Lugnasa Garlic Planting Moon
When we turn north off of our street, 153rd Ave. NW, onto Round Lake Boulevard, we pass a small white house with cheap siding and usually a car or two parked in the yard and after it comes Field’s Truck Farm.
Our house sits on a peninsula of sand that once jutted out into a lake that extended from about Coon Creek Boulevard, a mile or so south of us, to county road 18, a mile or so north of us. That lake is now a vast peat bog except for what was, I imagine, a deeper end, separated from what was the main body of water at this time by Round Lake Boulevard, and now far along in the eutrophication process itself, Round Lake.
Field’s grows corn, radishes, potatoes, tomatoes, onions and grass on the former lake bed. It sits about 2 feet to 3 feet lower than the rest of the land around it and lower still when compared to the height of our land. Just beyond the main sheds and buildings, including temporary housing for migrant workers, sit row after row of wood sided trucks, old tractors, some farm implements. As we proceed north on Round Lake various plots of the old lake bed hold radishes and grass, a commodity for which Anoka County is the chief source in the state.
A right, or eastward, turn on county road 18 goes along the northern perimeter of Field’s farm taking us to Hanson Boulevard, where we turn north once again. On three sides of the intersection here are large plots of wetland, covered mostly in bullrushes, a favorite habitat of the Baltimore Oriole. North on Hanson finds us traveling along fields and forest, a countryside scene familiar to anyone who knows Minnesota’s northern region. We are, in fact, the southern, or terminal end, of the great Boreal forest that extends north from here to the tundra in Canada.
The further north we go the more wetlands, forest and lakes. Great blue herons float across the highway from one hunting ground to another. If it were evening, we would have to be on the watch for deer and, of late, wild turkeys.