Category Archives: Garden

Garden, Memories, Weather +Climate

Down to Here, Down to There…

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Fall                                                                       Harvest Moon

Kate went, oooh!  What?  She came into the workshop bearing a foot long hank of hair, still gathered in a small rubber band.  Mine.  From the day I decided to stop wearing my hair long.  The thing is.  This is beautiful, auburn hair.  It still has sheen and highlights.  Boy, that must have been a while ago.

Now.  Would have been fit for the gray pony tail radio hour.  Nothing but Jefferson Airplane, early Stones and Led Zepplin.  And my hair.

So ends the play, Hair! in its local run.

Got out the sledge hammer, carried snow fence stakes to the orchard, dug a small pit, pounded one stake into the ground and put a plastic covered wire round the leaning tree of Zestra, pulled and secured.  Pretty good, but it took a two by four wedged in the earth coming from the other direction to secure the tree upright.  Another stake and more plastic coated wire around another leaning apple tree.

Inside I coarsely chopped onions, potatoes, leeks, carrots and simmered them in homemade vegetable broth with a stick of butter and lots of pepper.  25 minutes later I added 6 pealed tomatoes, quartered, a half pound of mushrooms and simmered 10 minutes more.  Winter vegetable soup.

Kate gathered herbs and the last of the tomatoes.  We’ll have to cover the peppers.  Freeze warning tonight:  25-32 degrees.  She also picked raspberries and the leeks I needed for the winter vegetable soup.

(Minnesota freeze map, Sept. 22, 2012)

She also cleaned and stored our Zestra crop.  60 or 70 apples.  The bagged apples were in much better shape than the non-bagged ones.  That was on purpose to see if bagging really helped.  It’s such a pain I wanted to know for sure.

Garden, Great Wheel, Politics

Apples and the Equinox

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Lugnasa (Fall Eve)                                                 Autumn Moon

“O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained
With the blood of the grape, pass not,
but sit
Beneath my shady roof, there thou may’st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe;
And all the daughters of the year shall dance,
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers. ”
–   William Blake, To Autumn 

Tomorrow at 9:49 we move into liturgical fall (as opposed to meteorological fall).  I’m partial to the liturgical fall, especially with its astronomical significance.  The sun comes up on the equatorial plane–as projected 93 million miles plus into space of course.  Otherwise, crispy critters.  Full entry tomorrow.

The campaign moves on, annoying me less than many because we cut the cord, or the coaxial, with Comcast and no longer have cable television.  Though we do have a basic component of broadcast channels, we never watch them (they bring down the cost of the broad band service) and thus miss the television political ads.

That does not mean we miss out on television shows altogether though since subscriptions to Netflix streaming and Hulu mean many of them are available to us, just not CBS programs.  BFD.  My current new favorite is Grimm, a weekly tale of a Portland detective’s life as a homicide investigator and a Grimm who has the family vocation of seeing and vanquishing fairy tale creatures and/or learning to live with them.

Kate and I went around the outside this afternoon identifying tasks that need to be done.  What needs pruning, weeding, transplanting.  What we want in next year’s vegetable garden and where to plant it.  Where the iris and the lilies and the tulips I buy will go.  What needs to come out altogether.  The yews out front, for example.  Long past their prime and now tall enough to hide the house.

I harvested the apples off the leaning tree of Zestar.  Boy, are they good.  A light, sweet flavor that seems almost unapple like.  This is the tree that needs shoring up.  Not a hundred percent sure how to do that.  Stakes and wires are one option, but with our sandy soil I’m not confident the stakes will hold at a high enough tension.  May have to support it from the front and hold it in place with stakes.

 

 

Cooking, Garden, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Head and Hands

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Lugnasa                                                                      Autumn Moon

Worked my head into a fuzzy place today.  Just couldn’t go further, so I worked out.  That always helps.

Tomorrow is a Latin morning with my tutor at 11:00 AM.  Before I meet with him, I have to review my Ovid, the last of the Philemon and Baucis, 14 verses.  I reviewed the Aeneid this afternoon, 9 verses there.  This crop, in both authors, was difficult.

This weekend is a garden weekend.  The orchard, shoring up a leaning apple tree.  It’s a Zestar and we had two apples from it today.  Boy, are they good.  I plan to harvest the tree before we begin the shoring up.  These are mostly bagged and, for some reason, the squirrels have left them alone.  Maybe they’re honeycrisp connoiseurs?

We’re going to prepare for winter pruning, decide the remaining tasks before the cold and get on the priority ones.

