59 bar falls 29.80 1mph NNE dewpoint 27 Beltane
Waxing Crescent of the Hare Moon
A few illustrations from today in the garden, showing various beds.
A Cambodian statue from Artisans D’Angkor
The blue and the green
My favorite spading fork (favorite spade above)
59 bar steady 29.83 3mph WNW dewpoint 31 Beltane
Waxing Crescent of the Hare Moon
Hemerocallis (the daylily) is a sturdy member of the plant kingdom. Every time I plant, no matter where I plant it, nor the care I give it, the daylily spreads and grows happily. That’s why years after the fact the foundation outlines for many rural home are still obvious, tiger lilies continue to grow and bloom just like the house was still there. Today all the daylilies in the first raised bed we ever had, made, as all of them, by Jon, got moved.
Jon also put in a cedar rail fence and last year I deconstructed it down to the original cedar fencing. We had him add wire fencing to keep out nuisance animals–our dogs. An older me saw them as less of a problem, Kate agreed, so down the wire fence came. The daylilies have gone from the bed to the edge of the cedar rail fence. Two peonies have likewise made the transition, but they went into a tree circling bed that is about a quarter finished. We have a young, sturdy elm on the fence line. I removed the fence around it and will soon complete digging out a circular bed around its dripline.
The former daylily and peony bed will get sweet corn. I’m also going to try the Native American method of planting climbing beans at the base of the corn stalk.
Three tomato plants grown from seed to 1 foot + under the lights are now in place, too. They went in the former lily (Asian and other true lilies) bed. I’m taking a chance planting them directly outside with no hardening off, but I wanted to try it, see how it works. If they die, we’ll buy a couple of tomato plants. If they don’t, I can skip a step in the future if I watch the weather carefully. Which I do.
Also had a brainstorm for what to do with the hill that has succumbed to raspberry canes. Moss. This is a shady area and I read an article about how to convert lawns to moss. It won’t work for our front lawn yet, but it should work on this slope shadowed by the seven oaks at the top. Gonna try it. The result can’t be worse than what we have.
While I dug and transplanted, Kate made a trip to the Greenbarn, a nursery and garden store up near Isanti. She bought a number of things: impatiens, onion sets, Coleus, sphagnum moss, small onion sets already well underway, some seeds as well as other things. Anyhow all this means the 2008 gardening season is off and growing.
52 bar rises 29.78 0mph W dewpoint 34 Beltane
A very beautiful Waxing Crescent of the Hare Moon
More garden work tomorrow. It feels so good to be back out there. Kate planted Ireland Creek Annie and Cherokee Trail of Tears and Dragon Tounge beans today. Also some mixed gourds.
A cool evening, a warm day. Perfect.
Tomorrow I’ll dig in three tomato plants. These are plants I’ve grown from seed. They’re now about a foot high. It will be nice to see my babies go into the soil. I’m keeping one back for my kitchen garden which will have tomatoes, lettuce, basil, cilantro, peppers and egg plant. The latter three I’ll start from seed sometime soon. Kate’s gonna pick up some seeds at the Green Barn tomorrow.
Got a nice note from Jon saying they’ve turned Gabe’s lights off and taken him upstairs to his room. I passed on the e-mails and comment from Tristan’s mom, too. We’ll gradually weave a web of support around them and the little guy so he can grow up to move on and do what he needs to do in this life.
A lot of growing be done around here right now.
54 bar steep rise 29.73 7mph NW dewpoint 39 Beltane
Waxing Crescent of the Hare Moon
“Scoundrels are always sociable.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer insisted that reason alone would not explain the human reality. He added passion and instinct to the neatly circumscribed world of the Enlightenment. As he did so, he became profoundly pessimistic about the overall human condition. He did, however, add a bit of solace to the world of us introverts in the quote.
Cool today so I’m headed outside to continue transplanting daylilies. I’m also going to plant vegetables since the near term forecast doesn’t have anything remotely approaching 32 at night. Generally, if we can make it past May 15th, we’re in good shape for the growing season.
Too nice to stay in and write. Out I go.
62 bar falls 29.71 0mph SW dewpoint 57 Beltane
New Moon (Hare)
It rained and the temperature dropped 13 degrees. Mother nature at work. In the cool moist air after the rain I planted onions, beets, lettuce and carrots. I also transplanted 3 daylily clumps out of the flower bed I’m converting to vegetables. Cool cloudy, preferable moist days are perfect transplanting weather.
