Snacks Returns, Sprinklers Reborn & Chicken TV Dinners - What I Did This Week

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It’s been another week of gardening, mild poultry-related mania, and one deeply judgmental owl.

Let’s begin.

Eastern Screech Owl stretches its long legs.

Table of Contents

🦉 Snacks Is Back

Snacks, the owl who lives in the box on my tree, is officially back on full-time night shift. After a few months of mysterious absences (rehab? pregnancy? Galapagos vacation? ), he’s now clocking in six out of seven days a week. Usually just sitting in the entrance to his house, blinking and gacking up feathers.

Eastern Screech owl with his mouth open and eyes winking.

He’s been around nearly every day, making faces and ejecting his lunch in pellet form. He's a performance artist this one. Six out of seven days a week, he’s there napping, clearing his throat and spitting. The seventh day is presumably for errands.

I've dissected an owl pellet. They're chunks of animal fur and bones he hacks up once day. You can relive that glamour of the dissection right here:
👉 Dissecting an Owl Pellet

The Resurrection of the Sprinkler

I fixed the cast iron sprinkler from my childhood. You know the one—black metal, shaped like Star Trek, and known for its capacity to both water the lawn and chip a kneecap.

I found it in the back of my shed a few weeks ago. I don’t even remember stealing it from my parents' house. But based on the evidence (and the fact that it was broken), I definitely stole it.

1960's Craftsman, cast iron sprinkler whizzes around watering a lawn.

Turns out the brazing had split. Next week I’ll show you how I fixed it, so you too can resurrect a forgotten relic from the 1960s. Bringing old things back to life is incredibly satisfying which is why I'm buying protein powder this week to see if I can bring the muscles I had just 2 years ago back to life.

#menopause

🍅 Tomato Trouble (a.k.a. Nose Trimmer Pollination)

Every few nights I wander outside and hand-pollinate my tomato plants with a nose trimmer. Not because they have unruly facial hair, but because the fella left it behind and it vibrates just enough to mimic a buzzing bee.

Watch this!

You just need to barely tap it to the flower, but I left it on a bit longer for full visual effect.

Black krim tomato plant growing in a pot with an upside down tomato cage supporting it.

Black krim tomatoes weighing down the vine.

It works well. Now I have so many tomatoes that the branches are drooping like unpaid interns. I’ve tied up what I can, but I fully expect to find at least one branch collapsed in protest every morning.

None of the fruit is red yet. These are Black Krim tomatoes which aren't truly black, but more of a moody bruise colour.

As you can see there was nowhere for me to use a string for the string method so I took a MASSIVE tomato cage that was out on my neighbour's front lawn. I took it. It was free. There were 2 more that I was going back for but in the 4 seconds it took to walk home someone else took the other 2.

I was angrier than was probably reasonable about this. Mainly because those tomato cages sat on that neighbour's lawn for 12 hours and no one touched them, but the minute someone saw me walking away with one they must have sprung out of the bushes and ran away with the other two.

It was like when you're at a sale and you pick something up to look at it and immediately there are 10 people hovering around you to buy the thing they had no intentions of buying until someone else seemed interested in it.

This concludes my tomato cage rage.

🍗 TV Dinners for the End Times

I roasted three chickens in the pizza oven this week to make homemade frozen dinners.

The system:

Make stuffing, pile it in a cast iron pan.
Spatchcock a chicken, place it on top to keep the stuffing moist.
Roast the whole thing in the pizza oven beside a wood fire.

3 chickens dry brining in the fridge on an ironstone platter.

A cast iron pan mounded with stuff, and ready to roast chickens off to the side.

I used a dry brine of 2 tablespoons of kosher salt per chicken. Salt the chicken outside, inside and under the skin then refrigerate it with no cover.

1 Tablespoon would have done. The dinners are a bit like licking a rotisserie ocean. Betty will love them. She's salty too.

Each pan got paired with mashed potatoes and caramelized corn off the cob, and then I packed them up like they were headed to 1978.

A whole chicken with stuffing roasted in a cast iron pan in a wood fired oven.

A tall stack of homemade frozen tv chicken dinners in foil.

If you want to make your own frozen dinners, here’s my original post on how and when I normally make them (including where I get the pans).
👉 Homemade TV Dinners

Would you like to save this stuff?

We'll email you this post, so you can refer to it later.

My onions are officially out of the ground and drying. They’re small this year, thanks to a combination of blazing heat and me not watering them enough.

Standard poodle on a wicker chair in front of an herb drying rack filled with onions.

Last year, a surprise rain rotted the whole crop. This year, I got them out in time. I laid them out on the drying rack and tried to convince myself being small makes them specialized. Fancy, personal pan onions.

An herb drying rack filled with onions, made from tobacco racks hanging on a front porch.

They're curing on my drying rack. I use it for curing garlic, onions, herbs and very mild scurvy.

I'm planning on getting a bigger potting shed built (possibly from here) and if I do, I'll move the curing rack into it.

👉 How to Make an Onion Drying Rack
👉 How to Cure Onions

🍵 Chicken Stock For the Cynical

After roasting the chickens, I turned the carcasses into stock—also known as bone broth if you say it while holding the hand of a millennial and thinking about your aura.

Homemade chicken stock canned and ready to put in the cupboard.

It’s stock. It’s always been stock.

Learn the difference between broth and stock and how to make it:

How to make and can chicken broth/stock

That’s it for this week.

Next week I'll show you how I fixed the sprinkler, whether or not the tomatoes snapped from their success, and if Snacks the owl files a formal complaint for being stared at continuously.

Until then, keep cool, tie up your tomatoes, and brine responsibly.