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Mother hens spend a lot of time with their chicks in thick brush. The brush provides cover from predators and their is a cornucopia of good bugs and worms to eat in the forest floor. Chickens evolved from jungle fowl, and they need to spend a good portion of their day hunting in thick brush and forest.
Berries You Can’t Buy
The peaceful walk down the driveway early this morning belies the reason I was walking through the woods. The dogs had caught an opossum in the wee hours of the morning. It wasn’t dead. It was lying on the asphalt looking very dead. A number of years ago, when the dogs caught one, I went outside to bury it. The dogs had lost interest in the carcass and were off by the pond. I went to get a shovel to bury it, and when I turned to go back to the opossum, it was wandering off into the woods.
This morning, I put the opossum in a box and took it deep into the woods and let it go. They are very resilient creatures, able to endure being dragged around by dogs. This is life in nature. Everything is eating everything else. No matter what you are, you are on somebody’s menu. While cutting tall grass this morning, the mosquitos reminded me I was on their breakfast menu.
Speaking of menus, the purple salmon berry blossoms of April have turned into berries. Another month or so, and they will be delicious tart snacks to enjoy on a sunny afternoon while toiling outside.
The thimble berries are in full bloom. Of all the berries here, they are my favorite. They are too delicate to appear in grocery stores. When they ripen, they are good for just a day or two. Many of the best foods never make it to store shelves. You need to grow them yourself, which is why cities need to be laced with community gardens, so that even people living in cities can enjoy delicate treats like thimble berries.
Cloud of Dust or The Sex Was Good
I went outside to take pictures of the golden chain tree, Laburnum, and spotted Billy and Imelda, our two old love birds. I dropped to the lawn to take pictures of them, when Kuma-Hime 熊姫 shook, throwing up a cloud of dust or dirt to bathe in.
Chickens are dusty creatures. They love taking dust and dirt baths. Hens make sure to teach their chicks how to take dirt baths. So it’s not surprising that chickens smell like dust. Since chickens enjoy dust baths so much, I wonder how chickens cope when living in environments where there is no dust.
When do chickens shake? After a good dust bath. The hens also give a good shake after sex. Once the rooster hops off them, they’ll stand and give a good shake, as if they’ve had a good thrill.
Baby Greens
For many people, the first time they encounter a tomato or a bunch of salad greens is in the grocery aisle in their supermarket. Or, if they are getting their food prepackaged, or in a can, or in a jar, or in a restaurant, or in the frozen food section of their supermarket, they don’t even see that.
But baby vegetables, popping out of the earth and spreading their leaves, have a charm all of their own. They can be as cute as baby chicks. Don’t have a garden or place to grow things? Check out How Things Grow at a man and his hoe® from time to time to see how your food grows. Do you want to see how a particular vegetable grows? Let me know.
Baby Arugula
Baby Swiss Chard
Baby Ruby Streaks Mustard
Baby Squash
Baby Tomato
Important to all growing vegetables, is a healthy environment. This includes providing habitat for a rich variety of insects. All of the vegetable beds here are not far from borders of flowering plants which provide food and shelter for predatory insects, spiders, and even snakes. See Bees, The Beauty of Produce, How Apple Pie Starts, How Things Grow, and The Soil Will Save Us.
Iris on the Verge
The iris by the pond are on the verge of unfolding. The thick vegetation along the banks of the pond is a perfect home for garden snakes, a playground for the dogs, and a foraging garden for the chickens.
Bring Out the Cannon to Shoot the Sparrows
Curious as to the sculptor and the actual sculpture I saw at the Hakone Open-Air Museum back in my college days, I sent a query to the museum describing the sculpture. A short time ago I got a reply from the museum. The sculpture is now at their sister open-air museum, The Utuskushigahara Open-Air Museum in Nagano prefecture in Japan. The links are in Japanese, but they have plenty of pictures to give you an idea of the beautiful, mountainous area. Below is a picture of that sculpture.
