Duck update

Some while back, we turned off the timed lights and cut back the ducks' feed, which was supposed to stimulate the molt. It's worked… kind of.

Khaki Campbells are so named because they supposedly reminded Mrs. Campbell of the British army's khaki uniforms. Ours haven't quite displayed that plumage because, due to the timing of when we got them, they didn't have a fall molt last year and so are still wearing their "teenage" feathers. In particular, Mr. Drake still looks pretty much like a hen, complete with lack of curly tail feathers.

It's been quite a few weeks, and some of the ducks are very persistent layers. We still get two, occasionally three eggs a day. Four of the hens have definitely molted, usually with a very abrupt "dump" of all their wing feathers in a single day.

They look pretty scruffy when that happens (forgive the fuzzy picture, they are reasonably sure cameras are dangerous predators):

Not sure which bird this is, but she's lost most of her right wing, and has loose feathers on the left. As I recall, while I chased her around for pictures she was flapping for balance and losing feathers along the way.

Watching the big wing feathers come in is interesting. First they get a hollow tube that's the feather's outer shaft. Then the feather starts to come out the end of the tube, and gradually spreads out. Here's a closeup of Squeaky Duck's primaries just starting to show:

You can see her body feathers are still very ragged. Since that picture, she's fully molted, and is now a lovely chocolate brown again, along with three other hens. Interestingly, during the molt we had to refer to her as Yellow-Band again: her voice changed and she had a conversational quack, which she used pretty much continuously—none of them are very impressed with their mostly-barley diet, meant to reflect the reduced feeding conditions of a wild duck in the fall. Once she was done molting, though, she went back to her regular rusty-gate squeak, only quacking when she "shouted."

One of our other hens is in some distress, and we're probably going to have to end it soon. At first, we thought she was egg-bound—a risk when you cut the calcium but the duck continues to try to produce eggs. She hasn't gone septic, though, so that's not it. We're thinking it might be "water-belly," though that doesn't seem quite right either. At any rate, she's carrying a lot of excess weight, to the point she's nearly dragging the ground and has trouble walking. It's particularly noticeable now that most of the hens aren't laying and have lost weight due to their diet—compared to their usual egg-heavy look, they're kind of long-leggity beasties right now.

Water-belly isn't necessarily fatal—apparently it usually involves fluid retention around the heart (i.e. congestive heart failure), but we're not seeing her panting more than the effort of moving her bulk seems to warrant, so we're not sure. However, its effect on internal organs seems to mean you don't eat a bird you put down for it, so it doesn't look like we'll have duck for Thanksgiving—though we won't know for sure unless and until we slaughter her. And maybe not then; we're not exactly ducky autopsy experts.

Drake, as I said, is being a tease—he hasn't dropped many flight feathers, is only very slowly getting new body feathers, and still shows no sign of curly tail feathers. And he still quacks instead of trilling like drakes normally do, all of which has led everyone who knows anything about poultry to knowingly tell us we don't have a drake. But he has distinctly orange legs, and a distinctly green bill, and we regularly got seven-not-eight eggs, and I candled Broody Duck's stash once and there was a definite shadow (I was too squicked to actually open the egg), so we're pretty sure.

If he and the last three hens will get their act together and dump their feathers—as they probably will soon as the weather turns cool for sure—we'll probably ramp their feed and lighting back up and get them all laying again. Though I have to say, two or three eggs a day is about right for our family's use. If it weren't about the same amount of trouble to keep eight as three, we'd probably consider cutting the flock back.

Green tomato mincemeat

The problem with having local readers to your blog is that sometimes they track you down in person to insist that you not leave an entry like the last one hanging.

So, for Jim and the Delano Community Garden (whose tomato plants are still in the ground, but still likely to produce plenty of green ones), here's the mincemeat recipe.

6 lbs green tomatoes
2 lbs tart apples
2 c raisins
4 c brown sugar, firmly packed
2 c strong coffee
1 lemon (grated peel and juice)
2 t grated orange peel
1/2 c vinegar
1 t salt
1 t nutmeg
1 t allspice

Core and quarter tomatoes and apples; put through food chopper with raisins.

