every day is a good day
On an early, Thursday morning, it’s time to pick greens for Tweets Café. There’s always time to enjoy the flowers on the way to the salad rows.
The baby kale are perfect for picking today. Light green on top, a soft purple underneath, they will make great salads this weekend.
Chickens are like ground vultures. They will scarf most any corpse they encounter, even a snake. A chicken has found a dead snake and the race is on to find a quiet spot where she can feast on it without being disturbed by the other chickens.
So would a chicken kill a snake? Some chickens do. Chickens are accomplished hunters. If they see something small and moving, they won’t hesitate to nab it with their beak. They can move with astonishing speed. These descendants of dinosaurs are formidable. If you close your eyes when they scream, you can hear a Velociraptor screaming.
Biking to the post office this afternoon I saw that the cows I love were back in the main pasture. After disappearing early this year, I learned that the farmer has cancer and that the cows were at his brother’s place. They returned in June and have been grazing the pasture on the other side of the barn. Today they are back on the main pasture near the road.
I stopped to enjoy them and the calves were curious as to what or who I was. Cows are very aware of their surroundings. You can’t sneak up on a cow. And as peaceful as they seem, cows are very strong and deserve respect. On Monday, a herd of 20 cows in Austria killed a German hiker. Evidently the cows were upset at her dog and rushed her.
Just like a mother hen, a mother cow will do most anything to protect her calves if she feels they are threatened.
Mother hens fluff their feathers when they sense danger. They can appear to be twice their normal size. When they fan out their tail feathers, they look like turkeys. This behavior begins before the chicks are hatched. A sure sign a hen is sitting on eggs to hatch, is when she goes around fluffing her feathers.
The whole brood takes a break when mother takes a dust bath. A chick’s day is punctuated with frequent breaks: dust baths with mom, warm naps in her feathers, lazy time in the sun.
Eggs laid within the hour, sweet tomatoes, fresh chard, all the makings for a summer lunch.
On the way back inside, I spot what I thought was some paper by an apple tree, and it turned out to be a very late blooming iris. Iris and apples, not two things you usually think of together.
The apples are a long way from being ripe, but the summer sun is turning them red.
