Chicken Ethics II: The Sequel

One of our Black Australorp hens

I linked to my Chicken Ethics post on Facebook, and the responses and discussion there were so good I wanted to post them here. Special thanks to Ashley at Small Measure and Kristina at The Rocking Horse for permission to repost their comments. Thank you to everyone (that's you, Ellen, Desta, Lynn, ahd KJ) for engaging with me on this difficult and complex topic.

I'm so grateful to be part of a community where this conversation is happening. I'm reposting exactly as is from FB - so ignore the informal punctuation and etc that is part of the culture of Facebook communication!

Thank you friends

~Beth/Milkweed

Kristina Mercedes Urquhart: when i first got into keeping chickens, i wasn't aware of the "disposal" practices that big hatcheries had for male chicks. after our first order of chicks, i quickly learned there were at the very least tiers of humanity with hatcheries...for instance, i wouldn't purchase chicks from TSC for the way they treat the chicks once they had them, and directly ordering from the hatchery is just slightly more humane. but like you Beth, we chose to do things the easy way the first time by buying directly from the hatchery, and lucked out not having received any males.

unfortunately, the alternatives to traditional hatcheries are not always available to everyone. first, the issue of straight run. while sand hill is great (and i considered ordering from them the first time around), we couldn't order even the minimum of 15 birds - it was too much for us.

obviously, straight run inevitably leaves you with some percentage of males... at the time we were not considering "processing" our own chickens, and certainly don't have the capitol to have 7-8 roosters as pets (nor the space or patience!). for many, if not all, small-scale urban backyard chicken keepers, male chicks are a huge no-no in city limits and if they were to buy straight run, having to figure out what to do with a handful of roosters is beyond their scope of experience.

i don't know what the solution is for straight run, but the second major alternative to buying from hatcheries is to buy chicks from a local farm, and that also has its risks. buying locally hatched or raised chicks presents biohazard issues, particularly with marek's disease (which is the #1 reason why we buy vaccinated hatchery birds). you could get vaccines to administer yourself, but that must be done in the first day of life to be effective (and come in packs of 1,000s).

the third alternative is to buy started pullets, or laying pullets, which, if you're starting a flock from scratch (no pun intended!) is just fine. but if you already have an established flock and want to add in a few more, this also presents biohazard issues in the form of spreading disease (even birds raised on soil a mile away have still been naturally inoculated to different microbiology in the soil). so, yet another risk.

the bottom line (after the longest facebook post i've EVER WRITTEN) is that i have no idea or solution. for ian and me personally, we one day hope to get local, heritage breeding stock, with several genetically diverse roosters, and breed, hatch and raise our own chickens. til then, we take good care of our hatchery chicks and learn the best flock management skills we can.


Feeding the flock

Desta Rudolph: With the rooster I would keep it until it became a problem I also got an accidental male from Eagledove and have become fond of his male presence in the flock it seems to be the prefect equalizer for our little flock


Ellen Green: Oy vey, I am getting a headache thinking about this topic. I love my roo, but at the moment he is having his own crisis. Sad that their significant contribution is protection (of a large group), fertilization, and .... a lovely crowing in the morning...More than one breeds fighting.

Even if you get older birds, the ugly truth is, there is still a disproportionate number of males hatched. And it needs to be "addressed" -- doesn't that sound nice??? So at what point in the chain do we intervene? As soon as they are born? The process sickens me. Later, when they have at least had the chance to have a life? How do we handle them until then? I am a firm believer that animals raised for food accept that fact, even come into their life with that purpose. Those that embrace veganism would disagree, but I feel it is quality over quantity, and a short life is better than no life...Why would you deny any creature a life, regardless of how short? Eww, does that mean I am for hatch-to-grinder????? No...

We had two roos that we raised from day-old chicks, not voluntarily, we thought they were hens... Surprise...They got along well until they were about 9 months old...Then the testosterone kicked in and the fighting began... Men....In the end we had to choose.

Lynn Johnson: my first thought was a less eloquent verion of your sharon astyk quote. that death is part of the process of eating, regardless of your diet, though certainly more 'in your face' when eating meat. if it doesn't make sense to raise boy chicks for meat**, then humanely killing them as soon as possible is what feels right.

i imagine i will continue to think about it, especially when i have my own beautiful cluckers:)

Beth Trigg: Wow, thank you for the conversation, friends. Kristina Mercedes Urquhart I so appreciate your experience and your advice and your super-thorough and thoughtful response....that's the direction we are heading as well - local, heritage breeding stock. Maybe our farm will get to the point of breeding for sale to local chicken-keepers one day, who knows. The Marek's issue is a big one when moving away from the big hatcheries. Ellen and Desta, I'm not opposed to killing some roosters - although it is not Harvey's fate anytime soon. I'm glad for the hawk protection and I like him. If he gets too macho and mean, we'll see - but I've heard that Ameraucanas are terrible meat birds. All of the other breeds we are raising are "dual purpose" - a lot of the traditional homestead heritage breeds were bred with this very issue in mind.