The sculpture is by the Swiss artist Bernhard Luginbühl and is titled スズメヲウツノニタイホウヲモチダス Suzume wo utsu noni taihou wo mochidasu, which translates to Bring out the cannon to shoot the sparrow. He created many huge, fantastical pieces. Take a look at the Iron Giants’ Garden, a park in Mötschwil, canton Bern, Switzerland, that has a collection of his work. And below are images of some of his works. The world has an endless supply of interesting, creative people.
On Mother’s Day
This is a tribute to the 99.999999999999% of chicks who don’t have a mother. Who are hatched in mechanical incubators, rushed to broilers and laying barns, and grow up never spending a night snuggled under a mother’s warm feathers.
This is a tribute to the 99.999999999999% of laying hens who never get to hatch a single one of the many hundreds of eggs they lay. Who never get to express their love for little chicks.
A melodramatic, sentimental tribute, and yet, perhaps the fact that we don’t even stop to consider that chicks do need a mother, and think it quaint that there are still places that have mother hens raising chicks, speaks more about what has happened to us humans than anything.
A mother hen teaches the chicks manners. She teaches them to be confident in the presence of other hens, and to mingle with the rest of the flock.
Happy Mother’s Day! The chicks who have mothers sure adore them.
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Mornings Start Early
Mornings start early for the roosters. They start crowing at the crack of dawn.
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Mornings start early for a mother hen and her chicks. They are often the first ones out of the chicken yard. Often it is the little ones that are most anxious to get outdoors.
It’s a different story with these chicks. Last night their mother was back up on the roost and the four chicks spent their first night without her. This morning they are glad to have her back, though now that she is roosting again, it won’t be long before they will be on their own for good.
And a pleasant surprise this morning was finding a young hen laying her first egg.
On the Board Today – May 10, 2014
On the cutting board today for lunch: lovage, eggs, chives, dill, arugula, shungiku (spring chrysanthemums). Half the fun of making and eating lunch is gathering the ingredients from the garden.
Living Sculpture
The Hakone Open-Air Museum is an amazing outdoor museum in Hakone, Japan. Located up in the hills, you take a cog-wheel tram which climbs steeply through a lush, narrow canyon up to the town of Hakone. The tram starts at sea level in the town of Odawara and by the time you reach the stop for the museum, you are at an elevation of 1,768 feet or 539 meters.
Decades ago, when I visited the museum for the first time back in my college days, there was one piece that really made an impression. I don’t recall the artist or the exact title, but it was a metal piece that looked like a massive crane pointing down at you. It may have been twenty of thirty feet tall, and the description was something like “A gun to shoot sparrows” (Found it!).
There are a few outdoor scupltures here at a man and his hoe®, but the sculptures that really impress are the ones nature creates. These are the living sculptures. The ones that change day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second. Truly amazing shapes of all sizes, colors, and textures.
What is remarkable is that many of these are edible. The great thing about being able to pick your food while you make your meal, is that when you sit down to eat the salad or dish you prepared, you can picture the beautiful setting where that onion or lettuce or cucumber or cherry or apple came from. You can remember all the shapes that fruit morphed through, from bud to flower to green fruit to ripened fruit. It adds another dimension to your eating pleasure. Gathering your food becomes an integral part of the recipe. It is like the sensations you feel while you knead the dough, or rub spices into your food.
A great meal is much more than just sitting down at the table and eating what is in front of you. It starts with collecting the food in the first place. Pushing a cart through a supermarket and heaping it full of produce creates a much different meal experience than going out into the garden and selecting the ingredients for your meal.
It’s frightening how disconnected many people are from nature when we humans are so dependent on other organisms. We can’t survive if the ants and bees and earthworms can’t thrive. We are dependent on chickens and cows shitting to nourish the plants and grains we eat. Our lives depend on the ocean being healthy, even if we live thousands of miles from the nearest beach. There are a million billion trillion intricate interdependencies among bacteria, fungi, mosses, plants, and animals that make our lives possible. The most important thing we humans can do for ourselves, is to protect nature.