Greenstorm's Journal

Alright. So it's my job as a land steward to create a system that fits into the larger ecosystem. Sometimes that's fun and easy. Sometimes it's challenging. With the crows, obviously, it's challenging.

Here's a first brainstorming run:

Like with coyotes, crows are smart and it makes sense to cultivate a resident population that has behaviours that help me and that don't harm. My friend T had a raven issue (apparently where they are ravens are territorial, here I get a ton of them) and they killed the problem ravens, then had a pair of ravens move in that didn't do those behavioural issues. Having crows here does keep ravens away, which helps for not having farrowing pigs eaten but causes obvious crop problems.

So categorically, options seem to be trying to keep all ravens away through killing them or scaring them (this seems unlikely to work long-term since if I kill them more will move in, and scare-based stuff tends to loose effectiveness over time unless I get a bird-chasing dog or something); training them not to go after my corn; or making my corn inaccessible somehow. A fourth option, giving them something else nicer to eat, isn't a real option because of how population dynamics works: they'll just keep multiplying until they can eat both my garden and my offered decoy food.

I suspect what works will be a combination of these things. I definitely prefer less infrastructure and inputs, and will be working towards breeding corns that the crows tend not to bother (taste? strong roots before a shoot comes up so they can't be pulled? who knows what the plants will figure out) but I need enough seed for heavy selection to make this work.

Right now cost is a bigger issue for me than amount of input, I think. I also like to reduce plastic use, especially short-lifespan plastics.

Killing/Scaring

Killing the current set *might* cause a different set to move in that doesn't have the learning that pulling up corn is fun.

Keeping the pig and bird food extremely tightly controlled so they can't eat any of it ever might help keep the population low and the level of interest in my garden commensurately low. This would involve a bunch of infrastructure: each field would need an enclosed pig feeding structure (or maybe only in winter and early spring, since that's when I'd expect the most starvation to occur). Birds are easier to make an enclosed feed structure for but harder to exclude crows from that structure since they are also birds. There is almost always some kind of food the birds get at when I do grocery pickup at the store, grocery pickup might be a casualty of this or I'd need additional indoor shed space to store the food plus the garbage it makes.

Scaring crows involves movement, noise, and things that look like predators. A dog that chases crows would be great, though keeping it out of the garden would be important and I have trouble imagining how to keep it hostile towards them instead of acclimatizing over time. It's possible that a radio and some gunshot noises or something that sounds like people and bangs, if deployed only during the seeding window, would help keep them away for a season or two before they figured it out. It might be a helpful layer of control but certainly not dependable.

Almost everyone recommends killing one and hanging it up to scare them, or getting "halloween crows" to hang up, whatever those are.

Training

Maybe it makes more sense to call this "convincing" the crows.

If there's something that makes the corn taste bad maybe the birds would stay away from it. Since I do a pre-soak anyhow it wouldn't be difficult to soak it in something. I see there is a commercial repellant called "avipel" that I would need to look into.

The crows aren't eating the kernels at this point, but it's possible that if I low-level poisoned some and set them out (think stomachache, not death) then the crows would leave the corn alone in future, or maybe if I set some out each year before seeding. That has some drawbacks: dose so as not to kill anything is important, I'm neither looking to kill them nor to get bad stuff into the food chain, I'm not sure what would produce that effect, if the poisoning agent had a scent maybe the crows would just not eat whatever smelled like that.

I have limited water pressure and power up there, but there are motion-activated squirting devices that are supposed to also deter deer etc. I'm not sure how well they work, or whether the crows could outsmart them, and they're not cheap, but I've been considering them for a couple years now.

Maybe running an electric fence wire right over the row of corn might shock them if they couldn't avoid touching it when they pulled the corn up? Not sure how well grounded crows are and this would take infrastructure.

Removing Access

Floating row cover is working best for me this year, but it's a consumable plastic item (lasts a couple years) that also costs money. It does make the corn grow faster and protect from frost. They do seem to try pulling the corn up when it comes off but there must be a size where they give up on that. I have 5' wide strips right now, square blankets that would cover most of my garden at once would make it easier to keep bird out from the edges. This costs money.

