These western Oregon winters used to really bring me down.  Coupled with a job that I disliked and being newly married in a college town that all my friends had just deserted, the endless overcast days had me pretty depressed most of the time.  One January day, however, Keith and I decided enough was enough.  We took ourselves down to Timberhill Athletic Club and plunked down a pile of cash for a membership.  Immediately it was like the skies had parted and little rays of sunshine were peeking through the clouds.  I would leave a long day’s work, drive to Timberhill,  don my cap and swimsuit and put in 2500 yards in the pool. Stroke, breathe, hard flipturn, stroke.   I would swim until all the tension loosened from my shoulders, until I didn’t care about my awful boss anymore, until I no longer felt like I was the biggest failure on the planet.  When I would pull myself out of the pool my biceps were ripped, my  lungs were strong and the water slid effortlessly off my sleek, lycra-clad body.  It was like a lightbulb had come on: this exercise stuff could really pull me through!

Eventually, I got some new friends.  I got fired from my job by the awful boss (good riddance).  I took a hard look at my life and decided to be brave and start the farm I’d always dreamed of.  We moved to Philomath and the athletic club wasn’t so convenient anymore.  Despite the physical labor of farm work, I still wanted something active to do.   Stacking feed bags and moving broiler pens just doesn’t fit the bill for aerobic activity.  I know enough fat farmers to rid myself of that delusion.

Enter running.  I watched Keith run the Portland Marathon in 2010.  I thought he was crazed in the head.

I did the Beaver Freezer Triathlon in February 2011 and asked Janine to team up with me and run the 5k part.  I mean, I’m a swimmer not a runner, people.

I watched Keith (and everyone else I know) run the Corvallis Half Marathon in April 2011.  I thought they were all crazed in the head.

But, everyone looked like they were having a blast.  So, I bought some running shoes and a pair of shorts and joined  the madness.   Turns out these things are highly addictive:

So, now I’m a runner.  I love it more with every track workout and every race.   In lieu of swimming, it’s a pretty decent sport.  And the people I’ve met through running are darn awesome!

Today I completed my first half marathon ever.  Because I’m mildly obsessive/competitive, I have been nervous about it for weeks.  I also didn’t train very much for it.  Over the holidays, I think I got confused and thought I was training for an almond roca eating contest.   But I braved the snowstorm and the very icy roads and finished the Cascade Half Marathon in 1:48:27 and placed 2nd in my age group to boot!  If you’ve never experienced running 13.1 miles into the wind while constantly wiping snow off your eyelids, I highly recommend it.   Seriously.  It beats sitting on the couch in the winter and being depressed by a long shot!

Victorious finish! Yes, it's cheesy. Shut up.

Seconds after this photo was taken, I started crying about how cold I was.

Life can be kinda confusing when you’re a chicken.

I began this new year with no real resolutions, except a mild hankering to get back to putting words on the screen.  Yet every time I log on to WordPress, nothing seems to inspire me.  It must be this over-sharing culture we inhabit which beings to make me feel that every paragraph sounds contrived and will be judged (and should be judged).  What more can there be to say?  You’ve already seen it all on Facebook and Twitter.  If, in order to counteract the superficiality of social media, I share my deepest feelings on this blog, it may seem as if I’m trying too hard.  If I posture myself as if I “have it all together”, I will be feeding the myth culture that bloggers create.   Anyway, I don’t have a fancy, overly-expensive DSLR camera, so why bother blogging pictures of my life, right?

Funny, the blogs I love the most are the real ones.  The ones that make you feel like you just got done having breakfast with your friend and you love her all the more for the conversation you just shared.  Sure, she talked about herself and her accomplishments a little too much. Perhaps she looked like a supermodel at breakfast and that made you feel like your hurried efforts at getting dressed that morning were laughable. Maybe she wore her most comfy old sweatshirt, giving you a guilty self-esteem boost for taking time to don your cutest sweater.  But you talked and you shared life.  And you walk away from the moment knowing her that much better and being a closer friend because of it.  

I think that’s how blogs should be, but it’s easier said than done.  

