Pillow Road

Summer. The daisies are standing tall.

On Saturday morning, six chickens went through the process that took them from the coop and turned them into meat ready for the freezer. This is my third batch of chickens over a period of two and a half years. The process does get easier the more you do it. Yet this primal process can be disturbing as well as mundane. Without thinking too much about it, we tried to dispatch the chickens quickly and get through the many steps to clean them. It took us about three hours.

I had a good helper in Sarah Mitchel, who was also learning how to do it.

I bought the six chicks on April 17, 2010. I had them eight weeks (56 days). Here’s how they weighed in after processing.

#1 	5.92 lb
#2 	6.14 lb
#3	5.96 lb
#4	5.71 lb
#5	4.60 lb
#6	4.40 lb

That’s over 32 pounds of chicken.

Sarah and I agreed that processing six chickens, especially on a hot day, was our limit in terms of attention and endurance.

I saw the weasel. It caught my eye out the window of my study. Long and thin, with sable fur and a long black-tipped tail that floated in the air, the weasel came into view quickly then darted around a corner to disappear into the field. I saw it come right back, bobbing its flat black head as it stopped on a ledge and then hopped around. I had never seen a weasel before. What do I do about this weasel, now that I see it and know that it has been grabbing eggs from the chickens?

Several weeks ago, Andrew Scheidt built a chicken tractor for Pillow Road Rancho. I first learned about chicken tractors from Michael Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma” in the chapter on Joel Salatin, a farmer from Virginia whose meat-chicken operation uses chicken tractors. Salatin also wrote “Pastured Poultry Profits“. The tractor, which protects the chickens, can be moved around the pasture so they can eat the grass, dig in the dirt and leave behind their droppings as fertilizer. It’s simply a movable chicken coop.

Here’s our chicken tractor, painted red to match the barn:

Once the chicken tractor was built, we put two laying chickens in it to see how they’d do. The Australorps seemed to do fine but we weren’t getting any eggs. The yellow yolk stain in the laying box was evidence that they were laying but I wondered if the hens were eating their own eggs, which happens sometimes. I speculated that their diet had changed since we moved them into the pasture, although we continued to provide the same chicken feed.

We also put two month-old Australorp chicks in the tractor with the other hens. But they disappeared within a day. I didn’t know what happened to them. Had they gotten through the wire and run away? Had some predator found them? We removed the Australorps and put them back in the stationary chicken coop.

Earlier this week, while working in the gardens, Milo left a message saying he had seen a weasel running along the house. The weasel was the probable cause behind the disappearance of the eggs and the chicks. And I also realized that I haven’t seen many duck eggs this year, as they don’t lay them consistently in a single place. So it began to make sense. Still, I had never seen a weasel, although I know of these critters as nervous characters invading cartoon barnyards.

I saw the weasel again this morning about the same time of day. I looked up information about weasels on Wikipedia to learn that the weasel family are the smallest carnivores. Looking further into the subject and based on a second sighting, I suspect that what I’m seeing is one of three types of weasels:

• Least Weasel (Mustela nivalis)
  
• Stoat, also called an Ermine (Mustela erminea)
  
• Long Tailed Weasel (Mustela frenata)
  

According to the Wikipedia entry the Least Weasel can be distinguised from the Stoat “by its small body size and short tail that lacks a black terminal brush.” The weasel I saw had a tail as long as its body and it was black-tipped. The description of a stoat is close: “The stoat’s coat is a rich red-brown with tan or off-white belly; the tail has a conspicuous black tip. But the stoat is smaller and its tail is shorter than the Long-Tailed Weasel, which is described as follows:

(photo of Long-tailed Weasel from Wikipedia)

This is a typical weasel with a long slender body, short legs and a bushy tail that is almost as long as the rest of the animal. Adult males measure from 33 to 45 cm (14 to 18 in), including their tails, and may weigh up to 500g (1 lb); females are typically about 15% smaller. They are gingerish-brown in colour, with yellowish-white belly fur, but in the northern parts of their range they moult to pure white in winter. The tip of the tail is black in all seasons.

The main diet of weasels is rodents, which would include the many gophers I have burrowing in the fields.

I will have to figure out how to keep weasels from getting eggs from the chicken tractor. I don’t want to get rid of the weasel (and I’m not even sure how I’d go about doing that.) I realize that I kind of like having weasels around.

We grow fava beans as a cover crop during the winter. They grow tall, fixing nitrogen in the soil. In the spring, they produce long pods full of beans. These fava plants have a crimson blossom.

It’s a bit of work to get the beans out of the pod because the pods are soft and spongy. Once you have the beans, you boil them for a couple minutes. They are bright green, like lima beans. While they can be eaten as is, the outer peel is astringent. So, you should remove the skins unless the beans are quite small. It’s tedious work.

This time of year, feel free to do me a fava and come over to tear open the pods and then help peel the many beans. There’s plenty of good things to make with fava beans but the two-step process of preparation takes time.

I’ve made a fava bean spread that we liked a lot. In a food processor, puree the peeled, cooked beans with olive oil, lemon and garlic to make a nice paste. I served the fava puree last night as a small, colorful side with bread or crackers. Fava beans can also be added to salads or with cooked vegetables over rice.