By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

We decided to let our grapes turn into raisins for the fall feast. Actually, Margo decided. I was against the idea. What's the point of having fresh, delicious grapes shrivel into raisins?

Margo told me we'd let the grapes raisinate on the vine. Raisinate. Good word, right? I didn't bother researching. I just left the grapes alone.

This is what we got:

Turns out raisinate isn't really a word. Well, Wiktionary includes it, and the references are indeed to letting grapes shrivel. One catch: it's done OFF the vine.

There goes our entire season's crop. Oops.

Raisins are usually harvested at their peak (late summer) and then laid out to dry for anywhere from two days to three weeks, depending on the conditions and your taste preference. Drying can be done outside or in a dehydrator, depending on the climate. The trick is that raisins need hot, dry weather to suck out all that juicy moisture (we're talking around 85-100 degrees). They're subject to rot and mold if the conditions aren't right (like in our coastal-influenced Menlo Park). Be sure to check them consistently.

There is a method for vine-ripened grapes, called DOV (dried-on-vine). This UC study presents DOV as a labor saving solution. Ripe grapes are left on the vine and collected by mechanized harvesting machines. While they technically dry on the vine, it's no longer attached to a living plant. The point is to increase mechanization and eliminate the need for workers to harvest bunch by bunch. Hm -- not quite the vine-ripened garden imagery we had in mind.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

I know I haven't yet told you about the first 7. I've been avoiding it...soon I'll spill the beans. But there's no avoiding disaster #8, the mushroom log we've been relying on for shiitakes for our fall one-block dinner. Which is in 5 days.

Eeesh.

I've tried to revive this log with soakings in diluted bleach, with mold-shaving sessions, with tight wrappings in plastic. I may have done the wrong thing; makers of other kits suggest rubbing alcohol and no bleach under any circumstances. Who knows. The mold lives on.

Luckily, Far West Fungi will replace incorrigibly moldy logs for its customers, as long as they're reasonably satisfied you haven't mistreated your log (stored it on the floor next to the trash, for instance.) In the meantime, does anyone have suggestions for how we can keep our next log mold-free?

By Jim McCann, Sunset Art Director

I hate when our chickens molt. Why nature insists on this cockamamie ritual once a year is beyond me. It’s a real killjoy around the water cooler when members of other One-Block teams compare the bounty of their projects and we on Team Chicken stand empty-handed. You see, I possess an unreasonable tendency to competitiveness, and to hear how productive the other teams are makes me downright envious.

Team Bee? Oh yeah?! Well… flying bugs don’t have an ‘off-season’, they just keep making more bees when the old ones retire or get lost searching for nectar—that’s kind of cheating. Team Cheese? Spotlights are on them as they begin testing batches of all kinds of cheeses. They’re out in the test kitchen now practicing with all their fancy-schmancy equipment. Show-offs. Team Mushroom? The new kids on the block who got lucky with their first crop. Besides, you’re growing fungus! Hel-looo! My shower wall does the same thing without me having to do anything at all. And as far as Team Escargot is concerned, all I can say is things are moving pretty slow over in their camp.

Fall used to be my favorite time of year. The harvest is in full swing and here in the West our weather is distinctly better than anywhere else in the country: warm and dry. Dinner can be a hot bowl of soup or chili. I can watch football and baseball at the same time. But ever since we got our chickens it’s now the season of my discontent. The chickens molt. They stop producing eggs. They become antisocial. Basically the Oakland Raiders of our One-Block Diet league.

At any other time of the year, our birds are exquisite looking. But during the molting season, they’re just freakish. Carmelita, who’s feathers normally are a dazzling display of burnt red tinged with metallic greens and blacks now looks like someone had been preparing her for a stew, but stopped to answer the phone. And Ruby—who has always been the avian equivalent of that Catholic schoolgirl played by Molly Shannon—looks like she could use a tiny parka. Her neck is full of empty feather pockets that make her look more like a lizard than a hen; not something I want to take questions on at the office show-and-tell. 

    The worst is poor Ophelia. She’s our Ameraucana with the inflated crop. I went out to visit with them the other day and caught a peculiar sight: Ophelia’s molted crop. It looks like the bird has a boob. I’m not kidding. One right in the middle of her chest. And it’s not small either. It’s still covered in feathers but the sides around it aren’t—or at least there are less of them—so it looks augmented. 

