Category Archives: Garden

Garden, Great Work, permaculture

Being Native To This Place

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Summer                                Waning Summer Moon

Weeds.  Weeds, by definition, are a plant out of place.  This is, if you think about it, a curious definition.  Why?  Because the hardiness and persistence of most weeds indicate that it may be everything else in the garden that is out of place.   So, we may have to admit that the true definition is anthropocentric one.   Weeds are plants out of place in the horticultural preserves we call  gardens and landscaping.

An article in the Scientific American got me thinking about this, as did this mornings work removing quack grass and other hardy locals from the clover in our orchard.  The Scientific American article has the provocative subtitle:  The Real Price of Flowers.  The underlying message is this:  plant what grows where you live.  This means you will have much fewer energy inputs than if you maintain out of zone plants.  Most experienced gardeners know this, though some pride themselves on their ability to grow out of zone plants.  Here the trick is to get them to survive our tough winters.

The Minnesota Zoo, when it began, had a similar zoological mission:  contain animals that live in the climate of the 45th latitude.  They had (and have) a smaller tropical indoor exhibit that includes Komodo dragons, Gibbons, Tapirs and Toucans, for example, plus a coral reef, but in the main they have native Minnesota animals:  moose, wolves, beavers, wall-eye, muskie, pileated woodpeckers.  There are also many that thrive in our climate:  pumas, wolverines, lynx, otters, fishers, musk ox,  Amur tigers, grizzly bears, snow leopards, sea otters.    I say had because it now has a summer African exhibit and I wish it didn’t because I like the original mission.

Permaculture attempts to take this general notion and apply it to our horticultural and agricultural practices.  That is, permaculture emphasizes plants that work together, that live in the climate, soil type, eco-system native to the location of the garden or farm.  This allows the least outside inputs like fertilizer, pesticides, even tilling and other mechanical techniques.

We need to know more about the plants we call weeds.  After all, they live here, too.

Garden, Great Work, permaculture

The Harvest Has Well Begun

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Summer                      Full Summer Moon

The garlic harvest is in the shed drying.  The mature bulbs now lie, a bit dirty, on an old screen I use for drying vegetables we intend to store.  It was a good harvest and, if last year is a rule, it is enough garlic to last us the full year until next July.  Some of these bulbs, about half, come from cloves I grew two years ago.  Very satisfying.

I dug up a bit of a potato plant to see if they’re ready to harvest for new potatoes, but they are not..  The potatoes ranged from tiny, about the size of the tip of my little finger, to one that would cover about half of my palm.  The last time I grew potatoes was on my farm, The Peaceable Kingdom.  One fine September evening I took a hit of mescaline and lay among the potatoes, the sky blue overhead.  The potatoes grew, visibly, as I lay there, shaking gently and rising slowly from the soil.  I could feel the tubers beneath me swell.  It was a direct and wonderful connection to a garden.  Wish the rest of the time had been that pleasant.

Moving stuff around in the basement so Jon can build us a wall for our storage cellar.  That’s next.

Family, Garden, GeekWorld

123456789 Tomorrow

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Summer                           Full  Summer Moon

Woolly Mammoth Tom Crane sent this interesting note:

I’ve been alerted to an event that will take place later this week, something that happens once and only once over the course of history. Shortly after noon on July 8, comes the moment that can be called 12:34:56 7/8/9.

Don’t forget.  A once in our calendar moment.

Now that the mulch pile has been moved I can turn my attention to other garden tasks like weeding the clover, checking for new potatoes and looking at the garlic.  Weeding vegetables and perennial flowers.  Harvesting vegetables.  Thinking about how to fill in that spot in the year, late June, with flowering perennials next year.

Jon has one more carpentry task.  We want him to wall in a portion of our utility room to create a cool storage area for fruits and vegetables, an inside root cellar.  I don’t think it will be too complicated for him.  He’s very skilled when it comes to handyman type work.  Thank God.

One of these morning we’re going to the zoo to see the grizzly bears.  I love to go to the zoo but its so far from here in Andover, almost 50 miles.

Garden, Great Work, Politics

Mulch

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Summer              Waxing Summer Moon

The six cubic yard of mulch pile has become several piles of mulch at strategic locations along the paths and beds of last year’s orchard installation.  Now it awaits distribution, looking like debris fields from some recent wooden mountain slide.  Mulch serves many purposes in the garden.  Winter mulch keeps the ground cold during spring’s heaves as the earth thaws and refreezes.  Summer mulch helps in weed suppression, keeps the ground cool to avoid plants getting overheated and helps hold moisture in the soil during hot weather.

