Beltane Waning Last Frost Moon
Category Archives: Weather +Climate
Be Patient With Yourself
Beltane Waning Last Frost Moon
An afternoon of thunder, swirling clouds, torrential rains. Another episode in the missing spring of 2011. We sat huddled in the basement amongst our workout equipment, watching the downstairs tvs with green rectangles and red rectangles. Occasionally, the EAS, Emergency Alert System, would blare its attention getting noise giving us notice that the national weather service had released a tornado warning for our area.
As we sat down here, I reconsidered my smug comments about those people that live near: the ocean (sea level rise), in earthquake zones, beneath volcanoes, where hurricanes play. Someone out there, watching the TV and pictures of damage in north Minneapolis, just said, “God. How can those people live there when they know tornadoes come along all summer?” Good question.
The first 12 Tai Chi classes have ended. Next time, starting June 5th, I can go to the 6:00 pm class and practice the first few moves, then move on to the 7:00 pm class and learn the next moves in the form. My learning curve here remains steep though I have seen progress. I read it in Monkey’s Journey to the West, and our Tai Chi instructors have said many times, “Be patient with yourself while training.” Very useful to me. Very.
On Monkey’s Journey to the West. This is a delightful story. I’m a bit over 30% through it, I imagine it will be June before I’m done, maybe into July. It’s so different from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Romance is a military and political epic; Journey is part fantasy, part religious and cultural instruction manual, part adventure. I see Ai Weiwei as a Monkey King figure.
An Intimate Relationship?
Beltane Waning Last Frost Moon
I spent the morning convincing my computer that the new laserjet printer I purchased exists, could be a good friend, one with whom we might enter a long term relationship. Boy, was that a hard sell. Something about the printer being made before Windows 7 and the run as command. After beating about a bit, I finally got a software package (downloaded from HP) that my computer would admit into its intimate confines.
Then. I stepped in and attempted to attach the USB cable to a printer not turned on. Didn’t work. I’d stretched the power cord when getting to the USB port. Took me three tries to realize what I had done. Finished just before the thunder made it. I turn all computers off during thunder storms. I have too much invested in my electronics. Not the computers so much as the external drives.
During our nap Kate and I had to get up to go down in the basement. Another tornado headed north of Minneapolis, headed north and east. Which is where we are. After forty-five minutes sitting on a bench I use to do bench presses and triceps curls it became clear that this one, like so many in recent years, would track north of Minneapolis, get up into Coon Rapids, but move east on trajectory well south of us. I’m not sure what’s going on but this seems like a track multiple serious storms have taken over the last few years.
Grocery store. Then dinner, a bit of dithering around about Brazilian Visas, at $160 each. Ouch. That doesn’t include processing fees. Geez.
Now, off to Tai Chi.
A Northern Spring
Beltane Waxing Last Frost Moon
This northern spring, a season all its own, as is the northern summer, has turned cold and wet. Again. The cold weather vegetables have had a near perfect early growing season. This combination of occasional heat followed by cold and rainy days marks the uncertainty, the ambiguity of our spring, often a time when the weather is neither this nor that, a variety.
Later, in another three to four weeks at most, we will trend hot and hotter, finding ourselves by mid-summer in heat rivaling our southern states. As the days heat up, the vegetables and the fruits will flower, become pregnant, then fruit, giving us the food we love: tomatoes, beans, potatoes, apples, pears, cherries and currant. Perhaps this year, with the transplanting even the gooseberries will yield.
Then, by mid-to-late August, the evenings will begin to cool, though the days remain warm. The sky will become an impossible blue, a color found only in the heart and the mind’s eye. This sky absorbs all earthbound thought and transforms it into the higher concepts of heaven. This signals the onrush of the harvest season.
Blessed be.
So, Why Get Up At 4 AM?
Spring Waning Bee Hiving Moon
As the bee hiving moon fades to black, it makes way for the last frost moon. Our last frost up in the northern exurbs of the Twin Cities comes somewhere between May 15 and May 20 on average. May 15 is the date I use because I haven’t experienced a later frost, but it could happen. That’s the date the tomato plants go out, the kale and chard I’ve started (though I’ve also sown them outside, too), the beans, cucumbers and various annual flowers.
Tomorrow the Celtic calendar, the one I follow in addition to Gregorius’s, turns over to the season of Beltane. More on that Sunday.
Today is a rainy, cool day unfit for working with bees. Good for transplanting though, but I don’t have any more to do right now.
There was a royal wedding, wasn’t there? No, I did not get up at 4 am for a breakfast party to watch it, nor did I watch the 68 minute version Kate and Mark watched yesterday. I did scroll through pictures on the LA Times website. Got me wondering. Why all the attention in this, the most plebeian of powerful nations?
I stipulate the romantic notion of princess and prince, especially the steroidal version that involves a commoner elevated by marriage to royalty. We have a 5 year old grand-daughter who would have no trouble seeing herself in Kate Middleton’s role. Middleton, eh. Even the name reeks bourgeois. I stipulate further the fascination of any marriage as a symbol for that fragile, wonderful, ordinary miracle of love. I know these two play a factor, a large factor.
But 4 am? What’s up with that? Rather, who’s up with that? Continue reading So, Why Get Up At 4 AM?
