a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Category: Reflections

  • City Greens and the Pursuit of Freshness

    KingfishWindow

    You don’t have to live in the country on acreage to enjoy fresh greens. It doesn’t take a lot of space to grow vegetables. We were in Seattle yesterday to enjoy one last meal at The Kingfish Cafe with a friend before the cafe closes this coming Sunday, January 25, 2015. On our way to the cafe, we walked by a series of raised vegetable beds in a yard and on a parking strip.

    Whoever lived in that house, had a steady supply of kale through the winter. Twenty to forty kale plants, can supply a family with fresh greens all winter long. You can’t beat freshly picked greens.

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    I often wonder why it is that freshness is not a high priority in the USA. It’s a mystery. I saw a clip on Japanese news yesterday about strawberries. Strawberries are an important winter fruit in Japan, and different regions compete to produce the sweetest, largest berries. The clip was about a new variety of strawberry called Skyberry produced in Tochigi. Growers of this variety of strawberry are wanting to export them to France, but were running into a serious problem. Within Japan, they can get their berries into stores within two days of picking. But when they ship them to France, it takes four days from picking until they are on store shelves. And for the strawberry growers, this was a major concern, as strawberries are fragile, and if they are bruised at all during shipment, they will no longer be salable after four days.

    FreshellWatching the news clip, I wondered if US growers of strawberries gnashed their teeth at the thought of it taking more than two days to get their strawberries onto store shelves. To deliver these Skyberry strawberries to France without damaging them, an agricultural research company developed special packaging which envelopes each strawberry in a protective shell they call a freshell. None of this is cheap. Each freshell costs $2 and the Skyberries will sell for $12 to $14 each in France. In Japan they retail for around $20 a pound. A luxury item for sure, but I wonder why freshness is sought after in Japan and is barely an afterthought in the USA.

    Home, after a wonderful meal and company, I found mother and daughter in a nest when I went to collect eggs. A few more months, and if the daughter insists on staying with her mother, the two will be laying eggs together.

    EggLayingWithMother

  • More Signs of Spring

    EarlySpringB

    With the unseasonably warm weather and increasing length of the days, it’s impossible to step outside and not see new signs of spring each day. Daffodils are popping up and sweet daphne buds are bulging. It feels more like mid-February than January.

    EarlySpringA

    It’s a contrast from past Januaries, like January 2007 and 2012. The chickens don’t care much for the snow. They will put up with it, but the boys dream about days when the snow falls thick and fluffy. The deeper the snow, the more fun they have.

    Winter2007
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  • The Law of Beauty

    DyingTree1

    Deep in the woods, an alder has died. The mushrooms and mosses and ferns have moved in and are devouring it. But, even as they slowly turn the tree into dirt, they assiduously follow the law of beauty, one of nature’s preeminent principals. There’s Amalie Noether’s theorem, a fundamental tool of modern theoretical physics and the calculus of variations, which states that any differentiable symmetry of the action of a physical system has a corresponding conservation law. There are Newton’s laws of motion. There are the Einstein field equations, which describe the curvature of space-time due to mass-energy equivalent to the gravitational field. And on and on and on.

    Then there is the law of beauty, Nature’s dictum that whatever must be done must be done with beauty. The mosses and mushrooms and ferns flagrant display of beauty, as they perform the mundane task of dismembering the dead alder, illustrates this fundamental law of Nature. You could say that Nature has an addiction to beauty. The capitalists and industrialists and hedge fund managers which rule us are doing their utmost to make sure we never see this beauty. They are working feverishly to wipe out as much of nature’s beauty as possible. They’ve even gone so far as to turn on as many lights as possible at night, so that we can’t see the glorious stars and planets and milky way and other galaxies when the sun sets. Their insidiousness knows no bounds.

    All it takes is an alder dying in the woods to take heart that in some places at least, Nature’s law of beauty still prevails.

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  • Common Things Can Be Amazing

    IsabellaTigerMoth

    In late fall, the Isabella Tiger Moth (Pyrrharctia isabella) caterpillars, called Woolly Bears, are crawling over everything. There are thousands of them just here. Yesterday, I noticed one crawling about already. I never knew how amazing these caterpillars were until today.

    These are northern climate moths. When their caterpillars emerge in the fall, they freeze solid in the winter. In the spring they thaw out and pupate. However, up in the arctic, where summers are so short, they can’t eat enough in one short season to develop to the state of turning into a moth. So they freeze the next winter, eat some more the next summer, and the cycle continues over many years. They’ve been known to live through 14 winters, until finally, they have eaten and grown enough over the short summers to turn into moths.

    Imagine freezing solid and thawing out every winter and spring for 14 years. I know of parents who would love to have children they could freeze over and over again.

    Close to home, the name of the nearby town of Sedro-Woolley is believed to have come from the Woolley Bear. The town formed in 1898 when the two neighboring towns of Sedro and Woolley Bug merged. Legend has it that the old town of Woolley Bug was named so because of all the Woolley Bears that were crawling around there. The town of Sedro got it’s name from the Spanish word for cedar, “cedro”. The man who named Sedro, Mortimer Cook, changed the c in cedro to s to make the name unique.

  • Solar Power Is Coming to A Man and His Hoe®

    SolarInstallation

    The crew from Banner Power Solutions began work yesterday on installing a solar power system on the garage. By next month we should be generating electricity and reducing our carbon footprint. They will be using solar panels made by Itek Energy, a company just twenty-two miles up the road in Bellingham, Washington. Their factory is close to Scratch and Peck, another great local company.

    Even the inverters used in the system will be from another nearby company, Blue Frog Solar in the pictoresque Viking city of Poulsbo. Instead of having a single inverter for the entire system, Blue Frog Solar inverters are small inverters with each solar panel getting it’s own inverter. This maximizes the power produced by the entire system. When a single inverter is used, the solar panel producing the least amount of power, determines the productivity of the entire solar array. With each solar panel getting it’s own inverter, electricity production is maximized, and it’s easy to determine which panel(s) may be having a problem.

    It’s been a longtime dream to do this, and now it’s finally happening. On to realizing more dreams. May you never run out of dreams.