A Week in the Life

Weekly experiences in my life as a WOOFer at Goodness Grows farm near Bedford, PA. Background picture by Dawn Custer.

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Mother Earth News Fair

For those of you who are not familiar, Mother Earth News is a progressive, eco-friendly, generally super awesome magazine. Every year they sponsor two fairs, one in Washington state and one in Pennsylvania, which we went to. These fairs host a plethora of great speakers and workshops as well as hundreds of exhibitors (Goodness Grows included). This is a sampling of both the talks and workshops I went to and the exhibitors that I thought were cool.

The coolest exhibitor of all was, of course, Goodness Grows.

We brought a variety of native, edible, and just gosh darn pretty plants to sell, as well as information about the farm and the Farm School event we are hosting in the spring.

Our best sellers were elderberries. Apparently, the berries were mentioned in a number of talks as being a great medicinal fruit. Of course I forgot to take a picture of them so here is a picture of a Service Berry instead (not medicinal but still delicious)

Mmm, hazelnuts. With these you could make your own Nutella.

A chestnut tree seeded from a stand of blight resistant chestnuts in Michigan

Beware the unripe persimmon.

This was the mushroom seller of the fair so of course I had to go say hi.

A pink oyster mushroom!

Another one of my favorite places to look was the hipcycle booth.

The idea behind all the stuff here is that artist takes waste products and instead of degrading them into something less valuable (recycled material), creates something more valuable.

Like a washer bowl.

Your local hammock hookup.

These people dye all the clothes they sell with natural dyes, including dirt.

If you were looking for a progressive, eco-friendly, sustainability or social justice oriented shirt, button or magnet, this was the place to be.

All the garlic you could ever want, and free samples!

A geodesic greenhouse

And a brick oven.

They had the electric cars covered too.

New,

and converted.

But I didn't spend all my time wandering around the stalls, I also went to some workshops. And like any good student I took plenty of notes. Unfortunately, all of my notes are still on paper. However, when I do get around to typing them up, I will post them on the blog.

DIY Plant Breeding. Pretty much everything a beginner plant breeder would need to know, as well as a ton of resources for learning more information and getting free seed to breed with.

Next, I went to a talk about no till gardening. Moral of the story: you don't have to be large scale to grow cover crops. In fact, everyone should grow cover crops, all the time (except of course when you are growing other things). If you need more convincing (link). Also, the woman who gave the talk does a whole bunch of really cool stuff, including solar food drying. This is her blog where she has a ton of information.

The last talk I went to on Friday was a talk about rabbit housing. The guy was pretty adamant that the best housing for rabbits was metal wire hutches suspended off the ground. He has been raising rabbits for over 50 years, so I probably trust him. But something inside me says let the rabbits run free (until they get eaten by racoons that is).

Saturday was light on workshops for me, but I did go to one on fermentation by Sandor Katz. For those who don't know him, he is the fermentation guru. It was more philosophy than practicality, but still very interesting.

I can't really explain bio char in a reasonable amount of space. So here is a webpage about it. The notes I will post are more detailed, but if you can't wait until then feel free to investigate for yourself.

This guy talked about his experience starting a homestead, and some recommendations for other people.

Mother Earth News Fair was a wonderful learning and doing experience. However, it left me quite tired, which is why this post is so late.

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Lake Koon: Late Summer

One of the hidden gems of the Bedford Valley has got to be the joint lakes Lake Koon and Lake Gordon. Because of the motorized boat ban on the lakes, the area around the lakes is almost completely undeveloped. There are areas to put in a boat, but for the most part the shoreline is uninterrupted.

This is from Google Earth, and as you may notice it was taken in the winter. The green patches are evergreens. The green patch on the knob below where it says Lake Koon is a stand of hemlocks. This is especially awesome because the hemlocks are currently under attack from the hemlock woolly adelgid.

On one of our Mondays off, Alex and I decided to check the lakes out. It turned out to be an excellent decision.

Look at all the species of trees! After living in Colorado for 4 years I had almost forgotten that a forest can be composed of more than two tree species.

