Category Archives: Garden

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home

It’s Beginning in Earnest

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Spring                                                                         Bee Hiving Moon

Scraping the mulch off the bulbs today, that scent, you know the one, decayed leaf matter mixed with the soil came up.  It says life is at work here, even in the midst of death. That smell alone brings me out in the early days of gardening. It was there when I raked off the mulch over the beds where I planted the carrots and the beets.

Then, under the leaves are pale green stalks emerging, starved for direct sun, happy to have their cover removed.  They’ll get a deeper green in just a day or two. We’re past the time for freezes of any serious sort now though frost is not only still possible, it’s still likely until around May 10, May 15.

The whole garden will gradually come back into full life.  The spring ephemerals shoot up now and will bloom soon. The carrots and beets will germinate and then in mid-May we’ll drop in the tomatoes, peppers, beans, chard, kale, melons, cucumbers and eggplants.  Meanwhile the fruit trees will bud, then flower, as will the currants and the elderberries and the gooseberries and the blueberries.

If the bees are alive, and I hope they are, they’ll be getting busy.  I’ll have a divide this year instead of a package, which means I’ll have to buy a queen for the divide. If they’re really going.  I’ll find out tomorrow.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

The Leaf In Place of The Cross

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Spring                                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

Final post on this series.  If you need a symbol of eternal life, let me refer you to the tree leaf and not the cross.  In this 74 degree day I just finished scraping the mulch from bulbs I planted last fall.  The mulch is tree leaves gathered in the same season.

The leaf works hard from early spring until fall capturing sunlight, drawing up water from the tree’s roots and combining them with CO2 in a true transubstantiation, photosynthesis. When the seasonal change indicates to the tree that conditions will no longer be good for photosynthesis, the leaf detaches from the tree’s vascular system and in so doing, its chlorophyll returns to the tree. This is the moment when the leaf changes color, revealing its other pigments.

As it withers from loss of water, the leaf changes color again and eventually detaches from the tree itself. That’s when I pick it up as a mulch. When I apply the leaf to the newly planted beds, the leaves perform two functions.  First, they insulate the bed, retaining the cold into the early days of spring so the earth won’t heave and throw the newly planted bulbs out. Second, they begin to decay and transfer their remaining stores of nutrients and fiber into the soil itself.

In this way the engine of transubstantiation, the leaf, even after it produces oxygen for us to breathe and glucose for the plant to use in its growth, gives up all of itself to the plant community in general, enriching the soil for the next generation.

So the leaf, a most ordinary miracle doer, does in fact what Christian’s claim Jesus can do, that is, give life through their death. You might say that in focusing on the cross Christian’s chose the wrong part of the tree.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Weather +Climate

Fencing Off Spring

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Spring (Ostara)                                                       Bee Hiving Moon

Friend Bill Schmidt found a helpful exposition on Ostara, an early fertility goddess, and her regular appearance in Christian households (among others) at this time of year. Here’s a link to this short, but well-researched piece.  After reading it, an odd thought occurred to me, perhaps because I also read this NYT piece this morning:  Saving Minds, Along With Souls.

The odd thought is this.  The church captured the renewal and invigorating power of spring as a metaphor for the resurrection, then demonized (quite literally) and punished pagan observances of the season, like those related in the linked piece Bill found.  The effect was to put a theological fence around the power of spring in Western culture, confining it within the garden of Christian orthodoxy.

By making church membership and belief a prerequisite for experience its power-through the Easter holiday-the natural celebration of a Great Wheel holiday, a real and joyous one, became dangerous, sanctioned as blasphemy.  The church accomplished this in fact through the burning of witches and the intentional extinguishing of earth focused traditions wherever it spread its missionary power. It accomplished it in theory through making spring only a metaphor for the resurrection.

Enough of that.  A temperate latitude Spring is a wonder, a life renewing, hopeful time when the earth shows that life comes again, and triumphs over the fallow time.  And more.  In doing so it assures life for the human race and all the animal kingdom that absolutely depends on its gentle, but unyielding power. It is an animal’s birthright to gambol when the grass greens and the trees leave out.  The joy is innate.

