Category Archives: Garden

Colorado, Garden, The Move

Last Day of Lughnasa, 2014

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Lughnasa (the last day for 2014)                                        College Moon

The season of first harvests is drawing to a close. In our garden the harvest is largely over with only raspberries, leeks, carrots and beets left. Well, a few peppers and an egg plant might make it, but they’re pretty small. Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise, this is the last Lughnasa in Minnesota. When we hit August 1st next year, we’ll either be looking at vegetables in a new garden or getting a garden ready for 2016.

It’s been an abundant year here with plenty of onions, garlic, beets, carrots, peppers, tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers, collard greens and chard already brought in. There are all the herbs, too, plus the currants and the gooseberries, the blueberries. Apples, cherries, pears and plums were in scant supply this year, but that means the new owners should have a great crop next year.

What I’ve learned about horticulture and bees, I’ve learned thanks to this land. The soil and the sun, the rain and the plants have all offered themselves as partners, and willing partners. Their language is more clear, more straightforward than the one in which I write here. I’m ready now for another teacher, for Rocky Mountain soil and sun, the sparser rain and more abundant snow, for plants that thrive on elevated ground.

Too, there is a project, a project of wondering. How will a lifelong flatlander, a Midwestern boy all his days, react to life among the earth risen up, pushed away from the surface, grown massive and hard? How will a 40 year Minnesotan, who has lived among lakes and rain and rivers, with cropland and gardens, respond to an arid land where the dominant element is rock, tough and tall? This is not a wondering about which is better, but about what each place teaches.

This student is definitely ready.

Anoka County, Garden, Our Land and Home

The Last Planting

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Lughnasa                                                                     College Moon

The garden has been less a priority the last month since packing became dominant. It’sIMAG0378 suffered some, the grass in between the beds has gone to seed, the collard greens have been picked apart by beetles and the chard has slowed down its growth. The raspberries though have become to ripen in large numbers and we’re freezing them as they’re picked, bags of frozen raspberries now available for breakfast.

After the next frost, if it’s a killing frost, I’ll harvest the leeks and beets and carrots. A bounty still available there. The carrots and leeks will go into my chicken/leek pies, also to freeze. The beets we’ll roast and can, pickle or make into a soup. Kate’s been perfecting a beet soup we had at the American Swedish Institute’s new restaurant. The last time she made it, it was wonderful.

As I’ve written here over the summer, there has been a subtle change in my relationship with the garden. The soil test went into International Ag Labs last week and I’ll do the broadcast fertilizer as recommended this fall. It’s just that after I plant the garlic next month, it will be the last planting I’ll do here. When we cut the raspberry canes, it will be the last time for that task. We’re still stewards, of course, but our stewardship is coming to an end.

 

Dogs, Family, Garden, Health

Fire and Raspberries

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Lughnasa                                                                          College Moon

Finished the fire pit repair this morning, spreading mulch over the landscape cloth. The IMAG0751landscape cloth covered the sand that filled the hole. The cobblestones from an old Minneapolis street in front of a former Kenwood mansion are clear of soil. We can now summon fire.

Picked raspberries, too. The golden berries have begun to ripen and they are abundant. Fewer red berries, but they are large and fat, juicy. Most of the garden is in now, a few tomatoes, all the egg plants, some peppers, the third planting of beets and carrots and the leeks are all that remain. When the leeks come in, I’ll my chicken and leek pies which we’ll freeze for over the fallow months dining.

Vega has returned to her tail wagging, bouncy self just as the vet feared when he wrote guarded on the prognosis. We have to keep her from running. She’s supposed to go out on a leash, but we never leash our dogs except for trips to the vet and the kennel. Otherwise they have free roaming rights to our woods. This means  that keeping a dog quiet whose surgical wounds need to heal can be difficult. So far, though, the wound has begun to close.

Kate’s down with a stomach bug I had last week. Used to be she shared all the illnesses she contacted at work with me, now I’ve done it to her.

Bees, Garden, Third Phase

Back At It

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Lughnasa                                                                      College Moon

Another week begins. And, yes, after 22 years of working on my own time, Monday is still the first day of the work week. The weekend slows hit me even now. This habituation to weekends and work week begins not when we first draw a paycheck, but that first day of first grade, maybe even kindergarten. That’s when we begin learn the distinction between the work-a-day world of Monday to Friday and the different, more relaxed Saturday and Sunday. No wonder that rhythm doesn’t disappear, even when its usual props of work place or class room have long ago receded.

