Category Archives: Garden

Garden

Uh-oh

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Imbolc                                       Woodpecker Moon

A chain saw morning.  Certain trees, elm and oak in particular, have windows of time when pruning does not expose them to disease:  dutch elm disease and oak wilt.  One of those windows is late winter, a window the weather gods seem determined to close early this year.

We had some pruning on what I think of as the three sisters, three oaks growing close together on the northern edge of our garden, and on the lone young elm that resides just inside the garden fence, also on the northerly side.

Chain saws do not like old gas, gas over 30 days in the tank, so each time I use the chain saw we have to get fresh gas, toss some two-cycle oil in it, then cranker’up.  Kate got me a gallon yesterday afternoon while she was out.  I adulterated it this morning, poured the old gas out of the chainsaw, filled it with fresh gas/oil.  It needed bar and chain oil, too, a gunky, thick oil that lubricates the chain and the bar around which it spins.  Added that.

In the oak’s case I had to use a ladder, not a real wise idea with a chain saw, but in true stupid home owner fashion, I went ahead anyhow.  On my behalf I am very careful with the chain saw and felt this was a risk I could handle.  Worked out ok.

The elm did not require the ladder.

The limbs and branches are down.  At some future point I’ll limb them and cut them up for brush or firewood, probably firewood since we purchased a steel fire pit at the end of last summer and have yet to install it.

Art and Culture, Bees, Garden, Health

Time Marches On

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Winter                                  Garden Planning Moon

Kate sent the check off for the bees.  Two two pound packages of Minnesota Hygienics.  They should come around tax filing deadline.  A happier thing to hive bees.

We also decided on the plantings for our garden this season.  I’ll wait a bit on sending out the order.

In other news:  yes, I left the honey I intended to take Roy Wolf on the counter top.  Here. Yes.  I left the rug I intended to take to American Rug Laundry in the garage.  Here.  Yes, I apparently sent a test back to my doctor without my name on it.  And that’s just this week.

Who’s turning 65 soon?

On a different note.  Two fun groups of kids today.  Asian art tours.  One kid said, “I have a wonder.  I wonder whether the Chinese see our living rooms as weird?  Like we see theirs?”  Don’t know about you but I imagine either one would see our living room as weird.

The museum has artificial turf and tropical plants, brightly colored metal outdoor chairs and outdoor umbrellas up in the lobby.  Called a popup park.  One kid asked, “Is this art?”  Geez, how would I know?

 

Aging, Bees, Family, Garden, Our Land and Home, permaculture

Under the Garden Planning Moon

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Winter                                   New (Garden Planning) Moon

In the next couple of weeks I’ll order two packages of bees, 2#, to install in mid-April. Two hives produce plenty of honey for us and some to sell.  I have no desire to create a bigger operation, but working with bees has its soothing aspects and its downright fascinating aspects.

Also, over the next couple of weeks Kate and I will sit down and plan our 2012 garden.  We now have all the beds installed, the orchard has begun to produce, albeit still at modest levels and our perennial beds have taken more or less to running themselves with the occasional weeding foray and bulb planting episodes.

My short burst workouts, which include four sets of resistance work in between the all out sessions of 30 seconds and one minute, have begun to show results, so this summer I plan to have more muscle which makes gardening both easier and more fun.

We have a fire pit, dug out fully by Mark last summer with a large metal fire ring and cooking grates ready to be installed come spring.  Once it’s in place we’ll have a nice area near the grandkids playhouse for twilight and nighttime fires, roasting marshmallows and wienies.

With Kate at home much more now, we’ll be able to take even better care of the yard.  Wisely, Kate let the grass cutting go a couple of summers ago, enabling her to concentrate on weeding and pruning, tasks, for some inexplicable and yet joyous reason (from my perspective), she enjoys.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story, Retirement, Writing

On Moving Toward Doing the Work Only I Can Do

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Winter                              First Moon of the New Year

Spent yesterday shifting to my new work schedule.  A couple of hours on Ovid, plus analyzing some of Caesar’s Gallic Wars.  Edited three portions of the Tailte Mythos:  Book I and began clipping postings from Ancientrails to consult for my first essay in the Reimagining project.

Also learned that I can’t go to sustaining status at the MIA until I’ve had 8 years as a docent.  Sustaining would cut my tour requirements in half.

This means I’m going to have duck out of the Sierra Club sooner than I had planned.

