Greenstorm's Journal

greenstorm @ 2024-04-29T00:26:00

2024-04-29T07:27:01Z

Two days of pottery classes learning teapots and after both days I come home and crash hard. I sleep and sleep and sleep and it's a challenge to get myself up the stairs or sometimes hold my phone, let alone lift anything heavier.

This is supposed to estrange me from my body. I'm supposed to be angry, frustrated with it, to stop believing it's an ally.

In dog training they say that behaviour is communication. My body is an ally. Together we experience joy and pleasure, this weekend and pretty much all days, in greater or lesser quantity. It supports me in taking care of it. When I consider there to be a need it bends its boundaries and allows them to be repaid later.

My society is not an ally. It proscribes the joy I'm supposed to be able to feel, reduces pleasure to a scarce commodity traded for a bucket list of abled activities. Like my body, my society has communicated with me through behaviour: when I have a need it will deny it and leave me without.

I've always been estranged from society. I have no interest in being estranged from my body. Human right or immense privilege, if food or shelter is withheld from me because of my body's capabilities that's not my body's fault. It's my society's. Likewise if joy is supposed to be accessed only through certain body abilities that's an external imposition. I've always had more things I'd like to do than I could reasonably do, both through number and ability. While this doesn't mean I have no loss or grief around some of them that is nothing new n my experience of life.

And so I stagger home to bed, fall asleep, wake up, type with my fingers burning, call the cat over to snuggle, and head back to sleep.

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greenstorm @ 2023-01-18T23:59:00

2023-01-19T08:01:11Z

I was invited to infodump about my favourite topic today. I responded with this:

I like plants, especially edibles, and especially temperate and cold/temperate edibles, especially growing in ways that genetics and combination on the landscape contribute to carefully-chosen system goals, especially heterogenous varieties eg modern landracing (or old landraces, I'll take 'em all!), especially if those goals are non-conventional (eg not 'how much land can we farm with the fewest people but the most gas and tractors' but more to optimize for human power or climate or the particular site's water or soil or aspect or or), especially if animals are involved in that small human-designed ecosystem, especially if it's allowed to evolve through propagation and selection over time, especially if the surplus that humans take from that system is optimized for local community use including aesthetic preferences and values as well as flavour, comfort, etc, especially if those surplus foods (but also fibre etc) is aligned with cultural use and preservation practices, plus I enjoy learning those use and preservation practices including charcuterie, brewing, canning, drying, annd fermenting. But sometimes I go on a kick and grow a monstera or my grandma's spider plant or fifty kinds of hot pepper just for fun and I keep a bunch of geese and cats and dogs and an old hen around as pets even if they're not contributing to my system. Oh, and I love love love plant variety trials; I live where the only domestic plants that grow reliably are from the old Siberian breeding programs so I need to trial and breed my own varieties (it's super cool here over the summer so nothing ripens, and it's -40C in winter so any perennials die).

Last year I trialled 24 varieties of corn including my heart-corn (gaspe) and discovered some new ones that do well here and I'm going to landrace them, and I made a a surprisingly successful squash grex, and I'm growing a bunch of tomatoes that a collaborator outcrossed to wild relatives to try and get the flowers to cross-pollinate more and thus allow more natural geneflow within the population so I don't have to make a million hand-crosses (tomatoes don't naturally cross much). I was asked in the group this evening about what kind of plant breeding I was into and kind of saved this up for a more appropriate spot. 🙂

Gaspe corn is knee-high and comes from the gaspe penninsula in Quebec, it's one of the shortest season corns in the world; it's a grain corn and grows about knee-high and fills me with absolute awe and gratitude that so many hands cherished corn from the time it was a grass in south-central mexico, and with love and attention they slowly selected and planted and selected and planted until it was corn, and then selected and planted and selected and planted and it spread into myriad forms across north america, slowly, going at the rate of friendship and sharing and at the rate the plant could adapt over so much time, through forms 20' tall with aerial roots, and then eventually spreading up to Quebec where it was so cold and short-season that it was basically unrecogniseable from not just the original plant but from the intermediate forms. All those people, all that persistence, that cooperatively created this plant that now can come live with me where no modern corn can grow. I love it so much. Also if you want to try growing some grain corn and are serious about it, I have seeds to share. (imagine a sea of green heart emojis)

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Every season is the best season

2022-09-16T17:03:36Z

I do not understand how I can have so much trouble with most transitions, but also do so well with seasons. Still, I do well with seasons. I love the seasonality of this place. I'm fully ready for each season in turn to shift my focus and my activities. Maybe it's the predictability, the feeling of processing through familiar sets of activities and so I can improve or alter what I did previously but don't need to start again from nothing. Maybe it's the feeling of building on last season's work so I never feel disconnected from the past, and knowing next season will build on this season's work so I don't feel that abrupt slicing loss of transition.

Either way, gardening is pretty much over and I'm ok with that (!?!!!???? !! ? !). I have turnips, the last of the soup peas, and some beets to bring in. I have the favas to look over, and the beans to see if any pods ripened. It's been too dry for me to plant winter grains, I daren't run the tiller or I'll turn my soil into dust, so I'll till once the rains start and wait to plant grains till spring. Maybe I'll do a test patch of barley. I've dug one hole for next year's as-yet-unordered apple trees, and I'll try and at least half-dig the holes for all of them, so when they arrive in the thick of spring planting I can just bang them in the holes and be done. The freeze/thaw will loosen the soil at the edge of the holes and help prevent circling roots in my clay, too, and I won't have to remeasure my circles of protection.

