a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

  • On the Board Today

    Rooster140509
    On the board today is a young rooster, born in December. When you raise heritage breeds of chickens on open pasture and woodland, each bird is unique. It takes nearly a half a year for these birds to get to butchering size. A truly great rooster takes a full year to raise.

    Each bird has a long story. A rich childhood with its mother and siblings. A period of young adulthood shared with its siblings, followed by a more independent adulthood, with plenty of opportunities to explore chicken love.

    Modern factory farming is all about denying birds their uniqueness. It is about cutting expenditures to the bone and producing as much meat as possible and making everything the same. It makes fast food possible with its buckets of inexpensive fried chicken. Cheap food demands cheap wages which demands even cheaper food in a never ending cycle of ever decreasing quality and satisfaction. In the end it leaves us all poorer.

    It deprives us of experiencing the richness of a hearty meal of slow-roasted fowl. Try finding a year old fowl to enjoy in your supermarket or butcher. I’ll be roasting this bird today at 190ºF. Come back this evening to see how it turns out.

  • Waiting for Mother

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    These six week old chicks are resting while their mother is off laying an egg. At six weeks, they are still tiny, and yet some commercial breeds are large enough to butcher by the time they are six weeks old. It will take these chicks all summer to get that large.

  • Personality

    ToraHime

    Tora-hime is one of my favorite hens. She has such piercing eyes and beautiful feathers. It’s always easy to spot her when she is on a nest.

    CurledBarkThe bark I stripped off the alder trunks when I made posts dried and curled into these beautiful shapes. These strips of bark were flat when I peeled them off the alder trunks. In the sun, they turned red and curled.

    A little sanding, trimming, and waxing could turn these into interesting dishes for appetizers, chopstick holders, or flower vases.
    StellarJayNest

    Everyday there are surprises waiting to be discovered. This is an abandoned Stellar Jay’s nest. And below are the flowers of a barberry bush.

    Barberry

  • Chickens in the Blueberry Patch

    On a sunny day when the peonies are blooming, it’s time to weed the blueberry patch.

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    20140507A-blueberryflowers

    This year, the blueberries are loaded with flowers. Weeding, hoeing, and digging quickly draws a gang of chickens eager to help. I didn’t even realize Lucky was trying to tell me something until I looked at the photos I had taken.

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    Billy stands guard, making sure the hens are safe.

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    The hens do a thorough job stirring up the dirt. They are after earthworms and bugs, but do a great job aerating the top few inches of soil. They will destroy anything you’ve planted, so they are of no help when you are trying to seed a vegetable bed.

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    It’s impossible to be bored when there are chickens and chicks around. Spending fifteen minutes with a hen and her chicks beats following Twitter feeds or looking at Facebook.

    20140507D-henwithchicks

  • Bees

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    All it takes is a little sunshine and the bees are out in force. There are thousands of wild bees here. On sunny days, the rosemary, mint, oregano, lavender and other herbs are buzzing with them.

    There are 200 species of bees in this area, some 4,000 species in North America, and nearly 20,000 species of bees worldwide.

    According to Lisa Arkin, director for Beyond Toxic, “Without bees we would lose a third of the food that comes to our tables every day.”

    If you look closely, you can see one of the mother hens in the background.

    A Diversity of Bees Is Good for Farming—And Farmers’ Wallets ~ Smithsonian