Our Green Table

These little ladies are getting into summer mode. Yesterday we got 9 eggs, today we got 9 eggs (so far). I designed this fancy egg carton label and on the inside of the cartons we have a hen profile such as, “Meet Ambrosia” and “Brown Egg Layers”.

We made this delicious skillet souffle with:
6 eggs
3/4 lb spinach
2 cloves minced garlic
3 oz crumbled blue cheese
1 diced onion
2 Tbs milk
1/4 C wild rice

Cook rice. Slightly beat eggs. Mix 6 eggs + blue cheese + milk. Meanwhile, cook garlic and onion in skillet with olive oil until soft on med heat. Add spinach to skillet and cook together for a little while (maybe 2 min). Turn on oven broiler.

Pour in egg mixture and stir until mixed. Sprinkle lightly with parmesan cheese. Let cook without stirring for 2-4 minutes (until egg on bottom does not move.

Without jostling too much, move from stovetop to broiler. Broil for 2-4 minutes. Enjoy!

It came out great. Definitely plan to make this again!

We’ve been feeding our hens 16% protein complete conventional feeds from Ranch-way and Purina. The ladies have a big feeder that holds about twenty-five pounds of feed. It does an amazing job of preventing them from beaking out pellets, and they can go two or three days between refills.

In addition, I can’t resist giving them a small ration of scratch grains each day, ostensibly to help them stay warm…scratch is a high-fat feed, a mixture of cracked corn, wheat, and milo….but also for the sheer joy of seeing them frantically devouring the tiny pearls of grain. We give them a cup or two of dry scratch each day, some days a bit more and some days none at all.

Inspired by The Modern Homestead’s excellent information on sprouting to enhance poultry feeds, I decided to start a small scale sprouting operation. Scratch grains are inexpensive but relatively low quality food for the ladies. By sprouting, we can enhance the nutritional content of the grains. Wheat, for example, increases its vitamin E content by 300% and riboflavin content from 13 milligrams to 54 mg after two days growth. Seven days growth also turns 1/2 cup of dry scratch grains into a full 26oz jar of delicious sprouts. The growing sprouts are an excellent supplement for the birds, especially now when green forage is non-existent in their yard.

So far, it has been working extremely well and the chickens LOVE the sprouted grains. Here’s how it works:

We have seven spaghetti jars lined up on the fridge. Each day I’ve been feeding the oldest sprouts to the hens, rinsing the jar and refilling it with 1/2 cup of dry scratch grains. I give the dry grains a single rinse, then let them soak until the next morning. The other six jars of growing sprouts get a quick rinse in the morning and evening each day. By day seven, the sprouts are about an inch long, green, and taste like, well, grass.

I wonder if the additional nutrition from our sprout experiment helped kick start Lone Feather and the mystery layer to restart/start egg production after the recent (and brutal) cold snap…

Sure, it was twenty-five degrees below zero here two weeks ago. But today it was sunny and fifty, and the snow is disappearing fast. Feels like spring….and not only to me!

The chickens are enjoying the break in the weather, taking full advantage of the dry warm weather to take luxurious dust baths and eat copious quantities of dirt and rocks. I’ve been sprouting their scratch feed, and they are extremely grateful (more on that later).

Lone Feather, our adopted hen, stopped laying again during the cold snap…but was squawking this morning like something was on the way. And some of the “ex-broiler” hens have been acting funny, scratching around in the nest boxes as if to say, “hey, glad this is here….feels like I might want to do something here soon…” The birds are five months old tomorrow, and -should- start laying any day now.

So it wasn’t a tremendous surprise when I found not one, but two eggs in the coop this morning! Two eggs! Lone Feather and a mystery hen! They’ve started…and I can’t wait to see who lays what tomorrow.

I’ve been killing plants here in Estes Park for six years now. Last summer I decided to take a different tack, working with hardy, native and/or short season plants well adjusted to our (lack of) summers. Phase one was a re-landscaping of our cabin, with a combination of native and hardy edibles and perennials…currants, rhubarb, sand cherries, rasberries, cacti, and so on. The shrubs grew nicely in their first year, though we gathered but a single berry from most. We’ll see what bounty they raise in their second year.

This summer it’s all about food! I built six raised beds behind our rental property out of an old deck that was being thrown away and filled them with honest-to-goodness “well rotted manure” from the pile at Elkhorn Lodge stables. I’ll use a bunch of seeds that I’ve had on hand for the new gardens…seeds that I’ve collected from survivors here in the small cabin gardens. I also ordered a bunch of seeds from Seed Savers Exchange. Not to mention a stunning seed catalog, they have a wide…no, enormous variety of cold weather, short season, high altitude seeds available. So we’ll be growing Hidatsa Shield and Dragon Tongue beans, All Blue potatos, Silvery Fir Tree tomatos, Rostov sunflowers, and a delicious looking lettuce mix.

I’m planning on filling out the ranks with some Botanical Interests seeds, including quinoa, amaranth, carrots, and kale. It’s a bit early to start the seeds here, even indoors….so check back in mid March when I will start all the seedlings!

It’s been about six years since I quit eating meat. Since 2004, I have selectively re-introduced meat into my diet. First we butchered a locally killed elk, then a poached mule deer fawn from the local game warden. Especially around the holidays, meat is a difficult tradition to forgo, and I did miss Thanksgiving turkey and Christmas braciole.

For our Christmas dinner this year, though, we roasted a young rooster, raised from a chick and allowed to roam and peck and scratch behind our garage….until his cock-a-doodle-doo led us to behead, pluck, and freeze him. I’d only roasted a chicken once before, so I was nervous. Two hours at around 350 degrees later…

Roast chicken, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. Delicious.

This morning I went up to see the chickens and opened the coop door.  Some of the chickens ventured out despite the snow on the ground.  Lone feather was walking around squawking and poking her head in and out of the different nest boxes.  I watched her climb into one and scratch around a bit… preparing for something perhaps?

Indeed!  I came home today after a snowshoe hike for Kirk’s and found an early Christmas present from Lone Feather.

Lone Feather is a new addition to the happy hen house.  She was in another backyard chicken coop but was getting picked on.  After slaughtering the roosters, Mark and Diana brought Lone Feather over.  It was getting dark and we believe the pecking order was thoroughly disturbed after the day’s work.  She immediately showed all the chickens that she was tough, mercilessly running after and ripping out their feathers.  I wasn’t so sure it was going to work out to keep her, but the next day she was better – chasing and pecking but not ripping out feathers with every attack.  The following day, even better, mostly making mean chicken noises and chasing but not doing much as far as pecking.  Now she acts just like any other chicken…

Except she laid an egg!  Thank you, Lone Feather and Mark and Diana!