Monthly Archives: July 2013

Commentary on the news, Garden, Our Land and Home, Politics

Bad News, Man

Leave a comment

Summer                                                           Moon of the First Harvests

Reading the paper this morning made me choke several different times.  First two related to horticulture.  The spotted drosophila, a fruit fly variant, lays eggs and larvae in blueberries, strawberries and raspberries especially.  We have all three.  Managing them may be very difficult without insecticides which I’ve avoided all these years.  They may force me into a difficult position if they show up here.

The second horticultural item involved the now seen as inevitable spread of the Emerald Ash Borer.  I’ve not done a census of our trees, but a reasonable estimate would be that 25% are ash.  That means a lot of holes over the next few years.  My plan is to get proactive and start taking them down, a few each year, and planting other species where it makes sense  .

Then there were all the articles about the Zimmerman trial.  Yecchhh.

Student loan rates.  This student loan business is a scandal.  Saddling kids, especially poor to lower middle class kids, with loans the size of mortgages in my day, before they even get started in life, is a real burden on the future.  It’s like attaching a drag chute to the lives of today’s college grads.

Not to mention that bank profits have jumped.

Guess the good news is that getting irritated by the news means I’m still alive.

 

General
Aside Leave a comment

Summer                                                           Moon of the First Harvests

All the soil in the orchard is now covered with landscape cloth and mulch.  It will be much easier to maintain weed control.  That had become a real problem, partly due to the bees.  I plan to move them somewhere over the winter.  Not sure quite where yet.

 

 

Bees

Bee Diary: Honey

Leave a comment

Summer                                                             Moon of the First Harvests

A possibly record honey harvest.  From just one hive.  Not sure how to account for the situation but this plucky little colony has put weight (honey) in all four honey supers, at least one is full, and that meant I had to add a fifth and sixth.  The colony plus supers now exceeds my 5′ 7″ so I had to use a ladder to add the last two boxes.

(Artemis Hives titular deity)

When I went outside today, sweatshirt on (for the long sleeves and bulk), gloves (I am trainable.) and the veil, it was like moving in pea soup.  It was the heat and the humidity. Caring for multiple hives in this kind of weather would be brutal.

BTW:  You’re not considered past the amateur or hobby level beekeeper until your number of colonies passes 50.

Bees

Bee Diary: Ouch!

Leave a comment

Summer                                                               Moon of the First Harvests

Slow learner.  Yesterday, in the blistering heat, Javier and his brother and another worker dug up grass in our orchard, a job for which they will be well compensated, but still under difficult working conditions. They did choose the day, btw.

But.  In the orchard I have my one bee colony.  I decided to help them by clearing out the grass in front of the hive after smoking the bees.  Smoked the bees, knelt down and began using my Japanese weeding knife to pull out clumps of grass.  Fine.  Then I got closer to the hive where some of the girls were hanging out on the ground, enjoying the cool sand there.  I had put on the veil (all the stings on my head two years ago convinced me that was a good idea.) but no gloves.

This won’t take long.  He thought.  And, yes, soon after I began digging up the grass near the lounging workers, some of them got up from the sand and lanced my left hand.  Ouch.  One sting right on the fleshy part of my thumb hurt like, well, like ouch!  So, this is the way the slow learner gets the message, always always always wear gloves if digging in front of the hive.  In behavioral psychology they call this aversive conditioning.  It works.

Garden

Garden Work

Leave a comment

Summer                                                        Moon of the First Harvests

Cut the tops off onions today and spread them out on a large screen with the few garlic bulbs ready for harvest.  They’ll rest now in the shed for two weeks, drying further for storage.  Yellow onions keep pretty well.  Sweet, red and white not so much.  The garlic we’ll cut into small slices and dry.  Garlic flakes dried retain flavor at a remarkable level.  We will buy garlic this year to dry since our crop was smaller than expected.

Javier and his crew are in the orchard, clearing out grass and preparing to lay down double landscape cloth and plastic, then mulch.  In an interesting sidenote one of the laborers is white, hired by Javier I assume from a day labor place.

Today was to be a bee inspection day but Javier and his crew are in the orchard so not a good time to rile up the colony.  I’ll get out there tomorrow.

 

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Retirement, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Being Human

Leave a comment

Summer                                                             Moon of First Harvests

The morning after.  The Woolly feeling lingers here, a gentle mantle over the back, around the fire pit where we gathered.  A primary, perhaps the primary, purpose of the Woollies is to see and be seen.  No invisible men allowed.  We have bum knees, wonky shoulders, weak legs, poor eyes and sore backs.  These are acknowledged, not for sympathy, but for recognition that we are each the sore back, the poor eyes, the weak leg, the wonky shoulder, the bum knee.  And that we are none of us only or even mostly our ailments, more and mostly we are the ones who have spent this 25 year+ journey together, time that included wholeness, able-bodiedness and now includes physical decline.

We’re not exactly a support group.  We don’t try to fix each others problems (usually).  We do go in for empathy, but not too much because too much focuses the group on one while the whole has been and is the most important.  We’re not a group of friends, or, at least, not only a group of friends, rather we are fellow pilgrims, traveling our ancientrails in sight of each other, calling out from our journey and hearing the other call out from theirs.

