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greenstormSo a couple weeks ago Josh was over and broke the snowblower by driving it into the fence. Instead of just breaking a shear pin the whole thing got kinda fucked. It was my new snowblower and I super enjoyed using it.
Luckily Josh is an engineer and ordered the parts; he's coming today to put it back together.
In the meantime we've had a lot of snow.
I've mostly ignored the snow. The geese trample it down by the back door/their waterholes, I park outside the gate, and I wear tall boots back and forth. I worked from home yesterday and shovelled off the decks because it was supposed to warm up today (if it gets warm the snow gets heavy, and if it gets warm then cold the snow gets heavy and then refreezes with a sharp, icy crust).
Yesterday I learned I (or any normal person) can take landrace wheats out of Plant Gene Resources of Canada. They have maybe 300, a bunch seem to have been given from Russia. You get a couple seeds, and you can just... grow them, test them. There are also a bunch of heritage potatoes. But here's the thing. A landrace is the physical manifestation of culture plus an environment. It's the touch of anyone who's ever eaten in a culture, everyone who's touched the soil and everyone who takes food from that soil and prepares it in a certain way, of all the ways animals were kept and used and of what labour was considered reasonable and what was not. To be able to take one of those genesets and grow them and maybe pass them on to someone else to grow in the future-- I imagine it is like handing a bible with a blank extra page at the end to a christian and giving them a pen. I can't describe the feeling. But anyhow, wheat is a big rabbit hole and I love it. I will be test growing a bunch this year (necessary since they don't really sell the old varieties in large quantities so I'll need to save my own seed for the following year's big field).
Today I drove in to work and the power was out. This doesn't mean I get the day off, because I'm set up to work remotely, but it does mean I get to come home. And on the way home I parked on the street and shovelled the end of the driveway for half an hour or so, and filled up the duck pools, and I'm going to let the fire go out and check the chimney to see if it needs cleaning. It feels like spring out there, maybe 2C wih a nice thick clean blanket of snow that's definitely melting a little. Also, half an hour of sweating tank-top-in-January manual labour is really good for my spirits. Plus I got to come home to this:
It feels like sunreturn. Soon it will be light out at 5pm. Soon after that I'll be doing chores in the light. Then the rush of spring will come and everything will happen at once, planting trees and spreading hay in the potato/squash field and making garden beds and moving the greenhouse and season-start training at work.
I've spent the last couple weeks mostly solo here, not many visitors, not going out much. I feel grounded and engrossed in my life.
Luckily Josh is an engineer and ordered the parts; he's coming today to put it back together.
In the meantime we've had a lot of snow.
I've mostly ignored the snow. The geese trample it down by the back door/their waterholes, I park outside the gate, and I wear tall boots back and forth. I worked from home yesterday and shovelled off the decks because it was supposed to warm up today (if it gets warm the snow gets heavy, and if it gets warm then cold the snow gets heavy and then refreezes with a sharp, icy crust).
Yesterday I learned I (or any normal person) can take landrace wheats out of Plant Gene Resources of Canada. They have maybe 300, a bunch seem to have been given from Russia. You get a couple seeds, and you can just... grow them, test them. There are also a bunch of heritage potatoes. But here's the thing. A landrace is the physical manifestation of culture plus an environment. It's the touch of anyone who's ever eaten in a culture, everyone who's touched the soil and everyone who takes food from that soil and prepares it in a certain way, of all the ways animals were kept and used and of what labour was considered reasonable and what was not. To be able to take one of those genesets and grow them and maybe pass them on to someone else to grow in the future-- I imagine it is like handing a bible with a blank extra page at the end to a christian and giving them a pen. I can't describe the feeling. But anyhow, wheat is a big rabbit hole and I love it. I will be test growing a bunch this year (necessary since they don't really sell the old varieties in large quantities so I'll need to save my own seed for the following year's big field).
Today I drove in to work and the power was out. This doesn't mean I get the day off, because I'm set up to work remotely, but it does mean I get to come home. And on the way home I parked on the street and shovelled the end of the driveway for half an hour or so, and filled up the duck pools, and I'm going to let the fire go out and check the chimney to see if it needs cleaning. It feels like spring out there, maybe 2C wih a nice thick clean blanket of snow that's definitely melting a little. Also, half an hour of sweating tank-top-in-January manual labour is really good for my spirits. Plus I got to come home to this:
It feels like sunreturn. Soon it will be light out at 5pm. Soon after that I'll be doing chores in the light. Then the rush of spring will come and everything will happen at once, planting trees and spreading hay in the potato/squash field and making garden beds and moving the greenhouse and season-start training at work.
I've spent the last couple weeks mostly solo here, not many visitors, not going out much. I feel grounded and engrossed in my life.
