• Tag Archives Garden
  • The Hydroponics Are On

    34  bar rises 29.50 3mph NNW dewpoint 31  Spring

                   First Quarter Moon of Growing

    The calendar says spring; the snow says not yet.  It’s all moisture, though, and if it doesn’t run away to rivers and streams, some of this goes to recharge ground water and aquifers.  A good thing whether it comes chilled or just wet.

    Last night it looked the drive in to the MIA this morning would be a nightmare.  Predictions of 1 foot snow depths and high winds could have lead to blizzard conditions.  The temperatures never dropped far enough.  So, instead of a foot of snow we got about 3 inches of slush, suitable for snow cones if not so oil impregnated.  The drive in was uneventful.

    Sachei Makabe brought her kids from Robbinsdale.  Marilyn Smith and I divided them up and took them through Weber.  Each one of the Japanese language classes I’ve taken through have been attentive, observant and interested.  Can’t ask for more than that.  The diversity in the classes surprise me.  There seem to be far more Asian, Latino and African American students than Caucasian.  This speaks well for the schools and the students but only reinforces the dismal record us white folks have with learning a second language.  I’m one of those who never learned.  Shame on me.

    Came home.  Kate had a great lunch made with fish, green beans and acorn squash.  I added a salad. 

    After the nap I got out the books and handouts for the hydroponics and got started.  The meter I got a couple of weeks ago I handed over to Kate because it required precision and a chemistry background, neither one of which characterizes me.  It will help us quickly diagnose problems and repair them.  It measures ph, temperature and conductivity.  All of these measures have to do with the uptake of nutrients, though I don’t understand the relationships by any means at this point.

    The lettuce seedlings that I started a few weeks ago have started to push roots through the rock wool medium.  This signals the time to transplant them to the hydroponics.  Each planter in the smaller hydroponic system (We have two.) has round lava rocks which hold moisture, but do not interfere with the plants root system reaching the nutrient bath in the reservoir below the planters.  It took 3 gallons of nutrient solution to fill the reservoir to the 2 1/2″ depth recommended.

    The nutrient goes into the reservoir through the planters.  This charges the lava rocks.  Then I got a pair of forceps (Adson’s, Kate says.) and plucked the rock well medium out of the seedling beds one at a time.  With a soup ladel I scooped lava rocks out and let them sit in the left over nutrient solution while I positioned the small cube of rock wool and its single lettuce plant.  When I had it where I wanted, one per planter, I scooped the lava rocks around the cube.  Planted.  It’s a strange process compared to gardening directly in mother earth, but it’s fun, too.

    After the nutrient solution was in the reservoir, a plastic tub in essence, I plugged the pump into the black tubing that leads inside the reservoir to a plastic tube with two airstones.  Airstones are permeable and the bubbling of oxygen through them creates a nutrient rich mist that reaches the bottom of the planters.  The roots of the lettuce seedlings will head down, through the lava rock to the mist.

    With the small pump sighing the only thing left was to switch on the Halide light.  It’s a big thing, 250 watts, with a ballast that feels like a large rock  in weight.  It now glows about 22 inches above the seedlings.   The distance is necessary while the seedlings are still  young and fragile.  After they become well rooted and mature, I’ll move the lamp down to 6 to 12 inches above them.  It will be on roughly 16 hours a day.

    We’ve begun.


  • Where Is The Life We Have Lost In The Living?

    34  bar rises 30.15 0mpn NNE dewpoint 28  Spring

                Waxing Crescent Moon of Growing

    “Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” – T. S. Eliot

    Eliot is fussy, conservative and pedantic; yet, he is also a beautiful poet and a trenchant critic.  I often wonder about the last two of his questions.  As an obsessive gatherer of knowledge and information, it often seems that knowledge gets swamped by information and facts. 

    In case you wondered, like I just did, what knowledge means, I found this helpful:  “Knowledge is part of the hierarchy made up of data, information and knowledge. Data are raw facts. Information is data with context and perspective. Knowledge is information with guidance for action based upon insight and experience.”   And this, too, a pragmatic (philosophical) definition:  “the human capacity (both potential and actual) to take effective action in varied and uncertain situations.”  This, too:  “Knowledge is an appreciation of the possession of interconnected details which, in isolation, are of lesser value.”

