Category Archives: Great Work

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Around and Around and Around We Go

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Fall                                                                       Samhain Moon

Interesting convergence.  In Ovid today I translated some verses about the silver age in which Jupiter created four seasons from summer, brief spring, winter and autumn.  After finishing this work, I went out and joined Kate, already at work in the garden.  Small pellets of snow fell.

(The Close of the Silver Age by Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1527-35)

We went into the orchard.  Kate pulled back the landscape cloth around the remaining trees while I broadcast the fertilizer, sprayed with biotill and then worked them both into the top three inches of soil.  While she replaced the landscape cloth, I shoveled soil, mostly sand, back into two large holes dug by our energetic girls, Vega and Rigel.

At one moment I looked up at a tall Norway pine and felt a kinship with Ovid and those farmers in long ago Latium.  We had similar things to do at similar times of year.

The word annum popped up from today’s translating.  You know, I imagine, that it translates as year, but you might not know that its primary meanings are: a circuit, circular course, periodical return.  In one sense this is obvious of course, but that term we use frequently could orient us not to linear time, as we tend to use it, but to cyclical time.

When I say, I am 66 years old, we tend to think, oh.  Born 66 years from this date.  But that’s not what it really means.  It really means I have experienced a full year 66 times.  The year itself, if we’re true to its Latin roots, is not a one after the other marker of chronos, but a complete set, 4 seasons here in the temperate latitudes, finished and done with each winter, begun anew each spring.  Or whenever you want to break beginning and ending.

We then start over again.  Another year as we often say.  Yes, just so.  Another year.  This time in the next year I’ll be fertilizing the orchard.  As I have this year.  So that moment of apocalypse when the earth becomes changed and brand new?  Spring.  When the earth becomes desolate and barren?  Late fall.  Happened before, will happen again.  Amen.

 

Anoka County, Great Work, Science, Sierra Club, Weather +Climate

A Riff on Rain That Got Away From Me

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Fall                                                                    Harvest Moon

Rain.  Creates a hole up in the burrow and sleep, slowdown sort of feeling.  We went out for a small lunch, took a nap.  Business meeting in the morning, partly dividing up money from the recent stock surge.

The soil here in the Great Anoka Sand Plain (a former river bank for the Mississippi as it detoured around the Grantsburg Lobe of the Wisconsin Glaciation) allows rain water a clear path to aquifers beneath it, including one from which we get our water.  Not great for gardening unless there happened to be a peat bog atop the sand like the Fields Truck Farm that surrounds our development.

So, there’s a trade off.  Good water resources for tillable soil.  The small crop vegetable grower and orchadist, however, can amend the soil with organic matter and top soil. We’ve done that.

The aquifer from which we get our water, the Franconian Ironton-Galesville, (see pic) underlies much of eastern Minnesota, much of Wisconsin, some of Michigan, Illinois and Indiana is hydrologically connected to Lake Superior as you can see by the map on the right.

In case you think the olden days have no impact now, you might consider aquifers.  The Franconian Ironton-Galesville aquifer came into existence during the middle Cambrian period of the Paleozoic Era, beginning some 540 million years ago and continuing to about 485 million years ago.  The water in this aquifer circulates around and among the area under all these states, providing the water from municipal wells throughout the region get the bulk of their water.

Here’s another matter to consider.  Water cycles up and down, into the earth then up to the sky and back to the earth, sometimes ending up in aquifers and sometimes in lakes and oceans and rivers and streams and ponds and lakes.  This material from the Coon Creek Watershed District interests me.

“The ultimate source feeding groundwater is precipitation. Actual
aquifer recharge rates are not well quantified within the watershed
which leads to uncertainty in assessing sustainable withdraws.
Over appropriation is the result of removing water at a rate and or
volume faster than the aquifer can supply. In cases where a water
source takes 100 of years to recharge, appropriations are an
irreversible withdrawal.”
An important thing to note here is that in cases of drought, as now, there is no recharge possible.  That means that any climate change induced reductions in rain fall directly impact our long term capacity to draw our water needs from these ancient sources of water supply.

