Tag Archives: gardening

Garden, Weather +Climate

USAF Officers Attacked!

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81  bar falls 29.99 0mph S dew-point 59  Summer, sunny and hot

Waning Gibbous Flower Moon

Each year in late June a convergence of heat, humidity, sun intensity and the growth of weeds combine to make gardening an early morning task for me.  The toddler trees, planted last year, had a considerable collection of weeds around them.  They had to go.

The machete makes short work of the nettles, the most troublesome of the weeds.  They grow tall and block the sun.  They grow from rhizomatous roots, so they send up new plants when the old ones are cut down.  Their main defense, formic acid, makes humans want to stay away from them, hence, the nettlesome person.

Virginia creeper and grapevines also sap a lot of food from the growing area of these young trees and must be pulled up like a zipper, taking out the length of the vine as well as its immediate spot of rooting.  Then there are the other weeds, names unknown to me, that gather in numbers.  Up they come by the handfull.

Last and hardest to remove are the tall grasses, the exact thing desired in the large open area, a sort of meadow, but harmful to the new trees.  Once they’ve become establish the trees will outcompete everything in their area, but these guys haven’t reached that growth stage.

One anecdote I loved from the Maxwell AFB experience involves nature’s own air force.  A single person walking along the east side of the cafeteria building often receives pecks and a dive bomber approach from a towhee who lives on the roof.  The idea of a bird attacking USAF officers is ironic.

Garden, Great Work

2008 Gardening Season Is Underway

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59  bar steady  29.83 3mph WNW dewpoint 31  Beltane

         Waxing Crescent of the Hare Moon

Hemerocallis (the daylily) is a sturdy member of the plant kingdom.  Every time I plant, no matter where I plant it, nor the care I give it, the daylily spreads and grows happily.  That’s why years after the fact the foundation outlines for many rural home are still obvious, tiger lilies continue to grow and bloom just like the house was still there.  Today all the daylilies in the first raised bed we ever had, made, as all of them, by Jon, got moved. 

Jon also put in a cedar rail fence and last year I deconstructed it down to the original cedar fencing. We had him add wire fencing to keep out nuisance animals–our dogs.  An older me saw them as less of a problem, Kate agreed, so down the wire fence came.  The daylilies have gone from the bed to the edge of the cedar rail fence.  Two peonies have likewise made the transition, but they went into a tree circling bed that is about a quarter finished.  We have a young, sturdy elm on the fence line.  I removed the fence around it and will soon complete digging out a circular bed around its dripline.

The former daylily and peony bed will get sweet corn.  I’m also going to try the Native American method of planting climbing beans at the base of the corn stalk.

Three tomato plants grown from seed to 1 foot + under the lights are now in place, too.  They went in the former lily (Asian and other true lilies) bed.  I’m taking a chance planting them directly outside with no hardening off, but I wanted to try it, see how it works.  If they die, we’ll buy a couple of tomato plants.  If they don’t, I can skip a step in the future if I watch the weather carefully.  Which I do.

Also had a brainstorm for what to do with the hill that has succumbed to raspberry canes.  Moss.  This is a shady area and I read an article about how to convert lawns to moss.  It won’t work for our front lawn yet, but it should work on this slope shadowed by the seven oaks at the top.  Gonna try it.  The result can’t be worse than what we have.

While I dug and transplanted, Kate made a trip to the Greenbarn, a nursery and garden store up near Isanti.  She bought a number of things:  impatiens, onion sets, Coleus, sphagnum moss, small onion sets already well underway, some seeds as well as other things.  Anyhow all this means the 2008 gardening season is off and growing.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

The Wollemi Pine–Live From the Carboniferous

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33  bar steep rise 30.06 5mph N dewpoint 22 Spring

                Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing

The workshop I attended today had two co-sponsors, The Institute for Advanced Studies (UofM) and the Arboretum(UofM).  This was the culminating workshop in a two-year long effort by the Institute for Advanced Studies to explore time from many perspectives.  Today we examined time in three different, but related, botanical areas:  phenology, paleobotany and time from the perspective of trees. 

The phenological, by definition, is the chronological study of events in nature.  This strikes me as an odd definition since it seems to impose a human mental construct, linear sequencing, on what is cyclical.  The notion is a good one, though, since it involves paying close attention to changes in the natural world, day by day, and making a record of them.  Phenologists know when the ice goes out lakes, the first robin returns, the dates that various spring ephemerals like the bloodroot, snow trillium and scylla bloom. 

Over several years I’ve tried my hand at phenology.  It is something an amateur can do.  So far, I’ve not had the discipline to continue my observations day after day, year after year.  Perhaps as I get older and slow down a bit this will come to me.  I hope so.  The woman who was our teacher for phenology was a lively Cantonese woman named Shirley Mah Kooyman.  A Smith graduate in Botany she has a direct and engaging teaching style.  Shirley took us outside and showed us the spring ephemeral garden they have planted.  It gave me ideas.  Our field was cut short by blowing winds, snow and cold.  On April 26th.

Over  the long lunch break I wandered the bookstore and picked up books related to aspects of permaculture I want to pursue in more depth:  pond building, fruit and nut trees and landscape design.

In the afternoon Tim started us out with segments of trees so we could tree rings.  This lead into a discussion of the time and stories that a tree knows, sometimes revealed in its growth rings.  He showed an amazing graphic created by an arborist who actually dug up tree roots and followed them, painting them white as he went so he could measure accurately.  He discovered that almost all trees have relatively shallow, but very broad root systems.  I learned, as did Tim, that tree roots stop at the dripline and that what’s below the tree roughly parallels what’s above in size.  Nope.  We measure a double centurion outside the learning center.  You measure at breast height, compute the diameter with everybody’s favorite mathematical constant; in this case it was 52 inches, then multiplied by a factor for white oaks, 5.  This gives a rough estimate of 260 years for the trees age.  Cutting back a bit for optimal growing conditions, experts feel this oak is 225 years old.  That means it was an acorn in 1780!  Whoa.

