• Tag Archives leeks

  • Extra Work Raises Grade

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                 Waxing Artemis Moon

    Up early and out in the garden.  This is the way I like it, working in the garden before and during sunrise, a coolness, some damp lingering from the night, stillness carrying only the softest of sounds, the earth friable and eager, weeds willing to come up and the garden’s purpose easy to discern.

    Kate worked on in the orchard, going back over intensive weeding of a week ago and pulling up sprouts and rhizomes, making the place just that more inhospitable for the weedy plants.  With a second load of mulch we’ll have this place looking ship-shape heading into fall.

    A few grasses have begun to turn brown and there’s a slight hint of autumn in the morning air, a certain clarity and crispness.

    After inspecting the garden again yesterday, I’m moving my grade from a B- to a B+.  Why?  I did three plantings of beets, greens, carrots and beans.  Now the second planting has come to maturity after many other plants finished their summer and gave up their yield.  We have a good crop of young beets, a lot of juicy carrots, plenty of greens and enough beans for a couple more freezer bags at least.  This planting weekly or so for a while, creates a series of gardens, all in the same place.  We even have a number of Cherokee Purple tomato plants which I did not plant.  They are volunteers from last year’s tomatoes.

    Add to these the onions, garlic, greens, beans, beets and various fruits already harvested we have a good gardening year, not a great one, but a good one.

    Plus those potatoes are still in the ground, the raspberries have begun to fruit and the fennel and leeks look good.  All in all, not bad.  I said at the beginning of the growing season that I saw this as a consolidation year, a year when we make sure we can care for what we have.  A week ago I would have said we hadn’t even met that mark, but now I believe we have.  Caring for the orchard, the vegetable garden and the new plantings from last year in there, managing the bees and getting ready for the honey harvest, plus pruning out and restoration in the perennial flower beds.

    This advance is mostly thanks to Kate’s back surgery and her hip surgery.  She can now care for the garden, too, as she has in the past and it requires the both of us, what we have now.  Getting back to normal speed.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Garden permaculture 📎and tagged

  • Flat

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                         Waning Planting Moon

    Leeks and potatoes both need mounding around their growing plants, the potatoes to have more underground room in which to develop their tubers and the leeks to blanch the lower part of the stalk into the familiar white of the leek you see in the grocery store.  Did that.  At the same time I planted bush beans between the rows of the potatoes.  They help ward off bugs and provide something to eat.  A good deal.

    Feeling flat today.  Negative.  Grief, probably.  I know I want Kate home.  I want to share the home here again.  She’s been gone almost two weeks.

    You ever have that moment where you realize things have slowed down, inside?  Movement becomes a tad   more sluggish, thought a bit more difficult, like slogging through a marshland.  Sighing.  That’s me.  Overcast weather gets some credit, too.  Multiple vectors today, arrows pointing down.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Faith and Spirituality Garden 📎and tagged

  • Getting Things Ready

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                       Waning Flower Moon

    After checking the parent colony with the queen excluder in, I found larvae in the top hive box.  That’s evidence of the queen.  That meant I shifted the middle hive box over to the new foundation and bottom board.  A syrup feeder pail went on top of the new, child colony.  This calms everything down and allows for a peaceful slow release of the queen tomorrow.  Leaving the queen excluder on the hive box in which I discovered larvae, I put two honey supers on it and replaced the inner cover and the telescoping outer cover.  The parent colony now has two hive boxes, one with a queen and brood, plus the other, lower box, which will get reversed on top in 7-10 days.

    Tomorrow I’ll check the package colony for larvae a second time.  If they have none, I’ll have to get another queen for them soon.  If there is no queen in the hive, the lack of her pheromones turns on egg laying in the workers, but, since they’re not fertilized they produce only drones.  Once a hive converts to worker egg-laying apparently you have to start over.

    This has been a busy couple of weeks for the bees.  Kate’s been making supers and frames and hive boxes, too.  If the divide and the package colony take, things will calm down for a while until the honey flow ends.  Then, there’s an end of the whole process I haven’t encountered.  Honey.

    Two more bags of composted manure on the leek/sugar pod pea bed, another on the sun trap and a lot of planting.  The herb spiral has the herbs Kate bought Friday at Mickman’s.  I also planted beets, mustard greens, fennel, onions and a pepper plant in the sun trap.  The tomatoes and other peppers will go there, too.  Those two beds, along with the other bed where I have green onions plants along with radicchio, beets from seed and thyme will be our kitchen garden for the growing season.

    Kate did a lot of weeding, including the blueberry patches.  It really makes a difference to have her focused on that aspect of gardening.  She’s also in charge of pruning which has its on rules.

