Yearly Archives: 2011

Bees, Garden

Bee and Garden Diary

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Mid-Summer                                                                                          Waning Garlic Moon

Today I performed partial hive box reversals in all three colonies.  The second hive box of three gets rotated to the bottom and the first or bottom box rotates up to take its place.  This means that all the hive boxes have to be moved, so it is a labor intensive activity, especially so now that some honey has begun to be stored.  One hive box was very heavy, my back a bit reluctant.  Having done that I checked the top box on colony 1 and the top two honey supers in colonies 2 and 3.  None of these have much honey.

Since I put queen excluders on 2 and 3, I pulled those off, intending to leave them off for a couple of days.  At the hobby bee-keeper meetings I’m told this is a common way to get the bees to move up into the honey supers.  I’ll put the queen excluders back on maybe Wednesday.  Since I reversed the bottom and second hive boxes, there’s not much chance the queen will get up there.

So far the bee season seems to have hurdled the early cold and rain and settled into a more normal pattern.

The potatoes and leeks both have mounds around their stalks now, blanching for the leeks and more space for the potato plants to produce tubers.  A lot of gardening tasks are very time sensitive and these were among them.  When the potato plants flower (now), they begin to set the tubers.  As the leeks grow, only the parts covered by soil will blanch, turn white, and be useful for cooking.  As the young apples begin to grow, the bags have to go on before the apple maggots come out to play.  Also now.

The bees, too, require definite care and different kinds of care all through early spring and summer, then less attention around now, when the honey flow begins.  Later in August will come extraction, then preparation of colony 1 for overwintering.  Gonna try one more time.  Colonies 2 and 3 will move out near the truck lane, into the sunny part.  That’s for next year.

Our tomato plants started from seed have begun to mature, though they are far behind the two plants Kate bought at the green barn.  Those plants have blooms and green tomatoes.  It remains to be seen whether we’ll get any tomatoes from the others.

We’ve harvested one full planting of spinach, several of lettuce, some sugar snap peas and just this week, lots of strawberries.  We have onions, carrots, beets, more lettuce and spinach, plus pole and bush beans all underway.  There are cherries and plums in the orchard in addition to the apples and the raspberry canes are in good mid-season form.  We’re going to have a good season as we continue to learn how to use our garden to complement and supplement what we buy at the grocery store.

Minnesota, Politics

What Is It With Minnesota?

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Mid-Summer                                                                   Waning Garlic Moon

I live in Minnesota.  A state that has made me proud to be its citizen over and over again.  So.  Why is that the most mind-dulled adherent to the no-new taxes pledge, a blow-dried white guy like Tim Pawlenty represents our state among presidential candidates for 2012?  Why is it, even more incredibly, that Michele Bachmann, my congressional representative, has started punching holes in Pawlenty’s run?  Here is a link to a hilarious and scary article about Michele in Rolling Stone, Michele Bachmann’s Holy War.

Who appears on the national stage from Minnesota these days?  A trinity of bizarre political positions represented by two really strange people and one so bland he could be a 1950’s ad man:  Jesse Ventura, Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty.  How did it come to pass that Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Eugene McCarthy got replaced by this trio of gibbering idiots?

At time I don’t even recognize the state to which I moved in 1970, 41 years ago.   We seem Californiaesque in our deeply divided politics with Keith Ellison, an African-American Muslim representing Minneapolis at one end of the spectrum and Michele at the other.  When I work with the Sierra Club’s legislative program at the state capitol, I see this divide often.  We have, for example, Kate Knuth, an Oxford educated environmentalist who articulates a clear defense of the science of global warming and a nearby state senator whose eccentric views would find a welcome home in the climate change deniers national conference.  Which he attended.

I know this.  If those of us on the liberal, left and progressive wing of American politics don’t get organized, and soon, we may be headed to a world not too distant from the strange one that gave us George Bush and Dick Cheney.  Remember them?

