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Category Archives: Life in the Catskills

Stabilitas Loci.

08-Jun-11

cheap disulfiram online This week marks three complete years in the woods; I moved up to the cabin full-time just as the private school year was coming to a close in 2008.  Since that time I have spent ten seasons here; and a season apiece in the two most interesting cities in America, a winter in New Orleans […]

Making One’s Own Tea.

05-Jun-11

buy Latuda in uk When you grow plants that have names like “Oswego Tea” (Monarda Didyma) or “New Jersey Tea” (Ceanothus Americanus) you start getting curious about what it would be like to replace all store-bought teas with infusions made in your own backyard.  So when the a local stream management organization offered a river walk with local herbalist […]

Garden Bed Number Two Ready for planting…

26-May-11

Digging with Bears.

26-May-11

A friend gave me some offsets from her bottlebrush buckeye plant, but not knowing quite where to put it – they get very large – I stashed the plants in my vegetable garden, which had not been planted.  The time has come to plant vegetables, so I chose some spots for the buckeyes and transplanted […]

Bee Plants in the Catskills.

23-May-11

We just had our wildflower festival at Catskill Native Nursery, and the owner, Francis Groeters, gave a pretty impressive talk on native pollinators (as opposed to the nonnative honeybees).  One of his powerpoint slides – how I love scientists – simply said “Observe.”  His point was to observe how the plants in your garden create […]

Saint Francis, Nature, and Poverty.

23-May-11

I have been reading Thomas of Celano’s two lives of Saint Francis, with all the complicated pleasure of advancing age.  In 1973 the Franciscan Herald Press put out a lovely edition of the early writings about Francis, Saint Francis of Assisi: Omnibus of Sources, a beautifully executed book, hardbound, with maps of Italy and Assisi, […]

On Artistic Discipline.

17-May-11

From Carey’s Wallace’s essay on maintaining discipline as an artist.  The most difficult of all tasks, for precisely the reason she indicates: There is no such thing, we discovered, as disciplining one corner of a life. There are only disciplined or undisciplined lives. So far I’ve kept to precisely the opposite pattern – bursts of […]

First Bear Visit.

28-Apr-11

April and May are tricky times for composting in this area, because the bears are rummaging around and are extremely hungry.  Wise folk are putting away their bird feeders, which turn into bear feeders around now.  When I read about bears hanging out outside people’s homes all day, until the police come and shoot them […]

Don’t Give Up.

27-Apr-11

Fifteen days after I sowed my lettuce, I gave up on it: the seed was two years old, and I figured it was no longer viable.  The package said it would germinate in 7-10 days.  But it just started coming up.  And everything else is happening too – spring beauties in bloom, trout lilies up, […]

Catskill “Spring.”

23-Apr-11