Dogs & Bees – No Bueno

Posted on February 28, 2011 · 2 Comments

At first we thought Squeek had rubbed her muzzle raw on the fence while barking viciously at the dogs the next door. Then it dawned on me that she got stung by a bee while we were in the garden and this must have been where it happened. She had pulled the stinger out before we could check her out so at the time it wasn’t clear where it had occurred. This photo was taken last weekend and it’s still looking pretty bad, though it’s not as swollen now. Next time I’ll need to remember to give her some benedryl. Poor pup.

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Filed Under: Bees, Livestock Tagged With: ,

Orange Braised Fennel

Posted on February 27, 2011 · 2 Comments

The rains have come again, bringing with them all sorts of delicious spring greens. I’ve spent the past few weeks starting lettuce and spinach (to be moved into the garden beds once this cold snap blows through), and am starting to notice all the delicious edibles popping up around empty lots and fields around the city. Miner’s lettuce and three-cornered leeks and lamb’s quarters and SO MUCH FENNEL.

One of my favorite forage-ables is fennel. It has so many culinary uses, and is so versatile. Yes, the bulbs don’t get as big as the ones in the grocery store, but to me that makes it even better. The seeds are fabulous fresh or dried in Italian foods (I put ridiculous amounts of it into my tomato sauce). The greens are delicious in salads. Eaten young, the bulbs are sweet and crisp, and don’t get tough and stringy like the big, older bulbs can. They are also SO EASY TO FIND, what with being EVERYWHERE.
I found this recipe a while back and knew I had to try it. I’ll tell you, Helene’s recipes are pretty spot-on and I tried to follow her directions as closely as possible. Unfortunately, I’m not the sort to have fancy liqueurs around the house, so I had to improvise with a little vodka.
So now I’ll let you in on an embarrassing little secret: I couldn’t wait for the neighborhood (or backyard) fennel to get big enough for this recipe. I bought the pictured fennel bulbs at the farmer’s market because I was impatient. The good news? Now I know the recipe is wonderful, and when the local fennel catches up, I will be ready.

Orange Braised Fennel
2-3 Tbsp sunflower oil
6-8 small bulbs fennel, greens removed
1/2 c fresh-squeezed orange or grapefruit juice
1 tsp orange zest
1-2 sprigs fresh lemon thyme, leaves picked off the stems
1 c water
1/4 c vodka
2 pods star anise
salt and pepper to taste
Cut off the ends of the fennel bulbs to remove any of the root, but leave enough that the pieces will not fall apart when they are cooking. Trim off the stems. Depending on the size of the bulbs, cut them into halves or quarters, again making sure to leave enough of the base on each piece that they hold together.
Juice an orange and reserve the zest. You’ll want to have at least 1/2 cup of juice. Let the zest soak in 1/4 cup of vodka, along with two pods of star anise, the thyme, and some fresh-cracked pepper. Add in the orange juice (and try not to drink it, even though it smells AMAZING).

Heat a large cast-iron (or other non-stick) pan with a few tablespoons of oil and sautee the fennel until it it is beginning to brown on all sides. Once it is golden, deglaze the pan with the vodka/zest/juice mixture, gently tossing the fennel pieces to coat them. Let this cook over medium heat for a few minutes to cook off the booze, then add about 1/2 cup of water and turn the heat down to low. Let this simmer for about 40 minutes, or until the fennel is fork-tender and the liquid has mostly evaporated and formed a glaze. Season with salt, and more pepper if needed.
If the fennel is still a little raw, add more water (or orange juice) and let it cook down a bit more until it is soft.

Serve this as a side dish with duck or pork, or as a topping for baguette slices spread with cream cheese or brie. Delicious.
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Filed Under: Foraging & Hunting, Main Courses, Recipes, Vegetarian Tagged With: ,

Mucky Mess

Posted on February 26, 2011 · 6 Comments

This past storm that came through decided to let us know that we are not immune to the muck. Our friends Heidi, from Itty Bitty Farm in the City, and Kitty, from Havenscourt Homestead, have both lamented about muck. Well, it has finally come here. And since our yard slopes away from our house and the livestock yard is at the end of our yard, it’s become a recipe for disaster. Kinda. Most of the actual yard is raised due to compost. Which is beneficial because it keeps everything from draining into our neighbors’ yards.

Most of the yard doesn’t look wet at all

But along the yard’s fence line and along the barn it’s a total mess. So the plan this spring is to dig an 18″ wide by 18″ deep trench along the fence, line it with filter fabric and fill it with drain rock. Very similar to what Heidi has done. I’m considering getting a sump pump as well, however we don’t have anywhere to pump the water to as the front yard is too far for any hose to reach.