I do still have a couple roses to put in the ground, and the garlic that isn't yet arrived, too. But still, hoses and nurturing and watching and trying to guess what'll happen-- that's over. I have a half-dozen dairy crates of corn drying in the woodstove room. There is another dairy crate of corn (saskatoon white) waiting to be shucked, and a crate of melons (none ripened on the vine, but I'm going to let them ripen as far as they can and take seeds from those that have fully formed seeds), and maybe 4 flats of green tomatoes (many of which ripened in the last couple days, gotta get on that). I have two shelves of squash, and outside there is half a bucket of beans and a bucket of cucumbers that need to be pickled.

The barley crop is in, a fact that needs its own post to describe how much of a joy and a relief it is. I don't grow barley but the farmers one town over do; that's why I mostly fed my pigs until this year's shortage. Straw is available, $55 per large bale (that's the 3 x 3 x 8' bales) and I'll be getting some the week Josh comes up and we'll figure out how to unload (normally it's tying the bale to a tree and driving the pickup away from the tree, but I'd like to stack them two deep).

With straw comes the ability to lay in my king stropheria mushroom bed for next spring. I need to put it in the shade, somewhere that doesn't flood. Problem is, the shade is what stays frozen till late in the year, I might split the block and try two places.

With the barley harvest comes barley. Rolled barley, or barley and oat chop, is $450/ton this year. The bagged feed I've been using is $1100/ton, and in the last month I went through a ton and a half of feed. So, just financially, this is a relief. I've been running a negative balance on my credit card the last couple months, just absorbing the higher feed costs, because I can't not feed the animals and I couldn't butcher while it was hot.

It's also a relief to have the barley, and soon the barley and oats, because feed makes a big difference to the texture of the animals' fat. Barley and oats make a firmer fat, while the bagged feed make a softer fat. I prefer the firmer fat. I've read a bunch on this, I guess feeding on acorns makes a softer fat which folks like more in prosciutto but which is not so great in bacon, for instance. Acorns also supply tannins, which keep the fat from going rancid as quickly (smoke does the same thing, which is why so much rustically-preserved pork is smoked). Soft fat is hard to manage for slicing thinly, it's hard to butcher with, and I'm not as fond of the texture for eating. I'm of half a mind to give the pigs a full month on barley before I butcher so the fat can convert a little, rather than get the butcher in as soon as possible. Honestly I may not be able to get the butcher up sooner anyhow, it's a busy season. And my mind may change once it starts freezing enough to put the hoses away and I need to carry water by hand for over a dozen pigs.

I also have four little uncastratated suckling pigs I need to slaughter as suckling pigs shortly. Three of the four are living in the lean-to greenhouse and associated enclosure in a life of luxury as of yesterday; I need to catch the last one and put him in there. I do hate catching piglets, they scream at just the wrong frequency for my nervous system and then the whole herd of pigs starts barking and grunting menacingly and following me around trying to rescue the babies. I understand why the bears stay away. I wouldif I could, my heart is always pounding by the end of it and it takes awhile for the adrenaline to dissipate.

I always tell myself I'll set up a big carrier with feed in it just outside the main pigpen so the escapee piglets get used to it, and then I can just close them in and carry them away. Maybe I'll actually do that this time? There is a new set of piglets this week, and one mama sow I'm very impressed with, she'll be a keeper.

So I suppose this is the season where my attention is turning from garden to animals, from harvest to slaughter, and then from there to seed sorting once the seeds are dried.

I'm also feeling the pull towards sewing, towards warm snuggly clothing. It's still a fairly recent revelation that clothing doesn't have to hurt my body as long as it's made of the right materials and tailored right, and I'm looking forward to playing around with that this winter. The gears are in motion for me to approach that activity in a seamless transition, nosing around at patterns, clearing a table for a sewing table, cutting out patterns, making a mock-up for loose leggings and one for a short sweater or wrap dress to wear over leggings, just a little bit of something every week as the snow comes and everything else subsides.

Meanwhile Tucker is here. I had wanted to do a bonfire with him, as I've intended to do every year for the last five or so, but the burning ban is still on despite the frost -- did I mention it's dry out? -- so maybe we'll try to just arrange the pile for his next visit. In the meantime I get snuggles and doubtless a shared brunch of two, which are much-needed.

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More joy than anything

2022-08-15T05:23:39Z

Addendum to gratitude post:

The smell of tomato leaves on my fingers

Completely comfortable and immersive sex which doesn't require a mental watchdog

Crocheted blankets

My blue linen shirts

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Holding Joy

2022-08-08T18:40:17Z

I've come up with a lot of ways to handle being upset. I write, I talk it out, I distract, I sit and feel it, I dance it out, I connect with new things, I connect with old things, I connect with my garden, I find patterns, all sorts of strategies depending on what's going on.

I do not have great strategies for what to do when I'm happy. I usually have a strong impulse to share joy or to make a plan to hold it. What I don't know how to do is sit with the intensity of it. I also don't know how to share it. I don't do joyful projects with other people in part because I don't do projects with other people (Josh excepted) but if I did I wouldn't know-- if you share the experience of making something, how do you then share the experience of pride and happiness and future-anticipation and whatever with someone? Do you just sit around and assume they feel the same? Josh will sometimes (years later even) comment on how happy he is with the pigshed we made and I'm happy with it existing as a memory of time we spent together doing the project, thinking together and working together, but I don't know how to share that with him.

