Snow Day

I was on kid duty Friday so Danielle could go to a farming conference. It happened to work out well since we received a couple inches of snow Thursday, not enough to cause Danielle any problems getting to the conference, but enough for the kids and I to have some fun.

Emily and Julia bundled up to help me with the morning chores.

And here is what the barn yard looked like when we walked out.

The girls were checking out some bunny tracks in the upper corner of the field, but the Turkeys thought they were playing with them.

Here is Sisyphus and his sister trying to roll his snow boulder up to the barn.

Goat Curry

Since winter has set in I decided to spice things up by trying some new recipes. As I blogged about here I butchered our Nigerian Dwarf Goat wether earlier this fall. At the time we grilled up some of the tenderloin and enjoyed it, but since then the goat meat has just been sitting in the deep freeze. Not just wanting to do beef recipes with goat I went to the largest cookbook in existence, the web. Typing goat stew into Google brought me to a Caribbean Goat Stew recipe that sounded interesting. I followed the recipe fairly faithfully except for omitting the tomatoes since we obviously do not have any fresh ones. I could have pulled some frozen ones out of the freezer but I was being lazy. The resulting stew was great (if I do say so myself) but what was even better was that everyone ate it. Now my kids are very adventurous eaters, but I would not have been surprised if they had passed on this meal. The curry gave it a nice kick, but did not make it too spicy for the kids. The funny thing is that everyone liked the meat, it was the potatoes and carrots that were not as well received. They came out as I would have expected and as I have had in other Indian Curries, but Danielle thought it would be better with vegetables cooked separately with a different flavoring. Truth be told she is not much for stew, or mushy vegetables. I knew that she really did like the goat though when she mentioned making the curried meat but with a different side dish later this week.

I find I get great enjoyment out of my kids eating food that I raised and prepared myself. My dad used to tell me something similar when I was a kid but I did not appreciate it until I had kids of my own. I guess that is always the case.

Julia's Birthday

My lovely daughter Julia turns 9 today. To celebrate here are some pictures of her over the last year.

Driving the tractor on a warm winter day (January 07).

Tilling up the garden (March).

Helping me construct the mobile chicken coop (April).

Swinging in the crab apple tree (April).

Riding on the water wagon (May).

Hanging out with her cousin (June).

Fishing (July).

Hiking the C&O Canal (August).

Collecting eggs (September).

Kyoshi Warrior (October).

High atop a load of straw (November).

Farm chores on a cold winter morning (December).

For anyone with a slow internet connection I am sorry for all the pictures, but Julia does a lot in a year.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY Julia!!!
Love Papa

Holiday Feast

A couple days after Christmas my mother, father, sister and nephew drove down from New Jersey to celebrate the holidays. I took the opportunity to try out, so to speak, one of my new presents. Danielle got me The River Cottage Meat Book for Christmas this year.

This book is a wonderful combination of political/social commentary on food production, cooking theory, recipes as well as gorgeous pictures and humorous anecdotes. It is truly a coffee table book with a message, and being a new farmer/foodie I am all ears. I was already planning to make prime rib since we had some in the deep freeze from last years side of beef, and figured this would be a great occassion to try out my first recipe from the book. I cooked up two prime rib roasts since neither seemed big enough for the 5 adults and 4 children who would be eating dinner.

Fairly simple recipe for the beef, rub with olive oil, salt and pepper, cook for 30 minutes under high heat to brown the outside then slow cook until done. Hugh, the author of the book, stresses that all roasted meat needs to rest for a minimum of 30 minutes for best results. Actually, the way he talks about it, you are committing a mortal sin if you don't let the meat rest. So while the meat was resting we took some of the drippings and made some Yorkshire Pudding (also from a recipe in the book).

I had never had Yorkshire Pudding so was not really sure as what to expect. There really is not much in Yorkshire Pudding, the recipe called for just flour, milk, water, salt and eggs. It did call for 4 eggs plus 2 more egg yolks which makes it quite decedent. The pudding puffed up nicely as you can see above, and the meat was thankful for the rest.

We also had mashed potatoes, gravy, and a green salad from our garden to round out the meal. Below is some of the dinner party.


My daughters were dressed up as fairies, and my son was too hot from playing with his cousin to wear a shirt, we have a very relaxed dress code at Chez Kushmerick. My nephew and sister are also in the picture, arguably much more appropriately dressed. Long story short the dinner and company was excellent and too many bottles of wine were consumed, exactly how I like to spend the holidays. The Yorkshire Pudding was a huge success, and based on the way it disappeared I foresee making it again soon.

