Category Archives: Garden

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture

Soil Test

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Lughnasa                                                                     Harvest Moon

Soil tests create the information base for deciding on what products and what amount of soil testthem to use next year.  Fall is the best time to do them since the broadcast fertilizer can be laid down before winter.

I used a clean trowel, a plastic bucket and my knees.  To do a soil sample involves a clean cut into the soil of six inches, then a small slice of that cut, top to bottom, into the bucket. This process repeats several times in different areas, then you blend the soil and take 1.5 cups of it and put it in a plastic bag.  I did this twice, once for the vegetable garden and once for the orchard.

A soil test sheet, provided by International Ag Labs, takes down garden size and what kind of testing you want done.  That all gets mailed to lab in Farmington and a while later, a recommendation comes back with very specific amounts and products.

My dealer, Luke Lemmer in Plato, Minnesota, will compile the broadcast according to the labs recommendations and will also supply the other products.  The soil test goes in today.

Asia, Garden, Literature, Writing

Dismiss what insults your soul

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Lughnasa                                                                         Harvest Moon

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Walt Whitman, Stanza 52, Song of Myself

 

The journey into gong fu cha continues.  Today I bought some new teas at Teavana.  Still have made no tea in my yixing teapots.  I want to be ready to do it, able to be in the moment with it and there’s been too much going on.  Probably tomorrow, too, since I plan to take soil test samples from the orchard and the vegetable garden. Maybe Wednesday.

Today has been a modern and contemporary poetry day, focusing on pre-modern poets, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.  The class proceeds by reading a poem, then a video of the professor and six U. Penn students doing a collaborative close reading of it.  This is a very rich process.  I’ll post one of the videos here along with the poem, so you can see how much you can get from careful attention.

This morning I sprayed brixblaster for the reproductive vegetables.  Maybe one, no more than two more.  No more drenches.

 

Asia, Bees, Garden

Gong Fu Cha

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Lughnasa                                                             Harvest Moon

Kate and I were out before 8 am today harvesting raspberries, tomatoes, cucumbers and IMAG0898ground cherries.  The tomatoes and cucumbers are in their last week +.  The ground cherries seem set to keep on producing through the first heavy frost and the raspberries have only begun to ripen.  We still have peppers and leeks, a few greens left.

During our weekly business meeting we melted more bees wax and this time attempted to fill the mold.  Only I had not melted enough wax so I had to melt some more.  That means the molds which didn’t fill ended up with two layers of wax.  That worked out ok in a couple of cases, not in two others.

Discovered that the wax has to be washed since the remnant honey, which has a different specific gravity than the wax, gathers and in two cases created a plug of honey between two layers of wax.  Those two have gone back in the bowl for remelting.  I have seven beautiful sweet smelling candles and will have a few more, probably made this time in half-pint canning jars for gifts.  Rendering some more wax as I write this.

After the business meeting, I drove into Verdant Tea and bought two yixing tea pots.  This Zhu-ni-teapot_is a present to myself for finishing Missing and getting ready to write Loki’s Children.  They’ll be in constant use.  Yixing teapots are perfect for the Chinese way of tea, Gong Fu Cha.  Each teapot goes through a seasoning process (at home) and then makes only one type of tea.  The porosity of the yixing clay fills up with the oils of that particular tea and enhances the flavor.  This is a centuries old tradition in China.

 

 

Bees, Garden

Candles

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Lughnasa                                                 New (Harvest) Moon

Sprayed Enthuse on all the remaining crops this morning.  Next week I’ll take the soil md240asamples from vegetable beds and orchard, get them sent off to International Ag Labs.

Kate got out the double boiler and the meat thermometer.  After I cleaned rust off the candle molds, she threaded the wick through the two molds we’re using for a test run.  With the double boiler I melted the beeswax, got it to 160 and poured through a plastic funnel.  A bit messier than desirable, I imagine, but we got it done.  Now we’re waiting to see how the mold releases the candles after they cool off.  We used a chopstick to hold the wicks in place.

 

Cooking, Garden

For Me and My Kate

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Lughnasa                                                                         New (Harvest) Moon

The harvest moon is traditionally the full moon closest to the fall equinox, so that’s the moon dark now but waxing soon.  Here in the 4 seasons 45th latitudes the harvest moon shines on much of the harvest, at least from the garden perspective, already long in the house and canned or dried or frozen, stored one way or another.  By Mabon, the fall equinox holiday, we will have only leeks and apples, perhaps some raspberries left.  Still, I have a curious attraction to tradition; as long as I can choose whether or not to observe it, so harvest moon it is.

