Category: How Things Grow

Posted on

Who Eats Apples?


Who eats apples? The question is more like who doesn’t eat apples. The Flickers and Stellar Jays joyfully peck at the apples we haven’t picked. I don‘t mind sharing. There are more apples than we can eat.

What I didn’t expect was to find wasps eating apples. The holes the Flickers and Jays make turn into all you can eat buffets for the wasps, though technically, I can’t call it a buffet. The dictionary says a buffet consists of several dishes and here we have a single dish, apple.





More Shaggy Parasols keep popping out of the forest floor. This is quite the season for them this year. We’re not the only ones eating them. I see spots on the larger ones where forest creatures have been nibbling.

Posted on

Still Alive


This morning I couldn’t resist plucking the Shaggy Parasol from under a cedar in the woods.



It’s a treasure to have such a delicacy pop up on this property. Around it are a number of smaller ones, which should be ready in a few days.

Posted on

One of the Best! Or Not


I’ve gone from cover to cover in my copy of David Arora’s “All That the Rain Promises and More – a hip pocket guide to western mushrooms” and this substantial mushroom I found in the woods is either a Parasol – one of the best tasting mushrooms, or it is a Green-Spored Parasol – poisonous to many people, causing severe gastrointestinal distress.

The guide says that in Western North America it is only known in southern Arizona, so it must be something else.

After more research I am leaning toward it being a Shaggy Parasol (Chlorophyllum olivieri), which is common in the conifer forests of the Pacific Northwest, and is good eating though some people are allergic to it


The anemones are nearing their end for this year. Their flower stems drag the ground, but they are still too beautiful to cut down.

Posted on

What You Don’t Know May Kill You


This may never happen again, an apple tree with red ripe apples and blossoms at the same time.


This will happen again and again, red maple leaves at the start of fall.


The fall rains have set off the mushrooms. The forest floor is covered with them. I bought an extensive guide book on mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest, but even with all the pictures and descriptions, I don’t have the nerve to pick one and take a nibble.

Back in my grade school days in Japan, I brought back an interesting plant from the forest. The stalk looked succulent and tasty, so my mother and I took a few bites. I don’t remember clearly what it tasted like. I do remember the fear I felt when our tongues and lips went numb. We didn’t die, but that was a good lesson not to eat plants you don’t know.


Posted on

Barefoot Gardening


The clouds and rain come nearly every day now. The rain held off for yesterday’s farmers market. When I checked the forecast for next week’s Saturday market, it showed rain all week except Wednesday, and rain on into the following week. This morning the forecast has changed and the rain ends Tuesday with sun and clouds through Saturday. Which will it be, rain or sun? I’ll know for sure on Saturday when I set off for the market. Until then, there’s no point worrying about it.

The moist earth beckons me to work barefoot. Shoes have no place in the home. Maybe they have no place in a garden either. If the earth feels lovely on your toes, you know it’s a perfect bed for potatoes.


This year’s grapes are so delightful. With the skies gray and the sun off to its wintering grounds, the grapes are a reminder of summer’s blue skies.


I took the seal off the white miso I put up in February. It turned out better than I imagined. You make a whiter miso by adding barley or rice to the soybeans. It’s time to put up next year’s miso. How much red? How much white? Barley or rice? If I make a batch and try some corn, will that be the first time anyone in all of history has made miso with corn?

A quick check to see if there was such a thing as miso made from corn resulted in me stumbling on a blog that talked about the wondrous cooling power of corn silk. Evidently, it cools the body and is great for when you have a fever or hot flash. One site claims, “Corn silk is used for bladder infections, inflammation of the urinary system, inflammation of the prostate, kidney stones, and bedwetting. It is also used to treat congestive heart failure, diabetes, high blood pressure, fatigue, and high cholesterol levels.” It sounds like you could chuck your entire medicine cabinet and cure all your ills with corn silk. Odd that I’ve never heard of a doctor telling a patient to eat more corn silk.


Happy has become quite the stately rooster. He has his admirers, and some of the young white roosters I unintentionally acquired this spring when I ordered Welsummer hens, look up to him and follow him around.



Even with fall deepening, the maples keep unfolding new leaves. In the wet, soothing fall air, their new-leaf red will barely turn green before they turn red from the first frost.

