And then there were two

A Chicken Story

Not keeping up to date with my blog sometimes has sad and unintended consequences.



Originally shot this to show how the chickens are acting as incredibly efficient garbage disposals.

Introducing our lovely ladies



This is Oreo. She is a Barred Plymouth Rock and the first to lay eggs. She has been consistently providing one egg daily.



This is Blondie. She is one of the original "rescued" chickens from the less than reputable pet shop. She hasn't laid an egg yet and I don't know if she will, but she is a sweet, sweet girl. I was told she was a leghorn. That was before I knew much about chickens. I am confident that she is Buff Orpington.



Lovely, lovely Mary, our beautiful Americana. She started laying gorgeous blue-green eggs a day after Oreo. She got out of the coup one day when the marauding feral dogs were making there rounds. They came after her in the middle of our yard and well, I don't want to go into details. We miss her dearly.




A lovely trio.

Death Row

The Garden Pathway is pretty much the only place where I can dig deep enough without disturbing the landscape to bury our fallen friends.



Sort of like Forest Lawn



This rock will mark Mary final resting place. I plan to install a blue pathway light in the stone to light the step.

It feels like a real farm, full of the triumphs and travails of your typical farm.

Skye is learning much about life in this Urban Farm Experiment


Mary R.I.P.

A little tipsy

I've been teaching an Ecology 101 class for a handful of home school kids and the parents have been wanting me to get some sort of compensation, but I am feeling way too much like a newbie and feel uncomfortable putting a price tag on the experience. I could go on about my resistance to this but right now too pressed for time. The Cliff note version is I am putting our a collection jar, rather a decorated Home Depot bucket. I thought that was appropriate. Of course, I must stress the "decorated" part. I had a lot of fun collaging and I am just getting started.















Lots of fun

What must the mail man think?

I can only imagine what goes through the minds of the guys down at our mailing address when these boxes come in. Gotta keep them guessing.





Which applies to anyone reading this blog.



More stories to come.....

Worm City.....Compton, CA USA?

When I started keeping earthworms in my garage a few years back, my step-dad told me the biggest grower of worms was right down the street in Compton. I found this hard to believe as the methods of raising various earth worms, red wigglers specifically required a good amount of farm land and dirt and I know that Los Angeles has a strong agriculture heritage but I couldn't believe that a chunk of land in the middle of Los Angeles would make economic sense to raise earthworms. And as it turns out I was right...about it being earthworms.

Now mealworms, which aren't even worms, but rather the pupae stage of the Darkling Beetle is a different story completely. These little critters can be raised in the dark, stacked from floor to ceiling in rolling bins, which is exactly what 2 city blocks of not-so-prime land,(actually its a pretty rough part of town) is being used to do in Compton around 20 minutes from our house at Rainbow Mealworms.

This sounded like a dual-purpose field trip for Skye and me to take. We would be getting some worms, a great source of protien that our chickens would love and crazy over for a great price, Skye would get to see what a meal worm farm looks like, not what you think of when you think farm that's for sure and we these little critters would make for a lively addition to the upcoming Ecology 101-It's a Bug's World. Hey that's three things making it a multi-purpose trip.



In the heart of the 'hood' is a thriving mega-insectopolis.



It was a bit of a dingy place, but can't beat the prices.



This is one of dozens of buildings and that house the worms and worm-processing equipment, and shipping stuff and pretty much all you'd need to make raising beetles into a profitable venture.



One of the many hundreds of racks holding a few of the many more hundreds of bins used in meal worm production.




They were nice enough to show us the various varieties and also told us that the meal worm and the jumbo worm were the same species, but that the jumbo worm get treated with a hormone to make it around twice as big as its untreated brethren.

Hormone treated bugs
There seem to be hormones in everything these days. I recently found out that almost all tilapia, a cheap white fish being used in all sorts of food, are treated with hormones, the hormone drug 17alpha-methytestosterone to be exact, basically giving the young fish a sex change so they are all male and will grow bigger and fatter and at the same rate.

But I thought, wait don't we naturally have hormones in us? How bad would it be to add hormones? It depends on what hormones, do what levels, etc. etc. and the studies and results and evaluations from the results are flooding in amid a cacophony of controversy. I mean fattening up worms mostly to be fed to pet reptiles is one thing, bad enough, but chemical sex change to fish that then go directly to humans that seems a bit, (no don't use the pun) f---y?




They also come in two different colors.



It takes a lot to feed that many worms, or baby beetles more correctly.



The Beetles waiting to go on stage as it were.

It was an awesome class with much carnage, between the our cold blooded killer, Lief Erickson and the baby killing chickens, but the kids loved it and hopefully learned a thing or two. I learned more than I every thought I would about the Darkling Beetle and I've only just begun.

Race to Mushroom Mountain

A Mushroom walks into a bar and asks the bartender for a drink. The bartender says "No way! We don`t serve your kind here!" The mushroom says "Ahh come on, I`m a Fungi!"