Today is auto maintenance and finish the firepit repairs. Plus more De Bello Gallico. Realized the other night that I want to read Vergil’s Georgics, too. This is a four book poem on agriculture. I’m beginning to feel that writing in some way about agriculture and horticulture, apiculture would be fun and important for me.

The exterior maintenance is wrapping up over the next couple of days, then the seal coater comes on Friday. I’ll finish packing the books, tomorrow probably. We also need to finish cleaning out the sheds and do a soil test for the garden. That’s the work week so far. As to the weekend? Nothing definitive right now.

Bees, Garden, Great Work, Science, Sierra Club

This Should Stop. Now.

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Lughnasa                                                                        College Moon

The Northrup King building in Northeast Minneapolis houses artists, floors and floors and floors of studios: potters, painters, metal workers, collage artists, sculptors, print makers. 5 years ago a docent group did an event there during Art-a-whirl. The room in which the event was held had remnants of the building’s original purpose. Slick concrete columns fat as oil drums flowered toward the top, supporting the weight of feed grains that would come into the top floor of the building, then get separated below through the chutes still visible in the large open area.

While the band played, memories of another time, in the late 1970’s swirled around. Back then Northrup King was still an independent seed company, selling seed to farmers. But in the mid-1970’s a specter stalked the seed industry. Large pharmaceutical companies had become aware of the great concentration of power available for those who controlled patents on seeds, on their genetic makeup. A huge buyup of seed companies was underway.

A group attempted to stop the buyout of Northrup King by Switzerland’s Sandoz corporation, but failed. Northrup King, or NK, became a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical company and was later sold to Sygenta, an agrochemical and seed company.

You may recall a post here on July 12th of this year that contained this quote: “Today, humans rely on fewer than 150 plants for nourishment, and just three cereal crops—wheat, rice, and corn—make up more than two-thirds of the world’s calories; along with barley, they own three-quarters of the global grain market.” Wired This could be the strategy statement for that buyup, which went unchallenged.

The result has been the concentration and subsequent manipulation of genetic material for many of those 150 plants and an even tighter focus on the big three: wheat, corn and rice. An article in today’s Star-Tribune mentions just one small outcome of this process, but one with big consequences for those of us who raise bees, the use of neonicotinoids. This pesticide-slathered on the seed before it is sold to the farmer for planting-has a role in colony collapse syndrome which has led to hive losses as high as 20% even for professional bee-keepers. It weakens the bee or kills them outright, geometrically increasing the effects of habitat loss (often created by the same agrochemical folks through “round-up ready” crops), mites, bee strains unprepared for the hygienic requirements these changes produce.

More than trouble for bees is exposed in the article Bees on the Brink. Here is the true problem (which is not to trivialize the problems for bees, but to see its place in a much larger and more insidious problem):

“Though they represent just 2 percent of Minnesota’s population, farmers control half its land. And their embrace of the monocultures and pesticides that form the basis of modern industrial agriculture has been implicated in the decline of bees and pollinators.

But as long as farmers sit at the receiving end of an agri-chemical pipeline that fuels the nation’s rural economy, not much is likely to change…“

The centralized control of seed genetics, with its beginnings in the mid-1970’s, has now become the apex of a command and control apparatus that dictates how over 1/2 of Minnesota’s land is used. And that’s just Minnesota. That control is hardly benign. Witness the Minnesota river and its agricultural runoff polluted waters.

The payoff, the ransom for which these lands are held in thrall by big pharma and big agrochem, of course, is higher yields. This however only reinforces a decades long collusion between agriculture scientists at land grant universities like Purdue, University of Minnesota Ag campus and Iowa State. Long before big pharma got involved crops have been manipulated not for better nutrition but for higher yields and crops that are easily harvested, shipped and processed.

The result? A farm sector which pollutes our waters, uses huge amounts of petroleum products in fertilizers and fuels, kills our bees, diminishes genetic diversity and worst of all produces food with less nutritional value. This is criminal and should stop. Now.

 

Garden

Gathering

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Lughnasa                                                                         College Moon

Out for a brief round of harvesting this morning: raspberries, tomatoes, peppers, beets, onions. The big raspberry harvest is still ahead of us; the goldens have only begun to ripen and they’re the largest number of canes. We’ll still have more beets and carrots, plus the leeks which have matured early this year.

The August grass dripped with dew and soaked my outside Keen’s, then the lower part of my jeans as I worked. A garden in the morning, before the heat has come, while droplets of water still cling to bent over leaves is a place of promise. It is the Lughnasa/Mabon/Samain season captured in a moment in a time. The harvest is the zenith of gardening’s purpose, at least vegetable gardening.

