Start your Christmas shopping early this year: Pure Poultry is here!

 Check out the Pure Poultry video trailer!

I bet you had forgotten you pre-ordered my new book Pure Poultry, didn't you? For quite some time now, the amazon.com page for Pure Poultry showed a release date of November 5, 2013. I was totally taken by surprise last Sunday when someone e-mailed me to say congratulate me on my book that was coming out on October 23!

So, on our blazingly slow dial-up connection, I raced to get on the amazon.com page to see for myself. Sure enough, October 23 was the new release date. Aack! I had been right in the thick of a big project for Kitsap Children's Musical Theatre, and wasn't expecting to have to kick into high book-promotion gear for another two weeks or so. Plus I was just coming down with a cold (swell timing, not that there's a good time to have a cold); I suspect the sniffling, sneezing baby held on his papa's lap next to me on the flight home from Kansas City the week before. This baby was attired from head to toe in Oakland Raiders gear. How I wished I was wearing a shirt and cap that said, roughly, "Oakland Sucks!" But I digress.

I'm not quite over that cold, so I expect I'm even less subtle than usual today (and, you will be glad to note, more brief than usual too). May I just suggest that you all now have an extra 10 days or so to decide how many people on your Christmas list are going to get Pure Poultry this year. If that isn't serendipity I don't know what is.

Those of you who have already received Pure Poultry, thank you so much for your support and for posting photos and such lovely comments on Facebook. This is a very exciting time for me, and I look forward to getting more feedback from you all.

I was going to call it "The Sustainably-Raised Egg and I," but...

What can I say. I've never been very good at coming up with names for things.

However, it is now official: my first book, "Pure Poultry: Living well with heritage chickens, turkeys and ducks," is on its way to being published! The manuscript is now in the capable hands of New Society Publishers, a British Columbia-based company which specializes in "Tools for a world of change, books to build a new society." They have an impressive book list. Take a few minutes to check it out on their web site.

Have you read Betty MacDonald's 1945 classic "The Egg and I"? It's the hilarious tale of how Betty, at age 18, marries Bob, a man 13 years older, whose dream is to run a chicken ranch. He buys an off-grid piece of property in the Chimacum valley, not far from Port Townsend, WA. It's quite an adjustment for Betty, who isn't nearly as thrilled as Bob at having no electricity or running water in the house. She perseveres, though, having been raised to believe that if her husband can do what he really wants to in life, he will be happy and therefore she will be happy too.

I recently re-read The Egg and I, while I was in the middle of revising the first draft of Pure Poultry. This time, somehow I noticed things about Betty and Bob's experiences that closely paralleled those of David and I. Our farm is off the grid. It's located only about a 45-minute drive from the Chimacum valley. We're surrounded by the beautiful Olympic Mountains. Bob was certainly more knowledgeable about poultry than we were when we got started, but still, like us, he evidently had plenty to learn.

Betty, who died in 1958 at the age of 49, was a very witty writer. Her humor reminds me a lot of Erma Bombeck, whose books I have loved for years. Although she has many moments of feeling lonely on their isolated ranch, Betty has a way of describing the mountains, trees and even the clouds as if they were living things. I love her use of language.

We don't have colorful neighbors like Ma and Pa Kettle here, and our egg operation is tiny compared with Betty and Bob's. Still, there is plenty of humor and real-life experience in Pure Poultry. We certainly share some of the challenges of living off the grid, although I'm thankful to say that our wood stoves don't misbehave like "Stove" in The Egg and I. And in case you're wondering, we do have indoor plumbing and running water.

Pure Poultry is a memoir of our first five years of raising heritage chickens, turkeys and ducks. There is plenty of advice and tips based on our experiences, but I believe that you will enjoy reading it even if you don't raise poultry. It might inspire you to start a little food garden in pots on your apartment's deck. Maybe you'll connect with a friend in the suburbs who has chickens and is willing to barter for fresh eggs. And if you do decide to start raising poultry, I hope that Pure Poultry will convince you to think about choosing beautiful, sustainable heritage breeds.

Pot Pies and Egg Money Premise #1: Purebred animals are more sustainable

As the first draft of my book "Pot Pies and Egg Money: The rewards of living sustainably with heritage-breed poultry" is nearing completion, I thought it would be a good time to summarize the concept of it. I have realized, in the process of researching and writing, that Pot Pies and Egg Money is a genuine reflection of our values and the kind of lifestyle we choose and strive to achieve. In fact, unlike most current books about poultry, it is less a "how-to" than a "why-to" kind of book. Throughout the book I have endeavored to share the steps we have taken (and the reasons for our choices) in our progress toward a more sustainable way of life.

