7

SALAD DAYS

LATE SUMMER: JULY

tomatoes – conserving water – buying organic chickens – rearing chickens

July, really, is the first of what might be called the salad months. We’ve had salad crops, like radish and lettuce and so on, for months now, but it is the arrival of the first tomatoes of the year that really signals the presence of summer. This is a special time for the Home Farmer. There are some vegetables that you grow yourself and you really wonder whether it’s worth the hassle, particularly if there are good commercial alternatives available (take a bow, potatoes). But given the fact that most of the tomatoes in our supermarkets are the super-bland, all-year-round Dutch variety and taste of … well, nothing at all, having a good crop of your own tomatoes is really most rewarding. When the nerdy garden geek that I am sits down at the start of the year to write down the list of veggies to be grown for the year, tomatoes always go top of the list, like the boy that always gets picked first for any school soccer team. In fact, if there was a law brought in tomorrow morning that restricted people to growing one vegetable, after very little soul-searching I would pick tomatoes.

The reason is, quite simply, their taste. Tomatoes that you grow yourself taste a million times nicer than anything you will buy in the supermarket. Period. This is because the overwhelming majority of commercial tomatoes are grown for superficial uniformity, rather than flavour. With your own tomatoes, you are not likely to care if you get an occasional less-than-perfect knobbly one because you know they all taste as great as each other, whatever they look like. A supermarket wouldn’t even allow such a tomato on the shelf, but they will take thousands of lifeless, insipid-tasting ones as long as they look good (and the same as each other). You are more likely to eat your own tomatoes as you would an apple rather than slice them up and put them in a sandwich. In fact, you will be lucky if they make it to the kitchen at all. They are a sweet, sumptuous treat, best eaten warm and freshly picked. Refrigeration, by the way, does nothing for the flavour of tomatoes – when cold, a tomato just tastes, well … cold.

I like being in touch with the seasonality of tomatoes, though it is a bitter-sweet affair, given how short the season is. Tomatoes are basically in season for just a quarter of the year, four short months. Ours are starting to ripen now in July and the plants will go on producing, hopefully, into mid-October, and then they will be no more and we will shed a tear. We try to extend their season a little by getting the first seeds going on a warming mat in early spring at one end, and by preserving the produce at the other end (storing, bottling). If we have a glut of nice big ones (like the mighty beefsteak tomato, for example) they may go in a drawer, individually wrapped in newspaper where they will store for a little longer and take us into late autumn. There will be tomatoes on the vine come autumn that cannot develop fully because of the shortening days and will have to be picked green – these are, ironically, our most valued picks because they end up in a rather superb green tomato chutney (see recipe below). Other tomatoes will be made into sauces and purées for the freezer and will provide the base for many a fine and handy pasta dish in the winter. Finding ways to store tomatoes is a vital way of getting some much-needed nutrition in the winter months (arguably, we need them more then than in the summer months when there is so much fresh food around).

Tomatoes are relatively easy to grow, but there is quite a lot of work involved, so when you start to eat your tomatoes, it’s worth recalling what has been a long and arduous growing season: seeds were sown expectantly in compost back in February or March and the pots placed on heating mats in the study trying to get them to germinate; the little plants were nurtured in the pots over months before eventually being put out in the soil in the polytunnel when they were about 30cm tall; they were trained to grow up lengths of string hanging from the top of the tunnel so that they wouldn’t fall over when they got heavy, and the plants eventually thrived and practically took over the joint, growing up to 150cm tall. They were mulched and watered. Side shoots (that divert the plant’s energy away from fruiting) were pinched off. We looked on with satisfaction and considerable anticipation as the clumps of green tomatoes started to form, and then, eventually, one day earlier this month, we got the reward of a single ripe tomato. It was cut in half and shared and savoured. And then a day later, another few were ready and so on until, eventually, we were basically struggling to keep up and eating them every day in salads and sandwiches, and making bruschetta and so on.

Having gone through all that, it’s hard not to feel a little odd about buying and eating supermarket tomatoes out of season because, as a tomato grower, you will know that to produce a tomato in February and ship it from Holland or Israel or South America to Ireland and have it appear ripe on the shelf in the frigid winter months, you have to bend the rules – a lot. In the commercial world, they use all manner of little tricks to prolong shelf life – the tomatoes are often picked green and then ripened in storage or in transit by gassing with a hydrocarbon gas called ethylene, which triggers the ripening process. These tomatoes will keep longer, but they will not taste as nice and will have a starchier texture than naturally ripened ones. Vine tomatoes (the ones you see in the supermarket that are attached to a vine) are an improvement on this – they too are picked when unripe, but ripen gradually in storage because they are still, essentially, attached to the plant.

Anyway, my point is that when you get scientists and food producers trying to devise ways to cheat seasonality and nature in order to grow out of season and prolong shelf-life, you have a situation where the food you are buying has been profoundly messed with. Scientists have developed a way to manipulate tomato genes to increase shelf life, but commercial producers are reluctant to go down this route because of the widespread resistance among the buying public to GMO foodstuffs. In the 1990s, a company called Calgene (now part of the biotech giant Monsanto, which is behind the market-leading herbicide glyphosate, otherwise known as Roundup) developed a tomato called the ‘FlavrSavr’, which was genetically modified to slow down the rotting process. It was the first genetically engineered food to be granted a licence for human consumption by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States. The genetic tinkering that they did on the FlavrSavr meant that the tomato could be properly ripened on the vine and, even though it was soft and ripe when picked, it basically stayed that way; it had a shelf life that would make a tin of beans blush. Problem was, it tasted crap, and because it was so soft, much of the stock got damaged in transit. It didn’t sell well and was pulled from the market in 1997, a rare example of consumers voting with their wallets to halt scientific meddling in the food chain.

