Category Archives: Garden

Home Alone

August 9, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

62 bar steep rise 29.98 3mph NEE dew-point 47 sunrise 6:08 sunset 8:28 Lughnasa

First Quarter of the Corn Moon moonrise 1533 moonset 2334

Kate’s been gone since Thursday morning. I miss her. There’s always a certain frisson being home alone, for a bit, but it fades and then missing her kicks in. We talk things out, watch each others backs, fill in each others life. Happily married, I’m happy to say, 18+ years and counting.

Bumped the irrigation system up to 150%. The rain has been scarce to none. We’re in a severely dry period. The grass has begun to turn brown, even with regular watering. The crops need water now because many of them come to maturation in the month of August and early September. Having our own well is a blessing when it comes to irrigation, it means we don’t have to worry about drawing down the city wells or abiding by their sprinkler rules. Even so, I wonder about the water table and if our use of the sprinklers and our neighbors affects the city as a whole. Don’t know enough about hydrology to know.

A few of the Olympic events were on TV, but women’s soccer, the early rounds, and volleyball do not draw me. The sports I enjoy are the track and field events. Even there, the participants are, for the most part, unknown and will not become visible again until the next Olympics. I suspect I’m not the only one who does not enjoy sports where the narrative line has no visibility most of the time. One of the things I enjoy about football is the back story I know from years of paying attention. Almost none with the Olympics.

Up too late. Again.

Garden, Our Land and Home

Dig In!

August 9, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

79 bar steady 29.88 3mph NNW dew-point 56 sunrise 6:07 sunset 8:28 Lughnasa

First Quarter of the Corn Moon moonrise 1432 moonset 2259

More empathy for the sandhogs and ditch diggers from the old sod who threw the new sod. The pit is down as far as I need to take it. Kate and I have to decide now how we want to trick it out. Stone? Metal? What kind of seating? Cooking? When she gets back, we’ll figure it out. She’s the detail person, the finished carpenter to my laborer.

The notion of standing stones in the yard still draws me, makes me want to find the right ones, ones that look like the standing stones in England, Ireland and Brittany. I haven’t put a full court press into it, but I will here at some point.

This afternoon after the nap I’m going to sterilize the hydroponics and set little cubes of various kinds growing in the nursery. I plan to have salad material growing, probably all but tomatoes. They will await another iteration of the hydroponics.

An African object written up, then back to the novels.

Garden, Literature, Writing

Du Fu, Li Bai and Wang Wei

August 8, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

79 bar steep drop 29.95 0mph S dew-point 54 sunrise 6:06 sunset 8:30 Lughnasa

First Quarter of the Corn Moon moonrise 1326 moonset 2226

Each day of the Olympics I will post a poem from a famous Chinese poet. Du Fu, Li Bai and Wang Wei are the three most admired T’ang dynasty poets. It is so easy to forget that this last century is only a tiny portion in the sweep of Chinese civilization. In all the sturm und drang about the rise of China the fact that China has risen and fallen many times over the last 5,000 plus years often remains buried. That’s right, 5,000 years of a continuous culture, sometimes dominant, sometimes ruled by foreigners, many of whom embraced Chinese civilization.

It is arrogant of us to judge China by our standards, standards that have stood nowhere near the test of time. In China the collective always comes before the individual, at least that has been true historically. This is not to say that there have not been individualists in Chinese history. Taoism tends to produce them, as does the famous literati system of rule by intellectuals. Many painters and poets also walked their own distinctive paths.

Well, anyhow, China doesn’t need my defense. I just want to add a bit from the depth of Chinese culture as we go through Olympics which often seem more about air pollution and human rights than sport.

Yes, I know. This seems like a conservative position, but in reality it is a position informed more by anthropology and history, a position not too different from walk a mile in the other person’s moccasin.

I spent an hour or so this morning admiring the work of the Irishmen who dug ditches. Put the shovel in the earth, push it down, lift it up, heave. Repeat. Not back breaking, but a workout. I had a good nap. The fire pit has begun to appear. It will be deep enough for a fire when the Woollies come, though whether the area around it will be is another matter.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Writing

Moving

August 7, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

78 bar falls 30.03 4mph NNW dew-point 53 sunrise 6:05 sunset 8:31 Lughnasa

First Quarter of the Corn Moon

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize that half of them are stupider than that. George Carlin, RIP

Finally. The first drafts of Heresy Moves West and Heresy Moves West II are in the digital file cabinet. They did not end where I had hoped though they cover in very broad strokes the topic I set myself in the beginning. There is a third, unwritten piece that will continue the Heresy, adding one of my own, or, at least, one articulated in my own voice. I will not start on that one anytime soon, however.

Tomorrow AM I plan to take shovel in hand and get to work moving day lilies. This is so I can clear a raised bed of its iris and true lilies by moving them where these hemerocallis live right now. Kate wants hemerocallis to fill the bed out front because she’s tired of weeding that large island east of the driveway. Can do, and I’ll get a start on the morrow.

Onto the treadmill.

Garden

Wanna See Some Pretty Pictures?