I know this, that when I talk to my friends, we don’t just discuss the farm.  We talk about everything from politics, drinking, running, our family members, vacation plans, dating lives and marriages,  plans for the future, cooking, you name it.  If I only ever talked about one thing, I’d bore people (myself included) to tears.  Which, is basically what has happened to this blog and is one reason why I became completely uninspired.

I bore easily, friends.  If you don’t know this about me, you ought to.  

Here’s to a new year and writing about life. ‘Cause life is a great adventure and it’s also a bit of a bore at times.  And sometimes I show up to it in a cocktail dress and sometimes in my rubber boots.  

Cheers!

One of my favorite things to do at Grandma and Tom’s is explore the bookshelves.  Tom has excellent taste in literature and his shelves feature many of my favorite authors.  I first learned of Michael Pollan (and subsequently The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which has forever changed the local food scene) by plucking The Botany of Desire out of a stack of books here at the cabin.  Today, while perusing the shelves, I discovered a treasure of a book and immediately thought I’d like to share it on this blog. If you’re curious about eating locally- produced foods, here is a wonderful introduction!

So, without further ado, the introduction from Eat Where You Live: How to Find and Enjoy Local and Sustainable Food No Matter Where You Live by Lou Bendrick:

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I Know What’s on Your Mind and Have an Eggstatic Response

Just a wild guess here: If you’re reading this book, you are already convinced that sustainable and local food can be a fantastic part of your life (either that or your sister-in-law gave you the book and you’re flipping through it just to be polite). Another guess: Your enthusiasm and curiosity are tempered by nagging questions such as Even if I can get my hands on sustainable and local food, how much work is this going to be? Am I going to go broke eating this way? Why bother when I can just get everything I need in one fell swoop at the local Safeway?

Wow. You are so normal.

You are going to have to trust me – if I can do this, so can you.  I’m an all-American, frantically busy, caffeine-dependent, cell-phone-toting, iPod-loving mother of two.  I’m not a yuppie, hippie, green-thumber, or food professional (just as my husband). Nor do I eat all local foods all the time – not even close. My hat is off to those resourceful people who do so, but for most of us, it’s not an option.  But including local foods in our everyday diets should be an easy option for all of us.

Now then: Forgive me for the Socratic method here, but I’ll answer your nagging (and very good) questions by asking you a question:

When was the last time you ate cookie batter?

I’m guessing that it has been a long time – most likely since your childhood – since you’ve tasted cookie dough outside of an ice cream cone. That’s because eating raw or undercooked eggs these days is a dangerous practice – just read the small print on restaurant menus.  I went several years without eating a single egg because, in 2001, I got salmonellosis, an infection caused by a bacterium called Salmonella that can come from raw or undercooked eggs.  (Mine came from an undercooked scrambled egg.)  If you’ve never had salmonella poisoning, let me say this about that: It might not kill you, but you’ll wish it would.  After I recovered, I not only stopped eating eggs but also treated every egg that came through my door like a biohazard.  My poor husband couldn’t make an omelet without me lurking about with a Clorox wipe, which does not set exactly the right tone for a leisurely brunch.

My attitude toward eggs changed several years later when I discovered sustainable and local eggs – henceforth known as “my eggs.”  They are sustainable because they do not degrade, deplete, or pollute the land or its inhabitants, but instead come from kindly raised, fluffy hens who are never fed hormones (Rachel’s note: industrial chickens are never fed hormones either.)  or antibiotics.  They’re local because they come from a farm three miles from my doorstep.  But I’m not going out of my way to get these eggs in order to adhere to a politically correct definition.  I go out of my way because I made the happy discovery that going to a farm beats pushing a squeaky-wheeled cart through the two-mile breakfast cereal aise.  On my “egg runs,” my daughter and I have patted the heads of fuzzy chicks, watched newborn piglets squeal and run, visited with horses and goats, and watched ducks make the most of mud puddles.  Bottom line: My eggs are fun.

But it doesn’t stop there.  My eggs – free-range, pastured eggs – are higher in brain-boosting omega-3 fatty acids, Vitamins A and E, folic acid, and beta carotene, and lower in cholesterol to boot – than commercially raised eggs.  Beacuse my eggs are truly fresh and come from healthy chickens (which I have seen with my own two eyes) and not from the intensive overcrowded conditions in factory farms, I am not worried about getting sick from them.  Am I eating raw eggs with abaondon?  Of course not.  But I”m also not putting on a hazmat suit to scramble them.  My point : My eggs are healthy. 