Combine all ingredients in large saucepan. Simmer 2 hours, stirring frequently.

Pack at once in hot pint jars. Adjust lids. Process in boiling-water bath 25 minutes.

Remove jars from canner and complete seals unless closures are self-sealing type. Makes about 10 pints.

Basic pie is four cups of mincemeat dotted with butter in a two-crust 9" pie, baked for 40-45 minutes and served warm.

My assessment of it was "apple pie with sweet relish in it," and to be honest, we didn't finish the pie. It wasn't bad, but it was… alien. The Farm Journal's subheader for it is "Decidedly different—on the tart side." I think I used apple cider vinegar, which in hindsight was not a good choice even though the following recipe, "Blue Ribbon Mincemeat," calls for cider (not cider vinegar).

I plan to pop a jar of it later to try some mincemeat cake…but for now, I'm going to crawl back into my non-blogging hole until I get over the bronchitis that's made me so "quiet" this week.

Green-tomato-and-coffee pie

When life gives you green tomatoes, make…mincemeat.

I mentioned the quantity of green tomatoes I picked before the freeze, but I forgot to mention the other green tomatoes I picked: the second-generation JetStar volunteer had had a pound or two of green tomatoes on it. I picked those Friday night to take to my mother-in-law's neighbor (the one who grew up in That House two doors down the street) so she could make green-tomato pie.

That left me with over six pounds of green tomatoes, so I decided to look into this green-tomato pie thing. Mom's Farm Journal pie book had a recipe, but next to it was one that called for six, yes, six pounds of green tomatoes:


Mincemeat.

I have only encountered mincemeat in figures of speech before, but I couldn't turn down something that called for exactly the amount of tomatoes I had, right? So my trip to the store today involved picking up some raisins and a lemon, the only ingredients I didn't have. But this is one of those recipes that seems incredibly unlikely. I can buy into the green tomatoes, and the apples, and the lemon juice, and the raisins, and the vinegar…but who decided to put coffee in their pie? Coffee? I was beginning to wonder if this wasn't Farm Journal's idea of a joke played on us city folk.

If it is, I'm playing along. Real farm wives don't have to process eight pounds of tomatoes and apples in a two-cup food processor, though. But my little Kitchenaid chopper survived, and the mixture is simmering now—minus the brown sugar. I'll split the batch and put Splenda in some of it. I have to say, it started out smelling like some kind of weird spiced coffee (allspice, nutmeg and vinegar, yum!), and then the green tomatoes and Granny Smiths (Grannies Smith?) made it look like some kind of mutant guacamole, but it's all mellowing together now in both smell and appearance.

It's supposed to make ten pints, which is enough for five pies. Assuming I bake two pies (one sugary, one sugarless), that leaves six jars, which is one load in my mother-in-law's canning thingummy (technical city-folk term there), so I might actually borrow that and try it…provided we like the first pie, anyway. (Coffee?!)

The end of the garden

The first frost date in Wichita is usually a whole lot later than October 10, but this year we got a cold front early and expected to get a frost or killing freeze last night. Didn't quite happen (I think the low ended up 34), but it's been unseasonably cold long enough that the tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers have mostly given up already. Between that and the July hailstorm, I had a pretty short summer growing season.

I just picked six or seven pounds of green Roma tomatoes off two plants. I think I got half a dozen ripe ones all told. There were a few green JetStars, and that was it.

The strawberries survived being overgrown by the Romas, and I just mulched them for the winter. They've thrown out a few runners, but it'll still be a year or two more before they fill that square and I start harvesting berries.

The green beans did remarkably well, considering I didn't plant any this year. I got volunteers that took over the north fence, from the overripe pods that I missed last fall. I tore those vines apart yesterday, getting the last couple pounds of beans off them.

