a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Category: How Things Grow

  • 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.


  • 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.


  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.