Beltane Garlic Moon
I’ve got lilies blooming. They’re early. By about a week, maybe a bit more. Lilies are my 
favorite flower, Asian lilies and Martagons. Their colors are deep, rich, luminous. I don’t know what it means that they’re out so early. Might be the peculiar combinations of heat, cool and lottsa rain.
pic is from 2010, June 28
Beltane Garlic Moon
The garlic may not be harvestable under the garlic moon. I took a guess, but it looks like I’m going to be off by at least a week if not more. So, retrospectively, I’ll have to go with a traditional name for this moon, The Strawberry Moon. We’ve had a lot of strawberries in the last three weeks.
Beltane Garlic Moon
Sauteed garlic scapes, olives and bit of yellow bell pepper in olive oil and butter, used over a large bowl of spaghetti. Didn’t come quite like I imagined, not enough garlic taste, but still tasty. Kate’s made several strawberry rhubarb pies, one of which we ate at the Woolly’s last night after our meal at Jack O’Connors Irish Pub. The garlic itself should be harvestable soon, when three of the outer leaves have gone brown. One and a half right now.
We’ve already had asparagus and onions. The garden begins to produce fairly early in the growing season and continues right through though the crescendo hits in early September.
It’s been rainy to check on the bees but I put second hive boxes on both colonies this week, so they should be fine for the near term anyhow. Plenty of expansion room, no need to swarm. Still building up workers and the nectar flows on us. I’m beginning to wonder about my new strategy of buying new bees each year. Takes a good bit of time for them to grow colony. An overwintered colony would have been making honey for almost a month now.
Diving back into Latin today. I need to stay at the Latin with substantial work each week to keep myself fresh. My learning leaks away, takes time to regather if I step away for longer than a week.
Sometime in the next week or so, I plan a deck-clearing. Pile sorting and re-filing, re-shelving, discarding. Getting things in what passes for order in this work area. When I do, I’m going to start Loki’s Children, Book II of the Tailte Trilogy.
Haven’t done much work on the reimagining faith project in a while. Need to get back at it sometime this summer, too.
Beltane Garlic Moon
source: Climate Central
WHAT WE KNOW
Mother nature’s air conditioner is on its way, course we might have to pay for it with a tornado strike or two, but there you are. I always think of Minnesota as a safe place when I read about Santa Ana fanned fires, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami’s, hurricanes, then a sudden storm reminds of me derechos and tornadoes. Oh, blizzards and 38 below zero, too. Yes. And ice? Well, yes. Other than that, though.
Inside with the air conditioner on and the heat outside. Back ouchy after lifting a bag of not heavy at all mulch. Geez.
Beltane Garlic Moon
Well, it’s happened already. Kate and I have begun adjusting our gardening times for the upcoming heat. Any of you with time spent in the south or the tropics will recognize the strategy. Get up early and get stuff done.
Out right now to clean off the cottonwood fluff from the air conditioner and lay down mulch in the vegetable garden. May get into the colony that still has only one box, too. If not today, then for sure tomorrow.
Beltane Garlic Moon
R.I.P.
“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.”
Ray Bradbury
Another epigram from Tomis (Constanta, Romania) Marea Negra (Black Sea)
Beltane Garlic Moon
Another day, another sandwich bag. Back to bagging apples. Glad I exist to do it.
Look here for Roman funerary epigrams from Tomis, now Constanta, Romania. They had it going on. An example below.
