Month: April 2014

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A Shovel Worth Having – and Made in Ohio to Boot

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Good tools are indispensable when it comes to farming. And this is especially true with hand tools. A few weeks ago I found a sturdy shovel made by Bully Tools of Steubenville, Ohio, where they make all their tools. What impressed me about the shovel is that the back of the shovel head is sealed. Most shovel heads are not sealed in the back so when you use them, dirt gets clogged between the handle and the head. And if you’re dealing with any clay, they are a pain to clean.

Since the head of the Bully Tools shovel is sealed in the back, there is no place for dirt to clog, making cleaning a breeze. You can see in the photo of a regular shovel, how easy it is for dirt to build up on the back of the shovel head.

The head is made of 14 gauge steel which means it is strong. The handles are made of ash. This is a shovel that last for years. Keep workers in Ohio employed. Make your next shovel a Bully Tools shovel.

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Salad Recipe – Five to Ten Minutes

It’s fresh salad season here at a man and his hoe®, and I thought I’d share a simple salad recipe, one that I make nearly every day.

Step 1: Go into the vegetable garden and fill a salad spinner with leafy greens. There’s no need to pull out an entire plant. Pinch off the leaves you want and leave the plants to keep growing and producing more leaves. Today, I’m using Siberian kale and arugula leaves.

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Step 2: Find some herbs, like oregano in your rockery, and add them to the pile of fresh greens.

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Step 3: Add some chives to the pile of fresh greens.

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Step 4: As well as a few sprigs of mint.

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Step 5: Rinse and spin the greens. Chop up the herbs.

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Step 6: Pile the greens on a salad plate. Top with the chopped herbs. And finish by drizzling the salad with balsamic vinegar.

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There you have it. A fresh salad more delicious than any you’ll find in a restaurant, all for just five to ten minutes of your time. Food the way it was meant to be enjoyed.

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Dirt Bath

On a bright sunny day, chickens enjoy having a bath in the warm dirt. They can spend an entire hour rolling around in the dirt, and often they like to do this in small groups. This is behavior that is innate and something they seem to need to do, like pigs needing to wallow in mud.

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So how do birds in these cage-free “humanely-raised” egg laying operations get to roll around in the dirt in the bright sunshine and fresh air? The next time you buy eggs, ask the grocer if the hens who laid the eggs you are buying, get to spend hours rolling around in the dirt in the afternoon sun.

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[wpvideo 4WdMujB4]

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Posts – Nature’s Gift

If you look around, nature often has what you need. What I need are some 10 foot posts to fence off a vegetable plot to keep the chickens out. I could go to a lumber yard and pick out some posts, but there are many young tree that need to be thinned out. They’re not perfectly straight, but they will make a distinctive looking fence that will be unique. I’ve left some of the branches to have handy hooks for hanging things.

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For fun: to get red hands, strip the bark by hand.

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Transformation – or Where Did the Cherry Blossoms Go?

What is this? It’s what cherry blossoms become. All those beautiful blossoms which drifted down, covering the ground like fresh snow. Now they will slowly decompose into the garden and turn into other flowers and vegetables. They don’t look like much now, but what is amazing about them is that much of their matter came out of thin air. Plants have this incredible ability to eat the air. Through photosynthesis, they can trap the carbon molecules in the air, and turn that carbon into stems, leaves and flowers. Like magic, plants can take what is invisible and turn it into exquisite things of beauty, and eventually into rich matter that nourishes all of us. Some of this matter will even end up being chicken and eggs and vegetables, and eventually us. Then as we breathe, we exhale carbon dioxide and at some point, the plants will eat that carbon dioxide, extract the carbon, and the whole cycle continues round and round.

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The Importance of Siblings

Next to a mother, siblings are the most important relationships young chickens have. When you go shopping for chicken and eggs, the fact that chickens develop such relationships probably doesn’t cross your mind. But chicks which are raised by their mother, develop strong attachment to their brothers and sisters. So, when their mother leaves them on their own, the siblings stick together. They roost together and roam together.

As they age, their sibling relationships get more complicated. The males and female chicks start to separate, with the males hanging out together, and the females sticking together. It’s only possible for chickens to have these sibling attachments where they are raised by their mothers and have plenty of space to be themselves.

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An Afternoon by the Pond – Chickens in Paradise

Producing food is all about encouraging life. All kinds of life. And life is beauty, so in a way, producing food is about beauty.

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So do you think the chicken you buy, or the hens who lay the eggs you eat, ever get to take a stroll by a pond on a sunny spring day?

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Do you think they ever get to walk along the shore of a pond and dig for things to eat in the mud by the pond? Maybe that should be a requirement for humanely grown chicken, that they have the freedom to go digging for food on the shores of a pond. How close to nature do you want your chickens and egg layers to live? Or has this inconsequential chicken farmer gone mad?

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Dinosaur Descendants

Scientists since 1870 have speculated that birds descended from dinosaurs. In the Smithsonian Magazine article Dinosaurs’ Living Descendants, Richard Stone writes that there was a lack of evidence until a poor Chinese farmer discovered a fossilized skeleton with a birdlike skull, a long tail and impressions of feather-like structures. This discovery of bird-like dinosaurs helped paleontologists fill in blanks in the fossil record, and have convinced many, that birds descended from dinosaurs.

Which makes me wonder if these dinosaurs were as beautiful as some of the chickens here. The feathers have so many subtle colors, and some have wild patterns that dazzle the eye

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Enjoying the Sunshine

No, there’s nothing wrong with this hen. She’s just stretching to soak up as much sunshine as possible. When hens are out soaking up the sun, they’ll stretch their legs out and contort their bodies into hilarious positions. From what I’ve observed during eight years of keeping chickens is that time out in the sunshine is a necessity. Chickens really need lots of space to lay great eggs, and they need lots of time out in the sun.

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So how do hens in a cage-free laying barn like that pictured below get to have their time out in the sun? They don’t, and neither do most of the hens who lay those cage free eggs you see in the supermarkets.

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Tsuneko Sasamoto – Almost 100 and Still Going Strong

Yesterday I saw a reporter interview Tsuneko Sasamoto, a renowned Japanese photographer, who will turn 100 years old this September. In honor of her upcoming 100th birthday, there is an exhibit of her photographs at the Japan Newspaper Museum titled
100 Years of Japan’s First Female Photo Journalist Tsuneko Sasamoto. The exhibit runs through June 1, 2014.

As I watched the interview, it was hard to believe that the vivacious woman being interviewed had turned 99 more than half a year earlier. It made me wonder what I would be still doing at that age. Would I still be raising chickens and working the soil with a hoe? In the interview, she credited her long life to always have something more to do, to never giving up.

Below is a video of her made October 2013 when she was 99. Even though the interview is in Japanese, you get a good idea of how active she is. It is her voice narrating the video. She was just as vivacious in the interview I saw yesterday.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wXohfgZKVk?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360]

About Tsuneko Sasamoto in Japanese and that page translated into English