Monday, November 30, 2009
Twin Oaks Farm - Day 9
Another long day on the farm. I left Tallahassee this morning at 6:00 am and drove the 99 miles to the farm arriving at 7:00, allowing for a 1 hour time change. We start right in with the usual morning feeding and duck egg collection and directly afterwords I go straight to egg cleaning. Renee went to the market on Saturday so there are the eggs from Saturday and Sunday in the refrigerator and this mornings duck eggs. Starting at 9:30 am it takes right up to noon to get them all clean, then we sit down for a brief lunch. The new activity for the day is going to be making preserves. A couple of days ago Renee picked three bushels of Mandarin Oranges from the trees on the property and today we are going to peel them and prepare for making preserves. All day today she is back and forth on the phone between the jar sales people and some Florida state official, since she is operating a farm and making food for sale she is exempt from the sales tax on the jars but she has to get this through to both the jar sales person and the state official. While waiting for her to finish up that conversation I decide to start peeling the fruit. When she is finally off the phone and walks into the commercial kitchen she see's what I'm doing and tells me I have it all wrong. She picks up a veggie peeler and shows me how she just wants the very outside skin of the orange peel, not the white part, just a paper thin layer of the outer skin of the orange. This is where the oil is that will somehow be used to make the preserves. So we peel about 75% of the oranges and then set aside the peelings. She runs them through a food processor and turns them into a wet paste and places it all in ziploc baggies for storage in the fridge until we need them later. Then we proceed to remove the remaining peel from the meat of the oranges and put them in buckets for use later on the compost pile. The meat of the oranges then get sliced in half so they start to drain the juice and then placed in two large pots over the stove to be cooked down. The commercial kitchen smells like one giant mandarin orange and while I'm cleaning up I find two oranges that escaped the peeling process, so I quickly peel and consume, mmmmm they taste great after those few hours of being tempted by all the odor. Finally at 7:00 pm we stop for the day and Renee prepares a dinner of leftover mashed potatoes from her Thanksgiving dinner and some chicken with mushroom sauce gravy but sans the mushrooms. The dinner is great and afterwards she moves on to the office to finish up some important paperwork and I put the table dishes in the dishwasher and then wash the big pots and pans by hand. At 8:30 I'm heading up the stairs for a shower, another long day on the farm.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Twin Oaks Farm - Day 7 & 8
Tuesday, Nov 24, Day 7 - Same old morning routine, breakfast of three scrambled duck eggs, toast and some tea, I dumped the coffee idea due to the acid reflux reaction which by the way is completely gone except when I drink coffee .... did I mention that? Today we have more clean up to complete from Sundays processing. The heavy pieces of equipment are still in the yard next to the commercial kitchen and we have to get them back in the barn for storage. First we take care of the feeding which is rapidly turning into dull routine, but is also taking less and less time and collect the duck eggs which is showing some improvement. For the last two mornings we have been getting 25 eggs from the 26 female ducks, up from 24. Hopefully this will keep improving to 26/26 which will mean 100% efficiency out of the ducks and maybe that good karma will manifest into their neighbors the chickens. Recently we had 42 eggs out of the 100 or so laying hens, which is not a good showing .... gotta figure out what the problem is with that light coup!! Too bad there isn't a way to monitor each hen to see how things are going, some kind of implantable chip or something ... hey I know, the government could send out a record keeper that can follow the chickens, one man for each chicken to see what the hens are up to all day! Bingo, the unemployment problem would be fixed, just convince the Chinese to loan us the money to pay the guys ....
After the feeding is finished Renee has to go in town to the post office and assures me she will be right back, then we can proceed with putting the heavy stuff away in the barn. A recent image of the barn pops into my head, as barns go I imagine this one is on the small size, about the size of a skinny two car garage with a large double door on the front, but size isn't the problem. I remember taking a brief look inside when I first arrived and then each morning when I get the riding lawnmower to carry all the feed down to the pastures, but it's like my memory isn't working properly. I can remember the lawnmower at the front, but then the rest of the image fades into black, like the rest of the barn just fades away into some kind of black hole, but I do remember thinking in my head that it needs to be cleaned out. Since Renee hasn't returned from the post office I decide to jump right in, but first I go to the bed of my truck and retrieve my special tool, my large push broom from my storage unit, yeah, compared to that whimpy kitchen broom this will make short work of the sweeping part of this task. The joys of life I suppose. I proceed to the barn where the doors have partially closed, open them up wide and look around near the door for a lite switch and shazaam, there is light. The place is totally cluttered, not a super mess but every square foot of the floor is covered with empty cardboard boxes, old plastic fences probably from some old chicken fencing idea, lumber and pvc piping laid out on the floor in the way, a pallet just laying there in the way, another pallet with a single bag of mulch, a bag of wood chips used for the chicken house where they lay their eggs, a little bit of this and some of that but all pilled in together, and it looks like she forgot it's all here. The poor woman is overloaded like you can not imagine .... Ok I think, this won't be too bad, I don't have to clean out the whole thing, I just want to make life a little easier to get the heavy equipment in and out. The first thing I decide is that a big, awkward, loose pile of cardboard boxes is going to stay where it is, and since I've made that decision then lots of other stuff can go on top of it. About half way into it Renee appears and explains that she arrived at the post office before they were open and decided to just wait it out, she is pleased with my undertaking and asks me, "There is lite out here? Where is the lite switch" ........ 30 minutes later I have perhaps 40% of the total floor area uncluttered and all the stuff piled into semi organized groups, cool, now I can sweep the floor and get on with storing the processing equipment. After everything is put away it's time to move on to the compost piles. When she went to the seaside farmers market on Saturday she stopped at the restaurant in the Hilton resort and picked up 5 large trash cans of compost material, which consists of leftover fruits and veggies, the peelings, the part of the pineapple nobody wants, etc etc. This stuff is gold to an organic gardener/farmer and it's free if you take the time and effort to pick it up, kind of like biodiesel which is always in the back of my mind. So we gather up the required handtools, two pitchforks, two shovels, a yardbroom for raking leaves and take them to the compost pile area at the back of the property behind the barn, then one at a time I drive the riding lawnmower over to the van and Renee dumps the cans into the trailer. Back at the compost pile Renee comments that the pile we started building last week has "decomposed" and has shrunk in size about 4 - 6 inches, my untrained eye roams over the pile and I come up with "if you say so" as I can really