This is another Dragonwood egg report… we haven’t had one in a while.  In short, February has been nothing short of amazing.  In the first week of February the hens were laying about 6 eggs a day (range 3-8) and had been doing so since November.  It’s now the 26th of February as I write this, and today we got 26 eggs.  That’s an increase of about one egg a day for three weeks straight!  Go ladies go!

For reference, this is the way egg season seems to work.  As the hours of daylight get longer, the ladies lay more eggs, more frequently, and as the hours of daylight wane across the summer, the egg laying falters.  For us, it means eggs start coming back in February, peak in June, and start waning in earnest come September.  From mid-October to late-February we don’t get enough eggs to sell, and barely enough to eat ourselves (and an occasional dozen for nearby family).  In mid-summer, we get roughly 2/3 production daily - two of three hens lay each day.

Our flocks are pretty naturalized… we don’t give them artificial light or artificial anything during the winter to force them through molting faster or to stimulate laying.  The most artificiality they get from us is that a couple times a winter when the temperature at night is going to fall below zero we might turn on a heat lamp for the coldest hours.

By contrast, it’s standard practice at egg farms to completely manage lighting cycles for hens so that they lay as many eggs as possible with as little seasonal downtime as possible.  This is equivalent to cracking the whip over those slave hens.  The hens have a brief molting period artificially imposed, and then it’s back to work.

Them: Egg Slave Factory Farms.

Us: Hey, take four months off, you deserve it.  Thanks for all the hard work.

So, now it’s February and the eggses are landing.  We’ve got lots of teeny pullet eggs coming in from the new flock we raised last fall, as well as increasing numbers of large eggs from the older ladies.  This photo is the first dozen eggs I collected today, laid out in the fresh snow on our picnic table.

We get so used to our big eggs that we think the pullet eggs are just SO TEENY that we call them “culls” and never sell them to anyone.  But I began wondering, just how small are these eggs?  And how big are the big ones?  So I got out the market scale to measure a few, and now I can quantificate our eggsitential nature for your edification.

Our littlest pullet eggs:  6 of them weighed in at 9.8 oz.  That means a dozen would weigh in at 19.6 ounces… not bad.

Our big bruiser eggs: today’s biggest three eggs weighed 8.4 oz together.  That means a dozen would weigh about 33.2 oz.  Wow.

Last fall I measured a couple of our average dozen we were selling at the Westside Farmer’s Market in Ann Arbor.  The dozens (with a range of all our sizes except for “culls”) averaged a hair over 30 oz.

Perspective?  At yer local store where sellers have to actually sort them by size and such, the size categories are: small (18 oz), medium (21 oz), large (24 oz), extra large (27 oz), and jumbo (30 oz).

Holy ostrich, Batman!  Our teeniest pullet eggs are halfway between small and medium.  Our average dozen we sell are jumbos.  What does that make our real bigguns?  Extra jumbo?  Super jumbo?  Ginormous?

And then talk about yer bargain pricing.  We sold eggs last year for $4 a dozen.  Chemical free, free-ranging, practically pets, beautiful browns and greens and blues in the jumbo size for $4.  By comparison, you can drop in at the People’s Food Co-op and get somebody else’s eggs there that look just like ours, browns and blues and greens all pretty, for $5.75 a dozen, in the “large” size.  Large.  That’s 24 oz of eggs.  Dragonwood’s Dozen, by comparison, is running 25% more egg (30 vs 24 oz) for about 25% less, which works out precisely to… oh, that’s not easy math.  Instead, those eggs from somebody else would only be about $3.25 at the pricing scale we use, not $5.75.  And if we sold our eggs at somebody else’s price, our jumbo dozens should cost about $7.20 per dozen, instead of $4.

Get yer Dragonwood Bargain Basement Eggs now!  Whoohoo!

M called me this morning from up the road about 4 miles, and practically shouted “I just saw an eagle!”  There was more to the story, but the sighting was nearby, so I threw on my boots and grabbed my camera and the bird book and headed up there.

I didn’t see it.  I drove back and forth in the area for about 10 minutes and nothing happened.