    The leeks, onions, kale, chard, garlic, parsnips, butternut squash, other beets and carrots will also be available during the growing season of course, but most of these will get canned or dried or frozen for the winter.

    I would not like to do the cost accounting on these vegetables and the fruit because the two fences and Ecological gardens have created a lot of sunk costs.  It will take years for them to zero out the costs, more years, I imagine, than we have left in this house.  In our case, of course, that’s not the big point.  The big point is a more sustainable and healthy lifestyle and in that regard the cost accounting has already tilted in our favor.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees Garden Great Work permaculture 📎and tagged

  • A Colony Divided Against Itself Can Stand

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                      Waning Flower Moon

    The potato bed now has three bags of composted manure dug into it and the leek, sugar snap, bok choy bed has one and one more coming.  Kate has weeded several beds including the herb spiral and the sun trap.  It all looks better with the weeds gone.  I found the seeds purchased Friday, so I’ll be able to plant them after lunch and the nap.

    The honey house is swept out and ready for a large table and better organization.  It feels good to have a place just to store bee related things like frames, hive boxes, the smoker, smoker fuel, bee suit and gloves.

    I leveled the foundation for the divided colony and after lunch, as the winds die down toward mid-day, I’ll do my first division.  We’ll see how that goes.  This will be my third colony.  After this year I should run at four colonies until or unless I have a winter kill or disease.

    A full outside day with pleasant (60 degree) temps and a light breeze.  Not like the 40 mph gusts from yesterday.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees Garden Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Fitter

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                       Waxing Flower Moon

    Kate called from the Northstar.  She arrives in Anoka at 5:52.  She took the light rail to Target Field and caught the train home from there.  Feels like living in Connecticut.  I’m glad to have her home.  This is a two-person house and needs both of us to make it run smoothly.

    Got the results of the fitness assessment I did last week.   The heart rate thresholds were not very dissimilar from the ones I had been using, though the max is about 10 beats higher and the mid-range of low is about 3 beats higher.  I got some good recommendations on how to modify my aerobic work and, as I hoped, the whole experience gave me a jump start back to the more comprehensive workout I had been doing before Christmas.  It involves flexibility, muscle warmup and stretching and resistance.  I kept faith with the cardio, but I’d let the other stuff slide.

    Spread more compost and worked it in.  I’m almost ready to plant.  In fact I may plant tomorrow morning before I amend the soil in the next bed, the one with the garlic and the lilies.  The garlic and onions and parsnips look healthy, as does the asparagus and the strawberries.  The bed for the leeks and the sugar snap peas and the bok choy needs some weeding and some soil amending, too.  In the next day or two I should have all the transplants and seeds in that go in now.  Just got word that the potatoes are on their way, so I have to get some more composted manure for the potato/bush bean bed.

    Last night I did research on four of the ArtRemix objects and I’ll finish all 8 of them before Friday.  The tour itself is not until May 7th.  Thrashing around the enlightenment, romanticism, modernism, Liberalism, post-modernism, Vico and Rousseau.  I want to arrive at a synthesis between enlightenment thought and the thought of its primary critics, those in the romantic family of thinkers:  Rousseau, Hegel, Kant, Vico, Burke, Hume.  Maybe somebody else has done it, but I want to do it my way.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Family Garden Health Humanities 📎and tagged

  • Leeks, Shame and Ancestry

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                           Waxing Flower Moon

    The new dog food must be a mistake.  The whippets did not eat at all this morning, the big dogs ate little.  Hilo (our smallest whippet) is in her crate with what I take to be a belly ache since she doesn’t look seriously ill.  How do I know?  Well, I don’t really, but I’ve seen multiple dogs in extremis over the years and she just doesn’t look like one.  I diagnose it to be a tummy revolt against the salmon and sweet potato I found so alluring.  I bought six bags at 35 pounds a bag.

    As any good chef, if the public refuses to eat the food I’ve chosen, I have to have a different menu selection.  In this case it will be food they’ve always liked.  Off to Costco.  Oh, and I can get that salt for the water softener, too.

    Leeks, basil, thyme, fennel, marigolds, lettuce and oregano starts sit in the front yard right now, still in the cardbox carriers Mother Earth Gardens gave me for them.  Later today, in the mid-afternoon, when it warms up into the high 50’s, I’ll continue planting this year’s garden.

    The leeks especially excite me because I want to learn how to grow this delectable vegetable.  It is, after all, the crown vegetable of Wales.  By that I mean Welsh soldiers would often wear a leek stuck in their hats.  No, I don’t know why, but the leek and Wales have a long standing relationship.  The ancestry I can trace most clearly is Welsh; I can put us in 17th century Denbigh, so I gotta learn how to grow leeks.  Besides, I really like them.  Their delicate onion like flavor is great in soups and wonderful as an addition to vegetable dishes, too.

