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this is why i don’t use those post title things
it’s meandery but drink has been taken and also i have a lot of eczema/hives/i don’t fuckin’ know. behind the cut i touch upon the life cycles of the noble fowl, and also the Anti-Rent Wars, because why not, it’s like a personal brand at this point. Also, photos.
n) today I drove 20+ miles to drop off a couple dozen of the chickens we processed on Tuesday, at a farmstand run by people who also come to the farmer’s market. They sell two dozen or so of our chickens every two weeks, and are one of our larger bulk buyers. They live the hard life of the farmstand farmer– you need to sell enough stuff all the time that you get a solid enough customer base to buy all your stuff when it’s in season, so that means constantly trying to find things people will come out to you to buy. They’re over in Stephentown, where I’d never been– it’s beautiful but sort of desolate? At least there didn’t seem to be many people. I went through “Stephentown Center” and the speed limit didn’t go down from 55.
I also went through a place labeled by one of those state-issued green-and-white roadside signs that just said “ALPS” on it in all-caps. So I guess I’ve been to the Alps now. Woohoo! (South/West Rensselaer County, you are weird. I never realized what a Troylette I was until I started hanging out west of Troy. It is a whole different world.) (They had their own mini-Civil War, by the way, two decades ahead of the main thing, and it was not over slavery, it was over feudalism. No, really. Weird trivia fact: New York State outlawed chattel slavery before it outlawed serfdom. I’m not making that a contest or anything, it’s just a point of out-of-context history.)
n+1) anyhoo immediately following that drop-off, I had Google Maps hie me to the Amtrak station, with a pause for confusion: there’s a closer Amtrak in Pitts…field. I get confused about place names in MA. Pittsfield, MA is 6 miles from Stephentown, while Rensselaer NY is 22 miles, but I figured out I needed to go to Rensselaer. Why, now?
Well because the guy who runs the hatchery where we get all the farm’s meat poultry from, as it happens, was taking a vacation, and getting on the train to do so, and he’d figured out that the timing was such that he could meet up with us and drop off the latest batch of meat chickens. Wednesday, my brother-in-law had driven all the way out there to pick up the turkey poults, because we do not mail those guys (we did one (1) time and it was so horrifying we try not to speak of it. OK, my sister spoke of it in some detail today for the first time and I wish she hadn’t). Normally we mail the chicken chicks, because it’s just a lot of a drive, but when it’s hot like this it’s not a great prospect.
So I met this guy, and he looked like he was in a farmer costume, denim overalls and a straw hat, and he handed me a stack of big peeping boxes with holes in them, and I put them into my car next to the empty coolers that had held their grown-up, dead, packaged kinfolks, and drove home with a peeping back seat.
It’s a lot of travel. But the point of organic farming is not strictly the carbon footprint, or the immediate environmental impact, or the immediate nutritional value. In my experience, anyway, the real point is the return to a sustainable methodology. The nutritional content of our chickens isn’t radically different from that of a Purdue chicken– but the more of us little farmers there are, the more robust the food supply chain is. The hatchery guy, that’s his side business; his main thing is that he raises draft horses. The farmstand people, they specialize in fruit, but they offer all kinds of stuff at the farmstand to draw enough of a customer base to get all their fruit sold. That’s how it works.
n-1) I turned down a tour of the pig pasture (that sounds dumb, it would have been fun, I haven’t seen those little guys in forever because their pasture is like, as far from the house as you can get, and that’s only partly because they’re a little stinky– really it’s because we rent some land from a neighbor as a favor to him so he gets the tax break, but the tax assessor is suspicious so we have to for real use that land, and so the pigs are over there and not smelling them is just a side benefit) and instead went out and harvested flowers this morning, before the sun hit that particular field. And it was before 8am, mostly, but it was already 80 and climbing, and humid as the inside of someone’s mouth, and so I let the sun chase me across the beds, trying to stay out of it, and I got enormous patches of hives/eczema spreading from the insides of my elbows (eczema) all up my upper arms and down to the backs of my hands (hives) and it’s fascinating but I absolutely can tell where one skin condition ends and the other begins, and I sort of hate that I’m that kind of savant, but I guess it could be worse, it could be my face or something. My legs are untouched, but mosquito-eaten.