not tell a difference. We remove the cardboard over the top and set it all aside and then take the pitchforks and start spreading the "veggie mix" over the entire length of the 7' pile then move to the adjacent dysfunctional smaller compost pile which smells just terrible and is infested with bugs and ants, and spread that material over the top of the fresh veggies. We do this with all the material from the resort and alternating with the bad compost then she sprinkles some lime and we top it off with one more layer. Renee decides she doesn't like using the cardboard, it holds in too much moisture and asks me what I think we should use. I recommend some material I came across in the barn, it's built like a tarp but is woven in an open manner to allow it too breath, so she marches off to retrieve it while I finish using the flat nose shovel to scoop out the last of the veggie mix fluid from the bottom of the trailer. We get that pile covered and she decides to do the same to a large compost pile that was started some time before I arrived. This pile is enclosed in a funky white plastic fence which is meant to keep the chickens out and is covered in cardboard that has been decomposing in the sunlight and rain etc. She hands me the cardboard one piece at time and as we get down to the second layer we see ants roaming around, little red ants that look to me just like little black ants, just red instead. She warns me about their presence while handing me the cardboard and I have to lift it up and over the fence and while doing that the ants roam down my arm to beneath my tee shirt. I'm thinking this is not a big deal you know, little ants that are red instead of black, what's the difference?? Well, the difference is how the little things BITE, so now I'm throwing the cardboard down and trying to sweep all of them off of me and considering ripping of my shirts to make sure, but alas I get them all. Now I have about a dozen of these little bumps, like a mosquito bite but smaller, harder and redder and I think they are going to be with me for a while. So we get the composting work finished and now I have to clean up all these white trash cans really nice because they are going to be near a kitchen at a Hilton resort and Renee has had complaints before because her interns didn't get them clean enough, so I'm sure to do a good job. After that all the plastic bowls, pails and buckets used to store the guts, feathers, the blood and whatever else need to be cleaned once and then a second time with a chlorine solution to get them sanitized and then stored for the next run. While I'm doing that Renee is in the yard working in the chicken coup that we had placed the tarp under, she is scooping up all the chicken guano and putting it in a large bucket about 30 inches in diameter, very smelly but this is another form of gold at an organic farm, chicken poop is actually something that can be sold to gardeners/farmers because it is a natural heavenly fertilizer. Instantly in my head I start thinking about a way to make a coup with a floor that would make it easy to collect the poop .... I'll have to put some time into this when possible, there has to be an easy way to come up with a workable solution, so I'm thinking. It's about 3:00 in the afternoon and all the outdoor activity for the day, other than the evening feeding which is done just before sunset, is complete, now it's time to go inside and can you guess the activity waiting for me .... you got it, clean eggs. The mp3 player is making a big difference, the time goes by much smoother and I don't feel the ache in my back as badly, more on that later. I finish up all the mornings duck eggs, this evenings chicken eggs and two small buckets of duck eggs that were being stored in the commercial refrigerator in the garage. Talk about an energy pig, this industrial fridge is mounted directly on the concrete floor and when I put my hand on the outside surface it feels like 40 degrees or so .... can you imagine the energy needed to keep that thing cold in the heat of the summer? Yikes, now I'm curious to see the electric bill for the entire operation but not sure I want that kind of shock, after all I'm still dealing with the physical shock to my legs, arms, back etc. Eggs are finished, it's around 6:30 and time for dinner. Tonight is a delicious mushroom pie and some tea from this morning. If you're thinking about the recipe for the mushroom pie then make a mental note, I'll post it as soon as I can ask her after the Thanksgiving break. Off to a long hot shower and some blissful sleep by 10:30.
Wednesday, Nov 25, Day 8 - Half day today, so we just feed the birds and ducks without letting them out since Renee goes into Tallahassee for a farmers market held in the backyard of the Foreign Legion post at Lake Ella Park. The park and lake are an old camping ground with old brick cabins that have been converted into business's such as a bike shop, kite sales, that kind of thing. It's a pretty nice setting, sort of perfect for a farmers market. Bobbie and Fred Golden of Golden Acres Ranch also sell their lamb and goat meat here and Mary who helped with the processing on Sunday sells her organic produce as well. I first met Renee when I was helping Bobbie take some livestock to the processor in Esto, a small town north of where Renee lives. We stopped by and visited on the way back out of town and Renee mentioned an organization called WWOOF, which stands for worldwide opportunities in organic farming, their website is http://wwww.wwoofusa.org , then we met again when she came to the Lake Ella event at the beginning of the month. After reading all the wwoof entries for Florida and seeing that most farms expect about 30-35 hours per week from an intern I thought I had an idea what I was getting into and then at Lake Ella I asked her what she expected and she said 15 hours per day 8 days per week, so I thought she was joking ..... and technically she was because it's been around 10 - 12 hours per day for 5 days a week, so now we can all have a good laugh, hahaha. Anyway, I'm learning left and right and getting in shape plus I see the effort she is putting into making this place work and I want to help her get it all off the ground if I can and of course she is grateful for the help. The other night we talked about the Christmas schedule and she's cool with me taking whatever I need to get up to North Carolina and back so I kind of made a commitment to be there into the new year. By then I should be in better shape and down more pounds ... right now I'm sure I'm feeling better, I'm just not feeling it yet, my poor body aches everywhere ... let's take a survey from the bottom up, the ball of my left foot feels tender as if I bruised it, both achilles tendons are aching, my calve muscles squeek a little, the tops of the fronts of my thighs scream when I squat like on the throne or to pick up something off the floor, knees seem ok and lower back seems ok but my shoulder tops and middle and upper back between the shoulder blades have been screaming since I unloaded all the feed, and get this, cleaning the eggs is pretty simple, you just stand there and place egg in left hand, sprinkle with baking soda and then spray with white vinegar then roll the egg around in the palm of your hand until clean, but my back is on fire at times when I do this. In all everything is ok, but I'm being cautious and on the lookout for trouble when it comes to my lower back, being very careful there and taking no chances. I feel like I've been moving constantly for a week and a half and boy am I glad for the four day break for Thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving Everyone