    Welsh Leek on Reverse of 2008 Proof Gold One Pound Coin
    Also Used in 1985 & 1990

    The time while Kate’s been gone has been busy even adventure packed, though all the adventures were domestic in nature:  hiving bees, doing the complete reversal on the over-wintered colony, buying vegetables and herbs, dogs and their diet and today–the garden.

    Forgot to mention something that warmed my heart yesterday.  I called Kate yesterday and she put Ruth (granddaughter) on the phone.  Ruth told me she was about to go gymnastics and a few other things even Grandpop’s good ear couldn’t grasp through cell phone reception and voice quality.  When she gave the phone back to Kate unexpectedly, I told Kate to tell Ruth I loved her.  Kate told her.  Over the phone came a loud and confident, “I know.”  Gossh.

    Also, while on the drive out to Nature’s Nectar yesterday I began to analyze my feelings when I get under pressure.  I had a bit of those feelings then and noticed a faint, dull ache in my lower left abdomen.  To make it feel better I could tell my body wanted to lean forward and down, then to bow my head.  Oh.  Shame.  Explained a lot.  Somehow either pressure triggered shame or shame triggered pressure, perhaps both.  So, when did I remember shame and pressure together?

    When I was maybe 12 or 13, the Ellis family had moved from rental quarters on East Monroe Street into our first home purchased with a mortgage, and our last for that matter.  This house, 419 N. Canal, has that magical valence that home has.  It also had a basement that flooded during heavy rains.

    Dad was not a handy man, if anything, he was the anti-handy man.  When the basement flooded, his solution was to bail it out with buckets.  Yeah, I know, but I’m sure it was the best he could think of at the time or else he considered other solutions too expensive.  I don’t know, but I do know I had to join him often at night  in the damp to carry buckets of water up from the basement to dump outside.  I didn’t like it, hated it in fact.

    I couldn’t get away from it though and I remember having more than one fight with him over doing it.  That’s the memory I have, the one that came up when I thought about pressure and shame.  It was the perfect metaphor, too.  Bailing out a flooded basement is what my defensiveness and short-temper try to do when I sense myself backed into a corner.  Too much in the id, the just below the mainfloor area in my psyche, needs to get taken out somehow, but I still don’t like the work.

    One solution to this, if I can remember it when pressure hits again, is to stand up.  I’m an adult now, not a 12 year old and I can make my own choices about bailing the basement.  I can choose another option, like, buy a sump pump, put in a drain field, landscape the area around the house so that it slopes away from the foundation.  Lots of options. I don’t have to bend over, bow down and be conflicted.

    Just to be clear.  This is not Dad’s fault. It was the way I responded to what he thought was the best way to handle a difficult situation.  One that probably caused him pain and shame, too.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Dogs Family Great Work Health Memories permaculture 📎and tagged

  • Whew.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                  Waxing Flower Moon

    Whew.  First quiet moments since 5:45 am.  Kate and I got up, ate breakfast and headed out for the Northstar station.  The plan:  put Kate on the Northstar and I return home to get ready for my tours.  However.  Those of us in our golden years have something we take with us that is more precious than money–our meds.  In Kate’s case we weren’t sure she had packed them.  So we turned around for home.

    She needed gas in the truck, so, assuming we would need to go into the City, I stopped to get gas.  Kate looked for the meds.  They were there.  We might make the next station stop.  So, quick like a bunny we hit the road again, pulling into the Coon Rapid’s station just a bit ahead of the train.  But.  It was on the opposite set of tracks heading south.  Kate would have had to climb several stairs, scurry across the walkway, then descend a number of stairs.  Scurrying is not part of Kate’s repertoire right now.

    So I drove her into the LRT station at 1st ave and 5th street where she boarded the Hiawatha line bound for Lindbergh terminal.

    Back home.  With much less time than I’d thought.  I can still scurry.  So I did.  Shower, dress, review tour notes, drive back into the city for the tours.  Great kids, good tours.  Worthwhile in many ways.

    Over to Mother Earth Gardens to pick up leeks, some herbs and some marigolds.  Before that though I ate lunch at a coffee house right across the street.  This was full of denizens of the Longfellow neighborhood, looking at home in a genuine third space, a young woman reading a book, another watching her two kids as they burrowed through a large pile of toys.  The clerk, a tatooed young woman said, “My back is much better.  She did much better work on the back than she did on the arm.  But, what the heck, it’s only permanent.”  Wry laugh.  She had a short blue cocktail party dress and cowboy boots.