I've also been invited to help myself to the neighbor's Purple Hyacinth Beans, which they've grown as an ornamental. My scarlet runners didn't do well (only one sprouted, and it died in the hailstorm), so next year I'll try the purple out front. They're technically an edible-pod bean, though I gather they're not the best-flavored, and like most purple beans the color fades when they're cooked.

The Marketer cucumbers recovered from the hail, and I got plenty to give away as well as a moderate amount to pickle. The Lemon cukes never showed up, or if they did they cross-pollinated with the Marketers and came out the usual shape and color. Next year I may consider Lemons only.

The spring/summer cabbages did well. I got Early Dutch instead of (IIRC) Stonehead, and between that and this year's more reasonable rainfall, got much larger heads without splitting.

The Malabar spinach has done impressively well after a very slow start. It sprouted well after I'd given up on it, and almost uprooted the first few assuming they were from windblown weed seeds. It loves heat, so I expected it to have wilted like the cucumbers well before the actual frost date. Instead, it's hung on enthusiastically even through the mid-30's nights. It's just starting to bud, so maybe I'll see flowers, or even some seed to save.

The sweet potatoes are the one thing I'm worried about. Poking around turned up a potato just a few inches long, and the vines are very frost-tender, so if they don't survive awhile longer I'm not sure I'll get anything out of them. Fortunately, they're easy to throw plastic over. They're not really suited to small raised beds, but I couldn't resist the temptation to try them this year.

I replanted zucchini and summer squash after the hail, next to the winter box where I'd spilled a fair amount of Mel's Mix and figured, why let good growing medium go to waste? While only the summer squash came up, for a wonder it didn't get eaten by squash vine borers this year (perhaps the ducks are doing their job?) I got enough of that to give away without making everyone run in fear, and like the Malabar it has thrived even in the much cooler weather, so I might get some more yet.

The potatoes did moderately well though they didn't set fruit in the compost piled on top of them, only in the box itself. I think that's because the duck bedding (cedar shavings) wasn't dense enough to trigger the "roots" that carry the potatoes. I put in some peat moss, but I think that was a bit late to trigger anything. I also lost a bit to what I suspect was late blight, so maybe next year I'll skip potatoes or plant them only in fresh beds.

The Hungarian Wax ("Mr. Pepper-Nose") Pepper and the "Fooled You" heatless jalapeño are in pots. The former came indoors, the latter will get left to the elements. The bell peppers fought back after the hail, and I have a couple of smallish peppers that might possibly get big enough to harvest, though I seriously doubt I'll learn whether the survivors were red or yellow peppers.

The fennel is also in a pot. It's supposedly Florence fennel, but as far as I can tell it hasn't even considered formed a bulb. Maybe this is because the black swallowtail caterpillars kept eating its leaves, I don't know, but I suspect it's actually the wrong kind of fennel. It's inside, sharing a pot with parsley (which was supposed to give the butterflies something other than fennel to eat).

The cherry tomato was in a pot, which came indoors but only because of the Swiss Chard that's finally coming up in that pot (after I gave up on it and planted the cherry tomato seedling in with it). There's more chard in the winter frame.

Also coming indoors briefly is the worm bin. I wasn't sure how the worms were doing, since they don't care for temperatures below 40. I opened the bin to take a look…and discovered it was full of water. Oops. Not quite full, though, and the couple inches of mulch above water level were absolutely swarming with very active worms. Whew. I drained the water, and brought the thing in, but it's going back outside as soon as the weather gets above freezing. A worm bin is supposed to have aerobic decomposition, which isn't smelly. Underwater, the anaerobic bacteria take over, and they stink—stick your head inside a restaurant Dumpster to get an idea. Once it dries out a little and the anaerobic bacteria die off it'll be fine again, but in the meantime the worms will just have to be chilly. Hopefully things will warm up enough and I'll feel healthy enough to dump the bin and sort out the finished compost to top-dress the empty frames.

Overall, a pretty good season considering the amount of neglect that went into it. I'm probably going to revisit the allergist as soon as our insurance rolls over. I love the veggies, but it's not worth being half-sick all summer. If it turns out to be the garden, I guess I'll have take up hydroponics or something.

