Now that we have a few years experience raising birds, I’ve done some quick calculations of costs. We already know what we get for them at the end of the season. I’m only doing the turkeys, ducks and geese. The Icelandic chickens both cost and pay very differently, and this is our first year with the Chanteclers, whose economics I expect to be different than any of our current birds. This is the version for raising day olds bought from the hatchery. Hatching our own is a topic for another day.

I’ll put a table at the end. Here’s the data in narrative form, the way I figured it out:

Hatchlings: Ducks $4.00, Geese $9.00, Turkeys, $9.00. The geese and ducks arrive alive and stay alive. The turkeys are stupid and delicate. There are dead poults on arrival and they keep dying for about six weeks. We lose a third of ours, and I would be skeptical of anyone who claims to do significantly better. So the real cost is $900/65 or just under $14.00 per turkey.

We are running 31 ducks, 13 geese and 70+ (they don’t hold still) turkeys together on roughly an acre of pasture, along with Danny the American Milking Devon steer. That’s somewhere between 110 and 120 birds. We feed them separately, but they all steal from each other, and the chickens sneak in too. We’re feeding them roughly a bag of feed a day, at $11.25 per bag including quantity discount. Call it $0.10 per bird per day.

The ducks are ready for slaughter in 13 weeks, costing $9.00 in feed. The turkeys take six months, 180 days or $18.00 in feed. The geese are also ready in six months, but the current plan is to keep them an extra month to sell fresh not frozen at Christmas. The ground is snow covered by then, so I allow $6.00 for the extra month or $24.00 per bird.

USDA processing for the turkeys is $5.00 per bird. We haven’t yet located a USDA processor for the waterfowl, but we can get it done under the poultry exemption for $5.00 per bird. (This year we have few enough to do it ourselves.)

So, at harvest, our cash investment per bird is: Ducks: $18.00, Geese: $38, Turkeys: $37. Assuming we sell everyone for $5.00/lb, we get: Ducks: $35, Geese: $65, Turkeys $65, for a gross profit of Ducks: $17, Geese $27, Turkeys, $28. In theory I should put the opportunity cost of money, but these day’s that’s 0. I’m sure the Too Big To Fail banks thank Ben Bernanke every day.

Those numbers look, and are, handwavy, but based on thirty years experience, they’re better than most corporations use to authorize multimillion dollar projects. Back in slide rule days, both Physics and Engineering 101 carefully taught the difference between accuracy and precision. Accountants on the other hand don’t seem to have heard of error bars.

I shudder at the thought of calculating capital invested, let alone return on it, and overhead is a topic for getting to sleep on a long winter’s night. However Lisa and I may eat for free, but we still have taxes and utilities, so how about some wages here? I can SWAG the hours we’re putting in now: Chores take anywhere from three (rare) to 8 (also rare) person hours a day. However the variations are driven by the mammals. Do we need to deliver balage through the snow? Do we need to dump snack size yoghurt for the pigs? The birds are rather predictable. Water always and check the grain which takes about the same amount of time whether or not we actually feed some. Anyway, I’m going to say the birds are an hour a day, and assume we can get more efficient on watering as more water is needed. Unfortunately I can’t plausibly claim less time after the ducks are gone. So, one hour per day for 7 months is 210 hours.

So for our current flock, our gross profit of $510 for ducks, $304 for geese, and $1960 for turkeys adds to $2774 or $13.20 per hour. It could be worse, but since I haven’t included depreciation or overhead, it has to get a lot better. Fortunately, as long as we can sell them, we should be able to raise twice as many birds with only a few more capital goods and little more labor.

Note, we are actually planning to overwinter all the females in the hope of raising our own babies rather than buying hatchery birds. Nonetheless, I think this is a good first estimate of the economics of a hatchery sourced free range poultry operation.

I read in the Keene Sentinel today that late blight has been spotted in both Massachusetts and Maine. It makes me just want to cry. My 75 heirloom tomato plants are taller than Frank, and the potatoes he finally got into the ground are thriving almost as well.

There are theories floating around the gardening world online and offline about ways to combat late blight. One of the ones I’ve been most intrigued with is one I had some success with last year. When you apply manure compost tea (like our Minnie’s Magic) as a foliar spray, the receptors in the plant’s leaves are filled with the good fungi and bacteria and are not able then to have the space to take in the blight spores.

