The End of An Era...Or, Goodbye Binky

Seven years ago, I mentioned to Matt that I'd always wanted to keep chickens. To my surprise, he thought it was a great idea, and he spent that Spring researching, designing and building a chicken house and run for our suburban backyard. I got special permission from the city to keep a backyard flock.

That May, we brought home 6 chicks from the local feed store - 3 Barred Rocks and 3 Golden Sexlinks. We each named two of the chicks. Mine were Binky and Bucky, Matt's were Pinky and the Brain. Two-year old Quin named his chicks Rocko and Sluggo. Don't ask me why a toddler would give names more suited to thugs to sweet little baby chicks, but he did. We tried to convince him to pick different names, but Quin was adamant. It became a joke, and our little flock became the "Chicken Mafia" (or the "Cluckanostra," as Matt liked to call them).

Those six hens taught us what to do and what not to do when raising chickens in suburbia. We weathered chicken diseases, visits to disbelieving vets, laying problems, and chicken nutrition issues with our starter flock. We learned how to maintain chicken health by "turning" laying on and off using light. We learned how to be compassionate and loving with our chickens. I learned all about what makes chickens great pets and companions. When we lost the first of those six hens at two years old to cancer, it was heartbreaking. I still get choked up thinking about it. Most of our original hens lived longer than we'd ever anticipated, with the last being Binky, the little grandmother of our current flock.

Binky quit laying over two years ago, but after over five years of giving us friendship and eggs, we felt she deserved a retirement without work or worry. As far as we were concerned, she'd more than earned her keep. She taught two other flocks of pullets the ropes, and was a trooper in dealing with Jesse (the serial rapist rooster) making sure he knew she wouldn't put up with any of his funny business. As an old hen, she'd go toe-to-toe with any rooster, fighting just like they do, with wing slaps and "spur" kicks.

While we were on the muzzleloader deer hunt this fall, a neighbor kindly looked in on our girls for us. She called to tell us that she'd found Binky dead in the chicken run a day after we left.

Binky had fallen asleep in a puddle of sunshine and didn't wake up.

Just the way I want to go.

With the last of our original backyard flock gone, and a remaining large rural flock of girls, it's like the end of an era for us.

Keeping Binky and the chicken mafia got us where we are today. We owe much to those first six hens. They all helped sparked the desire for more chickens, more land, more space, more farm animals. Our success with them helped give us the courage to take things further, one step at a time.

And while it may seem strange that this blog post is something of a eulogy for a chicken, it is no less than a dedicated pet deserved after eight years of being part of our strange, extended farm family.

Bye, Binky. You were loved. You will be missed.

Thanks for everything.

HONEY!

I've been AWOL on my blog for a bit...mostly the product of Fall harvest time. A successful muzzleloader deer hunt meant meat to process and freeze, and a full garden meant plenty of vegetables to store and preserve.

And Fall for beekeepers in Utah means HONEY to harvest. So, things have been sticky at our place for a bit (pun intended).

We learned a lot from last year's honey robbing, which we've been applying to this year's harvest. We want to keep all 12 of our hives as healthy as possible all winter long, so we left a lot behind for the girls to feed themselves, with some supplement from us, through the cold Utah months.

I got a few emails from folks wanting to know if and where we would be selling our honey. Locally, we are planning to sell honey at the upcoming Pumpkin Festival in Sandy. But, we also set aside some honey to sell to family, friends, or other interested parties. We have honey processed, packaged and ready to go right now.

The honey has great flavor - not too sweet, but very floral. It is a combination of orchard, clover, and alfalfa. The honey is raw - cold triple-filtered (which takes a ton of time but is worth it), and not processed with heat, which keeps all the natural antibodies and other good stuff in the honey. It has no additives, and is pure - not cut with syrup like the honey you buy in the store.

If you are interested in buying honey from us, you can click on the link on the right-hand side of my blog under the big picture of a bee, or you can email me. We currently have 12 oz. honey bears and 1 lb. bottles. Within the next week or two, we will also have 8 oz. jars. I'll try to post pictures of the packaged honey over the weekend.

Shipping in the US via USPS priority mail is $4.95 to $5.95 for up to 3 1 lb jars or 2 12 oz. honey bears (the honey bear jars are larger and bulkier). Due to import/export restrictions, I can't ship outside of the US.

