• Tag Archives fire-pit

  • First Fire

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                   New (Solstice) Moon

    The old moon went to black and the new moon in waiting, the Solstice Moon, has not yet appeared.  The weather stayed on the cool and cloudy side today though it did get a bit warmer later.

    Kate and I had first fire in our new fire pit area, dining on a delicious dinner of cowboy caviar, chicken wings and a broccoli, bacon and raisin salad while part of a dead black locust tree burned.  The crushed gravel we had Javier put around it will have to be modified in some way since it tends to slough when walked upon.  Could have foreseen that but didn’t.

    We sat there, watching the smoke rise among the ash trees around the border of what used to be a compost pile.  Our woods surrounds the area, in essence a new outdoor room tucked into the front edge of the trees near the grandkids playhouse.  Looking back into the woods I kept wondering what it would have been like, looking into woods like these and not knowing where they ended.  You can’t even see our property line, so the woods could be impenetrable for all that can be seen.

    Afterward we watched two more episodes of the Swedish crime drama, Wallander, not the Branagh one, but the original.  I like the Swedish one better.  In it Wallander has more personality in it than the depressive, uncommunicative character portrayed by Branagh.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television Family Our Land and Home 📎and tagged

  • Sollie Goes Home

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                         Waxing Garlic Moon

    Tomorrow I leave for Lincoln, Nebraska.  Sollie will head back to Denver with Jon.  Our goal here is to calm the dog situation down by getting rid of the extra dog and getting to work integrating Gertie into our pack.  She has a Jekyll and Dog personality; sweet and friendly, cuddly 90% of the time and all gnarly teeth and dog for 10%.  Trouble is, we can’t predict the 10%.  Outside humans seem to raise her hackles, at least sometimes, but there’s something between her and the other dog’s, too.  Our hope is that Sollie’s presence, a male among females, may have tipped the balance toward aggression in the doggy world for Gertie and that with him gone, she’ll calm down.  That may be wishful thinking.

    Mark finished a first course of granite blocks for our firepit. Now I have to find a steel fire ring.  It’ll be nice to have a place for a fire just in time for summer.  No.  Kidding.  It’s nice to have it done and ready for fall.  Mark’s helped out a lot.  I’ve found it much easier to do my work here if I don’t have to do the heavy work on both ends of a project.  (This will be the Agni fire pit by Mark Ellis.)

    I’m awake.  In addition to getting up at 10:40 I also had a 2 hour nap.  Staying out late is possible for me, but I have to have time to recover.

    Watched the NBA finals with Mark tonight.  Two Hoosier boys watching the big guys play ball.  We didn’t have the sound on.  Basketball is the one sport I know well enough to watch without commentary.  I decided, early on, that I wanted to see Miami win, so tonight’s decision pleased me.  It was a game right down to the final 4.0 seconds.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Family Garden Sport 📎and tagged

  • Bees and Dogs

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                        Waxing Garlic Moon

    Bee check this morning.  Colony 1 is about a week ahead of 2 and 3 due to my late release of the queens in those two colonies.  None of them have brood in the top box, though there is 400_honey-extraction_0225new pollen stores and honey.  They’ve only had the top box on for a week, so I’m not expecting much until the next hive inspection.  If I don’t see brood then, well, I don’t know what.

    All three colonies look healthy, plenty of bees and plenty of room.  These bees, too, are so gentle.  I can inspect the hives with just a veil, a long sleeved t-shirt and gardening gloves.  So much better for the heat.

    Each colony still has stored honey in the frames I put into the top boxes, the first one less than the rest, but they still have some.  I may need to get some feeder pails and some syrup, just to be sure.

    I feel more confident this year, more sure of what I’m doing and what I’m looking for when I do a hive inspection, but I’m still a long way from a  knowledgeable bee keeper.

    Mark has started a second round of work on the fire pit, a project stalled three years ago by lagging energy on my part.  He squared off the walls, has cut landscape cloth to put behind the granite paving stones I bought from the guy on Round Lake Boulevard and also put landscape cloth on the botton of the fire pit and covered it with sand.

