This Week's Harvest News

Raspberries, Kohlrabi, and Chigger Bites

Our CSA members will be glad to find they are only getting two of the three of these treats in their harvest bags this week. Sherry, on the other hand, has gotten all three. Wild raspberries don’t really want to be captured;  the thorns themselves should let you know this. The problem oft times is not the thorns, though they are sharp and hurty, but it’s those hidden warriors that are the real guardians. Poison ivy, mosquitoes, chiggers, snakes, and heat stroke are all real and present dangers.

I myself don’t seem to be prone to chigger attack, but Sherry, my precious wife, seems to be irresistible not only to me but to these parasitic creatures. When she goes afield she is most assuredly coming back with chiggers. I didn’t even know we had chiggers here in East Central Indiana until she arrived here at the swamp.

Sherry risked life and limb Wednesday to snatch a few pounds of these heavily guarded morsels—the raspberries, not the chiggers—for our members. She returned from the field punctured, mosquito bitten, hot and chigger plagued.

Be sure to read Sherry’s post about her raspberry picking adventure.

Kohlrabi

Another item in this week’s harvest is kohlrabi. Kohlrabi, German for cabbage (kohl) and turnip (rabi), is a funny looking vegetable for sure and surely delicious. All of the plant is delicious but it is the swollen base of the stem that is typically the prize. The leaves can be cooked and eaten as greens or with greens, like collards. Try some cut up and in your salad. The bulb grows above ground and has the stem of the leaf circling the orb top to bottom. You can eat the bulb raw or cooked in the way you might cook turnips or Brussel sprouts.

I will include a recipe at the end of this post, in case you're interested in trying this vegetable the next time you see it in the store.

  Well that’s all I have for now and I’m done talk’n,  --Matty G

Recipe Spot

Matty’s Roasted Kohlrabi

Ingredients:

• 4 kohlrabi bulbs, peeled and cubed
  
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
  
• 2 Tablespoons olive oil
  
• ½ teaspoon salt
  
• 1/3 teaspoon pepper
  
• ¼ teaspoon lemon juice
  

Directions: Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. Pour onto baking sheet. Roast at 450 for about 15 minutes, turning cubes every 5 minutes or so. Makes 2 servings.

My Wild Raspberry Adventures

I’m not sure how this happened, but I found myself assigned with the chore of picking raspberries yesterday for our CSA shareholders all by my lonesome. Matty had to work, so the task was left to me. Why do such gardening activities always happen on the hottest day of the year? I had to finish writing a chapter before going outside to pick. Yes, I know you really should pick stuff in the morning when it’s not so hot outside, but that sage advise didn’t really work out for me. I had to get my work done first. It’s all about priorities, you know. So, by the time I finished my chapter, it was 1:00 and the heat was on.

I’m not sure every area of the country fully appreciates the heavy, moisture-laden heat that comes often in the summer weather. It’s a heat that seems to lie on you like an unwelcome blanket. Midwesterners are very familiar with this type of heat. As soon as you step out the door, it hits you in the face and demands your notice. I wonder how many times a day during these scorchers the phrase “it’s hot out here” is uttered? I’m guessing millions of times. When it’s hideously hot outside like yesterday, you cannot help but utter the phrase out loud and repeatedly. I did.

Out I go to the edges of the far fields to collect the precious raspberries with my berry bucket. Our berries grow wild out here at the swamp farm, and they almost surround the perimeter of the back property, along with other thorny shrubberies, such as natural roses. Wild raspberries are smaller than the raspberries you find in the store or on commercial shrubs brought home from the nursery, but they’re just as good. I began at one end of the field and started picking. Thankfully, Matty had mowed a bit the day before and I was able to stand quite close to many of the thickets. It didn’t take long before I realized I was going to have to go deeper into the thickets to get the berries.

I don’t know about you, but whenever I go to one of those U-Pick farms, I try to have a goal in mind of how much I need. If I’m strawberry picking, for example, I try to decide ahead of time what I’m going to make and how much I need. Once I get picking, however, something snaps in me. Suddenly it becomes a competition, an feverish quest to pick as many as I can. I am somehow driven beyond my original plans. Like a pirate finding a hidden cave full of gold doubloons, I start grabbing every ripened fruit I can see, and try reaching desperately for those just beyond my arm length.

Unlike strawberry picking, however, you can do some serious damage to yourself in a raspberry thicket. Within moments I am covered in tiny scratches. Do you ever find yourself starting a project only to realize you don’t have the right equipment? This was one of those times for me. I was dressed for the heat, not for the wicked thorniness that comprises a raspberry patch. I thought for a moment about hiking all the way back to the house for a long sleeve shirt, my wellies (tall, rubber galoshes), and gloves. But it was so hot, I was sure I couldn’t bear wearing all those items. So I pressed on.

