• Category Archives permaculture
  • Over the Years

    Beltane                                                                     New (Early Growth) Moon

    “When you recover or discover something that nourishes your soul and brings joy, care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life.”

    Jean Shinoda Bolen 

    A nice rain, drizzly and over a few hours.  The irrigation folks are coming out on Monday to start up our system.  We’re under way for year 19 at Artemis Hives and Gardens.  We’ve never aspired to large scale production or to garden beautiful flower gardening, but we’ve kept at improving our property over the years, starting when we hired a landscape architect and Otten Brothers Nursery to give us key features even before we moved into this house.

    They graded, installed beds, planted trees, shrubs and some flowers, created the terraced garden in the back and laid in the boulder walls.  Over the course of the next year or two I cut down the scrub black locust trees to clear a large area in our back, an area that would eventually become our orchard, our vegetable garden and a general purpose back yard with the grandkids playhouse, a machine shed and a garden shed.

    Later we had the permaculture folks, Ecological Gardens, put in our orchard, then they added plantings to our vegetable garden.  We’ve done a good deal with our land over the years, adding value incrementally.  The bees came along five years ago with the assistance of a friend of Kate’s from her work.

    With each addition we’ve increased the level of our interaction with the land here in Andover, on the Great Anoka Sand Plain.  We added first vegetable production that Kate put in, then much more with our raised beds and finally the fruit trees, blueberry and raspberry and elderberry and currant and sand cherry bushes.  Each year we also take wild grapes from the vines native to our small woods.

    It’s a good bit of work from May to October, but not overwhelming–except for that time period with the back–and it gives us part of our own food supply.  In the fall we harvest the honey, then Kate cans, freezes and dries.

    Not to mention all the beautiful flowers we have all year.

     


  • Considering the Lilies of Our Fields

    Winter                                                                  Moon of the Winter Solstice

    Greens.  Peppers, especially those sweet hot peppers.  Leeks.  Garlic.  Onions.  Shallots.  Beets.  Collard greens.  Tomatoes.  Carrots.  Herbs.  Then, we’ll have the apples, plums, cherries, pears, raspberries, strawberries, goose berries, currants, wild grapes.  And honey.  That’s our plan for next year.  Most of it anyhow.  We’ll probably sneak a few things in just to see what happens.

    Three or four years ago we began a gradual winding down of the flower beds as annual events, turning them gradually toward perennials following one another, growing on their own.  We have to do some major work this spring along those lines, especially the garden bed on the house side of our front path.  That one I’ll dig out, amend the soil, and replant altogether.  Gonna take out the Viburnum.  It’s never done well.

    We have pruning to do yet this winter.  And I still have more trees to fell.  Winter’s a good time for both.

    There is, too, the fire pit and its immediate surround.  Mark helped us on the fire pit when he was here.  This year it will become functional.

    Indulging the mid-winter sport of garden planning.  An indoor prelude to the outdoor music of the growing season.


  • The Outdoor Season, Well and Truly Begun

    Spring                                                    Bee Hiving Moon

    Kate got a nasty cellulitis on her left arm.  Probably from scratches incurred while vigorously pruning and weeding.  Spring clean up.  It swelled up, got hot and sent her to the urgent care last night, the doctor visiting her own clinic for treatment.  They gave her a couple of jabs of rocephin, prescribed some sulfa and sent her home.

    After a restless night, she got up and drove out to the arboretum (today) for a class on fruit tree pruning.  She’s a Viking, moving past the pain, just as she has from the first days of our life together.  I’m no where near as stoic.

    Later on today I’ll check on our new colleagues, making sure they’re clustered under the feeder pail, then I’ll leave them alone until next Friday.  Next Friday I’ll go in and check for larvae.  Finding larvae means the queen has gone to work laying eggs and the colonies will be queen right.  After that, it’s the normal hive checks, hive box rotations and following their life as the colony builds up to full strength.

    The outdoor season is well and truly underway.  Got 2.5 pounds of potatoes from Seed Savers yesterday.  I’ll supplement them with sprouts from leftover potatoes of last year’s crop and, possibly, a few from Green Barn, up the road a piece near Isanti.  That bed has to be dug and amended.

    Also on today’s docket.  Move the large limbs I pruned a month ago onto brush piles, clear out the work Kate did yesterday, clean off the AC and do some weed prevention.  That’s enough for today.


  • Under the Garden Planning Moon

    Winter                                   New (Garden Planning) Moon

    In the next couple of weeks I’ll order two packages of bees, 2#, to install in mid-April. Two hives produce plenty of honey for us and some to sell.  I have no desire to create a bigger operation, but working with bees has its soothing aspects and its downright fascinating aspects.

