Where Have I Been

It's been awhile, and maybe it shouldn't have been. As you can see by the square-formatted images below, I have been spending too much time working for Instagram. Much more of my warm weather time is spent repairing our house in the woods (prior post). Yet much of that work should be ending soon as we approach freezing.

I took a break -really forced myself to cease working on siding and house painting to make a visit to our neighbors, adjacent to our woods, on the southern edge along the powerline. Luck has given us great neighbors, a couple -half from Minnesota and the other half from eastern Pennsylvania. Their property was formerly part of a farm, as was ours, but ours was the woodlot and the wetland waste where old car parts, appliances, and other mysteries were dumped (ravines were farmers' dumping grounds).

 

We grow what vegetables we can in one hundred and forty square feet of raised beds in the sunniest portion of our front yard. The remainder of what we grow, including my garlic, happens at the neighbors' garden patch.  

 

  You’ll see some of my native and non native plants growing in rows here (for sale next spring!) and hard to believe -my first successful carrot (just one -is that success?).  

 

And the greenhouses -where I now have the pick of the last tomatoes which will be sauce as soon as I can get to it.

The balance created by visiting open space while spending much of my time within the woods is restorative. I grew up not far from the sea -I would go there whenever I needed that open space. The desert I lived in, now over twenty years ago, also provided it. Now, the neighbor’s cleared ten acres and garden patch does the same.

 

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?


 

Do The Right Thing...

...and plant some goldenrod, Solidago species, somewhere on your grounds. As I painted this portion of the house a few weeks ago, creatures of all stripes feasted. 

The bumble.

Sweat Bee, Augochlora pura (Pure Green Augochlora). I used to call them Christmas ball bees.

No pollinating insects ever seen on the mums. Is it because of the frog? I don't think so.

After the Solidago species decline, the asters, or what used to be called asters, take over where the goldenrod left off to provide insects with their last great bounty of pollen for the season. Here in the woods we have lots of, err, asters. I purchased Sky Blue or Azure Aster, Symphyotrichum oolentangiense, to add to the intense yellows of the mini prairie/savannah I planted at north eastern edge of the new studio building. I tray seeded Short's Aster, Symphyotrichum shortii, for shaded to partly shaded areas south of the building but under a large basswood tree. Then there are the many that grow quite naturally in the woods and more commonly, at its edges. I was close to naming them all, until they changed the names! 

Although a well-blooming sedum will give asters and goldenrod a run for their money. There was a record Painted Lady, Vanessa cardui, migration this year. A September day with sun could easily show dozens in the garden.

Sadly, not all Monarchs make the transition. This one had its wing in dried in a coil.

As I write we are well into autumn. This yellow leaf landing on the still immature iceberg lettuce nearly three weeks ago.

And my single summer sprouted green bean is producing a bounty -just one plant has provided plenty.

The Hallow

The leaves have largely left the trees yet there hasn't been much of a freeze. A few weeks ago I wouldn't have thought this to be, after that first bitter morning gave us the shiv. My projects continue, in fact some have come to flower, not a moment too early, like the sage, better late than not at all. Things have turned around through early mid November.

Broccoli laid out last April, still in bed, dreaming up florets. It's both in flower and production, an odd duck in brassica land.

Whereas summer planted broccoli is beginning to form heads that should never set flower.

October came with a few freeze warnings but has chosen a different path. Just once did a clear night after a warm day provide a frosting for the garden.

Eggplant is an impressive plant -it takes long to establish but is one of the last to go. Its tolerance of light frost is likely due to the insulation provided by its pubescent leaves.

Starbursts of fennel, they did not produce meaty bottoms or seed.

_________________

Halloween is the Christmas of autumn (see that the box store has both decorations on display simultaneously). It was named Hallowmas long ago (Shakespeare: "like a beggar at Hallowmas"), and stems from Hallow evening (Hallow e'ening). All Hallow's Eve, the 31st of October (it used to be in May), the evening preface to All Saints Day on November the first. On November the second we have All Souls Day because you cannot mix the especially good with the rest of us. We speculate that the Church ordained these holy (hallow) rites on these autumnal dates to commingle with the rites of the pagans. Remembering the martyrs and saints and even the common dead must have had a very different tone in the warm growth of spring.

The emotions and attitude of growing darkness, chilling air, graying, stormier days, and the browning of plant life despite plentiful harvests could lead a mind to superstition and omen. Superstition leads us to an awareness of sin, that our darkening days in the face of so much good fortune must be accounted for, and that we account for it by accusing ourselves of the darkness that we confront at the cold edge of autumn. What else could have been offered, holy or pagan, to salve the confrontation with the portent of one's death from cold, disease, or starvation? Think of the dead -the saints and the rest as you enjoy today's plenty in the sweet of a soul cake.

