Category Archives: Garden

Garden

Broadcast News

Leave a comment

Fall                                                             New (Samhain) Moon

Out this morning early, before the rains come, laying down broadcast in the remaining vegetable beds.  Now all but the leeks, raspberries, strawberries and herb spiral have fertilizer already at work, nourishing the soil critters and spreading into the upper soil layers.  Those remaining are still active beds and will remain so until a heavy frost.  Then, I’ll cut the raspberry canes to the ground, pull the leeks for potpies and Kate will finish the herb spiral.  The strawberry plants will die back and I’ll be able to get the fertilizer into the top soil.

Planting garlic will finish the gardening season.  We still have fertilizer to lay down in the orchard, more ambitious undertaking as I said earlier this week, but I’m sure we’ll get it done in the next few days.  After that the bulbs go in the ground and with the exception of closing up the bee hive, we’ll be set for winter.  Bring it on.

Family, Garden, Humanities

Gotta Get Back to the Garden

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                          Harvest Moon

A full day with the garden, spreading fertilizer, working it into the soil, mulching the beds. Also pulled out the tomatoes, ground cherries and peppers while Kate removed the cucumbers, hot peppers and marigolds.  The compost pile looks colorful.

As I worked, I wondered about the significance of our garden for our lives, for the questions around reimagining faith.  At one level it feels like aesthetic statement.  A claim about the beauty of productive land and its products.  At another it embodies our relationship as a joint work, a family project that yields food and time together.  Going against the grain of the modern emphasis on surface and the phenomenal it places us in touch with the under ground, the chthonic and its rich resources.  Too, it puts the natural world into our lives, integrates our life with the seasonal rhythms.  This goes against the modern emphasis on the new and making things new.  Growing food goes back 10,000 years in human history and eating from plants back to the first proto-human.

I wondered today if the post-modern might be a more eclectic era, a time with a willingness to look back into the human past and ahead into the human future with no need for the ideology of reason, fragmentation, the new, yet not being afraid to acknowledge the fruits of scientific reasoning, manufacturing, globalization.  Just putzing as I raked.

Garden, Travel

Plato

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                    Harvest Moon

Kate and I drove out to Plato, Minnesota today.  Picked up broadcast fertilizer for both the vegetable garden and the orchard, plus the concentrated liquids for sprays and drenches. The broadcast fertilizer goes down now, worked into the soil.  Tomorrow.  The rest will be next year, including the nitrogen in the vegetable garden.  Different vegetables, different sorts of nitrogen.

Luke has a building up on the concrete slab Bill and I saw when we were out there in June.  He’s running a small business right now from a crumbling concrete block building. It’s stacked full of barrels and bins, weights and mixing apparatus.  A bare bones operation.  He mails all over the U.S. from Plato.

They missed a shot there in Plato.  Should have Aristotle Avenue, Diogenes Boulevard, Zeno and Anaxamander and Thales Streets.  But no.  Main Street.  2nd. 3rd. Coulda been good.

The fields of corn are dry, most not harvested though there was a cleared field or two.  Orange and green in the landscape.  There were, too, shallow lakes with wind rippled water, a bright deep blue, one with an egret pointing toward the west, white on blue, beautiful.

It takes an hour plus to get to Plato from Andover, a journey from the northern ex-burbs to the far south-western boundary of the metro area.  Each time I hop in the car, drive to someplace like Plato to pick up something, I remember how far away Indianapolis was from Alexandria.  Less than 60 miles.  Planning involved.  Rarely if never done.  Now, to pick up some fertilizer we get in the car and drive further than a trip to Indianapolis.  Because, you see, it’s all part of our area.  Our metropolis.  Our urbanized region.  Strange.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Our Land and Home, Writing

Yet Another Late Learning

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                        Harvest Moon

Another late lesson.  Or, perhaps better, a lesson only incompletely grasped, now more fully understood.

Learning, difficult learning, excites me and keeps me motivated.  But.  The brain only has so much patience for stuffing new things in before it tires, eyes glaze over and a slight headache develops.  At least for me.