    Also, over the next couple of weeks Kate and I will sit down and plan our 2012 garden.  We now have all the beds installed, the orchard has begun to produce, albeit still at modest levels and our perennial beds have taken more or less to running themselves with the occasional weeding foray and bulb planting episodes.

    My short burst workouts, which include four sets of resistance work in between the all out sessions of 30 seconds and one minute, have begun to show results, so this summer I plan to have more muscle which makes gardening both easier and more fun.

    We have a fire pit, dug out fully by Mark last summer with a large metal fire ring and cooking grates ready to be installed come spring.  Once it’s in place we’ll have a nice area near the grandkids playhouse for twilight and nighttime fires, roasting marshmallows and wienies.

    With Kate at home much more now, we’ll be able to take even better care of the yard.  Wisely, Kate let the grass cutting go a couple of summers ago, enabling her to concentrate on weeding and pruning, tasks, for some inexplicable and yet joyous reason (from my perspective), she enjoys.


  • Reimagine

    Samain                          Moon of the Winter Solstice

    Jon sent these two links.  Wish I’d had’em when I owned that farm up near Nevis, Minnesota.  I might still be up there, motoring around on some of these very clever inventions.  They show what an ingenious mind can do when rethinking what appear to be over and done with ideas.

    http://opensourceecology.org/
    http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/marcin_jakubowski.html

    Makes me wonder what other ideas need a complete rethink.  Computers have followed a pretty standard architecture up to now, one based on a central processing unit.  I read an article in Scientific American last week about a neural computer which, in essence, gives each unit of a computer a cpu, allowing for massively parallel processing as an integral part of the design. It’s modeled on, but not attempting to replicate, the human brain.

    How about housing?  Cars?  Or, my personal quest and long time obsession, religion?  The family?  Electrical generation?  I’m interested in distributed generation where a cul de sac or an apartment building or a couple of blocks city residential units might get their electricity from, say, a combination of wind, solar and geo-thermal units sited in their immediate vicinity.

    Here’s another one that could use a complete overhaul, reimagining:  nations.  The nation state is a relatively new phenomenon, most experts date its rise somewhere around 1800, perhaps a hundred years earlier in the instance of Portugal and the Netherlands.  In the wake of the globalization of economic life national boundaries have much different meanings that they did, say, 50 years ago.

    Let’s go back to religion for a second.  Over the last several years, 23 to be exact, I’ve wrestled with the hole left by Christianity in my life and sought to fill it through what I call a tactile spirituality, one wedded to the rhythms of the seasons, of flowers and vegetables, of bees.  This direction took its initial impetus from an immersion in Celtic lore while I sifted for writing topics.

    Then, I began to follow the Great Wheel of the seasons, a Celtic sacred calendar focused on 8 seasons, rather than four.  That led me to integrate gardening with my sacred calendar.  In the wake of these two changes in my life, I began to see the vegetative and wild natural world as more than tools for food or leisure, rather I began to see that they were my home, that I lived with them and in them, rather than having them as adjuncts to my anthropocentric life.

    This whole change, this rethink of what sacred and holy mean, what the locus of my spirituality is and where it is, has had a long maturation, much thought and experimentation.  My hope is that my reimagining might provide a common religious base, a sort of ur-religion, which all humans everywhere can embrace.

    As in times past this base religion could certainly have others layered on top of it, its essence after all is to be non-exclusive.  What I hope further is that reasserting, inviting, even luring others to see the sacred and the holy in our planet and its other living beings, they will be more likely to join in to see it healthy and vital.


  • Partners and Co-Creators

    Fall                                                       Waning Harvest Moon

    Went out and picked raspberries for pancakes this morning.  With a definite chill in the air the garden felt different, a bit sleepy, ready to bed down for the cold season.  After a month or so of feeling burdened by it, wanting it to disappear, my spring affection reappeared.  This patch of earth, these beds, work together with the plant world and Kate and me.  We share a joint stewardship of this property, each in our way committed to making it healthy, beautiful and bountiful.

    The soil has given of its nutrients, its water holding capacity, its sturdiness as a base for roots and stems.  The plants have combined the chemicals of the soil with that water and pushed themselves up and out of the earth, then blossomed and in many cases fruited.  Kate and I weed, tend the soil, watch the plants, picking bugs off of them, pruning, replanting.  We also harvest and, when the harvest ends, we replenish the soil with composted manure and mulch.

    When we use the plants and their produce, we take the leaves and stems and other unwanted parts and put them in a compost bin to return to the soil.

    This complicated working partnership among many different parties here is, in microcosm, the partnership we humans have with the natural world and the world of soils, air, water and sunshine.  It’s significant to note that the one unnecessary party to this the work is the human race.

    Plants will grow.  Rain will fall.  The sun will shine.  Soils will improve.  Fruits and vegetables will be made and distributed, all whether humans enter in or not.  We exist only as part of a richly integrated chain of being and we exist as its wards, not benefactors.

