every day is a good day
Not exactly helpful, but BB likes to plop his butt on freshly prepared vegetable beds. It never hurts to have a good laugh during the day. A dog like BB provides plenty of laughs during the day. You need a dog to keep the coyotes and eagles away, to chase away the deer, and let you know when someone is coming up the driveway. Most of all, you need a dog to make you laugh and realize how wonderful life is.
It’s a cool, blustery, wet day … a perfect day if you are a swan. The muddier it is, the more they like it. All winter long, the swans root through fields, finding food to eat. It makes me wonder where the swans ate before the valley forest was logged and made into fields. According to the Trumpeter Swan Society:
Adult swans eat aquatic vegetation, including the leaves, seeds, and roots of many types of pond weeds. In captivity, swans will eat corn and other grains provided. Wild swans have also adapted to field feeding, eating left over grains and vegetables that have been harvested by farmers.
So around here, they must have congregated along the mouths and banks of the Skagit river, eating there. They aren’t birds to waddle through forests.
For the young gray ones, the cygnets, this is their first trip south of the arctic. They have come with their parents, and will fly back north in the spring with them. Sometime during the summer, their parents will drive them away so they can hatch and raise a new brood. The young swans will stay together in sibling groups until they mature and start families of their own.
The beautiful pink carnations of summer are dried and don’t look like much. But inside their dried flowers are seed pods with the tiniest of seeds. Carnations have been cultivated for thousands of years. You can propagate them from seed, from cuttings, or by dividing them.
It’s always amazing to watch plants grow from such tiny seeds. Looking at these carnation seeds which look like cracked pepper, it’s hard to imagine that under the right conditions, by mid summer they could become hundreds of beautiful, fragrant carnations.
The bed of saffron I planted at the beginning of October is already blooming. I wasn’t expecting any blossoms until next fall. The three crimson stigmas are brilliant. A number of other saffron are setting flower buds, so I may be able to collect enough saffron to use early next year.
Initially, I was thinking of plucking these stigmas to flavor something this evening, but then I read that saffron stigmas have no flavor when they are picked fresh. They need to dry for two months before they get their full flavor.
“Mom digs, we eat” it’s a basic rule little chicks live by. And whatever she digs up, they will gobble down. I’ve seen chicks swallow earthworms as long as they are. Imagine a baby slurping down a two foot long snake. The entire time they are pecking through the dirt Mom digs up, the little ones are chirping away. The need to say something isn’t unique to humans. Keep your ears open and you’ll hear all kinds of animals speaking their mind. If they all had Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat accounts, would they crash the internet?
With their heads poking around in the dirt much of the time, what you see of little chicks most of the time are their fuzzy little butts. It’s a good opportunity to see if any have pasty butt. It can be a problem with chicks from hatcheries. Occasionally a dropping will get stuck on their vent holes and clog them up; chicken constipation if you will. It can be fatal on a little chick. I’ve only seen it a few times on the chicks hatched by hens. Fortunately, it’s very easy to treat with a little warm water and gentle washing.
