Category Archives: permaculture

Bees, permaculture

Vega. Again. Bees and Permaculture.

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Summer                           Waning Summer Moon

Vega the wonder dog continues to amaze us.  While I worked on the air conditioning earlier today, she picked up the small box I had to reserve the screws removed from the cowling.  I heard the screws clinking as she walked away.  When I got to the box, she had set it down and not a single screw had gone missing.  She continued to help me during the whole process.

Also earlier Kona, a whippet who opens doors, opened the back door and let everybody inside.  When Kate came out of her shower, Vega had sprawled out on our bed.

After I put the whippets to bed, Vega and Rigel come out in to the living room for a bit of human time.  Vega promptly hops up on the couch, rolls over on her back and relaxes her legs over the edge.  Then she goes to sleep.

The hive stands pretty tall now with its two honey supers and the queen excluder.  hivebody500

I’ve been very lucky to have Mark Nordeen as a mentor in the bee-keeping.  He’s gotten me through the rough spots for beginners:  equipment which he let me use, hiving the package of bees, how to examine frames and what to look for, when to put on the honey supers and when to use a queen excluder.   All of this stuff would be easy to stumble over in even the first few years and Mark has walked me through it.

The bees have added another element to the permaculture work Kate and I have begun.  The bees live and work in our garden just as we do.  They have a stake in a healthy garden just as we do.  Working with bees feels very collaborative; we are two species working and living together, sharing our needs and our specialized skills.

We have two apples coming along in our orchard as well as blueberries and currants.  I also found a huckleberry today, a plant I have never grown before.  The garden has begun its arc toward full productivity.

Now we have an orchard filled with fruit trees and plant guilds to support the trees, bushes that bear berries, even a hazelnut.  The orchard complements our expanded vegetable garden.  The playhouse Jon put together for us will go with the finished firepit (someday) as a family outdoor recreation area.  This is all part of the permaculture idea, having various zones of the landscape for specific purposes and each zone located optimally for its needs.

Garden, Great Work, permaculture

The Harvest Has Well Begun

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Summer                      Full Summer Moon

The garlic harvest is in the shed drying.  The mature bulbs now lie, a bit dirty, on an old screen I use for drying vegetables we intend to store.  It was a good harvest and, if last year is a rule, it is enough garlic to last us the full year until next July.  Some of these bulbs, about half, come from cloves I grew two years ago.  Very satisfying.

I dug up a bit of a potato plant to see if they’re ready to harvest for new potatoes, but they are not..  The potatoes ranged from tiny, about the size of the tip of my little finger, to one that would cover about half of my palm.  The last time I grew potatoes was on my farm, The Peaceable Kingdom.  One fine September evening I took a hit of mescaline and lay among the potatoes, the sky blue overhead.  The potatoes grew, visibly, as I lay there, shaking gently and rising slowly from the soil.  I could feel the tubers beneath me swell.  It was a direct and wonderful connection to a garden.  Wish the rest of the time had been that pleasant.

Moving stuff around in the basement so Jon can build us a wall for our storage cellar.  That’s next.

Garden, Great Work, Holidays, permaculture, Politics

As American As …

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Summer                                   Waxing Summer Moon

As american as stock-car racing, country music, Walden Pond and the Beach Boys, another long hot summer is well under way.  The neighbors love fireworks and each fourth of July they show off the good stuff they’ve picked up.  Some of it is impressive for local effects.  Flowering showers with a boom at the end.  Fiery pinwheels with whistles.  Percussive blasts.

Rigel and Vega did not get as upset tonight as they did last night.  Reassurance and familiarity are a powerful antidote.

The harvest continues and picks up speed.  Tonight I made a dish with chard and beet greens, topped with baked beets in Balsamic vinegar.  There was, too, roasted turnips covered in olive oil, pepper and Kosher salt.  Potato crusted wild Cod finished the meal.

The Seed Saver’s Exchange calendar that hangs on our kitchen wall has this quote under July’s photograph of heirloom tomatoes, onions and bell peppers:  “When the harvest begins to flow is the gardener’s joy.”  It’s true.

