Saturday, August 20, 2011
Phenology
Warm breezes float off Lake Superior. Highs in the mid 70's, lows in the 50's. Ate our first tomatoes of the season. Planted buckwheat to cover crop the garden until next spring. Bucking and splitting birch firewood. Plenty of bear signs in the surrounding hills.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Churning the Garden
The nights have been a little chilly. It's hard to imagine that summer is already slowly giving way to fall.
We've had black plastic covering our garden site for about one year now. Our hope is that this would kill a vast majority of the native seed bank. Last week we uncovered the plot and with the help of our friend Jim we deep-tilled the area. Tearing into a garden bed for the first time is full of surprises. For one, you never really know what the quality of the soil will be until you dig into it. It's the other surprises; like all the rocks and roots and other "artifacts" that make your first day tilling interesting!
The soil will work. We have a manageable mix of silt and clay loam to work with. The work we have ahead of planting is soil amending. Amending soil is simply feeding the dirt the food that it wants in order to be at the optimal chemistry to grow plants in. While most loam soils in the midwest are fertile enough to grow native species of plants, growing vegetables is another story.
We know that our soil is mineral rich and a little acidic. As a result we are planning on amending the soil by adding compost and manure to put some organics into the mix as well as a little lime (a base) to help neutralize the acidic clay-rich soil.
Another important element in healthy soil is nitrogen. Nitrogen is the most abundant element in the atmosphere. Plants need nitrogen to grow as nitrogen is an important building block of many molecules that are essential to life. Soil, however, is not always a good source of nitrogen. To best way to get nitrogen into the soil is to plant legumes. Legumes are a family of plants that fix nitrogen into the soil. Roots of these plants contain bacteria that allow the plants to convert nitrogen from the atmosphere into ammonia. Ammonia in the soil is then used by the garden plants as building blocks for growth. With only a couple months before our first freeze we are planting buckwheat, a legume. We will till this in next year before we plant our crops.
We know that our soil is mineral rich and a little acidic. As a result we are planning on amending the soil by adding compost and manure to put some organics into the mix as well as a little lime (a base) to help neutralize the acidic clay-rich soil.
Another important element in healthy soil is nitrogen. Nitrogen is the most abundant element in the atmosphere. Plants need nitrogen to grow as nitrogen is an important building block of many molecules that are essential to life. Soil, however, is not always a good source of nitrogen. To best way to get nitrogen into the soil is to plant legumes. Legumes are a family of plants that fix nitrogen into the soil. Roots of these plants contain bacteria that allow the plants to convert nitrogen from the atmosphere into ammonia. Ammonia in the soil is then used by the garden plants as building blocks for growth. With only a couple months before our first freeze we are planting buckwheat, a legume. We will till this in next year before we plant our crops.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Height of the Land Route
The berries are ripe. The fish are moving to colder water. It' August. To us this means the beginning of the paddling season. Last weekend we paddled a classic border route through Gunflint-Little Gunflint-Little North-North-South-Rat-Rose-Duncan-West Bearskin Lakes.
In our ongoing quest to paddle all of the major canoe routes in the eastern Boundary Waters we've been marking our routes through the years on a regional map. This winter we noticed something major was missing from the map: we haven't paddled a substantial amount of the Canadian border lakes.
These border lakes have a great historical significance. Traversing the waterways from the Northern depths of Canada to Lake Superior, the "Voyageur Highway" was the route that Voyageurs traveled during the Fur Trade era of the 1630-1760's. During this time fleets of birch bark canoes carrying beaver, moose, bear, caribou, fox and wolf pelts paddled and portaged the ancient trail.