Parking on a Salt Lick...Or, Cow Spit and Retribution

A few years ago, we went fishing with my in-laws. We left late after work on a Friday night so we could hit the lake first thing Saturday morning. We didn't get on to the mountain until nearly 2 am. Exhausted from a full-day of work and the long drive, we set up our tents and sleeping bags and fell asleep.

A couple of hours later, Quin woke Matt and me up, panicked. Something was snuffling and snorting against the outside of our thin Coleman tent right next to Quin's sleeping bag. Quin was sure it was a bear.

Matt peeked out the front of the tent, and in the waxing light of the pre-dawn morning, he witnessed a mighty and majestic free range cow not-so-gently trying to move our little tent out of it's way. Well, actually, several mighty cows. Mighty...pushy...cows.

In our exhausted haste to set up camp, we had set up our tents right in the middle of a salt lick.

So, while we were out hunting last week, I could empathize with the poor fellow who owned this trailer. He parked and staged his trailer for rifle elk season to save the spot he wanted. When we happened by, there were three cows investigating his trailer.

One was licking the door. The other two were circling the trailer, like they were trying to figure out how to move it.

The trailer was parked on top of a salt lick.

I guess if you can't get to the salt lick the cowboys left for you, then leaving some cow spit for the person who covered it up is fair retribution.

Looking Out For the Next Generation of Women Hunters...Or, Raising Boys That Hunt With Girls

Fresh back from deer camp, getting caught up on the blogs I regularly read and missed while I was in the wilderness, it was interesting to see that the blog post I'd mentally been formulating on the long drive out of the High Uintahs runs parallel to this post from NorCal Cazadora.

Growing up in Utah, deer camp was the mysterious place where only men went to conduct sacred male rituals. There were Deer Hunter's Widows, and Hunters Widow weekend sales at the mall dedicated to the women and children left behind while groups of men congregated in the woods to drink beer, shoot guns, and go without showering for a week.

Hunting season was a good excuse for "Fall Recess," a couple days off of school which most of the children didn't realize coincided with deer season. The tradition never changed even though fewer and fewer families hunted together as the years went by. Hunting became more of an excuse for "male bonding" and less of an opportunity for families to hunt for food together. Families no longer relied on the game meat as a food source. Little boys were taught to hunt as a rite of passage in families where hunting was a tradition. Girls and women were not included.

And I'm not sure when being excluded as women in a "men's sport" turned into not wanting to participate.

I'm one of the fortunate few women who found a companion who wanted an active hunting partner instead of someone to cook dinner back at camp and wash the dishes. Matt wanted me to enjoy hunting as much as he did so he took the time to teach me how to hunt, was patient when I wasn't ready to do something, didn't make fun of me when I cried because I couldn't shoot a .22 as well as I wanted, and attended my hunter's safety test with me.

He was so proud that I passed that he laminated my hunter's safety test target. He bought me my first large caliber hunting rifle for Christmas that year.

And I'm lucky that my father-in-law felt the same way about his wife, so that Matt was raised in a home where women were strong, active hunters, too. Hunting was a family affair. It was their annual family vacation. Matt grew up eating game meat every night for dinner.

Hunting has become a large part of how we live voluntary simplicity. We eat or use every part of the animals we harvest. We rely on the meat we put in our freezer to get us through the year. We reguarly eat rabbit, trout, deer and elk, in addition to raising and harvesting our own poultry. Hunting is as much as part of providing our own food as gardening and canning or gathering our chicken's eggs every evening.

Hunting isn't always easy or fun. Not all women want to participate, and that's fine. I've had unpleasant experiences in the field. I've been too close to ornery moose, I've been too cold, too hot, and I've had pine gum in my hair. I've gone days without a shower, felt less-than-attractive in hunting gear made for men, and I was once nearly attacked by a startled squirrel when sitting on a waterhole. We've had bears come in to camp. One year, I got a really bad perm right before leaving for the hunt. Imagine trying to comb that mess after going without washing it for over a week! At eight months pregnant, I still went to deer camp, even though I was uncomfortable and peeing in the forest required assistance (I wasn't one of those cute tiny pregnant women and it was hard to squat and then stand back up by myself). The women I worked with at the time questioned my sanity going hours from the hospital that close to my delivery date, but even before my son was born, I wanted him to know what hunting meant to our family.

