Category Archives: Garden

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, permaculture

Bee-ing

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Beltane                      Waning Flower Moon

Tomorrow morning Mark Nordeen and I will zip up our white bee suits, put on Wellies and gloves, secure the veiled bonnet that makes us look like prim Victorian ladies headed for a stroll in Hyde Park circa 1880 and do the third check on the bee hive.

When I checked it a week ago, I saw capped cells and a lot of activity.  As I’ve watched scouts come and go over the last week, I’ve noticed that between 1/4 and 1/3 of them return with pollen on their hind legs.  This is a key transition, meaning they will be able to make their own food, wax and propolis.

As each new piece has become a part of our overall property, the gestalt increases.  It grows in size, has grown in size, from the first decisions about boulder walls and perennial flowers, through bulb planting, hosta and ferns, the multiplication and division of iris, day lilies, true lilies, hosta, bug bane, ligularia, dicentra.  When Kate began to grow vegetables, the gestalt pushed out some more.

Hiring Ecological Gardens and putting in the orchard last fall has pushed the boundaries of the whole further out, while integrating it more.  The bees have added an animal component, a lively and complex bee-ing.

Growing vegetable plants from seed under lights, then planting them outside adds another layer.  The work that Ecological Gardens plans for May 26 and May 27 will enrich it yet again.

The feeling is hard to express, but wonderful.  Mabye the bee hive is a good analogy.  It feels to me like the whole property has become an interdependent whole, with the land working for us and us working for the land.  I’m not talking about just food production.  The beauty of the flowers, the grace of the ferns, the broad green presence of the hosta are part of it, too.  Each part feeds into and amplifies the other.  The bees enhance the fruit trees, the vegetables and the flowers; in turn they provide pollen to the hive.  We care for the whole and harvest food, aesthetic pleasure and a sense of connectedness.

Garden, Great Work, Hydroponics, permaculture

Plants I’ve Known From Seeds.

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Beltane                       Waning Flower Moon

The peas and turnips and beets and new onions are up and wriggling toward the sky.  I planted all of the hydroponic plants today with the exception of the cucumbers.  They go in tomorrow.

This was satisfying, putting in plants I grew myself from heirloom seeds.  The next satisfaction will come as they grow, another when we harvest, but the best will be when I replant them next year grown from seed I harvest this year.

I already have garlic growing from bulbs I planted two years ago.  Once the new beds are in we will plant the beans, all of which are from last year’s beans.

Good to get all this done before I leave for Hilton Head.

Now it’s in to MIA to pick up  the Sin and Salvation catalogue for the Pre-Raphaelite show I will tour through the remainder of the summer.

Garden, Great Work, permaculture

A Cool Night.

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Beltane                    Full Flower Moon

This is the kind of weather that can scare a Minnesota gardener.  Right now the temperature is 42.  It could, will, go lower, though the prediction says no lower than 40.  If I thought it were going to get down to freezing, I’d have to cover my new peas and turnips.  They have just poked above the soil and would suffer and most would die.

My baby plants from inside are now adolescents; they stayed outside six hours today.  Tomorrow, I’ll put them outside by the beds where they’ll be planted and give them one more day in the peat pots before digging them in to their permanent homes.

I cut up the potatoes today, readying them for planting, too.  They may be a little late, so we’ll see what we get.  A lot of new plants in this year’s garden: leeks, parsnips, turnips, greens, brocolli, cauliflower, plants I may not understand too well.  Again, we’ll have to see what we get.

That kind of experimentation is one of the joys of gardening, eating something fresh that you’ve only ever had from a produce section of a supermarket.  This year marks a large expansion in our vegetable and fruit crop.  That means a lot of uncertainty, a steep learning curve with some plants.  All part of the deal.

Garden

Beware Success With Perennials

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Beltane               Full Flower Moon

Beware success with perennial flowers.   I have, long ago, mastered the art of growing asiatic lilies, iris and day lillies.  To my occasional regret.  The asiatic lilies are not too much of a problem though even they live long and prosper, therefore sometimes making a nuisance of themselves.

Iris and day lillies though are another matter.  They grow, multiply, spread.  When in a happy location, their presence can become not much distinguishable from weeds, especially since the definition of a weed is a plant out of place.

