The Urban Farmer’s Almanac

The size of this egg that was laid today is ridiculous. It is at least twice as big as normal chicken eggs… there must be two or three yolks in there. The good news is, I think all of our chickens are laying again.

All it takes is a self-addressed stamped envelope to get some starter.

Came across this free sourdough starter offer… I think it’s actually from the Oregon Trail and 150 years old. I’m mailing off for it today; look for an update in a month or so. Sounds like a fun thing to try with our bread technique. Read the “About Carl” section… what a champ!

There is a post on Craigslist right now for some free composted manure in our neighborhood, so of course I’m all over that. Turns out a truckload was given to the Jesuit house up by St. Joe’s by a farm in Enumclaw, and there was a ton (probably quite literally) left over after they used all they could. When I pulled up the pile was probably 10 feet in diameter and 4 feet high. While I was filling bags and loading up the back of the car, a truck backed up. Between the two of us we barely dented the pile.

At some point, one of the residents came out and was joking about how you know the garden nerds when they are huddled around a steaming pile of manure, shoveling in the rain, and exclaiming “I can’t believe how much God loves me!”

This just posted on the Seattle Urban Farm Co-op listserv by Dave:

Here’s an interesting bit of chicken lore: Did you know that chickens can’t taste pepper heat? That’s right! You can feed a chicken a fresh habanero pepper, and it won’t even flinch. Lizards and chickens are alike in that manner.

Just in case you were wondering…

We got some of those apparently compostable spoons on our last trip to IKEA (they’re made of corn and feel like soft plastic). I thought it would be fun to see how long they take to break down, so I threw them in the compost as I was turning it today. Might as well see how they do; I saw on someone else’s blog that they tried to compost one of those “compostable” plastic bag, and it wasn’t going anywhere after a year.

The most fun part of turning the compost is seeing all the worms at work… there are so many of them. I know this photo probably looks kind of disgusting to some of you, but it is an amazing sight to see hundreds of worms in each shovel-full. They seem to show up and as time goes on, there are more and more of them. By the time the compost is ready to put on the garden, we’re adding nice fertilizer plus a ton of worms.