a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

  • On the Road Again

    This mother hen has learned that the way to the potato patch and vegetable fields is through the road. The fields are protected by a six foot high fence from the rest of the property, but there is only a four foot high fence facing the driveway.

    By taking the chicks out into the driveway, she can walk to the potato patch, fly up to the fence and jump down, while her chicks wriggle through the wire fence. So we’re needing to quickly redo the fence between the vegetable fields and the driveway to keep this hen and her chicks out.

    This is one determined mother hen. Once I shoo her out of the vegetable fields, it doesn’t take her long to walk her chicks four hundred feet through the woods around the vegetable fields and back out onto the driveway.

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    Chickens love potatoes. They will scratch through the dirt and once they find them, will quickly devour them. Last year we lost many beds of potatoes to the chickens. This year we are keeping them. The vegetables, they don’t eat that much, but they will destroy entire vegetable beds digging for worms and bugs.

    Maybe next year I should just plant potatoes in various places where the chickens roam, so they will leave the potato patch alone.

  • Magenta Spreen

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    I planted some Magenta Spreen (chenopodium giganteum) from Uprising Organics and some of it is ready for picking. I added a few sprigs to the salad greens I sold to Tweets Café today. This is how Uprising Organics describes it:

    Very closely related to the common weed lambsquarters, it has a blush of shockingly iridescent magenta coloring around the growing tip and undersides of the leaves. The flavor is very dense and wild (like a mix of spinach and collards) and the plant contains three times the calcium of broccoli by weight. It thrives in summer heat and is indifferent to neglect. Though not nearly as invasive as its weedy relative, it will self sow if not removed before seed set. Pick growing tips and young leaves all season until flowering as a stunning salad highlight. A staple food in the Americas 4000 years ago before corn dominated the diet.

    It can grow to eight feet and is known as tree spinach. Mine are still quite small. It grows to be a bush, so maybe it will make a good hedgerow. It supposedly seeds easily, so I may be able to make a permanent row of it. Other names for it are Purple Goosefoot and Giant Lambsquarters.

  • Supper Is Served – Very Slowly

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    Slow food, we read about it often. This is what slow food looks like. First it takes five to six months for the rooster to grow. You won’t find chicken like this in any store. As this is a bird which spent every day of its life outdoors, running around and exercising, it needs to be cooked slowly … very slowly … at a low temperature. 225ºF (105ºC) is a good temperature. After five hours, it will be so tender the meat will fall off the bones.

    Take your time enjoying it.

    It’s odd how so many people are in such a rush. Running around faster won’t bring them any closer to being happy. A restaurant chain in Florida is guaranteeing to fill your order in 60 seconds. That’s all the time people can wait for their meal to be served. Eating is not a race.

  • A Mother and Her 12 Day Old Chicks

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    There is nothing a mother hen won’t do for her chicks. While she takes them around, they are in constant communication with each other. Her chicks chirp often, letting her know where they are and what they are feeling. She talks to them all day long, warning them when there is danger, and telling them when she finds something good to eat. And at the end of a long day, she provides a safe place for them to sleep under her feathers.

    While they were developing in their eggs, they heard her heartbeat all day long. At night, when they sleep under her warm body, they sleep listening to her heartbeat too.

    I often hear people say that chickens are so stupid. Maybe the reason they seem stupid is that people are trying to raise them in environments they aren’t designed for. Give them plenty of space to roam, interesting things to do, the opportunity to mate, for hens to hatch and rear their young, and you get to see how complex and wonderful these birds are.

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  • Thousands? Why Not Millions, or Billions?

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    Biking to the post office this afternoon, I noticed that a row of thistles had gone to seed. Just a week ago, they were in full bloom with lovely purple flowers. “I should stop and take some pictures,” I thought back then. But today when I went past them, they had turned into ghostly forms, as if overnight, a million spiders had spun webs all over them.

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    When it comes to procreation, nature is prolific to a fault. Why stop at a thousand seeds? Might as well make a million or even a billion seeds.