• Tag Archives spring

  • We Inch, Slowly, Toward Spring

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                                 Waxing Bee Hiving Moon

    Kate comes home tonight.  Yeah!  I miss her when she’s gone. I’ll follow our usual procedure and pick her up at the Loon Cafe, conveniently located at the end of the light rail service 650-herb-spiralfrom the airport.  Makes the drive much shorter and I get a good meal in the bargain.

    After the biting and the barking and the adrenaline I figured out a somewhat complicated solution to the Rigel/Sollie problem.  It involves making sure that one set of dogs is in their crate before admitting the others to the house.  This way nobody trespasses on anybody else’s territory.

    It demands a careful watching of when Rigel and Vega are away hunting so I can let Sollie, Gertie and Kona inside.  Or, alternatively, when Rigel and Vega are on the deck and the others are out hunting.  A bit baroque I know but I have no more indentations in the leg.

    (pics from April of last year)

    As the Bee Hiving moon goes from New to Full, our yard will lose its snow and we will have several species of flowers in bloom, a few vegetables in the ground and as it begins to wane we should have our new bees hived and happy in their new homes.  There are things that need to happen before this last, not the least moving the hives to the orchard, cleaning all the frames of propolis and burning the old hive boxes and frames I got from Mark, the bee mentor.650-apple-blossoms

    Seeing the bulbs planted in the fall begin to emerge always heartens me because it reminds me of hours of labor spent in the cool air of late October or early November.  We won’t be here for that time next year, so probably no new bulbs this year.

    In fact, I’m declaring finished to our orchard, garden, vegetable, bee expansions.  We’ll stick with no more than three hives, the raised beds and other beds we have in the vegetable garden, the trees and bushes we have in the orchard and the flower beds we have in place now.

    We’ll always have to replace dead plants and put in new ones in their place.  We have to care for the fruit trees and bushes, plant vegetables and maintain the bee colonies so we’ll have to plenty to keep us occupied.  I just want to get good at the stuff we have and begin to slowly limit the work we do over the course of the year.


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

  • Breakthrough!

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring Waxing Bee Hiving Moon

    I have made several entries private and will explain that decision on Sunday. Stay tuned.

    The snow has only a few strongholds left in our front yard though the back and the woods still has plenty. The garden behind our patio has daffodil stems through the 06-27-10_marigoldeyeviewearth, a bit yellow at the top, then light green, then a darker green. Soon there should be other bulbs breaking through including some I’d forgotten I planted in the orchard.

    This is the transition week for our place, when the snow disappears and the greening begins. I’m excited to see the garden come to life. When the bees come, some time after April 23rd, it will feel like the whole gangs back together. I’m hopeful that the orchard will start producing this growing season. We’ll see.

    I want to get some more woodchips down right away in the orchard, perhaps in the vegetable garden, too. 670_0300

    It’s also time for serious clean up work in the back. I got distracted last fall and didn’t keep up with the maintenance as well as I could. Then, there’s all those tree branches split by the heavy first snowfall last November. So, plenty of outside work.

    We ate the last of our potatoes just two weeks ago and still have garlic, yellow onions, honey, and canned vegetables from several years.  We couldn’t make it as pioneers but we’re doing well at supplementing our diet.  More.  We tune our lives to natural rhythms, especially in the growing season.

    That original revelation to us that Emerson talks about is coming along out here in Andover.


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

  • Mindfulness

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                      Waxing Bloodroot Moon

    We’ve begun the slippery, muddy slide into the growing season, though I understand some of the parking lot snow piles, many well over 8 feet high and some much higher than that, will take a long time to melt.  Maybe months, into the summer.  The snow always pleases me as it falls and as it covers our world, now over 120 days straight with snow cover, but there is a time when it becomes a nuisance.  The snow went beyond nuisance this year and became a definite hazard as it has become impossible around the piled snow at many city intersections.  When driving the Celica out of the garage here, I’ve not been able to see traffic on 153rd since late December.  In that regard I will be not sorry to see the snow melt away.  On balance, though, I get far more pleasure from the snow than I do hassle, so when it’s time again, I’ll be ready.