When I'm happy with someone, say we're sitting in the car singing together or lying next to each other being close or sitting around a fire toasting meat or far away not talking and they do something that makes me feel like the world is perfect and wonderful and the moment rings like good crystal, I'm not sure how to share that. I know how to do things to make people feel loved, to learn their love languages and give them those things, but that's about creating a feeling in them and not in sharing a feeling when I have it. And love is different than happiness anyhow, for most people it implies a set of prescribed actions and thoughts and I'm just talking about happiness, about joy.

And when I'm planting the seeds of tomatoes or peppers I've crossed and they come up and I've created something in partnership with these plants, my mind and the world together, I can turn the energy into plotting out the next steps in the breeding process to distract but I don't know how to just sit and hold that feeling without it being so intense and overwhelming. Same as people, really.

I can deflect, distract, pour that energy into trying to drive towards a future with more of the same but I can't, I don't know, inhabit it.

When I'm upset the world comes apart, but when I'm happy the world also comes apart. When I'm upset I can talk through it and get support but when I'm happy? I go into myself, where I'm alone. Maybe I can write and hope someone finds and relates to that message in a bottle flung into the internet. But how do I share that experience? Or, how do I share myself, when I'm happy? How do I remain close?

Sometimes I just cry, and am held, and maybe that's the closest I've got so far.

Sometimes I play, like a dog with zoomies will frolic, but my play is weird and usually focused on wordplay and absurdities and few people can meet me in that space.

Anyhow, I don't know how to do this and it's probably part of why joy tends to come with an edge, I guess the edge of isolation and loneliness.

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Not so small

2022-05-10T20:09:03Z

Going into cold water for a bit, warming up, and going into cold water again -- or even just cold water, then drying off and bundling up -- always feels so so good. I love it when I go camping, I love it now.

Maybe I should work on a list of things I like doing, and try to do one of them mindfully every day? It's a bit of a PDA minefield (I'm allergic to "should" or hard plans) but I'm also great at workarounds (choose one from the menu per day, rather than plan one solid thing per day?). My always-tendency to focus on good things in the future means I forget to savour what I have.

And what I have is the most beautiful landscape in the world, an enormous garden, animals and people that love me, and a house full of amazing food. Those are good places to start.

PS My hair smells like woodsmoke.

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Mushrooming/Seeing abundance/PDA management

2021-11-30T19:09:38Z

It's looking like blue oyster mushrooms, winecap/king stropharia, nameko, enoki, and shiitake will work here. Probably shaggy manes too, since they grow wild. But here's the thought process:

I have a ton of aspen, which is actually between 3 and 6 clones connected by underground roots so they're very robust. They send suckers up all through my yard and I don't cut the suckers down as fast as I should. They're bad for my septic, for my garden, and for my foundation. When I moved in there was a neat row of aspen on the south side of the property that was below the height of my roofline: pretty good to have deciduous there, I get shade in summer and the sun has access in summer. Since then the trees have grown so they're higher than the roof, and if I were to cut them they'd fall on the powerline.

Right now they're an annoyance. I need to expend effort cutting the suckers out of my lawn because although the birds mow the lawn they do not mow the suckers. I need to either carefully fell the trees without wrecking my house, fence, and powerline or live with increasing numbers of suckers and water competition in my garden and shade increasingly where I don't want it.

When I have an abundance of something, such abundance that it annoys me, that is a system failure on my part. It means I haven't yet seen and incorporated the actual richness of the place I'm working with. So the first place to go is: what needs a lot of the thing I have a lot of?

With aspen, well. Moose eat it some. Aspen leaf miners like it. Geese don't really like it. Pigs like the leaves but not the wood or twigs. I can mill the bigger trunks to make siding for pig houses; that requires some level of chainsaw mill, it requires getting the trees down in the first place, and it produces a pretty useful product. Still there will be slabs that are all wane. Ramial woodchips are, so far as I understand, made from young softwood like aspen suckers and are great for soil building, but they use equipment and I'm not sure I can justify equipment cost for more soil building, since I get so much from the animals. Mushrooms use woodchips and are directly edible.

Directly edible foods are a powerful incentive. I'll do work for them beyond what I'll do "just" to improve soil, partially because my animals contribute so much to my soil-building that I don't feel the need for a lot more going into it (at least until I'm no longer importing feed). And in this case I can put together many uses: if I have a small woodchipper I can keep producing woodchips through yearly grooming of the aspen suckers (even if I cut them all down once a year I won't draw this resource down to nothing, they're very robust), feed it to my mushrooms, then get rich soil out of it. This requires the infrastructure of a chipper and provides incentive to actually do the work of cutting and chipping, because food is a pull (something I want) rather than a push (trying to get rid of something I don't want).

If I get a small chainsaw mill I can mill lumber and use the heavy wane for more woodchips if the chipper will take them. And/or I can cut logs and innoculate with shiitakes, which I believe perennialize better in logs vs woodchips (though this still needs research). If I cut down the adult aspen, I can leave a new set of suckers to grow up in that same area that will be ready perhaps when this round of pig barns needs more siding (or I could cut half now and half in a couple years and have a more complex rotation).

