Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Croci
Category Archives: Garden
Stuff Done
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
AC cleaned out. Limbs moved and put into brushpiles. Weed prevention completed.
Muscles a little achy, but feelin’ good. Bees this afternoon. Then a Latin day tomorrow.
Working outdoors at this pace at 65, a blessing. I’m ready to go longer.
With Kate’s sprucing up, the onions, leeks, shallots and garlic growing, asparagus popping up, rhubarb going strong, daffodils in bloom plus a few croci, bees buzzing about the cherry and apple and pear blossoms, the vitality of our home bursts out from every square inch.
The Outdoor Season, Well and Truly Begun
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Kate got a nasty cellulitis on her left arm. Probably from scratches incurred while vigorously pruning and weeding. Spring clean up. It swelled up, got hot and sent her to the urgent care last night, the doctor visiting her own clinic for treatment. They gave her a couple of jabs of rocephin, prescribed some sulfa and sent her home.
After a restless night, she got up and drove out to the arboretum (today) for a class on fruit tree pruning. She’s a Viking, moving past the pain, just as she has from the first days of our life together. I’m no where near as stoic.
Later on today I’ll check on our new colleagues, making sure they’re clustered under the feeder pail, then I’ll leave them alone until next Friday. Next Friday I’ll go in and check for larvae. Finding larvae means the queen has gone to work laying eggs and the colonies will be queen right. After that, it’s the normal hive checks, hive box rotations and following their life as the colony builds up to full strength.
The outdoor season is well and truly underway. Got 2.5 pounds of potatoes from Seed Savers yesterday. I’ll supplement them with sprouts from leftover potatoes of last year’s crop and, possibly, a few from Green Barn, up the road a piece near Isanti. That bed has to be dug and amended.
Also on today’s docket. Move the large limbs I pruned a month ago onto brush piles, clear out the work Kate did yesterday, clean off the AC and do some weed prevention. That’s enough for today.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Feeling directionless. Not down, just aside from forward motion.
Spent the weekend hands in the garden, planting beets, leeks, shallots, green onions, yellow onions, moving plant matter pruned or dug up by Kate. That all feels good, the growing season again, seeds again, the sun again, the sky and the clouds again. Pressing the beet seeds into the ground, placing the leek transplants tenderly against the trenches side, pushing the yellow onion sets into the sides of our side trap, like cloves in an orange. All good.
Still. The book. Not done. The Sierra Club. Not finished. Tours disappointing. Reimagining faith on a furlow after the push to get the Groveland presentation done. Work with photoshop and inDesign still potential.
Summer’s come and gone already. Now it’s fall. Hard freeze tonight. Maybe spring will return next week and summer come the week after that but right now the weather seems directionless, too.
Thought I had another two weeks before the bees came, but now the word is that they’ll be here on Saturday. That means work during the week that I’d planned to do on the weekend. That sort of thing.
A sort of malaise.
Maybe it’s that damn jockey trying to reclaim his seat.
Creating Self
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” by George Bernard Shaw
Later today, beets blood, bull and golden and carrots, Nantes and one lone blueberry to replace a dead plant. I think about it, this planting and nourishing, watching and waiting, then harvesting and preserving and eating, and I feel a part of my life being created. This part gets its hands dirty, relishes the seasons and their graces, their vagaries. This part looks at shades of green, knows this most important color as a friend and ally.
Another part, this one quiet and inward, wanders the halls of art museums, galleries, image collections on the internet and in books. Looking. Seeing. No dirty hands here. Visual contact. Delight in a curve, a color, an image, a remaking of tradition, new ways of perceiving. This one knows the spread of art from Chauvet Caves to MOMA and delights in each creative moment.
Then the father. And husband. The family guy. Cousins, aunts, uncles. Grandpop. One in a line. A link between that great one-celled ancestor and the transformation of our species that is yet to come. Love not abstract but concrete and timeless. Walking with children and their children, walking on toward some unknown future. Together. That’s a part.
A noisy chunk, this one involved in struggle, voicing the cries of the poor, the victims, Continue reading Creating Self
A Force of Nature
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
In these months, when I go to bed, the full moon shines in our bedroom window. It keeps me awake sometimes, gazing at it, feeling it, absorbing the ancient wisdom it offers. All those prayers and hopes and wishes flung its way over the millennia.
The last two nights the full bee hiving moon has lit up the magnolia. Its white blossoms have begun to droop and fall away but in the glow of the moon its fire blazes up again, a quiet torch illuminating the dark.
It’s cherry blossom time too. One of our cherries blossomed yesterday afternoon,
Kate has been pruning, weeding, clearing away debris as I visited the eye doc, did tours and today worked on Latin. She’s a full gardener now with her own expertise tied to her energy, her wonderful work. She gets a lot done. A lot. And always comes inside with a sense of having left it all in the orchard or the vegetable garden or among the perennials.
Meanwhile I’ve kept glaucoma in check, showed objects related to communication and swept through 14 verses of Metamorphoses, Book III. Work in its way, of course, but I can’t say I prosecute it with the same vigor as Kate. She’s a force of nature, out in nature.
Mickman’s comes on Monday to start up our irrigation system. We need the water to support the veggies that we plant. Especially in this drought. On Wednesday when I went to the eye doc I stopped by Mother Earth Gardens, across from the Riverview Theatre.