The 26th Annual Wild Mushroom Fair

A couple of weeks back on one of the several home school yahoo groups I'm on there was a link to a Mushroom festival weekend hapening over at the Los Angeles Arboretum.

This was the flier that captured my attention and wooed me.

Now I have been interested in mushrooms for a while now. Skye and I had grown mushrooms a year or so ago as part of a "science" class and I had been planning to order some spores and do a similar project as one of the topics in my Ecology 101 class. I was also very interested in foraging for wild mushrooms and had been planning on trying to go on an outing with the mushroom club.

I thought the timing of this post I came upon was perfect. So I collected Skye from a sleepover she had been too and raced to catch the last bit of Mushroom Extravaganza. There were plenty of other things I could have been doing, that I should have been doing, but not to deny my distractable nature would be, well unnatural.

So from Marina Del Rey we raced to literally the other side of town, in fact beyond the other side of town to the Los Angeles Arboretum. And then the frustrating obstacles really started, there was no parking, road rage was raging among throngs of people who came out on this beautiful day to relax in the gardens. Finally due in large part to the Prius' compactness we managed to squeeze in a small spot, so that we could go wait in line for half an hour. Their system of one cashier taking only cash and checks, with a broken ATM in the lobby was not really working and the ragers that had successfully napped a piece of asphalt for their cars now had to wait and wait in the sun, no shade for the line which was ironic because being a botanical garden there were hundreds of trees and arbors and such, just not at the line to get into the joint.

We raced through the gardens to get to the Mushroom-fest before it closed, by this point starving and a bit grumpy.

This is the poster that greeted us upon entry and I do quite like it.

The "festival" itself left a little to be desired, pretty much on the same level as a high school science fair. There were some interesting information and some perfectly lovely displays, it just didn't meet up to the hype. The long drive, bad parking and ridiculous line certainly didn't help. Add to that we were on the tail end of the weekend and I think all the "good" demos and events had already happened.



The exhibit was set up on folding tables in a dreary hall.



Like I said, valid worthwhile information, a bit lacking in the presentation.



Unfortunate because there were some pretty amazing fungi collections











Look at the size of that one mushrooms.





There were lots of types of mushrooms to be sure.

But with all this fungi, everywhere there was none to eat. So Skye and I ended up in another line, paying for overpriced yucky park food. Skye got the hot dog, always a "safe" bet, I on the other hand ordered a Thai noodle salad trying to be healthy. I ended up more with a soup of dressing and some drippy, droopy noodles.

We went back to the exhibit to make sure that we hadn't missed anything.

Nope, but at least now we could wander and investigate without pangs of hunger distracting us form our mycological wandering.



This is the group that I want to get involved with, you know in my free time the "Los Angeles Mycological Society". I would like to forage the local terrains hunting for mushroom with some experts before relying on a guidebook and my own peepers.

Eggciting Artistry

I was in Barnes and Nobel the other day and they had this book in the clearance section for ten bucks. It seemed like it might have something interesting in it.




The day before I took this picture.




Which she adds to the growing collection


And then we start the yummy adventure,...






It's like art....

and then to make the breky brek breakfast.

Leif Erickson--One of our latest additions to the Danniells household

Praying Mantis are Cool

That said as part of the on-going Ecology 101 class in conjunction with the Milagro Hills Vertical Farm and the Milagro Co-operative Experiment, and pretty much because of my previous feeling, Mantis are Cool. I purchased another "special" mantis. This guy (or gal) isn't the typical Chinese mantis that you buy the egg sack and put it out in your garden and hope that they will hatch and then eat all of the villain bugs. (Yes even our insects were imported from China, back in 1895)

Our latest addition is a Ghost mantis (Phyllocrania paradoxa) and so far she is amazing and healthy, eating well and on cue.

In class yesterday, I dropped a small cricket on the limb she was hanging out on and withing seconds the mantis had lurched out and grabbed the cricket and spent the next several minutes enjoying its conquest and meal, all to the gasping amazement of several children ranging from 6-13 years old, not to mention some of the parents. There is a reason why the Circus Maximus was so popular amount the Romans.



This is a clear photo of a Ghost Mantis, although not ours. I was having a tough time getting a good photo, more and better ones will follow, I'm sure.




Again clear photo and again not our little fella

Leif Erickson

After watching the predatory stylings of one of the latest additions to the Danniells Zoological Foundation, we needed to come up with a name.

After throwing out some too obvious and sometimes just lame (sorry) names, that did include "Edward" of Twilight fame, you crazy Twihards, we settled on what I thought was a lovely name, Leif Erickson. An outlaw with a nice amount of Viking brutality was fitting for our alien=looking friend.



I would have preffered Christopher Johnson from District 9 fame, but I doubt any of the young 'uns would have seen the movie and gotten the reference, so Lief Erickson it was.





This is our little guy.




Literally "hanging" out in his/her new home.







Enjoying a cricket snack.



I love this cricket crunch. Exoskeletons come prepackaged.

Make sure to click on the images to make them larger and really get to appreciate the unique life forms that live all around us.