The earth smells rich, a loamy scent that arises only after a rain. My Dad’s Aunt Rella, an early cancer patient, took an atomic cocktail and said it tasted like “the air after a June rain.” An image that has remained with me all these years.
I just started using a new program called SuperMemo. It showed up in an interesting article in Wired. This Polish memory researcher has developed this program that times repetitions of material you want to learn. This fits some neurological model of the brain. He guarantees 95% retention if you use the program faithfully.
I plan to use it learn art history, Chinese characters, horticultural information, folk tale and world history. And probably, over time, other stuff, too. This kind of thing excites me.
58 bar steady 29.81 1mpn SW dewpoint 20 Beltane
New Moon (Hare Moon)
Waiting on the service guy from Allied Generator to fill us in on how our generator works and what we need to do with it. We went ahead and bought it, now it remains to learn how to use it.
Another work outside day. Cleaning up continues, though I imagine today I’ll expand the clean up to the garden bed. Kate may get started on the pruning. 9 days or so until the average date of the last frost, May 15th, so planting annuals is still not a good idea. Transplanting though can proceed apace and I plan to remove day lilies from one bed completely and move them to other sites along the edge of our woods. The peonies, large now, will get divided and move to the front.
It is the most distressing or reassuring reality, the fact that life proceeds in its ordinary way no matter what the drama in your own life. I find it reassuring for the most part, though at times it seems cruel, unspeakably cruel. Sometimes it seems that the pain my life should cause the whole world to stop spinning, to pause for a moment while I adjust, solve or resolve the dilemma, then someone can push play.
65 bar falls 29.94 0mph S dewpoint 30 Beltane
New Moon (Hare Moon)
The forest is a peculiar organism of unlimited kindness and benevolence that makes no demands for its sustenance and extends generously the products of its life and activity; it affords protection to all beings. (Buddhist Sutra)
Though this comes from a Buddhist sutra (thread) it resonates with Taoist thought. These two ancient traditions crossed paths over and over again in China. At least one of those occasions created Chan Buddhism, which, in Japan became Zen Buddhism.
The Buddhist element I see here is the notion of unlimited kindness and benevolence, an attribution to the forest that I do not believe my brother Taoists would make. They would agree that the forest is a peculiar organism (among many) and would further concur that it makes no demands for sustenance (on humans) and does extend its product of life and activity (generously–well, maybe to a Buddha, but probably not to a tree) and would also acknowledge its protection to all beings (except those plants killed by competitive toxins and the small prey animals killed by predators).
Taoism is a fascinating (to me) blend of reason and organismic thinking which produces a vibrant metaphysic understandable at the tinest particle of matter and at stages of complex organization from thence upwards to the Heavens themselves, the 10,000 things.
Mostly clean up outside today. Getting ready for the more ambitious projects that will soon occupy my time.
From the deck last evening I looked at our Magnolia. It stood against the seven oaks like the flame atop a Thai Buddha. Its white glinted, mirrored back by white daffodils. This evening, for this moment, the Magnolia had a nimbus, a sacred aura, as if it had transcended its treeness and become another living entity all together a vegetative, blooming fire. A burning tree.
58 bar rises 29.80 2mph W dewpoint 30 Beltane
New Moon (Hare Moon)
There are days, ordinary days, days you can recall, when your life took a sharp angle turn, or created a swooping curve, perhaps dipped underground or soared up, up into the sky.
It seems I remember, though how could I really, the day I got polio. I don’t know how this memory got shaped or if it got shaped in the way all memory does, by our selective recollection of snippets of moments, but here it is.
My mother and I were at the Madison County Fair, held every August on the grounds of Beulah Park. Mom had wrapped me in a pink blanket and we wandered through the Midway. There were bright lights strung in parabolic curves and the smell of cotton candy and hot dogs. I looked out from the blanket, safe on my mother’s shoulder, held in her arms. And I felt a chill run through me.
Years later I was with my Dad, early in the morning. We sat in those plastic cuplike chairs in a pale green room. My mother came up in an elevator on her way to emergency surgery. Surgeons would try to relieve pressure on her brain from the hemorrhage she had suffered a week before during a church supper. I got in the elevator and rode up with her. Her eyes looked away from me, but saw me anyway. “Soaohn.” she said. It was the last time she spoke to me. I was 17.
The evening of my first marriage I wandered down a path in Mounds Park where the ceremony had taken place. I wore a blue ruffled shirt, music of the Rolling Stones carried through the moist July air. Butterflies landed on my shoulder.
