Category Archives: Garden

Garden, GeekWorld, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

Will I Build A Computer?

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76  bar rises 29.76 6mph NW dew-point 51  Summer, pleasant and warm

New Moon (Thunder Moon)

A new head has been found for the red car.  Hopefully it will get placed on its automotive neck tomorrow and we will go back to two vehicles.  This is important with the rise of gas prices since our Tundra has a V-8 (may be an antique walking) whereas the Celica averaged 30-31 mph on the Alabama trip.  Co-ordination is not such a big deal for us, though that can matter.

The computer has shut down on its own, without warning, twice already today. I bought the tools to crack the case, get inside and clean out the cooling fan, but I’ve hesitated due to a hyperactive June.  Now available time and increased urgency have moved closer to taking the step.  In the back of my mind, the fantasy part, I see myself building a computer from parts.  The tools I bought would serve that purpose as well.

Ate lunch with Stefan at the Modern Cafe.  I had a lamburger and Stefan had a smorbord, pickled herring and beets.  Both were tasty.  We discussed his poetry and he feels I’m helping, so I’ll keep at it.

He wants to start a support group for children of successful parents.   My hunch is it would be big hit.

On the way home from the Modern (it’s in NE Minneapolis) I drove north of Anoka (really, west) to Anoka Feed and Seed where I picked up four bales of bedding straw.  I’ll use it to mulch the garden over the next few days.

Now, a nap.

Art and Culture, Garden

Descaping the Garlic

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76 bar steady 30.05  0mph NW  dew-point 46  Summer, hot

Waning Crescent of the Flower Moon

The heirloom tomatoes we have growing, started from seed inside, required more support.  They have sent out thick branches from the central stalk, already within a tomato cage.  As fruit develops on them, they will sag and break or their fruit will dangle on the soil, going rotten before we can pick them.  At the same time, a few daisies had decided on a straggly path toward the grass, so I put support around them, too.

The garlic. Sigh.  I harvested four garlic plants yesterday.  They had not grown into large, juicy bulbs as I had imagined, but instead looked like large green onions, very large.  I read the culture instructions again.  I had forgotten to cut back the scapes, a curly stalk that shoots up from the center of the main stalk.  It carries the flower.  Allowing it to get much more than 10″ long discourages bulb production.  Makes sense.  If I’m gonna propogate by seed, why bother storing energy below the soil.

In a belated attempt to make up for lost ground I descaped all the garlic and will let the remaining plants sit in the soil a while longer, though I suspect my fantasy of large garlic bulbs grown in my own garden will have to wait until next summer.   All of gardening is a constant experiment, learning this from the plant, then that from the soil, again the message of the sun, then the gentle language of rain.  Like intimate relationships gardening requires close listening and a willingness to admit when you have erred.

My first visit to the MIA since May comes today when I go in for a refresher on the Africa galleries.  We have this one last check-out tour to give.  After it, we will be able to give tours of Africa only if requested.  I’m looking forward to getting back to the museum after a good time away.  No tours for me until September and I’m glad, still I miss the constant interaction with the art and the folks around the museum.

Family, Garden, Writing

Garlic Harvest

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77 bar steady 29.93 5mph N dew-point 49  Summer, hot and sunny

                      Waning Crescent of the Flower Moon

Wrote this AM.  Appended chapter 3 of Superior Wolf to its page on this website.  Next week I’ll take down chapter 1 and put chapter 4 and so it will go until I have written myself to the end.  We’ll see where it goes.

Moved mulch, created by renting the super chipper from Home Depot and grinding up branches, tree trunks and chunks of shrubs.  The mulch goes on the perennial bed first, keeping the weeds down as we move into high summer and also cooling the soil just a bit.  This involves a wheel-barrow, a pitchfork and a lot of moving from one place to another.

After a nap I unburdened the kitchen table of a couple of months of magazines, catalogues and desparate fund-raising pleas.  This involved a paper-sack, a lot of sorting and moving from one place to another.

Now I’m gonna cook supper, red beans and rice with some prime rib left overs thrown to make it interesting.  The now standard fare of lettuce, onions and cilantro from our gardens inside and out will join store purchased tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers for a colorful salad.  Later in the season we will have all of these ingredients. 

I also learned from a piece of paper recovered from the literary overburden of the table that I can  harvest the garlic now.  Somehow garlic has become my favorite crop.  Don’t know why.

Garden, Politics, Travel

Where to Buy Japanese Gardening Tools? Home Depot!

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69  bar falls 29.56  5mph WNW dew-point 53   Summer, pleasant with fluffy cumulus gathering

Last Quarter Flower Moon

When in Hawai’i I noticed the Filipino gardeners at the Hyatt had small, sickle like tools.  One of them had a serrated edge down and a cutting edge up.  The other had a slightly curved blade and a very sharp edge facing down.  They used them to easily uproot weeds, edge grass and other plants.  I asked the guy where I could buy them, “Home Depot.”  Of course, where else?

In fact, Home Depot did not have them, but Ace Hardware did.  It was your next guess was it not?  The ones I found were $8 and had a bamboo shaft.  When I packed them in my checked luggage, I felt like I might get stopped at security.  First, box cutters.  Now, Japanese gardening tools.

Yesterday I discovered the the second of these tools was a whiz at cutting back perennials whose leaves had died back.  By putting the blade just into the soil and cutting back toward myself, the leaves came off with ease, leaving the bulbs in mother earth where they belong.  Today I finished the daffodils.  I have a lot of daffodils so their leaft behinds are voluminous.   Into the red plastic tub and then out to the discard pile.  The plastic tubs are also great gardening tools.  Cheap and capacious, they are also light and indestructible.

Read an interesting article about Singapore in the Smithsonian magazine.  It says Singapore has become fun city.  Well, not quite.  But, compared to the authors first visit 37 years ago during r&r from Vietnam War coverage it was “Laissez bon temps roulez.” Bars in entertainment zones can stay open until dawn.  Theatre has begun to pop up and traveling musicians now include Singapore on their itinerary.

When I visited in 2004, one of the things that amazed me was seeing women, unescorted, walking the streets well after midnight.  My hunch is that relaxation of the puritan, or rather, Confucian value system may endanger that.

This “Asian values” idea, promoted by Singaporean political leaders, and rooted in Confucianism veers away from Master K’ung-fu-tzi in one very salient area.  In the Confucian world there was a distinct hierarchy of professions.  The emperor and courtiers, mandarins and nobles were at the top.  Then came landowners, farmers, woodcutters and fisherfolk.  After these, artisans.  At the very bottom, consigned to almost a pariah role, were merchants.  Merchants, Confucius believed, created nothing, adding nothing to the culture, rather they made money moving around the goods and food-stuffs created by the labor of others.

Singapore, much of Southeast Asia and certainly Taiwan, Japan and China are, in that wise, far removed from the core values of Confucius.

Off for a nap.  More gardening tomorrow morning.

Family, Garden, Great Wheel

Cool House Plants

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69  bar rises 29.73  0mph NNW dew-point 57  A summer night

                   Last Quarter of the Flower Moon

This time period, after the iris bloom and the lilacs have died back, we have annuals like petunias, begonias, geraniums and vinca plus the odd Siberian Iris and peony, not many late June perennials in our garden. We await now the Asiatic lilies.  My favorite among our flowers many of the lilies in our garden came from lily fanciers who live in the upper midwest.   Purchased at a lily growers special season sale at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, they come in beautiful colors and many, like the Star Gazer, have scents that beguile.  A bit later the hemerocallis, day lilies, will begin to bloom. They will take us into September along with the Liguria, the bug bane and the bush Clematis.

It is a clear night.  Stars light the sky, ancient messengers of events and objects of long past. They are deep history, a counterpoint to the now.  Insects chirp.  The occasional owl hoots.  Maybe the sound of some small animal scurrying through the grass in search of food.  A bats quick, furtive flight crosses the moon’s half lit face.

These nights offer a softness and elegance found only in the natural world.  There is no need for fancy dress, cocktails or dance music.  All you have to do is walk outside and share the company.  Your clothing or lack of it will not matter. Some of the party may find you irrestible, of course.  Yes, unwanted attention sometimes mars a quiet night.  It does show, though, that you have a niche. You are the canape.