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Filed Under: Farm Diary, Livestock

The 11 Rules of Being a Real Urban Homesteader*

Posted on February 24, 2011 · 18 Comments

1. This isn’t Fight Club. Talk about urban homesteading to everyone. Go ahead and be an urban homesteading asshole. Even if they aren’t interested force them to listen to you. Eventually they will “get it” and will thank you for forcing it upon them.

2. You must live in a city. Well, duh. But you can’t just live in a city, you cannot have more than 1/6th of an acre. Anything over that doesn’t count. See, we’re not Real Urban Homesteaders because we have a quarter acre. Too much land to be a bonafide Real Urban Homesteader so we call ourselves Urban Farmers.

3. Go 100% Green. Even if it doesn’t make financial sense to buy that $10,000 solar power system do it anyways. You want to be an Real Urban Homesteader don’t you? So what if you go into debt that you will never climb out of.

4.Get rid of your cars. Buy a cart for you bike and then ride it everywhere, including that horse ranch where you can use the cart to stock up on horse manure. So you may have to make several trips and won’t be done until next year. But that’s ok, you’re trying to be a Real Urban Homesteader.

5. Work out of your home. It will reduce your need for a car. Need to go to a meeting? Show your clients you’re a Real Urban Homesteader by showing up on a bicycle.

6. Grow all of your own food. Don’t have space to grow grains? Well, you’ll just have to go without baking. Can’t do fruit trees. Too bad, you’ll have to rely on berries for sweetness. Severly allergic to bees? Get over it and get a hive anyways. At least you’ll die a Real Urban Homesteader.

7. Raise your own livestock. What? You live in an apartment? Move out of your bedroom and build a rabbitry in there. They’re quiet, no one will ever know. You can slaughter them on your balcony. Chickens and goats are illegal where you live? Don’t worry about minor things like that. So what if the city you live in fines you $50/day per chicken/goat? You’re a Real Urban Homesteader producing your own food.

8.  Install a composting toilet and use humanure in your garden as fertilizer. Yes, grow your food in your own excrement. It’s organic! Only take showers once a week to reduce your water use. All that water needs to go to your pooh-fed organic garden.

9. Learn how to make everything from scratch. Learn how to can, pickle, ferment and preserve. Make your own bread. Learn how to cure meat and make cheese. Grind your own wheat by hand. Make your own beer, wine and soda. Blow your own glass for canning. Tan hides and weave cloth. Make and mend your own clothes, shoes and hats from those hides and cloth. You don’t need any outside inputs because you’re a Real Urban Homesteader.

10. Create zero waste. Kitchen scraps should be composted. Since you produce everything yourself you won’t have anything else to throw away.

11. Convert your neighbors into Real Urban Homesteaders. Afterall, they have to deal with the noise and stink of your livestock so why not get their own? Refer to Rule #1 if you need help. They’ll eventually see your side of things. If they don’t just build higher fences.
 
Follow all of these rules to become a Real Urban Homesteader.
 
*This, of course, is just a parody of some of the most hardlined urban homesteaders out there. Please don’t take it serious. You don’t really need to do any of these things to be an urban homesteader. It’s just to make you laugh.

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Filed Under: Community

Teeny Weeny Egg

Posted on February 23, 2011 · 3 Comments

No idea which chicken is responsible for this tiny egg, but it’s one of the younger girls. And this was her first egg. It was definitely the smallest egg I’ve ever seen. The egg next to it is another of our younger girls’ eggs. It’s smaller than most of our other eggs and definitely smaller than commercial eggs. This photo doesn’t show just how tiny this egg was.
I cracked it open last night. It had an incredibly thick shell (chickens use the same amount of calcium regardless of the size of the egg – larger eggs have thinner shells) and a very stiff, gelatinous albumen (white). The yolk was definitely under developed. I wish I had gotten a photo of it.

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Filed Under: Chicken Health, Chickens, Livestock Tagged With:

Flickr of Inspiration – Rye

Posted on February 22, 2011 · 2 Comments

I was honored to receive photos to post from photographer Heather Hoxsey. You can see more of her incredible photos on Flickr and buy some of her work on Etsy.

I’ll be posting more of her photos in future Tuesday Photo features. So stay tuned!

