Beltane Waning Last Frost Moon
Category Archives: Garden
Andover Chain Saw Butchery (of a Cedar)
Beltane Full Last Frost Moon
Taking the local this morning meant cutting down the second cedar trunk and limbing it. Mark worked very hard yesterday moving the downed and limbed trunks and branches in the front yard. He went to bed early and slept hard. Kate, too. She weeded and weeded yesterday. Her body mechanics have gotten better so her glutes tire instead of her back becoming painful.
This run of warm days will accelerate the growth in the garden. The first planting of lettuce is recognizable now and the spinach almost so. No potatoes coming through yet but they need a soil temperature of plus 50 degrees, so they’ve probably been tool cold. Just hope they haven’t rotted. The beans are up, the onions, carrots, beets and asparagus, too. A lot of yard clearing work, weeding, maintenance chores have gotten done and will get done over the next few weeks. Having Mark to help really moves things along.
Now I go see Leslie for our last visit, then a couple of Sierra club meetings in the evening. The legislature has begun to wind down, but there’s a distinct possibility that it is not all over. Not quite yet.
The Chain Saw
Beltane Full Last Frost Moon
Instead of opening Ovid this morning, I opened the garage doors and took out the chain saw. Checked the chain oil, thick almost like grease. Added some. Filled a measured quantity of oil in a squeeze bottle, poured into the one gallon gas can, added a gallon of fresh gas, shook the can and put the gas oil mixture in the chain saw. With the choke out full, I put my toe through the handle, pressing the saw firmly onto the driveway, grabbed the pull and yanked up. Sputter. Pulled again. Nothing. Pushed the choke half way in, yanked again and that ear-splitting racket that pierces homes and exurban silence whined to life.
With the exception of one cedar trunk I’ve now downed, limbed and cut into smaller sections all of the damage from last November’s early, heavy snow. The large cedar tree just off our deck is the only tree I’ll miss. We nurtured it from a small shrub into a magnificent tree. Though I’ll miss its 17 year journey with us, it does open up a lot of sun for the vegetable garden. It would have been strategic to cut it down years ago, but it was a friend.
When I finished limbing the first cedar trunk, my arms grew tired. I quit. No using chain saws when tired. Flesh and bone pose no obstacle to these tree fellers.
Horticulture
Beltane Waxing Last Frost Moon
Gardening commends itself in several ways, but two are most important to me. Having life tuned to the seasonal and daily rhythms of heat, light, rain, snow, even frost like we have predicted for tonight, grounds me. If the frost comes and I have nothing outside to protect, it is a passing phenomenon of little interest. With delicate plants to protect I know what it means, cold enough to cause ice crystals inside plant cells to burst. Likewise drought is of no notice to me if I live in a condominium or on a city lot where my grass and a tree or two are my only contact with the plant world. With a vegetable garden, though, the plants dry up, don’t produce. I have to consider the drought, see that my plants get adequate water.
When the rains come, followed by warming days and the seeds leap up through the soil, when the potato eyes push a stalk and early leaves through to the surface, when those leeks nurtured since early April stand up and begin to fatten, it matters to me. Their work, much like the bees, comes from their essence, not from anything I do, but, also like the bees, I have a role, to protect them, to see they have what they need. We work together, the vegetables, the fruit trees, the currant and gooseberries bushes and the bee colonies.
The food that comes from our garden does not see us through the winter, though some of our crops, like potatoes and garlic for example last that long, but eating close to the land, lower down the food chain, happens more naturally when some substantial part of the diet comes from home. So, the food alone serves as a final link to the growing process, but as a present symbol of the food available in the vegetable world, it paints into our world color that needs to be at our table all year round.
This, then, has come to pass as my new faith, a link with the earth and its fruits, a role in caring for them and the constant reminder of our dependency, our interdependency on it all. When I began to work with the Sierra Club three plus years ago, I did it to put my political experience to work on behalf of the living world, in part at least as a thank offering for the sustenance I have received from it all these many years.
Bee Diary: May 15
Beltane Waxing Last Frost Moon
Checked the bees just now. Each colony queen right, lots of bees and brood. Still honey in the frames I put in when they arrived, but I did pollen patties today. These bees are calm, allowing me to check the frames after just a bit of smoke, no attacks so far. So, the bee season has a good start. Still planning to try both the old method, take all the honey the colonies produce, and the Furgalas three deep overwintering method. Not sure which way I’ll way go, 2 old, 1 Furgalas or the other, but I have to decide before I put the third hive box on them. I’m still thinking whether to use honey supers after the first box, primarily to make each box a bit lighter weight, easier for this old back to handle.
Button down below says frost advisory. Yike! Well, it just shows that the averages are what they are for a reason. I took a chance and I knew it. Now we have to protect the tomatoes, the herbs, the coleus, maybe some others.
An Old Cannabis Farm, Right?
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.
At Peace
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.
A Northern Spring
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.
And Yet More Planting
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.
A Garden, Some Latin, Ai Weiwei
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
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: