A Life Filled With Design

Photo by Pamela Van Nough

We are the designer of our lives. 

How much time in any given day do we spend considering what we are creating?

I see design everywhere in my world and throughout my life, from my first passion for graphics and photography, through my current work in interior design, to my personal life as expressed through my hobbies; wine making, baking, gardening and now...my new budding enterprise, raising chickens for eggs and compost.









I have been longing for chickens for about ten years or so...long before raising urban chicken came into vogue.  I don't know why I have procrastinated about getting started.  No more procrastination...now is the time!  If not now...then when? 





Golden Lace Polish Chicken

 I have been spending vast amounts of time researching the different breeds to determine the best suited to our location and lifestyle along with information on the best type of coops, feeders, nesting boxes, how to care for day old chicks, and how to keep them safe outside from predators...the list of things to know is endless.  There is clearly way more to keeping chicken than I had first thought.








Silkie

 

Enter the design factor.  I am designing my chicken experience, designing my flock, their product - the egg basket, and their new home and playground.  Lots of fodder for though and creativity.





As I select my breeds I am considering the climate tolerance of each breed, their egg production, the egg color (so cool), and their temperament - no aggressive, loud, flighty girls for me - read high maintenance. :)



Our cold climate limits the breeds that will do well here.  No large combs to freeze in the Ohio artic climate.  





The Fab Golden Lace Polish Chicken and the gentle Silkie breeds are not cold hardy. (pictured above)  Too bad as they are truly a treat.  They are not good egg producers but oh so pretty and would give just the right "punch" to the style and look of the flock. 






Ameraucana - blue eggs and old breed

 

I have also considered the look of the egg basket.  Going for the perfect color palette - mixed blue, brown and deep brown. 



See the design factor emerging??

Here are a few of the breeds that I am considering.  They are cold tolerant, have a wonderful friendly disposition, fairly good producers and are more or less calm and quite.



I have run into a bit of a dilemma, I need to order more chicks that I really can handle.  The chicks ship in batches of 25 to keep each other warm and I can really only handle 6-8 hens, especially to start.  Hum, how to handle this???

My partner in crime and resident carpenter is working on designing the coop for the girls.  There are NO plans out there for great looking coops...what's up with that???  Enter my architect hubby. 

I will detail our coop adventures in future blogs.  Scroll to the end to see a few design ideas for coops that I did discover on line.




Dominique - brown eggs and old breed

 





Faverolles - brown egg, french breed  (photo by poultrykeeper.com)








Delaware - brown egg






Buckeye - brown egg, endangered, bred for the Ohio climate







Langshan - brown egg









Barnevelder - brown egg, very rare breed, endangered

Of course I want this rare girl...

 


Brahma - brown egg



One style of nesting box with easy access

The girls in their nesting box :)



Very cool coop - would the neighbors object to something so nice????



Nice style coop - note the pull out tray

Just looks like a coop for this Western Reserve area

Spacious coop and run



My favorite - click on image to visit site detailing construction





Here are a few resources that I have discovered thus far:

My Pet Chicken

Mother Earth News

Meyer Hatchery

BackYard Chickens

Hendersons

Check back often as I share the design process for our chicken coop.



Here is the beginning peek as Steve is drawing away in sketch up. Hum....





Early Fall Garden...or is it Late, Late Summer???

Some years I am so busy by late summer that I do not fully enjoy or use the bounty from my garden. Not so this year!

We decided to scale back our lifestyle this year and the benefit is more time available to spend cooking and hanging out in the yard and garden.

I think I might be a bit obsessed - I have been visiting the garden several times a day just to see what's going on (and trying to keep up with the weeds, bugs, and critters.)

Coleslaw, gazpacho, stuffed pepper, cucumber salad, fresh corn and beets, carpaccio, brocollini, eggplant pizza.... It has been a real treat!

Every morning my breakfast has been a chopped tomato with feta. Yum!

So here is my early fall garden update...or is it a late, late summer update???

Green fried tomatoes are so yummy - see the video below. My Mom made these every summer and I always loved them!

Green Fried Tomatoes

Cherry Tomatoes after the recent rain. The rain causes the tomatoes to split. Rats!

The flavor from the early cherry's was not so good and I vowed to find another variety. They are tasting better now - sweeter. The jury is still out on whether I should grow this variety again.

Broccoli for dinner tonight. Perhaps we'll have Steve's Hot Broccoli Fettuccine. Yum! It's perfect because it uses cherry tomatoes too.