    Gertie went outside this morning and wandered around the front yard.  She moved slowly, feeling the trauma today probably more so than yesterday as the vet’s pain killer subsided.  She’s still on two pain meds though, tramadol and rimadyl.  I think she’s gonna be fine.  We’ve seen battle wounds before.

    As I went to sleep last night, I said to Kate, “Just like an episode of Combat Hospital.”


    📂This entry was posted in Bees Dogs 📎and tagged

  • Du Fu, Li Bai and Wang Wei

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    79  bar steep drop 29.95  0mph S dew-point 54  sunrise 6:06 sunset 8:30  Lughnasa

    First Quarter of the Corn Moon   moonrise 1326 moonset 2226

    Each day of the Olympics I will post a poem from a famous Chinese poet.  Du Fu, Li Bai and Wang Wei are the three most admired T’ang dynasty poets.  It is so easy to forget that this last century is only a tiny portion in the sweep of Chinese civilization.  In all the sturm und drang about the rise of China the fact that China has risen and fallen many times over the last 5,000 plus years often remains buried.  That’s right, 5,000 years of a continuous culture, sometimes dominant, sometimes ruled by foreigners, many of whom embraced Chinese civilization.

    It is arrogant of us to judge China by our standards, standards that have stood nowhere near the test of time.  In China the collective always comes before the individual, at least that has  been true historically.  This is not to say that there have not been individualists in Chinese history.  Taoism tends to produce them, as does the famous literati system of rule by intellectuals.  Many painters and poets also walked their own distinctive paths.

    Well, anyhow, China doesn’t need my defense.  I just want to add a bit from the depth of Chinese culture as we go through Olympics which often seem more about air pollution and human rights than sport.

    Yes, I know.  This seems like a conservative position, but in reality it is a position informed more by anthropology and history, a position not too different from walk a mile in the other person’s moccasin.

    I spent an hour or so this morning admiring the work of the Irishmen who dug ditches.  Put the shovel in the earth, push it down, lift it up, heave.  Repeat.  Not back breaking, but a workout.  I had a good nap.  The fire pit has begun to appear.  It will be deep enough for a fire when the Woollies come, though whether the area around it will be is another matter.


    📂This entry was posted in Garden Literature Writing 📎and tagged

  • Onions on a Screen

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    80  bar steady 29.71  2mph W dew-point 61  sunrise 5:56  sunset 8:42 Summer

    Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon

    Heaved sand out of the to be fire pit.  Still a lotta roots even after the stump grinder.  Sigh.  It will get finished, and before 8/18 as a birthday present for Kate and as a Woolly place.  Gotta get up earlier to make this happen however.

    Pulled onions, put down an old sliding door screen over the raised bed and put them on it to dry.  We have red and yellow, no white.  Seeing them out there, all next to each other, soaking up the rays like California girls makes an aging horticulturist proud.  All the allium crops are out of the ground now.  The garlic hangs in the utililty room in the basement and the onions will go in the garage either in burlap or slotted crates.

    With tomatoes coming and the bean plants producing we are well into the first harvest cycle.  We will celebrate this on August 1st with some kind of ceremony in the garden.  We also plan to invite the neighbors on August 2nd.


    📂This entry was posted in Garden 📎and tagged

  • Brute Force

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    81  bar falls 30.07  0mph WSW dew-point 60   Summer

    Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

    The stump grinder applies brute force to the problem.  It has carbide tip blades on a rotary cutter that looks like a saw with few, but deep set teeth.  The first time required something of a learning curve, but not too much.  What it required more was strength.  The weight in it sits low to the ground and the tires were soft, so yanking it around the property had aerobic and resistance qualities.

    The two yew stumps out front disappeared, though the mugo pine stump remains.  It had too much that required cutting with a chain saw, something to do before the next rental.  Four smaller stumps in the back went under the blade.  The major work though required putting the blade deep in the earth in the area where the fire pit will go.  This was to eliminate a number of roots encountered on the first round of digging on it last fall.

    Kate made a nice lunch of encrusted sole with beans from our garden and a salad that contained some items from the garden.   The heirloom tomatoes have begun to change color, perhaps next week we’ll have our first.  These fruits are as big as my fist.