Business cycles come and go.  History rises and falls. Nations become great and then wither.  Religions prosper and die away. Note this, though. If even one spring failed to happen, it would cause a worldwide catastrophe more damaging than the failure of any of these. If two springs failed to happen in a row, there would be no need for business cycles or nations and history would record a near apocalypse.  Three springs? Well, just imagine.

(A Vision of Spring – Thomas Millie Dow)

So give me a bunny rabbit and some colored eggs. Let’s take off our shoes  and walk barefoot on the soil as it warms the seeds. I’ll dance with you as the shoots come up and starvation is banished once again.

 

 

Art and Culture, Family, Garden, Weather +Climate

Saturday

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Spring                                                                Bee Hiving Moon

Business meeting.  Money continues to come in and go out.  Life in advanced stage capitalism.  Third life, that is.

The rain today waters in the nitrogen I put down yesterday and soaks the seeds, giving them that first shot of liquid and snugging them in their rows.  The chill, raw temps are why I did that yesterday afternoon.  This is the next week’s weather, roughly, according to the weather forecasts.

Kate and I see Mountaintop at 1 pm today at the Guthrie.  Bill Schmidt’s description of it made it interesting to me.  Also, in all these years of theater going, I’ve never seen a Penumbra presentation.  Looking forward to this one.

A kind thought to all those recovering or about to begin recovering from one medical intervention or another.  Especially Tom’s thumb and Frank’s back.

Garden, Writing

Queries and Cool Season Crops

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Spring                                                           Bee Hiving Moon

Got Missing queries sent off to 7 agents who represent young adult novels.  I’ll pick up the other three next week and establish a new list of fantasy submissions.  Feels good to have it sent off, routine.  Book buying by publishers, agent’s choices for what they represent, even what the public chooses to read are all highly subjective decisions.  That’s why multiple submissions over a period of time represents the only way of making sure you’ve give a work a fair shot.

The cold season crops will go in the ground this afternoon after the nap.  The weekend and next week looks either cold or wet, so today is the best shot.  Beets and carrots, that’s our cool weather crops, but I’ll plant a lot of each.  We love both beets and carrots.  I spent some time this morning checking planting and nitrogen requirements.  I still have to lay down nitrogen since I left that out of the broadcast last fall.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Garden

A Wound

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Spring                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

There.  Got out and did my first garden task of the new season.  Cut down all the raspberry canes.  That means no harvest mid-summer, but a more bountiful one in the early fall. Getting out there, just standing in the garden, healed a part of me that gets wounded in early winter.  It’s the part of me that’s glad the garden is done for the season.

And that’s true.  I am glad when the last berry is frozen and the last tomato is canned.  At the same time the finish of the garden closes up a part of my soul, starves it for nourishment and that becomes a wound, often unnoticed until its healing can be accomplished.  With the least good garden pruners, an early brand purchased before I discovered Felco, I cut into the canes, cut them all down to the ground. Now that wound has suddenly healed and I am again the Greenman.

Next I’ll plant those cool season crops before we leave for Denver.

Dogs, Garden, Weather +Climate

The Wolf Came Out

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Spring                                                                 Bee Hiving Moon

The sun is as high in the sky now as it is at Labor Day.  That means warmth is coming. Today we’re supposed to hit 70.  Then, maybe get some snow on Sunday.  Back and forth. With the sun high, the snow from winter will be gone by then, except for those heroic dirty mountains that rose up in large parking lots.  I remember a few years back when they hung on until well into May.

The dogs heard something this morning around 2:30.  And set to howling and barking to get at it.  Kate finally got up and let them out.  She later heard a high pitched scream and a while after that the dogs retching.  Whatever it was, they caught it.  She also said the owl was in fact hooting last night.  It was, however, quiet when I wrote the post below this one.

Not often these days, but on occasion, we get reminded that these gentle loving creatures remain red in tooth and claw.  Underneath that indoor sweetness lie genes borne of wolves, most often not aroused, but last night.  The wolf came out.

Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, World History

An Afternoon

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Spring                                                             Bee Hiving Moon

Moving deeper into Book I of the Metamorphoses.  Next week I’ll set a schedule for translating, so many verses a day.  Plus I plan to set a schedule for certain additional research that will go along with this task, things like comparing Ovid’s stories with other accounts of the same myth, investigating key grammatical or etymological points and, the big one, getting deep into Roman history of the late Republic and early Imperial era, Ovid’s time.  Over the last couple of years I have purchased books about Ovid and his poetry, Roman poetry and comparative literature between and among Ovid and his peers.

(Deucalião_e_Pirra   Giovanni_Maria_Bottalla)

I’ve not been too willing to get into these areas in any depth until I felt the translating had reached some point, though I didn’t know what that was.  Well, now I’ve reached it.  And I’m ready to go the next step.

I spent a half an hour today and translated 5 verses, so my speed is picking up, though to be fair the difficulty varies, usually with regard to the length of a sentence.

Also in the mail today.  The nitrogen for the vegetable garden and my new Lenovo laptop. This replaces my old Hewlett-Packard, a sturdy and reliable machine that has been outstripped by cheaper processors and memory and the retirement of Microsoft XP.  It doesn’t have enough juice to run Windows 7 or Windows 8.  Tomorrow I plan to start it up and see what’s what.

Garden, Our Land and Home, Travel

Returning to Normal

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Spring                                                          Bee Hiving Moon

Finally beginning to settle back into home life.  Exercise back on track, though not quite up to pre-trip standards, but close enough.  It will get there.  Concentrating on Latin and then Kate’s pacemaker maintenance on Thursday kept me from getting back into my usual rhythm, but I did get substantial work done in Ovid.

We had our business meeting this morning and our finances are on track, as they have been, but it’s nice to see they are still after a long trip.  Travel is the budget buster in our house and we have to keep close watch over it.

So, a couple of deep breaths, the weekend and back to it.  Then we leave on the 23rd for Gabe’s birthday weekend.  Kate and I are going together, driving this time.  As I said the other day, I’m hopeful the soil will be workable enough to plant the cool weather crops before we go.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture

What Is Your Kiva?

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Spring                                          Hare Moon

Santa Fe.  Staying in a reasonably priced motel right in the heart of adobe filled Santa Fe.  The cathedral featured in Death Comes for the Archbishop is only a block or two away.  I came to Santa Fe after seeing Chaco Canyon.

Due to a weird late night mix up I checked into a motel-cheap-no phone, no wi-fi she said.  I didn’t mind.  She forgot to add no heat.  This in Holbrook, AZ high up just past the Mogollon Rim.  49 when I pulled in. I was too tired to hassle it so I went to sleep.

Fortunately, years of living with Kate have taught me cold sleeping skills.  It was fine until I woke up 4 am. I’d never shifting my bed time from home, nor my rising, so the 6 am Minnesota equivalent had me awake.  I decided to get in the warm car and drive to Chaco Canyon.  Which I did.

This is a haunting place, difficult to get to now as it must have been difficult to get to in the period between 850 a.d and 1150 a.d. when it flourished.  It was, for that time period the ceremonial for the pueblo peoples.  The architecture of Chaco County shows up in many other pueblo peoples sites, though much more modest in scale.

The Chaco folks built big.  And they built stone on stone, with a mud mortar.  The construction technique reminded me of dry stone fences in the East.

The part of each person’s inner life that reaches out to a particular patch of mother earth has created thousands of small kivas, I’ll call them.  The pueblo people go into the below ground circular stone structures called kiva’s as if returning to the womb. Each time they come out, they’re reborn.  So a kiva is a patch of earth where you feel reborn.  For me it’s our gardens and woods and orchard, for the pueblo people its Chaco Canyon and the Four Sacred Mountains.

Each patch of earth needs a kiva that holds it dear and feels responsible for its care.  And who, in turn, are reborn in the giving of that care by the earth.  This is a faith with so many worship sites and the worship is different for each kiva.  What kiva do you belong to?