Category Archives: Garden

Garden, General

The Hawthorne Giant Shakes His Shaggy Head

Leave a comment

64  bar steady 29.81 2mph S dewpoint 50 Spring

             Full Moon of Growing

It’s that time of year again.  The time, that is, when I have to pull the shades of my east facing computer room windows.  Otherwise, it heats up in here.  Pretty fast.

If we’d get some rain to get with this warmth, we’d have plenty of blooms.  I have daffodils and tulips getting close.  Went out yesterday and wandered through our woods and garden.  While looking at one of the large beds shifted from flowers to vegetables, a lily question came up.  Namely, where did I plant all the lilies I had in that bed?  I’ll be damned if I can recall.  They’ll come up as a surprise. 

The Hawthorne giant must have shaken his shaggy head and stomped off to the Arctic circle.  Hope he finds cool weather when he gets there.

The rock wool cubes in which I planted the lettuce dried out last night, at least in the smaller of the hydroponic setups.  I don’t know why.  The plants themselves don’t seem affected, so I conjecture that their root system now reaches down into the nutrient solution.  Learning while we go. 

The truck needs an oil change and I need to read Stefan’s poems and finish the book on Mastery that Tom Crane sent.  So, I’m off.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work

Matzo Located In Coon Rapids

Leave a comment

69!  bar steep fall 29.84 3mph ENE dewpoint 49 Spring

                     Full Moon of Growing

Boy.  With the temps in the high 60’s the full moon of growing has matured during the right weather. 

Good news.  There are Jews just across the city line into Coon Rapids.  Both Cub and Rainbow have many shelves with matzo meal, borscht, chicken bullion, matzo soup mix and potato pancake mix.  Bad news.  Manischewitz has back ordered passover approved matzo.  Bummer.  So, we will have to anoint the regular matzo as ok for passover.  It’s ok; I’m a minister, I can do that.  Not really, but what choice do we have?

The world as a whole is miraculous and in its parts, too.  I put more seeds into small plugs of earth, readying them for life under the bright lights until the weather is congenial for their presence in the big show outside.  Each seed I handled, most very tiny, a few bigger, say half the size of a small pencil eraser, had all that was necessary to produce a beet, a morning glory, a cucumber, basil, rosemary.  All these mighty engines need is a bit of help.  Water.  Light.  Some nutrients later on, but in the beginning they carry their own food source, stored away from a plant long ago gone to seed, perhaps compost now, but it lives on in these small parcels.

The imagery was impossible to not notice.  I took a pick-up (Adsons) and deposited the seeds into the crevice in the center of the small prepared plug of earth.  After I dropped in the seed, my role finished.  The rest is up to the seed and the things that nudge it into action.  Later, plants.  Food captured and processed, food made from light thanks to another miracle, photosynthesis.  Think of that:  food from light.  That’s what these living parcels can do.  Something we couldn’t do, ever.  No matter how learned and wise.  If not for photosynthesis, we’d starve to death in the midst of abundant energy.

Family, Garden, Travel, Weather +Climate

Compounding Pharmacies

Leave a comment

44  bar rises 30.06  2mph N dewpoint 31 Spring

              Waxing Gibbous Moon of Growing

A gray, cool start after a shirt sleeve day yesterday.  We’re still in the hurry up and wait phase of gardening.  It’s a bit too early for clean up, certainly too early for planting anything but cold weather crops.  We don’t tend to do those, at least not so far, so the hydroponics are our primary entry in this years vegetable garden.  The lettuce seedlings and tomato plant I put under the light first have grown rapidly.  Not ready for harvest anytime soon, but on the way.

Kate made me aware of compounding pharmacies, a vestigial remnant of that which all pharmacies used to be, independent pharmaceutical manufactories.  There are six in Minnesota including one in St. Paul, St. Peter and Wayzata.  The Wayzata pharmacy has a glitzy name, RxArtisans.  I knew a few of those when I was in college.  The growth and reach of pharmaceutical companies has reduced the average pharmacy to nothing more than a retail distributor of already compounded drugs.  This results, of course, in a matching of patients to available drugs and their available dosages, whereas the compounding pharmacy matched drugs to patients both in dosage and delivery vehicle. 

