Garden and Growing | picklebums.com

August 9, 2010 | Filed in: Garden and Growing

August is fickle.

It is definitely still winter here, but August tricks me with it’s sunny days. The sunny days confuse my brain into thinking spring has already come. It makes me want to put on shorts and go outside to dig in the garden. But if I were actually silly enough to break out the shorts and rush outside I’d quickly find that the sun is just a tease… it is still bitterly cold out there.

Still it is a sign that spring will eventually come. It’s is a sign that I should stop being envious of all the summer photos of lush green grass and tall sunflowers on northern hemisphere blogs and start working towards our own summer garden.

So here I am, lusting after summer, wading through seed catalogues and dreaming up grand plans for our garden. The thing is… this spring/summer finding the time and the muscle to garden might be a little tough.

You see we finally got our building permits and are all set to start the renovations. That means the Baldy Boy will be more than a little busy tearing down the back of our house and building a new bit. It also means that we are going to be living without a kitchen and bathroom at various times over the course of the building, which is going to make life a little more difficult to manage. Oh yes… and there is also the smallest boy who tends to take up a fair bit of my time at present.

As I was pondering my grand plans and how on earth I was even going to manage to plant a single zucchini I was reminded of the question the Planning Queen asked me a while back…

“I would like to know how you juggle the outside stuff like veggie patch, the animals, with the inside stuff of the house? “

The short answer is, I don’t!

Gardening is very seasonal here on the Pickle Farm.

Spring planting is very labour intensive and we all spend way too much time in the garden, neglecting almost everything else, to get things prepared or planted in time.

Then there is the magical ‘growing phase’ where I feel like I have it almost perfectly balanced, spending time in the garden maintaining and encouraging but not to the detriment of everything else.

After that will come short bursts of manic activity when things fruit and we try to pick, eat, give away or preserve it all before it goes to waste.

Autumn comes late here and is lazy. Summer crops have produced and died back and we really should be spending time cleaning them up and preparing for next year, not to mention planing out a few winter crops, but we often don’t.

We barely touch the garden in winter. I don’t like the cold so I refuse to go out and garden in it. So anything we plant out in winter has to pretty much survive on it’s own or not!

I’m sure if I could find that magical balance and if I spent more consistent time in the garden all year round the whole growing stuff gig would work better and spring prep would be a lot less insane… but it’s just not the way it works around here at the moment.

I’ve learnt not to be too precious about the garden over the five years we’ve been attempting it. I can read all the books I like but I am never going to keep all that knowledge in my head, let alone have the time to plant those carrot seeds on the day of the April full moon. I’m just not… and that is ok. I can be a haphazard gardener and still grow plenty of great stuff and more importantly, enjoy it.

So here I am… on a sunny afternoon in August. We planted our green manure crops today. Oats, clover, peas and broad beans. Ok so we planted them all at totally the wrong time, but I’m reasonably confident they’ll still grow and still help improve our compacted soil. And despite the fact that I’ll be minus one tractor driver and man with the muscle and plus one small body strapped to my back I’m still making grand plans, even if they never come to fruition.

So who else is with me? Who is making grand garden plans for spring? What will you grow and what garden blogs inspire you or make you green with envy?

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Normally at this stage we’d attempt to move them to their own house, because the other chooks are territorial and have been known to be less than friendly when they suddenly find new chicks among their ranks. But in the past none of the Bantam eggs have been fertile… so we just didn’t feel the urgency and um…er… we kind of forgot.

Bad form.

It seems two chicks hatched over night or early Sunday morning and it was on for young and old in the chook house that Sunday morning. Marshmallow and Jasmin had dived off their nest with one chick in tow hackles raised and talons out, defending from a corner… But they left another fluffy chick and one hatching egg alone in the nest.

Izzy happened to be outside and heard the chick peeping, and despite being told not to check in the egg boxes because of our recent snake encounter, she couldn’t help herself. Lucky for the chicks that her memory isn’t so crash hot.

We rushed the cold, tired chick and it’s equally cold egg bound sibling inside and popped them on the fire place under a lamp to try and warm them up.

Meanwhile, out side, in my pyjamas, I managed to lock all the other chooks out in the orchard and wage my own war with the frightened new mothers to try and encourage them out into the backyard where they would be safe. Oh boy can those two hens be narky when they want to.

Inside, Chick #1 perked up right away and to our amazement, Chick #2 in the egg was cheeping too.

I ummed and ahh about breaking Chick #2 out of the egg. I knew if the egg had been open too long it would begin to dry out and the chick wouldn’t have a hope of getting out on it’s own. I also knew that if it didn’t have the strength to get out on it’s own it probably wouldn’t survive anyway.