We now have four six packs of leeks, one of shallots, one of green onions and pots of rosemary, cilantro and basil. The last couple of years I’ve started these myself, but not this year. They won’t go in the ground until Sunday or Monday, so they can get watered right from the start.
Lots of tasks now: clean the air conditioner, clean out the bee hives, install our new fire pit, cut down a few trees that impinge on other activities. Some of them involve the chainsaw, so I’m happy.
Growing
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Put in my seed order to seed savers yesterday. This is the first year in a few that I’ve not started any plants. We moved the hydroponics cart into the garage to gain room for consolidation of all our dog crates in the kitchen. Not sure whether we’ll use it this winter or not. Maybe. But this year, we’re planting seeds or buying transplants.
I ordered 8 tomato plants and 6 pepper plants from seed savers. I still need to pick up onion sets, leek transplants and kale, probably tomorrow at Mother Earth Gardens at Lyndale and 42nd. Our potatoes will come from seed savers, too.
We’ve got raspberries, strawberries, apples, pears, plums, cherries, blueberries, currants, wild grapes and asparagus that are perennials, plus the overwintered garlic and some onions. Even so, I’m glad we don’t have to survive off of our produce. Gardening would be real work then, a chore.
Instead, our garden sustains us spiritually, maintaining that constant and close connection to the seasons, to the vegetative world, to the soil. It also provides food throughout the winter and we’ve chosen to emphasize that aspect of our garden by planting vegetables that we can put up.
Plus the bees.
Spring Cleaning
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
The so-warm March got folks cranked up about the garden, but this is Minnesota. Our last frost date is still May 15th, six weeks away. It’s no time for annuals.
(where we’re headed 2010 harvest)
Kate and I have started peeling away leaves, dead branches and stems, prepping our various beds for the warmer weather ahead. None of what we uncover is frost sensitive.
I spent time moving limbs I had pruned in the colder weather, raking mulch off our onions and garlic and getting the planting plan for 2012 down. We’ve decided to focus this year on crops that we put up or store for the winter: beets, onions, garlic, leeks, potatoes, tomatoes, kale, chard, collard greens. We’ll also put in some herbs and some peppers and some sugar snap peas, but those we’ll use during the season.
Working in the garden, a tactile spirituality, balances out the indoor heavy lifting that has occupied–and tends to dominate–the winter season. It feels good to be engaged again.
The Garden in Early June. No, Wait…
Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Seasonal craziness note: both of the photographs here were taken in our garden on the same day, April 20th, 2011.
Chainsawing today. Cutting back aged amur maple branches, considering eliminating all of these fragile little trees and starting over with something new. Kate raked out fallen leaves and I moved them to a place where they can rest. Both Kate and I cut down perennial stalks and grasses left in place over the winter.
Tulips and iris and crocus have all begun to push out of the ground. None of these will be injured if a frost comes; they’re spring ephemerals or early risers. Their strategy is to get up, bloom, go to seed and store food for next spring’s big push before the leaves come out and other plants get in their way. It’s a smart plan and one that gives us beautiful blooms often as winter seems to have barely left the building.
We’ll work away at it, an hour or two at a time and by the end of the week we’ll have those 
we can reach without compacting soil spruced up and ready for the growing season.
Our magnolia is in full bloom right now, a white torch in an otherwise brown world. Kate wanted a magnolia and she got one. If we don’t get the severe cold, say -30, it gives us an early spring pick me up.
It always feels to good to get outside, shake off the gardening rust and slowly get up to speed with the yard again. When we bought this house 18 years, we spent a fair amount of cash upfront on landscaping, figuring that we wanted to enjoy while we lived here and that’s its maturation would swing into place just when we needed it. We were right.
This year and the next couple we’ll focus on preparing our flower beds, vegetable beds and orchard for minimal maintenance, keeping active as far as planting and intensive tending only those areas we can manage.
A Year of No Winter, Now With No Spring?
Imbolc Woodpecker Moon
OK. So, there was this place that used to have winter but had it replaced by a season of cloudy skies and what passes for cold in the southern states. Then, that season ended and summer began. Minnesota 2011-2012
Not kidding. It’s 60 degrees here today, March 11th. And this doesn’t seem to be an aberration, the temps go like this for highs: 59, 65, 70, 67, 68. And that gets us through Friday. It may throw the bee season into a conundrum since my package bees don’t arrive until mid-April and the bloom cycle could be accelerated by as much as a month.
This is also a year when I didn’t start any vegetables. Not a one. We moved the hydroponics into the garage for storage so we could consolidate the dog crates in one place. I imagine the places I buy plants will have used the same calendar as usual and we could waste a month or so of available warmer weather. In other words we could have a growing season up to 6 weeks longer than normal. But we’re not ready for it and won’t be.
The Great Wheel continues to turn, but the holidays may usher in different weather than usual. Climate change is well under way. I hope the climate change deniers have a ringside seat in hell to the catastrophe they’ve created. I know, that sounds extreme, but I mean it.
The deniers will not and never could change the basic science behind global warming, all they could ever do was slow down humanity’s response to it, a slowing down that amounts to a criminal act, a felony against generations yet to be born. They need to be held responsible for their greedy, stupid, infantile actions.
But they probably won’t be. They’ll die off before the worst of it hits. That’s why I hope hell has a special viewing room for these shrunken souls.
Would you like me to tell you what I really believe?