The Quarter-Acre Farm Read online

  I soon found I was not alone in my appreciation for hens. Surfing the Internet I found hundreds of sites dedicated to chickens. There are sites that will walk you through every aspect of chicken ownership, including chicken nutrition, chicken housing, and navigating city codes if your burg frowns on fowl. And if I thought I was smitten with my chickens, I soon realized I was comparatively inattentive. There are websites where you can buy toys for your chickens, little bags of organic treats, chicken clothing. I saw videos of chicken owners pushing their hens about in prams. And to see someone kiss their chicken, and someone else give CPR and mouth-to-beak resuscitation to a hen, and to watch the excellent The Natural History of the Chicken, written and directed by Mark Lewis—you’ll never look at a hen in the same way again.

  In terms of talent, it turned out that my chickens were comparative duds. Apparently other chickens can play the piano, for Pete’s sake. But I still adored Klio and Kalliopi. In turn, the chickens seemed to like us as much as we liked them, which easily made up for their lack of musical ability. When we went into the backyard, Klio and Kalliopi would press against the net like groupies greeting the Grateful Dead. Their happiness was endearing. I looked forward to moving their chicken house to a new location every few weeks because when I let them out, they would tumble down the ramp and look around them in apparent awe that the world had changed overnight.

  No matter their delight in the world, when the sun stopped shining as brightly, their egg production did indeed drop markedly. By December, it had stopped altogether. I didn’t panic, for I had my hoarded eggs, and I had a plan.

  I installed a solar light, one of those designed to illuminate a garden path. I cut a hole in the chicken house roof, fit the lamp in, caulked it, introduced the chickens, and waited for the eggs to pile up. Nothing happened. As one eggless day followed another, and the number of my hoarded eggs dwindled, I stopped having boiled eggs for lunch, and then stopped baking. I only allowed myself to dip my bread into half an egg for my French toast, and even that was drawing to a close.

  In the meantime my friends told me that the chickens in the country flock were laying as if they were the muses of omelets. Feeling embarrassed for my circus hens, I admitted that my chickens had given up eggs for the winter. I described the installation of the light. My friend told me it was natural for the hens to have a rest from egg laying, and I could indeed nudge them back into production. However, my little solar bulb was too dim. So I pried the solar light from the chicken house roof and replaced it with a 100-watt bulb.

  The first time I turned on the light, the chickens were confused. At dusk they went in to roost. But inside, their house was bright as day, so they came out. They stood perplexed in the deepening night, turned around and went back in, then came back out again. So it went until I finally unplugged the light, let them settle on their roosts, shut the door, and then plugged the light back on. Within 48 hours, the girls were laying again, and I was enjoying my favorite full-egg French toast breakfast every morning. French toast that I like to think Louis and Sam might leap a foot off the ground for and pluck the plate right from my fingers.

  Recipe

  Walnut French Toast

  For each piece of French toast you will need one slice of bread, the type of which is up to you. I like a dense multigrain variety, or for a fancier version, a slice of brioche. You will also need as much sliced fruit as you like to eat at one sitting, and a handful of chopped walnuts.

  We use gleaned walnuts. A friend has about fifty huge trees on one section of her farm. The trees are so huge they are not commercially viable to pick, nor are the walnuts of a type that the commercial buyers are in the market for. Too bad for them, but great for us. At the end of the summer, armed with empty paint buckets and burlap sacks, we go out with several other families and pick enough of the walnuts to tide us over the entire year. The hard part is shelling them. We tried a dozen different nut crackers before we found the best method. Our neighbor Jay gifted us with an eight-inch-high, four-inch-wide section of log with a divot in the middle. I put the end of the walnut in the divot and smack the walnut with a hammer, just enough to break the shell but not enough that the nut loses shape. Louis and I sit on the porch like two old people, me putting a walnut on the divot, him wacking and tossing the cracked nut into a bowl. Fifteen minutes and you’ve got a week of French toast, cookies, and snacks—and the birds eat the bits that get left behind.

