every day is a good day
Fall is not only the time for colorful leaves, it’s also the time for great salads. Many greens love the cool weather. Dill is remarkable this time of the year. Arugula’s peppery bite softens and becomes more nutty. Ruby streaks mellow. It’s a treat going out into the garden before meals to see what is perfect to pick.
More young hens are laying eggs now. This afternoon I spotted Yuzu-Hime on a nest. She and her sister have been eying the nests lately. Every few days, I find an egg I don’t recognize in one of the nests. I keep an eye on Yuzu-Hime, and when she flies down from the nest, I see her fresh egg. Now I know what her eggs look like … and so do you.
There is a lot of talk about big data, about companies processing vast quantities of data to do whatever. Big data is nothing new, even to mice and chickens. They all do big data. Each of us has been doing big data forever. Our brains handle vast amounts of data. An average person has 100 billion neurons, each of which is connected to a thousand or more neurons, all sending data back and forth. There is a constant stream of data flowing through our neurons, processing gigabytes of information all the time.
In every cell of our body, there is a copy of our entire genome, over 3 billion base pairs of information, about a third of a gigabyte of date. We have between 10 and 100 trillion cells in our body, so we have anywhere from 3.5 to 35 trillion gigabytes of data just in all the copies of our genome in our body. Our bodies do big data very well.
It makes my use of these wireless sensor tags seem like very small data, insignificant data. They’re still a lot of fun. They’re what I’ve been looking for. I’ve wanted to know at any time, how hot is the compost pile? What’s the temperature in the hoop house? What’s the temperature in the garden?
These wireless sensor tags work with a tag manager you put on your home network. A single tag manager can monitor up to 255 tags. The tags are not waterproof, so you need to protect them if you’re going to use them where they might get wet. They’ll work from hundreds of feet away.
I have them hanging in the hoop houses, in a pipe inside the compost pile, in the chicken yard, and elsewhere. Every five minutes, they send the current temperature and humidity wirelessly. You can have them send this information from every 30 seconds to up to once every 4 hours.
You can monitor the tags from your computer, your cell phone, or your iPad. You can also graph the temperature and humidity over time. And you can get notifications if the temperature gets out of a specified range. For example, in my compost piles, I need to know when the temperature gets up to 170ºF. Compost piles that hot are going anaerobic and need to be turned. Whenever my piles get to 170ºF, I’ll get an email so I can attend to them immediately. It’s small, but very helpful data.
It’s a crisp fall morning, mist rising off the cold ground. In the woods, fall’s beauty lies gently on soft blankets of moss. There’s so much wonder hidden in the woods, that you best forget about looking at the time. Some leaves fall on the ground. Others have the good fortune of landing on a cushion of soft moss. There is so much beauty in every square foot of woodland. And when you think about it, most of the beauty in a forest is never seen by any human. It’s just for the birds, the foxes, the rodents, and smaller creatures to enjoy.
Kindling is a necessity this time of year. Maybe not for you, but for me it is. Quite a few years ago, my husband gave me this handy Swedish design log splitter. It’s called a Smart-Splitter and makes splitting logs into kindling a breeze.
Axes are good for splitting rounds into firewood. But when it comes to splitting firewood into slender pieces of kindling, the Smart-Splitter works even better. The blade rides a fixed post, so you can set the blade exactly where you want it, and when you drop the weight which falls onto the blade, it splits the log in two. It’s a failsafe way to split smaller and smaller pieces of wood in two. It doesn’t take long to make a bundle of kindling to start fires.
Seeing Hazel with her whole brood this afternoon was a pleasant surprise. With some hens, the break with their children is immediate. One minute they are sweet mother hen, “Here’s a plump worm children.” The next minute they are, “You’re off on your own – shoo!”
Other hens are like Hazel, spending less and less time with them each day, but still there when the children need some reassuring. Sort of like people, some chicks grow up with stern mothers, others with gentle ones. There are the no nonsense, “Children! Stay within eyesight at all times!” mothers, and the carefree ones who let their children do most anything they want, with every parenting style in between.
I never would have thought mother hens have so many different parenting styles. You certainly don’t read books detailing the parenting styles of mother hens, though if one were to write a serious one, it would easily require hundreds of pages. Add illustrations, studies on how childhood experiences influence parenting styles, the effect of this and that, the roles mother hens play in the success of roosters, et cetera, et cetera, and you’re talking about a thousand pages or more, perhaps even a few volumes. Now that would be a find in a library: three to five, leather bound, hefty volumes, an exhaustive treatise on how mother hens raise their children, with a companion compendium on evolutionary similarities between human and chicken child rearing.
