Greenstorm's Journal

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.

Some "soon" garden thoughts:

Make up some oyster mushroom/straw buckets from cat litter buckets.
Finalize tomato starts for the year.
Finalize pepper starts for the year.
De-seed the rest of the squash, and set the squash shelf up for seedlings.
Figure out seed distribution for landrace gardening talk (envelopes? Baggies?)
Seed a couple pots of basil and parsley.

Let's talk about something very real though: sun is returning. This time of year varies: I see a "warm", I see a "-32C", it's all over in past entries. This time of year is reliably steady: the light is coming back, I catalogue my seeds and start making decisions.

In 2020 I wrote Imbolc isn't spring; it's the evidence-based belief that spring really will come to exist so we should get ready and start planning.

This week I've been shelling the last of my corn. Corn is amazing for breeding for a couple reasons: it tends to outcross, or share pollen with the corn plants nearby to it, so if you want to mix two plants together you can plant them near without doing the kind of fancy tweezers-and-scalpel surgery needed on tomatoes; and if the mother has light coloured outer parts (skin layers, basically) you can see whether it has crossed with a darker pollen-father because the kernel will be a different colour (or sometimes the midlayers of skin).

So shelling corn isn't just gauging yield and admiring the beauty of the crop and evaluating how well it did. Shelling corn, if it's light corn, is also looking to directly see what was crossed and with what. Sometimes there are blue kernels, or red. Sometimes they're blue speckled or red starred. I didn't have original plans to do this but I find myself picking out the crossed kernels. I want to plant them all together and see the diversity that results in that patch: some plants taller or shorter, with redder or more chartreuse stalks or silks, stockier or slimmer, producing a clump of plants from one root or a single reaching stem. I'm almost done shelling (I'd left the corn to dry on the cobs for months stacked in dairy crates to dry) and soon I'll start setting aside the seed in small bags for each plot, then vacuum sealing and freezing the rest.

I'm starting to pull out my tomato seeds. In 2021 I grew a bunch of stuff, it was my first year landracing, and then it got sealed up into the vault because I was moving spring 2022. I kind of forgot about the details of it. Landracing is about adapting a diverse population to a very particular landscape, and in my mind that seed, grown and saved a year in threshold, was no longer adapted to my land since I was moving. Well, I found that 2021 seed and it's already a year adapted to threshold, so this will be its second year in its home! I remember things about it, there's a very sweet tomatillo for example, that I wanted to keep sweet for eating out-of-hand as a fruit. It's like someone gifted a year's work to me. There are all these pepper seeds. There are greens mixes carefully blended to go feral and create a seedbed of edibles.

Outside there are several feet of snow on the ground, 6" of ice on the driveway thanks to the recent warm snap, and it's supposed to snow 40cm. I will not start any transplants until March 1 at the earliest. Still, it's light for an hour after work, I have seeds to sort, and the next month will rush by so quickly.

The light returns.

Josh was up and we made a couple things.

Big batch Swedish meatballs

1 - 1.5 cup panko crumbs soaked in 2c milk or as much as makes a soft slurry
4lb ground pork
3 eggs
several tbsp garlic powder
1tsp-ish each nutmeg and allspice
2tsp salt
1/3 cup dried parsley

In mixer ~5 mins till sticky and smooth/adherent

2tbsp meat per meatball

Batch froze

Fry 4min each on 3 sides (maybe 5mins from frozen?) in hot lard. Remove meatballs; add flour and stir till light brown. Add stock, cream, worcestershire sauce, and maybe dijon and boil till thick. Return meatballs to simmer a minute. Fin.

Dashi squash

Skin-on kombocha or skin-off other squash simmered in dashi and mirin. If using hondashi, slightly stronger than 1tsp per cup.

Honourable mentions
Chestnut pie; butter & lard crust, blind bake, custard & candied chestnut paste filling w/ folded in meringue from eggwhites.

Juniper in coppa is great.

Fried 50/50 rye/wheat bread in the bacon fat.

I was rushing around to get to the airport and my ring flew off outside. It bounced off the icy, frozen-goose-poop-studded driveway with a surprisingly loud clang. The truck was running, had been warming up. I'd just fed the baby pigs and was going to grab stuff and go, to be on time.

