a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

  • The Beauty of Food Growing

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    Whether it be sprouting mustard greens, developing cherries, or stately garlic stalks, food that is beautiful. When you are lucky enough to see the whole process, from tiny seed or bulb to fully developed plant, cut and on your cutting board, the flavor of the plant is enhanced.

    As you eat it, you see all the many forms it took and the weeks or months or even years it took before it was ready to be eaten. You miss all that when everything you eat is purchased at a store. Even growing a few things, if you can, is worth the effort. Even if you fail, you’ll learn to appreciate that it’s not always an easy process producing fresh food.

    And if you’re lucky, you’ll get to see the many beautiful forms your produce goes through as it grows.

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  • Bees Feed Us

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    BumbleBeeOnArugulaFlowerA patch of arugula is in full bloom. The wild bees are buzzing all afternoon, finding plenty of food to gather as they buzz from flower to flower. Luckily for me, this means I will have plenty of arugula seeds to keep planting through the summer. The great thing about many vegetables is that you don’t have to keep buying seed. Let some of the plants flower and go to seed and you have a supply of vegetable seeds in perpetuity.

    That’s assuming that the wild bees will keep coming. There’s no guarantee that they will. They can’t reproduce and survive if their habitat, our gardens and our fields, are continually doused with poisons. When I visit garden and hardware stores and see aisles of poisons and herbicides, I wonder how much longer our fragile environment will last. It’s a sobering to think that one of these springs, the buzzing of bees may be gone.

    Honeybees abandoning hives and dying due to insecticide use, research finds
    Beyond Honeybees: Now Wild Bees and Butterflies May Be in Trouble
    Decline of bees forces China’s apple farmers to pollinate by hand
    Declining Bee Populations Pose
    A Threat to Global Agriculture
    Bee Sustainable

  • Raw Egg on Rice

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    After working hard outdoors, few things are as satisfying as a raw egg on warm rice with a dab of pickled plum and wakame (Undaria pinnatifida). The yolks of the eggs at a man and his hoe® are so buttery, with a texture like very heavy cream. They have so much flavor, you don’t need any salt.

  • Great Chicken Wall of 2014 part 2

    Work on the Great Chicken Wall of 2014 continues. Today I’m hanging the wire fencing on the posts, but before I do that I need to dig a trench so the bottom of the wire can be underground.

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    Digging the trench brings out the chickens. They haven’t come to help. They are out to devour as many earthworms as possible. Their claws are no match for a shovel which can dig much deeper and expose fat, juicy earthworms.

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    Even though they are losing some of their pasture, they will still have this meadow to roam. In late fall, after the harvest is over, I’ll open the gates to the vegetable fields and they’ll be able to scratch through them all winter long.

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  • It’s a Jungle Out There

    Everything is wet after steady rains through the night and morning. Behind the chicken yard, it’s a jungle of comfrey, burdock and tall grass.

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    It’s a perfect place for a mother hen to scratch for food with her chicks. They huddle around her beak, eager to snatch up any bugs or worms she finds. This is where chicks belong, outdoors with a mother, exploring a jungle full of exciting things to see and do.

    An interesting fact about mother hens is that they don’t care at all whose chicks they are raising. They are communal birds and will sit on anyone’s eggs. The chicks they hatch may be those of other hens, but they love them all.