AncienTrails

Extra Work Raises Grade

Lughnasa                                 Waxing Artemis Moon

Up early and out in the garden.  This is the way I like it, working in the garden before and during sunrise, a coolness, some damp lingering from the night, stillness carrying only the softest of sounds, the earth friable and eager, weeds willing to come up and the garden’s purpose easy to discern.

Kate worked on in the orchard, going back over intensive weeding of a week ago and pulling up sprouts and rhizomes, making the place just that more inhospitable for the weedy plants.  With a second load of mulch we’ll have this place looking ship-shape heading into fall.

A few grasses have begun to turn brown and there’s a slight hint of autumn in the morning air, a certain clarity and crispness.

After inspecting the garden again yesterday, I’m moving my grade from a B- to a B+.  Why?  I did three plantings of beets, greens, carrots and beans.  Now the second planting has come to maturity after many other plants finished their summer and gave up their yield.  We have a good crop of young beets, a lot of juicy carrots, plenty of greens and enough beans for a couple more freezer bags at least.  This planting weekly or so for a while, creates a series of gardens, all in the same place.  We even have a number of Cherokee Purple tomato plants which I did not plant.  They are volunteers from last year’s tomatoes.

Add to these the onions, garlic, greens, beans, beets and various fruits already harvested we have a good gardening year, not a great one, but a good one.

Plus those potatoes are still in the ground, the raspberries have begun to fruit and the fennel and leeks look good.  All in all, not bad.  I said at the beginning of the growing season that I saw this as a consolidation year, a year when we make sure we can care for what we have.  A week ago I would have said we hadn’t even met that mark, but now I believe we have.  Caring for the orchard, the vegetable garden and the new plantings from last year in there, managing the bees and getting ready for the honey harvest, plus pruning out and restoration in the perennial flower beds.

This advance is mostly thanks to Kate’s back surgery and her hip surgery.  She can now care for the garden, too, as she has in the past and it requires the both of us, what we have now.  Getting back to normal speed.

A Garden Morning

Beltane                                   New Moon (Hungry Ghost)

The potatoes have mounds around the growing plants and the hilled up earth from their trenches has leveled out.  The bush beans I planted there last week have begun to germinate and I plan to plant more bush beans tomorrow if the weather is ok.

While checking fruit on our trees, I ended up weeding the blueberries, too.  The clover is exuberant, mostly a happy addition to our orchard, but overwhelming in the blueberry patch.  We do have apples and cherries and currants, but I could find no pears.  Our production will at least double this year, maybe more.  I counted six apples and several, say 8, cherries.  The currants have experienced substantial predation, by birds, I think.

I mounded earth around the growing leeks, too, to blanch the stems.   The garlic, which grows near the leeks, looked ready to harvest, but when I pulled a few out of the ground, they looked like they had a ways to go.  I hung the five I dug from a bamboo pole in the honey house.

Kate’s begun weeding and that helps a lot.  Keeping the bees, the vegetables, the orchard and the flowers in good shape requires attending to the plants we have, doing things like mounding the potatoes and the leeks, checking the garlic, watching for disease and insects, taking action if a plant seems to be in distress, replanting if, as in the instance of the carrots, germination is low.  Though weeding is an important, very important maintenance action, it doesn’t involve direct plant care which is what I enjoy.  I’m glad to have Kate back at the weeding.  She’s also our pruner and she has begun to recover our front sidewalk.

Then it rained.

How Our Garden Grows

Beltane                                                    Waning Planting Moon

Plants up, time for photos:

A lot of manure

Spring                                     Full Flower Moon

Moved two hundred pounds of composted manure by wheelbarrow from the garage back to the garden.  Gee, that got my heart rate up.  Moved the same yesterday, too.  Still amending beds.  I put down newspaper as mulch between my garlic rows, then layered composted manure on top of the newspaper.  Got caught up in repairing the damage done by the dogs.  I’ve done bits of it here and there over the last week or so, but this time I finished it up except for leveling.  That took the bulk of the time.  Also did some weeding and planted an errant onion that had ended up underneath the wisteria.

Since I restarted my non-cardio workout last night, I slept well.  The work this morning was labor intensive, moving the loaded wheelbarrow, shoveling soil from one place to another, so I should sleep well again tonight, too.

