Winter, day 1

[greenstorm]

Last night I started up the woodstove; it got down to -5C last night and the mud was frozen this morning for early walking. My house is warm; the pain/slowdown of joints and muscles that my mind is so good at sidestepping is gone and with it a lot of tension and unrecognised cognitive load. I still need to figure out what to do with the roof, but I have a heating system at least.

I think I've also decided on a truck. More about that when it's happened though.

Mom and my youngest brother are planning to come up this Thursday. It'll be good to have them here, though the perennial problem of where to put my brother to sleep still exists. I'm thinking of buying a folding cot to put in the pantry; he often sleeps on the sofa when he comes over but the sofa is in the kitchen/livingroom/main room and his sleep cycle is different than mine and mom's, so I'd like him to have room to be undisturbed.

My mind is a little slow right now, I just woke up from a nap and I'm enjoying the surprising mental weightlessness of my body just being able to relax. It's been awhile.

I'm also already thinking of next year's tomato trial, and next year's pepper trial. I got seeds for some peppers that survive down to a range of -2C to -15C, some are perennial on the gulf islands here. They won't overwinter here but they should tolerate much cooler temps. I'm very excited about those.

And there are a ton of little indie seed places popping up on instagram that have short-season tomatoes. I suspect I will not be growing fewer tomatoes next year than I did this year. I also wonder if these indie seed folks have always been there and I have only now discovered them, or if they're a result of the pandemic. Probably a little of each, I imagine.

I did manage to score both Lucinda, which is a silvery fir tree green-when-ripe cross I've been looking for. Plus I'm looking into microdwarfs, which I should be able to grow indoors under lights. It's fun.

I did a feed run and the next town over was full of hoarfrost today: half-inch ice spikes covered everything as water sublimated out of the damp air. Winter is here. Better bring in my hoses.

Comments

[graydon2]

my brother is also visiting me on thursday. I hope you have a nice visit.

[greenstorm]

Thank you, I expect I will

[cz_unit]

Hasn't gotten quite that cold here, but I have been firing up the chimnea outside and test burning some of these split logs. They burn well, so I should have plenty of wood for the winter.

Which is good because splitting 2-3 foot diameter white oak logs is a pain. Each shot needs the maul plus the 16 pound sledgehammer to break them up. Oi.

[greenstorm]

I envy your oak. We all burn pine here because only pine, spruce, and aspen are available in any quantity; my catalytic burner saves the chimney from the worst of it but it's a differet beast altogether.

On the other hand I do not envy your splitting it. I would not enjoy trying to move a 3' round of something dense like oak, let alone split it, even with a wood splitter. At least you're getting exercise?

[cz_unit]

Fortunately they are round so you can just roll them into position. But yeah it's a hit with the maul, then endless whacking with the sledgehammer. Oddly enough a 10 pound sledge just bounces off the maul, you need a really heavy one to get splitting.

It's good exercise. We have some pine but I don't put it in the fireplace except as a bit of a starter (the CEMI has stainless steel afterburners, but it's not the same as a good catalytic)

[squirrelitude]

Whaaat, there are cold-hardy peppers?! I'd love to know what varieties. Do they die back to the ground or stay evergreen or what?

I'm familiar with peppers happily being perennial in warm climates, or if you bring them in for the winter (like my wife's 2 year old windowsill sweet pepper), but I've always seen them go to mush at the slightest touch of frost.

[greenstorm]

I suspect you would enjoy reading the etsy store of Small Island Seed Co. They are my source and have some write-ups there. I think they drop leaves but grow them back?

[squirrelitude]

Thanks, very cool. I'd love to try crossing that with sweet peppers to see if I could capture those cold-tolerance genes. :-)

[greenstorm]

I think there's someone working on that, or planning to, on the ossi forums. It sounds like a great project. I think the c pubescens tend to be hardy down to freezing or so too.

I'm hoping they'll give me some growth during cool weather, and figure out how to proceed from there. It was extraordinary how different tomatoes did the growth/fruit set/sizing up so differently in the trial, and it wasn't necessarily strongly linked to days to maturity.