Category Archives: Garden

Family, Garden, Our Land and Home

Outside

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Beltane                                                              Early Growth Moon

Trying to reconcile everyday writing (a creative need and best practice) with everyday gardening (a practical need and also best practice).  Decided in conversation with Kate to get up at 7 AM regularly, eat breakfast, work an hour outside until 9, then come in to write.  Today was the first day of that new schedule.

(Summer – Pierre Puvis de Chavannes)

Mostly I weeded this morning among vegetable rows where a stealthy clover had crept in and those damned prolific chives, bright green beautiful spears.  Along the way I observed the onions, the kale, the chard, the beets, lots of beets and the carrots.  Unlike my garlic, which had a very low germination rate, the carrots, often a problem, have responded with vigor, many of them up, almost a solid line of small green feathery stalks in each of three rows.

Due to the removal of the ash, and possibly the river birch pruning, we no longer have as much as shade as we had.  A major part of the point in both actions.  Yet.  We planted hostas and ferns and hydrangeas in both spots.  The ones under the ash will need to go elsewhere, way too much sun.  Those under the river birch, I’m not sure.  It’s an east facing side and the tree is still there, plus the seven oaks on our hill shade them, too.  I’ll watch them.

Javier and his crew finished the fire pit with crushed granite, extra thick landscape cloth and five cubic yards of shredded bark.  It’s ready for the grandkids, for the Woolly’s and for us, another outdoor room, this one away from the house at the edge of the woods.  There is a short path from the fire pit area to the grandkids play house.  It’s now a very spiffy area with a home for the imagination and a place to make smores nearby.

 

Garden

Bleeding Heart Liberals

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Beltane                                                                            Early Growth Moon

Yes, we transplanted bleeding hearts liberally in the area around our new fire pit.  They came out of a vegetable bed we had to transform to a shade bed when the small ash tree nearby got big.  Now the ash tree will be cut down and we’ll have more beds that get better sun, enough to grow vegetables.  I feel bad about cutting down the ash but it needs to go.

(2010)

Even so it did mean that we had a stash of dicentra, bleeding hearts, that could go to another shady location like the area north of the firepit.  And they are now there.  In the process I broke my spading fork.  Again.  I hadn’t mended it fully the last time and I put too much pressure on it.

Transplanting on a cooler, cloudy day with a high dewpoint is best.  It reduces transplant shock and helps the fine root hairs stay moist and alive between digging and planting.

Tomorrow a different task even though we’re not done with this one.  Bagging the apples.  The blossoms fell and fruit set is imminent, so we get those bags on before the fruits show.  Then, clean apples.

 

Garden, Health

Garden and Exercise

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Beltane                                                                           Early Growth Moon

The garden is well underway.  Beets, onions, chard, kale, carrots, cucumbers, sugar snap peas, tomatoes, peppers, leeks, egg plants and garlic all in various growth stages.  The garlic crop may be my weakest in several years.

Kate and I will transplant this morning.  We’re going to move hosta, hemerocallis and bleeding hearts to a mounded area near our fire pit.  Javier got the area prepared on Memorial Day and moved the fire pit into the center of the ring that Mark built.  He’ll fill the fire pit and the ring with a material that will be fireproof and weed proof.

Putting in some shade plants will give the area a more landscaped feel.  My goal is to have it ready for a visit by the grandkids sometime in July and for the Woolly meeting also that month.

The exercises I got from my physical therapist have already eased up the pain in my biceps.  My posture, which both Lervick (orthopedist) and Poulter (physical therapist) said tilted to the left, has changed, too.

The intensity workouts I’ve been doing work, too.  That’s the one minute of aerobics at the most flat-out I can stand, getting my body into the anaerobic range, followed by a set of resistance work while the heart rate goes down below 110, then another minute of aerobics, and repeat until 4 high intensity aerobic intervals and 4 resistance sets are done.

 

Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Weather +Climate

Roots

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Beltane                                                                                  Early Growth Moon

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
Simone Weil

 

 

Not surprising this is an unrecognized need because for most people for most of human history being other than rooted was not an option.  You were born within the sound of a church bell or a muezzin or a farm dinner bell and never got beyond them.

(Jean-Léon Gérôme. A Muezzin Calling from the Top of a Minaret the Faithful to Prayer (1879)

It is only as the world has begun to urbanize that we have had to consider our roots, or the lack of them.  In the US only 5% of the population lived in cities in 1800, but 50% did by 1920.  80% do now.  This trend is global.  In 2008 for the first time in history over 50% of the world’s population live in cities.  Interestingly one website on urbanization made this point, since no more than 100% of a population can live in cities, urbanization will come to a foreseeable end.

It is, though, this great hollowing of rural areas that underlines our need for roots just at the point when we realize we no longer have them.  Or, rather, it is this realization that makes the need for roots evident.