Surely it is only a matter of time before GMO tomatoes (and God knows what else) are revisited – with what consequences, I wonder? When you produce a tomato that can be shipped further and left on the shelves for longer, what is the impact on flavour? On nutrition? So, in protest, we embrace the seasonality of tomatoes, though it is, of course, a double-edged sword, given how damned short the season of fruitfulness is. If you want to really embrace seasonal food consumption, you could do worse then starting with the tomato. Grow as many plants as your space will allow – nurture them, harvest, eat and store. Enjoy them fresh from July until October, and then in the winter enjoy your own ‘processed’ tomatoes in whatever form you have converted them to – then give yourself a break from them. They are not in season, so don’t be tempted to buy them. When you have sampled the delectable taste of your own, I promise you that you won’t find this hard.

Green Tomato Chutney

The beauty of this recipe is its exclusivity. Because you generally can’t buy the primary ingredient (green tomatoes) in the shops, it can really only be made by the Home Farmer. Make it in autumn when your tomatoes can’t get enough sun to ripen. It also uses up some of your un-ripened peppers and lots of onions. Don’t tell Mrs Kelly I gave you this recipe.

3kg green tomatoes
6 large onions (about 1kg)
3 or 4 large green peppers
700g brown sugar
1.2 litres of vinegar
Spices: 3 tbsp mustard seed, 1 tbsp coriander seed,
         ½ tsp celery seed, 1 tsp turmeric

Chop the onions and slice the tomatoes finely. Layer them in a very large bowl – start with onions, then tomatoes, then onions etc, seasoning each layer with plenty of salt and a little pepper as you go. Leave to stand for a day or so – then drain off the liquid (and discard) and transfer to a large stockpot. Add the rest of the ingredients (chopped green peppers, sugar, vinegar, spices), bring the whole thing to a boil and let it simmer on a low heat for two or three hours. Put it back in the bowl and let it sit for another day. Put it back in the stockpot and cook it for another half-hour so that the liquid reduces down further – you want just enough liquid to cover the vegetables when they are transferred into pots. Sterilise some jamjars and ladle the chutney into them. Don’t be tempted to eat any for about a month – it’s like a fine wine, it will get better with age. This chutney is particularly great served with meats – sausages in particular.

The first thing that you will have to decide with tomatoes is where you are going to grow them. There are varieties of tomato that will grow outside – but be careful; tomatoes are essentially a Mediterranean fruit, so it stands to reason that they will not do particularly well if you grow them outside in a cold, wet Northern European summer. If you want to try planting outside, you really need a site that is sun-drenched and sheltered and, let’s be honest, there aren’t too many of them around these parts. Far more successful is growing them under glass or plastic. As discussed elsewhere, tomatoes are an ideal plant to grow if you don’t have a huge amount of space as they do very well indeed in pots and containers indoors or in hanging baskets on a sunny deck. A tomato plant in a pot (it will need to be a big pot, 25cm deep at least) will make an attractive feature in the porch or conservatory for the summer months and it will do very well there; in fact, many growers believe that tomatoes do better in pots than they do in open soil. The majority of Home Farm tomatoes, however, are grown in greenhouses or polytunnels. Every year we seem to plant more and more tomato plants – in our first few years of growing we started with, maybe, two or three plants, and gradually increased it each year. We just can’t get enough of them. This year we sowed about fifteen plants and we can expect a yield of about 3.5kg of tomatoes per plant, which is considerable.

Though you could opt to buy tomato plants in your garden centre in late spring or early summer, I can’t see the point in spending your hard-earned dosh on plants when they are so successfully and easily grown from seed (unless you forgot!). We get ours going in modules or pots (you can sow three seeds in one 8cm pot) on a heating mat indoors in February or March – tomatoes like a bit of heat coming up from underneath them. If you are growing more than one variety (and you should) it’s a good idea to label the pots when you sow, so that you will know what’s what later on. The seeds will germinate within about ten days, usually, and once they are well established (about 15cm high, usually around May) we plant them into the beds in the polytunnel. Lots of people will say the best way to grow them is in specially designed tomato grow-bags, but I like to think that the sweetness of flavour in ours comes from their unfettered access to soil (I’m probably delusional on that count). If you are planting them, as we do, in the soil in your tunnel or greenhouse, they will need a well enriched soil, so add plenty of well-rotted compost the previous winter. Be really careful when transplanting the plants – hold them by the root ball as opposed to the stem and try and bring as much of the compost that is clinging to the roots with the plant into its new home. We have, so far, successfully avoided disease build-up in the soil by planting in a different place in the tunnel each year in our incredibly unreliable imaginary quadrant system.