I think I waited too late to start spraying last year, so this year I want to start when my plants are all healthy and before it gets widespread in our area.

I’m going to start a bunch of batches and get spraying. If you are in the Monadnock region and want to try some, give me a shout. I can deliver in the Keene area.

Let’s fight this with the good guys and see if it can help! Spray early, spray often.

Here’s all about Minnie’s Magic

We made 12 pints of dilly beans the other day with the first harvest of the beans. All three colors (green, yellow and purple) had about the same yield so far. The plants are too close together, which is a mistake we always make, but the bed is pretty weed-free because of that, but it’s a pain to search the jungle for all the beans. We missed the first zucchini sitting there on the black plastic and it was almost bowling-pin size, but still quite tender. We sliced it up and put it in the dryer on Wednesday. Today we started a bucket of sauerkraut. We need to get the cabbage out of there so we can plant that bed with another batch of beans.

The tomatoes continue their epic growth. I’ve never in my life, anywhere I’ve lived, had tomatoes like this. There’s lots of fruit set, so I don’t think it’s a too much nitrogen situation. We’d like them to ripen now please, but we feel that way every year.

We were behind on the peppers and it shows. They’ve finally settled in and taken off, but they’re weeks behind the tomatoes. They’re the second batch that Lisa started. The first one had poor germination, and then got eaten by mice in the basement. Still, given our pepper track record, we’re getting better there too.

The sweet potatoes are doing well too. It’s a perfect year to try them with all the heat. We’ve been watering as the well can handle it, and I picked up a pump to throw down the old dug well that’s out there, assuming there is water there.

Right behind the house we have about a half of an acre fenced in. It has the beaver swamp on one side, and they’ve raised the level of the pond enough that a lot of that fence line is actually in the water these days.

For a while, we had the turkeys behind electrified poultry netting, in front of one of the sheds. I’m amazed that worked as long as it did, but it’s pretty useless these days. I’m trying hard to keep the turkeys in back, though. Friendly as they are, they can be pretty intimidating to visitors. I keep doing things to raise the height of the fence, and they just keep roosting higher and higher. It’s a good thing they are so cute!

Our gaggle of geese is back there, too. For a while in previous years, we’d let them out in front, but found that it was pretty stressful for them to feel like they had to protect the whole farm, which they did. They are far more relaxed in back, as long as they get some attention from me a couple of times a day. They used to groom me while I milked Elly, when they’d tell me all about their Very Important Goosie Things. I nodded and smiled a lot, being sure they all got as much eye contact as they wanted. After a few minutes, they’d wander off. I miss that! Since they’ve had the goslings, they’d kept more distant, though yesterday I got my hair groomed again while I was filling up the wading pool.

I’m pretty sure filling up that wading pool is probably my favorite time of day, especially in the morning before it gets too hot out or the bugs get bad. The Saxony ducks come running when they see me. Water! Water! When I spray the water in the air, they snap their beaks at it, jump up and down. When the water gets a couple of inches deep, they are absolutely incapable of staying out of it.

They stay and play until the geese show up. Ooh, the scary geese! They pretty much rule the back yard still, though having 70 turkeys out there has given them a little competition for barnyard bullies. We seem to have detente now — 31 ducks, 70 turkeys and 13 geese. Each gang pretty much leaves the other alone now. They even all sort of politely take turns with the sheds where we feed them.

Adding two dogs into the mix changes everything, of course, and the Icies are almost always with me. Bjarki loves loves loves to get squirted with the hose, year round, but especially in the summer. I throw their stick for them when I get tired of squirting him, and try to get it someplace really tricky so that it takes them a little while to find it. (Mean Mom!) As soon as I throw the stick, the ducks run for the pool and enjoy it until the dogs get back, when they need to give the stick a dip in the pool too. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The way Bjarki is able to ignore that gaggle of geese just cracks me up. He will NOT move, he won’t be chased, he won’t acknowledge their existence. Disa can’t do that. If they start to look at her, she takes the challenge and barks at them, and they love to make her run away. He’ll ignore them even if they get really really close to goosing him (which hurts!) but they don’t actually do it, so he wins. (and loves it)

Ignoring geese is hard!

