Category Archives: Garden

Bees, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work, Health, permaculture

Heirlooms. Better Eating, Better Seeds

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Beltane                                    Waxing Planting Moon

Got some plants in the mail.  I didn’t start anything from seed this last winter after starting way too many the season before.  Maybe this winter I’ll hit a happy medium.  These are heirloom plants, so I can save the seeds and plant them next year.  Would somebody remind me to do that when fall comes around?

The flower garden has gotten the short end of the stick this spring and it shows.  Weeds and grass in places where there should be neither.  While Kate’s away, I plan to get some work done on the flowers since the vegetable garden will be planted, irrigation problems are largely resolved and I signed out of the Museum for the two Fridays she’s gone.

We do have a lot of things growing.  The leeks have jumped up as have the sugar snap peas, beets, onions, fennel, mustard greens, garlic, parsnip, strawberries, apples, pears, cherries, currants, quince and blueberries.  The radicchio, thyme, dill, rosemary,  flat parsley and lavender are also off to a good start.  The potatoes are, as they say, in the trenches and we await their emergence.  The whole fruit group is still relatively new to us since the orchard is in its third growing season, but only beginning to actually bear fruit.  A lot of critters have evolved that love fruit:  insects, fungi, birds.  Just how much predation we can expect is still unknown.

I got an e-mail back from Gary Reuter at the U about the comb I photographed.  “The bees,” he said, “are making extra comb.  Take it off.”

The red car went in for its 260,000 mile check up today.  It’s in fine shapes with the exception of a little bit baling wire and bubble gum necessary for the next 100,000 miles.   Toyota dealerships are not intrinsically happy places right now, but they’ve always done well by us and I appreciate them.

Dogs, Garden

Potatoes in the Ground

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Beltane                               Waxing Planting Moon

Potatoes take some energy to plant.  First you have to dig foot-deep trenches, then you plant the seed potatoes.  After that, you fill the trench back in about 8 inches or so.  Even in my plot’s highly organic soil this involves lifting a lot of mother earth.  Having said that, I love finding potatoes in the soil, like little treasures.  And they taste really good straight out of the ground.  Really good.  (these are not our potatoes.  what a lot of work there.  Whew)

Vega snuck in the garden when my hands were full.  She put the hammer down and raced in a full suspension gallop all around the garden, then came up to me, rolled over and stuck her legs in the air.  Daddy, daddy, I know it was wrong, but I just couldn’t help myself.

Now a nap, then a workout then out to the Temple.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Humanities

Under the Planting Moon

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Beltane                                Waxing Planting Moon

Under the planting moon a large batch of potatoes will hit the soil, companion planted with bush beans.  Nasturtiums go in today, too.  I may have to replant a few things I optimistically sowed a couple of weeks ago.  I knew better.

Finished Wheelock chapter 15.  Gonna let that sink in for today, then I’ll hit the Ovid tomorrow.

Kate and I head out to the new Hindu Mandir in the northwestern burbs tonight for a tour and a meal.  Should be fun.

Goin’ outside.

Bees, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

Bee Diary: May 16, 2010

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Beltane                                                     Waxing Planting Moon

The bee project here has two active workers, a woodenware maker and a bee keeper.  Kate has put together 7 honey supers and 70 frames plus four, and counting, hive 05-15-10_bees_woodenware1colony31boxes and 26 frames.  Without her patient and careful craftswomanship, the hives would not exist.  I’m just no good at the fine, repetitive tasks involved in woodworking, but she is.  She brings an artisan’s hand to her work.  As a result we have beautiful hives.

A possible identity for our hives has begun to take shape.  Artemis is one of the many bee goddesses, but she is a familiar name, at least to some, so Artemis Honey is a strong possible name.  A common offering to Artemis was honeycakes, so we might be:  Artemis Honey, The Honeycake Honey.  When we start getting enough honey to exceed our use, including gifts, then we’ll start selling at farmer’s markets.  We’ll need a name, a label, a brand.  We’ll include a  honeycake recipe with every container sold and Kate has agreed to bake up some honeycakes to use as samples at our stands.  Let us know what you think.

Checked the crops today and harvested parsnips.  One resisted leaving its happy home in the raised bed.  It came out well over a foot long.  Smelling the tiny roots off the parsnip just after pulling, amazing.  A sweet, earthy, pure scent.  Wish I could bottle it.

When I left the MIA on Friday, I noticed on my walk back to the car, a migration of caterpillars.  I believe they were swallowtail butterflies in there can’t fly yet stage.  All of them, scores if not hundreds, chose northeast as their route across the warm concrete sidewalks that run between the Children’s Theater and the MCAD campus.  At first I just noticed their numbers, then I saw their common journey.

