A month ago she was looking out for eight tiny chicks. Now the eight chicks are a month old and getting more independent by the day. By now, they are too big to all fit under her when they sleep at night, but they still snuggle around her when they go to bed at night. She takes them out to forage before the sun is up, though I’m not sure if it’s her idea to get them up so early, or if it’s the chicks who wake her up.
Month: May 2014
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Mother for a Month
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What a Happy Chicken Looks Like
Hmm, so what does a happy chicken look like? What does a happy chicken do?
One thing chickens love doing is being outdoors. They love to meander through thick brush. And they’re not afraid to do it on their own. Chickens are communal birds in that they like to roost together, share a dirt bath, and gossip. At the same time, they need time to themselves. Watching these chickens behave, it makes me wonder how frustrated chickens must be which live in crowded conditions.
Even when they are still very small, chicks will venture a long ways from their mothers and siblings. At times it can be a lot of work for the mother hen to keep track of her brood. This freedom is what chickens crave. They need all this room to roam in order to lay exquisite eggs like these.
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The Beauty of Food Growing
Whether it be sprouting mustard greens, developing cherries, or stately garlic stalks, food that is beautiful. When you are lucky enough to see the whole process, from tiny seed or bulb to fully developed plant, cut and on your cutting board, the flavor of the plant is enhanced.As you eat it, you see all the many forms it took and the weeks or months or even years it took before it was ready to be eaten. You miss all that when everything you eat is purchased at a store. Even growing a few things, if you can, is worth the effort. Even if you fail, you’ll learn to appreciate that it’s not always an easy process producing fresh food.
And if you’re lucky, you’ll get to see the many beautiful forms your produce goes through as it grows.
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Bees Feed Us
A patch of arugula is in full bloom. The wild bees are buzzing all afternoon, finding plenty of food to gather as they buzz from flower to flower. Luckily for me, this means I will have plenty of arugula seeds to keep planting through the summer. The great thing about many vegetables is that you don’t have to keep buying seed. Let some of the plants flower and go to seed and you have a supply of vegetable seeds in perpetuity.That’s assuming that the wild bees will keep coming. There’s no guarantee that they will. They can’t reproduce and survive if their habitat, our gardens and our fields, are continually doused with poisons. When I visit garden and hardware stores and see aisles of poisons and herbicides, I wonder how much longer our fragile environment will last. It’s a sobering to think that one of these springs, the buzzing of bees may be gone.
Honeybees abandoning hives and dying due to insecticide use, research finds
Beyond Honeybees: Now Wild Bees and Butterflies May Be in Trouble
Decline of bees forces China’s apple farmers to pollinate by hand
Declining Bee Populations Pose
A Threat to Global Agriculture
Bee Sustainable -
Raw Egg on Rice
After working hard outdoors, few things are as satisfying as a raw egg on warm rice with a dab of pickled plum and wakame (Undaria pinnatifida). The yolks of the eggs at a man and his hoe® are so buttery, with a texture like very heavy cream. They have so much flavor, you don’t need any salt.