June 15, 2009

Day Old Chicks

102 Rock x Cornish straight run (mixed pullets and cockerels) for meat, 3 New Hampshire, 3 Welsummer, 9 Gold and Silver Laced Wyandotte pullets for eggs, and 2 Welsummer cockerels for their beautiful plumage.

June 7, 2009

Ostrander Lights

I have no secrets. I had one until recently—the recipe for Ostrander Lights. Everything from building furniture to making archery equipment, to smoking meat, everything I have ever struggled to learn on my own that helped me find my way through the world, I have shared with anyone who wanted to know.

It goes beyond that. I'm incapable of keeping secrets. That's why Mary won't tell me anything that requires discretion. Sometimes she'll want to share a private thought. "If I tell you something, would you promise not to say anything to….". She usually doesn't get very far into that proposition before I express annoyance with her for putting me in an impossible situation, or she remembers she's talking to me and we both start laughing.

In the face of this shortcoming, I needed to show the world and myself that I could exercise restraint in the face of temptation. So when I stumbled upon the secret ingredients for Ostrander Lights, the recipe grew to fill that need. Lash me to the mast, I would keep it for myself. That may seem like a token gesture in the direction of self-respect, but let me tell you, everyone who has ever eaten at a Torges breakfast featuring Ostrander Lights surrounded by homemade bacon, local Maple syrup, and yardbird eggs would have changed his religion on the spot for a glimpse at that secret recipe.

As guests from our table traveled through the world, they went as emissaries with the word and the news, and the reputation of Ostrander Lights grew. There is no record of anyone ever referring to them as pancakes or griddle cakes or anything else that mundane, and in all their reverent writings and correspondences on the subject, only one person ever referred to them as Ostrander Lites. The cognoscenti immediately shunned him, and within two winters he was dropped from all party lists. Christmas cards quit coming, and classmates no longer mentioned his name at high school reunions.

Let me say that I came to enjoy the attention, that I encouraged the fawning and the superlatives that people employed as tactics to separate me from my recipe. I remained intractable and sometimes in a show of resolve bragged that people would mourn my death long after I had gone. I'd even mock supplicants by speculating on the form of their lament. "I can't believe he took the recipe with him. It would have meant much to my family if we could have gathered around Ostrander Lights at family weddings, or 50th anniversaries, or memorial services for our departed parents. It was like being surprised by a brief glimpse of God and then longing ever after for a fuller view. Our lives were never again the same. We hoped that somewhere he'd written it down, but it's gone now and there's no record beyond the memories. Torges was otherwise a very good man, the sumbitch."

All that's buttermilk under the bridge now, cake flour in the wind. I gave the recipe to two Cajuns because they pleaded for it during their visit here. I thought about it long and hard before swearing them to secrecy, as I owed them nothing more than kindness. I caved to entreaties no more passionate than I'd heard a thousand times before and mailed them the specifications a week after they returned home.

It's not the same now as when I was the only guardian. It's out. They're cooking them in Louisiana today. Pretty soon Arkansas, Connecticut and Texas. I won't be surprised before I die to see a copycat version appear on www.topsecretrecipes.com. Nobody can keep a secret. Not even me when I needed to.

June 2, 2009

I couldn't Pen Henny

Much of our hens' flightiness resulted from the maulings they took from young dogs and pups that I brought onto the property. Seems they'd no sooner settle down near the henhouse after a feather pruning from one menace than another came along to prune the flock itself. And in this manner, over the course of two summers, eight hens and a rooster dwindled to three wary birds inclined to shun even the hand that fed them.

Turning our yard birds into jail birds was a solution that protected both garden and bird, but not the ideal one, and the regrets began soon after I scooped out their first trough of laying mash—their dinner destiny for the next 4 months.

I had a partial roll of 2' wide poultry netting that I'd used to surround my mother's garden a dozen years ago to keep the groundhogs and rabbits at bay. So I purchased a 150' roll to add to it and ran a perimeter fence around the electric fence. Of course, this brought on complications.

On their first day of liberty, the hens hopped the fence for a good dusting between the potato rows just as I hoped they wouldn't. I pinioned them that night. However, pinioning means that when a dog or wild critter gets after one of them, the clipped right-wing primary feathers will turn her dodge clockwise as she flaps to escape and make her easy pickings.

The poultry mesh also means that I've made the garden vulnerable to deer. They'll likely walk up to it and hop over it, missing the nearby electric altogether. I had no room to run the netting inside the electric fence and still push a cultivator through the rows. Besides, would I really want a deer landing on an electric fence inside my garden? I wasn't about to take everything down and start over, especially since I figured I'd have to move the electric fence well outside the netting so deer would contact it before they gathered themselves to jump the netting.

The resident deer are familiar with the electric fence guarding the garden, and like cattle, they stay clear of it even when it's turned off. That will buy me time. Maybe a month or more. I've already ordered replacement layers with the new batch of broilers, due here the 15th, so at the first hint of a deer problem, the poultry netting comes down and the hens are gone.

Last night I brought in a new rooster (and his hen) to govern the flock, one that's old and lazy, on the chance that he can influence the hens to stay near the henhouse. If that doesn't work, I'll get rid of all five soon enough and wait for their replacements to begin laying. There are no pups on the horizon and Tricks now understands without question that chickens are off limits, so as they grow they'll never have reason to cross the pond and thereby find the garden.

Life doesn't get simpler; it gets shorter and turns in smaller circles.

Previous entries...