In hindsight, maybe I should have attired myself appropriately. I am now covered in welts and scratches from head to toe. I nearly had several mishaps trying to reach far beyond where my arms could go, and at the time, thought to myself how painful it would be to land full-on into the thicket with its millions of pointy, sharp thorns. If I did fall in, how long would it take before they found me? While I did not fall bodily, I did manage to get my legs caught, my shirt caught, my shorts caught, my arms caught, and my hair caught in the wayward branches. Each time I’d free myself and grimmace at the new scratch or prick. I had berry fever, though, and had to keep going. My plan was to give away a package of berries to each of our shareholders that evening as a bonus item in their harvest bags. The berries were small, so it was going to take some doing to accumulate enough, or so I thought.

Onward I went, picking, reaching, and swatting flies and mosquitoes all the way. As it turns out, I was not the only creature out there. There were other critters in the thickets with me. The birds were yelling at me and zipping in and out to find their own berry treasure booty. I was also competing with a small miniature dachshund who, oddly enough, also likes raspberries. She snuffled along the bottoms of the thickets gobbling up the fallen berries. A deer came by and snorted at me, also surprised to find competition in the berry-laden thickets. My main company, however, were the bugs.

I picked, and I picked, and I picked. I swatted and I sweated, but I kept going. I kept sticking my arms in farther and farther into the brambles. There was always a juicy berry just beyond my grasp. Or worse, I’d grab a big one only to drop it. No time to weep for lost berries, though, I had to keep going.

Boy, it was hot out there.

I must have been out there for a couple of hours, but I'm not really sure since I was suffering from berry-fever. Did I mention how hot it was? Boy, it was hot.

Despite all the hardships, there’s something very relaxing about picking wild raspberries. You get the opportunity to focus on a simple task and marvel at what a wonderful design the little raspberry is. It’s a brilliant idea, really, this raspberry design. God made them wonderfully tasty, yet difficult to obtain. To achieve the prize, you have to work for it, move patiently forward just like in life. Have you ever noticed how much nature mirrors the lessons we need to learn in our own lives? Like a raspberry thicket, sometimes we have to reach into something thorny to find something wonderful. Yes, you’ll have some scratches along the way, but as it turns out it’s worth it.

I discovered long ago that God has a lot of messages for us in his creation if we’d just open our eyes a bit. He’s there in a raspberry thicket waiting for you to find Him. Risk a little of yourself and reach in! You never know what sweet reward awaits you. 

At the end, I packaged up several packages of berries per customer, far more than the goal of one package each. I hope they enjoy them. Despite my thicket wounds, I enjoyed picking the berries for them. But mostly I enjoyed marveling at the amazing design that is the prickly raspberry patch. What a sweet reward, indeed.

(Wild roses intermingle with our raspberries, and they're blooming right now. I should have picked some of the roses, too, but I took a picture of them instead.)

An Unusual Thing

You Don't See This Everyday

Yesterday a most unusual thing happened. Sherry and I had picked the day’s CSA produce and I cleaned it and generally readied it for the bags. Sherry was taking some pictures to accompany the blog, all pretty normal stuff. Our friend, Tracy Cox, was due to arrive soon; she delivers to the Indy area for us, and she was going to help me do the Florida weave on the tomatoes. No, the Florida weave is not a new hairstyle for my flowing locks. It’s a trellising method. So, quit giggling.

Man, was it hot outside. To quote my mother-in-law, Pat, it was “air you can wear” hot. It was so hot that when I went into town I saw a fire hydrant chasing a dog. That’s a joke, son. Well anyhoo, Tracy arrived and we visited for a bit. Sherry had some chapters to write and was supposed to stay out of the gardening project. I, on the other hand, was trying to stall long enough for a thunder storm to roll in that would excuse me from having to go back out into that heat and humidity. My sloth was foiled, however, when no storm appeared and Tracy piped up that she “loved the heat.” Wouldn’t you know it. That left me no cover. So, out we went into the unforgiving blast furnace leaving Sherry behind in the cool air conditioning, all the while I was doing a rain dance in my head to summon an immediate shower. I hoped for rain with every step, and with every step came despair. 

We proceeded to gather fence posts, stakes, and twine for the trellising task. The twine itself, green and in a can that has a twine cutting device built directly into the lid for maximum convenience, would prove to be worthless for my Florida weave partner. She preferred to bypass this costly accessory in favor of, well, I don’t know what she was going to cut the twine with, I just know she had a lot of twine out and tied a knot with the twine never leaving the can. This she got done before I realized she had opted out of the built-in cutter. I offered my knife, the string was severed and there was a new-found appreciation for the built-in twine cutter that lay at her fingertips all along.