Kate just came down with purple hands.  She’s processing the wild grapes I harvested this morning.  She said she looked like she’d been stomping grapes with her hands.  Now there’s an image.  Grandma doing handstands in a wine press.  The grandkids would love it.

 

 

Garden, Writing

Finished Early

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Lughnasa                                                   New (Harvest) Moon

Gave myself two days to write my presentation on the the third phase.  Finished the first draft yesterday so I’ve got more time today.  I’m not sure I like it; I may have to rewrite the whole thing, but that’s why I start early.  I’ll not reread it for a couple of days at least.

Bill Schmidt’s good work came to my aid yesterday as I scrolled through all my third phase entries on the blog, pulling out sections and pasting them in to word.  I now have a 50 page chunk of notes, erratic in content since it comes from many different days and contexts, but it was very useful in mining ideas.

I’m going out now to harvest ground cherries and wild grapes.  Sounds sorta strange, doesn’t it?

Bees, Garden

Labors Day

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Lughnasa                                                                Honey Moon

Out with brixblaster this morning.  Mid-50’s for temp and a dewpoint in the high 40’s. md240aJust right.  While out there, I noticed several tomatoes ready for harvest along with eggplants, peppers and cucumbers.  A few raspberries, too.  The raspberries are just starting to come while the tomatoes have worked through most of their blooms. The fruits are not all ripe, however.  Even though the temperatures will pop back up into the high 80’s and low 90’s today feels like the coming of the old fashioned fall.

Before I have lunch with Tom Crane over in Arbor Lakes, I’m going to hit Kate’s favorite store, Joann Fabrics.  Candle making supplies.  We have wick, mold and bees wax, but there’s something called mold release and mold sealer that I might buy.  Vegetable oil works, too, apparently and I can imagine using clay or putty for the mold seal, so if I can’t find them at Joann’s or if they’re too expensive, we’ll go ahead anyhow.

I’m also going to work on our bulb order this morning.  Labor Day.

Cooking, Family, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Health, Our Land and Home

Midwest Grimoires

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Lughnasa                                                                  Honey Moon

Finished spraying.  As the crops come in, the amount of spray needed diminishes.  Today I really only needed the reproductive spray because the remaining vegetables are mostly in that category:  tomatoes, ground cherries, egg plants, cucumbers, peppers, carrots. Granted there are a few beets, some chard and the leeks yet to harvest but they seem substantial already.  They also benefit from the showtime, nutrient drenches and the enthuse that I will spray on Saturday morning.

Kate roasted the broccoli and froze it.  She’s also making pickles today, cucumber and onion.  She’s in back to the land, earth mother mode and has been for several weeks.  She consults her canning, pickling, drying, freezing books like grimoires from calico clad wise women of the rural Midwest.  And does likewise, tweaking the recipes when she wants.

Family, Garden

Garden Diary: 8.22.2013

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Lughnasa                                                           Honey Moon

Perk-up soil drench and showtime for insect protection this morning.  Got up too late to do the brix blaster and qualify.  Tomorrow.  As the gardening season moves toward its end, I feel less urgency.  We’re on top of the tasks right now; we’ve already got a substantial harvest in and preserved.

BTW:  A lot of this gardening info is for my reference next year and in years to come so I apologize if it seems repetitive.

Cut down the broccoli this morning and picked a few more tomatoes.  We have 17 pints of tomatoes canned already with many more on the vine.

Kate’s taking advantage of her birthday present this morning and learning how to use the long arm quilter, a three-hour, one-on-one class.  When she gets the quilting side of quilting down, she’ll be able to take a project from start to finish.  Many can’t because the long-arm quilters are expensive take up a lot of space.

Bees, Garden, Writing

The Family That Sprays Together

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Lughnasa                                                               Honey Moon

In what has become a Monday ritual I filled the green plastic sprayers with Qualify IMAG0762(vegetative) and Brix Blaster (reproductive) solutions and hit the garden well before 8 am.  There’s apparently something about plant physiology that makes between 4 am and 8 am the optimal time to spray.  The probability of me doing anything at 4 am is not high so I always run closer to 8.

After that I putzed around with Scrivener, trying to learn how to make the compiled version of Missing 3.1 look the way I want it to.  Compiling takes everything you have in a long document and gives it a uniform look and feel, chapter headings, font size, pagination, paragraph treatments.  It has a lot of parts and I don’t understand this aspect of the program as well I would like, but I finally got to a place I liked pretty well.

After printing out a single space version for Lonnie  Helgeson, I sent five pages to a copy editor for a sample rewrite.  He’s returned those pages already and I’ll review them tomorrow morning.