When we got to the lake, we noticed someone had been having a clam snack.

Well maybe a couple of snacks....

Okay so a lot of snacks.

We also saw signs of what Alex thought might be a Pileated Woodpecker.

An outcrop of shale from the Onondaga and Old Port Formations. It was formed during the Devonian, meaning it is between 359 million and 416 million years old.

We also found brachiopod fossils from the same time period. Brachiopods first appeared in the fossil record during the Cambrian, that is over 500 million years ago. They have weathered several mass extinctions and are still alive today.

This fossil was my favorite.

Wild Mint I collected for tea. Dawn says it looks like spearmint but we are not sure.

Looks like these plants have dibs on this dead tree's nutrients.

This wall kind of looks man made, but is it?

Alex decided to swim across to check it out. He said that he was surprised by how warm the lake was. It was still to cold for me though.

Clearly it is not!

After Alex's swim, we decided to head inland.

Look a christmas fern! This is one of the only evergreen ferns in our region.

A rattlesnake orchid. As someone who has only seen orchids in pots, I was surprised to see one in nature.

Striped wintergreen.

There appears to be a beaver around with the tendency to bite off more than it can chew

This is the best picture I managed to snap of the hemlocks. Unfortunately it doesn't really do them justice.

A bluejay feather.

On the way out Alex found a deer skull.

And what did he do with it? He put it on his head.

As Lake Koon is such a cool area, we intend to come back to it at least several times before the year is up. In addition, I hope to write blog posts about Lake Koon in the different seasons and track the changes.

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Cumberland ArtsFest

The Cumberland Artsfest is both a fundraiser for the Tri-State Community School for the Arts and a concert featuring teachers and students of the School for the Arts. In fact, Caleb, one of Dawn's sons, was selected to perform. Very exciting!

The day before the fair we scoured the nursery for the nicest and most local and edible plants to take to the fair. Because we were using this as a practice for the Mother Earth News Fair (link), we gathered up quite a few more plants then we intended on selling.

The truck loaded up.

Some extra plants that we packed up into the trunk of the car.

While it had stayed dry the entire week leading up to the Arts Fair, the forecast for that Saturday was a 90% chance of rain.

And the sky didn't look promising.

Upon arriving we set up the tent and unloaded the plants and produce.

Quite a nice settup.

Thankfully John and Liane had returned from their adventures up north so setting up when quite quickly. Then it started to rain, and blow. It ended up raining off and on most of the day.

Alex and I sporting very stylish rain jackets.

The Arts Bus. A place for kids to do art, have fun, and stay warm and dry.

Kettle Corn! Yum.

The first performer. The first song she sang was Wagon Wheel, one of my favorites.

Another performer. Her voice was quite amazing for her age.

Next, Caleb shredding it up on the guitar. He is quite an accomplished guitar player for his age. After Caleb performed the WWOOFers (John, Liane, Alex, and I) headed home to warm up and make a massive amount of fried rice for dinner.

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Low Acid Canning

Two weeks ago I wrote about canning high acid foods (like tomatoes). This week I will talk about canning low acid foods (like green beans). The main goal of canning is to kill all of the bacteria inside the jar. Boiling water is hot enough to kill most bacteria but not all. Some bacteria, like Clostridium botulinum (botulism), can survive boiling temperatures by creating heat resistant spores.

Clostridium botulinum

However, these spore-forming organisms cannot survive in acidic environments. So for high acid foods, it is enough to simply boil the jars. For low acid foods we must bring the jars to a temperature higher than 100 C. This is where the pressure cooker comes in. Interestingly enough, the boiling point of water depends on the pressure of the water. As the pressure increases, so does the boiling point. Thus, to effectively kill spore-forming bacteria, we simply can under some amount of pressure.

Over the past month or two Goodness Grows has harvested about 1000 pounds, or a half a ton, of green beans. While we did sell many of them, there were obviously couple of pounds left over for canning.

The first step to canning beans, or anything really, is washing and removing the undesirable parts. This includes the stem and and any moldy or discolored parts.

