February 6, 2019 @goldenoakfarm
Primrose in the living room
Wednesday my intern was here and I’d planned preserving ginger, making celery salt, and working up a chick order.
We did the ginger first. I usually use organic ginger, and this brand, Melissa’s.com, has organic but all I’d found this year was non-organic. I’d also gotten some vodka, but not organic, too pricy.
The jars behind the ginger are from previous batches. One I had grown, the other organic bought. We broke the ginger into pieces and fit it into the jar, then covered it with the vodka. It will keep a long time this way.
Then we moved onto making celery salt. I had already processed the celery (cleaning, chopping stems and leaves, blending, dehydrating, and blending the dehydrated to powder) so it was just a matter of mixing the salt and celery powder in the blender, to taste. A dusty job, soon done. We cleaned up the mess and moved onto chick orders.
I’ve ordered from a lot of hatcheries over the years. We went over the pluses and minuses of various catalogs, and what sort of information one would seek and why.
Then we looked at various breeds and I explained why we chose the dual purpose breeds we had and our experiences with the various ones.
I got out my ledgers with information on each flock from the beginning, and she could see how I used this information from year to year.
I also got out the layer charts as the purpose of this exercise was to select a flock for her house and she could see how I had tracked the flock and the breeds in each and what the laying results were.
Then we went through the catalogs and looked at layer breeds in addition to dual purpose. She liked the Speckled Sussex and Americanas best. She wanted many colored eggs.
Primrose on the kitchen table
Then she told me all about her family’s trip to Kenya for 2.5 weeks and showed me the photos. A really lovely morning. We had lunch and she walked up to the barn to see the hens and collect eggs.
When she left, I slept on the couch most of the afternoon. I’m still a long ways from recovered from this bug….