And I've experienced some things I'd never experience anywhere else. I've seen amazing sunrises and sunsets, witnessed wildlife in it's natural habitat, and hiked to some of the most beautiful and remote locations in the country. I've spent hours in silence, watching the wild world happen around me and felt my place in the universe as part of that process. Hunting is not about killing, it's a beautiful process in the circle of life.

I hope that I'm the same kind of example to my son that my mother-in-law was for Matt. I hope Quin will have the same respect for female hunters as his father and grandfather.

Mothers teach their sons by example, and active female hunters can directly influence the future of women hunters by teaching our boys that girls belong in the field with them. As women, we need to reinforce the family aspects of hunting, teaching our children that deer hunting is not just for men, that it is not about drinking beer with the boys, shooting up the forest, and disrespecting the animals we're there to harvest.

And it starts with us - one mother at a time.

One child at a time.

One hunt at a time.

Crying Through Thanksgiving Dinner...Or, Simplicity and Hard Decisions

Apologies to all members of PETA, my squeamished and embarrased mother, and my vegetarian sister. Yes, this blog post is about eating animals.

My friends from the Voluntary Simplicity Network love the phrase: "Just because it's simple, doesn't mean it's easy."

When we homesteaded in the suburbs, this was less apparent. Simplicity, at it's core, is truly about making hard decisions that most often involve trading convenience for a larger principle. Sometimes in the midst of (simplicity-induced) stress, with easier options at hand, it is hard to make the decision to do the simple thing just because that is the direction you want your lives to go.

In a nutshell, voluntary simplicity is very much about commitment to a life choice. And that involves hundreds of little daily choices all along the way. And sometimes, those choices are not easy. Sometimes, those choices come down to the level of simplicity desired. For us, we long ago gave up the idea of merely dipping our toes in the pool of the simple life in favor of diving into the deep end of self-sufficiency. And, of course, that makes our daily choices that much more difficult. And often, a little strange.

Four months ago we moved to an acre and a half. We moved our chickens and our bees with us (which involved driving an ancient Tahoe filled with thirty angry chickens, loaded in boxes, five miles. It was the longest five mile drive of my life). Don't ask about how we moved the bees. You don't necessarily need land to be self-sufficient, but we all know our family motto - if it's worth doing, it's worth complicating.

We'd had chickens for 8 years on a third of an acre. Turkeys would have been pushing the zoning, so one of the first things we did when we moved to more land was get 4 little turkey poults. It was a great way to start keeping a more diverse group of agricultural animals, without jumping right into something scary like goats. Everyone said turkeys were dumb. It made them seem like easy food, right? You know, just buy these little turkey poults and feed them a bunch of food, and then by Thanksgiving, you whack 'em, and have an organically raised turkey feast.

Which is all very well and good until you get to the "you whack 'em" part. Don't get me wrong. We've killed and eaten our chickens. They were mean (who saw that one coming?) which made it much easier. Both Matt and I are hunters. We eat game meat. We shoot rabbits. We are not squeamish people.

Here's the thing - turkeys are not dumb. They aren't even like really big chickens. Chickens, while they can be affectionate, do indeed have a limited intellect that prevents connection with said poultry at the level a human can have with say, a dog.

Turkeys are like dogs with feathers. And I don't know how we are going to "whack 'em." When they were poults, I blogged about how they would become food. And in my highly intellectual, experienced way, said that we all understand that they are food.

That was before I got used to hugging them goodnight. That was before they started gobbling excitedly when they saw us coming. That was before I discovered that a turkey makes wonderful appreciative noises when they are given food they like. Turkeys are gentle and curious and interactive and sweet.

As a proponent of the simple life, I know better. With our chickens, there are pets and there are those we may eat. In an effort to make sure that these large birds would be friendly, we became friends with them.

Ultimately, I know we will eat at least two of our new friends. Hard decisions, remember?

So, this is what happens when a city girl tries to be a farmer. I might cry through Thanksgiving dinner.

But it's for a good cause.

A Honey of A Recipe...Or, Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Complicating

So, I psyched myself out a little bit trying to come up with a compelling subject for my 300th blog post. Then, I realized that nobody that comes here regularly really expects to see anything all that compelling.

Or you'd all be somewhere else.