Next you break them into 1 to 2 inch pieces, depending on your preference, and put them into the jar.

Canning beans can be a good time to chat but right now Nathanial (WWOOFer) is seriously contemplating his bean.

Once the jars are full of beans, ladle boiling water in the jars, leaving about one inch of space at the top.

Shake and tap the jars to get the air bubbles out, and then put the lids on. If you have burgandy beans, your beans will start to turn green at this point.

Put the jars into the pressure cooker on top of a wet towel to prevent the glass from shattering (the towel is in the pressure cooker), and put water in.

Bring the pressure cooker up to 10 pounds of pressure, and cook for 25 minutes for quarts or 20 minutes for pints.

Let the pressure cooker cool and very carefully release the pressure. Remove the jars when the are cool enough, and admire!

Also, the canning shelf so far.

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Harvesting Cattails

The main motivation for attempting to (and succeeding at) harvesting cattails was the Cumberland Farmer's Market. While all of the food Goodness Grows sells at the market is top quality, some of the items are hard to display. This is especially true for things like peppers, eggplant, and beans. To solve this problem we plan to weave baskets to display produce. In addition, since there is an abundance of cattails in the pond on the property, we decided to use the leaves as raw materials for our baskets.

While it may not look very big, this pond is actually quite deep. Dawn estimates it goes down at least 15 feet in the middle, and the bank drops off very quickly. To solve the problem of not being able to stand in 8 feet of water and mud, Alex (my boyfriend who is also living at Goodness Grows for a year) and I took to a canoe.

As there was only one paddle, and Alex is canoingly challenged (he would like to point out that no one has ever taught him how), I took the back seat and Alex sat in the front.

Once out on the water, I steered the canoe while Alex went to work harvesting the cattail leaves. We tried various methods:

The manual weed whacker (it worked okay, but not great),

 garden shears, scissors, and finally a knife. The knife seemed to work the best.

Alex leaning over the side of the boat to reach some cattails. I played the key role of counterweight for this part of the adventure.

Cattails on a boat.

A waterlily. Unfortunately, I disturbed many lily pads in the quest to harvest cattails.

As a side note, Alex also harvested some cattail roots. They are edible, but the ones we harvested tasted like pond water, so not very appetizing.

The first day's cattail haul.

The second day's haul.

We had to be extremely careful when cutting and transporting the cattails because they damage very easily. While a bend in a cattail leaf is not the end of the world, once dry the cattail is more likely to break at a bend point. So, it's not ideal for basket making.

After harvesting the the leaves and transporting them from the pond back up to the farm, we washed down the leaves to get the pond slime off. 

Then we laid them out to dry in the greenhouse. Because the temperature inside the greenhouse is so much hotter then the ambient temperature, a few sunny days should be enough to dry out the cattail leaves. After that, it's on to basket weaving!

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High Acid Canning (Peaches)

Like most farms, Goodness Grows often has an abundance of various types of food at different times of the summer. It often gets to the point where (even with three boys), they cannot either consumer or sell all of their produce. The solution, of course, is to can the excess. This way the food does not go to waste and the canned goods provide nutritional and culinary variety in the winter.

So many peaches!

There are two different kinds of canning: high acid and low acid. This post will cover how to can high acid foods like tomatoes and peaches. There will be another post in the future about canning low acid foods like beans, corn, and meat. If you are interested in learning how to can food, I highly recommend you buy The Blue Book of Preserving by Ball (they make all of those glass jars people use to can).

This book is so good, it is the one Dawn uses when she cans. In this post, I will talk about canning peaches. However, the same ideas apply to all high acid foods. For the exact recipe for other foods refer to the Blue Book of Preserves or the internet.

Liane is so happy we are canning peaches.

The first thing you need to do when canning peaches is peel the peaches. Don't worry, you don't have to try to peel a peach with a paring knife. There is a trick that works much better. It actually works with almost anything with a thin skin. Put the peaches in a pot of boiling water and let them sit for 30 seconds to a minute (the time depends on the type of produce you are trying to peel).

Then dunk the peaches in a pot of cold water.

