• Category Archives Garden

  • Rock Wool Seed Blankies

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    36  bar steep fall 29.84 1mph SSE  Dewpoint 26  Spring

                    Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

    Ah.  Hands back in the soil, thinking and doing with plants.  We bought two stems of yellow Plumeria when we were in Hawai’i and I potted them today.  Just the act of finding a pot, putting in some potting soil and adding water immersed my soul deep in the earth. 

    The hydroponics setup is underway, too.  Seeds don’t grow well in hydroponic growing mediums, so there’s a prior step that involves starting seedlings in small rock wool blankies, then transplanting them, blankie and all, into the large pebble-sized lava rock medium.  

    A seedling needs a couple of critical tools to grow inside.  The first is a warming coil to make sure the temperature underneath the seed pack does not get below 60 degrees or so.  We have those, four of them.  The second is a grow light.  We have those, too. Two of them. 

    Tomorrow lettuce seeds will go into the rock wool seed blankies and some herbs as well.  These are all heritage seeds Kate and I purchased at the Seed Saver’s Exchange outside Decorah, Iowa.  Potting soil will go in some small cubes made of molded peat moss.  In them will go a few heritage tomato seeds and anything else we need to have a jumpstart on for the garden. 

    The lettuce and herbs will make the transfer into the hydroponics.  We’ll learn how to work with the temps, timing of the nutrient solution flows, the nutrient solutions themselves while growing an easy crop.  The tomato seedlings and the other seedlings will get planted in the raised beds we’ve turned over from flowers to vegetables.

    There are still a few more tools we need like an electrical conductance meter, a turkey baster and an aquarium heater or two.  I’ll pick those up on Friday when I go in to do two Weber tours.

    This manual labor balances the intellectual work I do and I’m glad to be back at it.  From now until mid-October the garden and our land will take up more and more of my time and happily so.


    Garden Great Work Our Land and Home 📎and tagged

  • I May Fire-up the Chainsaw

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    46  bar steady 1mph SSW windchill 46

        Waxing Crescent Moon of Winds

    Kate and I developed a plan to repay the extra money we spent in Hawai’i.  It was the first joint trip we’d taken in a long time and we reverted to some old, looser behaviors.

    We had our business meeting and planned when to fix the red car, posted for the last three weeks (a pain) and decided how to move money around for the new exercise area TV.

    My two tours for tomorrow are put together and I’ve only got a bit more to do on the Weber tour.  Then I should be able to move to the hydroponic set-up and to more careful reading of the Permaculture book. 

    The gardener in me wants to get outside and do something so I may fire up the chain saw over the weekend.  There are plenty of buckthorns to trim.  The weed wrench can pluck them out of the ground once the soil thaws.


    Garden Great Work 📎and tagged

  • The Sons of the Soil

    Posted on by Charles Comment

     37  bar steady 29.78 0mph windchill 36

       Waxing Crescent Moon of Winds

     

    Below is a reply to my brother Mark about this e-mail he sent to me:

    Charles, This is pretty amazing. It really needed to happen. Mark ** Penang abandons pro-Malay policy **The Malaysian state of Penang says it will no longer follow a government policy favouring ethnic Malays.< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7289509.stm >In re:  the sons of the soil.  When I was in Hawai’i, I learned the natives call themselves kama’aina, literally children of the land.  Businesses offer a kama’aina discount and there has been some effort to get civil service preference to kama’aina.  In Hawai’i, where the indigenous population has experienced considerable oppression (plantation slavery for sugar and pineapples) and marginalization (numbers cut by 90% thanks to disease), it seems just.

    It made me think a lot about this notion of belonging to a land, or a place.  The problem with identifying one ethnicity or one particular population as sons of the soil is its ahistorical nature.  That is, at some point in time, virtually every population on earth, outside of a miniscule group in Africa, emigrated. In other words, kama’aina is not a permanent characteristic, rather it reflects an acquired relationship, one that reflects a love for this place.  Others, too, can become kama’aina.  That is the essential injustice in the Malaysian situation.It is, too, an injustice in Hawai’i, if Filipino, Japanese, Chinese and white inhabitants cannot, at some point, also be kama’aina.

