November 2018 – Brennah's Backyard

Rose Hips Take the Stage

This time of year is often not the easiest to find good photography opportunities; it is not yet really snowy and there are no interesting icy displays on the creek, and most of the plants and insects are dormant by now. The wild roses provide one exception to that (not the only exception, but it’s the one I’m focusing on today). The fruit of the rose plant, the rose hips, are not only at their most colorful right now, but also at their most flavorful. Like the autumn olive berries, rose hips get tastier after they’ve been through a few freezes. They are also extremely high in vitamin C and other nutrients.

A couple years ago we tried harvesting some of them. There are a couple of different species of wild roses around, and the ones with larger hips (about the size of a blueberry) seemed like they would be more practical to harvest than the tiny ones of the species in the photo. They were more practical, but we soon realized that the tiny ones were the ones that actually tasted good. The larger ones were tasteless in comparison. This was a problem, though, because each of those tiny hips were stuffed with seeds that needed to be removed. There was no way to do that at all quickly, and the results didn’t seem worth it. This year, a better use for them has come to mind. We have been making kombucha (which is a fermented tea) for a while now, and while experimenting with different ingredients to flavor it, one that was particularly popular with us was rose petal. Rose hips have a similar (although I think slightly sweeter) flavor, and using them as a flavoring for kombucha would not require removing the seeds. And if all else fails, at least they are fun to photograph!

Chickens in the Hoophouse

Chickens eating radish tops from the hoophouse

Ever since we got the hoophouse, it has had a connection with our chickens. When we needed compost to add to the soil in the hoophouse, the first place I looked was in the chicken yard. There is a compost pile there made up of the chickens’ old bedding and droppings. When weeding around areas that had been planted (or were about to be planted), the weeds would go into a bucket for the chickens. The chickens would also get any insect pests (mostly caterpillars) that were found on the crops. In the summer, the chickens weren’t too interested in the weeds; there were plenty of greens in their yards to choose from, so they might pick out a few favorite plants to nibble at, but they were more excited when they got caterpillars. Once winter came, though, they were suddenly eager to devour bucketfuls of weeds every day. I started intentionally leaving patches of weeds until they were of good size and pulling leaves off of them without even trying to pull the roots out. Things grow more slowly in the winter. I could hardly keep up with the chickens’ appetite for greens. The leafy parts of crops like carrots and radishes could also go to the chickens, and I even gave them some of the greens I was growing for us to eat (especially when they were most abundant). When chickens are able to eat greens, the yolks of their eggs are a rich yellow orange. When they aren’t they are a very pale yellow. Our eggs had once been very pale in the winter, and the chickens obviously craving greens. The hoophouse helped change that.

Chickens eating radish greens from the hoophouse

This year, we have moved some of our chickens inside the hoophouse for the first time. They are in a section that has not been used yet, really, and the chickens will be helping to prepare that area for growing things. The chickens frequently end up confined to their coops in the winter simply because they don’t much like walking around in the snow. The ‘front yard flock’ (which is the flock we moved into the hoophouse) doesn’t have a particularly large coop, so they will have more room than they would in their coop. On sunny days it can get quite warm in there too.

So far, they seem to be doing quite well in their new home.

Witch Hazel

Back in the woods right now, the witch hazel plants have already shed their leaves for the winter. The plants would be bare now, except for all the flowers on them. Witch hazel is the only plant I know of that does this. The chrysanthemums and wild arugula are still flowering, but they still have leaves, and when they are done, they will die back to the roots for winter. I first noticed the witch hazel in the November after moving here. It was unexpected to see a flowering shrub in the mostly leafless, dormant woods like that, and it caught my attention. I was able to identify it easily and quickly; besides flowering at a very unusual time, its flowers were very unusual and distinctive looking. The only problem was that everything I had identified it by had to do with the flowers. Would I still be able to tell which one it was in the spring? I was curious to see what the leaves looked like, but I would have to wait several months without forgetting where it was. (These days I suppose I would probably just look something like that up, but at the time I wasn’t very experienced with that sort of thing.) I did notice that the tips of the twigs had a sort of zigzag shape where the leaves had been attached and I used that characteristic to identify several more of them in the middle of winter. By spring I still knew which plants were the witch hazels, and got to know what their leaves looked like. Later, when we planted hazelnut bushes, I realized where the ‘hazel’ part of the witch hazel’s name came from: the leaves of the hazelnuts looked almost identical.

The unusual flowering habits of witch hazels do bring up a question, though. What pollinates a plant that routinely flowers in November? Not surprisingly, I am not the first person to wonder about that. It is obviously an insect pollinated plant, but it blooms when there don’t seem to be insects around. And, as it turns out, its pollinator is also nocturnal, so you aren’t likely to see anything pollinating it. It is pollinated by an exceptionally cold hardy moth, which shivers to warm itself on the cold nights when it is active, similarly to the way that honey bees keep each other warm in the winter. Here is a link to an article that explains more about that: https://www.venerabletrees.org/winter-sex-witchhazel/

Patches of Color

As the leaves turn to their autumn colors, it is quite satisfying to see many of the things we planted for some particular function (such as producing edible fruit or nuts) just sitting there looking very pretty. When we first got here, the woods looked magnificent in the fall, but now there are also bright patches of color all around the yard.