After this, rub the skin and it should come off quite easily.

After the peaches are peeled, cut them in halves or quarters and put them face down in jars.

Justin (a WWOOFer) was our head peach cutter and jar filler.

Make sure there is at least a half inch of space at the top of the jar. This is called headspace.

This is way to much headspace. Clearly Justin needs to cut some more peaches.

For vegetables, this would be the time when you add boiling water. For fruit though, you need a syrup. Combine sugar, water, and corn syrup in a pot and heat until completely dissolved.

Then ladle syrup into the the jars, making sure to leave a half inch of headspace.

Gently shake or tap the jars on a counter to remove air bubbles. Finally, put lids on the jars and place in boiling water for 25 minutes for quarts and 20 minutes for pints.

Once the jars have been in the boiling water for the appropriate amount of time, remove them and wait for the lids to seal. To tell if a jar has sealed, press down on the center of the lid. If it flexes then it is not sealed.

Aren't these jars just peachy?

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Oreo and Plant Cuttings

Yesterday was a very sad day at Goodness Grows. One of the beloved milk goats, Oreo or Or as she was affectionately called, passed away.

Oreo came to Goodness Grows at the age of about 4 months, and promptly proceeded to run away. Three days later she came back bleating over the ridge, as if she had just realized she was missing. Unfortunately, during those three days she contracted a parasite transmitted through deer urine. Thankfully, Dawn was able to identify it immediately and have her treated. If left untreated, this parasite kills animals in just a couple of days. The treatment was not able to fix the spinal deformation that the parasites caused, nor was it able to rid the parasite eggs from Oreo's system. Because of this, Or has been especially prone to health problems and has become extremely ill several times before. Initially Dawn wanted to put Oreo up for auction, anticipating the trouble she would have with staying healthy. However, Dawn never got around to it and soon Or became part of the goat family.  Despite all her health problems, Oreo consistently produced the most milk of all the goats and the best mother. She was a wonderful asset to Goodness Grows and will be greatly missed. RIP Oreo.

Now onto the cuttings. Most, if not all, of the vegetables Goodness Grows cultivates, they grow from seed. However, for some plants it is almost impossible to get seeds to germinate. In these cases, farms and nurseries propagate the plants through cuttings. The first step in making cuttings is to create a soil mixture with good drainage (this means that the water seeps through the soil quickly).

We used half sand

and half vermiculite.

The because the sand grains are relatively large, water flows through it quickly. The vermiculite keeps the sand from compacting too much. Once the sand and vermiculite are fully mixed and in a pot, you are ready to make the cutting.

Cut a stem with new growth on the top about 4 or 5 inches down.

Remove most of the leaves on the stem. This ensures that the plant won't have to spend too much energy on leaf upkeep while it is growing roots.

Then dip the end of the stem into a root growth hormone. Goodness Grows uses a powder called Rootone. This powder tells the cells on the outside of the stem to make roots, something those cells wouldn't normally do.

The root hormone should stick to the stem like so. If it does not, dip the stem in water and try again.

Next make a hole with your finger and place the stem in the hole.

Fill in the hole and give the cutting some water. While each plant is different, you will know whether or not the cutting has worked in approximately three weeks.  Here are some of the plants we took cuttings from.

Rosemary.

Lavender.

Stevia. Remember that low calorie sugar alternative, well this is the plant it comes from. It works great for making sweet teas.

Blackberries, yum!

Virginia Sweetspire or Itia virginica. This is a great native perennial. It produces fragrant flowers and has beautiful fall colors.

Coppertina Ninebark. This is another hardy perennial that is great for landscaping.

Fragrant Geraniums. This particular variety is the Rose Geranium.

Lemon Verbena. The leaves of this plant make excellent tea. One of the other WWOOFers, Liane, is making teas and selling them at the Cumberland farmers market, and Lemon Verbena is one of her favorite herbs to use.

All of the cuttings we have done so far. However, there are still more to be done. In fact, we don't take cuttings of many plants until the winter. So stay tuned for a winter cuttings blog post in a few months.