There’s one more soup to make, a winter vegetable that will use our onions, leeks, carrots and tomatoes at least.  Our frozen soups. pot pies and vegetables have begun to use up the available space in our freezer so one task is to clean out the old and the no longer desirable to make room.  That will happen over the weekend, too.

Bees, Dogs, Garden, Our Land and Home

Animal Ironies

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Lugnasa                                                                   Garlic Planting Moon

Animal ironies.

5 years ago when we put in the orchard Vega and Rigel took it upon themselves to shred the netaphim irrigation system.  We built a fence around the orchard to keep them out.  This was around the time I installed an electric fence to keep Rigel inside the chain link fence that goes all round our woods and most of our property.

Of late, squirrels have taken to jumping off a small ash, onto the top run of the split rail fence and from there on to our honeycrisp tree.  This was the first year the tree produced much fruit and we anticipated them.  So did the squirrels.  I saw one squirrel, with an apple twice as big as his head, leap from the apple tree onto the rail, from the rail onto the ash, all the time carrying this huge apple.  After that he disappeared among the oaks.

Also, this year seems to be a gopher year.  They come in waves, some years almost none, others they seem to be everywhere.  This is an everywhere year.  In pursuit (I think) of the underground rodent, Vega and Rigel have decided to join local 147 of the Sandhogs after seeing this picture and admiring the work of their NYC brethren.

They’re hoping for new tunneling tips from their brothers.

Also, yesterday Kate took Gertie, our German shorthair into the vet.  Her left rear leg had not gotten better after a course of antibiotics to eliminate a possible Rocky Mountain Spotted fever infection.  Gertie began her doggy life running around in the Rocky Mountains outside of Denver.

New diagnosis, confirmed on X-ray?  Spinal stenosis effecting the 10th vertebrae.  Just like her mommy.  She’s now on a course of steroids to shrink the swelling, hopefully in a month or so.

One last animal irony.  After my decision a year ago to shift bee management practices, taking only the honey the bees could produce in a year, rather than trying to overwinter the colonies, I have been forced–by the bees–back to the U’s original management strategy.

That is, buy packaged bees one year.  Watch over them and help them thrive.  Make sure they have enough honey to survive the winter.  Divide them the next spring, take all the honey from the parent colony and repeat the process with the child colonies.

Once the bees educated me to the soundness of this strategy I can now declare this year a success since I believe both colonies will go into the winter with sufficient honey.  So much for my plans.  Bees laugh at the plans of man.

Garden, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

TGIF

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Lugnasa                                                           Garlic Planting Moon

A Latin day, this time with work on both Ovid and Virgil.  Aeneid’s first 7 verses, its first sentence with the famous opening phrase, I sing of arms and the man.   Greg sees a lot of progress in my work.  It’s as if some dam broke a couple of months ago when I began using phrases to translate rather than whole sentences.  The benefit of hanging in there.   (philemon_baucis_bramantino)

The most important thing I can do is to read more and more.  That ups my vocabulary, increases my facility with grammar and adds to my foundation in written Latin literature.

When I hit Friday afternoon on a week, I feel like the work week is over.  Tours on Thursday and Latin all Friday morning, then a quiet time.

Tomorrow the garlic goes in the ground, the potatoes come out and I check the bees to see how the feeding is going.  It will be a pleasure to work outside, as a change from all this head work, and in weather beginning to cool.  The nights are better now, much better.

I’m also looking forward to getting back to Missing and the revision.  This last three days: pre-op physical on Wednesday, tours on Thursday and Latin today has not left me with time for it.

Cooking, Garden

In August, Thinking of January

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Lugnasa                                                               Garlic Planting Moon

The harvest and preservation season continues apace.  This morning I made a leek/tomato soup using 18 of our own leeks, two of our tomatoes and six of the ones we purchased yesterday at Green Barn, also locally grown.  This afternoon I’ll make another four chicken-leek pot pies for freezing and tomorrow a batch of chicken noodle soup and at least one, if not two, sugar cream pies.

Sugar cream pies are a Hoosier tradition and one of my favorites.  On a webpage devoted to the history of the sugar cream pie in Indiana it referred to the recipe as a desperation one, a recipe used when all the other stores had been used up.  Could be.  The recipes, though they vary a bit, all call for butter, cream and sugar.  Some of them that’s the whole recipe.  Finger stir–so as not to whip the cream–pop in the oven.

Desperation never tasted so good.

So we’re in August here in Andover, thinking of December and January.  The house smells great.  Kate’s making corn relish,

Garden, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Garlic

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Lugnasa                                                            Garlic Planting Moon

Ordered some more garlic from Seed Savers.  Drying the small garlic slices preserves the garlic volatiles and keeps the garlic from rotting.  Good deal.  We’ll make more next year.  Kate’s going to try drying leeks, too.  We have an abundance of leeks.  I was a bit over eager when I hit the garden store in May.  Leek/tomato soup, leek/potato soup, more chicken pot pies, some chicken noodle soup.