 

Aging, Garden, Great Work, Humanities, MOOCS, Our Land and Home, Writing

I Like Getting Old. Patti Smith

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Fall                                                                     Harvest Moon

Something’s happening here.  What it is is not exactly clear.  At the end of this gardening year I feel like I’ve finally gotten it.  That is, I believe I now understand how to grow fruits and vegetables in quantity and of high food value. As Kate said, moving her hand in a low but upward swoop,  “Sometimes the learning curve is long.”  And it has been.  Over 20+ years.  Today though I feel good about my gardening skill.

On the writing front I’ve rounded up several agents to query when Missing comes back from its beta readers and has gone through the copy editing process.  I’m deep in the research phase for Loki’s Children, focused right now on the text, Loki in Scandinavian Mythology.  No matter how all this turns out in the matter of publication, I’ve let the inner and outer censors go.  I don’t know how or why, but I freed them and they left.  So now the process is all good.  Research.  Critique.  Feedback.  Submission.  Writing.  All good.

The MOOC’s have retaught me a valuable lesson.  When I’m engaged in scholarship, I’m happy, in my element.  I hit flow most often while learning.  That means the work with Ovid, which begins again on October 4th, is another chunk of the same.  Happiness is a warm book.

Last night I had a dream in which a person ridiculed me for not being spontaneous, being disciplined to a fault.  It bothered me as I slowly rose to consciousness this morning.  Am I so focused on a few things that I’m missing life?  Has my willingness to change directions, chart a new path receded?  Been suppressed by all this?

No.  I don’t think so.  But I’m open to other perspectives.  To me my life is full, rich.  There are friends and family whom I see or communicate with regularly.  There is a creative life partnership with Kate here.  The dogs alone provide many spontaneous moments because dogs live only in the now.  In the past I have initiated change in the world through political action.  Now the action is more at home and in the family.  Seems just right for the third phase.

 

 

Garden, Great Work

A Good Year for the Crops

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Fall                                                                       Harvest Moon

Got my soil tests back and the recommendations for next year’s garden.  This time I asked IMAG0650cropped for specific information about beets, allium crops (onion, garlic, leeks) and tomatoes.  I will use a broadcast for all the beds but use special supplements for these three crops.  That way I can keep them in the same beds year after year unless some kind of disease problem occurs.

This time I included soil samples from the orchard, so I have recommendations for broadcast and sprays for it, too.  With a winter pruning that Javier and company will do we should have a better and more consistent fruit crop next year.  This year the cherries, currants, honey crisp and sweet tango were good.  Plums and pears and blueberries not so much.

Since I decided a couple of years ago to get more and better crops from our limited space, I’d rate this last year a definite step in that direction.  It was IMAG0689a weird year weatherwise and I have no way of knowing how that helped or hurt us, but the International Ag Labs feeding program did help.

A key aspect of the International Ag Labs program is its movement toward biosustainability so as I use their products my soil becomes better and better, not poorer and poorer as happens in much of U.S. agriculture.  There are two primary goals here: soil made better by our growing and the production of higher nutrient quality produce.  That’s a solid win for us and the planet at the same time.  It is the Great Work in miniature, right here in Andover.

Given the outsized (for us) honey crop this year I’ve also decided to scale back my bee plans.  Provided this colony survives the winter, and I think IMAG0873it will, I’ll just divide it next year and not buy another package in 2014.  Maybe in 2015.  2015…geez.  That still seems like flying cars, shuttles to the moon and computer created meals at home.  Guess I’m now the 20th century, second millennium guy anachronistically positioned in the future.