Essentially, there are two basic types of tomato plant – a vine type, which will grow to about 2m tall, if allowed to do so (and which consequently needs support), and the bush type, which is more compact. We have focused mainly on the vine varieties. When you are planting them into their final growing position in May, it’s easy to be fooled by their size and end up planting them too close together. In our first year of growing tomatoes we put them in the soil in the polytunnel at the recommended 45cm apart, stood back to admire our handiwork – and we were thinking, bloody hell there’s so much empty, wasted space between the plants. We were tempted to lift them up and plant them closer together – thankfully, common sense prevailed and we left them be. Of course, the plants grew huge by the summer and if they had all been planted on top of each other the lack of air circulating around them would probably have guaranteed a ‘healthy’ dose of diseases. You should also put your support canes or twine in place before you plant them so that you don’t damage the roots of the plants by shoving them into the ground later on. Like a naughty dog, tomato plants need to be trained – our approach is to anchor some twine in to the ground beside the plant and then attach it to another piece of horizontal twine that’s running along the roof of the tunnel – we then wind the main stem up the vertical string as it grows. The main stem produces leaf stems and also trusses on which the lovely tomatoes will grow. A tomato plant is just as interested in growing leaves as it is fruit, and so it also pushes out what are called side shoots, which grow in the angle between the main stem and the leaf stems. These side shoots will take much-needed energy from the plant and therefore need to be pinched out (with your thumb) as soon as they appear. Many growers recommend that you only allow the plant to form seven to ten trusses and then cut off the growing tip of the main stem to prevent the plant growing further upwards – this focuses the erratic tomato plant’s mind, so to speak, and encourages good crops of intensely flavoured tomatoes rather than huge quantities of late-maturing, low quality fruits.

As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, tomatoes are hard work at the height of the summer. They are sort of like divas – they demand tender, loving care. The most important thing of all is water; they are incredibly thirsty and the ground that they are planted in needs to be consistently moist, so you need to water well every few days and sometimes more in the really hot mid-summer days when the inside of the polytunnel is basically Death Valley. If you water lazily or intermittingly, the soil will alternate between really wet and really dry, and the resulting tomatoes will tend to rupture and split, which is really, really annoying. Do not go on holidays for two weeks in August and expect your tomatoes to be fine when you get back – they won’t be (believe me, we know this!). You will have to get someone to come in and water them for you. As with peas and beans, a good mulch around the base of a tomato plant will help to retain water.

Once the flowers have started to form fruits, it helps to give them occasional doses of a good fertiliser – a homemade one that involves immersing comfrey leaves or hen droppings in water (see below – it will be absolutely stink, but it works wonders), or there are lots of good quality, organic, commercial tomato feeds available. Pick off any yellowing leaves on the plants as the summer progresses, which will improve ventilation, and where clumps of tomatoes are forming near the ground, put some clean straw under them to prevent them from rotting on wet soil.

You can start picking the tomatoes as soon as they become ripe, and at the end of the season (late September or early October, probably) you can store green tomatoes in a cool, dark place where they will gradually ripen, particularly if you store them with a single red one. The ripe tomato gives off the aforementioned ethylene gas, which will help the others along.

Now, I know what you are thinking – this all sounds like a lot of hard work, but believe me, it’s worth it. After five summers of growing, I think I can fairly safely say that tomatoes remain our most treasured produce here on the Home Farm – there is simply no greater taste of summer. Incidentally, it’s nice to experiment with different varieties. Perhaps indicative of mankind’s obsession with them, you will find tomatoes of literally all shapes, sizes and colours. So far we have stuck with the vine varieties such as Matina (early-cropping variety with medium sized, bright red fruits), Gardener’s Delight (bite-sized tangy fruits, full of flavour), Brandywine (chunky beefsteak tomato, light pink in colour – last year we had one that was so big I considered entering it in a competition), Roma (oblong, plum, bright red – ideal for sauces) and Moneymaker (standard, smooth, medium-sized fruits – as the name suggests you get a huge crop, but perhaps a little blander taste-wise).

PAULA MEE’S NUTRITION BITES: TOMATOES

Tomatoes just blush with goodness! They are good sources of vitamin C and beta-carotene and the richest source of the antioxidant lycopene. Low lycopene levels are associated with prostate and breast cancers. Tomatoes contain other phytochemicals, which, together with their lycopene levels, make them an excellent addition to your salad. Interestingly, this is one case where processing can actually enhance the availability and absorption of nutrients. So, not only can you enjoy fresh tomatoes, you can also benefit from a little tomato purée, tomato soup or even tomato sauce! Lycopene appears to have the ability to help protect cells and other structures in the body from oxygen damage and has been linked in human research to the protection of DNA (our genetic material) inside white blood cells.

Nutrition per Portion (80g):

Calories	Fat(g)	Salt (g)	Saturated Fat(g)
17	0.3	0.02	0.1

COMFREY TEA

You can’t drink it yourself, I’m afraid, but your fruiting plants (and anything else that needs perking up)will absolutely love comfrey tea, and it is a thrifty, environmentally friendly alternative to buying nasty chemical fertilisers. Comfrey is a deep-rooted, incredibly hardy little wonder-plant that’s a cinch to grow, and was traditionally grown for its virtues in healing wounds. A very kind neighbour of ours gave us a little plant a few years back and it’s thriving – you can harvest leaves from it about three or four times a year and use them to make dynamite liquid fertiliser, rich in potash and nitrogen. Stick 500g of leaves in 13 litres of water and let it stew for a month or two. It will stink to high heaven after a few weeks, so invest in a bin with a tight-fitting lid. Dilute it before putting it on your plants – holding your nose, draw off a small amount of this nasty brew into your watering can and then fill it up with water: 1 part tea to 10 parts water approximately. Something to mull over while your tea is brewing: tests have shown that comfrey tea has higher percentages of nitrogen and potash than a market-leading tomato feed. Talk about a no-brainer!

