Category Archives: permaculture

Cooking, Garden, permaculture, Sport

Harvest and Preservation

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Lughnasa                      Waning Harvest Moon

It changed.  The game.  After half-time most of the time, I expected to see showed up.  How about that 64 yard run by Peterson?  Wow.  Still, it concerned me that we didn’t get more pressure on Brady Quinn.  I’m looking forward to the analysis.

Kate has made grape juice, a lot, from the grapes I picked this morning.  Next is jelly.  I have a role in the preservation process this week.  We discovered last year that gazpacho is a perfect canned soup.  When chilled, it tastes like it was made that day.  A great treat in the middle of winter, a summer vegetable soup.

We also several Guatemalan blue squash.  They run about a foot and a half long and 7-8 inches wide.  Heavy, too.  Taste good.   We still have parsnips (next year), turnips, carrots and potatoes in the ground, probably a beet or two hanging around, too.  Above ground we have lettuce, beans, greens and some more tomatoes.  Kate’s put up 36 quarts of tomatoes so far.

Kate also made use of our dehydrator.  Cucumber chips.  I know, but they taste wonderful.

There’s a lot of room for improvement in next year’s garden, but we feel good about the production this year.  Next year we should get more fruit from our orchard.

Bees, Family, permaculture, Politics

Water and Politics

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Lughnasa                             Waning Harvest Moon

Kate took her ailing sewing machine up to St. Cloud.  She bought it there.  On the way home she brought maid-rites, a taste of Iowa burger.  Maid-rites have a crumbly hamburger instead of a patty, a little bit like sloppy joes without barbecue sauce.  Kate had not been far from home for several days with this illness.  She’s on the mend now.

The new plantings, shrubs and trees, need water these next few weeks, before it gets cold.  Their roots will uncurl and extend into the soil, go deeper and wider.  By next spring they should need no extra care.  That’s part of the idea behind permaculture, a maintenance free or low maintenance landscape.  Permaculture achieves this in several ways.  Plant guilds, plants that complement each other planted together, and plants native to the eco-system are two primary strategies for achieving this goal.  Productive plants, aided by plant guilds, and native to the region make them naturally disease resistant and adapted to the particular moisture and soil requirements of your site.

Even so, they still need to get established, just like all those college freshmen throughout the land, uprooted from home and having to become part of a new place.

All this meant really long hoses since we have now begun to plant beyond the range our irrigation system.  Since these plants won’t require additional water in the future, it doesn’t make sense to provide new irrigation.

A few limbs and one tree also had to come down to make sure some of the new plants thrive.

I checked the bees today, too.  Still little honey.  I’ve provided the hive and the bees have worked all season, so I’m not unhappy.  Even so, I hope next year I can get some honey.  Don’t know right now what I need to do differently, if anything.

A good part of the afternoon I’ve spent reading Politics In Minnesota weekly reports, a subscription service focused on the ins and outs of Minnesota politics, especially at the state level.  On Monday I’ll attend a Minnesota Environmental Partnership meeting that will try to assess the political context for environmental issues at the legislature next year.  I’m reading ahead.  The context is critical when considering electoral and legislative politics.  Not so much when pushing issue campaigns, at least not in the early stages.  To win, though, requires sensitivity to the political context in which the issue must be resolved.

permaculture

Friday

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Lughnasa                                    Waning Harvest Moon

Paula Westmoreland came today for a walk through on the next to last phase of their work here.  This time we added a woodland edge to the woods visible from our kitchen table.  We also added shrubs and trees between ourselves and the Olsons, our line of site neighbors to the east.  It’s beginning to look like they will require watering.  Bummer.

The ten bales of hay I bought on Labor Day are now out of the truck.  Two of them will go as mulch for the new plantings in the prairie toward the Olsons.  8 will facilitate my attempt to recreate the compost pile.  It has been dismantled and spread out into a nice nest for two large sized puppies who will go nameless.

Kate’s home for the third straight day with what might be H1N1.  Whatever it is, it’s kicked her butt and it takes some doing to accomplish that.

Garden work is the order of the weekend.  That plus some more decluttering–the project that keeps on giving.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Politics

Still No Rigel

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Lughnasa                      Waning Harvest Moon

The second night with no Rigel.  I took fliers to filling stations, veterinary offices, grocery stores and the local humane society.  Tomorrow I plan to distribute a few more at baseball fields, the town rec center, those sorts of places.  After that, we call back to various places and wait.

The driveway has a nice fresh black coat on it; we have a woodland edge to balance our orchard and few trees planted out in the prairie grass.  My neighbor (not the suicidal one) came over and noted we’d planted a couple of hawthorns on his property.  He said he didn’t care and I said I didn’t either.  They’ll have the same affect there and at that point the properties run into each other on an open field.

Kate’s home.  She looks better, but still ragged.  We see the surgeon on Thursday morning.  Could be some big changes here after that.

The second in my series:  Liberalism in Our Time has gotten hold of me, it’s now the filter through which I read articles, think about politics and  our common life.  I just learned about a guy named Herbert Crowley today.  He was the architect (and an architect) of what some call the welfare state.  His thought has some interesting resonance for me, since I’m struggling in this series with my radical critique of liberal thought.  When I get to the Future of Liberalism, I’m going to have come down somewhere on that question, which I’ve  sort of neatly side-stepped so far.

