The Magic Crock

I've never been a picky eater....except for blue cheese....and organ meats....and black licorice...and just about anything from the ocean. OK, so maybe I'm a bit of a picky eater! In any case, I have never been a fan of sauerkraut.

As a kid I would turn my nose up at the stuff and always minimized my consumption of it to the smallest "no thank you" portion that I could get away with. Even though I tend to be someone who enjoys traditions, I never wanted any part of the whole eating sauerkraut on New Years' Day thing.

When Janet recently announced that she was going to make sauerkraut from the last of our cabbage, I did my best to conceal my lack of enthusiasm for the idea. I even spent an afternoon attempting to make a wooden lid for the crock that would fit inside on top of the cabbage. That didn't work out so well because of the conical shape of the interior made it a poor fit.

I watched as Janet rinsed, chopped, salted and placed the leaves into the five gallon crock. When she was done I said, "That's it? Just leaves and a little salt?" She assured me that nothing else was required. I didn't question her authority on the matter further because she was raised by her German immigrant mother who certainly knows all about sauerkraut.

The success of the pickling process depends on the exclusion of oxygen. After my failed attempt with the wooden stopper I tried a second idea that I saw in a book somewhere. I placed a large plastic bag in the crock on top of the cabbage and filled it with water. This idea seemed to work very well, it sealed very tightly to the sidewalls of the crock and provided weight to press the cabbage down.

The flaw in the idea wasn't apparent until a few days later when I checked the bag and found that all of the water was gone! My choice of bags wasn't the best and it ended up developing a leak and flooding the cabbage. With considerable effort, I lifted the full crock to the sink and drained the water back out again.

Janet wisely took the whole effort over from me then. She placed two dinner plates into a plastic bag and pressed them down on top of the cabbage. We moved the crock to a quiet corner and let it alone for about six weeks.

When the day came to open the crock and try the sauerkraut, I was dubious to say the least. I was expecting to find a moldy disgusting mess under those plates. When she lifted them out and we peered inside, I was amazed to see that the cabbage had been magically transformed into pale pickled strands that looked for all the world just like sauerkraut!

Janet rinsed some of the the sauerkraut and placed it in a pan. She warmed it up a bit and added a little red wine vinegar and a touch of sugar to taste. The children and I sat at the table wrinkling our noses as it was served out but became instant believers the moment we tasted it. To my surprise, it was delicious and we all asked for extra helpings!

I guess I have to admit that her skill in the kitchen has decreased my picky eating habit by one more item. We canned what we didn't eat right away and it is now now resting in the basement larder for whenever the mood strikes us. Despite my misgivings, I now find myself looking forward for the first time to resurrecting that New Year's Day tradition in our household. I know already what one of my resolutions will be.....to plant more cabbage!

Three Strikes

It started badly and went downhill from there.

Strike one... I turned into the driveway and began picking my way among the potholes. It was exactly one year ago on a sunny day in early November. We had just closed the deal to purchase this small farm and I could barely contain my excitement.

As the farmhouse came into view, I saw a black pickup parked in front and my reverie was suddenly interrupted by a wave of anxiety. The land purchase that was a high point of my life also marked the low point for the previous owner. Having fallen on rough times, the farm was now being surrendered to the bank and in turn to me. I hadn't anticipated running into him as he removed the last of his belongings and I worried that the encounter might be unpleasant.

I parked the car and walked toward the house all the while rehearsing a pleasant greeting in my head. As I walked, my peripheral vision caught movement from an unexpected direction and I turned my head to see a man racing toward me on a four-wheeler. He roared up the rise and parked the vehicle directly in my path.

The man was clearly upset and I was pretty unnerved myself. After several minutes of heated and confused conversation, I managed to figure out that this was not the previous owner but instead was the next door neighbor. He was upset because rumors had been running rampant about the new owners of this farm. He had been led to believe that it had been sold to a hunt club that was going to let the house fall into ruin and fill his weekends with the constant sound of gunfire.