Having enough water for the vegetables and animals can become a real problem at this time of the year, even though for a few summers, there, we had the opposite problem – too much water. Dublin City Council was roundly ridiculed some years back for having advertisements on billboards and radio advising people to conserve water and not to hose their lawn. Their motives were good, no doubt, and they probably came up with the idea during a sunny spell back in the spring, but by the time the ads went on air, the nation was in the grip of a forty-day deluge of biblical proportions. The idea of conserving water by not hosing one’s lawn when it looks like a paddy-field – my, how we laughed.

Our house is built on a bog, basically, and in really wet weather the lawn can be a rather unpleasant place to be because it gets all soggy. It feels strange to be donning wellies in the height of summer as we trek over and back to feed pigs, chickens, hens and ducks. Since we put in the raised beds and gravel paths in our vegetable patch, that area of the garden is relatively monsoon-proof, and you can get out and about if the rain breaks for a bit because the ground is dry underfoot. And, of course, there are some benefits to so much water falling from the sky: the duck’s bath and the pig’s water bucket do not need refilling, which is nice, and the outdoor vegetables don’t need watering. In really wet weather, even our polytunnel manages to water itself – there’s so much water in the ground around the garden that the soil in the tunnel gets wet from underneath. Handy. Still, it can be depressing not to have proper July weather in July. We tune in each night to the weather forecast, hoping for a glimmer of good news.

In regular summer weather, water conservation is an important consideration for the Home Farmer. A water butt is a great investment – it sits quietly, attached to the downpipe of a gutter, a forgotten hero gathering up all the rainwater falling off the roof of your house, so that it can then be used for watering the tunnel. It’s tempting, of course, to pull out the hose rather than ferrying buckets of water to and fro from the water butt, but your inner environmentalist will feel mighty pleased with itself when you do it the right way. You can even link up a number of water butts together to catch even more rainwater. Some people, who are far more ethically-minded than we are, go to the trouble of showering with the plug in so that they can collect up this ‘grey’ water for use on their plants. Frankly, life’s too short. But we do occasionally divert water from the kitchen to the garden – the water in which you have boiled vegetables, for example, is great for watering your plants because it contains all sort of nutrients from the cooked vegetables (though that’s probably an argument against boiling vegetables, if ever there was one).

The key with water conservation, I think, is to put a bit of thought into it. You shouldn’t just stand there blithely spraying all and sundry with the hose for ten minutes every day. Different crops have different needs. In general terms, shallow-rooted crops, like lettuce, peas and beans, need frequent but light watering, whereas the deeper-rooted crops, like tomatoes, need more water but less frequently – this stands to reason, when you think about it. It’s also worth sticking a spade in the soil to see whether it’s still moist underneath the surface – if it is, you can head back inside for a cup of tea. When you do water, give those deep-rooted crops a good soaking – try and get the soil wet to about 15cm depth and if you do, you shouldn’t need to come back to them for four or five days. You will, however, need to water your polytunnel or greenhouse almost daily, particularly if it’s sunny. We generally water the tunnel in the morning – watering in the evening means that your plants have wet foliage overnight which encourages diseases, while watering at midday, when it is hottest, means you lose most of the water to evaporation.

Of course, in the first instance, the more organic matter you have in your soil, the more it will retain the water you pour over it. Once the soil is moist, mulch is also a really good way to prevent water loss caused by evaporation. Spread organic mulches, such as leaves, bark or compost, a few centimetres thick on the soil around plants to prevent sunlight from getting to the soil. You can even put a few layers of newspaper down and put the mulch on top of that. Mulching also acts a weed barrier, which also conserves water, because weeds drink water too.

HANDY WATERING

If you spray the leaves of a tomato plant with water they will burn in the sun – the key is to direct the water at the roots rather than the plant itself. Same goes for your spuds. A nice tip from my mate Feargal to assist with watering tomatoes is as follows: take a used, plastic milk carton (the big 2 litre ones)and cut it in half. Discard the bottom half, but keep the top half, the one with the spout. Bury this in the soil beside your tomato plant with the spout facing in towards the root of the plant. The carton acts like a funnel into which you direct the hose when watering, which ensures that the water gets straight to the root system of the plant. This is also a good way to measure how much water your plants are getting – if you fill the carton, you know they’ve got it all. Alternatively, sink a 10cm flowerpot in the soil near the base of the tomato plant and fill this when watering.

There’s an organic chicken producer in these parts and his chickens sell for around L18 in our local supermarket. We buy one of them when we don’t have our own in the freezer, though I have to admit to finding them expensive, especially in these leaner times. As most people would be aware, you can often buy a bog-standard chicken for less than L5 or so and a free range chicken from L6 to L12, so from that perspective it’s not an easy argument to win trying to convince people that it’s a good idea to part with the L18. Still, there are several things that set these chickens apart from the rest. First of all, there is the size. The commercial chicken industry has done a very good job of creating the impression that all chickens are identical in size, when they patently are not. Every chicken, large or small, has two legs, two breasts and two wings, so we tend to feel we get the same amount of meat whether we have a little poussin or the biggest chicken in the world. The reality, of course, is that they can vary hugely in weight – from just over 1kg to nearly 3kg – and you get nearly three times as much meat on a bigger one. The organic chicken that we buy is basically the size of a small turkey – the average weight is about 2.5kg, and sometimes, if you are lucky and happen to pass the supermarket the day they’re delivered, you could pick one up that tips the scales at nearly 3kg (they charge €18 regardless of weight). That’s a lot of chicken. It’s very unfair that we look at two chickens on the supermarket shelf and judge ‘chicken A’ as expensive and ‘chicken B’ as cheap, when we should be comparing them kilo for kilo, as we would with any other type of meat. So let’s do that. A 2.5kg bird at €18, works out at €7.20 per kilo, whereas the 1kg bird at €5 is €5 a kilo. Now, you have grounds for a real comparison. The organic chicken is €2.20 more expensive per kilo than the bog-standard chicken – so what are you getting for the extra money?

