Greenstorm's Journal

Everything in my body hurts.

But.

I've done more than one thing a day the last... two days? And the day before that I also did a thing.

I've needed to get the sides on the greenhouse so I can overwinter the birds in it but I haven't had the ability to piece together scraps to make those sides up -- they need to be wood or hard plastic so the birds can't tear or claw through them, and they need to be windproof. Jigsawing bits I have around is super challenging mentally, so I just... spent money on plywood for the north and probably east sides, which was ultra expensive. Because it's so expensive I decided to pull some leftover half-buckets of fence paint out and paint it before it went on the greenhouse, so I can clean it more easily with the power washer and so it hopefully lasts until the greenhouse rusts out (it's an old pop-up greenhouse Josh and I covered with new plastic using wiggle wire).

Three days ago I cut three sheets of plywood to size and painted one side of four of them, plus dug a rhubarb plant to split it and steal some of the roots for fabric dye.

Yesterday I glazed some pottery and had a video chat with my family over their thanksgiving dinner.

Today I painted the other side of the plywood, went in and loaded the kiln and mentored another clay person on how to run it, then came home and ran the tiller. Now it's raining and I'm so happy I got some ground tilled.

The spot I tilled was alongside the baby apple trees I planted two years ago. The baby asparagus next to them survived the summer under the weeds! Those trees are big enough now that I'm going to plant rhubarb and comfrey between them and the fence, both are plants with big leaves that will reduce weed pressure. Then, as per Steven Edholm's testing, I'll put some daffodil bulbs in under the apple trees to create a "living mulch" (the plants flower in spring, with leaves that suppress weeds, then die back in early summer leaving leaves as a mulch and the weeds in that area way behind). Plus, daffodils are a vole-unfriendly plant so hopefully they'll survive. I'll add a handful of muscari bulbs because that's what you do with daffodils, and a row of garlic bulbils because I have thousands, I didn't cut my scapes this spring.

Then, ahead of that, I'll put in a row of winter rye, a row of favas, and home horseradish. Then another row of this year's baby apple trees interspersed with bulbs and garlic bulbils.

Everything will need to be side/top-dressed with manure/compost.

So, it's very good to have it tilled before it rains! I think that was likely the last dry and snow-free window.

I've also picked some rose hips -- carefully, because it's easy to stand too long to do so -- in the last week. So altogether very good. It's nice to be able to put my energy towards things I enjoy. When I do I realize just how long I was hanging on at work with zero energy at all.

Put 144 sprouted apple seeds into cells last night. 48 were seeds from my trees (crosses between a transparent, a very nice big eating crab I think, and the really fragrant crabapple with miniscule fruit since there's nothing else around here), 24 were Arkansas Black mothers, open pollinated, from Revelstoke. The rest were various things from Skillcult/Steven Edholm's 2022 season, including early mixed seeds, October mixed seeds, Sweet Sixteen crossed with a red flesh pollen blend, Muscat de Venus open pollinated, a mix of red fleshed open pollinated apples, and by far the most prolifically germinating which is Wickson open pollinated. Keep in mind that open pollinated from Edholm's orchard means they likely crossed with something very very interesting.

The rest of the seeds are still in their bags awaiting germination, though there are a ton of my local seeds that have germinated that I still need to pot up. Interesting about the local seeds, some of them have pink/red on the radicles. I wonder if that will translate into red in the plant, and if so if it's from the big eating crab or maybe from cross-pollination with the fragrant tiny-fruited crab?

It's just all so neat!

Thaw has been proceeding remarkably quickly. Every day snow is peeled off and water trickles downhill. Yesterday I took some time to walk the property after work. It's been awhile since I could do this in the afternoon; the snow crust is firm from overnight frost but mushy in the warm afternoon so previously it meant stepping through knee-deep snow which isn't really much fun. Yesterday I stuck mostly to my previous tracks and dog trails and the snow never topped my farm boots.

My south slope is nearly clear of snow. I planted haskaps and romance cherries on this a couple years ago, together with three apple trees on antonovka (full sized) rootstock: September Sun, Wealthy, and Goodland. The Wealthy was girdled by voles back to below the graft union two years ago, and all were nibbled by geese that year; this year the September Sun and Goodland have new shoots of a couple feet from above the graft line, and what used to be Wealthy sent up several good shoots from the antonovka stock. Antonovka is supposed to make a pretty ok apple tree.

With the snow gone I was able to get a good look at that south slope. Last summer/fall I'd done cardboard over it with year-composted chicken bedding over that and coarse unchipped aspen saplings over that. While that was supposed to help alleviate the fact that it's a hot, baking-dry hill with layers of shade and organic material it did also prevent water infiltrating evenly during our super dry hot fall and I was concerned voles would find a playground under the cardboard all winter and just girdle everything.

While some of the haskaps have die-back, I imagine either from the drought or from the quick, deep cold we got when we dropped below -30C with no snow on the ground, some do not and the apples look good. I couldn't see any vole damage on the apples or the romance cherries, which I believe to be the voles' favourites. While the hillside looks deeply messy, it also has a satisfying understory look to my eye: I like those bigger, inch-or-so branches beginning to go brown and black and signal a very slow slump into soil. My plan is to continue to add a layer or two like this every couple years: some slow-decomposing material, some cardboard, and some animal bedding. I want the soil to develop a top organic layer with embedded wood in various stages of decomposition. This is also probably the fastest-decomposing place on my property, just because it's so warm and sunny.