Kate uncapping the honey.  We’ve developed a rhythm, a working partnership when it comes to caring for the land and our plants.  We share the space and the work with bees, the living organisms of the first six inches of the soil and the dogs who keep critters out of our garden and orchards.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Weather +Climate

A Coarse, Tactile Spirituality

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Lughnasa                                                                    Harvest Moon

While out preparing beds for bulb planting later this fall, I thought over the post I’d made below.  Spirituality is not the best word for describing what I was talking about, I realized. At least it’s not in metaphysical terms.  I’m talking about a here and now, sensory delivered experience.

In a broader sense, and as I think it is often used, spirituality refers to a mode, event, ritual that makes present, even if momentarily, our connectedness.  In traditional religious circles that connectedness links up to what Kant would have called the noumenal realm, the realm beyond our senses.  Nietzsche put a stop sign to philosophical consideration of the noumenal, a problem for Western philosophy since the Platonic ideal forms, when he said God is dead.  That is, the noumenal realm is not and never was accessible.  If it ever was at all.

Using spirituality in this latter sense–the revelation of connectedness however it comes–then my use of it was just fine.

Just now I looked out my study window and to the north the sky was black and to the east a sickly green cast hoovered near the horizon.  When my eyes read that green, my stomach sank, just a bit, the fear engendered by growing up in tornado alley struggling to assert itself, demand my attention.  Survival at stake!   Red alert.  This was a moment of awe, a reminder of the power nature can bring to bear.  It was a spiritual moment in its sense of immediate connectedness between my deepest inner self and the world within range of my vision.

These are small epiphanies, yes, but they are available. This coarse, material spirituality, tactile in its immediacy reminds me, in definitive manner, of who I am and of what I am a part.  Do I need more?

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work

A Coarse Spirituality

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Lughnasa                                                                   Harvest Moon

Yesterday in the midst of wet raspberry canes, plucking fruit from thorny yet fragile IMAG0955cropped1000branches, the spirituality of the moment grasped me.  The canes stuck to my sweatshirt sleeve; the water soaked into my jeans.  This was the real in all its obstinate presence.

Last February Kate and I did some winter pruning and I cut last year’s canes down to the ground.  We were late getting this done, but the timing was alright.  Now, eight months later, those same plants had burst up, some over my head and drooping with golden and red-purple berries.

The garden, the orchard, the bees each reward us: tomatoes, carrots, onions, apples, cherries, pears, honey.  A virtuous circle, we care for the soil and the plants and the trees and the hives, they in turn offer something we can eat.  Eat.  Think of that.  This is the true and definitive instance of transubstantiation.   Eat this cherry and remember me.  Eat this IMAG0956cropped1000carrot; it becomes me.  It becomes me to eat this carrot.  The soil and the plants here give of themselves that I may not perish.

Thus, to be among them, feeling them pluck at me, rain water dripping off them onto me is a coarse prayer, a baptism by holy water made clean and pure in the clouds then delivered unto us by the morning rain.

Amen.

Great Work

Jelly Fish. They’re Back! And After 550 Million Years, Returning to Prominence

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Lughnasa                                                          Harvest Moon

Here’s an ecological problem I’ll bet you’ve not heard about unless you’ve traveled by Linblad ships recently.  Maybe not even then.  Read the whole review, well worth it, at New York Review of Books.

(Box Jelly, aka, the most poisonous creature on the planet.)

“From the Arctic to the equator and on to the Antarctic, jellyfish plagues (or blooms, as they’re technically known) are on the increase. Even sober scientists are now talking of the jellification of the oceans. And the term is more than a mere turn of phrase. Off southern Africa, jellyfish have become so abundant that they have formed a sort of curtain of death, “a stingy-slimy killing field,” as Gershwin puts it, that covers over 30,000 square miles.”

quote from:  Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean
by Lisa-ann Gershwin, with a foreword by Sylvia Earle
University of Chicago Press, 424 pp., $27.50

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home

Herbicides

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Lughnasa                                                                     Harvest Moon

I use herbicides sparingly, for problems I can’t eliminate by hand.  Those problems include an invasion of rhizomatous creeping charlie, poison ivy and the stumps of felled trees.  The creeping charlie (no relation) was a mistake on my part.  I didn’t recognize it and advised Kate not to pull it when it could have been controlled.  Somehow it got over a large section of ground.  I sprayed it this morning.

