The Pigs Have Arrived

The pigs have moved in, and they have chickens for housemates. I set up a corral made out of used pallets in the backyard, so that it also functions as a chicken run. The chickens have been taken down a peg; they have to sneak good food (cheese and bread) when the pigs will let them. At first they seemed puzzled by these weird creatures, but now I think the chickens are enjoying their farm company. They’ve actually been laying eggs more regularly, and have stopped their early morning screeching. They sometimes eat food off the pigs’ backs – maybe one day they’ll ride around on the pigs’ backs like the birds that travel on the back of hippos. Well, probably not, but it’s funny to visualize.

Anyway, the pigs are growing and eating at an alarming rate. They’re getting about a five gallon bucket of food waste every day and I think I’m going to have to find a way to increase their rations. Nearly everyone I know in the food service industry here in New Orleans is helping me save food scraps for them, but I’m going to have to ramp up the scraping. The whole goal in raising these pigs for my own consumption is to take a waste product (leftover or unusable food from restaurants) and turn it into a high-end, consumable product (meat for me and friends).

These pigs are moving beyond the cute phase and moving quickly into the smelly and gluttonous phase. They are quite entertaining to watch rooting around, making snorting/squealing noises, or just sleeping after a rigorous morning of eating. But, I have to say that these are the first animals I’ve raised that I (so far) don’t have reservations about eating. At this point, they may be putting on almost a pound of weight a day, and all I can think about are the chops, ham and bacon that is effortlessly being produced. I can’t help but notice, every time I look at the pigs, that they’re getting nice shoulders, rumps and bellies. They are so stout that they remind me of giant sausages with four legs poking out. I look at the pigs and I see meat.

Now I know that may sound callous to the animal-lover (I do count myself among that group, even though it may be hard to see beyond the the fact that I’m going to eat my pigs). I respect their personalities too, and I’m glad that they have some space to root around in the dirt, nap in the sun, and just in general, be pigs.

They like to be scratched a lot and they like to rub up on anything coarse to scratch themselves on, and they come straight at me with their dirty noses every time I enter their pen. But I had no idea that seriously, the way to truly let a pig just be a pig is simply to give it as much as it possibly wants to eat.

Intro to Pigs

Pigs love cheese!

I have to apologize for my absence from the blog world, but I have several confessions to make. First of all, I moved to a different house in another neighborhood. The idea of starting over seemed exhausting, and I have to admit that in some ways, I thought of retiring. And then I received a death threat as a comment on one of my blog postings about killing rabbits. And then I lost two entire litters of baby rabbits. So, I have to say that I have had enough black moments in my urban farming adventures lately to seriously shake me, but I now feel bold enough to start over, to proclaim that I will not be silenced by anyone who values rabbit-life over human. And now that there’s a new litter of baby rabbits, and I’m cautiously optimistic that maybe this litter is stronger, and maybe the weather will be kinder.

So, instead of retiring, I got pigs. Yes, pigs. They’re not at my house yet, but this week they will be moving into my backyard, with the chickens, rabbits, new citrus trees and vegetables.

And sometime in late March or early April, we will be having a very big barbecue.

Playing With My Food

Rabbits are nauseatingly cute. I’m not attached to them – really, I swear I’m not. Actually, they’re a bit of a pain in the arse. Every time I woke up to pounding rain in the middle of the night over the past two weeks, I’d fret about the baby rabbits’ well-being until I forced myself to leap out of bed and disappear into the wet storm at odd hours, searching for rags or other bedding material to keep them warm. And still, three of them died, due to I don’t know what. (The capriciousness of the worst October weather ever? Hot, wet and windy.) So, in all honesty, it would be much easier to get rid of them than to keep them. But, I can understand why Americans in general don’t eat rabbit – we have an obsession with cute, and rabbits are ridiculously so.

What is not cute is a chicken who screeches as soon as the sun comes up (about 6:30 right now). In the interest of maintaining domestic civility and keeping my neighbors from killing the chickens in the night, I got rid of one hen. So, there were three hens and now there are two. I gave the noisiest one to a woman who keeps a rooster – I don’t think she’ll be bothered by the noisy hen. I simply lost my sense of humor, especially since, it seemed to me, that the hens were withholding eggs. The remaining two chickens continued to make broody noises during the day, but it is less bothersome. Due to their broody noises, I became convinced that they might be hiding eggs, rather than witholding them. So, I had to go egg-hunting, which meant laying down some cardboard and crawling under the dark, damp, deck where the chickens spend time.