Now I was looking for a gold ring in a varying field of sparkly cratered tan-through-brown in varying textures.

The last several days had been a lot.

It's been so cold, and cold with no snow insulation. We have maybe 8" on the ground, if that, which means that the cold drives right in. I've been working hard and more or less constantly to make sure everyone is ok, which means running a lot of water and food and straw; with no snow to insulate the outside of animal houses, straw inside is the best bet. But the straw clogs up with poop and needs to be refreshed every day or two, the pile of straw in the animal houses climbs higher (great for the garden, all layered with manure, but too much and I run out of headroom) and then every piece of clothing I own has prickly stabby awns and slivers of straw in it but I need to wear clothing all the time because it's cold. Water goes out a couple times a day from inside, which is fine, but then it freezes in the containers and needs to be removed either with a lot of brute force stomping if I'm extra strong or by being carried into the house and set by the stove until the ice plug loosens enough to slide out.

My insulated gloves are MIA, or at least, I seem to have the right hand from several pairs. I sewed myself fingerless polar fleece gloves which lets me carry the coldest things in my palms and leaves my fingers free to open feed bags, but the first couple days especially it takes my hands a long time to rebuild the circulation they need to function in weather like this. My fingers go numb, I finish what I'm doing and go in, I warm up, I go back out, rinse, repeat. Several days into it my hands maintain warmth much better. The skin on my face goes numb too, but I've figured out some sort of system with two tubes of polar fleece that keeps my breath from freezing on cloth but covers my cheeks.

Nothing behaves. Water acts like wax poured from a lit candle: it forms that film first, then solidifies. A good bucket of water can stay mostly thawed for an hour or two, but a little spill instantly makes a spot that will be slick all winter, and a spill in the wrong place can weld a door closed or wedge it open. I spend a surprising amount of time walking around with a hammer knocking ice out of inconvenient spaces. Plastic snaps. Thank goodness my staple gun is a plain mechanical object; once I warm it up inside so it doesn't burn my hands with cold, I can take it out and staple old feedbags to the inside of the bird houses to block draughts and provide insulation. Starting the truck, even with a battery blanket and block heater, sounded like the end of the world for awhile.

The cats, trapped inside, are bored. They form new relationship with each other, trying to entice each other into playing but too irritable to respond reasonably so they squabble and zip through the house at full speed with tufts of each other's fur in their mouths.

The plastic of the special, insulated, triple-layer dog door has gone hard which means that when Thea comes in and out every three minutes to check in here, the door doesn't shut properly and the temperature in here drops, sometimes as much as 5 degrees in 3 minutes. It takes the stove awhile to recover that.

The stove, meanwhile, has a stupendous chimney and so its heat output fluctuates with the outside temperature and the wind and goodness knows what else. I carefully swing the cycle around so I can go into the airport for six hours without the house getting too cold, but the flight is cancelled and I have to set an alarm for 1 and then nope, 2am to refresh the wood so we stay warm enough in here since I'm not up already driving home at that time.

The floor is covered in fragments of bark, and straw. I can sweep it three times a day or not, it makes o difference. The patio doors in my cathedral-ceilinged livingroom leak air like a sieve and I haven't had the wherewithal to move furniture to put window wrap on them. I close the curtains but the draught still comes through and the floor in there feels like ice.

So when the ring that symbolizes my commitment to whatever part of this is meaningful slips off my finger and I can't see it in the field of goose poop in first glance, and I have an appointment that symbolizes the outside world that wants me to give up on this, I wonder if it's a sign. Do I leave the ring wherever it is (still can't see it) and come home and write a post offering all the outdoor animals to someone and just-- go? Create a life where the weather doesn't dictate my actions, even if it continues to inform my choices?

I decided to leave the ring there but I kept standing there, looking, anyhow. This is a symbol that this is enough, I thought, I'm leaving. But. I kept looking for the ring. Eventually I spotted it: gold, the colour of shiny goose poop, in piles of frozen shiny goose poop.

