Greenstorm's Journal

greenstorm @ 2026-04-29T08:58:00

2026-04-29T16:25:30Z

I'm starting to harden off some of the tomatoes. Some of the others are still being potted up. My general tomato growing principle is to start enough that they don't all fit under my lights along with everything else, but bring them outside for the whole day for the last couple weeks to a month, and just bring them in and pile them everywhere the rest of the time.

It's chaotic, but it's using my house in the way I prefer to. It also results in very well-hardened-off seedlings, and somewhat clear surfaces indoors after everything is planted out because all the surfaces had plants on them.

Yesterday I planted chiddham blanc wheat, the going to seed parsnip mix, and sprinkled some black swan poppies over them. This is in the upper field, in one of the bays between apple trees, which is also how I planted the favas and radishes. It'll be the second time I plant parsnips, the first was maybe year 1 or 2 of my garden and they didn't germinate well, or maybe I just wasn't prepared for how slowly they germinated. It's also an interesting test of the wheat; I planted it in June or July previously and it overwintered gloriously and grew well. This, well, we don't seem to be having a spring this year so I'm not sure if it'll get its vernalization (cold temp) in order to grow properly, or if it'll overwinter. We'll see.

In theory planting grains like barley and wheat and rye in the late summer lets them establish, then they overwinter and use the water from winter in order to fruit. It's a strategy for the same climate as bulbs: find some way of using that very early water (and in a deciduous forest, sun, but that's not relevent to these particular plants) and then be in a dormant state, either seed or bulb, during summer drought.

We're catapaulting right past spring though. It hasn't rained since that last big snow, and it's not going to do more than sprinkle anytime in the forecast. I've had other years where I find it so strange to be watering a month before last frost date, and those are the years where fire seems close and scary. Nothing is leafed out yet. We are getting very hot days right now, and a bit of frost at night.

Deciding when to plant is maybe more dependent on soil temperature than air temperature. If the soil is warm, throwing something over plants will protect them from frost because it holds the heat the soil is radiating up. If the soil is cold there's not so much heat to radiate up, and the plants can be frosted regardless, and they'll also grow slowly. These hot days have me wishing for a soil thermometer.

The ephemeral creek has dried up into wet mud, which means I need to keep more of my own water out for the birds. I finally blocked off the greenhouse yesterday. There are four geese sitting in it, and I had a delightful moment when I stepped into the greenhouse and all four turned their heads in perfect unison and hissed at exactly the same time. The sitters are 4 saddlebacks and 1 mixed girl. Everyone else is excluded from that garden now. Goose eggs take roughly 28 days to hatch, and usually geese don't start sitting full time until they're more or less done laying, so there should be young ones at last frost date. Then I can move them. If I make a covered enclosure to the south of the greenhouse they can hang out there and suppress weeds while being safe from ravens. I wonder if I can do that in 28 days? I wonder if I can block them in the greenhouse somehow so I can plant half of it (they're all on the south side)?

Come to think of it, it's warm enough that I could keep my tomatoes in the goosegreenhouse (which is different than this greenhouse, which currently houses geese) if I kick everyone out.

I'm really very interested in this batch of tomatoes.

Some of them are from the sweet cheriette/karma miracle cross, and we're into the F4 this year. That means last year I grew out a diverse set of plants and selected seeds from different ones, which got labelled things like "prolific cherry" and "two largest fruit plants" so when I grow out seeds from those I get to see both how much diversity there is within a selection and how different the selections are from each other. I only have between 6 and 12 plants from each selection but it's still neat to see the differences. I'm also growing out some of the uluru ochre/mikado black ones, some from black fruited and some from ochre fruited selections, and of course those throw some very obvious dwarf plants, which is always neat. Then there's some of the silvery fir/zesty green ones, some of the original zesty green plant seeds (which I now know was a natural hybrid plant) and some of the red-fruited seeds from one of the selections of those seeds, and then a bunch of F1s I didn't realize I had lying around.

And then of course the usual mix of fancy long season (relatively) tomatoes and short season/cold hardy ones, including a new saraev one, saraev spring frost and one of the "sub arctic" line which I remember reading about as a kid.

Next things to plant: dango mugi barley, ceres wheat, martoc favas, root veg (turnips, carrot) which I'm not sure where they'll go, and I'm considering planting corn under clear plastiic on the south slope because it is WARM.

I would also like to put up the rest of my concrete reinforcing wire trellises and get the acorns in the ground, but to do that I need to prep The Circle and that requires a bunch of raking, which I find challenging.

Theoretically my rootstocks are at the post office for pickup today so I can also do some grafting as soon as they start waking up.

There's always more to say about the garden but that feels like as far as I can do memory and cause/effect thoughts before my mind snaps. Neat to walk to the edge and stop, when so often I've had to push past that and have it snap aand just be blank for so long.

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greenstorm @ 2026-04-25T09:01:00

2026-04-25T16:08:19Z

It is such a relief to be able to go outside instead of staring at some words or numbers on a screen uncomprehendingly, losing time and or falling asleep, staring again, typing a bunch of stuff, realizing my fingers are on the wrong keys and deleting it, forgetting what I was going to type, and staring at the screen again.

This post brought to you by the disability people confirming they don't need anything more from me right now, and deciding to not go after my employer for messing up my tax forms, and deciding to file my taxes slightly wrong because of that.

I've also got someone to come and quote doing the back fence properly; I'm losing poultry to the foxes and garden to the deer pretty fast right now, and will continue doing so until Solly is better or I get another trained dog or I get decent fences. We'll see what he says for cost. I'd already bought the wire a couple years ago, hoping to do it myself, but that won't happen since I can no longer actually lift the rolls of wire, so we'll see.

I don't love my animals being eaten.

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greenstorm @ 2026-04-24T05:30:00

2026-04-24T12:48:26Z

I planted the first seeds yesterday: the fava mix I've been shepherding since the beginning, a pink hybrid radish called Orient Ruby, and Olympia spinach. Both big radishes and spinach are sensitive to daylength, which often means they can't grow well in spring here: by the time the soil is thawed, the days are too long for them and they bolt.

I don't do any gardening for certainty. I do it to learn the plants.

In any case, I planted them in the upper field in one of the bays between baby apple trees and covered them with frost cloth. Instantly Little Bear and Hazard came and played in the frost cloth; Bear absolutely adores going under fabric and skulking. I'd forgotten about that. Last year he would run straight through the relatively lightweight cloth.

Next is grain and peas. I haven't grown peas much, but I'm trying for more diversity than just tomatoes this year. Last year the fennel, kohlrabi, and broccoli were such successful additions that I'm following that path a little more. I also have a bunch of old soup peas, of course, I can't remember the provenance of the oldest ones but still. And I want to plant my dwarf soup peas again if the seeds will sprout.

I got this out to write because it occurs to me that I don't do art about things, for the most part. If we're going to consider pottery art and gardening not-art, I still do them both in order to be inside the thing I'm doing. Everything is aligned: mind, body, that whole subconscious apparatus that figures out how to interact with the physical world and performs the calculations necessary to throw a ball, the discernment apparatus and the appreciation one. Everything works together in one direction.

I have done pottery about wildfires. I have and will do it about The Waste Land. And I will eventually do it about Avallu. Those are important things.

So you'd think I'd do pottery about the garden. I don't. My experience of the garden might inform my pottery but it's not a thing I alchemize into some body of work. I'm not sure why that is.

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Just plants

2026-04-23T00:11:20Z

It's hot out! Still frosty nights but probably over 20C during the days. Solly lays down every time we go through shade on her walks, and really is only enthusiastic on the morning and evening ones.

I tried taking off her cone today. Fingers crossed for us all. She's a licker, but she was busy cleaning her front paws, and I'm hoping this will let her get at her bones and toys better. Besides, she was flexible enough to be able to reach and lick her wound with the cone on these last few days, I guess her leg is feeling flexible again.

I got the tiller working. It required siphoning out the old gas and putting in new. You're supposed to run the seasonal devices dry before storing them but I can never bring myself to do so. Maybe I should put the snowblower away and give it a try, anyhow.

The upper field is dry, the back field is a little squishy still but the puddles are gone. It's fascinating to use crocuses as microclimating tools. Places I'd think would be warmer, like a west slope, end up not being because of a couple degrees of angle in the wrong direction or a brief string of shade that I wouldn't expect to last long enough to have that impact.

All my apples in the main orchard are nicely woodchip mulched from last fall. I put in daffodils but the woodchip mulch is a ridiculous insulator: anything under it is still frozen, including any hose that runs under woodchips. The only exception is my perennial beds, which were layered woodchips and compost and maybe are just warm from compost still, or maybe the raised edge is south-facing enough to counter it?

About half of my scionwood has arrived. I'm going to try grafting one of everything on the wild saskatoons and one of everything on siberian crabapple rootstock: you can get two grafts out of a stick, usually.

I replanted some of the basketry willows along the ephemeral creek, some had grown up but geese had eaten others. The geese are excluded from the area currently, though it's occupied by a half-dozen muscovies who can fly around causing trouble.

