Cooking, grinding coffee, washing dishes, all of these things are better with fresh lilac in the kitchen window. It won’t be long before the fragrance of peonies fills the kitchen too. The peony buds are full and on the verge of bursting open.
Wild Cherry Blossoms
Wild cherry trees in bloom comfort my eyes each time I pedal home from an errand. There are wild cherries all through the woods. Somewhere in the mountains is a grove of cherry trees many hundreds of years old. A grove so beautiful when in bloom, that no one who has seen it as ever left the grove. As a result, to this day, no one knows where it is. If you stumble upon it one spring while hiking in the remote Cascades, you will never return either.
Where’s Skunky This Afternoon?
Skunky’s mother is taking a rest in the grass. I see some of her chicks, but where is Skunky? As you can see, chicks like being next to their mother. They are relaxed and take the time to preen their tiny new wing feathers.
When the mother gets up from her nap, out pops Skunky and more chicks. They were napping under her. She’s wandered off with some of the chicks in tow, but these three are just comfortable enjoying the afternoon sun.
Now Skunky is up and on the move. At two weeks old, Skunky’s wing feathers are nearly complete. Skunky still has the stripe down its back, but its wing feathers are a dusting of white and gray, more owl than skunk.
Out of the Garden Today – 2015/04/12
I don’t have the heart to cut these tulips. They are too beautiful to take inside, so they really aren’t “Out of the Garden” … they are still very much in the garden.
What did come out of the garden and into the house today were some over wintering kale and one of Cognac’s deep brown eggs. After growing produce for a number of years and watching the chickens hatch and raise a new generation each year, my understanding of what food is has changed. Ninety percent of the food on grocery shelves isn’t food. It’s some sort of edible (edible in the sense that it won’t kill you within hours of eating it) stuff that has been processed so much that it’s impossible to decipher from what plant or animal it came from. It’s not really food. It’s some sort of industrial product we’re told is food.
There’s no substitute for eating living things. Take the kale I picked above. We ate it within ten minutes of picking it out of the garden. The leaves were still respirating when we ate it. It’s the way most of nature eats. Even earthworms feast on living things: fungi, rotifers, nematodes, bacteria, and protozoans. They don’t first kill their food and then run it through industrial processes until it’s unrecognizable. They dig through the earth, sucking in living things and digesting them.
It’a fascinating working in the garden and seeing how alive the soil is. It’s teaming with life: earthworms, spiders, bugs of all sorts, and millions and billions of tiny creatures I can’t see. Good food is alive.
Love is not Exclusive
Scratching up earthworms and bugs isn’t the only thing mother hens do for their chicks. In the chicken yard, mother hens also pick up feed out of the trays and drop it on the ground for their chicks who are too small to reach the feeding trays. They do this over and over until their little ones are happy. If a kernel is too large, they will break it up for their chicks too.
Where Mom is, so is Skunky. Skunky’s wing feathers are coming in, and it won’t be long before Skunky doesn’t look so skunk like anymore.
With feeding done in the chicken yard, it’s time to head back outdoors where the really good food is. Twenty four hours a day, mother hens shower their chicks with love and care. So do all the wild birds rearing their chicks this time of year. Even if you are in the city, a walk through the park or along a tree lined sidewalk, will take you near mother birds, showering their chicks with love. Love is not exclusive to humans. No wild chick can grow up without love. Even baby mice can’t survive without it.
Skunky in the Woods
What is this? The woods in the spring? That and much more. That and a perfect nursery for a mother hen to raise her chicks. Somewhere in that thick brush is Skunky, its siblings and its mother.
There’s Skunky, watching carefully, so it can snatch any good earthworm or grub its mother digs out of the forest floor. There are very few chicks who at 10 days old get to spend all day outdoors eating good things their mother finds for them. It sure beats living under a heat lamp eating chick starter with no mother around to care for you.
Growing up this way, is one reason the eggs, the hens at a man and his hoe® lay, taste so good. Raising hens who lay wonderful eggs starts from when they are this small. As they sit on their nests, their minds are full of wonderful childhood memories. When they close their eyes, they can hear their mother’s call. That’s one reason their eggs are so good.
[wpvideo bQ54MRdQ]
What Frustration Looks Like
A bed chewed and ripped to shreds, that’s what frustration looks like. The culprit isn’t guilty looking BB in the back, it’s calm Echo in the front. We had to keep them in their kennel for some hours while we had company during the evening, and Echo let us know what he felt about not being free. That is just the way he is. If the door is open, he will spend hours sleeping in one of his beds in the kennel. However, if he knows the door is closed, he gets so frustrated he will destroy anything he can sink his teeth into. He should be the state dog of New Hampshire, the “Life Free or Die” state.
Detour While Collecting Eggs
I went out to collect eggs this afternoon and made a detour through the woods to see what is blooming. Bleeding hearts, thimble berries, trilliums, and spring beauties were in bloom all along the path. On one bleeding heart leaf, a thimble berry petal had fallen.
In the garden, the apple trees are in bloom. In Japan, when people talk about flower viewing, they are talking about viewing cherry blossoms. However, this was not always the case. During the Nara period (710-784) plum blossoms were adored for flower viewing. Aristocrats would have parties to view a single plum tree and write poems about the plum blossoms. Their adoration turned to cherry blossoms in the Heian period (794-1185) during the reign of emperor Saga who was emperor from 809 to 823 because he preferred cherry blossoms. Some cherry trees those ancient people adored still bloom today.
These days when the cherry blossoms are in bloom, crowds gather under the cherry trees to feast and drink and sing and dance. The feasts are often so elaborate that there is even a saying, “dumplings over flowers”, meaning that people go for the food instead of the flowers.
No day these days is complete without seeing what Skunky is up to. Is Skunky safe? Is Skunky healthy? Skunky is doing well. Long live Skunky!
What Happens to a Bulb of Garlic
Leave a bulb of garlic in the ground in the fall and in the spring, each clove of the bulb will sprout, resulting in a beautiful green bouquet shooting out of the ground. If you leave it grow through the summer, you’ll end up with a handful of small garlic bulbs, too small to easily peel and use. But, pull the bouquet out of the ground while it’s still young, and the result is a wonderful bunch of green garlic, perfect to slice and dice, and season any dish which craves garlic.
Asparagus Fever
The chickens enthusiasm is contagious when I dig several trenches to plant asparagus root crowns. They’re infected with asparagus fever, a feeling of overwhelming joy and exuberance brought about by the prospect of fresh asparagus.
