Ms. Buttersworth The Chicken Improves!

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Here is my vid of Ms. Buttersworth my sick (but less sick now) chicken over the last 3 days. She is still staying in the Luck Cabin with me, but seems to be improving - thanks to everyone for their comments, ideas and help!



PS- For those that mighta missed it... Ms Buttersworth was acting strange, not seeking out food, shivering, hiding from the other chickens, isolating herself, lacking hygiene habits, acting confused & scared. She was eating and drinking if the food & water was brought to her, she just wasn't making any effort for herself.
I put garlic, ginger and usnea in her water and am keeping her fed by the nice warm wood stove.

Xoxoxo

Weird Science In Your Food: Trademarked Experiments

(photo by Nutraflora [tm] )

My good friend Noel in NYC called me last night and told me her concerns about a cereal she had bought at the health food store...

She said aside from the fact that it "tasted like poison" when she tried to eat it, in the ingredient list there was something called "Nutraflora" (TM) which had been trademarked. Trademarked food? Assuming that any trademarked food must either be...

1. Chemical/creepy man made & bad for you (aka not food)

2. Trademarking some process of how they got that 'food' , maybe?

So she looked it up, here... where the whole website described a type of food fiber that helps you "absorb calcium". A "prebiotic" they say occurs naturally... but only in the tiniest amounts.

Really? Naturally occurring... then how can they trademark it? I mean my donkey poop naturally occurs from my donkey but I can't trademark donkey poop across the world. Can I?

Is this really going to start happening already, have any of you seen natural foods that have been trademarked at the grocery, such as fruits and veggies? This really smacks of some Monsanto monopoly type crap, where they have claimed their TM'ed seeds, and even seeds that insects accidentally pollinated miles down the road...(destroying other people's farms for their greed & seed!)

How can you claim seeds OR naturally occurring foods as a trademark?

Maybe Nutraflora (tm) can trademark it because actually what it does in your body is not at all natural....

" For example, to get the same benefits offered in one serving of NutraFlora-enriched yogurt, you would have to eat about 22 bananas, 15 onions, 16 tomatoes, or 383 cloves of garlic."
Um WHAT? I don't know about you, but hell if I would ever eat 383 cloves of garlic in one meal..... muchless 22 bananas, 15 onions, 16 tomatoes all on the same plate. That is not what the human body was made to do. Period.
To me this is a vitamin product, not a "naturally occurring" food that belongs in Noel's cereal.
And if you wanna know the real deal, this strange shit is in foods you'd never guess...
How about your Horizon organic milk? Or your Silk Soy Milk? Look at the labels.
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Why is so much food a trademarked experiment these days? And doctors sit around perplexed by all their patients with strange chronic diseases, and food allergies. I believe the mass scale altercation of food through farming AND processing is slowly breaking down the natural abilities & defenses of the human body...
who can say they don't know someone these days who has diabetes, cancer, allergies, arthritis, thyriod disorder, etc. In my opinion it went from minority sick to majority chronically pushing their way through life.
We have made some great break throughs in science, major technological advances. But the altering of what we eat is an experiment we will surely regret. The human body has evolved on foods provided by the earth, not by science labs. The human-like diseases which our pets and animals have begun to have from our man made foods (leukemia, AIDS, diabetes, cancer, tumors) for them is just a small proof of what we are creating for our own now and future.

For good health, eat whole real foods made by nature!



Xoxoxo
PS--- this blog post is the opinion of the author. Don't sue me. Sue Noel, she's the one who brought it up. ;)

The Dying Hemlock Tree(s)

I had heard about the Hemlock Pine trees in the mountains here dying out a few years ago, but had never really seen the damage, the reality of what was happening till moving here to Hot Springs, NC. Here at the Luck Cabin (and throughout the adjacent forest) there are scores of big HUGE old growth Hemlocks, and many smaller ones too - all dead or near death, falling down to the ground in piles, families of barren trunks, groves of up-turned roots.

I was told by an Old Timer neighbor that when the bark starts pealing off and shows this red color pictured here, it means it will soon fall to the ground. Another neighbor said after it's death, due to shallow roots, they will fall over within one year of dying.

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The impact is much more apparent when you are standing in the forest surrounded by dead trees - from the spot I took these pictures, in a heavily, dense wooded area I counted approximately 20 dead Hemlocks from where I stood.

""The future of the species is currently under threat due to the hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae), a sap-sucking bug accidentally introduced from East Asia to the United States in 1924. The Adelgid has spread very rapidly in southern parts of the range once becoming established, while its expansion northward is much slower. Virtually all the hemlocks in the southern Appalachian Mountains have seen infestations of the insect within the last five to seven years, with thousands of hectares of stands dying within the last two to three years. Attempts to save representative examples on both public and private lands are on-going. A project named "Tsuga Search", funded by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is being conducted to save the largest and tallest remaining Eastern Hemlocks in the Park. It is through Tsuga Search that Hemlocks have been found with trunk volumes of up to 44.8 m³ within the Park, making it the largest eastern evergreen conifer, eclipsing in volume both Pinus strobus (Eastern White Pine) and Pinus taeda (Loblolly Pine).""

Under these giant dead trees are the young new sprouts, of tiny hemlocks - ones that looks free of the disease. One thing about the forest is it knows how to renew itself... the sucky thing is, we have yet to begin to understand what the impact of losing old growth trees has on the eco system. There may be some lag time between now and like, say 200 years from now when these can right themselves again. Then again, before recorded history I have to wonder how many times species were wiped out and no one would ever know about it now... if these things are part of natural life cycles, we call disasters?

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""A 2009 study conducted by scientists with the U.S. Forest Service Southern Research Station suggests the hemlock woolly adelgid is killing hemlock trees faster than expected in the southern Appalachians and rapidly altering the carbon cycle of these forests. According to Science Daily, the pest could kill most of the region's hemlock trees within the next decade. According to the study, researchers found that "hemlock woolly adelgid infestation is rapidly impacting the carbon cycle in [hemlock] tree stands," and that "adelgid-infested hemlock trees in the South are declining much faster than the reported 9-year decline of some infested hemlock trees in the Northeast.""
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What do I plan on doing with all my dead Hemlocks? One thing I can not do is burn them, because the pine would clog up my wood stove pipe and catch it on fire ... I can use the smaller branches for good kindling though. I am hoping to get a portable wood mill out here and turn them into lumber for building. Other then that I am not sure what to do except watch the Hemlock graveyards house the bugs and birds and slowly decay, while the tiny new trees reach for the light.

XOxoxo

Spooky Tree: Portal To Another World?

The thing about nature is even the worst disease, the most scarred, damaged and dead thing in the woods is sometimes the most powerful, fascinating and attractive bit of beauty amongst the mundane. (Mundane, as anything we become accustomed to seeing.) Me and Bort found this giant melted, twisted, knotted, hollowed, mangled tree in the forest behind my cabin...
Seeing things like this always bring out the best of my imagination - if there is ever any glimmer of hope that things will turn out to be all multi dimensional (like it was in the Golden Compass book series) ... and just like in the movies you can just accidentally lean against a bump in an old tree to get to the other side(s) ---> finding things like this puts the spark of opportunity and mystery in my eye.
Bort began moving towards the other side of the tree first...
And then I followed to find a whole other realm of interest --- a blackened bark with knots following upward like a ladder made for critters and gnomes. ;)
With a big hole in the ground, which I stood in and tried casting a spell with a stick. Maybe it worked?!? But I lost my concentration when I realized I was standing in a wet hole, soaking into my boots. bye bye big spooky fantabulous tree.
xoxoxXooox