My latest one-liner on the subject is: if you're raising chickens for eggs, you're either going to have to kill some chickens or outsource the killing to someone else.

Ashley Adams English: Oh, it's SUCH a dicey issue. Kristina Mercedes Urquhart beat me to writing what I'd have written, if I'd been around earlier in the day when you sent this. It's actually a large part of the reason we recently got a cockerel, so that we'd have our own fertile eggs. We've long had a broody Australorp, so between her habits and those of the 3 pullets we picked up with the cockerel (Blue Wheaten Ameraucana's, all of them), we hope to be able to take care of this issue our selves. That said, lots of people taking up chicken-tendering don't have this as an option, as they live in no-roo areas. For such folks, it's simply a matter of either purchasing from no-kill hatcheries (to the best of their abilities) or getting straight runs and re-homing their cockerels (knowing that might very well entail, ultimately, their demise-I can't tell you how many "free" ads I've seen for roos in the Iwanna).

As Sharon said, death is inextricably linked to animal husbandry. It's linked to all food, for that matter, really, as she also states. Hank Shaw wrote that "we all have blood on our hands" and that, as a hunter, his is simply visible to him.

Also, the protection the roo will ultimately offer the flock is huge. We have loads of predators out here, and lost two birds to a raccoon last year. That said, if he turns out to be mean (he's super sweet and docile right now), as my mother's former roo "George" was (he attacked me years ago and I still have the scar on my leg to prove it), I'll have no issue putting him in a pot.

During my classes at AB-Tech, this subject has been raised repeatedly. Telling folks that the big hatcheries cull most males is something I never hesitate to mention. People should know how their birds arrive in their possession, for better or for worse, and then make an informed decision from their. It would be great if the larger hatcheries would keep all of the unwanted males and allow them to age a bit and then process them for food. Either way, though, ultimately, as I said above, animal husbandry involves death. Lots and lots of life, too, but death is in the mix. Death with dignity and mindfulness on the part of the hatcheries is the issue to seek out. I'm so glad you raised this issue on your blog and here, Beth Trigg. It often gets lost in the chicken-keeping love shuffle.

Kristina Mercedes Urquhart: you're very welcome Beth! you're right that roosters serve a very beneficial and often critical role on the farm - to protect the hens as individuals, but also your investment. no one gets rich farming, and when you get in the triple digits in birds, i imagine feeding a flock that big gets pricey! i've read that you should average a rooster for every dozen hens or so, even if they're one large flock, you'll need multiple roosters to keep eyes on everyone.

Ian and i have considered "processing" our own birds one day... our personal belief is that if you're going to eat meat, it's only fair to understand just how that chicken breast arrived on your table (the reason why i'm also taking up hunting this year, but that's another story entirely!). until we get our own dream farm, we can't do a lot of that in our fairly residential backyard.

on another note, for those birds that may not be "fit" for human consumption, we've tossed around the idea of feeding them to our cats and dogs (after a good life and a humane death, of course). i know i'm going to get a lot of raised eyebrows and some folks might stop reading). but the truth is, our domestic pets are carnivores and omnivores by nature (respectively). ian and i feed ours the BARF diet as much as we can (acronym for "biologically appropriate raw food" - and endless google topic). that's a fabulous way to keep the the food loop completely closed on a farm that has working herd dogs or barn cats. just some food for thought! :)

Orangina

KJ Laurro: I agree Beth, for if one chooses to eat chicken it is best to raise them ourselves and there is a way in honoring their lives. I also agree with seeing how things work with more than 1 roo. sometimes they do okay and sometimes they do not. I feel I have a responsibility to allow them to live safely and that includes within the flock. I have taken on the responsibility of keeping them all safe.

When I walk into the group, it is I who is at the top of the pecking order even with my roos. I talk to them to set the tone. They get along or someone is going to be chicken soup. If I don't want to eat chicken then I keep the flock to a minimum and do not allow them to continue reproducing. It all depends on what each farmer wants.

We had some girls that where getting injured by our roo who was a huge buff orph. and wasn't too good at his job of mounting, I had to separate him for a while and tend to healing some of the girls back up. He was a protector and he also was extremely excellent in his manners with me. He was extremely tame even when he came into his own sexually.