I was just starting home when, about a quarter mile ahead I did see a big bird wheel across the road.  I marked the spot mentally and slowed the car over to the edge where I thought it should be… and there it was.  Big and brown on a tree branch about 40 feet up, way bigger than a hawk.  I turned on the camera and turned off the car and started the video recording.  I shot just a few seconds then slowly started to open the car door… and saw him lean forward and take off.  So then I jumped out of the car and tried to keep him in the viewfinder, all zoomed up close, and not get hit by passing cars.  I didn’t do too well, most of the 60 seconds is not of the eagle.  But there were a few seconds that were just breathtaking, big swooping sweeps of wings in the gentle snow as he wheeled around and then headed off east.

Juvenile Bald Eagle, near Manchester Michigan, Feb 26 2011. Click for high resolution version.

Click it for the high resolution version.  Here are 13 sequential frames (one big wing flap down and up) starting from upper right.  I cut and pasted these all together onto the background of the first frame.  It seems to be a juvenile bald eagle, from what we can see in the books that we have.  Here’s a single frame:

It was pretty stunning.  I’ve seen eagles before, and they’re always breathtaking, but we’ve never seen one so close to Dragonwood.

Polydactyl Cat Trowel/Fist

So I started to write a post about the issue of the Dervaes family trademarking the term “urban homestead” (oops, I wrote it).  If you need some background, Agrariana’s Part l post and Part ll post seems, from my limited knowledge on it, to do a good job summarizing and analyzing the situation.

But then, I realized I’m not sure I have the time or the authority to write about this! We’re rural now, so though I once dabbled in urban homesteading, we are now following our personal path to freedom by growing and producing most of our own food on a tiny mini-farm that is not an urban homestead. I can’t take much time to write about this because I’ve got to get busy planting the seeds that will grow the future veggies for our our garden, even though there’s already a riotous homegrown revolution going on under the grow lights in our living room.  Enough said?

Path to Freedom, Urban Homestead, Urban Homesteading, Grow the Future, Homegrown Revolution (and trowel/fist logo) are registered ® trademarks of Dervaes Institute.

Okay, okay, we’ve had our fun.  And I poke fun because it IS so ridiculous on a certain level, to try to own language and concepts that exist without you.  But, even though l’m shaking my head along with everyone else, I think I may have a wee bit of sympathy going for the Dervaeses.  This tiny sympathy takes root in my belief that, if they hadn’t done it, someone else would have.  Seriously.  I truly think some marketing giant somewhere would have made a move to own “Urban Homestead” sometime soon, given its sudden, recent uptick in popularity.  I imagine it to be some slick business school graduate, who probably made fun of the farm kids when he was in grade school.  And I wonder if we’d be so up in arms about it if it hadn’t been one of our own.  If a huge corporation started selling “Urban Homestead” trademark jeans and forbidding others to use their name - would we be this outraged?  Or would we just absorb it quietly like we have all the other words and phrases that have been trademarked by the big guys?  I’m not making any excuses for the grabby Dervaes behavior, either.  I just wonder if it’s as simple as the Dervaes saw coming what I described, and decided to thwart that, without realizing what “if you have a trademark you have to defend it” was going to cost them on this one.  And the mob will take them down, because they’re little enough that the mob can.  Probably wouldn’t have been able to happen that way to Urban Homestead® jeans.

We reuse a lot at Dragonwood, far more than we recycle.  We don’t buy much stuff, or even much food, and very little of that food is packaged.  So we don’t actually have much to recycle on a regular basis, and we don’t have much to throw away, ever.  We can go weeks or even months without having to get rid of a garbage bag (garbage never really smells too bad if you compost the organic parts).

Mandy wrote the other day about planting and recycling… which was really about planting and reusing.  She reuses and re-reuses constantly in that process, to the point of going to our local recycling station and rescuing reusable resources that others used only once.  We recycle something once it’s broken to the point of not being able to reuse it for nearly anything.

