Full Moon – Lilac Moon Crests

Miraculously, there are lilacs still blooming. The mind boggles. The moon has also reached its fullness for this cycle, and we’re just getting started on the last leg of the trip towards Summer Solstice and the kick-off of Strawberry Moon. And my strawberries are, indeed, starting to set fruit. Not much fruit – they’re rather new, after all – but fruit all the same! 😀
 
Our girl has made her move to Toronto, and is starting to find her feet there. My wife and I are trying to regain our equilibrium without her physical presence and, I admit, it’s hitting both of us a little on the hard side. Thank the gods for text messaging and skype, is all I’m saying. The last time I did long-distance, all I had to work with were long-distance phone calls, and those add up fast. O.O
 
The garden is, for the most part, thriving. My rainbow chard is having Issues, and 3/4 of my cucumber starts have given up the ghost. But everything else seems to be doing quite well. I’ve harvested rappini twice, already, including enough to start freezing some for winter. It’s a weird feeling – equal parts exhilleration and “what planet am I on” to be thinking seriously about the winter food supply a full six months before that’s going to be an issue. But I suppose that’s normal for most of the planet, and most of human history, so I’ll probably get the hang of it eventually.
I can’t help wondering if this is part of how “thinking in spiral time” (as Starhawk might put it) works. Thinking months and months ahead of schedule, planning where you’re likely to be, and what you’re likely to need, based on the corkscrew curl you’ve just come out of, and that patterns of them stretching into the past.
I know it’s been “unusually cold” this past week or so, and I’m wondering if I go back and check my other Lilac Moon posts, if I’ll find similar notes about the state of the thermostat going back three, four years to when I started keeping track of these things. (I know that a frost-threatening cold snap near the beginning of September no-longer comes as a shock… maybe there’ll come a time when this doesn’t, either).
Regardless, I’m hoping to build a trellis in the next week or two, as the squash and beans have all started sprouting, and I’m hopeful that, once the warm weather and sunshine come back, they’ll start growing in earnest and I’ll need that trellis to lift them all up.
 
My front yard has been converted into a (somewhat wilting) flower bed, made up mostly of donations from a couple of specific friends who have tonnes of garden goodies to offload onto anyone who wants them. (I now have wild ginger – which, I gather, you can actually harvest, scrub, grate, and dry in order to use as actual ginger in cooking and baking and such – and hope to be adding ostrich ferns to the perennial bed as well).
 
I only half-regret missing the Witches’ Sabbat. I gather, from a friend who attended, that it was just as awesome as I expected it to be, BUT it also poured down rain all weekend, and I’m kind of glad that I missed out on camping (and dancing, and circling) in a downpour. I gather next year’s theme is “curses and protection” so it’s looking like I’m going to try and get to it in 2016 – useful information, to be sure, plus hey: I now have a “four person” (AKA: 1-2 people and their stuff) dome tent, courtesy of our Archivist, so I’ll have somewhere to sleep if I can’t get a cabin.
 
Having flipped the calendar over to June, it’s time to start shifting little packages of Pig from the chest freezer to the fridge-top freezer, in an effort to make actual use of them and not let an entire half of a pig go to freezer-burn out of neglect. I had the opportunity (I bought 125L of top-soil from a grocery store, which required delivery, so…) to buy up about five months worth of (white) flour the other day, so I’m set on that front. I’m keeping an eye on things like pot barley, and recognizing that I need to plow through my last six cups of bone stock (in the fridge),, if only because – in spite of up-ending 2-3 big bags of bones into my raised beds, all of a month ago – I still have two huge bags of bones taking up space in my freezer, and I need to turn them into stock ASAP. This is what happens when you buy bone-in meat, kids. Bear that in mind…
 
Anyway. I have dinner to make, and a dance-party to hit up in about an hour.
Time for me to get on out of here.
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.