I think in caring for animals there comes the responsibility of culling... for food, if they are injured beyond help, in pain that can not be alleviated.etc. I do not agree with hatcheries and the killing of male birds just because they are male. I also know of a farm that does not kill any of the animals because they do not eat meat at all. They keep it simple for them and keep the flock from reproducing until needed. They find homes for the few males when they need to. It all depends on the farm.

When I have had to cull chickens it was because they had a disease that broke my heart to watch what it did to them physically. They all had it and I had to end their lives. It is not easy. It never is easy. I don't want it to be easy. I thank them every time for sharing their lives with me and bringing me joy.

When the day comes that I cull for food, I will do the same. It will be "sacred" and not mindless when I do it. I will be grateful and I will do it in the fastest/painless way I can. To follow such a path in ending a life for food or other reasons is a sacred act for me. I will have them again, but I will not get be a part of a place that culls babies just because they are male and they mass produce them. I am not interested in mass produced birds and think a lot of health issues happen from it. I thank you for a place to share how I feel.

Harvey

Beth Trigg: I am so grateful to participate in this conversation with you all - Ashley Adams English, I am so glad you are out there facilitating honest conversations about this in your classes. I feel lucky to be part of a community where people are willing to look at these hard issues head on with eyes open. Kj Laurro, thank you for sharing your own perspective.

Producing my own food has radically shifted my perspective on the world in so many ways. I never thought I would be thinking about "culling" and killing chickens myself, but it is a very short path from eggs to meat.

I am hopeful that with all of the consciousness and caring that's out there now about food we will transition to a system that makes more sense. We ARE transitioning, and I believe this conversation is part of that process.

KJ Laurro:I would love for more of us to become even more aware. I have sometimes wondered how different it is those of us who cull our own chickens for meat and those who go out and hunt and use the meat for food? I only think that leaves me with the question of how fast the animal dies when someone goes hunting. That is what is first and foremost in my life whenever it is time to cull: "what is the fastest way for them?. I do it where the others can't see or hear what is happening.

On the economy of plants and hard virtues

I am at home. Don't come with me.

You stay home too.

From "Stay Home" by Wendell Berry

On Wednesday night, I went next door to Warren Wilson College to see Wendell Berry with Christopher and my parents. The crowd at the college chapel where Mr. Berry spoke was so huge that we ended up watching and listening with a couple of hundred other people on a live feed from another building on campus. In his deeply humble and entirely unpretentious way, Mr. Berry read one of his short stories, At Home, and then answered a few questions from students.

At Home is a story of small details, a beautiful embodiment of Wendell Berry's ethic and way of life. His reading was slow, deliberate, and quiet. For me, listening to the story required a disciplined effort to slow my mind down and be still and patient. The pace of the story, and of Wendell Berry's whole way of being, was so radically slow compared to the pace of computers, cars, and smartphones in the world in which I usually live. Berry's words were so evocative and his pace so meditative that I almost felt like I was dreaming.

"He could not distinguish between himself and the land," Berry writes of the central character in "At Home." I emerged from "At Home" with a deep calling to my own home and land, to which I have been gradually becoming more and more inextricably connected over the past five years. Will there come a time when I can no longer distinguish myself from the land? I hope so.

After the reading was finished, Mr. Berry responded to questions from students - I first wrote "answered questions" and then realized that he was reluctant to provide "answers" in most cases, but instead gave subtle, thoughtful responses, often lightened with wry humor.

I was jotting notes as he spoke, still moving somewhat slowly after being immersed in the world of Berry's short story, but here are a few of my favorite moments:

In response to questions from students about how we can find our way out of the ecological predicament we have created: "Problem solving is not applying the maximum force as relentlessly as possible. It requires patience, resignation, and other hard virtues." And later, "No one knows the answer. Don't trust anyone who says they do. The answer will have to be lived out." And finally, "We are working from the inside, necessity is working from the outside. The world is not going to continue to yield what we have come to expect of it."

In response to a question about how "people of faith" might be involved in the environmental movement: "It's hard to think of a person who doesn't have faith in something. The human mind is by nature faithful."

He encouraged students to "Get your language right. Call things by their right names." He talked about health in communities, referencing Aldo Leopold's concept of "land community" (a concept he fleshes out in more detail in his essay "Conservation and Local Economy").

When asked about Occupy Wall Street, he reminded us that "great public movements must be accompanied by local, small, private acts." He also noted that when we are told, "inform yourself," we should remember that "to inform is to shape inwardly."

He talked about making local food economies "that will be the kindest to the home landscapes of the world."

At the end of the evening, Mr. Berry repeated twice what he called one of his "articles of faith": "Things aren't going to get so bad that someone who is willing can't make it a little better."

