Category Archives: Garden

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.

Garden, Health, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Sowing A Fallow Field

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Spring                                                                                Bloodroot Moon

And the Latin keeps on coming.  I’m sure I’ll reach a plateau here at some point, but I seem to be learning faster and faster.  Of course, it’s taken me 3 years to get to this point, so it’s not like it’s an overnight phenomena.  Still, it feels good. Session with Greg tomorrow.

Jason plowed a fallow field, seeded it with dragon’s teeth and an army sprung up, only to take after each other with weapons grown with them.  Men.

My shoulder pain retreated a good bit while in DC.  That was after the third week of rest, including two before I left.  Today I started back with the same exercise routine, trying to discover exactly what’s going on so I can have good data for my visit with the orthopedist on April 17th.

Kate and I have on our calendars garden clean-up starting April 1.  April fools!  We’d have to shovel snow off it to get started.  We may straighten up the garden shed, clean and sharpen tools.  That we can do now.  Of course, I still have that book and file moving/removal project that’s about half done.  No dearth of things to do.

 

 

Garden

Garden Notes for later

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Imbolc                                                                             Valentine Moon

sugar snap peas

Green Thumb Tip
Sow seeds outdoors 3-4 weeks before last spring frost or as soon as soil can be worked. Tamp soil firmly; keep bed moist until emergence. Germination is slow and uneven, so be patient. Using spun polyester row covers may improve germination rates.

Cucumber, A & C Pickling OG

Green Thumb Tip
Sow seeds outdoors in 12″ diameter hills after the last frost when soil is warm. Space hills 6′ apart in all directions. Can also be started indoors 2-4 weeks before the last frost for an earlier harvest. Cucumbers benefit from consistent moisture. Provide support for vines to save space.
± 1,100 seeds/oz
Bees, Garden

Removing Roadways. Of the Treekind.

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Imbolc                                                             Valentine Moon

In two separate deconstructive moves the squirrel arboreal highway into our orchard disappeared.  First, last fall, the small ash that had a branch brushing the fence came down; the first tree felled with the new Gransfor Burks ax.  Today, the Swede saw cut off a long limb which also dangled invitingly near the fence and, literally, a hop and a jump away from our Honeycrisp tree.  This four-inch thick oak limb had to come off now to avoid the possible of oak wilt getting transmitted through the wound.  That could happen if the cut were made even in early spring and any time from then until the end of the growing season.

Now the little buggers will have to scale the fence, grab an apple, rescale the fence with the apple, not so easy, and carry the apple up a tree trunk to get into the branches.  Again, not so easy.  But, as we are well aware, hardly impossible.  Squirrels, rabbits, deer, turkeys and dogs all create serious problems for the exurban gardener, problems to which they, I’ve discovered, no permanent solutions, only barriers that can restrict to our moveable feasts of fruit and vegetable.

Also, sadly, I checked the hive that had live bees back in January.  They are now dead.  My management practices were not the best last year, so I imagine I didn’t help them much, but it’s still disheartening.

 

Aging, Dreams, Family, Garden, Latin, Our Land and Home, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

The Life Ahead

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Imbolc                                                                Valentine Moon

So.  66.  Tomorrow.  How that long-haired, green book bag carrying, dope smoking political radical could be turning 66 is, I admit, a puzzle.  Yes, he looks a bit different in the mirror.  Well, ok, quite a bit different.  Instead of long hair, little hair.  Instead of the book bag, a kindle.  Not smoking at all.  Hmmm, still a radical though.  Guess the other stuff is detritus of past fashion.

After passing the last great social milestone before the final one, that is, signing up for Medicare, my life has taken on a new cast.  I’ve written about it here, a change that came gradually but with a strange persistence.  That new cast has home, writing, Latin and friends as its core.  It entails reduced traveling into the city, a much lower profile in terms of volunteer work in either politics or the arts.  A word that sums it for me is, quieter.

Quieter does not mean less energetic or engaged, rather it signals a shift in focus toward quieter pursuits:  more reading, more writing, more scholarship, more time with domestic life.  Unlike the pope I do not intend to give up my beloved theological writing. (Kate believes he’s suffering from dementia.)  I intend rather a full-on pursuit of the writing life, novels and short stories, a text on Reimagining Faith.  This full-on pursuit means active and vigorous attention to marketing.

The primary age related driver in this change is greater awareness of a compressed time horizon, not any infirmity.  How many healthy years will I have?  Unknown, though I do actively care for myself.  Still, the years will not be kind, no matter what I do.  So, I had best get my licks in now, while I can still work at my optimum.

So, the man turning 66 has a different life ahead of him than did the man turning 65.   An exciting and challenging life.

 

Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work, Holidays, Our Land and Home

Pruning Weather

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Imbolc                                                                   Valentine Moon

Last of the furnace vendors.  Get your hot one, right here!  Red hot and cozy!  Discounted. Tax credited.  Rebate worthy.

We’ve made a decision.  We’ll go with Centerpoint, a dual-stage, variable speed motor operating at 95% or 96.5% efficiency.  A bit more with these options but they optimize the conservation of both natural gas and electricity.  Once we get it in that’s one less matter we’ll have to worry about over the next few years.  A good thing.

After Brad left, an interesting guy, knowledgeable about food as a former catering manager for Lunds, we put on our winter gear.  I got out the Sorel’s and clapped my work gloves on, wool hat and down vest.  Kate got ready.  She has less stringent requirements for work in the cold than I do.

Outside in the deep snow, bright with a clear day’s sun, we first cut back to the ground all the raspberries.  In clearing the snow with a coal shovel, I discovered that I could clear snow and prune in the same motion.  Kate went in afterward and cleaned up.

When I finished in the raspberries, I went to the tangle of grapevines that have grown on our front 6-foot chain link fence.  Originally a Celt (our first and dearest Irish Wolfhound) escape prevent barrier, it now serves mainly to give us an ample supply of wild grapes in the fall thanks to the volunteer vines.  Last summer though there were few grapes.

Lots of leaves and vine, not many fruit.  We’d never pruned it before, or if we did, it was a while ago, so it had overgrown.  I whacked away at the orchard side today;  I’ll finish it tomorrow.  Kate got after the bittersweet.  It was a good day for this work.

Back inside I had a snack of bacon and blue cheese with chestnut flower honey, the first installment in my birthday gift, a monthly specialty bacon club.  How cool is that?  Thanks, Kate.