a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Tag: kohlrabi

  • Letting Go


    You know your day is about to take a turn for the worse when someone calls to say they need you to come over to help them process their feelings. Feelings are such fleeting things, always changing by the second. One second you are seething with rage, the next your heart is bursting with love. For being such transitory things, the more you dwell on them, the more concrete they become. Trying to process them is like trying to shape melting Jello.


    Rusty, our cat, likes to process his feelings at three in the morning. If I don’t wake up to console him, he’ll pick at my face with his needle-sharp claws until I do. A few times I’ve reflexively bopped him on his head when he’s tried to wake me, and then I have feelings to process.


    The best thing to do when you have feelings to process, is to plant some potatoes in the garden. Pulling weeds, digging through the soil with your fingers, and shaping mounds for the spuds, and suddenly all those feelings you thought you needed to process are gone, having flown away on their own. Feelings are so light that all you have to do is to open your mind and they float away.


    A walk through the kohlrabi will do wonders for your frame of mind. Their huge, fan-shaped leaves light up when they catch the late afternoon sun. Underneath their huge leaves, their stems are fattening. A few more weeks and sweet kohlrabi will be a daily delight. When you are munching on sweet kohlrabi, you’ll have no feelings you need to process.

  • Babies in the Rain

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    For the first time in their lives, baby kohlrabi are getting a soft shower of rain drops. What do they think of the rain? Does it taste better than the well water I use to water them? A few more weeks, and the baby kohlrabi will grow up and be ready for market. Isn’t odd that you never hear about humanely grown vegetables? You can get someone to certify that you have raised your chicken, pigs, and cows humanely, though those certification standards are abysmally low. How about humanely grown produce? What would that mean to a kohlrabi? Having soil free of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides? A biologically rich environment? Rich soil full of earthworms wriggling around your roots to keep them aerated and fertilized? No heavy tractors rolling through the fields, compacting the soil and terrorizing the inhabitants? A quiet field so you can hear the songbirds? Clean air flowing through your leaves?

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