Mary Cook

I have rarely wanted to break a hen of broodiness--one time was when some idiot went broody in January. I had not read about the dunking method, but that you put them in a wire cage with no bedding so their bottom cools. The first years I kept chickens, we didn't have electricity so an incubator was not an option. Now I have it, but as off-grid solar so conceivably would worry about the drain during a long cloudy period. But in any case, as long as I have one broody hen, I'd MUCH rather let her handle it, because aside from the effort of maintaining an incubator--which is probably no more than keeping a hen fed and watered inside Chickland, the enclosure within our coop where we put a broody hen so the others can't keep laying eggs in her nest, and she's less likely to abandon the nest halfway through. But then! When the chicks hatch, she knows just what to do, and she keeps them all warm and fed and taught how to be a chicken. Once, we let a hen and her chicks out of the coop when they were 11 days old, and she led them straight to the sand pile, which I use in the garden. I guess she realized they needed grit for their gizzards, which I wouldn't have thought of.
Mostly I don't see why you'd want to break a hen of broodiness unless she's doing it off-season, or all your hens are going broody and you aren't getting eggs, or maybe you have no rooster so those eggs won't hatch. Right now I have two hens setting--which makes more of a dent in the egg supply than can be accounted for by the eggs under the hens and the hens out of the laying roster, it always seems--and someone coming to get a dozen fertilized ggs so she can replenish her flock after predators wiped out all but two hens.

Thank you Janie, now I can just leave my fennel where it is, in an improved garden bed where it has the best chance, without worrying about its effect on the flowers and peas and cumin I have near it.

Years ago I grew fennel from seed my brother gave me from plants growing ferally in Los Angeles. Not only did it survive in my West Virginia garden through a few years of (zone 6) winters, but I broke a couple of shovels trying to dig it out to move it. Too much damage to move, and I've never had such success with it since. I'm trying again and have a few seedlings in a garden bed now, figuring that's my best shot in getting it to germinate and survive, and I tried googling to see what the wisdom is on whether it's allellopathic or not. But I can tell you that the reason I dug that big healthy plat, that gave me a quart of seed every year, is because I noticed  other plants not doing well in the same bed. The one I specifically remember was peppers. Of course, you never know with a single trial whether what you observe is due to confounds, like different treatment of the soil, or being in the pathway of water moving underground, or maybe it was the shade. I've never seen it self-seeding, but that's probably because I'm growing it for the seed so I snip off seedheads as they ripen.

A couple of notes, not recipes. First, however you cook them, the thing that makes parsnips worth growing is the unique way they fill the "hungry gap" as they used to call it, here in Appalachia at least. The time when homesteaders/peasants were most likely to be hungry is not winter--there are wild animals to hunt, domestic livestock to slaughter, frozen and dried ...no, the hungry gap is in spring, when it's not a good time to hunt or slaughter, the frozen and canned and dried and root cellared stuff is used up, a garden is planted but isn't yielding anything yet--but the parsnips are at their best, and are hardy enough to come through till spring in most climate. The other biggies is eggs--chickens lay most heavily in spring, and resume laying in late winter.
On saving seed: be prepared for a six foot plant with a thousand seeds--but you almost have to do this every year, because parsnips are one of the plants whose seeds have the shortest longevity.

On smell, the three solutions are: tight lid as someone mentioned; a bucket of sawdust to put a handful on each deposit; and discourage people from using it for pee. We have a separate"pisseria" in the house, and that bucket gets emptied onto compost piles, some in the woods and composed of fallen branches, which can really use the nitrogen boost; The outhouse outside also has a bucket fitted to the toilet seat, and four spare buckets to switch in and cover a full bucket with a lid. When all five buckets are full I dump them in the poo bins farther from the house. On warmth, our outhouse hasn't ever gotten battens and occasionally wind-driven snow intrudes, but it's remarkable how little we mind the cold. Funny thing--an indoor toilet in a sixty degree house feels cold but the outdoor one when it's 15 degrees doesn't bother me. But I live in zone 6, it hardly ever goes below zero here and isn't often windy--your area is maybe quite another matter.

I see it as some roosters are aggressive and some are not. I've never had a peaceable one turn aggressive. We don't have kids here but if a rooster attacks a human, he's lucky if he gets a second chance and no way a third. I've had some roosters for years without problems, like my current one. I figure if a rooster is problematic, it's remarkably easy to get another one, free.

I suppose this is off topic, but the video of the little girl talking about sprouting sweet potatoes--you don't have to stick the entire sweet potato in water. My home-grown sweet potatoes, on a shelf in my pantry, start sprouting in February, sometimes even January. I can cut off the sprouting end, an egg-sized piece, and put that in water with toothpicks--and have the rest of the tuber to eat.

YES, Terry! I do the same, and urge others to in my garden column. There is a one-off hardware store with a wooden floor, where the clerk may ask if your mother's doing any better now; there's an auto parts store with barstools next to the counter so customers and clerks can shoot the breeze while someone's being waited on--I'll go to those places first, rather than Walmart of Advance Auto. I don't like the politics of the one-off farm supply family, but I like supporting my local community, and the owner once said he couldn't seem to get any decent thermometers so he wasn't recommending what he did sell. Our farmer's market ain't much--it's a very rural area and most people just go to WalMart, and others grow their own veggies and fruits (including me, but I stop by anyway because I do find things I want and it's a much more enjoyable interaction).

Because of the number of scam shots we get in the mail, over the phone And via email, I've begun wondering aloud what percentage of the US economy is fraud now. Which is not exactly the same as sleaze--a lot of what Paul describes is just carelessness, not deliberate deception. But my opinion is that this has gotten MUCH worse over time--this is not normal. I turned 70 this year, so I've seen this change over time. One example is calling a business or government agency. The normal thing when I was young is you'd dial the number, a human would answer and say "XYZ Gadgets, how may I help you?" Now you dial the number and you get a machine reciting a menu, and usually none of the options fits your actual question. After a lot of struggle, you manage to talk to a human, but this person is in India or the Philippines and has no idea how to help you. Eventually they transfer you to someone else, and if the call doesn't get dropped altogether, you're now talking to someone in the Philippines or India who also can't help... if you're lucky, one hour-long series of calls delivers the results you got in five minutes 40 years ago. Some of it IS AI, or automation anyway, the penchant of management to want to minimize employees.

He had all kinds of machines, but the only one that intrigued me--that looked better than doing it by hand--was the thresher. That's what I've had the most trouble with in growing grain. Well, that and grinding the grain into flour.