The cabbage is great this year.

I had a visitor while I was working away in the garden, Oliver, the neighbor's cat stopped by for a visit. I picked beets and Steve and I had them for dinner last night. Very tasty. We ate them all!!

I harvested most of the black beans. Seems like some of the pods need to dry a bit more so that they will break open easily. I love black beans and can't wait to see if they taste different being home grown.

Ah ha! Someone has been raiding the garden - someone with four legs and a good appetite. Rascals!!

We have had a few muskmelons that we harvested. They are out of this world, crazy good.






Whole melon from the garden. Can you believe that this would come from a home garden? Or should I say that I can't believe this came from my home garden.

Isn't it lovely???

White pumpkin. Pretty cute.

Cool orange pumpkin. I just labeled the pumpkins generally and I am guessing that this is the Rouge Vif D Etampes Pumpkin. I like it! It's the Cinderella pumpkin.

I am disappointed that we don't have more pumpkins for all the garden space that we devoted to growing them. The cucumber beetles are so difficult to defeat. They are out there now in abundance and I am not comfortable spraying at this point - too many bees and too late in the season.

Peppers ready for harvest. They are so large that the peppers are pulling the plants over. Time to use them!

Some turned red while others went to an orange and a light green. Actually, the green peppers seem to have a better flavor - go figure.

Made this recipe up last night and it was yummy!!! Happy harvest!

VEGGIE STUFFED PEPPERS

1 C. uncooked rice

1 (15 oz.) can black beans drained and rinsed
1 T. olive oil

1 Tbs. Chili powder

1 Tsp. Cumin

1 Clove minced garlic

1/2 C. chopped onion

3 C. grated cheese (cheddar)

2 Chopped tomatoes (or equivalent)

6 Peppers - tops, ribs and seeds removed

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

In a saucepan bring 2 cups water to a boil Add rice and stir. Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 20 minutes.

In a small skillet, saute onion and garlic until soft. Add chopped tomato and continue to saute for 5 minutes or so.

Combine cooked rice with black beans, seasonings and tomato mixture in a bowl. Fill pepper half way with rice mixture, then 2 tbs. of cheese. Repeat layer ending with cheese on top.

Place in baking dish loosely covered with foil. Bake for 40 minutes until pepper are just soft.

It's Tomato Season!!!!

YES!!! The tomatoes are ready!

I have been anxiously awaiting the first tomato of the season and...this was the weekend for it.

Our first tomato came in at a whopping 2lbs, 4oz. and it tasted FANTASTIC!!

See the weight on the photo at right.

Notice how the tomato is shaped - almost in lobes. The shape makes picking and cutting the fruit a little challenging. Of the 4 tomatoes that we have picked so far, they have all had this twisty shape.

I wonder if the shape might make the Mortgage Lifter variety difficult to grow for commercial use as it is time consuming to cut the fruit up around all the nooks and crannies.

I think that the sweet, full flavor is worth the few extra minutes that it takes to work with the shape. Would folks at the local farmer's market care if the shape is odd??

Our first Mortgage Lifter Tomato from the garden. Looks like two tomatoes but it was only one.

Look at how huge our first tomato was. This is the fruit from one tomato!! Doesn't it look perfect?

Note the nasturtium and the basil from the garden. I really, really like this nasturtium variety - Caribbean Cocktail. It appears to be a double and has a wonderful range of soft yellow and pink colors.

I am so excited!! I have to find my recipe for fresh peach and tomato salad. Oh, and we have to have gazpacho...and a fresh pasta sauce...and stuffed tomatoes...and.....

Recipes to follow. :)

Early August in the Garden

Guess who's coming to dinner at Sandy's garden???? Yep! Bambie.

Our main garden is fenced. I dug down 9" and buried chicken wire to keep our monster groundhog and the deer out. Our far back garden is not currently enclosed. It's trouble.

We have deer droppings all around the corn. They are just waiting for it to get ready. I was that close to having corn this year. Our plants have quite a few ears and I was so hopeful.

My friend Mark suggested that I try Liquid Fence around the corn - so I ran to the store and bought some. I marched out to the corn and began spraying. OMG - how disgusting is this stuff. Smells like a mixture of urine, feces and skunk - if you can imagine that. It is supposed to stop smelling after an hour or so...and it did. Thank goodness (I expected a visit from our neighbors.) It was just difficult to apply - not for the faint of stomach.