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Filed Under: Flickr of Inspiration

What Urban Homesteading Means to Us

Posted on February 21, 2011 · 5 Comments

It’s about security and health. But most of all it’s about community. Not just the urban homesteading community, but the community we live in.

Our security comes from knowing where our food comes from and that as long as we know how to grow it and raise it, we’ll always have it available. It’s about knowing what’s on and in our food. It’s about eating food that a corporation hasn’t touched and adulterated so far from it’s natural state that it’s no longer distinguishable.

But it’s the community. The community is the part I love. We have met some wonderful people in the urban farming/homesteading community that we are honored to now call friends. It’s about people that ask us questions and being able to help them be successful.

And it’s about helping feed our community. Extra food goes to our neighbors. It helps build relationships with them. And when your have good relationships with your neighbors it means that we all watch out for each other – a must in our community.

I’m not sure when I first heard the term “urban homesteading.” It may have been through Kitty, from Havenscourt Homestead when we first met her back in February 2010. It could have been when I was looking at books on being self sufficient while living in cities and came across The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City (Process Self-reliance Series).

Here are a bunch of other homesteaders – urban, suburban and rural – that are part of our wonderful community at home and abroad. Go check them out and say hi from me!

100 Mile Locavores
After the Crash
Animal Instinct
Annie’s Kitchen Garden
Birgitts_Place
Cadence Dairy Goats
Champagne Wishes and Coupon Dreams
Chile Chews
Cookers Urban Homestead
Curbstone Valley Farm
Deaf Dogs and Benevolent Gnomes
Drinkable Garden
Eating More Local Chard
Ghost Town Farm
Greenhorn in the Garden
Havenscourt Homestead
It’s All Happening
Itty Bitty Farm in the City
Jimmy Cracked Corn
Kitchen Sink Collective
My Little Garden In Japan
Northwest Edible Life
On Hollyhock Farm 
Pineheaven Farm
Pluck and Feather
Rachel’s Tiny Farm
Root Simple
Sicilian Sisters Grow Some Food
Soul Flower Farm
Teufel Hunden Farm
The American Society of Permaculture
The Original Henry Milker
The Wisdom of the Radish
Through the Eyez of Denimflyz
Town Mouse and Country Mouse
Urban Dirt
Yellow Tree Farm

Speaking of community. If you live in the SF Bay Area, don’t forget that we’ll be having a potluck on April 30th to welcome Spring. Email me if you want to be added to the invite list.

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Basic Egg Custard

Posted on February 20, 2011 · 4 Comments

When I was in 7th grade, my parents signed a form giving permission for me to participate in a raffle put on by my science class. The prize? Tiny baby chicks from our egg-incubation study. I am sure my folks were skeptical. Chickens? We lived in suburban Santa Cruz. People didn’t have chickens in our neighborhood.
But for some reason (perhaps owing to some spectacularly melodramatic pleading on my part?) they signed it.
It is possible that they’d done the math and figured the likelihood of my winning (8 chicks in a class of 35 kids) was slim. Maybe they thought saying yes would save them from having to break my heart and statistics would win out. Boy were they wrong. Only a few parents signed the forms, and I came home with not one but TWO tiny balls of fluff that afternoon.
Like any good 7th grader, I immediately informed my parents about the various duties we would all be expected to perform as new chicken-parents. Namely, I would be in charge of their socialization and upbringing (read: cuddling, playing with) while my parents would make sure the darling little things stayed alive (read: building coop/run, feeding, mucking coop, etc).
These two (named Rikki and Lucy) were the first of many chickens I would raise through my teenage years. I can’t say that I was a very good homesteader (wait, am I still allowed to use that word?), nor was I particularly interested in having chickens once they got past the fluffy-and-cute phase. I’m sure that most of the hard work was actually done by my folks, who tolerated my flights of fancy and let me go on pretending I was Laura Ingalls. Until, of course, they informed me that Laura “wouldn’t have gotten to eat sugar cereal, living out on the prairie and all”.

Still, though, I look back on that first day as a chicken-owner as the beginning of something pretty big. We now have chickens and ducks and a yard that provides a good amount of the fresh produce we consume. Would I be the person I am today if I hadn’t won that raffle in 7th grade? Who knows…maybe my parents DID know what they were getting me into when they signed that form, after all.
note: until I started raising chickens, I did not know eggs were seasonal. When the days get shorter, egg production slows and even stops in most birds, and we have made the choice to let our girls rest instead of installing artificial lights to keep them laying.
I can make do without a lot of things. I like to think of myself as pretty handy in the kitchen, and it generally takes a lot to really trip me up. However, when the chickens stop laying for the winter, it really throws a wrench into my plans. I LOVE fresh eggs.
Knowing what I know about the poultry and egg production industries, however, I will no longer support “farms” that de-beak or otherwise mis-treat their birds. So when free-range eggs come off the shelves, well, we make do. It’s not fun. I do not like it. But we go without.
This basic no-frills custard is the first thing I make when I have too many eggs. Think of it as a celebration: the ladies are back in business!

