“The chef eats his mistakes.”
Learning to grill burgers with my dad on the back patio is a fond memory of mine. If I had to guess, I would peg my age that day at 9. Leading up to my official BBQ tutelage, I’d already learned how to get the fire chimney going, pack a cheese-down dog (a Kiefer family classic), and I was allowed to splash beer on grilling meat to see the steam explosion (control temperature).
As we got started that evening — amidst instruction about coal temperatures, searing, and subsequent patty migration — Dad gave me a clear warning:
“The chef eats his mistakes.”
Drop it or burn it, that one is yours. What better way to get better at cooking that having to eat your charred or over-salted blunder?
In recent weeks I created a bit of a disaster on the farm. Initially, I built a mobile coop to enable us to move the laying hens around. Primarily because this is what my heroes do, and that’s what I’ve imagined since the early days of farming inspiration. Also, we weren’t sure if we’d be welcomed in the city. And, one possible way we pictured scaling over time was to actually move the chickens to different locations — as in drive the thing on streets to separate ~1 acre locations every week.
Fortunately, we could not have hoped to have been more graciously accepted by our neighbors than we have been. The idea to have multiple locations isn’t out of the question but not a focus at this time. As far as the regenerative farmers that went before us, they have a lot more land. These realities came to a head recently, and we made a decision that, for the soil farm, we would keep the coop in one strategic location. Their paddock will rotate through the chicken savanna, radiating from the centrally positioned hen house.
This decision makes the most sense for us, though habits can be hard to break, and I’m very harder headed. So, it took a bit of a disaster to beat me into submitting to change. We were moving the coop into its final resting place for the year, to put the chickens on deep bedding and give the grass a rest for the winter. That bedding, a foot or more of wood chips and deconstructed under-irrigated bioreactors I piled up for weeks, is apparently very soft. As in too soft to drive a big heavy coop over. I didn’t give up right away, though. I happened to have a skid steer on loan that night, swapped out the old Toyota 4x4 and proceeded to break stuff with the forklift attachment and chains. After some struggle, which included ripping off a wheel and driving the fork through one of the 2x6 floor beams, I abandoned the eggmobile where it was deadlocked.
Our final assessment was: We can’t do that again. And, why are we moving it around, anyway? There were the initial considerations already mentioned, and it has been helpful to get a feel for several different spots as all our other activities grew around it and things settled in. Being able to move the beast around wasn’t a loss, but now it was clear it needed a peaceful, stable home. I’d already planned to build a more mobile option next year, but now that it wasn’t necessary to move the coop I could upgrade the one we already built instead of constructing a whole new one.
But first: it’s still stuck. And, thanks to my Bobcat antics, it’s really stuck. It needs to be dislodged from where it’s buried, moved to it’s permanent location, propped up, and the trailer removed from underneath. Dad loved the idea of using a crane, and if that weren’t so out of our budget it could be great (as long as I wasn’t the operator). I decided to go a bit more manual and simply dig it out and move it into place one last time with the truck.
The means not only digging out all the bedding underneath currently under the coop, but also a minimum of 10' by 20' where it’s being parked and everything in between. It is basically just being shifted a bit from where it is now, which is a relief, but the material I’m excavating is one to two feet deep or more. This isn’t a light task, even for someone who starts every day pitchforking.
It took the better part of a day to jack the thing up, and there was a bit of a learning curve with the utility jack. Momentarily I thought that it would be so easy to get the skid steer back over and just grade everything. My cost to rent from a friend would be well worth the time saved. But then my good ol’ Dad’s words rang in my ears. I’m going to need to eat this one. Not in a self-punishing way — I’m facing my errors, fixing them, and will learn to be better at planning and observing situations instead of just ramming through them. I’m just going to have to dig myself out of this one.
