Category Archives: Garden

Garden, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

A Good Day, Even If It Is 95

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Beltane                                                                         Early Growth Moon

Got outside around mid-day and planted chard, kale and carrots.  Need to get a second round of beets in the ground, too.  We’re well under way now, with beets emerging, leeks going well, garlic beginning to curl skyward though a bit behind, onions still a bit pale at the top, but progressing.  No bees today due to the cloudy morning, the best time to check on them, but not when its cloudy and rainy.  So tomorrow.

Using the time, the mornings for Missing, writing and revising in turn, trying to remember all the pieces.  A little difficult.  Like juggling chainsaws, bowling pins, feathers and knives.

Not unlike the afternoon’s translating.   Holding those words and ideas in the air, not committing, or at least not over-committing, to a particular meaning until all the pieces have been considered.  Mentally tired.

Garden, Great Work

Soil

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Beltane                                                                            Early Growth Moon

The soil temps have exceeded 50 so I’ve got to get out there with the carrots and chard, hoping the tomatoes and peppers come soon.  They need to get in the ground.  I’m going to look at soil improvement over the next few years.  I’ve always done some amendments, composted manure goes on all my beds at the end of the growing season and I often lay it down as mulch once the temps get hot, then cover it with leaves, but I’ve not done any other fertilizing or soil supplementing, largely because I grow organic and I just don’t understand the organic soil supplement process.

Bill Schmidt hooked me up with some e-mails from an outfit in Farmington, International Ag Labs, and their stuff looks doable, though still somewhat complex for me.  I’ll need to look into it further, but it seems to have a focus that makes sense to me.  The basic thrust? Biosustainability created through soil improvement toward optimum soil health.  When you see the thin layer that is our atmosphere, the post below with the astronaut video, and then when you consider that it is the top six inches or so of soil that make plant life possible, you begin to understand how tiny is our margin of safety.

We can take active steps that ensure a healthy atmosphere and a healthy topsoil, why wouldn’t we do that?

 

Bees, Garden, Our Land and Home, permaculture

Over the Years

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Beltane                                                                     New (Early Growth) Moon

“When you recover or discover something that nourishes your soul and brings joy, care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life.”

— Jean Shinoda Bolen 

A nice rain, drizzly and over a few hours.  The irrigation folks are coming out on Monday to start up our system.  We’re under way for year 19 at Artemis Hives and Gardens.  We’ve never aspired to large scale production or to garden beautiful flower gardening, but we’ve kept at improving our property over the years, starting when we hired a landscape architect and Otten Brothers Nursery to give us key features even before we moved into this house.

They graded, installed beds, planted trees, shrubs and some flowers, created the terraced garden in the back and laid in the boulder walls.  Over the course of the next year or two I cut down the scrub black locust trees to clear a large area in our back, an area that would eventually become our orchard, our vegetable garden and a general purpose back yard with the grandkids playhouse, a machine shed and a garden shed.

Later we had the permaculture folks, Ecological Gardens, put in our orchard, then they added plantings to our vegetable garden.  We’ve done a good deal with our land over the years, adding value incrementally.  The bees came along five years ago with the assistance of a friend of Kate’s from her work.

With each addition we’ve increased the level of our interaction with the land here in Andover, on the Great Anoka Sand Plain.  We added first vegetable production that Kate put in, then much more with our raised beds and finally the fruit trees, blueberry and raspberry and elderberry and currant and sand cherry bushes.  Each year we also take wild grapes from the vines native to our small woods.

It’s a good bit of work from May to October, but not overwhelming–except for that time period with the back–and it gives us part of our own food supply.  In the fall we harvest the honey, then Kate cans, freezes and dries.

Not to mention all the beautiful flowers we have all year.

 

Commentary on Religion, Garden, Great Wheel, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Weather +Climate

Growing Up

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Beltane                                                                   New (Early Growth) Moon

Cold, wet and occasionally sunny the short Minnesota growing season has finally begun.  Our cold weather planting is done, sometime in the next week we’ll put in our tomatoes and peppers.  Then, we wait for the sun to warm the soil, the rain to nourish the roots, carrying nutrients from the soil into the plants, elevatoring it up to the leaves where that true, abundant and necessary miracle photosynthesis will transubstantiate solar energy into the real body and blood.  Each leaf a priest, each plant a diocese.  A garden the whole catholic universe.

