By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

The quinoa had to go. It flopped over, dried out, and just looked ready. (Click here for a refresher on quinoa.)

The seed packet listed the days to maturity as 100-110. It had definitely been that long, but I hesitated in harvesting because the seed packet also said not to cut the mature seed heads until after a frost. Did the crop somehow need a frost to fully mature? I called up the pros at Seeds of Change and spoke to Emily. She said that the seed packet is a bit misleading -- the crop is ready in September or so. Not all climates have a frost by then, so if it's looking ready, then it probably is.

Step one - Cut off all the seed heads

Step two -- Lay them inside and let them dry down completely (including stems and leaves)

Step three will be threshing. Emily suggests putting on gloves and rubbing the seeds heads together over a bucket.

Step four will be removing the leaf and stem debris from the seeds. Emily sets up a fan and has a container to catch the quinoa. Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, so I think I'll probably call her to flush out the details when we get closer to that time.

And the final step will be adequately soaking the seeds to remove the saponin, a tannin that tastes bitter.

More on each step as we get there...

So far I'm totally stoked on growing quinoa. We're getting far more than I expected. Emily tells people that they'll get about a cup per plant, and I think her estimate is seeming pretty accurate. We were able to grow 54 plants in a raised bed measuring 4ft. by 8ft. (the plants require spacing of 6-8 inches). It's a great crop to grow in that it's super unthirsty (10-12 inches for the entire season), low-maintenance, and stores well for months (a year?). The threshing seems to be the labor intensive part, but I'm excited to do it, and I imagine that anyone growing their own quinoa would probably be up for the challenge.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Last night Katie, our editor-in-chief, stopped me in the hall and said, "Have you seen the Do the Honey Bee video?" Of course I hadn't. I was probably out with the bees when it hit cyberspace.

I'm wondering if the Honey Bee will become the new Macarena?

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Yesterday we went into our Dead-Midge hive to see if by some chance the bees had managed to replace the queen cell we ripped open 3 weeks ago.  

Nope. Dead-Midge (hereafter known as Dramatica because of that hive’s penchant for drama) is not queenright. There is no queen. Just lots of drone brood randomly placed all over the frame and multiple eggs cramming the cells in the crazy way only a laying worker can accomplish.

But we also found a mystery: two queen cells (That’s one of them in the photo at left). And the girls are cuddling up to these oversize cells like a bunch of maiden aunts hovering around their only brother’s only baby.

We don’t know what could be in those big cells.

We don’t think it’s possible that there are queens. Bees need fresh eggs or young larvae to make a queen. And bee development from egg to emergence is very reliable. 16 days for queens, 21 days for workers, and 24 days for drones, give or take a couple days.

We’ve counted backward through the month of August every way we can think to count. It’s been 28 days since we split Veronica and gave Midge frames of brood, larvae and eggs, so by the calendar, the bees shouldn’t have had any fresh eggs or larvae to work with within the last 3 weeks.

In fact, the last of the brood from Veronica should have emerged by now. The youngest worker bee should be about 7 days old. Since a worker bee in summer lives only  38 days, this hive is looking at about one more month to live.  We don’t see how there could be any baby queens in those two queen cells.

But here’s a weird thing. Sometimes—although very rarely—an egg from a laying worker will develop parthenogenetically into a female. Anyway, so says The Hive and the Honey Bee, the beekeeper’s bible.

So who knows. Perhaps we’ve got a biological oddity growing in our hives. Or perhaps we’ve got a drone that’s been fed royal jelly all his life. Or perhaps those two cells are empty and the bees are just wishful thinking.

Now we have a decision to make. Split Veronica and try again? Or let Dramatica die?

By Amy Machnak, Sunset recipe editor

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

We found out what happened to deceased chicken Alana. I got a call this morning about the results of the necropsy (which is just another word for an autopsy that doesn't happen to a person).

There is good news. She didn't have anything infectious: not Marek's, not botulism, not worms, not bumblefoot or Newcastle or the flu.

She also didn't have heavy metal poisoning or any kind of digestive trouble. (My worst-case scenario: She'd somehow eaten a twist-tie or something from a bunch of spinach, which I'd let slip by.)

What she did have was kidney failure. No explanation. It falls under the umbrella of "metabolic disorder" that the vet had mentioned. Also, there was some inflammation around her heart, which was unexplained.

So no danger to the rest of the flock. Just a one-off thing that happens when you have chickens.