In the end, the Baldy Boy came home and the executive decision was made to crank up his home made incubator and break the chick out of the egg and see what happened.

By the time I managed to leave for my afternoon/evening out (running late but hey – these things happen) we’d managed to happily reunite abandoned Chick #1 with his or her Mothers and sibling but abandoned Chick #2 wasn’t looking crash hot in the incubator. I didn’t hold out much hope for #2 and I was pretty glad to be leaving the children and dealing with that potential devastation to the Baldy Boy.

When I dragged myself home at the oh so unreasonable mummy hour of.. ahem…. 10pm, I was amazed to hear that #2 had fluffed up, perked up and eaten and that they’d managed to slip it under the mother hens when it got dark that night.

Monday morning, there three happy little fluff balls being mothered to death by Marshmallow and Jasmin – none of them looking any the worse for their crazy start.

So you see, it was just your average day on the Pickle Farm.

I rescued two baby chicks, burnt the entire batch of biscuits and sang 80′s songs like a fool!

What did you get up to on the weekend?

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We already have a rooster, his name in Hamlet. He is a beautiful, majestic, placid, black barnevelder rooster and his son Dash quickly grew up to be just like his father. Initially the two boys got along just fine, but recently things became difficult between them. Both crowing and preening for the top position, and both with rather impressive spurs, it was a recipe for disaster.

We simply can not keep two roosters.

Way back when our first chick hatched (sadly mother and baby both died a short time later) we began talking about what we’d do if we got roosters. We explained to the girls why we couldn’t keep more than one rooster and we talked about how we might deal with that. That was the first time we broached the subject of eating our home grown chickens.

We are not vegetarian or vegan. While I respect those who are, it is not for us at this present time. We are, however, trying to be more mindful of what we eat, and how it is grown and prepared. We’ve been working towards eating more whole foods, cooking things from scratch, eating less processed nasties and growing our own food. After some discussion, initially between the adults and later including the big girls, we felt fairly strongly that if we could not kill, process and eat our own home grown animals then we should not be eating animals at all.

We can’t afford to only buy meat from lovely local producers at the farmers market, or even to buy organic meat from the chain supermarkets. What we can do is grow our own chickens, ensure that they have a full and happy life, that they are allowed to be chickens, scratch in the dirt, eat grass and bugs and all kinds of good food, hang out with other chickens and yes… be loved and cared for by us. Not only do I believe that this is infinitely more respectful and humane than how most meat animals are bred and kept, I also think this produces a better quality of food.

So we were firm on what we believed and why, but as Dash got older and as his final day loomed closer, I am not ashamed to admit that The Baldy Boy and I were both a tad apprehensive about the whole she-bang. We put it off for a while, neither of us being able to decide on the perfect day to do the deed…. that is until today.

Today Dash met a quick and humane death. He was plucked, cleaned and processed (I helped but Baldy Boy did most of it) and cooked lovingly (that was my job) and enjoyed by our family.

This is all that is left of our chicken dinner!

So it has been a rather momentous day at the Pickle Farm. We all learnt a LOT. Things we’ll do differently next time, whether or not there will be a next time, and how very different home grown and processed meat is. I had no idea that chicken had loads of fine wispy hair like feathers, nor did I know that their skin is normally a golden yellow (commercial chickens are often bleached to get the creamy white/pink skin). I know I need to get a whole lot better at jointing and cutting up a chicken, but I was surprised at how well we did following online instructions to clean and process the meat.

I know some of you may be horrified at the thought of this, even more so that our children were part of the process (I assume the girls would have been part of the plucking and cleaning, at least to watch, had they not been at school. The Small boy was super interested and watched some of it before he got bored), but I’ve thought long and hard on this. I want my children to know where their food comes from. I want them to understand that when they eat meat, that means that an animal died. I want them to be capable of making truly informed decisions about what they eat.

We did not force them to eat the chicken dinner tonight, I wasn’t even sure how I’d feel about it when it finally came to dinner time. We have been upfront and honest about the whole process from first discussion to plate and I was quite happy for them to just choose veggies, but they didn’t. They commented about the differences, they loved the extra crispy skin and they asked for seconds. They also thanked Dash for a good dinner.

Dinner was good. Different to store bought chicken, but very good.

And who would have thought we inner city dwellers who once thought nothing of living so close to our neighbours we could hear them fart in the shower…. who’d have thought we’d be growing and eating our own chicken one day!?

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