Summer Moon of the First Harvests
Much of the afternoon spent on a single scene, had to backfill some storyline, keep the narrative coherent. Trying to make the whole fit together feels like working a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces change shape as they go into the others. It will all assemble, but it takes reshaping old parts to join the new.
Also picked cherries and blueberries this morning and took a video of the bees. I’ll get it posted over the weekend.
Summer Moon of the First Harvests
I’m almost one and a half months into the International Ag Labs supplement program called High Brix Gardens. This morning I sprayed a product for general plant health, fish oil, mainly. When I look at the tomatoes, eggplants, tomatillos, peppers, carrots and beets, I see healthy, vigorous plants with lots of fruit or roots. The healthy, vigorous look seems to have come from the supplements.
Over the weekend I’m going to use friend Bill Schmidt’s refractometer to measure the brix value of fruits and vegetables from our garden and orchard. “When used on plant sap it is primarily a measure of the carbohydrate level in plant juices.”
“…mineral composition is not the only component of nutrition to be found in plants. It is the cheapest to analyze and is the foundation of al the other nutritional components of plants such as vitamins, amino acid profile, enzymes, sterols, and essential oils among many others. Since all these components contribute to the total dissolved solids we use the brix readings as the general indicator of quality and the mineral composition as the specific indicators of quality.” High Brix Gardens
Summer Moon of the First Harvests
Reading the paper this morning made me choke several different times. First two related to horticulture. The spotted drosophila, a fruit fly variant, lays eggs and larvae in blueberries, strawberries and raspberries especially. We have all three. Managing them may be very difficult without insecticides which I’ve avoided all these years. They may force me into a difficult position if they show up here.
The second horticultural item involved the now seen as inevitable spread of the Emerald Ash Borer. I’ve not done a census of our trees, but a reasonable estimate would be that 25% are ash. That means a lot of holes over the next few years. My plan is to get proactive and start taking them down, a few each year, and planting other species where it makes sense .
Then there were all the articles about the Zimmerman trial. Yecchhh.
Student loan rates. This student loan business is a scandal. Saddling kids, especially poor to lower middle class kids, with loans the size of mortgages in my day, before they even get started in life, is a real burden on the future. It’s like attaching a drag chute to the lives of today’s college grads.
Not to mention that bank profits have jumped.
Guess the good news is that getting irritated by the news means I’m still alive.
Summer Moon of the First Harvests
Cut the tops off onions today and spread them out on a large screen with the few garlic 
bulbs ready for harvest. They’ll rest now in the shed for two weeks, drying further for storage. Yellow onions keep pretty well. Sweet, red and white not so much. The garlic we’ll cut into small slices and dry. Garlic flakes dried retain flavor at a remarkable level. We will buy garlic this year to dry since our crop was smaller than expected.
Javier and his crew are in the orchard, clearing out grass and preparing to lay down double landscape cloth and plastic, then mulch. In an interesting sidenote one of the laborers is white, hired by Javier I assume from a day labor place.
Today was to be a bee inspection day but Javier and his crew are in the orchard so not a good time to rile up the colony. I’ll get out there tomorrow.
Summer Moon of First Harvests
One thing I learned here early on was that decisions to not do things had important consequences. Sections of the ash that grew so long undisturbed in the midst of our vegetable garden will now provide seating for the Woollies this evening and others in the future. We chose, for example, to not plant a full lawn in front, but to bookend the main lawn with prairie grass and wildflowers.
I chose to leave three oaks growing on what is now the northern border of the vegetable garden. They’re 20 years older now, a small clump of strong young oaks. I also chose to leave an ash sapling in the area where Jon and I cleared out the black locust, an area now covered by our vegetable garden and orchard.
As the years went by that ash grew, no competition, plenty of water and great sun. It grew so big that it shaded out two raised beds and threw shadows onto much of the northern section of the vegetable garden. Finally, we decided it had to go because we were not going to expand our vegetable gardening space and needed all the sun we could get for the beds we had.
Now that it’s gone we have a sunny garden which feels very open and airy. And that ash was not grown in vain. It will now provide seating for years to come. I like the cycle of growth, transformation and reuse.
Summer Moon of First Harvests
We have had heat and just a bit of rain, perfect for ripening stone fruits like cherries and 
plums. It helps avoid brown rot. The bees have worked hard, likely laying in one of our better harvests with only a first year colony, one that can be (and I hope will survive) overwintered and divided next spring.
Last year Kate had the idea of growing what we had in diminishing supply in our pantry, freezer and dried foods. We decided to focus on garlic, peppers, onions, tomatoes, beets, carrots, leeks with a few sugar snap peas, cucumbers and eggplants for eating during the year. It was a good idea, helping us focus our work and give garden space to foods we wanted to preserve in some way for winter.
The combination of heat and the International Ag labs high brix garden supplements for the soil and foliar sprays have given us a banner year for beets, carrots, greens, a year not over yet which looks like it will give us a great tomato yield, peppers, tomatillos and eggplants, too. My best guess is that the leeks will also have a very good year. That means we’ve almost run the table as far as vegetable gardening goes.
The strawberry crop was solid, too, though not amazing. I find the cherries hard to gauge 
because this is the first year we’ve had many fruits at all. My guess is that this is a middlin year for our cherries. Our currants are ripe now and the plums have begun to ripen though so far all the ripe ones I’ve seen are on the ground. The pears and apples have a good ways to go yet, though we definitely have substantially more pears than any other year. The raspberries, the latest crop of all, look, based on the plants, as if they will put out a good yield this year, as well.
Next year I’ll do a soil test and get a program for the orchard, too. Bump up production and quality there, too.
