Beltane New (Early Growth) Moon
“When you recover or discover something that nourishes your soul and brings joy, care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life.”
| — | Jean Shinoda Bolen |
A nice rain, drizzly and over a few hours. The irrigation folks are coming out on Monday to 
start up our system. We’re under way for year 19 at Artemis Hives and Gardens. We’ve never aspired to large scale production or to garden beautiful flower gardening, but we’ve kept at improving our property over the years, starting when we hired a landscape architect and Otten Brothers Nursery to give us key features even before we moved into this house.
They graded, installed beds, planted trees, shrubs and some flowers, created the terraced garden in the back and laid in the boulder walls. Over the course of the next year or two I cut down the scrub black locust trees to clear a large area in our back, an area that would eventually become our orchard, our vegetable garden and a general purpose back yard with the grandkids playhouse, a machine shed and a garden shed.
Later we had the permaculture folks, Ecological Gardens, put in our orchard, then they 
added plantings to our vegetable garden. We’ve done a good deal with our land over the years, adding value incrementally. The bees came along five years ago with the assistance of a friend of Kate’s from her work.
With each addition we’ve increased the level of our interaction with the land here in Andover, on the Great Anoka Sand Plain. We added first vegetable production that Kate put in, then much more with our raised beds and finally the fruit trees, blueberry and raspberry and elderberry and currant and sand cherry bushes. Each year we also take wild grapes from the vines native to our small woods.
It’s a good bit of work from May to October, but not overwhelming–except for that time period with the back–and it gives us part of our own food supply. In the fall we harvest the honey, then Kate cans, freezes and dries.
Not to mention all the beautiful flowers we have all year.