We’ve kept the sheep out of the front garden enough to be able to see the clematis bloom for the first time since we got the sheep. I’d like a gold star, please. (And I’d also like Murphy to look away. There’s nothing to see here!) There are also black-eyed Susans, bee balm and purple coneflowers in bloom too. Yay! (The beds are weedy as hell, but I’m still working mostly in the vegetable garden. I really need to cut back on my perennial flower beds, sadly. I have some ideas about how to do that.)

The weeds in the vegetable garden are still mostly under control, so can I have another gold star, please and thank you? Frank helped me tie up the tomatoes the other day, which was very helpful. I found it astounding that he could tie them up and not weed at the same time. Huh? I sometimes wish I could be that single-purposed, but I do ADHD farming. On the way to do one thing, I’ll do 4 things instead, and sometimes never make it out to what I set out to do.

Today I tied up the cucumber plants, which worked pretty well. I was thrilled to see tons of blossoms with tons of honey bees all over them. I think we are down to two jars of pickles left and no dilly beans or pickle relish at all. Grow, cukes, grow! The yellow squash and the zucchini near them looked really good too, full of blossoms and bees, leaves in good shape, and doing so well that they’ve shaded out the weeds all by their lonesome, and yet are still contained nicely in the raised bed. Score. (I don’t think I get a gold star for that, do I? Self-sufficient beasts.)

We have a trellis for the sweet potatoes that I tried to convince the plants to climb. I had better luck with some varieties than others, and need to find out which one was planted where. (Did I keep track of that? Surely I did. Dang. Frank says no, that he planted them and tried to put name tags but they’ve since gotten lost. Oops.) One variety in particular had really long vines that almost reached the top of the trellis. Other ones were still pretty bushy, not viney, and I didn’t realize that would be the case. I think we picked the right year to grow these, though, because it’s been so hot. I heard on the news this morning that this past June is the hottest on record, everywhere.

The peas are still going really well. I am throwing them into salads all the time, and also just eating them with a little bit of butter and salt, lightly steamed. I remember my Aunt Barbara used to think my choice of late-night snack was weird. “There’s no accounting for taste,” she said. But I’d far rather have a bowl of just picked peas than potato chips or something like that. Mmm. Peas. Despite planting lots of them this year, we should double the crop next year. I want to try for a fall crop this season too, and I have the seeds ready and waiting. I get a gold star for that because I wanted to do that last year and none of the local places had seeds for fall crops. (??) This year, we ordered enough for both seasons. Even if they won’t produce peas for me, I like the leaves, shoots and tendrils almost as much as the peas themselves. They are great lightly steamed with butter and salt, and also great in a stir fry, especially with some ginger and soy sauce.

Despite the heat, we are still getting a salad’s worth of lettuce for each of us each day. I can’t believe it hasn’t bolted or dried up in the heat. I definitely want a gold star for that! My theory on why is that this balcony only gets direct sun at the very end of the day, and I’m also harvesting it pretty heavily. I also water it by hand every time I harvest, so I’m not forgetting to do it. This mix of lettuces is just lovely. In the evening, I often pick two bowls worth, then add some broccoli and peas from the garden, then whatever meats I have. Last night was one of our chickens that I had in the crockpot all afternoon. Then a little cheese and some dressing and that’s a quick, cool and lovely dinner, all zero-mile meal. We are really enjoying it.

Speaking of broccoli, we are really enjoying this heirloom variety that I’m trying this year, so much that we are letting it bolt and are going to attempt to save seeds and then replant. I had tried it last year from someone at the Keene Farmers Market, and it’s just lovely. It doesn’t head up at all, really, but has long stems with little heads on each end. The stems sort of have the texture of asparagus, and the flavor is awesome. Frank usually doesn’t understand my love of broccoli, but he says this stuff “isn’t broccoli because it’s really good”. ha. Must grow more! I hope we get a second crop, because despite growing an entire bed of it, it wasn’t enough and I hardly blanched and froze any, because we ate it as fast as it grew.

