Food
Sprouts
09/23/2012 11:01
Sprouts are cool! I always wanted to sprout seeds for salad, but I’ve never really been organized enough to do it. I’m trying it again, with mung beans, alfalfa, and coriander seeds. The coriander seeds are big -- if we get sprouts from those that are the size of mung bean sprouts, but taste like cilantro, that would be really cool!
I read in Harvey Ussery’s chicken book that he sprouts feed grains for his chickens, so I thought I’d give that a try, too. I picked up a bag of whole oats at the coop, so I threw a couple of scoops into a bucket and soaked them for a day. Then I put them in an ice cream bucket with little wholes drilled in the bottom and sides. I rinsed them once a day, and in a couple of days I had little rootlets. I gave some of these to the chickens, and they piled onto them like candy (they really like sweets -- they love leftover plum smoothie, pear and apple cores, etc.). A couple more days, and the seeds had sprouted little stems and leaflets. This is supposed to make the oats about twice as nutritious for the birds as dry seeds. And once again, they ate the sprouts just as soon as they hit the ground.
It’s easy enough to do – I suppose the trick is just being around and remembering to rinse them daily to avoid mold. Another chore to add to the list, but it seems a lot of this small farming stuff is just about being there and staying on top of small increments of work on a regular basis. It’s an interesting combination of supervising these processes, and just letting them happen. Kind of cool, that the sheep and goats sort of take care of themselves, and the chickens keep growing, without me having to watch them the whole time. It’s not so much like rolling a boulder up a steep hill (like many of the jobs I’ve done over the years) as it is like kicking a soccer ball down a field. The ball’s momentum does most of the work; my job is just to keep it going in the right direction and then put it into the goal.
Anyway, the oats are sprouting well, and I’m going to keep starting batches every couple of days until it’s just too cold to play with water in the garage. I also tried a little batch of the oil sunflower seeds I bought for the wild bird-feeder. Surprise! They sprouted too. And apparently whole corn will sprout. I’ll keep experimenting and see where it takes me…
Anyway, the oats are sprouting well, and I’m going to keep starting batches every couple of days until it’s just too cold to play with water in the garage. I also tried a little batch of the oil sunflower seeds I bought for the wild bird-feeder. Surprise! They sprouted too. And apparently whole corn will sprout. I’ll keep experimenting and see where it takes me…
Day of Rest and Food Prep
08/05/2012 11:53
So it’s Sunday morning again. Got up late (after the sunrise) and drank a couple of cups of coffe while playing with the kittens and puppies on the back porch. Then Steph and I came inside and did our Sunday morning chore, preparing a week’s worth of food for the two pups and three kittens (the old indoor cats prefer their dry cat food and an occasional can of tuna).
The process is becoming a little more streamlined, now that we’ve done it a few times. The kitchen counter is a disassembly line. Whole chickens enter on one end and packaged meals exit the other. On the left, two two-packs of whole chicken, which we picked up again for 95 cents a pound at Walmart. I cut the birds on the board (with knives I’ve remembered to sharpen!), and Steph runs them through the machine. Along the way, there’s a loop, as the meat first gets cut into pieces that can be sent through the grinder, and then it all goes through twice. Then on the other end, they go into reusable plastic food storage containers.
The rough grind takes less time than it takes me to cut up the four chickens. After two birds, Steph cleans out the auger of all the cartilage that piles up there, so I have a chance to catch up. Bone goes through just fine, but the cartilage gets hung up there and after a while sounds like knuckle-bones popping as the grinder turns. So we clear that out, and it doesn’t end up in the final mix of food (which is probably just as well, since I don’t think it adds a lot to the nutritional value of the food). We get two big bowls from four chickens, and next time we’ll clean the auger between each of those bowls as we’re feeding it through again, too. By the end of the second run-through, the grinder was slowing down a bit.
Working together, we managed to make the process fairly efficient. Steph was even able to catch about half the meat as it came out of the second grind, which decreased the amount that had to be packed from the bowl at the end, and also eliminated the need to reuse the bowls from the first grind. After about an hour and ten minutes, we had 29 meals for the freezer, and a little pile of fresh meat for today. Then came the deep-cleaning of the kitchen (because, after all, we’re talking about raw chicken bought at Walmart), complete with bleach on the countertops and floor. The meat goes into the chest freezer, and we’re good for another week!
