I’ve seen bamboo my whole life, but this is the first time I’ve seen a grove bloom. The grove of bamboo next to the cabin is blooming. The leaves are drying and falling. Bamboo can go decades before blooming, but once it blooms, the whole grove dies. A bamboo grove really is just one plant, each year sending new shoots up new roots.

The flowers are small and plain, like most grass flowers. I’m curious what the seeds will look like. Will they be grain like? Something I could turn into flour and bake into bread?

Summer has finally arrived. Each morning blue skies await when I wake up. The long rains of June and early July ruined the cherries this year. They were small and many split. But the plum trees are full of fruit. So are the apple trees.

Every year an ice shelf forms on one bank of the pond, an ice shelf of cherry blossoms. Wind blows the cherry blossom petals onto the pond and pushes them against one bank. It looks like an ice shelf to me.

This last weekend we had a taste of summer in May. The temperature soared into the upper 70s here. Two days of mid July lost their way and showed up early, a reminder that more days like these are not far away.

The white lilacs are perfuming the backyard. The slow growing madrona tree is putting out new leaves. The pace of growth among trees is so varied. Some aren’t content without growing many feet in a year. Others, like the madrona, are happy with adding just an inch or two.

What would people be like if we never stopped growing? Nursing homes would be enormous with thirty foot ceilings, twenty foot long beds. Imagine five and six feet tall people herding twenty foot tall giants with dementia into a dining room. The toilets would be so large you’d need a stepladder to clean them.

The Komatsuna 小松菜 survived the winter rather well. So well they are on the verge of blooming. With no other brassicas in bloom, I can let these bloom and go to seed.

The nettles are up, a sure sign that spring is well on its way.

The weather is warm enough to start planting. And this year I am saying good bye to straight rows. Instead of potatoes rows, I’ll have potato bends, cabbage circles, and corn waves. And no more stretches of the same thing over and over again, starting with this bend of German Butterball potatoes. I mixed in garlic and leeks among the potatoes.