every day is a good day
Fall is not only the time for colorful leaves, it’s also the time for great salads. Many greens love the cool weather. Dill is remarkable this time of the year. Arugula’s peppery bite softens and becomes more nutty. Ruby streaks mellow. It’s a treat going out into the garden before meals to see what is perfect to pick.
It’s a crisp fall morning, mist rising off the cold ground. In the woods, fall’s beauty lies gently on soft blankets of moss. There’s so much wonder hidden in the woods, that you best forget about looking at the time. Some leaves fall on the ground. Others have the good fortune of landing on a cushion of soft moss. There is so much beauty in every square foot of woodland. And when you think about it, most of the beauty in a forest is never seen by any human. It’s just for the birds, the foxes, the rodents, and smaller creatures to enjoy.
Kindling is a necessity this time of year. Maybe not for you, but for me it is. Quite a few years ago, my husband gave me this handy Swedish design log splitter. It’s called a Smart-Splitter and makes splitting logs into kindling a breeze.
Axes are good for splitting rounds into firewood. But when it comes to splitting firewood into slender pieces of kindling, the Smart-Splitter works even better. The blade rides a fixed post, so you can set the blade exactly where you want it, and when you drop the weight which falls onto the blade, it splits the log in two. It’s a failsafe way to split smaller and smaller pieces of wood in two. It doesn’t take long to make a bundle of kindling to start fires.
Seeing Hazel with her whole brood this afternoon was a pleasant surprise. With some hens, the break with their children is immediate. One minute they are sweet mother hen, “Here’s a plump worm children.” The next minute they are, “You’re off on your own – shoo!”
Other hens are like Hazel, spending less and less time with them each day, but still there when the children need some reassuring. Sort of like people, some chicks grow up with stern mothers, others with gentle ones. There are the no nonsense, “Children! Stay within eyesight at all times!” mothers, and the carefree ones who let their children do most anything they want, with every parenting style in between.
I never would have thought mother hens have so many different parenting styles. You certainly don’t read books detailing the parenting styles of mother hens, though if one were to write a serious one, it would easily require hundreds of pages. Add illustrations, studies on how childhood experiences influence parenting styles, the effect of this and that, the roles mother hens play in the success of roosters, et cetera, et cetera, and you’re talking about a thousand pages or more, perhaps even a few volumes. Now that would be a find in a library: three to five, leather bound, hefty volumes, an exhaustive treatise on how mother hens raise their children, with a companion compendium on evolutionary similarities between human and chicken child rearing.
Some things are inexplicable. Like why isn’t kohlrabi served at every meal? Why isn’t kohlrabi seen in every shopping cart in supermarkets? Peeled and sliced, it is crisp and juicy, sweet and mild, the ultimate snack food, the most refreshing salad, the optimal side dish to any meal. It is so delicious, parents could use it to make their children behave. “Put that down this minute, or there will be no kohlrabi for you!” That would work one hundred percent of the time.
Crowds gather along the shores to watch the evening sun set on the ocean, to see the fading light pull its glow over the islands and waves. Who rushes into the garden to see the sun slip its last rays through the kohlrabi? The evening sun makes the kohlrabi seem even more sensual. Could these possibly be the first photos ever posted of kohlrabi at sunset? I did several queries and didn’t find a single picture of a kohlrabi lit by the setting sun.
There is a dearth of photos of vegetables glowing in the setting sun. No photos of cabbage, carrots, rubystreaks, or dried bean pods at twilight. During my search, I did learn that in Vermont, the night before Halloween is called Cabbage Night. Children go out into the fields to collect rotten vegetables, so that when they go trick or treating, they can toss the rotten vegetables at those who don’t give them a treat. Hopefully they leave the kohlrabi behind. A spoiled kohlrabi will crack a skull wide open.
Maybe if they went out before sunset and saw how beautiful vegetable plants are when lit by the evening sun’s gentle rays, they wouldn’t think of throwing rotten vegetables.
I better stop telling how beautiful vegetable plants are before there are hoards of photo snapping tourists, lined outside the gate, clambering to get in to photograph the vegetables at sunset.
