Category Archives: permaculture

Bees, Great Work, permaculture

We Have 6,000 New Residents In Multi-Hive Housing

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Spring               New Moon (Flower)

The bees have come.  Mark Nordeen drove over today with our first packet of bees.  This is a picture of a bee package off the web.  The circle at the top contains a can of nutrient syrup for the bees while in transit.  The can comes out and the bees pour out of the opening into the hive, which has four middle frames removed.

Mark and I donned our bee suits (mine is borrowed from him), me for the first time.  He pulled the can out.  It had seepage on the bottom from three very tiny pricks in the bottom.

He then turned the box over the opening in the hive and shook the bees out of the box through the circle which held the can.  The bees poured out, most landing on the floor, then climbing up the frame of already built combs.  A few bees remained so he shook the box, spilling the rest out into the hive.

The queen comes in a smaller wooden box with a screen over one side.  Mark uses the direct release method, meaning he opened the small wooden box on the bottom of the hive and let the queen walk out.  Queen acceptance is the first critical move in the hive.  That seems to have happened.

We replaced the four frames and then put a patty of pollen replacement on top of the frames.  Pollen substitute comes as a soft material that looks much the inside of a fig newton bar.  Over the frames themselves and the pollen patty substitute went the hive cover, a particle board piece as big as the top of the hive with an ovoid slot in the middle.  Over this slot goes a plastic pail with sugar water.   The pail’s lid has a small screen, smaller than a quarter in the center.  The bees come up to this screen to feed until the plant world provides enough pollen for them to make their own food.

I was a little nervous before Mark came, excited, too.  The most unexpected part of the process for me was the sound.  The hum of the bees as they took up residence gave off a sense of vitality and unity.

Much more to learn, a years long course I believe.

Friends, Garden, Great Work, permaculture

Let The Grass Green And The Plants Grow

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Spring          New Moon

Lunch with Paul today at Origami.  When I lunch with friends, I find we often go back to the same place we first went, even after years and years.  I had lunch with an old friend last month and we returned to Gallery 8 at the Walker even though it had been seven or eight years since our last meal together.

Today and tomorrow I have tours to prepare, and I’d best get to them.  Nuclear hearing tonight at 6:30.  Lots of stuff happening right now.  I’m feeling a bit distracted, maybe over stimulated, but it won’t last.

I missed the thunder storm in this blog and the couple of days of rain, but when I woke up to snow this morning I had to get on and say, enough.  I mean, really.  OK, I know it’s not unusual, that March is a snowy month, that winter lingers, yes, but even so, enough.  Let the grass green and the plants grow.  Let some color appear.

A friend has decided to head to the Smoky Mountains next week to hike and see some green. I get it.

This is not cabin fever, I don’t have a longing to be somewhere else, somewhere warm; but, I do have a hankering for growth.

There, that’s off my chest.  On another, similar note, my seedlings have gone from the sprouting stage to the small leafy stage.  This is onion, kale, chard, eggplant, huckleberry, leeks, broccoli and cauliflower.  On Monday I put them all in separate peat and coca pots, getting my hands in the potting soil.  That took care of some of my green desire.

Garden, Great Work, Health, Hydroponics, permaculture

Under the Lights

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Spring            Waning Moon of Winds

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. – Walt Whitman

Business meeting and plants this morning.  The business meeting went just fine, our financial management continues to work for us and not against us.  Wish I could say the same for the financial markets.  Sigh.  Decided to check.  Wish granted: Dow Leaps 497 Points on Treasury Plan.  Yeah.

My seedlings, grown over the last couple of weeks, sprouted roots which is the time to move them to their next medium, in this case soil in peat and coconut fiber pots with the exception of four chard and one mustard green that I put in lava rock and in the hydroponics.  The broccoli, egg plants, onions, leeks, mustard and collard greens, cauliflower and huckelberry now have soil around their sprouting medium.  They are all under the lights still.   Moving to larger size containers strained my space, though with some jiggering I got them all in new places and still under the lights.

