Winter on the urban farm and my new favorite chicken accessory

I am back after spending a couple of months working a short-term lab job in an attempt to give my mind something to think about during the long, dark days of winter, and to make a few bucks for my early spring hiking trip with my dad-- spiritual pilgrimage, bonding experience, real world Spanish practice, and the chance to use teeny, tiny backpacking accessories. I'm hoping to get some good photos and experiences worth sharing here.

For now, here's a quick update on the urban farm!

The days are getting longer and brighter!

With spring not too far off, even the snowy days seem more livable! The chickens don't like free-ranging in snow, though, so I'm looking forward to some grass for them to walk around on.

Did I mention that you can freeze whole tomatoes if you want to put off processing them?

I core them, squeeze out the seeds, and store them in zip lock bags. When frozen they are like billiard balls.

I froze these in August or early September and just turned them into spaghetti sauce in January. Because I had the freezer space (and it's easier) I decided the freeze the sauce in baggies instead of canning. I'll be sure to use this batch before my canned sauce.

The product that is going to change my view of winter chickens: 

If you keep chickens where it freezes at night, you need this heated bucket!

In the summer I use a similar watering bucket with nipples (to keep the water fresh and reduce the number of water changes). But in the winter, even with a bucket heater, the nipples freeze, so I'm back to using a dish and heater, and I have to change the dirty water at least daily. This is my new favorite water bucket (the best $40 I've spent all year). It provides clean, liquid water all winter, and I can unplug it and use it all summer, too. Fantastic! Buy it here or at your local farm supply store.

I hate buying eggs

Fall vacation is over, so it's time to come back to reality and tidy up the urban farm for winter. My compost bins are full, so a lot of the plant material has been worked back into the garden beds (burying it under soil, where it can break down over time). The tomato plants, however, always go to the municipal yard waste composting facility. My home compost piles just aren't hot enough to kill all of the disease-causing microorganisms that hang out on tomatoes. And those nasties can survive over the winter in soil, only to infect next year's crop.

Interesting how our city's compost facility is now owned by Purple Cow. (In the past I spent a lot of money buying compost from them.) So it does pay-- except for tomatoes and any diseased material-- to compost as much as possible at home.

All that's left outside are these few kale plants and some leeks that need to be harvested soon. Leek soup anyone?

The hens are also going through their first molt and they have many missing feathers and are very grumpy (and likely a little concerned with so much skin showing and next week's temperatures going down into the 20s). But once their molt is finished, they will look better than before and should have their best year of production ahead of them, which is good, because I haven't gotten an egg from them in well over two weeks.

Looks like I'll be supporting the local egg produces for a few more weeks.

This high protein food should help the hens grow feathers faster. Without added protein, chickens have been knows to eat feathers to add protein to their diet (and losing more feathers is not at all what we're going for!). 

And with the cooler, short days, baking is on my mind...

In Sweden my favorite fika treat were the kardemummabullar, which are cinnamon rolls with an almond and cardamom filling. They are the best things I've had in a long time! With all the cool weather, this is the perfect time of year to practice my indoor homesteading skills and bake my own breads and treats.

Have a great weekend!

I heart my chest freezer

Until the last few days, the warm weather has been hanging on, and we've all been outside wearing shorts and riding bikes. But all that nice weather keeps the tomatoes ripening, and without intervention all the ones my family cannot eat (and that would be most of them) would go bad.

I know people love their iPhones, giant televisions, and salted caramel lattes, but to love a chest freezer is a special kind of love. This humble, quiet, out-of-the-way appliance allows me to enjoy the end of summer.

In the past, canning was done on a hot day in a hot kitchen. (If you haven't canned before, the house can heat up to a sweltering temperature if it's still warm outside.) Canning would be an ideal cold weather activity, like baking bread or making a hearty soup. A friend let me in on a secret a few years ago that changed my canning forever. She told me that you can freeze tomatoes whole in plastic bags and then take them out whenever you're ready to can. And if you let them warm up at room temperature, the skins come off without having to boil them, which is amazing when you are making a chunky tomato sauce or salsa!

My newest spaghetti sauce method is to core each tomato, squeeze out some of the seeds, and then freeze them all in gallon sized bags. When I'm ready to can, I make the sauce with the skins on (which adds additional nutrients) and then zip the sauce in the high speed blender to pulverize the skins and any remaining seeds before canning.

Many fruits and veggies are easy to freeze and use right from the freezer: sliced peppers and any kind of berry are two of my favorites.

This week at the urban farm

Now that soup weather is upon us, I've started harvesting the leeks. A lot of soup recipes call for leeks, but they are also good in many recipes in place of onions or roasted in the oven with other fall vegetables.

The chickens are just starting their first molt, and because of this egg production is almost nil. Hopefully I will have more to report on this soon! They have had a good summer of romping around the yard and have appreciated the vegetable scraps this season.

The tomatoes and flowers are the last summer plants I will pull out of the garden. The tomatoes will go when they stop ripening on the vine (I'll put the pink ones in the window and ripen them indoors). The flowers will go once they die or we get a hard freeze and the butterflies are gone for the year, whichever comes first.

A note on fall eating and cooking: it's almost time to celebrate the harvest with fall meals: butternut squash soup, spaghetti and lasagna feasts, vegetables caramelized over time in warm ovens, stuffed and roasted acorn squash! Enjoy eating these warm and cozy foods; I hope you are all having a fantastic end of season!