Squash

I like winter squash. I like eating it, and ever since I read The Resilient Gardener, I have devoted two entire garden beds to it.

I haven't always been successful at growing it, however. It took me a couple of years to learn that I shouldn't bother starting seeds early in the greenhouse because the seedlings don't like being relocated, so by the time they recovered from their transplant shock their direct-seeded siblings had caught up and even surpassed them.

And germination has sometimes been problematic. For those of you who haven't examined the anatomy of a squash plant, flowers come in two varieties: male...

...and female.

That bulb at the base of the female flower is the potential squash. If fertilization is successful it will grow and grow and turn into dinner, and if not it just turns yellow and falls off. For my first few years of gardening I thought I had a problem with dying baby squash, but it was really a problem with fertilization. I haven't really paid much attention to this in previous years, thinking the birds and bees would take care of pollination for me, but I also haven't been entirely happy with the resulting yield. So this year I decided to help Mother Nature along and do some pollinating by hand. It's quite simple: you pick a male blossom, strip off the petals, and dab the naked stamen in the centre of the female flower.

My big problem: my plants can't seem to synchronize their male and female parts. One day I go out to the garden and all I see are male flowers. The next day: all female flowers. I've read up on this and the experts say eventually the plant should start producing both at once, but I haven't got a lot of time to dawdle. This is Canada, after all, and winter squash takes a long time to mature.

This morning? Happy male flowers, like this quartet. I had to go hunting under every big green leaf to find a single female counterpart.

There's something else a bit odd going on in the squash department. I already mentioned I allocate two 4x12 foot beds to winter squash, and this year they were side by side. Initially I thought I would plant seeds of the same type in the same bed, but at the last minute I thought it might be fun to compare the progress of the plants in each bed. So I have a hill of butternut squash in one bed...

...and another hill in the other bed.

Notice any difference?! 

These hills were planted on the same day, and since they are side-by-side, they have roughly the same exposure to sun and weather.

And it's not just the butternut variety. Here's the lush bed...

...and here's the wimpy bed.

The only variety that's doing well is the zucchini, way at the back. So what's going on? 

Here's my theory: last year the wimpy bed held onions. Maybe squash don't like onions. And last year the lush bed was where I grew garbanzo beans, and like the conscientious gardener I am, I treated the seeds with an inoculant before I grew them. (This is supposed to help any legume plant fix the nitrogen in the soil, making it available to the next crop that comes along.) 

And here's a confession: I have faithfully used an inoculant every year except this one. This year I hadn't laid in the year's supply when the day came to plant the peas, and I was too darn lazy to hop in the car and go get some. Lazy and a bit skeptical, not really believing it did any good.

So Mother Nature took the opportunity to teach me a little lesson: inoculant works! 

You read it here, folks.

Surplus

We've reached the point in the season where we can't keep up with what's ready to eat in the garden. That means it's time to switch into preservation mode. And for me, with vegetables, that largely means freezing.

I've gone the pickling and dehydrating routes, and neither seems to totally fit the bill. I enjoy pickled beets and beans and cucumbers, but there's a limit to how many I want to eat. I understand the economic and health advantages of dehydrating - you don't have all those additions of salt and sugar, and you're not paying to keep things frozen until you eat them. But with the exception of dried tomatoes and fruit leather, I find the end result not very palatable, even disguised in soups and stews.

So most of the excess vegetables around here get vacuum-packed and popped in the freezer. Instructions generally call for blanching vegetables first in order to destroy the enzymes that will cause them to deteriorate. I do that with hardy greens, like kale and chard and beet greens: they get blanched, refreshed in cold water and squeezed dry before being popped in the freezer. But with other vegetables I find blanching makes the thawed product too mushy, so I just clean and chop into chunks and freeze.

The only exception: cabbage, which gets fermented into sauerkraut, of course!