    Leslie’s mindfulness presentation this morning was wonderful.  We drew mandalas, did a guided meditation and ate a strawberry, a grape, a piece of cheese and a hunk of bread with intention and attention.  We washed it down with water and tea.  Each bite was an adventure.  Made me aware of how unmindful I am when I eat.  Also brought me into the present.  It was a Be. Here. Now. time.  Gotta get back to the meditation, discovered I missed it.

    South America.  A lot to learn in the next six months plus.  In addition to scoping out the ports, already somewhat begun, I’ll read at least one comprehensive history of the continent, an ecological history and a natural history.  I want to find a reasonably priced geography, too.  The ones I have found so far are damned expensive.  One of the values of traveling is its ability to make the distant, close and the abstract, real.  There’s a definite gestalt to lengthy travel in a part of the world unknown.  At some point, a point uncertain, an understanding snaps into place, a combination of prior experience, preparation and that small market in Manta, Ecuador, the smells of Santa Marta, Colombia, the sight of glaciers around Punta Arenas.  Then, like the Velveteen Rabbit, South America will become real for me.

    Often, I take along some literature, too, perhaps some Allenda, Losa, maybe I’ll just take take a Hundred Years of Solitude and read it again.  The phrase book, too.

    Grocery store now.


    📂This entry was posted in Asia Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Travel 📎and tagged

  • Good for the Crops

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                               Full Planting Moon

    Much of our garden is a couple of weeks ahead of schedule.  If it doesn’t produce leggy plants that focus on leaves, that should mean increased productivity for the vegetables.  Since we would not have put the honey supers on the parent colony until after the division and since division is normally done on or around May 15th, we’re a couple of weeks ahead on honey production, too.  To paraphrase a canard I’ve seen a lot of late, we write the garden plans in pencil, mother nature, however, controls the eraser.

    One of the chief delights of the docent program at the MIA is the number of intelligent autodidacts you get to meet.    I’m sure there are other collecting points for such people, but it takes a person committed to new knowledge to start the two-year training program and its three years after obligation for tours.  Since many of the people, over half I’d say, are retirement age or close to it, this signals a willingness to take on challenge at a point that many people dream of the eternal game of golf or the everlasting fishing expedition, a forever weekend of quilting bees or an eternity of television induced stupefaction.

    Summer colds have a special insult, that drug down feeling contrasts sharply with the sunny weather and the pleasant temperatures.  I slept poorly last night, but I got up with the dogs this am because they’re like cattle.  You have to feed them and care for them no matter how you feel.  A good thing, really, but it didn’t feel like it at 7:00 am.

    Onto Ovid, then back to bed.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Bees Friends Garden Health 📎and tagged

  • The Great Wheel

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                              Waxing Flower Moon

    As spring winds down toward Beltane on May 1st, the green up has taken on an accelerated pace.  We have leaves on trees like the Amur Maples, ash and feathery new leaves on the oaks as well.   The daffodils and tulips have brightened our April for some weeks now.  The more integrated I become to this property and its transitions, the more I can layer them in my head.  That is, as this moment of greening and flowering promises a new season, the needed resurrection of the plant world, I can also see late August and September when the florescence begins to yield to brown, to decay, to dieing back.  The two are not polar opposites but places on a continuum that extends not only from season to season but from year to year, decade to decade, century to century.

    This layered sensibility is one of the privileges of staying in place, where the rhythms of the land call different things out of me.   As Rachel Carson said, “There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrain of nature–the assurance that dawn comes after night, spring after winter.”

    This rhythm, the Great Wheel, teaches us about our experience of life, about life’s ongoing struggle against entropy, a struggle always lost, yet a struggle always valiant and often joyful even though destined to end in tragedy.

    I hope your life has a springtime right now, one in which the trees have begun to leaf out, the daffodils have bloomed and the first vegetables have started their journey toward your table.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Garden Great Wheel Great Work Humanities Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Awakening in the Dark

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                              Waxing Awakening Moon

    Rolled down the car window–oops, anachronism.  Pushed the button which slid the window down–and the scent of moist earth rolled into the truck.  Peat moss mixed with new plant and freshly unfrozen water carried along by a light spring breeze.  Tonight the awakening moon continues to swell, move toward full, growing in synchronicity with the planet 250,000 miles away; its dance partner in this long running marathon.  We squeeze her, she pulls our waters and squeezes us.  A dancer and her consort.

