Category Archives: Garden

Family, Garden, GeekWorld

Life Proceeds in Its Ordinary Way

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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.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel

A Burning Tree

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 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.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, Memories

There Are Days, Ordinary Days

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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.

Garden, Great Work

End of the Treadmill Season

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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.

Friends, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work

A Fed? LOL

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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?

Family, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work

Hazards in the Learning Process

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41  bar steady  29.96  0mph ESE dewpoint 24  Spring

                    Last Quarter Moon of Growing

Spent a good part of the afternoon on mechanical and electronic stuff.  It was time for the first changing out of the nutrient reservoirs in the hydroponics. 

I first tried the way the setup suggested, that is, drain the reservoirs onto the plastic shelf on which they both sit.  This is not as crazy as it may sound since the shelf has grooves pressed in to carry used nutrient mix and water toward a drain plug at the end of the shelf.  So, I hooked up some plastic tubing by cutting a small hole in the end of the cap and opened the taps.  This is slow.  The drain hose is not too big.  It’s also messy since the hole in end of the plug allowed a bit of the liquid to drain around the tubing and drip on the lights (electric!) and the floor. 

Hmmm.  Had to be a better way.  Then I thought of all those car thieves hard at work stealing gas.  Siphon!  By chance I had one hundred feet of plastic tubing and it fit inside the drain tubing quite neatly.  I pushed this tube through the hole in the drain cap, sucked on it a bit and voila!  Both of them drained all by themselves.  Still took a while, but it is a handsoff operation.

As I read somewhere, I took the used nutrient mix out and poured on the garlic, garlic is a heavy feeder and impervious to the cold weather we’ve had.  That’s important because you can’t encourage growth in most plants when the temperature can still go below freezing.  That possibility exists here until May 15th.  I also poured it on some daffodils about to bloom.

Then I made 9 gallons of fresh nutrient mix and poured it back into the reservoirs through the pots holding the lettuce, tomato plants, three kinds of beet and morning glories.  A tip I read in the hydroponic bible (according to the folks at Interior Gardens) suggested swapping out the nutrient every three rather than four.  So, I did.  This is fun.

The treadmill still has some hiccups.  I had to rewire it again this afternoon.  Landice apparently thinks they may have sent me a bad rheostat.  If so, that means I swapped a bad one for a bad one rather than a good one for a good one.  More work ahead there.

I also put away all the material from the Weber tours and the bronze tour I have a month or so ago.  The library is neat. (in a manner of speaking.  That is, my manner.)  I have a file to read for the three hour bronze session I have for Family Day on the 11th.  I also have a number of articles and objects to use as reference while I write something about Urania visiting the MIA.

Kate called today, too.  Ruthie ran out of the kitchen yesterday, into the dining room and tripped, falling on the corner of the coffee table.  Big cut.  Lots of angst.  But super grandma was there to be calm.  She and Jon took Ruthie to urgent care for stitches.  This is a busman’s holiday for urgent care doc, Kate Olson, but it gave her a feel for the other side of the examining table.  As she often does, she felt guilty.  Not her fault.  Ruth is a puppy, running and playing and trying out the world.  There are hazards in that learning process and none of us escape.

She comes home tomorrow and I’m glad.  The bris has been delayed because Gabriel still has not decided to eat enough and he’s still on some oxygen.  Until he can eat and breathe on his own, he’ll remain in the level 2 nursery.

And.  No snow!

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work

Newton, Darwin, Einstein–an Enlightenment Trinity.

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41  bar steady 30.16 1mph SSW dewpoint 26  Spring

              Last Quarter Moon of Growing

Charles Darwin was and is a remarkable man.  Newton, Darwin, Einstein–an enlightenment trinity.  An old paradigm physicist, a new paradigm physicist and the first student of complexity, a biological pioneer.  These three have direct influence on so much of our world: calculus, atomic energy, genetic sciences, conservation biology, space travel, orbital mechanics.  So much.  To know the work of just these three and still deny the reality and power of ideas.  Impossible.