(The photo is not of my rash, but of larkspur flowers, which are my favorite to look at, and very least favorite to harvest. They’re a pain in the ass.)
n+2) in the afternoon, hiving and eczema-sore (it doesn’t itch, it just hurts, ugh) I gave up on flowers or cooking, and went out and used my pot still and distilled half a gallon of… I don’t know what it’s called… from a batch of mead I’d made with honey from the awesome Russian beekeeping mafia. (They’re centered in Cohoes, which is across the river in Albany County, so the honey they give us isn’t necessarily from the hives they keep on the farm, but we figure it’s close enough. They pay rent in honey, and keep their weirdly aggressive Italian honeybees up by the property line where they only bother us occasionally.) It turned out pretty great, but I don’t know what to compare it to or how to describe it. Using a pot still gives you a result that has a lot of the weird flavors from the original mash, and so it looks totally clear but it tastes whiskey-y. It’s got a kind of… fiery taste? And you can tell it was once honey. I think if I were bottling it, I’d cut it with a little bit of honey after i aged it. Fresh, it’s kind of great but I can tell it’d be not to everyone’s taste. (I brought out a glass full of ice and stuck it under the outflow of the still, so that’s how fresh it was.)
While I waited for the still I did some signpainting. It took me forever, and I got almost no results. Earlier this week a neighbor dropped off some extra chickens he didn’t want in his flock– of course, cockerels, and my sister misheard him, thought he’d said something obscene, and actually clutched at her chest to ask him to repeat himself, which was hilarious– and it occurred to me that I ought to make a sign to go on the Eggmobile that says “Laughing Earth Home For Wayward Cockerels”, because somehow our egg-laying flock keeps winding up with more and more roosters in it. A free-ranging flock like that has more room for roosters than most– the roosters actually do some work besides fucking the hens, they do actually tend to die first in predator attacks, so we don’t mind them as much as we might, but you still don’t need more than 1 rooster per 50 hens or so, and we’re well over that. (You actually can guarantee fertile eggs with 1 rooster for something like a hundred hens, but I don’t like to think too hard about that.)
But they’re cute roosters– Barred Rocks, or mongrels thereof. They’re still immature; someone here, one of the apprentices or someone, thought they were hens and was confused. No, the neighbor who dropped them off wouldn’t be wrong about it, if he said they were cockerels they surely are.
But I did not paint that sign, instead i painted a sign for the roadside that says “pork by the piece” and spent the whole time trying not to write “fruit by the foot” instead. {there’s an existing sign that says “preorder pork” and I wanted to differentiate that we now also have pork a la carte instead of by whole or half hog by prior arrangement. you can just pull up and get some pork chops, that’s allowed now. very different state laws and licenses apply, so that hasn’t always been the case.}
oh an n+1) sidenote:
got the boxes back to the farm, went to unload them into the brooder. Sister and Farmbaby helped. As I was carefully taking the chicks out of the boxes one by one (and, mostly, trying to prevent Farmbaby from being needlessly cruel to the chicks; she’s very fond of playing with animals like toys, as is not unexpected for being three, but it means you really have to be vigilant), I noted to myself that some of the chicks were different-looking: they had darker heads, instead of being a uniform pale floofy yellow, and had an extra bump where their combs were going to grow in, and their beaks were shaped differently. But it wasn’t until we were almost done unloading them that I said anything. And what I said was, “oh isn’t that funny, that chick is stuck on its back and can’t flip over, just like the turkeys,” and my sister looked at it, really looked for the first time, and said, “that’s because that’s definitely a turkey.”
See, among other things, turkey poults are neurologically less-developed at hatching than chicken chicks. Chicks mostly can walk and get around and orient themselves. Poults, for their first couple of days, frequently have trouble orienting themselves relative to the earth’s gravity, and if you look in the poult brooder, there will often be two or three or more out of the whole batch who are lying on their backs. Some look dead, but they’ve just fallen asleep like that. They wake up and flail wildly and can’t get up for a while. Some don’t figure it out, and die, and that’s sad but apparently just sort of… how it works. (Righting them doesn’t help; if they can’t stay upright it’s indicative of a deeper problem.) But most of them do figure it out pretty soon, and are okay. They’re more fragile than chicks; they’re cannier than the meat chicks, but have less common sense, and more of them die from things like getting their heads stuck in fences or falling asleep and then having a sibling fall asleep on their head so they can’t breathe and so they just die like that. It’s… weird.
But anyway. Sister went through gathering up all the chicks that she could tell were Not Chickens (you can’t keep turkeys and chickens together in the long haul, not in significant numbers– chickens can harbor a parasite that doesn’t harm them, but kills turkeys and game fowl, so you can’t even pasture them consecutively except if you do the turkeys first, and chickens second; there’s a whole schedule for it here, and they never occupy the same brooders), and brother-in-law happened by and said, “oh yeah, the hatchery had some extra turkeys hatch, not enough to sell to anybody, and he said he’d throw ‘em in since there was no shipping to worry about, and I totally forgot to tell you, so good on you for noticing.”
