Category Archives: Great Work

Great Work, permaculture

Gaining from and giving back

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Beltane               Full Dyan Moon

newwork09Paula Westmoreland from Ecological Gardens came out today and gave us a walk through, explaining the plants and their relationships.  The real distinctiveness of permaculture lies in developing and nurturing those relationships, using plants together in ways that are mutually beneficial.   An easy to understand example is the familiar legume family, a group of plants that fix nitrogen in the soil.  Since most plants deplete nitrogen in the soil, following a planting of a non-legume, especially if it’s a heavy feeder like, say, tomato or corn, with a legume helps restore the soil chemistry.

There are also plants that tend to confuse insects with their scents;  since many of those fit in the herb garden, the herb spiral sits in a key corner of the new design, fooling predatory insects as they head toward our beans and strawberries.  Over time these relationships interleave and become stronger, the soil chemistry becomes healthier and the result is a stronger, less insect and disease prone garden.  This long term strength of permaculture makes it a wise investment for any yard or garden.

In the orchard and our new vegetable garden design we now have clover in place of grass.  It crowds out weeds, can take being stepped on and should  provide good tasting honey in years to come.

The gestalt here has begun to feel real.  We are less like human intruders on this oak savannah and more like c0-inhabitants, gaining from and giving back in the timeless cycle of life.

Art and Culture, Friends, Great Work, permaculture, Sport

Superman

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Beltane                           Waxing Dyan Moon

“It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.” – William G. McAdoo

Boy, is that true.  Look at Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, oh my.

Had lunch and a by the seat of the pants tour with Mary and Frank Broderick.  It was fun, wandering around the museum looking at art with friends.

Obama is such a smart guy.  Speaking to the Muslims yesterday, visiting Buchenwald today.  He does not allow the dust to settle in any one place before he moves on, readjusting the tunic of America’s presence in the world.  In such a short time he has restored my feeling of good fortune in living here.  Geez, just to have a President who can string together a complex sentence is enough to make me cry.

Following the low bar of the Bush presidency has eased Obama’s transition, but he would have looked good at any point.  Now he looks like superman.

The first phase of the growing season, planting and amending soil, has come to an end.  Almost.  Now mulch goes down newwork09and surveillance for pests.

This is part of the new work we had done last week.  The vegetable garden area has no more grass, just chips.  It also has new beds with flowers, shrubs and space for some more vegetables.  We have made another step toward a permaculture suburban acreage.  The small white form in the upper left is the bee hive.

Family, Great Work, permaculture

Pictures. Puppies and Plants.

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Beltane                    Waxing Dyan Moon

dogfamily

Poppa (the big gray wolfhound, Guiness) and his children.  Our new pups are in this picture, but I can’t pick them out.

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orchfirstgrowseas

The orchard early in its first growing season.  Currants in the foreground to the right, cherries and plums the trees in mid-ground.

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potatoeyeview

A potato eye view of its bed.

Great Work, Travel

Gators

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Beltane              Waxing Dyan Moon

gatorThis southern gentleman showed up on my tour of Okefeenokee Swamp.  He hissed and opened his mouth wide. (Does that mean he’s related to Jesse Helms?) After we moved past him, he moved to another patch of grass and rolled over on his side, happy at having driven away the intruders.

The gator is the moose and the wolf of the south.  It shows up on license plates, as school mascots and in tourist ware like mugs and hot pads.

Chip, the crocodilian biologist who gave me the tour, said that the crocodilian’s basic survival strategy got put into place 30-40 million years ago and has not changed since.  They hunt the shoreline and low water edges, relying on stealth and speed to catch birds, deer, fish.

The females (you cannot tell a female from a male without opening them up) lay a large number of eggs, guard their brood and hope for the best.  It seems to work.  Think of all that time.

Great Work, Travel

Sun Almost Shines

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Beltane             Waning Flower Moon

Westin, Hilton Head Island

Some heat has returned.  I only needed my gray great river energy zip up for the first half of the morning.

The Coastal Discovery Center sits about a mile, maybe two from Port Royal Plantation. It tries to deal with the cultural and natural history of Hilton Head.

