Putting Up Dry Beans

 As I have mentioned before, beans store best in an oxygen-free environment. Buying beans in bulk may work well to hold down costs.

But they obviously can't be stored in the bag for the amount of time it will take most people to go through them, and storing them in a bucket or tub will still allow them to age while they're being slowly used up. Packing them in mylar is fine, but once they're opened, they will start to age again--and they may have aged while in storage.

Therefore, when I buy a big bag, I pack it in five-pound increments.  Five pounds is about right for a gallon-sized mylar bag.

Some mylar bags have a zip lock, but all can be sealed with a heat source (and it makes sense to seal them on top of zipping them, too).  I use a curling iron (it has to be set on high to adequately melt the mylar for a seal).

A five-gallon bucket will hold about four five-pound bags of beans (maybe five with a little bit of work).  A bucket provides extra protection against pests and damage to the mylar bags while they're in storage (although mice can get through a bucket wall--nothing short of a metal can is truly pest-proof).

 

I don't know how long beans will keep in mylar.  I don't plan to hang onto them for too long before opening them up, but as I've mentioned previously, researchers have found that they seem to keep for up to 32 years and possibly longer.  With rotation, it should be possible to keep the storage time well under that in most circumstances.

 

When Roosters Get Rough

 Various sites recommend having about 10 hens per rooster so that the hens don't get over-mated.  Chicken mating is pretty rough on the hens, and the degree to which hens suffer seems to vary by individual rooster.  I have had roosters who never pulled any feathers out of his hens' backs, and I have had other roosters who plucked a few bald. I run my chickens in tractors, and my tractors aren't big enough for 11 birds--so my hen to rooster ratio is always lower than 10.  I have seen others with substantially larger flocks, and they still had one or two birds with bare backs--so even with a large harem, roosters seem to have favorites that get mauled.

There's not much to do to change rooster behavior (as far as I know), but there are some things that can be done to protect the hens.  One of the most obvious is to give them a saddle or flak jacket.  It straps on their wings and protects their backs--some have shoulder pads, as well.

I've tried a couple of different manufacturers; there are many that are available on Amazon and elsewhere.  The price varies widely.  Until this year, I have never needed them, but I now have one rooster (formerly two) who is drawing blood when he mates with his go-to hens (others in the flock are fine).  These seem to be working well so far. 

The hens adjusted to them quickly, and it made an impact on their behavior within 24 hours.  The hen pictured above with the shoulder pads had been nicked on her side by the rooster's claws and she had started to avoid coming out of the tractor.  A day after getting the saddle, she was back out foraging with the rest of them.  In this tractor, two of the five hens are currently saddled.

Hopefully the hens can grow back their feathers and avoid any further injury.

 

Easy Chicken Harvesting

 As I have previously mentioned, my chickens (currently all  layers) sometimes transition to the dinner table, one way or another.  Sometimes I sell them.  Most people, when they process a chicken, pluck it, carefully evacuate the abdominal cavity, and refrigerate or freeze it whole.  There are innumerable videos online of how to do this, such as this one from Justin Rhodes.

Plucking is a barrier.  I have done it--by hand, as I do not have a plucker.  I did not scald (I have done only one to five birds at a time).  I gutted the rooster in the post linked above, and I kept the skin on for the leg and thigh quarters.  Boneless skinless was the most natural way to process the breasts.

After that first bird, the solution that works for me with chickens is skinning and parting them out, leaving the guts in the abdomen.  Two very helpful videos on this are provided by the Sage and Stone Homestead and the Sarah Lynn Homestead. In my experience, about 75% of the hassle and upwards of 50% of the time associated with chicken processing is linked to plucking.  I like crispy skin on drumsticks as much as anyone, but I can give that up to save the effort and time. This is even more true when the parts are canned. Yes, automated chicken pluckers are fast, but they require scalding and they're expensive.  For my scale, they aren't worth it.

I can go from a live chicken to parted-out breasts and thigh/leg quarters in 20-30 minutes when following the practices in the videos above.  Given the amount of meat I get from my layers, that's a decent ROI for the time.

Older chickens can (should) be canned bone-in, and they turn out tender (trying to eat a two-year-old rooster that has been oven-baked is masochistic; I tried it; the flavor was okay, but my teeth hurt the next day).

Younger birds can be oven-baked and they turn out fine.

 This was a five-month-old barred rock rooster. I basted it with a simple mix of:

4 tablespoons olive oil

1/2 teaspoon of thyme, sage, and salt

It was tender.  Coming out of the oven, it looked like this:

 

That's perfectly decent.  I didn't miss the skin at all. I don't know that I'll ever raise chickens primarily for meat, but going forward, any that I do process, I plan to skin them and part them out at the time of butchering.  It's vastly easier than the alternative.
 

