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Author: theMan
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Babies in the Rain
For the first time in their lives, baby kohlrabi are getting a soft shower of rain drops. What do they think of the rain? Does it taste better than the well water I use to water them? A few more weeks, and the baby kohlrabi will grow up and be ready for market. Isn’t odd that you never hear about humanely grown vegetables? You can get someone to certify that you have raised your chicken, pigs, and cows humanely, though those certification standards are abysmally low. How about humanely grown produce? What would that mean to a kohlrabi? Having soil free of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides? A biologically rich environment? Rich soil full of earthworms wriggling around your roots to keep them aerated and fertilized? No heavy tractors rolling through the fields, compacting the soil and terrorizing the inhabitants? A quiet field so you can hear the songbirds? Clean air flowing through your leaves?
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Things Never Die
A number of years ago, a dead cottonwood fell over in a windstorm. It’s now home to a thick bed of moss and brilliant yellow something. They have years and years of food in that cottonwood trunk. No worries for them. As long as there is enough moisture, they won’t go hungry.
I’m outdoors much of the day, and it seems that most things in nature never work. I saw Hazel taking her chicks around the pond, through the woods, and out by the compost bin. No matter where she took the chicks, there was something for her and the chicks to eat. I never once saw her working, earning money, and paying someone for the food she found for her chicks.
It’s the same with the trees and bushes and grass. None of them are working. They lift their leaves toward the sun, and at no cost to them, absorb the energy they need that is streamed, free of charge, to them from 93 million miles away. They don’t pay anyone for the rain or the wind that blows through their leaves. How many trees and plants and animals would exist if they had to live in an economy where they had to work and pay for everything they needed?
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One Thing Leads to Another
We’ve been here more than ten years now so I’ve looked at this circle of beech trees many times. This morning I saw a cedar had sprouted between two of the trees. Trying to take a photo of the cedar sapling, I looked inside the circle of beech trees for the first time. Ten years here and I’d never done that before. Wow! Instant art. Wonderful, delightful things are everywhere. All you have to do is look.
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To Catch a Dragonfly
The quality of these photos aren’t good, but they do give a sense of what happened. I found Hazel foraging with her chicks, except one was missing. It wasn’t too far away and peeping. I wondered why it wasn’t joining the rest. On investigating, I saw the chick had caught a dragonfly and was trying to eat it. The dragonfly was too big to swallow but the chick was not about to let it go. It didn’t want to join its siblings because if they saw it had a big dragonfly in its beak, they would want to eat it too. How many chicks ever get to catch a dragonfly?
Hazel came over to check on her chick and when the other chicks followed their mother and discovered the missing chick had a big dragonfly in its mouth, they wanted it too. The chick ran off into the bushes and managed to get the dragonfly down its throat before joining Hazel and the others on their foraging adventure.
Little chicks thrive on adventure. They need adventure almost as much as they need love. Hazel’s chicks are 18 days old. Like exuberant children, they can be a handful for her to watch.
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Signs of Late Summer
It’s late summer when plump blackberries dangle in numbers beyond infinity. It’s late summer when you’ve eaten so many blackberries you can’t eat another one.
It’s late summer when the anemones are dancing. Anemone comes from Greek and means “daughter of the wind”, a fitting name for a flower which dances with the slightest breeze.
