Category Archives: Garden

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, General, Great Work, Our Land and Home

Dancing in the Garden

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Lughnasa                                                         Moon of the First Harvests

We’ve settled into a rhythm that will continue until the last substantial harvest.  I go out in the mornings and harvest.  Kate then pickles, cans or freezes.  I helped with the garlic drying, but otherwise she’s done all the work.  We’ve had to clear the detritus out of the food storage room, gathered there over the winter and spring, because now trips down there for empty canning jars or to deliver full ones have become frequent.

Kate said she needed a calico dress and a gingham (Gangham?) apron.   I suggested a bonnet.  This work for her, right now, is primary in her life and she reports getting energy from doing it.  She must because she stands long hours in the kitchen.  Of course, she’s one tuckered out gal at the end, but the pantry has more stores and she feels good.

This whole garden is a dance with each of us playing different roles over the course of the season.  I have overall responsibility for the gardens and their health.  I do most, but not all, of the planting, all of the international ag labs supplementing and survey the various beds for plant health over the course of the growing season.  If there’s corrective action to be taken, that’s my job.  I bag the apples and take care of the fruit trees, also harvesting. (but not pruning.)

Kate weeds and that is one huge job.  One I don’t like.  She says it brings her satisfaction. I can’t get no satisfaction there so I’m glad she can.  At harvest time Kate takes the lead and chooses what kind of recipes to use and what methods of preservation to employ.  Near the end, when the leeks come in, I’ll make pot pies for freezing.  We both do fall clean-up and I plant bulbs.  Then the garden takes its long late fall and winter nap.

Bees, Dogs, Garden

The First Harvests Continue

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Lughnasa                                                                      Moon of the First Harvests

Jobs I would not want to have.  Commercial harvester of either currants or gooseberries. Currants bend you over and twist your arms and legs to get into position.  Gooseberries do all of that, plus the plant fights back with alien-simulating probes.  I’m going to find out what the evolutionary advantage of spines are.  We have raspberries, gooseberries and black locust, all spiny.  The gooseberries and the black locust put off humans and the raspberries are no fun.  What’s the point?  Ha, ha.

There were enough currants, gooseberries and the last of the cherries and blueberries for Kate to make what she calls tartlets.  These are carb light, much more so than pies and very tasty.

We’ll probably pull more carrots and beets today or tomorrow, too.  Today or tomorrow as well I’m going to check the honey supers, just to see where are and I may head out to Stillwater to get a mite treatment.  This is an organic method that is food quality so there’s no negative effect on the honey.  I’m hoping this will increase my chances of over-wintering this strong colony.

The new bee area will require some chain saw work, creating both space and wood for the fire pit.  I’m thinking, after writing up Lughnasa yesterday, that a harvest bonfire on the fall equinox (Mabon) would be fun.  I’ll talk to Kate and see what she thinks.  Meanwhile we adjust to a smaller house, a leaner pack.

One example, then I’m done.  When Kona was young, we had her tested by a cardiologist who found a heart murmur.  They prescribed vasotec twice a day.  We gave it to her wrapped in sliced turkey.  I’ve mentioned this here before.  Since dogs understand fairness, that means everybody gets a slice of turkey, before bedtime and after the morning feeding.  Kona is dead now so there is no longer a reason to continue the turkey aside from the fact, and a big deal, that all three dogs have never known any bedtime ritual that doesn’t include the turkey.  We’ll keep on with it.  A good example of how traditions get started.

 

Cooking, Garden, Our Land and Home

Putting Food By

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Lughnasa                                                        Moon of the First Harvests

Finished turning much of our garlic crop and all of three boxes of farmer’s market garlic into thin shavings, put them in the dryer and turned it on.  We discovered last year that a very effective way to keep garlic is to dry it, thin.  The crop this year itself was thin necessitating purchase of some to get up to a quantity that we think will sustain us through the winter.  We like garlic.

Picked carrots, tomatillos and the first roma tomatoes.  Kate’s made pico de gallo and corn relish today and will make pickled carrots and daikon radish tomorrow.  This is the time when summer’s profligacy gets pickled or canned or dried or frozen since the plant world has little care for the distribution of its fruits beyond the spreading of seed.  Humans have had to overcome the plants long established plans for propagation in order to benefit optimally from the growing season.  It came in fits and starts, I’m sure, this storing of calories and nutrition, but the basics are the same now as they have been for a very long time.