Mulch in the orchard serves mainly to suppress weeds and to give a uniform look to the beds and paths, but it has one important purpose that Paula Westmoreland of Ecological Gardens taught me.  She says the breakdown of wood chips gives a different boost to soil chemistry, one more favorable to perennial plants while straw works better for annual plants like vegetables.  I don’t understand it, but she seemed very confident.

I drove into Panera’s in Northeast for a meeting with Dan Endreson, outgoing legislative committee chair of the Sierra Club and Margaret Levin, its executive director.  We went over the past patterns of developing agendas for the upcoming legislative session.  Dan made me a disc of all the documents that had been useful for him and the committee over the last four sessions while he’s been active.

It’s fun to get into a responsible role in an issue area I feel is important and in an aspect of the work that involves politics.  The future looks like lots of meetings, phone calls and work in or around the capitol.

The kids are on their way back here from a 4th of July spent in Chicago with Jen’s family.  Herschel will be happy to see his family again.

Garden, Great Work, Holidays, permaculture, Politics

As American As …

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Summer                                   Waxing Summer Moon

As american as stock-car racing, country music, Walden Pond and the Beach Boys, another long hot summer is well under way.  The neighbors love fireworks and each fourth of July they show off the good stuff they’ve picked up.  Some of it is impressive for local effects.  Flowering showers with a boom at the end.  Fiery pinwheels with whistles.  Percussive blasts.

Rigel and Vega did not get as upset tonight as they did last night.  Reassurance and familiarity are a powerful antidote.

The harvest continues and picks up speed.  Tonight I made a dish with chard and beet greens, topped with baked beets in Balsamic vinegar.  There was, too, roasted turnips covered in olive oil, pepper and Kosher salt.  Potato crusted wild Cod finished the meal.

The Seed Saver’s Exchange calendar that hangs on our kitchen wall has this quote under July’s photograph of heirloom tomatoes, onions and bell peppers:  “When the harvest begins to flow is the gardener’s joy.”  It’s true.

Digging up turnips and beets, cleaning and cooking them feels so good when they’ve come direct from the garden.  Though there are political reasons for having one, ecological reasons  and aesthetic reasons, the real payoff from a garden is fresh food, grown in a manner you know and in a place with which you are familiar, even intimate.

There are certain activities that just seem congruent with life.  Among them are picking, cleaning and cooking your own vegetables.  When I dig up the turnips and the beets, I remember the day their seeds went into the ground, one at a time.  Their first shoots.  Their growth over time.  All part of my life and theirs.

Another tradition of the fourth at our house is a meal with dishes cooked from our own sources.  Hope yours went well, too.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden

The True Generational Transition

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Summer                   Waxing Summer Moon

Jon and Jen moved around the house this morning, packing and stowing, wiping Ruth’s tears–the wrong cap on her bubble bottle–and feeding a smiling Gabe.  It was the deliberate preparation of seasoned parents, checking this and that, getting ready.  As I watched, I realized this was the true generational transition.  The birth of grandchildren seems to represent the moment when the grandparent’s generation gets legs in time.  It’s not.  It comes when those children integrate into their family.  It comes when their parents take responsibility for them in a functioning, dynamic family.  It comes when tears are soothed, food comes to the table, when boundaries are set, when imagination is nurtured.  It comes when love creates a new family.   I saw all this over the last two days.

Jon put together Ruth’s playhouse.  We bought it a year and a half ago on sale at Costco.  It’s actually a utility shed, but a very cute one with windows and peaked roof.  We’re going to put white lights over the whole area and dress up the inside so other grandchildren can use it too.   Permaculture focuses not only on the plant life in an area, but on the human use of the land as well.  The playhouse adds generational nurturance to the built environment here.

Meanwhile the attacks on our new drip irrigation continue.  Vega seems to have taken a particular interest in where the netaphim should be.   She is not content with things as they are; rather, she sees things as she would like them to be and acts.  She apparently sees the netaphim with multiple holes, disconnected from its sources of water and distributed not where the plants are, but where she sees a better design.

Life has vibrancy here.  A good thing.

Garden, GeekWorld

Gremlins or Demons or Bugs, oh my

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Summer                    Waxing Summer Moon

This morning the temperature has fallen back to 65.  Good garden weather for moving mulch and repairing netaphim.

