Category Archives: Garden

Garden, Great Work, permaculture

Two One Hundred Yard Pots of Soup

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15  bar steep rise 29.50  5mph  W  windchill 9   Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights     Day  8hr  45mn

It’s 4:48 and the sun has been down for 20 minutes, twilight almost run its course.  We are a week away from the Winter Solstice, the high holiday in my personal calendar.

There is a simple pleasure, at once profound and straightforward.  Grow a vegetable.  Save it in the fall.  Use it in soups in the winter.  Today I made bean based soups with white and black beans from our garden.  Onions and garlic went in each of them, too.  So did some Swiss Chard grown in our hydroponics.

Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired Magazine, had a column this issue titled Urban Food.  He said to heck with the 100 mile meal, I’m talking about the 100 yard meal.  These two pots of soup are 100 yard pots of soup.

Feels great.

Family, Garden, permaculture

Working on the Forest Edge

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32  bar steep rise  30.08  0mph NW  Windchill 31   Samhain

Waning Gibbous Dark Moon

Got groceries at Festival.  Grocery prices have gone up, maybe 15-20%.  Many people bought their Thanksgiving turkeys from a young woman with a table set up beside the butcher’s counter.  Christmas music played in the background, in sympathy, I guess, with the lonely retailers who expect no Christmas present purchases this year.

Once again I purchased produce unrecognizable to the check-out person, a friendly girl of about 18.  Is this a rutabaga?  No, jicama.  Is this a sweet potato?  No, a yam.  Oh, do they taste different?  Yes and have different colors, too.  What about these, are they good?  Rambuta.  Yes, just slice around the middle and take the top off.  Are they sweet?  Yes, if you like sweet, you’ll like these.  They’re not too sweet, are they?  No.  Medium.

Then I was on my way with my plastic bags, once again shopping without the cloth bags I’ve purchased for the purpose.   I wish they’d hop in the car without my having to remember.

orchard-week-1frtrees400006.jpgThe rest of the morning I cleared ground along the forest edge so I can put down black plastic, then mulch, to kill all the flora we do not want in the way when we plant the crops that will distract the birds from our orchard.  They will provide a height sensitive edge, stair stepping back toward the poplars, ash, cedar, oak, acacia and pin cherry behind them.

Built up a good appetite.  Still eating the 11-bean soup I made a week and a half or so ago.  Nap.

Now, after the nap, I’m doing inside things I’ve held off until I had a bit of time in the afternoon.  I put ink cartridges in my Canon Pixma printer.  This is a real rip-off.  Even when printing only black, like copies, it uses up colored ink.  This means that you have to replace the color cartridges as often as the black ones.  Guess what?  The colored cartridges are expensive.  Anyone with this printer as their primary printer pays a lot for the privilege.  My laserjet printer handles black and white in an economical manner.

Also cleaned the carpet in the study.  Dogs leave the occasional trail.  Also cleaned the stairs.  Dogs, again.

Kate’s upstairs threshing beans from our garden.  I look forward to using them in recipes over the course of the winter.

The cones are finally on the zone 5 grasses in the perennial garden.  I hope they survive.  They were a nice, delicate touch behind the lilies, iris and, later, the iris and sedum.

Oh. BTW.  No fruits on the pepper or eggplant yet.  It was a false pregnancy.  This may take a while to get down.

Family, Garden

A Fruiting Body?

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21  bar steady 0mph NE windchill 21  Samhain

Waxing Gibbous Dark Moon (I’ve been wrong on this for several posts)

Kate’s home and likely will be for a while until we get her neck dealt with in one way or another.  She’s read.  She’s sewed.  She’s cooked.   She’s helped out in the orchard work.   Not enough for her sturdy Norwegian work ethic. Her neck is bad enough that work just makes it worse, but when she rests it subsides enough that she itches to get stuff done, a tough place to be in for such an active and alive person.

A bit more garden work to do.  Stake the trees in the orchard.  Put protective sleeves on my 2-year old, toddler trees.  Put down black plastic on the forest edge and the shade garden area.  Still, the end is in sight for this growing season.

This is said sotte voce: I may be a daddy!  My dalliance with the peppers and egg plants seems to have begun to bear fruit.  I can’t tell for sure quite yet, but it sure looks like both plants are with fruit.  If so, I’m gonna be pleased.   I’ll post pictures when I know more.

Paula and Lindsay come tomorrow morning to do some rejiggering of our site plan.  Our work with them feels collaborative and I like that.

Tuesday evening is an event put on by our financial planner, talking about the current market situation.

Wednesday AM, most likely, Kate will have some more diagnostic tests for her neck.
Wednesday night is the Sierra Club political committee evaluation and celebration meeting.  I hope enough folks show up to help us get a good sense of what happened.  How many of our endorsee’s overall got elected.  Why did the four campaigns we targeted win and why did two fail?  What should be a time-line for next year’s political committee?

Thursday morning we see our financial adviser. Thursday afternoon Anastasia, Allison and I will judge the Northeast Minneapolis Art Show.  Friday night we’ll go to the opening.  Friday AM I have two tours and Kate has an appointment with the neuro-surgeon.

A very busy week.

