Daily Archives: October 17, 2013

Garden

Leaning Toward the Fallow Time

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Fall                                                                        Samhain Moon

Kate got several bales of hay (6) and pumpkins today at Green Barn, up near Isanti.  She saw Louis, who introduced us to his brother, Javier.  Javier has done a lot of work for us and will do more.  The hay will, next spring, go down as mulch over the landscape cloth around the fruit trees.  The seeds in the bales need to sprout and then die back before we can use it, otherwise we spread unwanted plants.

We’ll lift the landscape cloth when we broadcast fertilizer around the trees and spray them with biotill.  It will go back down to continue its function as a weed barrier.  Once we’ve finished this and I’ve sprayed and mulched the vegetable beds yet bare (with leaves from our trees), the produce gardens will be at rest.  With one exception.  The bed in which I plant next year’s garlic crop.

After that attention will turn to bulb planting in the perennial beds.  When that’s done, we’ll celebrate around a Samhain bonfire, welcoming the fallow time to our land and turn our work inside.  Like cleaning up and decluttering the garage.

That will be a big task because it entails dismantling our five stall dog feeding station, used when we had our maximum number of dogs, 7, 5 Irish Wolfhounds and 2 Whippets.

Quotes

And yet still more

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“Man can only endure a certain degree of unhappiness; what is beyond that either annihilates him or passes by him and leaves him apathetic.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

_Elective Affinities_ [1809]
“If thou follow thy star, thou canst not fail of a glorious haven.”
— Dante Alighieri 1265-1321, The Divine Comedy, Inferno XV, l.55
“The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts.
We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple
because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto of every
natural philosopher should be, “Seek simplicity and distrust it.”
— Alfred North Whitehead, _The Concept of Nature_
“Do not let too strong a light come into your bedroom. There are in a beauty a great many things which are enhanced by being seen only in a half-light.”
— Ovid (43 BC – 18 AD)
“It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live; it is fiction that gives us access to the truths kept veiled by our families, our schools, and our society; it is the art of the novel that allows us to ask who we really are.”
— Orhan Pamuk (1952- )

 

Weather +Climate

Frosts, Light and Hard

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Fall                                                                  Samhain Moon

The mornings are darker.  The evenings, too.  The night has begun to shift its way toward noon, pushing in from the boundaries where it was held back by the angled earth. Perverse as it is, I’m glad.  The furnace is on and the house takes on that snug burrow feel common to the fallow season.  We’re all hobbits for the duration.  Bring me my second breakfast.

The weather news has frosts, light and hard, within the week.  26 on Tuesday.  Well, fine.  I put the garden away for the most part long ago.  A few apples are left on the tree, a few raspberries on the canes, the leeks.  That’s it.  Of course, there’s the broadcast fertilizer for the orchard, planting bulbs, spraying the biotill on orchard and vegetable garden, but that’s all doable.

Then, with Halloween/Samhain we begin the long holiseason where we humans light up the landscape with our fear of the sun’s forever absence.  We eat, light candles, string outdoor lights, give gifts, go to special seasonal choral and theatrical events, gather with family.  Really we’re gathering around the fire huddled up hoping this will not be the year when the sun leaves and chooses not to come back.  It always has but you never know.