Today I picked a lot of herbs hoping to really use the summer’s growth instead of just the fraction I have in the past. It’s a bright sunny day in early November, and the little I know about herbs is that you should pick them in the morning, and on a dry day.
Drying lavender
During the summer I picked some herbs and dried them in my old way, hanging bunches upside down out of the sunlight until they were crunchy. You want to avoid sunlight because it will bleach out color and flavor, but you want to pick a place that has some light and good air movement, so they dry quickly and don’t mold instead. I tried out drying some in the dehydrator we bought (used from Amazon) for drying fruit. Herbs done this way were ready much faster of course, and also it was reliable even in humid Maryland summer weather. Although I enjoy the job of crumpling the dried herbs off their branches and bottling them up, I tend to put it off — and off — so those hanging bunches can get kind of dusty.
Excaliber Dehydrator full of oregano, rosemary,and thyme
To avoid the avoidance, I stored my dried herb bunches in ziplock bags this season as I went along, planing to process them when the press of summer gardening demands lightened up. Today I began to process those bags — WOW what a fragrance! – rubbing the leaves and branches inside the bag, and then with my fingers, pouring them through a funnel into glass jars. There they wait to become stews, soups, season baked chicken, etc. I use a lot of herbs when I cook. Naturally you want to store the jars of herbs out of sunlight also.
Lavendar to make dryer sachets
Since herbs grow very easily it makes sense to grow our own, which are fresher and potent beyond belief, organic without trying, and almost free compared to store bought. During the summer I use them in their fresh, and also semi-dried state stealing from the drying bunches — but it sure is handy to have them inside when I need them! I should never imagine that it will be so Martha Stewart al fresco to run outside and harvest them right when I need to be getting a meal on in a hurry.
So I am glad that writing this blog reminded me to put them in jars for the winter. Every year I get a little better at taking full advantage of what my suburban gardens can bring to our table. Every year there is more to bring.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever – look at that beautiful tidied chip yard! On Saturday I spent most of the day cleaning up the run and house for winter and for the addition of five 16 week old poulets to join our current flock of 8 laying hens. Eight is just not enough, as it turns out, to keep four “Paleo” eaters in eggs. Thriteen will be enough to have some to sell too. If I sell a couple of dozen eggs a week, that will subsidize the cost of organic layer pellet ($30 a bag). There are many ways to encourage hens to forage and feed themselves too. I am always trying to figure out how to make “suburban farming” practical and sustainable, a way to bring fresh organically grown food to suburban kitchens, cheaper.
In the photo above right you see my All Day Roadkill Diner bucket, which used to hold a dead racoon I found lying in the middle of route 301. The idea (from Paul Wheaton’s website video) is that the straw on top will manage the odor, the flies will populate the dead carcass with their eggs as nature dictates, and the subsequent maggots squirm out the holes at the bottom of the pail into the mouths of waiting hens. Thus voila, a municiple problem becomes a healthy and free food for hens. Chickens are not vegetarians – their eggs are more wonderful the more they are able to get bugs. One problem: that straw on top is not really up to the task. So, depending how much space you have, the Roadkill Diner may not be practical for your suburban backyard… Next year I hope to grow sunflowers, dry them, and store in a metal can for the chicks to pick apart themselves. I also plan to plant “gardens” specifically for them in their run areas.
The divided chicken run and coop
Chickens who are handled by humans become quite tame (depending on the breed – I’d like to see someone tame a flighty Italian Leghorn!). But chickens are not all that nice to each other, again depending on breed. When introducing the young group to the old it is generally painful to watch. I have become tougher after 6 years of doing this – eventually the hens decide who’s what I call the Bitch Chicken, and who comes next and next. We currently have a scapegoat chicken too – everyone picks on her, no one will sleep near her. My challenge is to introduce new chicks to old in a divided run and house, so Saturday I staples chicken wire (recycled! I knew that old wire would come in handy!) thru the center of the house and the length of the run. If they are side by side long enough, the theory is, they will become accustomed to each other. I will let you know how that goes.
Our current layers were raised by an adoptive mother, set under a broody hen last spring rather than in a box under a heat lamp. A broody hen is one whose “mother” switch has flipped on, who sits and sits on infertile (in our case) eggs, in the mothering mode. The hen adopted baby chicks in trade for the eggs without a problem. (Watch a video to see how to do this – link below)
And all seemed magical, as she taught them to scratch and to roost, until one day she decided they weren’t her babies any more. Then she began to treat them as competition and pick on them. I guess the chicken “mothering” hormone shuts off kind of abruptly. She also turned out to be kind of unbalanced herself, and would randomly run across the yard and jump on another chicken’s head. I suspect that she taught these aggressive behaviors to the chicks. She herself was one of a flock of Wellsummers who were aggressive to each other, and tended to pick on her. The best way to break general chicken bitchiness is see it coming, and redirect them – give them compost piles to dig through, weedy gardens to scratch up, leaf piles to break down, dig up some dirt for them to work over instead of each other. Hens like to have something to do. But a hen who attacks has to be got rid of – or that cycle of domination and fear just keeps repeating. Animals and humans both tend to treat others the way they have been treated… So I will do everything I can to ease the creation of this new flock.