Piles of twiggy branches may help keep the crows from getting at the beds, or if they can make their way into the twigs (they do move through trees no problem, after all) it can keep them from flying away quickly so maybe they will feel unsafe/I'll be able to get one with a pellet rifle and then they'll feel unsafe.

Netting over the field would also help with harvest time, since I suspect I'll have an even bigger battle there even if I bag each corn ear. This would involve a lot of posts for infrastructure, and I think there are some downsides for small birds (they can get caught in the mesh?). Posts are something like $15-20 apiece right now, this isn't a cheap option.

Polytunnels, either high or low tunnels, with either mesh or actual poly on them: these are expensive, they'd mess with my breeding a little bit (if I used poly they'd be warmer so I'd get better crops), they'd need irrigation inside. On the other hand they'd do the job, they could function as barriers to cross-pollination so I could control that better, high tunnels might be good overwinter spaces, I could grow way more stuff, they're generally great. These would also need irrigation if they have poly on them.

Hilling, which I did this year, involves pulling soil up against the stem once the corn is a couple inches tall. If only the leaves are sticking out, the birds can't grab the base of the stem to strategically pull out the roots and the plant is less likely to be injured, plus they just don't seem to go after them as much once hilled. This is cheap, a little labour intensive, and only works once the corn is a couple inches tall so it needs to be got to that point to start (maybe through row cover or a bad smell/taste).

Deep planting is what I tried doing this year, putting the seed in deep and tromping the soil down around it fairly firmly so it's not easy to grab the seedling and pull up the root but instead the top just breaks off. The crows wait until rain/watering when the soil is soft to pull, but it seems to still help and allows for some regrowth at least.

Mulch isn't precisely a barrier, but I tried putting fresh green mulch down in the hopes the crows would have trouble seeing the new sprouts to pull. Because they slowly walk across the field from one end to the other this didn't help much; they're not just flying over and spotting things that way. Also I know the infrared on dying plants (like ones cut for mulch) is much different than on healthy ones and I'm not sure how crows' vision is.

It's possible a deep straw mulch would be helpful at obscuring the seedlings until they were too big to pull. It would soften the ground, making it easier to pull. On the other hand it would add organic matter and retain moisture so it would be good for the plants, and big bales of straw are relatively cheap, though they're labour-intensive and need to be bought the fall before.

Someone mentioned that they plant into their weeds, making a little 8" wide opening and putting in several kernels of seed, then only weeding the rest of the weeds when the corn is a foot high or so.

I've noticed that two plants growing close together are less likely to be pulled up than plants evenly spaced. Maybe put 2-3 kernels together per foot, instead of spacing 4-6" in the row?

The crows didn't really touch my Saskatoon White. I wonder if that was a fluke or if it means I should just grow more Saskatoon White?

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.

Corns are all in the ground. It's time to set the second Gaspe corn soaking. It actually took something like 8 days to get it all put in; I stepped on a rusty nail at the beginning of the day off work I'd allocated and that stretched things out considerably.

That said, I put all the flint corn and also the dent corns in to soak at the same time, then the flour corns in later. Flint corn takes longer to get through its hard endosperm than flour corn does; dent is in the middle. So in theory all the flint corn had the same amount of moisture and the same amount of heat. I didn't do a great job planting everything exactly the same depth since I was making furrows with my rake but that's a variation I can see in each type's planting and make allowances for.

Things of note:

No matter how long they were soaked for, the corn that was planted first came up first. The corn that was planted later came up later. I wasn't sure about this; it was pretty dry after I planted and I thought the corn that had absorbed most water (and was thus planted last) might come up first but that was not the case.

Heat makes a difference. We know this, but the corn that had clear plastic over it grew much faster than the corn with row cover or with nothing.

Soil makes a difference. The flint corn field was sandy; the dent corn field is richer and more silty-clay. The flint corn came up first; the dent corn was planted a touch later but it really isn't showing yet. Granted, it's also slightly south-facing and shaded for a touch of the day, which maybe cancels itself out? We will see.