Now that I have a lot of grass-fed ground hamburger, (that is so so good!), I’ve been messing around with my recipes. My kids used to love Sloppy Joes, until one day when my daughter decided it looked too bloody and announced that she was vegetarian. (15 years later, she is still a vegetarian.) But it bothered my son a whole lot too, so I quit making them. I remember them fondly, though, and wanted to try it again. (but not by buying a can)

I’m down to a mere two cans left of my home-canned tomatoes from two years ago. (The blight last year killed almost my entire crop.) Grow, garden, grow! This recipe is worth using one of the last jars on.

In a hot cast iron skillet, cook the ground beef until it gets a lovely dark crust on each piece, then turn it over with tongs and brown the other side of each piece. Remove it from the skillet.

My meat was so lean that there wasn’t much fat left, sadly, so I added a little lard to the pan. Then I put in the veg: two onions, two carrots, two stalks of celery, a red bell pepper. Sloppy Joes are sweet, and the recipes I read kept calling for ketchup, which I didn’t want to do. So I added a couple of parsnips for the sweetness. I caramelized all of the vegetables individually to bring out the sugars. At the end, I added a little garlic, but barely let that brown. (Oh, and a little salt and black pepper.)

I added one jar of my canned heirloom tomatoes, liquid and all, added back the meat, and let it simmer for about an hour, covered. Then I took off the cover, turned the heat up high, and cooked it until it was thick and just barely burning the tomatoey sauce, to again enhance the sugars.

I served it on the onion rolls that I’ve fallen in love with. (I need to write that recipe up too. So yummy.)

It’s even better the next day. We even like it just barely room temperature.

We get about 6 servings out of it, because there are so many vegetables added. When summer squash comes in, it’s a great addition as well. (shredded in just at the end so they don’t get mushy)

I think I might add some dried black trumpets next time, but so far, I haven’t tried it with mushrooms.

I think I may just love mint a little too much. But I love mint.

Ever since it’s shown up in the garden, I’ve been using it. If I don’t use it, it will take over my garden. It’s a good thing I like it, but we may still have to put up stronger boundaries for it. I keep giggling at the thought of letting it go wild in a pasture, and then finishing the lambs on it next spring. (Add a little garlic to their water — a great parasite help! — preseasoned Easter lamb surely is a selling point, right?) (Note to self: you do not need help selling lamb. You need help growing your flock faster.)

Mint and runny eggs — not usually a combination that most people would think of, right? It is SO GOOD. I wander around the garden before almost every meal to see what looks good. One morning I picked mint, parsley and chives from the garden, added some parm and garlic, and baked it with my eggs on a whim. (20 minutes at 400 degrees) I usually use spinach and chives, or cilantro, but mint turned out to be awesome. I have to force myself to use other herbs in my egg now. I think Frank might be getting a wee bit tired of it.

There’s nothing I like better on a hot summer’s day than ice cold cucumber spearmint soup. It’s so easy to make. Peel and seed four long cucumbers, place in blender with any combination of white things. I like buttermilk and cream cheese. Sour cream and yogurt. Heavy cream and dill. I use handfuls of spearmint, add a little salt, then stick it in the freezer for about an hour. (Set a timer that you can hear outside!) Garnish with fresh mint and just picked chives.

I was a Girl Scout growing up, and I sold about a million boxes of Thin Mint cookies. I needed a way to make my own, and the recipe from Small Batch Baking is pretty good. I use whole wheat flour and lard in my chocolate wafer cookie, and for the glaze, I pour one cup boiling water over about three cups of chocolate mint leaves and let it cool, then cover and place in the ice box for two or three days. Add that liquid to two cups of melted chocolate, add a little butter and the glaze is the perfect consistency. I keep frozen logs of the dough in the freezer, slice a few off while it’s still frozen so I can slice really thinly, and then store the finished cookies in the freezer. I love having an ice cold cookie whenever I want, usually two or three in a week.

Whenever Frank manages to steal some nice oranges from the loot destined for the pigs, we juice them. I juiced 4 oranges, added about a cup of mint extract (just mint I’d soaked in water for a few days in the icebox), and simple sugar made with organic sugar, to make 2 cups of fluid. I added 2 ounces of dark Bermuda rum to keep it from freezing too hard. Yum! Highly recommended.

What do I do when I only have a few ripe strawberries? (I mean, besides eat them straight away.) 1 cup strawberries, 2 cups mint leaves soaked in water for two days, then drained, 1 cup simple syrup, 1 ounce lemon vodka. Yum. Adding just a little bit of alcohol (rum, vodka) keeps the sorbet from turning into a solid brick in the freezer.

