Posted by: By
Sunset, July 26, 2007 in Team Olive
By Jess Chamberlain, Sunset home writer
Ever moved into a new-to-you residence and realized after a couple years that you have some knock-out blossoming shrubs in the corner of your lot that'd you'd never noticed before?
Well, last week Sunset’s landscape supervisor
Rick LaFrentz took One Block Feast's Team Olive on a little field trip around Sunset's campus introducing us to the 21 (yes, twenty-one) fruit-bearing olive trees on the property.
As some of us shook our heads in bewilderment, shamefully realizing we don’t get up from our desks enough (how had we not appreciated these gigantic landmarks before?), team member (Sunset associate art director) Keith Whitney noted, “21....Almost a football game.” Indeed. We there committed ourselves to getting to know this seemingly under-appreciated food source on the property where we spend 5 days of our week.
For our part in the local feast Team Olive will be making olive oil and curing olives from the goods in our own front yard.
Over the next couple months, as we watch and wait for our baby olives to grow (admittedly not quite as cute and cuddly as Team Chicken's subjects, but we did leave our field trip unscratched), we'll be updating you on our olive research and observations prior to our anticipated harvest October/November-ish.
First tackle: DNA testing our subjects to identify exactly what type of olives we’re dealing with. Yep, we'll be sending in sample cuttings for analysis. Expect nothing short of CSI amazement.
Until then, please share any olive knowledge, wisdom, or intrigue.
And we’re taking name suggestions for our all-star team line-up of olive trees.
Read MorePosted by: By
Sunset, July 23, 2007 in Team Chicken
By Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher
We need some chickens. And we need them soon.
We did make some decisions. Finding ready-to-lay adult hens — ones that are at least four months old and fully feathered — is surprisingly difficult. Our first call was to Half Moon Bay Feed & Fuel, a local feed store. They sell only baby chicks — and get a new
shipment every Thursday. Then I tried feed stores in more rural areas. No, no. One clerk suggested that we check out the Modesto Livestock and Poultry Auction, which happens every Monday at 11 a.m. (Thanks but ... no
thanks. Poultry auctions scare us.) Another person suggested hitting up local SPCAs to see if they had chickens. Not a bad idea, but not
how most people start their chicken-raising experience.
Most people, we realized, get chicks and raise them to adulthood. (Hens start laying at the earliest at four months, although some hold out until they're eight months old.)
Raising chicks is both easier and harder than getting grown-up chickens. They have to be cared for gingerly for their first few weeks of life, warmed with a light and kept indoors. (Our chicken mentor, Jody Main, suggests keeping them in a cardboard box. When we visited her home, she showed us what she used: a box from Aidells sausage. Presumably not chicken sausage. She just used it because it was the
right size, irony aside.)
On the other hand, we'll get to hand-raise them, which Jody says makes them nicer.
And we won't have to worry about putting chickens who are strangers together and having them squabble. (It's not called a pecking order for nothing.)
We're still exploring the possibility of getting a couple of full-grown hens — more on that later — but our current plan is to get most of our flock as chicks. They'll peep into our lives the second week of August from Half Moon Bay Feed & Fuel. We'll see what kind of chicks they have that day, but we're thinking about getting a couple of fancy ones, which are reportedly finicky layers; and the rest tried and true hearty layers: Rhode Island Reds, Ameraucanas, Buff Orpingtons, and maybe a Barred Rock. Getting different varieties will give us some insight into the difference between the breeds, and it will help us chicken newbies tell which is which.
Sunset readers, do you have any suggestions for chicken names? Please leave them in comments!
----
A note about my last blog: Our senior researcher, Michelle Lau, tells me that her husband raised chickens as a child, and he often gave his chickens eggshells to eat. They never bothered their own eggs. So maybe what I wrote last week was an urban — or, rather, rural — legend. Readers? Any experiences to report?