Even though we're now adding a steady stream of food to the freezer, we're still enjoying everything the garden is giving us. In fact, I think that's one of the major differences between Miriam the First-Year Gardener and Miriam the Fourth-Year Gardener: I'm much more inclined to enjoy the food I am growing every day rather than waiting for a special occasion (as I am famous for doing with fennel), or for the vegetable to get bigger (meaning I never got to enjoy baby carrots or potatoes), or freezing it all before I could enjoy it fresh (I think Kim scarcely got her hands on a fresh strawberry our first year here). Now my philosophy is eat fresh first, preserve second.



This was supper last night: two kinds of kale, a rainbow assortment of chard, red and yellow beet greens, red cabbage, broccoli and snow peas, all home grown and cooked in a stir fry with some onions and leftover chicken.

That still amazes me: home grown!

Gump Jr

We're not so creative with chicken names here at Mucky Boots. There's Hector, which isn't bad as a name, but after that came Hector Jr (son of Hector), Hector Jr Jr (a slightly smaller son of Hector), and this year we're back to Hector Jr again for the new generation.

We're having the same problem with Gump's offspring, now that he's beginning to have some. Gump was one of the chicks we hatched last year, and the only cockerel we kept. We were looking for a replacement for Pee Wee, who had begun to get aggressive with the hens, and even though there were some nicer looking cockerels in the bunch we chose Gump because we fell in love. He was always sweet, always a little out of things, always in his own little Gump world, and as a result his tougher male siblings picked on him and made his life miserable. How could we not chose him over the others?

Gump has grown into an excellent rooster. He's a conscientious guardian of his flock, foraging tasty treats for his hens and keeping an eye on the sky for overhead predators. But as he matured, even though we were grateful for the role he plays in the flock, we began to miss the dopey little fellow he had been.

No more. Now we have Gump Jr, offspring of Gump and the one Buff cockerel Kim decided to keep this year - partly because we knew he was going to be enormous, and partly because he's a chip off the old block. He's so much a chip he's practically a clone. Most of the time he's clued out: where's the food? Where's the door? Where are his feet? Those feet are gigantic, and at the end of equally giant sized legs - if we didn't know his parentage we might suspect an ostrich played a role in his conception. He hasn't quite figured out how to coordinate them yet, so when he runs he's the most awkward thing on two legs, but as a result he's entirely, completely endearing.

Here's scratch-eating Gump Jr style...

...and Part 2, when I stopped being so distracted by the bunny.

Yes, we're suckers for the underdog, here at Mucky Boots. And I like it that way.

Best things ever

Okay, maybe not ever, but there are two things making my life a lot happier these days. 

Happy Thing #1: Gluten-free Breadsticks
I do much better when I stick to a gluten-free diet, but man, do I miss bread. Not regular bread, but  the kind of rustic loaf that's crusty and crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside. If I wasn't intolerant of gluten I would probably be living on bread (which, come to think of it, I did for a couple of years in my early adulthood, which is probably when I developed said intolerance...).

When we quit our jobs and began our new lives Mucky Boots, one of the things I planned to learn how to do was bake bread - gluten-free bread. I knew it was theoretically possible to make good gluten-free bread (even though I had never tasted any myself) and I was determined to find a recipe good enough to satisfy my hankerings. And I tried. I really, really tried. I bought books. I trolled through blogs and websites. I bought every kind of gluten-free flour (there are sixteen different kinds in my pantry at this very moment) and every necessary additive like guar gum and xanthan gum and gelatin. And every single loaf turned out more like cake than bread, unpleasant to eat unless toasted.

Until this. Just look at this!



It tastes as good as it looks. Crunchy outside: check! Chewy inside: check! Gluten-free: check, check, check! Plus it's easy to make, versatile (I have used the dough to make flatbreads for pizza, and it would make wonderful crackers), and it keeps in the fridge for a week so you can bake fresh as you need.

