A little chicken for @badboyburger

Thanks again!

I commissioned a pet portrait of Early via my sideblog, but of course it needs to go on here as well :D

Absolutely perfect portrayal of our little angel!

May he plow the Lord’s fields in heaven

Dave Brandt was probably the longest running no-till farmer in the state; he'd been running his land no-till since 1971. He experimented with fertilizers, cover crops, and different irrigation techniques and he'd been doing all of that for a very long time.

The guy was an institution all on his own; look at this.

Here you go

Oh this is why every gardening person I know keeps trying to give me the food they grow

That, and we love you. Homegrown produce is a love language.

Unless it's zucchini. Then it's a cry for help.

Tomato (June) - I think highly of you; treasured friend

Tomato (September) - you are a warm body that is nearby

Fresh new asparagus - romantic love

Artichoke - fondness

New rhubarb with leaves removed - flirtatious potential

Rhubarb with leaves left on - the bloom is gone

Swiss chard - I have made mistakes

Perpetual spinach - declaration of animosity between our houses

White-fleshed potato - you are a neighbor

Blue or red fleshed potato - as above, but with overtones of camaraderie/affection

Kale - you are a person who was nearby when I had kale

Raspberries - you are a person I admire

Strawberries - you are a treasure

Onion - I am confused

Young French beans or young peas - I thought of you especially

Runner beans - mild criticism; familial ties; gift from parent to child

Pumpkins - overt romantic, sexual or childhood-bestie interest; highest declaration of loyalty

Prettily coloured popping corn, I.e. glass gem - let this seal the breach between our houses

Zucchini/courgette - cry for help, resignation

Novelty pumpkins - marriage proposal

whats the best way to trim the crest+beard of a silkie? this lady can barely see with all that floof! 

apparently some people use little headbands to keep the fluff out of their eyes

80s chickens

yo im late but when i first got my polish frizzle bantams years ago from their breeder their crests were up to keep them out of the mud (because they’re show birds) and the result was amazing

chef hats/make-up brush hair

i love them thank you for the advice

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I had to Google what frizzles looked like normally and

the little coffee you get while out doing errands should be free for girls

When I fuck up during a stealth game and have to kill everyone in a five mile radius

   It may not necessarily be intuitive WHY I gripe about invasive species and thorny brush. I mean - what’s wrong with this?

Well, there are 3 or 4 invasive species of shrubs or vines, here, and they grow so fast and form such impassible tangles that

at some points, even BEARS can’t force their way through this. And because it’s so dense, tree seedlings can no longer get started on the forest floor. And THAT, my friends, is a problem for an east coast Appalachian mountain area that is supposed to be forested.

   They’re not completely without charm:

Even I can see the beauty in this little path that Hero and the deer have made. Especially when the redbuds are blooming. But

the forest isn’t supposed to look like there’s a wall across it. So off I go, with pruning shears and a hand saw.

and a helper.

mobile tumblr is a hostile realm. cold. uncaring. blanketed with ads and malfunction. all risk and no rewards to reap. desktop tumblr is a beautiful sanctuary. wide. open. honest. kept in check by 8497484732 thousand browser extensions

there’s been a really bizarre trend in the past couple years of TERFS/radfems getting pissed off about biology posts. posts about the bilateral gyandromorph cardinal (one half male, one half female), posts about older hens beginning to crow and act like roosters, posts about animals being animals. and it’s hilarious because they interpret these posts as some kind of agenda. no! these are animals not choosing any gender identity or sexuality but being born into bodies they have no control over. weird how that happens in nature huh

never tell terfs about white-throated sparrow or they will lose their fucking minds

Do you want to hear about white-throated sparrows?!

Of course you do, they’re fantastic. They come in two models, one with tan head stripes and one with white head stripes. But the gene that controls stripe color also has a bunch of other effects! It’s a supergene!

To briefly sum up a grueling amount of fieldwork by people who were probably not getting paid nearly enough, basically the tan-stripes are nurturers and the white-stripes are fighters, across both males and females. White-stripes chase away intruders more, tan-stripes bring more food to the nest. Tan-stripe females bring more bugs to their chicks than white-stripes, white-stripe females are more aggressive and sing more.