In an unrelated, but also related note: Farm City author and Oakland resident Novella Carpenter is hosting an open house of her urban Ghosttown Farm on Saturday, Aug. 29. Among the planned events are a chicken slaughter workshop, which is useful both for folks who plan to raise birds for meat, but also for suburban learners like ourselves who would like to know how to put a miserably sick chicken out of its misery. It's free.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Sick chicken Alana did not recover.

Here's what happened: On Friday, she was crouched in the coop with a droopy tail and no energy.

On Saturday, she seemed better. Perked up, walking, eating, drinking.

By Monday, she was worse again. So I brought her inside so I could keep an eye on her. In a cardboard box in my cubicle. We gave her graham crackers and yogurt and a couple of strawberries, which she demolished within minutes. That was a good sign, the vigorous appetite.

Photo by Emily Chow, Sunset editorial intern

Tuesday passed with not much movement. On Wednesday, she had her best day ever when I gave her a bite-sized piece of glazed doughnut.

We started to think she was faking.

Any animal who goes after a doughnut with that much gusto has to feel at least okay. At lunch, I took her outside, and while I ate yogurt, she puttered around (actually walked a little!) eating a small bunch of oxalis and a nascent sow thistle. (Weeds were her second favorite food. Behind doughnuts.)

One of her toes seemed splayed strangely, so I started to think that perhaps she had injured her leg somehow, that her reluctance to walk was physical injury rather than overall malaise. I actually put her back in the coop overnight, hopeful that she would continue to improve.

Thursday, I thought she'd vanished. She wasn't in the yard with the other chickens, she didn't seem to be in their house, she wasn't hiding in a corner anywhere. I actually came inside to ask the other chicken-keepers if they'd pulled her earlier in the morning. No, they hadn't.

I went back out and gave the coop another look. She was way, way up in the house, on the topmost roost. She looked at me, and it was clear that she either couldn't or wouldn't come down.

The chickens put themselves to bed each night and huddle together on the roosts, but it is highly unusual for them to not hop down when the sun rises. I reached into the house and scooped Alana up and brought her inside.

But no tempting morsel of food seemed interesting to her. I offered yogurt, a delicious hamburger bun, layer pellets, fruit. Nothing. She ignored her water. And she wouldn't stand up at all. She did, a couple of times, reach for the hamburger bun, but she was so weak that she would just fall over.

We decided last year that we would give our chickens limited veterinary care. (After our other Ameraucana Ophelia had an impacted crop last year that required surgery.) Not to be cruel, but as an acknowledgment that these are farm animals. Plus, not very many vets will even see chickens, and the kinds of maladies they come down with are not always effectively treatable.

As Jody Main told us, "If a chicken goes, she goes fast."

And yet, on Thursday, Alana seemed to be going, but not fast enough, honestly. I got spooked by the idea of a chicken dying in my cubicle.

Margo, on the other hand, only wanted to know what was wrong with her. She rightly pointed out that the chicken had been notably sick for five days, and we had no plausible guesses. We thought maybe she was egg bound, but we couldn't feel an egg. We thought she'd injured her leg, but there was no apparent injury. We just flat didn't know.

Margo found an avian vet in Mountain View, and I took her there.

At Miramonte Veterinary Hospital, I filled out forms talking about what our chickens eat, where they live, how old they are, what vaccines they've received. Then we saw Dr. Kenton Taylor. Patient and thorough, he examined Alana, put her on the floor and tried to convince her to walk, checked under each wing, felt for an egg (he didn't feel one either) and then told me what could be wrong with her.

His first guess: Marek's disease. Even though she was vaccinated against it as a chick, I asked? Maybe. He said it was somewhat unclear how long the vaccine lasts.

Then, it was a panoply of untreatable and terrible possibilities: heavy metal poisoning, botulism, a metabolic disorder that caused an organ to fail.

The bottom line: "Right now, being immobile, her prognosis doesn't look good."

The best thing to do, then, would be to put her out of her suffering and send her body to the state lab, where it would undergo necropsy. That way, we'd know what went wrong with her and help us learn if we needed to do anything different with the rest of the flock.

There was little doubt in my mind that it was the right thing to do. Which is why I was so surprised that I started to cry. And couldn't stop.

