The weather is always dreach

This was an outdoor exhibit at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. You can see it from the road as you drive past.

Across the street, you can view this response:
The East Lomond. It's apparently the eroded plug of an ancient underwater volcano. This is a shot from the hiking trail we took, which doesn't quite do this thing justice. I'll get a better shot of it for you to see how striking this hill looks from its surroundings.
This is a waterfall we encountered on our hike.
This was the end of our hike. You can see this monument from the farm, as it sits right on the side of a hill overlooking the valley. It's hollow inside with no stairs, otherwise it would probably have a great view! It was built to commemorate Onesiphorus Tyndall-Bruce, who replanted part of the forest on the Lomond Hills. The UK apparently has less than 1% of its original forest. The hills are quite bare in this area, so it is hard to imagine what the place must have looked like two or three hundred years ago.
And finally, a shot of the dead, featherless turkeys. It's all we talked about last week, so you might as well have a look at 'em. This is about half of turkeys hanging up, the rest were still waiting to be plucked at the time I took this picture.

The Christmas rush began today. It's been slower than usual, I've been told, because of the snow that's been falling for the last couple of days. People from Massachusetts would probably scoff at the scare over four inches of snow, but this is apparently the most snow this part of Scotland has gotten in several years. Luckily for the farm, they have about 200 turkeys that need to be picked up, so a lot of customers are forced to brave the roads to get their Christmas dinners.

I mostly bagged veggies today, though I did spend about an hour out in the freezing cold picking Brussels sprouts because the store sold out of 100 kilos by early afternoon. That's a lot of sprouts! Josh on the other hand, was given the title of Executive of Turkey Retrieval Systems (a.k.a. The Turkey Runner) and spent the day connecting customers with their turkey orders. Tomorrow will probably be just as busy, but the farm will be closed for Christmas and Boxing Day. I still don't know what Boxing Day is all about, but we will be spending it with a friend in the next town over.

In case I don't get to say it to you personally, have a happy holiday season! Eat lots of good (organic) food, drink lots of good microbrews, and spend time with lots of good people!

Turkey time

My mother emailed me to ask if I was still alive, so I guess it's time that I break radio silence and update the blog. Pillars is a great farm and we've been having a good time. There are a lot of people here our own age and it's been fun hanging out after work. We watch movies and, recently since it's been snowing, going "sledging" through sheep pastures. It feels a little like being home again and that is very mentally refreshing. Which is good, considering our work has been physically stressful. The following is going to be graphic, so if you are really squeamish, maybe you shouldn't continue.

So what have we been doing for work? Well, if you've been reading my facebook posts, you already know that we've been dealing with dead turkeys all week. A week ago Monday, we met down in the staff room at 5am to begin the gruesome task of slaughtering the farm's 130 remaining turkeys. They've apparently lost more than half of their birds to a disease called "blackhead," and these tough few were the survivors. Turkeys have terrible eye sight in the dark, so our early morning raid was designed to keep them as calm as possible. If they turkeys can't see us then they won't panic. They did remain strangely calm throughout the process, which I would count as a blessing.

My task for the three hours it took to kill them all was to grab turkeys by their legs and flip them over. After a very short struggle, I carried the limp turkey over to a wooden frame set up with metal cones and put the turkey head-down through a cone. Something about being upside down kind of puts the turkeys into a trance and keeps them calm. Next our host electrocuted each turkey and slit its throat. The blood drained out and Josh lifted them out to the tractor outside the shed. It was over a little after 8:00am, just as the sun was beginning to rise. We had breakfast and then the plucking team started to arrive.

Plucking the turkeys was definitely worse than the slaughter. This process was gross and smelly. The feathers had to be ripped out without tearing the skin, which required a finesse that I had trouble getting the hang of. The worst part was the little immature feathers, that when pulled out, oozed this weird, black puss that smelled and got everywhere. Yuck. Finally, the naked turkeys had their feet tied together and were hung up to age for a week in a cold environment.

Yesterday, after a good aging, we eviscerated them. Well, Josh and I mostly dealt with all the other stuff that made the gutting go smoothly. I volunteered to gut a couple of turkeys as a learning experience. First the head has to be ripped off and then the wind pipe and crop separated from the muscles. The crop is a slimy, pale sack that is hard to distinguish from the other inside bits. On both of the turkeys I gutted, I had to get help removing the crop. Next, the turkey is flipped over and a triangle is cut around its anus. This allows one's hand to reach into the cavity of the bird and grab the gizzard. A good yank and the whole intestinal system comes out. Then you just fish around a bit for the liver and heart, which are saved along with the neck for the customer to enjoy. After that, I went back to my previous tasks, which involved alternating between hacking the feet off of the turkeys and bagging and weighing the finished carcasses.

So that's how your organic, free-range Thanksgiving and Christmas birds come to you ready for the oven. Though it at times grossed me out, I'm glad I went through with the experience. I feel it is important that if I am going to continue to eat meat, that I have to know where it comes from and what it takes for it to get from the farm to my table.