(Peasants harvesting crops, by Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel)

Over this growing season I’ve discovered that taking a work outside break, a work with my hands or my back break, releases the tension and I can come back to my work refreshed.  I have also found that I enjoy the work outside much more when I understand its value in the total rhythm of my day.  So there’s a virtuous circle here.  Work hard at the desk, then get up and accomplish something manual garden work or changing light bulbs or organizing the garage.

 

Garden

The Garden Nears the End

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                               Harvest Moon

Another half gallon or so of red and golden raspberries, the last carrots, the last greens, most of the last beets.  A few tomatoes, mostly yellow and a pepper.  The raspberries keep going, producing new berries faster than I pick them.  The leeks have thickened up and are ready for making into chicken pot pies when I pull them in October.

The sky has that fresh, rain washed look, bright and filled with sun.  Golden and red flecks have begun to show up.  The birch, the euonymus have begun to turn.  The Norwegian maple across the street lit up a week ago.

Our old harvesting baskets, woven reed from Vietnam, have worn out and gotten lost so we bought some garden hods, a U-shape of thick green 1/2″ mesh with a wooden handle and two wooden ends.  This shape and configuration makes it easy to hose off the vegetable.  That’s handy for root crops like beets, carrots and leeks.   It worked as advertised and will see many more harvest seasons.

Aging, Garden, Great Work, Humanities, MOOCS, Our Land and Home, Writing

I Like Getting Old. Patti Smith

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                     Harvest Moon

Something’s happening here.  What it is is not exactly clear.  At the end of this gardening year I feel like I’ve finally gotten it.  That is, I believe I now understand how to grow fruits and vegetables in quantity and of high food value. As Kate said, moving her hand in a low but upward swoop,  “Sometimes the learning curve is long.”  And it has been.  Over 20+ years.  Today though I feel good about my gardening skill.

On the writing front I’ve rounded up several agents to query when Missing comes back from its beta readers and has gone through the copy editing process.  I’m deep in the research phase for Loki’s Children, focused right now on the text, Loki in Scandinavian Mythology.  No matter how all this turns out in the matter of publication, I’ve let the inner and outer censors go.  I don’t know how or why, but I freed them and they left.  So now the process is all good.  Research.  Critique.  Feedback.  Submission.  Writing.  All good.

The MOOC’s have retaught me a valuable lesson.  When I’m engaged in scholarship, I’m happy, in my element.  I hit flow most often while learning.  That means the work with Ovid, which begins again on October 4th, is another chunk of the same.  Happiness is a warm book.

Last night I had a dream in which a person ridiculed me for not being spontaneous, being disciplined to a fault.  It bothered me as I slowly rose to consciousness this morning.  Am I so focused on a few things that I’m missing life?  Has my willingness to change directions, chart a new path receded?  Been suppressed by all this?

No.  I don’t think so.  But I’m open to other perspectives.  To me my life is full, rich.  There are friends and family whom I see or communicate with regularly.  There is a creative life partnership with Kate here.  The dogs alone provide many spontaneous moments because dogs live only in the now.  In the past I have initiated change in the world through political action.  Now the action is more at home and in the family.  Seems just right for the third phase.

 

 

Garden, Great Work

A Good Year for the Crops

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                       Harvest Moon

Got my soil tests back and the recommendations for next year’s garden.  This time I asked IMAG0650cropped for specific information about beets, allium crops (onion, garlic, leeks) and tomatoes.  I will use a broadcast for all the beds but use special supplements for these three crops.  That way I can keep them in the same beds year after year unless some kind of disease problem occurs.

This time I included soil samples from the orchard, so I have recommendations for broadcast and sprays for it, too.  With a winter pruning that Javier and company will do we should have a better and more consistent fruit crop next year.  This year the cherries, currants, honey crisp and sweet tango were good.  Plums and pears and blueberries not so much.

Since I decided a couple of years ago to get more and better crops from our limited space, I’d rate this last year a definite step in that direction.  It was IMAG0689a weird year weatherwise and I have no way of knowing how that helped or hurt us, but the International Ag Labs feeding program did help.

A key aspect of the International Ag Labs program is its movement toward biosustainability so as I use their products my soil becomes better and better, not poorer and poorer as happens in much of U.S. agriculture.  There are two primary goals here: soil made better by our growing and the production of higher nutrient quality produce.  That’s a solid win for us and the planet at the same time.  It is the Great Work in miniature, right here in Andover.