Last night I finished my ArtRemix research for tour #1.  I’m going to plan two tours, but am working on just one right now.  An educator from the Walker has given us a framework for thinking about art after WWII and when I plan the tour, finish reading the research and map out a path, I want to go through each piece from her five point perspective.

Fitter

Spring                                                       Waxing Flower Moon

Kate called from the Northstar.  She arrives in Anoka at 5:52.  She took the light rail to Target Field and caught the train home from there.  Feels like living in Connecticut.  I’m glad to have her home.  This is a two-person house and needs both of us to make it run smoothly.

Got the results of the fitness assessment I did last week.   The heart rate thresholds were not very dissimilar from the ones I had been using, though the max is about 10 beats higher and the mid-range of low is about 3 beats higher.  I got some good recommendations on how to modify my aerobic work and, as I hoped, the whole experience gave me a jump start back to the more comprehensive workout I had been doing before Christmas.  It involves flexibility, muscle warmup and stretching and resistance.  I kept faith with the cardio, but I’d let the other stuff slide.

Spread more compost and worked it in.  I’m almost ready to plant.  In fact I may plant tomorrow morning before I amend the soil in the next bed, the one with the garlic and the lilies.  The garlic and onions and parsnips look healthy, as does the asparagus and the strawberries.  The bed for the leeks and the sugar snap peas and the bok choy needs some weeding and some soil amending, too.  In the next day or two I should have all the transplants and seeds in that go in now.  Just got word that the potatoes are on their way, so I have to get some more composted manure for the potato/bush bean bed.

Last night I did research on four of the ArtRemix objects and I’ll finish all 8 of them before Friday.  The tour itself is not until May 7th.  Thrashing around the enlightenment, romanticism, modernism, Liberalism, post-modernism, Vico and Rousseau.  I want to arrive at a synthesis between enlightenment thought and the thought of its primary critics, those in the romantic family of thinkers:  Rousseau, Hegel, Kant, Vico, Burke, Hume.  Maybe somebody else has done it, but I want to do it my way.

A lot today

Spring                                  Awakening Moon

Rain last night.  Thanks to all you who offered a faith tradition appropriate rain whatever.  It worked!  That means the onion sets I planted have a nice present in their new home and the garlic and parsnip received encouragement.

Since it was a wet, cool morning, I did just what I said I would, sat in my study and worked on Chapter 12 of Wheelock, the Perfect Active System for all conjugations.  Better than it sounds.

At 11:30 I drove into the art institute for a walk through of the ArtRemix exhibit.  More later when I’m not tired and I’ve had a chance to process what I’ve learned.

Back home to Andover, in bed, slept for an hour, then back in the truck with Kate and out to the last of Brenda Langston’s course on healthy eating, healthy living.  Good stuff.

Important Document? Read While Driving.

Spring                                                 Awakening Moon

Warning:  Rant ahead.  Not texting, not brushing teeth, not combing hair, not eating cereal or drinking coffee, no, this young woman I passed on my way to the MIA yesterday read while driving.  By reading I do not mean look down, then follow the road, but eyes glued to page, peripheral vision guiding her used buick down Highway 252.  I encountered her three times on 252, each time her head and eyes had the same position, eyes on the page, head tilted down.  Each time.  Then, after I had put her out of my mind, as I drove on 94, the last stretch of the drive in until city streets, she passed me on the left.  Yep.  You guessed it.  Still reading.  At this point I honked several times and pointed.  Exasperated, she looked at me, then put the several page document on the seat beside her and drove on.

I have a clump of daffodils in bloom, tulips with broad leaves and iris beginning to peak back above the ground.  I put cygon on the iris yesterday.  This is my one remaining chemical. It kills the iris borer which lives in the soil and wrecks havoc on iris rhizomes.  If you’ve ever lifted iris rhizomes after an attack of iris borer’s, you will know why I continue to use this one pesticide.

The parsnip and the garlic look good.  I poked into the carrot patch where I left the carrots in past ground freeze last fall.  Sure enough I have carrots composting in the soil already.  Very mushy and yucky.   The garden and my spirit for it are gradually coming to life.  I hope we get some rain.  The plants need it.

OUCH!

Imbolc                                      New Moon (Awakening)

A virgin no more.  I went the whole last season without a single bee sting.  Today, when I brought food out to the hive, so they have something to eat until there are blossoms, I got stung.  Twice.  On the face and neck.  OUCH.  With the first one I forgot the wisdom from the weekend, threw up my hands, let loose with a few poorly chosen words and danced like ol’ St. Vitus.  The second came after I suited up and discovered that I had enclosed a bee inside my veil.  She was unhappy and it cost her.  When honeybees sting, their abdomen comes out along with the stinger.  So they die.