We can imagine folks bent over their tomatoes, their green beans, their cucumbers, their squash. Striding through raspberry canes and, armed with scissors, headed into the grape arbors. They’re all over the state, all over the nation in these months, gathering food, the oldest of ancient traditions. How can the future be bleak in a garden, in the morning, in the harvest season?

Anoka County, Garden, Great Wheel, Myth and Story

The Season of Harvest

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Lughnasa                                                             Lughnasa Moon

Lughnasa celebrates the beginning of the harvest. Already underway by August 1st, at least here, and continuing through early to mid-October the harvest is concerto after concerto, first the beet and carrot concerto, then the onion, then the garlic. Soon the green beans and the sugar snap peas chime in and the collard greens play their deep green notes and the chard lights up the hall with its rainbow of colors. The opposite of chamber music garden music counts on ancient melodies like the sound of the rain, the wind and thunder of storms, the subtle bass notes of fertile soil.

(alma-tademas-harvest-festival)

We have already passed the allegro first movement and now enter the adagio, the time when various crops come slowly to maturity in late summer and early fall. Around Mabon, the autumnal equinox, the grain crops and corn and beans will begin to peak, the sound of combines and corn pickers, the brilliant blue notes of the September sky, grain falling into golden piles on the wagons, yellow corn piling up. And finally, as October sees the first frosts and the last of the crops come in, the final movement, begun in a frenzy of gathering will trail off, cold and bleak, senescence browning the once vibrant greens.

At the end, summer’s end, is Samain. It marks the end of the growing season and thins the veil between the worlds. As the vegetable world dies again and the fallow season begins, Samain is a time between rich, fruitful life and the darkness and chill of death. It’s an appropriate time for the barrier between the living world and the world of those who have died in it to become permeable, for the dead to come to the living and the living to the dead.

We are now in the harvest season punctuated by Lughnasa, Mabon and Samain, beginning, middle and end. Dance to its music. The music of life renewed and come bountiful.

Garden, The Move

Time-Shifted

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Lughnasa                                                                 Lughnasa Moon

IMAG0382Went out to the garden this morning after a week plus of packing, focused on the move, head and heart already time-shifted to matters months away. Oops. Lotsa weeds. Lotsa ripe vegetables. I was ashamed to see the shape of our garden. We plugged away at it until the gnats got too ornery. Got most of the beds mostly weeded. All the vegetables that were ready picked. Gotta spend more time out there over the next month or so.

The second planting of beets, some of the first crop of carrots, giant garlic bulbs, more onions flopped over, green beans (some gnawed at by tiny teeth. chipmunks? mice?), cucumbers, tomatoes and basil. The leeks look well ahead of schedule, almost mature now in mid-August where I picked them last year in late September. Lots of chard and collard greens left, too. Some peppers growing large.

The raspberries have just begun to come. Some of the reds have turned red, but not yet the deeper shade closer to maroon or purple that signals ripeness. The goldens have the berries formed, but no color yet. We’re entering the period of rapid maturity, for the vegetables, fruits and the weeds. This is the other burst of activity that the garden requires and it started a week ago without us.

Nature, as I was reminded by a Science Friday program, abhors empty ground. The raw soil in between rows and plants quickly filled up with weedy ground covers, spikes of grass, hopeful elm saplings. This is why no till ag is so important, but also why it’s practiced rarely. No till controls this ground covering tendency by having agriculturally useful plants in place of weeds.

Anyhow, back at it. And just in time, too.

Colorado, Garden, The Move

Way In The Move

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

Interesting. I’ve been living in the move. Too much. Pushing to get stuff packed, get the exterior work, house and grounds, underway, looking at movers and thinking about storage. Pushing. Turning on my phone and my jambox, listening to country music, Porgy and Bess, the blues, Coltrane while I fill boxes. Stuffing my life in liquor boxes, slapping on red or green tape, some packing tape, stacking them up. In the move. In it.

So much that this week I’ve done no Latin, little gardening, no writing other than the blog, been to no museums and taken little time to just consider life, be with it, flow toward the future. Except with the move. It’s as if I’ve time-shifted myself to next year, setting aside now for then.

But this is a long walk, not a sprint. And I’ve been sprinting. Time to slow down a bit. IMAG0477Smell the Latin, pick a tomato. Thin the third crop of beets and carrots. Bring in the onions from the shed.

Tomorrow we’re going to work outside and in the garage. A combination of then and now.

This balancing first toward the future, then back to the present, a sort of see-saw of attention and energy seems understandable to me, part of the inner work of leaving while staying. Staying while leaving.