    We do have the capacity to intervene, but too often, far too often, when we do intervene, we disrupt what nature does willingly and foul the process, in the end harming ourselves.

    I wish our gardens and our orchard were more than supplements to our diet, but that is all they are, to be otherwise would require a commitment to the work I no longer feel able or willing to give.  Even so, as a supplement, this growing of flowers, potatoes, tomatoes, beets, carrots, leeks, beans, onions, lettuce, chard, spinach and peas, this caring for bees and harvesting honey, does keep us intimately engaged as partners with the natural world, a partnership so often hidden from view in this, the most capitalistic of all possible worlds.


  • In the Garden

    Beltane                                                                           New  Garlic Moon

    One of those nights last night, unable to get to sleep, still rolling around awake at 1:00 a.m.  Up a little bleary.  Wrote  few e-mails, then out in the orchard, first.  I’ve had tent caterpillars on two trees.  Each time I have removed the tent and stepped on it or crushed the worms.  This is non-chemical pest control, a route I prefer and, as long as I’m not running a commercial operation, one I can pursue.

    Now I wander in the orchard, looking at seed pods (fruit) beginning to develop from the last of the blossoms which dropped this week.  I’ll try to find worms and moths before they do 2011-05-17_0805early-spring-2011damage and as long as I can I’ll follow pinch and destroy.  After that, I think, right now anyway, that I’ll go with Gary Reuter, the bee rangler for Marla Spivak.  I’ll just put up with wormy apples.  This is partly out of regard for the bees who have enough pressure of them and they don’t need an added pesticide load from our orchard, but it’s more out of a commitment to no pesticides, grow strong plants and let them fend for themselves.  It’s worked reasonably well for me so far.

    (before the fall)

    After the orchard the potatoes were next.  Now that the soil has warmed up the potatoes have begun to grow, their dark lobe shaped leaves appearing atop a fragile looking stalk.  At this point the basics of potato culture involves mounding earth over the stalk as it grows.  That’s what I did today.  In the long raised bed where I have most of the potatoes this year, I also have a bumper crop of asiatic lilies and tulips.

    I planted this bed originally as a cutting garden, years ago.  The same fall the bed was built I went out to the Arboretum to a lily growers sale and bought Minnesota hardy bulbs.  They’ve been in that bed ever since, maybe 10 years.  Boy, have they enjoyed that bed.  They’ve started lilies all over the place.  That means that as I mound the potatoes I have to move around the lily bulbs that have generated.  I hate to just throw them away because they’re so hardy and have been with me so long.  I’m trying right now to raise vegetables and flowers in the same bed.  That’s also worked reasonably well for me.06-28-10_earlylilies

    I also mounded the leeks as my last action in the garden this morning.  In the case of leeks the mounding blanches the stalk, keeps it white underground and increases the usable part of the leek.

    That done, I’ve come inside to work on my Latin.  Pentheus, now, Book III:509-to the end.


  • Bee Diary: April 17, 2011

    Spring                                                                 Full Bee Hiving Moon

    A full day of bees.  Mostly fun, but sitting for 8 hours just doesn’t have the appeal it used to.  What appeal was that?  Can’t recall.

    The info on bee diseases and, again, the multi-valent character of colony collapse disorder keeps getting clearer.  Repetition is useful for this old brain. (I think a companion piece to This Old House could be This Old Brain)  The big problem is varroa mites.  Marla said the bees would have developed adequate resistance to the mites if they had been left untreated, as they have been in Africa, for example, but our wealthier, fix-it-now culture insists on medicine.  The result?  We have resistant varroa mites that are much more difficult to control.

    The mites per se are not so much the issue; rather, they weaken the bees through sucking their vital fluids and serving as a vector for any number of bee viruses. This reinforces a long list of other interrelated negatives.  Lost pasturage in clover–reduced by adding fertilizer and decreasing crop rotation, different management practices for cutting alfalfa that reduce its bloom time, increasing pesticide use which further weakens the bees, herbicide use that kills bee friendly native plants (often called weeds) and the prevalence of monocultural planting of key ag crops like corn, wheat, beans create a dark synergy, a whirl of problematics that chip away at healthy bee populations, both native and domesticated.

    A rolling loss of genetic diversity, an extinction event with no peer in the geologic record,* characterizes our impact, mostly intentional, on the landscape.  In making incremental decisions concerning agricultural methods, population, urbanization and our hungry, rapidly increasing demand for energy we have added co2 to the atmosphere, cut down forests, built farms in important watersheds (see the Mississippi and the Minnesota rivers as poster children for why this is a problem.), delinked corridors for wild animal travel and increased our dependence on smaller and smaller gene pools.  As the patenting of seed corn, wheat and rice, to give three important examples, has concentrated ownership of important food seed stores, the resistance to disease which has kept these key sources of human nutrition vital, decreases.