But just in case you think all we do is kill animals, I have to say that most of our work on the farm involves vegetables and collecting eggs. We spend a lot of time bagging kale and potatoes and cleaning and sorting eggs. Not bad, really.

Scotland Photos

I figured out how to connect to the wireless internet at the farm. I have no idea why they have a network set up if no one here seems to know how to connect to it. A little digging on tech forums and the such gave me the info I needed to get the laptop online. This means I can now post more pictures!

Here is a panorama of Edinburgh from one of the bridges over the train tracks.

And another panorama of a cool park of various monuments.
I thought this would make a neat picture...
Playing around with night mode is tons of fun! Too bad my camera is too cheap to really do it justice. This is a shot of the Edinburgh Castle.
There is a Christmas market and fair going on in downtown Edinburgh.
Finally, a picture of the turkeys at Pillars. Unfortunately for these weirdly noble looking creatures, the end is nigh. Turkey Apocalypse begins at around 5am on Monday. We are getting up that early so we can catch them while they are still asleep. Our host claims this will keep them from panicking. Also, he said that when his time comes, he hopes it is also at night while he is blissfully unaware. I guess we are doing the birds a favor.

Scotland

Josh and I have been having a great time in Scotland this last week or so. The Pisa airport in general and the passport controllers in the UK were a pain to deal with, but we made it to Edinburgh (pronounced "EDIN-Brah") on time and with all our luggage. We spent a lovely week in Strathmiglo with a good friend of Josh's mom relaxing and making a few trips into Edinburgh. We visited a couple of neat museums (which were free!), walked around the Christmas'ed-up city center at night, and, of course, partook of a number of fine Real Ales.

In case you have been drinking ale for a good number of years and are confused as to whether it was "real" or not, let me explain. The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) was started in the early 1970s in response to the increasing lack of flavor of beer in pubs. They promote good beer in general and cask ales specifically. Cask ales are unpasturized, unfiltered, naturally carbonated (if at all), and most importantly, at cellar temperature. Improperly served, this results in a pint of warm, flat beer. When the proper care is taken, however, the temperature and carbonation are perfect for bringing out the best flavor an ale can offer. In the US, you might be lucky if you can find a bar with a single cask ale on hand, but here, it's the norm to have 3-10 available at any given pub. It's a sweet time to be a beer lover in the UK.

But I digress. We've been working at Pillars of Hercules for three days now, and so far it is looking like a great place. The people are friendly and the work is interesting. We've picked vegetables and bagged them for sale, gathered eggs and graded them, prepped land for planting over-wintering crops, and built a wood shed. The last one was probably the most fun. They basically just handed us the materials, showed us a drawing of what it was supposed to look like, and let us go. Quite trusting, these folks. We dug holes for posts, secured cross beams, used power tools to cut strips of corrugated metal down to size and then screwed said strips onto the cross beams. So if you ever need a wood shed built, you now know who to talk to :D

Photozilla: Random Stuff

All the other photos that don't fit into neat categories:

Sigismund had planted several pomegranate trees around the house and for a period of two weeks, we were eating them every day!
Did you know cork grows on oak trees? I didn't. The bark is squishy and they look really cool. The cork grown in Italy isn't wine cork grade and is used to make cork boards and other such things.
This cork oak kind of looks like a deep sea monster.
Oranges can be grown in Tuscany too, though they don't do as well as trees further south.
Lara eating her Elevensies, an event which can happen in real life and not just in movies about Hobbits.
I asked Josh to pose for a nice Elevensies picture and this is what I got.
Karl is the happiest cat on earth.
Ratzinger is the ugliest.
This is the polar bear on a leash that we had to walk by every day. Mean, vicious brute.

Photozilla: Adventure!

Cinque Terre, before the skies opened up on us:

A panorama of Riomaggiore, click on it to get a larger version.

A panorama of the second village, Manarola.

Two shots of the chocolate festival in Arezzo:

San Gimignano:
The City wall.
A shot from one of the main squares, looking at one of the city's remaining 14 towers.
A shot of the "sky scrapers."
Click on the panorama for a better view!

Photozilla: Olives

A few more pics of us harvesting olives:

Picking out the leaves and stems.
Yoshi was our best climber.
Sigismund spent the whole harvest climbing up and down a ladder.
Even Josh liked to climb up in the trees.
Sigismund critiquing Yoshi's hole digging skills. Seems we could never dig holes perfectly enough for the man to be happy.
Josh hurling a pruned branch into the fire. If the branches are allowed to just sit on the ground, they become breeding grounds for molds and fungi to attack the trees. We often had Disco Inferno stuck in our head during the week we were clearing the fields...

The beautiful and ancient olive trees at Bulghari:

The oil mill:

Those piles of brown gunk are the left over stuff from making extra virgin olive oil. It's carted off by another company that uses chemicals to extract the remaining oil to produce regular olive oil. Having seen this, I will just stick to buying EVOO in the future.
Olives are dumped in the bin and fans blow out the leaves and branches.
They get a bath.
They disappear into the loud machines.
And voila! Oil comes out the end. Each farmer gets only the oil he or she produces. Pretty cool!