Genetics makes a difference. Some corns popped a root out very quickly while soaking. Some really did not. Painted mountain, which is a very diverse set of genetics, was sourced from four different farms. I'd expect it to be different from each farm, since with so much diversity it's hard not to select and only keep a part of the gene pool. I did not expect something like 4 days' difference between the emergence in the Salt Spring seeds and the Annapolis Seeds (well, there was no root emergence when I planted it and the Salt Spring had 1-2cm roots). Granted, this can be influenced by age of seed, level of seed dryness, etc but it was very noticeable.

Young corn is beautiful. That green coming up through the soil? That's what love is for.

I got good germination. That's good.

The birds have (so far, knock on wood) left these seeds alone. Whether that's because they have access to other tastier foods now (like my ducklings, but I digress) or because it looks more like grass or what, I am unsure. I asked in the landrace gardening group about how folks' plants adapted to bird predation and it seems like planting deep, tamping the soil hard (so the birds can't pull up the corn by pulling on the seedling and are thus not rewarded with food), and then selecting for survivors that can put down roots to anchor against the birds and also regrow the tops after birds pick the tops off is about the best you can do. I need this in my favas; so far (knock on wood) my corn looks ok. Maybe that's a benefit of planting late, too?

I'm still waiting on flour corn emergence; I'm hoping the little rain today helps. I also need to dig out my stash of gaspe seed for the breeding projects.

I ran out of room faster than expected, in part because of some soil/rockiness issues and a bit more slope than I thought I had. It'll be interesting to see what gives me seed, to know how much I'm working with in that space next year.

Flint corns are up. Gaspe is up. I think things might be ok, despite everything.

Good talks with Avi. He's pencilled in end of July/beginning of August. I suspect there may be a Tucker return after that. I love these people a lot, you know?

If I did calligraphy I'd send an invitation registered mail to Nicholas.

My foot is healing up quickly; I'm giving it lots of breaks and time up in between gardening. There's still some swelling, I'm hoping it gets circulated away rather than needing to abcess. The pain is way down, anyhow, even as much as two hours after being on it.

Corn is almost almost all in. Just some flour corns left to go. Most of the enormous amount of painted mountain is in finally so just the various magic mannas (cream, starburst, and mixed), papas blue, oregon blue, and montana morado to go. Well, and Morden. And a succession of gaspe. But still. The ground is pretty dry, they keep calling for rain and we keep not getting it. That plus my heel make tilling a little harder and that plus the fascinating composition of the soils in those fields means that the plantings are a little ad hoc, but that's ok. The flints are at least segregated in the wood field, the dents are surrounded by painted mountain in the middle, and the flours will go at the end of the far field. I'm putting in blocks of beans etc as spacers in some cases. I'm mixing in a bunch of greens and herbs, both scattered and in rows. I don't know that the greens will have longstanding great quality given they're competing for moisture with the corn and they're on a south slope, but at worst I'll harvest a little and they'll go to seed, giving me weeds that are not wild mustard. There is a little bit of lamb's quarters growing, which I should try to leave to go to seed, but it's a very clean field since it was under grass for so long. Wild mustard and a little cress are pretty much the only weeds right now.

Okay. Facilitating the landrace gardening group meet'n'greet tomorrow morning. I'd better get some sleep. Just, I need to not forget to seek out and spend time with my people. It's good for me.

I woke up at 4 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep, so I came upstairs and sorted out my corn to soak before planting. Two dozen varieties will be put in seperately:

Flints: Gaspe, Homestead Yellow, Saskatchewan Rainbow, Saskatoon White, Assiniboine Flint, Floriani, Atomic Orange, Cascade Ruby Gold, New York Flint.

Dents: Oaxacan Green, Early Riser, Open Oak Party.

Flours: Painted Mountain x4, Papas Blue, Oregon Blue, Montana Morado, Mandan Lavender Parching, Starburst Manna, Magic Manna, Creamcap Manna.

Morden

It's a delight and a privilege to work with them. I was wondering why, then, I'm feeling so off-- why I can't sleep, why it brings me up to ok but not into full joy.

Part of the answer is physical discomfort, whatever's going on with that. I've been in pain before, though, and it isn't always so affecting.

