Category Archives: Great Work

Great Work

Frogs and Lichen, a success story

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Lughnasa                                                          Honey Moon

Here are two pictures that make me happy.  This one is a wood frog.  They are the IMAG0790only frog found north of the Arctic Circle and, in the dog watering tub in Andover.  This makes me happy because I also regularly see skinks and toads and on occasion salamanders and various snakes.  The presence especially of amphibians means we have a very low level of toxicity on our property.  We don’t use pesticides and keep herbicide use to a minimum.

This picture shows one of our two plum trees.  Up close.  You probably recognize IMAG0795the lichen growing there.  Lichen are very sensitive to air pollution and will not grow in the city, for example.

 

Great Work, Politics, Sierra Club

How Can We Let This Happen?

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8/13/2013  Lughnasa                                                                       Honey Moon

To the EPA meeting in Chicago to discuss sulfide mining in the BWCA:

mining_exploration_map

You may not have been to the Boundary Waters, a magical part of America the Beautiful, filled with lakes and rocks and fish and silence.  If not, I hope you get the chance to go sometime in the future.  There you will find rest as well as a place to celebrate the wonder that is our planet.

Would you locate a landfill so that it drains its waters into the baptismal fount of a Catholic cathedral?  Would you site a noisy factory with its emissions of smoke and toxins next to a spot dedicated to meditation?  Of course not.

The argument from Polymet and other would be miners of copper and nickel and magnesium locked in sulfides near the Boundary Waters is that their technology will not pollute the three watersheds that send water from its site to Hudson’s Bay, the Pacific and the Atlantic.  The trouble is that there has never, NEVER, been a technology that prevented sulfuric acid runoff from these kinds of mines.  Never.

Can we trust them when the EPA says this claim is suspect?

Bees, Great Work

Bee Diary: 8/7/2013

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Lughnasa                                                                State Fair Moon

Oh.  My.  Just came back from a wrestling match with an angry superorganism.  Bill Schmidt noticed the height of my tower ‘a honey and wondered about wind knocking it over, but the height produces another kind of problem as well.  A happy problem in the end, but a sweat inducing, sting evoking problem in the here and now.

Out of 6 honey supers on top of the three hive boxes, four are full.  Honey, basically water, weighs more than 8.5 pounds per gallon.  Each of these full supers weighs in close to 50 pounds. Therein the happy and the sad of it.

The happy is 200 pounds of honey!  The sad is lifting 200 pounds of honey!  Plus some.

Here’s the deal.  The recommendation is to treat for mites and to do it now in August, with the honey supers on.  That means using a food grade miticide, one that won’t harm the honey in any way.  Which means less potent.  Which is good as far as I’m concerned.  The idea is that we rid the colony of mites in August, then the brood turns over after the nectar flow and produces mite free bees for overwintering.  Mites reduce the bees capacity to overwinter.  By a lot.

So.  O.K.  I decided yes. I’ll do that.  When I went to buy the one treatment and done product, miteaway, my dealer was out.  He had instead hopguard.  Hopguard requires two strips in each of three hiveboxes (the big ones on the bottom that hold the colony and its honey stores for the winter).  That’s one week’s treatment and the full treatment requires three weeks.

(taken today and the point of all this hooha)

Now we get to the problem.  Each of those honey supers has to come off and sit somewhere while I put the hopguard strips in the hiveboxes.  So, that’s 200+ pounds off and set aside.  It also means moving two of the three hiveboxes off and back on.  They weigh substantially more than a full honey super.

Thanks to the Canadian leakage as Paul Douglas calls it the weather is about as good as it’s reasonable to expect:  70 degrees with a dewpoint of 50.  But.  By the time I finished schlepping honey supers the sweat had begun to run.  Down into my eyes.

Physically moving these boxes is right at or a bit more than I can do easily.  That’s ok, for the most part, but it does mean that I can’t make the slow, deliberate motions that keep the bees calm. So, by the time I got to the hiveboxes I couldn’t see out of one eye and had to squat and lift with my legs to budge them.  I’m not even going to mention the slippery hopguard strips that would not slide easily between the frames.

(an improvised super holding device.  also taken today)

Anyhow, I got all that done, got the honey supers back on and was feeling good.  Until I saw the queen excluder resting on the hiveboxes.  The queen excluder goes between the hiveboxes and the honey supers to prevent the queen from laying eggs in the supers.  Oh. My.  You can insert here words you use when you realize you have shot yourself in your own foot.

