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Is it art or is it firewood?

“Ahhh, so that’s how it works,” said two people after I’d helped one grasp the principles surrounding wet and dry firewood and the other to understand duck reproduction.

Here’s the lesson about firewood: “Wet firewood can be dry yet can still be wet, while dry firewood can be wet yet can still be dry.”

This was a mystery to me until the learned farmer explained that “wet” used in association with wood, relates to the freshness of the sap therein. Therefore wood from a tree that’s recently been chopped down is wet, even in a drought. After a while, the sap dries, creating wood which is dry even if it gets wet in the rain.

The urbanite who’d bought wet firewood and was agitated when a few days under cover didn’t dry it out, was thrilled to learn the reason why.

Our niece was similarly pleased to be enlightened about the business of breeding ducks and poultry.

“But she’s got two children,” exclaimed the farmer. “She must know how it works!” This niece, I hasten to point out, is from his gene pool.

If you’re fuzzy about such things, this is how it works based on my observations and unscientific research.

Q: Is it art or is it firewood?
Clue – it’s on Gibbs Farm, Kaipara and that spiky thing in the background is art.

A hen – or duck – can become fixated on motherhood especially if you let her hoard eggs. After she’s laid about a dozen, she’ll want to sit on them till they hatch. Strangely, I felt it necessary to say that eggs won’t produce chickens or ducklings unless they’re fertile, i.e. the female has to have been having it away with the male.

And yes, went my tutorial, fertile eggs are edible. If you’ve got a rooster or drake, pretty much all your eggs will be fertile. It’s even possible to put them under a clucky hen after they’ve been sitting on your kitchen bench for a week or two – and hatch chickens.

The niece seemed satisfied with my explanation and fortunately didn’t delve deeper into the breeding process.

For example, we have a hen that produced chickens due to the attentions of a rooster which is also her father. He is also her grandfather, which makes him the father, grandfather and great-grandfather of the chickens.

Is this legal? Don’t ask. The only thing I know for sure is that the principles of wet and dry firewood are elementary in comparison.

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Whitey Esq and one of his brood under the lemon tree – by Kelley Eady Loveridge for ‘Your Home & Garden’ feature.

We were eating dinner when Floss started her urgent “there’s an intruder” bark. I flew outside and immediately saw the telltale white blotch of a Friesian in the dark – a bull had meandered up the driveway after having strolled over a fence smashed in a big blow.

As I raced to chase it down the drive, Kate, the heading dog whose brilliance I have praised, sent it the wrong way – through the veggie garden and towards the new poultry pen! Oh no, it’s made of shade cloth and the bull could charge through it.

Luckily the farmer left his dinner to resolve the shambles. When he returned, I was still worked up: “You guys should have put rails around the middle of the pen so there’s no chance of a bull blundering through,” I said.

“But you said you didn’t want rails,” he replied.

What?!

A ‘you said – I said’ conversation led to an astounding revelation. Rex, Tony and his buddy Mason, who built the pen, weren’t certain what I’d said, but came to an agreement about what they thought I’d said and did exactly that – if you get my drift.

The pen is evidence of their willingness to please. It took three men and a tractor mounted with a post rammer about three days to build. It’s the size of a large room, has six-foot walls and features cosy sleeping and nesting facilities.

Its pampered residents include Whitey Esq, Glamour Boy having been sent to heaven in a heart-wrenching process. Afterwards CC – short for Crooked Comb – patrolled the pen looking for him. I felt awful – and was not alone: egg production dropped to zero.

I gave the matter of the hen house some thought and figured that as I couldn’t convince the farmer of what I really had said, there was no point trying to convince all three of them they had misunderstood or misheard. Or were they just ‘nod listening’?

When men are ‘nod listening’, they nod when you’re talking to them and you think they’re listening, but actually they’re thinking about rugby.

NB: I learned about “nod listening” in the Listener, a NZ magazine which invites readers to invent names for various situations.