It’s the great bamboo harvest of 2015. A massive pile of bamboo. If it weren’t for bamboo, civilization may never have started. Such a versatile plant. It doesn’t take a lot of bamboo to make a cozy, dry house. You can make bridges out of it, fishing poles, water pipes, spears, clothes, bowls, cups, baskets, all the things you need to be civilized.

The chickens come to investigate what I am doing with all this bamboo. Tangerine brings her chicks to show them how civilization started. You never know. Ingrained in DNA, passed down through the eons, may be terrifying memories of those first chicken cages made from bamboo. Chicken learning may be a matter of firing memories stored in DNA. One walk past a human taking apart bamboo, and the terrifying memories of being trapped inside bamboo cages come alive and the chickens walk a little bit faster. Don’t get too close to a human with bamboo their DNA tells them. Never fear, little ones. You live in the land of chicken freedom. There’ll be no bamboo cages for you today.

The bamboo harvest over, it’s on to the smallest cabbage harvest in the world, plucking one cabbage for lunch and a few meals. In cool weather, cabbage is one of those fantastic plants that stays fresh as long as you leave it growing. It would be stupid to harvest all the cabbages at once. They’d never keep. I’d have to turn them into sauerkraut, can them, pickle them, etc, or see them turn into compost. Leave them out in the garden, and I can have fresh cabbage next week, the week after, the week after that, and on and on. It’s cool when the soil does a better job keeping produce fresh than a refrigerator. Try keeping a head of cabbage fresh for four weeks in your fridge. It’s not going to happen. Leave it growing in the ground, and it’s a piece of cake.