I did my best to assure him that the rumors were as far from truth as could be. I told him that we were an ordinary family with young children who hoped to turn the property back into a working farm. My explanations seemed to be slaking his intensity at least a little when the previous owner finally approached us from the house. With a curt goodbye, the neighbor fired up his vehicle and retreated back toward his own house.

I recovered from the confusion of the past few minutes and managed to deliver my rehearsed salutation. The previous owner turned out to be very friendly and actually grateful that we had come along to purchase the property when we did. His changing fortunes had gotten him into a bind with the bank that was only remedied when they managed to locate a buyer.

Strike two... It was a beautiful afternoon only a few days after our first unfortunate encounter. The entire family had come with me to begin working on our new property and everyone was assigned a task. The children had begged to be able to bring our young Labrador retriever along and seeing no harm in it, Janet and I agreed. Having nothing else to do with him, we tied him to one of the benches at the bonfire circle and I began mowing the overgrown yard nearby. We were all so excited to dig into our new project that we barely noticed that Finnegan was barking for attention the entire afternoon.

As the afternoon wore into evening, I continued the massive project of mowing the very large lawn. At one point our daughter Freya approached to inform me that the neighbor was back and had asked to speak to me. I found him standing near the property line and walked up to see what was on his mind.

He was again quite agitated. He informed me that he had spent a very frustrating afternoon attempting to deer hunt in the woods next to his house. He had sat there in his tree stand listening to the incessant barking of our dog and he was convinced that the noise had spooked all of the deer from the area. I apologized for our lack of consideration and he replied with a statement that I should be careful or somebody might just shoot that dog of ours.

Strike three... A few days after the dog incident, I noticed that the same neighbor had placed "No Trespassing" signs on a series and trees and poles between our two houses. The problem was that the signs appeared to me to be quite far on my side of the line as if he believed that a section of our property belonged to him. I brought it to his attention and he told me that the previous owners of both properties had indicated that the property line ran where he had posted the signs.

Now to be fair, he had actually placed those signs prior to our first meeting when he feared that the farm was being turned into a hunt club. I decided that the best way to settle it was to hire a survey crew to mark exactly where the dividing line ran. A few weeks later the survey crew confirmed my assertion and my neighbor reluctantly adjusted to the idea that a couple of his acres were actually mine.

The last thing that I wanted was neighbor trouble. We were so excited about our new home and had looked forward to building good relationships with our neighbors. Unfortunately at each turn it seemed that we were just getting further into trouble.

Read the next post below for the rest of the story...

Gift Exchange

(continued from "Three Strikes" above)

Through November and December of last year my family hauled load after load of our belongings to our new farm. It was with great relief that we finally completed the task and could retreat from the cold to spend our time cleaning and painting the interior. On the brief occasions that we did happen to be outdoors at the same time, my neighbor and I mostly ignored each other. Time passed and the cold wind blew.

Our brief hibernation ended as the children and I emerged in late January to begin tapping the maples and boiling the sap down into syrup. I spent most of February and March carrying sap from the woods and sitting out behind the house tending the evaporator fire late into the night. I can't recall who it was that broke the ice first, but soon my neighbor was taking a minor interest in our sugaring activities.

One evening in late February my cell phone rang as I was sitting by the fire. My neighbor was calling to make an offer to give me a large pile of firewood that he had accumulated and couldn't use. Before long he had loaded up the trailer of his four wheeler began delivering load after load to our back yard.

This generous and friendly gesture changed everything! Before long, I was knocking on his door to deliver a bottle of our syrup and the reciprocal gift exchange continues to this day. I delivered a tin of cookies, he has returned the tin with strawberries inside. We have given him watermelon and green beans. He has brought us cucumbers and zucchini.

As the summer months have faded into fall our once tense coexistence has steadily grown into a friendship. We regularly loan each other tools and equipment. He has joined in my coop construction effort when heavy lifting was required. He has offered helpful advice and I have done my best to design the coop to reduce the crowing noise in the early morning hours.

It is now common for us to call each other when something interesting happens. In the early spring we called him to come see the snapping turtles that were crawling from our pond to lay eggs in the garden. In late summer he invited Aidan and I to join him in the woods where he showed us salamander eggs that he had found beneath a log.

