Category Archives: Garden

Art and Culture, Bees, Garden, permaculture, Weather +Climate

Echoes of Narcissus

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Imbolc                                     New Moon (Awakening)

An all day Latin day, this time 3rd conjugation verbs, the notorious bad boys of Latin grammar.  Due to a weak vowel they got jiggered around by spoken Latin until they’ve become most unusual, irregular in some ways.  Got remember the paradigms for present, future and imperfect.  Just gotta remember.  Latin has become easier and harder, reflecting, I suppose, past learning and present state of ignorance.  It is true though that I have begun to be able to read sentences without looking up a single word. That’s pretty exciting.

Ovid here I come.  Of course, that’s Owid to English speaker’s ears.  I have a plan to put my Latin and my affection for Ovid to good use.  When I get closer to its realization, I’ll let you know.

Talked to Mark Nordeen.  He has some pollen patties and has agreed to give me one for the live hive.  I’m gonna see him tomorrow.  Then, in April, I’ll hive the package bees and wait until mid-May to divide the new one, feeding and caring for both of them in the interim.  Kate has volunteered to be assistant apiarist.  Her first job involves whacking together ten hive boxes, eight supers plus frames and foundations.  It will be fun to have help.

All the fruit trees are now visible.  No rabbit or vole damage on any of them.  That’s a relief because I was exasperated at the end of the last growing season–trying to keep Rigel and Vega in the yard, then out of the gardens.  As a result, I didn’t put up the hardware cloth protective barriers around them.

It hit 64 here yesterday and its 56 today.  Geez.  The sun feels good.  When I walked out to pick up the mail today, I felt warmth on my neck.  It surprised me.

Bees, Garden, Our Land and Home, permaculture

Garden Theme for 2010: Consolidation

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Imbolc                                       Waxing Wild Moon

At this time of year gardeners begin to develop x-ray vision, seeing through the snow, ice and frozen  soil and imaging the greening.  Those of us who rely on memory more than paper try to envision what we’ve got in the ground, sort of the botanical base line.  Perennial flowers and plants, which make up the bulk of our terraced gardens, have an established presence.  We add in some annuals as the spirit moves, sometimes we divide existing plants like hosta, hemerocallis, iris, Siberian iris, liguria, bug bane, dicentra, aster.  Once in a while we plant new bulbs.  None last fall, for example, but that gardensenscence09probably means some this fall.

(pic:  where we left off last fall)

This part of the garden requires work, but not as much as the vegetables and the orchard.  I count it is a known quantity.

The permaculture additions, of which we have made several over the last three years, are still new to us, requiring attention and learning.  This year, I’ve decided, will be a consolidation year.  Nothing new, making what we have work as well as we can.  That means planting vegetables in two categories:  kitchen garden for eating throughout the summer and early fall and vegetables for storage over the winter:  potatoes, garlic, parsnip, carrots, greens, squash  those kind of things.

There is a good bit of work to be done repairing Rigel and Vega’s late fall destruction.  That won’t be repeated because we have a small fortune in fencing around the vegetables and the orchard, but I lost heart last fall and didn’t get the netaphim repaired and earth moved back into place.  That awaits in the spring.

In mid-March I have the bee-keeping class and this year I have the same consolidation idea for the bees.  Establishing the hives as permanent parts of our property.

We do have a couple of smaller non-garden projects that need to get done.  I dug the fire-pit two years ago, but with all the fun of the puppy’s last summer never got back around to it.  It needs finishing.  I also want to turn the former machine shed into a honey house, a place to store bee stuff and to process the honey.  Of course, we actually have to produce some first.

Aging, Garden, Weather +Climate

As It Is, So Shall It Be

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Imbolc                                         Waning Cold Moon

We have hoarfrost on fences, tree limbs, shed roofs.  I looked out yesterday afternoon and it fell to the ground like snow from two big cottonwoods.  Shrubs appear limned in light as the morning sun refracts through the hoarfrost on their branches.  We have a white, soft landscape that carries the long shadows of morning in their full definition.