The Delta buyout of Northwest, not a merger, will not be certain for some time to come.  The pilots association of Northwest and the other unions flight attendants, ground crews and mechanics are about to become part of a larger, non-unionized pool.  This creates probable labor and culture conflicts from day one.  Also, congress and the regulators still have to approve, as does Wall Street.  Both companies share price dropped the day after the announcement, an unusual event.  Also, both airlines have an aging fleet of planes and debt hangover from their respective bankruptcies.  The State of Minnesota wants its incentives back since Northwest, with the merger, violates the remain in Minnesota provision.  All this reflects the turbulent nature of an industry who excels in nothing quite so much as an uncomfortable experience delivered for hundreds of dollars.

Art and Culture, Garden, Great Work, Weather +Climate

The Hydroponics Are On

Leave a comment

34  bar rises 29.50 3mph NNW dewpoint 31  Spring

               First Quarter Moon of Growing

The calendar says spring; the snow says not yet.  It’s all moisture, though, and if it doesn’t run away to rivers and streams, some of this goes to recharge ground water and aquifers.  A good thing whether it comes chilled or just wet.

Last night it looked the drive in to the MIA this morning would be a nightmare.  Predictions of 1 foot snow depths and high winds could have lead to blizzard conditions.  The temperatures never dropped far enough.  So, instead of a foot of snow we got about 3 inches of slush, suitable for snow cones if not so oil impregnated.  The drive in was uneventful.

Sachei Makabe brought her kids from Robbinsdale.  Marilyn Smith and I divided them up and took them through Weber.  Each one of the Japanese language classes I’ve taken through have been attentive, observant and interested.  Can’t ask for more than that.  The diversity in the classes surprise me.  There seem to be far more Asian, Latino and African American students than Caucasian.  This speaks well for the schools and the students but only reinforces the dismal record us white folks have with learning a second language.  I’m one of those who never learned.  Shame on me.

Came home.  Kate had a great lunch made with fish, green beans and acorn squash.  I added a salad. 

After the nap I got out the books and handouts for the hydroponics and got started.  The meter I got a couple of weeks ago I handed over to Kate because it required precision and a chemistry background, neither one of which characterizes me.  It will help us quickly diagnose problems and repair them.  It measures ph, temperature and conductivity.  All of these measures have to do with the uptake of nutrients, though I don’t understand the relationships by any means at this point.

The lettuce seedlings that I started a few weeks ago have started to push roots through the rock wool medium.  This signals the time to transplant them to the hydroponics.  Each planter in the smaller hydroponic system (We have two.) has round lava rocks which hold moisture, but do not interfere with the plants root system reaching the nutrient bath in the reservoir below the planters.  It took 3 gallons of nutrient solution to fill the reservoir to the 2 1/2″ depth recommended.

The nutrient goes into the reservoir through the planters.  This charges the lava rocks.  Then I got a pair of forceps (Adson’s, Kate says.) and plucked the rock well medium out of the seedling beds one at a time.  With a soup ladel I scooped lava rocks out and let them sit in the left over nutrient solution while I positioned the small cube of rock wool and its single lettuce plant.  When I had it where I wanted, one per planter, I scooped the lava rocks around the cube.  Planted.  It’s a strange process compared to gardening directly in mother earth, but it’s fun, too.

After the nutrient solution was in the reservoir, a plastic tub in essence, I plugged the pump into the black tubing that leads inside the reservoir to a plastic tube with two airstones.  Airstones are permeable and the bubbling of oxygen through them creates a nutrient rich mist that reaches the bottom of the planters.  The roots of the lettuce seedlings will head down, through the lava rock to the mist.