The last session focused on the evolution of plants.  In some ways this was weakest session, yet in another it astonished me.  Randy Gage, the guy in charge of school groups for the arboretum, took a trip to Australia to investigate the Wollime Pine.  Here are some fast facts from the Wollemi Pine website:

Fast Facts
…………………………

Claim to fame One of the world’s oldest and rarest trees

This is a tree that, prior to its discovery in 1994 was known only in the fossil record.  It was a coelacanth or stromatolite like find.  Remarkable.  But I missed it.  Maybe you didn’t.

The time related stuff here was somewhat cliched with the 24 hour clock and an arm span as metaphors.  The Wollemi Pine story is the stuff of science fiction.

Taking this symposium at the same time I learned about a book, Reinventing the Sacred, which attempts to reinvent spirituality from within a scientific perspective, but one that discards scientistic thinking (reductionism, empiricism) has really set the wheels turning.  So many things clicking.  We’ll see where it all goes.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work

Matzo Located In Coon Rapids

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69!  bar steep fall 29.84 3mph ENE dewpoint 49 Spring

                     Full Moon of Growing

Boy.  With the temps in the high 60’s the full moon of growing has matured during the right weather. 

Good news.  There are Jews just across the city line into Coon Rapids.  Both Cub and Rainbow have many shelves with matzo meal, borscht, chicken bullion, matzo soup mix and potato pancake mix.  Bad news.  Manischewitz has back ordered passover approved matzo.  Bummer.  So, we will have to anoint the regular matzo as ok for passover.  It’s ok; I’m a minister, I can do that.  Not really, but what choice do we have?

The world as a whole is miraculous and in its parts, too.  I put more seeds into small plugs of earth, readying them for life under the bright lights until the weather is congenial for their presence in the big show outside.  Each seed I handled, most very tiny, a few bigger, say half the size of a small pencil eraser, had all that was necessary to produce a beet, a morning glory, a cucumber, basil, rosemary.  All these mighty engines need is a bit of help.  Water.  Light.  Some nutrients later on, but in the beginning they carry their own food source, stored away from a plant long ago gone to seed, perhaps compost now, but it lives on in these small parcels.

The imagery was impossible to not notice.  I took a pick-up (Adsons) and deposited the seeds into the crevice in the center of the small prepared plug of earth.  After I dropped in the seed, my role finished.  The rest is up to the seed and the things that nudge it into action.  Later, plants.  Food captured and processed, food made from light thanks to another miracle, photosynthesis.  Think of that:  food from light.  That’s what these living parcels can do.  Something we couldn’t do, ever.  No matter how learned and wise.  If not for photosynthesis, we’d starve to death in the midst of abundant energy.

Friends, Garden, General, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Politics

Plants and a Particular Location + Gardener = Dialogue

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40  bar falls 30.27  6mph  SSE  dewpoint 24  Spring

          Last Quarter Moon of Winds

Ah.  Can you feel the sigh?  A weekend with no outside obligations at all.  I plan to do clean up, plant some more seeds, read, maybe watch a bit more of the NCAA.  How about that Davidson, huh?  Took out Wisconsin.  That’s a student body of 1,700 versus one of what, 30,000?  I will read chapter 3 in the Permaculture design book for sure, perhaps polish off a novel or two, maybe start writing one of my own.  I have an idea that’s been bouncing around for some time now.

Tonight at 5PM I get to celebrate Chinese New Year again with the CIF guides.  I look forward to this each year, this one especially because I’ve done my homework on China and Japan over the last few months.  Saw MingJen, who organizes this event, on Wednesday at the Naomi Kawase film, The Mourning Forest.

If you can, would you write Hillary and tell her to get out now?  We need a chance to even up with McCain and a bitter end to the Democratic primary race just lets him have the field to himself.  I don’t have anything against Hillary, in fact she and Obama are about a horse apiece politically, but Obama has won the field, has the delegates and deserves his chance.  Hillary will have another shot.  She’s established that a woman can run as a serious candidate, a remarkable and historic achievement in itself.  Nothing in the feminist revolution demands that women win all contests or get all the jobs. 

Snow continues to retreat in our yard, but slowly.  As in years past, the Perlick’s grass is almost fully visible, while ours remains under 6-8 inches of snow.  They face south, we face north and that makes all the difference.  Spring comes to our property about a week later than theirs, weird as that is. 

On Thursday I followed the dog tracks in the snow and went out to check on my trees planted last spring.  Some animal, either rabbits or deer, have eaten the tops of them down to the garden hose I put around them as protection from mice.  I didn’t think tall enough up the food chain.   These were the trees I planted nearest the area we call the park.  Further north, also on the eastern edge of our westernmost woods, another group of oaks, white pines and Norway pines look like they’ve done well over the winter. 

This is the nature of gardening.  Try this and it works.  Try that and it doesn’t.  Listen.  Repeat what worked, change what didn’t.  Plants and a particular location engage the attentive gardener or horticulturist (as I’m beginning to think of myself) in a constant dialogue as shade patterns change, seasonal sun shifts become more understood, rain falls or does not fall and various cultivars and seeds prove well suited to the site or not.  This dialogue is multi-lingual as one party communicates in one language and the other has to translate, but it is true discourse as each can alter the others ideas.