What does "sustainable" mean? I have lately been reading Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (Penguin Books, 2006), and I agree with his view that the term has in recent years been overused to the point where, for many people, it has little meaning. He also suggests that anything unsustainable "sooner or later must collapse". For us, so far at least, "sustainable" has the most relevance in regard to our animals.

As most of you know, we grow heritage-breed chickens, turkeys and ducks, along with a couple of pigs for part of the year. The chickens and ducks are mainly kept for eggs; we keep a small breeding group of turkeys and raise about 20 every year to slaughter. The pigs, while grown for meat, also provide a valuable service by plowing up previously unused fields and eating the roots, allowing us to re-seed with grasses and clovers to create better pasture. Choosing the breeds we raise involved a lot of research and a conscious decision to keep only purebreds, also known as "heritage" breeds. From all we've read and heard, as well as learned from our own experience, it is clear to us that purebred livestock is the choice when the aim is sustainability.

For example, you may remember from a previous post that the Broad-Breasted turkey (a commercial hybrid) cannot mate naturally; it must be artificially inseminated. (Incidentally, you wouldn't be able to buy turkeys year-round if this weren't the case; purebred turkeys normally lay eggs only 4 or 5 months of the year.) Cornish Cross chickens, the ubiquitous grocery-store bird, has been bred to reach an impressive broiler size in 7 weeks or less. Obviously, these chickens are being slaughtered long before the normal breeding age of around 18-22 weeks (depending on variety). However, their warp-speed growth comes at a high cost: leg problems and sudden death from cardiac arrest are not uncommon.

I have no problem with those who are trying to make money in the poultry business and have found that they must raise these fast-growing hybrids in order to stay afloat financially. After all, in a sense, no business is sustainable in the long run if it loses money. Also, we don't raise chickens for meat (although we do occasionally slaughter a few roosters when we have too many of them), so perhaps my view doesn't seem to carry much weight. What I've said in the previous paragraph, however, are known facts, not just my opinion. That said, I hope you don't hear any judgment there; I assure you I feel none.

Aside from reproductive issues, another reason we prefer purebreds is the variety of instinctive behaviors that contribute to the long-term health of the farm. For example, one of my criteria for choosing a chicken or turkey breed is foraging ability. All our birds free-range during the day, and we expect them to do some of the work of feeding themselves. (Statistics suggest that foraging can account for up to 30% of a chicken's daily feed, but the numbers give no data as to which breeds were sampled.) Our observation has been that the birds spend a few minutes eating grain first thing in the morning, then head off to happily scratch and peck until it's time to head back in at night. In the wintertime especially, we make sure they get a little extra grain before bedtime, as a little boost in carbohydrates helps keep them warm through the long, cold nights.

Our Midget White turkeys also are excellent foragers. I noticed the first year we had them that they did a great job of cleaning up the windfall apples near the house, which kept the deer from coming into the yard. The ducks love to dabble in the freshly-plowed fields after we move the pigs to another paddock; they break up the manure piles and eat the larvae of intestinal worms, thereby interrupting the cycle of  parasites and disease. The pigs have thankfully retained their instinctive rooting behavior; they not only find a good portion of their own food, the rooting is also a super-efficient way to rid the land of the roots of weeds and other unwanted plants. The chickens and turkeys then follow the ducks, picking out leftover weed seeds and worms. This progression, by the way, also closely imitates nature; for example, woodland birds break up bear manure, in the process spreading around seeds from the berries the bears eat in large quantities in the summer.

We are still learning a lot about how to fully utilize purebred livestock on our farm, but we have already seen a little of the value of diversifying, step by slow step. In the next few posts, I will go into more detail about the other facets of sustainable agriculture and how we are working toward our goals. This is all just a teaser, of course; Pot Pies and Egg Money will give you the rest of the story.

Rooster talk: Predator alert or photo op?

The other day, David and I ran outside when we heard an aerial-predator-alarm call from our roosters. I don't know how to describe this exactly, but we've started to discern some subtle differences in this kind of alert. This time, our first reaction was that it must be a big bird coming in low overhead. Sure enough, we got outside just in time to see a pair of golden eagles cruising low overhead (the first one we saw wasn't much more than 50 feet up).

They were enormous, amazing, beautiful birds, and it was the first time we've seen golden eagles here, although we've had a lot of bald eagles around in the past year or so. Silly me, I had run outside without my video camera. David said to me later that for birders like us, the roosters' alarm calls can be helpful in letting us know not just that there's a potential predator in the vicinity, but that it might turn out to be a rare opportunity to see something like a golden eagle. (Golden eagles usually are higher up in the mountains than our place, which is at about 1000 feet.)

