I love planting beans. Since they are so easy to grow, you get an instant reward for just popping their large seed in the ground. They don't need much of anything, and reward you with endless beans at harvest time.
The kale sprouts (blue kale and red russian kale, respectively, above) are busting out too. This is the part of planting from seed that I get squeamish about: thinning. I seriously don't like having to pick and choose who lives and who goes. This time I took all the thinned seedlings and put them in the chicken's food dish. At least they won't go to waste.
Speaking of the chickens, they LOVE their wheatgrass:
I put it out a couple days ago, and they went crazy for it. They couldn't stop eating it. At first only Janet and Chrissy had discovered it. Henrietta (who might actually be the dumb one, as it turns out) was blithely snacking on some boring old feed when Janet seemed to look up, turn to Henrietta and squawk at her to get the heck over here and try some of this out-of-this-world wheatgrass. Henrietta ran over and tried it, and you couldn't tear her away after that.
At that point, I started getting curious about how they knew that wheatgrass was delicious. And how did they find it in the first place? I know their eyesight isn't the greatest, but maybe it's good enough, particularly when they see new things, like a rectangular black box of grass? And what about their tastebuds? Do they have fine palates to distinguish salty from spicy from umami?
The google provided ample information, though some of it was conflicting. So allow me to add to the mix. From what I gathered, it seems that most people agree that chickens have a keen sense of smell. They do have tastebuds, but they are concentrated on the back of their mouth/throat area. Not sure about their eyesight. But however you want to look at it, they seem to really enjoy yummy food like wheatgrass. So as their mom, that makes me happy. :-)
Chrissy getting her snack on.
0 comments:
Post a Comment