46 Omelettes

EggDelivery20150119

If you want to make 46 omelettes using 3 eggs per omelette, this is how many eggs you need. These are the eggs I delivered by bicycle to Tweets Café this afternoon, so they will be able to make quite a few egg dishes this weekend using eggs from the likes of Coulette, and Svenda, and Hazel, and Tangerine.

Working Hard

BBandEchoAtWorkA

Guarding a flock of chickens is hard work for our two dogs. It requires hours laying perfectly still, soaking up the warm sunshine. With one ear to the ground, and the other facing the sky, they can hear the soft footsteps of approaching coyotes as well as the wind rustling through the wing feathers of hawks soaring high in the sky. They’d rather be out chasing deer in the woods and hunting for rabbits, but they are duty bound to stay near the chickens, patiently listening for any danger. It’s hard work, but someone has to do it.

BBandEchoAtWorkB

Certified Organic Isn’t This

HenInTheStream

Certified organic doesn’t mean that chickens get to spend afternoons fishing for bugs and frogs in streams. It doesn’t mean that hens get to lay eggs in quiet nests all to themselves. It certainly doesn’t mean that mothers get to spend months raising their chicks to be well behaved chickens.

ANestToHerself
MotherAndChicks

OrganicMeansThisSmallThis is how most certified organic chickens live, by the tens of thousands in hen houses. They don’t get to spend all day out in the sun or fog or rain, never get to hunt for frogs in streams, never get to cozy up to their mothers, and certainly never get to flirt with a randy rooster.

Something New

Crocus20150216

Spring continues to unfold. More crocuses have popped out of the ground. While looking for more signs of spring, I came across my hat I left out all night. It glistens with morning dew.

HatInTheMorning
ChickensInvestigatingBranchesA

The chickens are having a field day. I’m trimming some cedars next to the house, and the chickens are fascinated with the piles of cedar branches. Something new happens, and they flock around to investigate. They never miss a thing. They should be reporters.

ChickensInvestigatingBranchesB
ChickensInvestigatingBranchesC
ChickensInvestigatingBranchesD

On a Bright Spring Day

20150215xA

The day may have started with a dusting of frost on the solar panels, but the bright sun quickly melted the frost and made everything dazzle. King Richard struts his best when the sun sets his cape ablaze. He glows so brightly, few hens can resist him.

20150215xB
20150215xC
20150215xE
20150215xF

The sun is bringing the plums into bloom. Chickens love eating plum and cherry blossoms so much, I’m surprised they don’t hop into the trees to eat them. Fortunately, they wait for them to fall before they gorge on them.

20150215xG
20150215xH

Time to Worship the Sun

Sunworship1

If there is one thing chickens worship, it is the sun. It is what they live for … and after many days of rain, the sun is out today, filling them with great joy. Chickens love the sun so much, that the cruelest thing you can do to a chicken, is lock them up in houses where they never see their sun god.

Watch chicken society closely, and you quickly realize that the sun god rules their lives. It’s whom the roosters are trying to wake up when they start crowing before dawn. It’s whom the roosters are cheering on as they crow throughout the day. And when the sun starts to set, the roosters gather their hens back to the safety of their roosts, to spend the dark night while their sun god is away. Who knows, maybe the idea of religion started with chickens and their sun worship.

Sunworship2
Sunworship3
Sunworship4
Sunworship5
Sunworship6

It’s Sad

Every day is a good day, but that doesn’t mean that sad things don’t happen. And it’s sad when you find agencies like the American Egg Board making audacious claims which just aren’t true. For more than a month I’ve been trying to get the American Egg Board to send data to prove their claim that “Most eggs reach the grocery store just one day after being laid and nearly all of them reach the store within three days.” I have never found such fresh eggs in any store, have you?

The images below are from a handout I found on the American Egg Board website this morning in their handout titled “An Egg’s Journey – From the Farm to Your Table” in which they make an even more audacious claim that “Most eggs reach the supermarket just one day after being laid!”

AnEggsJourneyA

To reinforce this claim, they ask a question about it at the end of the handout:

AnEggsJourneyB

After reading that, I thought that maybe I wasn’t checking the right stores. So I called the local Costco this morning and asked them what packing dates were on their eggs. Costco moves a lot of eggs, so if any store in the area has fresh eggs, it must be them. A kind employee checked their pack of 5 dozen eggs and told me that the pack date was 028, which means the eggs were packed on January 28 because that is the 28th day of the year. Today being February 13, it means those eggs are at least 16 days old. Where are these one, two, and three day old eggs the American Egg Board keeps claiming are in most stores?

