Category Archives: Garden

An Old Cannabis Farm, Right?

May 14, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waxing Last Frost Moon

A long, 3 hour, nap, perfect for a gloomy, chill spring afternoon. Then off to the grocery store. With Mark here there are items on the list peculiar to him like Raisin Bran, lots of bread, more fish than usual (a good thing) and a greater quantity of fruit.

The same kid from Anoka/Ramsey Garden came with the pocket sized dump truck, navigated it through our gate and dumped the load right in front of the orchard, saving several steps with a heavy wheelbarrow. He remembered our place, “An old cannabis farm, right? Not as much up now.”

Yep, during WWII the government wanted more rope so hemp farms were common in Anoka county. The weed grows everywhere, will get 8-9 feet tall if allowed to mature and has a stem at maturity that is so thick a machete takes two or three whacks to bring it down. It laughs at weed whips. And, no, its THC content is too low to be any good. It made rope, not laughing teen-agers and college students.

True story. When we first moved up here to Andover, back in 1994, we were the only house in the development. A white car pulled up on 153rd about two hundred feet from our house and two young kids popped the trunk and hopped out. They busily pulled hemp plants from the lot across from us and threw them in the car, not even bothering to shake the soil off the roots. Someone, we think it was the developer, Harvey Kadlec, called the police.

When they arrived, the kids were still at work. Oops. The police impounded the car and gave the kids a lift back to the Anoka County Jail.

Kate always tells this on me, so I’ll just go ahead. I had laced several hemp plants through our chain link fence, reveling in the fact that the forbidden weed grew wild on our property, a sort of dream lot for a sixties kid. When the police came, I went out through our back garage door and pulled the plants out of the fence. Can’t be too careful in these circumstances.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

At Peace

May 14, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waxing Last Frost Moon

Woke up this morning feeling the week past. Intellectually and physically tired. Gonna take a day off to play, sleep. Maybe go to the Walker, which I haven’t visited in far too long.

We have a large truck gate in the front section of our 6 foot high chain link fence. It opens to ten feet wide to allow delivery trucks, mobile lawn mowers and other wide things into the back where the orchard and the garden are. It’s open today because we’re having five cubic yards of mulch delivered. To open it, because it’s used infrequently, I had to dig out the accumulated soil in front of the two panels that create the gate, just so they could swing out.

Being tired, in a good way, with things done, matters accomplished gives me a feeling of peace. I like it.

Garden, Great Wheel, Weather +Climate

A Northern Spring

May 12, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waxing Last Frost Moon

This northern spring, a season all its own, as is the northern summer, has turned cold and wet. Again. The cold weather vegetables have had a near perfect early growing season. This combination of occasional heat followed by cold and rainy days marks the uncertainty, the ambiguity of our spring, often a time when the weather is neither this nor that, a variety.

Later, in another three to four weeks at most, we will trend hot and hotter, finding ourselves by mid-summer in heat rivaling our southern states. As the days heat up, the vegetables and the fruits will flower, become pregnant, then fruit, giving us the food we love: tomatoes, beans, potatoes, apples, pears, cherries and currant. Perhaps this year, with the transplanting even the gooseberries will yield.

Then, by mid-to-late August, the evenings will begin to cool, though the days remain warm. The sky will become an impossible blue, a color found only in the heart and the mind’s eye. This sky absorbs all earthbound thought and transforms it into the higher concepts of heaven. This signals the onrush of the harvest season.

Blessed be.

Art and Culture, Bees, Garden

And Yet More Planting

May 10, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waxing Last Frost Moon

Cherokee Trail of Tears. Hutterite. Soup beans and green beans. Vidalia onions from sets grown in Georgia. Purple passion and white asparagus. Three varieties of tomatoes. Golden beets. Pretty much the last of this year’s non-succession planting. Mark’s been a big help, letting Kate and I focus on the things we do best. One or two things remain: cucumber, gourds, but they’re delayed right now. So Artemis Hives and Gardens has all the bees in their colonies, early and post-frost vegetables plants in the ground and daffodils and tulips and our magnolia providing color. The fruit tree’s buds have swollen; the currants have fully leafed out; the quince has its bright red flowers; the gooseberry plants are in a new home with more sun and Kate has planted shade lovers in the spots where the gooseberries were.