That is the kind of hope, small and persistent, that I can feel resonating in my heart and bones. Thank you, Wendell Berry.

More from Wendell Berry:

"We must see that it is foolish, sinful and suicidal to destroy the health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral. We must see the error of our effort to live by fire, by burning the world in order to live in it. There is no plainer symptom of our insanity than our avowed intention to maintain by fire an unlimited economic growth. Fire destroys what nourishes it and so in fact imposes severe limits on any growth associated with it. The true source and analogue of our economic life is the economy of plants, which never exceeds natural limits, never grows beyond the power of its place to support it, produces no waste, and enriches and preserves itself by death and decay. We must learn to grow like a tree, not like a fire."

Read a longer excerpt from Berry's essay "Conservation and Local Economy," here.

Read the essay "Word and Flesh" here.

Read a profile of Wendell Berry in "Grist" here.

Goat Field Trip

Today we visited Three Graces Dairy to pick out our dairy goats. Three Graces is a beautiful farm in the Shelton Laurel community in Madison County that produces super-delicious cheeses made from goat, sheep, and cow's milks.

Roberta, the matriarch of the farm family, and Romalio, who works with the goats, showed us around. They have over 100 milking goats - Saanens, Nubians, and Nigerian Dwarves - as well as sheep and Guernsey cows. Big time, by our standards!

Nubian doe

The farmstead cheese that Three Graces produces is incredible - it was served to the Obamas at the Grove Park Inn as part of a showcase of local foods from the NC mountains, and is highly acclaimed by farmers market customers. We loved trading produce for Three Graces cheese at the tailgate market this season and Christopher is rarin' to get our own milk operation going.

Saanen and Nubian

We decided on four young does--three Nubians and a Saanen--and a Nubian buck to get them knocked up. I'm still holding out for a Nigerian Dwarf, but we decided to wait until next year instead of trying to manage the breeding logistics that would have been involved with adding a Nigerian buck to our little herdlet.

We're very excited about welcoming these new residents to Red Wing Farm...and the babies that will be born in the Spring! Yay goats!

Young Nubians snuggling

Stay tuned for goat updates....the new arrivals should be appearing on the farm sometime around Christmas. And you can be sure that I will post photos!

The Saanen doe we're adopting

And up close....

Nubians

Saanen

Nubian and Nigerian Dwarf

Nigerian doe

Those ears! That smile!

A lovely Nubian girl

Gathering Around the Table

Heirloom winter squash stuffed with walnut-fig-goat cheese quinoa and served with fresh figs, elder- berries, and chevre.

To me, the kitchen table is the hearth, the center of the home, an altar, a canvass, and a hub of family and community.

This summer we've been hosting weekly "family dinners," gathering around a big, long table and sharing food, drink, and stories from the farm. I have loved these dinners--of course for the flavors of the foods coming out of the garden, but also for the sense of community that is created when friends and family come together over food. Sharing food seems to be one of the oldest, most universal ways that we connect with each other.

This time of year it is so easy to fill the table with beautiful and delicious foods from the farm and garden--it's the height of harvest season and we are eating well.

And many friends with gardens have reached that point that gardeners know so well when the volume of food coming out of the garden has become more than the gardener can handle and s/he has to issue a call for help in dealing with the onslaught of produce.

Sharon put out such a call because her fig tree was laden down with fruit, and Puma couldn't keep up with the elderberries in his front yard. So in between meetings and office time at work this week, I slipped over to my friends' yards in my and harvested the surplus fruit. Deep in the foliage of the fig tree in Sharon's back yard, reaching for the higher branches, wearing my professional attire, and getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, I thought about how grateful I am for the gift economy in my community, and for the shared appreciation of good, fresh food.

Last week, we invited friends who have worked on the farm over the course of this growing season to come out for family dinner and celebrate the harvest--including figs and elderberries, along with the annual vegetables pouring out of our garden right now.

Trading with other vendors at the farmers markets has brought even more amazing food on to our table -- artisan cheeses and breads that are a perfect complement to the fruit and vegetables.

All-local bruschetta with homegrown tomatoes, beet green and basil pesto, local bread, and local goat cheese ... by Christopher

Friends bring their own delightful concoctions full of fresh local goodness to the table, too -- and the abundance almost seems too good to be true sometimes.

Blueberry cobbler by Michael ... with blueberries he picked that morning in Leicester

And as soon as the table is cleared, there is room for the next meal, and the next. Later in the week, we celebrated with our farm interns over breakfast with more incredible local food, and the abundance continued.

Butter homemade by Nicole from raw milk from Katie the cow next door.