It turns out that was the morning after the coldest night. It was supposed to get colder the next night and it never did. At 9pm I took water out in buckets, watching the animals drink by headlamp, and fluffed up straw. My hands were acclimatizing and I didn't need to come in and warm up, they felt fine. At bedtime none of the animals was shivering, always a good sign. The forecast wind never appeared and in the dead calm it felt almost warm.

They say tonight is the last of the hard nights for awhile, or at least, the last of the deathly cold ones. The next forecast is for snow and, somehow, freezing rain which is of course any ran that lands on a ground that has been seared by -35C for days. Several daily runs with water will be replaced by trying to start the snowblower and trying not to knock the blades loose on towers of frozen goose poop. Carrying so much straw will be replaced by several days of butchering and then carrying much less straw.

I took water and straw out tonight again. No one was shivering. We got through last night, which wasn't as bad as expected. We got through the night before that, which was way worse. We got through several nights previous to that where the cold built and settled like a malevolent beast. Somehow the pigs were trotting around and even the tiny, densely-furred little ones were roughousing as I fluffed the straw for them, and the adults got down to business grabbing mouthfulls of it and pawing it to fluff it up by my side. They drank two buckets of water and grunted interestedly and went to bed. The chickens fluffed up perfectly round on their perches (2x4s turned on their wide sides, so they can perch without frostbiting their toes) with little frost spots where heat could make it through those feathers. The ducks tried to climb into their bowl of water. The muscovies were alert under their lamp and not shivering and were walking fine-- if somonee is going to get frostbite it will be them and I've lost some over the years to frozen feet. Their cushion of straw seemed to be working though.

Now the dogs are both burrowed into straw in their chosen locations. The cats are strewn across the woodstove room as the embers burn down and down until there's enough room for me to load up a night's worth of wood. Everyone is nestled in their beds. A thousand scratchy shards of straw poke through my pants, needling at my legs; upstairs I have piles of fabric that, maybe, won't hold straw if it's sewn into new pants. My ring gleams once more on my finger. In eight or nine hours the worst of this one bit will be over, and the next bit will begin.

Huge relief: the butcher says he can come on the 29th, when Josh is here. This means I have some time to select who goes during the week before, then it'll be cold enough to do a bunch of butchering for the several days after. I want to can a bunch, then do a bunch of butchering for cuts for folks, and then maybe a round of charcuterie.

Tonight I should taste the canned al pastor I did, to see if I want to do more of that.

I should schedule the piglets in to smithers.

Since I never trust my plant markers *especially* over the winter, here's how my garlic bed is laid out:

The garlic is mostly in north-south rows just north of the gooseberries etc, in two patches: one on the east side of the aspen and one on the west. The east side is planted in more formal rows, the west side starts with more patches. The rows are not perfectly parallel since I couldn't get the tiller running, so it took some legwork to make the trenches to plant into on the east side, and I used the bulb planter for my drill on the west side.

The southern bed is covered in straw, the northern bed is not yet.

From east to west the rows are:

Prussian white (short row, only 1 bulb/4 cloves)
Northern Siberian
Metechi
Northern Quebec
Red Rezan
Great Northern
Purple Glazer
Portugal Azores
Georgian Crystal
Kostyn's Red Russian
Sweet German
Linda Olesky
Sweet Haven
Duganskij
Pretoro (short row, only 1 bulb/ 4 cloves)

(Aspen Tree)

Elephant Garlic planted by the State Fair apple tree so not in line with the others, only 3 cloves (the catalogue said 3 bulbs, I'm not pleased with their advertising)
Khabar (more in a patch than a row)
Fish Lake 3 (only 1 bulb/4-5 cloves)
Newfoundland Tall
Dan's Italian (1 bulb)
Dan's Russian
Brown rose
Wenger's Red Russian

All the above except the elephant garlic from Norwegian Creek garlic farm.

I still need to plant, from Woodgrain Farm, but ran out of room:
Music
Marino
Spanish Roja

That's a lot of kinds of garlic. This feels like a small trial to me, but I guess I really don't garden like other people do.