As I said, there seem to be some variations in the aerial-predator call. I'm going to try to get some recordings of these calls one of these days. In the meantime, I must remember to grab my camera next time I hear our helpful little roosters give the head's-up.

Happy New Year! I am back....

Hi there! I hope you all enjoyed the holiday season. After being down with a nasty 'flu for a couple of weeks (during which I couldn't be bothered even to check my e-mail, never mind find the energy to write on this blog), I am back! I've got a lot to talk about, too, so look out for more posts than usual this month.

You might think that January is some kind of off-season for farmers, full of short days and long winter naps. The days are certainly short (although already noticeably longer), so we need to maximize our daylight-hour efforts. We've had some cold weather lately, with several days in a row last week where the daytime high temperature didn't even reach freezing. On those days we spend a lot of time just making sure the animals' drinkers are kept thawed. Luckily we haven't had much snow lately, as that adds another degree of difficulty to the daily chores.

We also are racing the clock to get firewood in every day. Some recent high-wind activity brought down some trees on our property, and my husband David has been keeping quite busy locating, cutting up, and hauling them out of the woods. It's nice when the trees come down right next to the road, but more often we end up having to haul the rounds out by wheelbarrow (sometimes a sled), so it can get to be time-consuming. The payoff, besides the extra exercise, is that our house stays nice and cozy even when the temperatures drop down into the teens or lower.

Today the big project is getting the pigs moved into new paddocks. Even the newest pigs (the Three Little Pigs) are big enough at 4 months old that they have reduced their current paddock to mud in a short time. It's helped that lately the ground has been, for the most part, frozen; it's easier to walk around in their yard without getting stuck. The downside is that the pigs can't do much rooting, which is pretty much their favorite thing to do. They also do better when they have the variety in their diet that pasture crops provide. Part of their new paddock will include access to a wooded area. I'm hoping they'll find some truffles....

Speaking of pasture crops, I've spent the better part of the last two days doing some intensive planning and research about various grains, grasses and legumes. Since it seems that we will be continuing to raise pigs, it's becoming necessary for us to develop a good plan for sustainable rotation of grazing pastures. It's a lot of work because I'm relatively new to this, but at the same time it's exciting; the "big picture" of the future of our farm is starting to take shape, on paper at least. It will be up to us to make it a reality, starting this winter.

The egg production is up dramatically over the past couple of weeks, and we should be easily able to keep up with the Alder Wood Bistro's needs when they re-open the first week of February (they close for vacation every year in January). Our two older pigs are scheduled to be slaughtered on January 21, and we will be teaching several people how to break down the pigs into chops and roasts. We will also be starting another round of curing prosciutto, pancetta, lardo, culatello, guanciale, and several kinds of sausage (all without nitrates, of course).

Other stuff coming up: Before long, I will be starting some seedlings in the greenhouse, a task that I look forward to every year. Recently I have been learning to hand-hew logs, and I have hewn a number of cedar logs, from which I will soon be building a grape arbor. There is split-rail fence to repair where a tree came down on it during a windstorm, and a drainage ditch culvert that needs attention. This is also the time of year when we realize the need to repair the half-mile of road between the house and the gate; in the low areas especially, holes seem to develop quickly with the fall rains.

So... plenty to do. Lots to look forward to and daydream about. I'm excited, aren't you? All the best to you in 2011.

Getting ready for increased egg production

We have 38 pullets, mostly New Hampshires and some Ameraucanas, that are about to start producing eggs. Actually we've had a few "pullet eggs" already; the smaller-than-normal eggs that the birds typically lay shortly before going into full production. Close observation of the birds themselves, especially the condition of their combs, also indicates that a high percentage of them are nearing that stage.

So, this weekend I will be building additional nest boxes for the coops that need them, to make sure there is plenty of nest space for the girls. The typical advice is to provide one nest box for every four hens. However, our experience has been that if you have, say, a row of five nest boxes, the hens will head for the ones in the corners, ignoring the others unless they're desperate and the corner nests are occupied. Hens also prefer to lay eggs in nests that already have eggs in them, so I will be putting wooden eggs in all the nests, to give the newbies the idea.

It's always a challenge, with our free-range situation, to get pullets in the habit of laying in the nest boxes and not out in the bushes. But with adequate nest space, and the older hens setting the example, I'm optimistic. And of course we are looking forward to the increased production; nearly all the eggs we've been collecting lately (chicken, duck and turkey eggs) have gone to the Alder Wood Bistro in Sequim. Our other regular customers will be happy about it too!