Eggs from Gecko's chickens cooked to perfection by Dau

Butternut squash bread by Nicole

Homemade jams

I am deeply grateful not only for the abundance of nourishing, beautiful, and delicious food that we get to enjoy, but for the wealth of community that we create by connecting across kitchen tables and chopping blocks and farmers market stands.

Some of the people who helped grow food on the farm this year.

Wild Harvests

With the avalanche of cultivated foods coming out of the garden right now, and gardening fatigue setting in, it's nice to pause and remember that there is food all around us, available for free, growing wild.

Our first human ancestors nourished themselves by foraging, and I believe that there is something deep in our collective memory that calls us back to wild foods. There's a childlike delight that I've witnessed when people encounter food, free for the taking, outside of a cultivated garden. It's a reminder that food is not a commodity, but a gift from the Earth and part of our connection to the Earth.

Last week my sister Mary and I took our farm interns blueberry picking on the Blue Ridge Parkway, where the five of us picked about 11 pounds of wild blueberries in a couple of hours. It was a lovely excursion, complete with a dip in one of my favorite swimming holes (pictured below) and enough steep uphill hiking to leave my leg muscles sore for a couple of days.

Picking blueberries on the parkway is an annual tradition for me, infused with childhood memories, radical politics, and love of all things wild -- I wrote about all of these things last year here: "Wild Blueberries Fresh from the Commons."

We brought this year's blueberries home and made all manner of blueberry treats, including sourmilk blueberry pancakes, 5 gallons of blueberry mead, a blueberry crisp, and of course, a blueberry pie.

The mead is bubbling away, the pie and crisp and pancakes are long-since gone, and a meager quart of blueberries are preserved in a mason jar in my freezer for some winter day when we need a little burst of antioxidant-packed, wild summer goodness. Our interns are harvesting Autumn Olives and Sumac this week for more wild foods preservation projects on the farm this week. And I'm feeling gratitude for all of the nourishment, wild and tame, that's available to us if we pause and look around.

Book Review, Transatlantic Gift Economy, and Cherry Tomato Art Installation

One day sometime in the past year, I issued a plaintive call to friends across the intertubes for someone to lend me a book I had built up a powerful urge to peruse: Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning by the gardeners and farmers of Terre Vivante. My Internet Friend Annie Levy* (who is always referred to like so by her full title) promptly responded by GIVING me a copy! A woman who I have never met, who lives far across the ocean in Wales sent me a present in the mail! A really good present.

As soon as the book arrived I promptly read it from cover to cover and then commenced to re-reading, savoring, and luxuriating in each of its 197 pages. With prefaces by no less luminaries than Eliot Coleman and Deborah Madison, this dense little treasure of a book is a new favorite kitchen reference in our house.

The recipes and descriptions of techniques are simple, practical, and clearly held dear by the gardeners and farmers who offer them. Each entry includes the contributor's name and place of residence, and sometimes also information about growing, harvesting, or wildcrafting the ingredients and/or using the finished product. Over 100 people contributed to the book, and the brief personal notes that accompany their contributions make reading the book feel like sitting around a table sharing stories and techniques with other gardeners and cooks.

Some of my favorite entries are the simplest:

Plums, Variation 2.

Plums
Small crate

A pane of glass

Place whole plums in a small, well-ventilated crate, covered with a pane of glass. Keep the crate in the sun (ideally against a wall facing south).

~Annie Dijoud, St Joseph-de-Rivi

ère

The book begins with a section on root cellaring and other methods of in-ground preservation, including pits, trenches, and packing apples in elderflowers to impart a pineapple flavor. That is the sort of tidbit that I love. It continues on with chapters on drying; lactic fermentation; and preserving in oil, vinegar, salt, sugar, and alcohol. All of these methods are ancient, pre-electric food traditions that retain flavor and nutrients far better than modern methods. The flavors, textures, and look of these preserved foods remind me of shopping in open air markets in little towns in the South of France: encountering simple, delicious, and beautiful foods handcrafted with old-world grace.

I pulled this lovely little book down today when I was considering the abundance of cherry tomatoes coming out of the garden, and envisioning how nice they would look packed in a jar. But how to preserve their beauty and sweetness without compromising their vitamin-packed nutritional punch?

I looked up "cherry tomatoes" in the index of PFWFC and discovered this recipe:

Cherry Tomatoes

Cherry tomatoes

Small onions or shallots

Cider vinegar or lemon juice ( 1-2 Tbs per 16-oz jar)

Fresh basil, tarragon, oregano, etc. (to taste)

Coarse salt

Olive oil

Canning jars and lids

"You must start with cherry tomatoes that are very firm and ripe. ...Wash and dry the tomatoes. Peel...the onions or shallots.