Though our ancientrails intersected less in times past, as we move into third phase life they intersect more and more.  How to make this transition.  How to create a life anew when work is no longer the primary lodestar.  How to look death in the face, unafraid, even welcoming.  No, not suicidal welcoming, but unafraid of what is common, ordinary, part of the path.  We look at each others hearts, hear the pulse of each other’s blood.  This is what it means to be human.

 

Our Land and Home, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

The Woollies At Our Home

Leave a comment

Summer                                                      Moon of First Harvests

The Woollies came.  Stefan, Tom, Scott, Bill, Charlie H., Warren, Frank, Mark and me.  We sat around the fire pit, ate Kate’s tasty and thoughtfully prepared food, told stories of our lives as we almost always do.  Relationship trouble.  A son’s successful, so far, focus on alcohol.  A journey to see children and grandchildren.  A good experience in home repair.  Painting, the fine art kind.  Plein air even.  A cousin who drunk himself to death.  A trip to the polar regions with walrus and polar bears and knowledge.  A sister-in-law with Alzheimer’s, early.  Consulting with a group, helping them become creative.

The woods were there as witness.  The sun set and the moon rose.  We talked about home, my question, wondering why we want to stay home rather than go to a nursing home, why we want to die at home.  What is this home idea that is so powerful that it can penetrate even the fog of Alzheimer’s?  How do we know home?  How do we make a home?  When does a house become a home?  We only got started, stories and poems and few notions, but there is so much more here.  And it will only become more and more important as we live further into the third phase.

A conversation not yet finished.

Commentary on the news

Stand Your Ground

Leave a comment

Summer                                                 Moon of the First Harvests

Stand your ground.  An extension of the castle doctrine to include personal space when out of the house if I understand it correctly.  It meshes well with the NRA and those fearful Americans who see a burglar, rapist, home invader, government spy, black helicopter or revenue agent at every corner, but especially just around the corner from home.

The facts of the Trayvon Martin case have been jumbled and mixed since the case began and the decision yesterday should come as no particular surprise.  After all, if you recall, the police initially refused to charge Zimmerman and prosecutors agreed.  It was only after considerable public pressure that Zimmerman saw the justice system.  Even then it seems the prosecution proceeded half-heartedly.

The horror of the case is its probably correct verdict.  That is, with stand your ground as the prevailing legal doctrine governing close personal struggle in Florida, the aggressor is easy to confuse with the victim and vice versa.  The law tips in favor of the one who used deadly force.  In regard to the death of Trayvon Martin it was not only Zimmerman who was on trial, but the vindictive, armed and frightened public that supports laws like stand your ground.

And they were found guilty.  Guilty of creating a situation so murky that one man can shoot another and have the law say look the other way.  In a country where the democratic principle puts power in the hands of the majority it is dangerous, actually lethally dangerous, to have a populus fearful.  Fearful people can create the grossest of inhumanities, just ask any Jew in Europe at the time of World War II, or gays and lesbians before Stonewall, or pregnant women before Roe vs. Wade, or Africans in America before the Civil War.

Fear is the enemy and the NRA and its ilk are its prophets.

 

 

 

Garden, Our Land and Home

Paths Not Taken

Leave a comment

Summer                                                       Moon of First Harvests

One thing I learned here early on was that decisions to not do things had important consequences.  Sections of the ash that grew so long undisturbed in the midst of our vegetable garden will now provide seating for the Woollies this evening and others in the future.  We chose, for example, to  not plant a full lawn in front, but to bookend the main lawn with prairie grass and wildflowers.

I chose to leave three oaks growing on what is now the northern border of the vegetable garden.  They’re 20 years older now, a small clump of strong young oaks.  I also chose to leave an ash sapling in the area where Jon and I cleared out the black locust, an area now covered by our vegetable garden and orchard.

As the years went by that ash grew, no competition, plenty of water and great sun.  It grew so big that it shaded out two raised beds and threw shadows onto much of the northern section of the vegetable garden.  Finally, we decided it had to go because we were not going to expand our vegetable gardening space and needed all the sun we could get for the beds we had.

Now that it’s gone we have a sunny garden which feels very open and airy.   And that ash    was not grown in vain.  It will now provide seating for years to come.  I like the cycle of growth, transformation and reuse.

Family, Friends, Our Land and Home, Woolly Mammoths

Home Olympics

Leave a comment

Summer                                                        Moon of the First Harvests

Noticed as I did my second round of foliar spray today, vegetative and reproductive plants separately, that we have tomatillos, eggplant, many tomatoes and green peppers.  None ready for harvest, but they’re on the way and it’s only mid-July.

A few last minute things for the Woollies.  Have to move more ash sections to serve as seats and go over the fire pit area one more time.  Kate began prepping for today over two weeks ago.  Between the Woollies and the kids plus Mark in June, we’ve done a lot of spiffing up and getting things ready, things that will last past the events that triggered them.

Sort of the home equivalent of the Olympics.  No bird’s nest auditorium, no fancy velodrome or natatorium, but the fire pit and the cleaned up orchard (which didn’t get scheduled until after the Woollies, but we planned it before), the hung chandelier, Kate’s familiarity with certain recipes and her finely-tuned entertainment acumen, the cut firewood, the lights in the fire pit, not to mention all the reflections on home I anticipate and the memories from June and tonight will vibrate here long after everyone goes to their home while we remain behind, here, in our own.