Category Archives: Garden

Family, Garden, Great Work, Health, permaculture

Dinner Straight From the Plant

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Summer                        Waxing Green Corn Moon

Dinner with vegetables straight from the garden is a treat and can be a surprise.  It was tonight.  We had potatoes, new potatoes-709042potatoes, dug just before cooking.  They had a distinct flavor, a nutty earthy  tone unfamiliar from the long since harvested potatoes typical of both home and restaurant cooking.  This meal included our garlic, our kale and chard, the potatoes garnished with our flat parsley and a bowl of sugar snap peas as an appetizer.

Digging potatoes involved a spading fork to loosen the soil, then searching around under the earth for these lumpy  treasures.  They grow well in the sandy soil here in Andover.

(pic:  potatoes before harvest)

Kate takes off for the Grand Teton’s tomorrow, a CME conference.  BJ is also out there, playing in the Grand Teton music festival as she has for the last several years.  The Tetons have an incredible beauty, the American Alps, a very young mountain range.  She’s back on Wednesday, then we go to see a micro-surgeon who has perfected the technique for cervical vertebrae.  He’ll evaluate Kate’s candidacy for that surgery.

Lots of weeding today and more tomorrow.  A normal task in late July, early August.

Garden, GeekWorld

We’re Baaaack!

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Summer                                Waxing Green Corn Moon

Some new html code somehow turned all the type on some computers black.  Why this happened is not clear, since it never showed up on this computer or friend Bill Schmidt’s.  A long time back it became clear that the last thing done before a problem occurs probably screwed things up.  Yup.

A.T. will go to sleep for now, but the blog will be, as much as possible, in the third person, with no I.  This is an exercise in discipline for a writer.

The netaphim, shredded by Vega, now connects from one end to the other.  The reason for the fence, to allow it to stay that way, now comes into play.

The irrigation clock received new instructions based on something heard at Seed Saver’s over last weekend.  Water once a week, a lot.  Stop.  This encourages plants to grow deeper roots, following the water down.  This is an experiment, we’ll see how it works.  This new setup will eliminate, too, a frustrating situation in which two zones ran at the same time, reducing the flow to both.  At least clearing the computer of all its programming and starting over should fix that.

It’s surprising how many everyday items now rely on computer code.  The irrigation clock.  The weather station.  The blackberry.  Microwave.  TV.  Automobile.  Some experience with computers and with code, even if limited, can make navigating this electronic minefield easier.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden

They Nourish Us Five Times

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Summer                     New Moon

A.T. cleaned turnips and beets, cut their greens off and prepared them for boiling.  He also prepared kale and collard greens, first washing them, then cutting their rib out and storing them for Kate who will boil and freeze them.

An old folk saying suggests fire wood warms you five times: when you cut it, when you move it, when you split it, when you stack it and when you burn it.  There is a parallel in the seeding, tending, harvesting, preparing and eating of vegetables and fruits.  Each of these plants grew from a tiny seed placed either in soil or in soil block.  They were thinned and mulched.  The soil over and around them has been built up over the years.  When they grew to maturity, the same hands that planted them, took them from the plant and washed them.

When Kate and I eat them, they will have nourished us five times.  As we care for the seedling, we participate again in the miracle of vegetative reproduction.  While we tend them, we pay attention with love to the soil in which they grow, checking them for disease and creating a nurturing place for them.  When we harvest them, we enter into the oldest covenant of humankind, one that even preceded the neolithic revolution, the covenant between humans and domesticated or at least cultivated plants.  When we prepare them for food, we touch not strangers, but friends, allies in the ongoing wonder of nature’s intertwined parts.  As we eat them, we become the plant and the plant becomes us.

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, permaculture, Politics

In the Garden

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Summer                        New Moon

A.T. used the chainsaw this morning.  He cut out a mulberry tree growing in an unwanted (eastern) location.  A.T. feels manly after he uses the chainsaw.