Because there's less leaf area after the trees are cut they should take less water from the soil, and I can plant my burr oak and ginkgo seeds on that south strip. They'll be somewhat sheltered by the small pines and suckers, I'll need to keep them a little watered, but by the time the aspens have grown enough to be taking up a lot of water they should be fairly established. Then, after a couple more rotations of aspens, I can phase the aspen rotations into the back, away from my septic and foundation, and move to cutting every sucker as it appears and not leaving any for rotation by the house. The ginkgo and oak will produce food/nuts and will be less harmful to the house, though the aspen suckers will still always come up from the soil and need to be cut to feed the mushrooms.

(Josh has been finding and harvesting acorns and ginkgo nuts from the city and he'll bring them up; we're hoping some will be hardy here)

While I'm thinking about it, I've been meaning to convert my original garden to a mandala perennialish garden since it's got somewhat shady from the aspens and the house, and it's flat rather than south-sloped. How cool would it be to place the mushrooms in rings of alternating species as deep mulch to perennials and berry shrubs? That would be good multi-use stacking of the kind of shady moist space mushrooms like, it would be aesthetically very satisfying to have planted fairy rings, it's very visible from the house where I'd be able to track when the mushrooms were ready, and it's a great way to feed the perennials by converting my woodchips through mushrooms, where manure might be a little hot for them.

This system also just works better with my brain, where "hey, I want to make mushroom beds" allows me to incidentally cut the aspen suckers in service of something else, whereas "I need to do lawn and septic maintenance by cutting aspen suckers" doesn't enthuse me in any way. It's that pull I mentioned, rather than the push, and so it makes necessary work fun and joyful rather than a chore.

Pull rather than push is a fundamental, vital part of any human system because we participate physically and intellectually in systems that bring us joy and that in turn is self-reinforcing for a working (and improving!) system, whereas if we set ourselves up for work we don't enjoy then it will not get done, no matter how important it is, and neither the property nor our lives will be improved and will probably decay as the property succumbs to neglect and we succumb to guilt and inadequacy. Of course each person's good, fun work will be different and a system needs to be designed as much around individual incentives and skills as around light, water, and heat availability.

Anyhow, I realize I talk about outcomes but not about process here a lot, and this was a great opportunity to put the process I've gone through in the last couple days up here. I'll try to daylight more of these processes because my thoughts are more robust when I write them down. I live in a web of shifting incentives and plans change fairly frequently so I hold the "why" of everything in my mind a lot so I can go through this process (for instance, having my veggie garden right off the back porch had a lot of "whys" that have evolved away so now it makes more sense to have perennials and berries there).

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Harvest season is in full swing

2021-08-26T12:44:02Z

Yesterday we pretty much finished rendering the soap lard, and I have a 5 gallon bucket full of it. It's a good thing I love making soap; also what an amazing object to have! Overnight last night/tonight the cooking lard from leaf fat is rendering.

21 500ml and 8 750ml jars of stock are done and in the pantry.

Cheryl has been given her meat for the chicken trade; Ron has not yet.

Tomorrow the coppas actually go into cure and 3 more primals get broken down. The pace is slowing.

The chickens hopped the fence yesterday and were in the grain trial so I chased them out, then we harvested eveything that was ripe. That means amolinka, bishop, Ble de arcour einkorn, blue durum, ceres, marquis (pr seeds planted May 6 but not the cedar isle stuff planted may 11), pelisser, pembina, reward, and white sonora. Pelissier and blue durum are exceptionally beautiful: almost lavender coloured heads with dark awns. The einkorn was green long after the other wheats started to go golden, but it was as ready as the rest of them yesterday.

Still remaining in the grain trial is rivet (which I love and really want to ripen), rouge de bordeaux, braveheart triticale, and khamut from salt spring seeds. Also the two cedar isle patches, AC andrews and marquis, are still unripe.

There were a couple stray bits of ergot in a couple of the wheats, and also in one barley. The triticale has a bunch. It seems to be easy to pick out since it replaces the grain with a huge black fungal body, and I'm further told that it floats where the rest of the grain will sink.

I brought in a bunch of broccoli raab seeds from the sorrento from William Dam seeds. I made no effort to keep it from cross-pollinating with other brassicae but I think only radishes were also blooming at that time, if anything. It'll be interesting to see. The ones I let go to seed in the greenhouse have dropped their seeds and are trying to grow me some of a fall crop already, though it may be too late for that.

The crock got half-filled with cucumber pickles. I'm pretty happy with the way the cucumbers turned out. They're very sweet compared to bought ones, except for a single bitter one (we cut off the very end and tasted them all out of curiosity). I grew boston, national, and morden pickling cukes this year. National produced first, morden and national were similar in production. Boston started later but seems to be ripening more all at once; Aug 23 or so was the first serious pick from it so it might not make it in a cooler summer.

I brought in several lovely ripe mikado black tomatoes the other day from both deck and field. I think it's in the lead as the best black tomato here this year. The tomatoes are fairly sizeable, slicers, and have great form. I will be tasting them soon. Meanwhile cabot, glacier, minsk early (the most productive) and moravsky div have set and will ripen large quantities of fruit each. Matt's wild cherry is finally hitting its stride. Katja probably will, as likely will silvery fir tree and a couple others. I think the trial can be considered a success: I learned a lot a lot a lot. The chickens have discovered the garden and are helping me eat tomatoes. Boo.