Bees, Politics

Communitarianism No Longer In Fashion

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Mid-Summer                                                                          Waning Garlic Moon

Today is a bee day, with reversals and hive inspections.  In reversals hive boxes get shuffled to keep the queen working in the bottom hive box and so the colony feels there is plenty of room, therefore no need to swarm.  At last check the colonies all looked good, plenty of bees and brood.  We’re still working out the kinks of our honey extraction process, trying to figure out ways to make it less painful for all:  us and the bees.  This year we’ll try an experiment, running the extractor in the garage with overhead water and an enclosed trailer for the frames awaiting extraction.  Might work.

The potatoes still need mounding due to the back spasms yesterday.  If I can get finish that, I’ll call it a day.  No Tai Chi tonight, at least I think not.  We’ll see if the back limbers up after a day’s work or seizes up.

Lori Sturdevant nailed the main problem with politics in our time.  Communitarianism is no longer in fashion.  Democracy demands a sense that we’re all in this together, all of us, the poor, the environment, business and government.  The concept of social justice, so dependent on a robust notion of communitarianism, has disappeared from the political stage, reflecting in part the decline of the mainline protestant churches focus on the least of these.  It reflects, in part, too, the old, more muscular liberalism of Hubert Humphrey:

“It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

It is not only, nor even most importantly, the moral test of government.  It is the moral test of our nation.  In this high stakes testing, we have slumped, our gpa falling, falling, driven lower and lower by greed that blocks out the other, by, as Lori Sturdevant also pointed out, a religious perspective focused on individual salvation, by a shriveled sense of community, one so depleted that community may extend no further than the edges of our own yards, our own apartments.

Returning to Heidegger, we are thrown into the world, landing in it with many existential givens.  Those of us fortunate to have an upbringing that celebrated education, that helped us learn how to plan, how to work toward our goals, succeed.  Those thrown into poverty, into communities for whom education equals selling out, for whom planning does not extend past today and whose work ethic never had a chance to develop, don’t.  Of course there are exceptions, but note that there are exceptions in both sets of existential givens.  There are, too, those thrown into disabled bodies or saddled with disabled minds.

To not note the grim effects of our thrownness on some and its salutary effects on others is to deny reality, to pretend the world is other than it is.  This is the opposite of realism, it is denial.  To note those effects and be committed to leveling them is not idealism, it is realism.  In an increasingly competitive world we need the gifts and talents of all our citizens, not just a few, a lucky few with fortunate existential givens.

Let me try another tact.  Love thy neighbor as thyself.  We hold as self-evident that all (persons) are created equal.  As long as one person is hungry, then we are all hungry.

Bees, Garden, Great Work, Humanities

Practice Safe Orcharding

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Mid-Summer                                                                  Waning Garlic Moon

Spent yesterday relaxing after an unusually busy week.  I wasn’t home for supper the first four nights.  I like the connectedness and sense of agency I get when the days get busy, but I also appreciate the calm of home.  Not much Latin gets done when life gets frantic.  There have to be long blocks of time, hours, to settle in and start thinking like a Roman.  At least for now.  Maybe later it will come more naturally.

Today I finally get outside to care for my potato plants.  They need mounds built around them to support the now over grown stalks.  The leeks get mounded today, too.

Yesterday I did a weird thing.  I got up on a ladder and put plastic baggies around all of our apples.  The UoM extension says this prevents apple maggots, otherwise known as those damn worms in the apple.  We’ll see.  After I’d done about 20 of them, I realized it was like putting condoms on each of the apples so they’d stay safe.  Practice safe orcharding, I always say.

Tomorrow I do bee work.  It’s time for reversals of the hive boxes.  actually, probably past time.

Yesterday when I walked through the garden with Kate I noticed bees flying into the colonies and out again, one after another, filling the sky with their small, busy flights.  To an untrained eye it would look chaotic, bees flying in seemingly random patterns here and there; when, in fact, each bee knows where it’s going and to which part of the hive they will return.

