a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

  • Garlic Planting

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    It’s time to plant garlic. Breaking apart the garlic bulbs to separate the cloves, leaves behind a mountain of paper-like garlic skins. They are beautiful on their own. These are destined for the compost pile, but if you do some searching, you’ll find people doing a variety of things with garlic skins.

    By mid summer, these garlic cloves will have turned into fat, juicy garlic bulbs. As I stick these cloves into the moist soil, I see the wonderful scapes and bulbs these cloves will be next summer.

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    On the way back from planting the garlic, I bring in some gleanings from the field. Looking at the healthy roots on these turnips and radishes, it’s easy to see how much we owe dirt for all our food.

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  • Clustered Woodlover

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    It’s impossible to walk even a short distance in the woods without seeing something remarkable. I’m guessing these are clustered woodlovers (Hypholoma fasciculare), also known as sulpher tuft.

    As cute as they are, they aren’t edible. Evidently they are bitter and will cause vomiting, diarrhea and convulsions. The chickens somehow know this. Many of them walk by these adorable mushrooms every day, but they don’t peck at them.

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  • Running with Mother

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    Ruby’s two month old chick isn’t ready to leave her mother’s side. Ruby is done being a parent, but she doesn’t mind when her chick tags along. When Ruby is off on her own, the little chick panics and goes running around, peeping while she looks for her mother. The chick doesn’t feel secure being on her own yet.

    But when she is with Ruby, the chick loves racing through the grass by her mother’s side.

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  • Out of the Garden Today – October 12, 2014

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    Some special things came out of the garden today: stinging nettles and shirohana-mame (white flower beans). The shirohana bean pods are starting to turn yellow, which means they can be harvested. I picked a handful to see how they turned out this year. The main harvest is still a few weeks away.

    The recent cool spell has invigorated the stinging nettles and they are sending out new shoots.

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    The huge white beans are spectacular. I wish I had some extra to sell, but not this year. Don’t even ask. Most of this year’s harvest is for planting next year, the rest for our dinner table. Next fall I should be able to offer organic shirohana-mame. Try even looking for regular fresh shirohana-mame, let alone organically grown ones. Let me know if you find any place to buy them.

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    And what is that above? The latest art installation at the Gugenheim? No, the stems of stinging nettles after the leaves have been cut off.

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    And below is a bowl of freshly cooked shirohana-mame. Are we the only ones in the whole country eating a bowl of just picked shirohana-mame for lunch today? It’s possible.

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  • Chickens on the Hunt

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    Chickens spend much of their day hunting. I was turning and adding leaves to a compost pile. Lucky spotted me working and came running, her chicks in tow. She knows that when I’m turning a compost pile, the hunting will be easy.

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    In the short clip below, you can see Lucky plucking earthworms out of the ground and dropping them for her chicks to devour. You can also hear the staccato clucking sound mother hens make when they’ve found something good to eat. The louder the sound, the more delicious the food. Watch how excited Lucky gets when she finds a big worm. Chicks seem to know from birth what this sound means.

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    How is the meaning of a sound transferred via instinct? If we could figure this out, maybe we could change our DNA so that we could encode hundreds of languages so that children would be born knowing English, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Swahili, any language you could imagine. Entire encyclopedias inscribed in our genetic code so that as our brains develop all this knowledge would be at the tip of our tongues.