When doing this work, blowing snow, howling winds and fire in the fireplace are ever present, the time when this work will make sense.  Right now it just leaves a pain in my already sore left shoulder.  That will pass.

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home

Harvest Continues

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Summer                                                             Moon of the First Harvests

Spent some time picking currants, stripping them off the branch reminded me of milking a cow.  This time our crop, a slender one, yielded around 4 cups.  This is hobby level horticulture for sure.  To pick a commercially successful crop of currants would be very time consuming.  In this case we’ll end up with one currant pie.

We have had wonderful cherry tarts from our two cherry trees and have some cherries frozen.  The plum crop, though large, has not yet produced an edible plum. Not sure what the deal is with them, more to learn.  Meanwhile the bagged apples are growing inside their ziplocs and the few I couldn’t reach on each tree look great, too.  Maybe the cold, wet spring fouled up the maggots.

The bees continuing working at their in and out pace, workers flying off in all directions seeking the nectar while the the nectar flow still runs.  Our six supers make the colony look like an entomologically designed high-rise apartment complex.  Thousands of inhabitants, food and nursery service included.

Kate brought in a tomato and a cucumber, our first of either of those.  They’ll be in a salad for lunch.

Garden, Health

Morning in the Garden

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Summer                                                                     Moon of the Firsts Harvests

Still weary today.  Not sure why unless it’s the torpor I described yesterday, a collecting of tensions released, then a sag.  Maybe.

Out this morning encouraging the reproductively focused like tomatoes and peppers to do their best and the vegetatively focused like cabbage and beets to do their best.  I always have some spray left over so I then continue on to lilies, begonias, clematis, geraniums and hosta, ferns, hyacinths, bugbane.  Doesn’t take long and the results so far look good.  Lots of fruits, roots and few insects.

In the early morning the dew remains on the plants, water rolls off the rubberized sole of my boots, leaking in a bit.  My jeans soak up dew at thigh level when pressing through bushes like the gooseberries to get to other plants.  The rest of me though is dry.  The dewpoint a pleasant 57, the temperature 60.

Garden, Great Work, Writing

Flower and Leaf

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Summer                                                               Moon of the First Harvests

A torpor always follows completion of a manuscript and it set in today.  It’s a sort of aimlessness, a nothing to do so what could I possibly do sort of feeling.  Yes there is a tension between doing and not doing and yes sometimes I fear that the doing is only a way to shove aside the great fear, the dread of dying.  And, further yes, sometimes I fear that I lean too far toward the doing and away from acceptance and that the torpor I describe only underscores it.

And it may be so.  It may be that I write, garden, learn Latin, get involved in politics and family only to push back the confrontation with my own non-being.  It may be so.

Or it may be that I do these things because they are my flower and leaf, that they are the what I am.  That is my belief.  In doing these things I do what a lily does when it pushes up from its corm, strikes a thick green blade through the earth, gets to sunlight and puts on leaves and flowers.  I am this variety of human.  In this sense those things I do are not avoidance, but completion.

This time between creative efforts becomes a fallow time like the fall and winter months, a time to gather in energy and prepare for the next growing season.  Perhaps lilies, after the flower has bloomed, the seeds are made and leaf and stalk have died back wonder, too, what is my purpose now? I am not what I can be, so am I avoiding my end?  No says the older, wiser lily.  Not at all.  Now is when you become stronger, able to support more flowering.  We do not end, this older lily might say, but develop in such a way that others follow after us.  May it be so.

Garden, Latin, Writing

Files and Piles

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Summer                                                                             Moon of the First Harvest

First morning in a while that the first thing on my mind has not been Missing.  Feels good.

I plan to see Pacific Rim today.  What’s not to like about Godzilla versus giant robots?

Once I finish the putzy stuff I mentioned I have some further reorganizing of files and piles, the library and study.  Then, I will begin work on Loki’s Children.

The Latin will come back on line, too.  I’ll probably do some more translating, perhaps for the month of August, though I might read some of the works on Ovid and the Augustan period, too.

Main focus is on the garden through September which means it gets prime time.  Gotta have some heat though.  Much as I like the cool weather, the plants demand heat to produce best in this part of the growing season.

Garden

Garden Diary: July 25, 2013

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Summer                                                            Moon of the First Harvest

Rain last night.  A morning walk through the garden shows many beets ready to harvest, carrots, too.  The last of the onion and garlic crop out of the ground drying in the sun.  Most of the crop is on its second week in the shed for further drying.

