Category Archives: Garden

Garden, Great Wheel, Our Land and Home, Science

Blood Moon Risin’

October 5, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Falling Leaves Moon

Add blood moon to the adjectives in front of the Falling Leaves Moon for October 8. These lunar eclipses reflect light from sunrise and sunset giving the moon a russet color. Blends in well with the changing leaves. On my weather station I notice a small symbol I’ve not seen for awhile. A snowflake. Means it could snow.

We’re going to make use of the cooler weather with a work outside day today and perhaps a couple of other days this week. First task, start a fire in the firepit so the laborers can warm themselves. Then, the harvest. After that move old aluminum siding to the garage for recycling. Yes, this is stoop labor.

Gotta get out there.

Dogs, Garden

Containment

September 28, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Fall Leaves Moon

The visible fence has switched on. This is our attempt to keep Gertie out of the orchard until we move. She has, of late, taken to digging out around the fruit trees. No, no, bad dog. The big girls, Vega and Rigel, dig happily everywhere, hunting for something or other underground and aided by our Greater Anoka Sand Plain soil. I’m thinking the Rockies might not prove so congenial. Actually, I’m hoping.

That mulberry limb, a large one blown over in a storm a month or so ago, finally got taken down today. A few strokes of the large pruning saw and it was on its way to the brush pile. We have many brush piles around the property, handy as places to put, well, brush, but also and more importantly as homes for critters.

Finally, more raspberry picking. The raspberry harvest lasts into October, often accomplished when frost is still on the leaves early in the morning. Not so today, however, with the temperature at 77 already. (11:45 a.m.)

A few small chores done, now the Sunday relaxation begins.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

A Crucifixion Moment…for the garden

September 25, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Fall New (Falling Leaves) Moon

The river birch has begun to shed its golden leaves, small instances of light as matter falling toward the ground. The neighbor’s Norway maple has turned its autumn red, a reliable clue that the seasonal change is well underway.

Senescence becomes the word for gardens, vegetable and flower. Green turns to brown, then withers and falls onto the earth which has held it up so long. Tired, I suppose, from the long fight during the growing season to remain upright.

The water that fills out the cells flees back to the roots or out into the air through transvaporation, so leaves shrivel, stalks collapse. But this is not the field of ruins it appears to be. This is instead gathered nutrients ready to return to the soil following that

most necessary of almost hidden processes, decay.

We have arrived, from one perspective, at our crop’s crucifixion moment, when they give up their bodies on behalf of others. It is only an apparent crucifixion though because the dead will rise again, either from underground chambers where they lie dormant or from seeds. What a wonder. And it happens every year.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Third Phase

Mabon 2014 and the Springtime of the Soul

September 22, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Equinox Leaf Change Moon

Today the earth’s celestial equator (the earth’s equator projected into space) passes through the sun’s ecliptic (the sun’s apparent path throughout the year, actually caused by earth’s orbit.) You usually hear this put the other way around; that is, as the sun passing through the earth’s celestial equator, but that represents the stuckness of paleolithic astronomy that assumed the earth was the center of the solar system. From the diagram above you can see the sun’s declination (degree above or below the celestial equator) is 0 on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

This same diagram is very clear about the solstices, too. You can see that when the earth’s orbit tilts the northern latitudes toward the sun, the sun is highest in the sky-the summer solstice. When the sun is lowest in the northern sky-the earth tilts away from the sun and gives us the winter solstice.

Since the summer solstice day time has exceeded night time. In theory the autumnal equinox is the point of equilibrium between light and dark, but at our latitude that day actually occurs on September 25th this year. This is, however, the day the Great Wheel celebrates and it does so because of the sun’s zero declination at earth’s celestial equator.

This week then the victory of the sun, made complete on the summer solstice, begins to wane. The dark god of deep winter gains greater and greater authority as the sun’s rays spread out over a larger area of earth, thus weakening them, and the number of hours that the sun is in our sky, even in its weakened condition relative to the soil, decrease steadily until the night of the winter solstice. Thus comes the fallow, cold time.

It is no accident that the harvest season is now. Over the 475 million years (give or take a hundred million) since plants made it out of the oceans and onto land, plants have adapted themselves to the conditions that work with their particular genetics. Key aspects of a plant’s life include carbon dioxide, soil nutrients, available fresh water, adequate sunlight and temperatures adequate for all these to work with the plant’s life cycle.

Thus, as the earth’s orbit carries it to different relationships with solar strength, temperatures change along with it. At its maximum when the earth tilts toward the sun and the sun is highest in the sky, the sun’s rays fall on a smaller area of land. Here’s an excellent simulation. University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Plants have had the past 475 million years to refine their growing season so that it takes maximum benefit of the sun’s strength. In a very real sense the growing season is a clock, or an astronomical observatory directly correlated to the earth’s orbit around the sun–The Great Wheel.

On a spiritual level, if we follow the ancient calendar of the plants, the season of external growth, flowering and seed making, is waning now. Just as the plant either dies out and anticipates its rejuvenation from scattered seed or goes dormant and waits with stored energy below ground in roots or corms or bulbs, so we might consider this season as the one where we shift inward, away from the external demands upon us and the expectations put on us there.

Now we shift toward the interior life, the Self becomes more of a focus, our spiritual life can deepen. We can see this shift in the human life cycle if we compare the second phase of life with its emphasis on family creation and nurture and career, to the third, with its pulling back from those external expectations. The third phase is a post growing season time of life, not in the sense that growth ends, but that its focus is more down and in rather than up and out. The third phase is the fallow time. Michaelmas on the 29th of this month is known by followers of Rudolf Steiner as the springtime of the soul.

The third phase marks the beginning of the springtime of the soul for the individual.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Enough

September 21, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa (last day of 2014) College Moon

The raspberry plant. Source of the brambles, an imperial sort of plant that colonizes, then absorbs patches of land. Just realized today what an elegant form of evolutionary engineering it is.

In the spring it shoots up from last year’s cane or from seed. Then it grows up and up toward the sun, its spiny stalk with its thick, bark-like cover strong. During the summer months it spreads out its leaves, increases the size of its stalk, sinks its roots deeper into the soil. As the growing season begins to dwindle, it throws out small blossoms on thin, spindly branches. The resulting fruit at first weighs down the spindly branches just a bit, the whole still upright, able to drink in the sun.

As the fruit matures, however, it gains water weight and the spindly branches begin to bend toward the ground, overwhelmed by the cumulative mass of the maturing fruit. Once a large number of fruits are ripe, the weight of the whole may bend the tip and even the thinner part of the upper stalk toward the ground.

Think of it. At each stage of its presence during the growing season the raspberry has an optimal design. Firm and upright early to catch the sun, to get it above neighboring vegetation. As the fruits turn their soft golds or their beautiful magenta, the raspberry’s fruits gradually lower themselves so the seeds, which they exist to nourish, get closer to the ground. If a bird or animal doesn’t grab them for the taste of the fruit, they simply drop off and fruit and seed start more raspberry plants right there.

Picking raspberries in the cool of a sunny fall afternoon, the air sweet with the scent of snakeroot blooming nearby, the dogs waiting at the fence for fruits thrown over. Enough. That’s all. Enough.

Colorado, Garden, The Move

Last Day of Lughnasa, 2014

September 21, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

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

September 20, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa College Moon

The garden has been less a priority the last month since packing became dominant. It’s 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

September 9, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa College Moon

Finished the fire pit repair this morning, spreading mulch over the landscape cloth. The landscape 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

September 8, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

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.

September 7, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

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.