Unbuttoned

November 11 -a bright, sunny, and cold day. One month ago, on October 11, we had our first snowfall. Yesterday's snowfall ushered in the coldest air of the autumn. We bottom out tonight in the low single digits, but we are at 12° F this morning. There is a brisk wind, so we feel chillier than the temperature might indicate. On November 11, 1940, Minneapolis received 16 inches of snow in a surprise storm -forecasting wasn't as precise back then. In 2005, the temperature soared to 64° F on this day while 1986 had Minneapolis bottoming out at -1° F.

The many lakes of our area are open water -not yet a skin of ice on them, despite two weeks now of well-below freezing temperatures. The other day a man near Cambridge, Minnesota, not quite an hour north of downtown Minneapolis, thought it cold enough to try his feet on ice that had formed on Skogman Lake. Based on my observations, here, the ice couldn't have been more than an inch or so thick. If you've been to the lake in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, you'll notice the ice ladders stationed around it in winter. I recall watching a father and child shuffle out on the ice one day. Tragedy was averted thanks to someone more vocal than myself, whose hesitancy requires some introspection on some other day. Minnesota doesn't know what ice ladders are and I will never know confidence on ice.

As October rolls out into November, I need to have a flexibility never required by my ocean-tempered, Atlantic coast activity. We don't always have what we need, do we? Curiously, the post I just linked to, above, finished with this sentiment:

"I've grown accustomed to winter, finding solace in the recess of growth and decay. As much as I think of a new season's garden, of tomatoes and greens, peppers and garlic, it's always too much. I aim to accept what can be done and what can be done, well."

Now that winter has come to occupy an additional three months of the year, my experience of its slippery possession is that of prey who's frantic contortions allow a brief but futile escape from the quickening claws of no longer. A winter, fast, I accept like death, but with a consciousness of afterlife that offers a view to the world I no longer inhabit, a world perceivable through the bright scrim of slow-moving molecules. 

Buttoned

Box store bulbs, fifty percent off, needed unfrozen earth to plant in. With this trouble, those bulbs should have been 75% off, no? Despite two weeks of frozen temperatures, I laid rumpled plastic, held down by bricks, over a patches of bare soil. When I planted on Saturday evening (yes, this dark at 5:00 pm), the soil was pliable under my coverings. Tulips and miniature iris -good luck!

Outdoor plants brought in for winter. Potted, pruned, and placed. Now, only fungus gnats, aphids, and watering to think about.

Unbuttoned

A hanging plant frozen in its basket

The vegetable beds, tangled, leafy, and snowed upon.

Remaining siding from this summer's window and siding replacement projects. I will do some of this indoors and wait for that forty degree day to come.

The rocks. In this location, under the replaced siding and adjacent to window wells, the builder had placed Hydrangea arborescens, you know -the spreading kind with giant flopping heads. Three Minnesota hardy azaleas were placed around the bay-type window to the left. Around the base of these, one and one-half inch St. Cloud granite (gray/pink/black coloration). In order to fix the siding and the kick-plate below it, the roots, the rocks, the clay, and eventually the plastic that laid deep beneath it all was removed. The hydrangea were removed a few years ago to make the driveway border. 

Many rainy days embedded the granite rocks into the black clay earth. After grading the soil to a proper slope, replacing the edging, laying new barrier fabric and sheet plastic to shed water, the granite is only partially replaced. It is frozen to the soil, now, but it also requires pressure washing to remove the clay, which will not happen until spring.

Despite the snow and the freezing, I am still working on a few outdoor things, like gravel around the apron of the studio and cobble edging to contain it, possibly some tree felling, and rebuilding the lattice that sits beneath the front porch. Given the early depth of cold, twenty to thirty degrees below average, isn't it yet possible that we will see ten to twenty degrees above average?


 

At Home

It was back in July when we spotted the first giant puffball of the season. This was early -too early to our senses. By August's middle the water table had been coming back up, not quite draining after a moderate rainfall. The temperatures had descended to the mid to high seventies and steadily declined into the mid to high sixties by the last week of August and first of September. The trees prepared themselves, the monarchs passed through, the squirrels returned to the lawn, and the rains fell. Our autumn is upon us, and has been since mid August. I have casually mentioned to some that the season had changed, before the Minnesota State Fair -typically a late summer festival. For my observation I received a squint and pursed lips, huh blended into hmm.

