So last winter your freezer conks and you find five whole chickens on the outer edge of thaw and you think they’d probably be fine but you just don’t have the gut-based gumption, so you refreeze and wait ’til windfall apple season and you make the following recipe:
5 whole chickens
3 5-gallon buckets of windfall apples
Some water
Boil in cauldron
Stir until repulsive
Let cool overnight
In morning, feed to joyful pigs.
But I couldn’t get it to upload.
This is when I really got rolling on the writing, finally. Just under three hours of sleep then it was up to fix the chicken coop (the original one, the one on the cover of this book), move the barred rock chicks out of the stock tank and into the repaired coop, clean the stock tank and move in the 50 fluffy yellow meat chicks that arrived today, then move the new coop and chicken fence, then put up pig fence. Never would have finished without the help of my pal Mills, a friend going way back to the “Silver Star” days. We spent the last 30 minutes fencing in a deluge, but got’er done. Yessir. Got’er done.
Now some more writing. And a heart-shaped thought for my wife, who is running the whole show in spite of my ridiculous hours, obsessions, and avocations.
Hadn’t thought about the bull for a few years…then I did this interview with the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel.
Thank you to Jim Fleming and Wisconsin Public Radio for the gracious reading of Coop. It’s a humbling honor to hear that coming out of the radio. And for two weeks I’ve been running into folks who’ve caught a listen. One of those things a guy never expected…and as a lifelong cheesehead, even more meaningful.
They’re reading a chapter of Coop on Wisconsin Public Radio every day from now until February 12. If you missed a segment, the five most recent chapters are available here: http://wpr.org/webcasting/audioarchives_display.cfm?Code=cad&repeats=no (not sure for how long).
Weekdays at 12:30 p.m. CST from now until February 12, Jim Fleming will be reading Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Chapter A Day.” Jim has a wonderful reading voice (I have learned he is a favorite of rural mail carriers) and you can listen to a live stream of the reading right here.
Missed a segment? The five most recent chapters are available here: http://wpr.org/webcasting/audioarchives_display.cfm?Code=cad&repeats=no
I’ll be on the “Back to the Farm” segment of To The Best of Our Knowledge this weekend. Find out where/when to listen here. I believe you can also eventually listen online here.
Back on chicken butchering day we boiled up a big old tub of gizzards and livers. Dumped’em in the hog trough. Y’really haven’t lived until you ‘ve watched a pig dance while hot-mouthing a steaming gizzard.*
*Yes, I know we can eat them, pickle them, grill’em on a stick…but we had pails of the things. Plus if you put the chicken in the pig you get…pig. So we’ll eat them eventually.
Back when I was out book-touring, my wife planted a big patch of rape (special thanks to our neighbor Tom L. who came by with his yellow and green tractor and matching plow), which is kinda like cabbage without heads. We’ve been using it to feed our pigs, ducks and chickens. We do this by setting up mini-paddocks (I made a bunch of chicken wire panels for the birds, and for the pigs we use a combination of old cattle panels and electric fence) and moving them sequentially.
The good news is they love the stuff. The ducks and chickens eat it right down to the stem. The pigs dive into it, roll around in it, eat half of it, then spend the rest of their time rooting in it, doing a great job of prepping the soil for whatever we plant there next year. The two photos below show the pigs on a recent night right after I moved the panels.
Bad news is, they love the stuff so much we’ve pretty much run out. We also scatter-sowed (we again being my wife while I was on book tour) a big patch of mixed oats and field peas on last year’s pig run (got the idea from this guy). So lately I’ve been cutting big piles of that and wheelbarrowing it up the hill. The laying hens ignore the peas, the meat hens pick at them, the ducks devour them, and the pigs go through and pick out all the green oats before going back to strip off the pea leaves.
If you read Coop you know how much I love making trips to the feed mill (especially with any one of my three blue-eyed co-pilots), but every peapod them pigs crunch helps knock a few fractions of a cent off the price of those pork chops.
Some time ago when metrosexuals were all the rage I did a story that never got published. The premise involved a magazine having me fly pretty much straight from 10 days of northern Wisconsin deer hunting – windburned, stubbled, and with dried deer blood under my nails – to an extremely high-tone New York City hotel, where I then spent two or three days being scrubbed, trimmed, and toned. I did it all – manicure (two, actually — the deer blood, y’know), pedicure, straight razor shave with warm shaving cream, several different facials, an $80 dollar haircut (nice enough fellow, lots of rapid snipping, but when it was over I gotta say you couldn’t tell it from the ol’ DIY electric clippers buzz cut), eyebrow “shaping” (think of being attacked in the eyebrow region by a rabid woodpecker — lots of tears, but when it was over, for the first time in my life I had two eyebrows) (lasted for about a week).
Anyways. I am off track. Point is, as part of the story the magazine had me stay at a hotel that was over the top tony. That experience was a whole ‘nother story for some other time. I bring it up for this post only to ask, do you think a place with “Frederic Fekkai signature bath amenities” and “Frette linens” and “Fully Equipped Deluxe Poggen Pohl Kitchens in every Suite“ (I got the Fekkai and the Frette, but sadly did not stay in a suite, so no Poggen Pohl) ever reckoned a sheet from one of their bedside notepads would make a trip to Farm & Fleet?
It was so windy outside that the poor reporter who came to write this story wound up having to interview me inside the granary. We each sat on a piece of firewood. She was not the sort of person to complain. The photographs are fun. Don’t let the smile fool ya, I don’t much care for them two roosters. Anyways, here’s the link.
from $8.99
from $13.50
from $13.50