    Now, a nap.


    📂This entry was posted in Garden Our Land and Home 📎and tagged

  • Vineland Place

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    74  bar steady  29.89  4mph NNE dew-point 64   Summer, warmish and stickyish

    Full Thunder Moon

    Ah, the power of suggestion.  Especially from a spouse.  Spent an hour and a half clearing burdock, nettles, black locust, burrs, climbing wild cucumbers and virginia creeper from the site of the soon to be firepit cum family gathering spot.  An area in which everything has been removed invites the emergence of those plants whose seeds or rhizomes remain in the soil.

    Over the last few rainy, hot weeks nettles have taken nourishment from the former compost heap to grow large, reaching for the sun and laden with formic acid to prevent uprooting.   The wild cucumber which climbs, then produces lacy transparent fruit liked the compost as did the virginia creeper.

    While yanking on the long above ground runs of vine and pulling out their equally long runs of below the soil surface roots/rhizomes, I decided to change the name of our property from 7 Oaks, named for the 7 Oaks on the hill outside my writing room window, to Vineland Place.  I have no idea why, but our property is the ideal happy home for vines:  wild cucumbers, Virginia creeper and wild grape.  The wild grape in particular grows vines thicker than my upper arm (OK, so I’m not Ahnold, but still).  We have nurtured a wild  grape that has chosen the six foot fence we had put in the front after Celt began climbing the fence to go greet the neighbors on walks by our house.  At 200 pounds Celt, an Irish Wolfhound, was not a pleasant surprise, though in manner gentle and loving.

    As the CO2 level rises with global warming, it favors vines.  I do not recall why.  I could not help but recall this piece of trivia as I drove through Alabama, Mississippi and Lousiana where kudzu has a presence akin to an alien invader.  It grows over lower shrubs and covers the entire highway easement up to the drainage ditches on divided highways.  In more than one case I saw old homes, uninhabited (I think), shrouded under the green of this conqueror vine.

    Jon did many projects around Vineland Place when he lived here.  One of the early ones was to cut back the large grape vines that had begun to strangle the oak, ironwood, ash, elm, pin cherry and poplar that make up our woods.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Our Land and Home Travel 📎and tagged

  • Even Though It’s Still July

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    71  bar steady 29.87  0mph ENE dew-point 62  Summer, wonderful

    Full Thunder Moon

    The color:  deep red, pale yellow, pink, mauve, orange, red, virgin white, flame pink with a burnt orange throat,white with a pink throat.  Scents ethereal as they are ephemeral.  The true lilies and the day lilies are in bloom.  A chaos of color.

    The true lilies have a bloom architecture clean, sweeping, grand.  They have colors with hues so intense they can make the heart dance.  These are the regnant plants of this garden and this is their time.

    Here’s the problem with putting stuff in writing:

    “We will also finish creation of a fire-pit, family gathering area begun last fall.  These will be finished by the August date of my meeting.”  from my Woolly project notes.

    Kate dug this up yesterday and reminded me of this commitment.  Sigh.  The one aspect of gardening that seems always to drain from consciousness is the July slump.  Not much gardening gets done by me in this month.  It’s too hot, too many bugs and I’ve usually worked way more than I intended in May and June.

    In July I begin to need indoor time, book time and writing time.  By August things have become marginally cooler, I’ve satisfied the reading itch though probably not the writing and the bugs become tolerable.  August and September, sometimes in to mid-October can be intense gardening, too.

    All this means I sometimes (always) project more completion than I will realize.   Even so, I want to finish the fire-pit, family gathering area, too.  I have not told Kate that I intend to rent the stump grinder this Wednesday, but I do.  That will clear out the roots I found lacing the fire pit hole last fall as I dug.  After some weeding, moving some sand and rock and cutting up a few logs for seats around the fire, the fire pit will be done by August 18th.  That’s the date of my Woolly meeting and Kate’s 64th birthday.

    Maybe I’ll go out there right now and start pulling weeds.  Even though it’s still July.


    📂This entry was posted in Garden Great Wheel Great Work Our Land and Home Writing 📎and tagged