It’s not that there aren’t enough nests, it’s that hens want to use the same nest. Some days I’ll go to the coop to check out what all the cackling is about, only to see one hen on a nest, five empty nests nearby, and another hen expressing her frustration that the nest she wants to use is occupied.
By mid afternoon, the more favorite nests can have many eggs. It’s not always possible to tell which hen laid which egg, but by observing throughout the day which hens are using a particular nest, it’s possible to figure out the hen which laid a specific egg by the color and shape of the egg.
Nest full of eggs
Making Tofu
What does making tofu have to do with raising chickens? Nothing directly, except that chickens love homemade tofu as much as I do. They also go nuts over okara, a byproduct of making tofu. So do the dogs. Okara is the soybean solids left after squeezing out the soymilk. The soymilk is what is used for making tofu, but okara is an incredible food on its own. It makes fluffy, moist muffins, delicious pancakes and waffles, mixed with ground beef it makes mouthwatering croquettes, or is delicious on its own with a little ginger and soy sauce.
The basics of making tofu are crushing soybeans into a slurry, bringing the slurry to boil, squeezing out the soy milk, heating the soy milk, adding nigari to the soy milk to make it curdle, and then pressing the resulting curds into a block.
I recently learned that a farm on San Juan Island, San Juan Island Sea Salt, is making salt from sea water, and when I heard that, I knew that they also had to be making nigari because nigari is a byproduct of making sea salt. Basically, nigari is what is left when you take the salt out of seawater. It is also called bittern, and is mostly magnesium chloride. Nigari is very bitter. When you taste it, it is so bitter it feels like you are stabbing your tongue with needles. And yet, with their nigari, I detected a sweetness behind the extreme bitterness.
San Juan Island Sea Salt was very gracious to send me a sample of their nigari. When the sample arrived Saturday morning, I made a batch of tofu in the afternoon and was very pleased with the result. Their nigari is a wonderful product and it’s great to know I have a local source for nigari. The pictures below are ones I took of the process when I made tofu this afternoon. If you need more detailed information about making tofu, feel free to contact me.
Things to watch out for:
If possible, use pure non-chlorinated water to soak the beans and make the slurry. Not an easy thing to do if you have public water. If you have a well with good water, count yourself lucky.
When bringing the crushed soy slurry to a boil, stir occasionally, and pay very close attention as it nears boiling as it expands greatly and will easily boil over.
Don’t boil the soy slurry mix long, a few minutes at most. If you boil it for a long time, it will not curdle as well – at least that has been my experience.
A Chick Grows Up
A Chick Grows Up
Words lack the capability to describe the love and care a mother hen showers on her chicks. You have to see it to understand how important mother hens are to chicks. Born at the end of November, the chick at 2 and a half months of age is nearly halfway to becoming an adult. At times, she ventures out on her own, but she still spends much of the day with her mother, and roosts with her at night. This is what humanely raised chicken looks like. The chick is 13 weeks old now. You can scarcely find a chicken that has enjoyed life so long in your supermarket. You certainly won’t find any that have had the joy of being raised by a mother. At a man and a hoe, that is the only kind of chicken I raise.
Billy
It takes both a rooster and a hen to create a chick. Just in the US, some 9,000,000,000 chickens are raised each year for meat. Which means that hidden from view there are millions of roosters and hens kept to pump out fertile eggs. Artificial insemination is not used much in the chicken industry. According to Marian Stamp Dawkins, Professor of Animal Behaviour, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow in Biological Sciences, Sommerville College, Oxford:
In commercial production, breeders are usually fed very restricted rations to prevent them from becoming overweight, obese and infertile, sometimes only 25-40% of the food they would eat if they could.
In other words, breeding hens and roosters are kept on starvation diets to keep them from becoming too fat. If they get too fat, they can’t physically breed! Imagine how you would feel if you could only eat a quarter of what you would like to eat.
However, this certainly is not what happens at a man and a hoe. The heritage breeds I raise don’t over eat. They won’t stay in one place and eat nonstop like the broiler breeds most chicken farmers raise. I could dump out a whole bag of grain and feed, and the chickens here will eat their fill and move on, leaving much of the grain and feed untouched. They have better things to do than sit around all day and stuff their faces. With acres of pasture and forest to explore, they would rather be outside enjoying the sunshine, courting, chasing small birds, and finding fat earthworms to savor.
Billy is a special rooster. The first rooster at a man and his hoe. He is now five years old and is starting to show his age. He’s survived an encounter with a raccoon, when he bravely kept a raccoon from getting the hens. He’s battled with younger roosters challenging his dominant position. Over the years he’s broken a toe, and after battles with younger roosters, hobbled around while he healed. But he’s still the king of the flock and has two inch long spurs to prove it. He’s very gentle with the hens and is the favorite rooster of many of the hens.
So when you buy chicken or eggs from me, rest assured that there are no starving breeding roosters and hens used in the process. All of the chickens here have very full lives, spending most of their time outdoors, and get to eat whenever they want.
Edible Recycled Chicken Manure
Reincarnated Chicken Manure
So what happens to chicken manure when it is reincarnated? It turns into edible wonders, like these over wintering onions I pulled this morning. Most chicken farmers get rid of their egg laying hens by the time they have gone through two egg laying seasons. However, on the micro scale that I operate, the manure these older hens is as valuable as the eggs they lay. I’ve had hens live more than seven years. Billy, the oldest rooster, is five years old this year. Eight Week Old Chicks
The chicks born on December 19 are 8 weeks old now. They are still spending their days and nights with their mother. Most commercial broiler chickens are in the supermarket by 8 weeks of age. These chicks are still having the time of their lives foraging for food with their mother. Here, they are digging for earthworms next to a compost pile.