"A soul! a soul! a soul-cake!
Please good Missis, a soul-cake!
An apple, a pear, a plum, or a cherry,
Any good thing to make us all merry.
One for Peter, two for Paul
Three for Him who made us all.

 Down into the cellar,
And see what you can find,
If the barrels are not empty,
We hope you will prove kind.
We hope you will prove kind,
With your apples and strong beer,
And we'll come no more a-souling
Till this time next year."

By Christmas, as the larder dwindled from plenty to rations at the grim precipice of the full course of winter, the attitude of holy or pagan rites change to the spirit of hope, to the growing light as the earth begins its tilt toward the equinox, but also the superstition of redemptive suffering through the depths of winter. Why do I suffer? Because you are a sinner. Be mindful of this, suffer, and you will find redemption. The experience of spring is so wholly positive, so ineffably discordant with the experience of winter that our psyche again seeks superstition in the redemption rites of spring.

_________________

Several years ago a woman wearing a patterned skirt, equally of deep red and bright white, sat across from me on the subway. This color combination was visually captivating and I thought about why these two colors, put together, had such power. I considered things that come in red and white and two that came to my mind were Santa Claus and meat. Yes, fat marbled red meat. I thought about the promise of fatty red meat at the precipice of winter. I thought about venison at winter's solstice, its winter fat, but also of flying reindeer pulling Santa Claus in a red and white outfit. This fat, jolly piece of marbled meat or at the least sheathed in the colors of meat. What a gift to anyone trying to survive the winter, at its outset, when hope, hunting, the preservation of meat in freezing temperatures, and the ash-covered, fire-cooked meat (the irony that industrial era Santa comes down the chimney) are a bulwark against the longest season. Of course, I'm mixing histories and rites, but the psyche and the imagery so specific leads me to, at the least, wonder about such things.

Happy Halloween.

Breath

The breath of autumn is now well upon us. It scatters the leaves as well as my mind, and puts the quick into my step. As in life and age, autumn has a way of shifting the unimportant away. In our cold clime that first freeze can be an icy slope. One descends from warmth to frozen in a day or two. No lollygag of a New York City autumn -there is terminus.

The paper wasps have finally crawled deeply into buildings and the ants have long left the work atop their mounds. There is a grasshopper on the garage wall, but no longer in the garden. Flies find their way in as do lady beetles and what remains of the mosquito swarm has descended into the basement stairwell.  A woolly bear and a large wood spider hastened from the unfinished studio. A week ago I heard the frog's last chirp.

Last week we had our first frost, and tonight, should the skies clear, we will have our first freeze. We can now accept bringing in plants, out of sympathy for them, as we do with our pets. Will the lantana come in? Will the begonia tubers be saved? Should I unearth the rosemary and pot it?

Despite better planning, the fall vegetables have not gone as hoped. Cauliflower was a wash, and the broccoli too. Green beans just a week or two too late and nibbled. Brussels sprouts have more leaf than sprout thus far. Spring planted broccoli continues to flourish. Eggplants always do better until they just can't and I have yet to harvest the majority of potatoes.

 

Although it is nearing winter (it comes earlier here), there are still several outdoor projects to complete. I need to replace a porch balustrade, cedar plank the utility room landing and replace several mossy and rotted plank ends on the porch. There is a window frame to repair -it should not go another winter, but it is on the second floor and I don't prefer ladders. A brick walkway has remained a gravel trench. The gutters continue to fill with leaves -this can wait, but not beyond snowfall. Warmer temperatures are required to apply a second coat of paint to the alcove where siding, sill, and door were replaced by the height of summer. The studio has much remaining, but there is now power and today the concrete contractor is placing the insulation foam. Progress. Should I call the mudjacker for the sidewalk that cants to the house? Is there time? Is there money?

Winter Mind

Winter has finally come to us. Temperatures below 20 degrees F, snowfall, car doors frozen shut with the last freezing rain, the clinkeling of ice crystals shed at forty five miles per hour. Despite this wintry attitude, we here at PrairieWood have work to do. The new shop is now standing with roof and ceiling. It never occurred to me that I would work into the night, outdoors, at just a handful of degrees above zero, but I did just that last Sunday so that we could get the wiring in before the ceiling closed out our access.

While I've been able to put most house projects on hold until springtime, one thing is still weighing heavily on my mind -the woods. What once went concealed by countless leaves is now made obvious by the contrasting wet bark and newly fallen snow. If I could sum up its appearance in one word, it would be diagonal. What is it about a wood of slanted trees that is so disturbing? Is our sense of order satisfied by horizontal ground and vertical columns of trees? Is the removal of angled wood a goal of a "clean" woods? 

