Category Archives: Garden

Art and Culture, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Woolly Mammoths

To Bee, To Do

July 18, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Mid-Summer Waning Honey Flow Moon

Out to the bees in just a few minutes to slap on two more honey supers each, the six I finished varnishing yesterday while Mark put foundations in the frames. This will find six honey supers on colonies 2 & 3, while colony 1, the parent colony for next year’s only divide, will have four. Not sure if I’ll need more than these. I’m having to do this in the early morning, not the best time, but the only time I’ve got today.

At 9:15 Kate and I take off in separate cars for the Northern Clay Center. Our clay intensive starts this week, 10:00 to 4:30. I hope to learn how to make Japanese style tea cups and salad sized plates. Like tai chi working clay puts a premium on hand-eye co-ordination and sense of touch as well overall design skills.

A good while ago my spiritual journey had gone stale in the reading, meditation, contemplative modes I knew best. The next stage of my spiritual practice became gardening, working with the rhythm of flowers, soil, spades and trowels.

That practice went on for many years when Kate and I decided to add vegetables and the orchard with permaculture principles in mind. That added a good deal of oomph to the tactile spirituality, deciding to keep bees put animal husbandry into the mix. At this point my spirituality has become more and more attuned to the rhythms of growing seasons, plants and bees, all within the context of the Celtic Great Wheel.

With tai chi and clay my spiritual practice comes closer in again, my hands, my feet, my hips, my arms. Both clay and tai chi are paths on this nature focused ancientrail, though for me they are quite a bit harder. But that’s the push I need to grow.

After our first day at Northern Clay, I have my Woolly meeting tonight at Highpoint Print co-operative where we will make prints. One more step down the ancientrail of the mind/body link.

Art and Culture, Bees, Family, Garden, Great Work

Love Is Not Only For the Animal World

July 13, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Mid-Summer Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Kate’s put up ten jars of red currant jam and put together six honey supers. She’s a great ally in estate management with her skills. She keeps saying, “I’m surprised how much major surgery slows me down.” Oh?

When I ate dinner at the Java yesterday, the waitress said, “That was quite a storm last night.” “Yes,” I said, not remembering much. “It blew a big tree down, right at my house. It stopped less than a foot from my roof.” “Wow.” “Did you hire someone to cut it down?” “Yes. I’m going to miss that tree. It turned red in the fall. I knew I should take it down.”

Love is not only for the animal world.

The MCAD class has moved into Graphic Design history with an emphasis on posters, especially in the 19th and early 20th century. Some very striking pieces.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

Queen of Relaxation

July 13, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Mid-Summer Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Our new pack Kona, Vega, Rigel + Gertie has begun to calm down. There are fewer tense circling moments, fewer snaps and growls. Life with dogs has its rhythms, just like life with vegainwater humans. Vega, our biggest girl, lays on the window seat, tail thumping, watchful, inviting me to come down and sit beside her, enjoy a moment of relaxation with her. She is a great role model for relaxation. The 4th of July fireworks season has moved into the past, or the future, and Rigel no longer barks at the night sky.

Our tiered perennial garden and its brick patio have gotten neglected in our push toward the orchard, vegetables and bees. It was my focus for so long and now it grows on its own, almost, with little help from either of us. It looks that way, too. I began this morning a three or four day project to clean it up, weed it, mulch it, arrange and clean up the furniture and potting bench. This involved, today, pulling the lovely green chive like grass that volunteers everywhere, then putting down a heavy blanket of birch leaves, sweeping the bricks and clearing litter off tables and benches, killing weeds growing in the brick crevices and emptying old pots into the compost.

There’s still plenty to do and I’ll get on with that tomorrow.

Garden

Pick and Plan Eating

July 12, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Mid-Summer Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Kate and I have decided on a pick and plan eating method. That is, we’ll pick fresh vegetables, then build a meal around what we have. I picked this morning, for example, green beans, beets, golden and bull’s blood, lettuce, dill, and 7 garlic bulbs. We still have onions from an earlier harvest, so there’s the basics for our lunch or dinner tonight. In addition Mark has picked hundreds, maybe thousands of currants and Kate spent yesterday starting the preservation work. She’s test drying some, making jams and jellies. We’re well into the first significant harvest period though we have had strawberries, lettuce, kale, spinach and onions already.

The tomatoes I started inside, which looked puny early in the season have grown tall and begun to bloom. That means we’ll get heirloom tomatoes in addition to the two store bought plants. Through integrated pest management I’ve beaten back the yucky scourge Colorado beetles on the potatoes . Boy are they gross. Little fat jabba the hut creatures until they get their wings. The leeks have begun to thicken, not much, but some. The potatoes have blooms and that signals the beginning of tuber growth underground. Lots of onions getting bigger, carrots, too.