Things to write up later. Potato mint garlic potato salad, perfect to use with new red potatoes. Shredded pork, mint, and ginger on Thai egg noodles. Mint jelly that turned out a weird color because I use raw sugar and mint leaves and refuse to use green food coloring, but it tastes great!

We have at long last declared the garden “in”. Obviously there remains weeding, harvesting and succession planting, but no more new beds will be planted. We’re startling to eat out of it, but the harvest for storage won’t really start until August. July is hereby dedicated to fencing. I did a parry in septime to stop the pigs walking through the electronet Sunday. (All pig parries are lowline. They go for the knees.) It seems to be working.

Building new raised beds for everything we want to plant is incredibly time consuming. Especially when it starts with felling a tree and milling 6×6 for the raised bed. Then add fresh dug forest loam and have to remove the rocks and roots. We really don’t have a choice though. Thin soil, poor drainage and lots of rocks pretty much require the raised beds. We’re up to a thousand square feet of them, just over half of it made this year. The potatoes and pumpkins weren’t that well treated. I turned over the soil in the old pig garden with the backhoe, and shoved them in. Not optimal perhaps, but they’re not on the compost pile.

We’ve started picking up the coffee grounds at Prime Roast again. I figure we need six cubic yards of compost just to top-dress the beds we have. We won’t get it from animal bedding and kitchen waste. After composting, the coffee should be at least a couple of cubic yards over the course of a year.

The weather this year has been incredible. The sap ran two weeks early, and the pattern continued throughout the spring. Now that it’s summer it’s less consistent. The heliopsis started last week, almost a month early. The daylilies bloomed over the weekend, probably two weeks early. However we picked the first half dozen raspberries yesterday. By the time we get a good picking tomorrow or Friday, they’ll be barely ahead of the normal Fourth of July readiness. We’ve also had a good two weeks of actual hot weather already, which is showing up mostly in the tomatoes. The potatoes weren’t doing much until I watered them, then they took off. I’m not sure what the cuke’s excuse is.

We’re eating the cool weather crops (broccoli, lettuce, spinach, pak choi) now. The cabbage and peas aren’t quite ready. We’ve also bought seeds now for fall planting of these same crops. The stores still seem to be playing catch up with the big rise in gardening.

We’ve done relatively well at keeping animals out of the garden. The horses got in once, and there are way too many chickens, but we’re way ahead of last year. As of now, it looks like we will feed ourselves, with a little extra to sell.

The ducks and the Chanteclers are both molting now into adult plumage. There are still a few ducks whose sex we’re unsure of. We’ll slaughter all but two of the boys as soon as we’re sure of everyone. The Chanteclers are still growing, but we want to pull the cockerels as soon as we can. We have one batch of Icelandics chicks that are a couple of weeks younger, but we’ll pull the boys there too as we find them.

The goslings are growing like weeds. They are so big already. We’re thinking we need to band either the goslings or the grown ups so we can tell who the babies are, come fall, as they’ll all be going to freezer camp. Whichever set we decide to band, it won’t be a fun exercise, that’s for sure. Those geese are really tame as far as gaggles of geese go, and Lisa did cuddle one and live to tell the tale, but still. They are still geese.

Yesterday was a little bit tough for me. All of the beef was ready at the butcher. You know, the beef that used to be Elly. I called to see what she dressed out at and how much it was, to estimate the number of freezers to bring. It was 680 pounds, so four coolers it was. I moved all of the frozen meat from their boxes (that they charged me for, grr) to the coolers to bring it home in the heat. They helped me load it into the truck, and one of the guys slammed the tailgate.

When I got home, I was backing up to our deck to unload, and noticed that my tailgate was down. Odd. Then I noticed that one of the ice chests was missing. EEEP! Oh, crap. It must have fallen out somewhere. The road to our place is dirt and hilly and bumpy, so I assumed it was somewhere there. We backtracked. Slowly, carefully, all the fricking way back to the butcher in Westminster. I was feeling too stupid to ask them if anyone had called them, so Frank went in and did it for me. (Thanks, honey.) But they hadn’t heard a thing. Neither have local police or the Staties.

