Clipped Wings

Last spring we got four new chicks to add to our flock.  They have been laying for about two months and finishing their final growing.  They've also gotten strong enough to fly out of the pen.

This morning we found one outside the pen again.  We could build the fence higher, but it's easier to clip their wings.  Thankfully my daughters are able to catch them pretty easily.  She held the chicken while I clipped off the end of one wing.  It's a little creepy, feeling the scissors cut through the feather quills, but it doesn't hurt the chicken any more than clipping finger nails.

Farm animals come with a moral responsibility that gardens don't have. If a farm animal is hurt by me, I feel morally culpable. Since we are raising our own meat, we've had to develop a new morality around caring for animals that we will kill later on.  We've decided that the animal would die anyway, whether we butchered it or somebody else, but that our job is to give it a good life.  Never having worked through this before, I find myself swinging back and forth between too much compassion and too little.

The truth is that all eating comes with moral responsibility.  If the rich man had moral responsibility for Lazarus (Lk 16:19-31), then we have it too.  That is part of what has driven my family back to the land.  What we eat and the way it was raised has implications for the animals, the people, and the land.  And whatever we support we are responsible for.  If you buy your meat at the store, it's no small feat to find out where it came from and how it was raised.  An organic certification helps, but our whole food system has become so depersonalized that it's nearly impossible to track food back to its origins.  At least for the food we raise ourselves, we know the moral culpability we take on.

The sick chicken has been given a reprieve while we recover from the flu.  I noticed last night that she was standing up a little bit.  Maybe she will recover.

The peppers I planted last spring are producing.  I planted lots of different kinds, but many didn't germinate. Things got busy in June and I just started throwing little plants into the soil without keeping track.  Actually, I didn't expect any of them to live, so I thought it didn't matter.  Well, most of them did live and now we have a row of peppers and I haven't a clue what kind they are.  Most of them look like sweet peppers, but I know that I planted some hot ones too.   We picked that row and filled our harvest bucket.  I pulled two off one plant that might be hot.  I'll let my husband try one to tell.

Green peppers are beautiful when they freeze.  I dice them up, just as if I was going to saute them, and lay them out on a cookie sheet.  After freezing solid, I transfer them to a bag.  They freeze as green and perfect as if nothing had happened.

The root cellar book says that if acorn squash turn orange, they won't keep very well.  I noticed that two of our squash were getting orange spots, so I figured it was time for our first squash pie.  After cutting them in half and scooping out the seeds (we'll give those to the chickens), I bake them for an hour or two, until a fork pokes in easily.  I used to cut squash with a knife, but they are so hard that I worried about slipping and getting seriously hurt.  One year I discovered that if I use the little carving saws they sell at Halloween, they were easy to cut.  After baking, I scoop out the flesh and run it through the blender.   Then I cook them up just like pumpkin pie.