 

Pruning the Muscadines, 2025

 Muscadines flower and set fruit on new growth, so annual pruning helps ensure that abundant new growth will yield a good harvest.  There's one caveat: once the sap starts to run, they'll leak sap profusely when cut. It can go on for days.  Pruning earlier in the dormant season is helpful to avoid that, but they won't be noticeably hurt by the leakage.  With the best of intentions, I plan to do this at the end of January, then the realities of January weather deter me.  When it's 45 and windy, it's not going to happen.  So this year, the end of February and beginning of March it was.  I did not prune them last year, so there was a lot to remove.

 

The pictures show the before / after for my Ison, which is easily the most vigorous and productive of the plants that I have.

The sap was running, especially with the last ones pruned, but it wasn't too bad: it stopped after an hour or so.  I have seen it much worse.  Now it's just a waiting game until they break dormancy.

The Delawares Are Laying

 I got some new chicks last fall--hatched at the end of September.  A prior batch of Delawares from the same hatchery, hatched at the same time of the year, (Cackle) started laying in mid-Februrary.  Right on schedule, these are starting to do the same.

 

Things got off to a slow start, but they are rapidly ramping up.  My peak production months are typically April and May, and by then they should be laying almost one egg per day each.  The size always starts off small--35 grams puts the one above solidly in the peewee class--but they rapidly increase.  Some are inching into the small category after just a couple of weeks.

 

I sold off the prior batch, but their production held up very well through three seasons of laying.  At the time I sold them, they had just gone through a molt, and were just beginning to lay eggs again on the other side.  I found someone who was okay with getting old hens (and a matching old rooster) because he'd had some predator losses.  I hope they're working out well in their new home.

 

Khorosan Wheat

 Khorosan, aka Kamut, is similar to durum wheat.  Durum is commercially used for pasta primarily.  Some day that khorosan is not that good for bread.  Out of curiosity, I got some khorosan flour from Azure and decided to see what it could do.  First up was pancakes, where it made a yellow batter.

The finished product was pretty yellow, too; I usually make pancakes out of 100% red whole wheat.

 The flavor was... ok, but nothing great.  Next up was bread, baked more or less 50/50 with white bread flour.

 The bread is fine structurally--the dough was a bit brittle (insofar as wet dough can have that property); it cracked a bit as I was forming it into the loaf shape before putting it in the proofing basket.  But the bread itself looks pretty much like normal bread.  It tastes like dry spaghetti, which validates its durum lineage.  That's not necessarily the best thing in bread, IMO, but I may try pairing it with red whole wheat to see how that tastes.  I'm not thinking I'm going to stock up on a lot of this.

 

 

 

 

Reviving a Sourdough Starter

 I have been baking sourdough bread for a long time.  The first few loaves were leavened with yeast, but then I switched to a sourdough starter.  I soon got another starter, but that one soon fell by the wayside: I got a couple of loaves out of it, but it soon began to smell like baby vomit, a not uncommon problem.  I tossed it.  But the OG starter survived, and I used it for the next 15 years.  Sometime last spring, someone gave me another starter, which I revved up and started using, as well.  It was more vigorous than my other one, which had been slowly declining.  My practice was to bake one loaf per week, putting the starter in the refrigerator in between uses.  I'd feed it, then a few hours later take off what I needed, and put the remainder away.  The decline was pretty rapid once I got the other starter. I was alternating weeks, so each starter was fed every 14 days or so, then put back in the refrigerator.  Soon, both starters were pretty weak.

 Doing two feedings on the new starter worked pretty well, and I started using it most of the time, eventually idling the OG starter altogether.  I did some reading and I realized I was doing a lot of things wrong.  There are a number of websites around on managing and reviving starters. I should've been feeding the starters just before refrigerating.  I will do that going forward.

After the OG had been in the refrigerator for a few months, I hauled it out and fed it.  And fed it again.

 

The above picture was taken a few hours after the second or third feeding.  It was not quite flatlined, but there wasn't much life.  I continued with the CPR, switching to 2x daily feeding (and discarding, to keep the jar from overflowing).  The house was in the 60s, and I also put it in the oven on proof for a few hours (temps when the oven is running on the proof cycle go as high as about 116, but are usually about 95-105).  Finally, after several days, I got this:

 

It is doubling well and has the normal lactose-tangy aroma.  No baby vomit. It's actually showing more life than my other, newer, starter at this point.  Going forward, I think it's apparent that using them once every couple of weeks isn't enough--or at least that if they are not used for that long, feeding just before refrigeration (and maybe weekly while refrigerated) will help.