    After buying some plants, I drove back home.  Took a nap.  Got up at 3:30.  Ate a snack and tried to figure what I needed for the bees.  A few things yet to do.  I felt pressured, since I had expected the bees on Saturday.  When I feel pressured, I get confused, short-tempered and generally perform below expectations.  On my into the grocery store to pick up a spray bottle (which doesn’t work) and a four pound sack of sugar I felt that knot of worry, a diffuse sensation of not quite having things together.

    A question I had not asked before flashed through my mind.  Why do I react this way when I feel pressured?  I don’t have an answer, but I want to get one, find a way to calm myself and get into a less distracted space.

    Another 45 minutes over to Stillwater to pick up the bees at Nature’s Nectar.  I liked the folks there.  When I drove in the circular driveway, there was a garage with its door open.  The garage had packages of bees stacked on pallets with a few strays flying and buzzing through the air.  There was also a pallet load of pro-sweetener, a pre-mixed sugar water used for feeding new hives.  I’ll mix my own.  That’s what the sugar and the spray bottle were for.

    Another 45 minutes back home, but this time with  7,000 buzzing passengers and their fertile Myrtle, the queen.  Tomorrow morning I’ll level out a foundation and put them in place.  I had planned to put them the new hives in the orchard, but I’m rethinking that now and may end up putting them where the current colony is.

    The bee guy said I can go ahead and do a complete reversal tomorrow with my current colony and plan to divide in a week or so.  He has queens already.  The season is about two weeks ahead of normal.

    Anyhow, now I’m gonna kick back, then crank up for the bees tomorrow AM.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees Family Garden permaculture 📎and tagged

  • This Day, So Far

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                       Awakening Moon

    As the awakening moon wanes, its work done, life has begun to take on its growing season rhythms here at 7 oaks.  I’m hunting for weed free straw, leek transplants and onion sets.  Gotta lay down some bulb fertilizer because bulbs need extra help as they blossom.

    It’s been a productive day.  Kate and I finished our budget work for 2011–retirement budget.  It has lots of unfamiliar factors in it:  COBRA for me,  Medicare part B for Kate, shifting to checks from our retirement account, social security.  Some unknowns.  But, we look pretty good right now.

    We had lunch.  Now.  A nap.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Family Garden Great Work 📎and tagged

  • Ordinary Time

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                              Full Cold Moon

    In just two days those of us who follow the Celtic calendar will celebrate the coming of Imbolc.  I’ll write more about it on Monday, but I wanted to note here the difference in timber and resonance between post-Epiphany January and the holiseason just ended.  We move now into the ordinary days, days when the sense of expectation and sacred presence relies more on our private rituals, our own holydays.

    In my own case, for example, Valentine’s Day lends this time period a certain magic as its pre-birthday spirit invades the present.  Also, for me and my fellow Woolly Mammoths, this next week marks our annual retreat, so we get ready for it, this time again at Blue Cloud Monastery in South Dakota.  It is, too, for those with any presence in the Chinese world, just a couple of weeks before the beginning of the spring festival, or, as we know it here, Chinese New Years.  This year it begins on my birthday.

    Imbolc, too, has sacred resonance and its six week period marks the beginning of the growing season here as seeds for certain long growing season vegetables like leeks must get started.


    📂This entry was posted in Asia Faith and Spirituality Garden Great Wheel permaculture 📎and tagged

  • A Cool Night.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                    Full Flower Moon

    This is the kind of weather that can scare a Minnesota gardener.  Right now the temperature is 42.  It could, will, go lower, though the prediction says no lower than 40.  If I thought it were going to get down to freezing, I’d have to cover my new peas and turnips.  They have just poked above the soil and would suffer and most would die.

    My baby plants from inside are now adolescents; they stayed outside six hours today.  Tomorrow, I’ll put them outside by the beds where they’ll be planted and give them one more day in the peat pots before digging them in to their permanent homes.

    I cut up the potatoes today, readying them for planting, too.  They may be a little late, so we’ll see what we get.  A lot of new plants in this year’s garden: leeks, parsnips, turnips, greens, brocolli, cauliflower, plants I may not understand too well.  Again, we’ll have to see what we get.

    That kind of experimentation is one of the joys of gardening, eating something fresh that you’ve only ever had from a produce section of a supermarket.  This year marks a large expansion in our vegetable and fruit crop.  That means a lot of uncertainty, a steep learning curve with some plants.  All part of the deal.


    📂This entry was posted in Garden Great Work permaculture 📎and tagged