Category Archives: Garden

Bit? Or Stung?

June 4, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Summer Moon

We leapt again from winter to summer, missing most of the early start that comes in April. Two years in a row. So I’m mulching now, at the same time as second plantings, with the first plantings emerged and growing, but not advanced by, say, a month or a month and a half as they would have been by now in a normal year.

Laying down mulch this morning I transferred some of it by hand from a pile at the end of the bed. That was a mistake. Small red ants like the mulch-old leaves, soil and straw-as much as I do. They took exception to my invasion of their home, streaming up my back and arms, onto my neck, face and ears. They bit or stung, I don’t know ants well enough to know which. A bit of formic acid I imagine. Like stinging nettles and honey bees. Not big, blistering stings like a bee, not even as strong as brushing through a nettle with a bare hand, but more than you’d want voluntarily. So, I switched to the spade. Much better.

(cornfield ant. most like the ones I found all over me this morning.)

When I spray the orchard, including the currants, blueberries and gooseberries, I’m treating the trees and bushes in the same way I will treat tomatoes, peppers, egg plants, beans and cucumbers. The spray encourages the plant’s reproductive system to produce fruit or other seed bearing vessels like bean pods or cucumbers.

(gooseberry)

As will be the theme in the moving time, I wondered how much of what I know of gardening will transfer to the arid west. Planting, then watering in is a staple of Minnesota gardening, but it would have to be a more spare process on the high plains. The challenge of transferring and adapting my skills to a new, less forgiving climate excites me. This kind of knowledge transfer and adaptation of one climate zone’s skills to a new one is something temperate latitude agriculturists and horticulturists across the globe will face, most spots without having to move at all. In that sense this is pioneer work for a new era.

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Sierra Club, Third Phase

Sustainable, Nutrient Focused Horticulture

May 31, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Summer Moon

The purpose of our company is to
make soil better as we grow quality crops

Planted the 3 blueberry plants I abandoned in the orchard. Forgot about them when I planted the egg plant, collard greens and chard in the vegetable garden. Then, I sprayed the orchard for the first time, brixblaster, an international ag labs concoction that feeds plants focused on reproduction: fruits including tomatoes, peppers, egg plants, beans and peas. This feeding program for the orchard goes on twice weekly, ideally before 8 am or after 4 pm. Before is the best for me but I couldn’t make it happen today, so I settled for the good over the best.

On June 20th the spraying program begins in the vegetable garden. Lest you have an organic twinge here, let me explain the philosophy behind the (International Ag Labs) I.A.L. recommendation. The goal is to produce the highest quality foods (measured by nutrients, not ease of picking and processing) while supporting a soil chemistry that is sustainable over time. This is very different from traditional ags NPK focus which takes out nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium from the soil each year, then pumps them back in the following year.

NPK farming misses the critical elements of soil chemistry that supports microbial plant and animal life, as well as the critical trace minerals that make for healthy plants. Healthy plants = healthy food. There’s a reason for the plough and fertilize model. It produces high quantities of food, but over time the plants become modified not for nutrition but for their capacity to be easily harvested and stored, then optimally usable for food processing. In the past three decades or so the plants have also been modified to contain herbicides and insecticides as part of their genetic material.

Again, the emphasis is not on the nutrient quality of the food, but on the ease of growing and harvesting. This story is not new to me. Michael Pollan is probably its most gifted narrator right now. I remember a 1974 book, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times, that told the story of the unfortunate collaboration between land grant universities (like the Ag campus in St. Paul, Purdue in Indiana) and farmers/food processors. It’s titular story involved the problem of tomatoes. They were thin skinned and had to be harvested by expensive manual labor. The solution? A tomato with a hard skin, pluckable by mechanical arms. That’s the source of the tough hide you get on store bought tomatoes.

Criticizing the system is easy and the push back predictable. How would you grow sufficient quantities of food for all America and the other peoples of the world to whom we sell produce? It’s a fair question and one that has to be answered.

There are many competing solutions, often followed with dogmatic zeal, the cults and sects of the horticultural opposition: Permaculture, organic farming, bio-dynamic farming, no till agriculture, the long term project at the Land Institute to develop perennial grains, among others. While of all these organic has created the most scale, it has a huge flaw that should have been obvious from the beginning, but zeal blinded most of us to it.

Its whole focus is on a negative, the removal of chemicals and their replacement with organic/natural products used to grow food. A good thing, in many ways, but it leaves the more important question unanswered: is organic food better to eat? Well, in that it is grown in a minimalist insecticide/herbicide environment, yes. But. Is organic food more nutritious than NPK farming? Oddly, the answer is not so much.

That’s where the I.A.L. idea comes in. Improve the soil so that it can sustain its own chemistry and create a healthy environment for microbial life. Recognize that inputs to the food growing process move toward that goal. Make clear that the purpose of this program is not the creation of food for the food industry, but of good food for all. This strikes me as a balanced solution, accessible to individuals and growers for local markets alike.