Big-Stone Mini-Golf deserves its own entry and I’ll get to that either later today or tomorrow.

Aging, Family, Garden, Retirement

Changes Comin’

July 10, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Mid-Summer Waxing Honey Flow Moon

Mark and I transplanted hemerocallis (daylily) from the tiered gardens in the back to a front bed defined by a bur oak now in its 17th year and a Norway pine equally old. What we’re 06-28-10_earlylilies doing is gradually filling in spots on our grounds that seem to always require weeding, maintenance with plants that are hardy, go it alone types. The hemerocallis, like the hosta, receive scorn from landscape designers and permaculture folks, but like all God’s creatures, they too have a place. And their place is to grow in those places you don’t want to have to worry or fuss about. As we get older, we plan to retire more and more beds to this kind of planting, reducing the ongoing work until we have only some vegetables in a raised bed or two and the orchard. The rest will be in asiatic lilies, hemerocallis, hosta, bugbane, grasses, ferns, bulbs like tulips and daffodils, monkshod and various shrubs.

We don’t want to nor do we need to get there all of a sudden. We still love the bees, the vegetable garden, the orchard and the perennials, but realistically there will come a time when weeding, planting and transplanting will no longer be fun, but will turn into chores. At that point we want to have grounds that correspond to our willingness and ability to care for them.

Kate’s retirement has brought up a lot of these questions. We love her retirement and the success she’s shown in recovering from her recent, second, hip replacement. That means a lot of things that were too painful in the past, like long car rides and train trips, may become more possible. So, we’re not shuttling back into the shell until the end, just trying to be realistic about life’s changes that are ahead and inevitable.

Aging, Asia, Garden, Great Work, Health

It’s Illegal

July 3, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Mid-Summer Waxing Honey Flow Moon

In to see Kate this morning after making some soup and killing potato pests by hand and soapy water. Integrated pest management suggests hands-on management for small crops. It’s actually pretty straight-forward to keep pests in check if you inspect regularly. Like the plastic bags for the apples. The concept also allows that some leaves will get eaten, some plants will get lost, but that if you plan for these and don’t excited, you can keep pesticide use to a minimum. I haven’t used any for years.

Companion plantings helps. Crop rotation helps. Regular surveillance helps. Replenishing soil nutrients helps. Every bit of positive input reduces the hold insects pests can get on your veggies.

Kate’s color looked normal this morning even though her hemoglobin is still a little low. She’s ready to come home. Her nurse yesterday tried to get her to wear little footies with a sticky pattern on the bottom. Kate doesn’t like things on her feet. “You don’t want to wear them even though it’s illegal?” I knew who would win this contest.

Back home for a nap, read a little, then got ready for Tai Chi. Kona had been injured in the morning, but I couldn’t find the problem. She held up her right front foot, which I checked carefully, finding nothing. Mark found the wound. It was a tear in her side just above the right shoulder.

Uh oh. This is the kind of stuff Kate makes easy. So. I called her and asked her if she could come home. Nope. Well, I figured. Her advice though helped a lot.

After a snappy, biting 10 minutes or so, I figured out how to do what needed to be done, Kona stood quietly and let me put a gauze pad on the wound and wrap it on with a sticky bandage.

I missed the first hour of Tai Chi, but I made it for my class. Be patient with yourself. Relax. Trust the process. Cheryl, the teacher, is a calming influence in a learning curve that can be difficult.

By the time I headed home I needed some comfort food. A peanut buster parfait later, I felt calmer myself.

Bees, Garden

Bee and Garden Diary

June 26, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Mid-Summer Waning Garlic Moon

Today I performed partial hive box reversals in all three colonies. The second hive box of three gets rotated to the bottom and the first or bottom box rotates up to take its place. This means that all the hive boxes have to be moved, so it is a labor intensive activity, especially so now that some honey has begun to be stored. One hive box was very heavy, my back a bit reluctant. Having done that I checked the top box on colony 1 and the top two honey supers in colonies 2 and 3. None of these have much honey.

Since I put queen excluders on 2 and 3, I pulled those off, intending to leave them off for a couple of days. At the hobby bee-keeper meetings I’m told this is a common way to get the bees to move up into the honey supers. I’ll put the queen excluders back on maybe Wednesday. Since I reversed the bottom and second hive boxes, there’s not much chance the queen will get up there.

So far the bee season seems to have hurdled the early cold and rain and settled into a more normal pattern.

The potatoes and leeks both have mounds around their stalks now, blanching for the leeks and more space for the potato plants to produce tubers. A lot of gardening tasks are very time sensitive and these were among them. When the potato plants flower (now), they begin to set the tubers. As the leeks grow, only the parts covered by soil will blanch, turn white, and be useful for cooking. As the young apples begin to grow, the bags have to go on before the apple maggots come out to play. Also now.

