Still Life with Chicken

I finally finished reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle during a recent trip, and I am feeling much less depressed about it than I was only 20 pages into it.  What is revealed as you read the book is that Barbara and her family have been very serious gardeners/canners/poultry raisers for years prior to this.  They spent a whole year remodelling their farmhouse first before they embarked on their quest to feed themselves.  Their barns were already built.  And they’d been building their soils and their gardens for many years on this property.  They had well established asparagus beds, and knew exactly how much they had to grow of what crops and how they had to grow it.  If I’m reading the book correctly, it looks like Barbara had about 15 years of experience prior to this point to practice.  So now I don’t feel so bad, and in fact I think I’m doing pretty good considering I’m only in my third year of practice.  It’s hard to be patient when you have such a clear vision of what you want to do.  Unfortunately, that vision also shows me all the work it will take to get there.  Patience, it seems, is my only option.

Today was the first weekend that I’ve been home in over a month that has had decent weather. I spent the day weeding the lower garden and trying to get caught up on some planting. I planted Chiogga beets, early cabbage, broccoli, a spring lettuce mix and some bok choy. I also harvested some of the spinach that I’d planted in the fall. Planting Spinach in the fall works out really well – even though you can’t really eat it by the time winter comes, it stays alive all winter and gets a head start, so there’s actually something growing in the garden in April that is ready to eat. I invented a pesto recipe to use up the spinach – it’s a seasonally appropriate pesto, so no basil in it.

4-6 cups washed Spinach

2-5 cloves of garlic

1/2 – 3/4 cup olive oil

1/2 to 1 cup of walnuts

1/4 tsp salt, and pepper to taste

Put all ingredients in food processor and process till smooth. toss with Pasta and crumbled feta cheese.

In other news, Mrs. Whitey the white Muscovy duck decided to get broody again while I was out of town. She decided to put her new nest inside the chicken coop, underneath the nest boxes. This is a pretty safe place as far as I can tell – the biggest danger is that chickens will decide to hide some eggs on her nest. Chickens will hatch in only 21 days, but Muscovy ducks take 35 days. Alice the Appleyard has got a nice nest going too – although up to now she’s not shown any signs of wanting to sit on it.

I started reading it, and I got about 20 pages into it before the depression hit.

Everyone told me that I should read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.  In this book, Kingsolver and her family move away from Arizona and head to Virginia to live on a farm and try to have a more sustainable existence.  So, obviously, it would make sense that I might enjoy reading this book, since that’s exactly what we have done. I resisted reading it up till now, because I was afraid I’d read it and get really sad.  I was right.  See, the big difference between me and Barbara, is that I’m not a best selling author, and I can’t take a year off work and be a full time farmer.  Or even a half time farmer.  Last year I spent nearly every weekend during the growing season in the garden, and was just able to keep up with it.  This year if I get 2 days a month I’ll be lucky.  So I figured if I read the book, it would just exacerbate my feeling of job-burnt-outed-ness which has been growing steadily the past year or so.  See – if it were up to me, I’d raise vegetables, chickens, start a goat dairy, make cheese, bread and generally focus on the slow life for a while.  It’s hard to describe how much more in balance I feel when I am weeding the garden verses, say, sitting in front of a computer in a poorly lit windowless cube with no natural light.  Working at home improves things marginally, but still you are glued to a glowing monitor all day producing nothing but “software”.  Don’t get me wrong – I like programming, and I like working on the computer.  I’d just like my hobby (farming) and my job (programming) to switch places.