The Urban Orchardist

The chicks are finally big enough to go to their respective homes. Here’s a proud new parent, my friend Raven, and one of her soon-to-be hens. Raven and husband are yoga instructors and live in a cool apartment building with a large backyard garden–and now a fabulous chicken house. Raven confessed they spent $700 building the coop (it looks just like a mini-farmhouse). Whoa, don’t tell my chickens. My neighbor’s taking 4, and a few other people are going to take groups of three. To be honest, I can’t wait to have my living room back. And yes, it’s starting to smell a little barnyard…what’s next–lambs in the kitchen?

Not sure what kind Murray McMurray sent me. There are three white ones and three brownish ones. I’m thinking the white guys are Hollands or Giant Whites or White Midgets and the brown ones just might be Chocolates. It’s exciting to watch them grow. They are fearless, compared to the chicks (or are they just dumb?), who run away at any strange sound. They also make a “peep-peep-peeeeep” call that is somehow the saddest sound in the world, yet comic at the same time. Like John Belushi.
Last time I raised I turkeys, I wrote an essay about it for Salon.com. It made some animal rights activist-type people mad. But can’t they see that I loved my turkey? It’s just that I was also celebrating Thanksgiving–and my heritage. I’m hoping at least one of the six make it to my table this year.

So how did I get into urban farming?
One book. It’s called the Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery.
I was an editor at Sasquatch Books, a regional publishing company in Seattle when I first encountered the book. It had how-to info for homesteaders mostly, but I realized some of the skills could be applied in the city. That was back in 1999. That’s when William and I first got chickens and bees. Carla and I corresponded every now and again, and then I found out she knew my mom! Carla lived and farmed in Idaho for a long time, and my mom remembered hearing about book binding parties at Carla’s house (the book had a world record for being the longest mimeographed book for awhile). Each section had a different color, so each person would take their colored chunk, walk around the table and pick up the other colors in order, then they would bind the book with tape. That was back in 1969. Anyway, the book is in its 9th edition now, and sadly, Carla has since passed. She was a lovely woman, and an inspiration for a new generation of farmers.

I wrote about my honey extractor in the Kevin Kelly cool tools website. But the tool I haven’t been able to confess to Mr. Kelly is this: a fly strip. I know, I know, it’s gross to see all those fly corpses in one sticky place. However, when you have two pigs and two chickens out back, and 35 chicks and 6 poults, 6 ducklings, 2 goslings, and 14 rabbits–what’s a girl to do? Some guests came by and told me about an ingenious fly trap that learned about at Full Belly Farm. It’s a container of yeast flakes and water that acts as an attractant to flies. However, when they try to get out, they fly upward, but are stymied by a cone of mesh. For some reason, the flies can’t figure out how to get out the way they came. I guess the farmers at Full Belly then dump the flies out at the end of the day, for the chickens. Genius! Still, I’m sticking by my fly trap.

Holy crap, the ducklings, goslings, and turkeys came a week early. I’ll write about the poults tomorrow. Today I want you to focus on the fuzzy softness of these water fowl. The arrived in the Murray McMurray box via the post office. These guys–two goslings, seven ducklings– are so light, they’re like little puffs of air when you pick them up. They’re incredibly messy eaters and love to splash around their water dish (lined with rocks so they don’t get totally soaking wet and catch a chill). They grow really fast, too, I’ll be sure to take lots of photos and document their growth. A few years ago I lost both my geese and a few of the ducks to a marauding oppossom, this time around I’m going to be very careful about predators.

My heart is swelling just thinking about the beet I pulled up in the garden. Thing was the size of someone’s head. In fact, here’s Severine and her head. The beet grew to this monstrous proportion in the back of a bed. I kept thinking, “I need to harvest those beets there.” But then I’d forget. Finally, the thing started to go to flower (a thick stalk starts shooting up, it’s quite lovely actually) so I got in there and pulled the beast out. It must have weighed 10 pounds. After showing it off for a few hours (I took it to the Biofuel Oasis and displayed it for biodiesel customers for awhile), I cut it up and roasted it with garlic, marjoram flowers, and salt. I thought it was a choigga–the striped red and white beet–but this monster was all white inside. The taste? It was just okay, so I fed the leftovers to the ever-hungry hogs.