Category Archives: Garden

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.

Aging, Art and Culture, Garden

Morning Workout

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Spring                  Waxing Flower Moon

Shifting my workout to the AM.  The whole routine has gotten stale and needs shaking up.  Maybe when it gets a bit warmer I’ll take the aerobics outside.  I used to workokout outside all the time, even in the coldest part of winter, then on snowshoes.  Now I’m on the treadmill.

An Asmat tour today, filling in for Lila Aamodt.  Helping Kate with the garage sale, potting veggie transplants and planting legumes.  That’s the week this week.  Gardening stuff will occupy a lot of time between now and the vacation.

Art and Culture, Bees, Garden, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Travel

Getting the week started

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Spring                         Waxing Flower Moon

Business meeting this morning.  We decided to go ahead with a vegetable garden renovation planned by Ecological Gardens and to get the deck in on which we will build the playhouse for the grandkids.  That work will start soon. Exciting.

The bees spend these first days filling up cells with brood and honey made from the syrup mix.  I checked them yesterday and will now leave them alone until next Saturday.

Finished reservations for Hilton Head with the exception of the rental car.  That’s next.

Planting this week, too.  Today, though, is docent book club day.  Allison’s work on textiles.   Should be fun.

Bees, Cooking, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Hydroponics

A Green Miracle

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Spring              Waning Seed Moon

The bee hives have a new coat of white sealer, a soothing color for them.  The raised bed on which I painted them has some tulips pushing up and the bed across from it have the garlic.  They’ve begun to wake up in force now so we’ll have the pleasure of garlic grown this year from garlic we grew last year.

We had chard for lunch today.  I thought about it a moment.  I took one chard seed and put it in a small rockwool cube late last fall or early winter.  It got water and light from the fluorescent bulb until it sprouted.  After the first tiny roots began to appear outside the confines of the small cube, it went into the clay growing medium, small balls of clay that absorb nutrient solution.

The seedling grew in the nutrient solution for several weeks as the roots spread out.  The nutrient solution comes in a bottle, concentrated and goes 3 tablespoons to two gallons of water.  What those roots and the chard plant leaves have to work with then is that nutrient solution and the light from a full spectrum second sun that glows above the plastic beds in which the liquid circulates.

The wonder in this is the transformation of that small seed, not bigger than the head of a pin, into food with only the inputs of light and some concentrated chemicals diluted in water.  I’m not sure why  you need water into wine when you can turn water into food, better for you anyhow.

Over the next month the outside work begins to grow and take up more time.  In our raised beds and the orchard this same miracle happens, changed only by the addition of soil.  Seeds into food.  Which in turn create more seeds so you can grow more food.  A green miracle.

Garden

Let Cygon Be Cygon

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Spring             Waning Seed Moon

Heading out doors for a little garden work.  Gonna cut the bandages off the fruit trees, remove their wire varmint restraints and put cygon on the iris.  Cygon is one of the very few (2) chemicals I use.  It kills the iris borer, present in these soils and a nasty predator of iris rhizomes.  I also use the occasional herbicide for very problematic plants like quack grass and poison ivy, otherwise integrated pest and plant management is at work here.

Kate’s got strep and a sinus infection.  Plus the neck and back stuff.  Not pleasant.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden

Taking Part In the Process of Creation

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Spring        Waning Seed Moon
Friend Bill Schmidt passed these quotation on, sent to him by a friend.  I like the Hawthorne quote a lot because it captures an elusive feeling I often have when walking the grounds.
bloodrootSpring has returned.  The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
Rainer Maria
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I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation.
It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Hawthorne captures in the concrete this more abstract idea from Thomas Berry:   “Gardening is an active participation in the deepest mysteries of the universe.”
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As I thought about these quotes, this jumped out:  Want to live like they did 10,000 years ago?  Put in a garden. If it was good enough for the neolithic revolution, it’s good enough for me.
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We humans did not always tend to our gardens.  We stood up on two legs, dropped off body hair,  ran through savannahs, painted in caves and developed our gracile mind long before we realized seeds and plants went together.
Horticulture precedes agriculture and may again.  Latin hortus garden + cultura cultivation

Agriculture:  Middle English, from Middle French, from Latin agricultura, from ager field + cultura cultivation.

We worked small plots, or gardens, before the advent of fields or large scale cultivation.  I have a book in my library that I’ve not read (ok, I have a lot of books in my library I’ve not read), but this one has the title Human Scale.  Horticulture is human scale cultivation; agriculture is large scale cultivation.

As I’ve thought back over my life, I’ve noticed a common thread in many of the things I’ve done and co-operative efforts to which I’ve given energy:  they are an attempt to wrest human scale decision making authority and human scale work back from impersonal bureaucracies or larger scale political and economic entities.  Horticulture fits. Continue reading Taking Part In the Process of Creation →