Kate and A.T. harvested peas, greens, beets and turnips, too.  A.T. planted beans as a cover crop among the onions, where the garlic came out.  A.T. plans a much larger garlic crop for next year.  He has 9 or so large bulbs set aside for planting and set in an order for several new varieties.  At the SSE (Seed Saver’s Exchange) conference over the weekend a speaker suggested planting the garlic earlier, even in August.  A.T. asked SSE if he could get his garlic earlier than the September 7-9 ship date.  Nope.  Not to  worry, he’ll plant his own in mid-August and check the crops against each other next June.

This whole gardening process now begins to blur the line between horticulture and agriculture.  With crops meant for immediate consumption, but others for storage:  potatoes, turnips, carrots, squash, beans, garlic, onions, greens and peas, plus the eventual fruit yields, our garden has become a substantial part of our lives.  Substantial in the transubstantiation notion loved by Catholics.  We eat of the body of our garden and our orchard and in our bodies it becomes use, transfigured from plant to human.  A sacred event.  Substantial in the way it requires the use of our bodies to realize its harvest.  Substantial in the political sense since it cuts down trips by car, makes our place better than we found it and keeps us close to our mother.

The bees have added another dimension.  An interdependent, co-creative collaborative effort.

Garden, Great Work, permaculture

Laborers for the Great Work

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Summer                            Waning Summer Moon

There was a pagan feel to the gathering at Seed Savers Exchange.  Ironic, since Luther College in nearby Decorah represents a conservative brand of Lutheranism.  There was at least one obvious symbol, a man wore a t-shirt with a Wiccan theme, but the more pervasive and more subtle expression came through in conversations like the one I had with Virginia Nowicki, soon to be Gardener’s Supply Catalogue official national garden crusader.

“In the garden we feel a connection to the divine, the sacred,” she said while we ate organically raised chicken and pork, kohlrabi salad, heirloom green beans and mashed potatoes.  “We feel authentic.”

“Yes,”  her husband said, “We belong to that land.  It’s our home.  We feel like we’re just one of the animals that live there.”

Virginia will begin promoting Liberty Gardens in a couple of weeks on a website she’s producing and through  the network of those connected to Gardener’s Supply.

Virginia and Bob live in Downer’s Grove, Illinois.  Their home serves as a demonstration site during Permaculture Design classes.  They moved in thirty years ago.

“When the city inspector came, he asked when the lawn would come.” Bob said.  “I told him we weren’t planning on a yard.  He seemed taken aback.”

“Well,” he asked, “how will you deal with the mud?  I can’t give you an occupancy permit until you do something about that.”

“Woodchips,”  Bob said.

“What?”

“Woodchips.  We’ll put down woodchips.”

“Oh, all right.  When the woodchips are down, I’ll sign your permit.”

“We put in eight inches of woodchips,” Virginia says, “eight inches.  We imagined where the paths would go, then put  trees and garden beds in the places that weren’t the path.”

There home is in the midst of Downer’s Grove.

There were many examples of this kind of extraordinary devotion to the land and to growing food in concert with the cycles of nature, rather than against them.

Another man from Champaign, Illinois told me he fed himself and his wife and his son, his wife and their three kids.  Deborah Madison, the vegetarian cookbook maven, signed her books.  She’s on the board of SSE.  Eliot Coleman, a man who bought land from Helen and Scott Nearing–Living the Good Life, has a success story of intensive gardening.  He times his four-season gardening in concert with the Celtic cross-quarter holidays.  Mike McGrath, former editor of Organic Gardening and host of a garden show on NPR, is a garden crusader himself.

Garden, Great Work, permaculture

A Seedy Weekend

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Summer                                    Waning Summer Moon (7% illuminated)

Ancientrails spent the weekend in the company of gardeners and small farmers.    They blur the line between horticulture and agriculture, not to mention the line between 2009 and 1969.  Seedsavers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa had their 29th summer conference.

This was the largest of their conferences to date with 400 +  attendees from all over the country.

