a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Month: July 2014

  • Art in the Woods

    ArtInstallationA

    Wood is a good medium for making art. To work with wood, a chainsaw comes in handy.

    ArtInstallationB

    The pieces are cut and stacked. What’s left behind is the flattened grass where the tree used to lie. Eventually there will be rows of salad greens, garlic, shallots, potatoes, beans, and other produce growing here.

    ArtInstallationC

    The wood is split and stacked. The art installation is complete. This piece is about a quarter of a cord. By spring it will have vanished, used to keep the house warm in the middle of winter.

    ArtInstallationD
    ArtInstallationE
    ArtInstallationF

    Lucky isn’t impressed with the art installation. She just walks by without so much as pausing and pondering what the artist is trying to convey.

  • Impatience Rewarded

    MisoA

    For nearly a year I have been waiting for this recipe to finish. Last August I made my first batch of miso and set it in the pantry to age. I meant to wait until August, but now that it almost mid July, my curiosity got the best of me. I brought the crock out of the panty.

    MisoB

    Lifting the lid, it certainly smelled like miso. I made my miso with soy beans, brown rice, barley and salt. What transforms this mixture into miso is koji, or Aspergillus oryzae, a fungus used to ferment a number of food products. Humans have been using Aspergillus oryzae for some 2,000 years.

    Lifting the parchment paper I used to seal the fermenting miso, I am face to face with my home made miso.

    MisoC

    Opening it a few weeks early was worth it. My impatience was rewarded with some of the best miso I’ve ever had. There really is something to making some foods yourself in small batches. Now I can start making a batch every three months. One of the places I researched said that if you let it ferment for two years, it tastes even better. If I make enough batches, I will have the patience to let some ferment that long.

    MisoD

  • Heat Wave

    Forecast140712B

    Many of you will laugh at our heat wave, but this long a stretch of days above 80ºF (26.7ºC) is so unusual. I looked through the 2003 to 2014 weather records, the last twelve years, and this is the first time we’ve had more than four days in a row with highs 80ºF or higher. Yesterday it was 82ºF and it is supposed to be above 80ºF on Thursday. If that happens, that will be seven days in a row. In just four out of the last twelve years have there been stretches of 80ºF days lasting four or more days. In August 2010, there were five days in a row above 80ºF. In August 2008 and July 2006 there were four days in a row above 80ºF. In most years there are just a handful of days all summer when it gets above 80ºF.

    If it is this warm in the first half of July, I wonder what it will be like in August, normally our warmest month. This year will be a banner year for beans and squash.

    UPDATE July 14, 2014: The temperature only got up to 78.6ºF (25.9ºC) today, so our streak of 80º days only lasted three days. No record breaking heat wave this week.

    InTheDitchA
    InTheDitchB

    This mother hen is finding plenty of things for her five day old chicks to eat in the dry creek beds. Water flows through these creeks from November through April. They dry out by the end of June and are a favorite place for chickens to scratch for bugs. A little water doesn’t deter the chickens. They stay out of the creeks only when the water is deep and rushing.

    PotatoLeaves

    The potatoes are loving this sunny weather. They are beautiful plants. You can grow them in pots just for their foliage. If you’re living in an apartment with a balcony, a row of potato plants will provide plenty of greenery. They will get three to four feet tall. And when they bloom, their purple to pink to white blossoms are beautiful. In August, after providing you with greenery and flowers, they will reward you for planting them by producing three to eight wonderful potatoes to eat. Potatoes that you’ve grown without any pesticides, herbicides or fungicides.

    Ten potato plants will produce from thirty to sixty potatoes. When picked fresh, while their skins are still paper-thin and delicate, you will enjoy potatoes so delicious you’ll wonder why you bother buying the ones they sell in stores.PotatoBlossoms140712
    Supermarkets and big box stores aren’t designed to handle such delicate fare. They want produce that will ship easily and last. Potatoes with skin so thin that you can rub it off with your fingers, are out of the question.

    If you want such quality, you have to grow them yourself or find a farmer who will grow them for you. Look around. Ask your farmer at your farmers market that you want fresh, new potatoes with paper-thin skin that take just a few minutes to cook. You might have to pay three to four dollars a pound for them, but you’re paying that much for a latté anyway. Better to spend it on a pound of the world’s most delicious potatoes.

    ShastaDaisies140712

    The Shasta daisies are in full bloom, feeding the many wild bees which make their home here. Daisies are composite flowers. They aren’t a single flower. Their yellow centers are clusters of hundreds of tiny flowers, which provide bees with nectar and pollen.

    Sven, our Swedish Flower Chicken rooster, sparkles in the morning sun. Is he aware that this is a record setting heat wave? The last week, he’s been having a feast gorging on falling raspberries, and telling as many hens as possible where they are. The chickens get their share of the fruit which grows at a man and his hoe®. They deserve good things too.

    Sven140712

  • Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

    Reduce, reuse, recycle is a phrase we often hear. Reuse and recycle is something that nature is constantly doing. In nature, nothing is ever wasted. Everything is something’s food. As soon as something falls or dies, there are millions of organisms feasting on it.

    Nature isn’t much for reducing. Nature is prolific to a fault. So when I needed some poles for growing pole beans, nature had plenty of poles ready for me to use.

    ReduceReuseRecycleD

    I could go to a garden or hardware store to find some poles, but there are thousands of poles growing here. This is what a j pole factory looks like. There are no buildings. No workers. No managers. Nothing to pollute the air or water. Just young alders turning sunshine into trunks, branches and leaves. After forty minutes of easy work, I have a bundle of poles and a pile of leaves for the compost pile. Those leaves will eventually become onions, potatoes, salad greens, tomatoes, all sorts of good things to eat.

    ReduceReuseRecycleA
    ReduceReuseRecycleB
    ReduceReuseRecycleC

    Now the beans have sturdy poles to climb. In the fall when the beans are done, I can pull out the beans and the poles and recycle them in the compost pile. Next year nature will provide plenty of fresh poles to use.

    ReduceReuseRecycleE
    ReduceReuseRecycleF

  • The Joy of Producing Food

    It’s Thursday, the day to deliver fresh salad greens and eggs to Tweets Café. The time to pick greens like Ruby Streaks is early in the morning when it’s cool. It’s a great time to be out in the field, scissors in hand, carefully cutting tender greens. The only sounds are the roosters crowing and the birds singing in the trees.

    20140710-RubyStreaksC

    And this is one of the eggs destined for Tweets Café today. Maybe noting which hens are laying which eggs and writing the date on them is unnecessary, but each egg is that special.

    20140710-PeachesEgg

    Six months or so from now, these little chicks will be producing fantastic eggs. Until then, they get to spend several months bathed in the care and love of their mother, followed by a carefree months becoming adults with their siblings. They will never know what it’s like to be caged or confined to a laying barn with thousands of other chickens.

    20140710-Chicks

    Every day, they’ll wake up from their roost, hop down, stretch, take a drink, maybe peck a bit before stepping outdoors to spend the whole day looking for good things to eat over acres of pasture, brush, and woodland.