Great Wheel

The Solstice of Summer: 2011

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Mid-Summer                                                                    Waning Garlic Moon

A favorite website of mine, Pip Wilson’s Almanac, comes out of Australia and reminded me of this illustration with his cheery, Happy Winter Solstice.  Yes, indeed, cross the equator and the seasons switch, while we have the Summer Solstice, they have Winter.  I’m excited about our cruise for many reasons, but a particular one is that we will cross the equator and enter the realm of season’s opposite to ours here in the Northern Hemisphere.  Thus, we will cruise through Chile and Argentina in their spring time heading toward summer, while our home here in Andover experiences fall heading toward winter.

Here at 45 degrees north we celebrate now the middle of summer, the moment when, usually, our temperatures have begun to heat up.  Not this year.  As Pip Wilson points out, today is not mid-summer, that comes on June 24th, St. John’s Day, which is the traditional sabbat.  That is the day celebrated in Shakespeare’s “A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream.”

The Solstice, on the other hand, is an astronomical holiday, that moment when sun stands as high in the sky as it will all year.  Now we celebrate the longest day, the longest proportion of light to dark.  In Australia they celebrate the reverse, the shortest day and the longest night.

You may celebrate this on the 21st, the 22nd, or the 23rd since they all have the same long day.  Only on the 24th do days begin their long, slow descent toward the longest night of the year.

This is the midst of the growing season though the year has been chilly and generally wet so far.

I always take time around now to celebrate what grows well for me right now and what needs attention to move toward harvest.  There is, still, that novel out there, which needs lots of attention.  My work with Ovid has grown a good deal in the last few months and will benefit from yet more time.  The Sierra Club demands more and more of my time and my hope is that over the next few months we can push our legislative efforts into greater and greater strength.  I’ve been concerned for a while that we’ve been punching below our weight and it’s my feeling that the environment and the state need us at our best.  This is a slow time for tours at the MIA, but it is a time when those of who give tours can concentrate on getting the best resources made available to us.

What is it that grows in your life right now?  What needs more attention?  What has a good start toward the harvest?  Take the time to sit with a plant or two in your immediate surrounding and watch how they grow.  Become patient with yourself as a plant is patient in its growth over a season.

Art and Culture, Woolly Mammoths

Art and Friends

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Beltane                                                       Waning Garlic Moon

Two meetings today.  The guides group met today to focus on continuing education.  A lot of very good ideas were thrown out and compiled.  Over the next week or so I’ll organize them and put together a mailing to go to our list, asking for more input.  After that, we will create a specific communication outlining possible avenues for dealing with the problem created by no longer having Monday’s available and declining attendance on Thursdays.  This may create a vehicle for organizing the three guide councils and for communicating our ideas further up the museum organizational chart.

Morry was a gracious host in a lovely home.  He provided meat, cheese and crackers along with beverages while other folks brought desert.  The only oddity of the day was those chairs in the master bedroom.  Those of you who here there know what I mean.

Woolly’s tonight.  Charlie H. has decided to retire and move out of the condo, up to the woods of Wisconsin.  Bill continued to express appreciation for his brother Pat in words and in deeds, a website and an upcoming service for Pat in Ankenny, Iowa.  Paul was back from his vision quest in the Santa Cruz mountains.  He reports that going without food for that length of time heightened his senses and made his dreams more vivid.  He wants to be a person of impeccable love and kindness, starting with himself.

Jim was his usual bigger than life self.  He had an article in the South Dakota magazine along with several of his photographs.  He has a show opening soon in Aberdeen and has begun negotiating for one here, too, perhaps at MCAD.

Mark’s knee has him in rehab and ahead of schedule, looking forward again.

Politics

Read My Lips: No No-New-Taxes Hot Air. Anymore.

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Beltane                                                                             Waning Garlic Moon

Mid-Summer, the summer solstice, comes tomorrow.  Our eight times a year brief essay on the changing seasons of the Celtic calendar appears tomorrow.

Tim Pawlenty says, “What deficit?”  He claims there is no deficit in Minnesota, just bad accounting.  Bad accountability, yes.  Bad accounting?  No.  If there is no deficit, it is difficult to see what the game of chicken at the Capitol is all about.  It must have something to do with that big number.  What was it?  $5 billion.  Yes.  A deficit.  One caused by following the unusual to business practice of trying to keep business expenses level while decreasing income.  If expenses remain the same–the state budget–, and sales are intentionally allowed to fall off by a no-new sales promise, then?  Deficit.