I can't tell you what a relief it is that this has sorted itself out for the better. He and I are now looking forward to our joint adventure coming up this early spring when we plan to expand our maple operation to include his woods as well as mine. I am amazed at how far a little habitual generosity can go to overcome even the worst relations and build the foundation of a lasting friendship. I heartily recommend that everyone get in the habit of bundling up a little something, taking the kids and delivering it with a smile to your neighbors.

Big Help From An Old Friend

It has been a busy week preparing for the upcoming CSA meeting and an overabundance of assignments at work. The pile of tasks before me seem to grow faster than I can complete them and the days are falling off of the calendar like so many leaves in the wind. On Thursday afternoon I was racing with the clock to complete yet another assignment for my boss when an unexpected email found its way to my desktop.

The email was from Scott, a friend from my home town. He had just begun a stretch of days off and decided that it was high time that he paid us a visit. I hadn't seen him in at least six years so I checked with Janet and then replied that he would be very welcome. I took Friday off and he drove up from Ohio that morning.

Scott and I go way back, in fact all of the way to our first meeting in preschool daycare. Much to the delight of my children, he can still tell stories from my past such as how I caused a whole tray of chicken noodle soup to be spilled on the carpet at Mrs. Cooper's daycare. We have been friends through thick and thin although we have often been out of contact for years at a time.

Scott has a way of showing up when I'm in the middle of some big project and lending me a massive hand. We worked on each other's Eagle Scout projects, he helped me build a wood strip canoe, he has helped me out of jams and provided much needed muscle again and again. This visit was to be no exception as we stood in the yard catching up and looking over my never-ending chicken coop project.

I had bought siding for the coop months ago. Unfortunately that purchase proved to be premature as I had so many additional items to complete before I could finally begin hanging the sheet metal. In the meantime, the siding has sat in the grass getting rain soaked and always worrying me that it would rust before I ever had a chance to use it.

Friday and Saturday we applied ourselves to the task like men possessed. We visited and laughed as we worked and told stories of all of the things we had been doing in the past few years. It was wonderful to have the help and his company and we accomplished so much more than I had hoped.

On Saturday evening, the sun was sinking low in the sky as we hung the final sheet. We were exhausted and had been pushing ourselves for the past few hours even though either one of us would have happily given up if it had not been for the other saying "we're so close to being done, let's try to get another one hung up". The worst part of the job had been the meticulous cutting and fitting of each sheet around all of those doors and windows.

Just as we were finishing up the children relayed the message that dinner was on the table. Freya had harvested Brussels sprouts from the garden and Janet had made a delicious chicken pot pie. We sat around the dinner table telling stories and jokes and I noticed how easily my children enjoyed interacting with my old friend. We polished off the meal with homemade canned apple cake with ice cream and some of Janet's elderberry sauce.

A wonderful and helpful visit from a dear friend just when I needed the boost. Given the size of some of the tasks we have in front of us in the next few years I think we're going to have to encourage him to visit a little more often!

First Rooster "Processed"

This past Saturday morning I was pleasantly surprised to have our daughter, Freya, come up to me and suggested that this weekend would be a good time to butcher the roosters and that she would like to help. I had decided a while ago that I would like to try my hand at processing our own birds. At first this notion was greeted with a low-grade horror and disbelief from members of the family. It's quite one thing to raise the birds and have them hauled off to a slaughterhouse only to return as neatly packaged chickens as if from the grocery store. It is quite another to have it done right here at home with no opportunity for us to deceive ourselves that the bird on the plate wasn't actually one of those that we had been feeding and petting out in the coop.


Having had a while for the concept to sink in, the family eventually got used to the idea that I wanted to slaughter them myself. The common phrase became, "Just don't do it while I'm around!" For these reasons it was surprising to me when our daughter decided that she wanted to participate directly. We had a busy day ahead of us so we decided to undertake the task on Sunday.