That’s right.  I now had to remove the supers a second time, put on the queen excluder and put them all back on again.  Well, that’s all done and finished until next Wednesday.  When I do it all over again.  Except, I hope, for that queen excluder part.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, General, Great Work, Our Land and Home

Dancing in the Garden

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Lughnasa                                                         Moon of the First Harvests

We’ve settled into a rhythm that will continue until the last substantial harvest.  I go out in the mornings and harvest.  Kate then pickles, cans or freezes.  I helped with the garlic drying, but otherwise she’s done all the work.  We’ve had to clear the detritus out of the food storage room, gathered there over the winter and spring, because now trips down there for empty canning jars or to deliver full ones have become frequent.

Kate said she needed a calico dress and a gingham (Gangham?) apron.   I suggested a bonnet.  This work for her, right now, is primary in her life and she reports getting energy from doing it.  She must because she stands long hours in the kitchen.  Of course, she’s one tuckered out gal at the end, but the pantry has more stores and she feels good.

This whole garden is a dance with each of us playing different roles over the course of the season.  I have overall responsibility for the gardens and their health.  I do most, but not all, of the planting, all of the international ag labs supplementing and survey the various beds for plant health over the course of the growing season.  If there’s corrective action to be taken, that’s my job.  I bag the apples and take care of the fruit trees, also harvesting. (but not pruning.)

Kate weeds and that is one huge job.  One I don’t like.  She says it brings her satisfaction. I can’t get no satisfaction there so I’m glad she can.  At harvest time Kate takes the lead and chooses what kind of recipes to use and what methods of preservation to employ.  Near the end, when the leeks come in, I’ll make pot pies for freezing.  We both do fall clean-up and I plant bulbs.  Then the garden takes its long late fall and winter nap.

Commentary on Religion, Great Work, Politics

Short Takes

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Summer                                                                     Moon of the First Harvests

Who am I to judge?  Out of the mouth of a Pope.  Extraordinary and welcome.  Can’t help but wonder what the crabbed mind of our local bishop, The Most Reverend John C. Nienstedt, makes of it.  His diminished understanding of what it means to be human must be scuttling around wondering how things could change in such a short period of time.

Orcas are the largest dolphins?  You probably knew this, but I didn’t.  Killer whale stuck to them because some of their number hunt whales.  They are versatile hunters and can exist on whatever is in plentiful.  The film Blackfish and the book, Death at Seaworld, have added to the increasing criticism of keeping intelligent, social animals in captivity at all:  dolphins, chimps and I imagine elephants, gorillas, orangutans, too.

shaun peterson

 

 

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home

Harvest Continues

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Summer                                                             Moon of the First Harvests

Spent some time picking currants, stripping them off the branch reminded me of milking a cow.  This time our crop, a slender one, yielded around 4 cups.  This is hobby level horticulture for sure.  To pick a commercially successful crop of currants would be very time consuming.  In this case we’ll end up with one currant pie.

We have had wonderful cherry tarts from our two cherry trees and have some cherries frozen.  The plum crop, though large, has not yet produced an edible plum. Not sure what the deal is with them, more to learn.  Meanwhile the bagged apples are growing inside their ziplocs and the few I couldn’t reach on each tree look great, too.  Maybe the cold, wet spring fouled up the maggots.

The bees continuing working at their in and out pace, workers flying off in all directions seeking the nectar while the the nectar flow still runs.  Our six supers make the colony look like an entomologically designed high-rise apartment complex.  Thousands of inhabitants, food and nursery service included.

Kate brought in a tomato and a cucumber, our first of either of those.  They’ll be in a salad for lunch.

Garden, Great Work, Writing

Flower and Leaf

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Summer                                                               Moon of the First Harvests

A torpor always follows completion of a manuscript and it set in today.  It’s a sort of aimlessness, a nothing to do so what could I possibly do sort of feeling.  Yes there is a tension between doing and not doing and yes sometimes I fear that the doing is only a way to shove aside the great fear, the dread of dying.  And, further yes, sometimes I fear that I lean too far toward the doing and away from acceptance and that the torpor I describe only underscores it.

And it may be so.  It may be that I write, garden, learn Latin, get involved in politics and family only to push back the confrontation with my own non-being.  It may be so.

Or it may be that I do these things because they are my flower and leaf, that they are the what I am.  That is my belief.  In doing these things I do what a lily does when it pushes up from its corm, strikes a thick green blade through the earth, gets to sunlight and puts on leaves and flowers.  I am this variety of human.  In this sense those things I do are not avoidance, but completion.

This time between creative efforts becomes a fallow time like the fall and winter months, a time to gather in energy and prepare for the next growing season.  Perhaps lilies, after the flower has bloomed, the seeds are made and leaf and stalk have died back wonder, too, what is my purpose now? I am not what I can be, so am I avoiding my end?  No says the older, wiser lily.  Not at all.  Now is when you become stronger, able to support more flowering.  We do not end, this older lily might say, but develop in such a way that others follow after us.  May it be so.