And, I found nothing, even after I interrogated the chickens as to the whereabouts of their eggs (all they wanted to do was peck at the cardboard). So, I tried a different tactic: lavishing them with old cheese and giving each one her own nest box.

And it worked! I may have the most spoiled city chickens ever, but they are now laying lovely brown eggs with rich orange yolks almost daily. Which leaves me free to enjoy the best part of urban livestock-rearing: eating the long-awaited results.

Two-week old rabbit

Too cute

I just love the features!

Must get to the recipe section…

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The Roar of the Bees

Dismantled beehive

Sweat is rolling off my eyelids and there is nothing I can do about it. My hands are encased in rubber-lined gloves, there’s a hat and net covering my head and face, and my body is wrapped in its own personal sauna – a beekeeping suit. I may have actually sweat through two layers of clothes. Yes, it’s good to be back in New Orleans.

The weather isn’t even that hot right now (mid to high 80s), but nonetheless, in this humidity beekeeping is a sweaty affair. And there is a lot of bee work to do. Sadly, we lost one of the hives over the summer – they may have swarmed out and then moths took over. The moths lay eggs that turn into messy larvae that gorges on wax and honey, and nearly ruins anything the bees may have left behind. The process of taking apart a hive is hot and tedious and a little bit sad – like gutting a devastated house, it brings back memories of the life that once hummed inside, full of its own personal dramas.

Early last Spring, this hive lost its queen. A hive without a queen is purposeless. The angry bees have nothing to live for, so they sting anyone who comes near, almost without reason. I had been told that a queenless hive even sounds different: they buzz with a fury, a dull roar, and I paid attention to see if I could hear it for myself. And I did. Not only did I hear the angry roar of the bees, but I also felt nervous as they buzzed angrily near my face even though it was protected behind the veil of the beekeeping suit.

Once Albert, the baron of the bees, and Jeff, the bee expert, found a new queen and planted her in the angry hive, there was a noticeable change within a day. The bees had purpose again and hummed the contented hum of satisfied workers as they flew off to forage for the new queen. Through the next few months, the bees produced honey with abundance, enough for us to harvest once in May and then almost a gallon in June. Sometimes, when I could tell the bees were in a peaceable mood, I put my head right up to the side of the bee boxes to listen to the hum of 40,000 lives inside. It sounds like the rushing sound of the ocean you hear when you cup a shell to your ear, or the steady drumming of rain on a tin roof – if there are 40,000 bees inside, then there are 160,000 little feet pitter-pattering up and down the wooden frames, humming as they work.

Now the dismantled hive is totally silent.

Bees stealing honey back

There are still two more hives, working away, trying to stock up for the coming months, and each hive is full of its own stories, dramas and miracles. Just the other day, when I was processing honey in the yard on a cookie sheet, some bees approached, trying to steal back the honey I had just taken. One landed right on a sticky puddle and immediately began to get pulled under like quicksand, and they more she struggled, the faster she went. I grabbed a piece of mulch and used it as a lifeline for the bee to cling to. Once the bee latched on, I set the little stick with the honey-drenched bee on it right at the entrance to the hive. I just guessed which hive to take her back to – it could have been the wrong one and the guard bees would have killed her as an intruder. The sentry bees immediately came to inspect this honeyed worker, and after a few probes with long tongues, they decided to take her in, and immediately set to work, cleaning the honey off. The honeyed bee at first struggled against all their bathing efforts, but when I came back a few minutes later, she was surrounded by at least six busily cleaning bees, and she lifted each wing individually to let her helpers get the honey underneath. Then she tested both wings together and flew straight back into the hive, a regular worker again, just as she wanted to be. Innumerable miracles happen in a bee hive everyday.

Laissez Farming

Whoa! That’s a lot of papayas, was my first thought as we drove up to the house for the first time in almost three months. Even in the approaching dusk, I could tell that there were at least 60 fruit spread among 4 papaya trees.

When you’ve been away for almost three months, you’re grateful for anything left alive in the garden at all, but everywhere I looked, there was something not only alive, but thriving. My sweet potato patch has taken over its corner of the yard, and in the process, swallowed a lawnmower and a wheelbarrow. In addition to the papayas, there are two green clusters of bananas, plumping up on the banana trees, and the grapefruit is bowed down with heavy fruit. There is even about 30 fruit on the three-year-old satsuma tree (a first!). In the garden, there is a melon vine that is still setting fruit, enough basil to stock the freezer with pesto for the winter, and a bounty of eggplants and sweet and hot peppers.