I’m building a sugar shack.  It’s an extension of our West Flock Coop out in the back yard.  The West Flock Coop construction project was a significant effort in reuse for us… vertical posts and siding were salvaged from a disintegrating barn, windows acquired from Recycle Ann Arbor (and streetside, curb-toss finds) over the years, so only some 2×4s and nails were new.  Even hinges for the coop doors were mostly old hinges, most decades old and kept in old tin cans or peanut butter jars until ready for some project like this.

Oh, back to the sugar shack / woodshed / seasonal storage space project.  It’s been on hold this week in the snow and ice, but I’ll be getting back to it shortly (like tomorrow), so I’ll write a bit about it now.  The Coop is about 7′ deep and 15′ wide with a fence along the east side keeping chickens on the coop side of the yard and giving them free range into the woods, but not into our flower and food gardens.  We’re extending the Coop to the east in order to add firewood storage (partially covered, against the coop) and a covered sugar shack/seasonal storage area.

So far:  we’ve got the four posts in the ground (former barn beams and supports, 100+ years old), and we’ve got the full framework of 2×4s and 2×6s on top and connected to the Coop for roof support.  The 2×4s and 2×6s were scavenged from an urban teardown project where Mandy and friends tore things apart and stacked much used/partially rotted wood and plywood in a trailer and hauled it all back here.  We’ve been using it bit by bit for two years now, and have made small coops and repairs from many parts of the stack.  These are nearly the last of the 2×6s and 2×4s, and I took out about 300 old nails using pry bar,  hammer and vicegrip plyers to get them ready for use.

LEFT PHOTO: View from the front (north), West Flock Coop on the right, and you can see my woodpile waiting to be split (mostly) along the fence that keeps chickens safe from us.  I use that tire on the stump for holding firewood while I split it (another good idea I found on the interwebs).  After the roof goes on, our splits will be stored in the new roofed area next to the coop.  The really wide overhang in the front will get angle supports to help it, and we expect to use the area for summer tool storage outside (rakes and spades and barrow).

RIGHT PHOTO: This view is from the top, looking at one of the old beams now used as a post, and our reused lumber with LOTS of old nail holes.  I do sometimes reuse old nails, but these were worthless and I’m using decking screws from another project to hold things together well.  Chickens are on the other side of the fence in their yard.  Aren’t the new Buff Orpingtons looking great?  They’re kinda like those square cows in old pastoral paintings, in that their shape is so exaggeratedly chickenesque.  Gotta love ‘em.  Elm and ash in the woodpile; we’re still fueling the house from the dead trees killed by foreign pests, Dutch Elm fungus and Emerald Ash Borer beetles.  Yet more reuse, in a sense.

More on this sugar shack (and maple weather) coming soon.

Before tucking in the West Flock for the night, I walked out to the front of the house yesterday to get them some fresh water.  The sun had just gone down, and the view as I waited for the water bucket to fill was a glowing orange all across the western horizon.

I took a picture of it with my phone camera, but it’s not very good, as sunset photos go.  Low light, nearly twilight, and I wasn’t being all that careful to hold still.  So I won’t show it here.

The reason I’m writing is just that…  It isn’t about the beauty of this sunset.  What caught me was the trees out on the horizon.  All along the horizon, trees.  Sharp, needly trees against the orange, as far as I could see.

The view isn’t all that beautiful, if you must know.  We live on a federal highway, and it runs east-west about 100 feet from where I stood, and runs right across my photo of this scene.  A bit closer than that, out in the yard to the southwest, stands our porcine white propane tank (prominent in the photo).  Beyond the highway is a cornfield, a regular old conventionally farmed field corn field that has big harvesters running through it in the fall and runoff flowing into the little creek that flows through the field, and then east into the conservation acreage across the street from us.  The conservation acreage is pretty… but it wasn’t in my field of view at that moment.

What I saw wasn’t really those trees so sharp against the glow, nor the propane tank storing fossil fuels, nor the highway with noisy cars, nor the now-quiet corn field.  Although the trees caught me momentarily, I saw right through those and all the rest.

I saw the skyline, a wavy horizon with trees and no buildings.  No houses, no barns, no office buildings, no lights.  A simple skyline.