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The Goodness Grows CSA

For those of you not living on an small organic farm, you might be wondering "what does CSA stand for?" It is a system of buying and selling produce where the buyer pays the farm a lump sum up front (or spread out over a series of weeks) and then the farmer gives the buyer a portion of the harvest every week for a set amount of weeks. The acronym actually stands for Community Sponsored Agriculture, but in most contexts this doesn't make any sense.  This is the second year Goodness Grows has run a CSA, and they have 22 customers (up from 6 last year). The produce that people receive each week reflects what is ready for picking. So let's look at the veggies going in the bags this week and the plants they come from.

Potatoes.

And more potatoes. We recently finished harvesting all of the potatoes that were planted in the spring, and there were a lot of them.

An eggplant plant.

Fresh picked eggplant. This year we are growing fairytale (purple and white), Orient Express (long purple), Raveena (green) and Black beauty (purple) varieties.

Bean plants with purple flowers make...

purple beans!

Swiss chard, a very delicious and colorful green.

Parsnips under ground.

Parsnips above ground.

Pepperoncini. This medium hot pepper is often pickled and served with Greek food.

Everyone's favorite summer squash: zucchini.

Peaches!

Basil, the best of all herbs.

Most weeks we put some flowers from around the farm in the CSA. These are echinacea, or cone flowers. They make a wonderful tea.

Remember that chicken we butchered a couple weeks ago? Well that is going in the CSA as well. For the vegetarians and vegans in the CSA we have elderberries and sunflower seeds instead.

Sunflower plant.

Sunflower seeds.

Elderberry tree.

Elderberries.

Then once everything is picked we put it in a box and leave it in the refrigerator in the greenhouse for people to pick up. If someone doesn't live close to Goodness Grows, they do drop-offs in Bedford, PA; Cumberland, MD; and Frostburg, MD;

Recently, Dawn ordered cloth bags to put the CSA produce in and they just arrived! For those of you in the area who want to support local agriculture, I would highly recommend getting in on the Goodness Grows CSA next year. For people elsewhere, there are many CSAs all around the country. If you have trouble finding one, talk to the farmers at your local farmer's market and they might have a CSA or be able to point you in the right direction.

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Wild Edibles (and not so edibles) of Goodness Grows

Everyone knows that farms (Goodness Grows included) grow many delicious things to eat. But what about the things they don't grow, or rather don't grow on purpose, namely the weeds. As it turns out, there are a number of weeds that you can eat, that probably grow in your backyard (or farm) right now. This is a list of some of them, along with a few of the more infamous weeds as well. The list is by no means complete. I actually learned about another medicinal weed today called mullein. If I were to try to list all of the edible and medicinal weeds, even only the ones at Goodness Grows, I would never post this blog entry. In addition, the information I provide about each plant not exhaustive either. If you are interested I thoroughly encourage you to research plants further and integrate them into your diet.

Dandelions. In case you didn't recognize the picture, these are dandelions. They are probably the most well known weed in the United States. The flowers are edible and delicious if battered, fried and served with ketchup (but then again what isn't?). It's best to harvest the flowers as soon as the open in the late morning, making them perfect for a lunchtime treat. The leaves are also edible as salad greens or cooked. However, it is important to harvest the leaves before the plant flowers or else the leaves will be bitter as all get out.

Jewelweed. For anyone who gets poison ivy, jewelweed is a godsend. If you apply the juice from the stem (or use goat's milk soap with jewelweed in it) on an area that came in contact with poison ivy, before the rash appears, you won't get the rash. It is also good for most other skin irritations and rashes, including athlete's foot and eczema. It helps soothe bee stings and mosquito bites as well. There are most certainly other uses for jewelweed, but these are the ones I am familiar with.

Dock. Dock is one of those barely edible plants. It is high in iron and definitely good for you, but it is by no means tasty. The only time you can eat the leaves when they don't taste completely atrocious is right when the come up. The root can be eaten as well but it doesn't taste very good either.

Clover. Turns out clover isn't just for rabbits. In fact, the entire clover plant is edible, though the root should be cooked before eating. The flowers are especially good and are often used in salads.