There is an inherent problem with history here.  How to deal with enslavement?  The Coastal Discovery Center does not skirt the issue, it mentions enslavement in the pre-Civil war days, breathes a sigh of relief and passes on to the era of freedom after the war.

The best part of the Center for me lay outdoors.  Live oak trees reach gnarly branches out in twisted directions, some very low to the ground and all hung with the gray beards of Spanish Moss.  Loblolly pines shoot up high; red cedar grows in bulbous clumps, one such specimen has an estimated germination date of 1595.

Three boardwalks jut out into that complex eco-system, the salt marsh.  Here fresh water and salt water meet, creating an environment where only the toughest need apply.  This does not include, by the way, alligators or turtles.  It seems they dehydrate in salt water.  There is one turtle that lives in the marsh, but only one.

This is an area dominated by sea grass, fiddler crabs and oysters.

Docents guided classes of school children enjoying an outdoors break at the end of the school year.

I wandered around, shooting this and that with the camera and have returned to eat lunch with Kate.

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, permaculture

Bee-ing

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Beltane                      Waning Flower Moon

Tomorrow morning Mark Nordeen and I will zip up our white bee suits, put on Wellies and gloves, secure the veiled bonnet that makes us look like prim Victorian ladies headed for a stroll in Hyde Park circa 1880 and do the third check on the bee hive.

When I checked it a week ago, I saw capped cells and a lot of activity.  As I’ve watched scouts come and go over the last week, I’ve noticed that between 1/4 and 1/3 of them return with pollen on their hind legs.  This is a key transition, meaning they will be able to make their own food, wax and propolis.

As each new piece has become a part of our overall property, the gestalt increases.  It grows in size, has grown in size, from the first decisions about boulder walls and perennial flowers, through bulb planting, hosta and ferns, the multiplication and division of iris, day lilies, true lilies, hosta, bug bane, ligularia, dicentra.  When Kate began to grow vegetables, the gestalt pushed out some more.

Hiring Ecological Gardens and putting in the orchard last fall has pushed the boundaries of the whole further out, while integrating it more.  The bees have added an animal component, a lively and complex bee-ing.

Growing vegetable plants from seed under lights, then planting them outside adds another layer.  The work that Ecological Gardens plans for May 26 and May 27 will enrich it yet again.

The feeling is hard to express, but wonderful.  Mabye the bee hive is a good analogy.  It feels to me like the whole property has become an interdependent whole, with the land working for us and us working for the land.  I’m not talking about just food production.  The beauty of the flowers, the grace of the ferns, the broad green presence of the hosta are part of it, too.  Each part feeds into and amplifies the other.  The bees enhance the fruit trees, the vegetables and the flowers; in turn they provide pollen to the hive.  We care for the whole and harvest food, aesthetic pleasure and a sense of connectedness.

Garden, Great Work, Hydroponics, permaculture

Plants I’ve Known From Seeds.

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Beltane                       Waning Flower Moon

The peas and turnips and beets and new onions are up and wriggling toward the sky.  I planted all of the hydroponic plants today with the exception of the cucumbers.  They go in tomorrow.

This was satisfying, putting in plants I grew myself from heirloom seeds.  The next satisfaction will come as they grow, another when we harvest, but the best will be when I replant them next year grown from seed I harvest this year.

I already have garlic growing from bulbs I planted two years ago.  Once the new beds are in we will plant the beans, all of which are from last year’s beans.

Good to get all this done before I leave for Hilton Head.

Now it’s in to MIA to pick up  the Sin and Salvation catalogue for the Pre-Raphaelite show I will tour through the remainder of the summer.

Garden, Great Work, permaculture

A Cool Night.

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Beltane                    Full Flower Moon

This is the kind of weather that can scare a Minnesota gardener.  Right now the temperature is 42.  It could, will, go lower, though the prediction says no lower than 40.  If I thought it were going to get down to freezing, I’d have to cover my new peas and turnips.  They have just poked above the soil and would suffer and most would die.