I grew up in a city, a small grimy city in the rust belt.  For twenty years that town stayed the exact same size, gaining commuters to other bigger cities for every manufacturing job it lost.  The skyline was houses for me.  Then I went to college and on to bigger cities and universities and everywhere my skyline was jagged and blocky.  Oh I had sojourns in mountains and forests and on the high seas and I understand the nature of natural skylines… I even taught about such landscapes and their meanings, once upon a time, as a geologist.

But until Dragonwood I lived an urban life, and breathed urban airs, and looked on urban skylines, if I looked up at all.  A day doesn’t go by here that I don’t appreciate what we have.  So yesterday as I looked up from my chickens’ water bucket, I cherished our little view, with its propane tank and all the rest.  I couldn’t really capture that view on film, or on a memory chip.  It’s all in my mind’s eye.

A simple view.

Gardening, growing, farming is one of those things where you can spend a lot of money, and create more garbage and pollution burden….or not.  A new plastic flat of seed-starting cells can cost $8.  If you get the shiny new plastic cover to keep humidity levels even, and a drip tray below it, it can be $20…and you’ve consumed that many more pieces of plastic.

There’s another way, one that will let you save your money to buy seeds, and that I feel much better about.  Plant in recycled containers.

If you buy food items that come in styrofoam or or plastic trays or boxes, or takeout food, you can use these boxes to start seeds.  If you really don’t want them hanging around your house for months (or you don’t buy food in them), you can ask friends to save them (there will be no problem getting enough, and you’ll have to stop them at some point!), or you can visit a recycling station and quickly pick from a range of choices.  I don’t buy a lot of these things, so I get them from the recycling.  When I’m finished with them or they wear out, they go back to the recycling.

Here are some ideas:

Styrofoam boxes that mushrooms are sold in. Styrofoam is easy to poke holes through for drainage, and the sides of these boxes are just about the right height.

Plastic lidded boxes that strawberries are sold in. They usually have very wide vents in the bottom and sides, and you would think the dirt would fall right out.  What I do is line the bottom with a layer of dryer lint (another reuse!) and then put the dirt in over that.  (Dryer lint can go in the compost - it will be fine going into the garden.)  It holds beautifully, and you’ve got great drainage already built into the container.  Onions, lettuces, and other greens have started really well in these.  Also celery and other plants with very tiny seeds that need to be near the surface of the soil - they can dry out quickly, and benefit from the clear plastic lid.

Styrofoam and plastic single-use cups. Sometimes there are stacks of these in the recycling, probably after someone had a party.  Single-use packaging is hard for us to avoid when that’s the only way things are sold, but single-use disposable cups are more of a choice people make.  I try to mentally thank them for at least recycling, and feel grateful for the stash of little individual plant pots I have for free.  These are perfect for squash, pumpkin, and cucumber seedlings that need a deeper pot.

Those clear plastic boxes that baby greens are sold in. They are getting bigger and bigger every year, it seems.  Big ones can make nearly a terrarium!  These are perfect for something I sow a lot of, just one time, like leeks and onions.

All the things that are started in these containers need to get picked out of the mass planting and either transplanted to the garden, or to individual containers.  This has to happen before they get too big and their roots get very tangled together.  Some people don’t start seeds this way because it is another job when the time comes to separate and transplant the seedlings.  It can be a little tedious and require a gentle touch. But I start many of my plants this way, in mass plantings, because I don’t have enough space under lights for the amount of cell packs it would take to give all the seeds their own space from the start.  This way, you can really make the most use of a sunny windowsill or a couple of fluorescent lights.  Things like onions, celery, and leeks have to get started in February to get good crops, and they are very forgiving when their roots are disturbed to transplant them.  So are lettuces, endives and other greens.  They’ll get started the same way a little later.

Using recycled containers usually requires poking drainage holes in the bottom - very important not to forget!  I set them on a reusable tray to catch drips - an abandoned lid of one of those big tupperware bins, some old enameled pans, etc, do very well.  If the plants need a humidity cover, a light piece of clear plastic (like an opened bag from bread or a bulk food purchase ) works well.  No, the whole setup doesn’t look slick.  It can look a little messy and mismatched.  But it works well for me, and I feel better reusing what’s going into the environment, rather than adding to it.