I've done my best to moderate my attachment to these chickens. Indeed, I have often found myself disappointed by the limitations of their personality, and the way they peck at each other, and how I don't think they know the difference between me and any other person. I've worked to not fool myself about how there's little difference between these chickens and the chickens I eat. But after having Alana sit next to me for much of the week, trying to coax her into eating anything, hoping fervently that she would get better — then, knowing that there was nothing more to do, that she would die — it was a little overwhelming.

The nice folks at the vet's office, of course, were not at all surprised. They give people the sad news that their pets are beyond help all the time, so they gave me a few more minutes with Alana. Perched up on the table, she could barely keep her eyes open.

I regained my composure and poked my head out the door. The vet tech, whose name I never even learned, wrapped Alana up in a towel and took her to the back of the office. I did not see her again.

Alana, chicken
August 2007–August 2009

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

My last post told of our attempts at hive building. We deposed the false queen and created a situation where the bees could make a new leader.

And they did. They built a sweet little queen cell for the baby queen. They built it at the bottom of the 6th frame, and attached it to the adjacent frame.

Perfectly positioned to be ripped apart at one week of age by—yes, of course—us. Readers, we hang our heads in shame. When we opened the hive and moved the frames, we accidentally killed the baby queen.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

I’ve been too disheartened to blog. Two weeks ago we found we’d lost Queen Midge.

The queen is the heart and soul of a beehive. She lays the eggs to make baby bees, she controls the temperament and mood of the hive, and she gives the bees something to live for. Without the queen, the hive is dead. It’s a very important position.

So it makes some kind of sense that if the queen suddenly goes missing (likely smooshed by bumbling beekeepers), one of the workers will think she has a chance at promotion. She’ll fire up those latent ovaries and start laying eggs.

This never works out. A laying worker, being the required sex (female), is able to produce eggs. But since she never did the big dirty–—mating mid-flight with a drone (male)—all her eggs are infertile. Weirdly, the eggs of a laying worker can hatch, but the babies are all drones. And a hive full of drones will soon starve to death.

That’s what we had 2 weeks ago. A hive full of boy bees who had no idea how to feed themselves, a laying worker that could only produce more boy bees, and a dwindling population of working girls that were enthralled by the upstart queen.

A hive that’s accepted a laying worker is very hard to requeen, so we had to take some drastic measures. We had to destroy poor dead Midge’s hive and replace it with a split from Veronica.

This was complicated. We had to write out a script to keep track of our steps as we worked:

• Queen Veronica wasn’t present
• There was capped brood, larvae, and fresh eggs on each frame
• There were plenty of nurse bees on each frame

New hive (front) with bees from Veronica (back)

The idea behind this process is that the bees taken from Veronica, suddenly without a queen, will choose a worker egg, build a bigger cell around it, and douse it with buckets of royal jelly (a blend of proteins and bee hormones that you, who may have used it as a cosmetic, probably don’t want to know about.) Royal jelly turns an ordinary worker egg into a fully functioning queen bee. With any luck, in a week we'd have a new baby queen. A little larval princess.

The bees from the Dead-Midge hive, dumped unceremoniously on the ground behind our greenhouse, were supposed to fly back to their old home site and merge with the bees we’d taken from Veronica.

And the laying worker? We hoped that she stayed where we dumped her and died (since she had never left the hive before, we were hoping she couldn't find her way back).

The day after the big reorganization, I collected the drone frames we'd set out to die. An animal, probably a raccoon or opossum, had dragged the frames around the nursery and eaten most of the drone brood. On one frame I found a huddle of bees sheltering a remaining patch of drone brood. This cluster of bereft bees broke my heart.

It's a cold harsh world in bee husbandry. But at least they don’t squawk like chickens when you kill them.

By Kimberley Burch, Sunset imaging specialist

The Beekeepers Guild of San Mateo County is once again exhibiting at the San Mateo County Fair Peninsula’s Festival starting tomorrow, August 15, until Sunday, August 23, 2009.  Visit the table to talk about bees, see an observation hive and purchase goods from the hive (as available from guild members) such as honey, wax, and beauty products.

LOCATION: South Wall in the Expo Hall; San Mateo County Fairgrounds

I, personally, will be volunteering at the table tomorrow from noon to 4pm.  Please stop by to say hello.

Let’s talk BEES!