We weaved on, down the opposite way we had just come, back and forth, back and forth through the young tomato plants with all their promise of an Indiana, sun-drenched, summer-time treat. Getting to about the middle of the return pass, I heard a sound that I thought was a bird, but I couldn’t recall hearing this bird sound in the past. After a couple of more high-pitched bleat, bleat, bleat’s with a cadence that was getting faster, I looked toward the location of the unfamiliar sound. What I saw was one of those things, one of those unusual things you don’t see everyday, sometimes not in a lifetime. Like when you find one of your pet baby button quail’s stuck inside the jar of a chick feeder, and the first thing you notice is a teeny, tiny, shiny leg reaching from the bottom of the feeder into the jar, and you can’t tell there is anything attached to that leg. It’s hard to wrap your mind around it at first. It sends your brain into double-time, throwing switches and levers, changing tracks, and throwing more coal into the hopper--you know what I mean. Man, it just don’t compute for a minute. 

After a second of brain double-clutching, I realized, like some of you have probably already figured out, whatever was making the sound was running straight towards us. Yes, I said running. Running towards us with a mission was a fawn on willowy legs and covered in white spots, frightened but hopeful that we, perhaps, were it’s mother or at least a safe alternative. The fawn, probably no older than a few weeks, came to within four feet of Tracy. I believe the fawn would have come all the way up to her had Tracy, knowing of the full power of a two-and-a-half-foot tall, three-and-a-quarter-inch wide, white-spotted fawn with their man-crushing bicuspids, big clown-like ears, and oh those cartoonishly large eyes, stopped it right in its tracks with her soft as an angel’s voice, ”Hey little fellow” before it could inflict any damage to her or I. I wasn’t aware that she spoke “deer” or could do the Florida weave so well, but for both of these I am thankful.

The little Fawn moved over and away from us and we watched as it disappeared, still bleating frantically while walking into the thick weeds. It had no sooner disappeared from sight when I caught, out of the corner of my eye, a doe that was just as frantic as the fawn had been, coming to rescue her wayward baby. With a grunt from mom, the two were silent in their reunion.

I think to myself, it’s just like God and us. We are often like the fawn, noisy and lost, but our Savior is never far away. We may feel lost, but He will gather us up, just call out. Like the fawn, it may seem to take longer than we would like, but He is there, sure as the momma deer was there for the fawn. Don’t give up, keep calling.

I poked some fun at Tracy in this blog entry. In all honesty I do really, really appreciate her help with the tomatoes and feel blessed to have shared this wonderful event with her. Thanks Tracy.

Well I’m done talk’n. -- Matt

Passionate About Food

What Makes Me Different

The other day I was talking to a fellow about one of his family members starting a CSA here locally this year. It got me thinking, since there seem to be several CSA’s in my area popping up and all potently vying for the same customers as I am--how can I compete? Still, with this weighing on my mind, Sherry and I settled in that evening to watch an episode of “Top Chef Masters” on the Bravo TV channel. I watched as each master chef took odd and challenging ingredients and turned them into the most incredible culinary creations one can imagine—oh, the creativity, the understanding of the craft, the passion that they share for the food!

The show started me thinking again. I wish that I had that scale of talent that those chefs apparently had. I have the passion, and that’s a great start, and I have knowledge of ingredients, more than some probably. The ability to recall and creativity, that’s where I come up short, I fear. Passion I have in spades! I want to know everything about food, from how it is grown, where it is grown, how it’s processed, etc. I want to know how each culture uses food. Do they have something in their food culture that we have locally but don’t use as food (such as guinea pigs)? Or do they use nasty bits of the animal we normally don’t eat? I love to know that stuff.

And recipes… boy, do I love recipes and cookbooks! I have them running out of my ears and still I crave more. My favorite thing to do on vacation, second to eating, is to go to the local grocery store. They always have things we don’t have here at home. Even if it’s the same product but made by a different company, I want to know about it. I watch cooking shows as if it were some sort of food porn. Food! Food! Food! I want to grow it, make it, touch it, feel it, and smell it. Food from the beginning to end. It’s not about nourishment or survival. Nope, for me it’s a creative outlet, a passion--I want it, I need it.

This, I have concluded, sets me apart from other farmers and maybe even a lot of chefs. I want to be part of the food from seed to soil, from soil to harvest, from harvest to cooking, from cooking to plate. I don’t see food as a means to an end. I want to share it and watch as people enjoy food that they remember from childhood or watch them enjoy a food they never thought they would like, or for that matter, had ever heard of. I am a food traveler, a grower, a student, and a teacher. I don’t simply grow plants and animals so they will, hopefully, make a monetary return. Sure, it’s great to be compensated, but it’s the journey, the whole journey that I enjoy.

