a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Author: theMan

  • My Farm Workers

    SadMimosaBlossoms

    The overnight rain has made the mimosa blossoms look like sad creatures in a Dr. Seuss story. A little rain doesn’t stop me from preparing a vegetable bed for cabbage transplants. A freshly dug patch attracts the attention of a mother hen and her chicks. It’s a prime spot to teach her chicks how to find and catch earthworms. Over and over she picks up earthworms and drops them for her chicks. They grab them and run off to eat them without being hassled by the other chicks.

    SharingWormsB
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    SharingWormsA
    SharingWorms1

  • Grow Food, Grow

    CabbageSprouting

    Seeing planted seeds sprouting is always encouraging. Those first bits of green show so much promise. Soon, these cabbage sprouts will be out in the field, growing and becoming succulent heads.

    The ripening apples portend cooler weather. This year is promising to be a bumper year for apples. The riper they become, the more I keep my ears open to hear if any pileated woodpeckers have found them. They love pecking and eating apples. We don’t mind. This year there are more apples than we can possibly eat. We are open to sharing them with these wonderful birds.

    If you’ve never seen a pileated woodpecker with its bright red head, or heard its startling call, or listened to the rapid thump it makes when it pecks at a tree trunk, you’ve missed a great pleasure.

    RipeningApplesA

  • Love Continues

    BillyAndImeldaA

    Scientists don’t like to use words like love when describing the relationships animals have. But it’s a word that seems to fit the special relationship that Billy and Imelda have. They spend much of the day together. They aren’t monogamous by any means. But of all the hens, Billy seems to enjoy Imelda’s company most. And Imelda seems to like the attention.

    Billy is already five years old, so he may not be around too much longer. I will miss him a great deal when he is eventually no longer around. In the meantime, I get my heart warmed whenever I see Billy and Imelda together. Also see Old Love Birds and Cloud of Dust or The Sex Was Good.

    BillyAndImeldaB

  • Tucked In for the Night – Five Week Old Chicks

    TuckedInForTheNight

    Chicks grow a lot in five weeks. Here they are, five week old chicks tucked in for the night with their mother. And below is how they looked soon after they hatched. They are all feathered out and looking more and more like adult chickens. They’re no longer the cute little baby chicks. It won’t be long before they are on their own.

    TuckedInForTheNightInJune

  • 秋-Fall: not as complicated as it seems

    Aki

    秋 is the Chinese character for fall/autumn. In Japanese, it is read as “aki”. Chinese characters may seem like a very complicated way to write, but there is a method to them. Understand this method, and you can often make out what a character means even if you’ve never seen it. Most Chinese characters are combinations of a radical and additional strokes. The radical provides a base meaning and the additional strokes supply the sound and additional meaning. It’s similar to being able to understand English words that are made by compounding Latin and/or Greek words. For example, in medical terms, “itis” means inflammation. Anytime you read about a condition that ends in “itis”, you know you are dealing with a type of inflammation. Know the meaning of the part of the word before the “itis” and you know what is inflamed even if you’ve never seen the word before.

    NogiHenIn the case of the character for fall 秋 the radical is on the left and means a grain like rice or wheat. Originally, the shape of this radical looked like a stalk with an ear of grain hanging at the top. Over time it transformed into the shape it has now as shown on the right.

    This grain 禾 radical is combined with the character for fire 火 to signify the time of the year when grains are harvested. The character for fire 火 supplies the sound “shu” which is used when reading the character 秋 when it appears in compound words like 立秋 risshu which means the beginning of fall, literally when “fall stands up”.

    There are 214 radicals and these form the base for all the thousands of Chinese characters. Often, by looking at the parts that make up a character, you not only can get a good idea what it means, you also know how to read it. That said, the history of Chinese characters is thousands of years old, and at different times, characters had different meanings and different sounds. So even though the basics are simple, it is still a complex method of writing, but one that provides a depth to writing that alphabetical writing systems like English lack. For example you can make puns not only based on the sounds of words, but on the letters of the words.