The favas soaked last night, so I'm hoping to get them in the ground today. I should interplant them with spinach or radishes, something short. I had also considered alternating rows with a grain, wheat or the barley. I'll see what I do, I guess. They'll need watering whatever I do; we haven't had rain really, though that most recent snow was a lot of moisture for snow.

The first wildfire started in the area, though no one is worried about it. It did make it to 3ha, when usually they get caught below 1ha.

I'm mostly not heating the house anymore. Until the leaves come on the deciduous trees it's greenhousing when the sun swings around to the west. The point of sunset is moving really fast right now, but that's around 4pm at the moment. The temperature inside shoots up to 30C or so, I open the windows, then close them on the way down. By the next day midmorning the house is down to 18 but then it started to warm again, slowly then quickly. The basement has a tiny bit of heat going into it but that's mostly from the growlights down there.

The thermostat down there still doesn't work in spring, though it works in fall. I'm sure it has to do with the way the air flows through the area but it's deeply annoying. If it did work, I could keep downstairs at 20 and not have such extreme fluctuations, but it just doesn't turn the baseboards off when things heat up. Problem for another time.

Anyhow, gardens are good.

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Season chat

2026-04-20T16:27:31Z

I slept for the significant majority of the last two days and three nights, aside from Solly walks and feeding animals. When I wasn't sleeping or walking Solly I was mostly laying down, though I did take an hour total to work on pottery in there.

I'm not better -- my body hurts quite a bit in many ways, I'm still weirdly weak -- but my feelings are starting to live within perspective again.

It was actively hot outside yesterday. I want to get things planted, the cold weather seeds outside like favas and peas, the cool weather things inside like broccoli and fennel.

Today I get my summer tires put on. They're slightly more fuel efficient than my winters, and we may get snow but I don't think we'll get hard cold anymore.

One of the muscovy males who hatched here last spring has picked a harem and they can all fly really well, so they wander around the property being ultra ornamental. It does mean I'll need to cover any seeds though, extra well because there would be crows even if I didn't.

The crocus are coming up in the warmer places. Those I planted two falls ago have multiplied into tiny clumps. This is the first time in my life I've had a garden with bulbs long enough for them to multiply. My alba roses -- cuisse de nymph, chloris, and bellle amour -- came through the winter well, though I guess that's not surprising since it was a mild winter and this is their third (?). The romance cherries on the south slope look good too. One is suckering quite a lot, which I think means it's Valentine(?). I need to re-mulch that slope with cardboard, a bit of goose muck, and woodchips. It helps keep the grass down and the water in.

I'd also like to put in the second terrace down the slope in the front yard, but that's less pressing than many things. The lower oak circle is maybe more of a priority. I don't know how much of the upper back oak circle survived, but when I do I need to sort out seeds to complete it.

The cats are deeply happy. They've been bringing in the most ridiculous number of fat voles, as well as (sadly) a couple birds. They romp and frolic. Whiskey and Little Bear especially do long sprints. When I take Solly out at night they all come out and spread out like a security team across the area, all within sight. Hazard pounces on every spruce cone in case it's a vole and accompanies Thea on walks or Siri on hunts on the south side of the front yard.

The non-flying birds are confined to the back. I'm not counting them daily, though with onlly Thea on duty I worry. I'm getting a quote for fox-proof fencing across the midback, behind the current fencing, and kind of hoping 1) I can afford it and 2) the foxes all eat enough eggs they don't need to kill birds, and then I get the fence up before their kits are hunting age. I have lost a rooster to a hawk or owl strike (they come down and break the neck, so even if they're fought/scared off the rooster is alive but unable to move the neck right and soon dies) but only one so far.

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greenstorm @ 2026-04-18T10:09:00

2026-04-18T17:34:22Z

Yesterday I drove to the clinic and made them show me the fax cover that said they'd successfully sent my medical records to insurance, after a couple days of "yeah well maybe tomorrow". So that part is over, though I should send insurance a note to let them know I've sent the papers. Insurance will 95% send me a paper letter saying I haven't, which will arrive two weeks after next week's deadline. In the past I then contact them, they say it's my responsibility to figure out if the papers got to them and they can't tell me if they have them, then eventually say it's probably ok if I have some sort of proof and they go silent for awhile.

Which is to say, the relentless stress of the thing is supposedly almost over for a bit. I may also have got near the end of the wait list for one of the specialists, though this specialist tends to do some sort of group presentation things instead of one-on-one. I have doubts as to my ability to sit through a group presentation talking about, for instance, possible medications and when and what dosages are needed, then interpret that correctly and convince my personal doctor to prescribe it. At the moment trying to follow a complex or demanding youtube video or audiobook -- which I can stop and repeat -- will make me either fall asleep or lose ability to follow after 7 minutes.

This is why I like Agatha Christie: she's easy to follow and I've read them all lots of times, so missing chunks isn't so bad, and I know where to rewind to if I've missed a bit.

Anyhow, no use borrowing trouble about the specialist. If they accept my paperwork; and they don't try to put me on a return-to-work plan which I think could lead to me losing disability if I can't manage it; and the canadian disability they asked me to apply and then request a review of when they rejected the application, if that doesn't somehow reject me from insurance because I somehow applied wrong because I didn't hire oen of the application services...

...if those things happen, then I have until winter before I have to do it all again, which means I have some time in which to live my life, in an average of two hours a day. A lot of that life is walking Solly until her leg heals; it's going around and looking at the garden, which is good, but not really with the ability to stop and do anything in it, which is a bit frustrating. We're still getting solid frosts but we're in the teens during the day now, sometimes even the high teens (c).

When I've got some recovery in me I might even be able to clear off a surface or part of the floor and wash it. Imagine having an uncluttered couch or a table or a kitchen counter or no mouse blood on the floor and stairs. My current self is deeply grateful to my past self for keeping the dishwasher going, at least, and taking the occasional set of garbage to the dump (we don't have garbage service here).

At equinox I cleaned my pottery studio, which set it up so that I could easily use porcelain (it's very white so it prefers every surface to be cleaned to avoid contamination of dark smudges). Last night, for the first time since then, I got myself on the wheel. I threw three mug bodies with porcelain and remembered just how, hm. People say it's buttery, or like cottage cheese, but my experience is that porcelain moves by me thinking about it, where other clays move with my muscling them. It's a beautiful feeling. I can wreck a wet porcelain piece by setting down the board it's on too hard, and the clay will just slump over sideways, so it demands respect and attention. In return it responds, as I said, to mere thought.

That was a lovely but possibly unwise choice; I forgot my meds for an hour which made me nauseous, was up late, and now my body is complaining that I did too much and it hurts to lay down (actually it hurts to do anything but doing anything that's not resting is at least distracting, even if it will compound the problem). The fact that Solly has to be taken out to pee, which means no more than 11 hours of rest at a stretch for me, is another bit that's ultra hard on my body. But, we'll make it through. She's really being lovely about the whole thing, even though she's off her sedative drugs now and would like to run and play. She did a deep play bow to Thea last night and then tried to do the straight-legged romp around (vet said to keep her on a short leash, this is why: she can't be running) and I felt awful bringing her in. I would have felt more awful if she snapped the plate in her knee or had to re-do surgery though.

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Snow is a blanket

2026-04-15T17:15:59Z

We actually got a snowfall warning last night and it snowed all night. It's not colder than any particular April day, and the snow is struggling to stick and melting into the soil but because it snowed all night there's still a blanket of wet, heavy white on everything. It's a couple inches deep. The sky is white. It's very calming. There's no question about it staying long; in Vancouver there were "snow days" and this will likely last a day and water the ground gently.

The last few days I've been wandering around checking to see which of my discounted perennials from last fall managed to survive. I have no experience with herbaceous perennials in this kind of winter, and in Vancouver it never really got cold enough for a perennial to look fully dead; there was always some little bit of green at the centre of a rosette or the base buds of a dead stem. Here, the first day I looked around I thought several things hadn't made it: eryngium, trollius, leucanthemum, perovskia. The salvia and strawberries had clear tiny green though. By yesterday there were bits of sprouts on all the above except the perovskia. The coneflowers aren't showing anything yet either. I don't see the dicentra or pulmonaria but they're in shadier areas, along with the hostas, so the ground is still frozen there. I wouldn't expect to see much there, though daffodils are already pushing up. Alchemilla made it in one spot, the other is still frozen. I'm very happy about that, I really love alchemilla. And there's the plant which I always forget the name of, super grey fuzzy leaves with neon pink flowers on tall spikes, that used to be in my grandma's garden. It came through evergreen! Can't see the coreopsis yet. Some of those pink peony buds are pushing up!

I'd like to add: rockfoil, columbine, daylilies, ?delphinium (they don't like clay), sanguisorba, baptisia, persicaria, nativer/hardier coneflowers, that tall lobelia, more hen-and-chicks semper-(viren? viven? I confuse them, I can't believe they survive the winter here) and either more sedum or just take cuttings from my current ones, maybe some of the new ajugas, and nepetas.

It's really neat to start to gently become friends with the new plants. Last year was just shoving them in the ground and maybe making them a label. Now I get to go walking with Solly (now at 10 min 4x/day) along the edges of the beds and sometimes on my own, bending and poking at what's coming up or at the center of an apparently dead rosette to see if there's that hint of unfurling green yet. I get to learn what the sprawl of each plant's dead leaves look like: still there, or did they rot away under the snow in the winter? I get to learn when they start to green up, whether the crowns have multiplied into multiple buds, whether those first leaves are simpler than the older leaves or just smaller. I get to learn whether the new shoots come from the crown a couple at a time or all at once.

Soon I'll learn how fast they unfurl, how they sit before they bloom, how much they multiply over winter for real and how they respond to, well, everything. I love making new plant-friends. There's something about-- the plants have been around for mostly centuries, I think the domestic florist sanguisorbas are fairly modern, and people will be looking at them and growing them after I'm gone. The plants aren't going anywhere. I can make slow friends with a plant, learn about it, and then for the rest of my life when I meet that plant it'll be an old friend calling to me. It might be a surprise, in a city on a corner or back lot somethere. It might be in my own garden, the same plant year after year as it responds to different seasons and my knowledge deepens. Either way it's a pleasure that I can rely on.

The woody perennials are slower to come out. That's for the best since it's still cool, but the amelanchier buds are silvering with bits of fur as they swell, the manchurian apricots and a few of the mirabelle plums have green stems, the sea buckthorn is definitely thinking about opening buds, and even the tiniest of the corylus, the beaked ones which grew more slowly than the hybrids, are getting that indefinable robust feeling that shows up before the buds actively swell but when the plant isn't hunkered down being frozen solid anymore.

In the herb garden it looks like a thyme survived, the horehound and sorrel look good, the mint looks good, and the clary sage is happy. Weirdly the weld in the upper garden is good but the woad looks like a green smear, not sure if there's a crown left in there, but in the herb garden I can't find the weld but there is still at least one or two each of woad and chinese woad.

Looks like the roses that were ok in fall are still ok, though it'll be a bit, with the maybe exception of stanwell perpetual. The scotch roses don't seem to transplant well here, but we'll see if stanwell comes back from the roots. For this year I ordered a couple ramblers from the save-the-ramblers project and finally found a source for Hazeldean (!!). I should probably take some currant and rose cuttings.

I somehow ended up with something like 270 tomato transplants, though very few peppers since the aphids got to them. I did a bunch of perennial onions this year that I should start hardening out, the goal is to put them in the perennial beds. It's time to put favas in the ground outside and brassicas inside.

As of this morning the vet has told me to take Solly on walks for 10 min 4x/day for 7-10 days, then 15 mins, then no more than 20 until she gets her x-rays in 8 weeks. 20 min 4x a day will be at the upper limit of my ability, so the disability people had better be done with me until after that. I cannot express how much joy I get being in the garden again, and having to cut myself off from that in order to only do medical calls or paperwork for months is a real problem.

In the meantime I have been told the florist in town (my town, usually too small for a reliable coffee shop, has a gift shop/florist) has a bunch of cardboard regularly, so I'll see if I can grab a bunch from her to re-sheet-mulch everything and get ahead of the grass and potentially summer drought a bit.

Reminder to myself; if I'm unhappy, step outside. Just step outside, if you can, even if it's just to collapse a couple feet from the door.

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Snow mostly off

2026-04-10T02:13:53Z

We can call this the snow off date for 2026, unless more snow comes along. The back field is still a touch snowy but is mostly underwater as per usual, the upper field has some streaks of snow, the winter field is clear on the unshaded side, the front yard beds are clear. No buds really open yet.

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Dogs all the way down

2026-04-09T17:44:59Z

So just over a week ago Solly got her first TPLO surgery. If you don't know what that is, it's where they take the end of the tibia, cut it off, and rotate it about 20 degrees to create a stable platform for the joint. It's done when the tendons tear, which is ultra common in big dogs -- especially in big dogs who are "explosively" active, which is to say do sudden movements but not necessarily just a lot of movement, and I suspect in dogs who aren't carefully bred to avoid it.

Solly's ACL (or CCL on dogs and ACL on humans?) tendons were both gone. She was running around ok because, as I learned from Avallu, these dogs are more stoic than one can imagine, but it wasn't going to last long, and it hurt a lot. This surgery, or euthanasia after not too long, were the options. Back when I learned about this a friend offered to help me with the cost of surgery. Neither of us knew it would be just a few days after Avallu died. I cannot properly express how grateful I am that we can do this, that I'm not staring down losing two dogs in one year.

A week ago she went in and we came home with a big ziploc baggie full of pill bottles, a couple pages of instructions, a series of one-a-week phone calls with the vet scheduled, and advice from the vet to take it one day at a time.

She was heavily drugged for the ride home, because it's a roughly two-hour drive to the vet, and she's not supposed to be on the leg much for the first two weeks. She had the whole backseat of the truck with the seats out. Even so she sat up in her big cone collar, her chin propped on the console next to my arm, with her head slooooowly drifting downwards into a doze on the console and then snapping up groggily over and over to watch the road ahead.

After a couple days she started crying quietly in her crate. She was also reluctant to go in, though she would if I was insistent. She didn't cry when let out to curl up -- on leash, always on leash -- on the floor, and I finally realized that she couldn't fully stretch out in the crate and she wanted to stretch her surgery leg and her head both. From the tip of the cone collar to her toe when stretched out is over 5', there isn't a crate like that made, so I rigged up the hallway downstairs and she's much more comfortable in a nice 8' chunk of hallway, but only after sleeping on the sofa downstairs with her leash in hand a couple days. We're both happier now.

The cats are pretty happy because they can headbutt her and rub between her legs easily and she can't interfere with the cone, though if they're happy enough to purr she'll growl at them. She's never learned to properly interpret purrs as anything other than a growl.

I think the antibiotics were rough on her stomach. She's never been a big eater anyhow, and under her floof she has always been skinny. The meds are all take-with-food but I could barely get food into her at all; when the antibiotics were over, which coincided with the hallway change, she's started eating a bit more. We've also managed to find a pill solution. she chews her food carefully and can spit out pills except, I recently realized, if they're in roast beef chunks. So we're doing that and we're all relieved. She does not like pilling and in the beginning she had seven pills twice a day, and she'd growl to signal she needed a break after 4 or so, then after ten minutes would accept the others. I very quickly was reminded to cut my fingernails real short for it too.

It's astonishing she still loves me, honestly, but she clearly does. She knows the routine, recently shifted from 4x outside just to pee to 4x outside to pee and a 5 minute walk. She'll go willingly into the house (even when she was crated) after our walk, though she has been very happy to do bits of perimiter patrol on our walks. She even accepts the physio exercises, flexing and extending the leg and getting it massaged. I try very hard to allocate time, not just for the walk, but right afterwards for love and snuggles indoors so she doesn't just get dumped indoors and left totally alone.

We've made it through one week and done lots of learning. After this week it's supposed to get a lot easier. I know her wound is itchy, she keeps trying to lick it through her collar, but it's closing up nicely and the scabs are almost off it. Once that's healed the infection risk is I think gone, and I'll be relieved. The other risk is the plate holding on the end of her bone snapping (!!!!!!) which I can't do anything to tell how it is, just look at the joint and marvel. She's starting to put some weight on that leg already though, a bit limpingly, but it's happening, and that's what the vet wants.

Soon she'll be putting more weight on that leg than the other if all goes well, because it will hurt less than the still-torn side, and we get to go through it all over again with the other leg but with a lot more knowledge and understanding of each other.

It's good timing. It's a good time for me to be immersed in caring for one of my pups, just when I'm reminded how precious they are, and when a distraction isn't bad for me at all. It's a good time to get to know Solly better and be astonished at her immense heart, at her willingness to do what I ask, at her ability to laugh in the face of pain and strange happenings.

Meanwhile Thea guards the outside alone, and Avallu's memorial spot in the garden turns over and over in my mind until I have time and energy to create his stone to set in his favourite place.

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greenstorm @ 2026-02-03T10:34:00

2026-02-03T18:51:02Z

1) maybe shot is wearing off or maybe emotion last night put me into burnout? Both? If it were fifteen years ago I'd say I'm two weeks away from my period.

2) Northern BC is a zero-degree skating rink: water on ice

3) Not having a laptop to write is more annoying and less restful than I expected, luckily I can print off disability stuff via my phone

4) pharmacist called today, he can't administer the injection and I'll need to pay $500 for the meds so my friend who has been calling the clinic to try and make an injection appointment has to keep calling i guess

5) yeah, definitely wearing off, bloating and digestive tiptoing back in addition to mood stuff

6) people I think get more upset when they have a mascot to get upset about rather than just mass killings i guess

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Garden and relationships, with few relationships

2025-05-18T17:08:26Z

It rained yesterday, and the night before that. It's been a good soaking rain, the kind we rarely get these days. This is the May long weekend and the previous couple long weekends folks have cancelled their quad parties in the bush because it's been so dry that sparks or the heat of the vehicle could start fires (I still do not know what a "poker ride" is, though I have suspicions). This year things may have been cancelled for rain, though we definitely had sunny periods, but the spate of fires that comes immediately after this weekend seems unlikely to materialize.

The ground had been almost too try to till in my clay soil, even a month or two before last frost date. I had been picking away at it, a hundred or two hundred square feet at a time, and had done a first pass on the pig winter field (which needs a better name) and the upper field, and was just starting on the back field that has snowmelt running down over it for weeks when the snow first disappears. This will make my second pass much easier.