By Amy Machnak, Sunset food writer

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

Sara Schneider, our wine editor, tracked me down the other day to give me a gift. She found me chatting with Elizabeth Jardina, researcher-extraordinaire, and Alan Phinney, managing editor (also extraordinaire, of course) and handed over a nice, sleek cardboard box. You can imagine how special I felt being singled out by the wine editor, of all people, and being handed a gift. Who me? Gosh, thanks.

Was it special wine from an amazing organic vineyard? It didn't feel heavy enough to be a bottle. Magical seeds she'd procured?

I opened the box and instantly choked on a cloud of particulate matter. Ok, a slight exaggeration, but I essentially opened up a box of finely decomposed cow manure and a big 'ol cow horn. Um, thank you?

Sara had been given "horn manure" from  Paul Dolan, a partner at Mendocino Wine Company. The tradition of horn manure (cow poo fermented underground in a cow horn) comes from biodynamic farming.

This is what I understand about biodynamics:

• It comes from a series of lectures given by Rudolf Steiner back in the '30s (Steiner also gave us  Waldorf education).
• It involves paying very close attention to your land.
• There are a lot of compost preparations, such as stuffing a cow horn with cow poo and burying it under your ground for a winter.

This is what I've never understood about biodynamics:

• Stuffing a cow horn with cow poo and burying it under your ground for a winter

Listen, I am not meaning to poo-poo biodynamics (heehee). It is not a method of farming with which I am familiar. And yes, from the outside it seems very woo-woo. But I'm open to learning. I swear. I'm even going to make compost tea out of the horn manure and irrigate my crops with it.

But back to my story. The gift. Of horn manure.

So, Paul Dolan gave Sara his old horn manure. And then Sara gave it to me. And then I went home and thought long and hard about the decisions I've made in life to have reached this moment. The moment of being given the gift of cow poo in a box.

See what else our wine editor is up to here.

And learn more about the One Block Diet here.

By Kaitlin Louie, Sunset food intern

The Thompson Seedless grapevine in the Sunset test garden.

The grape season is about to begin, but homemade wine isn’t the only thing on our minds here in One-Block-Diet land. In keeping with our use-everything-that-is-useable philosophy, it occurred to us that the leaves of a particular grape vine in Sunset’s test garden could make a tasty addition to our next one-block feast, which we’re planning to have in October.

Grape leaves are used extensively in many parts of the world as tender, mildly-flavored wrappings for everything from spiced, nutty rice to grilled feta. The yummy possibilities were more than enough motivation for us to investigate how to harvest and prepare these leaves for immediate and future use.

After doing some research, we discovered that the best time to harvest fresh grape leaves is late spring to early summer. The later the season gets, the tougher the leaves become.  Whoops. 

No matter--our plan is to harvest and preserve the hopefully-still-tender leaves first thing tomorrow. The trouble is, our research has yielded several different ways of freezing and brining grape leaves, and we’re not entirely sure what method is the best one to implement.

Furthermore, we’re a tad concerned about the potential for botulism poisoning when canning our leaves. Grape leaves are classified as a low-acid food, and thus if they are improperly canned, they can breed the bacteria that produces the dangerous botulism toxin. Sunset editorial intern Natalie Jabbar, upon hearing news of our canning plans, raises an eyebrow. "I took microbiology a few years ago, learned a lot about dangerous spores," she says, shaking her head. "Canning is often bad news bears."

We may be stubbornly curious and slightly crazy, but despite our misgivings, we’ve put together an action plan, resolving to add plenty of citric acid to our brined leaves and to boil the heck out of them after they are sealed in jars.  What follows is a hybrid of several preserving suggestions gleaned from:

Najat Sukhun, who is a longtime home cook and Natalie Jabbar's mom. (Najat suggested that we use citric acid rather than lemon juice to ensure that our grape leaf brine has consistently adequate levels of acid to ward off botulism.)

Fresh Preserving’s official guide to canning low-acid foods. Exceptionally comprehensive information, with an emphasis on safety.

Ellen’s Kitchen: Where we got a lot of our info. Very clear instructions and appealing recipes at the end.

Mama’s Taverna: Nice pictorial depictions of how to preserve grape leaves.

Kalofagas: One man and his Greek cooking.

If any of you readers are experienced in preserving fresh grape leaves, we welcome any and all advice!

Here are the procedures that we intend to follow.

Picking the Grape Leaves

Choose leaves that are approximately the size of a woman’s hand, and which are light to light-medium green.  Najat advises looking for shiny, smooth leaves and steering clear of fuzzy, thick ones. Also, make sure your leaves come from vines that have not been sprayed with pesticides.

