Category Archives: Garden

Bees, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture

Considering the Lilies of Our Fields

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Winter                                                                  Moon of the Winter Solstice

Greens.  Peppers, especially those sweet hot peppers.  Leeks.  Garlic.  Onions.  Shallots.  Beets.  Collard greens.  Tomatoes.  Carrots.  Herbs.  Then, we’ll have the apples, plums, cherries, pears, raspberries, strawberries, goose berries, currants, wild grapes.  And honey.  That’s our plan for next year.  Most of it anyhow.  We’ll probably sneak a few things in just to see what happens.

Three or four years ago we began a gradual winding down of the flower beds as annual events, turning them gradually toward perennials following one another, growing on their own.  We have to do some major work this spring along those lines, especially the garden bed on the house side of our front path.  That one I’ll dig out, amend the soil, and replant altogether.  Gonna take out the Viburnum.  It’s never done well.

We have pruning to do yet this winter.  And I still have more trees to fell.  Winter’s a good time for both.

There is, too, the fire pit and its immediate surround.  Mark helped us on the fire pit when he was here.  This year it will become functional.

Indulging the mid-winter sport of garden planning.  An indoor prelude to the outdoor music of the growing season.

Garden, Great Wheel

Summer’s End

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Samhain                                                       Fallowturn Moon

All the leeks have left the earth.  I pulled them out, chopped off the roots and the upper green leaves, stripped off the outer layers of soil cover and put them in the bucket that held the pro-sweet syrup I fed the bees in September.  The carrots, too, have left the earth.  Fat, long, orange, soil clinging to the delicate roots sent out for more nutrients, they come up with the leaves intact.  Soup ingredients and ingredients for leek au gratin that I plan to make tomorrow.

After this final harvest, summer’s end at last for produce, I took my Gransfors-Bruks felling axe over to the elm tree, a small one.  It had begun to impinge on the gardens sunlight and Kate wanted it gone.  Warming up to my aerobics for the non-resistance days, I began to chop.

This took 20-25 minutes and saw me chopping, resting, breathing hard, chopping again, resting again.  At one point it seemed the tree would remain upright with only a small layer of wood holding it up.  Then, as trees do, it began to lean gracefully and fell slowly down, right where I had planned.  The ax work is intense.

Aging, Family, Garden, Health

Heavy Lifting

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Fall                                                                               Fallowturn Moon

Unanticipated consequences.  Kate’s upper body, shoulders and neck, screamed at her yesterday and are still doing it today.  Why?  She’s had to do all the (more or less) heavy lifting since my surgery.  One of my jobs in our marriage is to do the heavy lifting, literally. Now, I have my limits, too, of course, but they’re much higher than Kate’s.     Singapore

We’ve had to buy dogfood in 20 pound bags rather than 35 so I can carry it.  I made sure the water softener got it in, finally, before the surgery.  40 pounds per bag.  When Kate weeds, she takes the plant out roots, soil and all.  Puts them in plastic buckets.  They get heavy quick.  She had to empty her own this past month, using smaller buckets to empty the larger one.  I had the surgery in late September to be sure I could move honey supers if I needed to.  No need this year, unfortunately.

There’s also laundry and groceries.  Various items to take up and down stairs.  We’re done with our Excalibur (geesh) food dryer so it goes back in the basement.  Jars of canned tomatoes, peaches, apple butter go down, too.

Today I’m going to split a bag of composted manure in half so I can carry it down to the bed where I’m to plant the lilies and iris I have left to put in the ground.  I’ll be glad when this is done and I can get back to doing all these things plus my resistance work.  One more week.

Garden, Myth and Story, Weather +Climate

This and that

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Fall                                                            Fallowturn Moon

Put my 500 word essay on a reducing diet and got it down to 350.

Spent much of the day trying–again–to reorganize my space so there’s room for all my books plus art plus travel souvenirs plus computers, desk and me.

Kate and I harvested greens today, the last of them, and Kate put up another large batch of low country greens.  We’ve got onions and tomatoes in the refrigerator plus carrots and leeks in the ground.

Looked out back today, south, up toward the poplars, the tallest trees on our property.  A big gust of wind blew threw them and a rain of yellow-orange leaves flew into the air.  As the air filled with dancing, falling leaves, a bird flew through them, headed west.  With the gray sky it was a perfect fall moment.

Cinema and Television, Garden, Great Work

Off Mission

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Fall                                                                  New (Fallowturn) Moon

Was gonna plant lilies and iris but got stuck on the computers, shifting stuff around, getting a new computer setup, then into writing my essay for the mythology class.  Discovered after creating a 500 word piece that I’d read the instructions wrong, 250-350 words.  Condensing is another matter.  Will take some time tomorrow.

Then I went into the Sierra Club for the Legislative Awards.  Each year we give awards to our champions, up to 4, in the last session.  This year we gave them to Frank Hornstein, Alice Hausman and Bill Hiltey. Hiltey, who retired this year, gave a downbeat assessment of our odds in the future unless “reasonable” people get elected.  He sighted corporate control of legislators and the anti-science attitudes as difficult barriers to advances in environmental legislation.  The environment is, he said, and I believe, too, collateral damage of the economic and political culture we now have.

