a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Category: How Things Grow

  • SCOBY-Do


    Here’s the latest child to take up residence here, or should I call it another indoor garden? About three weeks ago I ordered some kefir grains and started culturing a glass of kefir in the kitchen window. The grains are a SCOBY, a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. They look like rice grains in a porridge.


    Every twelve hours or I strain the kefir, running it through a sieve, and collecting the kefir in a bowl. I use a spoon to mash the kefir grains against the sieve until I’ve reduced the grains inside the sieve to about a quarter cup, and have a thick, creamy bowl of kefir below.




    The creamy kefir is ready to drink, and I stir the remaining kefir grains into a glass of lukewarm milk to grow and do their thing again.

  • Under a Cloudless Sky


    Day after day of sun and warm weather is taking its toll. Some of the trees have given up and are letting their leaves go, turning to fall’s crimson colors months early. And there is no rain in the forecast. Just sun and heat. We often go entire summers without getting to 80ºF (27ºC). It’s shocking to see a week of 80º days forecast for the beginning of September, 20ºF above normal. I have many memories of many Labor Day holidays looking out at sheets of pouring rain. That won’t be happening this year.



    Planting beans and potatoes together turned out well. They are both thriving together. The potatoes I planted in early July are starting to flower, their fuzzy flower buds swelling by the day. I poked around the roots of one today and found healthy, apricot-size potatoes. Another few weeks to a month, and they will be perfect for eating.




    The lettuce is a kaleidoscope of colors. Out of the garden today are eggs, kohlrabi (the first one of the season), ao-jiso, and berries.



    And a humongous apple that weighed over a pound. Grow your own food and you realize that nothing is more precious than clear air, clean water, and healthy, living soil.

  • Peel, peel, peel


    The slow growing madrona tree is peeling. It’s something madrona trees do, and it is what makes them so beautiful. Their bright red, peeling bark, reminds me of my many childhood sunburns. A game my sister and I used to play when we were small. The day after getting toasted to a crisp on the beach on a hot, summer day, we’d carefully peel our shriveled skin, trying to extract the largest piece possible. The larger the piece, the happier we were.

    We got burnt so often, I’m surprised we haven’t died of skin cancer many times over. But maybe we inoculated ourselves by eating our dried pieces of radiated skin. Sunburnt human skin doesn’t taste so bad. Where are the studies comparing skin cancer rates of children who eat their peeled burnt skin to those who didn’t? You know, it might be an option to lathering your bodies with sunscreen. Just saying.



    Ruby, one of my favorite hens, is in her usual nest, laying her egg for the day. She’s a gregarious hen, often coming up to greet me whenever I go into the chicken yard. Nancy, black with a spot of white on her cheek, and Kumo-hime 雲姫 (Cloud Princess) are all quietly laying eggs. They aren’t interested in hearing about my skin peeling hypothesis.


  • 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.

  • Salad on My Arm


    The benefit of having a vegetable garden is avoiding the supermarket aisles to get produce for your salads. A vegetable garden is a far more pleasant place to do your produce shopping than a supermarket. You don’t find verbena reaching for the sky to spread it’s delightful blue flowers springing out of supermarket floors.


    You don’t find charming garlic bulbils clinging to their flowerheads in supermarket aisles. Nor can you smell the freshness of the earth around the basil plants, or see the way the ao-shiso plants smile, or the pride of tall leaks.





    In the supermarket aisles you don’t see the glory of kohlrabi plants, their huge leaves sucking in the air and turning it into plump, sweet morsels. And you won’t find clover blossoms hiding among the poppies.



    And best of all, when you’ve gathered a salad’s worth of fresh produce out of your garden, your kitchen is just a short walk away. You don’t have to get in your car and deal with traffic all the way home.