In praise of dandelions!

Why would I be praising dandelions?  Aren't they the bane of every homeowner with a lawn?  Yes, if you want to maintain a total monoculture in your yard.  But nature abhors monocultures, and will do everything she can to diversify them. Perhaps it is time for us to rethink the way we use the land around our homes.

Early-blooming flowers like dandelions are a major source of spring food for bees, butterflies, and other pollenators.  With the current bee shortage in many parts of the world, these insects need all the help they can get.  So I let the dandelions alone until they are done blooming, then mow them down. Sure, that spreads the seeds around -- but since I want dandelions, that's no problem for me.  After all, a "weed" is by definition simply a plant growing where you don't want it.

Our street number in spring

Granted, I live out in the country, where the philosophy pretty much is "if it's green, its a lawn."  In more controlled suburban neighborhoods you might have a hard time convincing your neighbors to let you have a lawn full of dandelions -- but then again, that's why I don't live there.  Nature is more important to me than social status.  If you visit me in the spring, you will likely be greeted with hundreds of these bright yellow flowers dotting the landscape.

Dandelions are also nutritious. In fact, they were brought to the USA as a vegetable by the French. ("Dandelion" comes from the French dent de leon, "Lion's Tooth," named or the jagged edges of the leaves.)  Old herbals prescribe them as a cure for scurvy, and recommend eating as many leaves as you can find in the spring.  Good advice at a time when people didn't understand about Vitamin C deficiency.  But they did know that the plants leafed out very early and the cure worked.

You need to pick dandelion greens before the plants flower, however.  Once the blooms appear, the whole plant gets very bitter -- so bitter, in fact, that I've known nature-oriented Jews to use them for the "bitter herbs" at the Passover Seder instead of the usual horseradish. (Which is perfectly kosher -- the Torah says "bitter herbs" but does not name a species.)

My chickens and geese also know the value of dandelions as food, and will choose them over other greens. Here you see two geese gobbling down fresh dandelion leaves, while ignoring the grain feed they've been eating all winter.  They know good nutrition when they see it!

Dandelions can also be used to make dandelion wine.  There are a lot of good recipes online, but one thing they may not tell you is to use the yellow petals only!!! The first time I tried it, I used whole dandelion heads and ended up with a bitter brew that only a masochist would care to drink.  That's because the green base of the flower (called the calyx) has the same bitter taste as the stems.  Having learned my lesson, I now use only petals.  The easiest way to prepare these is to hold the flower head in one hand and cut off the yellow ends of the petals with a scissors. A bit tedious, but you'll have a far better wine.

If nothing else, I find dandelions to be a welcome, happy greeting in spring after a long Minnesota winter.  Like little yellow smiley faces, telling me to come out of hibernation -- spring is here!

Father Goose adopts flock of Guinea Fowl

Junior and Prince

This is the story of an inter-species friendship between Prince the Goose (white bird in photo on the right) and a flock of guineas.  Prince and his son, Junior (grey bird in photo), are the last of a small flock of geese we have had on our hobby farm.  Geese live a long time -- Prince is now 14, Junior 13 -- and I'm not getting any younger, so I have let the flock slowly dwindle from old age. (We are vegetarians.  We eat the eggs but do not slaughter.)

With geese, the ganders help care for the young.  Since Prince no longer has a mate and there are no goslings around, he has turned his affections toward my guineas.  From the moment I brought home four half-grown guineas last fall, he has taken a most paternal instinct toward them.

When they first arrived, I had to keep them in a cage inside the coop for a couple weeks before letting them free range -- otherwise they would try to "home" back to where they came from -- and Prince stood guard by the cage every night.  When I finally did let them loose, he followed them around the yard.  Junior went along, but it was primarily Prince who set the pace.  And he made sure they went back in the coop, too.  If they tried roosting in a tree, he stood at the bottom and raised a ruckus!  By the time the first snow came, they were well trained to go inside.

The guineas turned out to be three males and a female.  I really had no intention of breeding her, but she had other ideas.  Her first nest she built too close to the road for comfort.  Prince was having a fit because the road is his boundary and the males were going across it to my neighbor's yard.  That's how I found the nest.  I took the eggs before she started setting, hoping that would be the end of it.

Can't find Molly?  Click photo to
enlarge and try again!

