a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Category: How Things Grow

  • The Taste of Fall

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    The nights are getting cooler. Fall is just around the corner. The ripening apples are good enough to eat now. A week or two from now, they will be perfect. This year the trees are loaded. With all the sunshine we’ve had this summer, their flavor is intense. Once you pick an apple off a tree, fresh to eat, picking them out of a bin in a store seems so drab.

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  • Colors of Farming

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    These are strips of alder bark, left over from making fence posts. When I first peel them off the alder logs, the insides of the bark are a light, cream color. As they dry in the sun, they turn bright red, which is why they are called Red Alder.

    From the Slater Museum:

    Alders are among the few higher plants that have the special ability to fix nitrogen, so they can take atmospheric N2 and convert it to ammonia (NH3), which then is available to be used in nucleotides and amino acids, basic building blocks of life. Thus these plants can grow on newly created soils that lack the nitrogenous compounds that act as natural sources of nitrogen for most plants.

    Which explains why alder trees grow like weeds here. In just ten to twelve years they grow to be 40 foot tall trees a foot or more in diameter, so they are very useful trees.

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  • A New Season

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    It’s the start of a new season – potato season. For the last four months the potato plants have been sending their roots through the earth, sprouting leaves and soaking up the sun, and working hard to form potatoes. Now it’s time to give them thanks for making such wonderful food.

    From now through fall, whenever I need some potatoes, all I need to do is go out into the field and dig up what I need. It beats making a trip to a grocery store to buy some. It seems very ordinary to be able to have such fresh produce, but when I think about it, how many people ever get to dig up potatoes for their supper just a few minutes before making supper?

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    These purple potatoes just have purple skins. Some varieties of purple potatoes are purple throughout.

  • Out of the Garden Today – August 21, 2014

    LeeksCut

    The smell of a leek, pulled out of the ground just a few minutes before chopping, is intense. And since I have the whole leek to work with, not just the parts the grocer thought I should have, I can play with the long leaves. Draped over the kitchen sink, they look like the tentacles of a sea creature crawling out of the deep, in search of prey.

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  • Grapes and kusakanmuri

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    The grapes are looking more delicious every day. We are hoping for warm, sunny weather through September so that they will ripen this year. As the climate warms, this Skagit Valley may become the new Napa: Napa on the Sound: Climate change turning Puget Sound area into prime terrain to grow valuable vines

    The Japanese word for grape is budou. Written with Chinese characters, it is written 葡萄. 葡-bu means grape, and so does 萄-dou. In essence, grape-grape. If you look closely, at the top of both of these characters is a horizontal line with two short, vertical strokes. You can see this more clearly in the chart below. This three stroke radical is known as the kusakanmuri or grass crown. When you see a Chinese character with these three strokes on the top, chances are, the character means something related to plants.

    Kusakanmuri2

    And what about the characters that mean to fall and store house? What do they have to do with grass or plants? In the case of the to fall character, the portion below the grass crown means water dripping. Combined with the grass radical, it meant leaves falling off of trees and plants, and eventually took on the meaning of to fall. Look at the other parts of that character. See the part that means water? You’ll find the answer here. And a simplified history of the character is below:

    Raku

    The store house character illustrates a store house with a grass roof. The part of the character under the grass radical means to cover something. In ancient times, people stored things under grass thatch roofs. Over time, the character came to mean a place where you store valuables.

    This should give you an idea that Chinese characters, called kanji in Japanese, are not a bunch of random squiggles. There is a framework of radicals supplying an base reference which is refined with components adding the meaning and the sound.