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
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