Our First Summer on the Farm: CHICKENS

My last post dates from all the way back in March, as we tapped our Maple and made our first batch of glorious maple syrup. 

It's been a busy Summer here at Hillcrest Farm.  We've learned a lot about vegetable gardening and its related joys and pittfalls. We've had some births and some deaths. We've had a lot of lovely guests and some unwanted pests. And finally we come full-circle: we've now spent one entire year on the farm.

It's Fall now and our Maple stands proud but naked again.

CHICKENS

One of the most exciting experiences we've had this Summer has been that of raising chickens for meat and to add to our layer flock.


We ordered twenty-eight day-old chicks from Frey's Hatchery. The wee Plymouth Barred Rock birds arrived at the local Feed & Seed store on April 14, tightly packed in a tiny cardboard box that looked like Chinese take-out.

The  little ones were just so sweet that it was difficult to imagine that we'd be eating them in a short while. We tried not to think about it. We made our very first brooder box out of an old bathtub which we set up in a separate pen of the chicken coop.

As Summer arrived, the little ones grew into beautiful teenage chicks and we allowed them to join the general population (consisting of two Red Sex Link hens and our little banty rooster, Stuster). We sent them all outside to play in the grass and catch flies and mosquitoes.

We arranged for them to have a jungle gym so they could grow into healthy, happy chickens, which they did.

Out of the twenty-eight chicks, three roosters came out. One of them matured before the other two. He was so glamourous and gorgeous that we initially decided to keep him for breeding next year's batch of chicks. We named him Clarence. He kept himself very busy with the gals.

Maybe a bit too busy. Clarence quickly earned the nickname "You Sexy Beast". He became extremely aggressive. The girls were constantly running away from him and fighting him off. He even started challenging me when I entered the barnyard, puffing himself up and darting at me - even as I challenged him back. One morning, he figured out that he was four times bigger than our beloved Stuster, our very small pet rooster, and beat his face into the ground - nearly killing him (our little Stuster never fully recovered from this attack and became ill and died shortly after despite all our efforts to make him better). Clarence became more than we wanted to handle and we decided his time had come.

Clarence was served up in a beautiful soup that night for dinner, with some dumplings. It was sad to see this splendid bird go. He was very delicious, however.

Of our remaining twenty-seven Barred Rocks, we traded four hens and a rooster for a deep freezer. Summer came and left and it was suddenly Fall. We needed to start butchering our feathery friends and place them in our new freezer.


It's not easy killing your friends. But such is life on the farm. You feed your animals and in turn, they get to feed you. Catching a chicken is not easy either. Physically or emotionally. You've got to really get in "the zone" and come to terms with the fact that this was your purpose from the very start, even as you first picked them up in their little Chinese take-out home. After catching the chicken, I like to make a little prayer of gratitude and then thank the bird for its generous gift before I hand it over to Stuart for the killing. I've killed once and decided that it was enough for me. It's now a "man job". I get to catch, pluck, clean and cook. I'm fine with that.

It's amazing what you find inside a chicken:

Every egg that chicken was ever going to lay is already formed inside its belly and you get to pull them all out. From a fully-formed, ready-to-lay egg with shell to a large, shell-less yolk to a medium one, a small one and loads of itty bitty ones, some even too small for the naked eye to see.

We meant to perform the slaughter in one day but due to inexperience, we've had to extend it over many following Saturdays. Seven is the most we've been able to do in one day. I guess we're not very thick-skinned in that department yet. It  is a daunting and exhausting task. I've come to the conclusion that maybe that's the way it's supposed to be. 

When I lived in the city I often wondered whether I should become a vegetarian when looking at the meat counter in the grocery store. Where do these animals come from? How have they been raised? How did they live? How did they die? I never knew. My conclusion was always that I love to eat meat and could never do without. I put my head in the sand and purchased another piece of mystery meat, neatly packaged in plastic and Styrofoam and absorbent napkins.

This new experience of raising our own meat allows me to be more comfortable with my eating choice, but most importantly, more uncomfortable with it. My conclusion is that maybe it's not meant to be so easy to eat meat. It's not at all easy for other carnivorous animals: they have to go hungry and chase and hunt and kill and succeed and fail. The process is not the same for us, but perhaps I'm supposed to look death right in the face and know EXACTLY what it is that I am eating. It tastes a lot better in the end, as strange as it seems.

Our raising meat has been fraught with successes and failures. Our chickens are a little bit skinny. Their meat is a little bit tough. We've learned our lessons and hope to make different choices in terms of breed and feed in the years ahead, but we now find ourselves changed and humbled by the food that will feed us throughout the winter.