We set eggs in the incubator and marvel at the time of the hatch as each one struggles to free itself from its confines. We nurture and coddle the chick so one day that same chick will become a hen that will provide us with the freshest of eggs, pure and wonderful, to be made into any number of mind-blowing treats. Or maybe that chick becomes a young fryer that I, with my own hands, turn into my version of a gourmet meal for our dinner table or a meal to share with friends.

I do get a great deal of pleasure watching these things grow--the edamame, the Japanese quail, the lowly squash. But being part of its journey to culinary perfection is what I crave. We grow gourmet food with respect for it and for our land; we want the people that partake of our products to share in that appreciation of food and understand this dedication, and recognize the value of it. Our food and our food point-of-view will not be appreciated by everyone, this we understand. That’s what the other farmers are for; they can feed the masses that just want food. We are that “other guy” and our customer is the person who recognizes food as more than just “food.” Our customer is the gourmet lover, the aspiring chef or the seasoned vet, the dreamer and the visionary, the one who enjoys taste, freshness, and food as it’s meant to be (not the chemically-enhanced, genetically-modified stuff found in our stores today). Our target is the person who truly appreciates the art and passion behind food, and aspires for a bit of it themselves.

I am sure this will keep our enterprise small, but so be it. It’s not about the money, it’s about a passion. With all this in mind, I went to bed knowing we had no competition.

Remember, play with your food.

I’m done talk’n, -- Matt

Harvest Day is Here Again

CSA Week 2

Today was the 2^nd week of Gunter's Gourmet Garden CSA delivery. All went well.  Our full-share members each received a large bunch of baby turnips with tops, mustard greens, collard greens, a head of butter crunch lettuce, and 2 baby romaine lettuces. Our half-share members received the same veggies, but in smaller amounts. 

Each member receives an information packet of new and exciting recipes for preparation of the bounty that the harvest bags hold.

 We’re very proud of our lettuce crop this year and it is even more special since it was a victim of the raised-bed collapse catastrophe and they had to be transplanted straight into the garden.  Next week’s bags should also include kohlrabi, which is a new and exotic vegetable to some, and one that definitely warrants experimentation. 

Remember play with your food! We harvested some lovely butterhead lettuce this week that's perfect for lettuce wraps. Have you had lettuce wraps? They're delightful. You can find dozens of recipes for them on the Internet, so do a search and try one out. 

Hot Tip

By the by, for all you local readers... if you like pork sausage, Harvest Market grocery at 8^th and Scatterfield Road has sausage patties in a blue-and-white 36-ounce box you need to check out. It's frozen and marketed under  “Southern Farms Breakfast Pork Patties." It was on Managers special for under four bucks. Go get a box, or a couple boxes for that matter, even if it’s not on special. If you see Jim the meat man (he’s there until around 3:00 PM), tell him Matt the fireman sent you. He will probably just shake his head and try to sell you a cart full of meat. Anyway, the sausage is really, really good, not healthy, but very tasty. 

All right then, I’m done talk’n. --Matt

Eat More Collard Greens!

Eat More Collard Greens!

Some might think it’s strange that a white kid from the Midwest could like collard greens so much, but I do. I have to admit I never tasted them in our childhood home as John and Joy’s bouncing baby boy. As I recall, broccoli was about as wild as we got with vegetables back then. Rather than a fondness for vegetables, we Gunters were some chicken-eating-son-of-a-Gunter’s. 

I remember how Mom would pan fry the equivalent of 10 whole chickens to a golden perfection, and shove it all in a big, brown, paper bag with Matthew’s Super Market printed on the side. There were always a lot more chicken legs than anything else in the bag because they were cheaper to buy. Truthfully, all chicken was cheap back then, and that was important on a police officer’s pay in the sixties, but more importantly, the three little Gunter children liked the legs best of all. Kids that don’t whine about the lack of chicken legs make for a happy mom, as you know. Next, she’d whip up a large batch of popcorn and toss it in another big, brown, paper bag with Matthew’s Super Market written on the side. She’d fold over the tops of both bags, throw three little Gunter kids in our white 1968 Chrysler with three-speed stick-shift on the floor, custom-made plastic seat covers that burnt your bare legs in the summer time as bad as a muffler of a Honda 350 scrambler, shove my blonde-headed dad behind the wheel, and off we would go. Pop would drive us to the drive-in movie where, by flashing his police badge, they would wave us through without charge. 