It was from the driver’s side of the truck, so it must have fallen splat in the middle of the road and made a huge mess. Route 123 is a really quiet state highway. I can drive for 20 minutes and not see a soul, and often let the dogs in the back of the truck, because it’s a windy twisty drive that I take pretty slow, and I never see a cop.

Disa wanted to do just that, and I remember looking in the back of the truck about halfway home and deciding there wasn’t enough room for her to be in back safely. She would have loved riding along on top of those chests. She’s a climber that I never ever indulge when the truck is moving. I think I was right about mid-way when I did that, so it happened within 10 miles of here.

I feel so stupid, but it’s also crazy how thoroughly it has disappeared. We looked for it so carefully. I’ve admitted to people I did it, because I wanted to find it, obviously.

I guess I figure the person who found it needs it more than I do. But you know what’s really weird? I don’t want someone to eat Elly who I can’t tell about her. The very thought keeps making me break into tears. She’s not anonymous, damn it.

I think the same thing when I think of it having fallen into a ditch somewhere and will be completely wasted and forgotten. She deserves better. Damn it.

Actually, so does the farm. That was $750 worth of grass-fed heritage breed beef. That would pay for all the hay Danny will ever eat. If the farm doesn’t pay, we can’t do it.

She was as humanely slaughtered as I could make it. She was in the plant no more than 10 minutes, and I know she went out looking around the corner to find the boy. He was in there somewhere!

We had burgers on the grill last night. Frank bought my favorite bottle of wine to serve with it, guaranteed to make me feel better, and it did. But I still keep thinking about it, and it still keeps making me cry.

I miss my crazy cow. All I wanted to do on the day I took the video below was to watch Barack Obama inaugurated. Elly had other plans.

A lot. A whole, whole lot.

The hive I split six weeks ago swarmed today.

The split itself was successful. Lisa looked into the hive Monday and found multiple frames of capped brood, and honey being laid down. She gave them a honey super with a couple of frames of old (to thick to extract) honey. When I looked today the honey was gone and there were bees all over the new super. This usually means that the hive is about to start putting honey there. I put in three more frames of old honey, hoping they’ll refurbish them as well.

Lisa also took a quick look at the old hive and found it crammed with bees. It already had a super and honey had started going in. She also mentioned to me today that she saw pollen coming in on every forager, a sure sign of heavy brood rearing. I should have had her look into the brood nest for swarm cells, but hindsight is always 20-20.

Lisa saw the swarm tornado about ten this morning, and by the time I got suited up, the swarm was in the pine tree. It was a big one, easily twice the size of the ones I remember from 2004-05. The old hive was still covered with bees, and I went in anyway. The hive body was also still full of bees although the super had neither honey nor bees, and there were frames and frames of capped brood including several swarm cells and row after row of drone cells. A virgin queen needs mates after all. I didn’t see any young brood though. It makes sense that the queen’s slimming down to flying weight stops her laying temporarily. Anyway, a couple of weeks without new bees won’t be an issue for this hive, it still has plenty. Unfortunately the swarm had taken all the honey with it. I found a couple frames with uncapped nectar, but there was no honey or pollen anywhere. They’re fine with all those foragers in the middle of June, but the swarm took probably 70 pounds of honey that will have to be replaced before any gets laid down for us.

Looking at the situation, I decided to try another split, since there seemed little to lose. I still had three deep supers, all with partially drawn black plastic frames. (I’d used the good stuff in May.) I pulled two frames of brood, including three unopened swarm cells, and two additional frames of bees and put them in a deep super on an adjacent pallet. Since they’ll have few foragers for several days, I gave them half a super of 2008 honey to tide them over. I made sure that the brood frames left behind included at least one swarm cell. I’m now remembering that there was at least one empty swarm cell as well. I’m hoping that if there is a virgin queen out and about she had not had time (only minutes after all) to kill her sisters before I whisked them away. There is no brood in either hive young enough to raise a queen from.

By the time I was done, the swarm had moved on. I’ll keep an eye out for it, but I’m not optimistic. There’s still plenty of time for us to get honey from the two older hives. I’m less optimistic about today’s split, given all the comb it has to draw, but global warming and invasive plants might give us a super of Japanese knotweed honey in the fall.