a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Author: theMan

  • 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.



  • The Blue Sky Returns


    The sky is blue again. Sunday’s rain, which left the mimosa blossoms looking like sad, wet feathers, washed all the smoke out of the sky, and pushed it over the mountains. The birds can now see where they are flying. When I head down into the valley, I can see the San Juan islands once more, their forested peaks rising above a shimmering sea.



    The one alarming thing about the rain was seeing Satan sliding along the wet pavement. In all the years we’ve lived here, I’ve never seen a snail so big. This spring is the first year I’ve even seen a snail in the garden. It was a snail no bigger than a gnat, which I crushed as soon as I saw it. Rest assured, this beast is no longer in the land of the living either. All the more reason to hope that Claire hatches the five duck eggs she is incubating. Once the ducks are grown, I will give them the whole vegetable garden to roam, where they will devour all the slugs and any snails they find.


    It’s interesting how hens lay eggs with subtle differences from one day to the next. The chicks below are having a feast with the tofu I gave them. Tofu is high on their list of most desirable things to eat. Perhaps at the top of their list is watermelon. They will pick a watermelon until its rind is paper thin.

  • Aliens in the Garden


    Baby cucumbers look like aliens, their little bodies covered with long spines. It’s almost hard to believe that these tiny, light green aliens will turn into dark, crisp, juicy cucumbers.



    The okra are starting to bud. Their little buds look like little hands clasped in prayer. It won’t be long before I’m plucking them for market.

  • Mach Kuchen – From Garden to Oven


    I’ve never made Mach Kuchen from scratch this way, by first going into the garden and harvesting poppy seeds. Collecting poppy seeds is so much fun, I’m surprised it’s legal for adults to do it.


    Looking at the way poppy seed pods are shaped, somewhere there must an insect that has evolved to live in poppy seed pods. The pods are made of bug-sized chambers with little doors with roofs over the doors, keeping the chambers nice and dry. With the seed pods lifted high above the ground, they’d make great apartments for flying insects to buzz off from in the morning, and return to in the evening.



    Mach Kuchen is a simple dish. You start off with poppy seeds, grind them a bit, and make a jam out of them. The usual method is to use sugar, but this time I used honey instead.

    You roll out a soft yeast dough into a thin rectangle, spread the poppy seed jam over it, roll it up, let it rise, and bake until it is done. Covering the top with butter and poppy seed is an option.






    This may be the first Mach Kuchen made from poppy seed grown in the Skagit Valley. It’s certainly the first one made with poppy seed grown in this neck of the woods. Baking Mach Kuchen may bring good luck. This afternoon, the sky turned a shade of blue, the bluest it has been since the forest fire smoke blew in a week ago.