And perhaps it will work. I have not seen damage from the deer. I did however catch someone else chomping away - big as life on Sunday morning. Read on to see who....

Liquid Fence

My happy crop of tomatoes. Look out, we are going to have a ton. In the past I have canned tomatoes but lately I have just frozen them - seems easier.

The tomatoes are growing well. I have just a few brown leaves. The vines are heavy with fruit, and I do mean heavy. The mortgage lifter tomatoes are huge! Can't wait.

One of my favorite summer breakfasts is an egg, cottage cheese, fried potatoes and FRESH TOMATOES! YUM!!

We have harvested some new potatoes and they are the creamiest potatoes I have ever eaten. These are replants from last years crop that sprouted. It worked! I just dug the trenches and planted the sprouting babies. They grew like crazy and have now died back.

The evil, wicked cucumber beetle.

It eats the leaves, stems, and root structure, destroying plants. See the squash stem below.

I have gotten a few squash from my plants and they taste great but my supply is about to end. The cucumber beetles have attacked the plants and left behind wilt. Note the stem - it is totally disintegrated and the plant will starve and fall off. :(

Black beans. They are growing like crazy and have lots of beans on the plants. There is damage from the Japanese Beetles. The bean pods are starting to turn yellow. I will keep tracking them to determine when to harvest for drying.

What is happening this year with Japanese Beetles??? It's like a plague or something.

Black beans in the pod.

Blue Lake Green Beans.

We have had a wonderful crop and it's still going strong. We keep picking but can barely keep up. I think they are on the menu again tonight. I need to search for an exciting green bean recipe.

Red Peppers.

These are growing well. The shape is throwing me off a bit. I thought that I planted red peppers...and these may get there but the elongated shape makes me think of a hot pepper.

Wonderful crop of cabbage. We had coleslaw last night that was so fresh and tasted excellent.

Yummy Coleslaw

1 small head of cabbage, shredded

1/2 c. chopped green pepper

1/2 c. chopped onion

3 tbs. mayonnaise

2 tbs. vinegar

1 tbs. sugar

1/4 tsp. salt

4 strips bacon, cooked and crumbled

In a large bowl combine cabbage, green pepper and onion. In a small bowl combine mayonnaise, vinegar, sugar and salt. Pour over cabbage mixture and toss to coat. Cover and chill for 4 hours. Stir in bacon just before serving.

Muskmelon.

It's outside the fence so it's in the danger zone. I think it has a week or so to go. Will it survive?

THE GROUNDHOG! %$#@&%!@*&!!

Seriously, this creature has tortured me for 5 years and he just won't go away. Why should he? I feed him so well.

We bought a have a heart trap to catch him and take him away to a groundhog playground somewhere else. Instead we caught a possum, many squirrels, a raccoon, and then a skunk. That was the end of trying to catch him. The skunk was difficult to get rid of.

I hadn't seen him all year and hoped that he had passed away from old age and we were FREE!! Not so. I saw him early Sunday morning chomping away on the fallen apples.

An hour or so later...I saw a stalk of corn waving in the distance just above the ground...I crept over to see what was happening. The fat groundhog was merrily eating away at an ear of corn with the stalk broken over. UGH! He ran for his hole and dived in.

I, in turn, ran into the house and collected all the used cat litter that I could find to pour down the hole. A pioneer would simply shoot the thing and make it into stew or something.

I helped my uncle skin one when I was about 8 or so. Maybe that's why I'm a vegetarian now.

See video below for how I feel. It's a fantasy.

So, I checked the Internet once again for remedies. I suppress the fantasies of buying a gun and shooting it; instead I bought Epsom Salt and went around the garden (on top of the gross liquid fence.) Gun...Epsom Salts...Gun...Epsom Salts. I would probably shoot myself - it's safer with Epsom Salts.

I will reapply often. :)

My happy corn waiting to get ripe. Out of desperation to beat the rodent to our bounty, we cooked some fresh corn last night. It was just a bit early but still yummy.

Nice size corn patch this year. Wish it was fenced.

See where someone has eaten the silks?

And on a happy note...the marigolds that I grew from seed are huge and lovely.

I was able to cut flowers last night and make a few vases for around the house. That's what brings me joy.

Happy Summer!!

PS-Just returned from New Hampshire and Cape Cod. Did you see that they have sharks in Cape Cod? I had heard about the sightings and I understand that the sharks are in the area to dine on seals. I saw 3 seals at the pier in Chatham swimming and playing last week. Hope they stay safe.

Monomoy Island