Category: How Things Grow

There is one apple left on the apple tree. After going through fall, a week of snow, freezing temperatures, rain and more rain, it’s still hanging on. Aged apple. When will it finally drop?

It looks like an asteroid that has traveled through many solar systems. I might look like that too if I spent all winter outdoors, unprotected from the elements.

Light snows during the night and on the surrounding hills were of concern when the forecast was calling for bitter cold starting Sunday night. Since mid week some forecasts called for morning lows down to 5ºF/-15ºC this coming Tuesday and Wednesday. What a relief to check the forecast a short time ago and see the coldest forecast call for a low of 20ºF/-7ºC on Monday.

In the woods a baby fern has found a lovely home in a dying tree. Trees die as slowly as they grow. Over the years they weaken, their branches fall, and all sort of things thrive on their dying frame. They become so covered with living things, mosses, ferns, mushrooms, that in a way they live on for years after they are dead.

Quite a spectacular morning for late December. It’s like a brilliant spring day.

The hard frosts in October and November didn’t kill off the arugula and having a bed of fresh arugula in winter is a treat. Other hardy greens like Komatsuna 小松菜 are doing well too. A feast for this time of year.

Thursday morning was frosty for a change. The Flickers, Jays, and other birds have yet to finish eating all the apples. This morning Spotted Towhees are making a breakfast of this apple.

For December, mornings have been mild. In some years, in the shade the frost doesn’t melt from day to day and accumulates to look like snow. Not this year.

Gobo ゴボ (burdock) is worth growing for it’s spiky seed pods. They become sparkling jewels on a frosty morning.

The weak December sun filters through the woods, casting long shadows. Less than a week and the shadows will shorten, the sun rays strengthen, and the chickens will get up earlier.

Even though Swans have an affinity for muddy fields, they somehow manage to keep their feathers snow white. Do the grey young ones impatiently wait for their feathers to become white like their parents’ feathers. With their heads so far from the rest of their bodies, I wonder what sort of out-of-body experiences swans have. In a way, they’re always looking down and seeing their bodies a long way off.

One of these years, and I will probably live to see it, the swans will return to find their wintering fields under the water of the Sammish sea. These muddy fields on Fir Island have but a few decades left before they are at the bottom of the encroaching bay.

The news today is that no agreement on reducing CO2 emissions could be made at the COP25 meetings in Madrid. Those making money on burning fossil fuels refuse to let any progress be made. The world has a strange economic system. Those getting wealthy are more addicted to their wealth than they are to the survival of their offspring. They’d rather let the seas rise and flood the homes of hundreds of millions, destroy cities, and let all of us suffer the consequences of a planet warming too fast for us and all other life to adjust. Future generations will never forgive them. They will be saying things much worse than, “OK, Boomer.”

Buttercup has gone back to laying eggs after rearing her chicks. And I’m beginning to find Welsummer eggs. The Welsummer chicks I got at the end of spring are starting to lay. New Welsummer eggs are a great way to end the year.

It’s a mild, foggy, winter morning. So far it has been a dry fall and winter. Usually at the end of November, wild and woolly weather has trees toppling over, rain falling like sheets, and rivers overflowing. Some years we keep the chainsaw in the back of the car in case we need to saw our way out of the driveway. Not this year. The Skagit River is running as low as it does in late August.

While raking leaves yesterday, I discovered cedar and fir seedlings. At this stage they are so fragile. It would take next to no effort to pluck them. A hundred years from now, it will take the most ferocious of late fall storms to topple them. Five hundred years from now, they may be the tallest trees on the planet. There is a record of a 465 foot tall Douglas Fir that was felled in 1897 in Whatcom county, a short drive from here.

It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to cut down such a magnificent tree. If you came across such a tree, wouldn’t you be in awe and want future generations to know it too?

The ducks spend hours each day preening themselves. Of all the farm animals, they must know their bodies the best. It wouldn’t surprise me if they couldn’t tell me how many feathers they have. According to Ducks Unlimited, researchers counted 14,914 feathers on a pintail, 11,903 on a mallard, and 25,216 on a tundra swan, which explains why it takes the ducks so many hours a day to preen all those feathers. With 12,000 feathers to preen, you’d have to preen more than 3 feathers a second to preen them all in an hour.

Snow and her brothers often rest and sleep at the edge of the pond, their bodies half in and half out of the water. I suppose this is so they can launch themselves across the pond at any notice. A hint of danger, and they can be off, out of danger’s reach in a split second.

Winter has arrived in the surrounding hills. The frosty mornings make going out in the morning to let the chickens out an invigorating experience. There is something purifying about the frost. It clears the mind, it clears the air, it clears out the bugs.

Apples left on the tree never go to waste. This morning I see four Flickers having a hearty breakfast pecking at the apples. What the Flickers leave, the Chickadees eat. What the Chickadees leave there are other birds happy to feast. So there’s no urgency in the fall to gather all the apples off the tree.

Under the leaves of a Christmas Cactus, a spider has spun a chaotic web. Try flying through that if you’re a fly. It makes you think the spider closed its eyes when making the web, and let its impulses direct it here and there. But a spider can’t close its eyes. For this spider, chaos must work.

All the leaves are gone, almost, and the clouds are not grey today. At first it was clear when I stepped outside before dawn to make tofu in the cabin. The fog rolled in when we rolled out of here to make deliveries, but by the time we returned, the sun was back.

I raked up all the leaves underneath this cherry yesterday, and today it’s like I did nothing yesterday.

While planting a bay leaf I encountered potatoes in the ground, a nice pile of potatoes, enough for several meals. Sensible people plant potatoes in well defined rows. My potato planting consists of some definite rows with potatoes planted here and there just so I’m surprised when I go digging to plant something and find a treasure of hidden potatoes. After a few frosts and once the leaves are gone, it’s impossible to know where I planted those wayward potatoes, sort of like a squirrel who forgets where it has buried all its nuts.

This afternoon I spotted some blackberries just blooming. These are blackberries that will never ripen. Speaking of odd things I’ve seen this November, yesterday a big dragonfly buzzed about. Was it one of those species of dragonflies that migrate south, some do, or one of those fated to succumb to winter’s ice? What I do know is that it is not a globe skinner, a dragonfly, Pantala flavescens, that migrates further than any other insect, with some flying across the Indian Ocean. How does a dragonfly fly across an ocean? An amazing feat for a creature so small.

How many are able to step out of their kitchen, take a short walk into the woods, and come home with a plate full of fresh shaggy parasol mushrooms for dinner? Not many. How did I get so lucky?

The fall rains have brought a bounty of stinging nettles. Nettle shoots, fresh mushrooms, and homemade miso make for a hearty creamy soup for supper.

The Asian Pears 梨 are big and ripe. They took a few weeks longer than last year to ripen. Next year I will bag them early on the tree so they ripen earlier.