Category Archives: Garden

Aging, Dogs, Garden, Humanities, Hydroponics, Memories, Writing

Walking and Talking

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Imbolc                                        New (Bloodroot) Moon

Took a walk along the road that goes around the Monastery.  A beautiful day with a blue sky and sun.  The sun has, like me, been on retreat this last week, and it seems to have returned bright and shiny, ready to get on with its job of sending us truly elemental energy.

While walking, I talked to Kate.  Cell phone reception is fine outside the Monastery, but inside, nada.

It’s rare for a person to find someone whose life and lifestyle fit so well as Kate and mine do.  At least I think it’s rare.  We both enjoy time alone and we enjoy being together.

She says the plants, the dogs and herself are doing well.  The dog are outside and  have been nearly all day.  She’s been sewing and made grandson Gabe a new shirt, this one with trains.

Today I finished writing early, still putting out about 6,500 words.  I tried to go further but the well was dry so I’ve been reading Conspirata, the Robert Harris novel about Cicero’s Consul  year and his life immediately after.  Cicero is a favorite of the conservative classes, but he seems more pragmatic than conservative, at least as Harris portrays him.  It might be his deep suspicion of populist politics that gains their favor, but that seems more complicated in this fictional biography.

Just as I was in a Chinese phase last summer, I’m in a Roman phase right now, learning Latin, reading Roman novels, translating Ovid.

If our plans for a fall cruise congeal, at some point I imagine I’ll turn toward South America and its ancient and contemporary history.  Read a few travel books on various ports of call.  We’re leaning toward a 37 day cruise that starts in NYC and ends in Rio, passing through the Panama Canal and traveling around South America through the the Straits of Magellan and Cape Horn to Buenos Aires and Rio.

My lunch table  today had Hoosiers, monks from South Bend, north Terre Haute and Indianapolis.  We talked about the old home place, Wabash College, Indy, the crazy time change rules.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Weather +Climate

Hail, La Nina

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Imbolc                                New (Bloodroot) Moon

A while back I asked John Harstad, then the naturalist at Cedar Creek Nature Center, a wonderful place run by the University of Minnesota and only about 15 miles from home, about first signs of spring.  His answer coincided with a local master gardener, “Bloodroot blooms.”  Since that should happen within the waxing and waning of this moon,  I’m choosing Bloodroot Moon for its name.

The snow began to come down this morning and has some legs.  The sky has turned sheet metal gray and the wind blows in from the northeast.  If I recall correctly, such wind direction can foretell deep snow.  Not predicted though.

This is the half-way point in my stay here at Blue Cloud.  I’m feeling it, too.  I’ve been working almost twice as long each day as I usually do when I write at home.  Though I love it, I’m getting tired.  Might be another 10 am nap coming on, too.

Conspirata, a novel about Cicero’s life, has been my casual reading.  I’ve finished 60% of it; I know this because the Kindle gives you a percent read number for each page since you don’t have the sense of the book’s length but its heft.

The other reading I’ve been doing is Livia Kohn’s introductory text on Taoism.  As with most things that interest me, I find as I get deeper into it that my opinion begins to change, split along certain lines where my own sensibilities face challenges.  In the instance of Taoism I find myself drawn more and more into the mystical, physical aspects:  the Dao, the exercises, meditation practices and pushed further away from the political implications, or wuwei (inaction) applied to political affairs.

This doesn’t bother me as I’ve learned, quite a while ago, that I don’t have to swallow the whole message to be enlightened by a school of thought.  Part of the creation of dogma comes as an institutional base emerges around any school of thought.  The dogma supports the creation of certain organizational structures, then the structures become a conservative force clinging to the original dogma, thoughts most often far removed from what Max Weber called the original “charisma.”

Thus, by the time most of us enter into a body of religious or philosophical thought the original genius behind it is hidden by layers of defensive structure and dogma hardened over time, often hardened against the danger of the original charism.

And so forth. Time to pick up the tablet and get to work.  Bye for snowy now.

Bees, Garden

The Growing Season Begins. Now.

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Winter                                             Waning Moon of the Cold Month   -13 at 8 am today

Just slept 11 hours.  After a two-hour nap.  And ten hours the night before.  My body is at work, fending off this chest cold I have.  I feel pretty good right now, but I don’t think it’s quite done.  Still, fluids, steam baths and rest.  That’s the ticket.

Today I put some seeds in their places:  leeks, lettuce and chard.  The lettuce and chard, once they reach two leaves in size, will go up into the hydroponics for use now.  The leeks will 06-05-10_leeksandpeas670keep on growing, too, also up in the hydroponics once they become youngsters and not babies, but they will go in the ground outside as soon the ground can be worked. (I think.  May be a bit later.)  Over February, March and April other plants will follow the same process, growing up to two leaves, then getting transferred to the nutrient baths of the hydroponics.  Each one, in its own time, will go outside to the waiting beds.  They will augment the garlic, the strawberries, the raspberries, the asparagus already growing there.