Art and Culture, Dogs, Friends, Great Work, Writing

A Trip Into The City

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Summer                                                             Moon of the First Harvests

When I picked up our rug from American Rug Laundry, the guy said he couldn’t believe how much dirt he got out of it.  I told him, but I’m not sure it registered, that our dogs really, really like this rug.  All of them.  And they come in and lie down on it.  Roll on it.  Transfer the sand from the Great Anoka Sand Plain to it, deep in its fiber.  As he now knows.  Not many folks let dogs on their multiple thousands of dollars oriental rugs, I imagine.

(this rug.  with favorite dog objects.  the one to the far right is a stuffed squirrel.  a big hit.)

On the same trip I took a baby quilt in to Margaret Levin.  She’s due sometime in the next couple of weeks.  Says a lot about our society that she’s in her last term of pregnancy and still running the Northstar Chapter of the Sierra Club.  Kate makes lots of baby quilts. This one used cloth made from our neighbor’s mother’s stash.  When she died, it fell to Pam who gave it to Kate.  This particular cloth was from the 1930’s.

We talked about politics, of course.  That was my entré to the Sierra Club and what I did with them for 5 years or so.  I asked her if she has the same sense I do that a cultural shift has begun on global warming.  A positive one.  She said yes, but she also said the movement thought one was happening in the 1970’s, too.  Still, you add in a Democratic President and Senate, plus the changing demographics of the U.S. population and there could be real grounds for optimism.  Whether such a shift would happen soon enough to matter? Hard to tell.

Stopped by the Northern Clay Center as well.  It’s only a block from the Sierra Club. There are a lot of able potters represented there.  I’m in the market for another tea pot since I plan to return to brewing tea from tea leaves rather than tea bags when I start Loki’s Children.  A reward for finishing the third revision.  Didn’t find anything.  I plan to look on Sunday at a large pottery show, but if I don’t find anything I’ll head up to St. John’s and Richard Bresnahan.  I’ve wanted one of his teapots for some time.

 

 

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home

Cherry picking low hanging fruit

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Summer                                                                      Moon of First Harvests

Cherry picking.  This morning.  Blueberry picking, too.  Also pears from two trees, their entire crop.  First, the low hanging fruit, then up the ladder.  A lot of cliches come from the world of the orchard and the garden.  Let’s wait til it bears fruit.  He planted the seed on fertile ground.   In the not so very long ago, maybe one or two generations, perhaps three depending on your age these sayings were not culture; rather, they were everyday experience, or, every appropriate season occurrence.  Now, with increasing urbanization, the rapid decline of the family farm and a rush to do all things with technology the hand in the tree which picked the cherries is on the keyboard checking Facebook or more likely on the iPhone checking Snapchat.

Delivering vast numbers from the mind numbing toil of subsistence agriculture is a good thing.  No doubting that.  Even having agriculture and horticulture done by the few is not necessarily a bad thing.  We need food and flowers.  If they come to our table full of nutrients and vibrant, well then.  If however, we create a system where the food we eat has been modified not for its nutritional value but for the positive economics of its growing, harvesting and processing, well then.

Somewhere a tectonic plate of public opinion has begun to shift.  I can feel it in the newspapers, the magazines, the websites I read and visit.  That shift is toward action against global warming.  My hope is that this shift, which will ride over the continent of fossil fuel and through subduction bury it in the mantle below the crust where it belongs, will include within it a return to the tree, the wolf, the tomato and the onion.  May it be so.

 

Great Work, Our Land and Home, Third Phase

The Land

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Summer                                                              Moon of the First Harvests

One with the land.  A cliche perhaps, though little used today.  I hope it has again some of the powerful connotation it had long ago.

On a fine cool morning like this one, not even really cool, 68, to step outside with tools in hand, tools for working with plants, and feel the morning air surround you, to see the plants green and the flowers vibrant, to step into the vegetable garden and see tomato blossoms, fruit, eggplant fruit, cucumbers vining up the bamboo, the carrot’s feathery leaves, the brave leeks tall and proud and to know, know in the biblical sense, that is, to have direct sensory knowledge unmediated by book or story, but present and available, that you and those plants share the workload.  To know further that the bees buzzing and dipping into the flowers are likewise colleagues, not just insects, but partners.  Yes, I know it’s overwritten, sorry about that, but it hits the feeling tone I want to convey.  Over the top.  Not overwhelming, maybe, but certainly whelming.  Intimate.  Holistic.

It’s a feeling, come to think of it, or come to feel it might be better, that synchs up with the mystical moment I had back long ago in college.  I’ve written about it here before so just a synopsis.  After a philosophy class I experienced a sudden moment of integration with the whole, with everything, with the cosmic.  I was in it and of it, as it was in me and of me.  This feeling I have, this oneness with this land, this particular place, is a discrete yet parallel feeling.  I am in this land and of it, as it is in me and of me.