a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Month: January 2019

  • Forest Humor


    What are those blooms? I thought when I walked past the noble fir we bought as a live Christmas tree a number of years ago, and planted. They weren’t flowers, they were the cones which had either shed many of their seeds, or had their seeds eaten by birds or chipmunks.


    They look like odd forest creatures lined up on the branches. There is always something in the forest to bring on a smile.



    A pileated woodpecker doesn’t waste any time pecking out chunks of a dead alder as it searches for grubs. It flew away before I could take its picture. Talk about not minding your manners and leaving a mess.

  • World Famous Airborne Moss Gardens


    A narrow strip of land from northern California to southwestern British Columbia is the home of the only palmatum group of maples found outside of Asia, Acer circinatum – Vine Maple. How did they get here? Seeds carried on winds from Japan? Maybe a Siberian swan wintering in Japan took some seeds stuck in its feathers back to Siberia where it fell in love with a swan from the Skagit Valley, and as they preened each other, the seeds embedded in the feathers of the Skagit Valley swan who brought it here, and the seeds fell into the forest, maybe even this very forest thousands of years ago, and from here Acer circinatum spread to California and BC? Maybe I should put up a sign saying this is the very spot Acer circinatum first grew on the Pacific coastal belt of North America.

    In midwinter when its leaves are gone, the long, twisting vines of this maple become airborne moss gardens. I would like to say world famous airborne moss gardens, but in a way its good that they aren’t famous, they aren’t even Skagit famous, otherwise the woods would be overrun with world tourists, arriving by the busloads, fresh off the jets, trampling through the woods to ooh and ahh and take selfies with them.


    With no worry of a busload of tourists suddenly appearing, I can take my time adoring the cuteness of baby moss barely clinging to the narrowest of vine maple branches.


    With no tourists bumping into me, I can let my mind fantasize that the moss growing on vine maples is the slowest growing moss in the world, and that just to get to the size of thumb takes a hundred years, though looking at the vine maple branch, that branch is a long ways from being a hundred years old which it would have to be if that fluff of moss was that old.



    Perhaps in just a year or two, I won’t know for sure until I tag some baby moss and see how big it gets in a few years, the airborne moss gardens are lush and mini worlds of their own.

  • Let There be Dust


    Months of rain make having dry places for the chickens a must. Rolling around in the dust is a favorite pastime of the chickens. Sunshine pouring down on them as they roll around in the dust is just a fantasy this time of year. Come spring with days of warm sunshine, and the chickens will be dancing for joy during their dust baths. On these endless cloudless days, a dry spot will do use fine.






    Lee is not happy that the nest she wants to use to lay her egg is occupied. Her frustration is mounting, but Ruby couldn’t care less. There are empty nests on either side of Ruby, but Lee wants that one. It has to be that one, it just must, the world will end if she doesn’t get to use that nest.

  • Before the Storm


    The forecast is for another windy night and a blustery day tomorrow. Before the trees and branches come crashing down, while it is still calm, I sneak off into the winter woods. One of the first things I encounter is a vine maple leaf stuck to a fern. Instead of falling gently to the ground, this leaf landed on a fern, and through the winter storms, it has stayed there, slowly disintegrating. I suppose the fern will be glad when the rains finally wash it away.


    A small Douglas Fir branch with cones that was ripped off during the last storm dangles in a vine maple branch. You can tell it is from a Douglas Fir by the three pronged bracts sticking out of the seed scales.

    I could see someone collecting these three pronged Douglas Fir bracts and doing something with them, making a necklace from them, bundling them up into a brush, or filling a pillow with them.



    In the damp woods, any fallen log or dead stump becomes a garden of moss, lichen, and ferns. It doesn‘t matter how dry the summer is, it takes but a few fall raindrops for these mosses and lichens to become soft, feathery beds.



    Tomorrow is the first delivery of the year. The eggs are ready to go. Last year, the hens laid over 5,500 eggs. It sounds like a lot of eggs, but it isn’t even a drop in the bucket compared to the vast commercial hen houses churning out several million eggs a day. I can’t fathom what it must be like to be one hen among more than a million, to never see the sun, never take a dust bath, never explore what is on the other side of that fern deep in the woods, to never flirt with a rooster.

  • Hidden Life of Trees


    2018 ended with one last tofu delivery to the Anacortes Food Co-op yesterday. These are not serene lakes reflecting the mountains, these are flooded fields in the Skagit Valley. In the summer, these “lakes” will be fields of waving wheat and corn. Hard to imagine at this time of year when the flooded fields are full of ducks and swans.



    A break in the steady winter rains and the chickens are deep into the woods. The forest floor is all fluffy from the constant scratching of the chickens.

    I’ve been reading Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees the last few days. It’s given me a new appreciation of the wonders of trees and forests, and the complexity of what is happening in the woods around me. The relations trees maintain have with other trees and fungi is far more complex than we can imagine. For example, the fungi Laccaria bicolor can sense when the pine trees it relies on for sugars lacks nitrogen, and the fungi releases a toxin in the soil which kills minute organisms which become fertilizer for the pines.

    Anastassia Makarieva from Saint Petersburg in Russia discovered that it is forests that serve as a water pump, transporting moisture far inland from the coasts. Without coastal forests, the interior of continents would be much drier than they are.



    Maybe I should invite scientists to unravel the effects of chickens on temperate, coastal forests. They certainly have an impact on nutrient recyling, consuming vast quantities of of bugs and worms, and converting them into fertilizer. The way they aerate the top few inches of the forest floor must have an effect too.