It was eight poults, which is not too shabby at all, especially since we’ve already lost four to either not being right in the head or getting slept on too aggressively by siblings.
this is why i don’t use those post title things
it’s meandery but drink has been taken and also i have a lot of eczema/hives/i don’t fuckin’ know. behind the cut i touch upon the life cycles of the noble fowl, and also the Anti-Rent Wars, because why not, it’s like a personal brand at this point. Also, photos.
n) today I drove 20+ miles to drop off a couple dozen of the chickens we processed on Tuesday, at a farmstand run by people who also come to the farmer’s market. They sell two dozen or so of our chickens every two weeks, and are one of our larger bulk buyers. They live the hard life of the farmstand farmer– you need to sell enough stuff all the time that you get a solid enough customer base to buy all your stuff when it’s in season, so that means constantly trying to find things people will come out to you to buy. They’re over in Stephentown, where I’d never been– it’s beautiful but sort of desolate? At least there didn’t seem to be many people. I went through “Stephentown Center” and the speed limit didn’t go down from 55.
I also went through a place labeled by one of those state-issued green-and-white roadside signs that just said “ALPS” on it in all-caps. So I guess I’ve been to the Alps now. Woohoo! (South/West Rensselaer County, you are weird. I never realized what a Troylette I was until I started hanging out west of Troy. It is a whole different world.) (They had their own mini-Civil War, by the way, two decades ahead of the main thing, and it was not over slavery, it was over feudalism. No, really. Weird trivia fact: New York State outlawed chattel slavery before it outlawed serfdom. I’m not making that a contest or anything, it’s just a point of out-of-context history.)
n+1) anyhoo immediately following that drop-off, I had Google Maps hie me to the Amtrak station, with a pause for confusion: there’s a closer Amtrak in Pitts…field. I get confused about place names in MA. Pittsfield, MA is 6 miles from Stephentown, while Rensselaer NY is 22 miles, but I figured out I needed to go to Rensselaer. Why, now?
Well because the guy who runs the hatchery where we get all the farm’s meat poultry from, as it happens, was taking a vacation, and getting on the train to do so, and he’d figured out that the timing was such that he could meet up with us and drop off the latest batch of meat chickens. Wednesday, my brother-in-law had driven all the way out there to pick up the turkey poults, because we do not mail those guys (we did one (1) time and it was so horrifying we try not to speak of it. OK, my sister spoke of it in some detail today for the first time and I wish she hadn’t). Normally we mail the chicken chicks, because it’s just a lot of a drive, but when it’s hot like this it’s not a great prospect.
So I met this guy, and he looked like he was in a farmer costume, denim overalls and a straw hat, and he handed me a stack of big peeping boxes with holes in them, and I put them into my car next to the empty coolers that had held their grown-up, dead, packaged kinfolks, and drove home with a peeping back seat.
It’s a lot of travel. But the point of organic farming is not strictly the carbon footprint, or the immediate environmental impact, or the immediate nutritional value. In my experience, anyway, the real point is the return to a sustainable methodology. The nutritional content of our chickens isn’t radically different from that of a Purdue chicken– but the more of us little farmers there are, the more robust the food supply chain is. The hatchery guy, that’s his side business; his main thing is that he raises draft horses. The farmstand people, they specialize in fruit, but they offer all kinds of stuff at the farmstand to draw enough of a customer base to get all their fruit sold. That’s how it works.
n-1) I turned down a tour of the pig pasture (that sounds dumb, it would have been fun, I haven’t seen those little guys in forever because their pasture is like, as far from the house as you can get, and that’s only partly because they’re a little stinky– really it’s because we rent some land from a neighbor as a favor to him so he gets the tax break, but the tax assessor is suspicious so we have to for real use that land, and so the pigs are over there and not smelling them is just a side benefit) and instead went out and harvested flowers this morning, before the sun hit that particular field. And it was before 8am, mostly, but it was already 80 and climbing, and humid as the inside of someone’s mouth, and so I let the sun chase me across the beds, trying to stay out of it, and I got enormous patches of hives/eczema spreading from the insides of my elbows (eczema) all up my upper arms and down to the backs of my hands (hives) and it’s fascinating but I absolutely can tell where one skin condition ends and the other begins, and I sort of hate that I’m that kind of savant, but I guess it could be worse, it could be my face or something. My legs are untouched, but mosquito-eaten.