What we need here is a plan, a forest plan, to guide us in the care of these woods. But wait. Why do the woods need our care at all? Isn't that awfully anthropocentric? Couldn't the woods take care of itself as it has for thousands of years?

Why is it so hard to look at the woods and see ourselves in it? We entertain the woods as a medium of passage. We experience the woods, but are not a part of it. Our aim is to be out-of-the-woods. We are beasts of clearings where a few selected trees may stand sentry. Why not the woods? Is it a blow to our ego to be among such large beings? Or is it the inherent danger of a sustained presence in the woods, the mashup of life and limb? Maybe this is the most practical tack, that a life in the woods is a life fraught with falling timber. Even among the trees there is danger. No elderly tree gives way without taking or scarring those around it. The falling of a great old tree reverberates through the forest, destroying the order, remaking communities, providing opportunities for well placed upstarts. 

I've realized how easy it is to make a metaphor of the woods, but the questions are more difficult. In our short time here we've had to ask many, and no answer is quite right. Any intervention is yet another question, or string of questions. We cannot extract ourselves from the story of the woods; people created it and we are living it. 

I regret to speak so abstractly, but somewhere in this line of thinking is a better perspective that may be teased out in writing. I understand intuitively that we have a role in this mess, that we are the aliens among the trees, roadsides, and fields. We cast dispersions on the plants and animals that take advantage of sensitive niches, but were it not for us this would hardly be the case. We are the aliens, the agents of drastic change. We project it onto others (plants, animals) while claiming our place. There would be no buckthorn, no garlic mustard, no barberry or burning bush if it weren't for our own invasive nature. Can we make it right? Can you take it back? Can you undo the done? 

This is a defining aspect of our culture. We invade a place, instigating the consequences that we see all around us and then tell ourselves that it is the others' fault, it is their doing that has created the mess and maybe, just maybe, we'll commit resources to cleaning it up, and it will be ongoing, forever perhaps. The productive citizen looks away; it's just easier that way, isn't it? We can spend a life throwing resources at a problem that traces back to exactly where we stand. Is it rational to label plants and animals invasive and yet completely ignore our responsibility for it? 

In the woods I see the paradigm of our conflict, one as much with the natural world as it is with other human beings. I am left asking you if an answer, one that can never be fully right, is to look away or to commit the resources to try to correct the damage, forever, perhaps. And what to make of the trying, because trying isn't necessarily accomplishing anything other than assuaging one's conscience of total responsibility. 

I don't mean to be melodramatic. It's simply that so much of what appears to ail us today is hindered by our unwillingness to take responsibility, or at the very least, to understand our responsibility. I am not personally responsible for the rampant buckthorn in the woods, but I sure can see how it came to pass and how I've benefited from our ancestral migration to this place. 

Ignorance (in the sense of not knowing, but also ignoring) leads to bad decisions, or self-centered ones, and consequences difficult to ameliorate. For instance, water holds in the middle swale, in the back woods, and leads to ponding, mosquitoes, and to water-logged roots which can bring an untimely death to the trees there, fallen timber, more sunshine, and then faster buckthorn spread. I considered trenching a drainage so that the captured water could drain into the great wetland. Autumn came and I saw that some trees at the center of the middle swale remained green-leafed long after the rest went yellow.

Upon investigation, the bark and leaf, below, spoke. These are silver maple, Acer saccharinum, the fast growing, brittle-wooded tree of wet areas in the Eastern Forest.

I can only guess that silver maples living at the boundaries of its range put the species under pressures not necessarily found near its core. So I came to an understanding of this middle swale. I will not dig a trench to help drain it, yet I will dig deeper into what else is growing, and dying, in this area, and attempt to understand it before acting or, quite possibly, not acting at all.

The questions of how to act and what sustained gestures are both possible and effective, are for our winter mind. What can be done that limits the rampant buckthorn and doesn't undermine the fragile species under threat from its able fecundity? We spent a quantity of time pulling garlic mustard from the drainage stream connecting the northern, small wetland to the great, southern wetland. Our work was effective, but it also appeared to me that there was a significant reduction in jewelweed in the very same area. I'm working on memory, now, but I thought it was more prolific in that region in past years. So I wonder, was it the garlic mustard that reduced the jewelweed population to nearly zero, was it natural swings in population due to unusual temperatures or flooding, or was it our trampling feet that inhibited its seed from sprouting? 