This year our planting will be more informed by several years of growing vegetables together, Kate grew some before.  We’ll plant what we need for canning, preserving in other ways like drying and freezing.  We’ve eaten well from our gardens over the last few years, but not as well as we could.  There’s always room for improvement.

One area for improvement is management of the orchard.  That will occupy some serious thought in March and April.  Fruits, especially trees, are different from vegetables, more vulnerable to insects and disease.  We’ll see what there is to do.

This will be the first growing season with Kate home full-time, so we’ll test out how that works.  Bound to help.

Then, too, in April, the bees begin to come out of their winter ball.  I over-wintered three colonies though I’m unsure about their survival.  I’d be surprised if all three pull through the 06-20-10_garden_6703winter, but delighted.  I’d understand if only two made it, but I’d be disappointed with one.  I’ve got a long ways to go before I’m a good bee-keeper, but I have years to go before I sleep.  Time enough.

Aging, Cinema and Television, Family, Garden, Our Land and Home

Chainsaw and Snowblower. Watch out.

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Samhain                                                  Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

An inside day today.  Tomorrow outside.  A little bit of chainsaw action on trees broken by the early wet snow in November.  Some snowblower work on the sidewalk, clearing a wider path to the front door.

I also have some mulch to lay down.  A bit late, not for mulching, but for the mulch which is in garden bags on our patio.  Frozen I imagine.  I might have to take a sledge hammer to it.

Maybe some soup making if I have any energy left in the afternoon.

The oldest cousin on my mother’s side, Ikey, has entered a nursing home for what sounds like hospice care.  He was the oldest son of Uncle Ike and Aunt Marjorie, my mom’s oldest sister.  When the sickle begins to bite into the generation of my family to which I belong, it has a frisson not there when my mother’s generation died off and eventually out.  I was never close to Ikey, but to most of the rest of my cousins I have relationships nurtured by at least every two year visits.  They’re mostly in Indiana, where I was raised.  A note for Ike, for peace and calm.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Humanities, Hydroponics

Stumbling

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Samhain                                             Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

Hmmm.  The ablative absolute and the passive periphrastic did not get put straight into my brain.  I stumbled through my lesson today, learning by mistake, a common method for me.  Still, I added a few more verses of Ovid to my translated column, down to 52.  Greg is a patient guy, a good teacher.  I’m lucky to have found him.  He played the music at the Minnetonka UU when I preached out there two Labor Days ago.  We got to talking and he mentioned his Latin and Greek tutoring.  I’d never had a tutor, one on one teaching and I love it.

A nap.  Then a lot of organization stuff, some for the Docent Discussion group I facilitate, some for the Sierra Club’s legislative committee, some for next year’s garden.

On that last point I ordered leeks, kale, chard, cucumbers, tomatoes, cilantro, rosemary, spinach, lettuce and a Seed Saver’s Exchange calendar.  They’re on the docket now because cranking up the hydroponics is a before the end of the year chore and I need to have seeds to start.

Most I’ll wait a bit on, but chard, lettuce, cilantro and rosemary I’ll start right away and grow them out in the hydroponic tubs for winter eating.  Then, around the end of February I’ll get other seeds started, some earlier, some later, getting ready for the start of the growing season.  Right now I’m happy it’s all under snow and out of reach, but come March, April I’ll be eager, looking forward to a new growing season.

Bees, Garden, permaculture, Weather +Climate

Snow. Deep.

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Samhain                                       Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

The orchard has at least two feet of snow.  The currant bushes have snow near the top of their branches.  The blueberry beds have almost disappeared.  The garlic lies now beneath a couple of feet of snow cover in the vegetable garden, as do the strawberries and the asparagus.  The bees have huddled up in their balls, all three colonies, rubbing against each other, creating warmth, keeping the colony at 93 degrees, maintaining body heat for the cold blooded individuals, the whole acting as a warm-blooded animal, using their mutual metabolisms to fend off the cold.  There are, too, all the bulbs, the ones planted this fall and those planted in years past, resting now, waiting for the signals, still months away, that will send them seeking sun and warmth.

Out the window shown in the pictures below I often see chickadees and sparrows scurrying from one warren of shrubs to another.  A rabbit or two come by at some point in the winter, as the chipmunks did earlier in the fall.  A squirrel dug a burrow in the snow near the end of November, coming and going several times.  I have not heard the great gray the last two nights, perhaps she’s out hunting in other places.