Cutting the cable news:  right now Kate and I are watching the Poirot series on Netflix.  There are 55 episodes and we can go through them at our own pace.  Never regretted the decision to bounce Comcast TV.  Well, with one exception.  Sometimes the picture quality suffers because of non-HD transmissions.  That’s too bad when we have a good HD setup.

Commentary on Religion, Garden

Matters Asian

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Fall                                                                   Harvest Moon

Having purchased lilies and visited the light shop where I had a question about halogen bulbs, I returned home.  The lily sale at the main Bachman’s is at the extreme southern end of Minneapolis and far from our home here in the outer suburban ring well north of Minneapolis.

Picked up many interesting lilies, sticking roughly with the purple theme of our garden, though there are some yellows and whites mixed in for contrast. The martagons, which I wanted, were $22 a bulb, too precious for my taste this morning.

On the drive I continued listening to the Teaching Company’s Great Minds of the Eastern Intellectual Tradition course.  Taught by a professor from UNC, Grant Hardy, this has been, by far, the greatest number of thinkers of whom I had never heard.  It’s a course I’m going to have to listen to twice and follow up with some reading to begin to have even a faint idea of what’s going on.

To give you an idea, here’s a name I’d never heard, Muhammad Iqbal.  He’s considered the foremost Urdu language poet, but was also a philosopher and religious thinker.  In particular his The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam sounds like a very helpful contribution to the current turmoil in the Muslim world.  It was written in 1930 and is Iqbal’s attempt to rethink Islam in light of modernity.  According to Hardy, it’s highly recommended reading.

 

Garden

A Lily Sale

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Fall                                                                            Harvest Moon


The annual fall lily sale by the Northstar Lily Society happens tomorrow.  I went to one of these sales several years ago at the Landscape Arboretum and bought lilies still blooming today.  Asiatic lilies and martagons, true lilies, like to stay in place and multiply.  These lilies are grown by Minnesota gardeners and are hardy in our climate, some of the varieties have been created by these growers and exist no where else.

Kate and I will replant our lily and iris bed with what we pick up tomorrow.  Fall planting is one of those gardening tasks I’ve learned to love over the years.  Kate laughs about it and reminds of that fateful October 31st evening in 1991 when I had waited too long to plant.  We lived on Edgcumbe Road then in St. Paul and I was in the front yard on my knees as the snow began to swirl and the kids came trick or treating.

If you were here then, you remember this storm.  We got two feet of snow over two days.  Since then, I’m more timely about my bulb planting.

Dogs, Garden

Fighting Drought

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Fall                                                                        Harvest Moon

 

Our irrigation company sends around alarmist circulars declaring potential severe injury or death for our sprinkler outside valve if we don’t have our system shut down early in October.  I’ve ignored this for several years now as the droughts have lingered on into fall and made more moisture deeper into the season a necessity, especially for trees, shrubs and perennials.

Even so, every once in a while, like this morning, I get up, go to the irrigation clock and punch manual start.  That way I can run water through the valve when temps are lowest while reassuring myself that it’s not locked up, frozen.

It’s working.  Yeah.

 

Garden, Weather +Climate

Thinking of Spring, Experiencing Early Winter

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Fall                                                           Harvest Moon

 

File this under what was he thinking?  I have a bulb order upstairs and it will need to go in the ground this week.  It will be cold this week.  Be careful what you wish for.  Both the bees and the bulbs need attention, not to mention that last $%#@! breach in the orchard fence by Vega the wander dog.

The bulbs can for sure go in under the 30 pound lifting restriction.  I prefer to dig with a shovel first, then plant; but, I can use a trowel, the old way.  Still, I don’t feel up to it today and the weather.  Well, it is changing.  And you won’t need a weatherman to tell you by tomorrow.

Local weather mage, Paul Douglas, says it’s fire and ice.  Fire watch over much of the state today, plowable snow possible in the north tomorrow.  Not to mention a possible 10″ of snow for Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Looks like Sunday is the bulb and bee day.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

Ora et Labora

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Fall                                                               Autumn Moon

Frost last night, but no freeze.  Either way, not too damaging for us.  Our harvest of above ground bearing vegetables and fruits is almost over.  Left are root crops like leeks and carrots, a few onions, some beets and a late crop of kale and chard.  All of these are frost hardy, even freeze hardy.

I have another leek dish to make, a leek gratin.  Will have several leeks left after that so I may have to return to the chicken pot pies or leek and potato soup.  Both are good.

All in all a good gardening year except for the failure of my bee management plan and the theft of our honeycrisp crop by those #$!%XXX squirrels.  Looks like I pulled out a save with the bees by going with over wintering.  Just no honey this year.  Next year.  Good thing Artemis honey is not a for profit business.

Ruth Hayden commented on our gardening and bees as not about poverty, but “…about creativity.”  In the broadest sense, yes.  In the particular though Kate enjoys the Iowa farm mom aspect of putting food by:  drying, canning, freezing, storing.  Both of us enjoy and I find essential the spiritual aspect of gardening, the close connection to the soil, to the source of our food, to the seasons, to the vagaries of weather and the changing of climate.

You might say our garden is our church, or, better really, our meditation and our sutra, our bible.  Ora et labora.  Work and prayer is the Benedictine motto.  I like it too.  Work as prayer, especially work with plants.