Here? This is where we talk about chicken poop and the dilemma of feeding bees economically through the winter or coffee. Oh, and sometimes, we talk about pottery or my neuroses or how there are few pictures of me as a child or how I accidentally flashed purple thong underwear at some unsuspecting boyscout leader.

You know, but mostly about my neuroses.

Long story short, nothing special to commemorate this milestone of blogging. Life happens, and there's chores to be done on our little farm and an 8 year-old to get ready for the 3rd grade and twenty pounds of blackberries to put up. Because I got a crazy idea somewhere along the way that we should be self-sufficient and raise, hunt, and grow all of our own food.

Because anything worth doing is worth complicating.

Since we have bees, and our own honey, I thought that this was a great opportunity to use what we raise to put up what we're given. Silly me, I figured that I could very easily find a recipe to make berry jam or jelly using honey instead of sugar. AND that if I found a recipe, it would actually work. Like everything else I get all obsessed with, it just wasn't that simple. Or straightforward. Think back to the thirty-some-odd-chicken idea in the middle of a quarter acre backyard. Yep, it was at least that complicated.

Being a modern gal, I started by googling. Nothing there except for a lot of people talking about how they wished they could find a recipe for making preserves with honey.

Not very helpful.

But at least I didn't feel so alone.

Barring an easy solution, I started sorting through all of my cookbooks. No easy task, but at least they all happened to have been one of the few things I've unpacked since we moved. I have my priorities, you know, and food is right up there at the top of the list. And yes, I do still get a little upset and cold-sweaty when I think about all the bins I haven't unpacked yet. But then I google or I cook something and I feel better about myself and this mess.

In sorting through my several hundred cookbooks, I happened upon this one my mother-in-law lent to my a while ago. If she's reading this and wondering what happened to these books...I'll get those right back to you. And I'm sorry.

The bad news is that this cookbook was published somewhere between 1965 and 1970. It contained ingredients I've never even heard of, and am not sure I could find, even if I was very, very determined. If anyone knows what agar-agar is and why I would want to boil sticks of it, please let me know. This book also called for me to make my own pectin, and while I am all about doing things the most complicated way possible (for proof, please read absolutely anything else on this blog) when Sure-Jell is $2 a box, I have a hard time spending half of a perfectly good day slow cooking apples to extract enough pectin to make six jars of jelly. Especially since "extracting" is really well beyond my cooking repertoire.

So I put three recipes together and tried to make blackberry jelly with honey instead of sugar.

The result? Great tasting, really runny blackberry syrup. The good news? All the jars sealed on the first try. The bad news? All the jars sealed on the first try.

I took them all apart and started over. I was determined to get a honey-based jelly that would actually be...well, jelly.

I got it to work on the second try.

I tried a different variation of the recipe that worked on my next two batches.

Then I got all creative, and I tried it with some pie cherries I'd been given. I made jam instead of jelly. And it still worked!

Success!

I figured I'd share what finally worked with all those other googlers out there who had the same question I had, as thanks for being there when I was all alone out in cyberspace looking for a honey recipe.

Low-Sugar Blackberry Jelly with Honey

3 c. berry juice (cold extracted)

1/4 c. cold lemon juice

1 pound raw, local honey

1 package Sure-Jell pectin

2 c. sugar

Bring berry juice, lemon juice, pectin and honey to a rolling boil. Add sugar, return to rolling boil, boil 5 minutes stirring constantly. Prepare glass canning jars, lids, and rings ahead of time by boiling and leave in hot water until ready for use. Remove from hot water bath, fill to within 1/8 inch of top of jar, put lid and ring (finger tight) on top of each jar. Any jars that don't seal should be processed using the hot water bath method.

No-Sugar Blackberry Jelly with Honey

3 c. berry juice (cold extracted)
1/4 c. cold lemon juice
1 pound raw, local honey
1 package Sure-Jell No-Sugar Added Recipe pectin

Bring berry juice, lemon juice, pectin and honey to a rolling boil. Boil 2 minutes stirring constantly. Prepare glass canning jars, lids, and rings ahead of time by boiling and leave in hot water until ready for use. Remove from hot water bath, fill to within 1/8 inch of top of jar, put lid and ring (finger tight) on top of each jar. Any jars that don't seal should be processed using the hot water bath method.

Childbirth, Pottery, and Authenticity...Or, What Makes You A Stinky Cheaterpants?