I talked to a farmer about chicken woes last spring, and she suggested hanging old CD discs (PS why not those bird seed balls used to feed wild birds?) to distract them from pecking each other. Some turkey farmers do this she said. In commercial poultry farming a common practice to solve the problem of chickens pecking, damaging and killing each other, is “de-beaking.” The breeder clips the beaks of very young chicks, blunting their ability to do damage to each other. But only chickens (animals) who are confined to too small a space, without any chicken-like things to do would engage in tissue-damaging levels of pecking. Given some space to spread out in, they would rather hunt bugs in the grass.
New hen observes the old flock thru the wire fence
Our new five hens are now installed and seem to be getting comfortable in their part of the run. But yesterday as I watched them settling in, I realized that they are victims of debeaking. I called my friend at The Feed Store and told her that if I’d known I was supporting debeaking I wouldn’t have bought them. Since they are here, I will have a chance to learn how debeaked hens function – and let you know. But how they look is ugly. Hopefully they can still enjoy foraging. I count on my hens to find some of their own food. And entertainment!
Does the idea of supporting the mutilation of animals bother you? Then redo your life and budget to accommodate buying organically raised meats. And try raising your own eggs, from chickens in your own backyard.
This is a Meyers Improved Lemon – it’s about 4 years old now. This summer it grew a bunch of lemons – (six?) – they are delicious and wonderfully fragrant. And there are more blossoms coming, so maybe we can keep this going all winter. Since the plant is inside now I will need to hand pollinate the blossoms. While the blooms last their scent fills the room.
November is here. The October garlic is in – most of it. We wish we had planted more. The pole beans are still producing. We wish we had planted more, way back in July, before we ran away from the August heat to a family vacation.
The fall lettuce and spinach look great – only we wish we
ld have planted more. The carrots might grow big enough before the ground gets hard – I plan to help hold the heat with a very thick layer of straw (an idea I took from an old Ruth Stout article in Organic Gardening magazine). The fall planting of broccoli and cabbage are hesitating – will they subside into food for caterpillars? or grow gorgeous green heads?
Things are slowing down. Except the caterpillars, apparently. Time to go and pull some of those off, and throw to the chickens. Mulch…
November is here. The October garlic is in – most of it. We wish we had planted more. The pole beans are still producing. We wish we had planted more, way back in July, before we ran away from the August heat to a family vacation.
The fall lettuce and spinach look great – only we wish we
ld have planted more. The carrots might grow big enough before the ground gets hard – I plan to help hold the heat with a very thick layer of straw (an idea I took from an old Ruth Stout article in Organic Gardening magazine). The fall planting of broccoli and cabbage are hesitating – will they subside into food for caterpillars? or grow gorgeous green heads?
Things are slowing down. Except the caterpillars, apparently. Time to go and pull some of those off, and throw to the chickens. Mulch heavily with straw, water them — and wait and see.
When, after drawing up plans in my diary, I pitched the idea of a coop in our backyard at my mom’s bedside one Saturday morning, she only pleaded “Go back to bed!” Saturday morning was not the best time to choose, but the idea was pretty much doomed to failure. In Mom’s mind, vegetable gardening, canning, and preserving were drudgery, roadblocks stopping a woman from becoming an artist or writer. Her memories of her own mother cutting up apples for applesauce or stirring steaming tomatoes were all cast as Depression negatives. If you could buy a can of tomatoes at the grocery store for a few cents, why would you hang over a boiling pot in August? The word “organic” or “commercially grown” and all these describe were not on her horizon.
My dad on the other hand was a great gardener, but focused on roses – 200 varieties thrived spotless in his gardens, regularly dosed with fungicide. To either of my parents, raising chickens would have been way too hippie for any normal 1970s suburban landscape. But in my young mind, living off the land, growing my own food, always seemed like an adventure. I was impressed by our neighbors huge garden beds, beekeeping, and canning projects. I noticed that growing food didn’t stop them from pursuing other dreams, as a lawyer and a history teacher.
Years later I fell in love with a gardener myself, who was the son and grandson of gardeners, and began to learn how it’s done. Bit by bit together we have turned our lawn into garden beds. We love and aspire to the idea that there is a way to fit it all together – that you can have a nice looking yard, and also raise food out of it.
When about 2008 I began to build a chicken house in the driveway out of scrap lumber (scrap to prove it could be economical, and not just a frivolous hobby) my oldest stepson shook his head and grinned. “I give you six months,” he said. But I proceeded, following the advice of friends whose chicken keeping I had been studying. Certainly I was not the first to think that chickens did not have to live out on a farm. I secured permission from my neighbors, and set the chickies up on mulch to control odors.
Six years later, about fifteen vegetable garden beds surround our home, with a chicken coop and run on the corner of our 1/2 acre lot. We have just shifted to the “paddock” method of handling the chickens, definitely the best in a suburban landscape (see Paul Wheaton’s site – permies.com).
We’ve learned so much from our experiences, good and bad, from reading, from talking to better gardeners. We’ve learned enough to feel certain that you or anyone can grow a lot of your own food in suburbia. Every year there’s more to understand about how to do it better, cleaner, kinder, and more productively. You gotta love the process it’s true — and we do.
process them when the press of summer gardening demands lightened up. Today I began to process those bags — WOW what a fragrance! – rubbing the leaves and branches inside the bag, and then with my fingers, pouring them through a funnel into glass jars. There they wait to become stews, soups, season baked chicken, etc. I use a lot of herbs when I cook. Naturally you want to store the jars of herbs out of sunlight also.
, so maybe we can keep this going all winter. Since the plant is inside now I will need to hand pollinate the blossoms. While the blooms last their scent fills the room.
Suburban Growing 