    The world for now, our part of the world, moves in darkness and I find the quiet soothing.  The night calms this exurban area down to peaceful.  Silence does not need to be sought; it comes to us as the hour moves past 9:00 pm or so.  If only for these dark hours, we have a hermetic isolation, nothing visible out the windows except stars and the moon.

    The longer I study art history, mix with the objects at the MIA, the more I tend to see much of the world through the lens of art.  It’s not a matter of finding art that fits a moment or an idea; rather, it’s as if paintings or sculpture or movies or prints or masks rise up from the unconscious, suggest themselves as a way, a path into an experience.  Here on the website I often choose, usually choose, literal relationships but in day to day life the moments are more ephemeral, less one to one.

    Let me see if I can think of an example.  A train whistle late at night may call to mind Honthorst’s “Denial of St. Peter.”  Perhaps it’s the association of a night scene and a sound transformed by being heard at night.  I don’t know.

    This is hard, it doesn’t really happen exactly like that, it’s more suggestive, subliminal.  Evanescent. Like the dying tone of the train as it moves further away into the darkness.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Asia 📎and tagged

  • Spring

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                  Waxing Awakening Moon

    Today is the spring equinox.  We’ve made it through another winter.

    The bees have already begin to buzz and plant life has pushed light green shoots through the soil.   The days have begun to warm and yesterday I felt the warmth of the sun on my neck.  What a treat!

    Spring, more than anything else, presses us into realm of fertility and abundance, the efflorescence of mother earth that feeds us all.  Birds come back from their winter homes.  Gardener’s start plants for their gardens.  Some folks lift their house, an expression I heard first in Minnesota.  It means spring cleaning.  Or spring cleaning means lifting the house.  Whatever.

    This is a good day to consider the things that are tender shoots in your life.  Maybe’s its that new package of bees on the way from California, that novel you finally set down to write, that language you finally got started on.  Maybe it’s a redesign of your living space, your occupational space, your own, internal space.  Remember that tender shoots require care, yes, but also remember that those tender shoots have power behind them, power rooted in the part of you that made them surface.  Some of those shoots, most of them, the best thing you can do, let them flourish at their pace.  Don’t force them.

    Watch for baby birds, puppies, infants, kittens, new plants.  They are the concrete hope out of which we make not only this world, but the future one, too.  They are reason you exist, to care for them, to provide a nourishing environment for their growth.  Those tenders shoots in your life are the same.  They are the concrete hope out of which you will make these moments in your life and the future ones.  So, be kind to them.  Let’em grow.


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

  • The Sun! The Sun!

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                        Waning Wild Moon

    On these days I often think of Fantasy Island, when Tatto would say, The plane!  The plane!  I want to run outside in the street and yell, The sun!  The sun!  After a long run of dreary weather the sight of the sun climbing higher and higher in the sky bucks us up and makes us eager for the end of winter.  By now we have earned our spring and the joys of the cold and snow have begun to fade when weighed against the possibility of flowers and vegetables and outdoor walks.

    Most of us do not come to this place without some regret and I’m among them, a part of me yearning for the depths of winter with its ascetic cold and its spare landscape, but the gardener in me has begun to awaken, thinking of which vegetable to put in which plot, how much, what new flowers might look good.

    Another 1,300 words in before Kate and I began to check our work chapter 6 of Wheelock.  She’s improving fast, as I knew she would.  Working together does make a difference, a major positive difference.  And just think how surprised the natives will be when we start using our newly acquired Latin on them.

    What’s that?  All dead?  Really?  Whoa, that’s a pity, all this language and no place to speak it.

    Sierra Club legcom tonight.  7:00 pm sharp.


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

  • Rites of Spring

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    52  bar rises 29.94  2mph NW  dewpoint 20 Beltane, sunny

                    Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon

    Nope, this isn’t about naked pagans dancing under a full moon.  Sorry.

    Rather, it’s about those things we do.  In spring. 