I harvested several unripe North Georgia Candy roaster squash from the vines and ate them like zucchini in a pasta sauce the other day. That was really good. I also tucked some into the pickling crock and am curious how that goes down. A lot of the squash look pretty immature, we'll see how much more heat we get this year to ripen. In future I might try to grow them up a trellis on the inside of the greenhouse/woodshed. Of the squash trials, burgess buttercup started putting out female fruit and squash earliest. Several of the kuris and the lofthouse squash are catching up, and gete oksomin and north georgia candy roaster seem to be doing ok. Fingers crossed I get some seed from something to plant next year. Again no attempt to keep things from pollinating each other; it was a hard pollinator year I think too. Likely that's because it was so warm then so cold then so warm over and over.

Though maybe bees should be in my three year plan. I'm getting some honey from a friend who has bees in town. I bet she could teach me.

I need to remember to call the bird butcher in Smithers to set a time for ducks and geese.

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Daily: discernment

2021-08-06T16:07:17Z

Seems like it's easier to write daily during the week, and when I'm at work. Makes sense. I'm lucky to have that spaciousness at work. It does mean I'm not going to the field, but my excuse is that a little fire showed up on the wildfire map across the road I was going to take into the bush today. We've had some rain, but fires have been moving very quickly and being out of contact along or past a road with a fire on it makes me twitchy. If it did blow up there'd be no way to let me know.

We have a safety system when we're in the field but it's missing the crucial component of being able to be contacted while I'm out there-- I can always call out but there's no agreement on, for instance, always running on a certain radio channel so they can get me.

The province lost another little community last night. It lost Lytton awhile back now, a train wheel against the track sparked a fire fight near the town, and it seems like within half an hour after the spark the town was gone. That was the day after Lytton had hit the "hottest spot in Canada ever" record two days in a row. Last night was Monte Creek, a little outlier town west of Kamloops. A big fire had been building in the mountain for days but a big wind drove it downhill, across the highway, and through the town.

A lot of the province is on fire.

Meanwhile I see damp grey clouds and patches of blue sky outside and it sprinkled rain twice yesterday. The apples are swelling and swelling; I keep the duck pools under them so they get several dozen gallons of water each per day, plus some fertilizer.

Tomatoes are starting to roll in.

The tomato trial has basically two parts: one is to gather information, and the other is to choose and collect seed from the ones that will continue on into next year.

Gathering information about plants and earliness is lovely. I walk along the rows, I count clusters of green tomatoes, I observe the plant growth form, I poke around looking for buried ripe fruit.

Continuation is more complicated. I'm still saving seed from everything that ripens, but. The panamorous row is a truly random collection of mixed wild and domestic genetics and it is producing a lot. What it produces is... fascinating. There are a couple cherry sized tomatoes, lots of saladette-ish size, and I just got my first beefsteak of the whole garden from that row (though Maya & Sion is coming right along behind, and maybe Taiga too).

Before I put seeds in to ferment, especially from the panamorous row, I taste the fruit. The panamorous tomatoes get sorted into A (tastes quite good), B (insipid, mealy, or has a weird acrid aftertaste that I associate with certain wild genes), and I have a tiny pile of Wow! Unfortunately the best panamorous tomato so far was densely fleshy with only 2 seeds. That might indicate an obligate outcrosser -- some of these have genes which prevent them from self-pollinating, so it's possible that ones with fewer seeds are obligate outcrossers which didn't get well-pollinated because our weird weather is hard on bees this year. It's possible that something else is going on. There certainly seem to be more seeds in the less tasty ones, sadly.

I'm keeping the B pile because any of these plants may themselves be hybrids so the offspring will be different than the parent, and/or they may have crossed with the garden tomatoes I planted in a ring around them. Any single one of those seeds may hold something amazing. And by increasing my seed supply in this way, and to this extent -- I'll have tens of thousands of seeds by the end of the year at minimum -- I can start hard selection for direct seeding and eventually self-seeding into an animal disturbance soil seedbank.

Basically-- I can plant lots and lots of seed and not too many plants will survive. The ones that survive will be the ones I want, and once I have enough survivors in that situation I can start tasting the first fruit of each and pull out the unpleasant ones so they don't contribute. Eventually, after a couple or a dozen years, I should have enough early tomatoes that I can pick some and others can drop to the ground and self-seed that way. As long as I keep removing the unpleasant ones there will be seed accumulated in the soil that will express itself over several years and the fruit should get tastier and tastier.

It's a multi-year project! There are a series of goals -- first, plants that ripen from transplants. Then, plants that ripen from seed. Then, plants that taste good. Then, plants that can seed themselves.

In the end the idea is to seedbank like this for many species. Bare land sprouts plants, it just does. If I can shift the seeds in the soil, it will mostly sprout plants that I want. Everything will sprout earlier than if I'd planted it after the soil warmed. There should be selection only for what doesn't sprout early enough that the cold kills it; I don't need to do anything for that to happen. This should allow me to get a really good early crop to work return out of the garden.

Gardening in this environment requires some knowledge; I need to have a good visual grasp of what all my desired plants look like when young. Then if I want an area to be only tomatoes, or only brassicae, I'll leave those sprouts there and weed everything else out. For warm crops, weeding everything else out might look like harvesting well-developed chard or lettuce or broccoli raab or lamb's quarters that started much earlier, leaving a patch somewhere to go to seed and replenish the soil seedbank.