It is in here, somewhere, that reimagining faith will finally come home, right down here at that literally elemental level where the chemicals and elements of earth, soldered by sunlight make the essentials for life.  No photosynthesis, no life, at least on the surface of the planet where we live.  I understand there are different processes in the deep sea vents, strange creatures with arsenic in their veins, but up here, in the green world, we depend on–what a weak word–we live or die by this vegetative marvel.

It’s not as if there might not be gods, there may be.  There may be.  But I can think of no god that does more to sustain my life than the least of the leaves.  Here’s the nexus where sin and redemption must occur.  Sin makes our planet less hospitable for these; redemption conserves the planet’s soil, assures the availability of sun light.

(Gods Pantheon.  Ratteau)

Think of the crucifixion each year as soils leach out their nutrients, become so friable that they can blow away in the wind.  Think of the top soil, made fertile over hundreds of years, wasted in a season or two.  Think of the aquifers, draining themselves for our sake with no hope of replenishment in a hundred hundred human lifetimes.

How will we roll away the stone on this deep crime?  Who will stand at the tomb, that fine rising’ up mornin’, when the world cares for its soils and its forests and its lakes and its streams as if life of very life could not do without them?  Someday.  I hope.  Someday.

Art and Culture, Garden, Politics, Third Phase

Pruning. Good-Bye to the MIA

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Beltane                                                                             Planting Moon

Pruning allows a shrub or tree to put its energy into productive growth whether it is a stronger trunk or better fruit.  It’s important to prune when a plant gets overgrown or has grown in ways that cut off the flow of air through the branches.  It’s also important to keep a tree, especially fruit trees, at productive sizes, ones where the tree puts its energy into apples, cherries, plums and where the fruit can be harvested easily.

This common garden activity, however, often confronts the gardener with a task for which they feel ill prepared and perhaps a bit nervous.  If I prune too much, will I kill the plant?  You can.  What do I take off?  Why?  It’s not unusual for home gardeners to skip this chore because it feels laden with risk while doing nothing seems to avoid harm.

The third phase requires pruning.  Leaving a job or a career is an act of pruning.  A move to a smaller home is an act of pruning.  Deciding which volunteer activities promote life and which encumber can proceed an act of pruning.

Last year I set aside my political work with the Sierra Club.  Today I have set aside my work at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.  This is pruning, too, and the kind of pruning necessary at this point for me.

The branches that I want to grow strong are my writing and my translation of Ovid.  They both require regular, sustained hours on a week by week basis.  Both the Sierra Club and the MIA took me away from that concentration.

These were not decisions I made likely, nor are they decisions I made without a sense of loss. In the case of the Sierra Club I gave up my sense of political agency, long a hallmark of my life.  With the MIA I’m giving up a chance to be with kids and adults on tours and the regular stimulation of art in my life.  These are not trivial for me.

Yet.  In this last phase of life I want to focus my efforts in ways that give me a chance to succeed, instead of scattering them in the interest of multiple passions.

 

Garden, Health

And Now For Some Rain. Please.

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Spring                                                              Planting Moon

Thunder, a quick shower.  Rain tonight, I hope.  Back to wanting the weather to turn seasonal, open the spigots, irrigate the crops.  Our irrigation system is not turned on yet and we have no way to get water to the onion sets, leeks, beets, cucumbers and sugar snap peas we’ve placed in the soil.  They need it.

My mood has begun to rise.  As the back pain recedes (far from gone, but no longer the first thing I think about when I move) and my body returns to a rested state after the stress of the last week, my work begins to come to the fore.  I’ve set aside the Ovid, Missing, exercising, Reimagining for time and space to heal.  It was necessary and good.

Now though those higher level needs, self-actualization, begin to kick back in, assert their right to time and attention.  And I’m glad they do.  Tomorrow I should be back at it, and, in case you hadn’t already noticed this, being back at it is where I like to be.

We’re going to the production and broadcast of a radio drama at the Artist’s Quarter tonight:  Jazz Noir.  I mentioned it earlier in the week.  This is the first of 5. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Dreams, Garden, Great Wheel

A Conductor Filled With Rain

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Spring                                                                             Planting Moon

As I pushed leek plants into the soil this morning, I saw my dream night in a different way. Each spring the dead earth, the decayed plants and animal carcasses join together, strike up a symphony for life that waits only the warmth of the audience hall and a conductor filled with rain.