Prepare scalded or serilized 16-ounce jars. Fill them with tomatoes, alternating with a few onions and herbs. When the jars are filled to about one and half inches from the rim, sprinkel with a pinch of coarse salt. Add one or two tablespoons of cider vinegar or lemon juice, and cover with olive oil.

Close the jars with a very clean lid, and store them in a rather cool place (10 to 15 C/50-59 F). The tomatoes will be ready to eat in two to three months and will keep for up to a year."

~Anne Duran, St. Front

Jars ready for capping and storing: Pearly Pinks packed in oil with basil and mixed cherry tomatoes packed in oil with pearl onions and basil.

One of the great things about simple, heat-free preservation methods such as this one is that you can quickly process small batches without lots of effort -- I packed two 16 ounce jars and an 8 ounce jar this evening and I'll continue packing more as the tomato season continues.

The jars of little jewel-tone tomatoes are as lovely as I had hoped. They feel like a little art installation on the top shelf of my fridge.

Thank you, Annie Levy, for your generosity. And thank you to the gardeners and farmers of Terre Vivante.

*I met My Internet Friend Annie Levy via the Wild Fermentation facebook group. A wonderful resource for fermentation lovers, and it turns out, a place to encounter lovely, facinating, and generous people.

Christmas Eve Gratitude

"When you boil it down, I am a sap." - My sister Mary, 12/24/09

This evening, I pulled some of our homegrown winter squash out of storage to cook for Christmas Eve dinner. I was cutting into a butternut when I started to tear up. Scooping seeds and pulp out of beautiful orange butternuts and creamy yellow Thelma Sanders Sweet Potato Squash, I just felt overwhelmed by gratitude.

The moment of opening up a winter squash--this hard, dry object--and discovering luscious, nutritious, soft, smooth food inside is incredible enough. Even though I have cut into thousands of winter squash in my lifetime, it just never stops amazing me. And knowing that we midwifed this food into the world in our very own garden and carefully kept it in storage for a midwinter feast just feels like a profound gift.

As I stood there at the chopping block scooping seeds with my eyes teary, Vienna Teng's "City Hall," which gets me every time anyway, came up on Pandora, and it was all over. I just cried and scooped, scooped and cried.

While it is probably not winter squash and gay marriage ballads that do it for most people, 'tis the season for gushy emotion, gratitude, and loving sweetness. For me this time of year is about rituals of connection with the family I've chosen, with the family I was born into, and with the family that extends out to all living things on the planet. It was great to let the emotion flow and know that there's a big pool of this sort of gushy love and gratitude out there right now.

CF and I are headed over to my sister's house in a bit for Christmas Eve dinner with my family, and we'll be bringing that emotion-infused winter squash and other concoctions featuring cabbage from Flying Cloud Farm, onions, garlic, and celery from our garden, carrots from Gladheart Farm, and Spinning Spider goat cheese. I'm so grateful for the family I was born into and the family I've found and formed in my life so far. Though I don't celebrate Christmas in any sort of Christian way, I am deeply grateful for the gift of nourishing food grown with care, passed down from food-growing ancestors, and for rituals that celebrate our connection to each other.

Monster Mash*

Earlier this week, my dear friend Pooma brought me a basket of gorgeous hot peppers -- a beautiful mix of several varieties of habañeros and jalapeños.

Above: some of the aforementioned habañeros plus the last Italian sweet frying pepper from my garden.

Locally-grown peppers are a rare commodity at the end of the dripping-wet summer we had in these parts, and an especially precious treasure now after the first frosts have hit.

I have for some time had a hankering to make homemade hot sauce, and these peppers presented the perfect opportunity.

When I started searching for recipes for hot sauce, I was delighted to discover that traditional sauces involve fermentation, of which (regular readers know) I am enamored. Fermentation is an old-timey way to preserve food, a creative craft that has been practiced in cultures throughout the world for thousands of years. I love fermentation, and have tried fermenting just about every vegetable you can imagine, and lots of other things too. I've added hot peppers to various ferments over the years, sometimes with extremely intense, mouth-scorching results, but I've never tried fermenting them alone.

Peppers and salt: all you need for a killer mash

It turns out that the most flavorful hot sauces are made from an aged pepper mash, which is just salted peppers fermented for a period of time from a few weeks to three or more YEARS. Then the mash can be used in small quantities for flavoring, or combined with vinegar to make hot sauce. Fermenting hot peppers seems like a good way to spread hot peppery joy throughout the year as well as a step on the path to superlative hot sauce, so I decided to give it a whirl.