Going to Abilene

There's a saying in our household that comes from a training session Carl went through at the aircraft plant: "Are we just going to Abilene?" I should have Carl explain it properly, but in the example, a group went to Abilene because everybody thought everybody else wanted to go.

See, I ended up going to the State Fair this year only after it was over, because we were all round-robining various sinus infections and the like and didn't get to the Fair proper. I was picking up my mother-in-law's entries (her scrapbook of her dad's WWII memorabilia took second place), and while I was in Hutchinson I decided to swing by some of the antique stores there. I think I ended up in just one, plus the Ten Thousand Villages/Et Cetera Shop combo, but while I was there I scored a nifty little purple china salt dip for MIL's collection. (Or her eBay store; anything she already has enough of goes there. But I think that one's a keeper.)

When I told my mother this, she asked why I hadn't invited her along. One, because I didn't know she was interested in antiquing, and two, because I kinda only went antiquing on the spur of the moment; wasn't sure stores would be open on Mondays, especially Monday-after-the-Fair when I think all Hutchinson doesn't want to see another tourist ever again. But, we decided, we'd plan to do that together sometime soon. So this week, I invited her to go to Abilene. I mean, Hutchinson.

The night before, somehow or other we managed to figure out that she was chiefly going antiquing because she thought I wanted to. I like doing it, but I pretty much only go because my mother-in-law does; my interests are narrow enough to make it more of a museum visit for me. However, my mother is on a bit of a scavenger hunt for a particular kind of bud vase, one that turns up in thrift stores instead of antique stores. So after some discussion, we decided to go on a thrifting road trip instead. She'd exhausted all the Wichita thrift stores' supplies of this type of bud vase, so we headed out of town.

First up was Newton, where we hit the Salvation Army store and promptly scored four bud vases. (Her friend needs sixty.) Next up was the Et Cetera store, where we found zero bud vases, but scored a singularly awesome find which I can't talk about because it's for my sister (hi Sis) who reads this blog but never comments, same as Mom (hi Mom). I also introduced Mom to Ten Thousand Villages, where I failed to convince her to buy more giraffes, and the office supply store, which is a much more interesting place than it sounds.

Then we zoomed out 50 to Hutch, where we hit the Anchor Inn for lunch. It's a pretty famous Mexican buffet that we'd never been to. It was good, but we were not sure it deserves the fame. It was next door to the Salvation Army (zero bud vases) and catty-corner to the Apron Strings kitchen store (zero bud vases), where I spent too much money but I now have an industrial-strength apple wedger. We wear those things out fast.

On the fourth corner of that intersection are antique stores: zero bud vases, but some cool Victrolas and such. Then it was back to the Salvation Army store since my sister (hi Sis) returned Mom's phone call and told us yes, she wanted the punch bowl we'd seen there. (She'd wanted to borrow Mom's, which just got sold in the garage sale. Oops.) No bud vases had shown up while we were gone, nor had the punch bowl been sold. We drove around a bit looking for the Goodwill store, but since I hadn't brought the phone book and we'd taken my car instead of Mom's with the GPS, we were kind of blindly looking and didn't find it.

After that, we headed home, this time through Yoder. We didn't stop, since Mom was worn out and pretty much the only place worth stopping in anymore is the quilt shop. It replaced the little consignment-booth craft shop that I think was the last surviving source of made-in-Yoder things (discounting the quilts at the Carriage Crossing Restaurant entrance, which are out of my price range). I did stop there on my post-Fair trip, though there again, I can't say what I got since it might be Christmas presents, on the off chance I get around to doing some sewing before then.

So yeah, we basically could have hit the Newton Salvation Army and come straight home, and saved a whole bunch of time. But hey, that's the adventure of thrifting.

Oh, and the funny thing about "going to Abilene" in this case is that the real Abilene (specifically, the Kansas one) is one of the places I go antiquing, and I almost invited Mom there instead of Hutch in the first place.