August 6, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

78 bar steady 30.01 0mph NE dew-point 61 sunrise 6:04 sunset 8:32 Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon moonrise 12:10pm moonset 10:37pm

“Beer will be (in) short supply, more expensive and may taste different as climate change affects barley production, a scientist says.” News.com.au april, 2008

Now there’s a motivator for action.

Punk Silk on our Country Gentlemen Corn

Our Early Season Onions in the Second Stage of Drying

Kate’s Purple Garden (a small part) in its 4th Year

Garden

Laying Food By

August 5, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

78 bar rises 29.99 4mph N dew-point 56 sunrise 6:03 sunset 8:34 Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

“The rest of the beans will dry on the plants!” Kate said yesterday, her brow perspiring from work over a hot pressure canner. Yes, the beans produce and produce and produce. Canned green beans now stock our larder, companions to the tomatoes, pickles, jams and assorted other 19th century farm food self lay-bys she has made. The beans which dry on the plant will get picked after the plant itself dies and the pods begin to crack open a bit.

Later, as the snow flies, we’ll take those pods and thresh them, pick out the dried beans and pop them in hermetic glass jars. Soups and other bean dishes to follow.

With the first harvest festival already past the garden goes into overdrive, testing the patience of even Kate, a long time canner and freezer. Tomatoes and cucumbers have begun to pop out and ripen, the spaghetti squash has several fruits on the way, the peppers have begun the slow process of maturation and a second crop of beets has about six inches of greens up already. This is when the sweat and the soil preparation and the weeding and pruning all begin to yield results. A good time.

The hemerocallis, likewise, are in their glory: many shades of purple in the front, orange and reds and yellows in the back and in the park. Of course, I wonder how the garden will look when the Woollies come in two weeks. I can’t recall that week from years past, but I imagine the daylilies will still be blooming and perhaps the clematis bushes will have begun to flower. I forget to mention here the begonias and geraniums, the sturdy plants that overwinter in the basement, moving happily outside after the last frost. They add color and texture to the garden.

Up late today, so I’ve got to get to Heresy Moves West. Bye for now.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, World History, Writing

Onion Drying, the Next Stage

August 3, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

72 bar steady 29.81 1mph NE dew-point 65 sunrise 6:00 sunset 8:37 Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

A writing day so far. I have started writing Heresy Moves West. It will take a bit longer than I imagined, maybe quite a bit, because I have this propensity to place things in context, deep context. In this case for example I have established the Protestant Reformation as the sine qua non of the development of Unitarianism and its westward expansion, at least I have established that to my content. Not too much further along I intend to swing back to Abraham who listened to YHWH and left his Canaanite Gods for monotheism. Since you can not just go back into the past and then jump into the present, the intervening time takes a paragraph or two (at least) to describe, and all this in service of the actual topic, the history of Unitarian and Universalist churches in Minnesota.

Why do I do this? Sheer cussedness in part. Simplistic explanations that ignore real historical paths irritate me. I do not like to emulate them. That means rooting my thesis about U-U expansion in Minnesota in the soils from which it sprang. They have lots of topsoil, gathered from diverse times and places. The process is sort of like archaeology. In order to explain the top, most recent layer of artifacts requires continuing to dig down, down, down until the physical culture either stops or changes to something completely different.

Anyhow, all this means I’ll be writing for some time, maybe as long as 2 or 3 days. That eats into posting time. So, for the next few days it might be a little sparse here. Might not.

In the past week AncienTrails had 2100 unique visits, about 300 a day. You are not alone.

Kate and I carried the old sliding door screen into the front shed. We had to take all the onions off it to get it inside, then move the onions back on it. In addition I had to remove the remaining stalks so my hands smell like onions. The onions must remain in the shed for two to three weeks, then they will go in tangerine crates. Once in the crates the onions will await their turn in the kitchen on an old book shelf in the furnace room. The garlic hangs not far from their future home.

When dead heading the last of the Lilium today, I found one that had bulbils. These form at the junction between stalk and leaf. They are another means of propagating lilies. I will cut this plant down and use the bulbils inside to create stock for next spring.

Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays

Primal Eating

August 2, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

71 bar rises 29.87 0mph NE dew-point 58 sunrise 6:00 sunset 8:38 Lughnasa

New (Corn) Moon

A vegetarian meal tonight. Spaghetti squash, golden beets, cucumber tomato and onion salad and cooked whole onion. Colorful and healthy. All but the tomatoes were from our garden, including the garlic and cilantro sauteed in olive oil as a dressing for the squash. After the OMG tomatoes the plants have settled into production with many fruits, but none mature right now.

I know some perhaps many of you who read this cook things straight out of your garden or meat from your stock, but I haven’t done it much. Flowers and shade plants, shrubs and trees have occupied my time. I love them and will always tend them but the vegetables now have my attention.

Primal eating happens when you go pluck five beets out of the earth, take them into the sink and wash them off, trim the leaves and roots away, then slice these hardy roots into smaller pieces, add tarragon and balsamic vinegar, some salt, cook and eat them. The same tonight with the spaghetti squash, the cucumber, the onion, both in the salad and the one I cooked whole. I knew these plants when they were tiny seeds, barely bigger than the lead in a pencil or when they were small potted specimens. The onions and the garlic went into the ground as what they would become, only larger. In each case though the same hands that harvested them prepared for eating.