There is a reason Jordan Peterson picked lobsters, not sparrows, to get all MRA about, because the sparrow ladies are ALL about the tan-striped males. Sexy nurturing tan-stripe males are immediately grabbed up by the more aggressive white-stripe females (who are also dead sexy if you’re a sparrow.) Then the remaining birds pair off, so you get tan and white couples reproducing in virtually all cases—nurturing male with aggressive female, hyper-aggressive male with hyper-nurturing female.*

And this is good!** Because it turns out that they can have a tough time if they don’t mate across stripes—white x white sparrows often come out undersized if they come out at all. There was some cool recent genetic sequencing and one particular chromosome is way funky, inverted, and scrambled in the white-stripes. So now every white-stripe has a funky chromosome and a normal one, and every tan-stripe has two normal ones.***

This is all really unique and means that white-throated sparrows effectively have four sexes, because they now only reproduce with a member of the opposite stripe and sex chromosome, and their offspring may be any one of the four sexes. The stripes have essentially become a second sex chromosome.

The geneticists involved think the funky chromosome probably showed up as a weird import from somebody gettin’ jiggy with another sparrow species. Presumably this created a hypersexy female whose white head stripes brought all the boys to the yard, and very unusually, that bred true.

Is that cool or what?!

*No word on whether there is a resulting sparrow tradwife media genre.

**Leaving aside the impact on the emotional health of the non-sexy sparrows.

**A population solely of tan-stripes can reproduce safely, they’re just not that into each other.

I reblogged this a minute ago but I’m going to reblog it again, because I want to add another non-binary bird species: the ruff.

First of all, look at it.

That’s a male ruff, specifically. You can see how they get their name. The females don’t have that fancy collar. They just look like sandpipers, which is what they are.

Like other sandpipers, these are wading birds, but they live in wet meadows and marshes instead of by the seashore. During the breeding season they gather together and the males hold territories, called leks, in which they display to attract females.

At least, some of them do.

Some male ruffs do not display in leks. They have plainer, often white, neck ruffs, and they sort of wander around the display grounds courting the females wherever. The interesting thing is that the territorial males tolerate this. Research suggests it’s because females are more interested in a display ground that has both kinds of males. The ladies like variety, it seems.

But it gets even more complicated. In 2006, a third male form was discovered. This form is extremely rare, and doesn’t have male display plumage at all. It looks just like a female ruff in the field. The other birds, however, can tell the difference, judging by their behavior. These female mimics travel with other males when the sexes split for the winter, and during homosexual mountings (which are common, as they are in many other animals), they often top.

What’s really interesting about these ‘cryptic males’, or faeders, is that they are apparently super sexy. Seriously. Females and males both prefer mating with them. And it’s believed that, like the satellite males, the presence of a faeder attracts more females to the area, which benefits all three forms.

And the thing about these forms is they are fundamentally different from one another. The plumage and behavior differences last throughout a bird’s life, and are determined by genetics. They are functionally three different genders - one of which shows natural intersex characteristics. All three can breed with females, and females are more interested in breeding when all three are present. They know that diversity is the good shit. Which makes them much, much smarter than TERFs.

As far as ethical materials go you can’t really get better than wool.

The sheep need the hair cut.

Nothing dies for it.

Sheep live pretty much wild for most the year.

Placed correctly they maintain a landscape and help the wildlife that live there to thrive.

Doesn’t use Vast Quantities of land for little product.

Not draining inland fresh water oceans.

Been spending thousands of years perfecting the genetics for this purpose.

Comes in many different kinds of uses.

And the animal it comes off is fully edible.

My main issue with it is it has fallen so out of fashion that it pays the farmers who make it more to transport it than they get per fleece, and people have really fucking weird hang ups about the ethics of giving a sheep a hair cut.

Sheep can get infested with wool maggots if they are not shorn.

Also an unshorn sheep can drown if it falls into water, just by the sheer weight of the water its wool can absorb, dragging it down.