Given the outsized (for us) honey crop this year I’ve also decided to scale back my bee plans.  Provided this colony survives the winter, and I think IMAG0873it will, I’ll just divide it next year and not buy another package in 2014.  Maybe in 2015.  2015…geez.  That still seems like flying cars, shuttles to the moon and computer created meals at home.  Guess I’m now the 20th century, second millennium guy anachronistically positioned in the future.

Kate uncapping the honey.  We’ve developed a rhythm, a working partnership when it comes to caring for the land and our plants.  We share the space and the work with bees, the living organisms of the first six inches of the soil and the dogs who keep critters out of our garden and orchards.

Garden

A Perfect Day

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                     Harvest Moon

If there is a perfect day, it falls in September with a light breeze, a blue sky with a few clouds and a slight chill in the air.  Over our 20 years I’ve come to associate those days, and today is such a day, with the planting of bulbs.  Sometimes the days fall in October, too, and I’m grateful for them then, too.

To celebrate this bulb planting weather I took to the brick patio and the three-tiered perennial garden we have there, digging out the hardy hemerocallis so I can have space for my bulbs.  In late summer I usually have an Allan Greenspan moment, you know, irrational exuberance, and order far more bulbs than I have room in which to plant them.

Each year I have to remove plants that have overgrown, often they are hemerocallis, so that I can find the space for the bulbs soon to arrive.  This year my exuberance was more irrational that ever, so I’m doing my space clearing a bit earlier and more comprehensively.

When I’m doing this work, I turn on FolkAlley.com and listen to folk music streamed from Kent State in Ohio.  Seems to fit.

Bees, Family, Feelings, Garden, Great Wheel, Woolly Mammoths

Wholeness

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                                  Harvest Moon

Mabon eve.  The night before the fall equinox.  Tomorrow the light loses its struggle to own more than half of the day, a gain achieved back at the Summer Solstice in June.  From this point on the light diminishes and the darkness increases to its zenith at the Winter Solstice.

Been meaning to report on an interesting feeling I had at the Woolly meeting on Monday night.  I took two pies Kate had baked:  ground cherry and raspberry, both of fruit from our garden.  I also took a box of honey from our  hive, Artemis Honey with the label made by Mark Odegard.

When I left, after having sold 18 pounds of honey, I had a feeling of wholeness, that’s the best way I can describe it.  I had worked all season on the garden, the orchard and with the bees and somehow that evening I felt one with it all.

When I told Kate how I felt, I said it felt like something private was made public, that those two worlds knit together in one moment.  She said she got a similar feeling when she took food for a group, as she did so often for work and as she does now for her sewing days.

It was a good feeling, however understood.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Weather +Climate

A Coarse, Tactile Spirituality

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                                    Harvest Moon

While out preparing beds for bulb planting later this fall, I thought over the post I’d made below.  Spirituality is not the best word for describing what I was talking about, I realized. At least it’s not in metaphysical terms.  I’m talking about a here and now, sensory delivered experience.

In a broader sense, and as I think it is often used, spirituality refers to a mode, event, ritual that makes present, even if momentarily, our connectedness.  In traditional religious circles that connectedness links up to what Kant would have called the noumenal realm, the realm beyond our senses.  Nietzsche put a stop sign to philosophical consideration of the noumenal, a problem for Western philosophy since the Platonic ideal forms, when he said God is dead.  That is, the noumenal realm is not and never was accessible.  If it ever was at all.

Using spirituality in this latter sense–the revelation of connectedness however it comes–then my use of it was just fine.

Just now I looked out my study window and to the north the sky was black and to the east a sickly green cast hoovered near the horizon.  When my eyes read that green, my stomach sank, just a bit, the fear engendered by growing up in tornado alley struggling to assert itself, demand my attention.  Survival at stake!   Red alert.  This was a moment of awe, a reminder of the power nature can bring to bear.  It was a spiritual moment in its sense of immediate connectedness between my deepest inner self and the world within range of my vision.

These are small epiphanies, yes, but they are available. This coarse, material spirituality, tactile in its immediacy reminds me, in definitive manner, of who I am and of what I am a part.  Do I need more?