After the feeding is finished Renee has to go in town to the post office and assures me she will be right back, then we can proceed with putting the heavy stuff away in the barn. A recent image of the barn pops into my head, as barns go I imagine this one is on the small size, about the size of a skinny two car garage with a large double door on the front, but size isn't the problem. I remember taking a brief look inside when I first arrived and then each morning when I get the riding lawnmower to carry all the feed down to the pastures, but it's like my memory isn't working properly. I can remember the lawnmower at the front, but then the rest of the image fades into black, like the rest of the barn just fades away into some kind of black hole, but I do remember thinking in my head that it needs to be cleaned out. Since Renee hasn't returned from the post office I decide to jump right in, but first I go to the bed of my truck and retrieve my special tool, my large push broom from my storage unit, yeah, compared to that whimpy kitchen broom this will make short work of the sweeping part of this task. The joys of life I suppose. I proceed to the barn where the doors have partially closed, open them up wide and look around near the door for a lite switch and shazaam, there is light. The place is totally cluttered, not a super mess but every square foot of the floor is covered with empty cardboard boxes, old plastic fences probably from some old chicken fencing idea, lumber and pvc piping laid out on the floor in the way, a pallet just laying there in the way, another pallet with a single bag of mulch, a bag of wood chips used for the chicken house where they lay their eggs, a little bit of this and some of that but all pilled in together, and it looks like she forgot it's all here. The poor woman is overloaded like you can not imagine .... Ok I think, this won't be too bad, I don't have to clean out the whole thing, I just want to make life a little easier to get the heavy equipment in and out. The first thing I decide is that a big, awkward, loose pile of cardboard boxes is going to stay where it is, and since I've made that decision then lots of other stuff can go on top of it. About half way into it Renee appears and explains that she arrived at the post office before they were open and decided to just wait it out, she is pleased with my undertaking and asks me, "There is lite out here? Where is the lite switch" ........ 30 minutes later I have perhaps 40% of the total floor area uncluttered and all the stuff piled into semi organized groups, cool, now I can sweep the floor and get on with storing the processing equipment. After everything is put away it's time to move on to the compost piles. When she went to the seaside farmers market on Saturday she stopped at the restaurant in the Hilton resort and picked up 5 large trash cans of compost material, which consists of leftover fruits and veggies, the peelings, the part of the pineapple nobody wants, etc etc. This stuff is gold to an organic gardener/farmer and it's free if you take the time and effort to pick it up, kind of like biodiesel which is always in the back of my mind. So we gather up the required handtools, two pitchforks, two shovels, a yardbroom for raking leaves and take them to the compost pile area at the back of the property behind the barn, then one at a time I drive the riding lawnmower over to the van and Renee dumps the cans into the trailer. Back at the compost pile Renee comments that the pile we started building last week has "decomposed" and has shrunk in size about 4 - 6 inches, my untrained eye roams over the pile and I come up with "if you say so" as I can really not tell a difference. We remove the cardboard over the top and set it all aside and then take the pitchforks and start spreading the "veggie mix" over the entire length of the 7' pile then move to the adjacent dysfunctional smaller compost pile which smells just terrible and is infested with bugs and ants, and spread that material over the top of the fresh veggies. We do this with all the material from the resort and alternating with the bad compost then she sprinkles some lime and we top it off with one more layer. Renee decides she doesn't like using the cardboard, it holds in too much moisture and asks me what I think we should use. I recommend some material I came across in the barn, it's built like a tarp but is woven in an open manner to allow it too breath, so she marches off to retrieve it while I finish using the flat nose shovel to scoop out the last of the veggie mix fluid from the bottom of the trailer. We get that pile covered and she decides to do the same to a large compost pile that was started some time before I arrived. This pile is enclosed in a funky white plastic fence which is meant to keep the chickens out and is covered in cardboard that has been decomposing in the sunlight and rain etc. She hands me the cardboard one piece at time and as we get down to the second layer we see ants roaming around, little red ants that look to me just like little black ants, just red instead. She warns me about their presence while handing me the cardboard and I have to lift it up and over the fence and while doing that the ants roam down my arm to beneath my tee shirt. I'm thinking this is not a big deal you know, little ants that are red instead of black, what's the difference?? Well, the difference is how the little things BITE, so now I'm throwing the cardboard down and trying to sweep all of them off of me and considering ripping of my shirts to make sure, but alas I get them all. Now I have about a dozen of these little bumps, like a mosquito bite but smaller, harder and redder and I think they are going to be with me for a while. So we get the composting work finished and now I have to clean up all these white trash cans really nice because they are going to be near a kitchen at a Hilton resort and Renee has had complaints before because her interns didn't get them clean enough, so I'm sure to do a good job. After that all the plastic bowls, pails and buckets used to store the guts, feathers, the blood and whatever else need to be cleaned once and then a second time with a chlorine solution to get them sanitized and then stored for the next run. While I'm doing that Renee is in the yard working in the chicken coup that we had placed the tarp under, she is scooping up all the chicken guano and putting it in a large bucket about 30 inches in diameter, very smelly but this is another form of gold at an organic farm, chicken poop is actually something that can be sold to gardeners/farmers because it is a natural heavenly fertilizer. Instantly in my head I start thinking about a way to make a coup with a floor that would make it easy to collect the poop .... I'll have to put some time into this when possible, there has to be an easy way to come up with a workable solution, so I'm thinking. It's about 3:00 in the afternoon and all the outdoor activity for the day, other than the evening feeding which is done just before sunset, is complete, now it's time to go inside and can you guess the activity waiting for me .... you got it, clean eggs. The mp3 player is making a big difference, the time goes by much smoother and I don't feel the ache in my back as badly, more on that later. I finish up all the mornings duck eggs, this evenings chicken eggs and two small buckets of duck eggs that were being stored in the commercial refrigerator in the garage. Talk about an energy pig, this industrial fridge is mounted directly on the concrete floor and when I put my hand on the outside surface it feels like 40 degrees or so .... can you imagine the energy needed to keep that thing cold in the heat of the summer? Yikes, now I'm curious to see the electric bill for the entire operation but not sure I want that kind of shock, after all I'm still dealing with the physical shock to my legs, arms, back etc. Eggs are finished, it's around 6:30 and time for dinner. Tonight is a delicious mushroom pie and some tea from this morning. If you're thinking about the recipe for the mushroom pie then make a mental note, I'll post it as soon as I can ask her after the Thanksgiving break. Off to a long hot shower and some blissful sleep by 10:30.