Maples Are a Girl's Best Friend

We have one, glorious, maple tree on our small property. We fell in love with it as soon as we arrived. It stands tall and majestic at the very end of our "park" and seems to beckon to us whenever we're outside. We've already climbed it numerous times, either trying to peer over the corn field which it borders to find out what lays behind in the distance or just to sit there on one of its branches to admire the landscape. We've watched numerous sunsets while leaning on its massive, sturdy trunk. Last Fall, I marveled as its thousands of leaves turned from green to the most vibrant, fiery orange, then to a deep cadmium yellow before dropping to the ground to form a warm and inviting carpet around our sad little picnic table.

I've never had a property before - and I've never really "had" a tree. Now we live together with many a tree, and a few of them have made an impression on me, but I can easily say that this is the tree I love.

I grew up in the city of Montreal and every year when March arrived, just about everyone made a day-trip to the country to go to the sugar shack. It's just one of those things us Canadians look forward to all winter long. The maple syrup yes, but also the maple candy laid over some hard snow and twisted onto a wooden stick, the baked beans, pancakes, bacon and eggs brunch, the sugar-pie desserts, the learning about maple syrup production, the log cabins, the fiddles, the songs and the dancing... all bring back such warm memories for me.

In March of this year, our friend Matty started making maple syrup. He's got a whole lot of maple brush, all the equipment needed to tap the trees and collect the sap and even a sugar shack in which to boil the sap over a fire. It's all so very exciting! My husband Stuart decided that maybe it would be a good idea to tap our beloved maple but I told him he was wasting his time, since I didn't believe it to be a sugar maple, Acer saccharum. Shortly thereafter, I learned that any maple can be tapped, and that actually, almost any tree can be tapped: Matt is now making birch syrup as well, which I can't wait to sample! We bought a tap and tapped our maple. We didn't have a proper stainless steel bucket for the sap, but decided that a plain plastic pail would do the job just as well. I was pessimistic about the whole thing at first.

Well, oh well, was I ever wrong. First of all, after doing a bit of research I actually realized that this tree is most probably a sugar maple. And this amazing tree's sap has flowed and is still flowing quite well... Tapping our own tree and making maple syrup at home has been a fantastic and unexpected new experience.

This tiny red squirrel was caught stealing sips of sap from our red pail. This of course infuriated my dog Emma to no end and they both literally started a game of cat and mouse over the situation:

This experience has taught me just why maple syrup is so expensive. Of an estimated total of four full pails of sap collected, I have made approximately 500ml of maple syrup. The first small bottle (of about 150ml) is the best (I would rate it myself as a Grade A light) since it was made at the beginning of the season (see maple syrup grades on wikipedia). The flavour is very delicate and the colour is extremely light. The next batch I made yesterday (350ml) is much darker and the flavour much stronger but just as delectably sweet. I look forward to making, if we're lucky, one other 350ml bottle this year! Perhaps next year we will drill two taps into our friend and double our tiny operation.

The liquid gold:

Maples, and not diamonds, are this girl's best friend.

Lontra Canadensis

Spring is in the air. 

In an earlier blog entitled "The Dead of Winter", I mentioned how everything had become so incredibly still over the winter. It's so different from the city out here. In Toronto, it doesn't matter what time of year it is - there are always millions of squirrels squirreling about, rounded-back raccoons scurrying over our roofs and through the alleyways at dusk, pigeons riding the subways, sparrows chirping, cats strutting... and dogs, well, abounding.

I've been very lonely out here these past few months, though I must admit that our neighbors have welcomed us with the kindest, widest open arms, for which I am so very grateful.

The weather over the past few days has been absolutely lovely. A balmy high of 10 degrees Celsius and a bright sunshine that entices rivulets to flow by the sides of the road. So after hanging some laundry out to dry in the sun this morning, Emma, Chico and I headed out for a walk to the wetlands.

The birds were singing in a multitude of voices. I caught a glance of a beautiful little gray and white Finch. Some geese traveling back North could be heard in the distance. The crows were crowing. There must have been a dozen of them up there in the sky at once. Emma was sniffing the air.

Suddenly, I gazed over the marsh and beheld Lontra Canadensis (identified over the internet after I came home). It was sitting on the edge of the ice, peering into the water. I paused. Emma was still sniffing the air. Chico barked. (Though neither dog actually saw this creature, I suspect they both smelled it.) Lontra Canadensis hurriedly dove into the water. I saw it resurfacing for a breath of air and dive again, its rounded back gracefully emerging out of the water for a second or two. I moved along, keeping an eye on the marsh and caught glimpses of it emerging and disappearing a few more times. The North American River Otter.