     

    As I thought more about it, I realized I am kama’aina of the American Midwest, the heartland of the North American continent, yet I am also a son of immigrants.  Am I less wedded to this land than the Annishinabe or the Lakota?  I don’t think so.  My life depends on it. When I return, I see home in its lakes and forests.

    In fact, the whole notion of an ecological consciousness comes down to seeing ourselves, each of us, as kama’aina of the planet earth.

    Anyhow, thanks.  I agree, amazing and hopeful. 


    Garden Great Work Politics Travel 📎and tagged

  • Meeting Luke, the Clydesdale

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    We had Kashi cereal and papaya for breakfast this morning.  They no longer stock the refrigerator with absurdly expensive items and wait for appetite to increase their income, so we loaded it with stuff we want.  Much better.

    Outside Lihue we went into a shopping center and bought some supplies:  water, Zicam (for me) and yogurt.   Headed north we passed the airport and found Wailua where we turned mauka (toward the mountains) and headed up to Opeeka’a Falls.   We ate our yogurt there and discussed the day.  Kate decided we should head back toward Poipu beach and stop at the Gaylord Plantation.

    Way over-priced.  Some nice stuff, but boy they did see us coming.  We bought nothing, but did meet Luke, a Clydesdale who was on carriage duty.  What a great animal.  Gentle, soulful, big.  He reminded me, a lot, of our Irish Wolfhounds. He’s way too big to fit in the suitcase.  Darn it.

    Lunch was take-out eaten at a pavilion overlooking a long, bare expanse of Pacific.  It was high-tide so the waves lapped up further and further.  Several Bantie roosters shared the pavilion with us.  After lunch a couple of young Hawaiian girls came along and picked up the roosters who seemed to like being carried, their red-wattled heads going this way and that.

    While hunting for shells, I slipped into the water and went on, only in ankle deep water.   Found a couple of gorgeous shells, a cowrie, brown with speckles, and a spiral shell with little horns along the spirals.  A bit of beach glass worn smooth by the waves and a nice piece of drift wood.  Beach combing, for some reason, can occupy me for hours on end.  I love trudging along, looking down, finding this or that.

    After lunch we went to the visitor center of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, http://www.ntbg.org/ .  We will tour Allerton Gardens next Saturday.  They were the royal gardens when Hawai’i was a monarchy.   Around the visitor center are several garden beds with various local and endemic plants:  sugar cane, plumeria, bougenvillea, Sumatran cherry, banana, many palms.  Of the plants native to Hawai’i over 80% are endemic and all of these are under pressure from encroaching environmental change.   Most of the plants we associate with Hawai’i like palms, ginger, plumeria are not native and they have tended to crowd out the local species.

    Tonight there is a large welcome dinner for the crowd here to study infectious diseases. I’m invited. Oh, boy. 

    Later.


    Garden Great Work Travel 📎and tagged

  • A Sacrament From Mother Earth

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    35  91%  23%  2mph ESE bar29.06 steady windchill34  Winter

                  Last Quarter of the Winter Moon

    Something I’ve thought about for a while.

                                                       A Sacrament

    water from our well, bread from local grain and cheese from Minnesota, candles

    Light candle(s).

    Say to all:  See this light, not as symbol, but as energy brought to us by fire from the sky and fire from deep beneath the earth.  By the light of this fire we see this water, this bread, this cheese.

    On the table or altar have the pitcher, a cup, a plate with bread not broken and cheese not broken

    Water in an earthenware pitcher. Pour into a single cup.

    To each person as they take the cup:  take this and drink it, not as symbol, but as substance, the necessary liquid of all life as blood is the necessary liquid in our body.

