Chicken Fever!

OHHHHHH I can not wait for everything to grow and then end up in my stomach! This is a very hard time of year to be... an eater and a cooker of food. There are certainly treats to have and good greens to cook up, but the anticipation of those summer veggies is sometimes a little too much to handle! On top of that, I've been patiently waiting for the 500 austerlorp chickens to show up on the farm, and that chicken house we built has been sitting empty for a month! Well, at long last the little teenage mutant chickens are here! I went into a trance when I was hangin' with them the other day. The sound of 500 little peeping chickens is hypnotic. Rosie the farm dog was beside herself and so were we. It'll be many months until they start laying, but just the fact that they have arrived will tide us over until we start ripping vegetables out of the ground and off the vine.

The tiny peeps of our housemates hatching chicks has been my background music of the evening. I held a chick in my hand that had just broken out of its egg, and I felt like a proud father even though I hadn't done a thing to aid their birth thus far. By morning, there just might be a whole pack of drying little chicks under the heat lamp! It has indeed been a weekend of chickens and warm fuzzy feelings... I feel like a three year old girl.













Adam

Ramps and Fiddleheads

I'm entering my 4th week at Remembrance Farm in Trumansburg, New York. It's a largely mechanized, Biodynamic, Organic vegetable farm. Nathaniel, the owner and operator, mainly grows root vegetables, salad and cooking greens, and soon eggs. Our chickens haven't arrived yet, but soon... SOOON there will be 500 little hens doing the Egyptian around the pastures of clover. In the mean time we've been working on a big ol' chicken house. It's really just a hoop house on skids, but we've been building perches and roosts on the inside, so it will really only be a hoop house in structure. Last week we started planting onions with a transplanter. The transplanter is a little implement that pokes little holes in the soil while also putting a dab of water in that hole. Two people sit in seats attached to the back and shove onion plants (or whatever you're planting) into the holes like 10 year olds playing whack-a-mole at the arcade! We planted around a 150,000 plants in a week, which is not bad for three guys in a week. It was hard to feel too proud of ourselves, because the Amish were goin' to town on a new addition to the work barn and a new machine shed for the farm. They've only been going for a week, and it's just a few days off from being finished! Those guys build like maniacs!
When I got home today, my lovely lady suggested we go forage for some spring goodies in the woods, so we did. We came back with a fist full of ramps and some fiddleheads which we promptly fried up to tide us over until dinner. For those of you who aren't familiar with either of these spring delectables, Ramps (on the right) are wild leeks that grow in the forest mainly, and Fiddleheads are the curly little sprouts of the fiddlehead fern. The long one in the photo is too mature to eat, I picked it to show how the plant looks at a later stage. It is really satisfying to find such tender little green treats this early in the season. I'm already looking forward to garlic scapes and the first of the cookin greens!

Adam