a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

  • Which is More Beautiful?

    151124Special

    Special is a beautiful hen, but is she more beautiful than colorful Svenda? It doesn’t matter if one is more beautiful than the other. If you stare at their feathers, it almost looks like they aren’t feathers, but brush patterns. You can easily imagine a painting style called “chicken feathering” where brush patterns resemble chicken feathers.

    151124Svenda
    FirstSnowA

    The first snow of the season on the foothills filled today’s bike ride to the post office with beauty. The cold wind flowing down the Fraser Canyon in British Columbia made holding the camera still a challenge. Mt. Baker’s bare, craggy rocks are no more. The whole peak is swathed in deep snow. On the slopes of Mt. Baker, the marmots and pikas are deep in their dens. The marmots are probably hibernating already while the pikas stay warm in their burrows, munching on the grasses and herbs they collected and dried during the summer.

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    151124MargaretCompostA

    Margaret and her chicks are far from hibernating. This is her second clutch this year. Her chicks are perfectly capable of being on their own, but she still dotes on them, making sure they are out of harms way as they scratch and peck their way through the compost pile I turned today. They will be two months old on Thanksgiving. The other day, two of her chicks were having a sibling fight and I watched her break them up. If one lags behind too far, she’ll go looking for it and tell it to hurry along.

    151124MargaretCompostB

  • A Family of Toadstools

    MushroomB

    A group of mushrooms is called a troop, but the tight cluster of purple mushrooms I found the other day poking out of a cushion of moss looked like a family to me. You could imagine that I stumbled upon them while they were taking a break on the moss after walking through the woods all morning.

    This is a great time of year to find mushrooms of all kinds. They seem to love the cool, wet weather. When you see them it’s hard to imagine their complicated lives, from spores to threadlike mycelium to mushroom primordia to fruiting mushrooms. Fungi are essential for creating compost, for decomposing plant and organic matter. Without them we wouldn’t be here. It’s comforting that our lives depend on such beautiful organisms.

    MushroomA
    MushroomC

  • What Happened Here?

    ChucanutDriveSunsetA

    On our way home from a shopping trip to Bellingham, we stopped along Chuckanut Drive to enjoy the evening sun. A boulder at the edge of the cliff was adorned with flowers. Oh, no! What happened here? Did someone fall over? You see something unordinary like this and your mind spins a mile a minute trying to make sense of it. It just takes seconds to picture a heart broken young man plunging to his death … no, a couple on their honeymoon stop to take a selfie, slip, and tragically plunge to their doom … no, a young girl can’t stop texting to her boyfriend while her parents take pictures of the view and she stumbles over the boulder … no, and your mind goes on and on. In a few minutes you’ve written an entire novel in your mind.

    ChucanutDriveSunsetAB
    ChucanutDriveSunsetB

    Just as I calmed my mind and walked back to the pickup to leave, there it was … a single shoe next to the curb. Not an old shoe someone would have thrown away, but a perfectly good shoe. No doubt it was the shoe of the heartbroken young man who leapt to his death. Why else would someone leave a perfectly good shoe twenty feet from the boulder on the edge of the cliff? Or is that a woman’s shoe? No, the shoe of a … you tell me. Your explanation is as good as mine.

    ChucanutDriveSunsetC

  • Hoary Daybreak

    HoaryMorningA

    When I went to bed last night, I knew the morning was going to be magical. I could feel it in the way the cold night air stung my nose. This morning we had our first ice. You can have many a frosty morning before first ice arrives, the morning when the surface of the puddles freeze over. The leaves which yesterday were floating on the small pond by the front entrance, are trapped in a layer of clear, cold ice this morning.

    We’ve gone beyond dainty frost to the wilds of hoar frost and ice hair, phantasmagorical creations of a deep freeze. They can look like an army of flesh-cutting glass shards to soft, cuddly blankets you want to wrap around your shivering body.

    HoaryMorningB
    HoaryMorningC
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    HoaryMorningJ

    The freezing nights do wonder for kale. Icy weather turns the starches in kale to sugars, making it much milder than kale picked during the summer. It becomes a mild, crunchy green, great for salads. It’s the middle of November and I’m still harvesting a bin of salad greens for Tweets every week. I wonder sometimes where the kale and other salad greens I gather each week end up. I imagine travelers stopping in at Tweets, devouring my eggs and nibbling on my greens, only to fly off that night or the next day to the far corners of the earth. By the time the kale comes out of their bottoms, it could be on the other side of the world. Bon voyage my hearty greens. Send a postcard if you can.

    HoaryMorningK

  • Just One

    OneOfAKindArtemis

    Just one melon, that’s all I got from the artemis melon vines I grew in one of the hoop houses. The vines were loaded with ripening melons this summer when one night, something got into the hoop house and destroyed them. It looked like a mini tornado had gone through the hoop house. Vines, leaves, and melons were ripped to shreds. One vine with one tiny, baby melon survived. I secured the hoop house so that nothing could get in, and after keeping it secure through October, I brought it in a week ago to ripen.

    This morning it was time to see what we’d missed this summer, and was thrilled that all was not lost. This one juicy, delicious melon was worth all the effort. Next year I’ll make sure no critters get into the hoop house to destroy the artemis melons.