I think this is the first time I've eaten an entire loaf of bread I made on my own. I have a recipe for a no-knead dutch-oven loaf I made a lot, but it was definitely bigger than I could eat all at once. I got a smaller dutch oven at one point to help shape it. For awhile I experimented with sourdough but couldn't get the intense sour taste withotu accompanying lacto flavours. I made some pretty loaves but just never did eat a whole one (I really don't like stale bread, so after 36 hours or so I usually won't eat it anyhow).

The other day I tossed together a loose pizza dough recipe in the style of no-knead, starting with 2 cups flour instead of the 3 or 4 I used to use. I think I was intending to make a pizza dough but habit took over and I tossed it in the dutch oven and it came out really nicely. I ate the whole thing over the course of 3 days -- I think the 90-ish percent hydration and olive oil I put in it kept it from feeling stale. I did two sets of stretch-and-folds, one before bed and one when I turned on the oven this morning to preheat it, and the loaf seems to have kept a nice shape.

So that's nice. Not sure why I'm baking bread again but I'll take it, bread at the store is between 3 and 5 dollars and it's not always great (though sometimes the airy cake texture of cheap white bread is fun).

I got some of my garlic in the ground last night. Everything is a race in the last sliver of light after work, then I put on my headlamp and feed the animals. I still need to get my daffodils in.

I got 200 gallons (!) of milk from the grocery store for the pigs, since the cooler went down with the power outage. Luckily it's in gallon jugs so it doesn't take me too too long to get it poured out for the day.

Both bulbs and milk is going to be complicated because the cold is here. It finally got real cold last night, -10C, which is more in alignment with the temperatures one would expect for this time of year. Days are still barely above freezing for now, and there's only a skiff of snow so far but that won't last. Hoses are frozen/I disconnected them last night and hung several of them to try draining, so I guess that means I'm bucketing water (and milk) now. I should figure out who I want where in terms of animals.

I do wish we'd had a good rain. I'm planting the garlic into dry dry soil, and I'd probably best put a sprinkler on it if we get a day a couple degrees above freezing. I want to cover it with straw but can't do that until it's watered in, I think.

Canned some goose, want to can some pork in the "beef pot roast" style since I realized it fries up really nicely when canned but the flavours in my al pastor and carnitas are sometimes just too much for me.

Money is a big issue right now too, the juxtaposition of the smithers/butcher trip, the last month's worth of feed for all the pigs, my property taxes, my house insurance, and a couple other bits and bobs makes me realize how much I overextended myself on feed over the summer. I do not like carrying a balance on my credit card but here we are. Time to get digging. There's some stuff about work, not having ratified a new contract, and so having not even the token raise we normally get, but I'll keep that out of here. We're not getting cost of living increase anyhow.

Oh! There's the timer on the bread coming out of the oven. Time to leave this and go see how it turned out.

Prepping for the trip still in odd moments at work. It's going to take a bunch of prepping.

o Talked to the abattoir, I can pick up either around 5pm the day of (fresh) or 2-3pm the day after (frozen). Neither of those really allows me to drive home across full daylight. Processing what I'll do.

o Keeping an eye on the weather. Snow is supposed to hit afternoon/evening of "the day after" (so maybe I should load the fresh birds up in coolers with ice and try driving straight home? But it's a 4 hour drive, and I'll have done the 4 hour drive in at 5am that morning, but I'll maybe avoid snow?)

o Updated BCAA/roadside auto insurance, just in case

o Got grain last night, need to offload a bunch of it still, which means...

o Need to cut and power wash a couple more grain barrels (and need to powerwash carriers and coolers)

o Still researching possible places to stay, there's a nice place (The Creamery Inn) in a small town nearby, but that isn't close to restaurants. There's also a treehouse place in that small town that would be fun if Tucker was coming along. Hotels in the bigger town are an option. Keeping an eye on budget, of course, this will cost me a couple hundred in gas and more than that in butchers' fees.

o Got snow tires put on.

o Slowly acclimatizing the ducks to eating in the goose shed, so I can put them in there Wed night, close the door, and get them in the carriers on Thurs so I can leave at 5am Friday.

o It would be great to get the mat off the truck bed and wash under it.

o I definitely need to put the top on the truck, which I haven't done singlehandedly before. It's several hundred pounds and very awkward, I think I have a system that involves scootching it along 2x4s. I should probably find someone who can be a safety check-in after I do that. I guess that'll happen Wed evening, since I need to unload tires and grain tonight.