Darwin has influenced my own thinking.  A constant question I bring to the biological world is, “How is that adaptative?”  “What adaptative advantage does that confer?”  These two questions alone encourage speculation about fever, pollen, phototropism, the color of plant  leaves, the place where birds nest, bipedal locomotion and so on ad infinitum.

I have multiple reading projects that will happen when I have time. One of them is to read through Darwin’s work, at least the important books.  Why?  To separate what Darwin was about from the muddled and often inaccurate picture offered by his acolytes.  Here’s an example.  An instructor at the arboretum’s symposium I attended on Saturday used the term survival of the fittest.  Not Darwin.  Herbert Spencer.  Spencer used Darwin’s ideas to speculate about the succession of civilizations.  He invented the now long ago discredited notion of social darwinism.  Oswald Spengler brought the idea into its zenith of disrepute during the Nazi era.

Darwin’s idea is natural selection.  It is not only the fittest, that is the strongest and most competitive, that survive.  Those also survive who have a protected niche (think islands and deep valleys), a winning reproductive strategy (seeds versus spore mats) and great defense (lion fish, poison ivy).  The long sweep of evolutionary time favors those whose characteristics favor survival, whether the organism is the fittest in their niche or in their species or not.  Thus, the many endemic birds of Hawai’i may well not survive in some other environment.

Here’s a brief paragraph from Wikipedia that says this better than I can: 

“An interpretation of the phrase to mean “only the fittest organisms will prevail” (a view common in social Darwinism) is not consistent with the actual theory of evolution. Any organism which is capable of reproducing itself on an ongoing basis will survive as a species, not just the “fittest” ones. A more accurate characterization of evolution would be “survival of the fit enough”, although this is sometimes regarded as a tautology.[3][4]”    

I have added a link to the Digitial Darwin Library on the right side here.  Allison Theil turned me on to the Darwin exhibition at the Brooklyn Botancial Garden.  They had the link to this library.   In 2009 we will celebrate the 150th year of the publication of Origin of the Species.  Much sturm und drang can be expected.  I stand with Darwin.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

The Wollemi Pine–Live From the Carboniferous

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33  bar steep rise 30.06 5mph N dewpoint 22 Spring

                Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing

The workshop I attended today had two co-sponsors, The Institute for Advanced Studies (UofM) and the Arboretum(UofM).  This was the culminating workshop in a two-year long effort by the Institute for Advanced Studies to explore time from many perspectives.  Today we examined time in three different, but related, botanical areas:  phenology, paleobotany and time from the perspective of trees. 

The phenological, by definition, is the chronological study of events in nature.  This strikes me as an odd definition since it seems to impose a human mental construct, linear sequencing, on what is cyclical.  The notion is a good one, though, since it involves paying close attention to changes in the natural world, day by day, and making a record of them.  Phenologists know when the ice goes out lakes, the first robin returns, the dates that various spring ephemerals like the bloodroot, snow trillium and scylla bloom. 

Over several years I’ve tried my hand at phenology.  It is something an amateur can do.  So far, I’ve not had the discipline to continue my observations day after day, year after year.  Perhaps as I get older and slow down a bit this will come to me.  I hope so.  The woman who was our teacher for phenology was a lively Cantonese woman named Shirley Mah Kooyman.  A Smith graduate in Botany she has a direct and engaging teaching style.  Shirley took us outside and showed us the spring ephemeral garden they have planted.  It gave me ideas.  Our field was cut short by blowing winds, snow and cold.  On April 26th.

Over  the long lunch break I wandered the bookstore and picked up books related to aspects of permaculture I want to pursue in more depth:  pond building, fruit and nut trees and landscape design.

In the afternoon Tim started us out with segments of trees so we could tree rings.  This lead into a discussion of the time and stories that a tree knows, sometimes revealed in its growth rings.  He showed an amazing graphic created by an arborist who actually dug up tree roots and followed them, painting them white as he went so he could measure accurately.  He discovered that almost all trees have relatively shallow, but very broad root systems.  I learned, as did Tim, that tree roots stop at the dripline and that what’s below the tree roughly parallels what’s above in size.  Nope.  We measure a double centurion outside the learning center.  You measure at breast height, compute the diameter with everybody’s favorite mathematical constant; in this case it was 52 inches, then multiplied by a factor for white oaks, 5.  This gives a rough estimate of 260 years for the trees age.  Cutting back a bit for optimal growing conditions, experts feel this oak is 225 years old.  That means it was an acorn in 1780!  Whoa.

