every day is a good day
On a hot summer day, a mother hen and her chicks find a cool spot in the mulch under Iris plants. I find relief from the heat in the woods. What do chickens make of these trees? They often scratch for food on the forest floor. Do they look up and marvel at the towering trees?
Wood is a good medium for making art. To work with wood, a chainsaw comes in handy.
The pieces are cut and stacked. What’s left behind is the flattened grass where the tree used to lie. Eventually there will be rows of salad greens, garlic, shallots, potatoes, beans, and other produce growing here.
The wood is split and stacked. The art installation is complete. This piece is about a quarter of a cord. By spring it will have vanished, used to keep the house warm in the middle of winter.
Lucky isn’t impressed with the art installation. She just walks by without so much as pausing and pondering what the artist is trying to convey.
For nearly a year I have been waiting for this recipe to finish. Last August I made my first batch of miso and set it in the pantry to age. I meant to wait until August, but now that it almost mid July, my curiosity got the best of me. I brought the crock out of the panty.
Lifting the lid, it certainly smelled like miso. I made my miso with soy beans, brown rice, barley and salt. What transforms this mixture into miso is koji, or Aspergillus oryzae, a fungus used to ferment a number of food products. Humans have been using Aspergillus oryzae for some 2,000 years.
Lifting the parchment paper I used to seal the fermenting miso, I am face to face with my home made miso.
Opening it a few weeks early was worth it. My impatience was rewarded with some of the best miso I’ve ever had. There really is something to making some foods yourself in small batches. Now I can start making a batch every three months. One of the places I researched said that if you let it ferment for two years, it tastes even better. If I make enough batches, I will have the patience to let some ferment that long.
One of the hoop houses has a healthy population of Swift Forktails, a type of damselfly. Swift Forktails are black with dabs of turquoise on the tips of their tails and their sides. They float through the air looking like flying gems.
Related to dragonflies, damselflies eat many harmful insects and keep their numbers under control. And unlike pesticides, they don’t leave behind any chemicals that can harm you. You don’t have to worry about inhaling any harmful dust. You don’t have to worry about reapplying poisons. The damselflies will keep working all summer long and into the fall.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