Well, first of all, these organic chickens are reared for a ‘normal’ amount of time, and when I say normal I mean the amount of time that chickens have been reared for hundreds of years – about twelve weeks. This is about twice as long as a conventionally farmed chicken, and four weeks longer than most free-range birds. Those four to six additional weeks are expensive for the organic producer – the chickens are out and about, scratching and foraging in a field, and they are mighty hungry as a result. The farmer can feed them only organic broiler’s pellets, which cost almost twice as much as normal pellets (which I can verify, because I’ve bought them for our own chickens). I can’t tell you how much profit the producer is making on each chicken, but, having reared chickens myself, I can tell you that in the last weeks of their lives, they are voracious eaters. We keep twenty chickens at a time for the table, and by the time they are ten or twelve weeks old, they are going through a bag of broiler’s pellets a week between them – a bag of organic pellets currently costs around €20, which means that each chicken is increasing in value by a euro a week. Even for a Home Farmer like me, the difference in the cost of rearing for an additional six weeks is €6 per bird. The organic feed is so expensive, in fact, that this year we reluctantly decided to rear our chickens on regular, free-range pellets at half the price. So, basically, the organic producer is rearing his chickens for twice as long (resulting in a larger bird), and using a feed that is twice as expensive.

THE MISERABLE LIFE OF A COMMERCIAL CHICKEN

Figures from Compassion in World Farming on the state of the global chicken industry make for depressing reading. According to that organisation, around 70 percent of chickens raised for meat globally are raised in intensive farming systems. As I mentioned, these birds reach slaughter weight in just six weeks, but, given the conditions that they live in, that’s probably six weeks too long. Literally tens of thousands of birds can be crammed into dimly lit sheds. An EU Directive from 2007 enforces a limit of 19 birds per square metre – that means that each bird has a space about the size of the surface area of this page in which to live their short lives. Fantastic! European chickens must feel very relieved that the powers that be in Brussels are looking out for them.

Lights are kept on in the shed most of the time because, of course, chickens don’t eat in the dark and if they are not eating they are not getting fat. But the lights are kept sufficiently dim so that the chickens never get too active. And so, this is how they live out their lives – in a strange twilight world, trampled by their peers. Their innate need to forage is not accommodated in any way, nor is there any attempt to make their life even remotely interesting. There is nothing in these sheds apart from water, food and other chickens – lots and lots of other chickens. The chickens never get to develop any of the behaviours that come quite naturally to them (foraging, scratching, dust baths)and they never get access to fresh air or sunlight. Because there is nothing to do and no space in which to do it, they generally opt to stay sitting down. Bad news for the quality of the meat.

As is the case with pigs, intensively reared chickens require a cocktail of antibiotics and hormones administered in their feed to keep them disease free. The ammonia from their droppings is a pollutant (particularly when there are so many of them)and it damages their eyes and respiratory systems. It can also cause burns on their legs and feet, which you can often see on the chickens in the supermarket (sometimes they cut off the bottom part of the leg so you can’t see it). Because they are bred as eating machines and have to put on sufficient weight to get them to the supermarket shelf in just six weeks, lots of them suffer from heart problems and leg deformities – it is estimated that up 120 million chickens die from heart failure in the EU each year. Another 20 million die as a result of injuries sustained in the battle that ensues from trying to round them up to get them to the slaughter.

The incredible flavour of an organic bird comes not just from the fact that it is fed top-quality nosh, it is also due to their longer lives (if twelve weeks can really be considered a long life) – during that additional six weeks spent out and about, doing what chickens do, they develop muscle tone and therefore flavour. A free-range chicken that’s reared for just six or eight weeks equally doesn’t have the chance to build up that same intensity of flavour. And with organic birds, you also know that they are not taking in any nasty chemical stuff – hormones, antibiotics and the like, which are routinely used in intensive rearing systems to fight disease and promote growth.

As you’re probably already aware, many commercial processors inject chicken breasts with water to bulk them out (you can usually spot the offending items a mile off because they look sort of glassy and wobbly rather than firm). This is perfectly legal, by the way, and harmless enough on the face of it – but still it is a con job, designed to make us think we are getting a really big, fat, juicy breast when we are, in fact, getting a really small one. This fact will be revealed only when the water evaporates during cooking and we end up with a breast half the size of the one we bought. In my opinion, we shouldn’t allow processors to take us for fools, like this. As is always the case with these food production sleights of hand, there are also health implications. The problem with injecting chicken with water is that eventually the water will go right ahead and leak out again, so they have to inject something else too to ‘help’ the meat retain the water – and it is with these so-called binding agents that potential health issues arise because they are typically based around animal proteins. An investigation by the BBC’s Panorama programme in 2003 found that some chicken fillets contained as much as 50 percent added water, retained in the meat using injected beef or pork protein. That’s just what we need – intensively reared chicken that’s been injected with protein from other dead animals.

