every chick deservers a mother
The thimble berries (rubus parvilorus) are starting to ripen. This year there is a bumper crop. Chances are, you will never see them in your grocer. They are very fragile and soft when they ripen. If you don’t eat them within a day or two, the berries will droop and then fall.
The best food isn’t purchased, it’s gathered by yourself.
This is what summer looks and tastes like at A Man and His Hoe®. The cherries are ripening early this year. Often, the birds finish off the cherries before we get a chance to enjoy them. This year, the birds are leaving them alone. Hurrah!
The raspberries are inside the hoop house, safe from the birds. They are most delicious picked in the afternoon when they are warm. Only a few make it into the house to be served.
It’s wonderful being able to eat these fruits directly off the vines and the trees. With most people living in dense urban settings, it’s a privilege to be able to walk out the door and enjoy them without having to go to a store to get them.
While weeding the garlic patch with BB, who was along for moral support, I spotted Sweet Annie (Artemisia annua) coming up between the garlic stems. If you are going to encourage any weeds, this is a weed to welcome. It will grow tall, six feet or more so be forewarned. The great thing about Sweet Annie is that the intricate leaves are as fragrant as the tiny flowers which appear toward the end of summer.
Let it go to seed in the fall, and next year, you will be guaranteed to have beds of tiny Sweet Annie seedlings. This is not an issue. It’s a delicate plant and you can easily weed it. The great thing is that while you are weeding the extra seedlings, you will be bathed in the most wonderfully scent imaginable. Just brushing against the plant will fill the air with sweet perfume.
Saria Stevens who co-founded Chuckanut Transition in 2009, first introduced me to Sweet Annie. That was three years ago. Every year I look forward to spotting the first seedlings in my vegetable beds.
In late summer, early fall, I cut whole branches of the lacy leaves and hang them inside. Their fragrance lasts for months. It’s perfect to hang a dried branch in a closet.
It’s the eve of the summer solstice. I’m not ready for the days to start getting shorter. The summer solstice comes too early. Days should keep getting longer until mid or late August. Many Iris are in bloom, and the apples are growing past their baby stage.
Driving home from picking up a truckload of supplies, two ducks forced me to stop. They were in no rush to cross the road. Such is life around here. This is no place to live if you are in a hurry.
Bicycling home after delivering eggs, garlic scapes, and greens to Tweets Café this afternoon, I had to stop and enjoy the roadside grasses and flowers. All the grass seeds and flowers are meals for many. The blackberries are in full bloom everywhere. Their white flowers provide meals for thousands of bees and insects. When the berries ripen in a few months, they will provide meals for countless birds and people who stop to pick them.
Roadside grasses and plants provide needed habitat for so many creatures. Which is why it’s important that they not be sprayed with pesticides and herbicides.
In his Parasites, Killing Their Host – The Food Industry’s Solution to Obesity article yesterday, New York Time’s op-ed writer, Mark Bittman describes how food corporations are killing their customers by producing highly processed food that is causing the obesity and diabetes epidemic.
Aware that finding solutions to this epidemic is important, some of these food corporations want to re-engineer their food and work with communities to solve the epidemic. Of course, much of this new food is highly processed and as far from real food as the many of the products that line supermarket shelves today.
A more long term solution is to enable everyone to have easy access to real food, fresh out of the garden like I have every day. When you have real food this sumptuous, settling for something that comes out of can or box doesn’t cross your mind. Even picking up produce picked a day or two or a week ago loses it’s appeal. Nothing compares to eating raspberries off the vine or munching on peas that you’ve just picked. Everyone should be able to do this.
Organizations like Seattle Urban Farm Company and Urban Harvest show that this is possible. You can grow a lot of food in the city. And the more people eat real food, fresh out of the garden, the more they will demand it.
Recent rains have made the woods cool and damp. The smell of decomposing leaves, twigs, and branches on the forest floor is so fresh. Any day is a good day for a walk through the woods. It takes just a few steps out of the house to be in the woods. It’s easy to take such luxury for granted.
Many years ago, I lived in a desert country for a time. The mountains and valleys were barren. Not a speck of green to the horizon and beyond. I’d close my eyes and dream of green. I met a local person who saw photographs of lush, green mountains of distant countries, and he told me that he thought the photographs weren’t real. Only knowing desert mountains, he thought that someone had painted the green on the photographs. It wasn’t until he traveled and saw the forested mountains for himself that he realized there are places in the world that are so green.
Stepping out of the woods, I see that the blueberries are forming. This is how blueberries look like before they turn blue. Another month and they will be as blue as the sky.
Life is the story of the power of tiny things. Each of us started as tiny, infinitesimal specs. And yet we are now giants, roaming the earth, millions of times larger than when we first started. It’s the same with beans. Small, beautiful seeds, beans rise out of the earth, pushing aside heavy dirt and brush as they make their ascent toward the sun. They are among the champions of growth and energy, growing taller every day.
With these tiny arugula seeds, I hold in my palm the makings of a hundred salads. There is enough energy in each seed to create an entire salad. With these seeds and just five weeks or so, and I can invite a small army of friends over for a small feast.
Want to be amazed? Grow your own food … even if you just have space for a few pots on a window sill.
The shallots are almost done. Their long, slender leaves are starting to lie down.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
If I shall die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Their bulbs are firming, and I’m already picking them to eat. The great thing about growing your own produce is that you can eat it at all stages of life. Shallots are such amazing plants. Put one bulb in the garden, and three to six months later gather five or six. You can’t do that with your money in a bank. Not only that, along the way, they fill your garden with great beauty. Periodically, you can snip their leaves to use in salads or sauces. Even when they fall down and dry out as they ripen, they retain their beauty.
Nature is not stingy. It will take one bulb or one seed and in a short time reward you with tens, hundreds, thousands or more.
The tomatoes in the hoop house are tall enough to need supports. I could have gone down to a store and purchased some supports, but nature’s thought of it already, and isn’t charging me a penny. The bamboo are sending up tall shoots and so are the alders. Both of them make excellent tomato supports. Cut them to the length you need, and leave some of the side branches on. These side branches which stick upward, make excellent hooks to support the tomato leaves.
At the end of the season, the supports can be added to the compost or cut up for kindling. Next year, nature will supply a fresh supply of supports so there is no need to try and save them through the winter.
The wonderful thing about nature is that it is prolific. Thank god, it doesn’t have the mindset of the corporations which rule us, otherwise it would be demanding payment every time we take in a breath of air. Before it rained, it would want some coin before it let the raindrops fall. We’d have to pay it for every bee visit. Nature’s way is to give and give and give. Imagine how much we’d have to pay if the likes of AT&T or Comcast owned the sun, or Monsato owned the wind.
