Month: June 2017

So when do poppies wake up? At the crack of dawn? At a reasonable hour? Wouldn’t you know, just like people, some are early risers, and others like to sleep in. At 6:40 this morning I went out into the garden to get an answer to the nagging question. Some of the poppies were wide awake and ready to go. Others were still fast asleep, and others starting to stir. So when do poppies wake up? It depends on the poppy.

And some poppies have rushed through the whole flowering thing are merrily into the being pregnant thing. There is no one way to do things in nature. It’s every poppy to itself.

And what do we have here? These are fruit ripening bags specifically for Kosui and Hosui, reddish varieties of nashi or Asian pears. The way they work is that you place the bags over developing fruit and the bags do the following marvelous things:

• Protect the developing fruit from damage caused by leaves, branches, and other fruit rubbing against it
• Protect the developing fruit from birds and insects
• Protect the developing fruit from disease causing bacteria and fungi
• Regulate the amount of sunlight the fruit get so that you get beautiful fruit

The bags sound indispensable. I bagged about half of the developing fruit on our nashi tree and will see if they are indeed as marvelous as they claim to be. The bags have a built in twist tie making it easy to fasten around the stem.

Like any product it comes with plenty of warnings, such as don’t let small children put them in their mouths, don’t stab yourself with the metal twist ties, the bags are flammable so keep them away from flames, you know, all the things we are all tempted to do with new products.

There are fruit specific bags for various apples, peaches, grapes, tangerines, and on and on. And not surprisingly the label asks the user to refrain from keeping bags you buy this year to use on next year’s crop as the efficiency of the bags diminishes over time.

“You have okra?” is a question I get a lot at the farmers markets. It’s because customers see that I am selling “okara” and mistake it for “okra”. Okara is a byproduct of making tofu, and there are many dishes you can make with it. It makes remarkable pancakes and muffins, and the hens love it too.

I get asked about okra so much, that I went ahead and planted a hoop house full of it. It started sprouting, and come mid August, when customers at the farmers market ask, “Do you have okra?” I should be able to say, “Lots of okra!”

Life is like a river ride. You never know what is around the bend, and you really have no control where the river will take you. You might as well enjoy the ride. Often the best things in life are the things you never planned. My childhood dreams, or visions of where I would live or what I would do when I was studying in university never included me growing okra out in the country in the Pacific Northwest. They didn’t include having an established bed of poppies that miraculously grows every spring and puts on a dazzling display of flowers in early summer, or having pear trees where robins nest.

A single clover blossom makes a lovely bouquet. The first of the potatoes are blooming too. This year I planted potatoes spaced apart so that all summer long and into the fall I can enjoy their flowers.

In the woods, the dogwood is starting to bloom. They are called “Yamaboshi” in Japan, and sometimes it is written 山法師 which translates to “mountain Budhist priest”, but it is also written 山帽子 which means “mountain hat”. I’d say they look more like hats than priests.

Yesterday while picking up logs to burn from a friend’s place in the woods, I came across a branch covered with feathery mycelium. The transformation of wood to soil is a slow, exquisite process, cloaked with astonishing beauty. Most of the time all this beauty goes unseen, deep in quiet forests, out of sight, out of mind. Only the mycelia know. The next time you drive by a forest, know that on the forest floor, under a blanket of decaying leaves, mycelia are spinning exquisite art as they convert wood into soil.