King Richard looks like he’s dead. He’s found a shady spot to take a long nap. See, he’s raised his head to preen and check on what the nearby hens are doing.
Big Personalities
Miasa is slowly taking her one week old chicks in for the night. They’re still tiny but so full of personality. When their mother pauses to groom her feathers, the chicks pose for me. Even at just a week old, they bloom with distinct personalities.
Bee Food
The bees have no shortage of food. There are plants and trees in bloom all over the place. Having plenty of food for the bees from early spring through fall is very helpful for growing crops which need pollinating. You can’t just put out a “help wanted” sign and expect the bees to arrive. They need to be fed all season long. They can’t hang out in their dens waiting for your crops to bloom. They have their lives to live. Have plenty of flowers all the time, and you can guarantee a healthy population of bees to pollinate your crops.
So Much to Learn
A baby chick’s time with its mother is all about learning. Can I eat that? What about that wriggly thing? That part is pretty easy to teach. For a chicken, if it moves and can fit in your mouth, it’s food. The more important lessons to learn are how to watch for danger. A shadow in the sky, something moving in the brush, a rooster or hen sounding an alarm, a mother hen teaches her chicks how to hide and be perfectly still. These chicks were born five days ago.
Compared to birds whose chicks are helpless in their nests for a long time and who need food delivered to them constantly, chickens have it easy. Within one or two days of hatching, baby chickens are ready to follow their mother wherever she goes. She can go scratching for food, her chicks in tow, and she doesn’t have to take food back to the nest.
Late in the Afternoon
Late in the afternoon, the hens gather before heading into the chicken yard and their roost for the night. Chickens don’t wear watches or bother to check what time it is on cel phones either. Sun worshippers, they head in when the sun dips low in the sky. In the winter they are indoors by four in the afternoon. In mid summer, they are out until eight or later. They make up for the short summer nights by taking long afternoon naps as they soak in the warm sunshine.
Fallen Beauty
The peony petals have fallen. There is a haunting beauty to fallen petals. A last farewell before the memory of their flowers melts away.
With Open Arms
The shallots are reaching out of the ground with open arms, welcoming as much sunshine as possible. As high as they lift their green arms, shallots stretch their white roots deep into the ground, oozing out sugars and carbohydrates and fats and proteins to feed a host of bacteria and fungi. Dr. Elaine Ingham describes plants as setting out cakes and cookies for these microorganisms. As these bacteria and fungi feed on the cakes and cookies the plants provide them, protozoa and nematodes feed on the bacteria and fungi, and after gorging themselves, leave behind waste at the plants’ roots, full of the nutrition plants need to thrive.
According to Dr. Ingham, put lime or nitrogen fertilizer on the soil, and you destroy these colonies of microorganisms the plants depend on to feed them. Lime and nitrogen fertilizers are salts, and so they bind up the water in the ground, depriving the microorganisms of the water they need to live. And it’s all unnecessary. The sand, the pebbles, rocks, clay particles in your ground have all the minerals your plants will need for a million years. According to Dr. Ingham, a single grain of sand has all the minerals to supply an entire acre of crops. You don’t need to add any minerals to your gardens. You have an infinite supply in your ground. You will never run out of nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium, boron, any of the minerals your plants need. The key to having a thriving garden is getting the correct mix of bacteria, fungi, protozoa and nematodes in your soil. Plants figured out how to do this millions and millions of years ago. It’s our job as gardeners, to make sure the biology plants need, thrives.
Sharing or Being Selfish?
Are these hens sharing or being selfish? There are three empty nests around them, yet Yuki-hime, the white hen, insists on sitting on Lucky when she wants to lay an egg. The conversation the two had before they settled in on top of each other didn’t sound like a harmonious, “Oh, yes, please, come join me in this cozy nest. Pretty please.” It sounded more like a bar room brawl, with Yuki-hime shrieking at the top of her lungs into Lucky’s ear. Then again, maybe that is what passes as friendly conversation in chicken land.
Maximizing Happiness
Maximizing happiness, it’s one of the maxims here at a man and his hoe®. What will make the chickens happier? What will make the plants grow better? What will make the dogs jump for joy? For little chicks, their mothers know how to maximize their happiness.
Finding the eggs of Cognac (the darkest egg), Lucky (the lighter brown egg), and Jacqueline (the white egg) in the nest this afternoon, that maximizes happiness. These three hens have taken to using the same nest. Lucky is always the first, laying her egg early in the morning. Later, Cognac and Jacqueline want to us the nest, and Cognac can cackle up a storm if Jacqueline is in the nest when she wants to use it, even though there are empty nests on either side.
In the garden there is the first pound of many ShiroHana-Mame (White Flower Beans) to plant. Some of the stray beans which fell to the ground from last year’s harvest are sprouting, so I know these will do well. Watching beans grow maximizes happiness.
The chickens are going nuts over the duck weed I hauled out of the pond. It is full of water bugs and tadpoles and other pond bugs. They like the duck weed too. Duck weed maximizes chicken happiness.
Bringing in a basket of eggs and asparagus for supper maximizes happiness. A basket taken out to the garden never comes back inside empty.
Independent Chicks
Skunky and its siblings are just over a month old now … and see, no mother. They’ve found a soft spot on a garden path and are enjoying the afternoon sun, not worried that their mother is off foraging on her own. They are old enough now to be on their own. A month is on the short side of chick rearing. More of the hens raise their chicks closer to two months than just one, but a month is not unusual. I’ll see if their mother is still spending the night with them. Chicks are completely independent when they no longer spend the nights with their mother.