Kate and I spoke to Mary on Skype today.   Arranging a physical connection with Singapore has its modest challenges.  She called us, for example, at 11:00 PM today, though it was 10:00 AM here.  Today has long since turned into tomorrow there.  She’s off this week finishing the revisions to her dissertation.  Then it heads out to her supervisor for one last check, then onto external readers.  More revisions likely.  Finally, the oral defense sometime from now.  Later, awarding of the doctorate.  Pretty cool.

She may visit the temperate latitudes building at the Botanical Gardens as a treat for finishing.  That’s where they have trees and plants adapted to cold weather, a mirror to our conservatories with their palms and philodendrons and other tropical vegetation.  A strange notion from the perspective of Minnesota.

Garden, Weather +Climate

USAF Officers Attacked!

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81  bar falls 29.99 0mph S dew-point 59  Summer, sunny and hot

Waning Gibbous Flower Moon

Each year in late June a convergence of heat, humidity, sun intensity and the growth of weeds combine to make gardening an early morning task for me.  The toddler trees, planted last year, had a considerable collection of weeds around them.  They had to go.

The machete makes short work of the nettles, the most troublesome of the weeds.  They grow tall and block the sun.  They grow from rhizomatous roots, so they send up new plants when the old ones are cut down.  Their main defense, formic acid, makes humans want to stay away from them, hence, the nettlesome person.

Virginia creeper and grapevines also sap a lot of food from the growing area of these young trees and must be pulled up like a zipper, taking out the length of the vine as well as its immediate spot of rooting.  Then there are the other weeds, names unknown to me, that gather in numbers.  Up they come by the handfull.

Last and hardest to remove are the tall grasses, the exact thing desired in the large open area, a sort of meadow, but harmful to the new trees.  Once they’ve become establish the trees will outcompete everything in their area, but these guys haven’t reached that growth stage.

One anecdote I loved from the Maxwell AFB experience involves nature’s own air force.  A single person walking along the east side of the cafeteria building often receives pecks and a dive bomber approach from a towhee who lives on the roof.  The idea of a bird attacking USAF officers is ironic.

Family, Garden

No Impairment of Our View

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71  bar steady 29.64 0mph SE  dew-point 51  Beltane, Sunny and warm

                  First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Ah, Costco.  A vast and cavernous market, as much a temple to the American obsession with stuff as store.  Two 40 pound bags of mature dog dogfood, Kirkland, and a box of dog biscuits plus $100 on the Costco gas card, a sort of futures market in which I bet that Costco prices will be under those of the competitor gas stations.  After a trip in which each tankfull of 11 gallons or so cost over $44 in my compact Toyota Celica, it seems like a good wager.  Through the lines with others and their carts, as American as fast food and credit cards, I spent $161 dollars on dog nourishment and car nourishment.

Back home I put the dogfood in the container we use for it, then went out to the shed that Jon built.  It houses the chainsaw.  When I found it needed gas, I had to schlep out to the further shed where I store the sharp and mechanical tools as well as gas and oil. 

Filled up I hiked out to the front yard and began pruning branches off Amur maples.  The first one to go was the one I mentioned yesterday, broken in some storm or another.  Then a couple that had long impinged on a spruce and a Norway pine.  At another clump of Amur’s I pruned some large dead branches, small trunks really all of these, and a few low hanging live ones.

While Kate mowed, I moved these cumbersome items down the hill and into the huge storm water drainage depression we share with our neighbor.  This wise feature is as far across as our lot and goes back about three hundred feet.  It slopes on all four sides down to a level bottom.  This ensures that the run off our roofs and yards soak into the soil, rather than into nearby wetlands or Roundlake.  Since it has no other purpose and is large, it can hide many branches, even tree trunks with no impairment of our view.

Kate’s finished mowing and I’m taking her out to lunch.  Bye.

Art and Culture, Friends, Garden

A Bad Break

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68  bar steady 29.65  2mph  ESE  dew-point 56  Beltane, Sunny and sort of warm

                       First Quarter of the Flower Moon 

“Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.” – James Russell Lowell

My docent friend, Bill Bomash, fell 10 feet into a culvert at a mountainside home in Brazil.  He had gone there to visit a friend who had recently completed his new house.  I wrote about him a couple of months ago.  He had two weeks in an all Portugese speaking hospital after the intial orthopedic surgery because he developed an infection, not unusual when a lot of hardware goes into the bone.  This happened in January.  He faced six months of recovery when he finally got back to Minnesota in early February. 