In we would go past the rows and rows of hang-on-the-window speakers and the playground down in front with it’s beckoning siren song that even the most shy of us would thrill to despite all of its childhood dangers. We would find just the perfect spot in the jungle of cars and speakers. Once settled, we’d begin our feast, set in to collapse about 164 red and white paper straws just trying to drink one 6oz bottle of Coke, and dig into that big-o-bag of chicken and popcorn, all while hoping not to be seen by anyone from our Baptist Church congregation and most of all Brother Don Camp, the minister of our little Baptist church. Movie going was frowned upon, I fear. As we’d finish a piece of chicken we would throw the bones out the window of the car. When the movie was over and it was time to go, we’d leave behind our little spot of the gravel lot with its hang-on-the-window speaker with nothing to show for our short stay but a pile of bones. It looked like a pack of wolves had made a massive kill and eaten it right there on the spot. I tell you this story to demonstrate our love for food, but also to explain that our conservative palates never ranged far from our local culture. Collard greens were more of a southern thing, definitely soul cuisine, pretty exotic stuff to our resident cook, bless her heart, we never went hungry.

To my knowledge, I would not eat collard greens until I arrived in Yorktown, Virginia while serving in the Marine Corps. I can’t remember the name of the restaurant, but I do remember the little place clearly. It was a mom-and-pop joint, the kind with a screen door with a push handle that said “Drink RC Cola.” The inside of this establishment had ribbons of flypaper hanging from a ceiling that hadn’t seen paint or most of its plaster in over 30 years. I fear one more fly on the flypaper strip could have pulled down the whole shebang. I’m sure the one bare light bulb with the black specks on it was securing it all; I was concerned for no reason. It was the kind of place that you know is good because there is no way anyone would enter it otherwise. It was busy all the time. I have learned these kinds of places are most often best of finds. 

My greens would be served by a waitress in a very clean, green uniform. The irony was not lost on me, even in my youth. The greens were served swimming lightly in perfectly seasoned liquid (pot licker) that was laced with some kind of smoked pork. I was not versed at the time on my smoked meat products even though I had worked at the old Emge packing company before joining up with Uncle Sam’s misguided children. My guess, it was shank or hock. The greens were served with cornbread, vinegar and Tabasco sauce, and they were wonderful. I was unaware of the vinegars value back then, but have since come to embrace it for what it brings to the party.

As it turns out, collard greens are easy to grow. You start them early in the spring and they grow into early winter in our area. You replant about mid July for the fall/winter crop. I picked greens at Christmas last year, just to show you how robust the vegetable is. Many say they actually taste better after a light frost. Collards don’t take much care in the garden, but you have to keep the cabbage worms from eating them. a BT product will take care of this and it’s organic. Collard greens are nutritional powerhouses, great for your health in so many ways. I have included a link to explain their nutritional value: http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=138. The “good for you” is all well and good, but it’s the fine eating I am after. Collards are typically cooked slowly and most often along with a ham hock for an all-day simmer. I love them this way, too, but out of necessity one day I made them a bit differently and I may prefer them cooked this abbreviated way now.

Here’s my recipe:

• Take as many leaves as you would like and wash them off in a couple changes of water.
  
• Prepare them for cooking by wrapping your thumb and forefinger around the bottom of the leaf at the stem, pinching the stem just enough so you can still pull the leaf through your fingers, and removing stem from leaf. In other words, you’re pulling the leaf part off of the stem. Dispose of the stems.
  
• Give the leaf a rough chop.
  
• Take some bacon, six strips is about right for a normal batch of about fifteen leaves or so. In a deep pot or Dutch oven, fry the bacon until crisp. Remove the bacon but leave the rendered fat.
  
• After letting the leaves dry a bit from their bath and being stemmed and chopped, add them to the hot bacon grease; they will wilt down considerably.
  
• Add water to the top of the wilted greens along with salt and pepper, a tablespoon of sugar, and a couple dashes of Tabasco sauce (optional).
  
• Cook on the boil for about an hour, adding water as needed but not too much; your goal is to have a nice concentrated pot licker (that’s what they call the rich liquid that results from cooking) and tender greens at the end of cooking.
  
• Sprinkle with crumbled bacon and serve.
  

I like to eat mine with a dash of cider vinegar and a couple dashes of hot sauce. Cornbread is always a welcome side or maybe some Johnnie cakes. Don’t be afraid. Let’s start a crusade to get people to eat more collard greens. They really are delicious.