Some of them have to move out soon to make way for the seedlings that need to get started on April 1st and April 15th.  Just when they were getting comfortable.  Hmmm.  I may have problems here.  Seems onions started by seed should not go outside until May.  This will definitely cramp the April batch of plants.

Aging, Great Work, Myth and Story, permaculture

I Have Not Mentioned Adam

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5  rises 29.92  NWN0  windchill 5  Winter

Waning Wolf Moon

A full day Permaculture workshop.  This guy, who takes a nap every day around 1pm, suffers in mid-day at day long events.  In addition, I find that my mind gets overloaded, takes in too much.  It’s not that I can’t absorb and eventually integrate the material, but the pace of absorption has changed over time.  I need space between intake and digestion.  A day’s worth of basically new material wears me out.

When I came back, Kate asked me what I’d learned and I had troubling with a clear answer.  The exhaustion played a factor, yes, but the tumbling pieces, the changing paragdigms and the altogether novel still raced around inside, had not come down to a place of rest. Tomorrow, next week.  Better.

Rest tonight.  Then I’ll work on Adam tomorrow.  I haven’t mentioned Adam yet, have I?  He’s taken over my thinking lately. What was it like, I wondered?  What was it like to wake up, come to consciousness, breathe that first breath? What happened in the mind and heart of Adam when God blew into his nostrils?

Great Work, Hydroponics, permaculture, Politics, Weather +Climate

Traveling By Television

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-6  steep fall 30.26  E1  windchill -8  Winter

Waning Wolf Moon

Boy do I feel good.  I recalled that some legislative meetings are webcast, broadcast, or taped.  Turns out the one I need to cover will be on Channel 17 at 3pm or I can watch it live on the web.  God, you gotta love technology.  Normally, I’d head into the capitol anyhow just to get the feel of the place, but the hassle of really cold weather and a long drive, capped with a return trip in rush hour makes the couch a much more sensible option.

I finished the seed database today for all the new seeds.  Tomorrow I’ll enter our left over seeds from last year.  It shows the work ahead in getting transplants ready.  Some plants like the mustard greens and huckleberries will go under the lights in the middle of February.  In two week intervals until May 1st, I’ll be starting different plants inside.

The weather today is what we usually get in the third week of January, really cold.  Paul Douglas, local weather guy, says this air was over Siberia two weeks ago.  And it’s still this cold?  Geez.

GeekWorld, Great Work, permaculture, Politics

Tech in the Service of Political Change

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17  bar steady 30.19  0mph NE  windchill 17 Samhain

Last Quarter Moon of Long Nights

The best way to predict the future is to create it.   Peter Drucker

Quick note.  No, I’ve not gone away.  Just had a busy day.  Picked up the red car and drove it without incident into the Sierra Club and back.  Yeah.  Meetings at Sierra Club with Margaret and Michelle on anti-racism training and communications work during the upcoming legislative session.  I will have a lot to do:  research, weekly updates, action alerts, perhaps co-ordinating some op-ed and letter to the editor material.

Home.  Nap.

Just spent an hour compiling research into usable slots.  Handy with Google.  Technology in the service of political change.

An invitation to do some modest work in the Permaculture arena, too.  Helping Reed Aubin put together some material for a talk on Permaculture and ethics.  Should be fun.

Gotta hit the treadmill.

Garden, Great Work, permaculture

Two One Hundred Yard Pots of Soup

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15  bar steep rise 29.50  5mph  W  windchill 9   Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights     Day  8hr  45mn

It’s 4:48 and the sun has been down for 20 minutes, twilight almost run its course.  We are a week away from the Winter Solstice, the high holiday in my personal calendar.

There is a simple pleasure, at once profound and straightforward.  Grow a vegetable.  Save it in the fall.  Use it in soups in the winter.  Today I made bean based soups with white and black beans from our garden.  Onions and garlic went in each of them, too.  So did some Swiss Chard grown in our hydroponics.

Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired Magazine, had a column this issue titled Urban Food.  He said to heck with the 100 mile meal, I’m talking about the 100 yard meal.  These two pots of soup are 100 yard pots of soup.

Feels great.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, permaculture

Make Meadows, Not Lawns

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38  bar steep fall 29.49  2mph N  windchill 36   Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights

Another TED video worth watching:  Where Have All the Bee’s Gone?  In it apiarist Dennis vanEnglesdorp gives a brief overview of the honeybee disappearances in the U.S.  We have lost about 1/3 of the total hives each year for at least the last two years.  Beekeepers have prevented this from reducing our total bee population by splitting hives and buying queens, but the price of doing this year after year will become prohibitive.

Just this year I saw some honeybees in our garden for the first time since we’ve lived here.  They surprised me.

At the end of the video he diagnoses the primary problem behind the bee disappearances as NDD:  Nature Deficit Disorder.  We have become, he says, too distanced from the natural world and no longer pay attention to how our lives influence the rest of the nature.  His solution?  Replace lawns with meadows.  Works for me.

This is an example of the followers of the old faith.  Each beekeeper, amateur or professional, is in the community of the saints, necessary in large, large numbers for this old faith to survive.

Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story, permaculture, Weather +Climate

A Time for Thought and Contemplation

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20  bar rises 29.94  3mph  NNE  windchill 13   Samhain

Waxing Gibbous Moon of Long Nights

Snow falling again.  3-4 inches or so by morning the weather folks say.  Winter has come in earnest.

Each year over the last three or four Kate and I have moved further and further from the mainstream Christmas culture. We have little in the way of decoration.  We give small gifts if any to each other.  The kids and kin still get holiday related presents but our home is an oasis.

This pleases me for the most part since my focus at this time of year is on the Winter Solstice and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  I say for the most part because there is still a sentimental side that likes the songs and the lights and the presents under the tree.  Mostly though I find this time of year most conducive to introspection, meditation and creation.

The areas in which we will plant new shrubs, a shade garden and all the bulbs planted this fall are now under mulch, the first two under black plastic and mulch.  Finally done.  Feels good.

Finished the Host.  It’s a strange, thin book with many pages.  I liked it, but the veiled theology and the conceit wore thin as I got further into it.  A lightweight read.

Great Work, Hydroponics, permaculture

A Prolegomena to All Future Gardens

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17  bar rises 30.08  3mph NNW  windchill 13  Samhain

Waxing Crescent Moon of Long Nights

The black plastic has been laid down; the marsh hay rests on top of it in fluffy abundance.  A good snow right now would marry the two until early spring.  May it come soon.

This was a long project.  I had to cut down weeds, trees, raspberry canes and shrubs, pull vines and dislodge a deadfall. All this was prolegomena.   The black plastic had to be rolled out, made to conform to the odd shapes created by various impediments, then cut and staked or held down with logs.  After a piece of plastic was cut and laid in place, then the marsh hay went over it.

This process, too, is prolegomena for the next phase.  In that phase we will plant serviceberry, hawthorne, and other shrubs and small trees that produce food edible by and interesting to birds and varmints.  That phase ties in with the orchard as a distraction from the human edibles, in the hope that more–or enough–will end up for us.  It is this linkage of one piece with the other, all in the service of creating a sustainable enviornment for people and animals, that excites me about permaculture.

I have also mulched all the bulbs I planted and/or transplanted at the end of August and the middle of September.  These are daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, snow drops, lilies of many kinds and iris.  I have both mulched and not mulched over the years and find that mulching the first year for all new plantings and after for those plants sensitive to cold increases the germination rate considerably.

There are also many peppers now in the hydroponics.  Only one is large so far, but they keep sucking down nutrient fluid at a rapid pace so they are growing.  I have not yet convinced any eggplant blossoms to move on to fruiting but I imagine that’s only a matter of patience.