Cross Quarters

[greenstorm]

On the one hand, the conventional pagan calendar was formed in a very different place and agricultural system.

On the other hand, I picked roughly a gallon of sakatoons, 2L of raspberries, a jar of pickling cucumbers, and a bunch of other stuff on the weekend.

I'll probably be picking that many raspberries every 2 days or so for a bit.

Every day I miss eating a cucumber I need to make up for it the next day by eating two. The pickling cukes are poised for a bit of an avalanche.

The tomatoes are trickling in slowly, lots of orange ones from the polyamorous row comparatively. My seed collection is swelling.

Apples are swelling. Everything is building and building, the trickle before the flood of harvest.

For my garden it's a good year.

Things are rough in other directions right now. Engaging with relationships as they are, not as I want them to be: that's taking a lot of constant presence and effort. When my expectations get too tangled up in something I often can stop appreciating what it actually is, and I also generally stop looking for what I need in places I can actually find it. Maybe PDA makes me extra aware that carrying the weight of other people's expectations is a heavy burden. It's not one I prefer to inflict on those I love without consent.

But every day I come back to the garden and for awhile things are alright.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

polyamorous tomatoes, lol. ours still haven't started ripening, though there is fruit on every plant now. OTOH, we're drowning in apples, all three trees - even the tiny semi-dwarf honeycrisp that has never previously borne fruit - bowed to the ground. we're making cider, and slicing & freezing, and canning, and dehydrating, and making fruit leather; all four interns have been at it all week - though with somewhat mixed results, as one of the volunteers is a young oaf whom i somewhat regret taking on. in hoeing out the grass from the beans, he also hoed up the beans. for instance. reminding me that bad help is worse than no help. fortunately, he's leaving, so my cider press is no longer at risk of imminent destruction through sheer clumsiness.

anyway - the pagan calendar. for my latitude, the thing that always feels Very Incorrect is the idea that summer solstice is the BEGINNING of summer. temps are always in the high 90s-low 100s for 3-4 weeks by the time we get to solstice, and it's often the worst part of wildfire season. it's obviously summer. that one is the most egregious. our seasons here don't pack neatly into 3 month sections; summer is much longer; spring & fall & winter much shorter. it's probably true in Dublin or London, but definitely not in Albuquerque. so i acknowledge Beltane as the first day of summer, Litha as midsummer, Lammas - definitely still summer; Mabon as the first day of fall (that one is reasonable given the actual behavior of our weather), Samhain mid-autumn, winter solstice the first day of winter (also reasonable), Imbolc the first day of spring (we put in our spring garden no later than the last week of Feb, every year), Ostara as mid-spring.

so while we celebrate the harvest for Lammas, we do so with the recognition that we've been harvesting various things since April.