With the small pump sighing the only thing left was to switch on the Halide light.  It’s a big thing, 250 watts, with a ballast that feels like a large rock  in weight.  It now glows about 22 inches above the seedlings.   The distance is necessary while the seedlings are still  young and fragile.  After they become well rooted and mature, I’ll move the lamp down to 6 to 12 inches above them.  It will be on roughly 16 hours a day.

We’ve begun.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work

Where Is The Life We Have Lost In The Living?

Leave a comment

34  bar rises 30.15 0mpn NNE dewpoint 28  Spring

            Waxing Crescent Moon of Growing

“Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” – T. S. Eliot

Eliot is fussy, conservative and pedantic; yet, he is also a beautiful poet and a trenchant critic.  I often wonder about the last two of his questions.  As an obsessive gatherer of knowledge and information, it often seems that knowledge gets swamped by information and facts. 

In case you wondered, like I just did, what knowledge means, I found this helpful:  “Knowledge is part of the hierarchy made up of data, information and knowledge. Data are raw facts. Information is data with context and perspective. Knowledge is information with guidance for action based upon insight and experience.”   And this, too, a pragmatic (philosophical) definition:  “the human capacity (both potential and actual) to take effective action in varied and uncertain situations.”  This, too:  “Knowledge is an appreciation of the possession of interconnected details which, in isolation, are of lesser value.”

As long we’re on this track, here are a few definitions of wisdom:  “is the ability to discern inner qualities and relationships; it is synonymous with insight, good sense, and sound judgment. It means to have “deep understanding”, “to have keen discernment”  I like this one, too:  “Knowledge with information so thoroughly assimilated as to have produced sagacity, judgment, and insight.”

The first one of his three questions is tougher.  The nesting nature of the wisdom/knowledge/information trio suggests that Eliot also sees this:  Life/living/wisdom/knowledge/information.   My impression, though, is that he sees Life/living as almost apposite and separate from the other two questions.  So, it might be that he suggests an analogous relationship, i.e. Life gets swallowed by the details of living in the same way wisdom can be consumed by knowledge and knowledge in turn overwhelmed by information. 

It is so often true.  The mundane, even profane (as opposed to sacred, not as in obscenity) aspects of our daily life can so focus our attention that we lose the joy, the delight afforded by this rare and precious gift of Life.  Let me give you an example.  On some days I go into the garden and my intent is to weed.  Or to prune. Or to plant or transplant.  If my task obscures the joy the garden itself brings into my life, if I find myself mumbling about the difficulty of getting rid of this particular kind of weed or the physical challenge of a difficult pruning, then I have lost the Life the garden can bring me in the details of gardening. 

So often delight gets pushed away by duty, joy by drudgery.  The invitation to be in the Eternal Now is the antidote.  If, in my weeding, I can appreciate the tenacity and strength of the weed, if I can experience just a tinge of regret for having to remove it, then I am in the moment, aware of the wonder of plant life rather than disgusted by the invader.  If pruning allows me a chance to notice the growth pattern of the shrub or tree, to wonder at the delicate reaching for air and light that branches are, then I can settle into the truth of the garden itself, become a part of its work.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel

Spring Ephemerals

Leave a comment

32  bar steep rise 29.79 1pmh SSW dewpoint 30  Spring

                       New Moon (Growing)

Snow!  Yes, it happens in April.  Even May here sometimes.  Even so, at this point it seems like such an insult, a step backward when the engine of solar warming has already taken hold and eliminated most of our snow cover.  Yet, even as I write this I don’t mean it.  This is the ever present dynamism of our latitude, visible both in the deep cold and dark nights of midwinter, as well as the forwards and backwards of early spring.  And I would have it no other way. 

The plants that show signs of life now, that spear their first leaves up through the oak leaves and straw laid down to keep them cool until temperatures even out a bit, they are ready for this, made to achieve height and bloom before their contemporaries.  This is an example of what Bill Mollison (author of Permaculture) calls a time niche.  Most perennials have specific time niches. Part of flower gardening involves learning their niches. Only then can you have a garden with blooms throughout the growing season. 