Precisely what seed replenishing rotation looks like depends on how long a sufficiency of seed remains viable in the soil. We've mostly bred multi-year dormancy out of domestic crops without even trying; our seed is basically always saved from what we planted this year so it's a strong selection for most of the history of domestication. But. I bet you that with the quantities of seed that can be pumped into the soil when I let several lettuce plants go to seed (hundreds of thousands at least) or even tomatoes and tens of thousands, that it'll come along on its own.

So, yeah. I'm basically tasting a widening trickle of tomatoes and making decisions and occasionally wrinkling my nose or grinning. I'm walking a path that leads far into the future and may never arrive there. I'm using my sense of discernment and consequence. And I'm having a lot of fun.

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Daily: which is natural which is infinite which is yes

2021-07-21T05:31:43Z

Today I got five new first fruits from the tomato trial: those green cherry tomatoes with seed saved from the grocery store, cole from annapolis seeds, the silvery fir tree from annapolis, sweet apertif from Casey's, the wild cherry thing I got from Corrie which is maybe from salt spring seeds, and a Brad which had ripened still in a transplant pot. Gonna save seeds from everything so I didn't eat them out in the garden.

Noticing the differences, collecting the fruit and the data, seeing everything next to each other and its fitness or lack thereof to my situation: this is the best thing. It's fulfillment and bone-deep joy and whatever happiness looks like.

My life still has other stuff in it that's at issue but my core is happy.

I just wish I could spend some hours talking with someone else who understood.

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Niche

2021-04-27T04:27:50Z

Took some time off work this morning and then went outside again after work this afternoon. Sun has just set and 'm resentful of coming in but so, so happy.

Did:

Some fencing.

Tilled part of the garden, that lovely tiller really does start up nicely. Going to do a starburst garden this year, I can see it from my deck so it'll look neat.

Tin roof on two pig sheds.

Made a third pig shed and put a tarp roof on.

Both of the above in the strong wind.

Put fresh hay in the pig sheds.

Plus the normal chores.

Brought all my plants in tonight after planting more flats earlier today and every surface is covered in plants. I even cleared my coffee table off so I could put plants on it. Just a couple more flats of melons and squash and I'll be at max transplants for the year, I think. Right now roughly 15 flats going in and out every day and 7 under lights inside.

These are the days I feel properly alive, properly a part of the world and my environment, perfectly suited to my life.

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Provider

2021-04-26T22:23:54Z

tOne of the things about living in the North is, fruits and veggies are super expensive. I've decided to grow most of my food by calories and that's led to certain decisions. If I had to grow most of my food by dollar value it would look very different.

In the summer and fall there's a ton of stuff to grow and forage, and in early winter all the pickles and sauerkraut and whatnot is great. By March, though, I get pretty tired of pickled or root veggies. This year I didn't do any microgreens but I did give myself permission to buy, not just veggies, but even whatever fruit I wanted at the store. I don't know if you've ever been poor, but spending $5-7/lb on okra or asparagus or red peppers when they barely have any caloric value is kind of an amazing luxury -- let alone spending $3/artichoke, or buying the expensive organic name brand apples.

But. It's spring. What does that mean? Today will be my first harvest of stinging nettles and dandelions (thank goodness for perennials and how quickly they get going) and the lamb's quarters is up and its seed leaves are almost parted enough to show a first true leaf in the greenhouse.

Today I did more indoor starts: my cucumbers (morden early, boston, and national pickling; suyo long; sweet success; and mideast peace), some poppies (ziar, red corn, hungarian breadseed, blue breadseed) and a couple melons (oka, sweet granite, and blacktail mountain watermelon). The melons are a gamble -- they'll only grow if it's an exceptionally hot year.

Still need to do my summer and winter squash and a couple more melons. Then it's only flowers left to do indoors, I think, except for a continuous half-dozen lettuces per week.

It's looking like we're getting some rain in the next couple days, and not just "40% chance of showers" but actual "rain". I'm working on getting a bunch of roofs up for the pigs in their new field and even some walls. That will keep me pretty busy this evening.

I also want to get some seeds in the ground outside before the rain tomorrow. We'll see if time allows but it would be great if so. My little tiller started up on the second pull after sitting all winter -- I didn't even winterize it! -- and the fence on last year's potato patch is coming along.

It's a good time of year. Now if only I didn't have to go to work in the meantime.

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Awe

2021-03-20T07:19:13Z

The gifts I receive from the world are so often greater than I believed the entire world could hold.

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Privilege

2021-03-03T18:16:02Z

So. Counseling.

I told my counselor about PDA yesterday. They hadn't heard about it before, and also wanted to know what it meant to me, in my daily life, so I spent a lot of time talking about it. They asked some questions about connections to things I'd mentioned previously. And I just kept talking.

And it was joyful. They asked how I felt about it and basically:

I feel so much lighter.

I understand things better. I understand why people don't accommodate me in certain ways and why they don't seem to notice when I accommodate them in ways that would be helpful or thoughtful to me.