I'd got some pre-started brassica greens in the ground, then the other day put out the broccoli and kale, and yesterday planted some peas finally. We're still dipping below zero some nights -- never the nights when it rains -- and there are tiny delicate skims of ice on the water in containers on those mornings if I get out there early enough.

Yesterday before the rain I planted three heartnut and three buartnut by the fence in the back field to see if the juglone they produce (when they're a little bigger) will suppress the aspen from coming across the fence from the neighbour's place.

When Josh was here we drove into Alberta and picked up some excellent hardy plums and apples, which we planted. The apples are leafed out now, they went into the orchard (mostly on siberian rootstock) and the plums look to be following suit shortly.

Those bulbs I planted last fall have been coming up -- no peonies yet, but squill, daffodils, muscari, etc. They aren't so much coming up en masse, as makes sense for the first year, but there's a nice long season of them. A couple test daffodils in the orchard have not yet been eaten by geese, which is excellent news.

Many of the bulbs were planted in little clumps around the baby apple seedlings I put in last fall. Not all of those survived but many did.

I'm hauling my peppers and tomatoes onto the deck everyday for hardening off, and festooning the livingroom with them every night. Yesterday when I brought them in the were wet with rainwater.

I also put some beaked hazel in, and an order of hardy roses from corn hill. I have a bundle of hazelbert waiting to go in as well, but those last dead spruce trees from the winter field were felled right onto the spot I want them to go and apparently chainsawing destroys my body.

Wheelbarrowing in moderation and tilling seem ok for the hour of activity per day though, so I've been doing those, bringing up the chicken compost to the fields. The tiller is so good because it's rear tine so it pulls itself along and I have the handles to lean on as I walk behind. I'm being as kind to it as I know how, checking the fluids regularly, but haven't yet brought myself to change the oil. It's still starting well.

The front yard has been mostly fenced off from the geese, except for a trio who keep getting out, laying an egg in the dog house which Thea then eats or cherishes, and asking to be let back in at the gate. They are keeping my grass down somewhat so that's fine.

I hired the neighbour a couple down to chop up the fallen south fenceline aspens and burn the tops for me. He did an excellent job, was great company, and I now feel more comfortable about the fuel load by my house and more comfortable in the neighbourhood. I need to cover that south bank with compost and chips and plant into it -- I already put two little leaf lindens but want to add some elm, ash, and oak plus a shrub layer of some kind, likely usask cherries and currants. that's the same slope my clove currant is thriving on and my haskaps do well on too, and it gets more heat than anything else in the area. Maybe some wild plum or plum seedlings to?

A semilocal (Edmonton) vocational high school was doing a scionwood sale as a fundraiser so I ordered some sticks of apple and plum. Its in the fridge (I have a (small) seed fridge now given me by a friend) while I figure out rootstocks. A friend locally has a bunch of apple suckers, someone else in a cold climate has been successfully grafting apple onto *wild saskatoons*, someone was having a sale on wild plums, I have some plums that the tops died off and they're just mustang rootstock, plus there's topworking on existing plum trees. So I have some options, I'm just limited to an hour or, if I'm lucky, two, per day.

The whole thing makes me happy but it makes be even more of a recluse because leaving the house takes up two days worth of activity and I would rather be gardening. Pottery is on hold. Disability paperwork is mostly settled. Most other things can wait.

A hundred tomato varieties-ish this year. Normally I would list them out for you (and myself in posterity) but making lists is hard and I'd rather be gardening. There are roughly three categories: "early hardy reds" "fancy trial tomatoes" and "my own crosses in F2 and F3".

Eightyish hot pepper varieties too, spanning all the major species except chinense. I do love those plants, they grow so differently from tomatoes. They'd rather err on the side of dry than wet. They flower and leaf so prettily. A colorado and the mystery athens peppers overwintered in the house and are doing great now too.

I also picked up a kaffir lime for indoors, which makes my house smell truly amazing, and some baby figlets are on order, because um. I guess I'm letting myself do what I want.

Yesterday I planted runner beans, marigolds, nasturtiums, woad, and chickpeas indoors to go out when the seedlings are big enough to make a visible row in the garden (difficulty of a bit weedy garden is that direct seeding plants I'm not intimately familiar with takes a lot of concentration to ID, not that I can;t ID nasturtium and runner beans). Runner beans are supposed to be happier in slightly cooler weather than standard phasesolus and I feel able to provide them support this year.

There are several projects that need doing, fencing and deconstructing excess pig buildings and making a woodshed and putting in some proper gates, but those can all be done later.

I really should take down the hedging cedars right up against my front balcony for fire reasons but I like the screen they provide from the road. The hope is to put a solarium there instead, with some sort of adhesive glass frosted stuff in the road direction, but that's a long ways away.

There's big stuff going on in the world, many people dying and many more deciding that some group or another needs to die. It's abhorrent. It's happening locally and internationally. I read about it more than I want, and I garden because I'd rather be doing that than reading. I can't tell you how lucky I feel to have this garden, better than I ever believed I could have in my whole life, and these cats and dogs and geese ranging around with their own individualities making up a community I can tolerate and that always wants me to be alive. They even take joy in my physical existence, which is so good for my heart.

Writing this feels superficial, but words have power, and so: I wish this for everyone in the world. A safe home, a loving community that feels joy in their existence. Safety. Life. Enough food of the kind that makes them stop sometimes and just say "this is so good". I wish this for everyone. Please.

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greenstorm @ 2024-05-27T08:55:00

2024-05-27T16:38:47Z

Now that I'm home, and still on leave from work, I am finally able to sort some of the stuff out I'd intended to get to originally. My capacity is tiny, which is to say I have a couple to a few hours of movement/doing things if they're interspersed with resting per day, one phone call every second day or so whether it's practical/medical or for social, eating several times a day but minimal food-making, and that's mostly it?

So I managed to arrange for someone to pick up the pigs tomorrow, I'm keeping Baby and Hooligan back because they're old and friends. I unloaded the truck, which took 2 days and a furniture dolly (boxes of clay are roughly 40-50lbs and I just couldn't lift them the first couple days). I went in to my specialists appointment and they eventually gave me a bed to lie down on since I couldn't sit as long as I needed to without my head supported.

In February I'd ordered chicks with a friend and we got the reminder email last week, but I somehow thought they were coming next Sunday. Well, yesterday-Sunday she messaged me to ask where at the airport to pick them up. So yesterday I cleaned out the bottom chicken coop (6 wheelbarrows of light bedding) so I can move the silkies over into it so I can put the chicks to brood in the quail house. The quail house bedding is moister, so heavier, and I need to move everyone over at night when they're sleeping, so it'll be a couple days. Meanwhile the babies are brooding downstairs in a giant rubbermaid tub brooder on the sofa. Little Bear is interested but there's lots else going on.

When your memory sucks every day is a surprise.

I also had a talk with my supervisor, who-- you know, I think I need a lot more words to say "it's still bad and I don't get to see my doctor till after the leave is over because Healthcare so I can't really plan at this point"

A friend brought me by soup and bread. Another friend helped me out financially. I feel safe, and I feel like I shouldn't feel safe.

I haven't had capacity to do pottery yet. That's hard. Because I can do only one or two things a day I need to have food lined up and no animal/work/medical stuff, but because I can only do one or two things a day most days contain something I need to do, I can't get it all out of the way to clear my schedule.

My housesitter killed about half my tomato plants by number, and more than that by variety %. I still have maybe 16 flats of peppers and tomatoes, and I started a bunch of squash and leafy greens and re-started some of my precious northern cantaloupe seeds. I'm getting to the point where some of these I don't have backup seeds for, either because they're an F1 or a rare unobtainable variety or whatever. That isn't to say I can't get other seeds and start them next year - it's too late now to start more tomatoes or peppers -- but it's a loss. Turns out the plants started dying after a week and instead of messaging me to ask what to do the housesitter decided to wait till I came back to explain. Who knew what could have been saved in that time?

She also, like every human to enter my house without intimate knowledge and care for me, threw out the "rotten" tomatoes in a bowl on the counter -- my seed tomatoes that the parent plant is now dead, so that line's done -- and I'm pretty sure fed one of my prosciuttos ("moldy cheese") to the pigs to get them in the pen when they got out, and despite very very very careful instructions to take only the meat from the downstairs bedroom freezer (which had frozen and thawed) to lure the pigs in used the gorgeous salmon Josh brought me from the freezer in the carport instead.

A ton of things in my house are unique, irreplaceable, and don't make a lot of sense to people without exposure to the concepts behind them. When people visit and try to be well-meaning (and don't have unique homes of their own) generally irreplaceable or hundreds of dollars worth of stuff gets destroyed. Other people's houses are frequently inexplicable to me but I don't think I destroy stuff like that? I've finally got mom trained, pretty much, and Tucker and Josh understand. But it's frustrating and I think it's yet another reason I wish I had more space-- space to entertain separate from the living space which contains what I do with my time everyday.

