Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon
Poppa (the big gray wolfhound, Guiness) and his children. Our new pups are in this picture, but I can’t pick them out.
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The orchard early in its first growing season. Currants in the foreground to the right, cherries and plums the trees in mid-ground.
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A potato eye view of its bed.
Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon
“After another night of losing sheepshead, it finally came to me. These guys have been playing a lot longer than I have. Bill since childhood. Roy and Dick since high school and Ed since entering the Jesuits. Now I view them as my mentors. That way I can lose and learn, instead of just lose.” from a May 7, 2009 post after I finished at the bottom again.
Some nights the cards change and the tide flows with you. Last night I got great cards and did well. Anything I’ve learned in this reprise of my brief sheepshead career in Appleton, Wisconsin, I’ve learned from these guys.
Those cells I thought were queen cells were drone cells. Drones have a life devoted to the vain pursuit of sex. Sounds like the American teenager when I grew up. Drones fly out and around, hoping to find a queen who needs him. This is a very rare occurrence, so only the most fortunate of these bee princes ever become king for a day.
Yesterday I planted squash, melons and beans, thinned the turnips and replanted carrots and beets. The last time I 
planted carrots and beets I didn’t water them in. Probably should have. The potatoes needed mounding and I discovered that the beets and turnips both benefit from mounding too. If a portion of these tuberous vegetables stick up above ground, they turn green and inedible.
The red car got expensive again and will get a bit more so. This time it needed a new radiator and coolant flush, a flush of brake fluid and steering fluid, a new transmission gasket and a flush of the transmission fluid with new replacement fluids. It probably also needs a new master brake cylinder, but I said no to that out of sticker shock. After consulting the mechanic, I’m going to order the part and have it replaced. Suddenly having no brakes is not a good thing.
Beltane Waning Flower Moon
Tomorrow morning Mark Nordeen and I will zip up our white bee suits, put on Wellies and gloves, secure the veiled bonnet that makes us look like prim Victorian ladies headed for a stroll in Hyde Park circa 1880 and do the third check on the bee hive.
When I checked it a week ago, I saw capped cells and a lot of activity. As I’ve watched scouts come and go over the last week, I’ve noticed that between 1/4 and 1/3 of them return with pollen on their hind legs. This is a key transition, meaning they will be able to make their own food, wax and propolis.
As each new piece has become a part of our overall property, the gestalt increases. It grows in size, has grown in size, from the first decisions about boulder walls and perennial flowers, through bulb planting, hosta and ferns, the multiplication and division of iris, day lilies, true lilies, hosta, bug bane, ligularia, dicentra. When Kate began to grow vegetables, the gestalt pushed out some more.
Hiring Ecological Gardens and putting in the orchard last fall has pushed the boundaries of the whole further out, while integrating it more. The bees have added an animal component, a lively and complex bee-ing.
Growing vegetable plants from seed under lights, then planting them outside adds another layer. The work that Ecological Gardens plans for May 26 and May 27 will enrich it yet again.
The feeling is hard to express, but wonderful. Mabye the bee hive is a good analogy. It feels to me like the whole property has become an interdependent whole, with the land working for us and us working for the land. I’m not talking about just food production. The beauty of the flowers, the grace of the ferns, the broad green presence of the hosta are part of it, too. Each part feeds into and amplifies the other. The bees enhance the fruit trees, the vegetables and the flowers; in turn they provide pollen to the hive. We care for the whole and harvest food, aesthetic pleasure and a sense of connectedness.
Beltane Waning Flower Moon
The peas and turnips and beets and new onions are up and wriggling toward the sky. I planted all of the hydroponic plants today with the exception of the cucumbers. They go in tomorrow.
This was satisfying, putting in plants I grew myself from heirloom seeds. The next satisfaction will come as they grow, another when we harvest, but the best will be when I replant them next year grown from seed I harvest this year.
I already have garlic growing from bulbs I planted two years ago. Once the new beds are in we will plant the beans, all of which are from last year’s beans.
Good to get all this done before I leave for Hilton Head.
Now it’s in to MIA to pick up the Sin and Salvation catalogue for the Pre-Raphaelite show I will tour through the remainder of the summer.
Beltane Full Flower Moon
This is the kind of weather that can scare a Minnesota gardener. Right now the temperature is 42. It could, will, go lower, though the prediction says no lower than 40. If I thought it were going to get down to freezing, I’d have to cover my new peas and turnips. They have just poked above the soil and would suffer and most would die.
My baby plants from inside are now adolescents; they stayed outside six hours today. Tomorrow, I’ll put them outside by the beds where they’ll be planted and give them one more day in the peat pots before digging them in to their permanent homes.
I cut up the potatoes today, readying them for planting, too. They may be a little late, so we’ll see what we get. A lot of new plants in this year’s garden: leeks, parsnips, turnips, greens, brocolli, cauliflower, plants I may not understand too well. Again, we’ll have to see what we get.
That kind of experimentation is one of the joys of gardening, eating something fresh that you’ve only ever had from a produce section of a supermarket. This year marks a large expansion in our vegetable and fruit crop. That means a lot of uncertainty, a steep learning curve with some plants. All part of the deal.
Beltane Full Flower Moon
The full flower moon rises tonight on beds full of daffodils, tulips, snowdrops and small blue flowers whose name I don’t
recall. The furled hosta leaves that come up in a tightly packed spiral have begun to uncurl. Dicentra have full leaves now, though no flowers yet. A few iris have pushed blossoms up, a purple variety I particularly like opens early. Even though they will not bear flowers until July the true lilies have already grown well past six inches, some with gentle leaves and others with leaves that look like a packed icanthus, an Egyptian temple column rising out of this northern soil.