Read MorePosted by: By
Sunset, July 14, 2007 in Team Garden
Left: the garden on July 10th
By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor
When plants have good soil and steady water (well, and the expert care of Ryan Casey, our test garden coordinator), they can grow like fairytale beanstalks. That’s what seems to be going on in our feast garden recently. A few weeks ago, it was just making do, inching along, and then Ryan put in the long-awaited gentle drip-irrigation system and—ka-bang. It was off to the races. The sight of our garden, after several days of not seeing it, was downright thrilling. The once-puny melons now carpet the ground. The pattypan squashes have leaves as big as baby elephant ears, with small bright yellow squashes clustering underneath. Teeny cucumbers are poking out from the plant's stems like toddlers behind their mother's knees. The potatoes seem practically possessed, using the energy stored in their big starchy seeds (actually whole small potatoes) to explode up out of their trench. The corn is up to my knee. I can't believe it's all a 3-minute walk from my desk...more proof that California can be paradise.
Here's what the garden looked like on June 15.
Left to right: row of edamame; row of squash (corn is off the right); row of yukon gold potatoes.
Here it is on July 10.
Left to right: Edamame (with chiles in background); squash and corn; yukon gold potatoes.
Read MorePosted by: By
Sunset, July 11, 2007 in Team Chicken
By Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher
Yesterday I held my first live chicken ever. It was a three-week-old Rhode Island Red, its dappled chestnut feathers just emerging from the crown of its little chick head. I cupped my hand to give its feet a secure base, and folded my other hand over its wings to keep it from flying away. I tucked it under my chin to calm its high-pitched chirping.
Our team's chicken consultant, Jody Main, invited us for a field trip to her gorgeous organic garden and chicken-education center. And by the chicken-education center, I mean the coop behind her house.
As part of our one-block feast, we've been preparing for the arrival of our feathered friends, and Sunset garden coordinator Ryan has been readying a spot for them in the garden. So it was time that Team Chicken reached out and touched some poultry.Don't get me wrong — I've held dozens of chickens before. But they were all the kind you eat, without feathers or heads or feet. I've tucked herbs and butter under their skin prior to
roasting them with rosemary and garlic, shoved them unceremoniously on a beer can for grilling, and chopped them up for soup. But that will not be these chickens' fate.
Our Sunset chickens will be kept strictly for eggs, like Jody's are. (Team
Chicken is all omnivore, but we're too squeamish to consider
dispatching the little hennies ourselves.) Still, it's hard not to think about the similarities and differences between the chicken that you eat and the chickens that we're planning to raise as, essentially, pets with benefits. (Mmmm ...
omelets.)
We'll get four laying hens and two chicks, probably in the next
couple of weeks. Deadlines demand that we get some eggs pronto, but we
also want the experience of raising chicks from fuzzball to
adult. We practiced chicken-rearing today. We learned that
chickens like to eat weeds (finally, something to do with my bumper
crop of sow thistle!) We learned that they like to peck at oyster
shells, which give them calcium to make their eggs strong, and that you should never ever feed
chickens eggshells. (They'll realize how delicious they are, Jody says,
and start pecking at their own eggs.)
But mostly our field trip to Jody's helped us get used to the idea that we're going to be in
charge of these animals, strange, clucking beasts who depend on us for
everything. We have to be good chicken stewards, I thought, as I held
that little chickie. Its down was fuzzy against my chin, and its new feathers tickled the side of my neck. I could feel its trembling, quick heartbeat and its
intense warmth. I watched its lizardy eye blink closed, and felt its
weird reptilian talon scratch against my palm. Not a high-five, but
close enough.
Posted by: By
Sunset, July 8, 2007 in Team Garden
Left: our one surviving chickpea.
By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor
For some reason, the entire bed of chickpeas has failed to sprout. The rest of our feast garden is doing fine, all the little seedlings and sprouts are emerging and growing, but not the chickpeas (also known as garbanzo beans). The only little survivor is an escapee that had somehow migrated beyond the bird-repelling mesh spread over the bed...other plants are joyfully shooting up from the tomb of the chickpea: nasturtiums, purslane, various weeds.
Rats. We'd been planning to make a wondrous appetizer with them. Ryan will make one last chickpea-growing effort, in containers, and then we will call it a day.
Read More
By Jess Chamberlain, Sunset home writer