I don’t know how the I.A.L. ideas work on the large scale though I know their primary customers are farmers and not gardeners.

Think about this. The path to a sustainable human future on this planet must start with agriculture that can continue indefinitely. I.A.L. is one approach that focuses on that goal. It’s worth a look.

Garden, Great Work

And, They’re Off

May 29, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane New (Summer) Moon

The heat has returned. As has our irrigation. That combination plus the International Ag Labs program seems to have gotten us off to a good start. I was afraid I’d burned the tomatoes and peppers (too much nitrogen), but they seem to be coping.

(2013 garlic)

The tomatoes, with one exception, look strong and so do the peppers. The collard greens, chard and egg plant have put on a growth spurt with that vivid color which signals good health in a plant. The onions, garlic and leeks have made good progress, too, though they’re a bit slower in general than the others. Beans and cucumbers have sprouted, except for one row which has just begin to push up, sugar snaps if I remember correctly.

The tomatillos, planted a week or so ago, have done poorly, and I don’t know why, but we’ll have to replant them. The beets and carrots, planted before we left for Denver, have sprouted, too, the carrots looking as good any I’ve had. The golden beets, beautiful on the plate, just don’t germinate well, at least the variety I’ve planted for three years. Which should be a signal to me. The bull’s blood variety grows with the kind of vigor you might associate with, well, a bull.

Kate went out today and weeded, weeded, weeded. The garden looks neat and organized. Tomorrow afternoon or Saturday morning I have to lay down mulch, seems awful close to planting, but the heat and the cold brushed against each other this year.

Colorado, Garden, Our Land and Home, The Move

Water, Water, Not Everywhere A Drop To Drink

May 27, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane New (Summer) Moon

Some rain. Glad to see it. Our irrigation system gets started today, my attempt to do it proved futile. Irrigation smooths out the rain here in Minnesota, covers the droughty patches in midsummer. Thankfully we have our own well in an aquifer that gets recharged quickly by groundwater thanks to the sandy soil here on the Great Anoka Sand Plain.

Water has a very different profile in Colorado and the western states. Learning water ways will require attention and persistence, one of the more difficult transitions. Out there it’s not only rainfall, but snowpack that determines water availability and the law that determines how it can be used.

Now, back to deconstructing the dog feeding stall.

Garden, Our Land and Home

Home Alone?

May 22, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

Yesterday morning, while planting cucumbers in hills, making rows of bush beans to cover their base, fanning the collard greens out along the north side of the bed, the swiss chard to the east and the eggplants to the west, leaving room for marigolds in the center where it’s hard to reach, I called Mickman’s, our irrigation company.

We pay Mickman’s a yearly fee to come out and start up our irrigation system, checking for heads damaged over the winter and making sure everything works correctly. They also close it down in the fall, bringing an air compressor to blow out the lines so no water remains in them to freeze and burst the pcv pipes and the plastic heads. This year I realized I had had no word from them about the spring service.

When I called them, yes they had my service contract, yes they would get to me, no they hadn’t tried to contact me yet because they were far behind due to the cold weather. When I told them I had plants (vegetables just planted) that needed water, the earliest they could get out here was next Wednesday. With full sun and some heat projected for today and tomorrow I pressed them. “What are you asking for?” Water for my plants.

After I hung up, settling for a late Tuesday appointment, a strain of contrarian thought streaked through my head. Who needs them? I’ll start it up myself. I’ve never done it, still haven’t, but I’m going to try today because my vegetables need to be watered in. We’ve had them do this start up for the last 20 years and in all that time starting up the system never occurred to me. Strange. It made me wonder how much else I have done for me that I could do myself.

This loops me back to a thought that comes to me, often about this time of year, that I am lord of the manor. In an odd way we have replaced the old English manor house. No baize doors. No downstairs and upstairs. Yet we have a cleaning lady, lawn care service, irrigation specialists, arborists, electricians, septic cleaners, window washers, a handyman, roof and siding replacers, generator maintenance guy, painters and a contractor for home remodeling.

This list does not include, but can, the washing machine and the dryer, the refrigerator, the television, the fitness equipment, a lawn tractor, the microwave, the electric sewing machine, several computers, cell phones, a landline, a freezer and a horseless carriage. These last are all labor saving devices. Yes, they replace actual laborers who at one time would have been employed for laundry, bringing in ice, cooking, lawn care, message delivery and transportation outside the home.

This means that though we have the patina of a single family living in their own home, alone, the reality is much more complex and all of it requires management of one sort or another. Relationships have to be built, skills assessed, work evaluated, checks written, needs for service monitored. None of this is, in itself, remarkable, but when looked at in the aggregate it shows how a family serves as the nexus of a complex web of services, some engaged by humans who live outside the home in their own home, some by machines, but often machines far too complicated for a home owner to service, which requires appliance repair and/or replacement people.