It was surprisingly hard to find a recipe online that takes the hot-sauce maker all the way through the process from fresh peppers to fermented mash to the final sauce product. I did find a couple of posts from experienced mash makers here and here and some interesting variations on the basic mash (for instance, here's someone who uses kefir starter culture to innoculate his pepper mash with good results).

Since I have a good understanding of brine-pickling in general, and since making pepper mash seems to be a fairly straightforward brining process. Brine pickling is an ancient, low-tech preservation technique that uses no electricity and very minimal equipment and ingredients. You can read more about brining in earlier posts here and here and also at Sandor Katz's most excellent website, wildfermentation.com. Grist also has a good summary article on brining, including pepper mash making.

Mash-making in progress

In any case, here is the recipe I culled from reading lots of summaries of the process. My mash is atypical because it is adds garlic to the ferment. We have lots of extra garlic from the garden right now, since we're planting our garlic for next year now and there are lots of leftover small cloves, and adding garlic is almost never a bad thing in my opinion.

Garlickey Hot Pepper Mash

Ingredients:

For the mash:

• 2 cups mixed hot peppers (I used green jalapeños; red, yellow, and chocolate habañeros; and one sweet red frying pepper)
• 1/2 cup peeled whole garlic cloves
• 1 Tbs fine- to medium- ground high-quality salt
• 1 Tbs coarse-ground high-quality salt

For the sauce (6 weeks to 6 months later)

• Raw apple cider vinegar to cut the mash to taste

Directions:

1. De-stem and de-seed the peppers. Be careful: this is serious business, because the seeds of hot peppers are really hot! You might want to wear gloves, and if you don't, scrub the heck out of your hands (I use dish soap, rubbing alcohol, and aloe vera to get the pepper sting out-I really should wear gloves) and do not touch your lips, nose, or any other sensitive parts after touching the insides of hot peppers.
2. Throw the peppers and garlic in a food processor or chop by hand. I chopped mine, because I was making a small batch. Some people ferment the peppers whole, but I decided to ferment them without the seeds because I am not one of those people who seeks out crazy over-the-top hotness in my hot sauce.
3. Mix in the regular-grind salt and stir or shake (easy to shake if you do it in a jar).
4. Gently pour in filtered, room temperature water to cover. Make sure that all of the peppers and garlic are completely submerged in the brine.
5. Cover with the coarse-grind salt.
6. Wait and watch!
7. Harvest the mash and make sauce by cutting with vinegar -- I haven't done this step yet, but will post when I do!

The mash in brine on day two.

*I must have heard the song Monster Mash hundreds of times throughout my childhood, always at this time of year, on record players of my elementary school classrooms, so I hope you'll forgive the gratuitious seasonal shoutout, dear reader.

On the Gift Economy

Gift pears

Two things happened this week that made me pause in gratitude for my circle of friends and community.

I remember when I first heard of the concept of a "gift economy," and secretly thought to myself as I listened to the radical feminist explaining the idea: "Well, that's a bit far fetched. It's a nice idea in theory, but it would never really work in this society."

I was so very wrong! I feel so grateful to have spent the past ten years in a community--the city of Asheville--where generosity is alive and well, and the gift economy is everywhere you look.

So here are the two things that happened that reminded me to notice and be grateful for generosity.

One: I posted a request on Facebook for advice on where to buy an "EZ-up" canopy tent locally. We need a canopy tent for our booth at the West Asheville tailgate market, and I was having a hard time finding one to buy. Within two hours, I had received two offers of long-term loaner canopy tents from friends. Thanks Melissa and Marin! The same day, various folks offered loans and gifts of all kinds of things we need for our booth, thwarting our plans to buy things. Hurrah!

Gift quinces

Two: CF and I were running errands in town today, and in the course of our travels around West Asheville and downtown, we gleaned and were given all kinds of free food.

We happened to be passing by Shane's, so we made a quick stop to say hello. We left with unexpected gifts in the form of pattypan squash and perennials in need of homes.

At Paul and Jude's, we dropped off some (gift) bottles of elderberry mead and were invited to pick some Asian pears, which we did.

Then we stopped to say hey to Tim and Gecko and see if we could get some eggs from their chickens. They weren't home but had invited us earlier to pick our fill of quince fruit from their backyard, and the quinces were ripe, so we did. We left there with a box full of quince, after a short visit with the new baby chicks and broody hen.

On the way home, we stopped at the honor-system based Haw Creek Honey stand and bought a couple of gallons of honey for mead-making. Not quite the gift economy, but a delightfully trust-based element of the local economy here.

Gift pattypan.