  The key to this French toast is that during cooking you allow the eggs to set. This “glues” the walnuts into place so that when the toast is flipped, the walnuts don’t abandon the bread. Therefore you want a nice low heat and a cover for your skillet.

  Ingredients (for each slice of toast): • 1 slice of bread

  •1 egg

  •1 heaping tsp brown sugar

  • 1/8 tsp vanilla

  • dash of salt

  • 1/8 cup chopped walnuts

  • fruit (as much as you’d like)

  1. Beat the egg(s), vanilla, brown sugar, and salt until frothy. If the eggs seem too thick to soak into the bread, add a bit of milk.

  2. Dip both sides of the bread in the egg mixture and place into an oiled skillet on a low-medium heat.

  3. Throw the chopped walnuts into the remaining egg mixture, stir, then quickly pour this mixture evenly onto the upward-facing side(s) of the bread in the skillet. Use your spatula to press the chopped walnuts into the soggy bread.

  4. Cover the skillet but frequently check the underside of the toast for color. When it is golden brown, gently flip the toast to brown the walnut-encrusted side.

  5. When that is nicely brown as well, slide the bread onto plates, turn the burner up to medium high, throw the fruit into the skillet with some water and, depending on the sweetness of your fruit and your own taste, add in some optional brown sugar and let it simmer briskly until the fruit has become soft, and the water, juice, and sugar have combined into syrup. Pour fruit and syrup over the toast.

  A dollop of Greek yogurt or fresh ricotta on the top of the steaming fruit pushes this meal into nirvana. If you eat this dish at half past 10 in the morning, it can almost get you through until dinner.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  FREE STUFF

  “No unemployment insurance can be compared to an alliance between man and a plot of land.”

  —HENRY FORD

  One of the criticisms I hear most about gardening is the cost. A magazine or newspaper will run an article refuting gardening’s cost effectiveness, tallying the cost of seeds, dirt, raised beds, and the like, concluding that a home-grown tomato must cost somewhere in the range of a new Subaru.

  Well sure it can, but not if you’re cheap like me. I am the kind of person who is drawn to magazines that announce “Remodel for pennies!” Or, “Can’t afford a new kitchen? You can with this plan!” Or, “Low Budget, no problem!” The trouble is that most of the time “pennies” means tens of thousands of dollars, and my idea of a low budget isn’t Elle Décor’ s. So it goes with gardening too.

  My idea of gardening is that I will eat well, enjoy myself, and save money. In order to save money, I need to garden on a budget. A Spring Warren budget. Which is minimal. In order to stay in that budget I use a lot of free and cheap stuff to garden with.

  Cheap doesn’t have to mean ugly. I (and my neighbors and family) don’t want the garden filled with failed retreads that I’m using as raised beds. Planting in an old toilet might be cute in some people’s yards, but I’d rather not have one in mine. I am cheap, but I’m also picky. This would seem to create a quandary, except that there are so many ways to get by using inexpensive or even free items.

  The number one way to get garden stuff is to have garden friends; be in a gardening loop. I have been luckier than anyone has a right to be and have often benefited from a friend’s interest in improving her garden or trying something new. When old bricks are replaced by new pavers, I am often happily offered the bricks. I got my first wooden raised beds because a f
riend began using a new bed system. Gravel, top soil, plants, seeds, growing plastic, pots, trellises, and river rock have all made their way to me via friends.

  If you check Craigslist, you will find all sorts of cheap and free stuff. “Cart away the fill dirt and it’s yours.” “Peeler poles for a dollar each.” “If you take chickens today, you can have them no charge (landlord is complaining).”