True, I could just buy healthy eggs with an organic label.  Don’t get me wrong: Organic is a very good thing, and I’m not here to bash it.  An organic label means that our government has deemed the food is free form certain harmful pesticides, hormones and drugs.  In the case of eggs, “organic” means that they come from chickens whose food contains minimal amounts of herbicides, fungicides, pesticides and commercial fertilizers.  But there’s a reason why “local is the new organic.”  Keeping my egg farmer in business means that he’ll be less likely to sell his farm, as tempting as that may be, to make room for condos or another strip mall.  It also means that the money I spend on eggs goes directly to a farmer in my community and not to some giant corporation in a town I’ve never heard of.  My farmer is now also my friend, and who couldn’t use another friend in this crazy mixed-up world? Astonishing but true: My eggs build community.

Another consideration: My eggs haven’t been trucked long distances to get to my plate.  Eating locally elimininates other negative effects of long-haul trucking: air pollution, the burning of fossil fuels, and that obnoxious sound trucks make with something called a jake-brake. In their own small way: My eggs are a bit gentler on the planet.

All this is well and good, but you might be wondering if I am taking out a second mortgage to shop for groceries.  It’s true, I spend a whopping $4 on a dozen eggs, which makes most people faint (even after I point out that they routinely spend more than two dollars on a single latte). Frugal type, stay thy hand: You’d never settle for a substandard car seat for your child, so why would you feed her a substandard egg? I beg you to remember that cheap food is a stinker of a lie because of its “hidden costs”: the cost to your health (from hormones, pesticides, trans fats, and so on) and the cost to the planet (from pesticides, pollution, etc.). By eating a bit more locally and spending less time in the typical gargantuan grocery store, I spend less money on packaged foods and impulse items (such as those well-placed chocolate bars at the checkout) and gravitate toward simplet, seasonal recipes.  It’s shocking but true: My eggs save me money.

But let’s face it: Time is money.  Cooking real meals from real food takes a little time, but not tons of time.  Take chocolate chip cookies, for example: They don’t take all day.  At the most, they take an hour (less if you make your kitchen slaves, I mean children, help with the dishes). Can packaged cookies even compare to the smell, let alone the taste of a batch of hot cookies on a cold afternoon?  I think you know where I’m going here: My eggs are worth a little extra time.

Last, and perhaps most important: If sustainable and local foods didn’t taste better than conventionally grown, fast , cheap, processed foods, none of the above would matter.  My eggs, with their glossy orange yolks, produce sublime desserts and inspire leisurely brunches.  They are eggy eggs.  One taste of them and you know you’ve been robbed by all those years of eating those ersatz white oval things.  To sum: My eggs taste great.

But don’t take my word for it.  Let me help you find and enjoy some incredible eggs, and other sustainable food, for yourself.  Because cookie batter shouldn’t be a thing to fear.

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Rachel here again.  If that piqued your curiosity,  go buy the book.  I haven’t read it all yet, but it looks like a good one.  And if that made you crave our delicious Provenance Farm eggs, you can visit our website to find out where to buy our eggs and other products: http://provenancefarm.com/

Photo credit: Danae Jones Photography

Last year in this post I said I would upload plans for building broiler shelters.  Well, funny thing happened…I got busy building and farming and stuff like that.  A year later, it took a blog reader to remind me that I never got around to uploading those plans.  Well, here they are!  I know a lot of people are interested in knowing how to build these, so I hope this is helpful.  All credit for this design goes to Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm and Tyler and Bradd Jones of Afton Field Farm.

For some pictures of the building process see my previous post .  You can also visit  Nate Davis’ Troubador Farm blog for some other good design tweaks and photos.  If you have any questions that are not addressed here, let me know in the comments below.

One note about using PALRUF corrugated PVC : this stuff is on the spendy side, but I think it’s worth it. It’s much lighter than corrugated metal siding, and it is durable.   In our small town we could only find it at Home Depot.