A Tunis sheep can live in a large doghouse, and staked in a different place every day, will mow your lawn (buy they get lonely. Buy two).

Light shearing nicks heal fast because the sheep’s waxy lanolin coats their skin. Though most sheep farmers won’t Nick the sheep bc it gets blood on the wool.

Sheep farmers MUST treat their sheep with care, because any little thing that upsets sheep affects the quality of their wool.

Even “natural” fibers like bamboo take TONS of water to process and alkaline dyes to color them. You can dye wool with unsweetened koolaid.

People have been raising sheep for close to 10,000 years. And all that time, we’ve been breeding them for better wool. Most mammals with thick coats shed naturally in the spring, sheep don’t because we bred it out of them.

Sheep and their farmers have an actual symbiotic relationship. Farmers remove their excess wool, keeping them healthy, and then sell that wool to buy what they need.

it’s also naturally antimicrobial and resists odors (unlike polyester, which absorbs them better and makes it harder to wash them out).

not-so-friendly reminder that hunting is an important part of conservation in many cases and that painting all hunting as morally, ethically, and/or environmentally "bad" does a major disservice to indigenous people, poor communities, and our environment

Just found out Brahmas chickens exist. Seeing those dudes really reminds me that they’re related to the t-rex. Look at this dude:

You must be saying, but that is just a regular rooster.

At this point you’re probably sweating, maybe shaking and crying saying, surely that child is just short, but again you’d be

They are big.

I got tagged in this and I should note: Of all the chicken breeds I've met, these are the gentlest and friendliest. Also very somft. All three I've gotten to handle have wanted to cuddle, and they're very warm, like cats.

Magnificent giant muppets of birds.

Yaaaaalllllll!!!

CHICKENS ARE FLUORESCENT!!

Look. I’m unnaturally excited about this. I learned that owls fluoresce so I had to know: Do chickens? Google wasn’t helpful. But I have all the things I need for this experiment.

Please please please if you get photos or video of your chickens under a black light tag me or this post! I WANNA SEE!!!

My great-grandparents raised their family on primarily food they grew themselves.  It was fucking miserable.  There’s still a whole host of shit my grandfather will not even permit in his pantry to this day, 75 years after he left home, because that was 90% of what they ate for one too many winters in a row.  Because that was all the kids got for breakfast every day for a year.  Because prepping it reminds him of the endless hours he spent dealing with everything that goes into drying things for winter storage, canning things, etc.

All the kids were put to work.  Effective commercial pesticides becoming available and cheap was a red-letter day, because it meant they could go around fogging the rows of plants every so often instead of spending every day picking weevils and worms off the plants by hand to make sure the crop didn’t fail.

One time some PWA guys came through to clear a strip of public land adjacent to the farm, and all the local farm kids threw rocks at them until they left, because the patch they were clearing was full of wild blueberry bushes, and goddamned if those kids were giving up those fucking berries without a fight. 

Another time one of my great-uncles decided to work smarter not harder and shook the fruit out of a tree instead of picking it.  He was maybe eleven?  It was the sort of stupid, impulsive mistake kids make.  My great-grandmother basically had a panic attack because it meant all the fruit he got down that way would be bruised and rot instead of storing right, and they needed that fruit.

They never had to hit up the local charities or church to make it through the winter, but there were families he knew who were in the same situation that his family was in where charity was the only thing that got them through the winter after a bad harvest.  That situation came with the extra awful choice on the parents’ part–how hungry do you have to get before you surrender your kids to an orphanage so they get fed?  What about when you know that you’ll need those kids’ labor come spring?

(You remember how back when ancestry.com first started to be a thing half the stories were about senior citizens finding their youngest sibling who’d been adopted out as a baby or toddler?  Not “secret half-sibling”–the kid their parents had, and maybe started to raise, and then had to give away because they were too poor to keep them?  Yeah.)

When you’re growing food because you need it to literally not starve, a lot of times things like crop reliability and yield, the ability to store it well and for long periods of time, and nutritional density take precedence over things like flavor and variety and personal preference. 