Every action has consequences, so many of which are unknown. I recall how, as a child, certain people were inclined to spray pesticides into the tall oak trees to bring down gypsy moth caterpillars. Our camp director screamed, during lunch, that by God he was not going to allow those trees to die! Our neighbor brought in a pump truck, unannounced in summer time, and sprayed his trees. I am still haunted by the overwhelming bitter smell of the pesticide, the sticky residue dripping from the trees, the dead birds and squirrels on the ground. His trees didn't die, nor did the camp's, but then, neither did the vast majority of unsprayed trees.

Each of us who is responsible for a part of the woodlands at the edge of the prairie has to choose for ourselves whether to act, or look away, to spray herbicides and trample, or do nothing. There is no mandate, we operate independently of our neighbors and yet nature cares little for these arbitrary boundaries.

I am inclined to act, yet feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of what is necessary to be effective. We hesitate to spray herbicide, usually in two or more applications, but pulling is incredibly time consuming, physical and often, incomplete. Should we adjust to the new, simpler woods, make peace with the knowledge that we brought this thicket on ourselves? Could there be a middle ground where buckthorn and garlic mustard and all the others are accepted to a degree, where we do not look away but effectively manage the woods?

*all photos are from October, showing yellow-leafed sugar maples along with the green understory of buckthorn -low growing, young plants spread north while the large shrubs reside on the south facing slope.

Time, Luck and Weather

It was a couple of days before Thanksgiving and I still had not planted the garlic. In New York City and region, this would be of little concern, but here, well I was pushing it well beyond ordinary pushing it. 

The week before it had rained, really rained, so much so that our excavation had completely filled with water (a story for another day, if ever). Then, not two days later, it froze for thirty six hours ensuring that the wet earth had become a solid block. Digging was out of the question. The swimming pool, above, became an ice rink.

A week later, the Monday before Thanksgiving, temperatures were climbing, yet again above forty. And the gravel came. It kept coming until there were two hundred tons of gravel, nearly one hundred a fifty cubic yards piled inside and outside the pit. 

Meanwhile, there was garlic to be planted, the Xian Turbans were sprouting, and the cloves would need at least a few weeks without frosted earth to settle in, but what could be anticipated after such a quick, deep freeze just a week prior? I wheeled out the seldom used, 30 year-old Troybilt tiller, filled the always flat right tire with compressed air, set the throttle, lifted the choke, removed the spark plug, poured a cap-full of gasoline into the chamber, replaced and hand-tightened the spark plug, yanked on the chord, bah the the the the, repeat, and then again. Throttle off, fully tightened the spark plug, dropped the choke, throttle on, yanked the chord, then bah buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, pop, and the old Kohler engine was humming.

It wasn't easy to break the semi-frozen, wet earth, nor the lawn which floats above it. The tiller is a beast, requiring strength to maneuver, patience on turns, and knee-jerk restraint as it rockets forward when hitting solid soil. I made several passes, bottoming out at six or seven inches on the lawn's compacted clay bed. I curved these new beds to match the Hydrangea transplanted from the south side of the house to edge the boundary of the lawn and driveway, leaving just enough room for the mower to pass between.

Although our garlic grew pretty well this year, experience told me I wanted compost tilled in, but I wouldn't have anything to do with buying the bagged stuff. The city of Minneapolis collects organic yard waste, which it sells to a composting company that happens to have a site in our area. I think I paid ten dollars for what would easily be well over one hundred dollars of bagged compost. These places are worth their weight in black gold.

I tilled in about two inches of compost and made the most of tight quarters by removing any chance for walking rows (I'll regret this later). In two beds, about five feet by twelve each, I planted roughly 350 cloves, or about 3 per square foot. 

I had more cloves, of course, and tilled a row from last season's planting bed for those.

Although it was the day before Thanksgiving with much to do, I chose to make another trip to the compost facility so I could place something over the indents made when the cloves are pushed in. The soil isn't very soft or deep; I felt this could help to keep the cloves from freezing too soon. 

A light snow had fallen, which can act as an insulating layer, but more was needed.

Out back I had been saving an old hay bale that Rex had stored under the playhouse we gave away last summer. It was just the thing I needed to insulate now that temperatures were plummeting (a week later I placed even more insulation -oak leaves from the woods, and just before the next snowfall).

This is the spot the straw had been laying. Even though the ground all around was frozen three inches deep, this spot was still unfrozen.

In fact, there was a lot of unexpected activity in the heat generated by decaying straw.

Pill bugs, Armadillidiida, also known as wood lice.

And this pale sprout.

Since the week of Thanksgiving we've had more days over thirty two, some well over, than those under it. Most nights have been relatively mild, staying well above twenty eight degrees.  In a year where I've often been behind on what needs to be done and with weather the spearhead of possible defeat, I think I may have gotten lucky getting the garlic in this late.

But I'm not having any luck keeping the turkeys off the mulch.

 It seems they're quite fond of gardens.