The bees, too, require definite care and different kinds of care all through early spring and summer, then less attention around now, when the honey flow begins. Later in August will come extraction, then preparation of colony 1 for overwintering. Gonna try one more time. Colonies 2 and 3 will move out near the truck lane, into the sunny part. That’s for next year.

Our tomato plants started from seed have begun to mature, though they are far behind the two plants Kate bought at the green barn. Those plants have blooms and green tomatoes. It remains to be seen whether we’ll get any tomatoes from the others.

We’ve harvested one full planting of spinach, several of lettuce, some sugar snap peas and just this week, lots of strawberries. We have onions, carrots, beets, more lettuce and spinach, plus pole and bush beans all underway. There are cherries and plums in the orchard in addition to the apples and the raspberry canes are in good mid-season form. We’re going to have a good season as we continue to learn how to use our garden to complement and supplement what we buy at the grocery store.

Bees, Garden, Great Work, Humanities

Practice Safe Orcharding

June 25, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Mid-Summer Waning Garlic Moon

Spent yesterday relaxing after an unusually busy week. I wasn’t home for supper the first four nights. I like the connectedness and sense of agency I get when the days get busy, but I also appreciate the calm of home. Not much Latin gets done when life gets frantic. There have to be long blocks of time, hours, to settle in and start thinking like a Roman. At least for now. Maybe later it will come more naturally.

Today I finally get outside to care for my potato plants. They need mounds built around them to support the now over grown stalks. The leeks get mounded today, too.

Yesterday I did a weird thing. I got up on a ladder and put plastic baggies around all of our apples. The UoM extension says this prevents apple maggots, otherwise known as those damn worms in the apple. We’ll see. After I’d done about 20 of them, I realized it was like putting condoms on each of the apples so they’d stay safe. Practice safe orcharding, I always say.

Tomorrow I do bee work. It’s time for reversals of the hive boxes. actually, probably past time.

Yesterday when I walked through the garden with Kate I noticed bees flying into the colonies and out again, one after another, filling the sky with their small, busy flights. To an untrained eye it would look chaotic, bees flying in seemingly random patterns here and there; when, in fact, each bee knows where it’s going and to which part of the hive they will return.

Art and Culture, Dogs, Garden

Garlic

June 18, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waning Garlic Moon

In my new names for Minnesota full moons this is the garlic moon, because under its gaze, in its waning nights, the garlic leaves will begin to die back and the garlic will be ready to come out of the garden. This is now my third year with garlic started from garlic bulbs I grew myself. Garlic gradually adapts itself to your soil and climate if you keep replanting it. Not sure how long it takes overall, but the process should be well underway. Artemis Garlic.

Walking the line. Nope, not Johnny Cash, but me, trying to track down a short in our electric fence. Found it. An ironwood branch detached during the last round of heavy weather landed on the eastern run of our chain link fence, bending the chain down and over the electric fence. Chain saw. That old branch popped right off. Since I had the chain saw warmed up, I went out to the front and pruned some of our amur maples. They’re getting old and their limbs have begun to crack and die.

Now I’m in here, finishing up e-mail communications and getting ready for a nap. Kate and I have a hand-built clay class this afternoon from 1-4. The last two days required a burst of energy. I have to restore it now.

Dogs, Family, Garden, Sport

Sollie Goes Home

June 5, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waxing Garlic Moon

Tomorrow I leave for Lincoln, Nebraska. Sollie will head back to Denver with Jon. Our goal here is to calm the dog situation down by getting rid of the extra dog and getting to work integrating Gertie into our pack. She has a Jekyll and Dog personality; sweet and friendly, cuddly 90% of the time and all gnarly teeth and dog for 10%. Trouble is, we can’t predict the 10%. Outside humans seem to raise her hackles, at least sometimes, but there’s something between her and the other dog’s, too. Our hope is that Sollie’s presence, a male among females, may have tipped the balance toward aggression in the doggy world for Gertie and that with him gone, she’ll calm down. That may be wishful thinking.

Mark finished a first course of granite blocks for our firepit. Now I have to find a steel fire ring. It’ll be nice to have a place for a fire just in time for summer. No. Kidding. It’s nice to have it done and ready for fall. Mark’s helped out a lot. I’ve found it much easier to do my work here if I don’t have to do the heavy work on both ends of a project. (This will be the Agni fire pit by Mark Ellis.)

I’m awake. In addition to getting up at 10:40 I also had a 2 hour nap. Staying out late is possible for me, but I have to have time to recover.

Watched the NBA finals with Mark tonight. Two Hoosier boys watching the big guys play ball. We didn’t have the sound on. Basketball is the one sport I know well enough to watch without commentary. I decided, early on, that I wanted to see Miami win, so tonight’s decision pleased me. It was a game right down to the final 4.0 seconds.