Beltane                      Full Dyan Moon

A gardening morning.  The potatoes got a bit more soil around their stalks and, in between rows, Hutterite and Arikara bush beans.  All the beds that could take mulch at this time got it, too.  The only ones  I could not mulch were the carrot and beet beds where the plants are not up high enough yet for mulch.

More bush beans went in amongs the peas and the turnips, this time  Charlevoix Red and Royal Purple.  With the beans I laid down a small path of tiny bacteria that help these legumes return nitrogen to the soil.

The purposeful acts involved in caring for a garden have a soothing character.  They put me in the  moment and each task in itself is not difficult.  The combination makes for a free floating feeling.  The gardener becomes an extension of the garden able to handle those tasks requiring mobility that these rooted beings cannot.

Up early, really sleepy.  Nap.

Beltane                  Waxing Dyan Moon

I’ve never wished for melancholy, it always finds me when it will.  I have, however, wished for a descended cloud, not fog, but a stepping off point for paradise, a place to enter the imaginary realm, perhaps withouth need for a return voyage and in its escapist way, its denial of now this wish does not lie far from the darker boundary beyond which melancholy lurks.

These days I’ve had a restless pointlessness, a wandering from project to job to book to t.v.  This is, to continue the melancholy/paradise metaphor, a sort of purgatory, neither deep enough for blackness or high enough for light; it is, instead, a descended cloud that is fog, a barrier between purpose and action, no, more, a barrier between heart and purpose.

Slow, again.  Like molasses.  Also cotton in my ears, dark sunglasses on my eyes.  I hear no evil, speak no  evil, think no evil.  I hear no live, speak no live, think no live.  I dangle, neither here nor there.

Beltane                Full Dyan Moon

Oh, boy.  We spent this morning checking our retirement budget.  Big fun.  Looks like we’re gonna be fine, barring a financial crisis or something.  Oh, wait…   No, we’re solid.  Great news in this fiscal environment.

Lunch out.  Nap.

Kate and I put together a shelving unit for more canned and preserved goods.  Made reservations for a summer conference in Decorah, Iowa at Seed Savers Exchange.

Now, a workout.

Beltane                           Waxing Dyan Moon

3122 153rd Ave. NW, Minnesota, USA, the mind of God

Home again and good to be here.  A couple of extraneous posts still in the netbook and I’ll get them up today sometime.  There is a lot of work to do in the garden.  A lot.  So, I have to get to it.

Boy is it good to type on a full-sized keyboard again.  My netbook’s keyboard is 92% full size and great as small portables go, but nothing beats full-sized and split for ergonomics.

Wonderful weather, though dry.  The new work by ecological gardens is in and I still have to take in all that they did.  Gotta get out there and build a trellis and plant beans, then we’ll see what comes next.  Oh, and check on the bees.

Beltane                    Waxing Flower Moon

A day in which I never found my center of action.  Flitted from planting to the garage sale, dog feeding to nap, rounding up mint and ultrafine sugar for Kate’s Derby mint julep.

I read for a hour and a half or so, Paul Fussel’s Class, a book I remember from the 80’s.  I read it then in an all black edition.  Fussel has a pretty clear eye for class divisions in America.  Worth the read, even if it is now a little dated.

Some days my life feels like today, without a center of action, pinging from this experience to the next.

Spring            Waxing Flower Moon

Went on a mission today.  That’s Kate and mine’s language for a frustrating shopping experience focused on finding a particular thing.  Today I wanted inoculant for the peas and other legumes we’ll plant.  This inoculant, actually live bacteria, enables the peas to turn nitrogen back to the soil.  I mentioned it a few posts ago.

Many places don’t have it.  I didn’t phone ahead, so that’s on me, but I did locate packages of inoculant at the Green Barn, near Isanti.  Kate and I shop there often for the garden, but it’s a long way to go for just one thing.  So, I bought some onion sets, too.

Back home I made a batch of chicken noodle soup, moved furniture out to the garage for the great garage sale and read a graphic novel, a memoir of Yoshiro Tatsumi, a force in the world of manga and gekeiga.  I found the book uneven, but a fascinating glimpse into Japan as it has grown and changed over the last 70 years or so.

Spring                   Waning Seed Moon

A garage cleaning morning.  Bringing a bit of order and cleanliness to a space we had neglected for a few years.  Felt good.  The opening of space and organizing clutter appeals to me as long I do it in discrete chunks over time.  In other words, I don’t feel the call to do this kind of thing often.  If you visited my study and computer room, you would know this immediately.  It’s not so much that they’re cluttered in a messy way, but they do have piles of related papers, books and magazines positioned in strategic locations, dependent on some inner navigator that tracks my future needs and tries to place resources, like nuts in the ground, where they will help the next project at the right moment.

Like many a squirrel, I have nuts buried all over these two rooms that I have forgotten.  Every once in a while I discover a particular cache, like the one filled with essays and books related to water, a topic I want to know more about and have the tools to do just that.  Now that I know where I put them.

Where is that collection on humanism during the Renaissance?  I know it’s here somewhere.

Excuse me now, I have to go hunting.

Spring         Waxing Seed Moon

I have become one tooth and I throb.  There is a beat where normally there is none.  My person, my attention absorbed not by pain, but by ache.  This will pass, yet right now it has come on strong.  Yikes.

Spring           Waning Moon of Winds

Last night the smell of fresh earth blew in to our bedroom on a cool breeze.  This scent has the power to quicken my pulse.  It means the long frozen period of winter has broken enough to moisten at least the top inch or so of soil.  Soon the now quiet movements of bulbs and corms and rhizomes will increase, green shoots will begin to press their way up, up, up.

Today the 2009 garden has come closer to emergence.  And not only outside.   The visit I made yesterday to Interior Gardens gave me enough material to place the seedling that are ready into soil, into pots that can go straight in the bed.  All of the onions, tiny seedlings though they are can go outside as soon as I can work the soil.  Most of what I planted has to wait longer, some a month, some until all danger of frost is past.  On April 15th yet more seeds go under the lights.

The germination rate of my seeds is very high, for most it is 100%.  After I get done today, I’ll know which seeds have not done as well.

I volunteered to help with e-mail alerts for the Sierra Club, so I also have to review the material necessary to step into that process.  It means developing some sample e-mail alerts, setting up the e-mail and getting it ready to send.  The latter part is the most mysterious to me.  Apparently, the national Sierra Club has strict rules about such things and the templates used can be difficult to navigate.

Then, of course, there is that new Gateway desktop I bought.  Getting it ready to use means I have to rearrange my desktop, think through several different things about how to organize data, what goes on which computer, setting up backup software, creating rescue disks.  All of this is good stuff, stuff that energizes me.