a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Author: theMan

  • Fall

    140811-MimosaBloomA

    According to the Japanese calendar, August 7, was 立秋 (risshu) the start of fall this year. We still have warm days ahead of us, but the mornings are starting to feel like fall. The mimosa tree is in full bloom, a sure sign that summer is coming to a close.

    140811-MimosaBloomB

    It’s time to plant fall crops like this purple peacock broccoli.

    140811-PeacockBrocolli

    The white flower beans are blooming well and developing seed pods. It’s odd, but watching the pods grow is exciting. It’s not like clicking through web pages or TV channels with a remote or watching an action movie where every second or two there is an explosion. It’s a quiet excitement that lasts a long time. Every day there is something new to discover.

    140811-GrowingBeanFlowers
    140811-GrowingBeanPods

  • Where Chickens Like to Roam

    Tree

    Chickens are fond of trees. The forest is a favorite place for them to find food and shelter. Can you spot the mother hen and her chicks in the picture below?

    MotherAndChicksInBrush
    ChickensOnABridge

    They also like hanging out on bridges. Maybe they are hoping a frog or field mouse will pass by below that they can nab. They also love vegetable rows, not so much for the greens, but for all the creatures that live in the ground. I added 50 feet of fencing to keep the hen and her chicks out of the fields. I have another 100 feet to go. Digging post holes and hanging fencing is great exercise. Why settle for a thirty minute or an hour workout in a gym when you can tone your muscles all day long building fences?

    CornPatch

  • Museum Quality Eggs

    Eggs140809A

    This morning’s eggs are almost too beautiful to eat. They belong in a museum, maybe in a hands-on exhibit. Let the visitors arrange them in any order they would like, from lightest to darkest, smallest to largest, most random, most beautiful. After each visitor has arranged the eggs to their liking, photograph that arrangement, and at the end of the exhibit, display all the different arrangements the visitors designed. Also have photographs of all the people who arranged the eggs, and let people guess who did which arrangement. Or show photographs of each chicken and give out prizes to those who correctly guess which chicken laid each of the six eggs.

    Eggs140809B

  • On the Road Again

    This mother hen has learned that the way to the potato patch and vegetable fields is through the road. The fields are protected by a six foot high fence from the rest of the property, but there is only a four foot high fence facing the driveway.

    By taking the chicks out into the driveway, she can walk to the potato patch, fly up to the fence and jump down, while her chicks wriggle through the wire fence. So we’re needing to quickly redo the fence between the vegetable fields and the driveway to keep this hen and her chicks out.

    This is one determined mother hen. Once I shoo her out of the vegetable fields, it doesn’t take her long to walk her chicks four hundred feet through the woods around the vegetable fields and back out onto the driveway.

    HenAndChicksOnTheRoadA
    HenAndChicksOnTheRoadB
    HenAndChicksOnTheRoadC

    Chickens love potatoes. They will scratch through the dirt and once they find them, will quickly devour them. Last year we lost many beds of potatoes to the chickens. This year we are keeping them. The vegetables, they don’t eat that much, but they will destroy entire vegetable beds digging for worms and bugs.

    Maybe next year I should just plant potatoes in various places where the chickens roam, so they will leave the potato patch alone.

  • Magenta Spreen

    Magentaspreen

    I planted some Magenta Spreen (chenopodium giganteum) from Uprising Organics and some of it is ready for picking. I added a few sprigs to the salad greens I sold to Tweets Café today. This is how Uprising Organics describes it:

    Very closely related to the common weed lambsquarters, it has a blush of shockingly iridescent magenta coloring around the growing tip and undersides of the leaves. The flavor is very dense and wild (like a mix of spinach and collards) and the plant contains three times the calcium of broccoli by weight. It thrives in summer heat and is indifferent to neglect. Though not nearly as invasive as its weedy relative, it will self sow if not removed before seed set. Pick growing tips and young leaves all season until flowering as a stunning salad highlight. A staple food in the Americas 4000 years ago before corn dominated the diet.

    It can grow to eight feet and is known as tree spinach. Mine are still quite small. It grows to be a bush, so maybe it will make a good hedgerow. It supposedly seeds easily, so I may be able to make a permanent row of it. Other names for it are Purple Goosefoot and Giant Lambsquarters.