a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Month: August 2017

  • Under a Cloudless Sky


    Day after day of sun and warm weather is taking its toll. Some of the trees have given up and are letting their leaves go, turning to fall’s crimson colors months early. And there is no rain in the forecast. Just sun and heat. We often go entire summers without getting to 80ºF (27ºC). It’s shocking to see a week of 80º days forecast for the beginning of September, 20ºF above normal. I have many memories of many Labor Day holidays looking out at sheets of pouring rain. That won’t be happening this year.



    Planting beans and potatoes together turned out well. They are both thriving together. The potatoes I planted in early July are starting to flower, their fuzzy flower buds swelling by the day. I poked around the roots of one today and found healthy, apricot-size potatoes. Another few weeks to a month, and they will be perfect for eating.




    The lettuce is a kaleidoscope of colors. Out of the garden today are eggs, kohlrabi (the first one of the season), ao-jiso, and berries.



    And a humongous apple that weighed over a pound. Grow your own food and you realize that nothing is more precious than clear air, clean water, and healthy, living soil.

  • Peel, peel, peel


    The slow growing madrona tree is peeling. It’s something madrona trees do, and it is what makes them so beautiful. Their bright red, peeling bark, reminds me of my many childhood sunburns. A game my sister and I used to play when we were small. The day after getting toasted to a crisp on the beach on a hot, summer day, we’d carefully peel our shriveled skin, trying to extract the largest piece possible. The larger the piece, the happier we were.

    We got burnt so often, I’m surprised we haven’t died of skin cancer many times over. But maybe we inoculated ourselves by eating our dried pieces of radiated skin. Sunburnt human skin doesn’t taste so bad. Where are the studies comparing skin cancer rates of children who eat their peeled burnt skin to those who didn’t? You know, it might be an option to lathering your bodies with sunscreen. Just saying.



    Ruby, one of my favorite hens, is in her usual nest, laying her egg for the day. She’s a gregarious hen, often coming up to greet me whenever I go into the chicken yard. Nancy, black with a spot of white on her cheek, and Kumo-hime 雲姫 (Cloud Princess) are all quietly laying eggs. They aren’t interested in hearing about my skin peeling hypothesis.


  • Eclipse Oddities


    It didn’t get as dark as we thought it would. With the moon covering 89% of the sun, we thought it would be quite dark, instead the sky turned a deep cobalt blue, and all the colors intensified. The most memorable oddity were the many reflections of the eclipse landing on the truck and pavement under a cherry tree. The spaces between the leaves became many pinhole cameras, reflecting the eclipse on the ground. The temperature also lowered during the eclipse. The chickens and dogs didn’t seem to notice anything was unusual. The cat, well, the cat slept through it all.




    Clear evidence of the fading sunlight was the light meter in one of the hoop houses. The intensity of the light dropped from 18,000 lux to under 2,000 lux at the peak of the eclipse. And in the house, it became very dark. And yet, even blocking 11% of the sun was not enough to make it dark outside. It shows just how brilliant the sun is.

  • Letting Go


    You know your day is about to take a turn for the worse when someone calls to say they need you to come over to help them process their feelings. Feelings are such fleeting things, always changing by the second. One second you are seething with rage, the next your heart is bursting with love. For being such transitory things, the more you dwell on them, the more concrete they become. Trying to process them is like trying to shape melting Jello.


    Rusty, our cat, likes to process his feelings at three in the morning. If I don’t wake up to console him, he’ll pick at my face with his needle-sharp claws until I do. A few times I’ve reflexively bopped him on his head when he’s tried to wake me, and then I have feelings to process.


    The best thing to do when you have feelings to process, is to plant some potatoes in the garden. Pulling weeds, digging through the soil with your fingers, and shaping mounds for the spuds, and suddenly all those feelings you thought you needed to process are gone, having flown away on their own. Feelings are so light that all you have to do is to open your mind and they float away.


    A walk through the kohlrabi will do wonders for your frame of mind. Their huge, fan-shaped leaves light up when they catch the late afternoon sun. Underneath their huge leaves, their stems are fattening. A few more weeks and sweet kohlrabi will be a daily delight. When you are munching on sweet kohlrabi, you’ll have no feelings you need to process.

  • Research, Research, Research


    My journey with making bread using levain, my own starter made with just whole wheat flour and water, started last summer and this week, my research with adjusting the amount of water and flour to mix, the length of time to let the dough sit before adding the levain, the amount of time to let it rise, how and when to shape the loaves, the amount of time to bake them in dutch ovens with the lids on and then with the lids off finally paid off.

    During the week I did more research and was quite pleased with the result of the three loaves that came out of the oven. This morning’s bake for today’s Mt. Vernon Farmers Market came out the way I wanted. All it took was research, research, research. You can rely on recipes only so much. After that it is a matter of your hands learning, and you discovering what your flour, your water, your levain, your oven, your kitchen wants in order for the bread to come out the way you want it.