To perceive the early arrival of autumn is nothing special. To read the language of our environment and to understand its meaning, in the Western mind, is like understanding Latin. Most will see an archaic text, pass over it, and only occasionally fathoming the root of some current verbiage. Millions of years of evolving, hundreds of thousands of years within this epoch of variable, yet recognizable, climate and species and still we have lost the ability to be at home in the world. I write 'at home' to indicate that set of cues that are so familiar as to become understood inconspicuously.

Our trip to Yellowstone National Park, the primary stimulus for these thoughts, offered some very unfamiliar cues. If you haven't been, go. The park is massive, often taking several hours to get from one site to your lodging. There are bison, and more worrying -grizzly bears. You are walking on a volcano, something difficult to dislodge from your steaming, sulfur-scented consciousness.

__________________________

Every season I have five, ten, maybe twenty projects to accomplish during the warm season. I typically finish three, especially when the warm season lasts only three months. This year's major project was to complete the renovation of the front lawn-vegetable garden. Above, eggplants, peppers, and cucumbers.

The far left raised bed was refurbished as it had been made from scrap decking, then a new ten foot bed was built and installed, and the remaining two beds moved from last year's location. The framing and mulching was accomplished in early June and then I moved on to other projects.

After our return from Yellowstone I set about laying the sod. We chose sod to cover the area previously covered in black plastic laid to smother creeping charlie. Sod is outside of my experience, and I messed up. When laying sod it is best to have prepped the ground ahead of time, it's best to get it unrolled in a day or two. I had to stretch it over four days and nearly composted the sod on its pallet because I hadn't the time to prepare the soil, pull the volunteer tomatoes (what was I thinking?), or deal with the unknown habits of sedge that had grown where the beds had stood the year before. 

It was only continual rain storms and the early autumn temperatures that spared me the near-total loss of live grass. I credit this for its return from tawny mush to lively green, albeit a few patches of dead remain. Although I've been spared the shame of spending a small fortune on sod and then killing it, the lack of soil preparation will undoubtedly reduce the benefits of sod over seed in the long run.

We've had a good year for brassica, getting two months of broccoli from under twelve square feet. BT worked well on the cabbage worms after I removed the floating cover fabric. I've also observed that deer do not seem to care for kale when there is so much else to eat in your garden.

My July planting of green beans were trimmed quite well by the four-legged pruning crew. But, they came back and I now have a steady supply to snack on in between mosquito raids. Unlike a national park (the "wilderness"), our place is home to us and many other creatures. Living with them feels much more natural than any wilderness experience I've had.

A new garden bed grows out an area of removed hydrangea. Scraps of plants, all flowering blue-purple, have been planted throughout the summer. In the background, the browning of a wet autumn.

Summer

Minimally sprawling, open pollinated cucumbers named Little Leaf -from Fedco Seeds. Well, they sprawl less than the Burpee cukes that went in last year, but if it weren't for some clever trellising, the would certainly have sprawled into the paths. They are now supplying about ten cucumbers (picklers) a day. In front, peppers and eggplant; both late producers. Behind, trashy solutions.

The plastic is in place to take out the creeping charlie. It will be removed in late August (late August is so close!) to put down sod. Why sod? The mat keeps out the weeds and minimizes a return of charlie. Here, where the planters were last year, we've had many seedlings of last year's vegetables. Growing up in a cool, moist winter climate, I'd never seen tomatoes sprout from last year's fallen, but in Minnesota's freezer like conditions -the seeds don't rot. We've got several of these in the plastic zone and many more were planted out at the neighbor's farm (where I keep the garlic -which is nearly all harvested).

Adjacent to the tomato is a snapping turtle's nest of eggs to be hatched, we hope, sooner than later. Betsy wants to leave a patch of soil for the mother turtle to return to yearly -but I'd rather it not be in the middle of the grass I'm about to plant. I suspect she'll find the bare patch of soil if I leave it nearby. Funny thing is that I never see any turtles around our place -yet I know there is a giant snapper living out there, somewhere, and then two dozen or so babies head towards the wetlands in fall.

The hydrangea -floppy top. Heavy, as soon as the first real rain hits them, over they go. This year they have been eaten by the deer, pom poms and all. Sometimes they enter the vegetable garden for a second course, should they not get their fill on hydrangea. They've also eaten down the thorny, climbing rose on the trellis -leaving only a full top above their reach. They eat tomato vines, cucumber vines, even buckthorn this year. At my neighbor's garden, they've not only pruned my tomatoes to an even sixteen inches and peppers to eight, they've consumed his giant pumpkin plant -spines and all, a first. They haven't touch the dino kale, potatoes, and garlic.

