Category Archives: Great Work

Garden, Great Work

2008 Gardening Season Is Underway

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59  bar steady  29.83 3mph WNW dewpoint 31  Beltane

         Waxing Crescent of the Hare Moon

Hemerocallis (the daylily) is a sturdy member of the plant kingdom.  Every time I plant, no matter where I plant it, nor the care I give it, the daylily spreads and grows happily.  That’s why years after the fact the foundation outlines for many rural home are still obvious, tiger lilies continue to grow and bloom just like the house was still there.  Today all the daylilies in the first raised bed we ever had, made, as all of them, by Jon, got moved. 

Jon also put in a cedar rail fence and last year I deconstructed it down to the original cedar fencing. We had him add wire fencing to keep out nuisance animals–our dogs.  An older me saw them as less of a problem, Kate agreed, so down the wire fence came.  The daylilies have gone from the bed to the edge of the cedar rail fence.  Two peonies have likewise made the transition, but they went into a tree circling bed that is about a quarter finished.  We have a young, sturdy elm on the fence line.  I removed the fence around it and will soon complete digging out a circular bed around its dripline.

The former daylily and peony bed will get sweet corn.  I’m also going to try the Native American method of planting climbing beans at the base of the corn stalk.

Three tomato plants grown from seed to 1 foot + under the lights are now in place, too.  They went in the former lily (Asian and other true lilies) bed.  I’m taking a chance planting them directly outside with no hardening off, but I wanted to try it, see how it works.  If they die, we’ll buy a couple of tomato plants.  If they don’t, I can skip a step in the future if I watch the weather carefully.  Which I do.

Also had a brainstorm for what to do with the hill that has succumbed to raspberry canes.  Moss.  This is a shady area and I read an article about how to convert lawns to moss.  It won’t work for our front lawn yet, but it should work on this slope shadowed by the seven oaks at the top.  Gonna try it.  The result can’t be worse than what we have.

While I dug and transplanted, Kate made a trip to the Greenbarn, a nursery and garden store up near Isanti.  She bought a number of things:  impatiens, onion sets, Coleus, sphagnum moss, small onion sets already well underway, some seeds as well as other things.  Anyhow all this means the 2008 gardening season is off and growing.

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?

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work

Hey, Buddy, Got Any Pictures?

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55  bar falls 29.59 8mph NE  dewpoint 36 Beltane

                 Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing

           grandmaanddescendants.jpg

This is Grandma and her descendants, Gabriel and Ruth.  Gabe still has to learn to suck and swallow.  He also needs to wean himself from the canula that deliver an oxygen stream.  Both of these are maturational tasks that would have completed on their own in the womb, so he just needs to grow and get older.  Right now everyone wishes he’d do both quicker, unmasking one of the many contradictions in human development.  As we age, no one wants to get older and grow bigger. 

Kate came home last night.  She was sad.  Ruthie now knows her and runs up with a smile and arms out, “Grandma!”  That’s tough to leave.  Gabe, too, is in a vulnerable place even though she’s confident he’ll be fine.  She also helped out Jon and Jen with domestic matters like cooking, grocery shopping and Ruth care when Ruth was not in daycare. 

Having a child in the hospital creates stress just because, but there is stress, too, because work goes on while the daily routine gets disrupted.  No one gets enough sleep.  A tough time for the Olson family, Denver branch.  It will receded into the past, someday, and become the stuff of family legend.  When you were a baby, Gabe, you were in the hospital so long and we were so worried.

A reader from the Webiverse asked to see some photographs of my hydroponic setup.  It occurred to me that it might be the feds trying to catch a not too intelligent dope grower.  Go, ahead, buddy, show me your pictures.  Heh, heh, heh.  I hope so, but because boy are they going to be disappointed.

                           hydro2300.jpg

From this and the next angle all you can see are lettuce and tomato plants, but there are also morning glories, cucumbers and three varieties of beets.  These last are not as far along in the growth process and will go outside as soon as the weather warms up.

                           hydro300.jpg

As I’ve begun to work with the hydroponics, this setup seems small.  The megafarm is the larger of the two; the smaller is sold as Emily’s farm.  

                          Here’s the whole deal, including the seed sprouting area. The halide bulb and shield are just out of sight near the top.

                          hydrosetup300.jpg

It’s amazing the charge I got out of working with seeds and young plants when snow and cold weather blew around the house.  I plan to branch out (ha,ha) a bit over the year to include flowers and, maybe, carnivorous plants.  No, I don’t know why.

                         

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.

Art and Culture, Great Work, Weather +Climate

And the Soothsayers Predicted Snow

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55  bar falls 29.79 0mph SE dewpoint 54  Spring   light rain

                Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing

And the soothsayers predicted Snow.  Oh, no.  Really, not a big deal.  Slush is more likely.  The precipitation now is all good.  As the weather continues (generally) to warm, the combination of rising soil temperatures and moisture puts plant life on the quick track up.

Randy, from Randy’s plumbing, called.  He will come out Friday am to install the gas piping to the generator.  Center Point will come out on Tuesday afternoon to give us the bigger meter necessary to provide adequate gas to the generator when it works.  Soon we will have protection against power outages.  One more block for the retirement security perimeter.

Membership in Permaculture in a Cold Climate is another one.  As we make the transition here to more and more home grown produce and hopefully some home captured energy, we will reduce our need to leave the property for grocery trips.  All this moves us toward a smaller and smaller carbon footprint. Although, I have to admit, the steam room probably eats up more than we’ll balance for awhile.  Gotta figure that out one of these days.  When we get that Prius two years from now, our balance sheet will look better.

Allison has asked me to consider a short article on astronomy for the summer Muse.  She wants me to focus on the moon since there’s enough written about sun cults. (her language)  Made a quick survey of objects in the MIA collection.  If you thrown in those with stars, there are over 100 objects that have either a moon or star connection.  Finding a good 8 or 10 for a Moon and Stars tour would be easy.  This plays to an interest I developed in archaeoastronomy while I belonged to the Minnesota Astronomical Society.  We’ll see what she wants.  More later.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work

Matzo Located In Coon Rapids

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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.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work

No Matzoh In Andover

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47  bar rises 29.95  3mph N dewpoint 40 Spring

                     Full Moon of Growing

No matzoh at Festival in Andover.  No lamb.  The butcher said, “We only carry it for holidays.  Can’t push it any other time.”  Not many Jews in Andover either, apparently.  This is a big one for Jews all over the world, but not big enough to create a market for lamb at the local supermarket.  No matzoh cake meal either.  All this  means a trip to Byerly’s tomorrow.  Plenty of Jews in and around Maple Grove.  It’s all about the market.  Plenty of Hindu’s in Maple Grove, too.

I don’t imagine there are many Parsi here either.  Oh, well.  It’s probably fair to say that I’m one of a handful of the Taoist inclined, too.  May be a few Chinese folks and me.

Just finished the Saturday workout.  This one’s a bugger and my muscles can tell they’ve had hard use.  It’s the only way to make’em grow and the only way to compensate for age related loss of muscle mass.  It’s important, but it doesn’t make it easy.

The world is a strange, big place.  While I did my resistance work, I listened to a program on the evolution of the planet.  The irregular catastrophic punctuations in her history gives me pause.  The Chixilub meteor, fissure eruptions, super volcanoes, snowball earth, a few ice ages here and there and pretty soon, as Evertt Dirksen used to say, you’re talking about real extinction events.  It may be that we have come on the scene in a period of Pax Terra; but, based on our history as a planet, I’d say it won’t last.