No plant starts this year.  I’m going to buy already started plants and of those only those we decide to grow for particular, planned uses.  We’re going to shift our gardening now toward minimalism, toward those things we’ll preserve.  Two colonies of bees.  Emphasizing less maintenance everywhere, planting towards a time when the gardens will need even less, eventually very little care.

Life’s focus changes as our lives change and now I’ve become focused on those kind of things only I can do.  Only I can write the Tailte books.  Only I can set down my scattered thoughts about a sort 0f ur-faith, a common reverence all of us on the planet might share.  Others might/will translate Ovid, but only I will work toward a beginner’s level commentary, one similar to Pharr’s commentary on Vergil.

Not sure why now for this shift except to say that I know my time is finite.  Yes, it always has been, that’s true, but now it seems existential.  No, I’m not covering something up here, I’m not ill, in fact, I just got a set of labs that Kate says are typical of a 40 year old.

Long ago, in my 20’s, I read an article about when certain professions reach their maturity.  You know the material about mathematicians and scientists, early ripe, but certain other professions matured much later, writers and artists, for example, with the oldest age of maturation according to this reckoning being 50, for philosophers.

Factoring in my drinking and an early career emphasis on politics and the practical side of religion, I don’t find 65 to far out of range for me.  I feel mature in my thinking and writing skills now and I need to deploy them or my unique contribution will be lost.

Aging, Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story, Politics, Sierra Club, Writing

How the New Year Might Look

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Winter                                           First Moon of the New Year

At an inflection point with the Latin.  Either I keep the pace I currently follow, maybe 6 hours a week; or, I ramp up, say to 10 or 12, maybe a couple of hours each day.  Some analysis of other texts–maybe Caesar or Suetonius or Julian, I have all of these in Loeb Library volumes–plus more translating of the Metamorphoses.  My inclination is to ramp up, do more, focus on Latin and the novel.  That’s what my heart tells me.

That other project, too.  The one I’ve got slotted for 5,000 word essays each month next year.  Where I’m going to give voice to my whirling ideas about the earth, about ge-ology, about what would help us help our home planet.  That one, too.

When you add these things together, they constitute real work and I feel good about that, not trapped or bummed.  Now all I need is a way of allocating my time so I can work them all in and still manage the art, the garden, the bees and family.

That may be my new year’s work.  Pruning activities and creating a new schedule.

 

 

Aging, Bees, Family, Friends, Garden, Our Land and Home, Retirement, Travel, Weather +Climate

Mi Casa

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Samain                                     Moon of the Winter Solstice

Much as I enjoyed the travel, the close time with Kate, the ocean, new cultures and places, I find this computer and my own keyboard, my reference shelf and my library, mementos from past trips, family, collected art like slipping into a pair of comfortable bedroom slippers.  At its best travel allows for renewal, challenge, broadening, but an unexpected and forgotten pleasure, perhaps never noticed before, is this lifting up of home.

Home as reality and as metaphor carries a special valence for all of us, one way or the other.  I moved so often for the first 40+ years of my life I never had the time, the digging into a place where I could really feel home.  Here in Andover, although the burb itself is nada as place, the home Kate and I have created nourishes both of us.  We have space for our mutual creative work, space for mutual work outside and in, leisure space and fitness space.

Over the years, as is the case with most family homes, our sons have developed memories here, now grandchildren and in-laws, too.  Animals, both present and past, inhabit the hallways and the woods.  Storms past, challenges met and overcome, Thanksgiving, Hanukah, Christmas, birthdays, honey harvests.  All here.

Home.  This trip made me appreciate it more than I ever have.

Bees, Family, Garden, Great Wheel, Our Land and Home

Making Pot Pies

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Fall                                                       Waxing Autumn Moon

We had our final straight from the garden meal last night.  Roasted potatoes, onions, fennel, carrots and a lone beet.  Raspberries for dessert.  Marinated chicken for protein, not from here.

Today I cut up the leeks, cooked some chicken breasts, carrots, celery, peas and corn (none of these ours), and cooked the leeks in salt water for five minutes.  After shredding the chicken, a roux thickened the broth with the vegetables.  The shredded chicken went in the pie crust, then the leeks (our own), and after that the thickened broth and vegetables.

A rolled out pie crust for a top to the pies and they went in the oven.  4 chicken/leek pot pies, frozen now, treats we can have when we get back from South America along with raspberry pie.

Had an aha about our garden while cutting up the leeks.  We’re not feeding ourselves in any significant way with our garden, though we do eat several meals a year with our own produce and fruit.  What we can grow, and the leeks, garlic, heirloom tomatoes and heirloom potatoes are good examples, are specialty vegetables that, even if we wanted them, probably wouldn’t be available and would certainly not be available fresh from the garden.

