“Egyptian Walking Onions are very unusual, heirloom onions. They are top-setters, which means that they produce onion seeds from the flowering green tops of the onion. They are called walking onions because the top-setters fall over and re-root themselves; literally ‘walking’.”

Apparently they are great to use like green onions when they’re small, and they also grow nice shallot-like bulbs. In addition to taking a walk around the garden. I’ll post some photos when I plant them.

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!

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!”

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…

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.

But lo and behold, when I swung by Madison Market today, we were indeed mentioned in the Gardening section of the Chinook Book. Right below freaking SEATTLE TILTH! I guess we must do alright if you Google “Seattle + urban + gardening” (actually, I just checked and we don’t. I have no idea how we were found.) Plus there are tons of way better blogs that post way more than we do. But hey, I’ll take it.

We bought the chickens at night — or something like night since it gets dark at 4 pm these days — and so we put them straight in their house and closed it all up. Much to my dismay, the next morning, there was evidence that a raccoon had indeed infiltrated the coop that night. Fortunately, the chickens were locked in their house and were safe, but it was a close call nonetheless. So I patched up the places where the defenses were breached and instituted a 4 pm “bed-time” for the hens.

The next day I had to teach all afternoon and evening, so Alicia was going to put the chickens to bed, as we call it. Her email to me explains it best:

“We need to do something about the chickens.  It took me almost 30 minutes to catch them and made Hannah cry (I made her help me and kept getting frustrated).  Our back neighbor came over and basically said the raccoons keep coming back and messing up his yard and they are coming because of our chickens.  We have to kill those raccoons.  What we have now is not a viable solution. I am sure the raccoons will be here in a matter of hours and will probably find a way in again.  Eventually they are going to get the latch open on the coop and kill these ones too.”

My response to her email was pretty classic:

“OK”

But then I decided to take her seriously (especially when she said the neighbor saw four raccoons on the coop the night before). So the next morning I called the fine folks over at Critter Control. Bob showed up with two traps, marshmallows and cherry puree for bait, and a plucky “Let the trapping begin.”

And let me tell you, leaving out marshmallows for raccoons seems to be like shooting at the side of a barn, because in the morning, both traps had captured their prey. Two down, who knows how many more to go. Bob said the record for a yard was 33 captures. (And all you left-of-left whiney Seattle liberals, present company included, don’t have to worry, because Critter Control brings the animals to a forest and does their best to reunite families once they’re captured.) While we were waiting for them to come pick up the two traps, the mother raccoon kept coming back to check on her trapped kids. This was kind of heart-breaking, but only a little. Hopefully she’ll get caught and be relocated to her kids’ new forest home.

And the upshot is, we still have two chickens that are alive.

Update: I just went outside to empty the kitchen scraps in the compost (10:14 pm) and there are two more raccoons trapped out there.

So that day I spent a couple hours in the rain getting everything secure, stapling chicken wire up to the fence and zip tying it together. I even buried a brick in a hole it looked like the raccoon had dug under the fence.

The next morning, there was another chicken missing. Chicken wire had been pried apart, and little openings where I wouldn’t think a raccoon could fit through proved to be ample room to invade through. There was even course grey fur on the chicken wire… evidence that the killer carelessly left behind. And the most unbelievable part was that the brick I had buried was pushed back out of the hole. Apparently those suckers are strong.

So we were down to one chicken (and it’s sad to admit this, but she was my least favorite of the original four). She took to hanging out on the porch and looking in the back door during the day when I would let her out in the yard.

Well, that daytime freedom soon became her demise a couple days later. I left to teach during the afternoon and didn’t think to close her in the coop — the raccoons had always come much later at night. Guess how that ended… Needless to say, I’m feeling pretty terrible about the whole thing. It sucks to have animals die because of my own carelessness. And I didn’t have to hear the chicken being eaten like Alicia did.

In the book “Farm City” I just read, the author catches a possum attacking her chickens and she kills it with a hoe. I can identify with that rage. I’ve been plotting borrowing the family .22 from my grandma’s house and sitting out on the back porch with a glass of whiskey and night-vision goggles; maybe some raw chicken in the coop as bait. But then I was talking to my friend Zack and he said that the legend back in Indiana is that large marshmallows will choke a raccoon. So maybe I’ll back off a little and just put some of those out in the empty coop and see if we can knock off one or two of them.