This causes me great stress. The way to treat an impacted crop is you have to massage it. I don’t think I’m comfortable with that right now. Imagine an impressionable coworker stumbling in on that scene. It would be even worse if they didn’t stick around for an explanation, slowly backing away as if they didn’t want to interrupt a bit of bird debauchery. The damage it could cause our inner-office relationship would be irreconcilable.

And to make matters worse, the coop looks like the scene of a recent pillow fight. The floor is covered with feathers. It seems I’m out there every other day picking up enough plumage to Frankenstein together a completely new chicken. 

All of this and not an egg to speak of for weeks. In the office, we employ an egg sign-up sheet as a way to gift fellow coworkers half a dozen eggs whenever we fill a carton. Right now tacked over the sheet is a sign that reads “No eggs. Lazy chickens. Stay tuned…” 

Oh the humility of it all.

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

The flooring of our coop has caused some trouble over the seasons. I've scoured the blog for any mention, but it seems none of the saga ever made it into a post. The record, then, lives in photos.

This post recounts Ophelia's crop failure. Notice that the flooring is straw:

What was omitted from all of that Ophelia drama was that her crop was impacted because she was eating all that straw.

This post was in the middle of the health problems (hence the yogurt regimen and Elizabeth's daily crop massages) and you'll notice that the floor is bare. We'd gotten rid of the straw but hadn't figured out what, if anything, should replace it.

It didn't take long to realize that bare soil a) gets muddy and messy when wet, and b) smells when pooped on. So by this post, we'd switched to large bark mulch.

The bark mulch works really well for us. We can add layers to it should it get messy or start to smell, and we can muck it out pretty easily when it's time to do a deep cleaning. It's actually due for a mucking. The bark is piled up so high that we're having trouble opening the door to the coop!

A passerby recently commented that it is cruel to have chickens standing on bark mulch because they can't scratch and dust-bathe. But actually, they can and do all the time. 

This is the least exciting picture ever, but it's my proof that the girls can kick the bark and scratch away.

We use wood shavings in the lay boxes because it keeps them nice and soft for egg-laying (less cracking when there's a fluffy landing). We decided against using them for the entirety of the coop because Ophelia still seems to enjoy eating them.

So that's how we do it. We are curious about how other keepers of backyard flocks handle flooring material. Margo recently learned that the folks at Full Circle Dairy in the San Joaquin Valley house their chickens on SAND! 

How about you, fellow keepers of backyard flocks?

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Our shiitake mushroom log gave us such a lovely first crop. Then came the weekend.

The log on Monday. Not pretty.

The poor thing was so dried out it was practically weightless. Plus, green mold was beginning to creep over its surface. 

I called Ian Garrone, co-owner of Far West Fungi, seller of the logs, and asked for advice.

"Well, the green mold likes the same environment as the fungi," he said. "Most people freak out about it. But it's natural. Just soak it for 24 hours in water with a little bit of bleach." How much bleach? "Half a capful for every three gallons. Then take it out and wipe off the mold."

The shiitake log, beneath a plate and topped with a weight to keep it from floating.

This bucket caused a bit of a stir among the cooks in our test kitchen the next morning, who couldn't figure out what the nasty brown stuff might be.

I put the log back out on the table in a fresh clean mold-free bag, tied it near the top as it had been, perforated it carefully, and hoped for the best. The best did not happen.

Four days later: serious mold.

So I called Far West Fungi again, and this time John Garrone answered. John is Ian's brother and the co-owner of Far West. I described the situation. 

"The molds flourish in the same environment as the mushrooms," said John. "Try scraping it off again, putting it in a brand new bag, and letting it rest for two or three weeks."

Resting for a mushroom log means being wrapped in the bag rather tightly (to discourage the mold) and being left alone. After a couple of weeks, if and when we begin to see--instead of mold--a little brown popcorn-like nubbin, that will be the log's signal that a mushroom is about to emerge. We should then unwrap the bag and re-tie it at the top, giving the log some space to shoot forth mushrooms.

Oh, another tip from John: Don't keep your mushroom log in the kitchen. Mold spores from kitchen trash can apparently travel and fix on the logs' surface. So now the recuperating log and the oyster mushroom log, which at least is not molding, are hanging out with me in my office.

They share space with bags of unwashed quinoa, old honeycomb, a Tupperware container of homemade salt, weird shriveled-up potato fruit, all of our chicken's first eggs (just the empty shells), and an old vial of brewer's yeast...souvenirs of our one-block diet so far. I realize that my office may sound the tiniest bit freaky, but  it really isn't, ever since I moved the vinegar crocks to the kitchen...they were kind of, um, overpowering.