Daily Archives: June 8, 2013

Garden, Our Land and Home, permaculture

Gardens and Bees

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Beltane                                                                 New (Solstice) Moon

The day began with the bees, lively and growing, now well into the second box, already  filling two frames with brood, making honey and collecting pollen.  After the bees, more honeycrisp bagging.  Yes, this is a pain, but it’s a one and done pain.  That is, after you do it those apples are ok.  I may start a feeding program this year for the orchard,  but that’s separate from the immediate disease and predation prevention.

This is what horticulturists calls IMP or integrated pest management.  Basically you first support the plant because a strong plant can repel invaders.  Then you do physical things like picking the bugs off, bagging the apples.  Only after you’ve done these things–and there are many more than I’ve mentioned–do you consider a pesticide or fungicide.  I don’t resort to those, so my whole strategy comes on the first two legs of the stool.

After I got some bagging done, it was time to go pick up Bill Schimdt and head out to Plato, Minnesota to meet Luke Lemmer of High Brix Gardens.  Plato, Minnesota is about 5 miles west of Young America.  Luke is a husband and father trying to make a living selling bio-dynamic soil nutrients for gardens as an adjunct of International Ag Lab’s agricultural product line.

Luke had mixed the broadcast minerals and put our orders of drenches, foliar sprays and transplant aids in a box.  We spoke with him near the site of a new building he has planned.  He says this year his business has finally begun to take off.  His daughter came out, hugging him and looking down at the ground.  She had what sounded like a summer cold.  He explained the use of the various products and the schedule they require.

The site of his home used to house a hotel and beer garden back when Plato was more of a manufacturing hub.  It now has one factory and the grain elevator.  It’s on an east west railroad line.  A pretty little town, bucolic with all the green thanks to our rains of late.  300 souls.  A true small town.

Back home a nap, then I broadcast the minerals and dug them in on all of our beds and got most of the tomatoes, peppers, egg plants, kale and tomatillos treated with a transplant powder and water.  We’re really a bit behind the curve, since the broadcast will be done in the fall in the future and the transplant aids are made to use when putting the plants in the ground.  But we’re starting when we can.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Memories

Memories

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Beltane                                                                     New (Solstice) Moon

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had interactions with folks from Alexandria, Indiana resulting from a reader posting a blog entry, a 50’s boyhood, to an Alexandria Facebook site.  It’s been interesting.  The most interesting interaction has come from an old classmate who found my memories romanticized.  You can see her comment under Who.

(1st)

I wrote her and in doing so discovered that she was a girl (then) who had done very well in our class, but didn’t (apparently) get the recognition she felt she deserved.  I had to reflect that could have been true.  Sexism (though not named) was alive and well back then and I’m sure it effected teacher’s perceptions and other students opinions.  It may have helped me to some awards and recognition.  Impossible to parse out now at this remove, but I’d never thought of it until she wrote.

Having said that I want to add that happy memories are not necessarily romanticized.  That’s a word used by an outside observer.  As resident in those memories, they were happy.  Being a kid among kids is a great way to spend time when you’re young.  Sure, we had our hassles, too.  Our arguments and fights.  I remember one incident where a next door neighbor pulled my pants down in front of my friends.  This was the nuclear option at the time.  I thought life was over and I could never face anybody again. Until the next day of course.

(3rd)

Once my life moved away from Monroe Street it began to take on a more serious, turning toward adult tone.  We had a house on Canal Street, one  we owned, rather than rented.  In junior high I remember a fight with Rodney Frost, a bad one by the standards of the day. (low)  Rodney died several years ago and my first memory when I saw his obituary was of that 6th grade fight near the junior high school.

Girls remained a mystery for me well into college, so I had the normal ration of pre-teen and teen angst over dating, sex and self worth.  Those were not happy memories.  My father and I began to part ways emotionally during junior high, a fact I credited only much later to a growing unease he had with my intellectual maturing.  When this distance had reached its maximum, around my senior year of high school, my mother had a stroke and died seven days later.

(4th)

Those months and the years following them were more than unhappy times.  They were a constant struggle for self-worth capsized often by grief and the estrangement I had with my remaining parent.  This was just the way it was.  Do I wish it could have been different?  Of course.  Do I know it won’t be.  Yes, I do.

That period and its attendant miseries are now in my past, but they are in my past and they show up whenever I visit that period or that place, Alexandria.

(third phase)