The last session focused on the evolution of plants.  In some ways this was weakest session, yet in another it astonished me.  Randy Gage, the guy in charge of school groups for the arboretum, took a trip to Australia to investigate the Wollime Pine.  Here are some fast facts from the Wollemi Pine website:

Fast Facts
…………………………

Claim to fame One of the world’s oldest and rarest trees

This is a tree that, prior to its discovery in 1994 was known only in the fossil record.  It was a coelacanth or stromatolite like find.  Remarkable.  But I missed it.  Maybe you didn’t.

The time related stuff here was somewhat cliched with the 24 hour clock and an arm span as metaphors.  The Wollemi Pine story is the stuff of science fiction.

Taking this symposium at the same time I learned about a book, Reinventing the Sacred, which attempts to reinvent spirituality from within a scientific perspective, but one that discards scientistic thinking (reductionism, empiricism) has really set the wheels turning.  So many things clicking.  We’ll see where it all goes.

Garden, Weather +Climate

Oh, Dear

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31!  bar steep rise 29.62 2mph S dewpoint 27 Spring?  Snow

                       Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing

OK now.  That’s enough!  I woke up, looked out the window on April 26th, just 5 days before Beltane, the beginning of the Celtic summer, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but snow, snow, snow.  Oh, dear.

To season the irony, I leave in a few minutes for the Arboretum and a day devoted to the Natural Rhythms of Time.  I guess if it happened, it’s not unnatural, but the snow feels like it has come outside the natural rhythms.  I don’t know what to expect from this day, but the notion of natural rhythms and a cyclical view of time are important to my own, still evolving sense of the cosmos.

No wonder the moon of growing has begun to wane.  It’s retreating before the Hawthorn giant as he takes a return visit, stomping around and shaking his shaggy head.  I can just hear him laugh.

My hydroponic setup continues to evolve.  I’d say I should have edible lettuce by the end of next week. The tomato plant I put the under the light first is over 8 inches tall and leafing out more and more every day.  The morning glories and cucumbers have begun a stretch toward the light, which means I need to reposition the megafarm under the light and move Emilies over.  This is addictive.  I can tell because I’m already planning how to  make my own setup out of parts I can buy at Interior Gardens.

The piece that gets me is the growth and maturation of plants from seed.  It never fails to excite me when I see a seedling appear.  Not quite the same as that cute Gabe, but the principles are very much the same.  DNA works its magic. 

Family, Garden

Morning Glories in the Lead with Cucumber Right Behind

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52  bar rises 30.13 0mph S dewpoint 39  Spring

             Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing

The moon of growing has fulfilled its role.  Daylilies have popped up everywhere.  A few magnolia buds have popped open.  I found a couple of daffodil’s with flowers still furled around the stalk, but visible now, where they were still hidden a day ago.  No tulip flowers visible yet but the plants themselves are in full leaf.  A few aconites bloom in the front, hidden by the asters of last fall.  I have to cut them down so we can see the blooms.  Leaves to rake.  Last year’s perennials to cut down.  The growing season outside is slowly getting underway.

Kate’s getting ready for her Gabe trip.  She’ll probably head straight to the hospital to see the little guy.  I’ll feel better when she’s there.  She’s got a lot of experience with infants.  A lot.

I’ll take her to the airport, then return here and probably work in the garden for a bit.

The morning glories have begun to rocket up.  I only planted them four days ago and they’re already an inch and a half above the plug.  The cucumbers race right along behind them with, for now, the cylindria beets.  I can see evidence of seedling’s emerging from most of the other plugs, too.  The vegetable garden has begun to grow, right here in our house.  Meanwhile, the lettuce and tomato up top with the halide bulb and the hydroponics continue upwards as well.