    The Mickman’s guy just left.  “Charlie,” he said, “We came through the winter pretty good.  Just one dead sprinkler.”  He handed me a sandy, wet plastic sprinkler head, smiled and went on his way.

    Kate bought her annual supply of, well, annuals.  Alyssum, impatiens and coleus.  She’ll go back for a few more.

    We prepared and planted new beds, cleaned old ones.

    The furnace last ran in April, but, unlike most years we have not turned on the air conditioning yet.

    The dogs spend more and more time outside, just like we do.

    The guy who cleans the gutters and does the outside windows will show up after the cottonwoods disperse their seeds.

    We moved the snowblower to the back of the garage bay and the riding lawnmower to the front.  These are his and hers machines.  Snowblower–his.  Lawnmower–hers.

    We have all of these mechanical/electronic servants.  Instead of a gardener, we have a sprinkler system and a riding mower.   Instead of servants working mechanical fans we have an air conditioner.  Instead of a summer kitchen we have Vent-a-Hoods.  Instead of the post office we have e-mail.  Instead of shopping in real world stores we have Internet retailers.

    These are sophisticated technological devices and they replace human labor of the domestic variety with skilled human labor.  The skilled folks make more money because they work in several locations rather than just one.

    I find though, that when I work in the garden, I prefer hand tools:  a spade, a spading fork, pruning saw, trowel, rake.  In general  I allow only one mechanical tool into my work on our grounds.  The chainsaw.  It replaces labor I’m not sure I could perform even if I had the time.  On occasion I’ll rent an industrial strength chipper, but only after many hours cutting down trees and brush, then delimbing.  I plan to rent a stump grinder sometime this spring, but that’s a very special purpose piece of equipment.  Otherwise it’s shovel and pick, adz and drawknife.  Small sledge hammer, wire cutters and bolt cutters, Japanese weeding knife, serrated sickle and unserrated sickle.  A tool in the hand is worth two in the bush.  Or something like that.


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

  • Tea Master for a Day

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    46  bar falls 29.96 3mph NNW dewpoint 25

              Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

    Last night the moon of winds cast shadows on our yard, elongated dogwoods, thick oak trunks and thin lines of multiple raspberry canes.  This point in the seasonal change is delicate.  Thin ice forms a lattice over the snow while tiny drops of water gather along the roof line ready to plummet the final distance to the earth.  Snow and grass play encirclement with grass spreading outward from trees and shrubs while the snow holds its own over the lawn, the hills and prairie grass.  Here there daubs of photosynthetic green have begun to appear.  Rosemary beneath the steps.  Tufts of grass up close to the house.  It is a gradual change for the moment, but soon the earth will leap and shout, fly flags of bright colors and clothe itself again in verdant splendor.

    Tour today with students, 6th graders, from a Muslim school in Fridley.  As near as I could tell, the kids were mostly Somalia, all born here, but there parents emigrated.  I had the boys, David Fortney had the girls.  We circled each other for half an hour in the Islamic gallery as these children drank in the physical objects of their cultures, linking themselves to the Seljuk Turks, the Safavid Persians and the Mughals of India.  After half an hour we went into the Weber Collection (Japanese traveling exhibition).  I asked them to become tea masters selecting objects for a tea ceremony for persons unfamiliar with Japanese art.

    We saw Hotei reach for the moon and a Zen monk’s ordination festival.  We learned wabi from the Negoro ware with its faded red lacquer, worn and used; we learned sabi from the tea wares, especially the lumpy and imperfect mizusashi.  I read them a Daoist poem and its conversion into a Buddhist poem by the extraction of only one line, spun downward in a flowing cursive script.  Time went fast and at the end they picked objects for their tea ceremony:  8 Views of Xiao and Xiang, the delicate miniature Song dynasty-like landscape, the Negoro spoon, the tea caddy with a silk cover, Oribe teaware and a few dishes for tea food.  Then we were done.

    Afterward I copied and copied and copied, even to the end of the toner cartridge, material on Chinese bronzes.  I have a tour on Saturday that will focus only on our Chinese bronzes.  I chose them because I wanted to go deeper into the world of early Chinese dynasties like the Shang and the Chou and the Han.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Great Wheel Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged