Jun. 26th, 2022

Devotion

Jun. 26th, 2022 12:44 am
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Today's gratitude.

When I pulled into my driveway at midnight thirty, there were two dogs and two cats waiting for me.

When I left J's place at midnight there was a thin pink line of... sunset? Sunrise? and it was beautiful.

I got a bounty of expired dairy from the store for my pigs.

My house has a lovely cool space and a lovely warm space so I can choose my temperature.

Today I had some time to sit on a swingset and just wait, just sit. It was next to the busy huge lake in the middle of town but everyone was on the beach so there was lots of nearby-people-noise but no people right there. It was nice.

I got the third batch of ducklings into the crow-proof house without too much trouble and maybe before any was eaten by a crow.

I think I could make a social space here if I so chose. There's a lot to navigate but. It might be ok?
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When I sit down to write a post I feel arrested, my body suddenly frozen and blank. It's a similar feeling to how PDA seizes me sometimes and I'm not saying it isn't that, but I'm also not sure it is.

It's summer. Covid is functionally no longer limiting most folks' choices of behaviour except perhaps to keep them a little more strongly in (I use this word deliberately) cliques they by now prefer to unfriends even if they didn't prefer them previously. People are busy.

I've already written elsewhere about the lack of interdependency I feel in my life, how I miss it. It seems to have always been an issue for many neurodivergent folks to navigate what having people in their lives sometimes but not other times looks like; they say autism has black-and-white thinking (you're there for me or you're not) and I feel that; they say ADHD struggles with object impermanence and while I don't know about ADHD I know that my sense of people in my life recedes when folks are too busy for me. A lot of folks have interacted with me lately in ways apparently of their choosing and then expressed regret at doing so afterwards. That's hard on me; it leads me to take my distance.

And so I freeze when I sit down to write in part because I want to hide myself from these people. If they are not in some way mine, I want to not in any way be theirs. I want to hide both my hurt and my little joys from people who feel, to me, to have abandoned the work of me but keep me around for entertainment.

Writing that, I know that I also very firmly want to be in a space of being wanted and consented to with my interactions right now. Folks who come to me under obligation, instead of freely: those aren't the folks I want around. And it's also true that I haven't before let anyone make me stop writing on their behalf and I am not about to start now. So here I am, writing.

I talk about people this and people that but here's the thing. The crows ate most of my corn trial and it broke my heart and I had no one to talk to about it so it got stuck in me and I haven't processed it yet. It's big and it hurts and talking to a person about it is stabilizing, whereas writing about it means I go right down into the darkness until I reach the bottom and I'm scared to do that. When I sit down to write the corn trial looms up and threatens to overwhelm my feelings and so I can't write about anything else.

So I guess I'm resentful and restless around people because I want someone to make a safe space for me to talk about this and they haven't and won't.

I'm also in the dark part of my cycle right now, the cycle that was worse last time around and feels like it's gonna be worse this time around. It takes a lot more to settle me at this time.

I need to write about corn, loss, the process of pain and then unfolding that into fertilty and new options, but I need to feel loved when I do it.

And I think to do that I'll need to go sit with what's left of the corn, and plant my new round of it.

Repair

Jun. 26th, 2022 07:28 pm
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I visited the corn field. I'd been kind of avoiding it since the crow massacre, popping up to plant squash and notice damage briefly and plant tomatoes but without really settling in up there.

I ran 400' of hose up there, took a deep breath, and looked around. It's actually a mixed field, I mean it was supposed to be mixed and corn-dominant but now it's just mixed. We've had a couple days of quite-hot-for-us weather (28C or so) and what is there is popping along.

Of the corns, Floriani, Papa's Blue, and Oregon Blue don't have a single plant left. Those I didn't have enough cloth to cover at all and they never got big enough to hill. I planted roughly a hundred of each of these.

There are a few plants each of montana morado, oaxacan green, early riser, assiniboine flint, saskatchewan rainbow flint, yellow homestead flint. The montana morado, oaxacan green, and early riser I covered but too late, after most plants had been picked off, but I managed to cover them before every single one had been picked off. The flints, saskatchewan rainbow and assiniboine flint, I planted near-first, they came up, and they didn't start to get killed until the crows had killed the flints and flours so there was maybe a dozen plants of each left once they were big enough to hill. Most of these I planted about a hundred of, only maybe 50 of the flints though.

