Your cart is currently empty!
Author: theMan
-
A Whole Meal in One Worm
Hey! How’s this for an earthworm? The chickens would go crazy if they found it. It would be smorgasbord time. The overnight rain brought this large earthworm out of the ground. There are snakes smaller than this earthworm. You can see that it wouldn’t take too many of these earthworms burrowing through your soil to keep it light and fluffy. Have 25 to 75 of these per square foot, and they will do a bang-up job aerating the soil and keeping it very porous. The last thing you want to do is till the soil. One pass with a tiller through a vegetable bed, and you’ll kill thousands of earthworms.
The hens don’t know what they’re missing. Or maybe they’ve all gorged on giant earthworms already and are stuffed. They have been up for several hours. It’s gossip and preening time.
-
Fog to Sun
All it takes to transform the place to a hideaway high in the mountains is for the fog to roll in.
BB enjoys a walk as the fog starts to lift. In the afternoon, with the sun out, and the fog but a memory, the chickens are out foraging under the blooming cherries. It takes wide open spaces for chickens to be happy and lay the best eggs.
-
Not in Her Usual Nest
I can hear Special. She’s not in her usual nest. She’s decided to try a new nest for a change. It’s something hens often do. They get bored seeing the same things, gossiping with the same hens when they settle in a nest to lay an egg. What these two were talking about before I showed up I’ll never know. It may have been about me because they shut up the instant I appeared.
There is Special trying out a new nest, and she has a young suitor. Young roosters have it so hard. They have to sneak about and court when the older roosters are not around. Of all the young roosters who hatched last spring, only two remain, this handsome two-toned gentleman, and Billy Junior, a pure Buff Orpington, a spitting image of Billy. The rest ended up in the oven. Who lords over them? Seven year old Billy, Sven the Swedish Flower rooster, and King Richard.
Special’s laid her egg in the new nest. It’s the smaller egg. Below is her mother, Hazel’s, two-tone egg. She’s done a great job with the shading, going from light to dark. I’m sure one of these days a hen will lay an egg with the Virgin Mary on it. If it happens, I won’t tell a soul. The last thing I want is a line of faithful adorers down the driveway, wanting to venerate the miraculous egg.
-
It’s a Beautiful Morning … But
It’s a beautiful morning, the cherry trees are ecstatic, Special is on her nest, I saw the first swallow of the year, who could possibly be cranky today?
Midge is cranky, that’s who. Pepper is on her nest, never mind that there are empty nests on either side of Pepper, Midge wants that one. It’s the only one that will do. For some time, Midge and Pepper have been laying their eggs in the same nest in the woodshed.
[wpvideo eW5xAhlg]
Midge can work it out with Pepper. They do every day. I’ve got fencing in the woods to repair. It’s a chance to see the first trilliums of the season.
-
You Can’t Have Too Many Tulips
Each year I keep planting more tulips. You can’t have too many tulips, can you? When you have free roaming chickens, you need two to three times as many tulips because they like nibbling on tulips when they start pushing out of the ground. They like nibbling on the blossoms too.
