a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Category: How Things Grow

Garlic Planting

It’s time to plant garlic. Breaking apart the garlic bulbs to separate the cloves, leaves behind a mountain of paper-like garlic skins. They are beautiful on their own. These are destined for the compost pile, but if you do some searching, you’ll find people doing a variety of things with garlic skins.

By mid summer, these garlic cloves will have turned into fat, juicy garlic bulbs. As I stick these cloves into the moist soil, I see the wonderful scapes and bulbs these cloves will be next summer.

On the way back from planting the garlic, I bring in some gleanings from the field. Looking at the healthy roots on these turnips and radishes, it’s easy to see how much we owe dirt for all our food.

October 14, 2014
Clustered Woodlover

It’s impossible to walk even a short distance in the woods without seeing something remarkable. I’m guessing these are clustered woodlovers (Hypholoma fasciculare), also known as sulpher tuft.

As cute as they are, they aren’t edible. Evidently they are bitter and will cause vomiting, diarrhea and convulsions. The chickens somehow know this. Many of them walk by these adorable mushrooms every day, but they don’t peck at them.

October 13, 2014
Out of the Garden Today – October 12, 2014

Some special things came out of the garden today: stinging nettles and shirohana-mame (white flower beans). The shirohana bean pods are starting to turn yellow, which means they can be harvested. I picked a handful to see how they turned out this year. The main harvest is still a few weeks away.

The recent cool spell has invigorated the stinging nettles and they are sending out new shoots.

The huge white beans are spectacular. I wish I had some extra to sell, but not this year. Don’t even ask. Most of this year’s harvest is for planting next year, the rest for our dinner table. Next fall I should be able to offer organic shirohana-mame. Try even looking for regular fresh shirohana-mame, let alone organically grown ones. Let me know if you find any place to buy them.

And what is that above? The latest art installation at the Gugenheim? No, the stems of stinging nettles after the leaves have been cut off.

And below is a bowl of freshly cooked shirohana-mame. Are we the only ones in the whole country eating a bowl of just picked shirohana-mame for lunch today? It’s possible.

October 12, 2014
Out of the Garden Today – October 7, 2014

A magnificent head of Tatsoi, apples, and nashi. The Tatsoi not only looks remarkable whole, cutting the leaves creates a starburst of green stems.

October 7, 2014
Out of the Garden Today – October 5, 2014

Fall is a time of clearing summer vegetable beds, making compost beds, and planting for the winter months. I cleared out mountains of old tomato, squash, and bean vines out of one of the hoop houses this afternoon. In the process I gleaned a variety of good things to eat: Swiss chard, burdock (gobo) root, beans, onions and shallots, and squash.

The variety of onions and shallots I found growing among the chard has a beauty you don’t see in store produce, where everything is neatly sorted by variety and size. I don’t get tired looking at the mix of sizes and colors. The rule of food commerce is uniformity: everything the same size, everything the same color. The rule of nature is chaos: nothing of the same size, nothing of the same color. No matter what you grow, produce comes out of the field a mishmash of sizes, shapes, and shades. In the processing plants, machines and workers clean and sort and sort and sort some more. So the uniformity that appears in the grocery bins is a far cry from how it came off the fields.

I think it’s one reason people get tired in urban settings. There isn’t enough variety. Your eyes get tired looking at such a boring canvass. Step into the forest or a meadow or walk along a beach, and the intricate patterns of nature are infinitely more complex than anything people make. Plus, so much of what nature creates is moving all the time. Sit in an office and the walls don’t move. The patterns on the walls don’t move. The curtains, the blinds, they are just dead still. But step outdoors and everything is in constant motion. All the leaves and bushes and tree branches, they never sit still, and they are growing, changing every day. The slightest breeze makes them flutter. The sun traveling overhead is changing the color of everything from morning to dusk. And the animals are in constant flux, chickens included. A dog can lie in the same spot for an hour, a car for most of the day. Not a chicken, which makes them rather difficult to photograph. They don’t sit or stand still. They make hyperactive children look comatose. Which is why boredom doesn’t exist at a man and his hoe®. Every time you blink, the world changes. Boredom is for the urbane.

October 5, 2014