This February has been outspoken in its winter voice.  The woodchuck in Pennsylvania saw his shadow, so we might have a February and early March filled with cold and snow.  That’s ok with me.

I’ve been waiting for the gardening bug to hit me, usually it happens around New Years.  It did a bit.  I got a couple of seed catalogs and spent time sifting through them.  Then, however, the feeling went away, submerged I guess by the unrelenting nature of this seasons winter.  Kate says it’ll return and I hope she’s right.  We’ve got a lot of garden that will need care soon, well, relatively soon.

Meanwhile I get messages from Mexico, Georgia, Singapore and Bangkok, places where winter either never happens or lands with a light brush.  Watching Burn Notice last night I felt for the first time a pang of envy at the easy way the characters moved the Miami climate.

It’s been a busy time for me, something I generally embrace, but I also love downtime.  I’d better not keep writing here or I’m going to write myself into a fit of melancholy, not what I want or need right now.  So, Vale, amici!

Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, permaculture

Ordinary Time

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Winter                              Full Cold Moon

In just two days those of us who follow the Celtic calendar will celebrate the coming of Imbolc.  I’ll write more about it on Monday, but I wanted to note here the difference in timber and resonance between post-Epiphany January and the holiseason just ended.  We move now into the ordinary days, days when the sense of expectation and sacred presence relies more on our private rituals, our own holydays.

In my own case, for example, Valentine’s Day lends this time period a certain magic as its pre-birthday spirit invades the present.  Also, for me and my fellow Woolly Mammoths, this next week marks our annual retreat, so we get ready for it, this time again at Blue Cloud Monastery in South Dakota.  It is, too, for those with any presence in the Chinese world, just a couple of weeks before the beginning of the spring festival, or, as we know it here, Chinese New Years.  This year it begins on my birthday.

Imbolc, too, has sacred resonance and its six week period marks the beginning of the growing season here as seeds for certain long growing season vegetables like leeks must get started.

Garden, Weather +Climate

Clarifying. Stimulating. Oh, All Right–Damn Cold.

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Winter                             Waning Moon of Long Nights

As Bilbo said, I have been there and back again.  Up here in the land of the midnight hobbit it remains cold, -7 now at noon.  On days when the high is below zero you know for sure you live in a cold part of the world.

I can look out the window of this room though and see beds where daffodils and tulips, iris and dicentra, liguria and lilies lie, apparently dead, but actually taking  a long winter’s sabbatical from photosynthesis.  Their presence, more than anything else, convinces me that the blooms of yesteryear are not figments of a hypothermic crisis, but rather the wonder they are.

The deep cold does not stop life here.  There were many folks at at the grocery store, a normal crowd for a Saturday.  An active snow storm, a severe one, can cause folks to stock up and sit tight, but the cold is part of the territory.  You deal with it, much as I assume the Bedouin do the heat.

Garden, Great Work, Politics, Travel, Weather +Climate

With Thoughts of Green, Growing Things Dancing in My Head

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Winter                                Waxing Moon of Long Nights

We’ve warmed up to 0.  Midmorning’s brittle sunshine diffuses in the hazy, partly cloudy sky.  The whippets go outside, pee, turn around and come right back inside.  Rigel, unphased, continues to hunt around the machine shed, staying on the hunt for hours at a time.  Sometimes she comes in after midnight, too.  Vega prefers the comforts of home, a couch, a bone, heated air.

A subtle change has occurred in my inner world.  I have begun to wonder where the seed catalogs are.  I have one in hand but I didn’t like their seeds so I’m waiting for others.  This year’s garden will benefit from last year’s mistakes.  In particular I’m going to make a real effort with leeks, have a better onion crop (sets), plant fewer greens and harvest more regularly (in general), beets, beans, one squash, not many tomatoes since we stocked up this year.  I’ll plant potatoes again, too, but this time I will store them in the basement rather than outside in the garage stairwell.

