every chick deservers a mother
The White Flower Bean 白花豆 vines started blooming today. This is the first flower to open. Now you see why they’re called White Flower Beans.
And these pole beans which have purple beans, also have bright purple vines. Many vegetables are beautiful while they grow. They are worth growing just for their charm. On the plus side, you get to eat them too.
Carrot flowers look like fireworks. The next time you’re gazing up at a night sky, watching fireworks explode, you can exclaim, “That looks just like a carrot flower!”
The last of the chicks hatched during the night. This morning I moved the mother and her chicks into a nursery. Some chicks don’t move much the first few days. These chicks are ready to explore. They are going to be handful for her to raise.
Most people when they hear the word “potato” will think of mashed potatoes, french fries, potato salad, and will see images of potatoes in their mind. But flowers? Do images of beautiful, fragrant flowers come to mind?
It’s a cool, cloudy, windy day. Standing next to a large potato field in full bloom with the wind blowing off the field, the wind has a pleasant, sweet carnation-rose fragrance. The wind makes a rustling sound as it shakes the potato leaves and blossoms.
Fort Fairfield in Maine hosts the annual Maine Potato Blossom Festival mid-July each year when the potato blossoms are in full bloom. This 9 day festival features fun for the entire family. This event is one of the oldest and most established festivals in Maine. There is also a Potato Blossom Festival going on right now in O’Leary, Prince Edward Island.
Potato blossoms come in a variety of colors: white, pink, purple, almost blue. Planting a row of potatoes in your garden is worth it just for the blossoms.
Born just a few hours ago, this chick looks up at me, trying to make sense out of what she is seeing. Snuggled next to her mother, safe in a soft, straw bed, she has it made. Only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the 25 million chicks born in the USA today were born under the warmth of their mother’s body. A world of fun and adventure is awaiting her and her siblings. With a mother to look out over her, she should have a great childhood.
Hens on their nests can have piercing eyes. Kuma-hime 熊姫 (Bear Princess) glares at me with eagle eyes. Hens usually stay perfectly still until you get too close. Then they erupt, squawking and batting their wings, making a fuss and sometimes running away.
Curious Becky wonders who approaches. I find it amusing that chickens will cock their heads just like people when they are trying to figure out something. It points to a behavior we inherited from a very distant common ancestor. If so, it means that animals have been cocking their heads for hundreds of millions of years.
Picking baby kale for Tweets Café is always fun. This week there are baby kale, baby chard, baby arugula, and ruby streaks. Stop by at Tweets this weekend and enjoy a salad with produce picked today from a man and his hoe®.
And while you are at Tweets, pop next door to the Edison Eye and check out this art by Mandy. What is it? A Salmobbit? You never know what you’ll see in off the beaten path Edison.
Shopping for produce in grocery stores you miss the beauty of food as it grows. Kale leaves start out as tiny, cute, lacy fronds. Mustard greens produce clusters of green flower buds. Squash blooms splash bright orange color across forests of huge green leaves. And growing apples grow up next to siblings. When they are picked and carted off to stores, do they miss their siblings?
Even if it’s not practical for most people to grow their food, it would be practical to weave gardens and mini farms through urban areas, giving even city dwellers the joy of watching food grow. Then when they bite into their salads, they could close their eyes and picture all the wonderful shapes those salad greens took as they popped out of their seeds, pushed their way through the soil, and spread their leaves like wings.
I read an article by Denise Grady in the New York Times titled The Mysterious Tree of a Newborn’s Life – The Push to Understand the Placenta. In the article she writes:
Dr. Fisher and other researchers have studied the placenta for decades, but she said: “Compared to what we should know, we know almost nothing. It’s a place where I think we could make real medical breakthroughs that I think would be of enormous importance to women and children and families.”
The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development calls the placenta “the least understood human organ and arguably one of the more important, not only for the health of a woman and her fetus during pregnancy but also for the lifelong health of both.”
Reading the article, I was surprised to learn that doctors and scientists have so much more to learn how the placenta forms and develops and how it interacts with the mother’s body. As the placenta plays such a vital role in the development of every human, I would have thought that by now, such an important organ would have been extensively studied.
What is amazing about the placenta is that it is created from the embryo’s cells, not the mothers. Cells called trophoblast cells form the outer lining of the embryo. These trophoblast cells bury into the mother’s uterine lining and begin the process of creating the placenta in which the embryo will develop. In a way, they act a lot like cancer cells.
It’s a fascinating article.
There are plenty of mysteries here at a man and his hoe® to ponder as well. One of them is why the roosters periodically settle in one of the laying nests like a hen laying an egg. Sometimes they will even cluck like a hen after she’s laid an egg. I’ve read that some think they do this to let hens know they’ve found a good place to lay eggs. I’m not so sure about that. They usually do this in nests the hens are already using. It may be that a hen they like recently used the nest and they want to snuggle where she was sitting. This is Sven climbing out of a nest box after sitting in it for a while.
Why are carrot flowers so beautiful?
Why do dogs need so much love? Where does all this love come from? BB, the dog in the picture, follows me everywhere. If I am working in a field, he wants to stay nearby. He doesn’t love me enough to help me with the weeding. Just enough to keep me company. But I’m OK with that.
On a hot summer day, a mother hen and her chicks find a cool spot in the mulch under Iris plants. I find relief from the heat in the woods. What do chickens make of these trees? They often scratch for food on the forest floor. Do they look up and marvel at the towering trees?
This is what the last of the garlic scapes became. You can cut the stems and use them like you would string beans. They taste like string beans cooked with some garlic. The garlic flavor is not strong.