a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

  • Picked Today

    20140703Eggs

    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.

    20140703BicycleDeliveryA
    20140703BicycleDeliveryB

    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.

    BowLittleMarketA
    BowLittleMarketB

    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.”

    BowLittleMarketC
    BowLittleMarketD

    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.

    BowLittleMarketMap

  • Planting Beans

    PapaDeRolla

    World genebanks hold 40,000 varieties of beans. Every year I try different varieties. Two of the new ones I am trying today are Papa de Rolla, a bean from Portugal, and Zuni Shalako, a bean from Southwestern United States and Mexico. I purchased these beans at the Olympia Farmers Market in June.

    ZuniShalako

  • Harvesting Shallots

    It’s a good day when you can pull 9 pounds of shallots out of the ground from a 6 square foot plot. I’m getting 1½ pounds per square foot, so if I want to grow a ton of shallots, I’ll need 1,333 square feet. Round that up to 1,500 square feet or a 15 by 100 foot area.

    ShallotsOnTheGround
    ShallotsInTheGround
    ShallotsHarvesting
    ShallotsFreshOutOfTheGround
    ShallotsDrying

  • Three Young Roosters

    These three young roosters are as colorful as the flowers around them. Young roosters spend most of their time together. They remind me of teenage boys who hang out together, too timid to ask girls out for a date, too insecure to be on their own. Roosters don’t come into their own until they are nearly a year old. Until they do, they seek each other’s company.

    Roosters come in so many colors, I wonder if they look at each other and think, “I wish I had his feathers.”

    YoungRoosters

    The Stewartia is still blooming. Their flowers are refreshing on a soft summer evening.

    NatsuTsubaki

  • Summer Heat

    It’s a new month and the first egg of the month is from Lucky. That’s a good way to begin a month.

    20140701-A-FirstEgg

    July starts with a heat wave. It’s almost three in the afternoon and it is 78ºF – 25.5ºC, the hottest day so far this year. It will be even hotter before it starts to cool down. This may be our first day over 80ºF – almost 27ºC. For many readers this probably makes you laugh. Some of you live in places where it doesn’t get that cold at night. Growing up, I didn’t feel like it was a summer day unless it got over 30ºC – 86ºF.

    20140701-B-YoungChickens
    20140701-C-Cherries

    The chickens are in the shade, the cherries are ripening fast, the lavender is in full bloom, the apples are growing, and the garlic is being whimsical. What more could I want?

    20140701-D-Lavender
    20140701-E-Apples
    20140701-G-GarlicScape