It started out harmlessly enough. Just like when the Titanic departed Southampton. A wave goodbye, a bit of confetti and streamers, and then – just like that – a good idea gone bad. Absent the fluttering paper, that’s about how things went this past weekend at the annual Bainbridge Island Tour de Coop, which as it sounds, is all about chickens.
Our participation began in May of 2012 when I was picking up the first batch of chicks down at Bay Hay and Feed – my favorite store that I can’t afford to shop at – when Chicken Expert Robin asked: “So, are you going to be on the Tour this year?”
“The Tour” was, at the time, in that vast set of things about which I am clueless, so I asked and got the lowdown. Basically, you open your property to a herd of strangers who park on the lawn, trample the shrubbery, and say things like: “Eewwwww, they sure smell bad” all the while scoffing at the pitiful, crowded enclosure your hens suffer in like some avian Auschwitz waiting for a sprinkling of corn before their short, miserable lives are ended because they don’t produce enough eggs.
I looked down at the tiny balls of fluff huddling together for warmth in the child’s sized shoebox. “We don’t have a coop.” I shamefully admitted.
“But you will by July, right?” Always the optimist, that Robin.
As it turned out the chickens did end up with a coop – in September – so it was a good thing we passed on the tour.
Fast forward to May of this year: Same venue, same helpful Robin, same question.
I had no excuses.
“Uh, sure.”
Shortly thereafter I was standing out in the meadow regarding the chickens when JoAnn, the Tour’s organizer, came over to see whether our coop was tour-worthy. I actually think her visit was to make sure it would stand up to the scoffing.
“It’ll do,” she said and handed me a book titled: Chicken Raising Tales which was nothing more than a slap in the face of here’s what your coop could have looked like.
Inside the book were pictures of coops set in lush gardens, coops painted in rich, vibrant colors, coops with benches to watch the hens’ antics, coops with attics, basements and attached garages.
“Buncha show offs!” I said and hurled the book into the woods.
Bainbridge Island, as I’ve mentioned, is kind of spread out. It doesn’t lend itself to typical small town fundraisers like an open house of all the rich people’s homes so you get to see what you can accomplish with a 200-grand annual budget and a live-in staff. On Bainbridge – as with most of the country – it’s really tough to walk anyplace. Couple that with the Seattle Freeze, where most people refuse to interact with anybody else, and the problem compounds itself. Sure we’ve got the Bainbridge in Bloom garden tour as well as the Tour de Coop, but the six to eight people who are willing to let people wander around their yards are not precisely neighbors. On these days there are enough extra cars running around the island that NOAA can see accelerated melting of the ice caps from the extra CO2 being pumped in the air.
Thus it was this past Saturday. We got up early to move the chickens from their barren, stubbly place in the meadow up to a “display area” where I had been watering for a week in an effort to make the grass turn green. I figured that it would be easy to make the move and get set up by the 11:00am start; it takes two hours to move them and it was only 7:30.
Well, it took a bit longer what with trying to scrub a year’s worth of crusty chicken shit of the roof, and chasing the chickens out of the garden, and fixing the wheels for the cage, and chasing the chickens out of the garden, and getting the fence out of the rock-hard, desiccated clay that passes for soil around here, and moving the coop and cage and fence, and chasing the chickens out of the garden. And we were almost done when…
…the first tourist showed up forty-five minutes early.
We chased him off.
Eager is one thing, but eager about a chicken tour? C’mon buddy, get a life.
Just as the starting gun sounded, we applied the finishing touches of paint to some scratches and a line of cars came rushing down the lane to see our display. As the smog from the traffic cleared a small girl looked at her mom and asked:
“Where’s the chickens?”
In our rush to get the coop in place we left out one key part of the display. The chickens were now ranging free over the entire property and refused to respond to the usual enticements of fresh corn or jasmine rice. (Spoiled ain’t in it.) In fact, a full hour and a half after the tour began, we still hadn’t accounted for all the flock and had to wait until the last few stragglers started dying of thirst and stumble back to the coop searching for water.
Other than that the day was a resounding success. There were endless questions, answers, and discussions. We talked about the breeds and the number of eggs and the benefit of moving the coop around. By the time the gong sounded at 4:00pm I was hoarse and my throat had swollen from breathing all the car exhaust that still hung in the air.
The next morning I moved the coop back out onto the meadow. The chickens, still full of themselves from all the attention, behaved well and hung out snacking on the fresh, green grass that had finally responded to the mega-liters of water we doused it with before the tour.
All buttoned up and safe I retired to an early cocktail(s), put my feet up, and pondered.
Now what?
Which brings us back to last week and the effort to make some home grown sauerkraut.
As you recall, sauerkraut has a total of two ingredients: cabbage and salt, and is simple enough that even I can follow the directions.
First get some cabbage, here’s what cabbage looks like in the field (for all you city-slickers) and here’s what it looks like when it’s ready for processing. Now you might notice that The World’s Largest Mixing Bowl Approved for Home Use is immediately next to the cabbage. This is because cabbage in the head has a density equivalent to a neutron star and once chopped expands in volume alarmingly as you can witness here.
As an aside, I must say that of all the things you can do in a garden growing cabbage to make sauerkraut has to be among the most foolish. Even at the over-priced temples to gullible consumers that pass for grocery stores and farm markets out here, cabbage is the cheapest vegetable in the bins – it’s even cheaper than zucchini. On the shelves, sauerkraut is the cheapest canned vegetable. So where’s the sense in buying four-bucks worth of seed, spending five hours tending the crop, and two more processing the stuff into kraut? Let me know if you have an answer, I can’t figure it out.
Nevertheless.
After the chopped cabbage is expanded you sprinkle a little salt on it, mix it up until the juice starts getting sucked out of the cabbage, and pack it into the jars you can see in the picture.
The amount of cabbage I made – four pounds – was supposed to make a gallon of kraut. It looked bigger than that so I figured I should prep an extra jar just in case. That’s why there are three. Once I started packing, the cabbage returned to its original density – just in a different shape – and all four pounds of cabbage and two tablespoons of salt fit nicely into just one half-gallon jar. Isn’t it pretty?
I took the lone jar into the workroom to avoid stinking up the house with the noxious vapors the bubbling cabbage emits. Really, I grew up downwind of Exxon’s Bayway refinery and that was a piquant zephyr of spring compared to the stench I waded through in my first – and thus far only – visit to a sauerkraut factory.
I checked yesterday to see how the cabbage was progressing.
Oops.
They didn’t tell me not to fill the jars all the way up. The expanding, fermenting cabbage had displaced most of the juice up through the airlock, out of the jar, and all over the workbench. What a mess. Four pounds of cabbage makes a gallon of kraut because it doubles in size! If only I had known.
I’ve got to go check on it now. If the expansion has continued I might need to split the cabbage into two jars. I hope not because that would mean I’d have to bring the stuff back to the kitchen and the reek would be everywhere. Maybe my best move would be to junk this batch and start over. After all, we’ve still got another seventeen heads of cabbage out there.