The lilies are in bloom now and the new varieties from the Northstar Lily Society sale have exceeded their promise. (see picture above)
Summer First Harvest Moon
Thinned carrots, harvested beets, Bull’s Blood and Early Blood, the golden beets need 
more time. I also pulled onions and laid them on top of the garden beds for their three days of drying out before they go in the shed on the screen for two weeks. A few garlic plants had three leaves brown today so I harvested those, still more in the ground.
Finished cutting firewood and moving it to the firewood pile near the fire pit. Less chainsaw work today, but more lifting and hauling. Left me pleasantly worn out.
Kate’s at work right now trying to remember how to hang all the crystals on the chandelier that used to hang over our piano, but which we moved to the grandkids playhouse when we redid the lighting in the living room. Later today or tomorrow we’re going to string lights for the fire pit area. We’re very close to just needing friends to make it complete.
Summer First Harvest Moon
Today, again, harvesting trees. This time black locust, a thorny tree that grows fast and germinates easily. In olden days fence posts, foundation posts, anything requiring a sturdy rot-resistant wood were common uses of the black locust. This tree will get used as firewood for the great Woolly ingathering here on Monday.
Other hardwood trees like oak, in particular, but ash and maple and others as well, require a year or two of drying to get their moisture content below 20%. Black locust is a low moisture wood even when it’s alive.
In felling this tree my directional cut was at a slight angle and the tree came down on our vegetable garden fence. But. Fortuna was with me. The main branch that hit the fence landed right on top of a fence post, square cedar. It didn’t mind at all. May have sunk a bit lower in the earth. A slight dent in the gate where a smaller top branch made impact, otherwise, the fence came through fine. Whew. Felling trees is art as well as science and I mishandled this one.
Early this morning I sprayed Enthuse, a product to generally spiff plants, give them an energy boost. That was over all the vegetables and the blooming lilies. The lilies are my favorite flowers by far and almost all of the varieties that I have I purchased at the North Star lily sale last spring. These are lilies grown here, hardy for our winters. Here are pictures of the current state of the gardens and preparations for the Woolly homecoming.
Summer First Harvest Moon
Without the Latin I’ve had considerable time to focus on revising Missing. I’m finding the rhythm of garden work and writing very satisfying. I can work outside in the earlier morning, then revise until lunch, and pick up the revising again after lunch and until I work out. This means a steady pace, one that leaves me feeling whole at the end of the day.
Feeling whole means that I’ve kept up with my commitments.
There’s a part of me that feels bad about letting the Latin lie, I’ve put so much energy into it up to now, but the feeling of wholeness I’m gaining suggests I had spread myself too thin. It may be that I’ll work on the Latin only after garden work falls away sometime in September, then drop it again in May. I like to adjust my life to the seasons and that would be another way to do it.
Summer New (First Harvest) Moon
When we installed the landscaping, we asked for low maintenance. I still remember 
the skeptical look on Merle’s face. “Well, I can make it lower maintenance, but there’s no such thing as no maintenance.” In those first years I deadheaded, sprayed Miracle Gro, pruned the roses and planted a few bulbs.
Gradually, the land drew me in and I got more interested in perennials of all kinds bulbs, corms, tubers and root stock. Fall became (and remains) a ritual of planting perennials, most often bulbs. Fall finds me on a kneeler, making my prayer not to the Virgin Mary but to the decidedly unvirgin earth. Receive these my gifts and nourish them. And yes, I agree to help raise them.
Kate always planted a few vegetables but at some point we merged interests and expanded our vegetable garden. That was when organic gardening, permaculture and 
now biodynamics began to interest us. We futz around using some organic ideas like compost and integrated pest management, some permaculture design with plant guilds and productive spaces closest to the building that supports them and now some biodynamics (or whatever the right term is).
As I understand it, biodynamics works to produce the highest nutrient value in food by moving the soil towards sustainable fertility. This requires applications of various kinds of chemicals, yes, but in such a way as to increase the soil’s capacity to grow healthy, nutritious food and to do that in a way that maintains the soil’s fertility from year to year.
This is very different from modern ag which has a take it out and put it back approach to soil nutrients. In that approach modern ag focuses on nutrients that produce crops good for harvest and the farmer and food company’s economics, not the end consumer’s dietary needs. Biodynamics works at a subtler level, looking at the whole package of rare earths and other minerals necessary for healthy plants and the kind of soil conditions that optimize the plants capacity to access them.
Today I did a nutrient drench called Perk-Up. A nutrient drench goes onto the soil and 
encourages optimal soil conditions, a large proportion is liquified fish oil and protein. I also sprayed on the leaves and stalks of all the reproductively focused vegetables a product called brix blaster which encourages the plants to focus their energy on producing flowers and fruit.
The whole vegetable garden got Perk-up. The reproductive vegetables in our garden are: tomatillos, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, sugar snap peas, cucumbers and, for some reason, carrots plus all the fruits. I only sprayed the vegetables since the strawberries have just finished bearing and I haven’t decided whether or not to spray the orchard this year. Since I made up more than I needed, I also sprayed all the lilies which are heading into their prime blooming weeks just now, plus a few other miscellaneous flowers blooming or about to bloom.
Tomorrow I will spray another product that encourages vegetative growth on the appropriate vegetables: kale, onions, chard, beets, garlic and leeks.
This year my overall goal has been to jump up a level in the production of vegetables, increasing both quantity and quality without increasing the area planted. Next year I’ll continue what I already think is a successful program for them and expand to the fruits and, maybe, at least some of the flowers.
As I’ve said elsewhere, horticulture is a language and it takes time to learn. The plants and the soil speak to me all the time. I’ve had to immerse myself in a lot of different disciplines to learn their language. I’m not a native speaker, nor am I completely fluent but I’m well past the beginner stage.