(The photo is not of my rash, but of larkspur flowers, which are my favorite to look at, and very least favorite to harvest. They’re a pain in the ass.)
n+2) in the afternoon, hiving and eczema-sore (it doesn’t itch, it just hurts, ugh) I gave up on flowers or cooking, and went out and used my pot still and distilled half a gallon of… I don’t know what it’s called… from a batch of mead I’d made with honey from the awesome Russian beekeeping mafia. (They’re centered in Cohoes, which is across the river in Albany County, so the honey they give us isn’t necessarily from the hives they keep on the farm, but we figure it’s close enough. They pay rent in honey, and keep their weirdly aggressive Italian honeybees up by the property line where they only bother us occasionally.) It turned out pretty great, but I don’t know what to compare it to or how to describe it. Using a pot still gives you a result that has a lot of the weird flavors from the original mash, and so it looks totally clear but it tastes whiskey-y. It’s got a kind of… fiery taste? And you can tell it was once honey. I think if I were bottling it, I’d cut it with a little bit of honey after i aged it. Fresh, it’s kind of great but I can tell it’d be not to everyone’s taste. (I brought out a glass full of ice and stuck it under the outflow of the still, so that’s how fresh it was.)
While I waited for the still I did some signpainting. It took me forever, and I got almost no results. Earlier this week a neighbor dropped off some extra chickens he didn’t want in his flock– of course, cockerels, and my sister misheard him, thought he’d said something obscene, and actually clutched at her chest to ask him to repeat himself, which was hilarious– and it occurred to me that I ought to make a sign to go on the Eggmobile that says “Laughing Earth Home For Wayward Cockerels”, because somehow our egg-laying flock keeps winding up with more and more roosters in it. A free-ranging flock like that has more room for roosters than most– the roosters actually do some work besides fucking the hens, they do actually tend to die first in predator attacks, so we don’t mind them as much as we might, but you still don’t need more than 1 rooster per 50 hens or so, and we’re well over that. (You actually can guarantee fertile eggs with 1 rooster for something like a hundred hens, but I don’t like to think too hard about that.)
But they’re cute roosters– Barred Rocks, or mongrels thereof. They’re still immature; someone here, one of the apprentices or someone, thought they were hens and was confused. No, the neighbor who dropped them off wouldn’t be wrong about it, if he said they were cockerels they surely are.
But I did not paint that sign, instead i painted a sign for the roadside that says “pork by the piece” and spent the whole time trying not to write “fruit by the foot” instead. {there’s an existing sign that says “preorder pork” and I wanted to differentiate that we now also have pork a la carte instead of by whole or half hog by prior arrangement. you can just pull up and get some pork chops, that’s allowed now. very different state laws and licenses apply, so that hasn’t always been the case.}
oh an n+1) sidenote:
got the boxes back to the farm, went to unload them into the brooder. Sister and Farmbaby helped. As I was carefully taking the chicks out of the boxes one by one (and, mostly, trying to prevent Farmbaby from being needlessly cruel to the chicks; she’s very fond of playing with animals like toys, as is not unexpected for being three, but it means you really have to be vigilant), I noted to myself that some of the chicks were different-looking: they had darker heads, instead of being a uniform pale floofy yellow, and had an extra bump where their combs were going to grow in, and their beaks were shaped differently. But it wasn’t until we were almost done unloading them that I said anything. And what I said was, “oh isn’t that funny, that chick is stuck on its back and can’t flip over, just like the turkeys,” and my sister looked at it, really looked for the first time, and said, “that’s because that’s definitely a turkey.”
See, among other things, turkey poults are neurologically less-developed at hatching than chicken chicks. Chicks mostly can walk and get around and orient themselves. Poults, for their first couple of days, frequently have trouble orienting themselves relative to the earth’s gravity, and if you look in the poult brooder, there will often be two or three or more out of the whole batch who are lying on their backs. Some look dead, but they’ve just fallen asleep like that. They wake up and flail wildly and can’t get up for a while. Some don’t figure it out, and die, and that’s sad but apparently just sort of… how it works. (Righting them doesn’t help; if they can’t stay upright it’s indicative of a deeper problem.) But most of them do figure it out pretty soon, and are okay. They’re more fragile than chicks; they’re cannier than the meat chicks, but have less common sense, and more of them die from things like getting their heads stuck in fences or falling asleep and then having a sibling fall asleep on their head so they can’t breathe and so they just die like that. It’s… weird.
But anyway. Sister went through gathering up all the chicks that she could tell were Not Chickens (you can’t keep turkeys and chickens together in the long haul, not in significant numbers– chickens can harbor a parasite that doesn’t harm them, but kills turkeys and game fowl, so you can’t even pasture them consecutively except if you do the turkeys first, and chickens second; there’s a whole schedule for it here, and they never occupy the same brooders), and brother-in-law happened by and said, “oh yeah, the hatchery had some extra turkeys hatch, not enough to sell to anybody, and he said he’d throw ‘em in since there was no shipping to worry about, and I totally forgot to tell you, so good on you for noticing.”
It was eight poults, which is not too shabby at all, especially since we’ve already lost four to either not being right in the head or getting slept on too aggressively by siblings.