Wednesday, Nov 25, Day 8 - Half day today, so we just feed the birds and ducks without letting them out since Renee goes into Tallahassee for a farmers market held in the backyard of the Foreign Legion post at Lake Ella Park. The park and lake are an old camping ground with old brick cabins that have been converted into business's such as a bike shop, kite sales, that kind of thing. It's a pretty nice setting, sort of perfect for a farmers market. Bobbie and Fred Golden of Golden Acres Ranch also sell their lamb and goat meat here and Mary who helped with the processing on Sunday sells her organic produce as well. I first met Renee when I was helping Bobbie take some livestock to the processor in Esto, a small town north of where Renee lives. We stopped by and visited on the way back out of town and Renee mentioned an organization called WWOOF, which stands for worldwide opportunities in organic farming, their website is http://wwww.wwoofusa.org , then we met again when she came to the Lake Ella event at the beginning of the month. After reading all the wwoof entries for Florida and seeing that most farms expect about 30-35 hours per week from an intern I thought I had an idea what I was getting into and then at Lake Ella I asked her what she expected and she said 15 hours per day 8 days per week, so I thought she was joking ..... and technically she was because it's been around 10 - 12 hours per day for 5 days a week, so now we can all have a good laugh, hahaha. Anyway, I'm learning left and right and getting in shape plus I see the effort she is putting into making this place work and I want to help her get it all off the ground if I can and of course she is grateful for the help. The other night we talked about the Christmas schedule and she's cool with me taking whatever I need to get up to North Carolina and back so I kind of made a commitment to be there into the new year. By then I should be in better shape and down more pounds ... right now I'm sure I'm feeling better, I'm just not feeling it yet, my poor body aches everywhere ... let's take a survey from the bottom up, the ball of my left foot feels tender as if I bruised it, both achilles tendons are aching, my calve muscles squeek a little, the tops of the fronts of my thighs scream when I squat like on the throne or to pick up something off the floor, knees seem ok and lower back seems ok but my shoulder tops and middle and upper back between the shoulder blades have been screaming since I unloaded all the feed, and get this, cleaning the eggs is pretty simple, you just stand there and place egg in left hand, sprinkle with baking soda and then spray with white vinegar then roll the egg around in the palm of your hand until clean, but my back is on fire at times when I do this. In all everything is ok, but I'm being cautious and on the lookout for trouble when it comes to my lower back, being very careful there and taking no chances. I feel like I've been moving constantly for a week and a half and boy am I glad for the four day break for Thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving Everyone
Twin Oaks Farm - Day 6
Today was move day. Since the debacle with the hay guy has been resolved and the hay has been bailed we have access to the rest of the pastures at long last. Renee uses a portable electric fence that uses plastic posts that have a large metal stake molded into the bottom, you just put it where you want it and push it in with your foot and then there are clips along the side that hold the wire. Long story short tonight because I'm dead tired. We moved the fence and then moved the chicken and duck coups, get this, if you let the chickens and the ducks out of their coups and then move the coup, then that night they will go back to the old position looking for their home even though the coup is only 100 feet from the old location, so we have to move the coups with the animals inside which was kind of tricky. Then move all the hoses for the automatic watering in each coup and set up the new fence. It doesn't sound like much but it took us a couple of hours to get it done. Then we do the old standby activity, the activity that you just finished but need to do again today and then again tomorrow, we clean the eggs. Eggs from the weekend, from last week when we were busy getting ready for the weekend, eggs from who knows when ...... eggs out my butt. If you haven't noticed, I get tired of this part of farm life. Today around noon Renee leaves to deliver eggs and broilers to people and restaurants on her email list, while she is gone I get to do whaaaaaaat??? You guessed it. I get my mp3 player out of the truck and download some financial news interviews and reports and listen to them while cleaning eggs, it works pretty good .... gives my mind something to do other than feel the aching in my back and legs. Around dusk I do the evening feeding and collect the chicken eggs that have been laid today and then back to you know what ....
I don't know what time it was when Renee gets back (see how well that mp3 player idea is working?) but she cooks up some dinner including a really nice broccoli and couliflower dish with some kind of white sauce, all in a large casserole dish and then baked. I compliment her 2 or 3 times during dinner and she is very gracious, but then when we are finished she asks me to do the dishes because she has a lot to do before Thanksgiving. See how much I compliment her cooking next time .... if it's that good then yes yes yes on the compliments and I'll be glad to do the dishes. Maybe I should get a copy of "The Joy of Cooking", then I could just point to the page and ask her, "can you make that?" ..... I'll clean your eggs really really good if you make it!!
Think it will work?
I don't know what time it was when Renee gets back (see how well that mp3 player idea is working?) but she cooks up some dinner including a really nice broccoli and couliflower dish with some kind of white sauce, all in a large casserole dish and then baked. I compliment her 2 or 3 times during dinner and she is very gracious, but then when we are finished she asks me to do the dishes because she has a lot to do before Thanksgiving. See how much I compliment her cooking next time .... if it's that good then yes yes yes on the compliments and I'll be glad to do the dishes. Maybe I should get a copy of "The Joy of Cooking", then I could just point to the page and ask her, "can you make that?" ..... I'll clean your eggs really really good if you make it!!
Think it will work?
Twin Oaks Farm - Day 5
After a brief break on Saturday I make it back to the farm on Sunday morning at 8:00 am, right on schedule. The other helpers are Mary from the Lake Ella farmers market crowd and Paula who helps out now and then and is part of the "invisible work force", out of all of us, including Renee, Paula probably has forgotten more about chickens than we all will ever know. I take my stuff upstairs to my room and then change into my "expendable clothing" which are a pair of black jeans that already have a hole forming near the left pocket in front, a tee shirt and then over that an old, old tee shirt that should have been recycled into a shop rag a year ago ... I new I'd find a better use for it. Also I brought my new rubber boots so I can walk through any mess mother nature throws at me, as long as it's not deeper than 18". Today, mother nature is going to have a field day. The goal is to process approximately 50 broiler chickens. There are two types of chicken here at the farm, hens that lay eggs which are called "layers" and then there's hens and roosters that are called broilers which are raised for the meat. There are about 100 layers which are kept in two large coups, and for some unexplainable reason these chickens gather together 30 in one coup and 70 in the other. The coups are nearly identical, it's baffling in an interesting kind of way, I wonder why they do that. Anyway, then there are about 100 broilers, 50 of which are 11 weeks old and are ready for processing, the other 50 are younger and will be ready on December 13. There are also 26 ducks which are kept in a large coup. All the specialized equipment is set up in the back yard off the rear door to the commercial kitchen in a kinda, sorta assembly line. There are basically four stations set up with an operation specific for each. First the chickens come out of the coup and each into a canister which is held on a rack that will hold 8, but at first we are going to work in batches of 4 until we all get comfortable with our specific tasks. Each canister is a skinny cone made of stainless steel with a bevel on each end, the large end is around 8 inches in diameter and the small end is around 2 inches in diameter, they hang on the rack small side down. Paula grabs the first chicken by the feet and places her headfirst into the canister so her head is sticking out of the small end, then takes three more and places them likewise in the other canisters. Directly below the canisters is a large black plastic bucket about four feet in diameter and separated into three compartments. Renee kills the chickens in what she calls the "kosher method", she takes the hen by the neck in a pinching fashion, holding by the muscles and bone in the neck with one hand and then pulls the throat and main artery away from the muscle and