We preserve tomatoes, store potatoes and onions, garlic and honey.  Kate makes currant jam and wild grape jelly.  We have raspberry pies frozen and now the chicken/leek pot pies.  We also freeze chard and spinach.  Our garden supplements our diet in ways that would not be possible without it.

It also gives us a joint project, a place we can work together, while keeping us in touch with the Great Wheel and the ways of the vegetative world.  We get a lot from our garden.

Cooking, Family, Garden

The Final Harvest

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Fall                                                Waxing Autumn Moon

Going out today to collect the rest of the rest of the harvest.  A few potato plants I missed the first time around remain.  Leeks, those Musselberg Giants.  Some carrots, some chard.  Beans.  Rain has appeared in the forecast for the first time in weeks.  A good thing, but it reduces the clear days for harvesting and mulching.

When I get those leeks inside, chicken and leek pot pies come next.  I’ll use carrots and maybe a potato or two.

Still no news from Saudi Arabia.  The weather has cooled down in Riyadh, only 93 today.

Been pushing to finish the fourth book of Game of Thrones, but will have to give up on ending it before the cruise.  Too many words, not enough hours.  I’ll have to finish it in a deck chair. Darn.

Garden

A Melancholy Garden

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Fall                                                  Waxing Autumn Moon

In spite of the 80 degree plus weather it felt like a fall day outside.  The sky blue, the clouds white, the sun weak.

Collected the potatoes.  After Mark carried the harvest inside, I put the potatoes on slatted wooden shelves that slide into our root crop storage system.  They went into the garage stairwell for a couple of weeks of higher humidity curing, after which they will return to the pantry and await their turn in the pot.

The garden beds have begun to empty out.  Most of the tomato plants are down, the garlic left in July, carrots, for the most part, harvested.  The major crop still left in the ground is the leeks.  These are Musselburg Giants and they have grown thick and tall, dark green leaves on top, so much thicker than those pencil lead thin plants I started in the hydroponics.

Fall gardens have a melancholy feel.  Plant matter turned brown, fruits and vegetables collected and eaten or stored.  In northern climates a garden’s year has its temperature controlled limits, after mid-September growth slows and begins to stop.

By October most things have stopped growing altogether.  By November even the hardiest plants have either disappeared underground with food stored for the winter or given up struggling with the cold nights.

 

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Politics

Partners and Co-Creators

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Fall                                                       Waning Harvest Moon

Went out and picked raspberries for pancakes this morning.  With a definite chill in the air the garden felt different, a bit sleepy, ready to bed down for the cold season.  After a month or so of feeling burdened by it, wanting it to disappear, my spring affection reappeared.  This patch of earth, these beds, work together with the plant world and Kate and me.  We share a joint stewardship of this property, each in our way committed to making it healthy, beautiful and bountiful.

The soil has given of its nutrients, its water holding capacity, its sturdiness as a base for roots and stems.  The plants have combined the chemicals of the soil with that water and pushed themselves up and out of the earth, then blossomed and in many cases fruited.  Kate and I weed, tend the soil, watch the plants, picking bugs off of them, pruning, replanting.  We also harvest and, when the harvest ends, we replenish the soil with composted manure and mulch.

When we use the plants and their produce, we take the leaves and stems and other unwanted parts and put them in a compost bin to return to the soil.

This complicated working partnership among many different parties here is, in microcosm, the partnership we humans have with the natural world and the world of soils, air, water and sunshine.  It’s significant to note that the one unnecessary party to this the work is the human race.

Plants will grow.  Rain will fall.  The sun will shine.  Soils will improve.  Fruits and vegetables will be made and distributed, all whether humans enter in or not.  We exist only as part of a richly integrated chain of being and we exist as its wards, not benefactors.

We do have the capacity to intervene, but too often, far too often, when we do intervene, we disrupt what nature does willingly and foul the process, in the end harming ourselves.

I wish our gardens and our orchard were more than supplements to our diet, but that is all they are, to be otherwise would require a commitment to the work I no longer feel able or willing to give.  Even so, as a supplement, this growing of flowers, potatoes, tomatoes, beets, carrots, leeks, beans, onions, lettuce, chard, spinach and peas, this caring for bees and harvesting honey, does keep us intimately engaged as partners with the natural world, a partnership so often hidden from view in this, the most capitalistic of all possible worlds.