Anyhow, that aside we've had good rain on and off, more than we've had in awhile. I'm hardening off my tomatoes. Something on my back deck eats lettuce but all the leafy greens other than lettuce I planted out there before I left are doing well. I have a silkie - looks like a giant white cottonball -- who can somehow hide effectively in an empty field. Little Bear had his first shots, is microchipped, and will shortly be fixed and I have a vet. Every time Little Bear goes to the vet they exclaim "he's such a delightful cat" so who knows what happens back there.

I need to get the wherewithal together to till my garden but we still have some lows in the forecast, even though the actual temps have been turning out very high. With the loss of so many tomatoes I started a sweet corn grex. My southmost garden is now fully planted, more or less, and waits only for a path and little greenhouse. It's woody perennials, needs underplanting with herbacious, but still. Has lots of haskap, hardy cherry, ribes, elderberry, etc and lots of blossoms this year.

Some apple seedlings from last year survived -- I knew my winter would kill some, since those seeds are from california -- and I'd like to catalogue them when I have wherewithal. I sorted through my seeds and put away anything I'm definitely not growing this year (missed the favas window, pulled out individual squash seeds, chose my corn path, put away the tomatoes and peppers, etc) so I only have a single dairy crate of seeds left out that I'll be putting in. The year is shaping up.

Every night Little Bear stalks me up to bed and settles in with me and Whiskey.

Solly has been sleeping in the muddy stream to keep cool, and here I thought she was just getting out.

The goose nests were eaten by the pigs when I was gone, but there might be a couple they missed.

The ambient temperature here varies between 10-27C indoors and 4-25Coutdoors (barring a little frost here and there) and is comfortable open window weather. Somehow n Vancouver a much smaller range was sticky and both too warm and too cold.

I'm not strong enough right now to unscrew the hard-water-encrusted thingers under the sink tap so I may need to hire the job out, annoying when I know exactly what I need to do but less annoying than not having running water in the bathroom sink.

I'm slowly sorting through "what if rest doesn't increase my capacity, it just maintains it, and I'm like this now". So: instead of telling a friend I can go for a walk with them, I would probably invite them over? So: I need to plan my systems much better and more efficiently. So: I need a cart so I'm not using the same wheelbarrow for chicken manure and bringing groceries in from the truck?

Threshold loves me. I love being here. All that, good and bad, and things are ok.

The psychologist I was referred to asked twice if I had things I enjoyed, hobbies, etc. Of course they want to steer me towards depression. The first time I just said yes. The second time I said "Yes, tons of stuff, the best is my tomato breeding program where I'm finally into the F2, so after 3 years of work I get to see the results finally, to see it opening out into a whole bunch of possibility-- and of course we're starting the little pottery studio in town, and there's a garden club" and I think he finally believed me. But it's hard for people to believe, I think.

If you're disabled you're supposed to be dissatisfied, unhappy. If you cure the unhappiness you're supposed to cure the disease, too, especially in "women". I have pain sometimes and a weird lack of function other times, enough that apparently I'm setting my jaw hard to get myself through things and have worn through the disc on both sides, which is what's causing the ear pain? But I'm happy. It's very possible to be in pain and also to be happy. And it's obviously possible to not do everything you want to do and still be happy, because in this near-infinite world how could anyone ever be happy otherwise?

Loving my life, and living in a life I love, has always been my most radical and least-understood act. Even when it's hard and it hurts and it's lonely. Even when it's not safe because of course it's never safe. Even when, even when.

I've been sitting up typing for 40 minutes now. The rain has restarted outside. I need to lie back down. Two cats are sleeping on the foot of the bed. Sometime later I'll go out and clear out another third of the bedding in the quail shed, or maybe do some pottery, or maybe do a run into town for more chick starter. I'll not chain multiple activities together, I'm learning that. And things will, for now, be ok.

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greenstorm @ 2024-04-04T11:38:00

2024-04-04T19:06:37Z

Tomato seeds are in for the year, I believe 101 or 102 varieties depending on how you count. Several of them are F2s, which is the first variable generation after a cross. Many of them are up already.

Peppers are potted up, mostly, and the couple that didn't germinate are replanted.

I put a bunch of greens in too, though just a couple of each except sorrel, with the plan to start a bunch more for the farmer's market later on. Doesn't impact me, but I believe some legislation was just changed so it wouldn't be legal for actual stores to buy veggies from me unless I did a bunch of licensing stuff and joined a group of some sort based down south. Not a great look, gotta say, for a gov that mouths words about food security. As always I'm excited at the idea of ethiopian kale.

Potato seeds started, though seed potatoes are not ordered. The snow is mostly off the garden, on a sunny day I could go up and plant favas and poppies and I bet the ground would be thawed enough; it's still mostly freezing hard overnight which makes chores less muddy.

Looks like many of the apple seedlings I planted are still up there -- some are not -- but the geese keep getting into the garden and likely will eat them all if I don't get better fencing sorted asap.

No legumes or corn or squash started yet. I'm thinking about doing a round of sweet corn or popcorn on top of my gaspe, I'm more likely to eat popcorn but people locally like sweet corn so a seed crop might be nice. Anyway, I could offset those by starting them indoors, especially if I'm starting from several different varieties. I'd like to try runner beans this year too, I don't really like figuring out support but they're supposed to do well in cooler weather. Maybe on the deck? I have a nice assortment.

I did plant some mache and pak choi on the deck.

I would like salad season.

I set up some damp boxes and am experimenting with those. I'd like to be able to throw a bunch, carve a bunch, and handle a bunch of objects not necessarily in the demanding timespan that air drying with a bit of plastic over them forces on me. Fingers crossed! The damp boxes are just clear bins, I set cardboard in them for the mugs to sit on and I can spritz those or just dump water in. Now I need to shift some shelving so they can be somewhere convenient and also allow more plant space when the tomatoes get potted up.

Geese are sitting in a lot of cases, I'd been hoping to keep them off the eggs until midmonth so no babies happen while I'm gone in early-mid May. I've managed to keep the ducks off at least. It all means lots of eggs for me, I sent a box of them with Tucker and stored a box in the back of my fridge (goose eggs keep for a really long time) and now it's time to start making and freezing pasta dough. The little food processor I got way back when is putting in some hard labour on pasta dough.

Thea has really bad matting on her pantaloons. It must be uncomfortable because she doesn't want me touching it. I think I can get in on Solly's before it's that bad, and Avallu's are good, but I think I might take Thea in for a professional groom. She gets spectacularly motion sick, but there's a groomer just a couple kms down the road, I might even walk her down there?

In other dog news, Avallu let me clip his nails the other day after I worked up to treats-for-touches for awhile. None of them are running on the road much, so they're definitely needing clipping. Thea is Not Having It, Solly will be worked up to it ok, she's just skeptical. And Solly has showed truly excellent escalation from tiny liplifts, through gentle escalating growls, to a sudden but roomy air-lunge with the cats. I'm very pleased; when she arrived she went right to lunging to indicate her displeasure, and I've been working on letting her know that growling is a good communication tool. This just makes her a safer dog all round. The cats appreciate the heads up too, and are feeling safer knowing when to be around her and when not to be (the not being: when she's eating or getting lots of attention from me. We're working on this latter one a bit).

I realize I'm supposed to be making some dishes for my brother's wedding but I haven't been in to the studio to use those bats for plates recently. Hm.

I also started a "mug of the day" post on instagram, where I'll post something about something I've made. Sometimes it will be a glaze detail, sometimes another thing I'm noticing or thinking about. At work it's something about the mug I bring in to drink out of.

Visit with Tucker was excellent, though I didn't love being away from home. Finally talked with Josh about all the stuff that had been waiting on me having energy, and that was good. It's a place to start.

So: lots of good.

The drop-dead date for having completed all the stuff I haven't been able to do to keep working is this fall, and I'm just not able to do it in time, plus work, plus manage my health stuff. So far as I can tell they allow zero accommodation there, too. So this lovely castle in the air I've built myself rests on that foundation until October, when I'll most likely lose my job because I'll be kicked out of the forestry thing for not finishing it. The forestry thing doesn't allow it all to be done separately, only while working, so that's a no go. I'm glad to have had this, anyhow. Not sure how long I'll be able to hold down any other job, like retail or whatever is available in town, since I'm working from bed a couple days a week right now. So I know there are changes ahead, but I'm happy right now. That counts for something.

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It balances out?

2024-03-20T15:46:25Z

( Tired of medical stuff? I sure am. )

In other news I potted up my F2 heirloom mini x baby jade seedlings, there's time nice variation there. I set up some lights in the basement after clearing out some of my closet for pottery supplies (the closet is right next to the wheel). After those tomatolets and some of the peppers got potted up I ran out of shelving, so I need more shelving to set up more lights on. I'd been going to put them in the nutri-tower but I can't find the clippies to set it up.

I need to replant one set of peppers, and finish winnowing down which tomatoes I'm planting this year. I'm down to 70 varieties, which is pretty good honestly. I also want to remember to plant a bunch to sell.

Obviously I need to grow a bunch of the F2s I produced last year, some of my good favourites, some new quick red ones, and some new fancy ones. The F2s really need a good quantity of grow-outs so it starts to limit the rest.

Some of my micro tomatoes from the micro tomato project are forming baby tomatoes, they're carrot leaf plants and I can't wait to see what happens! They may have brown or large fruits.