bone with the other hand, then takes a sharp knife and slits the hens throat. Instantly blood starts dripping down the remaining part of the neck and head and then into one of the compartments in the black bucket. Naturally the hen is startled and starts kicking and squawking madly, but the large end of the canister contains all the jerky movement and prevents the meat from getting bruised or damaged. The next station is a two step process, the first is a large 5 gallon pot of water with a little bit of soap over a single portable propane burner which we have to keep at precisely 150 degrees F, Renee takes the hen by the feet and fully dunks her 25 times until the feathers are completely soaked. The hot water and soap solution heats the skin and makes it softer so the feathers are easier to pull out. Then the hen goes into a machine that will "de-feather" the entire bird. This machine looks like a shallow drum and has a matrix of plastic fingers around the wall and on a round platform on the floor of the drum. The drum revolves around the platform and they turn in opposite directions while a sprinkler system keeps everything nice and wet. After all four hens of our trial batch are in the drum Renee turns on the water for the sprinkler and then throws the main power switch ... there is an instant shit storm as all four hens start tumbling and bouncing around like acrobats in a circus and while they are doing that the little plastic fingers are removing all the feathers which the sprinkler system washes down under the round platform to an exit door on the side of the base under the drum, right into one of those square plastic milk boxes, all nice and neat. After less than 30 seconds all four hens are stripped down to the skin except for a half dozen tail feathers and a few on the ends of each wing. I am completely amazed, my eyes are jumping out of their sockets and I keep mumbling for all to hear, "no way", "no way" but the smile on my face is a mile wide. Plucking feathers from a chicken was something I thought you did while watching all 4 episodes of the Star Wars movies back to back, like a pain in the ass extraordinaire, but this machine gets the job done painlessly in 30 seconds, four hens at a time no less. Somewhere on the face of this earth there's an engineer kicking back in the captains chair of a mega yacht, contemplating all the thoughts that led to the design that led to the manufacturing of the "de-feathering drum" that led to the mega yacht. My faith in humanity is restored and all those comments about "the best thing since sliced bread" can now be replaced by the new standard, "the best thing since an automatic defeathering drum". I'm starting to think that this whole chicken processing thing is going to be easy. Well, back to reality. After the drum comes to a stop Renee picks up all four hens by the feet and takes them to Paula who is at the sink on the wood deck near the door to the commercial kitchen. Paula removes any feathers that the machine missed (our engineer is working on a new version) and cuts off the heads and the feet and then rinses away all the feather particles. Enter Tony and Mary who have the role of "eviscerators". On the sidewalk that leads to the rear door of the commercial kitchen there is a stainless steel table set up under a large 10'x10' collapsible awning. Renee takes the first hen and demonstrates to us how to cut the hen open and separate the guts from the cavity of the body, I won't bother you with the details. Of all the organs from the bird we just want the livers, the heart and the gizzard which is another name for the stomach. As we process (what a nice word) the birds these organs go into separate bowls which are each within another larger bowl that is holding ice water. Renee is going to use the livers for a patee over Thanksgiving and I ask her to keep a small amount so I can sample it and she kind of giggles and explains that her guests who are coming up from Miami for the holiday are coming for the patee and fat chance on any being left over. I totally understand and instantly remember that we are going to be processing more chickens on Dec 13th, yeah that's right baby, a second chance on some fresh organic chicken liver patee, french style ... I'll keep you posted. Note to self, get the recipe and preparation directions for Jason. I'm gonna have to break down and buy some kitchen utensils, they have operating instructions don't they? After processing the birds are rinsed a final time and then placed in one of three large buckets of ice water directly inside the door to the commercial kitchen, Renee will pick them up from here, weigh and package each one and then store them in the refrigerator in the garage. Six hours later we are finished and have some hens leftover that Renee didn't feel are large enough to process, they can wait until the next time when they will be larger and will get more $$. After lunch we start to clean up and put each piece of equipment back in the barn and I volunteer to take the remaining broilers back down to the pasture. Renee says yes, good and tells me to do the afternoon feeding first and to pick up the eggs. Back in the feed cage I'm getting everything ready, she has a color coded system that matches the color of the feed bucket with the color of the label on the specific type of feed, there's broiler feed with a blue label and it goes in a oval blue bucket and there's layer feed with a red label that goes in a oval red bucket and the ducks eat layer feed that goes in a green bucket and when the new broiler chicks arrive they get a special mix of young broiler feed that go in two small round red buckets. It's a good system that must be intern proof but it's got my head spinning like a top at the moment, I've been gone for one day and I have to stop and think about what I'm going put where and how much because we just processed some hens so naturally they don't need to be fed anymore and now the young broilers aren't so young anymore and there's the ducks ..... shit, this can get complicated, I have to stop what I'm doing, come to a complete stop and scratch my head to get it all figured out, then I grab a bucket for the eggs and head out. After I get it all into the trailer of the riding lawnmower and I'm on the way down to the pasture I realize that today is Sunday and that Renee was gone all day on Saturday to the farmers market in Panama City and we have been busy all day today, which means the ducks have not been out of their coup for two days .... that's about 24 eggs per day .... plus the chickens as well have been laying eggs for the last two days without any collection ..... shit, I only grabbed one bucket. STOP, Oooops, turn around and go back for another bucket. I finally get down to the pasture and my head is still foggy from the feed bucket feed type equation so I decide to feed the ducks first because that feed is in the green bucket and there is only one of them, so it's impossible to screw it up, I think. I walk over to the duck coup and the ducks are going nuts because they hear me coming, they must be hungry or they want the hell out of that coup, or both. I open the door and I'm shocked, there are eggs everywhere, all over the floor of the coup and some of them are buried about half way in an ocean of duck poop and all their feed containers are bone dry empty, there's not a single blade of grass standing, it's all been matted down under a solid layer about an inch thick of you know what ..... I am so glad I'm not wearing those old tennis shoes anymore. But now I realize the gravity of the situation for the poor ducks, they must be beside themselves after being couped up (no pun intended there) for these two days and frankly, I bet they are just plain pissed about having to live on top of this ocean of fertilizer. I think they are having a really bad day and then a twisted smile comes to my face, they are actually having a great day, it's the broilers that had a bad day. Keeping things in perspective sure can help. There's nothing I can do, I can't let them out until tomorrow morning so I feed them and then go back to the trailer for the egg bucket. The image of 48 eggs buried in duck shit has been burned into the receptor of my eyeballs and the image of me standing at the sink in the commercial kitchen cleaning those eggs tomorrow is starting to take shape in my minds eye ..... didn't I just clean a bazillion eggs the other day??? Ah, but wait a minute, these eggs have to be initially field cleaned right now to get this loose layer of crap (another un-intended pun) off them, otherwise it might dry and be that much more difficult to clean tomorrow. And I have to collect two days worth of chicken eggs. After I get it all finished and the feed buckets are back in the feed cage I take the lucky small broilers back to their small coup, they will live to see another day, for a while that is. All done, I'm on the mower on the way to put it away in the barn and I realize that a farm is always open, there are no holidays, no days off, no vacations etc. and this leads me to contemplate the seriousness of the term "everyday" .... I ask myself, do you realize how often e-v-e-r-y-d-a-y is? It has such a ring of permanence to it, and I think in a very simple kind of way that I am so glad to just be a part of it all, e-v-e-r-y-d-a-y.