Hope everyone had an enjoyable holiday full of good food and friends.

Early Xmas Present

We were gifted with a beautiful rainbow a couple days before Christmas.

Ice Storm

We got an ice storm Saturday night/Sunday morning. We got off light compared to the midwest but everything did get a thick glaze of ice.


Julia came out to help me tend the animals, and had a lot of fun knocking the ice off the fences and gates.




All the animals weathered the storm fine. Luckily the pigs and sheep respect the electric netting since the thick glaze of ice would have prevented it from shocking them.


A large branch from a neighbors evergreen came down due to the ice landing on our fence. After cutting it free with the chainsaw, the fence rebounded, although I may need to add a t-post at the spot to take out the slight bow that is left.


The asparagus stalks were finished off by the ice. They were ready to be cut down anyway, but they do make quite a tangled mess.

High Tunnel Construction Part 2

Snapped a few pictures of the finished hoop house when I got home from work last evening.
Danielle purchased the 6 mil plastic in a roll 100 ft long and 40 ft wide. The plastic is held in place along the sides by simply burying it in a shallow trench. We cut 24 ft of the plastic so that we had 2 ft on each side to bury in the ground.
The ends are framed out with 2 x 4s with a 4 ft wide door on one end and a window at the other.
We need the window so that we can get cross ventilation on warm days so that we don't bake the plants. You can see some of the seedlings in the picture above.

T-posts are driven into the ground and attached to the end frames to add support. It is not really clear but we also strung all the hoops together with rope to tie the entire structure together. Probably the most difficult part was figuring out how to attach the plastic at the ends. We ended up just stapling it in place, which was easy enough, but I had wanted to avoid it so that we could more easily remove and reuse the plastic. Well we see how it holds up and we may end up leaving this in place all year since we are expanding our market garden, thanks to all the rooting the pigs are doing -- but that is another post. As far as holding up to the weather the hoop house so far has proven up to the task. It was something of a trial by fire, since the day after we finished it we had a nasty wind storm with 50 mph wind gusts followed by 5-6 inches of snow. Besides having to knock the accumulated snow off the top of the tunnel all was well.

I need to put a remote thermometer in the hoop house to get an idea of how well it is doing at insulating the plants. As you can see in the pictures from inside the tunnel it has already started to create its own weather system thanks to water vapor condensation.

High Tunnel Construction

Here are some photos from our high tunnel construction project. I am sure Danielle, will explain the rationale and such on her blog later, but since I am known as Manuel on the farm I will just give you an idea of the construction. It is a simple design, 4 ft long rebar driven into the ground with 1 ½ inch pvc conduit slipped over it to form the hoops. The hoops themselves are 20 ft long and 14 ft across at the ground which makes the tunnel just under 6 ft high in the middle. The overall length of the house is 34 feet.

One of the great things about this type of building is that you can vary the dimensions to fit your space/needs. We wanted to get the most plantable area so we went with a slightly wider footprint, 14 ft for the 20 ft long hoops, most designs suggested a 12 ft span. Adding the extra 2 ft in width dropped the middle some, but since Danielle and the kids will be doing most of the work inside it makes little difference.

We were only able to get the conduit locally in 10 ft lengths, but they did come with bell ends so we were able to glue them together without a separate coupler. The kids helped me do the conduit gluing, and measuring out and pounding in of the rebar. Emily and I bent the hoops into position and slipped them over the rebar.








I will post pictures of the framed out ends, as well as the finished product when I get a chance.

First Snow

Well we are having our first snow of the season, and it reckons to be a real one. We have at least an inch already and it isn't even noon yet. Overall they are calling for up to four to six inches. Went out deer hunting this morning but nothing seems to be moving with the snow falling. Maybe I will get lucky this afternoon if it lets up.

The pigs now have access to part of the market garden and seem to
be enjoying cleaning up the leftover corn stalks and other vegetable matter.

The Navajo-Churro sheep don't mind the snow at all with their nice thick wool coats.

This will likely be the only snow many of these geese see, as we need to butcher them soon for Xmas.