    As long we’re on this track, here are a few definitions of wisdom:  “is the ability to discern inner qualities and relationships; it is synonymous with insight, good sense, and sound judgment. It means to have “deep understanding”, “to have keen discernment”  I like this one, too:  “Knowledge with information so thoroughly assimilated as to have produced sagacity, judgment, and insight.”

    The first one of his three questions is tougher.  The nesting nature of the wisdom/knowledge/information trio suggests that Eliot also sees this:  Life/living/wisdom/knowledge/information.   My impression, though, is that he sees Life/living as almost apposite and separate from the other two questions.  So, it might be that he suggests an analogous relationship, i.e. Life gets swallowed by the details of living in the same way wisdom can be consumed by knowledge and knowledge in turn overwhelmed by information. 

    It is so often true.  The mundane, even profane (as opposed to sacred, not as in obscenity) aspects of our daily life can so focus our attention that we lose the joy, the delight afforded by this rare and precious gift of Life.  Let me give you an example.  On some days I go into the garden and my intent is to weed.  Or to prune. Or to plant or transplant.  If my task obscures the joy the garden itself brings into my life, if I find myself mumbling about the difficulty of getting rid of this particular kind of weed or the physical challenge of a difficult pruning, then I have lost the Life the garden can bring me in the details of gardening. 

    So often delight gets pushed away by duty, joy by drudgery.  The invitation to be in the Eternal Now is the antidote.  If, in my weeding, I can appreciate the tenacity and strength of the weed, if I can experience just a tinge of regret for having to remove it, then I am in the moment, aware of the wonder of plant life rather than disgusted by the invader.  If pruning allows me a chance to notice the growth pattern of the shrub or tree, to wonder at the delicate reaching for air and light that branches are, then I can settle into the truth of the garden itself, become a part of its work.


  • Tulips and Daffodils, Oh My!

    54  bar steady  29.77 3mph ENE dewpoint 32  Spring

                                New Moon

    This is a fecund time.  I spent a couple of hours today putting down pre-emergent weed prevention in the flower beds, moving some mulch completely off now, the garlic, and putting Cygon on the Iris to prevent borers.  Cygon is now a prohibited insecticide so my stash is pretty much it.  Our beds are not near running water and we have a storm drainage basin to catch run off so I don’t see my limited use of Cygon, once or twice a year on about 40 Iris, as a great health hazard.

    Just being outside is wonderful.  Where the snow melts back, as it has begun to do even here, we often  find tiny tunnel systems in the grass.  Voles dig these under the snow all winter.  At first it seems that they might kill the grass, but in fact, I think the opposite is true.  Where they go, the soil gets aerated and the grass continues to grow.  It looks strange and possibly harmful when you first see it. 

    The Iris have grown about six inches and now is the time to get those damned Iris borers.  If you raise Iris, you know what I mean.  If you don’t, well, they’re slimy and icky and eat the rhizome.  Yeck.  

    Tulips and daffodils have also begun to press through the snow and frozen earth.  With the showers we get this week I wouldn’t be surprised if we get some blooms, especially if it warms up, too.   


  • A One-Celled Organism’s Progeny Looks Back in Wonder

    45  bar steady 30.06  9mph WNW dewpoint 20

           

                  Waning Gibbous Moon of Winds

    There lives more faith in honest doubt, / Believe me, than in half the creeds. -Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poet (1809-1892)

    I’d put the percentage higher than Tennyson, but his general principle strikes me as true.

    The gro-light fluorescents switched on today at 10:00 AM.  At the same time the small electrical heating pads began their function of warming seed mediums bottom layer.  Earlier tiny lettuce seeds went into the small holes in the rock wool seeding mediums, soaked overnight in 5.0 ph water.  Four peat pots, filled with miracle-gro potting soil, received two tomato seeds each.  All the seeds are heritage seeds.  After both trays went into plastic tubs they went under the lights and on the heating pads.  The early phase, sprouting, requires a humid environment so a clear plastic hat went over the lettuce and tomato seeds.  Now we wait, wait, that is, after remembering to turn the lights off after twelve hours and checking periodically to keep the seeding mediums moist, but not so moist that they rot the seedlings.

    This process is still unfamiliar to me, so I don’t know what to expect.   Managing heat, light, water and humidity exceeds by a factor of four  what happens in outside gardening.  Outside you have to plant where the new seeds will get enough light, but you don’t provide the light.  You also have to provide water if there isn’t enough, but again, that’s rare.  Unless you’re over eager and plant too early, you don’t have to worry about heat either.  Humidity is fine here, at least during the crucial seed sprouting time.  Outside, you provide decent soil (if not provided for you by the land) and plant at the proper depth.  That’s it for a while.  In this process you are the sun and the rain, the atmosphere.