I’m done talk’n, --Matt

News from This Week at the Gunter Farm

First Harvest Bags

Well, we are off and running with the harvest bags for members of Gunter’s Gourmet Garden CSA. Our members each received a nice bunch of baby turnips with greens, collard greens, mustard greens, mizuna, and a little bag of mixed lettuce all picked at their nutritional best and just a couple of hours before delivery for the freshest food possible. Sherry, of course, took the extra step to include a little welcome card, recipes, instructions and descriptions of their produce. One of our main missions with the CSA and this blog is to get people to learn about and eat food they wouldn’t have normally tried. Our motto is “play with your food”. Tracy, our friend and top notch landscape architect, stopped by yesterday to peruse the flower gardens up in front of the house that Sherry Darl’n has lovingly built and take a tour around the fields out in the back of the farm. Tracy got to meet the chickens, turkeys and also the baby quail. Tracy happens to be our delivery person to the Indianapolis area.

Speaking of Fowl…

The quail have been moved to a new pen that I built. It is to grow them until the time they are separated into breeding pairs and grow-off pens. We all have rejoiced at this move for the convenience.. and the smell of having them inside the house was, I will admit, a bit overpowering for everyday. We should have quail eggs for sale in just a few weeks.

All is well with the chickens. Sherry is a better mom to them than their own moms would be, and I know she worries about them more. She has placed green and yellow streamers cut from plastic table cloths all around the fenced barnyard in an attempt to dissuade any old chicken hawk from dining on her charges. She takes this all very seriously and gives me pause as to whether she will be able to eat these fowl when their time comes due. Though she has refrained from naming most of them, she has names for their little social groups they stay in: the Blondies, Little Goldies (I call them Reds), Darks, Blues, Adoptees (the Easter chicks we adopted), and such. She does a head count in the morning after she plods out to the barn through the dew-laden grass that has grown a bit of length do to my neglect. After passing the count, they are let out of the barn to run around in the barnyard for the day. She will return again to close them back into their small barn for a safe nights’

 slumber, at which time she will do another head count. I thought this head counting was part of her obsessive-compulsive nature and a total waste of time. There is nothing you can do for a chicken that has been toted off by an unauthorized intruder. I, once again, have proven to be the one of intellectual weakness.

Upon one of these head counts on Friday in the A.M., Sherry came up short one little red chicken. I, upon hearing this, think to myself, “well, there is nothing you can do, it’s been eaten.” She, I think, knew the reality of it also. There was sadness in the air at this news.

Turns out we were wrong.

During our friend Tracy’s visit, we were giving a guided tour of the barn and Sherry was lamenting the loss of one of her beloved birds to Tracy, while I was admiring the craftsmanship of the wonderful little stock barn built out of fine, rough-sawn, native red oak lumber sawn by Mr. pace at his sawmill down the road to the north (you remember that story, right?). I, looking to the northwest corner of the barn for no particular reason, spy a little red chicken head barely peaking up high enough from below ground level and from behind a corner post. He was trapped to be seen by my, some might say, predator eyes. There was a deafening cheer that shot out of the barn door and down our forest-lined valley road. I am sure the neighbors could hear it. The cheer arose because upon one more head count, yes you guessed it, this was our wayward little red chicken. The chicken coop and Sherry were once again running in greased grooves.

I’m done talk’n, --Matt

It’s All Planted!

Garden News

Finally, it’s all planted: tomatoes, lettuces, mizuna, collard greens, mustard greens, green beans, kale, potatoes, onions, peppers, beets, turnips, carrots (purple, red, white, yellow, orange and different shades of all), bok choy (failed already--will try again in the fall), Asian eggplant, edamame, cucumbers three types, melons, sweet corn, kohlrabi, squash (summer and winter varieties), okra, old hickory white corn, pumpkins, multi-colored bell peppers, and, of course, an assortment of hot chilis. 

Keep in mind that this is basically a two-person operation and one old rototiller, and this seems to be a large field or I should say fields. I think we planted about 250 tomato plants and 50 plus chilis and peppers. Plus, most of it is on black plastic stretched over raised beds. This is in itself is a herculean undertaking by a fellow that is way more grasshopper-oriented than ant-oriented (referencing Aesop’s fables). Well, anyway, that part is done until we plant the fall garden later this summer and the continued succession planting of the green beans. Did I mention we’re doing four types of green beans? Time to move on to phase two--weeding!!! Ah, but remember I took the extra effort during the cooler weather to build raised beds with black plastic over the top. This cuts down on hoeing considerable, just run the tiller between rows and you’re weeding is done. Whew!

