Oh, boy. Thought I had a cyber apocalypse here. Opened up AncienTrails and there were no blog entries. Yikes!
A quick e-mail to my cybermage, Bill Schmidt, apparently frightened the devil in the bytes to flee. When he turned on AncientTrails, everything was there. After his e-mail telling me the same, I looked again and there it was. Whew.
Annual physical today, oh, boy. Also, prepping for a Renaissance/Reformation European painting tour.
17 bar rises 30.08 3mph NNW windchill 13 Samhain
Waxing Crescent Moon of Long Nights
The black plastic has been laid down; the marsh hay rests on top of it in fluffy abundance. A good snow right now would marry the two until early spring. May it come soon.
This was a long project. I had to cut down weeds, trees, raspberry canes and shrubs, pull vines and dislodge a deadfall. All this was prolegomena. The black plastic had to be rolled out, made to conform to the odd shapes created by various impediments, then cut and staked or held down with logs. After a piece of plastic was cut and laid in place, then the marsh hay went over it.
This process, too, is prolegomena for the next phase. In that phase we will plant serviceberry, hawthorne, and other shrubs and small trees that produce food edible by and interesting to birds and varmints. That phase ties in with the orchard as a distraction from the human edibles, in the hope that more–or enough–will end up for us. It is this linkage of one piece with the other, all in the service of creating a sustainable enviornment for people and animals, that excites me about permaculture.
I have also mulched all the bulbs I planted and/or transplanted at the end of August and the middle of September. These are daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, snow drops, lilies of many kinds and iris. I have both mulched and not mulched over the years and find that mulching the first year for all new plantings and after for those plants sensitive to cold increases the germination rate considerably.
There are also many peppers now in the hydroponics. Only one is large so far, but they keep sucking down nutrient fluid at a rapid pace so they are growing. I have not yet convinced any eggplant blossoms to move on to fruiting but I imagine that’s only a matter of patience.
15 bar steep rise 30.05 5mph NNW windchill 11 Samhain
Waxing Crescent Moon of Long Nights Day 8hr 56m
Below are photographs of recent work underway along the wood’s edge here. Almost done for this year.
The fruit trees as winter takes hold.
Marsh hay before use. AKA hay without seeds or straw without seeds.
View along the wood’s edge facing due north. The straw in the foreground and mid-ground covers the black plastic. The area covered is approximately 15 feet wide, that is, 15 feet between the truck path and the beginning of the forest proper and extends perhaps 150-200 feet from end to end. This whole area will have shrubs and small trees planted in the spring.
This gives you a better picture of what’s going on here. I ran out of hay on Sunday and had to get the new load visible in the first shot.
Do you remember how you felt when you first realized you loved someone? I have that feeling over and over with the land here.
37 bar rises 29.59 0mph SSW windchill 37 Samhain
Waxing Crescent Moon of the Long Nights Day 8hr 57mn
Lunch with Lonnie. We ate in Gallery 8, the first place in the city of Minneapolis I saw when I came to seminary in 1971. I met Lonnie back during the Leadership Minneapolis days, probably 1983/1984, sometime in there. She was a consultant to the program and did a good deal of work on creative leadership.
My fellow committee chair, Gary Stern, and I were so creative in our response to the question of defining leadership that the entire board got fired the next year. Although I don’t recall the process, Gary and I facilitated that years class as it sought to understand leadership in its terms. We all came up with love, justice and compassion as the key qualities of leadership.
Turns out the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce, sponsor of Leadership Minneapolis, did not think those terms fit their idea of leadership and cleared out the whole board the next year to start over. They never did give us their definition, but they must have felt a little stupid when Neal Pierce, a national columnist who focused on urban issues, wrote up our effort and commended its results to a national audience.
The chair of Leadership Minneapolis that year was Sarah Strickland. Not long after I finished my year as a participant with a year on the board (the one that got fired), Sarah’s husband, Paul, and Lonnie’s husband, Stefan invited me to join the Woolly Mammoths and the rest is hysterics.
Friends of diverse backgrounds and from different facets of life make life richer, like a soup with several ingredients. There is the comfort of being known and knowing, of seeing and being seen. Lunch today with Lonnie gave us both.
Today was mild. Pleasant.
Quick note:
Heading outside right now to unload marsh hay and see if I can get some black plastic down before I take off to meet Lonnie Helgeson at the Walker for lunch.
More on the situation in Bangkok:
from the Scotsman for December 1st, 2008
Published Date: 01 December 2008
By CLAIRE GARDNER
IT WAS supposed to be a relaxing sunshine holiday in Thailand after a punishing schedule following his record three gold medals at the Beijing Olympics.