I also found some carbon x zesty green F1 seeds which is amazing and I really hope they grow. They were in a tiny weirdly-shaped tomato and there are only a couple seeds, that happens sometimes with hand pollination and bagging.

Meanwhile the geese are laying-- I had sorted out a few extra nests for them on the weekend. They're adorable and I want goslings this year. Not sure if I want to incubate or not. The ducks are in spring plumage and therefore gorgeous. The silkies remain tiny and cute.

Woodstove is out, it's been warm and the house has been spiking in the afternoons due to the angle of the sun. It's supposed to be cold the next little while so although I've cleaned the chimney I need to clean the ash box and maybe start another fire or two for a couple days.

The government is already sending out "watch for burning bans" ads over fb and youtube, we're all nervous about the spring and fires.

There was a glaze fire Sunday night in the studio kiln, it cooled yesterday and so we can open it after work today. I've been seized by catastrophizing that my new glazes have run all over all the shelves and wrecked them. They're probably fine. We fired at cone 5 with a 12 minute hold instead of the previous cone 6 because the kiln was overshooting some so they should run less than previous, and I was pretty careful.

Tucker, his partner, and her kid are going to visit some friends for the eclipse. I made a set of eclipse mugs for them all, one of the first times I've worked to an idea I clearly visualized in advance, and I'm very curious to see how they come out. It takes skill to be very deliberate in a creation like this and I'm still only building skill slowly and in slow kilnload-by-kilnload iterations.

I haven't been able to throw in awhile, it seems like an exceptionally bad idea with the migraine hanging over everything, so I have some ideas piling up.

Today I'm still getting visual artifacts but am in much less incipient pain so yay! And also bad to work. Oh well.

Big update infodump I guess. I think I'd be writing more if screens weren't so weird and uncomfy. Maybe I should start vlogging or something. Is there an audio equivalent?

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greenstorm @ 2024-03-17T22:04:00

2024-03-18T05:15:14Z

Heat hammering on the snow
Lancing it
Burning it away
Layer by layer the garbage is revealed
Held safe in ice
Covered in blankets of cleansing snow
The landscape was at peace
Now it is torn raw by cross-land flow
Water carving and tearing new wounds
Into old scars revealed
Sun ripping six months of flaws into
Full view in six days.
Under the gunshots of shattering lake ice
Beer cans peeled into curved knives by ravens
Glitter in every ditch
The first geese chew innumerable shreds
Of muddy plastic
No leaves are open yet
No ground is thawed
No romantic empty slate appears
Promising fertile growth
Until you pick up the trash.

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Drive to work

2024-03-14T20:23:57Z

When it warms up everything smells like hot dogs
Smoky fires kept dampened as
Sun rewarms our cluster of homes.

Earlier in winter the air was crisp with
Sweet pine smoke, sticky balsam, and the lower scent
Of charred birch.

Each house with its particular scent
Particular smoke pattern
The intimacy of strangers living through the same
Circumstances.

If you have pine I know where you spent your
Fall. If birch, I know where you spent your
Money, or social capital, or long rambling time
Driving down dusty roads to find it.

When you wake up you light up a smoke
Signal from your chimney, defiant against the cold,
One spark among many with the message: we
Survived the darkness. We
Are still here
Together.

Edited to add: I love these line breaks, they make me feel like I'm listening to an alien

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Inversely productive

2024-03-11T17:10:26Z

It's been awhile since I wrote. I had that truly terrible cluster of migraine symptoms at first, then work was extremely busy -- we did a last minute heli flight that lasted a full workday, then I was helping with a conference one town over, then I was recovering, then I was helping with our seedy saturday, then I did a tiny bit of pottery at the studio, now it's now. It really took everything I had to get through that. I gave up on non-masked human social stuff for that couple weeks, on doing more than minimum for food and house. Now I want to sink into the deep pool of peace that is my house and my life. I want to watch my cat sleeping and intermittently pet him for hours while my mind unspools and processes.

There's a lot to process.

It's spring and the geese are all over the yard looking for nests and there are melt-pools everywhere. I can hear gregarious honking through my dog door.

While I was at the end of the conference, but still in it, before the drive home, I was sending off a quick email to my supervisor about how my work hours supported the yearly priority plan. I used the term "DEI" and he didn't know what that meant; I sent him a copy of our organization's new DEI plan that had come out and been circulated something like last fall and he said thank you; he didn't dispute (and never does) the time I spend on this but wow.

I introduced my colleague to proper vietnamese food for the first time and as I was dressing and flipping my pho he asked how I knew how to eat it. He loved it, even the (truly phenomenal) fish sauce.

I gave away 8 mugs as door prizes and several hundred packets of my own seed at seedy saturday. They had someone else as a speaker this year talking about "proper" seed saving (how not to cross, for instance) so I spent my time at the seed tables. First I was stuffing envelopes with seed and directing people to label them as I stuffed, but we quickly ran out of packets. Then I showed people how to do the origami seed packets, the librarian used her paper cutter and a pile of recycled paper to make squares, and we folded, filled, and taped. People kept coming in with big bags of seed. Someone came in with elaborate origami seed packets with a crane folded into them. We had such an incredible richness of local seeds come in, I felt so honoured, like a conservator of a community treasure. Several thousand packets of seed went out, free, to people. My mugs, some plant starts, other folks' homemade wine went out as door prizes. The space was packed. Everyone said it was an amazing event. One of the speakers brought 75 varieties of tomato seed to give away. They say that in the coastal indigenous cultures your wealth was measured by what you give away, and I always feel that, and last Saturday I felt wealthy. All the extra seeds go to the new seed library in the library there so anyone who missed the event can still grow things. A+ use of my time but following on the end of a long week it was a lot, and by this time I was really missing talking to my people.

Dogs finally got treated for the fleas Solly picked up when she went on her walkabout. I hadn't seen any in the last month but that means very little. I've been watching videos of a professional dog groomer doing livestock guardian dogs on youtube and trying to figure out how I could wash my pups. I'll settle for getting the mats out and doing a deep brush. Avallu's been loving this; I think it's time to start treating Solly for it. Thea has realized it gets her attention so she's settled into it.

My pepper seeds are all up except for the african birds eye. It's getting on time to start tomatoes and separate the peppers, which means setting up more lights, which means clearing a shelf or two, which means doing some work on my storage container. My first round of seeds, tomatoes from Jan 1st, is doing well-- some of the micros are flowering, and the F2s exhibit the breathtaking diversity that hold me in awe and that I'd always hoped to attain.

The headache seems to be somewhat recurring, but not as constant as it was. Nausea is a near-constant struggle. These two things may (?) be correlated to air quality, as they may get worse when I turn off the CR box or have the windows closed? On the other hand it's warmed up and I can keep a couple windows cracked open so my body just feels lighter in a lot of ways.

In two weeks I'm driving to the coast for a couple days to visit Tucker and bring him (and some clay) back up, maybe disseminate some mugs.

This Wed is a bisque kiln and possibly the following weekend a glaze kiln, that doesn't leave much time for glazing.

Odds and ends, unprocessed. Spring is coming. My mind doesn't think well. Still I'm doing what I love and am happy; I only hope this life doesn't have that fall expiry date.

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Soul of winter

2024-01-17T18:42:32Z

Every day there's more sunshine.

We had a fresh blanket of snow two nights ago and through into yesterday early afternoon. I popped out on work breaks to snowblow, working from home, and it was the kind of fine dusty-sand snow that blows all around and is easy to snowblow but hard to walk through.

Today it's very sunny, -20C. That sounds cold but with the sun at least making it above not just the horizon but the trees there's so much directional radiant heat and everything is bathed in light. The air is cold enough that it's full of glitter, sparkling like a christmas card or fantasy movie set.

I have a friend at a similar latitude in maybe Sweden whose geese are starting to posture. I should split off a couple groups for breeding before they pair off inappropriately.

I started seeds for the garden club meeting in two weeks, we'll be splitting the tightly-packed seedlings at the first leaf stage and everyone will be potting up some micro tomatoes and small pot-friendly peppers. It's much too early to plant indoor starts for planting outdoors at the end of May, so this is a way to get our hands in the dirt and play with seeds and build some community without having overgrown seedlings later on. Plus it introduces people to micro tomatoes and I do have a ton of micro seeds. The club is providing soil and pots (I am also bringing some pots scavenged from the grocery store program's poinsettas). This makes me happy.

My apple seeds will arrive soon and I will soak and stratify them. I have no money right now but am hoping to order a couple more haskaps and some oaks for this year. Maybe I'll sell some pottery to do it?

Speaking of selling pottery, I have the kiln lined up to buy from my mentor in spring, but money is a definite issue. I'm considering doing a "help set up my ceramics studio" kickstarter/indiegogo/maybe patreon sales type thing, though it makes me nervous. I do love the idea of crafting items for people based on a couple data points though (big or small, handle or no handle, texture or no texture, colour family, choose a word if you like).

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Dust

2023-06-15T22:21:22Z

I planted sixty tomatoes last night, mostly promiscuous and blacks but also my 16 grocery store green F2s. Greens and reds are mostly already planted. More blacks, some sibling promiscuous, and some "weird" colours still need to be done.

