a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Category: How Things Grow

  • A Remarkable Hen and Her Family

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    MiAsa Hime 美朝姫 is an extraordinary mother. Her chicks are more than three months old and she still spends her days with them and roosts with them at night. I’ve never had a mother hen attend to her chicks for so long. Some of her chicks are nearly as large as she is. Usually, hens raise their chicks for a month to two. For the ten years I’ve had mother hens raise chicks, this is the longest a hen has stayed with her chicks.

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    pumpkina

    This is pumpkin season. It’s impossible to be sad when you’ve got a pumpkin to roast. Pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup, pumpkin bread, pumpkin cake, roasted pumpkin salad … well you get the picture.

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    An ice scream scoop makes a handy tool to eviscerate a pumpkin.

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    Eviscerated and cut up, it’s on to the pot to roast. I like to keep the skin on. It becomes very soft after a thorough roasting in a dutch oven, and when I make pumpkin pie, I puree the skin along with the meat. It gives pumpkin pie a deep undertone of earthy goodness.

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  • A Sliver in Time … Pfft And It’s Gone?

    Biking to the post office today, the sky was filled with so many snow geese it was hard to stay on the road. Honk! Honk! Honk! It’s hard to pedal straight when you’re eyes are looking up at all the snow geese. Flocks of swan were flying too.

    Which brings to mind what an amazing planet we live on. What makes it so amazing is the length of time it has taken for us to get to this point. Today on Skunk Bear, Adam Cole, using the length of a football field, illustrated just how long it has taken for much of the life we take for granted to evolve. If we take a hundred yard football field to represent the 4.5 billion years the earth has been around, and start walking at one end, many of the creatures we know and love don’t appear until the last yard at the other end, and we humans don’t appear until the last eighth of an inch before the end. Civilization, farming, industry, society as we know it doesn’t appear until two hair widths from the end.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8V_glRW1hA&w=898&h=505]

    Which shows how precious life is. If we destroy it all, and we seem hell bent on doing that, how many millions and millions of years is it going to take for it to come back again? Next time you see snow geese flying overhead, or the smile of someone you love, consider that it took over four billion years of trial and error for those wonderful things to appear.

  • Peace, Love, and Happiness

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    Few things say peace, love, and happiness like a basket full of tomatillos. Today was the day to clear out the last of the tomatillos, peppers, and tomatoes. The tomatillo plants were still loaded with tempting fruits. This is the first year I grew tomatillos. They have earned their place as a staple in my garden.

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    While clearing out the tomatillos and other plants in the hoop house, I found a few chrysanthemums in bloom. How did they get there? That’s the great thing about having a garden. Colorful friends you never knew were there sprout and bloom.

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  • Dainty Wall Flowers

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    The winter flowering cherry is in bloom. It doesn’t put on a showy display of flowers. Its flowers open a few at a time, hanging like forgotten ornaments on barren branches. All winter long it will bloom, even in the snow. A few sad, dainty flowers waiting for suitors who never come.

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    cauliflowerplant

    The cauliflower is none of that. Wild and woolly, it flays its strong arms about in the winter gusts. Bold, brash, grumpy, if it had a voice, it would roar. When you hold a cauliflower in your hands, you’re holding the decapitated head of a proud, angry vegetable.

  • Nature’s Little Masterpieces

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    In every nook and cranny, nature weaves and spins little masterpieces like the delicate curl of a grape vine tendril, or the odd sculptures noble fir cones make after they’ve dropped their scales. You can live a hundred years and still find wondrous things you’ve never seen before, just by spending an hour in your garden looking closely at nature’s little masterpieces.

    nobelfirconestalks