    Over the years I’ve tended to plant perennials and of those almost all flowers or shrubs, so working with seeds is something I’ve not done often.  As I picked up the tiny lettuce seeds with the pick-up (a medical device much like tweezers, but with a finer point, great for removing splinters and, it turns out, picking up tiny seeds), I marveled at how something  so small can unfold and develop into edible lettuce.  A lettuce seed is smaller than the inside of an o and not much bigger than the enclosed portion of an e.  The tomato seed is a bit bigger, it would cover a capital O, but again, from something that size and almost flat, a 24″ plus vine and ripe tomatoes for the salad will emerge.  And you don’t believe in miracles?

    This is why proteomics is still the hot new field.  In that seed is the dna for a particular type of lettuce or tomato.  The dna, once the seedling begins to sprout, switches on and off various genes in a finely orchestrated sequence.  The genes, when switched on, express a protein which unfolds, literally, to form, say, part of a stem, or a leaf, or a fruit like the tomato. 

    The same process created you, dear reader, and me, too.  Not only life had to come into being, a miracle when inorganic chemicals combined in such a manner as to respond to their environment rather than submit to it, but that life had to create as well a means of propagating that first miracle.  Without reproduction, no future.  Those twisted twin ladders that constitute our dna developed out of that first dna, in other words, that first one-celled organism somehow managed to propagate itself in such a way that its future included a species that could look back on it and say, Grandpa!  We are life with the ability to reflect on itself and its place in the cosmos.  Pretty wonderful.


  • Rock Wool Seed Blankies

    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.


  • A Tea Master Selects Objects

    44 bar steady 29.83 2mph WSW windchill 43

         Waxing Crescent Moon of Winds

    The snow mass has begun to recede.  Our north facing property retains snow longer than our neighbors, but the snow over the firepit area has shrunk below the top rail of the fence.  The temperature today gives us the general trend, though we may have a “major snow event” next week.  These late snows don’t last.

    The gardening season will begin soon and I’m ready to go to work.  Check on my baby trees, finish the firepit, begin the permaculture planning. 

    Had a break through on the Weber Collection tour.  I will use the notion of a tea-master preparing a tea ceremony for guests unfamiliar with Japanese art and its long traditions.  Together we will choose items that will give each of us a once in a lifetime experience together.  Let’s wander through our collection of possible tea objects and decide what will work best.

    The Great Work is many small works.


  • A Root Cellar in Andover

    19  65%  26%  1mph W  bar30.10 rises  windchill19  Winter

                    Waxing Crescent of the Winter Moon

    I like Sundays.  My workout schedule is 6 days a week and Sunday is a day off.   Much of my life Sunday, especially Sunday morning  was a work day, so to have the day off is a special treat in my world. 

    Of course, like most Sundays, I will write today and spend some more time on the garden plan.  Might even watch a play-off game.  How ’bout them Packers?  Winning in the snow.  Northern football.  Brett Favre comes from Mississippi; must have been a shock when he first started in Green Bay.

    Yesterday I looked over plans for root cellars.  Kate and I plan to put one in this next growing season.  I’m not sure where quite yet.  One book recommends digging into a hill, which makes sense, and I have a hill right outside the window here.  The problem is, if I dig it by hand, there are difficulties.  First order of business is to kill and remove the poison ivy.  Then, since this hill has seven oaks trees on its crest and a few stubby ash and oak there will be woody roots to remove.  Not to mention the actual digging.  That could be a good workout, though.

    None of this is impossible, of course.  The question is whether I’m willing to do all the work by hand.  If we put the root cellar in the back, we could have a backhoe come in and do the heavy lifting, then all we’d have to do is frame it out, make steps and a floor, put in a roof and call it a cellar.  To get to the hill area I’d like to use, any heavy equipment would have to come over lawn and I’m not sure I want to do that.

     Noticed in the paper today that the election has world attention.  As well it might.  Having spent the last presidential election in Singapore, however, I can report that even then taxi drivers gave a damn about whom we elect as President.  Many foreign nationals are eager to see the Bush era come to an end.  I’m with them.