    I mention this last because it is easy to see the bridge between our behavior in general and such problems as colony collapse disorder.  There are, thankfully, many solutions to these problems, but we have to have the will to act.  How many people will grow their own vegetables or participate in Community Supported Agriculture?  How many farmers will turn toward less intensive, and therefore less productive, farming methods in a time when larger farm sizes seem the only route to financial success?  The solutions all seem to lie in a spectrum of activities that support bio-diversity, emphasize sustainable energy and food production and reduce our reliance on steroid-like chemicals such as fertilizers.

    The diverse pathways to a positive future give me hope.  Each of us can do a bit:  consume less gas, make our homes more energy efficient, grow some of our own food, patronize local suppliers, recycle.  We can also encourage systemic change in sectors like energy production, agriculture, urban development, defense and foreign policy.  Perhaps it’s time for a JFK moment:  Ask not what Mother Earth can do for you, but what you can do for Mother Earth.

    *The background level of extinction known from the fossil record is about one species per million species per year, or between 10 and 100 species per year (counting all organisms such as insects, bacteria, and fungi, not just the large vertebrates we are most familiar with). In contrast, estimates based on the rate at which the area of tropical forests is being reduced, and their large numbers of specialized species, are that we may now be losing 27,000 species per year to extinction from those habitats alone.


  • We Inch, Slowly, Toward Spring

    Spring                                                                 Waxing Bee Hiving Moon

    Kate comes home tonight.  Yeah!  I miss her when she’s gone. I’ll follow our usual procedure and pick her up at the Loon Cafe, conveniently located at the end of the light rail service 650-herb-spiralfrom the airport.  Makes the drive much shorter and I get a good meal in the bargain.

    After the biting and the barking and the adrenaline I figured out a somewhat complicated solution to the Rigel/Sollie problem.  It involves making sure that one set of dogs is in their crate before admitting the others to the house.  This way nobody trespasses on anybody else’s territory.

    It demands a careful watching of when Rigel and Vega are away hunting so I can let Sollie, Gertie and Kona inside.  Or, alternatively, when Rigel and Vega are on the deck and the others are out hunting.  A bit baroque I know but I have no more indentations in the leg.

    (pics from April of last year)

    As the Bee Hiving moon goes from New to Full, our yard will lose its snow and we will have several species of flowers in bloom, a few vegetables in the ground and as it begins to wane we should have our new bees hived and happy in their new homes.  There are things that need to happen before this last, not the least moving the hives to the orchard, cleaning all the frames of propolis and burning the old hive boxes and frames I got from Mark, the bee mentor.650-apple-blossoms

    Seeing the bulbs planted in the fall begin to emerge always heartens me because it reminds me of hours of labor spent in the cool air of late October or early November.  We won’t be here for that time next year, so probably no new bulbs this year.

    In fact, I’m declaring finished to our orchard, garden, vegetable, bee expansions.  We’ll stick with no more than three hives, the raised beds and other beds we have in the vegetable garden, the trees and bushes we have in the orchard and the flower beds we have in place now.

    We’ll always have to replace dead plants and put in new ones in their place.  We have to care for the fruit trees and bushes, plant vegetables and maintain the bee colonies so we’ll have to plenty to keep us occupied.  I just want to get good at the stuff we have and begin to slowly limit the work we do over the course of the year.


  • Breakthrough!

    Spring Waxing Bee Hiving Moon

    I have made several entries private and will explain that decision on Sunday. Stay tuned.

    The snow has only a few strongholds left in our front yard though the back and the woods still has plenty. The garden behind our patio has daffodil stems through the 06-27-10_marigoldeyeviewearth, a bit yellow at the top, then light green, then a darker green. Soon there should be other bulbs breaking through including some I’d forgotten I planted in the orchard.

    This is the transition week for our place, when the snow disappears and the greening begins. I’m excited to see the garden come to life. When the bees come, some time after April 23rd, it will feel like the whole gangs back together. I’m hopeful that the orchard will start producing this growing season. We’ll see.

    I want to get some more woodchips down right away in the orchard, perhaps in the vegetable garden, too. 670_0300

    It’s also time for serious clean up work in the back. I got distracted last fall and didn’t keep up with the maintenance as well as I could. Then, there’s all those tree branches split by the heavy first snowfall last November. So, plenty of outside work.

    We ate the last of our potatoes just two weeks ago and still have garlic, yellow onions, honey, and canned vegetables from several years.  We couldn’t make it as pioneers but we’re doing well at supplementing our diet.  More.  We tune our lives to natural rhythms, especially in the growing season.

    That original revelation to us that Emerson talks about is coming along out here in Andover.