  In many cities there is a Freecycle group. The Freecycle Network has almost five thousand groups, so chances are good there are Freecyclers near you. It is a nonprofit entity that facilitates its members getting and giving things away for free, promoting reuse of items and keeping useable goods from ending up in the landfill. People post not only what they’d like to get rid of, but also things they need. I recently scrolled down a list of things to give away and this is what I found: mums, garden hoses, plant buckets and pots, mustard greens, gravel, garden stones, wooden boxes on wheels, shade canopy, irrigation fittings, and for those of you who do like whimsy—several toilets. I myself have been gifted a dwarf peach tree, organic potting soil, gloves, tools, and a big bag of asparagus crowns. Membership is of course free.

  This sort of turnaround is one of the perks of farming in town. In the country, old stuff gets put in the barn or in the might-need-that-againsomeday junk pile full of rusting baling wire, spools, a rusting truck body, cinderblocks, churn bodies, and who knows what else. There isn’t that kind of space in town, and it costs money to get rid of excess. Giving it away or selling it for a song is a win-win situation for everyone.

  For instance, I have spread truckloads and truckloads and truckloads of free mulch in my yard. Store-bought mulch is almost always a chipped or shredded redwood. It is a warm sienna color for a time and then fades into a sun-washed grey brown. My mulch is free and it is never a warm sienna color, nor of a homogenous texture. Instead, it is a mixture of browns and greens and has a variety of textures because it comes from the tree-trimming companies that work in my town. The mulch is the chipped branches that are pruned from all varieties of trees. The tree-trimming companies are pleased to dump an entire truckload of mulch in my driveway; it means they bypass a trip to the dump, along with the dump fees. While this mulch isn’t a consumer-familiar color or texture, leaves are mulched up along with the branches and bark, which makes for a much healthier mineral-rich application. Because it’s free, I can be very generous with the depth of mulch I put into my yard, which means that after the many truckloads of mulch I have spread across the Quarter Acre Farm, I now have a very generous layer of humus on the ground.

  Still, I know that redwood mulch looks nice, perhaps nicer than my free stuff (though I could make an argument against that). Further, I have to admit that I am a fan of cocoa hulls, which are not only a beautiful dark brown, but smell like chocolate heaven as well. If one wants the color or the smell of purchased mulch but the cost of the free stuff, I recommend putting down eight to twelve inches of the free stuff and then broadcasting a film of the redwood bark/cocoa hulls over the top.

  Speaking of trees, pay attention to events. Arbor Day is a great day to pick up free trees. In my town on picnic day in the spring you can get free vegetable starts. Free pumpkins are given away at the fall farmers’ market festival and often those Halloween-y and fall-themed yard decorations end up in the garbage unless you mention you would love to take those bales of straw off their hands and use them to winterize your beds, bed your animals, or add to your compost.

  Compost is expensive but homemade compost is free. Many communities give away free composters through their recycling programs, but if not, they’re easy to build. My neighbors built theirs from discarded wooden shipping pallets. (Free how-to-build-your-own instructions can be found in many places on the web.) If you don’t have access to pallets, there’s no law that says a compost pile can’t just decompose au naturel.

  Manure is free if you have livestock. If not, perhaps you know someone who does. Lots and lots of people have rabbits for pets. Ask them to dump their pans of wood shavings and bunny berries into a bucket for you. If you want a lot of rabbit manure, look up rabbitries on the Internet or ask your local pet store (or butcher) where they get their rabbits from. Likely as not, a rabbit-raising entity will happily give away the manure for free, or at least at a very minimal charge if they’re seeing manure as a crop in itself.

  Some say that feeding animals costs money, so therefore manure isn’t free. True, but you can get free feed for your critters—feed your livestock discards from the grocery store. Louis calls the co-op several times a week and asks for a box of green trimmings. He is in competition with several other people (including “J,” the other goose lady) who do the same thing. The trick is to call first thing in the morning. What we get in the boxes is varied. It is a good day when there are mild greens in the box. The geese, the duck, the chickens, and the rabbits all love lettuces. Rabbits and chickens love the fruit, but none of the animals likes mustard greens or kales, nor will they eat garlic or onions in any form. Potatoes are not popular, but if they sprout I can use them for seed. What we can’t feed the animals we put into the compost pile to feed the bacteria and worms that make the dirt.