Sweet Potatoes swallowed the lawnmower!

Bounty of hot peppers

There is still a lot of work to do (the weeds had an excellent summer too), but I was pleasantly surprised by the rewards present for a lazy farmer.

Or I should say “laissez farmer,” not only because we are in New Orleans, but also because this garden has been left alone, to just be, with little human intervention, for the past three months.

And, with little effort on my part, my freezer is full of rabbit. There’s two does and a buck left to continue to supply us with meat for the future, but thirteen rabbits ended up butchered a few weeks ago and I am benefiting with the most tender white meat I’ve ever tasted. I browned it in a little duck fat left from my muscovy ducks and the results have been marvelous.

Tarragon Rabbit in the Dutch Oven

Now that September is here, I’m eagerly making plans for the fall garden, blending up pesto and eating papayas. It’s good to get my hands in the dirt again. Laissez farming clearly has its benefits, but it’s time to get back to work.
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Dwarf Nigerian Goats

Dwarf nigerian Goat

I would love to have a goat. Making goat cheese and goat milk soap holds a certain pastoral charm for me. But I also love having a yard full of edibles, and I don’t want everything in it grazed down to nubs by greedy ruminants (I don’t think goats ever feel full). I was thinking about starting a goat co-op, where the goats are kept on someone else’s lot, and all interested people would share the work and the milk. That still means I would have to find some other people interested in such an endeavor. Having the farm animals I want in a city setting has to have compromises.

But, while traveling on the west coast, I got a new idea to mull over.

Novella Carpenter is an urban farmer in Oakland. She lives in the upstairs unit of a double, next-door to a vacant lot that she has turned into a garden. Over the course of the last six years, she’s raised bees, rabbits, ducks, turkeys, and two pigs, chronicling most of her lessons learned in a recent memoir, Farm City, the education of an urban farmer.

After I read her book, I went to her blog and discovered that she has started raising goats since the book was written. So, I contacted her when I was in the Bay Area and she was ridiculously pleasant about letting a total stranger visiting from New Orleans come tour through her garden lot, her backyard, and take notes on her backyard goat management.

She’s found the perfect goats for a small-scale setting; they’re dual purpose for meat and milk and they are small – Nigerian dwarf goats. Okay, hold on. I know what thoughts immediately spring to mind – I thought it too before I saw the goats myself. Anytime you put the word “dwarf” in the title of an animal breed, images of pot-bellied pigs and miniature horses comes to mind – totally useless animals that have no purpose besides companionship (oh, and they look ridiculous). But the dwarf Nigerian goats were specifically bred to produce lots of milk, and survive on less food than a standard size goat that could eat me out of house and home – they are very efficient creatures that can provide milk and meat, and don’t need ample pasture to roam or graze.

Novella's goats on staircase.

And as an added bonus, the goats themselves are quite personable, and are hilarious to watch. Novella’s goats spend their days running up and down the staircase in her tiny backyard, climbing up onto anything that is taller than them, then jumping off.

Goat on shed

So, on the long drive back to New Orleans, I’ll be busy planning ways to make my yard more efficient, maybe planning fencing for the possible addition of some efficient little goats.

Traveling Front Yard Farmer

On of the many benefits of being an urban farmer, as opposed to a rural farmer, is that I am constantly supported by a network of people interested in the animals and vegetables I’m caring for. These supporters are my neighbors and they generously offer to care for my animals and keep an eye on things when I go away. This summer, I’ll be gone for a total of two and a half months, escaping the heat. While I’m galavanting around the country on a road trip, visiting my family on the west coast, and traveling to Brazil, there’s a small army of people ensuring that the rabbits get fed and slaughtered, the bees have enough room to keep making honey, and the sweet potatoes get enough water to continue their takeover of the backyard. It’s like my community of substitute farmers.

One of my neighbors has been feeding the rabbits, and another neighbor is lined up to do the slaughter. In exchange, they get meat and rabbit skins. The chickens went to spend the summer in my friend’s large and grassy backyard, paying for their stay with fresh eggs. The bees are being checked on by Jeff Armstrong, the swarm catcher. And perhaps, most importantly, Miss Betty is there, quietly overseeing everyone from her kitchen window, making sure that the sweet potatoes don’t wilt and that only approved people are prowling around the backyard.

