Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

Yes. This.
I am lucky enough to have a half dozen established peach trees and they only just finished flowering.
I guess peaches at this time of year must come from the Southern hemisphere.

Of course, its not the right season! And peaches don’t grow in greenhouses

Right now there's only frozen peaches. When they ripen in southern USA they are shipping up fresh.... they are hard and rot before they ripen most of the time 😢
 
The food industry has been selecting varieties of fruit and veg that suit it - consistency of size, shape, colour, ability to withstand drenching with pesticides and herbicides, mechanical harvesting, sorting, and cleaning, and above all long storage and transportation etc - for decades. The eating quality, and the nutritional value, were not considered, so now we have industrial quantities of bland, tough fresh fruit and veg and the same crap everywhere. UPFs try to compensate by pulverising the toughness out and injecting lots of chemical flavour.
And now adding Apeel coating, which cannot be washed off.
:mad:

What I don't grow I try to get from the local farmers' market. The county decided to limit the market vendors to Saturday only, though they were doing brisk business being open Fridays and Sundays, too. Stupid.

I got some wonderful REAL honey a couple weeks ago, and delicious goat cheese.

Tax:
IMG_20240506_210927019~2.jpg

Not enough room under Momma, but Lydia is tolerant.
(the chick on the right is the one who was attacked)
 
And now adding Apeel coating, which cannot be washed off.
:mad:

What I don't grow I try to get from the local farmers' market. The county decided to limit the market vendors to Saturday only, though they were doing brisk business being open Fridays and Sundays, too. Stupid.

I got some wonderful REAL honey a couple weeks ago, and delicious goat cheese.

Tax:
View attachment 3826429
Not enough room under Momma, but Lydia is tolerant.
(the chick on the right is the one who was attacked)
What a wonderful picture!
🥰
 
they are hard and rot before they ripen most of the time
exactly, because they're picked before they are ripe (when they are still tough enough to withstand the machines that handle them). Strawberries are a classic example; they are usually harvested when only 75% ripe, and they do not (cannot) get any riper or sweeter after harvesting, they just go soft and spoil. They also have less vit C, less quercetin and just over half the anthocyanins of fully ripe berries. So even if it's a variety that might taste good when ripe, we don't get to enjoy that because it's picked before it's ripe. Stone fruit sales have dropped significantly because people are fed up buying fruit that's sold with the claim it'll 'ripen in the bowl' but doesn't. If it was exposed to too cold temperatures while immature and in (probably lengthy) storage, the flesh can turn brown, dry or leathery. Yum, not :tongue.

Tax for food talk: a chicken mosaic from 2nd century BC Sicily. I reckon this is a crested variety :D
P1130592.JPG
 
I have had people surprised that they could actually grow garlic, or fruit, or seasonings. One neighbor thought almonds were an exotic and needed lots of water. She told me my almond tree would die because it was a tropical.

Although it was a revelation to me a few years ago when I learned of a pistachio grove a few miles north of where I was living. Desert zone 4, I believe.
I have an almond tree in the pathetic excuse I have for a backyard here in NJ.
 
There's one I use in Swansea that has an amazing range of fruits and veggies that I don't recognize and have to look up to find out what they are and what they're good for. Obviously, they're not local but exotic, so they're being flown in to satisfy the tastes of people who come from those parts of the world, now live here, and miss fresh home seasonal foods. And unless I dig a lot deeper, I don't know how they're produced where they come from; I just know they're not part of our industrialized food system.

But I wonder if, despite being flown in, their carbon footprint is actually bigger than that of home grown industrial fruit or veg, and I suspect it isn't by the time you factor in all the seed manipulation, fertilization, spraying, storage, packaging and transport that goes into supposedly 'local' foodstuffs. A worrying large number of people don't even know which foods could, never mind do, actually grow here, and which couldn't and aren't.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7116398/
There are a couple of farmers markets but they are hard to get to on public transport. I'll make the effort soon and visit what is reputed to be one of the better ones.
The last one I went to was a bit short on farmers, a bit short on raw produce. I did buy a very good jar of quince chutney there.
 
Yes. This.
I am lucky enough to have a half dozen established peach trees and they only just finished flowering.
I guess peaches at this time of year must come from the Southern hemisphere.
I think I recall you saying last year the peaches were good from your trees.
 

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