Then, that terrible moment of late fall or early winter when everything becomes dormant, goes chthonic, or dies, gives witness to its eventual purpose.   A work of music so vital, so alive that it will fuel a whole growing season, bringing movement after movement after movement until the applause dies down in late October.

(Persephone_Opens_Likon_Mystikon–a mystic winnowing fan.)

That icy hand of death in whose grasp I felt my soul earlier can be seen, perhaps ought to be seen, as the hand that turns the compost barrel, keeping the fertile loam of humanity rich and ready for the next season.  A season in which I can rise again, vital and alive, a movement, another movement, in another season.

These times between the seasons have abundant mythological content, gathered in by poet harvesters and folklore gleaners, just so we will not forget what is so obvious.  That death is not an end, not an end no more than birth is a beginning.  They are, rather, rests in the music of the spheres.

Dogs, Garden, Travel

Grounded. At last.

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Spring                                                                       Planting Moon

Yes!  Planted under the planting moon even if I couldn’t get the bloodroot up for the bloodroot moon.

We have Wally and Big Daddy onions in, 100 sets each.  Three rows of beets:  Bull’s Blood, Early Blood and Golden.  Pickling cucumbers and Dwarf Gray Sugar Snap Peas.  Of course there was bed prep, too.

With Kate and I wandering around holding this limb and that a bit tenderly I kept getting the image of a dinner bell, fried chicken and mashed potatoes, perhaps someone playing a little Stephen Foster on the grand piano.

Of all the gardening chores, planting is the most magical to me.  That tiny seed.  A beet, a cucumber, a pea.  Those small plants, a fat onion, or a thick leek.  Couldn’t plant the leeks today because the ground is still frozen at about 3 inches down.  How about that?  April 27th.

Had to cancel the Chicago trip due to Kona’s vet bills.  Keeping dogs is a choice and keeping 4 is the same choice 4 times over in terms of food and care.  Choices I have made and make cheerfully.

Garden, Politics, Third Phase, US History

Pioneers

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Spring                                                                        Planting Moon

Finally, my activities and the turning of the Great Wheel will synch up.  Gonna plant cold weather crops today.  The soil’s still cold though the air will warm this week, only to cool down again next.  It’s important to remember that our average last frost date is the beginning of the second week of May and we haven’t gotten there yet.  No transplants outside yet.

Except.  The leek and onion I got in the mail Thursday and Friday.

Kate and I will be a pair out there today, trying to figure out which of us should do what to lessen the likelihood of pain.

As the planting has approached, I’ve pondered, as I have often, the fate of pioneers* who wrenched a back, had disc problems, sprained an ankle, broke an arm at the wrong time of year.  Not that there’s a right time of year, but some times are worse than others.  Planting and harvesting would be terrible times to have a significant physical impairment.  Can you imagine?  Your life and perhaps your family’s depends on planting this year’s crop.

What is today a nuisance, a bother, something to wait out, could have been literally fatal, and not just for one.  I’m sure everybody pitched in, did what they could, but sexual dimorphism and physical development from child to adult would often mean some work simply couldn’t be done.

A bleak prospect.

I can load up on Ultram, lace up the backbrace and then, if necessary, go to the grocery store and buy my vegetables.  The options are better today.

 

*And, yes, I recognize the irony between the pioneers and the Native Americans, the latter  having developed their styles of living off the land in accordance with the way the land provided, at least for the most part.  The pioneers, most of them anyhow, were usually poor folks hunting for a place to live and raise a family.  This phenomenon of the poor spreading out to the places of least convenience continues in our day.

I no longer know how to easily understand the right and wrong of it all.  Yes, the Indian Wars were wrong.  Of course.  And the associated Indian schools and all of it.  Wrong.

The pioneers, though?  They don’t seem wrong to me, perhaps not right in a larger, probably undiscernible sense (for them), but not wrong.  At least not most.  Most were Okies.  Cox’s army.  Peasant class folks hungering for a chance.  For them, I have a lot of empathy.

The question today is not how to go back and redo the past. Rather, it is how to discern the lines that will allow us all to walk into the future together, as friends and allies.

Garden, Great Wheel, Poetry

Soon, I Imagine

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Spring                                                                                                      Bloodroot Moon

The Daffodils
by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A Poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed–and gazed–but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.