The recipe comes from the Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef, and the secret ingredient that makes this dough so unlike the usual sloppy, sticky, pourable gluten-free dough is psyllium husks.

Strange but true. You can eat this bread and be regular at the same time.

I am a happy, happy woman.

Happy Thing #2: Aprons
I have a small issue with stain management. I accumulate stains like nobody I know, and I am more useless than anyone I know at getting them out. I think I'm doing all the right things, but somehow my pile of fit-to-be-seen-in-public t-shirts keeps getting smaller while my shockingly-stained pile grows and grows.

The stains come from all sorts of activities. Working in the garden, of course, but I have learned my lesson there and don't venture into the garden unless I'm wearing my Dirty Clothes. But also things like eating.The likelihood that I will spill on my white shirt is in direct proportion to the stain-making potential of the food I am eating. I can drink water without spilling, but as soon as I have a glass of berry juice in my hand an accident is practically inevitable. And there's cooking. Grease splatters, beet juice droplets, chocolate sauce - they all find their way to the front of my shirts.

But there's this thing called an apron. It's a garment that is easily donned, that doesn't restrict your movement or feel too hot or too heavy, and when you need to quickly look presentable because the neighbour has appeared unexpectedly on your doorstep, it is quickly doffed and hidden in a drawer. It comes in a variety of styles, and is easily made by even the most novice of sewers.

But the best thing about it: it protects your clothes from stains. Why didn't I know this? How could I have four aprons in my pantry and somehow not realize I could wear them and keep my shirts from being wrecked one by one?

Now I am a convert. And to celebrate, to mark this turning point in my life, to show my confidence that this simple garment will change my life forever, I have bought two new t-shirts.

White, of course.

Stampede

No, not the Calgary version, the Mucky Boots version. It happens every day about 6 pm, when Kim calls the chickens for their daily treat of scratch.

You better not get in the way, that's all I can say.

Wondering about Kim's t-shirt? Here's a closer view.

Kale without a hangover

(Please know that I am not a food photographer. If I was, I would have special light deflectors for eliminating those funny glints off the egg, and I would have a hand thrown pottery plate with the perfect colour for setting off the cooked greens without making them look anaemic. You're just going to have to trust me when I say this meal was delicious, even though the photo may make it look just a touch unappealing...)


You may know that this is my summer for overcoming my aversion to kale. I planted two different varieties this year (Red Russian and Lacinto), determined to find a way to make culinary friends with it - it's just too nutritious and too hardy in the garden to keep avoiding it any longer.

I've been eating it for a few weeks now, always chopped into oblivion and mixed in stir fries with other greens I like better, like chard and baby bok choy.

But yesterday...yesterday I made it the star of the show for the first time, using a recipe from Julie called "Joe Beef's Kale for a Hangover". (Joe Beef is a chef and restaurateur in Montreal, and the recipe comes from his book The Art of Living According to Joe Beef.)

I didn't have a hangover, but I was tired after a long and busy day, so this was my supper. And maybe it was that I was so tickled there's a chef named Beef, or maybe it was that this meal was amazingly quick. Or it could have been the beautifully oozing fried egg. Maybe it was the bacon. (Yes, I think it was the bacon.) In any case, I shovelled back this kale-centric meal like nobody's business, and not only survived, but am looking forward to making it again.

When I have enough kale, that is. In fact (she says with shy pride) I am eating the kale in my garden faster than I can grow it. I'm going to have to plant more...

Soap box

Don't worry - I'm not about to start proclaiming or declaiming or exclaiming. I just want to tell you about the soap mold Kim made for me.

After a post-Christmas hiatus on soap-making, I geared up production again last week and tried making milk soap with goat's milk. My first batch (made with a recipe from here) wasn't so hot - it took forever to harden (after two days I sliced it anyway, but it was still too soft), it's greasy to the touch, and each slice has a dark centre, all of which sent me back to the Internet on a quest to figure out what happened. And here's what I learned.