I’m glad it’s finally happened.  No more suspense.  I didn’t die, so I imagine I’ll react better next time.  Maybe.

While I was out there, I cleared the mulch from the garlic.  They like this kind of cool, wet weather.  We have daffodils breaking the surface.  Unfortunately, our magnolia tree thinks it’s mid-April.  That’s not good for its blooms.

The Awakening moon finds our land here doing just that.

Here’s something I’m playing around with.  I think there’s a difference between living on the land and living with the land.  To live on the land means we place our house there, perhaps a swing set, grass, maybe even a few flowers and trees, but our daily life happens on the land or in our dwelling.  To live with the land means some engagement with your land’s seasonal changes.  There’s something here I think.

A Good Day

Samhain                                     Full Dark Moon

Rigel and Vega spent much of the day defending us from visiting neighborhood dogs.  Of course, thanks to our record setting fence-lines no battle could be joined, but jaw-boning was much in evidence.  This evening they came in, flopped down on the couch and went to sleep.  That is except for the show on birth and babies in the animal kingdom.  Rigel turned her head toward the TV and watched a mule-deer born, penguins enfolding their single chicks and musk-ox turn to face down the white wolves of the Arctic.  Would loved to have been inside her head.

Kate worked outside today, weeding the blue-berry patches and other parts of the orchard.  The good news is the clover has become established and has choked out the weeds.  The bad news is that the clover threatens to choke out the blue-berries.  Sigh.  She is only two weeks out from her procedure tomorrow.  Amazing.

Our defended (defenced?) vegetable garden can now be worked without fear that a Rigel or a Vega will come along later and try to emulate any digging I might have done.  Their work is not up to my exacting standards.  The last greens came out today with the exception of some Swiss Chard that still has vitality.  All that’s left in the garden now are strawberry plants, asparagus, garlic, parsnip and carrots.  The first two are perennials, the latter three crops from this year that can stay in the ground for a while, carrots, or need to over winter, the parsnip and garlic.

I couldn’t bring myself to patch the damage from the dogs.  It is quite extensive and I find myself reactive when I work on it.  It will keep until next spring.

Then of course there was the Vikings-Packer game.  Our defense had a bit of a let down late in the third quarter and the first part of the fourth, but they played brilliantly otherwise.  So did Favre.  At one point a Packer named Jennings fell on the Viking sideline very near Favre.  Favre’s concern and his action, bending down to see how Jenning’s was, moved me.  He seems to genuinely care for his team mates both current and former.  He also plays like a little boy, jumping and waving his arms, picking up players who’ve just scored a touchdown.

After the game he had an interview in which he spoke warmly of the Packers and the fans there.  It was a mature and sensitive moment.

It’s fun to see him play as a Viking.  Didn’t think I’d feel that way, but I do.

Gnashing of Teeth

Fall                                    Waning Blood Moon

Back to the gnashing of teeth.  When I went out to plant the garlic this morning, I discovered Vega and Rigel had decided to become gardeners, too.  They dug up beds, they dug up around beds.  They moved a lot of soil, none of it in a constructive manner.

This almost made me cry.  After some unpleasant words and gestures, a bit of stomping around, I called Dan the fence guy and said, “Dan, I need another fence.”  When he finishes, this yard will have more fence than many cattle ranches.  It will take days just to walk the fence line.  And this all inside an acre and a half.

Anyhow, I planted the garlic, covered them with six inches of straw and protected them with left over chain link fence.  Later in the day I mulched the parsnips, which will over winter along with the garlic, and the carrots.  I’m going to try storing them in the ground with a heavy mulch to protect them.  In theory, then, I can go out in the middle of winter and harvest fresh carrots.

The potato harvest is now in, too.  I dug up the Viking Purples (no kidding) and the rest of the white potatoes, washed them off and left them in a large plastic boxes to cure.  They stay at room temperature for two weeks, then downstairs to the coolest storage we have.  That’s outside the house at the bottom of the basement stairs, but still inside the garage.

Got some nice feedback today on my organization skills for the Sierra Club and on my writing from a fellow Docent.  Also, a good nap.  That all helped.

Big dogs bring big problems and big rewards.  Can’t get one without the other.