Our several tomato plants have both blossoms and fruit.  Two of the heirlooms have large beefy tomatoes, Brandywine and Cherokee Purple.  We also have cherry and roma varieties.  All have fruit and blossoms, presaging a bumper year.  We planned for this because our pantry stock of tomato based canned goods has almost reached depletion.

I did buy, for the first time, this year two non-heirloom varieties from Gurney’s.  A brix test will tell the difference, if any, in nutrient value.  Of course, the heirloom is not a highbred, so the seeds will breed true, meaning growing them retains and preserves the genetic diversity in our vegetable crops.  That’s a valuable tradition to support.  I prefer heirlooms, but didn’t want to be in a purist rut.

It also looks like a good year for peppers with several large peppers already on the plants. The eggplants have more fruit coming, too.  The cucumbers have begun to climb the bamboo, have blossoms, but no fruit so far.

The leeks, our remaining allium crop, have begun to fatten.  Which reminds me, I haven’t mounded them yet.  Oops.  Gotta get on that.  It creates longer white sections on the stalk and white is usable, green not.

Our pear crop has been harvested as has been most of the cherries.  The plums fall to the ground, not quite ripe and I have yet to find a ripe one on the tree.  Not sure what to do next with them.  Our quince with its first fruit has not yet begun to ripen.  The currants are ripe and we may not harvest them this year.  The apples grow inside their plastic ziploc bags though right now the apples I couldn’t reach to bag look just fine, too.  They’re a much later harvest.

I did find one raspberry on our canes in the vegetable garden but this is very early for them.  We have golden and red all in one patch.

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home

Cherry picking low hanging fruit

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Summer                                                                      Moon of First Harvests

Cherry picking.  This morning.  Blueberry picking, too.  Also pears from two trees, their entire crop.  First, the low hanging fruit, then up the ladder.  A lot of cliches come from the world of the orchard and the garden.  Let’s wait til it bears fruit.  He planted the seed on fertile ground.   In the not so very long ago, maybe one or two generations, perhaps three depending on your age these sayings were not culture; rather, they were everyday experience, or, every appropriate season occurrence.  Now, with increasing urbanization, the rapid decline of the family farm and a rush to do all things with technology the hand in the tree which picked the cherries is on the keyboard checking Facebook or more likely on the iPhone checking Snapchat.

Delivering vast numbers from the mind numbing toil of subsistence agriculture is a good thing.  No doubting that.  Even having agriculture and horticulture done by the few is not necessarily a bad thing.  We need food and flowers.  If they come to our table full of nutrients and vibrant, well then.  If however, we create a system where the food we eat has been modified not for its nutritional value but for the positive economics of its growing, harvesting and processing, well then.

Somewhere a tectonic plate of public opinion has begun to shift.  I can feel it in the newspapers, the magazines, the websites I read and visit.  That shift is toward action against global warming.  My hope is that this shift, which will ride over the continent of fossil fuel and through subduction bury it in the mantle below the crust where it belongs, will include within it a return to the tree, the wolf, the tomato and the onion.  May it be so.

 

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

A Wabi-Sabi Soul

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Summer                                                                             Moon of the First Harvests

The first yellows and browns began to show up in the gardens a couple of weeks ago.  One dicentra has turned completely.  A few hemerocallis have yellowed leaves.  The process of maturation leads on past fruiting bodies to the dying away either of the whole plant, counting on seeds to carry its generations forward, or of its above ground components stalks and leaves after sufficient energy has made its way into the root or tuber or corm or bulb, sufficient energy to ensure a new beginning in the next growing season.

In this sense you could say humans are more like annuals.  We die away, leave the field entire and only our seed lives on.  There are though those artists, poets, painters, playwrights, architects, writers, composers, musicians, engineers who store energy in their works, works which often disappear for a season or a century or even a millennia only to be unearthed in some latter day renaissance (rebirth, after all).

Not sure what it says about me but my sentiment, my inner compass points toward fall and winter, toward the longer nights and the shorter days, toward the cold as opposed to the heat.  A part of me, then, a strong and dominant part, sees the yellows and the browns not as grim harbingers but as the colors of the inner season only weeks away.

I don’t have quite the patience right now to explain, but I believe I have a wabi-sabi soul, a soul made content by the imperfect, the accidental, the broken and repaired, the used, the thing made real by touch and wear.  Fall and winter are the wabi-sabi seasons.  Their return gives me joy.