Now, I know what your thinking: Well, it may be delicious and it may be healthier, but I still can’t afford €18 for an organic chicken when there’s a free-range bird sitting on the shelf beside it for €6. Believe me, I share the pain, and ultimately it’s everyone’s own choice how much they want to pay for the meat they buy. Our approach, for what it’s worth, has been to eat a smaller number of bigger birds instead of buying lots of smaller, cheaper ones. It’s worth asking (politely) whether we are perhaps eating far too much chicken (and meat in general) anyway. Back in the 1950s, chicken was such a treat that most Irish and British people ate less than a kilo in a whole year. These days we eat almost 2kg per month each, on average. There seems to be an emerging consensus about the health benefits of meat – that it is a great source of iron and protein, but that we eat far too much of it (particularly the highly processed forms of it). Most nutritionists believe that eating a little less meat and a lot more fruit and vegetables is good for your health, as well as your wallet. And, finally, we might bear in mind that, at €7.20 per kilo, even organic chicken is exceptional value when compared with other meats – pork loin, for example, will cost over €10 a kilo; a leg of lamb could cost upwards of €13 a kilo; a striploin steak will typically cost a whopping €25 per kilo. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that the two cheapest types of meat – chicken and pigmeat – come from animals that can be intensively reared, while the two most expensive – lamb and beef – come from those reared outdoors on grass.

I can’t tell you how many arguments I have had with people over the years about the price of chicken and it’s an argument I almost never win, particularly in the face of the economic woes that we currently suffer. Still, I’m a sucker for punishment, and I have fun trying. The fact that I can never seem to win these arguments, makes me very worried indeed for organic chicken suppliers – I think that in a world gone mad they are providing a top-class product that they are passionate about, and they should be fêted, not condemned. I prefer to give my money to someone who appreciates the importance of rearing a bird the way it used to be reared, rather than giving it to someone who is happy to sell chickens at a derisory profit – and that’s what it must be. Derisory. I know my little chicken rearing project here is not representative of the commercial world in any way, but I just don’t see how it’s possible to sell chickens for €4 or €5 when they are costing me over €7 per bird to rear myself at home. Since the feed accounts for the vast majority of the cost of rearing a chicken, that is really the only area where commercial producers can make savings and that makes me very suspicious. What can they feed their chickens that costs so little? Or worse, what are they being given instead of food to promote growth? Rearing chickens is not an easy undertaking – if you go through that and come out at the end of it with a derisory profit, then you are going to be very unhappy indeed. Apart from anything else, a state of unhappiness is not what you want in the people who are producing the food that you eat. I know, however, that these are not particularly popular points of view.

I guess, all I am suggesting is that we all ask questions of our local butcher about the chicken we are buying. Most supermarkets do, in fact, employ a butcher, and in my experience they are generally very happy to answer questions about the meat that they sell. We might ask them where the chickens come from, what they have been fed and how long they have been reared for. Whether the breasts have been bulked up with water. If we are not happy with the answers, then maybe we just should not buy that chicken. And if the butcher doesn’t know the answers, don’t buy the chicken. We could try farmers markets, farm shops and country markets in our own area – there might well be someone in the locality producing chickens the way they should be produced. When we are lucky enough to find them, I think we really should pay them whatever the asking price is, even if it is more than we’re used to. We’re getting a far superior product.

Readers of my first book, Trading Paces, may recall my first forays into the world of rearing chickens for meat. It happened quite by accident, really. We have a cockerel to keep our hens in order, essentially (a cockerel is like a manly chaperone, escorting hens around the garden and keeping them safe-ish from predators), and, of course, if a cockerel is doing his duties, then all the eggs being produced by the hens are fertilised and, given the right conditions, will hatch chicks. One of our hens went broody, which means she sat on a batch of eggs, and lo and behold, some weeks later we had three little chicks. Faced with this fait accompli, I decided to rear them myself and about a hundred days later I went all hunter-gatherer and killed them for the table. It was not a happy event. I won’t go into it again.

Of course, in times past, people kept chickens in the garden and killed them as they needed them. This is a nice idea, but unfortunately, the older a chicken gets, the tougher its meat becomes. As Mrs Beeton said in her household management guide, first published in 1859, ‘in no animal, however, does age work such a change in regard to the quality of its flesh, as it does in domestic fowls.’These days, with the glorious technology that is the freezer, you can fatten a batch of chicks all at once and pop them in the freezer to preserve their youthful tenderness and use them as required. My brother-in-law was getting rid of an old garden shed last year and I took this as a sign that now was the right time to start rearing chickens properly; I requisitioned the shed for use as my Palais Poulais and erected it at the side of the garden, behind our garage. I then sourced twenty-two Hubbard chicks from a local supplier. These are a good meat bird and grow quite slowly, making them ideal for the Home Farmer. I only ordered twenty, in fact, but he threw in two for good luck, which made me feel (a) half pleased as I was getting a bargain and (b) half bad about how disposable this seemed to make the chicks.

