Saturday, February 18, 2012

denial is a human constant

i have absolutely no frame of reference for this winter and so i am having some difficulty with the chronology of the year so far...there was eight inches of snow on the ground here last weekend and today the winter wheat in the backyard is basking in what sunlight there is filtering through partly cloudy skies...my notoriously inaccurate thermometer says its thirty-four degrees fahrenheit and there are a few flurries falling so it's still winter...but it might as well be late march as mid february...it was fifty degrees yesterday and promises to reach that high again in the coming week...every time i go out back i expect to see elephant garlic coming through the soil and when that happens the jerusalem artichokes won't be far behind...last spring was cold and it took much longer for things to get started...it could be eighty degrees by the time my seed potatoes arrive...then again it may still be snowing and melting...like i said i have nothing in my experience to relate this to...new territory and i have to wonder how much of a part i'm playing in it...the deniers say that climate is cyclical and that's what this is...that i can burn all the fossil fuel i want...that daniel yergin subscribes to this theory is not reassuring...i am forced to believe that we have entered the anthropocene era and that the consumerist culture that i am so bound up in is actually trying to do us all in...so i grow perennials...i just transplanted this year's apple trees into larger peat pots...the roots ( those future carbon sinks...along with all the living, organic soil i can manage to sustain [ won't be so arrogant as to say create] in all the place i will be growing things this coming season...this one hundred and sixty square foot garden on campus has extended it reach well outside the academic domain) of the larger tree were coming out the bottom of the pot it started out in...those guys still have a couple of months under the grow light until i start to take them outside to harden them off so i thought it would be a god idea to give them more room...on the whole i am anxious for the new season to begin and anxious about what the results might be as well...i am going to have to be careful about making the call on when to unmulch the yams and asparagus...the planting schedule is going to take some deeper consideration as well...at least for the spring planters.

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