Monthly Archives: June 2009

Our Land and Home

Houdini Inhabits a Canine

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Summer                 Waxing Summer Moon

Each penitentiary or prison warden fears the convict who can identify a weakness in the multiple barriers to escape.  So do dog owners.   Our puppy Rigel wiggled under the gate leading down to our perennial garden, an impressive feat considering the narrowness of the opening and the size of her body.  When I blocked this one, she wriggled through a slat in the gate as far her rear hips which just would not fit.  I had to pry the gate apart to free her.  I nailed another slat diagonally across the gate and she quit trying.

Now, however, we have a dog of a similar color, Vega, but different strategy.  A good strategy.  Good for Vega, that is, but bad for us.  I went outside this afternoon to work in the perennial garden in back, overlooked by the deck where our dogs spend much of their time when relaxing.  I looked up there.  All five dogs up there.  Rigel did not try the gate.  Ah.

Oh. I turned, walked around the side of the house and suddenly, standing beside me, Hello!  Hello! I’m here!  Look at me! was Vega.  At first I thought she might have vaulted the gate.  I had put a concrete block down and inadvertently left the solid side up.  I had to know how she did it.

After 13 dogs I have some window into the canine mind.  After finally coaxing Vega  back onto the deck inside the fenced in part of our yard, I left her out there, let the rest of the dogs out and returned to the perennial beds.  Sure enough, only 3 minutes passed and I caught sight of Vega, not on the concrete block, which I had guessed, but near the fence that borders the perennial garden about 100 feet or so from the deck.

The fence is chain link and has contained all of our dogs except for the occasional whippet who follows out some animal that dug to get in the yard.  I have a regular routine of walking the fenceline, checking for breaches and filling them with old tree trunks, fence rails I no longer use, rocks.

Back to Vega and the fence.  She looked at me, looked down at the area where the fence met the ground, crouched with her doggy butt up in the air, tail wagging and dug.  At first I thought it was just a feint, that she had really jumped as I imagined.  Nope.  She got up, then crouched down again, put her nose under the fence, then squeezed her 70 pound puppy (a really big puppy) body under the fence and Hello!

Sigh.  Now I’m going to have to harden all the fence line that borders the perennial garden against these escape attempts.  Instead of the bird man of Alcatraz we have the man dog of Andover.

Bees

Late June Hive Inspection

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Summer                        Waxing Summer Moon

Mark and Elise came over today.  We wandered through the garden and the orchard, followed by Rigel and Vega.  They licked and pressed and jumped.  New people!  New people!  Oh, boy!  Oh, boy!  New people!  Rigel and Vega found Leif and Tate and Tate’s twin really, really interesting.  Baby head!  Baby head!  Oh, boy!  Oh, boy!

Mark and I went out to the hive and popped the lid after suiting up.  The smoker worked better today, but I’ve still not got it down.  There are a lot of bees.  I thought so, but Mark confirmed it.  There are lots of brood, plenty of honey and a few uninhabited queen cells.  We scraped and checked each of the 20 frames, leaving two frames out to insert into the new box we put on top.  The hive is now three boxes high, its maximum.

Next week or so, the honey supers go on the third box.  About half the size of a hive box the supers fill up with honey.  They are the work product that goes into the centrifuge for extraction.  A typical super has about 30 pounds of honey.  Seems like a lot to me.

Mark finds the bees fascinating per se, the honey a bonus that sometimes pays for the bees and the equipment in a given year.  I agree.  The hive construction project alone interests me.  The six sided cells, the propolis, drone, worker and queen cells, the making of honey and its storage reveal a life way and a life form unlike any we contact in the usual day to day.  There is more, too: the queen and her squadron of drones, hopeful suitors, all but one of whom will live and die unfulfilled, the solitary life of the queen, moving from cell to cell squeezing out egg after fertilized egg, the workers who build the cells and scout out food, coming back to communicate in a well known  complicated dance.

Many bee keepers work without suits and gloves.  Honey bees that survive our winters have a docile temperament and are not as defensive as the ordinary person would imagine, though Mark says they get more protective in the fall when the beekeeper begins to take the honey.   This might seem a bit cruel, but in fact the bulk of the honey, say 80-90 pounds, remains in the hive boxes and has enough nourishment for the hives to over winter.

Garden, GeekWorld, permaculture

Take That Hose And Grab It

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Summer                              New Moon

A bit of a disconnected afternoon.  A long nap followed by working for a while in the heat trying to figure which zone on our irrigation clock corresponded to which actual sprinklers.  This was necessary because we got a new clock and the guy joined the wires in roughly the same order as the old one.  Roughly.

