June 10, Day 40

It is hard to eat with no hands. I first observed this many years ago while watching a snake eat a toad. It was hit and miss at first—the toad was not a willing participant—but when the snake had a good grab on it, it had kept at it, working its jaw around the toad millimeter by millimeter. It was agonizingly slow. The chickens don’t have any trouble with the “crumble,” as the feed is called. These little bits of food don’t need any handling. The greens are another matter. They are most adept at grass. Through several iterations of picking up and dropping, they are pretty good at orienting it so one end is in their mouth. Once the blade is in position, they slurp it down like spaghetti. Broad leaves are another thing entirely. They peck and shake to dislodge the leaflets from the clover and break up the dandelion leaves. It is a lot of work to feed yourself using only your mouth.

Ingrid slurps a blade of grass

Ina eats some clover

Ellie pick lambs quarter from the top of the cage

The entertainment value of giving greens to the chickens has changed the way I pull weeds from the garden. I walk the row first and pull up all the tasty treats before I start in with the hoe. Today I found two enormous lambs quarters growing among the peas. I tied them to the side of the annex, which seemed to help them get the leaves off the stem. In a few hours, the stripped and wilted stems dangled forlornly from the strings.

Jennifer and Ellie graze on lambs quarter from the perches while Bridget forages on the annex floor

The potato experiment is done. The sprouts that I left above ground never did turn green. They sprouted new growth from the base, but otherwise failed to develop.

Original sprout from the pantry, seen in the bottom middle of the picture, never amounted to anything.

The evening primrose I bought in May is blooming now. It blooms in the morning. Go figure.

Evening primrose blooming in the morning

We should be picking peas in a day or two. I’m getting a little panicky that the harvest is starting and I haven’t got my syllabi done for fall yet. I must get into work this week.

Peas approach harvest