I realized, reflecting on the gifts I received today, that the gift economy is a big part of my economic life. I shop at the Free Store at Warren Wilson College. Our house is built with all manner of salvaged materials, many of which were offered to us by people renovating or tearing down buildings. We have heated our home for the past few years with firewood and scrap wood given to us by various people we know. When I look around me at the things I own -- furniture, clothing, dishes, art, houseplants -- the vast majority came to me as gifts from friends and family. I give spontaneously with great frequency, and am given things spontaneously even more frequently.

Of course, I still pay for plenty of things with old-fashioned paper and plastic money, and barter a fair bit. One of our errands in town today was dropping off potatoes and garlic at Rain and Shannon's house as part of a trade for farm work that they did earlier this spring. But my dream economy is one based on spontaneous generosity. And I can see evidence of this economy all around me.

So here's to generosity, sharing, and the mundane daily process of creating the world we want to live in.

Moon and Stars in Virgo

We grew the beautiful heirloom watermelon "Moon and Stars" this year (pictured above getting ripe in our garden). The speckles on the rind really are like stars in the sky, and coming across a melon in the garden somewhere that the rambling vines have ended up is like stumbling on a little galaxy.

We sliced one of the Moon and Stars melons open this week with some friends and feasted on the luscious and juicy pink melon flesh.

After we had eaten our fill of watermelon, we made watermelon mead with the leftovers, saved the seeds for next year, and cut up the rinds for pickling in brine.

For the pickling, I used a teaspoon of salt per cup of water and pressed the rind slices gently to squeeze out their juices, and submerged the rinds in a big glass cookie jar. The brine is starting to cloud up and get bubbly, so fermentation is definitely happening.

Looking for brine-pickled watermelon rind recipes online, I discovered that this Southern/Asian fermented delicacy is known as an aphrodisiac. I'll report back what I learn about the love-inducing properties of fermented watermelon rinds once the pickling is done!

Watermelon mead

Next year's Moon and Stars watermelons

All in all, it's a lovely watermelon that I heartily endorse. We got our seed from Fedco, but Seed Savers Exchange and other companies offer it as well.

Hurrah for "Moon & Stars!"

Harvest Celebration...with Sparklers

Above: corn patch

Left: harvest offerings

Lúnasa

The beginning of August is one of the four main festivals of the ancient Celtic calendar, variously called Lá Lúnasa, Lughnasadh, or Lammas. Lúnasa falls halfway between the solstice and the equinox, and honors the beginning of the harvest season.

In various pagan traditions, this time of year is a time to offer gratitude to the earth for the food we eat. At this time of year when gardens are overflowing and the earth is so abundant, it can be easy get caught up in the frenzy of the season without stopping to take stock and give thanks. I love the tradition of pausing in gratitude for the harvest.

Harvest Altar with snakeskin and sunflower

In Old Irish the name of the festival was Lughnasadh; in Modern Irish, the name for the month of August is Lúnasa, with the festival itself being Lá Lúnasa.

The modern neopagan festival of Lammas is another incarnation of this holiday: when Christianity came to Ireland and the other Celtic nations, Lughnasadh was renamed Lammas or 'first loaf.'

Huckleberry potatoes from the garden

At Lammas, the custom was to bake a special loaf of bread from the first grains of the harvest, to place on an altar as an offering, or to eat at a celebratory feast. The concept of “the bread of life,” rituals of communal breaking of bread, and even the honoring of bread as the body of the divine, can be traced to these roots. Although we did not break bread together, we did commune over some fine potato salad, fresh tomatoes, and all manner of other homegrown and locally-foraged foods.

Lúnasa is traditionally a time of community gathering, feasting on homegrown food, & reunion with loved ones. We celebrated last night by the full-ish moon with food, homemade wine, family, and friends.

Gratitude Floats

My friend Dana (who blogs delightfully over at Dana-Dee) has a tradition of launching a raft covered with flowers and vegetables down one river or another at this time of year as an offering of gratitude for the harvest.

Dana came over yesterday afternoon and whipped up a bamboo raft in no time flat. Later, she decorated the raft with marigolds from Susie's garden and we all loaded it up with offerings from our gardens--okra, cucumbers, basil, garlic, dill, carrots, broccoli, and all sorts of miscellaneous beautiful and delicious things.

Christopher's sister Kelly is in town, and she led us in some old-time religion, after which we all trooped down to the river to launch our outlandlishly lovely little boat.

The raft floated off down the dark river, festooned with sparklers, candles, flowers, and food, and with marigolds floating all around it, to the strains of "The Love Boat" theme.

We walked home in the dark and shared a feast from the garden, meads and various other beverages, a wood-fired hot tub soak, and chocolate. A whole lot to be grateful for.

More photos here. . .

Lúnasa blessings:

May you never go hungry.

May you always be nourished.

May all be fed.