When I was young (and stupid) and didn't understand a lot of things about what makes a person genuine and sincere, I focused on all the wrong things.

Take for example, childbirth. When I became pregnant at the fairly advanced (for Utah) age of 28, I was bound and determined that I was going to "go natural." Being induced two weeks early due to the sheer size of the Baby Q, and a doctor that underestimated the actual size of said Baby Q, I was begging for an epidural at the first available opportunity. Unfortunately, the epidural only took on the left side of my body, so I got to experience half of the natural experience. Being in half-excruciating pain, learning that labor is not just like "really bad cramps" (whoever started that rumor should be shot), made me realize for one of the first times in my life that getting the whole experience, untainted, does not necessarily make the experience any more genuine than doing things an easier, less painful way. Wanting an epidural didn't ultimately make me any less of a mother than a woman who suffered through childbirth on both sides of her body.

Which brings me to pottery. Where else were you expecting this post to go? You did remember whose blog you were on, right?

Everything here eventually comes back to farm animals, the life cycle of a bee, bad cooking, or pottery - even if we take a lovely detour along the way.

And I'm sorry.

Kind of.

So, when I graduated from art college, I had developed some very interesting views about art versus craft, artisans versus craftspeople, "real art" versus production pottery.

By interesting, I mean biased and in a lot of cases horribly judgemental and ultimately incorrect.

But you all knew that, of course.

In the beginning as a potter on my own, I was a purist. I owned a kick wheel, built my own small gas kiln and insisted on doing everything in pottery the hardest way possible. I dug my own clay and mixed all of my glazes from scratch. I had a lot of failures along the way, and spent a lot of money doing things the most "authentic" way possible. In my mind, anything to make the process of making pottery easier made me a big, fat, stinky cheaterpants.

You know, because I totally thought I was Bernard Leach. Or Paul Soldner.

Or something.

Unfortunately, I would have had to sell my pottery for about 10 times what the market price would bear to maintain that level of "artistic purity." And oddly enough, nobody looks at a mug at a farmer's market and says - "Wow! You're right...that is worth $50 because it was handmade on a kickwheel and fired in a homemade gas kiln with painstakingly mixed raw glazes and hand dug, processed clay."

And although those experiences made me a better potter, more grounded in the rules, or principles of great pottery, I eventually grew up and realized that it doesn't make you any less of an artist or a craftsman to allow yourself shortcuts or to use technology to ultimately be more creative. In my newly formed, more mature opinion based on real-world experience and suffering for my art (ha!), as long as you have a strong foundation skillset rooted in the traditional "rules" of your chosen medium, you should feel free to break any of those rules in the quest for new ways of doing things and being creative.

Which is why I recently bought a "Pure and Simple" bat mold system after years of debating about whether or not it would make me a stinky cheaterpants.

I got the system not only to make keyed plaster bats for my wheelhead, since I prefer plaster to plastic or composite bats but want the convenience afforded by quick change bats, but also to make hump molds for large bowls and platters. Because I know how to make large bowls and platters the hard way, and can do so very competently, I figure it's ok to do so in "production" mode once in a while.

So far, I've been very impressed with how easy the molds are to make, use and how well the keyed bats fit to the wheel-head portion of the kit.

I just hope you all still respect me in the morning. You know, while you are reading my blog and drinking coffee out of your authentically handmade mug.

When Produce Volunteers...Or, It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!

I didn't plant pumpkins in my garden.

And yet I have several very, very large pumpkins growing.

Right where I planted cucumbers?!? Either those are really big, round pumpkin-y looking cucumbers, or I've got pumpkins.

They're called "volunteers." I just love that gardening word. As if produce can volunteer to live in your garden and feed your family. I guess it beats "accidental" produce.

My garden has turned into a volunteer pumpkin patch.

It makes me want to jump out and yell, "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!"

But I can't, because it would scare the little family of quail that now live in my volunteer pumpkin patch...

A mom, a dad, and three little babies.

It's about time they got off the fence and decided that we have a good place to live. Maybe they were just waiting for a pumpkin patch.

Well, it's a good thing one volunteered.

Mother nature gives and Mother Nature takes away.

But I've learned that the she gives so much more than we've ever lost to her. Whether it's pumpkins.

Or baby quail.

Or beautiful land on which to build a family farm.