Daffodils, tulips, bloodroot and anemones fall into a category roughly named spring ephemerals.  Their strategy is to grow, bloom, and begin to die back before the larger, woody plants like trees and shrubs leaf out.  That way the spring ephemeral gets light denied to those that grow later in the season, light filtered or blocked out entirely by the leaves of maples, oaks, dogwoods and lilacs. Ephemeral refers to their time niche and defines them as the mum and aster are as fall bloomers.

I like the spring ephemerals.  Their pluck, their hardiness and their almost too obvious metaphorical value regenerate horticultures spirit in me each year.  Right outside garden patio door I can see the red leaved tulip plants and the yellow green daffodil leaves.  Up from and behind them the iris have already grown as much as six inches.  The moss has turned bright green and buds on the dogwood and magnolia have swollen. 

At this point I’m always reminded, in an admittedly perverse way, of the Aztec poem that goes something like this:  We are here as in a dream between a death and death.  I haven’t got it quite right and I can’t find it.  The intent though is to say that life is the illusion, that our true existence is in the realm we think of as death, we emerge from it at birth and return to after death.

Garden, Our Land and Home, Weather +Climate

Tulips and Daffodils, Oh My!

Leave a comment

54  bar steady  29.77 3mph ENE dewpoint 32  Spring

                            New Moon

This is a fecund time.  I spent a couple of hours today putting down pre-emergent weed prevention in the flower beds, moving some mulch completely off now, the garlic, and putting Cygon on the Iris to prevent borers.  Cygon is now a prohibited insecticide so my stash is pretty much it.  Our beds are not near running water and we have a storm drainage basin to catch run off so I don’t see my limited use of Cygon, once or twice a year on about 40 Iris, as a great health hazard.

Just being outside is wonderful.  Where the snow melts back, as it has begun to do even here, we often  find tiny tunnel systems in the grass.  Voles dig these under the snow all winter.  At first it seems that they might kill the grass, but in fact, I think the opposite is true.  Where they go, the soil gets aerated and the grass continues to grow.  It looks strange and possibly harmful when you first see it. 

The Iris have grown about six inches and now is the time to get those damned Iris borers.  If you raise Iris, you know what I mean.  If you don’t, well, they’re slimy and icky and eat the rhizome.  Yeck.  

Tulips and daffodils have also begun to press through the snow and frozen earth.  With the showers we get this week I wouldn’t be surprised if we get some blooms, especially if it warms up, too.   

Cinema and Television, Family, Garden, Travel

Really Creepy Vampires

Leave a comment

42 bar rises 29.73 0mph W  dewpoint 28 Spring

         Waning Crescent Moon of Winds

OK.  I’m taking off my hair shirt and hanging up my cilici.

Today is Ruth’s second birthday.  Ruth is our first granddaughter.  The thought of another life, connected to your own, just starting out, makes the world seem a more congenial and more precious place.  Her blue eyes, mischievous quality and alertness augur an interesting and bright future.  She feeds the dogs, carrying their bowls with that peculiar toddler rolling gate.  She also crawls in the dog crate and closes the door to go night/night. (She’s just pretending.)  Jon and Jen are good parents, another fact that makes the world more congenial and more precious.

A quiet evening after the workout.  Started watching 30 Days of Night.  Vampires attack Point Barrow, Alaska just after it heads into 30 days with no sun.  One of the vampires says, “We should have come here a long time ago.”  A bit of Draculian humor.  A good movie so far.  Great production values, interesting actors and really creepy vampires.

Kate leaves tomorrow morning at 6:15 AM (with me as taxi driver) for Denver to celebrate Ruth’s birthday, then onto San Francisco for a family practice CME.  I plan to do some garden work tomorrow, like put down weed preventer and remove some mulch, maybe rake a bit.  It’s still too early to do much, but I’ll be able to get started.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, Our Land and Home, Weather +Climate

Natural Rhythms and Time

Leave a comment

53  bar falls 30.03 omph W dewpoint 32 Spring

            Waning Crescent Moon of Winds

Over to IHOP for some of that down home country fried food.  Always a treat.  Kate and I did our business meeting, deposited several thousand dollars in Wells Fargo and came back home.  Lois was here.  She commented on the amaryllis which have bloomed yet again for me.  I do nothing special to them except take them outside in the summer, then back inside in the winter.  At some point they decided its ready to bloom, so I put them in a window and water and feed them.