Posted on

No Remorse


Friday, September 6, was our last day of summer. In many places summer dawdles on with no clarity as to when its last day was. Not here. As the temperature soared on Friday, there was no doubt that once the cool Pacific air moved in on Saturday, that in this neck of the woods, summer was finished for this year. Saturday night’s thunder and lightning, accompanied by drenching rains, kicked summer to the curb. With this morning’s steady rain, fall has settled in for good.


With the grass wet, the slugs stay out long past sunrise. I have no remorse collecting them by the bushel, or so it seems, for Emma and her large ducklings to eat. Each time I pick one up, it’s a death sentence for that slug. Ducks have no remorse either about eating them. Is it wrong not to feel some sense of loss? No slug has ever apologized to me for mowing down seedlings I was tending. Perhaps being eaten by a duck is a slug’s highest calling. If you’re going to be eaten, you might as well be eaten by a creature that gets great joy out of eating you.


It is the season for 小松菜 Komatsuna. I’ll keep planting them until they cease sprouting. Picked fresh and dragged through simmering water for just three to five seconds, you can’t ask for a better green to eat.



With summer over, it’s time to open up the fermenting crocks of miso and pour off the 溜り tamari which has puddled on the surface. As the miso ferments, it weeps salty black tears which collect on the top of the crocks.


Tamari 溜り, the precursor to soy sauce 醤油, comes from the verb 溜まる tamaru, which means to collect little by little over time. When fermenting miso, the black salty tears collect drop by drop over many months until you have a little puddle of them. Three crocks of miso yielded maybe a cup of tamari. I will have no remorse savoring this precious miso-tamari.


Posted on

September or May?


The cool mornings are more like fall than summer now. The ducks have settled into their new digs at the pond, swimming much of the day, and coming out of the water to forage on the grass. Emma, living in the garden with her ducklings, is back to laying eggs. I wouldn’t be surprised if Snow isn’t laying eggs too, but where? It’s going to be hard finding her nest in the dense cattails around the pond.




Today’s surprise was finding an apple tree in bloom. Is it September or is it May? The same tree is full of almost ripe apples.


Posted on

Life Without Rhubarb is No Life At All


Hard to believe that last spring, the lush row or rhubarb didn’t exist, and were just small, round seeds I pushed into the soil. Life without rhubarb is no life at all.



Sunday night when I went out to the tofu cabin to soak soybeans, I heard the cries of a chick in distress. It was dark, and using the light of my phone, I found one of the Bielefelder chicks on death’s door, impaled on the thorns of a blackberry, dangling nearly lifeless. After rescuing it, I placed it under its mother in the chicken coop, fearing the little one would not make it through the night. But it did, and yesterday it was scurrying around with all the other little chicks as if nothing had happened.

Posted on

Too Far to Go


I found a bee sleeping on a daisy yesterday morning. It’s a common sight in the summer, to find a bee who decided to spend the night on a flower instead of returning to the hive. I suppose if you’ve gone too far and been caught by a setting sun, a daisy makes as good a bed as any.


And when your life is over, for a bee, a daisy makes a nice final resting place. Such short lives bees live.


A new nest brimming with eggs explains why I haven’t been gathering as many eggs as usual. When the number of eggs in the nest drops, it is a good sign that some of the hens have found a new place to lay eggs.

Posted on

It Takes a Lot of Smarts to be a Duck


The path to the cabin is overgrown with lavender and thimble berries. You can’t see the cabin until you are almost there. When the summer busies are over, the market a memory, I’ll have time to trim the thimble berries, but I’m in no rush. It would be a shame to trim the thimble berries before I’ve eaten them all.


Shasta daisies are a sign that August is nigh. It’s been a cool summer, frequent rains and clouds, not good for tomatoes but a paradise for potatoes.


A near drowning incident with one of the ducklings was the inspiration to make an easy landing for them to get out of the water. I didn’t expect the landing to be a hit with the ducklings. After a swim, they love gathering on it to relax.

Spend any time with ducks and you realize that there is a lot going on inside their little heads. They converse with each other much more than chickens. When you consider the feats that wild ducks have to accomplish to survive in the wild, migrating long distances, finding places to raise their young, eluding prey, it’s not a life for the stupid. It takes a lot of smarts to be a duck.