Hate beans?  Too bad, they dry well and keep forever and form a complete protein with rice.  Hate squash?  Too bad, that’s going to be your source of a bunch of vitamins once it’s too cold for leafy greens.  Hate tomatoes?  Too bad, you’ll hate scurvy more.

You can plant whatever you like, obviously, but if that’s all the food you’re going to get… There are only so many hours in a day to tend crops and so much space on shelves for pickling jars and so long certain things will keep in a root cellar or a drying shed and sometimes these decisions get made for you by your need to not become malnourished and too sick to take care of the animals or sow once spring comes.

There were still cash-crops in the mix, because they didn’t grow 100% of what they ate (sugar and wheat flour and shortening were the big ones) and because they still needed to, you know, wear clothes and have furniture and repair equipment, and sometimes people survived the immediate aftermath of whatever horrible farm accident and needed a doctor.  Sometimes fodder crops also failed, and you still needed to feed your animals over the winter.  They didn’t raise turkeys on the farm, so one of the older kids would work at the turkey farm for a week in the run-up to Thanksgiving or Christmas and get paid with a bird.

The supplementary cash-crops weren’t any less fraught, because even if your crop made it out the door, the starch-testers could say your potatoes were no good for chips or fries and kick them back, and then what?  The dairyman showing up late to collect your milk meant it sat there warming up on the side of the road, and then it was a coin-toss if it would get rejected as spoiled once it made it to the processing plant.  The margin is razor thin with the “little bit here and there” model.

They had a sizeable, established farm.  It was about as big as one family could reasonably keep in good working order with draft animals.  Most families had been in the small town for several generations.  They had a lot of neighbors they were on good terms with.  They’d hire each other’s kids to help with harvests, which basically meant trading a bit of cash around because what a family made hiring out went back out the door when they had to hire on.  When the maple sap was running, all the adults would take shifts at the boiler shed and all the kids would be hauling firewood.  When the snowmelt had the stream going strong enough to run the wheel-powered sawmill, they all pitched in to get the lumber there and processed.  We’re not talking every-family-for-themselves Dust Bowl displacement catastrophic circumstances.

It was still fucking miserable.  Any given fuck-up or stroke of bad luck having the potential to starve you and your family understandably turns people into nervous wrecks, and when you’ve spent months of back-breaking labor on something only to have it go tits-up at the end and now you’re all going hungry, it can turn people into mean nervous wrecks.  Rapid industrialization of the area and the farm industry did its part in the disappearance of the small family farm, sure, but every one of my grandfather’s siblings was desperate to get the fuck off that farm before anyone in town had even seen a Caterpillar in action.

When I was growing up, my grandfather always had a huge garden.  Probably about half an acre, plus another two acres of hobby fruit trees.  He took a lot of pleasure in growing stuff, and he enjoyed being able to just go out and harvest food.  It was a source of pride that he could just turn his grandkids loose to go pick as many oranges and tangerines and peaches as we wanted.  He was thrilled when a neighbor got free-range chickens and they’d show up to his place to get fed, even though the rooster was a territorial pain in the ass. 

He did all that while he was still putting in forty hours a week at work.  His experience growing up wasn’t the result of ‘some people just don’t want to be farmers.’ When he left home, he left home to work other people’s farms for cash until he was old enough to join the military.  When he mustered out and bought a place, he planted on it.  When he had the flexibility and freedom to grow what he liked and not have to worry about that being the only thing his family had to eat, he was happy as a clam.

The reason I know all the stuff about how awful growing up on that kind of farm was is that every so often, my mom or one of my siblings would ask his advice about growing your own food, and he would tell us in explicit detail exactly what goes into growing your own food in any significant quantity, or with the expectation that it’s going to replace a lot of purchased groceries.  He never said “don’t do it” or “you’re going to fail,” but he was very explicit about how much labor goes into it and how much of a crap-shoot getting a real return out of it is.

Individual subsistence farms are soul-killing misery-machines unless you’re mostly looking for a bullet-proof excuse to do meth for a couple months a year to keep up with all the labor and power through whatever injuries you racked up doing all the labor.