  That’s not the only garden-related stuff you can get from your grocery store. I get my best growing beans (cranberry and pintos) from my organic grocery. I bought them in a pinch and have bought them by choice since. I also buy sprouted chickpeas from the grocery store. You’re supposed to use them in salads but since chickpeas can be a bother to sprout and the sprouted chickpeas are marked half-price after a day or two, they’re often cheaper than a packet of seeds.

  When my potatoes sprout in the refrigerator, I see it as an audition for growth. If they sprout in the fridge, I figure they’ll do pretty good outside, and so far, that’s proven out. These are organic potatoes. Conventional potatoes are often sprayed with a sprout inhibitor, maleic hydrazide, which inhibits cell division in plants. I got a potato in the discarded greens for the geese and tossed it aside, and the thing still looked and felt like a rock after a month out in the sun. And we are supposed to eat those?

  Sweet potatoes are different. In fact, they aren’t exactly potatoes; they are more closely related to morning glories, so they are propagated a bit differently. If you want to grow sweet potatoes, give yourself at least a month’s head start; stick a raw sweet potato halfway into ajar of water. It will root and grow shoots (called slips). Twist the four- to six-inch slips from the potato, stick them in ajar of water, and when the slips get roots they’re ready to plant in the ground and grow bushels of lovely sweet potatoes.

  Nurseries often pile their six packs of wilted vegetable and flower seedlings in a corner to throw away. If you ask, sometimes they’ll give the perceived goners to you. A little TLC and the sad little plants will either come around or they’ll die entirely. If you’re willing to gamble, it can work out well. Jesse brought home a tarp full of discarded flowers. I stuck them everywhere, willy-nilly, telling the bedraggled plants, “This is it, your last chance, pull yourself up by your chlorophyll-green bootstraps.” Lots of the blooms rallied and provided the farm with beauty and beneficial insects. Some noticed they didn’t have bootstraps and died, but some of the dead came back the next spring as if they’d just been resting for nine months.

  I also get free plants from my garden, all the time—from volunteers and rooting shoots. My rosemary plants are parents to hundreds of little rosemary plants. If you trim plants in the spring when the new branches are still pliant, you can dip their cut ends in rooting hormone and stick them in the dirt. You can also bend a branch down and cover it with dirt. In no time they will be newly rooted bushes.

  You also can get water for free. My parents have several vinyl-sided pools that fill up with rainwater by early summer and then are depleted little by little as rains ebb and flow and ebb and ebb. . . . My friends Alan and Emily just put in rain barrels that collect the rain that comes out of their roof gutters. Alan and Emily are heroes of mine because n
ot only do they catch rain, but when they run their shower and wait for the water to heat, they also use buckets to catch the initial cold water and use it in the yard.

  I have begun to use a bucket in the kitchen to wash produce, loathe to pour good water down the hatch (and gunk up the drains with dirt and aphids). Even more, though, I dream of utilizing a greywater recycling system—even if just to capture the sink water that runs down the drain with nothing but toothpaste in it, or the water from our washing machine, since we use phosphate-free soap.

  Another thing that’s available for free, but only after you’re a together farmer (something I still haven’t managed to become), is seed from your own vegetables. I keep meaning to put together a system, not only to collect seed (and remember to collect them), but also to date, store, and then remember (once again) that I’ve got the seeds to plant. Maybe this year.

  Then there’s free produce, a movement started by my neighbor Judith. She simply set out a cardboard box and wrote “FREE” on one of the flaps with a Sharpie. Inside the box she’d put her extra lemons. I’ve gotten so used to going down the street to get lemons when I’m out, that I’m somewhat surprised when I see them for sale at the grocery store.

  After the lemon box came the Great Pineapple Guava Giveaway by Millicent, then the Peach Purge by Bridgette. Louis went back and picked Hayashi persimmons off the student rental behind us, and I have given bowls of tomatoes away, spears and spears of rosemary for grilling, peppers, and fruit.