Twin Oaks Farm - Day 4
Another killer day today. Up at 6:30, slept great getting up only once around 3:00 am and then right back down no problem and then had to get up to the alarm. Friday is the big day, preparation for the Farmers Market in Panama City on Saturday plus preparation for processing around 50 chickens on Sunday. Breakfast is the usual 3 duck eggs scrambled, toast with Twin Oaks jam and no coffee today, but Renee does prepare a hot lemon water that she recommends I have about a half hour before I eat to clean my system, I add honey to that and then have it with breakfast. We start with the usual feeding and duck egg collection and then move one of the spare chicken coups over near the door to the commercial kitchen and place two tarps under the coup to contain the chicken poop from the yard, I guess because it is too close to the commercial kitchen to let it lay on the grass like in the pasture. Then Renee starts cleaning all the material used in the processing while I finish cleaning out the garage and the feed storage, I have to sweep it all out with a small kitchen broom. I ask her if she has a push broom and she says, "A what?". Note to self, pick up push broom from my stuff in the storage unit when I'm in Tallahassee over the weekend. With the garage all swept out I can put all the "stuff" back in a neat orderly manner, not that it will make any difference since the two car garage doesn't have a door, a small detail the original home owner left out, so the dirt and leaves will soon retake the garage. So, yeah I can risk using my own push broom, after all it's my back that will be saved. Around 11:00 Renee calls the freight service in Dothan, Alabama to double check that her feed has arrived, sure enough it's ready so she gets a copy of her insurance paperwork to satisfy any interested uniform type that may disagree with my driving technique and another small piece of paper with the name and addresss of the freight service. Then she gives me a single page of notebook paper that is filled out from top to bottom with written directions to get there and back ....... an alarm and a blaring red warning light go off in the back of my head. Warning, warning, I am about to go 26 some odd miles from the back country of Florida into the back country of Alabama, a place I have never been before, hell, I don't even speak the language and I'm going to go there based on written directions from a little 94.5 pound , no offense to Renee, Swiss woman who, don't get me wrong is a very nice woman who is determined as hell to make this organic farm work ... BUT I barely know her and just the general idea of all these forces, the new area, the written directions which are NOT equal to a map, the van I've never driven .... all this coming into play at one time, one wrong turn and I could totally fuck up my day. So I tell her I want to go upstairs to my laptop and check the directions on Google maps, she assures me that the directions are good and with the look on my face I assure her that I'm not going anywhere until I check the computer map. There's just no comparison between looking at a map to get an idea of the general lay out of the streets and just going into it blind because trust is a good thing. Trust yes, buy also verify. Beyond a few small spelling errors the directions are good so I'm off to get the 2600 or so pounds of feed. I move the "Biohazard free area" sign from the driveway so I can move the van, replace the sign and then settle in for a long drive. First thing is to put the seat all the way back instead of all the way forward and then I reach for the seatbelt and pull it around to buckle in, but the belt seems jammed up like they sometimes get so I pull and tug and nothing changes. I look down next to the seat and I can see where someone had cut the seatbelt where it came out of the spool and then tied the remaining portion in a knot and now the damn thing is way too short for me to use. Ok, no problem I just get out of the seat and buckle it up and sit on the safety device that may save my life under certain situations, but could also prevent me from saving my own life under other certain situations. I'm finally on the way. The drive is really nice, it reminds me of the drive we used to take when we were kids to get to our grand parents house from Indianapolis to Elnora, but this is all two lane county roads, twisting and turning, once your going east then north then east again, but I know I'm ok because the journey is unfolding just the way the map said it would, in my minds eye I can see a little red dot that is the van moving down the road on the map making all the correct turns, I'm so glad I looked at the map. Somewhere along the way I smell a BBQ and images of the perfect BBQ sandwich go through my mind. I'm in Alabama and I'm sure this is BBQ heaven, so I start looking for a place to stop and get a bite ... but I don't come across anything so it will have to wait for some other time. Note to self, the next time I'm in Alabama be sure to take the time for a good BBQ meal. The guys at the freight office are super friendly, I'm in and out in a matter of minutes and on my way back in no time. In my mind the return trip seems to take less time and it reminds me of when we were kids and the ride seemed to take forever and this makes me contemplate how time passes faster as you age, is that actually true or does it just seem that way because the older you get the more stuff you have on your mind and it just feels like time is passing faster. Pretty soon I can no longer ponder these questions of time and space because I'm back at the farm and there's 2600 pounds of feed that I have to carry through that little door into the feed cage one bag at a time .... who designed this damn thing anyway? Note to self, if I ever have to design and build a feed cage lets be sure to put in a frickin huge pair of doors that are machine accessible, i.e. you can back the delivery truck right up to the cage .... and put the feed storage area close to the animals that will be eating it .... seems like common sense to me but I'm just in intern, what do I know. I get most of the feed unloaded and then have to stop so we can move the 50 or so broilers from the pasture to the coup in the yard near the commercial kitchen. Renee has a special large plastic storage container that she has modified for this task, the lid has two large square holes cut out and we use it to put around ten hens at a time and then transport them with the riding lawnmower up to the yard. This takes five trips but it seems like a long time. Then we move the younger broiler hens from their small coup to the larger one and feed all the chickens and ducks before heading back to the house where I finish unloading the feed while Renee prepares the finished eggs for the market. The unloading is finished and I'm pooped but there is one more bucket of chicken eggs and two more small ones of duck eggs that need to be cleaned. We are finally finished and have dinner around 7:45. I know she is processing the chickens this Sunday so I ask if she needs any additional help and sure enough someone has said they can't come so I volunteer to come back early Sunday to help out. Processing 50 chickens, that is going to be a new experience, wear expendable clothing she says ...... shit, this has been one long ass day. I head off to a shower and Renee heads off to the office where she still has some labels to print.
Twin Oaks Farm - Day 3
What a long day today was. Up at the usual time and breakfast of the usual three scrambled duck eggs, bread with TwinOaks own jam and coffee then off to feed the chickens and ducks. The ducks are cool to watch sometimes, they do everything together and sometimes follow one another around in single file like a happy small marching band ... quack quack quack. The property has a pool with a disabled pump and the ducks have reclaimed it as their communal bathtub, every morning they dive in together, dip their heads and shake to distribute the water over their backs, pluck this and that out of their feathers and then climb out and meander over beneath a large oak tree and finish cleaning and grooming themselves to get ready for the day, all together , their sense of community just struck me. Every night all 26 of them go together into their coup and they build a nest out of grass, in the morning there will be around 24 eggs in a single group .... everyday.
