every day is a good day
Little chicks need to feel safe and secure. Of the billions of chickens raised each year just in the USA, just a tiny handful get to snuggle inside their mother’s feathers. For little chicks, there is nothing more important than having the security of a caring mother.
On a blue day, the Christmas trees touch the sky. They are so beautiful, they don’t need any decorations. On the ground are wheel barrow after wheel barrow of fallen leaves, waiting to be picked up. In time, they will crumble. Bacteria and bugs will feast on them, turning them into soil to grow beautiful vegetables.
Raking the leaves attracts the chickens, including this young rooster with brilliant colors. Chickens can be among the most colorful of all birds. The variety of colors and patterns is stunning.
Just as stunning is the power of these small arugula seeds to grow into delicious salads. A plant which likes cool weather, I can even plant them in the unheated hoop house in November.
Not exactly helpful, but BB likes to plop his butt on freshly prepared vegetable beds. It never hurts to have a good laugh during the day. A dog like BB provides plenty of laughs during the day. You need a dog to keep the coyotes and eagles away, to chase away the deer, and let you know when someone is coming up the driveway. Most of all, you need a dog to make you laugh and realize how wonderful life is.
It’s a cool, blustery, wet day … a perfect day if you are a swan. The muddier it is, the more they like it. All winter long, the swans root through fields, finding food to eat. It makes me wonder where the swans ate before the valley forest was logged and made into fields. According to the Trumpeter Swan Society:
Adult swans eat aquatic vegetation, including the leaves, seeds, and roots of many types of pond weeds. In captivity, swans will eat corn and other grains provided. Wild swans have also adapted to field feeding, eating left over grains and vegetables that have been harvested by farmers.
So around here, they must have congregated along the mouths and banks of the Skagit river, eating there. They aren’t birds to waddle through forests.
For the young gray ones, the cygnets, this is their first trip south of the arctic. They have come with their parents, and will fly back north in the spring with them. Sometime during the summer, their parents will drive them away so they can hatch and raise a new brood. The young swans will stay together in sibling groups until they mature and start families of their own.
The beautiful pink carnations of summer are dried and don’t look like much. But inside their dried flowers are seed pods with the tiniest of seeds. Carnations have been cultivated for thousands of years. You can propagate them from seed, from cuttings, or by dividing them.
It’s always amazing to watch plants grow from such tiny seeds. Looking at these carnation seeds which look like cracked pepper, it’s hard to imagine that under the right conditions, by mid summer they could become hundreds of beautiful, fragrant carnations.