If, however, expenses for keeping a state of the art business growing increase, then the sales force increases its effort.  Minnesota has been a state of the art state in so many things.  Compassion to the poor.  Education for all citizens.  Environmental consciousness.  Efficient and effective government.  Infrastructure improvement.  Education funding.  Property tax relief.

Now, under the no new taxes regime, we get the poor denied health care and basic needs like housing and food.  High stakes testing has reduced our education system to a teach to the test marathon without even significantly increasing test scores.  A state that gave us the boundary waters and the wild and scenic rivers act plus state level mandates for clean air, clean water, a moratorium on the construction of nuclear power plants and a similar action barring new coal plants and importation of new coal generated electricity is tripping all over itself to build an unneeded bridge over the St. Croix and can’t wait to get sulfide mining started.  Aid to local governments has dried up and the state is days away from a shutdown.  Transportation funding, especially for emission reducing forms of transportation like light rail, has tanked.  Education funding for the UofM has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk while school boards are forced to go to the levy to raise funds that should come from the state.  The result?  Rising property taxes.  This is the legacy that Tim Pawlenty wants to share with the nation?

It is a difficult time to have a radical analysis of the nation’s economic infrastructure since so many have tilted toward the center-right ideas of the free market, but it is an important time to have and to apply such analysis.  Who speaks for the poor now?  Who insists on gender, racial and age justice?  When did the guarantee of freedom in America get reduced to the right to carry concealed weapons and allowing states to deport persons?  When did careful interpretation of our founding document get replaced by a secular equivalent of biblical literalism?  We are deep into a time of unparalleled meanness in our politics.

It’s as if Jesus said, “I come to bring solace to the rich, recovery of  cash for those who already have much, release to the plutocrat yearning for more wealth, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s bounty for all those who already have a lot.”

It is no secret that children starve and adults go without health care in this the richest nation on earth. The left, the radical left, needs to heal its fractures and get back to building its base.

Art and Culture, Dogs, Garden

Garlic

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Beltane                                                                      Waning Garlic Moon

In my new names for Minnesota full moons this is the garlic moon, because under its gaze, in its waning nights, the garlic leaves will begin to die back and the garlic will  be ready to come out of the garden.  This is now my third year with garlic started from garlic bulbs I grew myself.  Garlic gradually adapts itself to your soil and climate if you keep replanting it.  Not sure how long it takes overall, but the process should be well underway.  Artemis Garlic.

Walking the line.  Nope, not Johnny Cash, but me, trying to track down a short in our electric fence.  Found it.  An ironwood branch detached during the last round of heavy weather landed on the eastern run of our chain link fence, bending the chain down and over the electric fence.  Chain saw.  That old branch popped right off.  Since I had the chain saw warmed up, I went out to the front and pruned some of our amur maples.  They’re getting old and their limbs have begun to crack and die.

Now I’m in here, finishing up e-mail communications and getting ready for a nap.  Kate and I have a hand-built clay class this afternoon from 1-4.  The last two days required a burst of energy.  I have to restore it now.

Great Work, Humanities, Politics

Friday

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Beltane                                                               Full Garlic Moon

Boy, the learning is slow on Latin.  I slogged through conditional counter-factual clauses and how to translate subjunctive verbs within them.  I’m still at the beginning of the Pentheus story but already we know what will happen to Pentheus, torn into a thousand bloody pieces by his mother and aunts, he will be scattered all over the place.  It’s worth waiting to get to the good part where he happens on his mother and her maenad friends.

Kate and I met with Mark over lunch.  He’s done a lot.  He attended a job seeking resource day on Wednesday and an interview tips day on Thursday.  He’s working now on getting info together about a driver’s license and Minnesota Care.  He’s made a lot of strides since he got here in early April.

Back in to the Convention center for another 4 hour shift at the Sierra Club booth.  Back home now.  Bushed.  Some TV, some reading, then bed.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Myth and Story, Politics

Still Alive.