I just finished two hours of digging and moving daylillies.  Again.  The good news is that they grow anywhere you put them.  The bad news is the same.  I have a sturdy Smith and Hawkings spading fork which I broke today.  Again.  Shouldn’t have stepped on it to free the gnarly net of roots the daylilly clumps develop.  Sigh.  A satsifying, yet frustrating morning.

They need to move again because I want the sunny spot they have occupied for sprawling melons and cucumbers.  This spot has great sun and lots of room for squash sprawl, a good thing if you have the room and we do.  Right where one large batch of daylillies currently live.

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, permaculture

The Moon of Full Flower

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Beltane                     Full Flower Moon

The full flower moon rises tonight on beds full of daffodils, tulips, snowdrops and small blue flowers whose name I don’tdaffodils675 recall.  The furled hosta leaves that come up in a tightly packed spiral have begun to uncurl.  Dicentra have full leaves now, though no flowers yet.   A few iris have pushed blossoms up, a purple variety I particularly like opens early.  Even though they will not bear flowers until July the true lilies have already grown well past six inches, some with gentle leaves and others with leaves that look like a packed icanthus, an Egyptian temple column rising out of this northern soil.

My hydroponically started plants will stay outside today for four hours, working up to seven until they graduate to full time outdoor spots.  All of the three hundred plants began as heirloom seeds and have had no chemicals other than nutrient solution.   Unless we paid Seed Savers to ship us transplants, there is no other way to get heirloom plants that need growing time before the date of the last frost.  Too, the selection of vegetables and their varieties is of our choosing, not the nurseries.  I don’t have anything against nurseries; I just like to grow what I want, not what’s available.

The big daylilly move underway will make way for a full sun bed of sprawlers like squash, watermelon and cucumbers.  The perennial plants like the lilies, iris, daffodils, hosta, ferns, and hemerocallis have their complexity but I’ve majored in them for the last 14 years.  Now I understand their needs, their quirks, the rhythm of their lives and their care.  Vegetables, on the other hand, only this last two growing seasons have received any concentrated attention.  Their complexities are multiple because there are so many varieties and species with so many varying needs related to soil temperature, ph, nutrients, length and temperature of the growing season.

The learning curve has been steep for me so far, though the experience gained from the perennial plants has kept me from being overwhelmed.  In another couple of years I should have a good feel for what does well here and what does not.  After that, the vegetable garden will become more productive while at the same becoming easier to manage.

By that time, too, I hope to have had two successful bee-keeping years under my belt and have grown my colony to three hives or more, enough to justify purchasing an extractor.  At that point this should be an integrated and functioning micro-farm.  If it works well, I hope it will serve as a model for what can be done on 2.5 acres.  We’ll see.

Garden, permaculture

Sheepshead Mentors

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Beltane                        Waxing Flower Moon

After another night of losing sheepshead, it finally came to me.  These guys have been playing a lot longer than me.  Bill since childhood.  Roy and Dick since high school and Ed since entering the Jesuits.  Now I view them as my mentors.  That way I can lose and learn, instead of just lose.

The flower moon is near full and so beautiful.  It overlooks all our seeds, our bees, our orchard.  The back deck may transform into a moon viewing platform since it has a nice view to the south and east where the full moons tend to linger.

Paula Westmoreland came out today and we finalized plans for the garden transformation, the vegetable garden.  All the work will be done while I’m still in Panama City.  I’m excited to have more beds in which to plant vegetables and to have the vegetable garden have a more aesthetic feel.

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, permaculture

Our Life And This Land Are One

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Beltane                      Waxing Flower Moon

The garden beckons, so a short one this morning.  I’m set for having the garden planted before I leave next Friday, atulips674 week from tomorrow.  Everything I need to get in the ground before I get back will have a spot:  various tomato plants and potato eyes, broccoli, cauliflower, egg plant, onions, leek, chard, greens and cucumbers.

There is a sense of wholeness now as the orchard begins to blossom, the vegetable garden for this year starts to grow and the perennial flowers, hosta, ferns and bugbane blossom and emerge.   With the ecological garden’s work later this month we will have a yet more integrated homestead, with food and flowers, bees and a home of their own for the grandkids.

This must be a similar feeling to a farmer’s, a feeling that our life and this land are one.  That means, too, that as the garden comes to life, a certain part of my Self also comes to life, when it grows, so do I.  As the harvest comes in so do I harvest fruits within my Self.