Electronic gremlins have given me fits for weeks now.  Not strong fits, but sure annoying.  A while ago my computer refused to recognize my disk drives.  On a day to day basis this is not a problem, but on those days when I want to play a CD or reload software or look at photographs saved to disc, on those days it’s a total frustration.

Then, sometime after returning from the trip to South Carolina, Georgia and Florida my photoshop elements photo organizer seized up.  It opens with a large rectangle in the upper left of the screen and a smaller slice vertically to the far right.  Nothing happens after that.   Again, on a day to day basis, not a big problem, but when I want to manipulate photographs, something I do often, particularly to make them smaller so they’ll fit on this website, I’m shut out completely.

In all these cases and the one below I try to sort stuff out myself.  I have a pretty good, but not perfect track record at this.  I never could figure out how to set up our wireless router, for example.  Geek Squad.  I may have to take my computer over to best buy.

The last couple of days, too, I’ve been bothered by a diminished stream.  No, nothing that Flomax could cure.  I’m talking about irrigation system.  I’m very familiar with the amount of water that comes out of a given spray head.  When it comes out in a weak flow, something is wrong.  It happened last week and I called the well guy to check the well reservoir.  Works fine and he did not charge me.  Whoa.  Again, this morning a weak flow.  Hmmm.

Kate said, “I know why it’s weak.  The front sprinkler is on.” Now that’s just strange.  This should never happen, two zones on at the same time, unless two different programs are scheduled for the same time.  Nope.  I checked that, not the problem.  Zones run in sequence.  1 runs, shuts off, then 2 runs, shuts off, then 3 runs and so on.  Why this should happen, I don’t know, but I hope the folks at Rainbird can explain it to me.

Art and Culture, Family, Garden, Politics, Writing

What Do You Do Well?

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Summer                      Waxing Summer Moon

“We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.” – William Hazlitt

What do you do well?  No false modesty, please, just a clear honest look at yourself with an assessment of your skills and abilities.  Each of us has something that we have forgotten the how of in the midst of performing the act.

Typing is one such skill for me.  I long ago broke with the eyes to the keyboard, careful typing of the uncertain.  I’ve used a keyboard since turning 17 and it is now a tool about which I think little.  Perennial flower gardening is the same.  Vegetables not so much, since I still have to think about growing season, water and food preferences, sun and varities.

Politics comes naturally to me now, but only because my dad and I started watching political conventions when I was 5.  Weighing the political possibilities in a given situation is like typing.  I no longer look at the keys.

Writing, too, has begun to come into that category, too, though the longer pieces, like novels, still require a good deal of careful planning and thought.

Parenting and child-rearing, also, seem to have become second nature to me.  I can think about it, but I don’t much.  I just do.  In the same vein caring for dogs now has experience and attentiveness to guide me, not conscious thought so much.

Cooking, too.  I’m not confident in my cooking skills when it comes to cooking for others, but for Kate and me, I work in the kitchen with interest and experience.

Touring at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts has gone through peaks and valleys, with my comfort level and confidence now beginning to rise again.  This one will take a while to pass into something I do well consistently.

OK, that’s my list.  What about yours?

Garden, permaculture

Sharpening. Mulching.

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Summer            Waxing Summer Moon

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.”- Bertrand Russell

Hmmm.  I wonder if that’s true?

Laid down some more straw, weeded a bit in the perennial garden.  After that I went out to the hardware store and bought a diamond file to sharpen my Felcro pruners,  often used garden tools.  A clerk had take me back into the tool aisles.  When asked why they roped them off, she gave me the expected answer, “People have been stealing tools.”  Tough economic times.

Then over to Anoka Feed and Seed where I ordered 6 cubic yards of shredded wood mulch.  Gotta cover up the netaphim and refresh the mulch all around the orchard.

Garden, GeekWorld, permaculture

Take That Hose And Grab It

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Summer                              New Moon

A bit of a disconnected afternoon.  A long nap followed by working for a while in the heat trying to figure which zone on our irrigation clock corresponded to which actual sprinklers.  This was necessary because we got a new clock and the guy joined the wires in roughly the same order as the old one.  Roughly.

The stimulus for this work came from Kate’s discovery that our new puppies get excited when the water comes through the netaphim line we just had put in our orchard.   By excited I mean grab the netaphim and run with it, chewing all the while.  Netaphim is a plastic tube about half the size of a garden hose through water drips onto plants rather than sprays.  It works great, but better without teeth marks.

Tomorrow I’ll put all the netaphim lines on a schedule separate from the rest of the sprinklers and start them early enough in the morning that their work will be done before the puppies get up.  That should solve it.