The Urban Farmer’s Almanac

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.

Our garlic is looking happy and healthy in the ground for next fall’s crop.  This is the only successful propagating we have done so far this year (or ever).  We used last year’s garlic to plant this year’s and so had no need to buy anything to get another crop.  Having a self propagating garden is our sustainable dream, but apparently reading one library book on the subject did not give us enough understanding to pull it off.  Hopefully this year we can choose better varieties and see if anything sprouts next spring.

Our kale has proven to be the most resilant crop we planted this year.   Our recent freeze finished off the last of the other vegetables still in the ground, which only consisted of lettuce, chard and one, rather ugly artichoke.  The lettuce had long ago stopped being of use to us since it was quite bitter, but neither Dan nor I had bothered to pull it up so it remained in the garden surrounded by the burlap which covered the rest of the bed.  With the frost it became slimy and unsightly enough to motivate Dan to pull it out for the chickens.  The kale wilted for a day or two and popped right back to life after warmer temperatures returned.  We’re now in the midst of a stand off about what to do next.  Dan thinks we should move it to the backyard in the hoop house to give it a warmer, frost free environment.  I say leave well enough alone.  We’ll see who wins this one.  In the meantime we’re enjoying what little bounty we can from our garden and using up the fruits of my canning labor over the summer.

I got a comment last night from someone saying they saw the blog in the Chinook Book (the Entertainment Book for people who shop at swanky eco-conscious urban stores). That was weird. I told Alicia and she said it must be some kind of spam scam.

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.