In summer, gardens do their thing -as do we. This year it is a medley of siding, painting, customer projects, teaching, and exhibitions. I see the work to be done in the garden and it must wait. Seedlings in trays suffer my inattention -yet I keep my eye on these things just enough for them to tug at my desire to do more than is humanly possible.

The front garden is being encroached on by the woods, particularly younger maples that quickly shade out sun loving plants. Oaks and ironwoods do not do this. It's hard to take down living creatures, but the maples will likely meet the chainsaw come late autumn -after I pick up a new chainsaw. The old Stihl croaked last year as I cleared a fallen maple from a path.

Around that front garden is a retaining wall into which I have been ever so slowly moving large stones. The soil is miserable under road bed stuff from last year's gravel driveway rehab. I've got compost to add to the mix, over there, in the shade, now two years old, waiting for my attention and a shovel. Afterward, maybe in autumn, plants will be re-organized to deal with the expanded garden.

One of two woodland edge prairie-savanna hardly-gardens I planted after the studio was finished. These change every year. Without a supply of fresh black-eyed susan seed, it looks rather green. Prairie seed mixes can be rudbekia lush, but the plant tends to diminish once shaded out by perennial grasses and forbs. It's a biennial, so the third season the profusion is limited to small, fuzzy leaves -often at the edge of where they showed up en masse the year before. Each season different plants dominate -this year will no doubt be asters and goldenrod, to the point at which I will likely be thinning them out. Lavender-colored Monarda fistulosa in the background.

The second prairie-savanna garden has a dumpster in front of it, so no pictures of that this summer. The dumpster takes in insulation, wood, old rotting siding and a window or two. I've been replacing siding, piecemeal, every warm season as I convert the house from the pukey-pink paint you can see in the background, above, to the umber-magenta grey visible in the foreground. This garden, along a path from a back door to the studio, is hosta-heavy, magically invisible to the deer thus far.




The brilliant, but less prolific (in these drier conditions ) than I wish American Bellflower, Campanulastrum americanum, is blue-purple in the background. To the left, the very prolific Blue Lobelia, Lobelia siphilitica, about to bloom and a black-eyed susan that found a way to full form.

It May Be July

Just finished putting together the new vegetable beds. Four raised beds, each about 12 inches tall. The herb bed was the first, back near the greenhouse. Then the two nearer, each already around for a couple of seasons, but moved yearly. After attempting to grow vegetables plunked in the middle of the  lawn, I soon realized that it wasn’t going to work.  We didn’t want to mow around sprawling vines and the shade allowed aggressive creeping charlie to truly creep.

I concocted this new scheme, very much wood chipped, framed by cedar ripped on the table saw and spiked with rebar to hold it in place. Once dreamed up, I set about building the final raised bed. The lawn will be rebuilt on three sides, plenty far from the beds.

Tomatoes are supported by two zinc-coated irrigation pipes plugged into 5/4 cedar deck boards also ripped on the table saw. String is attached to the leading vines and wound over the pipe. The tension created with this type of system keeps tomato vines from ever flopping over. I’ve never applied this system before, mostly due to laziness and lack of necessity. It’s neat -I like that, but it requires a willingness to reduce the number of tomato producing leaders. We won’t need so many as all our other tomato starts are planted in the neighbor’s garden, just downhill from the garlic. 

This was the same, June 21, not much more than three weeks ago.

The Slough

A busy life, the return of mosquitoes and then the ever more aggravating deer fly, have kept me from the woods -through which I must pass to get to the back slough. The slough, a small natural woodland basin bordered on its west by an old gravel pit, has become wetter over the last decade. Prior owners of the neighboring pit decided it would be more useful filled and so introduced a stream of trucks dumping their fill.  We believe this raised the water table and is the reason our woodland vernal pond supporting silver maples and green ash has become a permanent swamp; one that has dried, only temporarily, a couple of years out of ten. The last of the trees within its bounds has died and the aggressively spreading, wet soil tolerant canary reed grass has taken hold in the newly sunny slough.

