a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Category: How Things Grow

  • A Perfect Day … If You Are a Swan

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    It’s a cool, blustery, wet day … a perfect day if you are a swan. The muddier it is, the more they like it. All winter long, the swans root through fields, finding food to eat. It makes me wonder where the swans ate before the valley forest was logged and made into fields. According to the Trumpeter Swan Society:

    Adult swans eat aquatic vegetation, including the leaves, seeds, and roots of many types of pond weeds. In captivity, swans will eat corn and other grains provided. Wild swans have also adapted to field feeding, eating left over grains and vegetables that have been harvested by farmers.

    So around here, they must have congregated along the mouths and banks of the Skagit river, eating there. They aren’t birds to waddle through forests.

    For the young gray ones, the cygnets, this is their first trip south of the arctic. They have come with their parents, and will fly back north in the spring with them. Sometime during the summer, their parents will drive them away so they can hatch and raise a new brood. The young swans will stay together in sibling groups until they mature and start families of their own.

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  • From the Tiniest of Seeds

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    The beautiful pink carnations of summer are dried and don’t look like much. But inside their dried flowers are seed pods with the tiniest of seeds. Carnations have been cultivated for thousands of years. You can propagate them from seed, from cuttings, or by dividing them.

    It’s always amazing to watch plants grow from such tiny seeds. Looking at these carnation seeds which look like cracked pepper, it’s hard to imagine that under the right conditions, by mid summer they could become hundreds of beautiful, fragrant carnations.

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  • Crimson Surprise

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    The bed of saffron I planted at the beginning of October is already blooming. I wasn’t expecting any blossoms until next fall. The three crimson stigmas are brilliant. A number of other saffron are setting flower buds, so I may be able to collect enough saffron to use early next year.

    Initially, I was thinking of plucking these stigmas to flavor something this evening, but then I read that saffron stigmas have no flavor when they are picked fresh. They need to dry for two months before they get their full flavor.

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  • Frost’s Paintbrush

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    The last few days of frost have pretty much taken care of the outdoor vegetable beds. Frost is nature’s blanket, telling the plants that it’s time to go to sleep. Each day, the leaves are more curled and closer to the ground. Once the frost is gone, many will spring back up, only to lie down again when frost returns. Many will refuse to sleep until they are covered with thick snow. Some years it happens, some years it doesn’t.

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  • What Mother Spent the Summer Here?

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    With the leaves falling off the bushes, it’s easier to see the nests the birds made this season. So what kind of bird made this nest? A goldfinch perhaps? There are many who spend the summer here. A thrush? It doesn’t look woven tight enough to be a robin’s nest.

    Did the eggs hatch and was the mother able to raise her young? Did the chicks leave this place full of fond memories, with plans to return to this little paradise next summer? Did they laugh at the chickens? Fly away when our dogs ran through the woods? Did they watch me working in the vegetable patches? It’s a mystery, and I’ll never know. Life is like that. We go through life not knowing much of anything at all. Until today, I didn’t even know a bird family spent a summer, using this bush, so close to our house, as a home.