Into that messy-looking slope of branches and bedding I need to (very quickly) seed some lettuce, poppies, calendula, edible chrysanthemum, and maybe a couple other greens and/or flowers. I'd like them to get the jump on whatever weeds are in the animal bedding.

Come to think of it, maybe I should put the poppies in a location that doesn't have edible greens/flowers so there are no mistakes when picking. They go well with small grains, I think.

Just above that steeper south slope is the spot I planted my garlic trial. I'm very interested to see if any of it survives.

Meanwhile the rhubarb is still under several feet of snow: microclimates are real. Increments of slope and shade make such a huge difference. I can't quite see the ground in my field gardens: it's a plain of slowly-subsiding snow punctuated by cornstalks and lamb's quarters seedstalks and around each stem is a dip that almost, almost shows the ground. Any object sticking out of the snow collects heat on the south side, melting more deeply, and most of them screen heat on the north side to leave a little mound. Metal fences collect heat and stand in their own dips. It is a good time of year to learn about sunshine and heat.

It's also seed-starting time. I'm trying to remember to pick up soil on my way home from work today so I can get everything started this weekend. I want to not just start tomatoes and peppers and potatoes, but also get the apple seeds from my fridge into soil. I'm very curious to see how they do.

I do not have a labelling solution for this year and I'm upset about it.

I'm debating buying more apple trees this spring (the best time for planting trees is always yesterday, the second best is now). I have elderberry cuttings I can almost get into the ground. I need to figure out which dimensions of frost cloth I want to get, which means remeasuring my fields and deciding on planting patterns/bed shape. I am not ready to make those decisions, but it needs to happen so the frost cloth can get here on time.

My first greenhouse's cover is definitely destroyed. I'm costing out plastic and wiggle wire to re-cover it. Five winters isn't a bad run, and the frame is still good. It was one of those pop-up ones. I also need to figure out how to re-cover the woodshed, ideally with something more permanent, and maybe I need to decide if I want it to stay there first.

During the winter the power company came along and straightened up the power poles along the road, they were leaning pretty badly. I honestly am pretty skeptical of the whole thing since my understanding is that if a mix of snow and dirt is used to prop up a pole, when the snow melts you're gonna have issues even if regular frost heaving wasn't a thing. But, that's not my problem. What I'm interested in is the bare, disturbed, and now snow-free ground outside my fence along the road there where I'm considering dropping some of my extra raspberry canes and some comfrey roots. I don't want to pay for something that deer might eat, so my first idea of haskaps wasn't great, but I have a ton of extra raspberry runners.

All the other apples seem to have come through without vole damage too, which is very strange. I know the cats were much less busy this winter than they were other years, and there's less vole damage than I've seen before so far. This year I really need to get vole collars on them all; I did most but not all last fall and it's just luck that everything made it through.

The Zestar! apples might have a bit of southwest disease damage, we'll see how they do. This was their first winter here.

So: spring, kind of unexpectedly early. I wasn't quite thinking I'd see the ground anywhere quite yet.

 It's Lughnasadh, day of first fruits. Every year I don't think I'm going to get any fruit, it seems way too early. Every year I am wrong.

Last year I'd had my first tomato by this time and this year I have only had my green grocery store cherry tomatoes. 

I had a big bowl of saskatoons yesterday, the bushes are literally bent double under the weight of berries. I pickled the cereal bowl full in a few minutes and the bush looks untouched. I have a bunch of saskatoon bushes around here but this one, my favourite, provides enough for the freezer on its own.

I picked a couple of the first raspberries today, this year, despite not doing any pruning last year at all so there were dead canes, some single year canes, and a whole ton of this year's canes all mixed up together and bending over. It looks like there'll be a decent harvest of them after all.

I've been eating lettuce salads since the lamb's quarters finished, though I am still terrible at making viniagrettes. Josh is an artist with them and I just cannot get the delicacy they need for fresh homegrown lettuce. Today's salad had some of that very nice chard (I only like chard without offensive stalks, which means "perpetual spinach" or biatola e costa) and some oxeye daisy flowers and some chive seeds.

Most importantly to this time of year, I've sorted out some planning on the woody perennial part of the garden just off the house, and put in the remaining apple tree and some accompanying grapes, with spots roughed out for the haskap, a kiwi (issai), some sour cherries, gooseberries, and the roses. With a bow towards Hestia as home and hearth I'm centering the backbone of the gardens in rings on the garden firepit (apple trees in a 36' ring) and on the chimney/woodstove. If I put a bonfire ring in the back the third ring will center on it. 

This doesn't mean a solid ring of trees, but it means that an arc of apple trees punctuated with taller cherries along the south of the property will shade the south side of the garden from south sun and then with raspberries underplanted shade the house from west sun, will part to let the drive run through, and then either spiral out into the plum trees or just continue along the edge of the plum bed. Within that some arcs of roses, inside the fence of the inner garden, will screen the more private area there. 

Running a ring off the chimney will be a little more challenging that running one off the firepit, but I can probably use my work laser for that.

Spent a ton of time this weekend moving the sprinkler around for the garden and being super exhausted. Will make a separate post about corn etc.