Digging up turnips and beets, cleaning and cooking them feels so good when they’ve come direct from the garden.  Though there are political reasons for having one, ecological reasons  and aesthetic reasons, the real payoff from a garden is fresh food, grown in a manner you know and in a place with which you are familiar, even intimate.

There are certain activities that just seem congruent with life.  Among them are picking, cleaning and cooking your own vegetables.  When I dig up the turnips and the beets, I remember the day their seeds went into the ground, one at a time.  Their first shoots.  Their growth over time.  All part of my life and theirs.

Another tradition of the fourth at our house is a meal with dishes cooked from our own sources.  Hope yours went well, too.

Garden, permaculture

Sharpening. Mulching.

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Summer            Waxing Summer Moon

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.”- Bertrand Russell

Hmmm.  I wonder if that’s true?

Laid down some more straw, weeded a bit in the perennial garden.  After that I went out to the hardware store and bought a diamond file to sharpen my Felcro pruners,  often used garden tools.  A clerk had take me back into the tool aisles.  When asked why they roped them off, she gave me the expected answer, “People have been stealing tools.”  Tough economic times.

Then over to Anoka Feed and Seed where I ordered 6 cubic yards of shredded wood mulch.  Gotta cover up the netaphim and refresh the mulch all around the orchard.

Garden, GeekWorld, permaculture

Take That Hose And Grab It

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Summer                              New Moon

A bit of a disconnected afternoon.  A long nap followed by working for a while in the heat trying to figure which zone on our irrigation clock corresponded to which actual sprinklers.  This was necessary because we got a new clock and the guy joined the wires in roughly the same order as the old one.  Roughly.

The stimulus for this work came from Kate’s discovery that our new puppies get excited when the water comes through the netaphim line we just had put in our orchard.   By excited I mean grab the netaphim and run with it, chewing all the while.  Netaphim is a plastic tube about half the size of a garden hose through water drips onto plants rather than sprays.  It works great, but better without teeth marks.

Tomorrow I’ll put all the netaphim lines on a schedule separate from the rest of the sprinklers and start them early enough in the morning that their work will be done before the puppies get up.  That should solve it.

Bees, Garden, Great Work, permaculture

Smoke Gets In Your Bees

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Waning Days of Beltane                   Waning Dyan Moon

We near midsummer; it’s only 15 hours away.  The Summer Solstice, the hot sister of my favorite holiday, the Winter Solstice, comes to Minnesota at 12:47 am tomorrow, the early hours of father’s day.

To celebrate I plan to work outside in the garden and do some pre-Raphaelite reading, maybe look for a PRB take on midsommer.

To start, this morning I checked on the bees.  There are many, many more bees than came in the small wire and wood box in April.  They come and go, searching the area for nectar and finding plenty at this time of year with the bumper crops still ahead.  Nectar flow precedes honey flow and we are hind leg deep in pollen and nectar.

The bees did not meet the threshold of 8 sides substantially covered with brood that indicates the need for another hive box.  Maybe next week.

There must be a trick to getting the smoker lit and working.  It has challenged my bee-keeping more than the bees so far.  In order to use it  you have to a fuel burning, then smother it, but not put out the coals so the fuel will continue to smolder, producing smoke for the duration of your hive check.

Like many learning curves this one imposes a double penalty.  While taking time to keep the smoker lit and producing, I can not work the hives.  Once in the hives, which I work slowly anyway because I’m still learning, the smoker punking out (pun!) puts me at risk from angry bees.  Meanwhile back to the smoker which means I’m not checking the hive.  Normal learning process.  Frustrating and exhilirating.

Now for some deadheading, trellis building and potato and beet mounding.  Check you on the flipside.

Family, Garden, permaculture

Growing

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Beltane                       Waning Dyan Moon

“Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.” – Remy de Gourmont

Don’t you suspect Remy de Gourmont considered him(her)self a complex mind?  It’s the simplest explanation for this quote.