I have no tours tomorrow and so have a good stretch with no art tour work.  I like that. 

Went outside and looked at the trees.  Looks like at least five, two Norway Pines and two River Birch got trimmed back to the hose I used to protect them from sun scald.  Those rascally rabbits I presume.  In the other area, though, two white pines thrived during the winter, as did a Norway Pine, an oak and, I believe, a River Birch.  Feels good to see them growing.

The garlic has begun to push through the soil, a bit pale under the mulch, but I removed it and they will green up fast.  Garlic are hardy plants that like a cold winter and they had one this year.  They come to maturity in June/July.  Drying, then using our own garlic will be a treat.

Wandering around outside gets the horticulture sap rising.   I’m itchy to do stuff.

Signed up for a Natural Rhythms and Time course at the Arboretum.  It’s a symposium put on by the University’s Institute for Advanced Studies, a real find.  If you live in the Twin Cities, I recommend getting on its mailing list.

Friends, Garden, General, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Politics

Plants and a Particular Location + Gardener = Dialogue

Leave a comment

40  bar falls 30.27  6mph  SSE  dewpoint 24  Spring

          Last Quarter Moon of Winds

Ah.  Can you feel the sigh?  A weekend with no outside obligations at all.  I plan to do clean up, plant some more seeds, read, maybe watch a bit more of the NCAA.  How about that Davidson, huh?  Took out Wisconsin.  That’s a student body of 1,700 versus one of what, 30,000?  I will read chapter 3 in the Permaculture design book for sure, perhaps polish off a novel or two, maybe start writing one of my own.  I have an idea that’s been bouncing around for some time now.

Tonight at 5PM I get to celebrate Chinese New Year again with the CIF guides.  I look forward to this each year, this one especially because I’ve done my homework on China and Japan over the last few months.  Saw MingJen, who organizes this event, on Wednesday at the Naomi Kawase film, The Mourning Forest.

If you can, would you write Hillary and tell her to get out now?  We need a chance to even up with McCain and a bitter end to the Democratic primary race just lets him have the field to himself.  I don’t have anything against Hillary, in fact she and Obama are about a horse apiece politically, but Obama has won the field, has the delegates and deserves his chance.  Hillary will have another shot.  She’s established that a woman can run as a serious candidate, a remarkable and historic achievement in itself.  Nothing in the feminist revolution demands that women win all contests or get all the jobs. 

Snow continues to retreat in our yard, but slowly.  As in years past, the Perlick’s grass is almost fully visible, while ours remains under 6-8 inches of snow.  They face south, we face north and that makes all the difference.  Spring comes to our property about a week later than theirs, weird as that is. 

On Thursday I followed the dog tracks in the snow and went out to check on my trees planted last spring.  Some animal, either rabbits or deer, have eaten the tops of them down to the garden hose I put around them as protection from mice.  I didn’t think tall enough up the food chain.   These were the trees I planted nearest the area we call the park.  Further north, also on the eastern edge of our westernmost woods, another group of oaks, white pines and Norway pines look like they’ve done well over the winter. 

This is the nature of gardening.  Try this and it works.  Try that and it doesn’t.  Listen.  Repeat what worked, change what didn’t.  Plants and a particular location engage the attentive gardener or horticulturist (as I’m beginning to think of myself) in a constant dialogue as shade patterns change, seasonal sun shifts become more understood, rain falls or does not fall and various cultivars and seeds prove well suited to the site or not.  This dialogue is multi-lingual as one party communicates in one language and the other has to translate, but it is true discourse as each can alter the others ideas.