My next task is to round up all the empty feed bags and cut off the bottom and then cut them open and lay them out flat. Renee is somehow going to use them in the raised garden. There are lots and lots of bags, I think the last intern was here many months ago and Renee has been overloaded since then trying to drive her one woman show. The two car garage is used as the feed storage and food storage, inside is a commercial walk in refrigerator and then next to that is a small feed storage cage made of chain link fence with a locking small Renee size door that I can barely squeeze myself through, inside is a large pile of empty bags and an ever diminishing pile of full ones. Tomorrow I take the van to Dolton, Alabama to pick up more feed from a freight forwarding center, the special organic feed comes all the way from Virginia. The rest of the garage is used as storage for various "stuff" and the "stuff" has been accumulating for a while, with the bag chore complete my next task is to remove all the "stuff" out onto the driveway for sorting and then stored in it's proper place when Renee returns from the dentist's office. She has been complaining on and off about a tooth ache, made and appointment and then broke it after the pain went away and then called this morning to see if she could go in after all, long story short she came back less one tooth. While she was away I started the next task which is to clean chicken and duck eggs, one stinking egg at a time and there is about a weeks worth of eggs in the commercial fridge, not to mention that the duck eggs are laid on the ground, in the mud and they are a pain in ass to clean. Well, to be honest it's not a pain to clean just one, but it is to clean 24 per day times 3 or 4 days worth .... and that's just the duck eggs. But this has to be done to get ready for the farmers market in Panama City on Saturday. I get one bucket finished before Renee returned from the dentist and then while we are discussing her tooth adventure two farm tractors come up the driveway, it's already very late in the afternoon so these guys must be on overtime. Finally the 20 or so acres of hay are going to be bundled. About a week or so before I came a local farmer was hired to bail the hay, so he first cut it all down and then disappeared to do some other task. Renee has been trying to get this guy to call her back or something to let her know what is up, then yesterday he called and said pretty soon. Finally we will be able to move the portable chicken coups to a new pasture area, the hangup with the hay was forcing us to keep reusing the same square and frankly that area was getting pretty shitty, literally with chicken crap everywhere .... there will be some very green grass in that area in another month or so. After a brief discussion with the two drivers we return to finish the eggs and then have dinner at about 7:40 .... frickin long day.
My next task is to round up all the empty feed bags and cut off the bottom and then cut them open and lay them out flat. Renee is somehow going to use them in the raised garden. There are lots and lots of bags, I think the last intern was here many months ago and Renee has been overloaded since then trying to drive her one woman show. The two car garage is used as the feed storage and food storage, inside is a commercial walk in refrigerator and then next to that is a small feed storage cage made of chain link fence with a locking small Renee size door that I can barely squeeze myself through, inside is a large pile of empty bags and an ever diminishing pile of full ones. Tomorrow I take the van to Dolton, Alabama to pick up more feed from a freight forwarding center, the special organic feed comes all the way from Virginia. The rest of the garage is used as storage for various "stuff" and the "stuff" has been accumulating for a while, with the bag chore complete my next task is to remove all the "stuff" out onto the driveway for sorting and then stored in it's proper place when Renee returns from the dentist's office. She has been complaining on and off about a tooth ache, made and appointment and then broke it after the pain went away and then called this morning to see if she could go in after all, long story short she came back less one tooth. While she was away I started the next task which is to clean chicken and duck eggs, one stinking egg at a time and there is about a weeks worth of eggs in the commercial fridge, not to mention that the duck eggs are laid on the ground, in the mud and they are a pain in ass to clean. Well, to be honest it's not a pain to clean just one, but it is to clean 24 per day times 3 or 4 days worth .... and that's just the duck eggs. But this has to be done to get ready for the farmers market in Panama City on Saturday. I get one bucket finished before Renee returned from the dentist and then while we are discussing her tooth adventure two farm tractors come up the driveway, it's already very late in the afternoon so these guys must be on overtime. Finally the 20 or so acres of hay are going to be bundled. About a week or so before I came a local farmer was hired to bail the hay, so he first cut it all down and then disappeared to do some other task. Renee has been trying to get this guy to call her back or something to let her know what is up, then yesterday he called and said pretty soon. Finally we will be able to move the portable chicken coups to a new pasture area, the hangup with the hay was forcing us to keep reusing the same square and frankly that area was getting pretty shitty, literally with chicken crap everywhere .... there will be some very green grass in that area in another month or so. After a brief discussion with the two drivers we return to finish the eggs and then have dinner at about 7:40 .... frickin long day.
Twin Oaks Farm - Day 2
Day two on the farm:
Didn't sleep too good last night, got up around 3:45 am and didn't really get back into a deep sleep after that, my head was spinning with ideas about how to make the ultimate perfect portable chicken coup .... spin, spin, spin and then I was in and out of sleep. Got up around 6:00 before the alarm clock went off and eased my sore body out of bed and into the shower, I can't wait until this part gets easier, waking up these tired old muscles is kinda slow and achy. More duck eggs this morning, this time scrambled with toast and more of Renee's great coffee. She has read the blood type diet book and is a firm believer and she is also a type A, this is going to be really good for my diet. When I put creamer in my coffe yesterday she gave me a scolding look and said that I shouldn't have any dairy, so this morning I had my coffee black with some real sugar and the usual acid reflux reaction was much reduced, according to my MD I shouldn't have coffee either, when I come into Tallahassee this weekend I'll be sure to get some goats milk from NewLeaf. As usual we start the day by feeding the chickens and ducks, with two of us this now takes much less time and then we moved on to building an additional compost bin from the pvc pipe we salvaged yesterday. Renee described to me what she was looking for and went inside to work in the commercial kitchen. After a couple of hours the bin is complete, about 4 feet wide and maybe 7 feet long. It's next to another one that is only 4 feet square and the compost in that one wasn't started correctly so the idea is to get this new one started with about four inches of leaves and then sprayed with some organic compost starter fluid that she has prepared in the kitchen, then spread out the existing partially composted pile on top of the leaves. This was ok until we removed the top couple of inches of the existing pile. Ohhhhh, wheeeeww, uhhhhhh an undescribable odor comes out of this compost pile and my appetite is killed for the next week, inside is veggie and fruit remainder cuttings from a restaurant kitchen that have been decomposing slowly and improperly for the last two weeks, what a stinking mess. So we spread that out in the new compost bin and then cover it with a thin layer of dirt, a sprinkling of lime and then more leaves, maybe not in that order. Renee sprinkles the whole thing down on the top of each layer of leaves. Then we go to the back of her van and there are two large white plastic trash cans, each full of more cuttings from the restaurant. These have been in the back of the van for two days wating for the new compost bin to be built, turning into a smelly V8 concoction. I back up the riding mower with a small trailer to the back doors of the van and Renee dumps it all into the trailer and then we are off to spread it on the next layer in the pile, then more leaves and finally we top off the new pile with some cardboard. Glad that's over, kinda messy and smelly but an essential thing to get down, these compost piles should be ready for the garden this spring. We spend the next hour or so cleaning up and putting away tools and organizing the rest of the material we salvaged from the old prototype chicken coup, that part of the garden/yard looks a lot nicer now. Of course we finish the day with a feeding of the chickens and ducks and egg collection. The ducks seem to lay one egg per day per duck pretty consistenly but the chickens are not so consistent. Not only that but the two coups of equal size for the laying hens have 31 in one coup and over 70 in the other ???? I didn't count the chicken eggs but I would estimate the take at around 35 total and about the same for both days.
