If you look around, nature often has what you need. What I need are some 10 foot posts to fence off a vegetable plot to keep the chickens out. I could go to a lumber yard and pick out some posts, but there are many young tree that need to be thinned out. They’re not perfectly straight, but they will make a distinctive looking fence that will be unique. I’ve left some of the branches to have handy hooks for hanging things.
For fun: to get red hands, strip the bark by hand.
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Posts – Nature’s Gift
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Transformation – or Where Did the Cherry Blossoms Go?
What is this? It’s what cherry blossoms become. All those beautiful blossoms which drifted down, covering the ground like fresh snow. Now they will slowly decompose into the garden and turn into other flowers and vegetables. They don’t look like much now, but what is amazing about them is that much of their matter came out of thin air. Plants have this incredible ability to eat the air. Through photosynthesis, they can trap the carbon molecules in the air, and turn that carbon into stems, leaves and flowers. Like magic, plants can take what is invisible and turn it into exquisite things of beauty, and eventually into rich matter that nourishes all of us. Some of this matter will even end up being chicken and eggs and vegetables, and eventually us. Then as we breathe, we exhale carbon dioxide and at some point, the plants will eat that carbon dioxide, extract the carbon, and the whole cycle continues round and round.
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The Importance of Siblings
Next to a mother, siblings are the most important relationships young chickens have. When you go shopping for chicken and eggs, the fact that chickens develop such relationships probably doesn’t cross your mind. But chicks which are raised by their mother, develop strong attachment to their brothers and sisters. So, when their mother leaves them on their own, the siblings stick together. They roost together and roam together.
As they age, their sibling relationships get more complicated. The males and female chicks start to separate, with the males hanging out together, and the females sticking together. It’s only possible for chickens to have these sibling attachments where they are raised by their mothers and have plenty of space to be themselves.
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An Afternoon by the Pond – Chickens in Paradise
Producing food is all about encouraging life. All kinds of life. And life is beauty, so in a way, producing food is about beauty.
So do you think the chicken you buy, or the hens who lay the eggs you eat, ever get to take a stroll by a pond on a sunny spring day?
Do you think they ever get to walk along the shore of a pond and dig for things to eat in the mud by the pond? Maybe that should be a requirement for humanely grown chicken, that they have the freedom to go digging for food on the shores of a pond. How close to nature do you want your chickens and egg layers to live? Or has this inconsequential chicken farmer gone mad?
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Dinosaur Descendants
Scientists since 1870 have speculated that birds descended from dinosaurs. In the Smithsonian Magazine article Dinosaurs’ Living Descendants, Richard Stone writes that there was a lack of evidence until a poor Chinese farmer discovered a fossilized skeleton with a birdlike skull, a long tail and impressions of feather-like structures. This discovery of bird-like dinosaurs helped paleontologists fill in blanks in the fossil record, and have convinced many, that birds descended from dinosaurs.
Which makes me wonder if these dinosaurs were as beautiful as some of the chickens here. The feathers have so many subtle colors, and some have wild patterns that dazzle the eye
- Origin of Birds – Wikipedia
- Birds: The Late Evolution of Dinosaurs – Natural History Museum of Los Angeles
- The Life of Birds: Evolution – PBS
- Birds and dinosaurs – one of the great fossil connections – The Guardian
- ScienceShot: When Did Feathered Dinosaurs Become Birds? – Sciencemag.org