Let’s stick to the vegetative metaphor.  Roots say where we are planted, where we have pushed organs for receiving nourishment deep into the soil, even into the subsoil of the place where we live.  Yes, you might want to talk about relationships and regular shops and schools and sports teams, yes, those things are part of a broad understanding of the metaphor, but I’m wanting to stay closer to the plant.

(I worked in this factory when I was in high school, 1968.  Johns-Manville)

If we eat local food, our bodies themselves become literally one with the earth in a particular locale.  Knowing where we are, not only in terms of street names and legalities, but also in terms of trees, food crops, fish, game, local meats, birds, flowers, grasses, even the so-called weeds is also part of having roots.  Embracing the weather, the local changes, as in part defining who you are, that’s having roots.

It is, I think, these things that disorient us the most when we move away from our home.  We think it’s the people or the customs or the new boulevards and highways, but in a deeper place, in the place where you know you are, it’s the Indian paintbrush that no longer shows up, the alligator not waiting in the pond,  the summer that fades too soon or lasts too long, these things make us not only feel disconnected from the place where we are; they are in fact the evidence of our disconnection.

(fall harvest, 2011, Andover)

If we have roots, we usually don’t know it; if we’re missing them, well…

 

Garden, Holidays, Sport

Help.

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Beltane                                                               Early Growth Moon

Kate has found a garden and landscape helper for us.  Javier does tree, gardening and landscaping with his brother.  They are very reasonable in their pricing.  If he works out, and I’m sure he will, a large part of the burden of maintaining our grounds will lift and Kate and I can concentrated on growing vegetables, fruit and flowers.  What we love doing.

For example, I planted 9 tomato plants and 6 pepper plants this morning, with three egg plants waiting for the removal of the ash in our vegetable garden. (part of the work Javier has agreed to do.)  We’ll probably put in a few more tomato plants with the added sunlight the vegetable garden will have sans ash.

It’s Memorial Day weekend though I have trouble conceiving Memorial Day as any day other than May 30th.  Growing up the Indianapolis 500 always ran right after Memorial Day and that was May 31st.  It was the 1968 Uniform Holiday Act that created all the Monday holidays and their resulting three day weekends.  That’s no way to run a holiday.  Holidays are about tradition, not long weekends.

Anyhow the race is tomorrow.

Garden, Health

Your Plant Is In The Mail

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Beltane                                                                                Early Growth Moon

The tomatoes, peppers and egg plants arrived in the mail yesterday.  They’re resting now, will go in the ground tomorrow morning.  Today is a bee day, move leaves to the vegetable garden, new lights in the garage and in the garden study day, plump up the sun trap day and begin outlining projects for Javier to bid.  Over the last three days I’ve laid the writing and translating aside in favor of poetry, analysis and today gardening.

I also worked out last night after missing Monday and Wednesday; this way I can get two sessions in this week.  I really miss working out and need to rethink my schedule since having a meeting or event in the evening can often screw it up.  I do three intense sessions a week, cardio and resistance combined in an interval training program that cranks up the heart rate, then extends it through a set of resistance work, a cool down to below 110 bpm, then up into the anaerobic range for a full minute followed immediately by the next resistance set.  4 sets altogether.

Soon, probably tomorrow, I’ll begin to feel the push back to the writing, translating rhythm, but right now I’m enjoying the break.

Garden, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

The Wall

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Beltane                                                                          Early Growth Moon

I’ve hit some kind of wall.  All this straight at it time, working on Missing and translating Ovid, reading about the numinous and researching Edward Hopper, modernism and romanticism, all fun, all core to what I’m about in this phase of my life, but the weather and the constant intellectual push has me wanting some relief.  The garden often provides that balance for me, but the rain has kept us out of there and it looks like it might for the next couple of days, too.

Those tomatoes and peppers are in some UPS warehouse, supposed to be here today.  Kate bought annuals, laid in some root stimulator to support the transplants after they move from pot to ground.  So we have planting to do.  She also found a possible source of garden help for us while shopping at the Green Barn.  That would be nice.  We could do much more if we had an extra hand for the heavy and tedious stuff.

These walls come.  Then they go.  Right now I’m feeling over-stimulated, I think, too much going in and not enough going out.  Rewriting is no help in that it involves a lot of analyzing, decision making, recrafting.  Doesn’t have the same juice as writing from scratch.

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

A Grounded Faith

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Beltane                                                                         Early Growth Moon

I walked through the garden alone, while the dew was still on the beet seedlings and apple blossoms.  Oh, wait.  That was roses, wasn’t it, from the old gospel tune.

If you want a moment of intense spirituality, go out in the morning, after a big rain, heat just beginning to soak into the soil, smell the odor of sanctity, in this case fertility, coming up from the plants and their medium, see the beets and kale and carrots and cucumbers and sugar snap peas on the rise, look at the onions and garlic and leeks filling out, getting greener, taller and fatter.  Take a stroll past the cherry blossoms, the pear and plum blossoms, the apple blossoms that came out yesterday, past the bee colony hard at work, over to the blueberries and check out the new growth on the hard pruned wild grapes.   The sand cherries and quince and even the currants with their modest, tiny green flowerettes, all showing to the bees their best and sweetest offerings.  Each petal, each flower, each stalk, each leaf is a miracle, a wonder of the evolutionary path on which that particular organism travels, its genetic ancientrail.