It is  time, too, to get back to work on legislative matters for the Sierra Club.  I got a call last night from Josh Davis about a meeting of the Club’s political committee next week.  No tours for the time being, just fine with me.  After Sin and Salvation followed by the Louvre, I can use a rest.

In the middle of January I head out to Denver for a week to take in the Stock Show with Jon and Jen and  Ruth and Gabe.  This is a premier event of the western US.  I’m going just to see what it’s like.

Aging, Dogs, Family, Friends, Garden, Great Work, Health

Garden Crusader

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Samhain                               Waning Dark Moon

Welcome to another sunny, warm November day.  These are days I’ve come to expect from October, but, as Paul Douglas often says, nature tries to balance, so here we are close to Armistice Day with a 60 degree and bright day about to unfold.  That means time to finish what I hope will be the last Rigel barrier of the season, extending a wire across the top of our wooden orchard fencing to make it really, really hard for her to get a purchase.

Kate’s lying low for the next few days, taking care of that not yet healed back.  A wise decision on her part.  She’s most at risk just as she begins to feel better, chasing down dogs, picking up the mail down our sloped driveway, loading and unloading the dishwasher, making Danish pancakes.  These are all part of the routine of a normal  life, not important, perhaps even a bit annoying on a daily basis, until you cannot do them at all, then they loom large as important, even critical parts of identity.

A shout out here to Vicki Nowicki.  I met Vicki at the annual Seed Saver’s Exchange conference in July.  I ate dinner with Vicki and her husband.  We talked about permaculture, Celtic holidays, the odditys of American landscape preferences and the importance of becoming native to a place.   Vicki told me she’d won a Garden Crusader award from Gardener’s Supply Company.  The notice came today in a e-mail from them.  I’ve excerpted a bit from the interview with her.

When we spoke, and as I read this, I found myself speaking when she talked.  We were in synch.  She also has a Liberty Garden project that I admire.

2009 Garden Crusader Vicki Nowicki

Vicki’s life work has been to help people slow down, learn about the land they live on and take better care of it. “What I’ve been trying to do for 30 years is to glorify the place where you live,” she said. “I want to use food gardens to nail people down to their place. A garden helps to reveal the nature of your site and bonds you to the land,” she said. “When you have a garden instead of a lawn, you are now producing something, not just consuming at the maw.”7150-nowicki-bench

Liberty Gardens

Her newest project pulls together everything she knows and believes about gardening. It is a website called libertygardens.com. The site will include tutorials and garden journals and will be a resource for anyone interested in gardening.

Here is how she describes it:

“It’s for the 21st century and it’s about growing food at home in order to make it a home. Our lives will change and our world will change when we start to plant food gardens at home. It’s a simple act that each person can choose to do at any time without a new law being passed, or a feasibility study being run or a stimulus package being doled out. But talk about a shovel-ready project! If our land is worth caring about and if our families are worth caring about, we can each choose to create the food supply that we have been asking for. We have the liberty to choose what to grow and how to grow it. People have always done it.”

And with Vicki Nowicki’s help, more and more people will be joining in, and doing it too.

Aging, Dogs, Garden, Health, Sport

A Good Day

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Samhain                                     Full Dark Moon

Rigel and Vega spent much of the day defending us from visiting neighborhood dogs.  Of course, thanks to our record setting fence-lines no battle could be joined, but jaw-boning was much in evidence.  This evening they came in, flopped down on the couch and went to sleep.  That is except for the show on birth and babies in the animal kingdom.  Rigel turned her head toward the TV and watched a mule-deer born, penguins enfolding their single chicks and musk-ox turn to face down the white wolves of the Arctic.  Would loved to have been inside her head.

Kate worked outside today, weeding the blue-berry patches and other parts of the orchard.  The good news is the clover has become established and has choked out the weeds.  The bad news is that the clover threatens to choke out the blue-berries.  Sigh.  She is only two weeks out from her procedure tomorrow.  Amazing.