The night the midnight plane arrived from Calcutta carrying a 4 pound, 4 ounce boy.
The third week of our honeymoon, a northern journey begun in Rome, found us at our northernmost destination Inverness, Scotland. We had rooms at the Station Hotel, right next to railroad terminal. It was a cool foggy night and we took a long walk, following for much it the River Ness, which flows into Loch Ness. We held hands and looked at this old Scots village, the capital of the Highlands. A mist rose over a church graveyard on our right.
And today. Planting beets and carrots. Kate taking a phone call. The news from the lab about Gabe. Now, after this sunny spring day, life will go on, but its trajectory has changed, changed in a profound way, in a way none of us can yet know.
54 bar rises 29.85 4mph WNW dewpoint 20 Beltane
Waning Crescent Moon of Growing
Over to NOW fitness to check out new Landice treadmills. Not what I wanted to purchase, but the old one seems more and more problematic and it gets in the way of my workouts. As Ecclesiastes said, everything has its season. Turns out this is the end of treadmill season. Looks like I can get a deal. Sorta makes sense. Folks break into the great outdoors for aerobics.
I used to do all my aerobic work outside, all four seasons. In the winter I snowshoed, in the other three seasons I hiked in the regional parks and rode a bike. My bike rusted up and I started doing resistance work, which requires an indoor environment. Over the last few years I’ve switched to 100% indoor. The treadmill is a necessary part of my fitness regime.
Groceries. They had fresh, wild walleye. I bought some and made baked walleye, corn on the cob and asparagus for supper after Kate came home. She got a big bonus this quarter and she’s floating right now.
Spent some time outside. I fertilized the flowering bulbs, trimmed all the perennial grasses and dug up some ornamental annual grasses that finished their run. Have not yet hit my stride with the outdoor work, but I will. I prefer to do garden work early in the morning, then use the rest of the day for writing, reading, exercise and MIA related work. All that falls into place as the days become warmer.
43 bar steady 29.47 11mph NNE dewpoint 42 Beltane
Waning Crescent Moon of Growing
Well, ok then. The reader who wondered about my hydroponics is not a Fed. LOL they said.
It is a weirdness about the Web that we can connect directly with people, yet know nothing about them. The weirdness compounds when we realize the people with whom we come in contact in this way, we don’t know at all beyond a few words on a computer screen. In the case of comments on a website or a blog like this one the stakes are, for the most part, low, but when you consider the apparent number of people who meet up in person after such interactions.
All this reminds me of Alvin Toffler and his book, Future Shock. I still remember many ideas from that book because he was a good phrase maker. High tech, high touch is the one that comes to mind here, but in a slightly different vein than Toffler’s. His version was that the more we connect through technology, the more we will want to see each other in person. I believe that’s true, but I’m on another tack here. High tech, high touch heightens the need, the desire for personal interaction, yes. It produces that desire–the original sense of eros in the Greek, the desire for human contact–in a situation we have not evolved to understand.
We are animals wired over hundreds of thousands of years to read the language in another person’s eyes, the way they hold their hands, the set of their neck, the wrinkles and twitches of the mouth. Though we are often wrong even with those cues, at least in face-to-face encounters we have a chance to assess, to ponder. Words on a page are not the same. Not even close. It may be that we have a sophisticated reader’s intution about how language reveals the author, but that’s a game often got wrong by critics, so how good can we be?
The point is this, words without flesh, disembodied words put us at a disadvantage. We can’t judge the intent of a phrase, the reason behind a conjecture. This has led to the all too familiar problem of flaming where some unhappy soul takes this anonymity and uses it to vent, often just to vent.
Toffler also described Over Choice, a situation where we face more decisions about more matters than we can handle with anything approaching wisdom. This applies to people we meet through the electronic ether, too. The reader interested in hydroponics might be a valuable interlocutor, one whose journey with indoor gardening might supplement and enhance my own. And vice versa. Or, they could be, as I speculated, a law enforcement officer hiding behind the web’s anonymity. Because it is my nature to trust first and question later, I accept the response to my speculation at face value; but, I have no face. Therein lies the dilemma.
We must evolve some method, some means of reading people we meet on the web. I suppose that’s what Facebook, Youtube, Myspace propose to accomplish, but there it is often meeting people to be meeting people. And those social networking sites get gamed, too. An endless loop.
Enough on this. I have to get to work writing my piece for the Muse. It’s taken an odd turn. Wonder how it will finish?