After lunch on Sunday we started gathering the supplies that we would need. I reviewed some chicken butchering instructions on the web and we set up a table out back with everything we would need. I constructed a "killing cone" out of sheet metal and attached it to a stake that I placed in a discrete location among our pine trees out of sight of both our house and our neighbor's. We put some water on the stove to be used for scalding and I headed out to select a rooster.






Our surplus roosters have been making a real nuisance of themselves for a while. Of course they are only doing what comes naturally, but their behavior has made it increasingly clear that we needed to cull the flock down to the proper male to female ratio. Our breed of chickens is normally happy with a proportion of 1 rooster for every 8 hens. Since our current population is 7 roosters for 13 hens this has led to lots of fighting, chasing and commotion as the roosters have competed for too few females.


The biggest problem of late has been the fact that the roosters are harassing the hens mercilessly. The roosters tend to hang around the exit of the hen house squabbling amongst themselves and waiting for a female to come along. Whenever a hen emerges from the building she is immediately pursued by all of the roosters and very roughly bred by most of them until she can escape back to the relative safety of the coop. Not having any hands, the roosters tend to grasp the feathers of the hen's head in their beaks to keep her still during the procedure. This generally results in feathers being yanked out and all of our hens are partially bald from the excessive and unwanted advances of so many males. During my daily visits to the coop, the sight of the long-suffering little hens reminds me that I need to do something to give them some relief.

I retrieved a rooster and we found that I had to make some adjustments to the killing cone due to the large size of the birds. When it was finally ready, I tried to persuade Freya that she probably shouldn't watch the actual killing. I had never done this before and was worried that it would be excessively unpleasant and upsetting, especially due to my inexperience. She insisted on watching and told me that I shouldn't "sell her short" by assuming that she couldn't handle it.


I went ahead with the deed and it went surprisingly smoothly and with very little distress for the bird or us. The killing cone did its job by holding the rooster securely and preventing any of the legendary commotion of "a chicken with it's head chopped off". The method that I used was to simply place the rooster upside-down in the cone with it's neck sticking out of the bottom. After one quick cut it was all over quickly.


We carried the bird back to the processing table and checked the temperature of the scalding bath. Aidan arrived at that point and seemed to handle the sight of the dead rooster more with curiosity than anything else. I noted to myself that all of this was much easier to handle emotionally as soon as the rooster was dead. I put Aidan to work by having him watch the timer for me as I scalded the bird to loosen the feathers for plucking. After that was completed, we immersed it in ice water to quickly cool it back down again.


I was concerned about how difficult the plucking would be having heard a number of people indicate that it was laborious. Freya and I sat down at the table and began plucking only to find that it was quite easy to do. It was somehow amazing to see that the bird emerging from beneath the feathers already looked just like one from the grocery store. I had originally planned to make a homemade chicken plucking device to assist in the job, but for this first bird it just seemed quicker and easier to pluck it by hand. Most likely that little project will wait until some point in the future when I have more birds to handle.


By the time the rooster was completely plucked, I admit that I was getting a little tired of the task. The rest of the process of cleaning the bird and preparing it for the freezer proved to be pretty simple. In seemingly no time, the children and I were admiring the final result and Freya said that she couldn't wait to show Janet how well we did.


I did learn one lesson that is apparent from the picture. Due to my inexperience, I removed too much of the skin from the upper breast as I was removing the rooster's crop. It's a minor defect and one I'm not likely to repeat now that I know better. I felt proud of myself for figuring out how to do my own butchering and especially proud of Freya for being so strong and helpful in the face of an unpleasant task.

A day later I find myself reflecting on the contributions of the chickens much in the same way that I did when I carried the first egg away from the coop. I feel greatly impressed by the very significant contribution to our table and livelihood that these birds are able to make. It is humbling somehow to realize that eventually every one of those birds and potentially thousands of their progeny will meet the same fate as the first, but not without first providing us with many thousands of eggs along the way.

While their contributions are less than voluntary, I feel they are worthy of considerable respect just the same. Looking at it that way, all of the resources and effort we have expended to build them a comfortable and healthy place to live seem much less like folly and much more like something that they heartily deserve in return for all that they provide to us.