Category Archives: Garden

Garden

Laying Food By

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Family, Garden, Weather +Climate

Integrated Pest Management

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78  bar falls 29.68  2mpn NW dew-point 65  sunrise5:57  sunset8:40  Summer

New Moon (Corn Moon or State Fair Moon)

NOAA awakened me with its trademark ululation, alerting me to the thunder storm watch declared for Anoka County.  Such notices are rare in the morning, mostly coming in the late afternoon as the heat of the day punches up cumulus clouds into congestus, then into the anvil shape of the thunderhead, sometimes 5 or 6 miles high.

This allowed plenty of time for Kate and me to conduct our family business meeting.  This included Kate’s announcement of the fourth large quarterly adjustment in a row.  She works hard and gets compensated accordingly.  She’s off right now having lunch with Penny Bond at the Istanbul Bistro.

Last night while checking the crops I found an infestation of aphids in one corn stalk’s tassel.  After checking others and only finding the one, I ripped that one of the ground and moved it far away.  This morning I found another tassel with a few aphids, this one I squeezed between fingers and thumb instead of discarding.  I’ll check it again, but I imagine that fixed it.

Watching for disease and pests is an important part of gardening.  Another important part is not overreacting. I used to overreact, head straight for the pesticide or fungicide.  Since then, I’ve learned that plants can sustain damage with no harm to their overall purpose.  The trick is to know when the balance shifts from the plant’s natural defenses to the invaders.  Even when I react, I almost never resort to pesticides (I use cygon on Iris Borers in the spring.).  Instead I look for hand removal, plant elimination or measures such as squirting with high pressure water.  That approach has served me well for the last four to five years.

Integrated pest management (IPM) encourages this kind of response.  Good cleanup in the fall, creating a soil and growing condition favorable to healthy plants and either starting or purchasing strong plants also goes a long ways toward a manageable pest and disease environment.  These are also part of an IPM strategy.

Garden

Onions on a Screen

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80  bar steady 29.71  2mph W dew-point 61  sunrise 5:56  sunset 8:42 Summer

Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon

Heaved sand out of the to be fire pit.  Still a lotta roots even after the stump grinder.  Sigh.  It will get finished, and before 8/18 as a birthday present for Kate and as a Woolly place.  Gotta get up earlier to make this happen however.

Pulled onions, put down an old sliding door screen over the raised bed and put them on it to dry.  We have red and yellow, no white.  Seeing them out there, all next to each other, soaking up the rays like California girls makes an aging horticulturist proud.  All the allium crops are out of the ground now.  The garlic hangs in the utililty room in the basement and the onions will go in the garage either in burlap or slotted crates.

With tomatoes coming and the bean plants producing we are well into the first harvest cycle.  We will celebrate this on August 1st with some kind of ceremony in the garden.  We also plan to invite the neighbors on August 2nd.

Garden

What a Tomato!

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86  bar steady  29.66  2mph SSE dew-point 56  sunrise 5:55 sunset 8:43  Summer

Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon

“Frisbeetarinism is the belief that when you die your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.”  George Carlin, RIP

OMG!  Picked another Cherokee Purple tomato.  It weighs 1.5 pounds.  That’s quite a tomato.  These plants have just begun producing ripe fruit so I imagine the next month or so will see challengers.  Now I have to figure out to save the seed and grow these monsters again next year.  Each of these plants got their start in our hydroponics.  Very satisfying to go from seed to a 1.5 pound fruit.

Kate’s sewing a dress for Ruthie.  She already made two small suits for Gabe.  She gets into a trance when the sewing begins, real flow.

Garden

One Slice Covers a Salad Plate

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82 bar falls 29.66 1mph E dew-point 73  sunrise 5:55 sunset 8:43 Summer

Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon

Dead headed the lilium today, their bloom period is almost past.  Buddhists say flowers get their beauty from their transience.  Makes sense.  The flower symphony I outlined a few posts ago honors this notion, seeing the transience as  beautiful.  The hemerocallis, or day lilies have begun to come into their own, vigorous and bountiful.  Their multi-colored, short-lived flowers will grace our garden for some time.

The acorn squash plant that had designs on much of the area in its not so immediate surround had to give up some of its space today.  While cutting back the vine, I harvested squash blossoms for soup or salad.  This vine has small prickles on it, stay away signals.

Kate harvested four of the Cherokee Purple tomatoes yesterday.  They are huge.  They taste sweet, a subtle flavor with undertones.  One slice covered the bottom of the salad plate on which I put it.  The heirlooms have a different feel, a different texture on the palette.  Sort of like eating history.  I imagine pioneers or turn of the century farmers plucking these giants and serving them up just as I did, slice after slice with a little salt and pepper, no need for garnish.

The corn, some of it, has tassles.  With tassles, ears of corn are not far behind.  This is Country Gentelmen, a shoe peg white corn with irregular kernels.  The beans planted in the space between their rows flourish, too, as do the second planting of beets in the bed now vacated by the garlic.  Today, too, I plan to dig up all the onions and put them on a large screen to dry, then bag.  There are a lot of onions.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Garden, Great Work

The Heart of What Ails American Culture

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75  bar steady 29.84  0mph NE dew-point 68  Sunrise 5:50  Sunset 8:59pm Summer

Last Quarter of the Thunder Moon

A Deborah Madison recipe I used this noon called for tomatoes, beet greens, oregano, olive oil and garlic.  The beet greens came from the golden beets I picked just before the lunch.  The oregano from Kate’s herb garden.  We had a couple of dried garlic bulbs. I thought they had not differentiated. but I decided to use it as it was.  When I peeled back the white, papery layers over the bulb I found cloves.  This meant  two things.  I had enough garlic for the recipe and the garlic in the bed could be harvested now.  The dish was great, but the cloves excited me.

There is no reason why growing garlic bulbs with cloves should excite me so much, except it entered my head early in the gardening season–last September.  They grew throughout the winter and were ready to harvest in July, just as the cultural recommendations for it said.  Their taste is more intense and more sweet, at least this variety.  I planted three.

In the furnace room, hanging from green gardening twine are four bunches of garlic bulbs.  Set aside from them are the largest 2 bulbs from each variety.  They will go in the ground in late September or early October to produce more garlic for next July.  Kate will take a large head from each bunch out to Jon and Jen so they can have garlic in their garden.  They too will be able to harvest the largest heads and plant from them.  This chain of living things, nurtured and in turn nurturing, is the true great chain of being.

Watched 10,000 BC on the recommendation of a friend.  Well, the anachronisms were many: iron, boats, buildings, captive mammoths and the story line fed on coincidence.  On the other hand the Woolly Mammoths and the Sabre Toothed Tiger were very real.  A mish-mash of times, cultures and continents.  Just what I thought when I was the first ads.  In fairness, the same friend watched There Will Be Blood on my recommendation.  He thought it was too violent and the lead character, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, a poor guy with whom to spend a couple of hours.

There Will Be Blood is a mythic movie of great power.  It speaks to the heart of what ails American culture and it speaks the truth.  The truth is neither pretty nor easy and the film knows it.  It is uncomfortable, but that it is different from bad.  10,000 BC is an entertainment and it works sometimes and not others, but it is not mythic, either in truth or in story.