10,000 years ago some hunters and gatherers first planted seeds and tended crops. The effect on human culture still gathers momentum even today. Nomadic life began to disappear for those people. Settled villages sprang up around the fields. The keeping of animals for food was more predictable than the hunt. In both cases though our ancestors had to give up the moving from place to place depending on season and game patterns. Our bodies, developed in the paleolithic to survive predators and hunt for prey, found themselves out of place.

They still do. So, while gathering and cooking goes far back in our history, it does not go all the way back to that earlier phase of the moveable feast. This fall, however, when Kate and I pick wild grapes that grow in our woods and turn them into jam we will travel back to those ancient times, the ancient trail of seeking food where it decides to be rather than where we care for it.

This meal tonight was a Lughnasa meal, a meal of first fruits, the harvest we do not plan to store either through drying or canning. As a Lughnasa meal, it put us in contact with those early Celts whose gardens might spell the difference between survival and starvation. We live in a wealthier time, but not in one any less dependent on the gifts of mother earth.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Weather +Climate, Writing

Spaghetti Squash and a Scimitar Cucumber

August 2, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

81 bar steady 29.93 1mph NE dew-point 51 sunrise 5:59 sunset 8:38

New (Corn) Moon

Tao is the way without a way;
It is the path with no tracks.
You start walking the way of Tao when you erase anything – good or bad – you learned about Tao.

“If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.” – Wilson Mizner

This quote from Mizner amuses me since I’ve just read many authors to tease out the history of Unitarian and Universalist churches in Minnesota. Research, not plagiarism. I put down Freedom Moves West this morning after read it, mostly, from beginning to end. It is rare when researching a topic as outside the mainstream as this one to find a whole book exactly on point by Freedom Moves West is such a book. It offers up the history of the Western Unitarian Conference from 1852 to 1952, the period when Minnesota churches came into being and the context nationally and regionally that surrounded their creation.

Of course, such a lot of material on point requires a good deal of sifting and weighing, matching with other sources, like church histories written by individual congregation, still it provides an overall narrative that makes the whole task better.

After my nap, I plan to sit down and organize my notes and thoughts on Heresy Moves West (yes, I sort of borrowed the notion from the book). If I can, I hope to get to writing. If not, tomorrow. That will feel good.

Last night I harvested a spaghetti squash and a long, scimitar shaped cucumber. This morning I pulled golden beets and Nante carrots. Later on I’ll pluck one of the drying onions off the screen and a head of garlic to use in cooking supper. This will be a vegetarian meal, one made in honor and celebration of Lughnasa. Celtic holy days lasted a week or more, occasioned as they usually were by markets, dances, rituals and general collectivity.

A lovely, blue sky day with reasonable dew-point and temperature. Good deal.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work

The Beginning of Summer’s End

August 1, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

77 bar rises 29.83 3mpn NNW dew-point 61 sunrise 5:58 sunset 8:39 Lughnasa

New (Corn) Moon

As I note in the Lughnasa entry now posted on the Great Wheel page, we have come to the beginning of summer’s end. The Celtic word for summer’s end is Samhain, also the name for the last of the harvest festivals celebrated on October 31st. August 1st finds those of us with gardens and farms involved in some manner or another with our early harvests. The first tomatoes, the garlic already in here, beans, beets, carrots and onions. This is a time of thanksgiving, a day of gratefulness for the earth and for the plant life which offers itself to us and to our fellow creatures so that we might live.

A dish of green beans, onions in a salad perhaps garnished with tomatoes, garlic used to flavor a sautee all remind us that food does not emerge from the ether, rather it grows with care and attention, care and attention meted out over a growing season, not all at once. It is not a matter of a moment to grow food. Vegetables only reward those willing to practice attentiveness, to stay in the now. The plant needs what it needs today, not tomorrow. The pests that infest today will become worse tomorrow. Act now.

Today is an all Heresy Moves West day. The story of Unitarians and Universalist as they follow the frontier, especially the pioneers from New England, makes an American saga. America’s exceptionalism often takes the form of manifest destiny, our version of Kipling’s White Man’s Burden, but a truer idiosyncrasy of this country lies in our embrace of religious freedom. We take it for granted, imagine that if it’s not the case in another place, they just haven’t gotten around to it yet, but in fact we are very much the outlier when it comes to the firewall between the state and religious institutions/faith traditions.

That a peculiar brand of new thought that changed the flow of a millennia old faith tradition–the Judaeo-Christian–could not only flourish but spread as the country grew, that the new thought itself would become fractious and splinter along unpredictable lines, and that it would find its most radical expression in the Midwest rather than its place of origin in Boston and surrounds could only happen here. The chance to tell this story makes me glad, for it is a story of vision, of unfettered thought, of reaching beyond the boundaries of the mind, a story that transcends its makers by breaking open new sources of authority for those searching for a place in this vast universe of ours.