Working together, we managed to make the process fairly efficient. Steph was even able to catch about half the meat as it came out of the second grind, which decreased the amount that had to be packed from the bowl at the end, and also eliminated the need to reuse the bowls from the first grind. After about an hour and ten minutes, we had 29 meals for the freezer, and a little pile of fresh meat for today. Then came the deep-cleaning of the kitchen (because, after all, we’re talking about raw chicken bought at Walmart), complete with bleach on the countertops and floor. The meat goes into the chest freezer, and we’re good for another week!
It's a grind!
07/27/2012 20:17
We now have two indoor cats and three barn kittens. Next week we’re getting two puppies, and in the late fall a third. We had good luck feeding our dog in New Hampshire a raw diet, so we thought we might try that here. In Keene, we were able to buy frozen blocks of ground raw chicken from the small meat market up the road. Here, no one is really doing that yet. So we decided to do it ourselves.
A little back-of-an-envelope math suggests that three big working dogs are going to eat 18-20 thirty-three pound bags of chow a year. Five cats are likewise going to eat about 20 twenty pound bags of cat food. If we used a decent supermarket brand like Iams, we’d be looking at about $1,500 in annual petfood costs. If we used a premium brand, it would be more. A lot more.
On the other hand, we could grind fresh meat for all the animals. This meat could come from a variety of sources, at a variety of costs. Some of it could come from the farm or from fishing, and would be very very cheap. But let’s look at the worst case scenario, and assume we went to the supermarket and bought people food, and ground it up for the animals. How would that compare?
We started out today with four whole chickens at 95 cents per pound. I dismembered them a little bit (note to self: sharp knives are more efficient and safer!), and then Steph fed them through the grinder for a coarse grind. The machine gobbled up skin, organs, meat, and bones, as fast as we could stuff chicken into the top. Then we changed to the fine extruder, and I fed the rough mix through again. This not only ground the chicken finer, but also mixed the meat, organs, bones and marrow into a nice uniform paste that looked just like the chicken-burger you get at the store. Most of that went into forms Steph placed in the freezer so we’ll have bags of serving-sized chicken for several weeks, from about an hour’s work this morning.
If the animals
eat between three and four pounds of raw meat daily, we’ll save from $100 to $500 in the first year. That will pay for the grinder. And chances are, our animals will be healthier and fitter as a result. We’d save even more, of course, if we added fillers like rice to the mix. But let’s be real, fillers are one of the reasons commercial pet foods lead to obese pets.
The kittens inhaled it.
Of course, it’s having a large number of animals to feed that makes this economical. We wouldn’t be able to do it this efficiently with just one dog or two cats. But it would still be healthier for single pets to eat a raw diet. Something to think about…
Later in the day, I worked on the henhouse some more. I set the base plates, cut the posts so they were all level at the top, and framed the sidewalls. Then I threw some of the dirt I had previously removed onto the floor, to protect the hardware cloth. I placed the studs so that I’ll be able to hang nesting boxes between them. I’m going to build the nesting boxes in stacks two across. So some of the gaps are two feet, and others are closer to three (for the Jersey Giant hens). It will all make sense later in the process. But it was fun cutting and hammering, and it’s nice that this structure is finally starting to look like something!
A little back-of-an-envelope math suggests that three big working dogs are going to eat 18-20 thirty-three pound bags of chow a year. Five cats are likewise going to eat about 20 twenty pound bags of cat food. If we used a decent supermarket brand like Iams, we’d be looking at about $1,500 in annual petfood costs. If we used a premium brand, it would be more. A lot more.
We started out today with four whole chickens at 95 cents per pound. I dismembered them a little bit (note to self: sharp knives are more efficient and safer!), and then Steph fed them through the grinder for a coarse grind. The machine gobbled up skin, organs, meat, and bones, as fast as we could stuff chicken into the top. Then we changed to the fine extruder, and I fed the rough mix through again. This not only ground the chicken finer, but also mixed the meat, organs, bones and marrow into a nice uniform paste that looked just like the chicken-burger you get at the store. Most of that went into forms Steph placed in the freezer so we’ll have bags of serving-sized chicken for several weeks, from about an hour’s work this morning.
The kittens inhaled it.
Of course, it’s having a large number of animals to feed that makes this economical. We wouldn’t be able to do it this efficiently with just one dog or two cats. But it would still be healthier for single pets to eat a raw diet. Something to think about…