But the real answer is probably that the significant de-escalation with Tucker, which has been going on slowly for awhile now, is real now. We still touch base everyday but there just hasn't been the same level of connection woven through for me, and I suspect in future that feeling of connection will come and go with visits or significant events that prompt a bunch of talking. It's become one of my distance relationships instead of a major daily source of care.

Couple that with the misfire with J, where I've gained a friend but because of the way things started there's not pure gratitude for that because it's mixed with disappointment that he won's also be a lover, and I'm just--

You know, mourning endings is a thing. Poly has generally meant that when something ends there's someone around to care for me and get me through the tough time, but it's also meant that I don't slow down emotionally as much as I might. I still want to be a little available to partners, to not sink into that feeling that relationships can never go well that always comes right after for a bit. I don't really have to keep myself open in that way right now, though.

And then again, my routines have been super destabilized. I don't see Tucker regularly anymore, that whole schedule is disrupted. Fieldwork is starting at work so I'm in the office on pretty random days. J isn't much of a scheduler so those visits have been ad-hoc and not laid into my schedule predictably or in advance. Josh and Tucker are busy, again available pretty randomly so I can't quite just reach out when I want and I can't quite settle into routine communication. Even the farm is switching from winter chores to summer chores.

So it makes sense this time would be rough for me. And even as I write this, as I'm parsing through what's going on, my pain level is distracting enough that I suspect it probably is impacting me more than I think. They're going to drop a camera in there and take a look around; fingers crossed they find something easily fixable and this whole thing can be resolved.

I was going to say, at least I'm eating again, but I think that may have been the issue: my body doesn't want to introduce food into that whole situation because it hurts. I haven't really consistently eaten so poorly for so long before and it was really messing with my ability to think, so hopefully I can keep this up.

So here's the thing: as a dryad I have loving feelings towards both people and plants. The word love is a little weird, it contains some stuff that doesn't apply like sex, so obviously this looks different with people and with plants but floaty happy feelings and wanting to poke and learn more and wanting to entwine my life forward into the future and wanting to stay close all exist, if in different form.

I generally have a relationship with the plants I come into contact with, much like you have a relationship with the people you come into contact with. Anything from "oh yeah, that's what's-his-name from London" to "this is my lifelong living partner" and everything in-between. For me, part of living in the same landscape for a long time is the ability to continue my relationships with plants. When people ask me why I moved up here I often say "I wanted to eat fruit off a tree I planted" and that's one kind of relationship for sure, with an individual. Generational relationship with an annual plant is another kind.

A little while ago I wrote this:

"Gaspe corn. I'm having so many feelings right now, it's hard to write. Gaspe is a tiny corn, the plant grows knee-high if that. The cobs are as long as your shortest finger. It doesn't produce a lot of corn per acre, if a full acre has ever been planted in the last century.

It was bred by the Mi'kmaq people of what we call the Gaspe peninsula. It's the northernmost thrust of this amazing array of forms of corn that co-evolved in the Americas in a supportive dance between humans and an unremarkable-looking grass. It's the physical form of thousands of years of humans all united in giving labour and thought and recirculation sustenance.

There's probably enough of the genetics left that it can survive. I can hold it in my hands. I can put it in the soil. It's given me more seed already; I've sought out a wider genetic base so it can continue to do so. I can give these seeds to other people so it's more likely to live. I can be a link in that chain.

But more than that I can hold it, and grow it, and that's very good."

I was handling more than the gaspe seed this evening though. I was handling Magic Manna and Cascade Ruby-Gold, which were bred by Carol Deppe for the pacific northwest as a staple crop out of I think Painted Mountain and something? and the magic manna was some from Adaptive Seeds and some saved from last year's Adaptive and Snake River seed planting, which looked quite different vidually from the original seed. I was handling Painted Mountain itself, four different acessions of it: from Salt Spring seeds, from Annapolis seeds, from Sweet Rock farm, and from Glorious Organics. I was handling the flashy new Atomic Orange sold through Baker Creek. I was handling Adaptive Seeds' Mandan Lavender Parching and Great Lakes Staple Seeds' New York Red Flint. I was handling "American Indian Flour Corn" and Saskatoon White. And I was handling Morden.