So what did she do?  She hid her second nest closer to the coop in the tall grass.  I didn't find this one until she was incubating, so I let her be.  If you look really, really closely in the photo, you can see her in there.  That brave bird sat through two very strong rainstorms and held fast to her eggs -- I thought for sure I'd find her drowned the second time, when high winds brought four inches of rain within hours.  But she built well, on top of a little rise, earning her the name "Molly Brown"  (of Titanic fame, since both survived dangerous waters.)  Why didn't I move her inside?  Because moving a guinea nest is very risky.  They are wild, flighty birds who often abandon the eggs if disturbed.  Better to leave nature alone.

Molly's well-hidden nest

There were 15 eggs.  12 hatched but one baby died, leaving 11.  I wasn't sure exactly when she started sitting, so I checked every day.  Luckily I found them right after hatching, because the grass is cold and wet in the morning this late in the year.  That can mean death to new keets. So I caught them all with mother Molly and put them in a large cage inside.

Prince stood by them outside the cage, often not even wanting to come outside the coop.  When they were feathered out and big enough, I turned them loose -- and here you can see both ganders herding the flock around the yard!

Prince herds the flock home toward evening, fall 2014.

Prince and Junior guarding the flock
in the chicken yard, fall 2014. 

Baby Chicks are not Easter Toys!

Or Passover toys.  Both Easter and Passover are spring festivals (In the Northern Hemisphere at least).  Jews are not as strongly focused on chicks and bunnies this time of year, so I suppose this post is directed more at my non-Jewish readers, but my plea to both is the same:  Please don't buy baby animals that you can't keep for their entire lifetime.   It's not fair to your kids, and not fair to the animals.

Day-old incubator chicks
(Photo courtesy of USDA)

Those cute fuzzy chicks are going to grow up -- very quickly -- into full-sized chickens, most likely roosters, because the hatcheries keep the more valuable females for the egg trade.  In addition, you really can't keep just one chick, because these are flock birds who do not thrive in solitude.  That sharp, incessant peeping of a lone chick is a signal of extreme loneliness and distress.  He is calling for help from his flock mates -- who aren't there.

Chicks hatching under a mother hen bond with her and their nest mates even before hatching.  The hen clucks softly to her eggs, and the chicks begin peeping softly to each other from inside their eggs -- a very different sound than the distress call.  By the time the hatch is over, they are already a bonded family unit.  Incubator chicks can't bond with a machine, but they probably do bond with each other.

A mother hen sitting on her nest
in my backyard.  The pale yellow
spot by her breast is a new chick.
(click photo to enlarge)

Separation from the flock is very traumatic.  So is being kept under bright lights in a pet shop, because normally the chicks would periodically take shelter in the warmth and darkness under their mother's wings.  Being exposed to bright light and strange people all day long is like being out in the open and constantly threatened by a predator, with no place to hide.

A minimum of three chickens is needed for a happy flock.  Unless you live on a farm, just what are you going to do with three roosters?  Every year, animal shelters are inundated with unwanted chickens and ducks after the holiday, birds that have grown too big and too noisy for urban backyards.   These birds are very hard to re-home, because most people don't want a crowing rooster anymore than you and your neighbors do.

This little chick was hatched
by the hen above, and grew up
knowing his mother

Even worse, some people release them into the wild, mistakenly thinking they will get along just fine.  They might for a while -- but when winter comes, they will freeze to death, because domestic ducks cannot fly south like their wild cousins, and chickens are jungle birds, not well adapted to snow like pheasants or grouse.  A number of years ago I rescued two half-grown chicks that somebody had dumped at a freeway rest stop.  (Read that story)   And I found my white gander, Prince, waddling down our country dirt road.  He is still with us at the age of 13 and may live to be 30.  None of these birds would have survived in the wild.

There is also a very real danger that children can accidentally kill a baby chick or duckling simply by holding it wrong.  Birds do not breathe the same way we do.  They have no diaphragm.  Instead, they must rely on the expansion and contraction of their little chests to breathe.  If you hold a chick too tightly -- as children often do -- he can smother in minutes.   Unfortunately, this happens more often than we want to hear about.   There is nothing more traumatic than having a child's pet die in her hands.

The bottom line is:  Jewish law says that you should not acquire any animal unless you can feed and care for it properly.  As readers of my blog know, I myself have chickens, and I am not against keeping them, if you can properly care for them for their full lifespans -- which is an average of 8 to 10 years.  If not, then it is better to buy your kids a plush toy.