Where I wondered, did they begin?  So, I followed them back, moving against the small, humping crowd until I found a crabapple tree along an MCAD sidewalk.  Looking up I noticed caterpillars soon to head north by northeast eating their way out to the end of small branches, then, as the branch bent under their weight, falling to the grass.  Why they decided on their direction, I have no idea.

Bees, Garden, Politics, Weather +Climate

A Quieter Period of Time

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Beltane                                            Waning Flower Moon

We had a light frost last night.  Many flowers are now gone, tulips mostly, and a few leaves have that sickly green color that comes from burst cells in the stem.  The weather service has predictions of 29 tonight, that means I’ll for sure have to cover the sensitive plants this evening.

A really busy week last week with several trips in and out of the cities, meetings or events at various times of day and three days in a row at the MIA.  It’s nice to have a few days where I can organize my time on my own.  Not like there’s nothing to do, of course.  My three bee colonies each will need inspection today or tomorrow and there’s weeding and other gardening chores.  Latin, chapter 14 in Wheelock, will put me half-way through this text, usually used for a year long college level course.  Then I’ll tackle my next four verses in Ovid.  There is also a tour to prepare.

This is supposed to be the last or next to last week of the legislative session, but the Minnesota Supreme court’s ruling on Pawlenty’s unallotments of last fall has thrown the whole situation into a big mess.  We may end up with a special session, in which case the legislative committee’s work is not yet done.  You may have seen that the Minnesota House voted to lift the moratorium on nuclear energy though with some important provisions.  Until such legislation is also passed in the Senate, worked out in conference committee, then signed by the Governor, it is not law.

Art and Culture, Bees, Garden

The Garden, The Bees, And Touring

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Beltane                                            Waning Flower Moon

After closer checking, all of the vegetables I’ve already planted can stand a light frost, most even a heavier one.  So, no worries there.  The herbs will require a blanky tomorrow night, as will the coleus Kate planted in the front.  Otherwise, we’ll be fine.  A few flowers will die, but that doesn’t kill the plant.  This is, again, a way that the world outside my door keeps my attention.

I will delay planting the potato/bush bean combination bed until this cold snap passes and the tomatoes and peppers haven’t come yet.  Oops.  I did, though, plant one potato670050210pepper plant come to think of it.  It will need a cover.  (the potato bed after soil amendment)

The Minnesota Hobby Bee Keepers Association does educational evenings once a month and allows new beekeepers to interact with veterans.  I plan to start attending on Tuesday night.  They will be discussing colony division, not discussing only, but also dividing a colony at the UofM’s on bee yard at the intersection of Larpentur and Cleveland.  We have to take our bee suits so we can watch up close.  I need a mentor, perhaps I’ll find one there.

The first tour of the day today, a group from St. Paul Central organized by Vitris Lanier, never showed up.  They never called.  Weird.  My second tour, my first ArtRemix tour, had eleven young women and a teacher.  These were students for whom the world of art was foreign territory, at least at first.  As the tour went on though, their curiosity got the better of them and they wanted to see how the Wu family reception hall was reassembled and what was in the Scholar’s study, then the garden.  We went upstairs to the Salon and Shonibare’s dress, then onto the dec arts gallery at their insistence.  All in all these kids developed an interest in what was in the museum and I went along to help them explore.  A successful tour, though it had little to do with ArtRemix.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Family, Friends, Garden, Health, Woolly Mammoths

Man About Town

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Beltane                                    Waning Flower Moon

We were both a bit achy from yesterday’s garden-a-thon, but it’s that good kind of ache that comes from things accomplished, the kind of things outside, those things that often feel more substantial, more real than the reading and writing.

Today has busy on it, too.  In an hour there’s a going away party for Michele Yates, a sweet woman, an artist, a French citizen long ago, now American for the most part.  We’ll miss Michele, we being the docent class of 2005.  We’re a close group, again for the most part.  We met every Wednesday for two years, not to mention hours of practice tours, parties, that trip to New York, enough time to bond with each other and as a group.  Michele is part of us and she’s leaving, so we need to say good-bye.

I leave Michele’s party to visit my dermatologist, not exactly a 9 on my thrillometer, but one of those important self-care things, like teeth cleaning and annual physicals.  Dr. Pakzad, a thin, intense guy comes in white coat, hurried but kind, confident.

In between Dr. Pakzad and the Woolly restaurant evening tonight, I have to get in a nap, queen my divide and check the package colony for larvae.  It’s doable, but it will be a whir.

Tomorrow morning I’ll go with Kate for her first visit to Dr. Heller, who does the minimally invasive hip replacements.  This visit should determine whether Kate has the right pathology for a hip replacement.  I hope she does.  She throws her right leg out as she walks, trying to find a movement that doesn’t cause pain.  With no luck.

