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Author: theMan
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Deep in the Woods
Mother hens have a field day when I clear brush along a drainage ditch to prepare for the winter rains. The brush and fallen leaves are so thick, you can’t see their little chicks digging for things to eat in the moist ditch. Chickens love spending much of their day in the woods.
The leaves are turning more each day. It is all the leaves which make the forest a paradise for chickens. The leaves blanket the forest floor when they fall, making a feast for the worms and bugs the chickens savor.
How much time do the chickens which provide the eggs you buy get to spend in the forest? Did the chicken you buy get to walk through a forest to look for tasty grubs to eat?
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Real Food is not Industry
Looking at the food coming out of the garden, I wonder how we ever came up with the idea that food can be industrialized. I wonder about it when I cut open a cabbage I just picked. It is so different than any cabbage I find in the stores, even the local co-op. Store potatoes don’t have the deep flavor that the potatoes I dig out of the ground have.
Perhaps it’s that to have a cabbage that can endure going through the food industry, from growing in a field with thousands if not millions of other cabbages, to being picked quickly, industrial processes demand efficiency so industrial cabbages need to be picked as speedily as possible, packed, shipped through warehouses, trucked to stores, and stacked on shelves; such cabbages need to be tough and endurable.
Cabbage varieties that don’t go through the food industry can be sweet and delicate. Eating cabbage picked moments ago is sweet, crisp, and full of love. Real food can’t be industrialized, just like a parent’s love can’t be canned and sold on the shelf.
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Our Green Whale
A blue whale is 30 meters, 98 feet, long. The green whale in the southwest corner of our property is longer than that, 31 meters, 103 feet, from where it was cut to the tip of the longest branch. Add the height of the stump, the upper branches which broke off when the tree fell, and the roots below ground, and the green whale resting in the corner of our property is a giant compared to the magnificent blue whales, a giant no Greenpeace film crew will ever want to document.
At one time, these branches were a hundred feet in the sky, where they waved in the wind and rested the feet of many a weary bird.
The green whale is now the home to a myriad of green plants, this fern included. They are to fallen trees what barnacles are to blue whales. Only beached trees don’t rub their skin on gravelly ocean floors to remove their green barnacles.
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Sloooooow Food
My fingers are tingling. The long wait is over. How did it turn out? Is it edible? I’ve been waiting since July 2014 to see how my last batch of miso turned out. Two summers ago, I filled a crock with mashed, cooked soybeans, salt and an inoculation of aspergillus oryzae fungus, and set it on a windowsill to ferment through the summer, winter, and a second summer.
The weight and lid are off. The miso under the seal looks tempting. I peel the seal off and taste. Fantastic. Slow food at its best. This is real home cooking. After several successful attempts at making miso, I’m prepared to make multiple batches, try different combinations of soybeans and grains, and wait, and wait, and wait.
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On a Crescent Moon
It’s a sliver of a crescent moon which lights the morning sky today. On today’s list of things to do is to stack firewood in the woodshed. All summer long it has been drying in the sunshine. It’s time to bring it in under roof.
It doesn’t take long for the chickens to notice what I’m doing. As the stacks of wood outdoors clear, and the stacks of wood in the woodshed grow, the chickens spot the bugs, spiders, and worms thriving at the bottom of the wood piles.
Hens, roosters, and mothers with chicks come running to enjoy a feast. Chickens are very observant, curious creatures. They know that if I’m doing something, there is a good chance I may be stirring up the dirt. They will come by to check, and if one finds something good to eat, the others will come.
At the end of a long day, Tangerine is herding her chicks towards their nest in the chicken yard. She had them out at the crack of dawn and over to the pile of wood for a hearty breakfast. After a full day of foraging she is ready for bed, but the little chicks aren’t quite ready. They want one last run through the grass.