My hydroponically started plants will stay outside today for four hours, working up to seven until they graduate to full time outdoor spots. All of the three hundred plants began as heirloom seeds and have had no chemicals other than nutrient solution. Unless we paid Seed Savers to ship us transplants, there is no other way to get heirloom plants that need growing time before the date of the last frost. Too, the selection of vegetables and their varieties is of our choosing, not the nurseries. I don’t have anything against nurseries; I just like to grow what I want, not what’s available.
The big daylilly move underway will make way for a full sun bed of sprawlers like squash, watermelon and cucumbers. The perennial plants like the lilies, iris, daffodils, hosta, ferns, and hemerocallis have their complexity but I’ve majored in them for the last 14 years. Now I understand their needs, their quirks, the rhythm of their lives and their care. Vegetables, on the other hand, only this last two growing seasons have received any concentrated attention. Their complexities are multiple because there are so many varieties and species with so many varying needs related to soil temperature, ph, nutrients, length and temperature of the growing season.
The learning curve has been steep for me so far, though the experience gained from the perennial plants has kept me from being overwhelmed. In another couple of years I should have a good feel for what does well here and what does not. After that, the vegetable garden will become more productive while at the same becoming easier to manage.
By that time, too, I hope to have had two successful bee-keeping years under my belt and have grown my colony to three hives or more, enough to justify purchasing an extractor. At that point this should be an integrated and functioning micro-farm. If it works well, I hope it will serve as a model for what can be done on 2.5 acres. We’ll see.
Beltane Waxing Flower Moon
After another night of losing sheepshead, it finally came to me. These guys have been playing a lot longer than me. Bill since childhood. Roy and Dick since high school and Ed since entering the Jesuits. Now I view them as my mentors. That way I can lose and learn, instead of just lose.
The flower moon is near full and so beautiful. It overlooks all our seeds, our bees, our orchard. The back deck may transform into a moon viewing platform since it has a nice view to the south and east where the full moons tend to linger.
Paula Westmoreland came out today and we finalized plans for the garden transformation, the vegetable garden. All the work will be done while I’m still in Panama City. I’m excited to have more beds in which to plant vegetables and to have the vegetable garden have a more aesthetic feel.
Beltane Waxing Flower Moon
The garden beckons, so a short one this morning. I’m set for having the garden planted before I leave next Friday, a
week from tomorrow. Everything I need to get in the ground before I get back will have a spot: various tomato plants and potato eyes, broccoli, cauliflower, egg plant, onions, leek, chard, greens and cucumbers.
There is a sense of wholeness now as the orchard begins to blossom, the vegetable garden for this year starts to grow and the perennial flowers, hosta, ferns and bugbane blossom and emerge. With the ecological garden’s work later this month we will have a yet more integrated homestead, with food and flowers, bees and a home of their own for the grandkids.
This must be a similar feeling to a farmer’s, a feeling that our life and this land are one. That means, too, that as the garden comes to life, a certain part of my Self also comes to life, when it grows, so do I. As the harvest comes in so do I harvest fruits within my Self.
When the garden begins to go fallow in late August through October, another aspect of my Self blossoms. In this light I can see September 29th, the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel, as the springtime of the soul. This begins a period more reflective and contemplative, a period, too, when my creativity flowers. As outside, so inside.
Blessed be.
Beltane Waxing Flower Moon
Windows Without Walls. Microsoft has this new advertising slogan. I keep wondering if they realize that without walls there are no windows?
2 hours today for my baby plants getting ready to head out to the garden. They’re done right now and I have to go get them before my treadmill workout.
As I passed over the Mississippi on the way out to the endodontist this morning, I noticed a tree with an American flag attached to a branch, fluttering. Somehow the artlessness of it reminded me of days gone by, of a world in which there were fewer right angles, fewer stone bridges and no steel and concrete ones, no cars. This triggered a revery at first between art and artifice which went away almost as quick as it came. Not the point.
What was the point? Permaculture has something to do with it. So does our very American and persistent yearning to return to the land, to become one with nature. This flag without a flag pole, without dramatic lighting suggested this. What was there here?
The red car sped along Highway 252 headed toward Highway 100. The reflections kept coming. Nature and artifice. No. Not nature and artifice. Nature and the human drive to build and decorate, artifice. Both natural. Then, the city, where I feel such energy and hope, and our home with its orchard and vegetable beds, its perennial flowers like the tulips and daffodils up now, where I also feel energy and hope, these two must walk together. The tight gathering of humans and their shelters is no different from the mud daubed home of the wasps or the cave of the hibernating bear. Likewise humans earning their food from mother earth is no different from the bass dining on minnows or the moose eating duckweed from a wilderness lake.
Yes, that was it. The flag on the tree branch reminded me that we humans and, all of what we do, are natural. This whole earth in the balance rhetoric is wrong; it is not earth that is in the balance, it is rather humankind. We may live in such a way that we eliminate our own niche. It has happened before and it will happen again, naturally.
Spring Waxing Flower Moon
Business meeting this morning. We decided to go ahead with a vegetable garden renovation planned by Ecological Gardens and to get the deck in on which we will build the playhouse for the grandkids. That work will start soon. Exciting.
The bees spend these first days filling up cells with brood and honey made from the syrup mix. I checked them yesterday and will now leave them alone until next Saturday.
Finished reservations for Hilton Head with the exception of the rental car. That’s next.
Planting this week, too. Today, though, is docent book club day. Allison’s work on textiles. Should be fun.