Greenstorm's Journal

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

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

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

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

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

So last year I lost a packet of seed I really wanted to plant. It was a problem.

This year I'm cataloguing all my seeds in a spreadsheet-- not carrying them over from previous years when I bought them but doing a full inventory. Then I'm putting them in a cabinet. They don't go in the cabinet until they're catalogued. Theoretically they don't come out again until the packet is empty, and I just pull out the seeds I need to plant very briefly.

The activity itself is pretty fun, cataloguing, and I'm expecting the spreadsheet to be pretty helpful in building my planting timetable for the year.

I've got a couple new things I'm trying that I'm excited about: skirret, for instance, and scorzonera. Plus I'm trying a couple baccatum peppers and some new corns, a bunch of breadseed poppies, and things like that.

Anyhow, looking forward to completing the cataloguing and starting ot build a picture of what my garden will look like this year. It'll be big; it's also a moving target since some of the original garden is perennializing/turning into roses and haskaps.

Can't wait to see how it turns out.

This was an excellent holiday. It had the things I love over the holidays: cooking, passive entertainment, a slower pace, special foods, family, pretty lights, regrouping for the future, some time outside. Someone even sent me a secret surprise gift (!) though that shook me a little. I took over a whole week off, and I managed that feeling of being outside of time and space.

There was some experimental baking and some less experimental baking: I made chocolate cupcakes with marshmallow pieces in them, next time I'll only sprinkle the marshmallows on top. Tucker made shortbread and reese's pieces cookies. Together we made a golden crispies cereal bar thing. He made challah. I made roast duck and got a shrimp ring and cheezies and pfeffernusse. He made french toast, and my friend sent me jam that I ate on it. I still had plenty of aged eggnog from spring (Islay was the best booze; rum and Canadian whiskey were the least good, adding ceylon cinnamon-infused booze was also good) and some clamato juice and cherry juice and tea and fancy hot chocolate. Lovely.

I was feeling a formulaic show (no real anxiety about people dying or getting hurt because that's not the formula) with folks who had each other's back and a writing team that respected their characters rather than using any of them, even bit parts, as the butt of jokes. I'd managed to forget the first season of Leverage where there's a terrible heteronormative dynamic around drinking and nagging, so watched a bunch of season 2 and 3 with Tucker -- it's one of his favourite shows so there was room for me to analyze it a little bit while watching. I think last time I had a holiday that felt nice like this we watched Gentleman Jack together.

Josh was up here the week before Christmas, and Tucker was here more-or-less the week between Christmas and New Years, with some breaks. I like these long stretches with people where we can dig in to being together; either a couple hours or at least a couple days works for me, but the middle space I can feel the grinding of gears and never quite get settled ("trouble with transitions" says descriptions of autism). I felt close and loved and there was time for some conversation and doing stuff together as well as just being together.

I did end up getting a tree. My beloved fibre-optic tree was thrown out when I left New Westminster back when (I lose so much stuff in moves) and it had been pretty difficult to find a fibre-optic tree since then. I finally found a little one on sale, the greenery isn't as nice as my last one but it has gold glitter and a little urn-thing as well as fitting on a side-table. I really enjoy watching fibre-optic threads shift colours, specifically, and being able to sit on the couch and watch the tree has been excellent. For some reason strands of lights or other colour-changing lights don't do it for me; just the tree.

I'm cementing in my head what will be done this year: a gate cut in the upper field, some variety trials, a bunch of potatoes grown for starch and thus clearing out my laundry room boxes to build a potato cabinet, some fencing, front deck redone, maybe a re-cover of greenhouse, maybe my aspens dropped, and a quote for fixing the shed with the wood foundation and the collapsing root cellar (I will not be able to afford to fix the shed or add on to the house but those are the two options I'll need to consider to make this place really livable for me). There was a potato infection in the maritimes so seed potatoes will be light on the ground this year; I need to order those soon. Aphrodite has also asked me to plant her a rose garden, as she did the summer I started and then stopped living with Josh, so that will be done this year. I guess my first garden will get roses in that imported soil where it's visible from the deck; it already has the one. I don't know whether I'm supposed to make a mandala/maze type shape or what; we will see. The wild roses do grow well here.

We've also finally been getting snow. Cold without the snow feels especially perilous; even with all the snow blowing everywhere and obliterating my hand-shovelled pathways it feels safer to have cold with a blanket of insulation. It's been hovering around -20 +/- 10C, a good temperature for all the snowshovelling I've been doing. It's been good exercise. A big dump of snow last night means I'm going to get someone to come in and plough all the way back to the chicken coop for me since it's between knee and thigh depth now and I am not hauling water and feed back through that in the -37C we have forecast. I have not fixed the snowblower yet, obviously. We'll see where all this goes. I'm wondering what it would cost to get a blade for the truck; it probably isn't cheaper than the snowblower but it's one less engine to maintain, and I bet it would be a hilarious learning curve figuring out where and how to push snow without destroying things or leaving inconvenient piles. We're deep, deep into solid waste territory with water: parkinglots are all full of giant piles waiting to be taken away to snow dumps.

Awhile ago I posted about an illustrated apple encyclopedia on fb, and the other day it arrived at the post office with my name on it. The return address was the address of the PG post office; the shipping label was printed on a computer and correctly made out to my PO box (there isn't street mail delivery here, so just because someone knows my street address doesn't mean they know how to mail something to me). Someone clearly paid attention to me liking it, knew my address, bought it, opened one book to admire it and left the rest in wrapping, then sent them on to me. I'm- it's a very thoughtful gift and I spent a lot of time crying about it because it's a really caring thing to do but I feel so alone up here, I want someone with that kind of attention and caring to have conversations and mutuality with but instead they're secret and I can't talk to them. It's- lotta feelings there.

Meanwhile I can go back to cataloguing my seeds today, carry some water and feed, and slowly pull things out of the way of where I hope the plough can get to. The truck is starting up super well with its new battery-and-battery-blanket (though I haven't checked to see how much electricity that's burning). The dogs got a ham for Christmas and now I need to manage Thea down from guarding Avallu out of the area by the house. The dishwasher is going. My aerogarden has given me dill and I think I'll make borscht or gravlax out of it. I have some korean ground pork and noodle recipes I'm looking forward to. The new year is a continuity from every other year, building and folding on times past, and I am grateful to have it.