Category Archives: Garden

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.

 

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.