Getting Technical
Spring Full Bee Hiving Moon
Over to Hennepin Technical this morning for earth day. I’m responsible for a Sierra Club table there during a three hour long green event. Not sure what this will be like, but it sounds like an interesting day. I’ve already worn myself out this week and I have two tours tomorrow, plus Latin on Friday. Worked yesterday on my art student tour for portraiture, then went into St. Paul for a meeting with non-traditional allies for the Sierra Club.
Snow. Snow. Go Away. Come back around All Saint’s Day. I love winter, but I’m ready for spring.
Gotta go. On the flipside.
I Roll Over On My Belly
Spring Full Bee Hiving Moon
OK. Enough. Uncle. I give. I yield. I roll over on my belly. Please let us have spring. Snow? More snow? Just when the Himalayan inspired mounds of soot black snow have begun their glacial retreat? This is not insult to injury, but insult to insult. Well, all right. If it’s coming anyhow, but could this be the last one for this season? Please. I have plants that need to get back to growing.
T’ai C’hi. Coming along. I am within one move of learning how to grasp the sparrow’s tail, then one more, the long whip, of having the basic moves in some sort of order and execution. My teacher says, insists, promises it will all get easier. But, it took her, she also says, 30 years to get her form to its current level. Wait. I’m not sure I have 30 years of T’ai C’hi practice in me. On the other hand, maybe with T’ai C’hi…
T’ai C’hi feels like Latin for the body. It’s taking all of my concentration to stay with it when I practice and the learning is slow.
Then there’s that radiation problem in Japan. Good news on it. The power company says it can have things cleaned up in 6-9 months. 6-9 months? We’ll see.
This is the time to move the bees. Bee colonies do not like to have their homes moved once they’ve learned where they are. Even a move of 2 feet can be too much for them. If you want to move existing colonies, you have to do it in slow, incremental steps. Right now, since I have no bees, I can put the hive boxes wherever I want. Still mulling. I want to put them in the orchard, but that will entail switching out the gear from the front garden shed to the back shed where I currently have all the bee equipment.
Week’s End
Spring Waxing Bee Hiving Moon
Kate and Annie (her sister) are off to Omaha, Kansas City and various quilt shops in between. When asked what they do on the bus (she’s done this before), she said, “Talk.” Me, “No 
singing, no poker, no beer?” Nope.
Brother Mark is here, decompressing from a tough six months, and inhaling American culture, “Something there, but being brought forward from far back in the mind.” He’s not been back to the US in over 20 years.
Today is the first day I’ve had any lengthy time to myself this whole week. Gonna spend it doing Latin.
The kale and chard starts have germinated; the tomatoes have yet to break the surface. All this is under the lights. I’ve not checked the beets, spinach and lettuce planted outside earlier in the week, but they should get started in the not too distant future.
Next weekend the bees should arrive, so there are bee related chores this week: cleaning frames and hive boxes, moving everything to the orchard, checking the honey supers. The smoker needs cleaning out, too, a lot of soot collects over the course of a season. Tomorrow I have advanced bee keeping, open only to those who have kept bees at least a full season or two.
But, since this is Minnesota, first we may have to have some snow.
In Spring A Man’s Heart Turns to…Yard Work
Spring Waxing Bee Hive Moon
The weather has turned gray, inclement, wet. The snow continues to melt, but not wholly disappear, as if it has gotten used to the yard and wants to stay as long as possible. Where the snow has melted, there is mud. Mud that tracks it on little dog’s feet. And big one’s, too. The spring cleaning season has begun.
This morning I look outside and see only work: the trees to repair, various objects that need to get picked up and burned or trashed, the bee hives I need to move, old plastic that has to come so we can plant underneath it. This last is a method for killing weeds without herbicides. Leave the plastic in place for a couple of years and seeds germinate but die for lack of sun. Works pretty well.
Of course, there’s the garden that will need planting, too. Perennials left in for winter interest must come out now to make for their 2011 versions.
Tomorrow I plan to have a meal of greens from the hydroponics and next Monday I’ll use the basil grown there for a caprese salad for an afternoon meal with my docent friends.
Mark, my brother, e-mailed me and says his flight comes in on Saturday at 1 pm. I’ll be there.
Have to practice my Tai Chi.
Changing Seasons
Spring New (Bee Hiving) Moon
We are now over three months away from the Winter Solstice. The spring equinox has come and gone, yet our yard still has snow, maybe 5 0r six inches, more in spots where the snow plow moved our many snow falls to the side of the driveway. In the orchard the snow has begun to melt around the apple, pear, cherry and plum trees. The currants have no snow around them at all and the huchera is free of snow, too. Those gooseberry plants I didn’t move last fall are still in the orchard, but their destination is the sunny slope of our 
third garden tier.
I have a sizable number of trees with broken branches, many large ones. They will have to be cut down and moved. The chain saw!
As soon as the soil becomes workable, I’ll get the cold weather crops in the ground, something I’ve not done so well in the last three years. The bees will move into their new homes in the orchard where I hope the protection of the garage on their north/northwest side and the sunny aspect of the southern exposure will help them in the winter. They will be closer to the house, which may prove to be a problem. If so, they’ll have to go elsewhere next year.
In the spring this man’s heart turns to the garden, the bees, the trees. I’ve been preparing my body for spring, but I’m a bit 
further behind than I thought I’d be. The resistance work has taken a while to work its way into my exercise cycle, but it’s there now.
Learning the language of plants, flowers and vegetables, is a life-long pursuit. Another school year begins in just a few weeks.