Chicken News

Over on the chicken front--Sherry is calling herself the crazy chicken lady and has been keeping very busy with the new poultry. We have moved them into the little oak barn, you know the one, and have put up the electric fence around it, not to keep the chickens in so much as to keep the other chicken-thieving, murdering sons-o-guns out. It has worked well so far, except on the hawks. We’ve only lost a total of two. The fence does a great job on Dachshunds, too. Ouch! We are thankful for the fence because keeping livestock here is nearly impossible without it to keep them safe.

Meanwhile, the Quail scheme continues to move forward. The quail are growing at an astounding pace now. No wonder they eat and drink so much--they are little, growing dynamos. They have most of their feathers and have more than doubled in size. I had doubts of their maturing and laying eggs at seven weeks of age, but no longer. I have never seen anything transform so quickly. I will definitely do the brooding of the little buggers differently next time, though. They will be on wire floor in a bigger brooder and in a barn. If I had just a couple Corturnix quail or just button quail this would be fine, but sixty plus is too many for the brooder box system set up as I have it now. Keeping them outside, even as babies, would be a plus, too. Boy, for little bitty things, they sure do reek!

Lastly, no farm is complete without the mowing and maintenance. I take care of the mowing, with a little help from a hired hand with proper mobile mowing equipment. Sherry takes care of the flower gardening and landscaping. Wow--makes me sleepy just typing about it. So that’s what’s happening at Gunter’s Gourmet Gardens this week.

I’m through talk’n now. --Matt

Nail in the Foot

Well, I know there are already five nails on each foot, but I now have an extra and it isn’t on the end of a toe. No sir, this extra nail was from a Furrow’s (remember those—red and tan-colored buildings that pre-dated Lowe’s and Menard’s in our area), an 8 penny, galvanized, straight-as-an-arrow nail sticking out of a very sturdy, red oak, rough sawn, native 1x6 board, that had laid on the floor of the little livestock barn (which is also made out of very sturdy, red oak, rough sawn, native 1x6 boards).

It all started harmlessly enough—I was tilling the dirt floor of the little livestock barn to even it out for the new chickens. The little livestock barn is the one that stands out east of the big barn, just west of the little over-grown pond that sits just below a little rise. It’s the barn built by me, out of sturdy, red oak, rough sawn, native 1x6 boards that were sawn at little old Mr.Pace’s sawmill (he sure did love biscuits) that is down the road just a little north of here by Killbuck Creek. That’s the creek that my Dad would take us little Gunter children to explore in, except he called it Indian Creek back then. I suppose he had to call it that to peek the interest of a little Gunter kid, that, I am told, needed that sort of tale to keep his interest in one thing longer than it took to blow up a tire on a Schwinn 26“ bicycle that he would eventually ride right smack dab into the trunk of a blue 68 Chevy Impala while lookin’ at the ground as he was singing “Wichita Lineman” by the great Glen Campbell. I wonder how low my voice would have been, had that not have happened? That’s another story for a later time.

Now, all you fellas and most of you gals already know the rule on leaving any board with a nail in it sticking straight up, including very sturdy, red oak, rough sawn, native 1x6 boards. Never, never, never, never do that. I, too, know this rule. I cannot believe I broke it. Even more amazing than that is the fact that I built this little livestock barn out of very sturdy, rough sawn, red oak. native 1x6 boards nineteen years ago. This hazard has waited for me like a buried land mine for nineteen years to stumble upon it, literally, and pierce my foot. So now I am walking around like a cat that has poo on its paw and won’t put it’s paw flat on the ground. It’s no good, this hobbling about, there’s work to be done.

Planting

I did finish tilling the barn floor. I also planted three 50-foot rows of pie pumpkins, jack o’lanterns, mini punk’ns and a couple types of winter squash. I was also able to get about 650-feet of edamame seed planted that I was sent to test by the University of Illinois, Urbana. All this with a nail still stuck in my foot! That’s not true, I removed the nail, but I still have a sore nail hole. Don’t pity me, though, I do plenty of that by myself… just ask Sherry.

I’m done talking, Matt

Quail, Quail, Quail!

You bet we’ve got’em. We’ve got yellow ones, we’ve got yellow ones with spots on their heads, we’ve got brown ones with stripes, we’ve got brown ones that don’t have many stripes. We’ve got little tiny ones and big ones, and some what aren’t so big, we’ve got loud ones and quiet ones, fast ones and really fast ones, some that’s easy to hold, some that’s not so easy to hold, some that’s been dropped and some that ain’t been dropped. 

Quail, Quail, Quail! 

You betcha we got’em. 66 Cortenix quail and 8 button quail.

This Week’s News

The fields are almost planted. I was chased out of the pumpkin area last evening by the lightning. I did however get three raised-beds done. I can plant those when it dries up just a bit. Here’s what I have left to plant: kale, chard, miniput watermelon, carrots, edamame, and a few more plants I have picked up.

