every day is a good day
September gave me a reason to open a Samish Bay Cheese I’ve been aging for four years. Every so often I buy a cheese from them and set it aside to age. I write the year and month four years from when it was made on the cheese. This is the first one I purchased to age four years ago.
After four years it is sharp. People mellow with age. Cheese gets edgy.
Ena 枝那 is a determined dog. Three times now, she has dug up this bed. She hears and smells something underneath. I might as well forget planting anything in the bed until she finds whatever she is looking for.
The Jacobs Cattle Beans are almost ready. If only they would stay so beautiful when you cook them. I’m determined to someday figure out a way to cook colorful beans and keep their vibrant colors.
The dry summer has the alders and cottonwoods dropping leaves months earlier than usual. It’s sad to see the trees so stressed. Instead of raking in October, I’m raking in August. Will there be anything left to rake in October?
The elephant garlic will appreciate the leaves. Worked into the soil and spread on top of the garlic beds, the leaves will break down and turn into lovely humus. Garlic grows well in beds full of organic matter.
The end of August means the chickens get to enjoy one of their favorite foods, grapes. The champagne grapes aren’t ripe yet, but the chickens don’t mind. They jump up to get the low hanging ones. They go nuts when I toss them extra bunches to gorge on. Vineyards would do well to employ flocks of chickens. They’d keep the vineyards weeded, eat many bugs, and snatch any grapes that drop to the ground.
I picked the last of the Chioggia beets on Thursday morning for Thursday’s market. Thankfully, no one bought them. These are my favorite beets. They taste as good as they look.
I had some Savoy cabbage left from the market too. When you look at a Savoy cabbage leaf from above, it’s as if you are flying over a lush, green, hilly landscape with white rivers flowing to the sea. No, those aren’t rivers, they are deep, fog-filled canyons where pterosaurs soar from canyon wall to canyon wall, hoping hapless earthlings will fall from the sky and into their monstrous beaks. If you put your ear next to a cabbage leaf, you can hear their bloodcurdling shrieks. Don’t listen to your mother. Go ahead and play with your food. Life is too short not to.
Putting your face into a sunflower is the secret to happiness. You’ll forget all your troubles, and smile.
Tonight, a bumblebee has decided to spend the night in that sunflower. Some researchers think that maybe honeybees, at least the foragers, might dream. They spend up to a third of the time sleeping, and use this time to store memories, something humans do, so possibly bees dream too. What could be more pleasant than dreaming while you’re sleeping in a sunflower?
Ena 枝那 is exhausted. What could tire out a dog so much? How about digging up onions and beans? I hadn’t planned on digging up this row of onions and beans today, but she decided it was time for them to come out of the ground.
She left a moonscape of elbow deep craters. She hasn’t learned yet to pile up the onions at the end of the row. Oh well, I was needing a bed for fall peas, I might as well put them here.
The trouble with gardening with dogs is that they don’t ask you first where you want to plant things or what things need digging up. When dog is your gardener, you’ve just got to go with the flow, and laugh a lot.