My baby plants from inside are now adolescents; they stayed outside six hours today.  Tomorrow, I’ll put them outside by the beds where they’ll be planted and give them one more day in the peat pots before digging them in to their permanent homes.

I cut up the potatoes today, readying them for planting, too.  They may be a little late, so we’ll see what we get.  A lot of new plants in this year’s garden: leeks, parsnips, turnips, greens, brocolli, cauliflower, plants I may not understand too well.  Again, we’ll have to see what we get.

That kind of experimentation is one of the joys of gardening, eating something fresh that you’ve only ever had from a produce section of a supermarket.  This year marks a large expansion in our vegetable and fruit crop.  That means a lot of uncertainty, a steep learning curve with some plants.  All part of the deal.

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, permaculture

The Moon of Full Flower

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Beltane                     Full Flower Moon

The full flower moon rises tonight on beds full of daffodils, tulips, snowdrops and small blue flowers whose name I don’tdaffodils675 recall.  The furled hosta leaves that come up in a tightly packed spiral have begun to uncurl.  Dicentra have full leaves now, though no flowers yet.   A few iris have pushed blossoms up, a purple variety I particularly like opens early.  Even though they will not bear flowers until July the true lilies have already grown well past six inches, some with gentle leaves and others with leaves that look like a packed icanthus, an Egyptian temple column rising out of this northern soil.

My hydroponically started plants will stay outside today for four hours, working up to seven until they graduate to full time outdoor spots.  All of the three hundred plants began as heirloom seeds and have had no chemicals other than nutrient solution.   Unless we paid Seed Savers to ship us transplants, there is no other way to get heirloom plants that need growing time before the date of the last frost.  Too, the selection of vegetables and their varieties is of our choosing, not the nurseries.  I don’t have anything against nurseries; I just like to grow what I want, not what’s available.

The big daylilly move underway will make way for a full sun bed of sprawlers like squash, watermelon and cucumbers.  The perennial plants like the lilies, iris, daffodils, hosta, ferns, and hemerocallis have their complexity but I’ve majored in them for the last 14 years.  Now I understand their needs, their quirks, the rhythm of their lives and their care.  Vegetables, on the other hand, only this last two growing seasons have received any concentrated attention.  Their complexities are multiple because there are so many varieties and species with so many varying needs related to soil temperature, ph, nutrients, length and temperature of the growing season.

The learning curve has been steep for me so far, though the experience gained from the perennial plants has kept me from being overwhelmed.  In another couple of years I should have a good feel for what does well here and what does not.  After that, the vegetable garden will become more productive while at the same becoming easier to manage.

By that time, too, I hope to have had two successful bee-keeping years under my belt and have grown my colony to three hives or more, enough to justify purchasing an extractor.  At that point this should be an integrated and functioning micro-farm.  If it works well, I hope it will serve as a model for what can be done on 2.5 acres.  We’ll see.

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, permaculture

Our Life And This Land Are One

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Beltane                      Waxing Flower Moon

The garden beckons, so a short one this morning.  I’m set for having the garden planted before I leave next Friday, atulips674 week from tomorrow.  Everything I need to get in the ground before I get back will have a spot:  various tomato plants and potato eyes, broccoli, cauliflower, egg plant, onions, leek, chard, greens and cucumbers.

There is a sense of wholeness now as the orchard begins to blossom, the vegetable garden for this year starts to grow and the perennial flowers, hosta, ferns and bugbane blossom and emerge.   With the ecological garden’s work later this month we will have a yet more integrated homestead, with food and flowers, bees and a home of their own for the grandkids.

This must be a similar feeling to a farmer’s, a feeling that our life and this land are one.  That means, too, that as the garden comes to life, a certain part of my Self also comes to life, when it grows, so do I.  As the harvest comes in so do I harvest fruits within my Self.

When the garden begins to go fallow in late August through October, another aspect of my Self blossoms.  In this light I can see September 29th, the Feast of  St. Michael the Archangel, as the springtime of the  soul.  This begins a period more reflective and contemplative, a period, too, when my creativity flowers.  As outside, so inside.

Blessed be.