Left to figure out. What crop(s) to grow in the hydroponics during the summer. How to take good care of the fruit trees and their produce. Succession dates for the rest of the growing season. Mulching and pruning. Weeding.

My object list for my Thursday early evening Love, Sex and Scandal tour: Venus figurine, The Singer Su Hsia0-Hsia0, Theseus Killing the Centaur, Bacchante and Satyr, Mlle. Lange as Danae, Lucretia, The Little Girl, The Living Room. This group wanted edgy. This tour will qualify.

Late to bed last night, a great day today so I planted in the am, but I still need to do Latin. Not so easy with a fuzzy head. Probably nap time.

Art and Culture, Asia, Bees, Commentary on the news, Friends, Garden, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

A Garden, Some Latin, Ai Weiwei

May 4, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane New Last Frost Moon

The potatoes are in the ground. The lettuce has two leaves, as does the spinach, a few beets have emerged. The leeks look a bit droopy, but they’ll pick up. The garlic is well over 6 inches now as it makes the final push for harvest in late June, early July. None of the carrots have germinated yet and most of the beets have not either. The onion sets we planted have cropped-free-ai-weiwei mostly begun to show green. The bees show up now around the property, working as we do, tending the plants in their own, intimate way. The gooseberries we transplanted look very healthy. The daffodils are a carpet of yellow and white. A few scylla out front brighten up the walk with their blue.

Most of today went into Diana and Actaeon. I’m down to verse 227, the finish line is 250. I’m close and moving faster now than I was. One of the things I’ve learned is that doing this at a pace which would allow you to complete a project in a reasonable time frame would require real skill. I’m a hobby Ovidist, to be a Latin scholar would take decades. Who knows though? I might make it. When I finish this first tale in the Metamorphosis, I’m going to have some kind of celebration.

Buddy Mark Odegard has come up with three remarkable designs for a Free Ai Weiwei t-shirt. Here’s an example and the one most seem to prefer:

Asia, Family, Garden

Impish and Knowing

April 30, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Waning Bee Hiving Moon

Talked to the grandkids on Skype. Gabe’s linguistics have made a jump and Ruthie seems to have rocketed past the early years of childhood and landed in an elementary school body. 2011-04-01_0742

Jen went to crossfit this morning. If you’re not familiar with this gonzo approach to fitness, click on the link. She’s gonna be tired.

Skype has increased the quality of long distance communication with kids by a geometric factor. We tickled Gabe, watched Ruth move gracefully through the house. We saw the expression on Ruth’s face as she dumped out a box of soft building blocks. It was impish and knowing. We saw Gabe do his mad face and his happy face. Wonderful.

I decided the other day that the only way I’m going to get good at Tai Chi is to practice, practice, practice. I go through the form several times, all the way through the single whip, the last and most complicated move we’ve learned. Doing it in the morning, as a moving meditation and a general loosening up of the body for the day is where I’m headed. Right now, though, I’m doing it before I do my aerobics.

The daffodils outside have finally begun to approach the image I had in my head all those years ago when I began to plant bulbs. My first and most memorable bulb planting event was on Edgcumbe Road in St. Paul. I began putting them in sometime in the mid-to-late afternoon, just as the snow began to fall. This turned out to be the Halloween snow storm which eventually dumped 2 feet of snow on the Twin Cities. I got the message.

Kate made me a quilted piece with a bee and the words Artemis Hives on the side. I’m going to staple it up in the shed where I store the bee equipment.

Garden, Holidays, Humanities, Weather +Climate, World History

So, Why Get Up At 4 AM?

April 30, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Waning Bee Hiving Moon

As the bee hiving moon fades to black, it makes way for the last frost moon. Our last frost up in the northern exurbs of the Twin Cities comes somewhere between May 15 and May 20 on average. May 15 is the date I use because I haven’t experienced a later frost, but it could happen. That’s the date the tomato plants go out, the kale and chard I’ve started (though I’ve also sown them outside, too), the beans, cucumbers and various annual flowers.

Tomorrow the Celtic calendar, the one I follow in addition to Gregorius’s, turns over to the season of Beltane. More on that Sunday.