Yesterday morning a meso-scale storm passing just to our north provided a strong draft and mosquito-free window to pass through the woods. The last time I gazed upon this rapidly changing two acres it was a pond pushing beyond its bounds. Now, the lower water table of summer has changed it to a burgeoning meadow; the remains of duckweed sitting on a crust of drying muck.

Canary Reed Grass, Phalaris arundinacea

Although I seeded a portion of the slough in December with what is called a detention mix, I'm not surprised to see an abundance of human-bred, hybrid canary reed grass, Phalaris arundinacea.

It is a surprise to see the blue flag, Iris versicolor, I planted two years ago continuing to bulk up, maybe even thrive, despite the competition from so much mad dog skullcap, Scutellaria lateriflora.

This sedge, "weeded" out of a wetland edge of a nearby lakefront residence, has begun to transform the northwestern edge of the slough. I hope to see it "make a stand" against the encroachment of canary reed grass.

I purchased seeds of another grass, prairie cord grass, but have been hesitant to distribute the seeds. It is a native, warm season slough grass that I intended to use as a foil to the cool season canary reed grass. Like canary, it spreads by rhizomes and can be aggressive. Although it grows all over Minnesota, further reading led me to think that the six to eight foot grass may not be the right choice. I'd rather be out ten dollars in seed than dealing with another grass, not currently present, that then spreads too widely. My curiosity, however, gets the best of me -I have tray-seeded a few to see how they grow.

As more storms approached from the north, I pressed on toward the little wetland to see how it has changed since the high water of late spring. Water sheds from the surrounding moraine, draining through two gullies, then filters through two wetlands to pool at the bottleneck that leads to our driveway culvert. Earlier this spring I cleared the growing stand of buckthorn from the floodplain surrounding the bottleneck. Dying ash and falling box elder have opened the canopy here, letting in more sun.

In early June I made an attempt to slow the spread of canary reed grass weakened by five weeks of flood waters. Wearing knee high rubber boots, I cut any grass growing along the perimeter of the open water with a weed trimmer. Although it has come back now that the water has receded, it has done so less vigorously -a rather minor victory. If I want to maintain open water here, or better yet, introduce sedge and other wetland plants, I'll need to continue to fight back the canary reed grass which has a stranglehold on much of the small wetland.

Last Saturday I spent an hour at a nearby natural landscape contractor's end of season native plant sale. Most of my purchases (only $2.50 per plant!) were infill for my prairie plantings, but I did buy a couple of wetland plants. Above, ironweed, Vernonia fasciculata, has a wetland indicator status of facultative (FACW). This means it usually occurs in wetlands -66 to 99 percent of the time. This wetland status and my failure to grow it successfully in my dry Brooklyn garden led me to choose the flood plain as its new home.

My other purchase, broad-leaved arrowhead, Sagittaria latifolia, has a wetland status of obligate wetland (OBL) which means that it occurs in wetlands nearly 100 percent of the time. This plant prefers standing water and at least partial sun, so I placed in the pool that collects at the bottleneck, a stones throw from the ironweed.

We've been in a very wet period, receiving several inches of rain over the last two weeks. The tropical air and daily storms are expected to last through the week. Over the last 24 hours we've received over 3 inches of rain, and another three plus within the last ten days, bringing the water table back up to where it was in late May. This morning, braving the mosquitoes, I ventured to see the arrowhead I planted two days back -but it is missing, most likely it has tipped over into the muck under the rising water.

Intersection 53

The last three weeks of May were owned by the selection of images from seventeen thousand, color correcting, titling, and finally writing statements for the exhibition of photographs made during my artist in residence experience at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve. Below is the catalog for the exhibit that is still on view at the Waseca Art Center until June 28th. Please note that the PDF viewer may not display properly, or at all, on mobile devices.





Many events, both life and landscape, have occurred since my last journal entry, when we were still snowbound in mid-April. But these will need to be drawn at a later date -maybe soon, possibly not. Summer is now upon us and it commands within me an unceasing freneticism as it does all warmth loving life.

Thank you for reading.

Osiris Rising

Winter began at the end of January. The low temperature, early Wednesday morning, January 30, bottomed at -34℉ with a high temperture of -16℉. In February, temperatures did not get very much above 10℉, and were often below zero.

My wife described these low temperatures in this way -one feels surrounded. Imagine you stepped outside of your plane on a flight across country...

When it's minus thirty you can play around with making clouds with boiling water.