(our quince)

That walk, by the way, is not the walk of an individual, self-reliant and independent, but of a dependent creature glorying in the symbiotic relationship between his cells and these plants.  This is a community enterprise, the humans here, Kate and I, in partnership with the vegetables, the flowers, the fruit, the bees.

(our honeycrisp tree in bloom)

Which reminds me of the other partners, or co-habitaters at least, all the wild animals that live in the soil here, the gophers and earth worms and grubs and snails and voles, those who use the trees the squirrels, the woodpeckers, pileated and red-tailed, crows, hawks, Great Horned owls, robins, chickadees, blue birds, those who live on the land, under buildings and in brush piles the rabbits, chipmunks, woodchucks, opossums, raccoons, mice, the interlopers the wild turkeys, the deer, the coyote.  And of course, the woods themselves the ironwood trees, the poplar, ash, cottonwood, red oak, burr oak, cedar, spruce, yes even the black locust and the buckthorn.  The grass, yes, the dogwood yes, the amur maples yes, the alicanthus yes.

(a baby opossum in a dead tree in our woods)

We all share this land, to which we have the deed, but so little else.  When Kate and I leave, as we will one way or the other, the rest will continue, unaffected, unmoved by our passing.  Land is not for owning, but for cohabitation.  We know this, if we bother to look.

Garden, Literature, Weather +Climate

Root and Branch

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Beltane                                                                       Early Growth Moon

Water and heat.  Sun and soil.  Roots, stalks and leaves.  There you have it.  And we’ve got it this week.  Rain, rain, rain.  Then some heat.  Seeds germinating, bursting up, ready to transubstantiate.  All for the great cycle of life, churning, moving, flowing, surging.  I can feel it, smell it at this time of year.  And I love it.

Just finished Dan Brown’s Inferno.  If you read the NYT review, you will discover that Dan has a mundane talent for words.  And that’s true.  The reviews I read didn’t add, but they should, that he throws in potted art history and architectural criticism, not to mention some odd rant on transhumanism.  Yet, did you notice, I finished it.  Why?  Well, reading like a writer, this guy knows how to plot.  He can make you wonder what’s coming next.

He pulls off one big twist in this novel and it’s a dandy, but it feels very contrived even though he sucked me in completely with it.  That’s sort of the thing he’s got going, you can see the holes in his works, where I wondered were the editors who could have easily fixed much of this, but you pass them by to find out what happens next.  That’s story telling and it’s the true game which every writer plays.

(Lucifer, trapped in the 9th circle. Canto 34, lines 20–21  Gustave Dore)

Hey, listen!  Have I got something to tell you.  Clumsy sentences, wooden metaphors, filler pages, yes, they matter, but in the end not as much if you keep me interested.

coda next morning:  I will buy and read your book if you can entertain me.  Whether I remember it or learn from it and, most important, whether I will return to it, however, depends on those skills Dan Brown seems to shunt aside as unnecessary.  No, I won’t be re-reading any of his work.

Bees, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

Welcome, Growing Season!

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Beltane                                                                                  Early Growth Moon

We have turned the corner on winter it seems and now will begin the gradual invasion of a more southerly clime, with heat and humidity climbing like kudzu broken free from the Confederacy.  We are two distinct climates in one here in Minnesota.  The one for which we are best known and with which most of us here identify is the polar influenced late fall, winter and early spring.  Cold, often severe, snow and a long fallow time typify this one.

The second, one for which we are not known at all, but which we know well, is the briefer Northern summer in which all signs of that polar influence wane then disappear, giving way to temperatures often reaching the 90’s and sometimes into the 100’s–this has happened more lately of course–and dewpoints moist enough to make being outside like wrapping yourself in one of those turkey cooking bags sold around Thanksgiving and sticking yourself in your oven.

This means, the good part, that we can grow crops that mature in under 120 days or so, leeks stretch that, but I’ve done it consistently.  This is long enough to get most garden vegetables including tomatoes, peppers and others that require frost free conditions when planting. (which shortens the season).

The bees, long adapted to cold climate, are fine with these temperature swings; it’s the multivalent attack of pesticides, mites, loss of habitat, mite borne viruses or viruses aided by the mite weakened bee and reliance on bees not bred for hygienic behavior (cleaning out diseased larvae before they can infest the colony).

Our cherry, plum and pear trees all blossomed in Monday’s record heat.  The apples have not, yet, and I’m glad because once their blossoms fall I have to get out the ladder and bag each fruit set.  And, this year I’m getting more aggressive with the damned squirrels, those tree bandits.

It’s time to get out there and dig several holes in the ground, mash it up, put it in a plastic baggy and send it off to the lab.