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Beltane                                                              Waxing Garlic Moon

Oh, boy.  I’ve not gone a day without a post in a long time.  Yesterday went by so fast.

Worked on Latin for a bit, but a brightening day pulled me outside.  I plucked tulip detritus out of a bed where some tomato plants needed to go.  These were full grown ones, liable to produce tomatoes as opposed to my healthy, but still immature seedling started back in April.

At the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers meeting Tuesday I learned that honey filling what could be brood frames means the bees in colonies 2 and 3 felt crowded.  I got out my honey supers, scraped them free of propolis, something I realized I could have done last fall, and excess wax, then plopped two each on 2 & 3.   These are the colonies that will be allowed to die out over the winter.  Colony 1 already has its 3rd hive box on with the queen producing brood at a quick pace.  All three of these colonies started out on drawn comb which reduces the initial work load significantly and allows the bees to focus on brood raising, foraging and honey and pollen collecting.

All of this means Artemis hives have positioned themselves for the start of the honey flow.

Then it was quick get into my nicer clothes for a 3 hour stint at the Netroots Convention in downtown Minneapolis.  I volunteered for service at the Sierra Club table in the convention’s exhibit hall.  We highlighted our Beyond Coal campaign.  I got into a snit with an organizer who felt that chairs should be anathema at tables.  He feels this creates a climate that forces staff and volunteers out into the stream of traffic, pressing cards and information into people’s hands, getting names and addresses.  At 64 standing on a concrete floor for 3 and 4 hours in a row is not something I choose to do.  A chair gives me an opportunity to take a break now and then.   Which I need.

The organizer’s view saw volunteers as numbers useful for gaining more numbers, rather than people.  This is an instrumentalist view of the person, an error in judgment not unusual among utopians who willingly sacrifice today’s people in service of a better future.  It ignores the true and only reason for organizing which is to gain a better life for others, a better life which begins in the present, not in some imagined or hoped for more powerful future.

Do we need to sacrifice to move our political ideas forward?  Of course.  Do we need to sacrifice our health and well-being?  Only in extreme situations.  Which the Netroots Convention in the Minneapolis Convention center is not.

After three hours of hawking underwear (I’ll explain later) and moving beyond coal as a source of electrical generation, I drove over to the Walker where I began a two session seminar at the Walker Art Center on THE BLURRING OF ART AND LIFE: IMPACT OF MASS CULTURE ON ART. Taught by an art historian from Hamline College, Roslye Ultan, this seminar approaches modern and contemporary art especially since Dada and Marcel DuChamp.  There are ten or eleven of us in the class, all women save for me and all Walker guides save for me.

This means I find in myself cast in the unusual role of traditionalist.  The MIA is an encyclopedic museum with an emphasis on the historicality and the geographicality of art from the earliest to the most recent, extending from a 20,000 year old Venus Figurine to a finished last year installation, Dreaming of St. Adorno by living artist, Siah Armajani.

Roslye takes her art historical cue from DuChamp who said he wanted to put art in the service of the mind.  Rosalye has expanded on or extended this idea into an assertion that it is not the object that is the universal, transcendent work but the idea given form in the object.  Seemingly entrenching my traditionalist orientation, I disagreed, holding out for the work of art itself as the what that transcended time.

She tried to tell me this was not right, but I am not easily budged by an argument from authority, so we had a tussle.  A mild one.  I backed off, as I often do in classroom settings, not wanting to waste other peoples time.  In this instance, as the class progressed, I found the tussle invigorated the class, gave it an edge and increased my focus.

That was two instances of conflict in one day.  On the drive home I turned them both over in my mind, like teasing a hole in a tooth.  Was I too much in the argument with the organizer?  Yes, my tone was over the top.  Did I regret?  Tone, yes. Content, no.  I’ll apologize for the tone to him today.  But not the need to treat volunteers as people not instruments.

The tussle in the class left me with no negative hangover.  In fact, when I put the two together, I realized they meant I’m alive and still living.  I felt good about that.