The stimulus for this work came from Kate’s discovery that our new puppies get excited when the water comes through the netaphim line we just had put in our orchard.   By excited I mean grab the netaphim and run with it, chewing all the while.  Netaphim is a plastic tube about half the size of a garden hose through water drips onto plants rather than sprays.  It works great, but better without teeth marks.

Tomorrow I’ll put all the netaphim lines on a schedule separate from the rest of the sprinklers and start them early enough in the morning that their work will be done before the puppies get up.  That should solve it.

Bees, Garden, Great Work, permaculture

Smoke Gets In Your Bees

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Waning Days of Beltane                   Waning Dyan Moon

We near midsummer; it’s only 15 hours away.  The Summer Solstice, the hot sister of my favorite holiday, the Winter Solstice, comes to Minnesota at 12:47 am tomorrow, the early hours of father’s day.

To celebrate I plan to work outside in the garden and do some pre-Raphaelite reading, maybe look for a PRB take on midsommer.

To start, this morning I checked on the bees.  There are many, many more bees than came in the small wire and wood box in April.  They come and go, searching the area for nectar and finding plenty at this time of year with the bumper crops still ahead.  Nectar flow precedes honey flow and we are hind leg deep in pollen and nectar.

The bees did not meet the threshold of 8 sides substantially covered with brood that indicates the need for another hive box.  Maybe next week.

There must be a trick to getting the smoker lit and working.  It has challenged my bee-keeping more than the bees so far.  In order to use it  you have to a fuel burning, then smother it, but not put out the coals so the fuel will continue to smolder, producing smoke for the duration of your hive check.

Like many learning curves this one imposes a double penalty.  While taking time to keep the smoker lit and producing, I can not work the hives.  Once in the hives, which I work slowly anyway because I’m still learning, the smoker punking out (pun!) puts me at risk from angry bees.  Meanwhile back to the smoker which means I’m not checking the hive.  Normal learning process.  Frustrating and exhilirating.

Now for some deadheading, trellis building and potato and beet mounding.  Check you on the flipside.

Art and Culture, GeekWorld

Decipher Hunt

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Beltane                      Waning Dyan Moon

My e-mail accounts have slimmed down after post-vacation bloat.  It always takes me a while to delete and save e-mails after a time away from the main computer.  Done now and feels good.

The whole pre-Raph show work has begun to heat up and I plan to do some library time on the paintings I plan to feature on my tour.  Not sure yet, but I’m leaning toward:  Awakening Conscience,  Sheep,  Mary Virgin, La Dolce,  Afterglow, Finding the Savior, Light of the World and Lady of Shallot.  As to theme, not sure yet, but something to do with sight, like New Sight, Clear Sight seems possible or symbol, Decoding the PRB, or Decipher Hunt.

Right now I’m trying to kick my weather console and its data-logger (internet link) back into consciousness.  Gonna  try it again right now.  Looks like its back.  I missed its linking to the national weather observer network.  Now it will get back on in a bit.

I have finally learned my cell-phone number.  My sons will be so proud.

Family, Garden, permaculture

Growing

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Beltane                       Waning Dyan Moon

“Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.” – Remy de Gourmont

Don’t you suspect Remy de Gourmont considered him(her)self a complex mind?  It’s the simplest explanation for this quote.

Our two puppies are six months old, so they’re past that OMG they’re cute! phase.  They still play like puppies though. Rigel ran circles around the cedar just off the deck while Vega lay in wait, pouncing on her sister as she made each circuit of the tree.  They slept outside in the garage, just as we had always intended the wolfhounds would.  Never happened.

We have a five stall doggy home in the garage custom built by Jon.  Each stall has a layer of insulation below its floor and an opening in the front where feeding bowls can be set.  We did feed the wolfhounds out there.  The doors lock.  Perfect for containing these big (68 pounds) puppies.

We’ve decided on Rigel and Vega as their call names, though which is which we have not decided.

Still gimping along with a less than stellar inner world, pressed down, slow to motivate.  The saving grace of these periods of melancholy, as my analyst pointed out, is that they are a prelude to a creative time.  I’ve been turning over ideas for a new novel and possible new, online, ways of marketing.

The garden continues to develop.  All the squash have emerged, ditto all the bush beans.  Carrots and beets have begun to show their presence, too.  The garlic is close to harvest.  The potatoes have really taken to this sandy loamy soil we have in the raised beds.  Strawberries, tomatoes, sugar snap peas, chard, mustard and collard greens, kale, cucumbers, asparagus and onions are all growing, especially now that we’ve had a little heat.

Time to hit the grocery store.  After that, I need to work on the computer set up which has some problems that need addressing.

