For supper tonight, kale, radish, and one very large garlic. This is my first season growing elephant garlic. If the customers who come to Bow Little Market enjoy them as much as I think they will, I will grow a lot of them next year.

The last of the compost is off to the vegetable beds … and the chickens are having a hay day with the rest. If they could, chickens would spend all day in a compost bin. There are too many good things for them to eat.

Before you know it, the compost will turn into delicious vegetables, some of which will end back in another compost pile, and round and round it goes. It makes you wonder if individual atoms ponder what they’re in now. Am I in a plant? Am I in an animal? A spec in the ground? Where am I? Imagine how many different organisms, say an individual nitrogen atom has been in over the last 450 million years since plants first appeared. And before then, fused inside supernovas from oxygen and hydrogen, and blasted out through space throughout the universe, where all have the nitrogen atoms travelled that are in the vegetables you eat? They’ve been on the move for billions of years. You munching them isn’t going to stop them from moving.

With the compost bin empty, it’s time to gather matter for the next compost pile. There is an endless supply of grasses and brush, fallen leaves and twigs, and chickens wanting to lend a claw.

Overnight thunderstorms and a morning shower gave the daisies a refreshing shower. What is it about lingering raindrops on flower petals and leaves that make us smile? What about the chickens? When they look up and see raindrops dripping off the flowers and leaves, do they feel anything? Hard to imagine that most chickens never even see a flower let alone a raindrop. How did we get to this point to think that chickens don’t need to see flowers or see raindrops?

The vegetable beds are full of babies: baby corn, baby pumpkins, not so baby radishes, baby chard, baby kale. Baby vegetables grow up faster than human children so you have less time to enjoy them. Fortunately, you can plant many, many, many more baby vegetables. And, unlike human children, you can eat baby vegetables. Baby humans you can just hug, kiss, and tickle.

It’s impossible to be sad when the summer blues are here. Even on cloudy days, you can see blue skies in these hydrangea flowers. Their centers look like baby suns, beaming happiness no matter what the weather; their white veins, wispy cirrus clouds, floating weightlessly across endless blue sky petals.