They were freakishly cute the day I collected them – tiny, fluffy yellow, and cheep-cheeping to their hearts’ content. At only a few days old, they were far too small to be given the run of a garden shed, so I put a wooden box in the corner for them into which went about 20cm of wood shavings. Nicky gave me the loan of an infra-red lamp, which you hang from the ceiling to keep them warm. At night time, the lamp sent an eerie red glow out the window of the shed into the surrounding gloom – from our bedroom window, it looked like someone was operating a brothel down at the end of the garden. During the first week or so, I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to kill them at all, they were so damned cute. I would go out there about three times a day to check up on them, to give them feed (a special starter food called a broiler’s crumb) and make sure they had enough water. Sometimes I would go out just to look in the window at them. Initially, they were very skittish, running and flapping around whenever I was anywhere near them; disappointingly, the fact that I was providing for their every need did not seem to create any level of bond between us. Perhaps deep down they knew my motives were not pure …

One day I went out to find that two of them had managed to get out of the box and were huddled on the cold ground in the shed, shivering and generally helpless. One poor little fellow was in such bad shape I thought he would surely die – I placed him carefully back under the lamp and a few of his buddies came over and stood beside him – they seemed happy to see him, as if they had missed him. I could almost imagine they were saying: ‘Where were you? What were you up to? What’s it like out there?’ Perhaps I was reading too much into it.

Two of the chicks went on an exciting excursion one day – they were taken in a cardboard box to visit the local school where Mrs Kelly works. There was much excitement – I gave out lots about how it was inconvenient and was eating into my day and that the chicks might never recover from the ordeal, but deep down I was delighted at the way the kids reacted – the sheer joy on their faces at these little bundles of yellow fluffiness was a sight to behold. Of course, I didn’t tell them that we were keeping them for the table – perhaps they knew this anyway, or perhaps it doesn’t matter.

One of the chicks died after about a week. I had been feeding them from a small tray and I reckon the competition at the trough was just too intense and maybe this little lad wasn’t getting his fair share of grub. But, then again, maybe it was my friend that got stranded outside the box for the night. Either way, the poor little fellow didn’t make it, which I felt bad about because it was a waste of one tasty chicken. After a few weeks, they had outgrown the box and I gave them the run of the shed, which they seemed to appreciate. There was a mixture of cocks and hens, and you could see the cocks starting to square up to each other, presumably an early sign that they were trying to establish a pecking order. The all-round cute fluffiness quickly disappeared and they started to get their first white or russet feathers. We had a pleasing mix of reddish chickens that basically looked like our Rhode Islands, slightly yellower ones that looked like a Buff Sussex, and pure white ones. After another week or so, the infra-red light was gradually phased out and then, eventually, switched off altogether, and we started to let them out of the shed for a few hours a day if the weather was fine. Myself and a buddy of mine spent a manly day constructing a chicken-wire run for them, which they could get out and about in, in relative safety. By their second month we were leaving the shed door open all day long and they were able to come and go as they pleased. Every morning when I opened the door they would all run out en masse, flapping their wings as if to embrace the new day.

It was interesting to see them starting to develop regular ‘chicken behaviour’ – when you are focused on rearing them for meat, you tend to forget that they are the same animal as your hens. I put a perch in their house and they started roosting on that at night, just like our hens do. Then, shortly before they were killed, some of the cocks started to crow in the morning, which upset Roger the Chivalrous Cockerel something awful. He would pace up and down outside their run and start crowing manically, and then they would all be crowing together, trying to drown each other out – it was like a dance-off scene from a bad R&B video. It was strange watching Roger interact with them at the chicken wire fence like that, and I couldn’t help thinking about how ‘sweet’ or ‘not-sweet’ life is for chickens in our garden, depending on which side of the fence they happen to live. The poor meat birds live for just over eighty days, which is a terribly short existence, really (we have one hen who must be four or five years old). And though they have a lot of space in their run, we can’t, unfortunately, give them the run of the garden like we do for the hens and ducks because there would be an unmerciful row – and Roger’s head would surely explode at the idea of ten other cockerels on his turf. But, through it all, through eighty days of feeding and watering and mucking out their house, we try to keep a sense of perspective about it. Our chickens are well looked after, and, compared with the miserable existence of a commercial chicken, I reckon they do very well indeed. Any chicken that you eat has had its life ended prematurely – that’s the plain black and white truth of the matter. We could let our chickens die of natural causes and, no doubt, they would have a marvellous time of it here on the Home Farm, but they certainly wouldn’t taste very nice at the end of it. So, basically I suppose, we try to keep our eyes fixed on the prize: twenty-one chickens in the freezer, which represents over €350 worth of meat, and at our current rate of chicken consumption perhaps eight months’ worth of eating.