Basic Egg Custard
3 c milk (I use 1% or 2% for this recipe. Some people really like the silkier, richer flavor of whole milk or cream in a baked custard, but I have always liked this recipe a little lighter)
4 fresh eggs, cracked and scrambled lightly
3/4 c evaporated cane juice (or other light-colored granulated sugar)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg (use powdered if you can’t get the fresh stuff)

Find a baking dish (a casserole dish, ramekin, glass bowl, or pyrex cake pan would be fine, here) that will fit completely inside a larger high-sided pan. Place the smaller pan inside the larger pan: there should be space on all 4 sides. You’ll be filling this space with water once the pans are in the oven (making a water bath for the custard ensures that it comes up to temperature more slowly and the heat is distributed evenly, preventing the eggs from seizing and becoming grainy or rubbery).

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

In a mixing bowl (sometimes I do this directly into the baking dish), combine the milk, eggs, sugar, and vanilla. Do not add the nutmeg yet. Whisk until the eggs are completely combined and the sugar does not settle to the bottom of the bowl. Pour the mixture into the smaller pan. Sprinkle the nutmeg over the top of the mixture (it will float) and carefully place both pans in the oven. Using a pitcher or container with a pour-spout (I use my tea kettle for this), add warm water into the bigger pan until it is more than half-way up to the level of the custard mixture.


Bake this for about 30 minutes, or until a toothpick or knife inserted into the center of the custard comes out clean (it will seem wet, but there will be no egg on it).

This custard is delicious hot, but is probably my favorite breakfast of all time when it’s served cold the next morning. Ma Ingalls would approve.

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Filed Under: Baking, Breakfast, Desserts, Recipes Tagged With: , ,

Springtime!

Posted on February 19, 2011 · 6 Comments
Our almond and apricot trees are blooming now

We’re lucky. Springtime comes early around here. The last average frost date is March 27th.

Spring brings the promise of life. Birth. The buds are breaking and flowers are blooming. Baby animals populate our urban farm. And really, who doesn’t love baby animals?

Lucy and her 5 kits (gotta love the foot in the back)

The kits are getting big. They are already starting to eat rabbit food and nursing less. Though to be honest, rabbits are very secretive about certain things. Giving birth, nursing young and eating poo. Yes, they eat their own poo, but it’s not something you will probably ever see. Esperanza, from Pluck and Feather, did a very informative post about this when she was hand raising kits whose mother had died in a really bad heat wave. Rabbit kits are very difficult to hand raise and she did a fantastic job and was awesome enough to share with us how she did it. We now have two of those kits and they are big and healthy, though they like to nibble – the downside of not having mom to teach them not to bite.

Chicks!

We also picked up 15 more chicks yesterday. We got 5 White Plymouth Rocks, 5 Buckeyes and 5 Dark Cornish. The Dark Cornish will all be meat birds. They aren’t particularly known for their egg laying abilities. We will keep 2 of each of the other breeds for egg laying and use the remaining birds for meat production. According to a survey conducted by Mother Earth News, Buckeyes and Cornish were rated very high in taste. The Plymouth Rock and Buckeye are also both listed on SlowfoodUSA’s Ark of Taste.

Pregnant Goats!

Bella has 3 weeks left in her pregnancy. She’s more and more uncomfortable. She’s not sleeping or sunning herself on the spools as much. For the year that we’ve had her she’s never just laid on the ground. Now she is. She’s gained 30lbs. It’s really neat to feel the kid(s) kick. We’re nervous about the birth since neither of us have ever helped a goat kid. The only births that we have experienced here are rabbit kindlings and, well, we don’t have to do anything to help out with that.

When does Spring visit you? And what does it entail at your home?

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Filed Under: Chickens, Farm Diary, Goats, Livestock, Rabbits Tagged With: , ,

Calling all Urban Homestead Bloggers!

Posted on February 19, 2011 · 19 Comments

This Monday blog about your Urban Homestead and what Urban Homesteading means to you! Let me know if you’re planning on joining in and I’ll make sure to link to your blog on Monday.

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