This is a Minnesota winter, the kind most of us here know well.  I’m glad to see it.

Aging, Friends, Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Politics, Weather +Climate

Losing a Friend, More on Dams

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Samhain                                   Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

“In the view of conservationists, there is something special about dams, something…metaphysically sinister….the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam.”

John McPhee Encounters with the Archdruid (1971)

We lost half a cedar tree in our backyard to heavy snow and wind.  We nurtured this tree from a small cedar bush into a two trunk tree that shaded our small patch of grass just beyond the deck.  These early heavy snows can be hard on evergreens since they retain needles throughout the winter, making them vulnerable to the wet and often large snow falls of late fall.  We’ll have a chance to do something new out there come spring.  Kate wants a lilac tree.

Here’s another thing about dams.  They generate, in addition to hydroelectric power, strong feelings.  People love’em or hate’m.  After they are built, they often become so much a part of the local ecology that people defend them from destruction with much the same fervor that folks oppose their construction in the first place.

There are a multitude of problems created by dams:  river flow is often altered and in turn alters the ecology both upstream and downstream, sediment pools at the base of dams robbing downstream deltas of needed material, archaeological sites can be destroyed or rendered extremely difficult to discover, populations are often displaced and, often, are denied access to the power produced by the dams which relocated them.

Equity questions abound as in the case of waters diverted to Los Angeles and Las Vegas from the arid Western states of Colorado, Utah, Nevada and Arizona and as in the case of a dam on the Zambezi river, built by Mozambique but because it needs military protection from rebel forces, forced to sell its electricity to South Africa at 1/7th of the world price.  Dams concentrate capital and political power in often unhealthy ways, especially in third world countries and especially when used as elements of a geopolitical strategy by such bureaucracies as the US Bureau of Reclamation.

More as the week goes on.

Art and Culture, Garden

Planting and Reaping

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Fall                                            Waning Harvest Moon

The last forty bulbs, a monet tulip collection, have gone in the ground.   I planted a couple of hundred daffodil and tulips at various spots in the orchard, which we see from the table while eating breakfast.  The others, more daffodils and tulips along with a bunch of new lilies, went into the tiered beds off our patio.  Spring color has such an invigorating effect after winter.

It was more hassle, but I went ahead and amended the sandy orchard soil where I planted the monet tulips.  Without the composted manure/top soil mixture, the sandy soil would not support these tulips for long, especially since most tulips are biennials at best in our garden.

With all the bulbs and corms put to bed, I went to work taking out all the remaining root crops:  onions, beets and carrots.  We had a large number of each, enough to add to our stores for the coming winter.  I also picked four big leeks since I plan to reprise my leek based chicken pot pies.  Over the next week I’ll have to pull the remainder of the leeks and make something with them.  The last butternut squash came in as well.

With the exception of putting the bees up for the winter the only remaining necessary garden chore will be mulching once the ground freezes.  I have oak leaves and still hold out hope that I can find actual bales of straw somewhere.

Garden, Humanities

Rusty Latin

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Fall                                                         Waning Harvest Moon

Back into the Latin this morning with my tutor, Greg.  Boy, I got rusty in just two months off.  This language stuff requires constant attention.  When I went through college and sem, I took courses that I could set aside for weeks at a time, do a reading and note review in one big gulp, then be fine for a mid-term or a final.  I can’t do that with Latin.  It’s probably why I never learned a language.  The repeated application just didn’t suit the style I brought to learning.  Now, older, I’m more methodical, more patient with myself and feel no pressure for a grade.  Makes the process better, though not simpler.

So.  This ends the intellectually demanding week I’ve had since Tuesday morning.  Whew.  A bit of let down now, a kick back and read.  Then, I’m going to pick up the Latin again this afternoon after the nap.  Strike while the mental iron is still hot.

The weekend will see me finishing the bulb planting-24 tulips, harvesting carrots and beets and leeks and squash, maybe even some more greens.  I’ll also get the bees ready for their cardboard wraps, though I won’t put them on until sometime in November.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

On Defining Maturity

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Fall                                            Full Harvest Moon

Three lily beds planted, topped with a serving of tiny yellow daffodil bulbs.  I realized today that planting bulbs in the metaphoric equivalent of maturity.  Putting lily corms in the ground in autumn to produce flowers in June, July and August of 2011 defines delayed gratification.  So.  There.  In spite of my personal measure of maturity–did I get a napkin the first time I went through the line–I seem have passed a different test.  Gotta make it before I hit 65.

Kona helped.  She chased down marauding chipmunks and rodney danger squirrel.

Kate’s off at work, each evening a chip closer to retirement.  I’m about to head on the treadmill for a late work out.  Watching Ghost Writer now.  Pretty good.