Culinary Arts and a Coop

It was a very busy week on the "farm," and I can confidently say a lot has been accomplished. Most of the week was spent in Seattle, and while that didn't get a lot of the physical work done, it moved the farm's concept forward in great strides.

I have decided that, if a job (teaching life skills to incarcerated men at Clallam Bay Correctional Center) I interviewed for doesn't come through, I will likely enroll in the Culinary Arts Program at Seattle Central Community College if I can get enough funding to pay for it. Seattle Central is one of a few colleges that still has worker retraining money available to the unemployed for certain programs, and one can still draw unemployment while going to school. I attended an orientation for the program on Thursday, and it was quite impressive. One of my original motivations for choosing this program was to gain credibility as a food writer, and in the orientation the presenter said some of their graduates had gone on to do just that. One part of the program includes summer work on a Skagit Valley farm and the curriculum also infuses sustainable food system practices into the coursework.

This is a very attractive Plan B, but if the job is offered to me, I'm going to take it for a variety of reasons and be content that I can continue to learn about culinary arts through self-study. At the prison, there is a large grassy area in the middle of the surrounding buildings. If I work there, my dream is to make it into a garden and teach the guys about sustainable food practices.

In the here and now, when the weekend came, Tim not only put up the plastic storage shed that has been lying in pieces in the yard for a couple of years now, but also took a load of brush to the dump and helped pick up the chicken coop my friend Jim gave to me. I rewarded Tim with a pork roast slow-cooked in a clay roaster (using a porter ale for the beer ingredient) which I bought at a Seattle thrift store for $7.99 and will cook Jim a good meal for his generosity, too.

Normally, I wouldn't have anything to do with a plastic shed, but I found it at a local building materials recycling store, Waste Not Want Not, for $75, so I figure I haven't contributed to plastic production, it was already "out there." Plastic is definitely not in the Bent Fork aesthetic either, but it will do for now until we build something better. It still needs to be cleaned up, but once I get that done, I plan to hide it as best I can with some trellis and climbing plants. Ugly though it may be, it will go a long way toward getting a lot of the crap lying about the yard sorted and stored or thrown away.

The horror of having to settle for a plastic shed in the interim was offset by getting this cute little chicken coop from Jim, who got it from his neighbor. Jim didn't really have his heart into being a chicken farmer, so it wasn't long after he got the coop and chickens that he had an empty coop. You don't want to know why.

Anyway, the coop has four nesting boxes -- just the right amount -- as I'm thinking I'll have about six hens. Tim's mom is going to raise the chicks for us and his niece who also wants some.

I'm still considering how to keep my chickens safe once they come to live at Bent Fork. You may think raccoons are cute, but they are a real problem here. Most chicken owners would sooner shoot them. My friend Theresa has had chickens for years, and she says that if you shoot a raccoon and hang it up on the coop, it is a powerful deterrent for other raccoons. I'd rather not have to deal with any kind of massacre, chicken or otherwise, and I don't own a gun anyway, so the next step is to build a predator-safe pen.