Beltane Waning Garlic Moon In my new names for Minnesota full moons this is the garlic moon, because under its gaze, in its waning nights, the garlic leaves will begin to die back and the garlic will be ready to come out of the garden. This is now my third year with garlic started from […]
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Beltane Waxing Garlic Moon So, this guy has this dog. He puts up an electric fence to stop the dog. The dog jumps up on the fence, standing as a mountain goat, all four feet together, on the electric fence and the wooden top rail. She’s laughing at me. It’s another episode in the long […]
Read the rest of this entry »One Shocking Day
Beltane Waxing Garlic Moon One more shocking day. Headed out this morning with Mark to Fleet Farm. If you’ve not ever encountered Fleet Farm, your life is not complete. A megastore before there were megastores Fleet Farm carries all that stuff you can’t find anywhere else. Electric fence supplies in this case. Yes, my dog […]
Read the rest of this entry »Burn your bag, boy?
Spring Awakening Moon Two stories from the world around us. Michele Yates, a docent colleague, toured a group of second graders last week. At the James Ensor expressionist piece, “Intrigue”, a little boy raised his hand, “Look, you can see the paint. It’s still wet.” Turns out this young art connoisseur believed we had a […]
Read the rest of this entry »Surgery, Money and the Electric Fence
Fall Waxing Blood Moon Saw Ruth Hayden again, today. She has guided us since a stressful period in our finances over 7 years ago. As Kate’s retirement comes closer and closer, Ruth helps us with fine-tuning our retirement budget and preparing our holdings to manage the inevitable ups and downs of the market. Her help […]
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Fall Waxing Blood Moon The run of electric fence alongside the east side of our woods. The fence installation. Squash now in our storage room The garden dies back.
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Fall Waxing Blood Moon Kate made pasta sauce(s) from our tomatoes. She also made an eggplant (ours) parmesan that we had with one of her sauces along with a toss salad of our tomatoes, basil and mozzarella. Pretty tasty. Kate has preserved, conserved, cooked and sewed on her two days off. In this environment where […]
Read the rest of this entry »More on the Humanities
Fall Waxing Blood Moon Walked the fence today, checking for limbs, plants I’d missed. Sure enough, about a third of the way around a large fallen tree branch pressed against the chain link shorting the fence and creating a hissing, popping sound when nudged. The air smelt of burnt plastic fibers. A visit with the […]
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Lughnasa Waxing (Blood) Moon The fence continues. Today I strung the rope and checked that none of it touched anything except the yellow plastic insulators. 1,200 + feet of fence now has a yellow insulator every 10 feet and white rope laced with wire. Tomorrow I’ll do the electrifying. That means connecting the energizer to […]
Read the rest of this entry »Neighbors
Lughnasa New (Blood) Moon Good fences make good neighbors. Sort of. On the other hand three of our neighbors have stepped up at various points and returned our wayward puppies to us. As a result, we’ve met folks we didn’t know like our neighbors to the south and to the southeast. Neighborliness does not have […]
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