Homesteader’s Breakfast

Scrambled eggs fresh from the coop and toast made with home-baked bread. Yum.

For HRH

Front Yard

Back Field

Coop

Hearthfire

This morning we woke to a howling blizzard. I took more satisfaction than usual in the morning ritual of kindling today’s fire from the still-glowing coals of yesterday’s, and watching it catch and then roar.

Heating with wood is like baking your own bread. It takes a fair amount of planning, organization, effort, and hard work, but you have not only a greater appreciation for the end product (even an imperfect loaf of home-made bread tastes better than store-bought), but a communion with the process. You have to tend the fire throughout the day. Sometimes it doesn’t go as planned – a log is wet or rotten and doesn’t burn well. Sometimes you forget to check it and it burns down too low, and you have to waste kindling (which you split last week with great effort and freezing fingers) to re-start it. But it’s all part of the process – and part of a direct connection with the elemental energy of fire.

And even if it weren’t for the environmental and spiritual benefits, just knowing that if the blizzard should knock the power out, we’ll still be plenty warm is worth the extra effort.

Carter, our half-husky, took two steps outside, and turned around to come back in (we let him – who’s to argue when the dog thinks it’s too nasty to be outside?). I think I will spend a good part of the day baking, and maybe put some soup on in the crock-pot as well.

First Egg

This morning when I went out to let the chickens out of the coop into their run, like I do every morning around 10:30 or 11 am, I found our first egg sitting in the sawdust on the floor of the coop! It was all I could do not to race back to the house waving it in the air and shouting “Egg! Egg!” at the top of my lungs. As it was I did call t! quite loudly to show him our prize:

It’s small, which is normal. Young chickens start by laying smaller eggs, and “ramp up” to larger eggs. Here’s a comparison shot with an egg we bought from Hans at the market last week:

I’m hoping that the hens will start to lay in the nest boxes I made for them out of a couple of wicker baskets (I didn’t have enough spoons to build boxes out of spare plywood).

I need to try to find a couple of wood hen eggs to “seed” the nests with in hopes that they will figure out where they are supposed to be laying. Last time I went looking, I hit four different craft shops and the closest I could find were a couple of round wooden doll’s heads – since I know some people use golf balls as substitute eggs, the shape might not matter overly much.

Doesn’t that look like a cozy spot to settle down and lay an egg? The chickens didn’t seem to think so. They scattered the shredded paper all over the coop and knocked the wooden ball under the feed bin. Every morning I search for it and put it back into the nest box in hopes that they will eventually get the right idea.

So our little flock is doing well. Their diet of organic layer mash is supplemented by all our vegetable peelings and any other food scraps that they will eat and are safe to give them (pretty much everything except tea bags and leftover chicken):

And Chief, the head rooster, has been spotted doing his thing with the hens, which bodes well for some of the hens eventually raising their own chicks.

For now, I’m just thrilled that it looks like we’ll have our own fresh eggs all winter, and probably enough to pass on to family, friends and neighbors as well.

The 14-year-old sweater.

In 1995 I moved to Ottawa to start my first real grown-up job, working for Nortel (which, at the time, was still called BNR – Bell Northern Reasearch). I had a little one-bedroom apartment downtown, some disposable income, not many friends, and lots of free time. So I decided to knit myself a sweater. I found a local yarn shop, and bought a pattern, and some yarn, and a set of needles, and all the bits and pieces you need to knit a sweater, and I started knitting. My grandmother taught me to knit when I was about eight years old, and I practiced regularly during her visits and whenever I needed to knit something (Girl Guide badges, doll clothes, the occasional hat or pair of mittens) so the sweater went fairly well. It was an easy pattern: moss stitch with raglan sleeves.

Within the year (or so, my memory is quite fuzzy on the matter) I had knit the front and back and two sleeves, and had the remaining stitches for each segment on its individual stitch-holder. I started to sew up the seams… and ran out of yarn. I had the making up and the one-inch ribbed collar to go, and I was out of yarn. I failed to find any more of the same yarn, and so bought the closest I could find – which really wasn’t very close. The original yarn was a very lightly heathered beige in a wool blend (no idea what yarn it is, the ball bands were lost years ago). The new yarn I bought was a fairly close colour match for the beige, without the heather flecking, and 100% acrylic. It was the closest I could find, and I didn’t like it.

So the sweater pieces got put away in a box. Yep, I had a whole sweater 97% finished, and I stuck it in a box rather than finish it with the best matching yarn I could find. The box containing the sweater moved to the UK with me in 1997. It moved in the UK with me from my apartment to the house I bought in  Reading. It moved back to Canada with me in 2003. It moved from my house in Montreal to our homestead in Maxville with me 14 months ago.

And last month, I took it out of its box and took it to a crafting weekend organized by my friends who knit. They Oooh-ed and Aaah-ed over my sweater pieces and gave me lots of helpful advice and suggestions, and leant their moral support while I sewed up the rest of the seams and started to knit the neck with the not-matching yarn. I finished the neck a few days later at home, and had to research how to cast off – it had been so many years since I knit anything.