Our defended (defenced?) vegetable garden can now be worked without fear that a Rigel or a Vega will come along later and try to emulate any digging I might have done.  Their work is not up to my exacting standards.  The last greens came out today with the exception of some Swiss Chard that still has vitality.  All that’s left in the garden now are strawberry plants, asparagus, garlic, parsnip and carrots.  The first two are perennials, the latter three crops from this year that can stay in the ground for a while, carrots, or need to over winter, the parsnip and garlic.

I couldn’t bring myself to patch the damage from the dogs.  It is quite extensive and I find myself reactive when I work on it.  It will keep until next spring.

Then of course there was the Vikings-Packer game.  Our defense had a bit of a let down late in the third quarter and the first part of the fourth, but they played brilliantly otherwise.  So did Favre.  At one point a Packer named Jennings fell on the Viking sideline very near Favre.  Favre’s concern and his action, bending down to see how Jenning’s was, moved me.  He seems to genuinely care for his team mates both current and former.  He also plays like a little boy, jumping and waving his arms, picking up players who’ve just scored a touchdown.

After the game he had an interview in which he spoke warmly of the Packers and the fans there.  It was a mature and sensitive moment.

It’s fun to see him play as a Viking.  Didn’t think I’d feel that way, but I do.

Aging, Garden, Health

Not much

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Fall                                         Waxing Dark Moon

Kate and I had our business meeting today.  I mailed a check to Allianz for Long Term Care Insurance.  Having Kate home right now is like a trial run for her retirement.  The big difference will be that she will be able to add her energetic presence, too.

She folded the clothes today, so she’s by no means just lyin’ around, but by next year she should be patched up and ready to rock.

Work outside has come pretty much to a halt.  Not that there’s no chores left, but a combination of wet weather, home distractions and doggy meddling has frazzled my energy there. I hope to get back to some of it before everything freezes up.  Don’t know quite what to do about the bees.  I do know I plan to keep bees next year, too, perhaps in my own hive boxes.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, Our Land and Home

The House That Harvey Built, We Have Made a Home

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Fall                                                New (Dark) Moon

The house that Harvey built ( Harvey Kadlec) as a model house for Kadlec Estates–3122 153rd Ave. NW, Andover, Minnesota–became a home long ago.  The kids have contributed memories and projects.  The land around the house has had many iterations of plants and vegetables.  Kate has sewing materials and tools scattered here and there.  I have books and computers.vegachair

With Kate off in the hospital this home reverts part way to house.  Without her here part of the spirit of the home dwells elsewhere.

Houses are inanimate, things of wood and metal, pipes and plastic.  The house, or the apartment, at least in America, will have serial occupants.   Except for those folks who work with architects, their construction and  siting decided by someone else, often a construction company, these sophisticated shells provide shelter from the elements and changing seasons.  Various ports of entry connect a house to electrical service providers, a gas company, a cable or satellite service for TV and broadband internet, water and sewage removal.  Often a patch of earth surrounds the house, a buffer between the house and the outside world.

A home, now that’s another matter.  A home is a house (or apartment) that has been made real in the Velveteen Rabbit way.  It may have a step or two that jiggle when walked upon.  Maybe one or two windows have their weatherstripping coming loose.  The floors probably have scuff marks and once pristine walls have chips showing the wall board beneath.  At any time there is probably a light bulb out somewhere.  The gas fireplace stopped working two or three years ago.  The water pressure is not what it once was.

That brand new furniture that looked so good in the show room?  A dog is asleep there now with a young boy.  The cat scratched the chair and though long dead her mark remains.  The beds in the home have bred dreams, consoled sadness and rocked with anticipation on holiday mornings.  Showers have cleansed little boys before t-ball games, girls before prom, mom and dad before anniversary dinners or after funerals.

Cars have been dissected across the dining room table.  Gardens planned.  Weddings, too.  Thanksgiving dinners and birthday parties.  The oven still has the remnants from a first cake.