Now this:

Hi everybody.  Well I got some disappointing news the other day.  I’ve been having more pain in my leg and when I went into the doctor he said that he thought the hardware in my leg was failing.  As a result, there was too much movement in the bone. I’m going into the hospital again on Monday for surgery to remove all the hardware and have a rod inserted through the bone to hold it in place. I’m afraid it’s pretty much back to square one.
    It looks like it will be quite a while yet before I can return to touring.
    I’ll get back to you with an update after the surgery and I have returned back home.

In a much more modest instance I had three months of recovery after surgery to repair my ruptured Achilles tendon.  It drove me nuts.  Six months after the initial break Bill now faces another six months of recovery.  Geez.

Off to Costsco for dogfood, then chainsaw Charlie will emerge and start whacking off limbs.  Of trees.

Cinema and Television, Garden, Great Wheel

Sad Movies Always Make Me Cry

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60  bar steady 29.59  0mph NNW dewpoint 59  Beltane, night

              Waxing Crescent of the Flower Moon

What a beauty.  This crescent moon, nearing the first quarter, has two stars above it, one low toward the horn and the other on a thirty degree angle further away.  Rain scrubbed the sky clean tonight, so they sparkle.  We only to look to the moon and the stars to find ample inspiration.  Do we need another layer, a human interpretation of the wonder we feel when we see the great star road?  I’m not so sure anymore.

The list of movies I haven’t seen that others have a long time ago included Dances With Wolves until tonight.  Not many movies make me cry, but the closing scenes when Dances With Wolves and Stands With A Fist leave the winter village did.  Especially moving to me was Wind in the Hair crying from the cliff top, “Dances With Wolves, do you hear me?  Do you know that I will always be your friend?” 

When the soldiers killed Dances With Wolves’ horse and then his wolf companion, I also cried.  The wolf’s loyalty and love repayed with death.  These two incidents capture so much of the casual violence that American culture legitmates.  Once again, I cringed at the harsh lessons of the frontier. 

Weeding tomorrow.  Oh, boy.  Also, I get to do some chainsaw pruning.  We lost a main branch off one of our Amur Maples.  They have a tendency to fragility so it didn’t surprise me. 

Garden

The O Club

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73  bar falls 29.59  0mph E  dew-point 63  Beltane, cloudy

Waxing Crescent of the Flower Moon

Finished putting down Preen in the flower beds.  The straw for mulch in the vegetable beds took a bit longer, but not much.  The beets have grown, as have their bedmates, the carrots.  The corn is ankle high by the 8th of June.

The garlic nears its time for harvest.  The water is shut off and I wait now for the stems to die back.  Don’t know why I’m so fascinated with growing garlic, but I am.   Looks like a good crop.

The onion bed, too, has made great strides.  Green hollow leaves spear through the hay, sending food down to the bulbs underneath the ground, energy Kate and I will harvest.  Two hills of gourds and one of squash have broken through and begun to leaf.  The beans Kate planted are on their fourth and sixth leaves.  Lettuce sown a while back has enjoyed the cool weather and begun to flourish.

The tomato plants outside have yet to go through a real growth spurt and I finally pruned back the one inside.  A different, more hydroponic friendly variety will produce better and now I have to find one.  We continue to harvest lettuce each day for salads, so lettuce works.

We have a few other stray plants in odd locations some watermelon, cucumber and peppers.  They’re all healthy.

The bearded iris have begun to bloom, while the smaller purple varities have begun to fade.  Not much else blooming right now, save for the lilacs, the bleeding hearts and the annuals Kate planted.  The garden is lush, green. Healthy.

The almost II lieutenant called.  It has hit him that he needs a bed.   All the officers have to live off base at Tyndall and he will be there for well over a year.  He’s going to have to fly to Denver, rent a U-Haul truck and drive back to base.  He does not, however, have a bed.  Don’t know what to say to him.  Suppose I could drive the truck and take the bed in his old room down to him.  I don’t know.

He’s cranked.  His class got initiated into the wonders of the O club, as he called it.  The Officer’s Club.  It has traditions, though what they are he didn’t say.  His skin color has worked to his advantage so far.  He’s been picked for some extra duties, to show Generals and other dignitaries around OTS.  Face time with the high command.  He says he knows who he is and if they want to work it that way it’s ok with him.