Disaster! My cast-off was way too tight, and the neck of the sweater won’t go over my head.

I was trying for a roll-neck, but I think I need to stay with the original (long-lost, but interpolated from the cuffs and waistband) pattern, and do an inch of ribbing for the neck instead. So I’m going to rip out what I have, back down to the stitches at the top of the of the front, back, and sleeves (yes, the same stitches that sat on stitch-holders for 14 years), and re-knit the neck in ribbing. I’ve found a bind-off that’s supposed to be extra-stretchy just for things like  sweater necks.

Wish me luck.

What the books do not tell you about killing chickens.

by t!

When you raise chickens for meat, the logical endpoint of the raising is, of course, the slaughtering and butchering. And you have two choices about how this will be done: (A) by you, or (B) by someone else. We have decided to kill our chickens ourselves, and the several books we own which describe raising chickens all assume that this is what the reader will be doing. So far, so good.

However, the authors of these books have been raising chickens for quite some time. They enjoy it, they are good at it, and their books are designed to make chicken raising seem both fun and easy enough for anyone to do. The same goes for the slaughtering. It is easy enough, but there are a handful of tiny things that came up which I think deserve a mention, and these books did not quite warn us about.

- We use the broomstick method. What this is, is you lay the head of the chicken on a flat rock, place a broom handle across the back of its skull, place your feet on the handle, one on each side of the head, and yank up on the chicken’s legs. This breaks the chicken’s neck instantly, killing it. If you do it right. If you don’t, you will just damage the chicken horribly, probably paralysing it, but it will still be alive and frightened. Then you will have to pick up the injured terrified animal and kill it a second time. The key word here is to be *decisive.* Kill the chicken, with certainty, on the first try. This isn’t cruel; in fact *failing* is cruel.

- Also, some indication of how hard you should pull on the legs would be nice. If you pull too hard, the head stays behind.

- If you can keep the chicken’s head on when you kill it, afterward while you’re butchering you don’t have to worry about the gizzard spilling its contents out the top of the neck.

- You’ve heard that chickens flap around after they’re dead; everybody hears this. But it needs to be stressed: Chickens really *really* flap around. A lot. Enough such that we were glad the legs were tied so the corpse couldn’t run off down the road.

- The books play down how difficult it is for a caring human being to kill a chicken. One expects that the authors have become used to it, or that they don’t want the readers to think they can’t do it, which is all fair enough. But there should be some warning about the eyes. Once the chicken is dead, do *not* dwell on its eyes.

- Also the books do not warn you about the *feel* of that first chicken. You catch him, pick him up, and hold him steady, ready for the end. Since you rarely get this close to a chicken, you look him over. You’ve done well as a homesteader; he’s a good-looking animal. His chest is warm. You can feel it moving in and out as he breathes. He feels just like a kitty. You want to stroke his belly. Hang on – this is *not* the proper mood for poultricide! You’ll need a few sharp moments to rearrange your perspective and remember that this creature is food. It’s not too difficult to do, but I would have preferred it if I’d been prepared for that moment.

- If you read about killing chickens, you will be told that holding a chicken upside-down by its legs will cause the blood to rush to the chicken’s head, knocking it unconscious and making things easier on you and the chicken. Everybody agrees this will happen. Nobody will tell you how much time it takes for this marvelous passing out to occur. We’ve suspended the chicken and waited patiently; out of 11 chickens not one has ever passed out. But each of us has had a chicken try to escape by bending itself upward and pecking our hands.

- When you are cutting the legs off a chicken, the blade presses into its tendons. This causes the toes to curl. Therefore, when you cut into a chicken’s leg, the dead claws will grab your finger. This is rather startling the first time it happens. The second time, it’s still pretty creepy. I don’t know about the third time. I’ve changed the way I hold the leg.

- You hang chickens upside-down with their carotids cut (or heads missing, depending on how you killed them), to allow the blood to drain out of their bodies. This is better for the meat, and means less mess during innards removal and other butchering. The books all recommend you hang the chicken upside-down for a half hour, but they don’t tell you how much blood should drain out. We had one chicken that looked like it had clotted after two minutes, there was so little blood. But it did not bleed during the butchering. Our last chicken dumped a lot of blood into the pail for its half hour, and then bled some more in our garage, and then bled all over the counter during the butchering. Maybe the books don’t tell you how much blood is normal because it always varies? Perhaps this last chicken bled so much because it was one-third heavier than most of our others. Or maybe it had been taking Aspirin.

- With practice, one gets better at catching chickens. However, it does not get easier. The first ones you catch are the small and slow ones – the losers. The later ones are faster and more clever, plus there are fewer bodies remaining to get in their way when you chase after them. We were down to our last three roosters: The alpha, the second biggest, and the smallest. We decided, naturally, that the smallest should be killed, so that should anything happen to the alpha his replacement would still be a large bird. Well, it turned out the smallest one was also the fastest ever. After five minutes – a very long time when you’re trying to catch one specific chicken and all around you the other dozen are running flapping and shrieking – we gave up on him, and nabbed the second largest. He was *much* slower. Darwin has spoken; the one best able to avoid predators (or farmers) has prevailed.

