It’s marshmallow harvest season in the Skagit Valley. Marshmallow berries in the marshmallow fields are plump and ready to be picked. Marshmallow berries are the largest of all berries. In the mild Skagit Valley climate they grow to epic proportions.

Even though they are so huge, they are so light that they can be hand picked and stacked onto the marshmallow trailers.

Marshmallow farmers in Skagit County are a major grower of marshmallows. From the vast marshmallow fields, Farmers haul the marshmallow berries to marshmallow packing plants. Dedicated workers in the packing plants cut the huge marshmallow berries into bite size marshmallows and place them into bags you find in your local store.

Despite all the rain this spring, this year looks like a good year for harvesting marshmallows. And from how plump this year’s marshmallows are, this year’s crop will be a great tasting crop.

So how can you tell if the marshmallows you buy are fresh? Look for the harvest date on the bag. You’ll find it in tiny print somewhere. By law, marshmallow packers must include the harvest date on the package.

Marshmallow farmers in the Skagit Valley harvest marshmallow berries from June into August. So if you want the freshest marshmallows buy them from mid June through August.

I need to take pictures when the sun is out so on days like today when the rain pours all day long I can remember the sun. According to the National Weather Service, Seattle had 5 hours in all of May when it was 70ºF or higher. In a normal year there are 80 to over a 100 hours of 70ºF weather in May. So you can see how off we are this year.

What do the spiders think of all this cool, rainy weather? They can always crawl into a crack to escape the steady rain drops.

Snow waits patiently on her nest, waiting for her eggs to hatch. She picked a perfect place to hide.

When it isn’t pouring rain, I do like to let the chickens enjoy the nice weather. Do they compare this spring with sunny springs from years past?

On a totally, not a man and his hoe type of topic, with all the horrific shootings happening recently, I decided to get the latest numbers on gunfire deaths in Japan. And for that I turned to a reliable source, the National Police Agency of Japan. So these are the statistics for gunfire deaths in Japan from 2017 through 2021. The English labels for the rows is on the right.

The figure that popped out to me was that in all of 2021 there was just one death by gunfire in all of Japan. If the US had the same ratio of gunfire deaths, there would have been just 3 deaths by gunfire in the US during all of 2021. The number of gunfire homicides in the US during 2021? 19,384. A far cry from 3.

The goal of the National Police Agency of Japan is to have zero gunfire deaths. They are almost there.

Letting children get gunned down in elementary schools is a choice not an inevitability. Some countries choose to let this happen, others do not.

From me to you, a photo of a bee gathering nectar and pollen from a Thimble Berry flower. Cool weather still dominates here with the occasional warm, sunny day breaking the wet, cloudy days. I’m sure the bees are wanting warmer weather more than we humans.

Despite the cool spring, the bees did pollinate many of the cherry. The proof is the green cherry fruit where white cherry blossoms used to be.

And the three duck eggs in the second duck nest are now seven. So how many duck eggs will the ducks lay before they decide it is time to incubate them?

The chickens do enjoy foraging in the meadow. But the bob cat is back, so how much time to let the chickens roam is something to consider. Two nights ago the dogs were still out at 2 in the morning. It was too quiet. Something wasn’t right. I grabbed a flashlight and went looking for them. I found them at the gate, looking up at the archway. And on the top of the archway was a large bobcat.

When I aimed the flashlight at the bobcat, it jumped off the arch onto the roof of the garden shed and disappeared into the neighbor’s woods.

I did find it odd that the dogs were so quiet. Normally if they corner something in a tree like a squirrel or raccoon, they bark constantly. They were eerily quiet with the bobcat.

So how do these pictures get from me to you? When you look up into the sky, do you imagine that at some point the pictures I take were at some point radio waves bouncing around 550 kilometers (340 miles) up in the sky? They go further into space than the International Space Station.

So how do my words and photos get from me to you? I use my iPhone to take the photos. I edit the photos and words on my MacBook. From my MacBook the words and photos get beamed as radio waves from our StarLink antenna to a StarLink satellite orbiting the earth. From there they get beamed back to a StarLink ground station and sent to our host company’s servers, and sent on to you.

This morning, there are 1,877 functioning StarLink satellites orbiting the earth. Each one circles the earth in 90 to 95 minutes. Which means they are overhead for just a few minutes. If I could grab a tether from one, I could be in Tokyo in 12 minutes.

Every little white dot is a StarLink satellite orbiting the earth. The long strands of satellites are recently launched satellites which are still climbing. As they reach their final orbiting height they will spread out and blend in with all the other orbiting satellites.

The hexagon cells are areas where StarLink provides service.

Our StarLink antenna tilts north, so it mostly communicates with StarLink satellites zipping across southern British Columbia. Which in turn communicate with ground stations in places like Redmond, North Bend, and Brewster. And this happens in millionths of a second.

So that is how my words and pictures get to you.

Summer skies have returned to the Skagit Valley. It’s finally warm and dry enough to work in the garden.

The late spring warmth has the bees buzzing about. Speaking of bees, I’ve been reading and listening to Jacqueline Freeman’s Song of Increase. The book is about the life of bees. After keeping bees for many years, Jacqueline Freeman wrote down what she heard the bees tell her about their lives.

“Listening to the Wisdom of Honeybees for Kinder Beekeeping and a Better World,” is how she describes her book. “When the bees speak, I listen,” she says. Throughout the book she sprinkles sections where the bees speak for themselves, like this:

“We wake up to the understanding that we are all one, all the time. Human beings exist connected each to each, but believe that they are not. Honeybees dwell in the full realization of that connection and have done so for eons. The unity we embody is a reflection of the kingdom-wide Unity that dwells in us all.
This is the gift we bring: complete, sacred unity in body and spirit. To be in the presence of Spirit [God], to simply sit and be in such presence, offers the opportunity to be transformed by it. This we offer you. Come sit. Be with us. Drink in the Unity as you would fresh rain. We offer our gift with great joy and love!”

For a refreshing, different view of bee society get a copy of Jacqueline Freeman’s Song of Increase.

The harsh winter killed our grand California Lilac. So we were debating how to cut it down today when we noticed a green sprig sprouting on one of the main branches. It lives. We won’t chop it down yet.

A harsh winter followed by a long cool, wet spring has given way to summery days of delight.

Have you seen a dirtier dog? Talk about dirty dogs. Enna and Taku outdid themselves hunting rabbits in the woods. They caught two! One they brought back early and left at the gate. Perhaps they were hoping we would chop it up and fry it for them while they got more rabbits?

They came back hours later with another rabbit. The two dogs looked like they had died and gone to heaven. Enna and Taku love nothing more than chasing and catching rabbits. Wild rabbit is their favorite food. Fortunately a straw bed is the best cleaner for muddy dogs.

This is the first nest like place I’ve found of duck eggs this season. Most of the time the ducks are leaving their eggs scattered along the banks of the pond or in the grass. But this spot is too muddy, at least for me, maybe not for the ducks. So I couldn’t stop myself from spiffing it up with some straw.

So if at some point a duck decides to hatch ducklings, she’ll have a drier spot to sit. And the view from this nest isn’t bad. She can watch the swallows dart over the pond while she sits, and sits, and sits, and sits.

However, danger lurks nearby. Close to the nest is a favorite spot for bull frogs to sit in the afternoon sun. These invasive frogs can swallow baby ducklings whole. Now that I know where these large frogs like to whittle away the afternoons, I can catch them, or at least try. There are three that hang out in this spot. Maybe the dogs will prefer them to rabbits. Don’t they taste like chicken?