I guess it’s not odd that starting up the irrigation system never occurred to me.

Garden, Sport

Superbowl. Wow.

May 21, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

It’s taking me two days instead of one to finish the planting. I have to distribute nitrogen sources in two beds before I can plant the remaining collard greens, chard, egg plant, cucumber, bush beans, green beans and sugar snap peas. Gonna do that in just a few moments, then finish up.

Hard not to notice the grins and cheers of Minneapolis boosters after the announcement about the 2018 Superbowl being played here. To get the millions from the Superbowl we only had to spend one billion dollars on a new stadium and I don’t know how much more on Stadium East projects. Which reminds me of Kierkegard’s parable about the brewer who made beer that sold for ten dollars a barrel. “Even though it costs me eleven dollars a barrel, I plan to make up the difference in volume.” BTW: Zygi Wolf looked demonic in his Star-Tribune picture. We’ll be settled somewhere in Colorado by then.

Is it just me or does the new stadium look like a Lutheran church designed by a 1960’s architect?

Time to get out there and finish up the planting before the Gentle Transitions’ movemanager comes.

Family, Garden, Great Work

Earth Bound

May 20, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

That Kate and Charlie gardening team have begun another year of plant wrangling. Kate planted the herb spiral, cut a space so we can more easily harvest raspberries in the fall and mended the flower bed wounded by Rigel. Meanwhile tomatoes, peppers, chard, collard greens and ground cherries found themselves spots for the growing season.

There is nothing more literally grounding than planting. We move the soil aside, add some nutrients and water. All the time we have to consider the type of plant, what it needs, how the soil is (though that process here is largely over) and what its requirements for sun are. Most vegetables need full sun and we had the big ash in the midst of our garden cut down last year to open up more areas of full sun. A seed (its package) or a plant (its plastic container) leaves a temporary home for a place it can flourish, reach its optimum.

Caring for a garden together is so much like raising a family, caring for dogs. Nurture. It helps us stay in touch with our home and as a by product we get nutritious food. A pretty good deal.

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home

Tender Planting

May 20, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

Finally the temperature regime has begun to warm, making it safe for the tomatoes, peppers, egg plant, beans, cucumber and tomatillos. We drove to Green Barn this morning to pick up egg plant, tomatillos, blue berry plants, chard and collard greens. They’re already out of kale.

After getting my head straight about the international ag labs recommendations, I put together a batch of transplant water, 3 gallons. Then I poured Jubilate, a microbial inoculant into an old dog dish, tossed the urea in its jar on top and carried all this out to the vegetable garden. To get into the garden I had to step over the copper bird feeder pole I inserted just below the gate’s bottom to keep Rigel out.

Setting those things down I retrieved the tomato and pepper plants from the deck where they have been sitting since coming last Tuesday. Kate’s been taking them out and bringing them in at night since the weather was too chilly for them. Now it’s all good.

Putting two tablespoons of urea (small white pellets) and two tablespoons of Jubilate (a brownish thick powder) into each hole, I put the midgets, the romas and the Cherokee Purples in their places atop the sun trap. Then, using an old Tide measuring cap, I spooned a pint of transplant water onto each tomato plant.

The peppers went into a raised bed and they received identical treatment except the amounts were one and a half tablespoons instead of two. Then the transplant water.

By that time the sun had come out. It was noon. Having just seen the dermatologist yesterday I decided to stop and return later in the afternoon, when the sun’s angle is more gentle. I want to get all the tender plants, including the beans and peas, planted today. Then we’ll be into maintenance mode for the next two and a half to three months.

Of course, with the international ag lab’s system, maintenance is more intensive than in the past, but that’s fine. The results are worth it.

Colorado, Garden, Our Land and Home

Colorado Diary: First Steps

May 6, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

Kate sorts through the first batch of items from the Jon-built shed. Keeps (move) went in the white plastic bucket. Discard was in two piles: trash and donate/sell. It’s a beginning. Just have to keep at it now.

When we sold the house on Edgcumbe Road in St. Paul, our Realtor told us that our pictures of the property in bloom were instrumental in the sale. The one above and the one below are before pictures for the 2014 vegetable garden.

This one of the cristata is the first of a sequence of photographs that will show our perennial flowers as they bloom over the season.

Garden

Planting

May 2, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

Went out to the beets and carrots I planted the day before we left for Colorado. No emergence yet. So I stuck my finger into the soil, gently peeling back layers until I found a seed, a rough beet seed, notable by how bumpy they are. Out of it grew two small thin green shoots. They’d been headed for the sun. Some warmth in the next week and they should all push through.

Tomorrow leeks and onions go in. Then the planting will be largely done until after the 15th, the average date of our last frost. After that the transplants: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, chard and kale.

It’s strange to think of this as the next to last gardening year here. Sweet and bitter. Maybe we’ll end up with a third season. That will depend on the date of our move.