Art and Culture, Family

New Dogs

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Beltane                      Waning Dyan Moon

Something hinky with the 1&1 servers today. (my web host)  Couldn’t get on until late.  Back now.

I spent the morning and late afternoon working on an America’s tour for a group of design students at the College for the Visual Arts.  The theme came with some difficulty, but I decided on Essential Designs.  The notion is that art of the Americas focused on matters essential to the culture that produced them:  myth, rank, the natural world as a source of sustenance, protection and ritual.  The tour should be fun with students already engaged in the world of art.

Midday Kate and I went back out to Junior Lehman’s and picked up Cleo and Blue, the Irish Wolfhound/Walker Coyote Hound mixed breed I wrote about last week.  The ride back was tough for these two who had never ridden in a vehicle before, but we cleaned that up.

The introduction of new dogs to a pack always has its moments and today was no exception, but nobody got hurt.  It will take a bit of time for all parties to adjust, but we’ve done it before and are confident we can make this work.  Having new dogs is like having new plants, grandkids.  They are alive, vital and have their own way in the world.  That’s what makes having them in our lives exciting and fulfilling.

Bees, Garden, permaculture

A Northern Summer Garden

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Beltane                        Waning Dyan Moon

The garden.  The squash and melons are up.  The beans have begun to put on second leaves, the peas have begun to climb the trellis and the cucumbers have their tendrils out for their trellis, too.  The garlic is not far from harvest and greens are in abundance.  Flowers are blooming and the bees are buzzing.  A garden that works.

Aging, Travel

Traveling Together. How?

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Beltane                         Waning Dyan Moon

Speaking too soon.  Right after I posted the last entry Kate got sick.  She lay on the couch in our deluxe room, sweating and feeling miserable.  This concerned me, both for her and for what it might mean for our travel together.

I felt we had established the train as a good means of transportation for the both of us, then this sudden onset.  Perhaps it was dietary, perhaps motion sickness (to which she is prone), whatever it was, it seems to rule out the train, too.

Traveling with Kate is so much more fun, more pleasurable in a lot of the big and small ways you might expect.  The shared burdens of travel:  watching luggage, listening to announcements, finding the right exit become easier.  The shared joys of travel:  people watching, running commentary, being together also multiply.  So, I wanted the train to work.

My reaction to her illness was complex.  Of course I felt concern for her and empathy, but, too, I experienced disappointment, upset, some anger.  Just when I thought we had the travel thing licked, here she was, sick again.  Not fair on my part, no.  But, it was what I felt.

Not a pleasant moment for either of us.  Our job now, today, is to work out new wrinkles, perhaps scopolamine patches or different dietary choices.

Here’s the overall problem.   A difficult and painful ride back from Turkey six years ago, in which Kate suffered agony from the long haul, tipped me over from a reluctant flier to an only if absolutely necessary flier.  The thousand small insults of air travel combined with Kate’s difficulties to make me say, enough.  That was when I resumed taking the train, a practice begun long ago and abandoned for a time in favor of air.

A trip to Denver last fall made it obvious that Kate can’t take long rides in vehicles, either, so that ruled out car, truck or RV as modes of travel.  Note that none of this is her fault, underlying health issues from degenerative disc disease to an intolerance for certain motion stimuli just cause problems.

It does however leave us with diminishing options for traveling together, something  we hope to do more when she retires.  We’ll just have to see where this goes.

Aging, Travel

Only 2 more hours

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Beltane                  Waning Dyan Moon

Empire Builder, Winona, Minnesota around 8:00 pm

We just ate dinner with a couple who retired 5 years ago from IBM. They’re headed for Glacier National Park, then onto a cruise up the Northwest Coast to Alaska, thence to Denali. All the retirees we’ve met have said how much they enjoy retirement. Positive news for us with Kate’s impending retirement.

This trip, a quick one, has only 2 more hours to run. It has however established the train as a means of transportation suited to Kate. We pulled out the beds and napped our way between Chicago and Milwaukee. Before supper Kate lay down, then while we ate we had the cabin steward restore the seats. There is a toilet and a shower in this unit. That would make a longer trip more fun.

The Mississippi flows just to our east with the ridges of southern Minnesota and Wisconsin lifted up from the river valley. We just passed the Billy Carneal, a barge tug (even though it pushes), with 9 barges in tow (even though they precede rather than follow the tug.) There were waiting on the tainter valves to drain a lock.

The eastern sky, toward Wisconsin, has a pink blush. This long summer day gives more time to see the river on the ride home. In the winter night has fallen by Winona and the river passes by in the dark.