a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Category: Reflections

  • Time to Experiment


    With no farmers markets to worry about, I have time to hone my bread baking, and experiment. What if I add more levain, or change the moisture content of the levain, or let the dough rest longer, or rise longer, or, or, or … there are as many variables to play with as I can imagine. This morning’s cumin loaf was pretty good.



    Chuckanut Mountain looked like a volcano steaming ferociously, about to blow it’s top. Fortunately it’s not a volcano, just a mountain that clouds have a thing for.


    At home, late afternoon sun rays turned an apple tree into a burning bush.


    I’d gone out to rake more leaves for the garden beds. Though the leaves on the pond are out of reach.


    It’s impossible to rake leaves without stirring the interest of the chickens. They have all day to inspect the leaves, but something about me raking them, makes them more interesting to the chickens. It may not be the leaves that pique their curiosity. They are probably wondering why I bother gathering them into big piles and cart them off in a wheelbarrow.



  • Mystery is a Tiny Egg


    Morning starts with a heavy frost, turning leaves to leather and wood to fine art.




    Watching coffee roasting is a pleasing activity. Having a nearby friendly coffee roaster you can enjoy a pleasant conversation with while you pick up your coffee beans is precious. So is feeling how soft a bucket of warm chaff from roasted coffee is. Evidently it makes great mulch and bedding for worm bins, earthworms love it.



    So is enjoying the sun setting over the San Juan Islands on the drive home. And so is coming home to find a tiny egg, the first egg from a young hen. Based on its size and color, it is a Turken egg. The mystery to solve is which of the six month old hens has started laying eggs.

  • Where Snow Belongs


    Snow belongs up there, not down here. Saturday’s snow is but a memory. The sun has seen to that. The snow has retreated up into the hills and mountains where it belongs.


    Mt. Baker can have as much snow as it wants.


    And so can Lyman Hill. From now until spring, it’s a fine line where the snow ends, is it up there or down here?

  • All the Way from Umingmak Nuna


    A carpet of fallen leaves greeted me when I went out to the cabin to make tofu this morning. “Whoa!” I said when I stepped through the gate and saw all the leaves, wheelbarrows and wheelbarrows of leaves for the garden. Yesterday’s bluster shook the trees. Leaves fell all day and night.


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    In the cabin the gentle sound of soybeans soaking underneath a trickle of water is so soothing. The beans have come all the way from the other side of the Rocky Mountains to fatten in a cool stream. Maybe someone in Anacortes or down in the valley is feasting on fresh tofu tonight. I’ve adjusted my schedule so that I always have some on hand. If you need any, let me know.


    Snow geese by the thousands greet me on my way home from delivering tofu. It’s just in the past two to three years that the flocks are spending a lot of time in the northern part of the Skagit Valley. At times they fly overhead. Unlike other geese and swans which fly in small V-shaped groups, snow geese take to the air en masse, forming ribbons of hundreds and thousands of birds, noisily flying overhead, ribbons that at times stretch for miles.

    When you approach a field of snow geese, from a distance, they look like fields of white daffodils, or snow covered fields. And then you get closer and see that they are snow geese from here to the horizon. Their summer homes are in the far, far north, on the arctic sea coast, all the way to tip of Ellesmere Island, Umingmak Nuna, or land of the muskoxen, less than 500 miles from the North Pole. Just a few weeks ago these snow geese were on the tundra, looking down at muskoxen and caribou as they flew. Now they are here, watching cars go by, and flying over houses and freeways. Lucky snow geese, no passports to carry, no border crossings to worry about, just wings to flap and sail over all boundaries. If humans had wings, we never would have dreamed of creating border crossings, or fences, or walls. What would be the point?

  • Summer To Smoke


    On a calm, sunny October day, we light a pile of brush accumulated over the summer. Sweet smoke billows up like incense. If I close my eyes, it seems like I am at a temple in Kyoto, savoring the soothing fragrance of a thousand sticks of incense. If I listen, the crackling of the brush sounds like monks gossiping.




    It’s time to plant fall vegetables. These are cabbage seeds. Seeds are wondrous packages of information and energy. All the wonderful things humans have created don’t compare to what nature has devised in the way of seeds. We owe our existence to these tiny bits. Maybe by the time the iPhone M arrives, centuries from now, it will self replicate. After a year of use, it will produce a seed which you plant, and six months later, you’ll have a handful of shiny new iPhones you don’t need to purchase, and the old iPhone you’ll compost with the fall leaves.


    High above, ducks and geese are making their way south. The joy of working outdoors this time of year is hearing migrating fowl coming from afar. Sometimes they pass just out of sight. Other times they fly directly overhead. It won’t be long, maybe three weeks, four or so, before the first of the swans arrive to spend the winter among us.