37

The Way takes no action, but leaves nothing undone.
When you accept this
The world will flourish,
In harmony with nature.

Nature does not possess desire;
Without desire, the heart becomes quiet;
In this manner the whole world is made tranquil.

Aging, Bees, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Our Land and Home, permaculture

Home

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Beltane                                     Waning Flower Moon

There is here the action:  taking the hive tool and wrenching loose the propolis, moving the frame, all the while bees buzzing and whirring, digging into the soil, placing the leeks in a shallow trench, the sugar snap peas in their row, inoculant on top of them, around them.  The plants move from pot to earth home, their one and true place where they will root, work their miracle with light and air.  The dogs run, chase each other.  Vega plops herself down in the water, curling herself inside it, displacing the water, getting wet.

There is, too, this other thing, the mating of person and place, the creation of memories, of food, of homes for insects and dogs and grandchildren, for our lives, we two, on this strange, this awesome, this grandeur, life.  This happens, this connection, as a light breeze stirs a flower.  It happens when a bee stings, or a dog jumps up or leans in, when Kate and I hug after a day of making room for  more life here.

In a deep way it is unintended, that is, it happens not because it is willed, but because becoming native to a place is like falling in love, a surprise, a wonder, yet also a relationship that requires nurture, give and take.  In a deep way, too, it is intended, that is, we want to grow vegetables, flowers, fruit, have room for our dogs and for our family, for our friends.  The intention creates the space, the opening where the unintended occurs.

Sixteen years Kate and I have lived here.  A long time for us.  Now though, we belong here.

Bees, Garden, Great Work, permaculture

Getting Things Ready

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Beltane                                       Waning Flower Moon

After checking the parent colony with the queen excluder in, I found larvae in the top hive box.  That’s evidence of the queen.  That meant I shifted the middle hive box over to the new foundation and bottom board.  A syrup feeder pail went on top of the new, child colony.  This calms everything down and allows for a peaceful slow release of the queen tomorrow.  Leaving the queen excluder on the hive box in which I discovered larvae, I put two honey supers on it and replaced the inner cover and the telescoping outer cover.  The parent colony now has two hive boxes, one with a queen and brood, plus the other, lower box, which will get reversed on top in 7-10 days.

Tomorrow I’ll check the package colony for larvae a second time.  If they have none, I’ll have to get another queen for them soon.  If there is no queen in the hive, the lack of her pheromones turns on egg laying in the workers, but, since they’re not fertilized they produce only drones.  Once a hive converts to worker egg-laying apparently you have to start over.

This has been a busy couple of weeks for the bees.  Kate’s been making supers and frames and hive boxes, too.  If the divide and the package colony take, things will calm down for a while until the honey flow ends.  Then, there’s an end of the whole process I haven’t encountered.  Honey.

Two more bags of composted manure on the leek/sugar pod pea bed, another on the sun trap and a lot of planting.  The herb spiral has the herbs Kate bought Friday at Mickman’s.  I also planted beets, mustard greens, fennel, onions and a pepper plant in the sun trap.  The tomatoes and other peppers will go there, too.  Those two beds, along with the other bed where I have green onions plants along with radicchio, beets from seed and thyme will be our kitchen garden for the growing season.

Kate did a lot of weeding, including the blueberry patches.  It really makes a difference to have her focused on that aspect of gardening.  She’s also in charge of pruning which has its on rules.

The leeks, onions, kale, chard, garlic, parsnips, butternut squash, other beets and carrots will also be available during the growing season of course, but most of these will get canned or dried or frozen for the winter.

I would not like to do the cost accounting on these vegetables and the fruit because the two fences and Ecological gardens have created a lot of sunk costs.  It will take years for them to zero out the costs, more years, I imagine, than we have left in this house.  In our case, of course, that’s not the big point.  The big point is a more sustainable and healthy lifestyle and in that regard the cost accounting has already tilted in our favor.

Bees, Garden, Weather +Climate

A Colony Divided Against Itself Can Stand

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Beltane                                      Waning Flower Moon

The potato bed now has three bags of composted manure dug into it and the leek, sugar snap, bok choy bed has one and one more coming.  Kate has weeded several beds including the herb spiral and the sun trap.  It all looks better with the weeds gone.  I found the seeds purchased Friday, so I’ll be able to plant them after lunch and the nap.

The honey house is swept out and ready for a large table and better organization.  It feels good to have a place just to store bee related things like frames, hive boxes, the smoker, smoker fuel, bee suit and gloves.

I leveled the foundation for the divided colony and after lunch, as the winds die down toward mid-day, I’ll do my first division.  We’ll see how that goes.  This will be my third colony.  After this year I should run at four colonies until or unless I have a winter kill or disease.

A full outside day with pleasant (60 degree) temps and a light breeze.  Not like the 40 mph gusts from yesterday.