a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Month: November 2017

  • Mystery is a Tiny Egg


    Morning starts with a heavy frost, turning leaves to leather and wood to fine art.




    Watching coffee roasting is a pleasing activity. Having a nearby friendly coffee roaster you can enjoy a pleasant conversation with while you pick up your coffee beans is precious. So is feeling how soft a bucket of warm chaff from roasted coffee is. Evidently it makes great mulch and bedding for worm bins, earthworms love it.



    So is enjoying the sun setting over the San Juan Islands on the drive home. And so is coming home to find a tiny egg, the first egg from a young hen. Based on its size and color, it is a Turken egg. The mystery to solve is which of the six month old hens has started laying eggs.

  • Where Snow Belongs


    Snow belongs up there, not down here. Saturday’s snow is but a memory. The sun has seen to that. The snow has retreated up into the hills and mountains where it belongs.


    Mt. Baker can have as much snow as it wants.


    And so can Lyman Hill. From now until spring, it’s a fine line where the snow ends, is it up there or down here?

  • Early First Snow


    Waking up this morning came with a big surprise, snow. This is the earliest snowfall since we moved here twelve years ago. It snowed steadily all morning, before stopping, and melting away.



    The chickens don’t let a little snow slow them down. It takes a blizzard to keep chickens from venturing outside.


  • All the Way from Umingmak Nuna


    A carpet of fallen leaves greeted me when I went out to the cabin to make tofu this morning. “Whoa!” I said when I stepped through the gate and saw all the leaves, wheelbarrows and wheelbarrows of leaves for the garden. Yesterday’s bluster shook the trees. Leaves fell all day and night.


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    In the cabin the gentle sound of soybeans soaking underneath a trickle of water is so soothing. The beans have come all the way from the other side of the Rocky Mountains to fatten in a cool stream. Maybe someone in Anacortes or down in the valley is feasting on fresh tofu tonight. I’ve adjusted my schedule so that I always have some on hand. If you need any, let me know.


    Snow geese by the thousands greet me on my way home from delivering tofu. It’s just in the past two to three years that the flocks are spending a lot of time in the northern part of the Skagit Valley. At times they fly overhead. Unlike other geese and swans which fly in small V-shaped groups, snow geese take to the air en masse, forming ribbons of hundreds and thousands of birds, noisily flying overhead, ribbons that at times stretch for miles.

    When you approach a field of snow geese, from a distance, they look like fields of white daffodils, or snow covered fields. And then you get closer and see that they are snow geese from here to the horizon. Their summer homes are in the far, far north, on the arctic sea coast, all the way to tip of Ellesmere Island, Umingmak Nuna, or land of the muskoxen, less than 500 miles from the North Pole. Just a few weeks ago these snow geese were on the tundra, looking down at muskoxen and caribou as they flew. Now they are here, watching cars go by, and flying over houses and freeways. Lucky snow geese, no passports to carry, no border crossings to worry about, just wings to flap and sail over all boundaries. If humans had wings, we never would have dreamed of creating border crossings, or fences, or walls. What would be the point?

  • On Golden Pond


    Against a slate November sky, ceanothus blossoms wait in vain for bumblebees to come tickle their blue petals. Most of the bumblebees have passed away. The surviving bumblebee gynes have all gone to bed, burrowing into the ground to pass the winter months in peace, until they wake in the spring to bring bumblebees back into the world. Meanwhile, noisy Stellar Jays make frequent forays into the apple trees to peck at the few remaining fruit.



    The first of November solves a mystery. Where are some of the hens laying their eggs now? At the end of last week the daily egg count dropped precipitously. I found their new nesting spot behind a bale of hay.


    By late afternoon, the clouds break enough to bathe the pond in gold. The towering cottonwoods are at peak color. On days like this, when I make tofu, I should call it “Golden Tofu”.



    My gardening companions always have plenty to say. They would prefer I spend all day in the garden. They wouldn’t mind me sleeping with them either. When they hear me come out of the house, they quack, “Hey, you, you’re coming to see us, aren’t you?”

    Ducks are the comedians of the bird world. They seem to tell each other jokes and laugh all day. The world is a much better place than we can imagine. A handful of ducks will show you that.