a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

  • Before the Storm


    The forecast is for another windy night and a blustery day tomorrow. Before the trees and branches come crashing down, while it is still calm, I sneak off into the winter woods. One of the first things I encounter is a vine maple leaf stuck to a fern. Instead of falling gently to the ground, this leaf landed on a fern, and through the winter storms, it has stayed there, slowly disintegrating. I suppose the fern will be glad when the rains finally wash it away.


    A small Douglas Fir branch with cones that was ripped off during the last storm dangles in a vine maple branch. You can tell it is from a Douglas Fir by the three pronged bracts sticking out of the seed scales.

    I could see someone collecting these three pronged Douglas Fir bracts and doing something with them, making a necklace from them, bundling them up into a brush, or filling a pillow with them.



    In the damp woods, any fallen log or dead stump becomes a garden of moss, lichen, and ferns. It doesn‘t matter how dry the summer is, it takes but a few fall raindrops for these mosses and lichens to become soft, feathery beds.



    Tomorrow is the first delivery of the year. The eggs are ready to go. Last year, the hens laid over 5,500 eggs. It sounds like a lot of eggs, but it isn’t even a drop in the bucket compared to the vast commercial hen houses churning out several million eggs a day. I can’t fathom what it must be like to be one hen among more than a million, to never see the sun, never take a dust bath, never explore what is on the other side of that fern deep in the woods, to never flirt with a rooster.

  • Hidden Life of Trees


    2018 ended with one last tofu delivery to the Anacortes Food Co-op yesterday. These are not serene lakes reflecting the mountains, these are flooded fields in the Skagit Valley. In the summer, these “lakes” will be fields of waving wheat and corn. Hard to imagine at this time of year when the flooded fields are full of ducks and swans.



    A break in the steady winter rains and the chickens are deep into the woods. The forest floor is all fluffy from the constant scratching of the chickens.

    I’ve been reading Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees the last few days. It’s given me a new appreciation of the wonders of trees and forests, and the complexity of what is happening in the woods around me. The relations trees maintain have with other trees and fungi is far more complex than we can imagine. For example, the fungi Laccaria bicolor can sense when the pine trees it relies on for sugars lacks nitrogen, and the fungi releases a toxin in the soil which kills minute organisms which become fertilizer for the pines.

    Anastassia Makarieva from Saint Petersburg in Russia discovered that it is forests that serve as a water pump, transporting moisture far inland from the coasts. Without coastal forests, the interior of continents would be much drier than they are.



    Maybe I should invite scientists to unravel the effects of chickens on temperate, coastal forests. They certainly have an impact on nutrient recyling, consuming vast quantities of of bugs and worms, and converting them into fertilizer. The way they aerate the top few inches of the forest floor must have an effect too.


  • A White Christmas – Barely


    Christmas morning dawned with the faintest covering of snow. Certainly there was no inch of snow by 7 a.m. to make it an official white Christmas. There isn’t even enough snow to cover a chicken’s toe.


    Just enough snowflakes to powder dried flower buds and the camellia.



    But it only takes a single coating of snow to transfer the pond into a scene out of the arctic, turning it into an ice-covered bay on Baffin Island. But what are those two eyeballs staring up into the sky? Maybe aliens have landed and are exploring the depths of the pond.



    By evening, the aliens are long gone, taking the snow cover with them.

  • Art Unintended


    When we installed solar panels on the garage a few years ago, I didn’t realize we were installing an art piece. On frosty mornings, it’s a beautiful slab of ice, a metaphor for the transient nature of all things. By the afternoon, the slab of ice has vanished in the brilliant sunshine.


    Frost turns molehills into towering mountain peeks, Kilamanjaro and Mt. Rainier rise above the frozen plains.

  • Happy Solstice


    This year’s winter solstice arrives on a clear, cold, icy morning. 8:28 a.m. is the magic moment when the sun reached its lowest point in the sky for this year. You would think the earth would shudder and groan at reaching this momentous spot and turning around. And yet, as far as the earth is considered, the solstice is nothing, just an imaginary point in its circle around the sun.


    Bushy cattails look out over a frozen pond. Frozen oregano and lavender a winter garden make.




    At solstice, King Russel is strutting his goods. With their superb eyesight and innate magnetic sensitivities, I wonder if the chickens sense that today is a special day, and tomorrow will be just a tad longer.