13th April

Back into our blogging today. While hating to seem keen on this writing idea, Zara has subtley inquired each day during the weekend whether we would be doing our blog that day. For a formerly reluctant writer she has come a long way.

After a couple of days not observing the garden closely it was inspiring to go out and see how much bigger everything was. Unfortunately the weeds were keeping pace with the planted plants so a bout of weeding very small weeds out of very small germinating seedlings ensued. Not my favourite job, but I plodded through it while imagining luscious harvests of greens when the plants are fully grown. The spinach is germinating, minutina growing rapidly and miners lettuce doing well. The mesclun mix I’m a bit stumped on though. I’m not familiar enough with it to know for certain which seedlings are there as part of the mix and which are weeds. We will be eating both when I harvest it as microgreens and small leaf stage I think. Weeds are not only delicious but good for you I’m told. I’m not sure what the kids would choose out of weeding the weeds out or eating them…..

Easter gifts from the land.

• 

• 

I also managed to sneak some beautiful handmade eggs from an organic online shop we use into the house to surprise the kids and Garth. We also harvested the worlds smallest rockmelon. Better late than never?????

Anika: Today is sharing some writing she did on a topic that she feels strongly about ( We haven’t covered how to reference web site pages etc yet so please excuse her unspecified claims!)

I reckon there should be acres and acres of chook runs for free range chooks. This would mean people wouldn’t have to buy caged chicken eggs. It would also mean there wouldn’t be as many chooks locked up in cages being practically forced to lay eggs.

Research suggests that the sort of conditions that cage hens are kept in are often poor. There can be 6-8 hens in a cage. They cannot do many of their natural activities like scratching, flapping their wings, dust bathing and more. They also cannot go outside and probably don’t know what grass, dirt, or sky looks like, as they are kept in big, dark sheds with controlled temperatures. There are rows and rows of cages, which are quite often stacked on top of each other. The sheds stink of chook manure and rotting chooks that have died unnoticed.

Some people think that there may be a difference in the caged hen eggs taste and colour relative to free range eggs. Apparently the yolk may be lighter and they may have a different taste, but I don’t really know.

There are several arguments suggesting that caged eggs are necessary. Vegetarians eat lots of eggs to get protein and some think that eggs need to be affordable for this reason. I think that if vegetarians are avoiding eating animals as it is cruel to kill them, then surely they should not want to eat eggs from hens living a horrible life.

Some chicken farmers like to have caged hens to provide lots of cheap eggs for people to buy. The buyers probably don’t know what the poor chooks have gone through to give them eggs (or they can’t afford to buy anything but the cheapest product). Someone needs to raise their awareness of this.

Other species of animals are also farmed very intensively, pigs and cows especially. Beef feedlots overseas are an example of this. I feel very sorry for the animals.

In NZ there are about 165 caged egg farms. Organic eggs make up about 1% of the eggs we eat. That is really quite shocking. I wish there were more free range eggs being produced.

If I were a chicken I would feel absolutely terrible. It would be worse than death. I really don’t think there is a word or words bad enough to describe it. I can’t imagine living in a A4 sized cage laying eggs and doing nothing else. I wouldn’t know about all the happy chooks getting food scraps while I got the same diet day in and day out. My life would be nothing to me or to anyone else.

If there were more free range chickens and eggs the prices might go down. People might start buying free range eggs instead of caged hen eggs. This would mean more chickens could be free and happy, rather than locked up and poorly treated.

NB if we had more time I would have got Anika to research what the welfare issues are with ‘free range chickens’ to give a more balanced viewpoint but we will have a discussion around that instead. This was really just a writing exercise rather than a research project.

And on a lighter note:

I got to make Sticky Coconut and Feijoa Muffins which was fun. This shows me laughing after photo bombing mums shots of the muffins. The muffins were fairly easy to make but I need to make more next time because they are yummy and they disappeared too fast!

Jamie:

In the weekend I rotary hoed the bottom garden that is down by the river. The white stuff you can see in the photo is fertilizer. We were preparing it for sowing a cover crop to draw up more nutrients for next years potato and kumara crops. We grow all sorts of kumara including purple ones that are purple all through the middle and a whole lot of other varieties. We grow Maori potatoes, Agrias. The pumpkins we grow are Cupola, Queensland Blue (and some others). I personally like the Cupola the most. They are very long, half skinny pumpkins that are very deep orange inside and are very tasty.

We have had another night in our new room. It was fantastic except I couldn’t get to sleep.

My pea seeds are growing like stink but my bean seeds are being interestingly slow.

I keep finding praying mantises everywhere.

Zara:

Life continued as normal over the weekend. I did get an Easter egg on Sunday morning, but didn’t get to eat it for breakfast. We have been getting lots of riding in which has been awesome. We haven’t done too much gardening, just enough to keep on top of things.

It has been extremely windy here for the last few days. The wind is just strong enough so that when you are sitting inside and the wind is whipping through the trees, you have to listen closely to tell whether it is wind or rain.

I am loving my new room and not having to share it, although I can still hear them snoring through the wall.

Today I planted out some more lupins into some different cover crop beds. We germinate them in a container so that they have a higher germination rate. The seeds germinated in the garden bed have the weather, mice, slugs, snails and birds to fight against. I also planted the flaxseed/linseed seedlings out into Bed 0, otherwise known as the overflow bed. This bed has had so many things self seed in it that it looks like a miniature herb and flower forest. At this stage in the seedlings growth it is hard to tell the different seedlings apart.

• 

• 

• 

• 

•