Tags
bloomfield ny, brooder, cherry trees, chicken coop, chickens, family farm, finger lakes, food, Gardening, honey bees, new farm, old barns, priorities, rochester ny, summer project, tomatoes
Spring has finally arrived, and it’s gonna go fast. This past week was again frustrating, it snowed again, it poured, the sun came out, rinse and repeat, yay Rochester! I spent most of my free time working on the chicken coop and I’m dying to move on to a new project, but – I am really happy with it. It has roosts, access to the spring water, a way to sweep the litter straight into a compost pile and as soon as I get some milk crates it will have a shelf full of nest boxes.
Good thing too because those chickens are growing fast! I knew they were starting to get crowded. I went out with some friends on Saturday night and received a text from Matt that simply said “they can get out.” Ha! Having severely underestimated the difficulty of acquiring a refrigerator box, I constructed a new brooder downstairs out of several boxes. 
It’s a little cool down there, but they seem much happier. It won’t be long before they can escape from this one as well, so I’ll have to cover it with some chicken wire soon. Those Rhode Island Reds are sorta camera hogs.
Back in January my lovely in-laws gave me a gift card to a garden store for my birthday. Having learned a lesson last year, I went very early this year and picked out the best cherry trees. I picked them up this week and walked up and down the hillside for the 50th time thinking of where to put them. I’m trying to imagine the overall finished area. When the trees first go in, it may look silly and random. But that is priority number 3, because…
This coming week’s adventures include the tomato patch and the bees. I’ve begun work on the tomato patch and started hardening off my tomato plants, which are huge as a result of the late spring. Usually I’d start putting them out sooner. Oh well. I have next to choose a location for my beehives and level the ground off. They are being extracted from the barn this weekend – I’m excited and nervous about this. 
I keep imagining being in a swarm of bees and restraining the impulse to swat. Stay tuned for the episode where I take my life in my hands with a beehive in an 80 square foot space.
The daffodils are up, the currants are budding, the fava beans are in the ground, the neighborhood is emerging from hibernation and I’m looking forward to an 80 degree Wednesday tomorrow. Yay, Rochester!
Especially if you’re even remotely like me (having enormous difficulty actually adhering to a recipe), these great folks can save you a lot of trouble. Part of their model is to choose items that are common and either commonly messed up, not as good as they could be or way to complicated for a normal person to have time for. Then, they experiment with different methods, ingredients and equipment. You get the results of each, what tasters liked best and what flopped. Take 5 minutes to read their kitchen diary entry before each recipe and save yourself a lot of trouble while learning methods and chemistry at the same time.
We ordered drinks first – wine and beer all around and a craft cocktail to taste. We chose what we thought was the most bad-ass one on the menu: the Spanish Harlem. Let me preface this by saying that these lovely ladies enjoy whiskey of all kinds and generally drink it neat, so the issue here is not toughness. We thought – r
ye, mezcal, vermouth, lemon – awesome, what could possibly go wrong? Unfortunately only 2 of 5 liked it enough to have more than one sip and 0 of 5 would order this again. The words “cleaner,” “gasoline,” and “bacon” were used. I was happy with my malbec, but there are plenty of other options.
Our suspender-wearing server was knowledgeable, polite, prompt and sufficiently indulgent of 5 women more interested in talking that focusing on the menu. All of the food plus 6 drinks ended up costing us each a little under $38 plus tip, which I thought was very reasonable for the experience we had. I will not order another Spanish Harlem, but I will go back.