What color is snow?

The cats of the East Flock barn were happy to see me, as usual.  They wanted a drink more than cold catfood, but I gave them both.   I trampled down the snow in the chicken’s yard so they could “free range”.  The ladies (and Saruman the rooster) came out (I bribed them with scratch grains) and walked around the little circle of trampled squeak snow hunting the corn and other tidbits.  Gandalf remained inside.  Saruman hasn’t attacked me in several months now, a truce for which I am grateful.

Squeaky snow is just one of my favorite winter sounds.  The huff of the deer just before it bounds away is another (even rarer) favorite.  I’m always partial to wind noises, of course (I’m a sailor, you know), and we get plenty of that here.  Another favorite sound is the crunch of ice needles.

Ice needles from the woods. Is it crunchy, precious?

Ice needles like these should be familiar to everyone, but it seems that few people stop to notice them.  I suspect they are familiar more by sound than by sight.  Ice needles form best when a wet, bare soil is suddenly given a very hard freeze.  So next time there’s a nice thaw during the day and you get some muddy ground and you know there’s going to be a good hard freeze that night (at least the 20s, and teens is even better), get up in the morning and tramp around listening for the sound of crunching ice needles.  Where the soil starts crunching loudly under your boots, stop and look at the crunch source.  The ice starts growing near the ground surface (where it is coldest) and then freezes down into the soil pores wherever the water is.  Ice needles can easily reach an inch or two in length overnight and can be sharp enough to stick right into your finger (I know from personal experience this).

But best is the rewarding crunchy sound.  You can hear it on and off throughout the winter whenever there’s been enough thaw and a good freeze again.  The ice needle season wanes through March as the maple season does, for the lack of good hard freezes at night.  But it’s a much longer season than the squeaky snow season.

What are your favorite winter sounds?

Three things happen at this time of year, often on the same day.

1) Maple sap starts to flow

2) Hens start to lay

3)The first seeds started indoors are coming up

This week was the week.  It shouldn’t be amazing that it all happens at once, but it still is.  The maple and the hens are most in sync, and this is the third year running that we literally have received the first egg from a new flock of hens on the same day the maple sap started flowing.

Here’s to hoping for a good maple season!  Last year was so short we processed very little.  Already, the past two nights have been too warm for a really good run during the day - it has to freeze at night.  But we’ve gotten enough to start boiling down.  And right on cue, the new hens started leaving the cutest little pullet eggs for us.  The whole flock is ramping up fast - every two days we’re getting about 2-3 more eggs than we got two days before.  Maple custard, anyone?

First seeds are potted and started under the grow lights.  Onions and eggplants are just up, and more get planted every time I have some time to sit down with the soil mix and seed packets.  So exciting.  Even if it gets cold again, snows again (and we hope it will, for the maple’s sake!)… even if there’s actually another month of winter to go… our three signs that spring is coming are in place now.

It is a cold and still morning.  Nothing moves.  Pink light seeps through the icicles.

A month off in near isolation and reflection is a precious thing.

For the start of this new year, we took a month off.  Not really “off” in the typical way of imagining it.  No, for all but about 6 days of it, we worked.  Hard physical work, demanding work, work to empty the mind, finally, of clutter and conflict.

Many years ago, I read Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, and was struck by this passage:

Another row, and yet another row, followed–long rows and short rows, with good grass and with poor grass. Levin lost all sense of time, and could not have told whether it was late or early now. A change began to come over his work, which gave him immense satisfaction. In the midst of his toil there were moments during which he forgot what he was doing, and it came all easy to him, and at those same moments his row was almost as smooth and well cut as Tit’s. But so soon as he recollected what he was doing, and began trying to do better, he was at once conscious of all the difficulty of his task, and the row was badly mown.”

This passage has come back to me many times in my life when I was working hard physically, or attending others as they worked.  I have no intention of making this a college essay analyzing a literary passage; I wanted to see the words in print here again, because I have felt them so many times.  There is a release that comes with physical work and exercise - a clearing of the mind, an easing of the perception of hardship, when one lets go and reaches past the stage of considering giving up.  If I do get all philosophical here, it is only to take this truth into a wider consideration.

