a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Category: How Things Grow

  • A Season for Colors

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    The first tulip is starting to open. This is a season for colors. Everyday there is something new in bloom. It makes waking up each morning an adventure.

    EggsInASweater

    A sweater makes a good makeshift egg basket. So do pockets in jackets if there are just a few. Jut don’t forget you put them in your pockets. The egg on the far right is Hazel’s. The egg on the lower left is Bendy’s. I gathered these at the end of the day, when I went to let our old rooster, Billy, into his evening roost. He likes to be let in the back way so the younger roosters won’t harass him. He’s so happy when he doesn’t have to sneak past Sven and King Richard. He chuckles with joy when we let him in. That’s the closest way I can describe it. Roosters have a distinctive happy call they make when they are overcome with joy. If they are really joyous, they will even do a little dance with their feet. Does happiness in chickens feel the same as happiness in humans? Why wouldn’t it? Happiness is such a fundamental emotion that it’s origin probably predates humans and chickens by hundreds of millions of years.

    Carrying the eggs into the house, I pass the cherries in bloom. Few things are as soft as cherry blossoms in the evening. The wonderful things about flowers is that they look so different at different times of the day.

    EveningCherries20150308A
    EveningCherries20150308B

  • Cherry Blossoms

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    The cherry blossoms are in full bloom now, three weeks earlier than last year. Last year it was March 27 when they opened up. They smell like baby powder. It’s been a very warm winter and spring. I looked back through my photos and found dates when the cherries bloomed before. They show what an unusual spring this is:

    2015 – March 7
    2014 – March 27
    2013 – March 30
    2010 – March 18
    2008 – April 7 (it snowed March 30)
    2007 – March 29
    2006 – March 25

    In the hoop house, the lettuce I planted last week is starting to pop out of the ground.

    LettuceSprout

  • Seed Mindfulness

    GoboSeedsA

    Saving seeds is an opportunity to practice mindfulness. These are the dried flowers of 牛蒡 – Gobo (burdock). The foot to two feet long roots of young gobo have a delicious, woodsy, mushroomy, carroty taste.

    GoboSeedsB

    After pulling the flowers apart to get their seeds, I discovered that the burdock flowers are also the home to many spiders and tiny bugs. Most of those are back outdoors looking for new homes. It emphasizes the importance of letting plants alone in the garden after they have flowered and gone to seed. Their dried stems and flowerheads house thousands of beneficial insects and spiders.

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    So how many seeds does a handful of gobo flowers produce?

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    1,011 to be precise. This is the mindfulness part. Turn off the radio. Close your eyes. Enjoy the peace and quiet, and start counting. Paying only attention to the seeds, make stacks of 10 seeds and line them up until all the seeds are counted. You can turn most any task into an opportunity to practice mindfulness.

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    GoboSeedsFThe 1,011 seeds are now in packet ready for when I plant them in a few weeks.

  • Nature’s Hope

    DiddleMeA

    This is how nature hopes … with blossoms. The fruiting plum trees are just starting to unfold their blooms. Each one of their tiny buds is hope for a plum, and from the plum, a future plum tree. Imagine if people’s hopes budded as beautiful as plum blossoms. The more hopes a person had, the more blossoms they would show.

    DiddleMeB
    DiddleMeC

  • Winter Refuse

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    The world of vegetables is a world of dazzling color. It makes you wonder why they aren’t called colors instead of greens. This is a colorful pile of chard, ruby streaks, and onions I cleared out of a hoop house to make room for spinach. Life is good when even your refuse is so colorful and edible.

    WinterRefuseB
    WinterRefuseC