Lambs Quarter. Also known as wild spinach, lamb's quarter is everything that spinach is but better. As far as nutrition goes, it has all the vitamins and minerals that spinach does, but more of them. It tastes pretty similar (but I think better), and has a nicer texture. It also doesn't need the babying that spinach does and doesn't have the bolting problem. Like spinach, you can put it in salads as well as cook with it. It even looks prettier!

Purslane. Purslane is the only succulent on this list. This means its leaves (and in this case stem) are thick and fleshy. While there are succulents (even cactus!) out east, they are a much more dominant plant type in arid climates, where water conservation is paramount. Purslane is possibly one of the most delicious of the wild edibles mentioned here. It has a sweet-sour taste that makes it great for spicing up all that bland lettuce. Of course you can steam it or saute it as well. Be careful though, it often grows near another, poisonous plant called spurge (below). Spurge has a wiry stem, thinner leaves, and has stems that grow out from a center root. In addition, it oozes white sap when broken.

Spurge. http://www.aragriculture.org/horticulture/ornamentals/weed_id/spurge_prostrate.htm

Wood Sorrel. With its heart shaped leaves and small yellow flowers, wood sorrel is an easily identified snack. It has a lemony flavor that goes great in salads or cooked. The leaf, flower, and fruit are all edible so dig in! You can also use the plant to make tea, but I have never tried it.

Pigweed (Amaranth). Unlike the weeds mentioned above, the seed is the part of the plant people most commonly harvest. They can be used in the same way as quinoa, and they make excellent popcorn. To harvest the seeds, take the seed stalk (below) and rub and shake it over an open container. Then let the seeds dry for a day or two. Finally, blow air over the seeds to remove the chaff. Beating the amaranth seeds can help with this. In addition to the seeds, you can also eat the leaves as cooked greens and the baby shoots like asparagus.

Pigweed (Amaranth) seed stalk.

Chicory. Chicory is another edible weed that is not primarily picked for its greenery. This flowery weed is instead picked for its root, which is often larger than a carrot. Once roasted and ground, chicory root makes an excellent caffeine free substitute for coffee. Of course, you can also combine it with your preferred roast for a more delicious kick in the pants. Interestingly enough, one of chicory's closest relatives is the dandelion. And like the dandelion., you can harvest chicory leaves in the early spring and late fall when they are not as bitter.

Thistle. This is one of the not so edible weeds. In fact, it is not edible at all. In addition, to the fact that it can give you liver problems, it is incredibly spiky. So if you are going to be weeding thistle, make sure to bring your gloves.

Autumn Olive. Like many of the problems in our country, we have lack of government foresight to thank for the Autumn Olive. Once they discovered it grew in areas that had been strip mined, they imported as much of this tree sized weed as they could from Asia and planted it in areas disturbed by excavators. From there it spread like wildfire across much of the Eastern United States. However there is a silver lining. The Autumn Olive bears fruit. It is admittedly small and mealy but it makes for pretty good jam.

Grass. You might be thinking, wait grass isn't a weed. Oh, but it is. Consider this, people use untold amounts of water, fertilizer and pesticides just to grow something that they can't eat. Not only can the owners not eat it, nothing around them can either (unless the people have a deer or some livestock). Moral of the story: have an edible lawn people, or at least one that doesn't waste so much energy.

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Shaving My Head and Slaughtering Chickens

Before getting to the blog post, there are a few housekeeping notes. First, if you want to comment on a post click on the circle with a pencil (or alternatively a box with an arrow when you mouse over it). It will take you to a version of the blog post where you can comment. Alternately, if you put your mouse just below the bottom of the post, a button that says Comment will appear and you can click on that. If you want to be notified when I update my blog, click on the follow button in the upper right hand corner of the page. Okay, now on to the exciting stuff.

The first week I was at Goodness Grows was hot. The high was at least 90 F every day, and on Saturday the high was 104 F. Since the humidity was not 0% like in Colorado, this meant my scalp and neck were constantly sweating, even when my hair was up. As I saw it, the only solution was to shave my head. Allison had brought her clippers from home and graciously offered to do the honors. Now for the before and after photos!

