Gratitude for the lilac white petunias tiny papyrus the boxes of garden, off-square the potato bathtub these hillbilly choices, my higgledy carpentry and green life that says yes nonetheless gratitude for the patio this ache in my back from the building of it that pile of bricks for the path yet to lay these eye…
Tag: gardening
Day 22: Laconic Tonic
Don’t ‘at’ me any Earth Day bullshit, i’m in the garden: unless you have some skin to put in this game, shut up. If all you have is voice then tell me like a peasant only the poet bones of it. But better you bend your back to shovel lift these bricks, use knees. Kill…
Askipaw: Permaculture Superstar
Woke up to a slight flu, enough to spend the day languishing round the house til mid-afternoon, when a timid knock at the back door announced Fatima, my neighbour, who had come to ask if I had grape leaves to spare. Fatima has been harvesting my leaves for a few seasons now, and I’ve become…
Coming to Canada: A Gardener’s Meditation, Part 1
A garden is a long work. Yes, you can turn soil, plant seeds, harvest in that same fall. In that sense, to grow a garden is a simple task, unskilled labour; weed a little, watch the water, wait on the season, and done. Gardening, though, is more than this. It is the communion of human…
Practice
This is not the garden yet, but a beginning, seventeen years worth work submitted to wills and whims of climate. Mid-April and the ground only now in view, shawls of snow lying about like dirty underwear after a particularly long night. The mud, the mud, it’s all mud. Who knows what survives? One thing for…
In the Garden, Retilled
you can’t hurry dirt garbage to rich brown, seasons and the efforts of millions, obedient to life, composing, compost, calm pose, compelled to completion so small against it all, tidal wave, tectonic thrust, breath ocean exploding, green threads back toward the sun. does any given microbe know daylily blooms? And here’s the 2009 edit,…
For My Mother
April 17: Nocturne: Tiny Now She is tiny now, my mother and jokes in the morning, when her teeth aren’t in, how she whistles like a little bird. And i want to reach back to the nights when she brought the piglets in laid them in the woodstove oven so tiny, but she believed in…
Seeking Names
This grows in my garden: As you can see, the stalks grow 8 feet tall, and taller, with multiple little heads that clearly show this plant belongs to the sunflower family. This is what we eat from this plant: You might know this plant as Jerusalem Artichoke, or Sunroot, or Sunchoke. You might, if you’re…
Day 27: Bee Count
to discern the flow, the way that land likes to be what grows where, what light brings joy, what soil what drainage. all this, and counting bees fills spring days. five kinds this morning: lady bumble with her pockets full, honeybee sweat bee, fly bee; we bend astonished closer to nonchalant antics of one small chestnut…
Prairiepomes 