We had several larger trees get taken down, but this allowed me to repurpose the tree trunks. Instead of bucking them up into logs for burning this next winter, I cut them into eight feet long lengths – a relatively standard length for fence posts.
The trees that fell with the heavy snow fall – poplar, pine and buckthorn – are green and fresh, but they will eventually rot. If we can get three to five years from these tree-posts around the garden, the bit of effort that went into getting them into the ground will likely have been worth it.
Along with getting the vegetable garden seeded this weekend, we headed to Racine, MN, again. We have four beehives down there, and I wanted to make sure that the bees looked like they were doing their bee-things around the hives.
In addition to the hives in Racine, we have four hives at the house here in Saint Paul. We laid the groundwork for them this last winter. Saint Paul allows hives, but requires a rather time intensive permitting process. If owning beehives had been enshrined in the constitution, it is almost guaranteed there would be little if any bumps-in-the-road to having them. Luckily, our lot is large, as is our neighbors’ lots. This reduced the number of neighbors we had to get signatures from to only five of the six. While we were getting the permit for honey bees, we tossed in a permit application for keeping chickens. The hens have been hanging out in a brooder, in our basement, for a little over three weeks now.
Back on the farm in Racine, while we were there, we dug up flat of strawberry plants and two large rhubarb plants. These, subsequently, ended up in our new vegetable garden. The strawberries will likely need some active curation, else we will eventually end up with a large patch of strawberries and little room for vegetables.
Perhaps, someday, we will opt for an enormous, un-curated patch of strawberries, but, not at this time. I am quite pleased with the how we were able to get the garden plot carved out of the yard; it was no small feat. It started with a stretch of mild weather in the last November – we were able to get the grass and moss that had been residing there turned over before the snow landed and before the ground froze.
And, I nearly forgot to mention, this fall, I will officially be a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. Something to do with that field that is closely aligned with my profession, but rarely is written about here on this blog.
Conversations with my mother, as of late, tend to wander to years past. Often, those talks about years of past involve Clarice. Clarice is my grandmother – my mother’s mother – will be turning ninety this year, and as it sometimes happens as one ages, memory is not what it used to be.
With a bit of searching, my mother and I found one of the notebooks. The first entry in this particular notebook was from June 11, 1989. I would have been eight years old. Reading through this first entry, I remember parts of it. The tent caterpillars (colloquially, we referred to them as army worms), and the cat fish. The cat fish was one of the many creatures that happened to be eventually housed [ever briefly] in a small, grey enamel wash tub; I think the tub is still at my parent’s house under the basement laundry sink. The catfish and the turtles that happened to find their way through the grey tub were all released into a local lake on the outskirts of Hibbing.
My thinking was that I was traveling to someplace that took some time to get there. This may be where my fascination for and joy of getting there came from; just riding with my grandparents without much of a hurry. It was an adventure, albeit, an afternoon adventure that took us on an at most sixty mile round trip adventure. But, in my head, these adventures were to far off lands where we would see creatures that did not reside in my immediate backyard; like deer, ruffed grouse (partridge), woodchucks, catfish and sometimes we saw snapping turtles, ducks and geese.
Melissa opted to stay back at the hotel with Nancy; Melissa’s sister, Sarah, and her oldest daughter were also along for the dog show, as well. With Melissa staying at the hotel, Sarah, her daughter and the three dogs (and myself) headed out to Walnut Wood.