Before.

After. While I thoroughly love the buzz cut, it takes some getting used to. I still try to take my hair out of a ponytail regularly, but I imagine that will lessen with time.  And now the chickens.

Because this part of the post is about slaughtering chickens, there will be pictures of (mildly) bloody chickens, as well as chicken guts. For those of you who are not interested in these types of pictures I will mark where the small amount of blood and guts begins and ends with a row of X's.

Before. These are the unsuspecting chickens picking at bugs in the soil and grass. the are especially hungry because we haven't fed them for 12 hours. This is to make the gutting process less disgusting.

Silas (one of Dawn and Rob's sons) with some of the chickens in a cage. We use cages to transport the chickens from the yard to where we slaughter them.

Once we get the chickens to the slaughtering area, we put them upside down traffic cones. This helps hold them in place while their blood is draining.

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To kill a chicken, Rob slides a knife into its mouth and pokes its brain. This kills the chicken, but does not stop its heart. Then Rob slices both of the chickens jugulars, so the chicken's heart pumps most of its blood out of its body.

After the blood has drained, the bird is dipped in boiling water for 30 seconds to a minute to loosen its feathers for plucking. Tim (Allison's Fiancee) is dipping this one.

Rob plucking a chicken.

Chicken completely defeathered.

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After the chicken is completely devoid feathers, we gut the chicken. First, we cut the head and legs off, and then the neck. We save the neck, but head and legs are discarded. Here Amber (a WWOOFer from nearby Buckland Farm) is cutting of the legs.

We cut into the back of the chicken and pull out the intestines and the gizzard. Next the liver comes out, along with the gallbladder. We save the gizzard and the liver but cut away the gall bladder. This can be difficult. If the gall bladder breaks it smells really bad and everything needs to be washed off.

After this the heart and lungs come out along with the stomach and crawl (the crawl is is the passage that the food goes down). We save the heart but the rest is thrown away.

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Then we wash the chicken off to get all of the blood and other stuff off.

Finally we put the chicken in a bag and vacuum seal it, finishing the process.

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Goats and Milking

Goodness Grows has incredibly nice goats. In the approximate words of Dawn Custer "the mean ones become dinner." They are well trained and (usually) do what they are supposed to. There are six female milk goats, one billy goat for mating and an assortment of kids. Now for the introductions!

Momma. Don't let the horns fool you, she is female. In fact she is the alpha female of the goat tribe. She is also currently pregnant so we are not milking her at the moment.

Buddy. He is the billy goat and the one that breeds with all of the female goats. He may look intimidating but he is very sweet.

Peanut. She is the easiest to milk and as such she was the first one I milked. She is also always the first one out of the gate for milking, along with Momma.

Oreo. She is the hardest to milk. Her udders are so stiff they would give climbers' hands a workout.  She even has a challenge named after her, the Oreo Challenge. In order to complete the Oreo Challenge, a farm visitor must finish milking Oreo before she finishes the food in her bowl. Not an easy task in the least! On a side note, she was rubbing her head against me most of the time I was taking pictures.

Maisy (and Tickle). Maisy has only been milked for two years so her udders are also on the stiff side. I did milk her successfully. However, I did squirt significantly more milk on the floor than with Peanut.

Dusty. She, along with Peanut, are the easiest to milk. She also enjoys nibbling on my fingers and knee brace while I attempt to photograph the other goats.

Tickle making a face! He is Dusty's kid.

Three kids in their stall.

The milking stands. The goats stand on the wooden stands with their heads between the wooden bars. This keeps them from moving too much. As a treat to keep them preoccupied they get a helping of oats to eat.

Dawn milking Oreo. She has no problem with the Oreo Challenge.

Me milking Maisy. She has fairly small udders so when I milk her I have a tendency to squirt milk in the wrong direction.

Allison (another WOOFer) milking Dusty. This is the first time she has ever milked a goat so three cheers for her!