Cooking, grinding coffee, washing dishes, all of these things are better with fresh lilac in the kitchen window. It won’t be long before the fragrance of peonies fills the kitchen too. The peony buds are full and on the verge of bursting open.
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Perfume from the Garden
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Wild Cherry Blossoms
Wild cherry trees in bloom comfort my eyes each time I pedal home from an errand. There are wild cherries all through the woods. Somewhere in the mountains is a grove of cherry trees many hundreds of years old. A grove so beautiful when in bloom, that no one who has seen it as ever left the grove. As a result, to this day, no one knows where it is. If you stumble upon it one spring while hiking in the remote Cascades, you will never return either.
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Where’s Skunky This Afternoon?
Skunky’s mother is taking a rest in the grass. I see some of her chicks, but where is Skunky? As you can see, chicks like being next to their mother. They are relaxed and take the time to preen their tiny new wing feathers.
When the mother gets up from her nap, out pops Skunky and more chicks. They were napping under her. She’s wandered off with some of the chicks in tow, but these three are just comfortable enjoying the afternoon sun.
Now Skunky is up and on the move. At two weeks old, Skunky’s wing feathers are nearly complete. Skunky still has the stripe down its back, but its wing feathers are a dusting of white and gray, more owl than skunk.
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Out of the Garden Today – 2015/04/12
I don’t have the heart to cut these tulips. They are too beautiful to take inside, so they really aren’t “Out of the Garden” … they are still very much in the garden.
What did come out of the garden and into the house today were some over wintering kale and one of Cognac’s deep brown eggs. After growing produce for a number of years and watching the chickens hatch and raise a new generation each year, my understanding of what food is has changed. Ninety percent of the food on grocery shelves isn’t food. It’s some sort of edible (edible in the sense that it won’t kill you within hours of eating it) stuff that has been processed so much that it’s impossible to decipher from what plant or animal it came from. It’s not really food. It’s some sort of industrial product we’re told is food.
There’s no substitute for eating living things. Take the kale I picked above. We ate it within ten minutes of picking it out of the garden. The leaves were still respirating when we ate it. It’s the way most of nature eats. Even earthworms feast on living things: fungi, rotifers, nematodes, bacteria, and protozoans. They don’t first kill their food and then run it through industrial processes until it’s unrecognizable. They dig through the earth, sucking in living things and digesting them.
It’a fascinating working in the garden and seeing how alive the soil is. It’s teaming with life: earthworms, spiders, bugs of all sorts, and millions and billions of tiny creatures I can’t see. Good food is alive.
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Love is not Exclusive
Scratching up earthworms and bugs isn’t the only thing mother hens do for their chicks. In the chicken yard, mother hens also pick up feed out of the trays and drop it on the ground for their chicks who are too small to reach the feeding trays. They do this over and over until their little ones are happy. If a kernel is too large, they will break it up for their chicks too.
Where Mom is, so is Skunky. Skunky’s wing feathers are coming in, and it won’t be long before Skunky doesn’t look so skunk like anymore.
With feeding done in the chicken yard, it’s time to head back outdoors where the really good food is. Twenty four hours a day, mother hens shower their chicks with love and care. So do all the wild birds rearing their chicks this time of year. Even if you are in the city, a walk through the park or along a tree lined sidewalk, will take you near mother birds, showering their chicks with love. Love is not exclusive to humans. No wild chick can grow up without love. Even baby mice can’t survive without it.