People are -so different-. Most people are -so different- from me on a scale I hadn't previously imagined. Like, there are probably many (most?) people for whom wanting something, or wanting to do something, doesn't cause a huge amount of internal pressure and conflict. And I don't mean "wanting to violate society's rules" I mean "wanting to get a glass of water". What would it even feel like to not do internal gymnastics and have to work against internal pressure for every. single. thing? No wonder folks always seem like they have so much energy!

Probably doing societally-mandated stuff is much easier for everyone else than it is for me. Everyone looks at me and says "oh, I wish I could [be poly/not live with my partner/sexuality stuff/follow my passion] like you" and I say "well, you can, you just have to accept the trade-offs" and they say "oh no, it's especially hard for me not to do the normal thing, it's different for me than you, you wouldn't understand" (this is the Universal Conversation), well. It seems like they are probably right, it is different for me than them. I do still have to deal with the consequences of my choices: smaller dating pool, no one understands me, in contravention of legal stuff, blah etc etc. But they don't have to deal with the same consequences because the decision to conform is just not as difficult for them. They might not like it, but it's not like dying every second for them. It's probably worth it for them to be makin those choices and I'm just like the kind of inspirational poster people hang on their walls and ignore than an example of a life path they never thought of before. That's super bitter, but hey.

I feel more at peace with myself: how I am is real. I can accept that better now and get on with building my life.

The only way I'm so functional is because I've built my life this way. I've been driven to create a life of what Harry Thompson calls "freedom" because then I don't have to control everything around me so much. But, without this life I've built I'd be much less functional.

It's annoying that the thing is called "pathological demand avoidance". Like, seriously.

I've often been in situations where my abuse legacy/need to conform so as not to get hurt is in conflict with my demand avoidance. Sometimes that can feel like a hard freeze: nonverbal, feels like moving through molasses when I move my body. The more I resolve my boundaries the less this happens but I can still be caught in moments by little things, especially things I feel like I should do: help with the dishes, put down a book and pay attention to someone.

People who ask me for things, especially in relationship: they're not deliberately asking me for things that are really really really hard. Those things maybe aren't hard for them. They're not trying to be unimaginably demanding. They're not trying to break me.

Asking people for little things without leaving them an "out" is maybe more ok than I thought it was. Making a statement and letting someone approach it as they like, rather than asking pointed questions that require a specific response, is not a kindness but is instead just confusing to folks.

Other folks have created strategies, like two do-to lists or focusing on the larger task to accomplish a smaller part of the task, that are just like the ones I've come up with. I can tap into other folks' strategies, and I can refine my own, now that I have a clearer idea of how my mind works. I don't have to chisel everything out of the unknown myself.

Maybe I can have easier relationship discussions now? I can ask for things clearly since I understand they're not a default, or I understand that they're not intuitive to other folks. And I can be clearer on what I can offer and how I can offer that.

This is why I want so much information from the people I care about. Because they can't ask me for things directly("you never do things I ask you to do", ouch) I have to know what's important so I can do it on my own (for instance, I can do dishes on the nights I'm not asked because I know it's important, but not on the nights when I'm asked).

So many lightning bolts going off everywhere.

I'm not failing to do all this stuff because I just don't have enough willpower or whatever. Stuff is just genuinely different for me, and now I have a roadmap to it.

Joyful.

I am so glad to have this counselor, and to be able to access them. I don't feel pathologized despite coming up with a thing that literally says pathological. And I can share that joy and find help in how to keep crafting my life. How amazing is that? How many people have someone really in their corner?

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Sunlight

2021-01-17T23:20:50Z

Date with Tucker at his place last night. I let the woodstove go out so I could clean the chimney. When I got home today I just wandered around outside in the warm sunshine on snow that was shallow enough I could walk wherever I wanted without worrying about it overtopping my boots. I watched geese and piglets, checked the stems of shrubs like haskap, petted the dogs, unloaded some grain, and basically just had relaxing time.

The haskaps on the slope have good fat stems and buds, no shriveling at all. The geese haven't eaten the stems of the raspberries yet.

I even went into the tomato greenhouse, which smells and feels like all greenhouses I've ever been in at this time of year. The sun slants in, there's a smell of warm brown vegetation, it feels right. The carrots I didn't harvest have been nibbled by voles or whatever that is, and there are a couple big kale plants still hanging out through the warm/cold cycles we've had.

It's been such a warm winter, just a couple drops with maybe the lowest to -15C. We're due for some colder weather in about a week, we'll see what it does. It was such a cold summer and now it's been such a warm winter.

The stove isn't finished smouldering yet -- that's maybe a 29 hour burn with embers that would have been able to kindle a new fire, I love the Blaze King -- so I'll likely do the chimney tomorrow morning. Luckily it's been warm lately. The stove had been keeping the house up around 26C or so, and my mobility and muscle soreness was so lovely, but now the house is cooler and I can feel the sunlight coming in through the window on me now.

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Best

2021-01-04T19:14:23Z

Cataloguing, sorting, and buying seeds and planning my garden is my happy place.

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One Little Thing

2020-08-25T19:38:58Z

I think I've finally hit a food goal.

Food, for me, is always evocative. It always means something, it's a statement of acceptance of some kind of identity, it's some kind of memory, or it's some kind of new adventure. It's embodiment. And I've written before about how preserving feels like creating hope for the future, how it helps me look forward to the world I'll be eating the food in. Then, when I eat it, that food reminds me of the time when I made it. It sews me into time, and into my life, stitches me firmly to my self.