Crushed the Colorado beetles.  Seems harsh.  Felt harsh.  But gardening demands choosing sides.  For the plants and against their attackers.  This is what I’ve called previously switching over to Mr. MacGregor.  There are, though, limits.  At least for me.  For instance, I will not go to pesticides, so if an infestation overcomes my manual or less lethal intervention, so be it.

Also picked our entire 6 apple Zestar crop today.  Apples are a couple of weeks ahead of schedule.

All but the last chapter of Missing now summarized and another 6 verses of Philemon and Baucis done.  A good day.

Art and Culture, Friends, Garden, Politics, Third Phase

In the Jungles of Northern Andover

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Lugnasa                                                        Garlic Planting Moon

Living out here, in the wilds of exurban Andover is very peaceful.  Quiet, except for the neighbors who occasionally try out their motorcycles and dirt bikes on our street–not all that often.  Spacious, we have one hectare or 2.5 acres with woods, flower and vegetable beds and an orchard, plus a large reasonably useless yard.  Roomy, with rooms for Kate’s sewing and quilting, exercise, reading and for my writing and study.  Memories, we’ve been here 18 years and have many birthdays, Thanksgivings and holidays in our past plus visits from the kids and grandkids and all the dogs.

Yet peaceful has its limits.  When we met last night with all the Woolly wives and discussed books on a clear, comfortable evening, it was wonderful.  The buzz, the casual conversation, the different personalities.  People I’ve known for years, shared intimate parts of their lives.  That we don’t have out here.

I’ve never found my people in Anoka County, though I love it out here.  That’s partly because I’ve refused to give up my urban connections, working in politics for the Sierra Club, volunteering at the MIA, visiting museums, meeting with the Woollies.  It’s partly because I’m an introvert and starting over with new friends is tough for me.  It’s partly because my politics don’t have company here.

I suppose another way to look at this is that I have the best of both worlds, a peaceful refuge and cosmopolitan friends.  I’ll stick with that one for now.

 

 

 

Garden, Writing

Working

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Lugnasa                                                         Garlic Planting Moon

Down to the last book, of three, in Missing, chapter summaries complete in the first two.  A steady work, reacquainting me with the book, giving a reread not focused on revision quite yet.  That will come after the summaries and looking at the character and location files.

My interest in gardening, which always flags in late July, early August due partly to the heat and partly to the repetitious nature of the tasks, picks up again near the end of August, about now, as harvest and planning for next year becomes more the work at hand.

Already planning more vegetables in the front yard and what to do with the potato spot next year.  These new beds are important because the main vegetable garden has begun to be overtaken by maturing trees and we don’t have that any full sun locations.

Cooking, Garden, Weather +Climate

Ancient Necessity

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Lugnasa                                                                  New (Garlic Planting) Moon

This afternoon as Kate and I drove out for a late lunch, the clouds were high cirrus, horse-tails against a robin’s egg sky.  The angle of the sun tells the story of seasonal procession and the temperature hinted at fall days still a ways ahead.  We’ve lost 97 minutes of daylight, having long ago turned the corner headed toward the winter solstice.

A lot of the garden activity now happens inside the house.  Herb and fruit drying, soup making, soon canning.  These are the harvest months of August, September and October.  No, we don’t subsist based on our garden’s produce, but eat it we do, over most of the year, either directly from the garden or laid by in any of various methods.  In a sense we only continue the long Midwestern cultural tradition laid down by ancient necessity, the life or death need to eat during the cold months.

Our harvest and preserving echoes that tradition since necessity long ago gave way to grocery stores and farmer’s markets, but in that echo we can hear the voices of our grandmothers and our grandfathers as they worked in the fields, filled the farm kitchen with the heat of their cooking, preparing themselves and their family for winter.

Lack of necessity, however, does not mean lack of need.  I believe there is a need for us to plant a seed, or nurture a transplant, to care for a tree or bush or a flower.  And more.  To gain in reciprocity something from that nurture: a fruit, a vegetable, some sustenance.  And more.  To use that food on our own tables, to create the magic of the true transubstantiation, flesh of the earth, blood of the sun, work of the plant made into our body.

This is an ancient necessity, to know this transformation from plant to food.  Why?  Because no matter our physical location, it is still and will be for the foreseeable future the source of everything we eat.  If we do not understand it, we will not protect it.  If we do not protect this source, we are in danger of losing it.  Ancient.  Necessity.