I have been late in getting another thrilling installment of this blog out and I apologize to our many, many loyal followers (pay no attention to the area on the screen that says we have only three followers… I bet there are at least twice that many). Anyhoo, we have been crazy busy, as you can imagine. I have been splitting my allotted time between prepping raised beds in the fields, planting and cultivating between rainstorms, mowing, and clearing land behind and around the little livestock barn. I’ve been cleaning out all the lumber and old windows that have been stored ever so meticulously in said barn all in preparation for the chickens, which by the way there are now 48. I have to get the fencing up now while I have a wife that’s still practicing tolerance instead of violence.

Bless Sherry’s little pea-pick’n heart—she has taken such good care of these chicks. She takes them out of their Rubbermaid totes that they sleep in and releases them every morning . She does this knowing full well that they will have to be caught again in the evening. This bring us to the evening chicken round up. This is no easy matter my friends. Chickens of this age do not like to be captured. They are like some teenagers that are sure they know what’s best and can fend for themselves. Wrong—they do not and cannot. Left unattended, they will surely fall prey to creatures that go bump in the night. These youthful chickens are assuredly on the menu here just as they are at your local KFC.

Sherry Darl’n is painfully aware of this as she has witnessed the taking of one young chick by a thieving chicken hawk. In an effort to thwart the hawk, she has rigged an area of the backyard with a variety of household/farm items to offer cover and protection for the chicks as well as deter the sky attacks. Every evening, Sherry dutifully goes out and chases these ever-growing two-legged speed demons (aka: chicks) around the yard. They have more moves than the highest paid athletes in the world. They are chased in and out of the labyrinth of obstacles that are there to protect them from the death that comes out of the sky.

Quite frankly, it all looks like a kids birthday party scene gone wrong. Let me paint you a picture of this elaborate hawk deterrent scheme. There are long, green streamers tied on every available tree branch and on twine that’s stretched from the old, falling down garage building over to the sycamore tree and back again. There is an giant patio umbrella in its most outstretched position propped up as to give the most cover it can afford. There is wire picket garden fencing scattered about—you know the kind, it is about knee high, scalloped along the top. Your mom or grandmother always had it around a flower bed. When you where in charge of the mowing you would always hang a lawn mower wheel in it because you were in an all-fire hurry to finish since the Key boys down the street were getting a game of baseball up, and you didn’t bother to take the little fence down like

 you were told to do! Yeah, that kind of fence. Well it’s laid around the yard at odd angles to offer more chicken protection.

There is also a an old metal trash can which has had the bottom missing out of it for fifty-three and a half years. The can’s been a part of the farm since I got here. Someone had the good sense to tie a piece of plywood cut to a reasonably round shape and size, some might consider, and tied onto the bottom of the can with a yellow rope. I foolishly tried to throw the whole thing away once. 

Surprisingly, it is hard to throw away a crappy trash can with a plywood bottom tied on with a yellow rope. The boys on the trash truck must have thought it’s just a crappy trash can holding, as best it can, trash, and in and of itself was not intended to be part of the days pick up. In all fairness, I am sure that this is the sort of scenario the trash guys encounter all the time. I’ll bet the trash pickup route is full of good folks with similar trash receptacles that would not wish to have their crappy trash cans mistaken for the very refuse they hold, and would have complained severely over the matter of a mistaken pickup. So with this in mind, and attempting to avoid customer wrath, the trash guys ignored my poor metal can even though I dearly wanted to get rid of it. This is my good fortune now as this very can has become an intricate piece of the chicken hawk depredation zone avoidance system… along with assorted old house window screens, Rubbermaid lids, flower planters, cardboard boxes, and a flower trellis. (The lesson here is keeping things around, even if they’re rusty and falling apart, is a good thing. You never know when they might come in handy.)

I am sure all of this does a very good job of holding down the mortality rate of death among our chicken population. We have not suffered one more loss due to the hawk since the depredation zone avoidance system has been put into place. But it cuts both ways. What’s good for keeping the hawk at bay is also good for keeping the slow, sore humans that are designated chicken wranglers each evening from a quick catch. Sherry starts out every morning knowing that this dance is going to take place the same way every evening—the running, the dodging, the weaving, the almost cussin’, the for sure crying, yet she does it everyday without despair and with a since of duty. She cannot stand the thought of losing one more of the dirty, uncaring, ungrateful, feather-covered little beasts. She loves and cares for each one of them, and I don’t understand it. Same as I don’t understand why God does this very thing for me and you. I just know he does. She will carry on and so will He.

Well that’s going to wrap it up here at the swamp farm, I’m done talking. -- Matt