o I need to choose which geese are going, I have three selected but need to select the other couple.

o Also need to pull my breeder ducks.

o Need to get lumber and other odds and ends under cover suddenly, since it's supposed to snow and if it sticks then everything is there forever/until May or June.

o Really should cover straw.

o Need to pack, including birth control pills and pads since this of course will be happening over my period.

o Need to make sure the truck has emergency supplies if I need to sleep in it, patch a tire, etc.

o Need to figure out how to get both full carriers and coolers into the truck, this is a lot of items that take up space. Tetrisy.

o Need to load the animals up on food/water on Thurs night.

o I'm tired.

I made garden signs for all my roses and gooseberries. Soon will do cherries and haskaps and apples, at least the ones I know the names of. These are signpost-style, with a stake and painted sign screwed to it. My plastic tags were not holding their marks, I guess sharpies have been reformulated, and so I lost some names that way. I lost some other names because crows and geese like the tags. So, wooden signs seem both practical in an enduring way and kind of charming. Now if only I had pretty painting handwriting, but I was not turning this into a stenciling project.

I found two more squash out there that looked pretty ripe, hiding among the weeds where they were sheltered from frost.

Josh helped me find a dairy crate full of relatively ripe cascade ruby gold cobs, so I'm calling that more of a success than I earlier anticipated. We'll be looking through the painted mountain today. The plants were definitely frost-nipped but I don't think the cobs themselves were harmed.

It's neat to be out in the corn and hear that dry, rustling noise of the leaves. Humans have been listening to that sound for many thousands of years as they bring in the harvest.

I've done a bunch of mixed pickles as documented on my preserving site, urbandryad on dreamwidth (I just keep recipes there). Basically I've done a couple gallons with my zesty brine at half strength for salt and sugar, a couple gallons with a lightly sweet brine, and I'll do a couple gallons with a salt-only brine. all have bay leaves and pepper, I forgot the garlic in the lightly sweet ones. Oops. The veg mix was largely brought up from the big farm on Josh's way from the city, it's more-or-less 1 part cauliflower, 1 part carrot, 1 part green beans, 1 part hot peppers, 1/4 part celery. The goal is a moderately hot pickle mix to eat with charcuterie, everything bite-sized.

Meanwhile Black Chunk (who has still not got a better name) had 8 piglets, and she's doing well with them. Lotta piglets this fall it seems. Ugh I guess I need to castrate, better do that while Josh is here. I will probably miss Tucker's calming presence for it.

A chicken in the bottom chicken run got huge adobe balls on her claws, they must have accumulated through iterations of mud (the ducks splash by the water a lot), dust (everywhere else in the run, it's been a dry summer), and straw/wood shavings from inside the coop. It took Josh and I roughly 3 hours to soak them (did nothing), chip away at the very edges with pliers delicately so as not to hurt wherever her toes were in the balls, and then finally pry the last bits off. I do not know why she got it and no others did. Her toes inside the balls were fine, though she did lose a fingernail by getting loose enough to shake her foot when we were part done and... you know, just don't think about it too hard, let's just say it was another weird and uncomfortable farming moment. She's good now, I gave her a penicillin shot for the one raw bit of the toe where the mud was rubbing and the toenail, I figured her body could use the help, and put her back in with everyone. She's lifting her feet ridiculously high as if trying to compensate for the weight that is no longer there, but is walking and perching just fine. Poor girl. Also I'm much less suspicious of cobb houses now, my goodness that stuff was durable. Clay soil, wow does it behave in unexpected ways sometimes.

Meanwhile I am going to keep one of the americauna roosters from my friend in town, and give another to a friend who has a couple hens and wants to let them hatch out more chickens in spring. That means 7 going into the soup pot this week, which is manageable. I've had the propane ring on the deck and that makes canning a lot more comfortable given the humidity situation in here, not sure if I'll can the roosters immediately or freeze them a bit but I'm more likely to can them now.

Asparagus planted. Daffodills, chiondoxia & relateds, and muscari ordered. These are all supposed to be vole-resistant, we'll see how it goes.