To Use Immediately

1. Rinse your leaves well and pat dry.
2. Bring 1 part salt to 4 parts water to a boil.  Blanch leaves in batches of 12-15, covering them with the boiling water and blanching for 2-3 minutes.  Remove leaves and place them in ice water until fully cooled.  Dry with a towel. 

To Freeze

1. Follow the above steps, then stack similar-sized leaves 6-20 at a time, lay them flat so they don't crack, and place them in freezer bags. Freeze for up to 6 months.
2. To use, thaw in a colander and use immediately.

To Brine

1. Sterilize several canning jars by putting them in a pot of water and boiling for 10 minutes. Lower the heat to a simmer and keep jars in the hot water until needed.
2. Place lids (without bands) in another saucepan and place over medium-low heat until bubbles form (do not boil). Remove from heat and keep lids in the hot water until needed.
3. Fill your canner/boiling pot halfway with hot water and bring to a boil over medium heat.
4. Remove jars from the pot of hot water using a jar lifter.
5. Tie blanched leaves into bundles.  Gently push bundles into jars with a wooden spoon, leaving a good 1½ to 2 inches between the bundle top and the jar’s rim. 
6. Prepare the brine by boiling ¼ cup kosher salt with every 4 cups of water you use.  Add 2 ½ to 3 tsp citric acid powder for every 4 cups of the brine. Boil brine (with citric acid) for a minimum of five minutes, then pour the hot brine into your leaf-filled jars.  Make sure that the brine covers the leaf bundle by at least 1 inch.
7. Remove air bubbles by running a clean knife inside the rim of each jar. 
8. Remove jar lids from their hot water using tongs. Place lids on top of jars so that sealing compound on lids meets the jar rims. Seal the jars by placing bands on jars and tightening them firmly (do not force). Place sealed jars in canner/boiling pot and fill with enough water to cover jars by about an inch. Boil, covered, on high heat for 15 minutes. Let jars cool and store in a dark, cool place for up to a year.

 

For more tips on Sunset’s way to can, click here.

We’ll keep you posted on how this all turns out!

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

You may remember that we once had a rooster. Nugget. We got him when he was a chick-let, a rescue chicken. We opened our coop and (as much as you really can expect) our hearts to our little fluff of maroon. I held Nugget's little warm body in my hands and introduced him to visitors at Sunset's Celebration Weekend two years ago.

Then, the awkwardness of adolescence revealed it unlikely "she'd" ever lay an egg because she was totally a dude. Also, beating up on our other chickens. Even more unacceptable, giving me a hard time, pecking me every time I went into the coop.

And then he started crowing.

This put us on the wrong side of the law, as well as our plan of a happy coop of hens.

We shied away from the idea of killing him, even though Sunset magazine is a premier source for recipes for roast chicken, almond-crusted chicken, chicken stewed with green chiles or green olives, or turned into a summer corn chowder with avocado.

It's funny: I'm naturally squeamish, so I dreaded the idea of the blood and terror of killing him, but I became the strongest advocate for it. If you are going to eat meat, why not meat you raise yourself? If you've got the nerve to eat flesh, why not take a principled stance?

In a last-ditch effort, I even shopped around the idea of feeding him to the alligator gar at the California Academy of Sciences, figuring it would be a relatively honorable end for him. The alligator gar, actually a large, toothy fish, has to eat; he eats chickens. It's fulfilling the natural order of things. (A colleague's father-in-law is an ichthyologist there, which is why she suggested it. I didn't make that up myself.) Anyway, people thought I was a psycho who wanted the rooster to engage in some kind of gladiatorial nonsense. Which I DENY.

Eventually, he ended up going to live in the country, keeping his head, but leaving me feeling conflicted about my love of chicken korma.

Which is why I was so interested in how our colleague Samantha Schoech dealt with her backyard flock. Turns out, her Tilly was a rooster too. And this weekend, her husband and a couple of trusty friends killed him. In their backyard. Tonight, she's planning to make pozole.

Sam's blog has a video of the dispatching itself, which I steeled myself to watch. Only it wasn't that bad. If you're interested in animal husbandry, I recommend watching it to see if you can deal with the gory bits.

Want more about chicken "processing"? You must also check out our colleague-in-honest-food, Hank Shaw's blog Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. (He is a rooster assassin for his Italian neighbors.)