Garden, Our Land and Home

Crash Under the Blood Moon

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46 bar falls 30.22  6mph  ENE  windchill 43  Autumn

Last Quarter of the Blood Moon

It looks like the most violent moments of the credit crisis, stock market crash will have come under the aegis of the Blood Moon.  Coincidence?  I think so, but it’s still metaphorically powerful.

All the trimmed hemerocallis in the back have been tucked away in piles to decompose for the good of the land.  The umbrella for the patio table has been deconstructed; it broke during a powerful windstorm in August.  We will use the skeleton of the umbrella as a tutor for some climbing vegetable next spring, probably beans.

There are no more major fall clean-up tasks.  The orchard has fall tasks, but I’ve only begun to learn about them, so I won’t do any of them until we come back from Colorado.

I also need to clear a fifteen foot edge on the woods, then cover it with black plastic and  hay.  That one I’m going to let nature start by killing back the existing plants.  Once we have some snow on the ground I plan to burn two large brush piles in the way.  A couple of other areas need black plastic or newspaper and hay, that I may start tomorrow.

Kate and I have our business meeting now.  Tomorrow we have to get packed, finish up the usual pre-trip stuff.  Later.

Garden

Over the Back Fence

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Truck unloaded, then filled up with 6 bales of straw.  All the outside plants inside.  The morning.  Along with a few miscellaneous things:  watering the orchard, deconstructing a run of fence, talking with the neighbors over the back fence.

Now.  A nap.

Garden, Literature

Quack Will Inherit the Earth

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42  bar steady 30.28  0mph WNW  windchill 42  Autumn

Waxing Gibbous Blood Moon

That damned quack.  It has begun to overtake our new plantings.  So, purity to the wind.  If it warms up to 60 degrees, we’ll hit it with Roundup.  Then again.  And, probably, given the tenacious qualities of quack grass, again quackgrass_rhizome2300.jpgnext spring.

Over the years I have become a grudging fan of these hardy herbaceous plants, the weeds.  Without sophisticated gardening intervention they thrive; in fact, they often thrive in spite of it.   They are true survivors and give succor to anyone worried about humankind’s ultimate effect on the planet.

Herbicide us.  Nuke us.  Poison Gas.  Plague.  Quack grass and creeping charlie will soldier on.  I have not yet read The World Without Us but if it’s honest, it will tell the tale of a world dominated by weeds.  Only they will not be weeds anymore, since a weed is a plant out of place.  No, The World Without Us will be quack world, dandelion heaven, creeping charlie nirvana.  Long may they reign.

Until then, however, I want to get the damned stuff out of my young orchard.

Right now I have no Sierra Club responsibilities, except my last rounds of stranger phone calls ever.  I have no tours for which I have to prepare.  My sermons have left the computer and entered the world.  So for the next week or so I can devote myself to finishing up gardening chores, cleaning up my spaces infected with piles and perhaps catching up on a bit of reading.

Speaking of that, I have a recommendation for those of you who like literature and mysteries:  The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, by Swedish author Steig Larson.  A smart mystery and an intriguing look into contemporary Swedish life.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, permaculture

Senescence

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60  bar rises 30.07  2mph N  dew-point 59  sunrise 7:06  set 7:00  Autumn

Waning Crescent of the Harvest Moon  rise 5:12  set 6:05

Today and tomorrow will be full gardening days.  There are bulbs to plant: daffodils, hyacinths, snow drops, many tulips and garlic.  Sprinkler heads need coaxing.  Mulch sits over at the Anoka County Landfill.  Some of it has to come here in the trailer.

orchard-installation-day-3decay.jpg

While documenting the orchard installation, I also took some shots of the vegetable garden in late September.  This photograph has our heirloom Cherokee Purple tomatoes in their senescence.  The asiatic lilies with the tall tan stems of wilted leaves look much the same in terms of their life cycle, but in fact are different.

As annuals, the Cherokee Purples put all their effort into fruit, then the plant dies.  As a result, we have had a bumper crop of tomatoes, all raised from four seeds planted in April of this year under the lights of the hydroponic system.  Continue reading Senescence →

Garden

Moving–Logs, Day Lilies

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75  bar falls 30.07  2mph E  dew-point 59  sunrise 6:58  set 7:13  Lughnasa

Waning Gibbous Harvest Moon  rise 9:58  set 1:37

Couldn’t get chipper this morning, so I spent some time moving logs, then went on to plant daffodils.  After the nap Kate and I worked on transferring day lilies to a front bed.  She wants them to block out weeds and they should do a good job.  That took most of the afternoon.  Tomorrow I can get the chipper so we’ll do that AM.  After, I’ll plant more bulbs and more lilies.

Garden, permaculture

A Splitting Morning

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63  bar rises 30.11  2mph NW  dew-point 54  sunrise 6:58  set 7:13  Lughnasa

Waning Gibbous Harvest Moon  rise 9:58  set 1:37

A crisp morning, tending toward a warm afternoon.  Great for outdoor work.  Have to split logs so I can use the chipper on them Monday.  Then, plant bulbs and move hemerocallis.  Plenty outside labor for the crew here at Vineland Place.

Check in later.