Chickens seem to always be on the verge of asking a question. Who is that? What are they eating? When is that nest going to be empty? Where are you going? They are always asking questions. You can see it in their eyes.
Is She or Isn’t She?
Hanabi-Hime 花火姫 has been on a nest for two full days. Is she or isn’t she incubating eggs? She’s just a year old. If she is, she will be the first hen this year. It’s a great time to start. The cherry blossoms are starting to bloom, and potatoes are poking out of the ground. I have a patch of potatoes which have gone wild. When I see them sprouting, then I know it’s safe to plant potatoes.
Seed Mindfulness
Saving seeds is an opportunity to practice mindfulness. These are the dried flowers of 牛蒡 – Gobo (burdock). The foot to two feet long roots of young gobo have a delicious, woodsy, mushroomy, carroty taste.
After pulling the flowers apart to get their seeds, I discovered that the burdock flowers are also the home to many spiders and tiny bugs. Most of those are back outdoors looking for new homes. It emphasizes the importance of letting plants alone in the garden after they have flowered and gone to seed. Their dried stems and flowerheads house thousands of beneficial insects and spiders.
So how many seeds does a handful of gobo flowers produce?
1,011 to be precise. This is the mindfulness part. Turn off the radio. Close your eyes. Enjoy the peace and quiet, and start counting. Paying only attention to the seeds, make stacks of 10 seeds and line them up until all the seeds are counted. You can turn most any task into an opportunity to practice mindfulness.
The 1,011 seeds are now in packet ready for when I plant them in a few weeks.
Nature’s Hope
This is how nature hopes … with blossoms. The fruiting plum trees are just starting to unfold their blooms. Each one of their tiny buds is hope for a plum, and from the plum, a future plum tree. Imagine if people’s hopes budded as beautiful as plum blossoms. The more hopes a person had, the more blossoms they would show.
Winter Refuse
The world of vegetables is a world of dazzling color. It makes you wonder why they aren’t called colors instead of greens. This is a colorful pile of chard, ruby streaks, and onions I cleared out of a hoop house to make room for spinach. Life is good when even your refuse is so colorful and edible.
Help Is On the Way
I’m clearing out a bed of chard and onion to make way for spinach. The packet says 38 days to harvest. I love how seed packets are always so full of optimism. First Billy and then Lucky come into the hoop house to help me prep the ground. You can accomplish any farm task as long as you have enough chickens. They are soil experts with beaks and claws from hell. Need a vegetable or flower bed aerated? Chickens to the rescue. Need a bed of cover crop mowed down? Chickens at your service. Need a compost pile turned? Chickens know how to do that. Need a plot debugged? A flock of chickens will do it nicely, and leave the plot well fertilized to boot.