But Scots cycling champion Chris Hoy found himself caught up in the chaos at Bangkok’s international airport, which has been taken over by anti-government protesters.
There are more than 500 Britons trapped in the country and Thai officials say the airport will remain closed until at least tonight.
Fortunately for Hoy, 32, who became a household name after his victories at the Olympics this year, he was able to pull a few strings.
Thanks to a longstanding relationship with the global parcel delivery company DHL, he and his girlfriend, Sarra Kemp, were among the lucky few to find a flight out of the country – not from Bangkok airport, but from Phuket.
Last night, Hoy’s agent, Ricky Cowan, revealed the cyclist had managed to fly out of Thailand “avoiding the Bangkok airport altogether”.
37 bar falls 29.69 0mph NW windchill 36 Samhain
New Moon (Moon of Long Nights)
As many of you know, my brother Mark lives in Bangkok. Thailand is almost invisible in the American press, so you may not have noticed the protests that have been going on there since early in the year. The politics, even to Mark, a long term resident of Thailand, do not make much sense. One school of thought believes it is the Bangkok royalist elite facing off against the more rural and populist base of recent prime minister and now exile, Thaksin.
Difficult to say, but this Buddhist country has a lot of unregistered guns and the protests have taken a nasty turn. Apparently the goal of the yellow-shirted PAD protesters is a coup by the military which they hope would turn the government back to more traditional royalist influenced politics.
Mark and Mary, both ex-pats, live out their lives as foreign nationals in cultures far removed from the West. Even English speaking, British spawned Singapore has a Chinese government and a citizenry made of up of Malays, Chinese, Indians and a few Caucasians. As non-citizens, even though well established, their daily lives can get upset when the politics turn nationalist as ex-pats are often visible reminders of the other.
In Mark’s case, as an American and a white man, he is culturally and physically obviously other almost every where he goes in Thailand. When jingoism gets cranked up, no matter what the cause, the tendency is to notice strangers/farangi when at other times they may well be invisible. He feels understandably a bit nervous, but he also says, “It’s a rush to be here.” The politics are an alive moment, a culture trying to sort out its future and its present, searching for the mix of groups that can govern. We just had such a moment in the last year here in America.
I respect and sometimes envy my brother and sister. They have access every day to the unique and the different, to the daily lives of persons who respond to different customs and values than those we learned in Alexandria, Indiana. Like them, I value those kinds of interactions and find their willingness to stay admirable.
Kate and I will head over to Beisswingers in a few minutes. The lawn tractor has had a checkup, gotten set up for winter storage and had its blades sharpened. It will go in the machine shed, the one back on the wood’s edge.
After that, we will start laying the black plastic. I cleared the area of standing weeds, trees and brush over the last three weeks. I want to get the plastic down before it snows.
Though by my reckoning we’ve been in Holiseason since Samhain, the pace does pick-up between Thanksgiving and New Years. A real holimonth filled with Holy Days. The sacred puts itself before us in so many ways over the next few weeks.
The article I posted yesterday from the magazine Orion points to a key locus of the sacred: home. At some point over the weekend I’m going to post some thoughts about home and ge-ology.
From the Faraway Nearby
The Most Radical Thing You Can Do
Staying home as a necessity and a right
by Rebecca Solnit
Published in the November/December 2008 issue of Orion magazine
LONG AGO the poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder said, “The most radical thing you can do is stay home,” a phrase that has itself stayed with me for the many years since I first heard it. Some or all of its meaning was present then, in the bioregional 1970s, when going back to the land and consuming less was how the task was framed. The task has only become more urgent as climate change in particular underscores that we need to consume a lot less. It’s curious, in the chaos of conversations about what we ought to do to save the world, how seldom sheer modesty comes up—living smaller, staying closer, having less—especially for us in the ranks of the privileged. Not just having a fuel-efficient car, but maybe leaving it parked and taking the bus, or living a lot closer to work in the first place, or not having a car at all. A third of carbon-dioxide emissions nationwide are from the restless movements of goods and people.
We are going to have to stay home a lot more in the future. Continue reading The Most Radical Thing You Can Do
Quick note: Finally, after over 4 years I’ve cleared obstacles between garage bays, set up during and just before the renovation. Much better.
Today I also changed the nutrient solution in the hydroponics and tried again to the encourage the eggplants to fruit. I now have several peppers at various stages of growth. Very cool. At least to me.
Last I got out the chain saw and cut up the trees I cut down last week. They went on the extra large Varmint Hotel. You might know it by its other name, brush pile.
That seemed enough for the morning, so it’s nap time now.