Which leaves me free to explore other front yard farming practices everywhere I go. And I’ve been surprised by the lack of urban farming in Brazil. I thought that in poor areas and developing countries, I would find small garden plots in average yards, at the very least a tomato plant tucked into a sunny courtyard – but no. Brazilians seem to be content with fruit trees, and I do admit that the variety of fruit trees is pretty amazing. But the only real urban farming I saw was the occasional city horse grazing beneath a billboard, or a donkey tethered on the median between very busy lanes of traffic.

Donkey in Feira Santana

Horses by a busy road in Bahia, Brazil.

So, now that I’m back in the US, visiting my California family, I’m stunned by all the other front yard farmers there are in this state. People here for the most part aren’t afraid of a little broccoli in the front-yard pansy bed, a few tomatoes and basil next to the lawn near the front door. And in this ridiculously temperate and un-challenging growing environment, tomatoes can reach unprecendented heights, with delicious results.

Gigantic tomato plant loaded with fruit - picture almost doesn't do it justice!

The Last of the Hairy Sicilians

Today I cursed Barbara Kingsolver. And Novella Carpenter. And whoever else has written in a book (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Farm City, respectively) about how they can pluck a duck, chicken, whatever in under 30 minutes!

I roasted the last one of my ducks today. The duck was hastily thrown in the freezer last November, before the skin was cleaned fully. Most of the body was peppered with short, dark black feathers that looked like heavy five o’clock shadow on a very hairy man.

So I set to work with the kitchen tweezers – and the skin ripped, and the tweezers slipped. After about thirty minutes of swearing and starting to feel cross-eyed, I instead concentrated on the skin on the breast, deciding that if there was one part of the skin I was going to eat, it would be this choice part.

Duck plucking - and cursing.

And it turned out fine. Most of the fine hairs burned off in the oven, leaving strange, ingrown stubble under the duck skin. So I ate it anyway, and, for the most part, it tasted really good – it just wasn’t pretty.

Taste is the part that matters the most to me, but it also has to look decent. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I probably couldn’t pay some of my friends and family to even try to eat that duck with me – there were too many reminders that it had once been a living animal.

Duck dinner

I picked the carcass clean, rendered the fat, and then was left to stare at the bones. I knew in my urban farmer frame of mind that I should make stock ( ah! what would Barbara Kingsolver and Novella Carpenter think if I didn’t?), but I couldn’t. The heat in New Orleans is approaching 90 degrees now and I couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to be sweating over a boiling pot. So, instead, Albert laid the duck bones to rest in a hole in the backyard, next to whatever remains of its brothers and sisters who were killed by the dog, and near a cantaloupe vine.

Leftovers

Eating the last duck has gotten me thinking about the last nine months in the life of my yard. New successes happen all the time, like the arrival of baby rabbits and the first harvest of blueberries from my plants this year.

First blueberries

And I keep thinking of ways to improve upon, or move beyond the failures (why can’t I still grow tomatoes in New Orleans? Nearly all my plants have succumbed to to verticillium wilt this year – something I never would have even had to look up on the West Coast). Now there’s a fence underneath the house, I can think about more ducks next fall, maybe light-colored ducks that wouldn’t leave such obvious stubble. Or turkeys? Or quail? I’ve been bitten by the urban livestock bug and now I have to find a way to one-up myself for next time around. I’ll mull it over until September.

One-week old rabbit

Mother’s Day Babies

My first adventures in rabbit breeding were unsuccessful. Apparently, sometimes when females are kept together, they won’t get pregnant, even when bred. So, thirty days later, in correspondence with the full moon again, the randy rabbits got taken to visit the buck for a second time. And, thirty one days later, in line with the full moon again, I came outside this morning to find a wiggling mass of fur in the nest box.

Baby rabbits!

The doe seemed okay with my curiosity, so I poked around until I found seven kits in the nest. Seven! Nora the doe seemed fine – alert and very hungry – so I turned to inspect the other doe, Nelly. She looked miserable. Panting and sprawled on her side, she had a mouth full of fur. As I watched, she mustered some enthusiasm with a slightly crazed look in her eye, and hopped down into the nest box with the fur. Then she proceeded to dig, burrow, and push all the bedding around, then mix it with fur until the nest met her specifications. At one point, as I leaned into her cage to check on her water, she nudged me in the face, then grabbed a mouthful of my hair and proceeded to tug. My long, soft hair must have looked like an incredible bedding material to her in her slightly deranged state.