We call him Speedy.

A silver thimble and a treadle sewing machine

The theme for my birthday this year seems to have been “Everything Old is New Again.” My mother, knowing my new passion for sewing and quilting, gave me this lovely antique silver thimble:

It is made of Chester silver and dates from 1923. My mother bought it this summer when we were in England for my sister’s wedding and she visited Chester with my sister’s new in-laws.

On Saturday, t! and I went to our local flea market to look for a few things, and found this gorgeous treadle sewing machine for $75. It is a “New Williams” machine, built by the Williams Manufacturing Co., in Montreal, sometime around 1906. The factory building it was made in is still standing on the corner of Bourget & St. Jacques streets, in St. Henri.

It is in absolutely excellent condition, it looks for all the world like it was well used, and then taken out of someone’s grandmother’s front room one day in the mid 1950s, carried up to a dry attic, and left there undisturbed for 50 years.

The amazing thing about it, though, and one of the big reasons I bought it, is that in the cabinet drawers were all the original attachments (in the box they came in), a glass vial containing 6 original needles, an old plastic pill bottle containing needles and pins, and two original bobbins (the scrap of cloth they are sitting on was pinned to the arm of the machine to serve as a pincushion):

and the original instruction manual (which I plan to scan to digital format so that I can make a less fragile print-out to refer to as I’m learning):

Oh, and it also has its leather drive belt. All it needs is a thorough (careful) cleaning, and for me to read the manual to learn how to thread it, and then I’ll be able to start sewing with it!

A day in the life of a modern homesteader

Wake up, drink tea. Check email.

Take the dog for a 4.5k jog. My neighbors wave at us as they slow down to drive by on the gravel roads. It’s -0.5°C when we leave the house and +0.7°C when we get back.

Change into work clothes.

Put on a load of laundry.

Disinfect kitchen worksurfaces, sinks, and chicken-butchering tools.

Kill, hang, bleed, skin, eviscerate, wash, and chill two chickens.

(Get t! to hang the laundry out on the line while I am elbow deep in chicken guts).

Disinfect kitchen worksurfaces, sinks, and chicken-butchering tools.

Put on a batch of bread dough for tonight’s supper of home-made pizza and a loaf of bread.

Knit a couple of inches of the sock I’m working on.

Bring the laundry in. It’s sleeting out.

Close up the chicken coop for the night.

Mop/disinfect the kitchen floor (post chicken-butchering) while t! takes the dog out for his evening walk.

Make and eat pizza for supper. Yum. Put bread in for second rise.

Watch an episode of something on DVD (we don’t have TV reception or cable) while the bread bakes.

Post to blog.

Fall exhausted into bed.

Tomorrow: Farmer’s market for groceries, possibly flea market for tools & other things. Chores. Cleaning out and re-organizing the garage in preparation for stacking our winter firewood in it.

Knitting

I resisted for ages and ages and ages…

…a bunch of my friends took up knitting over the last couple of years, but I wanted to start quilting so I did that instead. But those darned knitters my lovely friends who knit finally sucked me in.

My grandmother taught me to knit when I was about 8 years old, and I knit scarves, hats, doll clothes, and mittens as a kid. When I was living in Ottawa in 1995-1997, I picked up knitting again and knit most of a sweater (more about this sweater in another post).

Between

spending a crafting weekend in the company of my knitting friends

who post regularly about their knitting and spinning and crocheting projects, and

the fact that my hand-quilting project has gotten large enough to be slightly unwieldy to take-along as often, and

the fact that I can get locally shorn and spun llama and alpaca wool at my farmer’s market

and the fact that I wear wool socks all winter…

…I’ve started knitting my first pair of socks. Slowly and painfully. I wish I had been interested in knitting socks back when my grandmother was teaching me. I’ve used DPNs before, but the memories of how to start knitting in the round on them came back in fits and starts as I ripped out and re-started the beginning of the first sock several times. But it’s going better now:

Oh, and I also caved and signed up on Ravelry.

Red in tooth and claw

We slaughtered, plucked, dressed and wrapped our first chicken today. It took 4.5 hours start-to-finish. There will be a photo essay once we have… ahem… refined the process somewhat. Important notes: 1. Starve the chickens for 24 hours prior to slaughter. 2. Cut the entire head off to make sure it bleeds out properly. 3. Get better at plucking and dressing.

After the chicken was wrapped for the freezer and I had thoroughly cleaned all the tools & work-surfaces, I desperately wanted to order pizza for dinner. Am having a hand-made-by-a-local-and-bought-at-the-farmer’s-market Jamaican patty instead, and will follow it up with the lentil-beef soup I made for the crafting weekend. And a whiskey.

The crafting weekend was fabulous. There will be a full post about it tomorrow.

Also, I need to change my banner photo to an Autumn-theemed one.