a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

  • Egg Day – May 15

    Today is Thursday, Egg Day here at a man and his hoe®. Time to pedal this week’s eggs down to Tweets Café in Edison. The subtle variety in the eggs the hens lay always impresses. You never get the idea from supermarket eggs that chicken eggs come in such a riot of shapes, sizes and colors. The relentless push to sort and standardize gives people the impression that chicken eggs are all the same, and that they only come in three sizes: small, medium, large. And that they only come in two colors: white or brown.

    Reality is far more interesting than that. Not only is there a vast variety of sizes, shapes, and colors, each hen lays a slightly different egg every time. They are never identical. It almost makes you believe that they scheme about what kind of egg they want to lay the next day. The really radical hens have figured out how to squeeze two yolks inside a gigantic egg, or do they lay a double egg when they feel really lucky or are hopelessly in love?

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  • Fresh, Fresh, Fresh

    FreshPickedGreens
    A tub of greens picked this morning, headed for Tweets Café this afternoon, along with dozens of fresh eggs.

  • Harvard Study Linking Bee Colony Collapse Disorder to Neonicotinoid Pesticides

    In this article of the Bulletin of Insectology, Chensheng Lu, Associate Professor of Environmental Exposure Biology at Harvard, describes a study he conducted testing the effect of neonicotinoid pesticides on bee colonies.

    In the study, they compared bee colonies which were given exposure to neonicotinoid pesticides to bee colonies which were not exposed. The study started in July and after a winter, the colonies treated with neonicotinoid pesticides had significant colony collapse disorder, while the non-treated colonies did not.

    Upon close examination of colonies in early April 2013, we found that the majority of bees in all neonicotinoid-treated colonies, regardless of whether they survived or not, had abandoned their hives during the course of winter. However, we observed a complete opposite phenomenon in the control colonies in which instead of abandonment, hives were repopulated quickly with new emerging bees.

    Neonicotinoids are banned in Europe. Hopefully, with more studies like this, showing the dangers of these pesticides, they will be banner in the US as well.

  • In Thick Brush

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    Mother hens spend a lot of time with their chicks in thick brush. The brush provides cover from predators and their is a cornucopia of good bugs and worms to eat in the forest floor. Chickens evolved from jungle fowl, and they need to spend a good portion of their day hunting in thick brush and forest.

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  • Berries You Can’t Buy

    Driveway

    The peaceful walk down the driveway early this morning belies the reason I was walking through the woods. The dogs had caught an opossum in the wee hours of the morning. It wasn’t dead. It was lying on the asphalt looking very dead. A number of years ago, when the dogs caught one, I went outside to bury it. The dogs had lost interest in the carcass and were off by the pond. I went to get a shovel to bury it, and when I turned to go back to the opossum, it was wandering off into the woods.

    This morning, I put the opossum in a box and took it deep into the woods and let it go. They are very resilient creatures, able to endure being dragged around by dogs. This is life in nature. Everything is eating everything else. No matter what you are, you are on somebody’s menu. While cutting tall grass this morning, the mosquitos reminded me I was on their breakfast menu.

    SalmonBerryStage

    Speaking of menus, the purple salmon berry blossoms of April have turned into berries. Another month or so, and they will be delicious tart snacks to enjoy on a sunny afternoon while toiling outside.

    The thimble berries are in full bloom. Of all the berries here, they are my favorite. They are too delicate to appear in grocery stores. When they ripen, they are good for just a day or two. Many of the best foods never make it to store shelves. You need to grow them yourself, which is why cities need to be laced with community gardens, so that even people living in cities can enjoy delicate treats like thimble berries.

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