Doe preparing for kits!

Daddy buck - I think he's freaked out.

I carefully extricated my hair from the rabbit’s mouth and myself from the cage, then proceeded to go about my day. At about 4 o’clock, I wandered over to the rabbit cages again and noticed the same wiggle amidst the white fluff in both nest boxes. Another eight baby rabbits born right under the dining room window!

And so, another highly productive day in urban farming, and I didn’t even have to do anything but watch.

In other events, the chickens and the rabbits have been almost interacting lately. When I let the chickens out in the evenings, they now wander over to the compost under the rabbit cages to scratch and look for bugs. The other day, I put the youngest buck, Nick, out in the chicken tractor on the lawn so that he could eat some grass and dig around a bit. The newest chicken, Bunny, (yes, I have a chicken named Bunny because the other hen is named Bea) seemed irked and perplexed that such a strange creature with disgustingly large ears was running around in her house. But Nick was just happy as can be.

Nick the rabbit and Bunny the hen - a meeting of modest minds.

Creatures of Habit

Every morning, as soon as I’ve let the chickens out of the condo and into their daytime run, I walk across the street to the empty lot that is, at this time of year, covered in white clover. This empty lot is currently owned by the Road Home and they diligently mow it every 3 weeks or so. But, during the growing time between mowings, I do my best to take advantage of the free rabbit food that rebounds like hay, more healthy after each cutting, by picking enough clover to fill my arms, and then carrying it back to the eager rabbits.

I don’t really know some of my neighbors surrounding this lot, and every morning I wonder if they peer out their windows and wonder what I’m picking grass for, as they sip their coffee and get ready for work.

One of the reasons that rabbits are a difficult livestock animal to raise (when I say difficult what I really mean is hard to kill – they are actually very easy to raise and care for) is not only because of their cute and fuzzy appearance, but also because of their similarities to an excited puppy when you bring them food. The rabbits know that the first time they see me every morning, it means that they are going to be fed some delicious greens – one of the highlights of their day. Sometimes they race back and forth in a crazy, excited zig zag when they know food is coming, stand on their hind legs, or simply try to climb the wire of their cages while they stick their noses through the squares, trying to get a nibble or at least a scent of what I’ve brought them. Rabbits are, unfortunately, quite personable.

Nick the rabbit enjoying his morning greens.

Chickens are endearing in their own way, but mostly because of their unerring routine. One of my hens died quite abruptly in the night about a week ago, of what I can only guess was a heart attack – I have no idea what else would kill a young hen so suddenly and not afflict the other one. I also had the odd experience of watching the whole thing happen: it was dark, the hens were roosting, and suddenly one hen flapped up, ran to the corner of the cage and convulsed, wings flapping and neck stretched out. The other hen ran off the roost to see what the commotion was about, and noticing her friend writhing on the ground, gave her a few stern pecks, as if to say, “snap out of it!” Then she went back to the roost, making more scolding noises.

I expected the solitary hen to look for her lost companion, or at least change her routine in some small way, but she still went about her business of egg-laying, mulch-scratching and dirt-bathing the next day without so much as a cross cluck to me about the whole affair. In fact, when I got up in the morning, the live hen was standing next to the dead hen, preening her feathers after the night’s rainstorm, waiting for me to let her out so she could get on with her day.

One hen foraging.

Even if my remaining hen wasn’t perturbed by the whole affair, I couldn’t stand the sight of one hen. So I ran an ad on craigslist for “One Chicken Wanted for My Lonely Hen,” explaining the situation. And craigslist came through, as it always does, so now I have a new hen. But the new hen seems to have her own routine that she won’t break. She is a brown leghorn, a breed developed to be efficient egg-layers because of their intake of food to output of eggs ratio, and she is about half the size of a Buff Orpington, even when full grown.

Replacement hen

She refuses to stay in the condo with the other hen – she prefers to roost under the deck on a water pipe, going to bed as soon as dusk falls, making worried quail-like chirping noises.

Bunny, the chicken, roosting on a water pipe.

Animals don’t feel safe when their routine is altered; the chickens in particular pace and fret – humans just seem to get irritated. When I went to pick clover from the lot across the street this morning, I saw that the Road Home had come sometime the afternoon before, and shorn my hay field to stubs, forcing me to go scout for weeds on the medians and other nooks around my block, thoroughly altering my routine and making me very cross indeed.