According to naturewatch.ca, "otters fare poorly in areas of human disturbance and have become extirpated from southwestern Ontario because of habitat loss, over-harvesting, and pollution. Monitoring otter populations is recommended as a biological indicator of the health of aquatic ecosystems."

 (I succeeded in snapping a picture when I went back around noon. Lontra was eating a catch and dove back in to continue his hunt.)

Shortly after that, I saw a small creature hopping towards us on the edge of the ice. At first I thought it was a squirrel, until it, too, dove into the water. It swam a bit, jumped back out onto the ice, and Emma caught sight of it. She stood up on her hind legs pulling on her leash, looking like a lemur watching it go. This new creature seemed like a tiny teeny version of the river otter. Mustela vison - the American mink. Back in the city, one of these minks decimated my father-in-law's koi population, one at a time, over eighteen days, by "fishing" in his beautiful backyard pond. There was nothing he could do to protect his beloved fish as all wildlife is protected in the city (except for mice and rats, of course).


Later, I saw a pheasant walking in the woods. And a dead snake by the mill.

I doubt this poor fella came out for the hot sunshine. His corpse must just now be thawing out from last Fall.

I'm looking forward to all the wildlife I'll get to know this coming Spring and Summer.  Archie - the walker - and I had a chat out front a few days ago, when I had to go rescue him from Emma's attacks again (he keeps saying it's fine, that she's a good dog just doing her job). Anyway, he mentioned that big, long fish (two-footers!) are coming - in about a couple of weeks (silly I can't recall what kind). And that soon, loads of huge snapper turtles will be traveling through and coming out onto the roads to greet us.

Oh March... I beg of you to forgo the snow altogether and bring us more of this warm sunshine!

20 Years of Art

In the past, my artwork has often been about being somewhere else than "here" and "now". (See kl-d.ca)

For many years, the focus of my artwork was old family photographs. I loved to dwell on those old memories that were not mine and dream about the people in my family whom I never got to meet, or gaze at my own mother's image as a child.

After that, I began painting scenes from my travels. Feeling the heat of the jungle from my tiny city studio on a cold and snowy winter day... hearing the sounds of the crashing waves and the rustling palm trees in my mind.... being "there" and not "here".

  

Now, I don't want to be anywhere else but here, in my beautiful countryside. I figured I would be spending this winter painting surrounding landscape, becoming a local, comfort-country artist. But I'm just not that into it for some reason. Maybe I haven't found my new voice yet. I did try to paint the neighbor's field:

And another neighbor's cows:

But these paintings just don't seem right. Pretty. Lame. I need a bit of an edge even though I'm a very traditional painter. Or maybe because of that. Something's missing. I've been thinking about how this great transition, this drastic change in environments is affecting me, and I guess I need time to stew a bit like a piece of tough meat. Maybe I'll just take my new inspiration with food and carry it over to my art and start painting "still" lifes like I used to back in my University days:

Who knows what will happen with my art in the future, but for now it seems I have to embrace this hiatus, and patiently wait for the meat to tenderize and fall off the bone.

Germinations

Living in the city, my idea of eating local was to shop at the local butcher's, baker's, neighborhood fruit and vegetable store or the Korean grocer rather than the large supermarket. I firmly believed - and still do - in supporting small businesses in my community. Our apartment was situated in the junction between Little Italy and Korea Town and we were in walking distance of Kensington Market, so we had plenty of small shops to chose from. The fruit & veggie store on the corner of Bloor and Manning was just awesome - it carried ultra cheap berries year-round (you could get two cases of strawberries for $4 in the middle of winter!) and seasonal eating never even occurred to me then as everything was always available. I very rarely was concerned about how far these foods had traveled before being offered to me for sale in Toronto.

With my new-found consciousness of food production and recent attempts at eating locally grown, seasonal foods, fresh local produce is virtually non-existent at this time in our rural area. This is why I decided to grow sprouts.

 

Growing sprouts is super easy! You can purchase sprouting seeds at the Bulk Barn, or order them online from Mumm's or Sprout Master. All you need is seeds, glass jars, screen material and elastic bands. (All these items can be recycled: re-use your tomato sauce jars, the elastic bands that come with your veggies, and pantyhose or garlic sleeve for screening.)

First, soak the seeds overnight:

After that, all you need to do is rinse and drain your sprouts twice a day and within 3 to 6 days, you've got fresh sprouts to eat!

I've grown (clockwork) hot mustard sprouts (great in sandwiches!), red daikon radish sprouts, crunchy pea and lentil sprouts and alfalfa sprouts.

Sprouts can be used in sandwiches, salads, stir-fries and many other recipes and they are highly nutritious, abounding in vitamins and proteins. Not to mention how delicious they taste. And you can't get more local than when the food was grown in your own kitchen!