Poison ivy.   My earliest adventures with industrial strength herbicides (triclopyr) began soon after IMAG0944our purchase of this property.   Doing research I discovered Rhus radicans likes the ground around oaks.  We have lots of oaks in our woods.

My first efforts with roundup (glyphosate) had no effect.  Ha, ha.  Like rain water to me.

The first time I used triclopyr, as brush-be-gone, a dilute solution sold for ornery shrubs and could-be-tried as adult weeds, failed, too.  Back to the research.  Ah.  The best time to spray them is in the fall when the plant stores energy in its roots for the coming winter season.

(Gog and Magog)

Today (it’s fall, you may notice) I sprayed the creeping charlie because of this information.  I also went hunting poison ivy. I’ve been after it off and on for 15 years.  This year I had trouble finding any.  A good sign.  The ones I did find I coated leaves and stems.  The word on triclopyr is that it vanishes after three months in the soil.  You don’t want to use it around things you want because it’s effective.

Last I’ll use it on stumps.  The problem with stumps, especially ash and black locust is IMAG0949that the tree immediately sends up new treelets to replace the missing one.  Unless you grind the stumps, which I no longer do, you’ll have a clump of new trees instead of an eliminated old one.  I don’t cut down many trees, but when I do it means I have a specific purpose in mind:  more sun for a growing area, more space for the bees, an area for our fire pit.  New trees are not part of the plan.  Using a paint brush to coat the stumps with triclopyr, a less dilute version than brush-be-gone, solves the problem.

(in our woods near the big oaks, Gog and Magog)

In all cases I use integrated pest management to reduce and/or eliminate the need for pesticides.  I use hand removal, physical barriers like landscape cloth and careful selection of plants to reduce the need for herbicides.  I don’t like using them, but in some cases I’ve not been able to come up with other solutions.

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture

Soil Test

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Lughnasa                                                                     Harvest Moon

Soil tests create the information base for deciding on what products and what amount of soil testthem to use next year.  Fall is the best time to do them since the broadcast fertilizer can be laid down before winter.

I used a clean trowel, a plastic bucket and my knees.  To do a soil sample involves a clean cut into the soil of six inches, then a small slice of that cut, top to bottom, into the bucket. This process repeats several times in different areas, then you blend the soil and take 1.5 cups of it and put it in a plastic bag.  I did this twice, once for the vegetable garden and once for the orchard.

A soil test sheet, provided by International Ag Labs, takes down garden size and what kind of testing you want done.  That all gets mailed to lab in Farmington and a while later, a recommendation comes back with very specific amounts and products.

My dealer, Luke Lemmer in Plato, Minnesota, will compile the broadcast according to the labs recommendations and will also supply the other products.  The soil test goes in today.

Cooking, Family, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Health, Our Land and Home

Midwest Grimoires

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Lughnasa                                                                  Honey Moon

Finished spraying.  As the crops come in, the amount of spray needed diminishes.  Today I really only needed the reproductive spray because the remaining vegetables are mostly in that category:  tomatoes, ground cherries, egg plants, cucumbers, peppers, carrots. Granted there are a few beets, some chard and the leeks yet to harvest but they seem substantial already.  They also benefit from the showtime, nutrient drenches and the enthuse that I will spray on Saturday morning.

Kate roasted the broccoli and froze it.  She’s also making pickles today, cucumber and onion.  She’s in back to the land, earth mother mode and has been for several weeks.  She consults her canning, pickling, drying, freezing books like grimoires from calico clad wise women of the rural Midwest.  And does likewise, tweaking the recipes when she wants.