a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Author: theMan

  • Slurpling and Mooffling


    On a misty morning, I hear the snow geese flying overhead. When I’m lucky, the mist parts, and the snow geese flutter across the blue sky.




    A generous gift of pine needles from friends makes for nice, soft foot paths between the garlic beds. They make a pleasant place to rest my knees when I plant garlic cloves. Happiness are friends with a gigantic pine tree who don’t know what to do with all the pine needles and pine cones that fall from the tree.

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    The ducks are slurpling through water-soaked grass. Their feeding sounds like a babbling brook. In dry brush and grass they moofle along, filling the air with soft moofles. They chirp, whistle, and grunt too.

  • Art In Every Slice


    Slice a colossal chioggia beet vertically and you get a piece of art in every slice. These slices are destined for a pot of borscht. With chioggia beets, you don’t get a deep red borscht, but it tastes just as good.



    An onion I found hiding among the weeds, revealed four developing buds inside. Grow your own food, and you are freed from the tyranny of standards. Grocers and produce buyers demand that the produce they buy adhere to rigid standards of size, color, shape, and weight, which means that any onion you buy in a supermarket has been stripped of any personality. Only the ones which conform to a rigid standard of what an onion is supposed to look like make it onto the store shelves. But grow a row of onions and you get to pick them at all stages of growth, and enjoy an endless variety of sizes, colors, and shapes.

  • A Study in White and Black


    While prepping another bed for garlic, I dug up some garlic I missed pulling up this year. It had already sprouted, sending magical white roots deep into the cool earth. There is more root than bulb. You have to admire a plant that can grow robustly when the earth has chilled.



    Back into the cool earth the garlic will go, row upon row. Underneath the surface, their magical roots will spread and intertwine, making a network more intricate and complicated than you can imagine. The next time you walk past a bed of garlic, picture those magical white roots spread far and wide underneath the surface.

  • No Robots Needed


    The prescription these days for solving the world’s problems are better robots. Robots to vacuum your floor. Robots to water the garden. Robots to mow your lawn. But I doubt any robot will do as good as job of keeping my garden pest-free as the four Cayuga ducks. Watching them scurrying through the leaves and vegetation in search of bugs and slugs to eat is awe-inspiring. They have more intelligence in their brains than any robot Silicon Valley Millennials can conjure up. Millions of years of evolution have honed the ducks’ senses and drive to scour every bit of the garden. I don’t have to recharge them, and they convert everything they eat into fertilizer in a matter of hours. I don’t have to upgrade them every year or two, no need to call support, and they self-reproduce to boot.

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    While the ducks tend to the garden, I make tofu to deliver to the Anacortes Food Coop on Thursday. There is a pure beauty to soybeans when you soak them overnight under cold, running water. The soft flow of cold water washes away all impurities, leaving plump, pure soybeans.

  • Spring in Fall, or How to Sleep Like a Log


    It feels like a spring day, not the middle of fall. 124 days from the summer solstice, the sun is as bright as a day in late February. Just two more months and the days start getting longer. The ducks have found a dry, sunny spot in a woodshed to dry and preen their feathers. Watching ducks preen melts all your worries away. It’s cheap therapy.


    Bicycling to the post office on a day like today is cheap therapy too. Last week I heard Terri Gross interview sleep scientist Matthew Walker. In the interview she made a comment that made me laugh. When Mr. Walker told her that he tries to get eight hours of sleep every night, she gasped, “Eight hours in bed every night! How in the world do you do it? … Most people don’t have eight hours available to sleep.”

    It made me wonder if that is really true, and if it is true, what sort of mad world have we made that most people don’t have enough time to sleep? I am a very sound sleeper. Once as a child, I fell off a top bunk onto a hard wood floor and didn’t wake up. When I woke up in the morning, I couldn’t figure out why I was sleeping in the lower bunk because I knew I went to bed in the upper bunk.

    Plant rows of garlic, chop wood, clean out the chicken coop, bicycle to the post office and back, rake leaves, watch the ducks preen themselves, take in the beauty of fall, and you will sleep like a log for eight hours without any effort.