What is odd, is that after emailing the American Egg Board this morning about the handout, the link to the handout www.aeb.org/images/PDFs/Educators/AnEggsJourney.pdf is no longer in the Lesson Plans and Materials section of their website. Maybe things aren’t as sad as I thought.

I Want That One

BattleOfTheNest04

Drama at the nests. Hanabi-hime is eyeing the nest Ruby is in, and Ruby is not happy. She is screeching at Hanabi-hime. “Don’t you dare!” she says. There are two empty nests next to the one Ruby is in, but Hinabi-hime wants THAT ONE.

BattleOfTheNest05

Eventually Hanabi-hime gives up, and nestles into the next nest, but she’s not happy. Ruby finishes laying her egg, and jumps down. There are two eggs in the nest, but which one is hers? That’s easy to tell. It’s the warmest one as it’s the last egg out of a hen, but before I have time to take the eggs, Hanabi-hime nestles into the nest she wanted in the first place. The two fake eggs are there to let the hens know the nest is a safe place to lay eggs.

BattleOfTheNest03
BattleOfTheNest02

Later, when Hanabi-hime is done laying her egg, I have a chance to gather the eggs before the next drama starts.

BattleOfTheNest01

Every Day is a Lucky Day

LuckysEgg150211

Every day is a good day – it’s a saying I say over and over again. Around here, it’s also a Lucky day. Early this morning while bringing in some wood, I found Lucky sitting in one of the nesting boxes in the woodshed. She hopped out, leaving this warm, wonderful egg.

LuckyInHoseA

Later, while we were having lunch, she made us laugh when she decided that a curled up hose was a perfect place to take a nap.

LuckyInHoseB

Only Love Can Save Us

Painted in Waterlogue

Looking at the peaceful Chuckanut Mountains and the beautiful valley at their feet, it’s easy to miss the danger that runs right at the foot of the mountains. I was coming home from an errand the other day when I was stopped at the railroad crossing as a mile long coal train lumbered by. It looks idyllic, but these coal trains that pass through every day on their way to deliver coal to ships which will carry it across the Pacific are slowly destroying this very valley.

It’s only a matter of time before the the burning of all this coal warms the earth enough that the Sammish Bay rises and creeps across the valley. The farmers who farm this valley won’t be able to pass their farms on to their grandchildren, their great grandchildren, their great great grandchildren. The villages that dot the valley will disappear under the sea.

So why aren’t the farmers parking their tractors onto the railroad tracks to stop the coal trains? Why aren’t all the residents of the valley lying down in mass on the railroad tracks to keep the coal trains from destroying their homes? It’s a puzzling question.

CoalTrainWaterColor
Painted in Waterlogue

ThisChangesEverythingCover
What will bring an end to the burning of coal, is love. If someone came to us with a proposal to gouge out a hole on our mother’s breast so they could extract a substance that would make them very rich, and leave us a sick mother to care for, not a single one of us would listen to them. We’d run them out of town, or turn them into the police to be locked up. We love our mothers too much to allow anyone to rip them open for profit.

And yet, most of us think nothing of people ripping the earth open, gouging out vast quantities of coal to sell and make fortunes, and leaving us with ecological nightmares. These fortunes come at a great cost to us all. It sounds ludicrous to compare strip mining to gouging our mother’s breasts, but it really is not. The earth is every bit as much our mother as our own caring, loving, crying, laughing mothers.

The earth deserves our love as much as our mothers. It is our earth, the tiny spec of blue in the unimaginable vastness of the universe, which gives us everything we need to live. Unless we love the earth as much as our mothers, we are going to let the ones who love money more than anything, destroy our beautiful earth, one coal train at a time.

Naomi Klein describes in her new book This Changes Everything, how our love of money is making our earth uninhabitable. Her point is that the form of capitalism we have created, is at war with nature, and the end result of letting the current system continue, is certain death for us all. What we need is a system that treasures our earth, listens to the laws of nature which govern how our environment works, and live accordingly. In other words, it will take all of us loving the earth as our mothers, to change our system so that future generations are assured of inheriting an earth even more wonderful than ours.