite to him already, too.  My prediction is that he ends up in a pot by the end of the year!

We named him Stewie (after the obnoxious baby in Family Guy) but as I'm typing this, I see that the name is also very likely his destiny. Now that's funny!

Check out these rain barrels!

Hooray!  We finally have our rain barrels installed. Commercial rain barrels can be really expensive - $150 each, or even more. We made our own using food-grade barrels that I got from a restaurant (they used to contain crushed tomatoes!). They are 55 gallons each and we have two sets of two linked together. We have a set next to the raised vegetable beds and a set by the chicken coop. We use them for drinking water for the chickens, to water the vegetables, and also to keep the compost piles moist. There is a screen over the one open barrel below the gutter to keep the mosquitoes out and there is an overflow at the top of the closed barrel.  They work great and I am so happy that we have them.  It is amazing how much water is wasted in a soaking rain!  These barrels fill up completely in about 5 minutes if there is a good downpour (typical of the summer thunderstorms that we get).  The only thing that we would have done differently is put a larger diameter spigot at the bottom. We used the typical diameter hose, but we should have used bigger to get a faster flow rate.  It's not a big deal, but if we build any more we will definitely use the bigger size.