I found a case of food from the first year I did canning: 2013. There was some blackberry crabapple juice I made that I collected fruit for on one of my first walks with Dave. We went up by UBC, I remember making the juice, I remember thinking that if I were ever to marry him it would be neat to go get the same fruits from the same place, make wine, and serve it at the wedding (he taught me to brew beer). Goodness, do I ever like romantic gestures when they aren't assumed to be a new baseline. There were also pickles and blueberry mint jam from when I learned to can with Julia, that same summer, when I basically did canning for that little farm's excess. I loved doing that work, I loved that role. They paid me in food, which allowed me to make that the summer of my canning challenge, putting up one jar of food in summer for each day in the oncoming winter. Now here I am in a home I'd hoped for but wasn't able to envision then -- it was the beginning of my journey to forestry but I didn't know it yet, and hadn't envisioned leaving Vancouver at that time. And there I was embedded in community that I wish I had now, and also that I'll work towards in my future again.

So that is an example of how food ties deeply into my emotions and experiences. But. For me so much of it has been linked to memories and to what was going on at the time; people say the things I make are good but I know they don't connect in the same way.

Today I experienced something completely new.

There's always an ad hoc quality to how I cook. There's an element of serendipity, an external trigger: this is ripe, I have a lot of this other thing, let's combine them! Well, this spring while I was making bacon I had a jar of spruce tip syrup that hadn't sealed.

I want to go on record as planning to make gallons of spruce tip syrup next year, it's one of my favourite things on earth and it's an alchemy: it's floral not resinous, but it keeps the warm quality of the conifer.

But. I had this extra syrup, so I tossed some into the bacon cure I made. That was just salt, some nitrite, and then the spruce tip added sugar as well as essence. The bacon sat in that for six weeks -- an equilibrium cure, which functionally means the salt and flavourings have time to work their way deep into the meat and you don't need to worry about it getting too salty -- and then I cold-smoked it yesterday on some neutral Applewood.

I fried up a piece this morning and sat down to write this.

This is the first time my food has achieved a complete sense of place not tied to the experiences of harvesting. I'm not sure how else to describe it. It was an end bit of bacon, salty and fatty, from the pigs I can see through my window as I write this. There was almost no sweet, just a tiny hint to balance the salt, and a very balanced spruce flavour from the trees I can see out my window, though not the same trees the pigs scratch on. Tasting it should have taken me to my farm, grounded me right here, made me look out the window and smile.

Instead... the spruce tips without their sugar, and with the extra smoke, had de-alchemized a little bit. Instead of flowers they gave the feeling of a campfire in a deciduous forest, and not any deciduous forest but *this one*, the one I've been shouldering through for work for the last 5 years. I reach my arms around those trees to measure their diameter and my cheek lays against their bark and I breathe the scent in, not every day but many days. This forest, my forest, with a little controlled smoke like from a fire, with fatty salty pork richness that wasn't quite crispy: I'd evoked something with my food that hadn't happened but that managed to completely embody me in this invented experience anyhow.

I suppose in a lot of ways food is my canvas, my communication medium. When I'm giving people food I'm always trying to give them some of my feelings and experiences. I don't think it usually works. But this time I was able to invent something completely new but also completely from *this place*, from the north, and it makes me so happy.

So: spruce tip bacon. Perfectly balanced by some bannock made with fresh-ground flour, a little milk powder, a little salt, and a little baking powder fried in the bacon fat.

Alchemy. On so many levels.

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Expansion: pigs and driving.

2020-02-27T21:05:11Z

I've picked up skills since I've lived out here. One of those skills is driving. I couldn't drive at all when I came up north; my company pretty much taught me and I did my road test up here. There's a lot of snow and ice on the roads some days but very little traffic; I've learned. So now when I back down a steep snowy hillside to turn around in the silly little work truck and find myself going backwards instead of forwards when I go to pull out, I pop her into 4-lo and lock the diff and out I come. I wouldn't have known to do that three years ago and I'd be sitting beside the road, stuck, feeling embarrassed.

I was driving the work truck in the snow because I'd taken an evening away from the conference to go see someone (the only other someone in this half of the province?) with my breed of pigs. These folks happen to be related to my closest coworker so an original failed contact got renewed. I don't fully know how to convey the buoyancy in my belly and the way I want to tell this to everyone and maybe yell it a little, but: they have a line of Ossabaws that's related to mine years back but looks like it captured a distinct set of genetics. That is, the line was imported into Ontario, the guy imported "quite a few" and at the time swapped boars with my pig person. She got one of the boars he brought in, and he bred his others.

The pigs I found locally are from the other boars he imported. My current boar is 50% from that original boar swapped down here. And there's a clear phenotypic/visual difference: the local pigs are a little longer, much smaller, white with big black spots, very sleek. The local guy wants a boar and he'll get one; I'm trying to decide if I want a second boar in trade, or if I want a boar and a sow. IF I had a boar and sow I could sell breeding groups that would take any buyers for a couple generations.

But mostly it's... you know, mine are the only Ossabaws I've seen in person. It's such a thrill to see these, slightly different but similar. They're gorgeous animals, very wild-looking and competent, and diversity-but-familiarity is so viscerally pleasant. I was walking on air all the way back to the conference.

There was some more interpersonal stuff that came up this week too, some good and some bad, but I'll dig into that more in a different post.

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