The Gel Phase: this is something you either want to happen or you don't want to happen. It all depends on preference. More specifically, many people who make milk soaps don't want it to happen because they believe it makes the end product darker, and apparently light-coloured milk soap is something to be desired. Other people believe the quality of the end product is better if the soap does go through the gel phase. Which leaves beginners like me scratching our heads.

But here's what I figured out. If you want the gel phase to happen, you insulate the soap really well during the first 24 hours, to keep in the heat. That means wrapping it in blankets or towels and not peeking. If you don't want the gel phase you do the opposite: as soon as the soap is poured into your mold it goes into the fridge, if not the freezer. Those were the instructions I blindly followed with my first batch of milk soap, but apparently it was not enough, because that dark circle in the middle of each slice is a sign of a partial gel. And if there's something gel-lers and non-gel-lers agree on, it's that you don't want a partial gel.

So in my second batch I went for the gel phase and got a much better product. Yes, it's a touch darker in colour, but still a lovely creamy tan.

Super-Fatting: even though this makes me think of my arthritis-is-flaring-and-I'm-too-sore-to-exercise physique, what I'm really referring to is a component of the calculations that go into a soap recipe. Most beginner soap makers follow someone else's recipe, but at some point you may want to experiment with a different combination of oils, or be forced to experiment because you run out of one oil or another. That's when a soap calculator comes in: you enter the amounts of each of the oils you are using and the calculator tells you how much lye and how much water you'll need. (You can find a reliable soap calculator here.)

But there's another input to the calculation, and it has to do with how much oil you want left in the soap not taken up by the lye in the saponification process. If you are making a nourishing facial soap you will want a higher superfat number (more oil left) than if you are making a laundry soap. When I got an unpleasantly greasy first batch of milk soap I wondered if the superfat percentage was off in the recipe because of the fat in the milk. It turns out that a standard superfat percentage for soap is 5%, but for milk soap it should be 3%. Sure enough, when I ran the recipe I had used through the calculator with a superfat of 3%, the calculator called for a greater amount of lye than I had used in the first batch. I adjusted it for the second batch and got a much better product.



But wait...wasn't this post supposed to be about a soap box?

Until last week I had been using assorted found objects as molds - milk cartons, plastic trays, silicon muffin cups - because I found the commercial molds available all over the Internet way, way too expensive. Many of them are fairly simple boxes made of wood. And who do I know who likes making things with wood? Kim, of course.



Here is my lovely soap box. It's made from scraps of cedar, with a top that helps insulate the soap as it hardens, but which lifts off easily.



With a lining of parchment paper...

...and a removable front, it's a breeze to slide out the hardened block of soap for cutting.

Kim constructed the box to my specifications, but I think I got the proportions a little wrong - the bars of soap are a bit too wide to fit comfortably in the hand. Luckily for me Kim's game to make me another one!

Morning harvest

This is what came out of the garden this morning: two heads of Bambi lettuce, the first bunch of new carrots, the first bulb of fennel, the first batch of snap peas, a baby bok choy, two small heads of broccoli, some spinach, and some Chinese stir-fry greens. And a handful of calendula and chamomile blossoms. I feel rich!



And if you're sharp eyed you might have spotted the kale hiding behind the bok choy. I am actually eating kale, and sort of enjoying it, chopped beyond all recognition and disguised among the other greens in my almost daily stir fry. I haven't been quite brave enough to try one of the recipes all of you have suggested - the recipes where kale stands proudly as kale - but I'm working up to it.

Really. I promise.  

Feta update

It's good! It's really good!

If I sound surprised, it's because I am. Our jar of home-made feta has been hiding out in the fridge in its brine for the last three weeks, waiting for us to muster enough courage to eat it - I was really worried this was going to be one of those interesting sounding experiments that turn out badly. But this morning, as Kim was looking for things to add to her scrambled eggs, it finally seemed like the right time to have a taste. So we took the jar out of the fridge, held it up to the light, opened it, smelled it. It looked right and it smelled right, and when we finally tasted it, it was briny and creamy and intense, just like feta should taste.

