a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Category: How Things Grow

  • Heat Wave

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    Many of you will laugh at our heat wave, but this long a stretch of days above 80ºF (26.7ºC) is so unusual. I looked through the 2003 to 2014 weather records, the last twelve years, and this is the first time we’ve had more than four days in a row with highs 80ºF or higher. Yesterday it was 82ºF and it is supposed to be above 80ºF on Thursday. If that happens, that will be seven days in a row. In just four out of the last twelve years have there been stretches of 80ºF days lasting four or more days. In August 2010, there were five days in a row above 80ºF. In August 2008 and July 2006 there were four days in a row above 80ºF. In most years there are just a handful of days all summer when it gets above 80ºF.

    If it is this warm in the first half of July, I wonder what it will be like in August, normally our warmest month. This year will be a banner year for beans and squash.

    UPDATE July 14, 2014: The temperature only got up to 78.6ºF (25.9ºC) today, so our streak of 80º days only lasted three days. No record breaking heat wave this week.

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    This mother hen is finding plenty of things for her five day old chicks to eat in the dry creek beds. Water flows through these creeks from November through April. They dry out by the end of June and are a favorite place for chickens to scratch for bugs. A little water doesn’t deter the chickens. They stay out of the creeks only when the water is deep and rushing.

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    The potatoes are loving this sunny weather. They are beautiful plants. You can grow them in pots just for their foliage. If you’re living in an apartment with a balcony, a row of potato plants will provide plenty of greenery. They will get three to four feet tall. And when they bloom, their purple to pink to white blossoms are beautiful. In August, after providing you with greenery and flowers, they will reward you for planting them by producing three to eight wonderful potatoes to eat. Potatoes that you’ve grown without any pesticides, herbicides or fungicides.

    Ten potato plants will produce from thirty to sixty potatoes. When picked fresh, while their skins are still paper-thin and delicate, you will enjoy potatoes so delicious you’ll wonder why you bother buying the ones they sell in stores.PotatoBlossoms140712
    Supermarkets and big box stores aren’t designed to handle such delicate fare. They want produce that will ship easily and last. Potatoes with skin so thin that you can rub it off with your fingers, are out of the question.

    If you want such quality, you have to grow them yourself or find a farmer who will grow them for you. Look around. Ask your farmer at your farmers market that you want fresh, new potatoes with paper-thin skin that take just a few minutes to cook. You might have to pay three to four dollars a pound for them, but you’re paying that much for a latté anyway. Better to spend it on a pound of the world’s most delicious potatoes.

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    The Shasta daisies are in full bloom, feeding the many wild bees which make their home here. Daisies are composite flowers. They aren’t a single flower. Their yellow centers are clusters of hundreds of tiny flowers, which provide bees with nectar and pollen.

    Sven, our Swedish Flower Chicken rooster, sparkles in the morning sun. Is he aware that this is a record setting heat wave? The last week, he’s been having a feast gorging on falling raspberries, and telling as many hens as possible where they are. The chickens get their share of the fruit which grows at a man and his hoe®. They deserve good things too.

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  • Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

    Reduce, reuse, recycle is a phrase we often hear. Reuse and recycle is something that nature is constantly doing. In nature, nothing is ever wasted. Everything is something’s food. As soon as something falls or dies, there are millions of organisms feasting on it.

    Nature isn’t much for reducing. Nature is prolific to a fault. So when I needed some poles for growing pole beans, nature had plenty of poles ready for me to use.

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    I could go to a garden or hardware store to find some poles, but there are thousands of poles growing here. This is what a j pole factory looks like. There are no buildings. No workers. No managers. Nothing to pollute the air or water. Just young alders turning sunshine into trunks, branches and leaves. After forty minutes of easy work, I have a bundle of poles and a pile of leaves for the compost pile. Those leaves will eventually become onions, potatoes, salad greens, tomatoes, all sorts of good things to eat.

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    Now the beans have sturdy poles to climb. In the fall when the beans are done, I can pull out the beans and the poles and recycle them in the compost pile. Next year nature will provide plenty of fresh poles to use.

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  • The Joy of Producing Food

    It’s Thursday, the day to deliver fresh salad greens and eggs to Tweets Café. The time to pick greens like Ruby Streaks is early in the morning when it’s cool. It’s a great time to be out in the field, scissors in hand, carefully cutting tender greens. The only sounds are the roosters crowing and the birds singing in the trees.

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    And this is one of the eggs destined for Tweets Café today. Maybe noting which hens are laying which eggs and writing the date on them is unnecessary, but each egg is that special.

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    Six months or so from now, these little chicks will be producing fantastic eggs. Until then, they get to spend several months bathed in the care and love of their mother, followed by a carefree months becoming adults with their siblings. They will never know what it’s like to be caged or confined to a laying barn with thousands of other chickens.

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    Every day, they’ll wake up from their roost, hop down, stretch, take a drink, maybe peck a bit before stepping outdoors to spend the whole day looking for good things to eat over acres of pasture, brush, and woodland.

  • Beauty of Vegetables

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    Heading out to take some pictures of carrot flowers, I pause for a moment at one of the rhubarb plants. I find a calm forest underneath their expansive leaves.

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    Next to the blooming carrots, a raspberry has fallen into the crevice of a squash leaf.

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    Carrot flowers are spectacular, lacy creations. It would take a human with very nimble fingers hours and hours of delicate work to recreate a flowerhead like this. But carrots seem to do it effortlessly. They send up tall flower stalks and over a period of time these exquisite flowerheads simply unfold. They start out simple and get more and more complicated until they are in full bloom.

    The next time you bite into a carrot, take delight in knowing that the seed for that carrot came from a beautiful flower.

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    BeautyOfVegetables-SoldierBeetle

    A red soldier beetle feeds on the nectar and pollen of the carrot flowers. Like many beneficial insects, even though this soldier beetle also eats aphids and other insects, it also needs the nectar and pollen of flowers. Which is why it is so important to have plenty of flowers. Instead of using poisons to manage pests, turn to flowers instead, and use the flowers to attract the insects which will manage the pests for you. The bees, the wasps, the other insects, the plants, the field mice, the earthworms and other organisms in the soil will all thank you for keeping your bit of earth free of pesticides.

  • Picked Today

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    It’s Thursday, time to deliver eggs and produce picked this morning to Tweets Café. This week I have three cartons of Ruby Streaks, a carton of kale and chard, and some shallots, and of course eggs. In few weeks I’ll start making an extra delivery of fresh salad greens to Tweets on Saturday. Eventually, I plan on delivering fresh salad greens every day they are open and expanding my service to other restaurants which want to serve their customers produce picked that day.

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    On the way home, I dropped by Bow Little Market, a country market held on Thursdays in Belfast, Washington. This is the fifth year for the market and it has grown a lot since it first began.

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    Bow Little Market was started by Chuckanut Transition, “a group of rural, independent and capable people learning to live cooperatively with each other and our natural world.”

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    Bow Little Market is held next to Belfast Feed Store, on North Green Road near the intersection of Old Highway 99 and Bow Hill Road. The nearest freeway exit is exit 236 on I-5 north of Burlington, WA.

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