Farm City by Novella Carpenter

Jared and Kris got me Farm City by Novella Carpenter for my birthday this year. It has a nice Bay Area connection for us, since the author is writing about her urban farm in the ghetto of Oakland, and we all met while we lived down there. It is fun to hear her talk about Berkeley and Oakland, BART and the bay, and be able to call it all to mind.

It was definitely an inspirational book; she starts off as kind of a hobby gardener taking over a vacant lot, and by the end she’s butchering pigs. The arc of ambition gains momentum, big time, and the farm seems to get away from her quite a bit (which I can identify with). Fortunately, winter comes, animals are butchered, projects completed, and things quiet down for awhile.

Reading this book makes me want to expand our farm into the livestock arena. I’ve been threatening to get some rabbits for awhile now, and Alicia doesn’t quite know what to make of it. Plus, it’s in my family heritage — my grandpa Vern raised rabbits for meat when my  mom was a kid. I love the description of butchering a rabbit in this book — you slit the throat, then pull of his pajamas. I can do that.

There are some real highlights in this book — reading about the author dumpster diving for 15 buckets of food every other day to feed her pigs, the description of pouring a box of bees into a beehive, and plenty of salivating descriptions of food (mostly meat) produced on the farm / vacant lot. Check out her blog… it’s a good read too: www.novellacarpenter.com

The week before my birthday cider pressing this year, I changed my Facebook status to “in search of apples.” One of my old students Kyle got back to me, saying he had apples and grapes, which was a double-bonus. We went out to his place in Juanita and harvested two big containers of Concord grapes, plus a bunch of apples.

I have started grape vines in the front yard from my dad, but they’re only a year old, and if we’re lucky we’ll get our first grapes next year from them. Kyle’s grape trellis was incredible. The vines must have been 15 or 20 years old; they surrounded an outdoor awning about 10 feet tall, and were climbing up a huge tree they were next too. We easily got 100 lbs. of grapes in about a half hour.

Alicia is a woman of action when it comes to preserving; that very night she got busy smashing, boiling and straining grape juice for jelly and other projects. I had my eyes on some pyment (mead made with grape juice), and Hannah and Robbie just wanted to stuff as many in their mouths as we would let them.

I tried juicing grapes in the apple cider press, which was not very successful. It squeezed out juice, but definitely not all of it. The smashed grapes I took out of the press after squeezing them were still really juicy. The technique that worked best was putting all the grapes in a mesh bag and smashing them by hand. I have the bag with all the skins and pulp inside in the bucket of grape juice right now, hoping to transfer some of the tannins from the skin. Otherwise the juice is just sweet, not sweet-tart. I’ll add honey and get it fermenting into mead in the next week, probably following my plum mead technique from last year (I just tasted it and I think it’s ready to bottle after a year in the carboy).

In the end, we’ve got a bunch of grape jelly, about 16 quarts of grape juice (just grapes and sugar with boiling water poured over them, you don’t even have to process the jars!), and a batch of mead from the grapes. Plus I took some cuttings and am starting grapevines for planting next spring. We’ll have our own Concords in a couple years with any luck.

I think the reason it blew me away today was because I’ve been so busy, working so hard on a variety of fronts, and then I realized that compost is one thing that does all the hard work on its own. I just throw plants and grass clippings in, jab a shovel into it a few times, and then it’s invaded by worms and everything is set in motion. I am so mentally and emotionally weary that it was completely refreshing to see that excellence occurs without my intervention. It gave me a little hope.

Peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes from the garden.

The garden has been neglected due to a massive home improvement project, but I finally got out and picked everything that was ripe in the hoop house and up front in our meager potato patch (that is all the potatoes we got this year, minus a few I pulled up earlier).

Like any good farmer’s wife, Alicia decided the next thing to do was braid them together, so now we’ve got enough garlic to last us through the year, looking like a million bucks. Plus, not to get too Ominvore’s Dilemma on you, but a recent pack of garlic we bought was grown in China. Really? This batch should get us through the year, I’d imagine, hopefully with enough to plant next year’s in the fall.