Success! Now the problem will be rationing our $28 feta so it doesn't all get eaten today.

As a side note, just look at that breakfast: home grown eggs, strawberries and greens, and feta from our newly initiated kitchen dairy. No, the bread's not home-made, but this plate still gives me a happy sense of accomplishment.

Chicken coop renovations, Part 53

Kim loves her chickens. You know that, I know that, everyone in a 20 mile radius knows that. She loves them for their personalities, and for their interesting social structures and psychologies. But most of all (I suspect) she loves them because they give her an opportunity to build things.

In the two years we've had a flock at Mucky Boots, Kim has built internal walls inside the coop, built new nest boxes, built a chicken tractor and then a chicken yurt, built chicken doors and chicken fences, and built Chicken Alley as a way of getting the chickens from coop to orchard without trashing my vegetable garden along the way. She has built moveable roosts and fixed roosts, gates and brooder boxes, and then when we transformed the tool shed into Coop #2 she got to do much of the above all over again. As Kim often says, one of the great things about chickens is that if you build them something, they use it. (For a brief but thrilling history of chicken building at Mucky Boots, go here.)

Once she saturated the market here at Mucky Boots, she began to look farther afield, and so she started building nest boxes for other people and selling them at chicken swaps all over southern Vancouver Island. And that was great, until one fellow came up to admire the boxes and ask about their construction, and then said that he had been experimenting with nest boxes mounted on the exterior of the coop, to free up space inside the coop and to make egg collection easier.

I was standing there as he said it, and a little voice inside my head said "Oh, no." And sure enough, pretty much as soon as we got home Kim began working on a design for an exterior box for Coop #2.

There were some technical problems to consider, like how to keep the overhanging roof of the boxes from getting in the way of the drop-down doors, how to best protect the boxes from the elements, and how to organize the construction and box swap with minimal disruption to the poor hens just trying to lay an egg. But this weekend the old boxes came out and the new ones went on, and don't they just look lovely.



It is a five-part nest box, with three comfy spots for hens in Coop #2-A and two for those in Coop #2-B. This photo shows the internal dividers, and the holes Kim cut in wall of the coop. The box itself was built with scrap lumber (my honey is a thrifty one), with only the door hardware purchased.



All the egg collector needs to do is walk around to the back of the coop, unlatch the door and drop it down, and voila, there are the eggs, right at eye level just waiting to be collected.

Here is the view from the inside (Coop #2, Enclosure B)...

...and the finished product, complete with roof.

These new arrangements are taking some getting used to for the hens doing the laying. Just imagine, there you are, nestled in a cosy nest box laying an egg, when all of a sudden the wall behind you disappears, leaving you open to view. There have been some indignant squawks emanating from the back of Coop #2 today...

Dust bath

If you wandered over to Mucky Boots today you might be excused for thinking there is some kind of archaeological dig going on, or maybe a hunt for buried treasure. Because everywhere you look there are excavated hollows, with all the vegetation in a two foot radius coated in dry dirt. But no, it's just dust bath season.

Chickens like nothing better than scratching out a chicken-body-sized hollow in the ground and then wallowing and flapping in the dry dirt. They work the dust deep into their feathers, to help keep them clean, dry and in good condition, and to discourage any pests from taking up residence. The entertainment factor for human spectators is purely incidental. (Go ahead, click on that link!)

The birds at Mucky Boots, always keen to excel at their chickenly duties, take their dust baths seriously. Hector and his hens staked out the orchard as their preferred location which, happily for me, meant that the job of weeding around the trees was done for me. 

In fact, the base of a tree seems to be one of the preferred sites for dust bathing - that and the sunny side of the workshop, all along the foundation.There has been so much excavation around the roots of two of the big cedar trees near the workshop that I began to wonder if the chickens could undercut the roots enough to make the trees unstable. But I suspect that's just my natural ability to find things to worry about talking...