Today we learned how to graft a bud from a scion onto a trunk of root stock and came home with a new apple tree.  We also learned about methods for extending the garlic harvest:  dry sliced garlic then use a cheap coffee grinder to create home made garlic powder and why we should eat 5 pansies a day:  ruthin.  A.T.  is a skeptic about medicinal claims so we’ll have to check the data.

Yesterday a lecture traced both garlic and carrots from their homelands in central Asia to their current locale  in our gardens.  Here’s an interesting piece of information.  Though garlic does sometime reproduce from seed in the wild, it never does in our gardens.  This means that garlic can be said to be cultivated but not domesticated.

A.T. toured the Seed Savers operation.  They offered back office tours during the conference.  We saw the room where 500 to 7oo hundred thousand seeds go from store room to seed packet–by hand.   A seed sorting machine is on the way that will automate this task. We also saw the seed sorting operation, the root cellar and the greenhouses where the preservation plants go to seed.

There are two different streams to the SSE operation:  commercial and  preservation.  They inter-relate though the commercial side supports the preservation side.  Preservation of heirloom varieties is a key mission of SSE so they have a huge seed vault, a regular germination rate check program for the vault and a regular grow out operation so the seed stock gets replenished on a rotating basis.

If  you love gardening, you would enjoy a trip to the Heritage Farm.

Aging, Garden, permaculture

Speed Bumps Ahead?

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Summer                                   Waning Summer Moon

Life has begun to take on some speed again.  The garden work.  The conference this weekend.  Sierra Club work later this afternoon.  Tours to design for the first of August.  That sort of thing. Along with the cool weather, 64 here this morning, it feels good.  (check me out on this 3 to 4 months from now and see if I’ve stressed myself out.)

We now have a gated orchard, free from the marauding Vega.  The split rail defines the orchard, gives it a secluded look.  I’ll post a photograph at some point.

Gotta go right now.  Up to Elk River for dog meds, then I have to read material so I can look modestly informed while I represent the Sierra Club at the Minnesota Environmental Partnership’s agenda setting process.

Art and Culture, Garden, permaculture, Politics

My life, now

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Summer                                  Waning Summer Moon

Vega the wonder dog has:  shredded the netaphim irrigation,  chewed up a length of high quality hose, swallowed my wedding ring, peed on the bench cushion Kate made and, most recently, peed on our oriental carpet.  As a result we have:  put up a split rail fence, done loads of laundry and taken the oriental in to the rug laundry.

On the upside, she’s irrepressible, enthusiastic and downright funny.  Her sister Rigel, a sweet girl and a lover, seems bland in comparison, but they have the same parents.

This weekend I’m off to Decorah, Iowa for a conference at the Seed Saver’s Exchange farm.  There will be lots of information on organic farming/gardening, wagon rides, two speeches on heirloom vegetables, a presentation on Heritage Poultry and a barn dance.  There will be workshops on saving seeds, garlic, potatoes, hand-pollination and bud grafting.

This turn toward permaculture, horticulture, gardening was a gradual process.  It sort of snuck up on me as I dabbled in perennials on Edgcumbe in St. Paul, grew some vegetables, then did a bit more after we moved to Andover.  Later, I took a horticultural degree by mail from London University in Guelph, Ontario.  At some further point I began to read about permaculture, picked up Bill Mollison’s book and began to make contacts locally.

The real spur to push further on all this was a conference Kate and I attended in Iowa City three years ago now.  Run by Physician’s for Social Responsibility it convinced me that I needed to turn my activist attention toward environmental matters.

It took a while to get going but I got myself on the Sierra Club’s political committee last year in the summer, then followed up with work on the Club’s legislative committee this last session writing a blog.  Last September we hired ecological gardens to do a permaculture design for the whole property and made a push to get the orchard planted that fall so it would have the benefit of a full growing season this year.

This gives me work outside, in the political arena and, as a Docent, in aesthetic and intellectual realms.  A really good deal for me.  As always, thanks, Kate.