Today is a rainy, cool day unfit for working with bees. Good for transplanting though, but I don’t have any more to do right now.

There was a royal wedding, wasn’t there? No, I did not get up at 4 am for a breakfast party to watch it, nor did I watch the 68 minute version Kate and Mark watched yesterday. I did scroll through pictures on the LA Times website. Got me wondering. Why all the attention in this, the most plebeian of powerful nations?

I stipulate the romantic notion of princess and prince, especially the steroidal version that involves a commoner elevated by marriage to royalty. We have a 5 year old grand-daughter who would have no trouble seeing herself in Kate Middleton’s role. Middleton, eh. Even the name reeks bourgeois. I stipulate further the fascination of any marriage as a symbol for that fragile, wonderful, ordinary miracle of love. I know these two play a factor, a large factor.

But 4 am? What’s up with that? Rather, who’s up with that? Continue reading So, Why Get Up At 4 AM? →

Bees, Garden, Writing

Gooseberries and Bees

April 28, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Waning Bee Hiving Moon

Yet more work on Missing this morning. Still at play in the Winter Forest, up in the Dark Range, around the shores of Lake Arcas and on the waters of the Winter Sea. It is so difficult 640cranes-photograph to know what the quality is of your own work. Very difficult. Some say impossible. May well be. This one feels, however, like the best work I’ve done to date. But, hey, that’s just the author speaking. What does he know anyhow?

(photograph by Tom Crane)

This afternoon Mark and I transplanted four gooseberry from their shade sheltered residence along the west facing side of our hour to an east and south facing slope in the third tier of our perennial beds. As we worked digging the holes to receive the shrubs, then digging the gooseberry plants prior to placing them in their new homes, bees buzzed around the deck, drawn, I imagine, by the residue of last year’s honey extraction. Now long over as far as we know, last August, fall rains have pounded the deck. Snow has piled up it over two feet high and that has washed away with spring rains, yet the delicate sensory apparatus of the honeybee knows that something was done here, something relating to honey. Perhaps bees have their own CSI crews.

Bees, Dogs, Family, Garden

Baby Leeks Leave Home For The Raised Beds

April 25, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Waning Bee Hiving Moon

Beets and leeks. Carrots and spinach. Lettuce and kale. Sugar snap peas and sugar peas. Garlic from last year. Strawberries and raspberries. A few missed onions. Rhubarb. leeks Asparagus? We’ve got green things above ground, not far above ground, with the exception of the mighty rhubarb, but we have germination and lift out.

The bee yard has bees coming and going, busy doing what bees need to do at this time of year. They flit in and around with purpose and energy. We were all working outside today.

It felt good to have Mark here helping, a sort of family experience. A bit unusual in my life, but good.

When I transplanted the leeks the other day, I was proud of them. A month ago they were just seeds in the packets from Seed Savers Exchange outside Decorah, Iowa and here they were, well underway in life, ready to go outside and grow in the wide world. There are tomato plants still growing inside along with some kale and chard. They won’t go until the last frost date is past, May 15 or May 20 depending on whose map you read. Other things will get planted then, too. Beans, in particular. Cucumbers.

Today when I dug a trench to re-seat the irrigation head near our back deck, unearthed by Vega and Rigel two seasons ago, I got the trench finished and Gertie plopped herself right in it. It was cool, she said, thanks. I shooed her out of the trench and she got up willingly, only to lie down on the mound of earth removed. Which, of course, I wanted to put back in the trench. She looked up at me with a smile, sand bedecking the hair hanging below her mouth.

Family, Garden

Workin’ Outside

April 25, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Waning Bee Hiving Moon

The bees buzzed around their new homes while Mark, Kate and I worked in the garden. Mark cleaned up a bunch of junk that always seemed just a bit too much after finishing up other work. Place looks less like we’re the poor cousins of the Beverly Hillbillies. I finished the early spring planting, adding a succession planting of spinach, golden beets and Fordhook kale plus lettuce and Early Blood beets. Kate did her weed destructor thing clearing out space for transplanting gooseberries.

A good morning’s work. We ate lunch at the Panda Buffet, a sort of thresher’s breakfast. Now it’s time for a nap.