I retreated to Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve one last time to work on some writing. The moon rose, and later that night, the second of several significant snowfalls began.

The snow piles higher; sliding off roofs, snow blown, and accumulation.

The icicles grow longest on the upper floors -some over six feet long.

Ice dams form where house heat melts roof snow, where the weight of snow compresses it at the edges of a roof.

By February 20th we had the snowiest February on record -with still more snow to come. By the same date, however, one begins to think of what else may come -warmth! With it comes melting, wet snows, even rain. The weight on the roof is probably okay under the cold regime, but snow is like a sponge -lighter when dry and heavier when wet. Ordinarily welcome, the warmth could become a problem.

It is easy to imagine the return of glacial lake Agassiz, forming as rainfall accumulates between a snow pack of thirty inches, four foot snow mounds, and the frozen ground. I begin to clear areas previously left untouched -in front of the greenhouse, the sidewalk between the house and front yard and six feet beyond the walkway between the house and the backyard.

I even cleared a path to the compost pile -you can almost make it out on the far right, above. This was to keep us from trudging knee deep to dump the bucket, but also to give the melt water a place to travel down slope, away from the house.

Then it was time for the inevitable: clearing the roof. Wind helped keep some edges below sixteen inches, but other spots were above eighteen inches. This view is akin to a core sample -each storm depositing more snow, compressing under the weight of the next. The upper portion is the thickest and lightest, the bottom crispy and snow-cone like.

One of my better purchases: insulated rubber boots: good to -20℉.

When climbing out a window into a thirty inch snow drift, mind the space above your head. This icicle was disturbed by my head, broke, and dropped on my noggin -not a good way to start shoveling snow off of the roof.

On March 10 we woke up to another six or seven inches of snow. This time the temperature was in the mid to high twenties and the snow sticky: aka wet snow -a sign of things to come.

A six foot tall azalea has little positive things to say about six inches of wet snow. We have noticed that between -30℉ and 30℉, the azalea leaves change form. Warmer temperatures show leaves that are open wide and flat. At colder temperatures, the leaves are tightly rolled.

By Tuesday, March 12, the air was a warm and dewy 37℉. That's when the rain started to fall. By Wednesday, we had a morning fog with near white out conditions. It continued to rain through Thursday -leading to flood reports across several Midwestern States. 

There is little moderation in the Midwestern climate -at times, we can span 70 degrees in a couple of days. On the coasts, even within a three week period, to experience below zero temperatures at the beginning and sixty degrees Fahrenheit at its end, is unheard of. With over thirty inches of snow on still frozen ground across the entire state, days of rain, and the increasing temperature to near 60℉ by Saturday, we will see large scale flooding.

Like Osiris rising from the dead, so too is spring. The geese were heard flying over just a few days ago. The birds, winter friendly, are spring noisy. The popping of basswood, Tilia americana, trunks were heard echoing among the woods on a sunny afternoon of twenty-five degrees -calling us out to tap sugar maples for sap.

From winter weather to spring in bird song.

Momento Vivere

Forty five days beyond the solstice in this coldest of states...

 ...buds form on plants dug up this past October.

The sun's elevation is high enough to energize plants placed below the sills of windows; the salvias and pelargoniums, the capsicum and rosmarinus.

In the long winter everyone has their coping strategy, but a good dose of sunlit snow, long blue shadows, and eager plants are a reminder at five degrees below zero.

 Pelargonium, otherwise known as geranium, will go into its third outdoor season, late this May.

Three weeks back, this pepper plant was profuse with blooms. Now it is, as far as overwintering peppers that were dug from the garden can be, profuse with fruit.

 The petals stick to the fruit without wind to shake or rain to wash them toward the ground.

Last year, this jalapeno, a thick and woody stemmed specimen twice ripped from its raised bed, produced winter flowers but no February fruit. It is now getting ready to produce flowers again. Time will tell if it is as up to the task as its cousin across the room. Two summers running, this pepper has produced a fine crop of jalapenos.

A long raceme of indigo blue flowers emerge from near-black calyxes seen in the second image above.

Salvia elegans, or pineapple sage, pushed into perenniality in my New York City garden, is now pushed into houseplant duty every October. We usually get a week or so of blooms in the garden beds before a freeze forces it into a pot, then into the greenhouse, then into the studio, and finally resting in the sunny south window, where it blooms in February, once again.