A full day with not a cloud all day. Even the jets passing overhead from Asia to Denver or Dallas, couldn’t mar the cobalt sky with a contrail. The sweet daphne is in full bloom. It is so fragrant it’s intoxicating. The plums aren’t as fragrant, though if you lie in the grass underneath a plum tree, the beauty may put you in a trance. Now there is a fairy tale. Once upon a time, there was a hidden garden with flowers and trees so beautiful, no one who entered was ever seen again …

It’s time to get more lettuce started in one of the hoop houses. Hard to believe that in not too many more months, these dirt rows will supply many salads. But not if I forget to close the hoop house door. If I leave it open just a bit, the hens quickly make themselves at home. In their never ending quest for the fattest, longest worm on the planet, they can quickly destroy many a lettuce bed.

Arugula and Ruby Streaks overwintered in the hoop house and with all the recent sunshine, they are exploding. Which means plenty of fresh salads. Happiness is picking greens moments before you eat them. The best food doesn’t come from the store, it comes out of your own garden.

All it takes is a few minutes of sunshine to make the day remarkable. The wind was blowing ferociously this morning. In the afternoon, the rain came down in sheets. The chickens spent much of the day huddled under the trees. Late in the afternoon the clouds lightened, and streaks of blue appeared in the west. Golden rays of sunshine poured through, making the daffodils glow. Flowers look most beautiful after the rain, with sunshine dancing on their rain drops.

While stacking wood the other day, I spotted a moss garden growing on top of a log. This is a great place to live if you like it green and damp like I do. Set out a stump or a rock, and within a year, you’ll have a beautiful moss garden. Torture for me would be having to live in a desert or dry climate. If the trees aren’t lush with moss, I’ll visit but I don’t want to live there.

It can be hard photographing moss gardens with dogs nudging your hands and trying to bite your camera. This is Echo who became diabetic after a bout of pancreatitis before Christmas. Since then it’s been an adventure finding the right dose of insulin to keep his blood glucose level stable.

Which led me to delve into the many mysteries of insulin. Researching how your pancreas knows how much glucose is in your blood, and when to release insulin into your blood stream, turns up diagrams such as this from articles with titles like Glucose sensing in the pancreatic beta cell: a computational systems analysis.

And slogging through sentences like this:

Glucose equilibrates across the plasma membrane and is phosphorylated by glucokinase to glucose 6-phosphate, which initiates glycolysis. Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) converts a portion of pyruvate to lactate. Pyruvate produced by glycolysis preferentially enters the mitochondria and is metabolized in the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, which then yields reducing equivalents in the form of NADH and FADH2.

It’s all fascinating stuff, with researchers still teasing apart the puzzle as to how it all works, with much of their research being done with rodent cells. Simplified, beta cells in your pancreas under go a chemical process when glucose levels rise in your blood, and release insulin they produce into your blood stream. When your glucose level drops, the beta cells close up and stop releasing insulin. But that is a gross simplification of a process that involves many chemicals and numerous intricate steps.