every day is a good day
Before your wheat is ground and made into bread, this is what it looks like, golden sheaves of spiny heads of wheat.
Swiss chard stalks look like candy sticks. The colorful stalks are worthy of their own dish. The Costata Romanesco, a ribbed variety of zucchini, is beautiful too. I much prefer it to the smooth, regular varieties of zucchini.
Grow savoy cabbage. You won’t be disappointed. Few vegetables are more beautiful, or so delicious.
Grow corn. You won’t be disappointed. Few vegetables have such wild hairdos.
Plant a noble fir. In midsummer, its cones will remind you of Christmas. The sap, capping the cones, even looks like icicles.
For a really great time, grow potatoes. When its time to dig them up, it’s like a sandbox for adults. I grew up in sandboxes and on the beach, digging through the sand, making roads and bridges, and castles more than I can count. Digging through the soft, warm dirt, looking for potatoes is every bit as much fun.
And look at all the potato fruits I found. I’ve got thousands of seeds to plant, just with this lot. Something interesting and new should grow with this many seeds.
Don’t forget to thank the earth and all the creatures living in the earth which made your potatoes possible. A sack of potatoes will provide many meals and plenty of conversation, all made possible by the good earth.
A surprise this afternoon was coming upon a snake skin on a log. You can picture the snake rubbing its belly against the log to remove its old skin. It makes you wish you could crawl out of your skin and leave it behind. If we humans did that, we’d have all sorts of rules as to where and where you could not leave your skin. NO SKINS ALLOWED IN THIS PARK! Or country people would say, “I’m so glad I live somewhere I can leave my skin wherever I want.”
Wherever you live, may you be surrounded by flowers.
Chickens go nuts over potatoes which is why they are banished from the vegetable garden. A few years ago they dug up the entire crop of potatoes and ate them all. It’s not that they went looking for potatoes, but while digging for their favorite food, earthworms, they uncovered the potatoes one by one.
This pile of potatoes came from a single plant, nearly four and a half pounds, over two kilos, of potatoes. This was a potato that came up from a potato I missed when I was digging up potatoes last year. My experience is that potatoes which overwinter do better than those planted in the spring. My guess is that throughout the winter, they are growing roots so that when spring comes, with a well developed root system, they are able to grow more vigorously. The trick to planting potatoes in the fall is to have beds that stay well drained through the rainy winter months. If they sit in water during the winter they will just rot.
Fresh onions are the jewels of the garden. The whitest of whites, the most beautiful greens are those of freshly dug potatoes. While I was cleaning the onions in the garden this afternoon, Ena 枝那, slept peacefully next to me. You can’t ask for more than to have a sleeping dog at your side to keep you company while you work.
Love is inescapable. You can’t go a few minutes without seeing it. Because so many living things express it, love must be one of the core attributes biological forms acquired. Peel away the billions of bits of DNA we have, dogs have, cats have, plants have, and in the bits we all share, there must be the instructions to love.
The sun is down behind the trees. It’s the soft time of day when the colors drift off to sleep, slowly, quietly.
A flower falls onto the soft leaves below.
The dogs pounce like foxes in the meadow.
The heavy grass seeds bend to the ground.
Flowers sigh for departed bees.
A stone rests on a warm block of tofu, pressing it into shape.
Pressed, the block of warm tofu floats dreamily in cooling water.
The soft time of day is a poem which flows like a gentle stream into night’s pleasant dreams.