Morden corn.

John Sherck thinks it's maybe the earliest corn in the world. It's one of the loneliest. Corn is a group entity; it gets lonely; it needs some diversity of genetics supported by a large population or it succumbs to inbreeding depression pretty easily. They say you should generally have a population of at the very least 200 corn plants to save seed from, or else bring in corn friends every couple years. Corn reaches out over long distances to mingle with other corn, I think the safe distance to prevent pollination is something like a mile? But for a corn to fully retain its character it can't mingle with other types, so it needs a big enough group of almost-similar, same-variety individuals to maintain itself.

So far as I can tell all existing Morden corn descends from 28 individuals. That's not enough. It's not enough diversity for it to be happy; it's planted and doesn't quite want to fill out its ears, its kernels are small, it doesn't leap vigorously out of the ground. All grasses are group entities in some way or another and they do best in groups. It takes the heart out of them to be lonely. Morden's heart is heavy, but it's alive.

Now Morden is in my possession. Its genetics are fragmented. Its story and its people are lost. Most seeds come with some responsibility but this one is bigger than most. What do I do? Do I try to preserve it as it is, growing out every seed into a plant and saving as large a number of seeds as I can to avoid any more diversity slipping away, trying to trap it in time? Do I give it a very different friend, maybe gaspe, maybe something colourful, a new infusion of genetics that brings it back to life but indelibly shifts its original character? Even with years of selection it would never be the same. I want it to continue. I want it to be neither lonely nor eradicated.

And I want it not to be so lost. I want whatever vibrant population it came from to continue to exist, to not be missing. I want it to be lively and gregarious as it moves into the future, to leap out of the ground and fill fields with some farmer's heart's green delight. It was once that way and maybe it can't ever be again; maybe not dying, but certainly changed unalterably and certainly surviving in some way.

All that is in my hand. It's such a weight. It's so many feelings. My understanding of masculinity is that it's supposed to be linked with this urge to protect, and femininity with this urge to nurture, or something. Those genders are supposed to complete each other in those roles. I hold these seeds in my hand, so small and so few, and I want to protect them against anything that may ever harm them. I want to spend sleepless nights running out with a tarp against a hailstorm. I want to stir them into life and warm them and feed them and gently ease away the weeds that threaten to take their space. These two corns, Morden and Gaspe, they reach into me and draw me into roles that fit me so comfortably. I want to live with them, and I want them to live.

Let's see what we can do to make this happen.

Ok, let's talk about something nicer. About corn.

Last year I grew several varieties of corn, and the ones that gave any sort of yield were Gaspe (flint) and Magic Mana / Magic Mana starburst (flour). The latter was pretty late-yielding but I suspect the seeds will sprout ok?

Lavender mandan parching corn did not do well. Cascade Ruby-Gold did not do well but it was in a bed that had a ton of aspen root which may have drunk all the water.

There's some daylength interference in corn, but for the most part I have a benchmark now. Gaspe is more-or-less the earliest known corn in the world. Something called Morden (of course: there was a Morden research station that turned out a tom of short season varieties) is maybe almost as quick as Gaspe but is basically impossible to find (it used to be maybe offered through Sherck seeds, which closed down last year). Saskatoon White (not to be confused with Saskatchewan White) is probably one of the next on the list, I should be able to get that from Adaptive Seeds. Other contenders may be Pima 60 days (ki:kam hu:n) from Native Seed Search, Alberta Clipper which may be available from Oikos when they reopen for the year, maaaaaaaybe unlikely Darwin John flint from Oikos as well, maaaaaaybe Baxter's Yellow from Sandhill, there's apparently a tiny blue early corn sold in a natural history museum(?) gift shop in the states that I might be able to track down, and I'd like to get a more robust gene pool for my Gaspe from Great Lakes Seeds.

I also have to figure out where things go. This will be contingent on which aspens I cut down to keep shade off the fields.

But, in the meantime, a sleuthing exercise to find all this stuff (and whatever I've currently missed).