I don’t appear to have saved a close-up picture of the dolly that is used for moving the pens.  I will take a picture of it (I really promise this time!)  and take note of the dimensions so that it can be replicated easily.  The dolly is the genius part of this whole project.  It allows a 120 lb woman like me to be able to move the shelters effortlessly.  (Granted, I can pull them without the dolly but it’s pretty backbreaking, as my chiropractor bill will attest.)

Without further ado, here is the link to the plans.  Go grow some chickens!

Broiler Shelter Plans 2011

So, back when the sun was shining on Friday, our friend Joe Murray (see his work here:  http://www.joemurrayphotography.com) came out to our place and shot a photo session with Keith and me.    He’s quite talented and so fun to work with!  What could be more awesome than pretending to be a model for 3 hours straight and hiking around in a pasture in patent leather red heels?

Everybody says that owning a farm must be such a romantic occupation.  Why, yes!  Here’s a glimpse into our everyday life on the farm.

*Stifles giggles*

We’ve been preparing brooders for the last week now.  Cleaning out the old bedding with a front-end loader, shoveling in the new.  Putting out green mouse bait, which Emmie promptly ate.  (Iron gut, that dog has.)   Washing chick feeders and sanitizing mason-jar waterers.  Replacing burned-out 250 watt heat lamps with bright new ones.

This morning, between sunbursts and rainstorms, 310 little Cornish-Cross broiler chicks arrived on the late-delivery truck at the Philomath Post Office.  Their approach was much anticipated.  I’d been waiting all morning for word on the whereabouts of my little babies, and they had been missing in transit for a few hours.  That’s never a desirable event, especially on a cold April morning.  So, when my phone rang, I headed straight for the Post Office to pick up three big boxes of chirping chicks.

The first thing they did when they were unloaded into their new home, was huddle under the heat lamps to warm up.  630 miles on a USPS plane is a rough journey when you’re only 24 hours old!

There’s absolutely nothing more heart-warming than a flock of yellow puff-balls drifting off to sleep under a toasty heat lamp.

The more adventurous chicks soon found the food and water sources.  They are hungry little guys, as this is the first time they’ve ever eaten.  For such little babies, they are amazingly adept at learning how to eat and drink.

I think they’re going to be just fine.  Right now, they’re all tucked into bed, well-insulated in their little brooder houses.  It’s going to be a cold night (snow showers, what?!?) but that’s the name of the game when your broiler season starts in April.  And so Farm Season 2011 begins…it’s bound to be a fun year!

…and I don’t want to wake up.

This year, while examining my navel instead of going to the gym, I decided I need a competition. I’ve got to have a goal to train toward, otherwise I’m going to get awfully bored swimming laps with all the old ladies at Timberhill Athletic Club.  Fortunately, around the same time I decided this, I ran into Janine at Keith’s Heart of the Valley Running Club meeting.  She too wanted to try the Beaver Freezer, but her strength is running not swimming.  Voila!  Instant team.  No more excuses.

I borrowed a sweet racing bike from a friend, bought some padded bike shorts (cycling is weird) and signed our little team up for the triathlon.  Guess what?  I think we can kick some butt.  Of course, I don’t really know what I’m doing when it comes to bike racing.  Is that even what it’s called? My current plan is just to get on the bike and go really fast for 12 miles and hope I don’t face-plant on Walnut Blvd.    It’s a good thing that Janine kills it on the running course.  She’s going to have to be my saving grace.

Here is a video of me during “swim practice” at Timberhill yesterday.  I’ve never seen myself swim, so I had Keith record a little bit.  My backstroke technique clearly leaves a lot to be desired.  The best part is how I mis-count the strokes to the wall and quit swimming a few lengths early. It makes me laugh every time I watch it.  That’s Olympic material right there, baby!

So, if you want to see this hot action live and in-person, come cheer for us next Saturday (April 2) morning at the OSU campus. Whether or not you come, please pray that it doesn’t rain, because I’m a weenie.  Thanks.

Wanna see?

Emmie takes a momentary break from "herding" the chickens

A broody Silver-Laced Wyandotte hen

The whole crew

A curious Dekalb Amberlink hen, right before she pecked my iPhone

I guess, if you’re a chicken, shoelaces look like delicious worms.

Emmie and I go for a walk to the lower paddock