You might wonder how on earth it cost us over €7 to rear each bird. Well, here are the maths. For the first four weeks of their lives the chicks are fed a broiler ‘crumb’ and they will get through around 1.5kg to 2kg of it each in that time. That’s two 25kg bags. For the remaining eight weeks of their lives, they are fed on ‘finisher’ pellets and they will devour between 10kg to 12kg each. That’s eight or nine 25kg bags (we actually had a little bit left in our eighth bag when they were killed). So the total cost is:

Quantity	Description	Unit Cost	Total Cost
20	Day Old Chicks	€2.00	€40.00
2	Broiler Feed – Starter (25kg bag)	€9.28	€18.56
8	Broiler Feed – Finisher (25kg bag)	€11.28	€90.24
	Total		€148.80
	Price per Bird		€7.44

I am being a little disingenuous with these figures in that I left out two other items of expenditure which should really be included – I bought two bags of woodchip shavings to line the floor of their house, which cost me over €20 and a bulb for the infra-red lamp to keep the chicks warm, which cost €10 – the former went on the compost heap, providing some value there, while the latter is re-usable. Including these items would bring the price per bird to over €9 – really makes you wonder about those €4 supermarket chickens, doesn’t it? Even though the price of rearing them was pretty high, we still reckon that rearing chickens is a thrifty enterprise for the Home Farmer, particularly when you consider the amount of meat we got from the end product. Our chickens weighed in at between 2.5kg and 3kg each (that’s plucked and gutted weight, incidentally). A 3kg bird at €7.44 is a breathtakingly cost effective €2.48 a kilo, which is actually cheaper per kilo than the piddly little €4 supermarket chickens.

During the time they were here, we wrestled with a decision about whether or not to kill them ourselves. There’s a meat processing plant near here that will take in the chickens live, and return them to you in a plastic bag ready for the freezer, for the princely sum of €2 a bird. This sounds like a paltry amount in the scheme of things, but when you are watching your pennies to make sure that your chicken-rearing project is worthwhile, €2 per bird is actually a lot, and as a percentage of the total cost of keeping each bird, it’s a huge amount. I also had the feeling that we would be doing it out of laziness – or worse, to salve our consciences. It also seemed a little spineless – like we weren’t willing to go through this last, most difficult, step with them. And so, we opted to do the evil deed ourselves – well, when I say ‘ourselves’, I mean the two of us and anybody else we could drag in to help! We are lucky that we have family and neighbours who are extremely well up on these things and happy to lend their time and expertise – there were seven people in total, including Mrs Kelly and myself, which made the whole thing quicker, more efficient and far less daunting. We started at 9.00am and all birds were safely in the freezer (killed, plucked and gutted) by midday.

I could write a whole chapter on the process itself, but it would be a most disagreeable piece of prose that would put you off your supper, so don’t worry, I am not going to (if you really want to read about the brutal process of killing chickens, try Chapter 7 in my first book, Trading Paces). There’s a knack to it, you see, a way of going about it that makes things simpler for the person doing the killing and more humane for the bird being killed. But it is the details that make it sound absolutely awful – the implements and accoutrements used, the noise and flapping that ensues, the blood and gore; bad enough to describe it in relation to the two I dispatched in Trading Paces; multiplying it up to twenty-one – that’s just not on. Suffice to say that the process of turning twenty-one live birds into edible meat is a most unpleasant one for all concerned (particularly the chickens). Killing them is not a bit nice. Plucking them is equally unpleasant – and gutting them, well that’s just about the most unpleasant thing of all.

That evening, though exhausted, we felt very grateful that the whole endeavour had been successful and that we had the freezer stocked to the brim with a huge supply of top-quality meat. Meat that has darker flesh than any chicken we have ever tasted. Meat that has real chicken flavour. Meat that is plump, as opposed to being pumped with water to make it appear plump. Meat that is, ultimately, guilt-free. And in the context of what we’d been through in the process of killing them, that really is saying something.

JULY GROWER’S CALENDAR

Prep Work

• Any ground that has finished cropping must be quickly cleared away to take more vegetables – this is the essence of a productive Home Farm.
• Keep your Home Farm diary/notebook handy and honestly jot down your successes and failures (‘It was that big, honestly’) – these records will be invaluable for next year.

To-do List

• Use your produce – eat it, freeze it, process it, exchange it, give it away. Do not let it rot in the ground or end up on the compost heap.
• Continue to water and feed plants and practise good weed control. Continue to pinch out side shoots on your tomato plants and remove the lower leaves.
• Earth up brassicas such as brussels sprouts – these plants will grow tall and require a good deal of support.
• Prune raspberries and gooseberries when they have finished fruiting and apply a mulch.
• Cut down legume plants that have finished cropping and compost them. Leave the roots in the soil as they fix nitrogen in the soil.
• Keep an eye on the blight forecast and spray potatoes (if you have decided to do this) if required.
• Inspect all brassicas regularly for creepy things – it might be a good time to cover plants with fine plastic mesh or fleece.
• Summer-prune over-vigorous apple, pear, plum and cherry trees by shortening the vigorous shoots.

Sowing Seeds

• Continue successional sowings and use quick maturing varieties for autumn use – Swiss chard, lettuce, rocket, salad onions, radishes, turnips, peas, French beans (dwarf), carrots.
• Sow for winter use – spring cabbage, Hungry Gap kale, parsley, perpetual spinach (God, could it really be that time of the year again?), chicory and coriander.

Planting Out

• Anything else that’s left indoors in a pot. As the song says, it’s now or never.

GRUB’S UP – WHAT’S IN SEASON?

July is a peak month for produce – enjoy it! Pick early and often as some vegetables stop producing if not continually picked.

 

First crops of French and runner beans, tomatoes, peppers and chilli-peppers, cucumbers, courgettes and aubergines, marrows, beetroot, globe artichokes.

 

Continue to harvest new potatoes, calabrese, cauliflower, cabbage, spinach, carrots, turnips, shallots, garlic, radishes, spring onions, salad crops, strawberries, raspberries, tayberries, currants (black, red and white), gooseberries, loganberries, peas and broad beans.

 

Ask yourself – do you really need to go to the supermarket?!