The furs were trapped in the winter by Natives. They were then traded to representatives of the Hudson Bay and Northwest Companies for commodities like guns, traps and other supplies. French Voyageurs packed up the furs into their canoes and made their way down the Voyageur Highway to the Lake Superior. At Lake Superior, the "hivernants" (voyageurs who wintered in the north) rendezvoused with the "pork eaters" (voyageurs traveling in 30-40 foot canoes from Montreal). It was here, on the shores of Superior at the Grand Portage outpost that the two groups swapped their cargo loads. After a couple weeks of celebrating the voyageurs turned around and headed back to complete the trade. The Northerners carried their supplies North to spend the winter and trade with Natives for the next season of furs. The large canoes carried the furs back to Montreal to be felted and made into hats for the robust European markets.
I call the route that we took the "Height of the Land route" after the portage between North and South Lakes that straddles the Laurentian Divide. Geographically speaking, it's a major watershed divide (rivaled only be the Continental Divide of the Rocky Mountains): all of the water in North Lake flows to the Hudson Bay via the Rainy River watershed. The water in South Lake flows to the Atlantic via Lake Superior and the rest of the Great Lakes through the St. Lawrence seaway.
Significant as this divide might be portaging it is actually very anticlimactic. I've seen artistic renditions of this point being some great, steep and rugged ridge in the Northwoods. The reality is that most of the portage is a flat wetland with balsam, cedar, various sedges and thimble berry. No, we did not stop at the "top" of the divide and smoke a ceremonial pipe. I couldn't even really tell where the watershed break was. Nonetheless, it was one of those places where you could almost still the see the moccasin prints and hear the music of the countless french voyageurs who trotted that trail long before us.
These border lakes have a great historical significance. Traversing the waterways from the Northern depths of Canada to Lake Superior, the "Voyageur Highway" was the route that Voyageurs traveled during the Fur Trade era of the 1630-1760's. During this time fleets of birch bark canoes carrying beaver, moose, bear, caribou, fox and wolf pelts paddled and portaged the ancient trail.
The furs were trapped in the winter by Natives. They were then traded to representatives of the Hudson Bay and Northwest Companies for commodities like guns, traps and other supplies. French Voyageurs packed up the furs into their canoes and made their way down the Voyageur Highway to the Lake Superior. At Lake Superior, the "hivernants" (voyageurs who wintered in the north) rendezvoused with the "pork eaters" (voyageurs traveling in 30-40 foot canoes from Montreal). It was here, on the shores of Superior at the Grand Portage outpost that the two groups swapped their cargo loads. After a couple weeks of celebrating the voyageurs turned around and headed back to complete the trade. The Northerners carried their supplies North to spend the winter and trade with Natives for the next season of furs. The large canoes carried the furs back to Montreal to be felted and made into hats for the robust European markets.
I call the route that we took the "Height of the Land route" after the portage between North and South Lakes that straddles the Laurentian Divide. Geographically speaking, it's a major watershed divide (rivaled only be the Continental Divide of the Rocky Mountains): all of the water in North Lake flows to the Hudson Bay via the Rainy River watershed. The water in South Lake flows to the Atlantic via Lake Superior and the rest of the Great Lakes through the St. Lawrence seaway.
Significant as this divide might be portaging it is actually very anticlimactic. I've seen artistic renditions of this point being some great, steep and rugged ridge in the Northwoods. The reality is that most of the portage is a flat wetland with balsam, cedar, various sedges and thimble berry. No, we did not stop at the "top" of the divide and smoke a ceremonial pipe. I couldn't even really tell where the watershed break was. Nonetheless, it was one of those places where you could almost still the see the moccasin prints and hear the music of the countless french voyageurs who trotted that trail long before us.
Looking east across Rose Lake into Canada
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Phenology
Height of the berry season. Blueberries, rasberries, strawberries and thimbleberries are all out in full fruit. A broad-wing hawk has been spotted for the past few mornings hunting on our road. The broad-wing is one of the most common hawks on the shore. Inhabiting the forests of most of eastern North America, the broad-wing are famous for the large flocks or "kettles" that they form during migration. In 2003, over 100,000 broad-wings were spotted in a single day flying past Hawk Ridge in Duluth, MN!
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