every day is a good day
After just two days, Lucky has taken her chicks outdoors to enjoy life. In the clip below, you can see how little chicks bury under their mother when they want some warmth.
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During the day she takes them further and further into the grass to explore and find good things to eat.
Near the post office is this long row of fifty or so trimmed poplar trees. Whoever trims them must spend a lot of time trimming them as they are always trimmed. Only, it turns out that it’s not a person who keeps these trees looking so neat. It’s a pair of cows. They go along the fence by the trees, nibbling at the trees and eating all the branches and leaves they can reach. In the process they keep the bottom branches of the leaves all trimmed to the same height.
The next time you are in the country and see a row of trees with their lower branches all trimmed neatly. Look for cows. They’re most likely the ones trimming the trees.
Lucky’s eggs hatched. After watching hens hatch eggs for five years, you’d think it would be no big deal. But each hatching is wonderful. And Lucky is a very special hen. As a tiny chick, she had an unfortunate accident and scraped the back of her head and neck. We had to separate her from her siblings as they kept pecking at her wound. Oh she peeped and peeped and peeped to be with them. They didn’t have a mother. Someone had ordered some chicks from a hatchery and received the wrong breeds. The local post office called and asked if we’d take them.
We rigged up a space with chicken wire just for Lucky so she could be right next to her siblings while she healed. She grew up to be an outgoing hen, with a very distinctive look. She’s usually the first hen to see what we’re doing when we go to work in the gardens.
We weren’t sure if her eggs would hatch. She decided to brood her eggs in a nest a few other hens also liked to use to lay eggs. Sometimes we’d find her in the next nest while another hen lay an egg in her nest. We marked the eggs we put under her for her to hatch, so we were able to remove any eggs other hens added to her clutch.
From time to time, we found her sitting on new eggs in the nest next to hers and had to move her back onto her eggs. One morning I found that she’d even spent a whole night on the other nest and her eggs were cold. I had my doubts any of her eggs would hatch. But they did, and now she has a happy brood to raise.
Not exactly tyrannosaurs, but fearsome creatures nevertheless if you’re a field mouse, the chickens have found a bone one of the dogs buried. With a bone, a flock of fifty chickens can attack it like a school of piranhas. Well, maybe that is a bit of a stretch. But, leave a bone out and the chickens will strip it bare in no time.
I watched a program on TV Japan called “Tameshite Gatten” which each week, looks at something people use all the time, and takes an hour to thoroughly explain it. This evening they were covering fresh soybeans, which are usually boiled in salt water, and are called “edamame”, which literally mean “beans on the stem”.
Many stores sell edamame, but they are usually sold precooked and frozen in the US. What was interesting about tonight’s show is that many in Japan will only buy fresh edamame that are picked that day. The reason for this is that within hours of being picked, edamame loose their sweetness. When picked fresh, the amount of sugar in them is a bit over 3%. But with three days of being picked, that level falls to nearly 2%.
It would be hard to find consumers in the US insisting on buying only beans that were picked that day, and refusing to buy beans that were picked three days ago. Why aren’t consumers in the US more demanding of the groceries they purchase? I often wonder about that. I’ve yet to see someone in a supermarket ask the grocer if the produce was picked that day or how many days ago it was picked. The same is true for eggs and meat. There seems to be no demand for fresh produce.
Plants are living things, and even after being picked, they still breathe. To breathe, they use up the sugars that are in them. However, since they are no longer attached to their root systems and to the ground, they aren’t able to replenish the nutrients they use to breathe, and their quality degrades.
Quick cooling and shipping produce in cool, oxygen and carbon dioxide restricted containers will slow this breathing, but with each passing day the quality of the produce degrades. It’s best if you can pick your produce at the time you make your meals. The question is how do we do this? What needs to change with how people get their produce to enable them to have produce picked just hours before eating it?