Cow in my driveway

Mother-in-law and I made a road trip to Grenola, Kansas, this morning, and came home with a very large passenger.

Seven hundred and sixty-four pounds large, to be specific. Of course, it had gained weight since that picture and was over 1,100 pounds, but it's lost weight since then. Yep, we got a side of beef for the Freezer Of Dooooom. But not exactly.

See, there were supposed to be three cattle. A whole one for my mother-in-law, a whole one for her brother (who's doing the raising), and one to split between us and her brother's daughter. But one calf died, so we ended up with a "third of a cow"—we split one with my mother-in-law, her brother split one with his daughter.

I assumed MIL knew the way to the processor; it was down near her brother's place in Elk Falls. Turns out she didn't, quite, so we got to Grenola, Kansas by way of Winfield, and what I thought were pretty back-country roads. I busted out the map after she missed the turn for 160.

We made it to Grenola, after which we followed signs to Family Tree… and left the pavement for some real back-country roads. Two-lane gravel became one-and-a-half-lane gravel, and we were there. They helped us load up bags upon bags of frozen beef, and advised us to "drive slow" on the way out so the van didn't bottom out. The road isn't quite that bad, and the van wasn't quite that overladen, but we took it easy.

We stopped at the 160 Cafe in Burden, beef and all, and had an early lunch. MIL had a hamburger (to my amusement; we had a couple hundred in the van, and she had already said she'd taken some Schwan's burgers out to thaw for dinner), I had a chicken-fried steak sandwich. We then wished we had our cameras, since her burger looked like it was surely a full pound, and my steak was about twice the size of the bun. And her "homemade fries" were probably two large potatoes' worth. (The menu, also to our amusement, lists "frozen fries" as an option, apparently for those sad souls who dislike potato skin so much they'll skip homemade fries.)

We managed to take the correct route home, and pulled into my driveway to divvy up the beef. I pulled out laundry baskets and we sorted beef right out of the back of the van, two for her, one for me, until we had bags of beef all over the yard. The neighbors, by now, have learned to ignore our crazy antics, so this drew no attention beyond perhaps a muttered "at least they're not slaughtering it there." Then it was time to heft approximately 509 pounds of it back into the van, and approximately 255 pounds of it into my house, the latter to the delight of Baxter the dachshund, who almost dove into the bag of fat scraps. I barricaded myself in the kitchen and sorted beef, then lugged it down to the Freezer Of Doooom (henceforth FOD), and managed to make it all fit.

Then I came back upstairs and realized I'd left one bag: the frozen fat scraps, which was frozen into a block the size of one of their freezer trays, and that unless I took everything back out of the FOD and removed some of the dividers and baskets, it wasn't going in the FOD no way, no how.

That was all the excuse I needed to toss it in the van and head up to help MIL unload hers…where I happily discovered my husband's brother had already shown up and loaded all the beef. My tray of fat went into one of her several freezers nicely.

So now, aside from a lot of fat (some of which will get rendered down for soap and suet), I have quite a few cow parts I don't normally buy at the butcher shop, which will make for some interesting adventures in cooking. Kidneys (steak and kidney pie!), heart, and tongue.

Yes. Tongue. Be glad I can't figure out why the camera's not transferring to the PC, because otherwise I would take pictures of this lovely frozen cow tongue, which will undoubtedly traumatize my son if he sees it, and probably some of my readers. Because it's unmistakeably a tongue.



Frozen. Cow. Tongue.

And now you're all hoping I'll go back to monthly posting, if not less often, right?

So now we're blogging monthly?

How did that happen?

And how is it that our house isn't painted, if I haven't been wasting time blogging?

It's not been for lack of blogging possibilities. I could blog on the ducks' molting. Or on the garden's decision to make up for time lost to the hail storm. Or on the dining room "remodel." And the neighborhood association work could be a blog of its own.


I'll probably recap some of those, once I get around to taking pictures off the camera. But for now, I'll just say I'm not dead (yet), and hopefully I'll have some exterior progress to blog about in October.