{"id":6107,"date":"2014-07-11T22:13:19","date_gmt":"2014-07-12T03:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/?p=6107"},"modified":"2014-07-11T22:16:01","modified_gmt":"2014-07-12T03:16:01","slug":"strange-but-true-chickens-chasing-fireflies-and-pumpkins-in-the-piggery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/2014\/07\/strange-but-true-chickens-chasing-fireflies-and-pumpkins-in-the-piggery\/","title":{"rendered":"Strange but True — Chickens Chasing Fireflies and Pumpkins in the Piggery"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DSC_6695\"<\/a>Funny, strange, unexpected things seem to be happening a lot on the farm these days. Never a dull moment, as my father likes to say.<\/p>\n

We found a birds\u2019 nest in a tomato plant yesterday. (Four beautiful eggs; Mommy is a fox sparrow.) Farmer found (another) nest of baby bunnies (six of them) in between two rows of onions last week. Then yesterday, he unearthed a pack of snails under a cosmo plant. That\u2019s in addition to the robin\u2019s nest he found a month ago with newly hatched baby birds in it.<\/p>\n

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There is a frog living in the pea patch.<\/p>\n

At night, two owls talk to each other at opposite ends of the farm. The sound is loud and disconcerting and space-alienish, especially with a full moon on a misty night (like the one we had tonight, above).<\/p>\n

There is a group of hens who won\u2019t go into their coops at night, because\u2014get this\u2014they\u2019re having too much fun chasing fire flies. Roy did an imitation of them the other night after trying to corral them, and I was in stitches. Apparently the hens get really confused and practically fall over each other dancing around after the flickering lights.<\/p>\n

The ducks\u2014and the Aracaunas\u2014are taking turns sitting on a nest of duck eggs. (We have one male duck, so ducklings are, theoretically, a possibility. A couple of the Aracaunas like to brood on their blue eggs constantly, but little do they know, with no rooster, there will never be any baby chicks.)<\/p>\n

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All over the farm, plants are growing where they weren\u2019t planted. We have two\u00a0 really healthy pumpkin vines in the old piggery. Poppies and tomatoes in practically every garden bed. (We moved a volunteer tomato into Libby\u2019s garden, and it has the first ripening Sweet 100). An entire row of sunflowers and calendula we didn’t plant. There is dill in the chard bed. And cilantro absolutely everywhere.<\/p>\n

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There are even blueberry bushes in a chicken pen. That\u2019s right, our new group of 125 pullets (18-week-old chickens) are the lucky owners of a huge wooded parcel of land (fenced off by Roy) that includes wild blueberries and black raspberries that we can\u2019t even get at through the thick growth (and ticks).<\/p>\n

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And weeds? We have more weeds this year then we\u2019ve had total in all previous years. I am completely confounded by this.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s just the critters and the plants. People at the farm do funny things, too. A nice couple stopped by the other day just to give Farmer a present. They were leaving the Island after three weeks and apparently (unbeknownst to me) had bonded with Farmer. Farmer, in fact, is a Rock Star. He has all kinds of fans who ask for him to come outside if he\u2019s not around. Who knew?<\/p>\n

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Because of the crap-shoot nature of farming, the surprises are often not pleasant. But it seems, often as not, the unexpected is lovely, even joyous. Bionic summer squash! A towering volunteer sunflower! Peas, peas and more peas. A gift of freshly baked bread from a farm stand customer\u2026chocolates from another\u2026dog bones for Farmer.<\/p>\n

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A customer told me the other morning, \u201cIt makes me so happy to come here.\u201d That\u2019s the kind of unexpected surprise that makes my day.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Funny, strange, unexpected things seem to be happening a lot on the farm these days. Never a dull moment, as my father likes to say. We found a birds\u2019 nest in a tomato plant yesterday. (Four beautiful eggs; Mommy is a fox sparrow.) Farmer found (another) nest of baby bunnies (six of them) in between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[111,115,103,6],"tags":[153,104,152,46],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6107"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6107"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6124,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6107\/revisions\/6124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}