Last year was a very hard year.  I do not exaggerate when I say that I have never in my life been happier to welcome in a new year, with a new start and new changes.  Somehow, last year was a year that became a series of situations that relentlessly took a great deal from me.  There were many blessings and delights as well, and I am grateful beyond words for my amazing husband, for the earth that sustains us, for those around me who gave me hope and brought me smiles.  But at the end of that draining year, I found myself deeply in need of renewal and restoration of damages.

I thought at the start of the month off I would write a lot.  This winter I gave in and joined a blog “challenge” - the Dark Days eating local challenge.  I have been a past skeptic of, for example, local foods challenges, because I have observed people go about them as just something to get through - okay, that’s done, whew, I did it, let’s go get some junk food, or some fruit from Equador to celebrate!  I felt bad being a skeptic, because these challenges are such a good thing, to raise awareness, to result perhaps in some permanent changes for the better, to teach others from your experience, etc.  I thought it would be easy, because what we eat through these dark days of winter still is, to a large extent, what we have grown ourselves and stored in the pantry, the canning closest, the freezers, or what is still on foot and on the ground outside, despite winter.

And that part was easy.  What was not easy was wondering why I was doing this exactly, when this was the way we ate most days anyway.  And I found that I did not need another deadline in my life to meet, just at this moment.  When it’s 10 pm after an exhausting day and a post is due at midnight, it just suddenly takes the joy out of writing and becomes one more depressing unfinished task.   I did not like the feeling of trying to prove myself to other people on one more level, or to meet their requirements, kind-hearted even as they may be.  Self-doubt is sometimes only enhanced by trying to prove yourself too much.  And was it getting competitive?  Was there some kind of glory we were all seeking in a see-what-I-accomplished sort of way?  Sigh.  With some clarity of meditations, I find I just don’t need that.  I find I will be freer to just be, and share, and write of what we live, without trying to meet a challenge.  So I’ve let my part in the Dark Days Challenge go, with much respect.  Nothing’s changed; we’re still making salad out of jerusalem artichokes, celery and cabbage that have been in storage since October, eating chicken we raised from the freezer, and our eggs, but it’s such a day-to-day, permanent, lifestyle that I am not going to document it as though it’s a novelty.

There is a very humorous side to this, as well.  My old digital camera has started showing its age, and one day when it was being uncooperative, I borrowed my husband’s IPhone to photograph the process of making yogurt from the lovely local milk we enjoy - for, you guessed it, the blog and the challenge.  Now, IPhones can be slick slippery devils at times, and somehow, after many shots of all the steps of the process, the thing slithered out of my grasp suddenly, and as luck would have it, submerged immediately in the bowl of 112 degree fluid milk-and-yogurt mixture.  Completely submerged.  Of course, I yanked it out before I’d even really registered what had happened. Fast forward through several hours of agonized phone triage, and somehow, it survived seemingly unscathed.

That was camera episode one.  Camera episode two came while photographing some other soup or stew-making process, this time with my own camera, and from a place of being deeply engrossed, I became aware of a burning plastic scent wafting through the kitchen.  Searching the source down, I discoverd I’d turned on the wrong burner, and edge of my camera was sitting on, and melting to, the heating empty burner I’d carelessly put it down beside when my hands were full.  Amazingly, the camera mostly survived this too, but is even less reliable with how it uses batteries now.  So - there are hazards as well to photo-documentation of a cooking process!

And, so, I find myself in need of simplicity and joy.  There is so much to navigate as the world tries to bring in its drama, darkness, depression, and neediness.  I take inspiration once again in the beautiful passage of Levin’s work, above, and its lesson: first he fears he’ll fail, fall behind others, and works in competition and strain.  But by the end of his work, all that slips away, and he is working in satisfaction in the work only, and enjoys the peace found there.

“Another row, and yet another row…”  and so we go on, into the next chapter.  Happy New Year, everyone.