When the garden begins to go fallow in late August through October, another aspect of my Self blossoms.  In this light I can see September 29th, the Feast of  St. Michael the Archangel, as the springtime of the  soul.  This begins a period more reflective and contemplative, a period, too, when my creativity flowers.  As outside, so inside.

Blessed be.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work

This May Night Has A Sacred Presence

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Beltane                Waxing  Flower Moon

When I walk outside at night, on the back deck, the flower moon shines, almost full.  A May rain has dampened all the earth in the back, where the vegetables seeds wait for the right combination of moisture and heat to spring to life, begin their season.  The earth on this May night gives off a scent, a strong scent,  the odor of fertility.

It was said that the odor of sanctity, a scent associated with saints, was the smell of roses.  I’ll go with the smell of roses and leave the sanctity to the theologians, but this May night has a sacred presence, the presence of life and the inanimate in an intimate union.

Moon light on a growing garden, an orchard beginning to leaf out, tulips and daffodils folded up for the night, are the early signs of a northern summer.

A northern summer has a marked difference from the southern US or Southeast Asia, which my brother refers as the land of endless summer.  We come to summer after a long, cold, sometimes difficult winter.  The greens, the yellows, the reds and blues of summer gladden the heart, create a sense of openness and possibility, so welcome.  In lands where the seasons are only dry or wet, but always hot there is no caesura, a fallow time, for contrast.

Right now, to step outside in the dark, with a fine bright moon, is to walk into the Otherworld straight out of the Land of Winter.  Magical.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Myth and Story

A Mist of the Otherworld

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Beltane                   Waxing Flower Moon

Beets.  Carrots planted.  Beds all planned.  Kate’s taken off all the wire surrounds for our fruit orchard and begun eliminating quack within the mounds around them; the mounds filled with guild plants to sustain the trees.  This afternoon I will round-up the quack in the areas around the mounds, then plan to seed it next week.

Seeds.  Plants.  Reproduction and renewal.  Resurrection.  Reincarnation.  No wonder the garden has a mist of the Otherworld.  It reeks of life at its most survival oriented and at its most elegant, beautiful.  We see there the possibility of our own resurrection, planted too in the soil, awaiting a springtime for the soul.

Can we draw an analogy from the garden to our Selves?  We can’t help it.  Whether it translates to our experience or not, we intuit that it does.  I’m for the intuitive.  It just make intuitive sense.

Friends, Garden

Peas, Turnips and Parsnips Oh, My

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Beltane                    Waxing Flower Moon

Many daffodils bloom outside the writing area.  No tulips yet, but they should bloom in the next few days.

Snow peas, sugar peas, garden peas, snap peas all went into the ground this morning.  This took a while because there were several steps.  First, loosen the soil with a spading fork.  Rake smooth.  Create a taut twine line marking the location of the trellis.  Scratch a half inch to one inch furrow on either side of the twine.  Lay down inoculant in the rows.  Then, one by one, place the peas.  Do this over and over until 4 rows run parallel to each other.

In between the 1st and 2nd rows and the 3rd and 4th rows, reachable with ease from the bed’s edge, white globe turnip went into the same soil.  Turnips like pea companions.

Another bed, this one with a nice daisy and a star-gazer lily, got loosened up, too.  After a smoothing with the small garden rake, parsnip seeds fluttered down onto the scratched surface, tiny space ships with feathered brown edges and a cockpit containing the parsnip seed.  The parsnips, after thinning and trimming, get a mulch and then remain in the ground until next spring, achieving their nutty flavor through hard frosts and a hard winter.

At that point the noon sun had made me hot so I came inside to write, have lunch and take a nap.  Later this evening I’ll plant greens, beets and carrots.

One more thought on garage sales.  Here in Minnesota, after a hard winter, they are also the equivalent of a  social event for post-hibernation bears.  Minnesotans love the winter, but during the winter our travels outside of our home usually have a distinct purpose and almost always head away from the house.  There are no yard parties in the winter.  Well, not many anyhow.  Some folks just gotta barbecue.

When the weather warms up, though, lawn mowers come out.  Lawn chairs.  And, garage sales.  Neighbors drop by to say hi, see if you made it through the winter, and coincidentally, to check out your stuff.