Bambi

What does the name "Bambi" bring to your mind? Probably a baby deer or a starlet, am I right?

Not me. Not any more. These days Bambi is my favourite salad green, beating out my old standby Anuenue hands down. Bambi is a gem romaine, which means it's the cutest bundle of crisp, dark green, tasty leaves you've ever held in your hand. The fully-grown heads are grapefruit-sized, and make a generous salad for one, and they're the best thing I have grown, as far as I'm concerned. And since I'm someone who doesn't naturally gravitate to lettuce salads, that's saying something.

We first had gem romaine at the Genoa Bay Cafe in a deconstructed Caesar salad, with the individual leaves stacked log-cabin style on the plate. I tracked down the seeds at Johnny's over the winter, and started them in the greenhouse in early March. We're eating it as fast as I can grow it - I'm on my third planting, and can see many more in my future.



Our local bunny is a fan, too. I'm thinking that once I plug all the holes in the fence he's using to make his way into the inner sanctum of the vegetable garden, I'm going to have to plant a little patch of Bambi in the pasture just for him. A bunny and his Bambi. It could be a movie...

New kid

There's a new kid in the Mucky Boots flock, and it ain't a chicken. It's a rabbit. 

We first spotted it a couple of weeks ago, hanging out in the back pasture where the chicken tractor and chicken yurt are, and now we see it every day. Just a regular rabbit, but it doesn't seem afraid of either us or the grown-up chickens wandering around very close by. Gump and his flock cruise around the pasture eating grass and bugs, and there's the rabbit right beside them, nibbling back dandelion stems like pasta strands. Does s/he think s/he just blends in?

We're charmed, even though the little bugger has found a way into my vegetable garden and is helping itself to my lettuce...

...but we're also a little concerned, because Miss Comfort Queen herself, Petunia the cat, is an expert and somewhat bloodthirsty rabbit hunter. We know this because a few times a year she leaves the bottom half of one on the door mat. (Yes, the bottom half - neatly severed at the waist line, and no, we don't know what she is doing with the top half. Perhaps that's where the tastiest bits are.) We love our Petunia, and want her to live out her kitty destiny, but we'd rather she left this particular rabbit alone.

Come to think of it, Petunia gives the adult chickens a wide berth - after all, most of them are bigger than she is. So maybe our rabbit is hanging out with the chickens for a little protection.

What a smart rabbit.

Just for Jean

What's that growing in my garden? No, you are not seeing things. That's kale.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you probably know I don't like kale. I have tried really, really hard, but I really, really don't like it.

My friend Jean, on the other hand, loves kale and thinks I should too, because it's so darn good for me. She's right, of course, and when I read that my go-to greens (spinach and chard) contain enough oxalic acid to add to my struggle with arthritis, I knew it was time to get over whatever feelings I may have about kale and just start eating the darn stuff.

So now there are two lovely rows of kale in my garden - Red Russian and Lacinto - and here is a photo, just for Jean.

And now I need some good ideas. What's your favourite way to eat kale?

Cerinthe

Do you know this flower? It's an annual, which means I normally wouldn't look at it twice (I'm all about perennials, you know) but it caught my eye a couple of years ago on a trip to the Butchart Gardens. It was used in the planters that decorate the top of every garbage receptacle (only at Butchart would the waste bins be horticultural works of art) and I fell in love. What a colour!

So this winter, when I was trying to inject a little whimsy in my oh-so-practical planting list, I added cerinthe to my seed order. I was imagining the small, trailing version I saw at the gardens, so I didn't read the description very carefully. Imagine my surprise when my little seedlings grew, and grew, and grew. They're about 18" high at this point, which makes the container I planted them in completely unsuitable, but once they started to flower I didn't care. 

