• Tag Archives garlic
  • The Heart of What Ails American Culture

    75  bar steady 29.84  0mph NE dew-point 68  Sunrise 5:50  Sunset 8:59pm Summer

    Last Quarter of the Thunder Moon

    A Deborah Madison recipe I used this noon called for tomatoes, beet greens, oregano, olive oil and garlic.  The beet greens came from the golden beets I picked just before the lunch.  The oregano from Kate’s herb garden.  We had a couple of dried garlic bulbs. I thought they had not differentiated. but I decided to use it as it was.  When I peeled back the white, papery layers over the bulb I found cloves.  This meant  two things.  I had enough garlic for the recipe and the garlic in the bed could be harvested now.  The dish was great, but the cloves excited me.

    There is no reason why growing garlic bulbs with cloves should excite me so much, except it entered my head early in the gardening season–last September.  They grew throughout the winter and were ready to harvest in July, just as the cultural recommendations for it said.  Their taste is more intense and more sweet, at least this variety.  I planted three.

    In the furnace room, hanging from green gardening twine are four bunches of garlic bulbs.  Set aside from them are the largest 2 bulbs from each variety.  They will go in the ground in late September or early October to produce more garlic for next July.  Kate will take a large head from each bunch out to Jon and Jen so they can have garlic in their garden.  They too will be able to harvest the largest heads and plant from them.  This chain of living things, nurtured and in turn nurturing, is the true great chain of being.

    Watched 10,000 BC on the recommendation of a friend.  Well, the anachronisms were many: iron, boats, buildings, captive mammoths and the story line fed on coincidence.  On the other hand the Woolly Mammoths and the Sabre Toothed Tiger were very real.  A mish-mash of times, cultures and continents.  Just what I thought when I was the first ads.  In fairness, the same friend watched There Will Be Blood on my recommendation.  He thought it was too violent and the lead character, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, a poor guy with whom to spend a couple of hours.

    There Will Be Blood is a mythic movie of great power.  It speaks to the heart of what ails American culture and it speaks the truth.  The truth is neither pretty nor easy and the film knows it.  It is uncomfortable, but that it is different from bad.  10,000 BC is an entertainment and it works sometimes and not others, but it is not mythic, either in truth or in story.


  • A Flower Symphony

    75  bar falls 29.89  0mph N  dew-point 59  Sunrise 5:49  sunset 8:49  Summer

    Last Quarter Thunder Moon

    The garden speaks.  Last month, when I dug up my first garlic, it was not a head, but a single large clove.  What the?  Back to the garlic culture book.  Descaping?  Oops.  I forgot to take off the flower and seed forming stalk. It suppresses bulb formation.  Now, a month later after I descaped, bulb formation proceeds.  I do not know whether it will get where it would have, but I just pulled up one garlic bulb that looks pretty well defined, though not completely.  The individual cloves are not yet distinct, though their formation is clear.

    The tallest corn is now well over 6 feet high.  No tassels yet.  The beans have begun a very productive season and the onions are ready to dry.  After we dry them, we can story them in burlap bags in the furnace room.  The squash and watermelon have demonstrated their power to dominate territory.  Our garden paths and boulder walls are in danger of disappearing at some points.

    The Cherokee Purple tomato plants have fruits that have begun to turn a dusky red, shading now toward purple.  So far I have not noticed a tendency to disease which can be a problem growing heirloom vegetables.   I plan to save seeds and heads of garlic since these vegetables will breed true and not separate into warring varieties as most hybrids will.

    The lilies continue their quiet fireworks.

    I have had this idea for a long time about a flower symphony.  Each flower would get a lietmotif, as in Wagner, each color would have a note or a phrase.  The whole piece would have a somber, quiet opening, andante, for the slumber of winter.  Then an agitato as the ground breaks loose with the warmth of spring and, in their bloom succession, the flowers emerge, their leitmotifs varied by color phrases, until we pass out of the spring flowers into the early summer blooms.  This third movement is tranquil as the garden settles into its summer patterns, again the leitmotifs ordered by bloom time and varied by color phrasing.  The fourth and final movement returns to andante as the asters, the fall blooming crocus, clematis and mums emerge, then die back.  The final movement stops for a bit, then a presto sequence of lietmotifs, then grave, ending with bassoon, bass drum, and bass viol.

    Many do not like programmatic music and I understand why, being a fan of Mozart and Bach, both abstract and interested in following the music’s own logic, not an outside one.  Even so, I offer this because it is the way I see the garden now after so many years.  The flowers emerge, bloom, dieback and another group, adapted to a slightly different season, replace them.  These movements are like a symphony in my mind.


  • The Crescent Moon’s Gentle Spell

    61  bar steep rise 29.87  0mph WNW dew-point 52  Summer night, pleasant

    Waxing Crescent of the Thunder Moon

    I dug up a couple of garlic to see if descaping had any affect.  It has.  Bulbs have begun to form.  I hope if I leave them in a bit longer, I’ll get fully developed bulbs.  This is important because I can then plant the cloves from the best bulbs in the fall and harvest more garlic next year.

    The crescent moon casts a gentle spell over human kind.  It ends up on flags, in religious symbols and in children’s books.  The Thunder Moon crescent is in the west, just below the tree line, but visible through some our poplars.  Hidden, it takes on even more allure.

    Back in the 80’s I used to practice a form of contemplative prayer; it carried me into many strange places.  One of them was sitting on the cusp of a crescent moon with Jesus on one side and Moses and Abraham on the other.   We spoke, but I don’t recall the conversation.  The crescent moon made that possible because it has that curve.  Could not sit on a quarter or whole moon.  A gibbous moon does not seem right either.


  • Natural Rhythms and Time

    53  bar falls 30.03 omph W dewpoint 32 Spring

                Waning Crescent Moon of Winds

    Over to IHOP for some of that down home country fried food.  Always a treat.  Kate and I did our business meeting, deposited several thousand dollars in Wells Fargo and came back home.  Lois was here.  She commented on the amaryllis which have bloomed yet again for me.  I do nothing special to them except take them outside in the summer, then back inside in the winter.  At some point they decided its ready to bloom, so I put them in a window and water and feed them.

    I have no tours tomorrow and so have a good stretch with no art tour work.  I like that. 

    Went outside and looked at the trees.  Looks like at least five, two Norway Pines and two River Birch got trimmed back to the hose I used to protect them from sun scald.  Those rascally rabbits I presume.  In the other area, though, two white pines thrived during the winter, as did a Norway Pine, an oak and, I believe, a River Birch.  Feels good to see them growing.

    The garlic has begun to push through the soil, a bit pale under the mulch, but I removed it and they will green up fast.  Garlic are hardy plants that like a cold winter and they had one this year.  They come to maturity in June/July.  Drying, then using our own garlic will be a treat.

    Wandering around outside gets the horticulture sap rising.   I’m itchy to do stuff.

    Signed up for a Natural Rhythms and Time course at the Arboretum.  It’s a symposium put on by the University’s Institute for Advanced Studies, a real find.  If you live in the Twin Cities, I recommend getting on its mailing list.