Atomic orange and painted mountain I planted in great quantity and managed to hill or cover, respectively, before they were completely gone. I'm not sure how many plants I'll have of each but more than a dozen, I hope, and less than fifty. I planted several hundred plants each. Of the four painted mountain types, most will be from sweet rock farm and annapolis since I planted a ton from sweet rock farm and annapolis germinated way last, after I had a chance to cover it. The Salt Spring painted mountain was entirely uncovered and germinated first, so it's entirely lost. I haven't looked under the cover at the glorious organics painted mountain yet.

I forgot to specifically note what happened to New York Red.

Gaspe was maybe 80% pulled up. I've heard that it can tiller pretty well, so I'm going to keep messing with it.

Saskatoon white was basically untouched, they pulled maybe 5%. Very interesting.

Cascade ruby gold was the largest, and the crows were starting to work into it when I hilled it. I lost maybe 20-30% but I also planted a ton.

Open oak party, which I covered super early on, was maybe 40% eaten and I took the cover off since it was tenting the floating row cover pretty strongly. I did not hill it and will go look in a few minutes ot see if the crows started pulling.

Magic manna went in late and I covered it pretty quick, we'll see what's under there when I lift the cloth off.

I watered most of the individual plants by hand, with a hose, with my thumb on the water and no intermediary between me and the gift to the plants. I didn't do the cascade ruby gold, saskatoon white, or the flours down on the end.

I also watered in my cucumbers, which were suffering in the heat, and my squash, which look very happy to be out of captivity into the soil. The squash mix is, erk, I'll have to get back on the number of plants I put out but it's maybe in the 40 range. My tomatoes are happily rooting in, everything from the specific cultivars to my northern mix to my promiscuous ones. I probably have 200-280 tomato plants out there in all?

Some of my undercrop of greens on the corn is coming along ok: lettuce, edible chrysanthemum, kale, some beets and chard, some gai lan. Some of it got destroyed by hilling all the corn. I'll replant some of it, even if it just goes to seed.

I have pretty mixed success with the beans, I am not sure whether the crows picked certain types and left others or whether I just had a bad plant. The mix has uneven rows, some of the single cultivar rows are pristine and others are empty. I didn't check to see who got what done.

Gaspe and painted mountain have been soaking two days, I need to plant them and cover them. I'm mixed about whether I'll interplant the gaspe with the flints and dents so it can do its own pollination mix or put it in the floriani bed.

I have my melon grex to put in still, I was going to go that tonight and may still do so when I go up to crow-check my open oak party.

It's definitely easy to tell which corns have some inbreeding depression going on, vs the new varieties and new mixes which are huge and robust.

In a couple weeks it'll be time to start fall crops like napa cabbage and a round of turnips, and to seed diakon and lo bok.

Some crow observations: they picked the far field clean and worked back from it into the near field I had tried really hard not to leave any seed on the surface for them to see and start digging but they didn't do much digging, just pulled the plants. They didn't necessarily eat anything off the plants.

Some of the painted mountain is resprouting under its cloth; I think they tend to pull out the resprouts if they aren't covered.

They tended (?) to leave alone corn plants that were in clumps of 2, maybe I should seed in small clumps instead of with even spacing next year.

They didn't seem to like saskatoon white. I think they preferred red kernels(?).

They seemed to be at their worst the couple days after a rain, maybe because the soil was softer to pull things up?

Edited to add: two dozen homestead yellow flint, maybe three dozen new york red (I planted a bunch). I put in the melons, mostly in with the atomic orange in the empty spots and in the central sandy bed, and an additional patch of gaspe that ran into the empty spots in the new york red. Watered everything in. The crows were starting to pull up the open oak party (it was 4-6" tall!) so I hilled it some.

Tomorrow I will plant the rest of the gaspe under the cloth with oaxacan green and under a couple crates in with the atomic orange. I'll put the very lively painted mountain (it's sending out roots already) in all the flour bare spots except by the montana morado. I might put a little gaspe in with the montana morado?

***realize I didn't explain hilling, which is just what you do with potatoes: pull up the soil against the stem until just the top leaves are sticking out of a mound of soil. I think this makes it harder for the crows to pull up since I can't plant the actual seed 7" or so down, and after hilling it ends up about that deep. It seems to have worked so far but we'll see what watering everything did. It's supposed to be 30C tomorrow though so hopefully the ground will crust up soon. Who knew that was desireable?

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