These flowers could make me not care about a lot of things. It probably sounds ridiculous, but somehow most items on my list of things to worry about just fade into the background, when I have these blooming on my porch.

Feta

Close your eyes and cast your mind back a few thousand years. You're stirring a vat of milk over a fire, and someone walking by accidently drops in the stomach from a just-slaughtered calf. (I'm sure you could make up an interesting if implausible story to explain that.) And a miracle happens: cheese is born!

There were no calves or camp fires here this week, but I am happy to announce the birth (or coagulation?) of the first Mucky Boots cheese. Yes, we made cheese! Goat's milk feta, to be precise.

Our interest was piqued by our friend Rebecca who began making hard cheeses a few months ago. She has had us over for a couple of cheese-making experiences in the last few weeks, and we came out of them with the confidence to try it on our own.

So I ordered a couple of different cultures (one for feta and one for chevre) and some rennet from Glengarry Cheesemaking, and sourced some local goat's milk just in time for a visit from my dad. Put a Math teacher, a Science teacher and an engineer in the kitchen with pots and thermometers and bacterial cultures, and for sure something interesting will happen!

We followed a recipe from here, but basically this is what happens:

Step #1: Gently heat the milk, add the culture, and let it sit for an hour.

Step #2: Add the rennet, stir, and let it sit for 40 minutes. [Our rennet came as liquid in a dropper bottle, which made me wonder how folks a hundred years ago would have done it. If I remember Laura Ingalls Wilder's account correctly, her ma got a piece of calf's stomach from a neighbour. But does that mean people only had cheese when a calf was slaughtered? It turns out people would dry pieces of the stomach and reconstitute it when it was time for cheese making. Go figure...]

Step #3: Cut the curd and let rest for 10 minutes. During this time the curds will start to release the whey.

Step #4: Hold at a constant heat and stir gently for 45 minutes. This "cooks" the curds and makes them a bit tougher.

Step #5: Pour into a cheesecloth-lined colander and hang to drain for 24 hours. After a few hours we turned the cheese in the cloth, so we would get a more uniform ball.

Step #6: Cut the ball into manageable pieces and let sit covered at room temperature for 2-3 days. Then cover the pieces with brine and refrigerate for 1-4 weeks. 

Step #7: Eat!

We're in the middle of Step#6, so it will be a while before we know if the cheese is any good. Even if it's fabulous, this experiment isn't likely to be repeated soon, since we used about $28 worth of organic goat's milk to get a ball of cheese the size of a large grapefruit. Not so cost effective, but worth the experience. One time, anyway!

Swap

Something unheard-of happened on Sunday: Kim sold six cockerels at the local chicken swap.

You need to understand that this is the time of year when everyone is looking hard at the chicks they have bought or hatched, trying to figure out how many pullets and how many cockerels they have. We call it The Great Rooster Lottery, and the end result is always the same: everyone tries to unload their cockerels. Some people raise them to eating weight and then butcher them, as we did last year. But Kim was really proud of her boys: she has been breeding for size, and the six cockerels she brought to the swap were fine specimens - good enough to breed rather than eat. Kim was determined to find new homes, good homes, for these six youngsters.

She didn't have great hopes. Neither did I. When we unloaded the crates the folks beside us came to have a look. "Cockerels?" they asked, and then shook their heads sympathetically. We all know this sad dance.

But nobody factored in how compelling the combination of Chicken Mama and Science Teacher can be. People may have wandered over just for a look and maybe to ask "How much?" but they stayed because of Kim's passion and knowledge. And then they bought because of the healthy birds, and clean cages, and because Kim answered every single one of their questions - clearly and patiently like the teacher she is. She sold one cockerel, then another, and another, then two at once, and then the last one - all to people looking to start their own breeding programmes, or for a rooster to help protect an existing flock.

Woo hoo!

It was an interesting morning for me, too - a lovely woman named Kate came over to introduce herself and to tell me she had been reading the blog. How cool is that!