Our two puppies are six months old, so they’re past that OMG they’re cute! phase.  They still play like puppies though. Rigel ran circles around the cedar just off the deck while Vega lay in wait, pouncing on her sister as she made each circuit of the tree.  They slept outside in the garage, just as we had always intended the wolfhounds would.  Never happened.

We have a five stall doggy home in the garage custom built by Jon.  Each stall has a layer of insulation below its floor and an opening in the front where feeding bowls can be set.  We did feed the wolfhounds out there.  The doors lock.  Perfect for containing these big (68 pounds) puppies.

We’ve decided on Rigel and Vega as their call names, though which is which we have not decided.

Still gimping along with a less than stellar inner world, pressed down, slow to motivate.  The saving grace of these periods of melancholy, as my analyst pointed out, is that they are a prelude to a creative time.  I’ve been turning over ideas for a new novel and possible new, online, ways of marketing.

The garden continues to develop.  All the squash have emerged, ditto all the bush beans.  Carrots and beets have begun to show their presence, too.  The garlic is close to harvest.  The potatoes have really taken to this sandy loamy soil we have in the raised beds.  Strawberries, tomatoes, sugar snap peas, chard, mustard and collard greens, kale, cucumbers, asparagus and onions are all growing, especially now that we’ve had a little heat.

Time to hit the grocery store.  After that, I need to work on the computer set up which has some problems that need addressing.

Bees, Garden, permaculture

A Northern Summer Garden

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Beltane                        Waning Dyan Moon

The garden.  The squash and melons are up.  The beans have begun to put on second leaves, the peas have begun to climb the trellis and the cucumbers have their tendrils out for their trellis, too.  The garlic is not far from harvest and greens are in abundance.  Flowers are blooming and the bees are buzzing.  A garden that works.

Great Work, permaculture

Gaining from and giving back

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Beltane               Full Dyan Moon

newwork09Paula Westmoreland from Ecological Gardens came out today and gave us a walk through, explaining the plants and their relationships.  The real distinctiveness of permaculture lies in developing and nurturing those relationships, using plants together in ways that are mutually beneficial.   An easy to understand example is the familiar legume family, a group of plants that fix nitrogen in the soil.  Since most plants deplete nitrogen in the soil, following a planting of a non-legume, especially if it’s a heavy feeder like, say, tomato or corn, with a legume helps restore the soil chemistry.

There are also plants that tend to confuse insects with their scents;  since many of those fit in the herb garden, the herb spiral sits in a key corner of the new design, fooling predatory insects as they head toward our beans and strawberries.  Over time these relationships interleave and become stronger, the soil chemistry becomes healthier and the result is a stronger, less insect and disease prone garden.  This long term strength of permaculture makes it a wise investment for any yard or garden.

In the orchard and our new vegetable garden design we now have clover in place of grass.  It crowds out weeds, can take being stepped on and should  provide good tasting honey in years to come.

The gestalt here has begun to feel real.  We are less like human intruders on this oak savannah and more like c0-inhabitants, gaining from and giving back in the timeless cycle of life.

Art and Culture, Friends, Great Work, permaculture, Sport

Superman

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Beltane                           Waxing Dyan Moon

“It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.” – William G. McAdoo

Boy, is that true.  Look at Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, oh my.

Had lunch and a by the seat of the pants tour with Mary and Frank Broderick.  It was fun, wandering around the museum looking at art with friends.

Obama is such a smart guy.  Speaking to the Muslims yesterday, visiting Buchenwald today.  He does not allow the dust to settle in any one place before he moves on, readjusting the tunic of America’s presence in the world.  In such a short time he has restored my feeling of good fortune in living here.  Geez, just to have a President who can string together a complex sentence is enough to make me cry.

Following the low bar of the Bush presidency has eased Obama’s transition, but he would have looked good at any point.  Now he looks like superman.

The first phase of the growing season, planting and amending soil, has come to an end.  Almost.  Now mulch goes down newwork09and surveillance for pests.

This is part of the new work we had done last week.  The vegetable garden area has no more grass, just chips.  It also has new beds with flowers, shrubs and space for some more vegetables.  We have made another step toward a permaculture suburban acreage.  The small white form in the upper left is the bee hive.