a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Month: July 2014

  • Tiger Mom

    For baby chicks, their mother is their teacher. They watch her every move and mimic what she does. In the first photo, look how intensely the chicks study her every move. If she pecks at something, so will they. If she flees from something, so will they. If they see her drinking, so will they.

    As she teaches them life’s lessons, she watches out for them like a hawk. Some hens are more protective than others. You see the same thing with human parents. This hen, 紫雲姫 – Princess Purple Cloud, is a tiger mom. She keeps all the other chickens a safe distance away, and makes sure her chicks are always nearby. When she was incubating her eggs, if I got my hand or arm too close, she gladly drew blood. She is not a hen you want to mess with.

    MotherAndChicksFaceToFaceD
    MotherAndChicksFaceToFaceC
    MotherAndChicksFaceToFaceA
    MotherAndChicksFaceToFaceB

  • Summer Blooms

    When the anemones start to bloom, it’s proof that we are in the middle of summer. The wonderful thing about anemones is that they bloom for a long time. The dahlias look like star bursts. White oregano blossoms are a favorite of bees. And the lovage blossoms will produce plenty of seeds to plant a row of lovage.

    Anemone
    Dahlia
    OreganoFlowers
    LovageFlowers

  • Tar Sands – Breathtaking Destruction

    Alex MacLean and Dan Grossman are documenting what the oil companies are doing to the forest and bogs of Alberta as they strip the land to retrieve oil from the tar sands. You can read about their project at Tar Sands Truth. The environmental destruction happening in Alberta is hard to comprehend. It makes you wonder what planet earth is going to look like in fifty years.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ1fNnVs2iM?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360]

    How does this have anything to do with raising chickens and growing produce at a man and his hoe®? We are all connected, no matter how distant we might be from each other. The air that blows over the tar sands of Alberta eventually blows over you and me. The mindset that allows such environmental degradation is a mindset that affects all of us. By saying that it is OK to do that over there, we have no right to say you can’t do it where I am.

    People will be needing to live on this planet a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, ten thousand years from now, a hundred thousand years from now, a million years from now. They will need pure water, pure air, pure soil to live. How are they going to have these things if this is what we keep doing to our tiny planet? Our economic and political systems are set up to just look at a few months to a few years ahead. But we need economic and political systems that think far, far, far into the future.

  • Time to Pop the Champagne

    FirstRedTomatoes

    Spotting the first red tomatoes of the season is more than enough reason to pop open a bottle of champagne and propose a toast to the wonders of nature. The three red cherry tomatoes in the photo above were in my mouth seconds after I took the photo. Lucky me.

    There is this company called soylent whose advertising campaign is “What if you never had to worry about food again?” It seems an odd question and for some reason the person behind this company thinks that getting produce and making healthy meals is bothersome and that eating is a waste of time. Their solution is to sell you powder you mix with water and forget about eating regular meals. Their advertising says that a bag of soylent powder provides a day’s worth of nutrition and takes three minutes to mix with water, so that you can use the time you used to spend cooking and eating for doing things you want to do.

    The people who come up with schemes like this clearly do not have a garden. They’ve never tasted a ripe tomato picked off the vine, or crunched into vibrant chard leaves picked seconds ago. They’ve never plucked a ripe raspberry off the vine, or nibbled on greens in a field. They certainly haven’t held a still warm egg laid minutes ago by a squawking hen. Experience foods like that, and eating becomes one of the great pleasures in life.

    MediumChard

  • Mom on the Move

    Every mother hen is different. This one is a mover and a shaker. Some mothers don’t take their chicks out of the nursery until they are a week old. This one has them running around outdoors the day after they hatched.

    When I see day old chicks exploring the great outdoors, running through grass, scratching the dirt, I chuckle at the environment enrichment efforts of large scale poultry farms. These efforts include adding string bunches for chickens to play with and sand boxes to use.

    These day old chicks experience more enrichment in their first day of life than do most chickens do during their whole life, and they get a mother to boot.

    MotherOnTheMoveA
    MotherOnTheMoveB
    MotherOnTheMoveC