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.

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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.

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.

Cedar Blush

The foggy morning was a prelude to the storm that just ended. Blue sky, something we've had little of this winter, is now in its stead. It is these weather events that make a cold climate tolerable, just rewards for what can be hard.

Moisture riding the push of warm advection crystallizes on cold twigs and grasses.

And sumac not yet pecked by the birds.

I love the cedars that grow here; reminding me of those that break the monotony of old fields on Long Island. They, of course, are the same species, and aren't truly cedars -Eastern Red Cedar, Juniperus virginiana. These are tough trees, can be over nine hundred years old, tolerate drought and wet, cold, and the poorest soils. While deer browse your expensive arborvitae hedges, by the looks of the Eastern Reds around here, they hardly touch them. There is gin, of course, and the aesthetics which, to my eye, are some of the best an evergreen can provide.

There is a moment every autumn, usually middle to late, when the cedars turn bronze, red, mauve, blushed or however you may see it. This change requires a loss of some of chlorophyll's green and the development of red anthocyanins and the two, together, create this bronzing effect. This is painter's stuff, mixing reds and greens to create blacks more green or more red. The dark bronze contrasts with the white of aspens and snow and plays well with ochre field plants.

Like so many plants you love, someone, somewhere lists them as invasive. How can this be, you ask, after all it is a native in its range! Well, I rationalize it this way -Eastern Reds grow readily in farm fields and get a bad rap for its ability to grow readily from bird-dropped seeds in these fields. The other reason is the loss of fire as a control agent, but this is our fault, and we shouldn't be blaming the cedar. Finally, because we plowed under so much prairie that there is less than one percent of it left, managers curse the Eastern Red for colonizing what's left that isn't being managed by fire. Given these rationalizations, I still wouldn't blink if I had the opportunity to plant one on our land.  I may well have that chance in one of the many clearings created by downed large oaks or bass that have given rise to another accomplished colonizer -common buckthorn.