Silly Geese

Our Chinese Geese are growing well. We plan to harvest all but three (one gander and two female geese) the week before Christmas. While my wife will not miss them getting into the market garden -- they did a job on the radishes -- I will miss the funny way they flock about the pastures. They get all excited and have an almost deafening squawk when it is feeding time, but easily get spooked and run off flapping their wings. They are unable to fly more than a few feet but they make quite a spectacle of themselves trying.

Reducing Numbers on the Farm

Haven't posted much recently due to all the work around the farm. In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving we reduced our poultry numbers significantly. First we took forty nine broilers and six of our Royal Palm turkeys in for processing on Monday November 12th. We recently purchased a second freezer in which to store said birds. The fifteen Narragansett turkeys we were selling were scheduled to go in Thursday night November 15th.

When I got home from work on Thursday and saw my daughter in the house she informed me that the turkeys were up by the barn. Since I knew Danielle had planned on having them loaded up into the dog kennels which we use to transport them I thought everything was set. After asking Julia if they were all loaded up she said "not exactly". It turns out that Danielle and the kids had been chasing our free range turkeys around our and our neighbors pastures for much of the day. She had only managed to catch two or three, but had localized a bunch with poultry netting up by the barn. Five had jumped the fences onto neighbors properties and were so skiddish from being chased all day that we were unable to get them back where they belonged. That night we were able to coax the rest of them into two of the stalls in our barn. Hopping to still get all of the turkeys to the processor for our 5:30 AM appointment Danielle and I woke up at 4AM on Friday to try to catch the wayward birds and get them loaded onto the pickup truck. We had no luck that morning with the five that had flown the coop so we decided to just take up the nine Narragansett and two Royal Palms we had been able to capture.

Over the weekend we were able to get all the birds back on our property, and confined in the barn stalls. Friends of ours who had arrived Friday night, got to see what a working farm is like, as Danielle and I plucked and processed four turkeys on Saturday. I remember their older son (~6 years old) asking me "is it dead" as I carried a recently deceased bird in from the barn to be plucked and eviscerated. Finally Tuesday night, two days before Thanksgiving I got around to butchering the last two turkeys, one of which was a rather large tom which would be our Thanksgiving bird.

All in all everything worked out fine. We were able to fill all our orders, have a couple birds in the freezer available for sale for Christmas, as well as a few smaller 8-10 pound birds for us to eat throughout the winter. The fabulous Thanksgiving dinner, along with the rave reviews of those that purchased the birds makes it all worthwhile.

Heritage Turkeys

We are getting ready to take our heritage Narragansett and Royal Palm turkeys to the processors next week in preparation for Thanksgiving. The New York Times has a short article on why it is important to keep these and other heritage breeds around.


The upper picture is our Narragansett Tom, the lower is our hen with her poults right after they hatched last May.

Load of Straw

With the dry summer hay and straw is scarce in these parts. Danielle has been calling around without much luck trying to find some straw for bedding once we move the animals back to the barn. Thursday she calls me at work to tell me that I am picking up 30 bales after work. She had talked to the farmer on the phone and got directions to his place. Therein lies the first problem. If you have ever received directions from someone who has lived their entire life in the same town you know that they do not necessarily give the best directions. I guess that is not completely fair. They do not give directions that an outsider can follow, since they tend to use landmarks and names for places and roads that are not the norm (i.e. not on Google Maps).

I am supposed to meet the farmer between 6:30 and 7:00 PM, which means in pitch black, due to the season and the fact that it is a new moon. I drive around for a half hour trying to find his place, turn out he does not actually live on the street he told my wife, and am unable to get him on the phone since it is busy. After going up and down a bunch of country roads I finally find his drive and pull into his place which has no outside lights on. The nice guy comes out and states matter-of-factly, "must of been hard finding this place in the dark".

He directs me to pull around to the back of his barn and we begin to load up the truck. I have a tough time keeping up stacking the bales as he tosses them in the back of my truck. He has no lights on the outside of his barn so I do my best to strap it all down in the little bit of light that is coming from inside the barn. Not happy with the security of my load, I drive a mile or so and pull into a McDonalds, park under a light pole in their parking lot and rearrange the load. Then it is a slow drive with blinkers on back to my place.

The kids ckome out of the house and are all excited to see the truck all loaded up and want to be on top of the straw mountain.





Then Danielle and the kids help me unload it all into our loft.



All and all it worked out fine, we now have straw for the winter, and I learned not to pickup straw from an unknown farm at night.