Cooking, Dogs, permaculture

One of Those Days

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Lughnasa                       Waning Harvest Moon (visible in the western daytime sky)

Kate has begun the dreary process of checking with animal control, vets and the humane society.  At the same time she’s begun canning tomatoes, a task she finds soothing.  It’s a good thing since she has a cold and numerous pains throughout her body.  She prefers to keep going, get things done.  In the past I’ve tried to get her to relax, take it easy a bit, but just this year I realized this is part of her spirit, her who she is-ness.  Now I congratulate her.

Today is one of those days.  Rigel’s still missing.  The borderline asphalt company will show up sometime today to seal the driveway.  Paula and the Ecological gardens folks have begun installation of a woodland edge garden.  To put a nice bow on the day I have my semi-annual teeth cleaning at 11:00.  I moved the vehicles to the street, got the gate ready for Paula, then took off and bought 10 more bales of hay from Al Pearson.

Al’s a 70+ farmer who sells his bales right off highway 10.  He bales the hay and sells it retail.  We all win.  He’s a ramrod straight 6′ 1″ sturdy Scandinavian.  He told me, “We like our repeat customers.”

Faith and Spirituality, permaculture, Writing

Not Yet Ready

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Lughnasa                                Waxing Harvest Moon

I wanted to start writing this morning.  But I could not.  The piece was not ready.  I had to do more work, winnowing ideas and quotes, looking for contra arguments.  Now, I’m almost done, should be ready to write sometime after the nap.  This work tires me out as much as working outside.

When my eyes glazed over, I got up and helped Kate a bit in the garage.  She’s boxing up the last of the garage sale stuff or pick-up by the Salvation Army.

While doing that, Paula Westmoreland of Ecological Gardens came.  She’s finalizing plans for some additional work on an edge to our woods.  We’ll be getting plants that attract birds away from the orchard and to themselves.  Plus, the look out the kitchen window will finally have a finished look, except for the small shade garden that we decided to postpone.  Those big clompy feet of the pups would have made its life difficult right now.

We’ll also get some trees in the area where we have prairie grass, a sort of screen for the neighbors.

Up at 6:30 with the dogs, very sleepy.

Cooking, Family, permaculture, Woolly Mammoths

Kate the Cook

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Lughnasa                                  Waning Green Corn Moon

It was fun to see Kate get compliments on her cooking.  Her cooking skills are remarkable.  Her nutmeg sauce melts the heart of the largest Mammoth.  We had a ceremony, a brief one, in which Kate passed to me the new wedding ring she purchased for me in Jackson Hole.  We also acknowledged the reason for the ceremony, Vega.

Though we have not done our work here for a public or any public, it gratified us both to have genuine interest in our permaculture efforts.  Having said that I need to get and plant some fall crops right now.

Aging, Garden, permaculture

Other Drivers

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Lughnasa                           Waxing Green Corn Moon

Up early.  Woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I fed the dogs, got the paper and made breakfast.

I spent an hour deciding where to put some extra cash among several spots at Vanguard (I chose a T.I.P.S. mutual fund.), then put  together a China tour:  the Sacred Arts of China.  I’m subbing and wanted to do something I’d already researched.

Kate and I had our business meeting.  More money and calendar stuff.  We decided I should get long term care insurance, so I sent off for the application.  I also bought an orchard rack to store dried fruits and vegetables in the dry storage area Jon built over his vacation here.

A while back I mentioned passing the deaf driver signing wildly and turning, hands off the wheel, to read the communication from his passenger.  A couple of days ago I was on my way into St. Paul; a car in front of me swerved over and back across the center line.  I had an opportunity to pass and took it.  It was a woman wearing a burka, a narrow angle of vision in the fading twilight.

Today I had a small, bitter cherry from a bush in our new orchard.  On another bush across the way, must be different, I picked two (100% of the crop) that were fleshy and sweet.  Someday I have to learn the names of all of these plants.

Got my notice of accepted application from the friendly folks at your social security administration.  This month on the third Wednesday I’ll get my first social security direct deposited.  Hmmm…

Aging, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, permaculture, Woolly Mammoths

Becoming Native To This Place

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Summer                        Waxing Green Corn Moon

westorchard709

The next meeting of the Woolly Mammoths will be here in Andover.  That means it’s theme and subject matter time.  The theme will be, Becoming Native to this Place, the title of a book by Wes Jackson of the Land Institute.  The subject matter will focus on the gardens, permaculture and the local food (slow food) movement.

At the Seed Savers Exchange conference held two weekends ago in Decorah, Iowa a commercial grower told of his change to the local foods idea.  A grower of greenhouse foods for various distributors who took his foods far from northern Iowa, he recounted attending a meeting sponsored by folks whose agenda was local foods.  They showed that, due to commodity based agriculture, northern Iowa was a net importer of food.  That astounded him.  He switched his focus then to growing vegetables for local consumers, working on niche markets like institutions, restaurants and grocery stores in the northern Iowa area.

He didn’t mention Michael Pollan by name but the subject matter was similar to Pollan’s recent work, In Defense of Food.  The Woollys have read the Omnivore’s Dilemma and the Botany of Desire.  We’ve also looked at the notion of Homecoming and the Great Work by Thomas Berry.  This August meeting, only 17 days after Lughnasa, the first fruits festival of the Celtic calendar, will celebrate the Woolly’s interests in home, food and continuity.    southgarden709400

Continuity?  Yes.  The Woollys have a 20+ year record of perseverance with each other and, by implication, an interest in this place we have  chosen to call home for those same number of years.

To the Woollys who read this:

Please choose one of the books or websites indicated and take a look.  While looking pick out two things:  what surprised you?  what would you like to know more about?   If you want, also look for something that seems off or misguided to you.