Tomorrow we will clean eggs in preparation for Saturdays market in Panama City and learn about "double digging" an organic garden bed, specifically the part about the shovel and the boot on my foot coming into harmonious matrimony.
Didn't sleep too good last night, got up around 3:45 am and didn't really get back into a deep sleep after that, my head was spinning with ideas about how to make the ultimate perfect portable chicken coup .... spin, spin, spin and then I was in and out of sleep. Got up around 6:00 before the alarm clock went off and eased my sore body out of bed and into the shower, I can't wait until this part gets easier, waking up these tired old muscles is kinda slow and achy. More duck eggs this morning, this time scrambled with toast and more of Renee's great coffee. She has read the blood type diet book and is a firm believer and she is also a type A, this is going to be really good for my diet. When I put creamer in my coffe yesterday she gave me a scolding look and said that I shouldn't have any dairy, so this morning I had my coffee black with some real sugar and the usual acid reflux reaction was much reduced, according to my MD I shouldn't have coffee either, when I come into Tallahassee this weekend I'll be sure to get some goats milk from NewLeaf. As usual we start the day by feeding the chickens and ducks, with two of us this now takes much less time and then we moved on to building an additional compost bin from the pvc pipe we salvaged yesterday. Renee described to me what she was looking for and went inside to work in the commercial kitchen. After a couple of hours the bin is complete, about 4 feet wide and maybe 7 feet long. It's next to another one that is only 4 feet square and the compost in that one wasn't started correctly so the idea is to get this new one started with about four inches of leaves and then sprayed with some organic compost starter fluid that she has prepared in the kitchen, then spread out the existing partially composted pile on top of the leaves. This was ok until we removed the top couple of inches of the existing pile. Ohhhhh, wheeeeww, uhhhhhh an undescribable odor comes out of this compost pile and my appetite is killed for the next week, inside is veggie and fruit remainder cuttings from a restaurant kitchen that have been decomposing slowly and improperly for the last two weeks, what a stinking mess. So we spread that out in the new compost bin and then cover it with a thin layer of dirt, a sprinkling of lime and then more leaves, maybe not in that order. Renee sprinkles the whole thing down on the top of each layer of leaves. Then we go to the back of her van and there are two large white plastic trash cans, each full of more cuttings from the restaurant. These have been in the back of the van for two days wating for the new compost bin to be built, turning into a smelly V8 concoction. I back up the riding mower with a small trailer to the back doors of the van and Renee dumps it all into the trailer and then we are off to spread it on the next layer in the pile, then more leaves and finally we top off the new pile with some cardboard. Glad that's over, kinda messy and smelly but an essential thing to get down, these compost piles should be ready for the garden this spring. We spend the next hour or so cleaning up and putting away tools and organizing the rest of the material we salvaged from the old prototype chicken coup, that part of the garden/yard looks a lot nicer now. Of course we finish the day with a feeding of the chickens and ducks and egg collection. The ducks seem to lay one egg per day per duck pretty consistenly but the chickens are not so consistent. Not only that but the two coups of equal size for the laying hens have 31 in one coup and over 70 in the other ???? I didn't count the chicken eggs but I would estimate the take at around 35 total and about the same for both days.
Tomorrow we will clean eggs in preparation for Saturdays market in Panama City and learn about "double digging" an organic garden bed, specifically the part about the shovel and the boot on my foot coming into harmonious matrimony.
1st day at Twin Oaks Farm
I got out here about 7:30 on Monday night and after getting most of my stuff out of the truck and set up in the bedroom we had dinner, meat loaf from your mothers goat meat, brown rice and salad of fresh veggies that Renee buys at the Lake Ella farmers market ... there might be some trading going on there and then sat around and talked about organic foods and how factory farm raised crops and/or livestock are raised/grown with the aid of modern chemistry and steroids etc and then after they leave the farm what happens on the way to the supermarket, how they are processed and various treatments on the assembly line and into a box/bag and then off to the shelf of the supermarket.
Went to bed around 10:00 and read for a while, turned in around 11:30.
Renee supplied an alarm clock that receives a radio signal from Fort Collins, Colorado to keep very accurate time, how thoughtful of her, LOL but I just couldn't figure out how to set it up etc. So I set the alarm on my cell phone for 6:30. This morning I woke up to the morning light coming through the bedroom window at 6:10, showered and had breakfast of three duck eggs over easy, toast and some of the best coffee I've ever had. We talked for a while, mostly a continuation of last nights
converstion and then went out to feed the chickens and ducks, moved the coups around with the riding lawn mower. This all took say 2 hours on the outside and then it started to rain so we finished up and put stuff away and went inside for a cup of tea and a short break, some apple pie and more discussion. Then around 2:00 we rounded up some hand tools and proceeded to dis-assemble some of her first prototype chicken coups that were constructed out of pvc pipe, she wants to recover the pipe to make a frame for more compost piles. With the addition of a circular saw the demo work proceeded at quite the accelerated pace, got all the dis-assembly done at around 3:50, put all the tools away and then a short break with some tea. The last activity of the day was to feed the chickens and duck their evening portions and then get them all into their coups for the night. Dinner was white rice, veggies (carrots, turnips?) and black beans with water. Clean up the kitchen and sit down
to watch a movie ..... Friday on the Farm.
More later
Welcome to Tonys Farm Daze blog about my intern experiences
Hey Everyone, Ken showed me how to set up this blog which I'm hoping will make it easier than sending emails and you can write back or ask questions. I can also include photos, so it all sounds pretty exciting and something new.
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