    Break the bread and hand pieces to each person

    Say to all:  Eat this bread, not as symbol, but as substance, the marriage of earth and sun which gives birth to grain.

    Break the cheese and hand pieces to each person

    Eat this cheese as a gift from one mammal to another, food which sustains us.

     Say to all:  This water, this bread, this cheese transforms itself even now into your body, one link in the sacred chain stretching back to the one-celled organism, our common ancestor, and forward to our descendants, who may be as different from us as we are from that one cell.  This is a miracle.

    Go now in peace. 


    Faith and Spirituality Garden Great Wheel Great Work Our Land and Home 📎and tagged

  • Bared Roots and All

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    38  73% 23% 0mph SSW bar29.12 steady  windchill39  Winter

                           Last Quarter of the Winter Moon

    Think I lost a post somewhere in cyber space, one from this morning. 

    A miscellaneous day so far.  Kate and I decided on the kinds of vegetables we want to grow.  Next I’ll look at her choices for varieties and the seeds we bought at Seed Saver’s Exchange outside Decorah, Iowa.  With those in mind I’ll put together a planting plan which will include when to plant or start seeds indoors, companion plants, a plan for optimum soil rotation over the years and the amount of vegetables we plan to consume over the summer and fall, plus those we want to put away in the root cellar-to-be or through canning or freezing.  If I have to order some new seeds or plants, I’ll get those orders in early.  I’ll also put together a tree and shrub order for the bare root plants that the Anoka County Conservation folk sell in early May.

    Later I edited my sermon for March 23rd, a sort of where I am now in my own theological/ge-ological thinking.  Decided to wait until March to put together the one page digest on Transcendentalism so I’ll be familiar with it as the day arrives.

    Ordered some meds.  Lipitor this time.  Took a nap that included another dog filled dream. 

    I also finished all the material I printed out from the Real Politics website on the Democratic race.  It’s a real nubby matter right now with conflicting data, streaks rather than whole waves of momentum.  So far Clinton remains ahead in national polls, but the electorate is tricky when they sense someone fading in the stretch.  They’ll bale and move toward someone they believe can win.  How white men and Latinos vote may decide the race.

    Doesn’t seem like much, but it took all day.  time for a workout.


    Garden Politics 📎and tagged

  • A Sixty Degree Temperature Swing

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    24  87%  21%  0mph  SSW  bar29.96  steady  Winter

               Waning Gibbous Winter Moon

    As the winter moon wanes, a warm up heads our way.  Tomorrow the temperature will hit 40.  That’s a sixty degree swing within the week.  Not unusual for Minnesota, but impressive anyhow.  I’ve read that we have the most significant temperature and weather type fluctuations of anywhere on earth, though Siberia is similar.  That’s Siberia.  As in the place to which you were exiled as to the lonliest and most inclement place on earth from Moscow.  One of the most inclement places on earth.  So….

    On this point Paul Douglas, local weather sage, whose long term eye is better than his short term one, has a website up that is worth a visit, www.climatespot.com. I’ve added it to the blogroll, too.

    The sun shines today and small dimples have begun to show up at the base of trees, shrubs and the winter remnants of last year’s flower garden.  As the weather warms, the snow sinks away first at the point where something that can warm up meets the ground.  I hope that this warm up will bring a fresh snowfall, one that will fill in the dimples and freshen up the sagging snow.  It looks, and feels, like early March, deceptive though.  In March I can look out the window, notice the same changes and get the feeling, as I did momentarily this morning, plants have begun to stir underneath, that buds will open on trees and maybe a few early daffodils and the bloodroot will break the ground.  In March that is a fond hope, one with the chance of reality in a month or so, two at most.  In late January, not true.  February can have cold and snow like January.  March often has big snow, but the snow doesn’t last.  That feeling today only leads to dis-ease.  It is not a hope that can sustain itself in the near term future.

    I continue my study of Taoism, look for some new additions to the Taoism pages. 


    Faith and Spirituality Garden Great Wheel Our Land and Home 📎and tagged