a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

  • Eggs in December

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    Eggs in December. These days, no one ever thinks how odd that is. Before electric lights, eggs in December were like tomatoes in December. Stop any one in the street and ask, “Are eggs a seasonal food like fruits and vegetables?” The idea that eggs are seasonal sounds absurd. No matter what time of year you go to a supermarket, you will see carton after carton of eggs.

    Yet, egg laying hens are sensitive to the amount of daylight. As the days shorten in late summer and fall, their egg production drops. In December and January, the hens here lay only a sixth to a fifth of the eggs they do in spring and summer. The number of eggs the hens lay starts to increase in February, and by March, they really go into overdrive.

    The way the large egg producers keep egg production up year round, is by keeping laying hens bathed in artificial light. They also don’t keep laying hens very long, from 18 to 24 months. Then the hens are done with. A hen is born with all the eggs she will ever produce. You can either get her to lay all those eggs as quickly as possible using artificial light, or let her take her time laying her eggs over a longer period of time.

    Which makes you wonder how it is that year round, we are able to buy most any type of produce in supermarkets. None of it comes out of thin air. Someone has to plant it, tend to it, and pick it. Here is an interesting article as to how much of the fresh produce in our stores is produced: Hardship on Mexico’s farms, a bounty for U.S. tables

  • Slow Food – Dinner Eight Months in the Making

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    It takes a long time to make a sumptuous winter dinner. After growing slowly for eight months, the end has come for this rooster. Yes, it’s sad, but he did have a wonderful childhood, raised by a mother who cared for him. He spent a summer running around with his siblings, dashing through flower beds, chasing each other around the pond, playing hide and seek in the brush. And this fall, when he matured, he had plenty of romance.

    But, I can only keep a select number of roosters, and this one did not make the cut. He was too aggressive with the hens and other roosters. The roosters that get to stay must have better manners and treat the hens with more care.

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    So into a covered pot he goes, salted, and dusted with crushed pepper and allspice, and laid to rest on a bed of rosemary.

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    After four hours in a 200ºF oven, covered, and 15 minutes uncovered under the broiler, he’s nearly ready for dinner. All he needs to do now, is rest ten or twenty minutes before carving.

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    And finally, a simple feast, great for a December night.

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  • A Late Winter Afternoon

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    Late afternoons are special times for the chickens. As the sun sets, and shadows stretch to the edge of the lawn, the roosters and hens make their last rounds before heading to their roosts. They find things to eat, court, and enjoy the last rays of the sun.

    The yellow rooster is Billy, the five year old rooster who is the progenitor of many of the chickens here. He no longer rules the roost, but he’s made his peace with the rest of the roosters, and seems to enjoy retirement. This spring he was looking pretty ragged and walking with a limp, but he recovered over the summer, and is well on his way to growing back his tail feathers.

    A typical rooster lives from five to eight years, so for a rooster he is a senior bird.

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  • Made for Running

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    Feathers hide the truth that roosters are made for running. These are birds that run much of the day. Most of the time, they are running after hens. And when there are too many roosters, it’s time to remove the more aggressive ones.

    Some days when I go out, the hens look into my eyes and tell me which roosters they want me to sell or eat. I’ll do anything for the hens.

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    The legs on these roosters are amazing. Look at the size of the feet. It’s no wonder these birds can tear across the grass at blinding speed. Due to all the exercise they get, the older roosters have meat as red as beef on their legs and thighs.

  • Phantom Dogs, Dried Leaves and Herring

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    The late afternoon sun likes to play tricks. Against the side of the house is the shadow of a strange dog … which turns out to just be the shadow of a rock.

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    The golden sunlight turns a wheelbarrow of leaves into a pile of gold. The leaves are actually worth more than gold. You can’t eat gold, but the leaves will turn into rich soil which will nourish a field of carrots and beans and kale, which in turn will feed us.

    A calamity many organic farmers in the Fukushima area experienced after the nuclear meltdown, was the radioactive contamination of the forests. They relied on the fallen leaves of the forest to help nourish their fields. The government could decontaminate their dwellings and their fields, but no one knew how to decontaminate entire forests, and so the farmers lost an important source of nutrients for their crops.

    We humans keep building these incredible, fantastic, complicated mechanisms like nuclear power plants, but when they go poof! we have no idea how to undo the unimaginable harm they cause. There will be towns around the Fukushima nuclear power plants that people will never live in again.

    It is like the destruction of the Herring fishery in Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez ran aground. Twenty-five years have passed since that manmade calamity, and the herring have still yet to recover. There never seems to be any adequate accounting or compensation or meaningful punishment for those who bring such devastation to an ecosystem, because it keeps happening again and again. 600,000 to 800,000 birds died due to the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. All the money in the world can’t make up for such enormous devastation.

    In the case of the Exxon Valdez disaster, a fitting punishment would have been to make the CEO and board members of Exxon eke out a living by fishing for herring in a sound with no herring. Only after twenty-five years would they have begun to comprehend a fraction of the harm their greed and decisions wrought.