The smoke was coming in last night, not high where the sun turns orange but low where the sky is still blue but it moves like mist along the ground and smells like a neighbour's bonfire all day. Today, thank goodness, it's gone. My air filters have not yet arrived and I haven't yet cleaned up the dust from downstairs.

Somehow I've gone from being energized by the sun all my life to being sick and weird-feeling when I'm out in it even in the late afternoon. I've been gardening between 7 and 9:30pmish, because I just do not feel well if I go out otherwise. I have a Dr's appointment next month; I need to bring my list of symptoms and push for whatever the next thing is because I still don't have enough memory to advocate for myself in a visit like that without notes. Sinus infection still present: eyes hurt, shoulders and neck hurt, on top of the normal sinus places. Not sure if the stabbing headache I've had for the last week and a half is related. Things just hurt, dammit.

I don't work tomorrow. I may stay out late and plant things; this is about as late as I want to push that.

It's supposed to be cold on the weekend. I want to do some pottery, and maybe I will. I am feeling significantly more emotionally regulated now than I was yesterday; I assume that was a medication wobble, or maybe I took some steps to reach out and chat with folks and that helped with my sense of connection.

Canada is doing an education grant for all citizens, regardless of income: $3500 for selected "futurizing the workplace" type courses. A couple are website design for small business owners, which I might do to out out some of my soap, random cool animal bones, maybe random pottery, and meat in season - I have a website sketched up but the last time I did the internet it was all straight html, so. There's also a nice drone program or two -- good for work - one on autism (not sure how good it is), some things like the basics of plumbing which would be ultra useful, and -- well, I just like taking online classes, so this is neat. But it would be good to get a website up. I think we have 2 years to use up the grant funding.

Oh right, I also need to put some mushrooms in my logs. Tonight is pottery, so this might be a late night, or an early morning tomorrow if I'm trying to avoid the sun.

The geese and especially ducks are growing super fast (the babies, I mean). It's unreal how much they eat, poop, and grow. The chicks in there are a little more civilized.

I had a tap installed in the south wall of my house when the plumber was here, and now I realize I have water there. I should* put a lean-to greenhouse against the south side of the house, where it will broil and be great for tomatoes and peppers, slightly insulate the water side of my foundation, etc. In the meantime I should put pots of tomatoes along that side, they'll be easy to water (before I had to wrap the hose around the house) and do well in the heat.

I have a bunch of my seedling apples in the ground, about 18" apart. Will be interesting to see what survives the winter. These are the edholm seedlings: "early OP", "Oct OP", "Wickson OP" and "red flesh OP". There's no real way of knowing what they crossed with, though there are a ton of interesting things on his land, and only Wickson is a reliably hardy parent. I figure I'll just replace any that die with new seedlings every year until I have no more gaps. But anyhow, that's why I thnk the 18" spacing for full-sized apple trees is ok.

My named apples planted in the orchard are doing well. All the crabapples are flowering.

I'd like to make a bunch of tags, one for each tree, out of clay. Just one more project, besides the poetry tumblers and the seed storage jars and the plates. Good thing winter exists?

It's dry dry dry here. The "poker ride" (something about riding around the trails on ATVs and poker hands?) was cancelled because those hot engines on the vegetation can start fires when it's this dry. Thank goodness for my well and for that little bit of rain the other night, but still.

PDA is kicking my butt in so many places. I have pictures and last year's text for piglets, I need to put up excess pigs for sales. Also something course degree something mumble oof.

The folks in Smithers who were looking to share their property let me know about a job in that area. I guess that's also an option if I wanted to move, which I don't really. The more apples I plant, the more I know that when my dogs leave the trees won't survive unless they're big enough to survive moose predation.

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Disney spring

2023-06-05T19:04:44Z

Well, I'm super exhausted and can't breathe, which makes sense because recovery from the last week) plus my downstairs is completely covered in concrete dust including all my clothing that had been freshly washed and laid out on the bed and in the closet. And I'm back at work doing a leadership program that is extremely anti-autistic.

But: goodness are there a lot of animals around this year. A bear on the neighbour's lawn, two separate elk sightings, a deer making her way through my neighbour's garden while I was watering mine, five bears on the forestry road in one day, swallows that took the place of the bats eating my mosquitoes, looks like maybe a high in the rabbit cycle, etc,

First wild rose opened June 2nd, spruce buds are opening very quickly, arnica cordifolia and viola canadensis are all over and open, tons of them. Dandelions are going to seed.

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I hold with those who favour fire

2023-05-08T15:44:44Z

Two cool rainy days in a row, much-needed, and now we're back to warm. I hung my laundry on the line late last night in anticipation of the forecast, which is clear and warmer day after day until the weekend. I find the laundry does better outside than in the machine overnight, and the machine needs babying because of the low well pressure so it can only be run when I'm around.

Anyhow, we hit Warm a couple days ago, and 30C is forecast next weekend. For those keeping track, that's warmer than many of our summers ever get. In May. We're still having intermittent frost at night but I'm thinking seriously about planting my corn.

I'm doing this poetry challenge, 30 poems in 30 days, and I started by writing about plants and the land and now I'm writing about global warming. Go figure.

Tilled most of the lower garden before the tiller stopped running. I think I need to check the chain/transmission oil, it may be overheating.

Many of the apple trees have baby leaves, though the new ones don't yet. Some of the seedling apple trees have deep red leaves, I assume they're the offspring of my red-leafed crabapple.

I'm digging raspberries and giving them away, and turning the eggs in the incubator twice daily. It's a good time.

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In my glory

2023-05-07T05:14:28Z

It's been a lovely couple days. Aside from Friday morning, when I had to catch some piglets, it's been largely gardening with some pottery and some socialization, plus organization-without-having-to-lead-things, cat snuggling during much-needed rain, and more gardening.

Thursday was supposed to be pottery day. We were going to be learning the kiln but the teacher cancelled on us and one of the volunteers also cancelled, so three of us opened the kiln (stuff looked good) and then one went home and the other organized the studio some while I (tried to) throw some pots. I was definitely off my game, which I've been expecting -- I've only thrown a couple times since 2014 and there's a strong curve from "first time or two back are good" through "lost everything and keep failing" and then back into "solid skill and also solid muscles" with almost everything I do. So I'm going to need to do a lot of throwing for the next bit to actually build my skills back to be able to do what I did the first couple times.

Anyhow, the other volunteer left and I got some time alone with the wheel and some music just to play, which was lovely. Oh, and my seed potatoes arrived.

When I got home I had a bunch of tidying to do and I was tired and slow, so I ended up doing animal chores at midnight. Amazingly for May there was a warm wind and the moon was full and very very bright. I didn't need a flashlight.

I had Friday off. I got a sunburn while catching piglets, and got the tiniest warning nip from Hooligan. It's the first time I've been touched with teeth by a pig, and we were closing the catch on a crate with a screaming baby in it, so I don't blame her at all. She also just barely touched, but the message was clear. She let me settle her with some scritches after so she doesn't hold it against me. It was a hot day, hotter than some of our summers have managed to achieve, made hotter by the fact that not a single leaf is on the trees yet. Weird spring indeed.

Friday afternoon was planting willows at the arts building. We'd planned to put in a basketry willow hedge in rainbow order: some willows are purple, some red, some yellow, some green, some almost grey. The plan was to line them up in coherent order to block off an area of path where people tend to walk, to make something pretty, and also to give us willows for making basketry in the future. Beyond that there didn't seem to be anyone particular planning it exactly: someone got the district workers to take the sod off the area, someone else got a grant and got the willow cuttings and irrigation line and then went on vacation, and someone else took over planting within the necessary window. I'm not sure anyone who was involved had planted into lawns before and of course I am a pro at it, having done it nearly every move in Vancouver. Luckily I noticed that it was just rock-hard subsoil the day before and we got a tiller sorted out, then some rebar to make holes beyond the depth we could till. Roughly 350 willows were planted, 19 types. I ended up with the extra cuttings, which I need to plant basically right now.

While we were working - I think 7 different people showed up to help by the end - there was a lovely lightning/thunderstorm with warm sprinkling rain so erratic that it would be raining on one person and not on the next five feet away.

Today was Saturday it had rained overnight. I spent the morning picking away at the raspberries and trimming dead out of them in the morning. After awhile doing that I raked the main garden so I could till, dug some extra raspberries, and then it started raining so I took a break. The garlic is finally coming up; I planted many different kinds last fall and somehow everyone else's garlic was up but mine wasn't, so I thought it had died. Actually, nearly overnight everything sort of started: alder catkins are falling everywhere, the haskaps somehow into leaf without ever swelling their buds, my plum tree flower buds swelling, grass everywhere, the clover seeded into my lawn showing cotyledons, willow blossoms everywhere.

With it overcast all day and not too windy this was the first day my tomatoes were outside all day.

The afternoon was cleanup and evening was going in to get the expired grocery store feed for the pigs, but I had time to catalogue the willows this evening.

