a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

  • Nothing Is Like Anything Else

    Blackberries

    No two snowflakes are the same. We’ve heard that a million times. Neither are any two blackberries. Each one is like no other blackberry. All you need to do is look at them closely. Hold them side by side and there they are, two unique blackberries. No matter how many blackberries you pick, you can never pick the same one twice.

    DifferentEggsA
    DifferentEggsB

    It’s the same with eggs. You can never have the same egg twice. Or the same lovage seed, and a single lovage plant produces thousands and thousands of seeds. It must be a lot of work making sure no two are ever the same.

    LovageSeeds
    MelonBlossomsA

    Or the same melon flower. Each flower blooms only once. All the things we see, all the clouds that flow overhead, all the birds that sing for us, we never see the same thing twice. Nothing is like anything else.

    MelonBlossomsB

  • Woodpecker Chick

    HazelAndClownA

    What name do I give this chick? One of Hazel’s chicks has a woodpecker face. It has a featherless neck like Hazel, a Turken chicken. These naked neck Turkens are from Transylvania. This little chick’s biological mother is Special, Hazel’s daughter. Special is a cross between Hazel and Sven, a Swedish Flower Chicken.

    HazelAndClownB

  • Out of the Woods

    OutOfTheWoodsA

    Ungetsu-hime 雲月姫 brought her chicks out of the woods today. Like many a parent, she’s too proud of them to squirrel them away in the woods. It’s like she’s flaunting them. This one will be a doctor, this one a lawyer, this one a …

    I will be curious where she takes them tonight to bed down. Will she take them back into the woods or find a spot in the chicken yard? There are already three hens with chicks bedding in adjoining nests in one quiet corner of the chicken coop. Somehow they manage to keep their chicks apart. When two hens with clutches get too close and their clutches intermingle, it’s like watching soccer moms trying to corral their tots. Chaos. It’s best to go inside and have a beer or a glass of wine. The mother hens get it all sorted out in the end. There’s no point getting my nerves frayed. Mother hens know best.

    OutOfTheWoodsB

  • Hazel Shows Her Chicks Beauty

    HazelInTheFlowersA

    Yesterday Hazel took her chicks out for the first time. Out and about she took them. Down the path and through the mint and bachelor buttons, to all the places beautiful she took them. This is why chicks need a mother, someone to show them the beautiful places.

    Can you find Hazel’s face in the last picture?

    HazelInTheFlowersB
    HazelInTheFlowersC
    HazelInTheFlowersD
    HazelInTheFlowersE

  • A Surprise Every Day

    UngetsuHimeAndChicksB

    I was heading out the gate on my bicycle to pedal down to the post office when I heard baby chicks chirping in the woods. When I went to check if they were in trouble, I found Ungetsu-hime with a brood of one or two day old chicks. I didn’t even know she was sitting on eggs. What a surprise.

    UngetsuHimeAndChicksA
    UngetsuHimeAndNestA

    And this is the nest where she hatched her six chicks, a fairy tale nest inside a tree stump with a thick roof of moss and dried ferns. You can see three unhatched eggs near the bottom in the middle of the picture. Below is a closeup of the nest. How many chicks get to be hatched in the woods? These chicks could be the first generation of the wild forest chickens of Bow Hill. If some decades from now you read in Nature or National Geographic about the elusive, mysterious Bow Hill forest fowl, you will know that Ungetsu-hime is the mother of them all.

    UngetsuHimeAndNestB