Tomorrow is supposed to rain. I really want to get this lower garden tilled but I don't want to harm the soil by tilling in the rain. So my menu is:

Till the lower garden in order to:
-plant favas
-plant onions
-plant kale
-plant lettuce
-plant other garlic

Plant elderberry cuttings
Plant willow cuttings
Plant seed potatoes
Start hardening off TPS potatoes
Figure out 3rd incubator
Feed out loop/grocery store food
Start raking/tidying upper garden
Load truck with garbage
Separate doubled tomatoes and put some in the aerogardens
Move some stuff into the storage container
Plant raspberries outside the fence by the electric poles
Cut back the spruce hedge
Cut back the cedars
Cardboard the south hillside
Manure the asparagus
Set up nests for geese

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Good, actually: plants, pottery, and internet

2023-05-02T21:00:40Z

People have been asking me how I am and I’ve been saying things like “good” or “excellent”. It’s been awhile! A couple counseling visits ago I said something like “is it even possible to give a straight, single, non-ambivalent answer to this? Like do neurotypicals have everything average out so they don’t experience both the good and the bad, but just a kind of middle mush?”

Last visit I said, “really good, actually.”

It’s important to laugh at myself when it’s warranted.

So here’s the stuff:

Garden: tomatoes are looking great and I’m starting to acclimatize them to outside. I never did set up my lights, but the thing about seeding so late is that daytime is starting to be warm enough to keep them outdoors as they’re thinking about stretching. We’re still getting freezes at night but they’re still in the “couple hours at a time in the shade” phase so I just take them out once it warms up. I’m thinking of repurposing my chick brooder for a mini greenhouse on the deck so I don’t need to haul in and out.

Meanwhile the apple seedlings are thriving, they’re outside all day and any evening there isn’t frost (only one so far). Peppers had poor germination but I did plant two flats so I’ll have enough to grow. I also had poor germination on ground cherries.

I started messing with the raspberries the other night. Started cutting out last year’s fruiting canes and cutting the east fence one into rows, leaving a stub so I can dig out the extras.

Outside is beautiful but weird. Stinging nettles are coming up, rhubarb is up, sweet ciciley and apple trees haven’t budged yet. Favas are in the ground. The pigpen is almost dried out, it could almost be tilled already. The lake is lower than folks remember ever. They’re forecasting a big wildfire year for the whole province. Eep.

Pottery: so looks like we’re crystallizing into an actual functional group, or at least moving towards it, without me having to shoulder the whole thing. A previous volunteer, who burned out because she didn’t have help, seems to be back. The first kilnload of bisque is currently cooling down, I’ll get to see it on Thursday. We’re going to glaze. The plan is to meet regularly on Thursdays. Hopefully that doesn’t fall apart. I really do want to do a bunch of throwing until I can do it confidently.

Tucker/stupid/mystery: a lot of stuff is percolating on this one. My therapist suggested that what keeps drawing me back is that he’s unpredictable. Or, I mean, she said “mystery” and that’s maybe accurate? Which offers me the lens that his unpredictability throws me off in both directions: I appreciate not always knowing what’s going to happen, but I really struggle without any sense of certainty or agency in the relationship. I also feel stupid every time we go through the dance where he distances, I distance, and then he comes closer after I distance. It is kind of predictable, after all, and if someone doesn’t explicitly commit to me I feel uncomfortably ambivalent about my right to complain when they suddenly don’t act committed: on the one hand they didn’t say anything for me to rely on, on the other hand if someone does a bunch of stuff with typical societal meanings about commitment for years and then stops it was in fact fair to believe they’d go on as they had begun unless they said otherwise. Anyhow I’m chatting cautiously with him again. We’ll see how it goes. He tends to schedule himself pretty full and I’m not great at “I can only talk to you on Tuesdays for the rest of the year except when I’m too busy, then we skip a week”.

Willow: the basketmaking course was nice. I’ve harvested a bunch of willow, some from my property and some from the side of the road last time I drove the highway. It’s supposed to be harvested before buds start to open. I may have been slightly late? And just a week or two later it’s definitely too late. We’ll see if the stuff I got is ok for basketmaking or not when it’s done drying and soaking. I have a couple friends interested in learning too so we’ll see how that goes. I guess practice baskets are fine even if they’re not perfect.

I really enjoy the way the willow smells, and the way it scents my basement while drying.

Poetry:My friend did that wonderful poetry month daily challenge, and I’ve taken up a PDA-compatible “30 poems sometime in 30 days” challenge starting randomly on April 29th. It’s a real joy. I’ve written a backlog of poems to put out one at a time (I did write them all in the first couple days) and in the meantime that frees me up to write new ones without PDA last-minute pressure. Writing feels so good. Manifesting the inside of my mind on my outside is empowering-feeling. Also it’s neat to see what’s on my mind.

Well: my water pressure is a real problem. There’s also sand coming up through the system. I cleaned out a bunch of my little faucet screens last night; the kitchen water had completely stopped and I pulled maybe ¼ tsp of sand out of it, which fixed it. Apparently the sand is a big thing for everyone on my road right now, so for everyone on the couple layers of aquifer. We think it’s because the water is SO LOW right now, and I think on a karst system it shifts around very quickly. Anyhow, my washing machine is struggling – it’s the thing that uses the most water in my house right now, and loads are taking an extra hour or two as the machine fills up so slowly. I need to order a pressure tank and try to figure out how to put it in by myself or get a plumber to come out for an hour. The money is definitely hard right now and I’m waffling between the same sized tank (25 gallons of “useable” water, aka drawdown) or get one step larger (35 gallons of drawdown) to help protect me through power outages. Either way I may need to sell random stuff to make it happen.

Starlink: the provincial government said something about wanting broadband to every rural household in the province in 4 years. This comes 1-2 years after almost removing it completely from some remote communities, and after funding it being put in south of me along the whole highway of tears (which is definitely taking longer than they expected). My internet right now is a hub that runs on cell service, it’s very very slow but it’s reliable and it’s $90/month. It’s getting worse as the local cell towers decay (as with everything owned by businesses, they cut the nonprofitable stuff for small groups and focus on what makes money, which is not rural stuff). Starlink (and the truly awful satellite internet) are the only other options.

I hadn’t wanted to get starlink since there’s the $700 equipment cost up front and if the gov ever does get some other kind of broadband internet up here I don’t want to be stuck with the sunk cost fallacy keeping me on it. However… the other day I learned that starlink is offering its equipment to rural Canada, NZ, and Australia at a very very steep discount ($200) that makes it palatable amortized over even just four years. Soooooo… I’ve ordered it. I am not thrilled to be supporting the organization, I firmly believe it should be a government service, but my government is failing me here.

I am looking forward to making youtube videos again! I wasn’t able to upload them in less than 20 hours or so before. I wonder if IO can find a used gopro or something?
Anyhow, that’s a lot and mostly good.

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The two faces of breakup season

2023-04-19T16:23:01Z

My coworker takes guesses at breakup every year. It's been as early as April 6 and as late as I think May 16 in the last twenty years. He has a neighbour identify a particular strip across the lake that has to be ice-free. This has been a long cold spring; I guessed May 12th. The prize is bragging rights, which is why my PDA self can participate. I have serious issues with competition.

The long cold spring hasn't stopped it being a dry spring. The ground was dead dry last fall and we got a normal amount of snow or just barely above normal. There are spots on the mountain where we did controlled fires last fall and it seems like with snow off them they're still smouldering this spring. Uncomfortable.

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Fast spring

2023-04-13T20:25:06Z

Finished planting things April 8. I got in to cells (most of which are germinating, but there will be some misses). One cell is mostly one individual for plant-out space planning purposes.

Allium (6, but I pack them pretty tight into cells and separate at plant-out)
Artichokes (18)
Asparagus (42)
Basil (48)
Dahlia (24)
Goji berry (2)
Ground cherry (24)
Peppers (144)
Potato (144)
Peruvianum (12)
Rhubarb (12)
Tomato (442)
Tomatillo (40)

Hm, my math isn't adding up, need to recount. Anyhow, 12 flats of 72 cells each I think. All planted between April 3 and 8. I will maybe do some cucumbers later, still not sure.

My apples were also starting to sprout, or many of them are, which is super exciting. I need to get them out of plastic bags and into soil.

Also I'm going to grow F1s for two more hand cross tomatoes: one that's taiga as the parent (pollen parent lost) and one that's carbon as the pollen parent (small red as the mother). They kind of sat on the counter all winter, so I'm not sure how they'll work, but it's exciting.

I'm thinking pretty seriously about keeping a clone of each F1 in the aerogarden so I'm sure to get plenty of F2 seed. Not sure how that will work for full-sized tomatoes; I guess I could try kratky finally for them? F1s have no real need to be tested in soil or anything like that, they just exist to provide as much F2 seed, and thus as many variations in offspring, as possible.

Spring was so slow and cold and now it's so fast, snow is almost gone except for on my mushroom bed and the north side of my house as the sunset swings around and sunlight covers more ground every day. Last year was ultra dry - many wells ran out in January - and we got normal snowpack so it's looking to be a dry spring and likely a bad fire season. Fingers crossed.

Costing out re-covering my greenhouse with soft plastic (cheap, need to redo frequently) or hard plastic (expensive, only needs redoing every 20 years).

Whatever is going on with me is still going on; anytime I do things I'm super exhausted after for sometimes days. Luckily I don't need to do too much right now. Hopefully I'm recovered by plant-out time.

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