Greenstorm's Journal

Connection with Tucker continues to deepen in a way that feels cautiously safe enough for me to mostly own where my attachment issues are - even the ones that were previously caused by his behaviour, there's space to listen and empathize. That's good. There's a lot of baggage, that's hard, but I'm mostly hopeful.

Solly has not yet learned to use the dog door but the dogs have all been in the woodstove room at once, or in various pairs, though she's still getting some counterconditioning around guarding things, and she's poorly mannered about the sofa (but is getting better). Still, we've had nice evenings with all three dogs and a couple cats snuggled up in here. Solly is also re-learning her growl and I'm so proud of her (haha, as someone who spends time with folks who have trouble expressing "negative" emotions I guess) and she's growled several times now instead of going straight to a lunge-and-air-nip. Thea needs daily love and attention for her to not guard Solly away from me in the downstairs. Avallu will not displace cats who are lying in his bed, and so has been sad.

I cleaned the chimney a couple days before new years and relit from the ashes. Chimney was good and clean from burning dry birch. I want to make a better woodshed and get a bunch more birch if possible.

Making a ton of pottery. Downloaded a tracking app and am numbering anything that will be bisqued in 2024 as 24-1 through 24-whatever.

Josh and Tucker both might be visiting in Feb.

It's been ultra warm, not even consistently below freezing though the ground is frozen and we finally got snow a couple weeks ago for insulation. Finally have -20C in the forecast. Very curious to see how the rest of the winter goes.

Last night, on the 1st of the year, I planted 4-6 seeds each of 8 types of tomatoes: two I'd got from a silvery fir micro lineage for testing online, two for crossbreeding (mission mountain sunrise and sweet cheriette), and 4 of my own crosses (unknown whether F1 or F2) sweet baby jade x hardin's mini, F2 zesty green (an offtype of karma miracle I think) x silvery fir, F1 of mission mountain sunrise x (F1 of aerogarden "heirloom" micro x sweet baby jade), and F2 sweet cheriette x karma miracle. This morning I woke up and, knowing those seeds were planted in the next room, I couldn't stop smiling. It's not a lot for growouts but it gives me something to look at, and it's my first manually crossed F2s!!!!!!

Working on a micro tomato workshop for the garden club. The grocery store gave me their poinsettas, so I can use those pots and some scavenged soil and my own micro seeds and people can plant their own. This is the time of year everyone wants to plant things but it's too early to start outdoor veggies. I love being able to help people do plants, especially at low-to-no cost. The garden club is trying to plan one workshop per month and a couple seed swaps at the right time for different plants (early flowers, veggies, and probably plant-straight-outdoors plants).

I am inspired to do some sunreturn pottery as the days get noticably longer (and maybe some wheel pottery at summer solstice?). Tucker requested something firey, and I realized in that moment that good reds usually come from reduction firing-- that is, heating the clay with actual fire instead of electricity, so the fire eats the oxygen and you get different chemical reactions and thus colours than you do with electricity and exygenated air. Relatedly, someone about 3.5 hours away offered for me to fire pots with her. That's relatively close in the scheme of things. I'd like to figure out some sort of wood firing here, not sure if barrel or pit or clay oven style.

I'm going to open Threshold to folks who want to celebrate the solstice and eating and planting and telling stories and maybe canning or sausagemaking or making clay things and who knows what for a week around June 17-24 this year. Hopefully I'll have the outdoor shower & maybe an outdoor toilet by then, there's some camping space maybe even fenced off from geese and some room in the house. It's going to be a big lift but it's important. Need to figure out covid protocols etc. Hoping too much of the province is not on fire by then, we're still in hella drought and I know a lot of those fires are burning under the snow. Flying over them some of the fires were very patchy, so there's lots of edge for fuel to be living in.

Little Bear the kitten manages to somehow be adorable enough that I welcome his help in keeping surfaces clean rather than being upset that he knocks things over and tracks mud onto my neck etc. His current hobbies are windowsills and sinks but they change often.

Tucker got me some lights from ikea as a christmas gift and I'm using them to set up shelves to display my unfinished pottery so I can stare at it after bisque and before glazing and let a creative process of some kind happen. Downstairs is getting really nice. The lights and shelves are as much of a game changer as the couch or the storage can.

It's cat brushing season and now Hazard is demanding, not just food in the mornings, but also brushing.

#53 F3

It’s just us two here:
Me, and the whole wide world.
Humans didn’t stay,
One of us was too big for them.
Last year I ripped up flowers
Bending the tiniest part of the world to my will
Cradled my offspring under lights all winter.
The ravens watch over me
And take their share in exchange
A reminder that flesh always tears
In the end.

I am the meaning-maker,
My stories stitched together to support
The weight of my demanding mind
My life bigger than the compass of my memory
Glutted with years of joy
And honed by solitude.
I always watched across the room
Watched you,
Watched myself,
Told stories as kindly as I wished they’d be told about me.

In the beginning I named myself
And like any good spell the name remained
While the world burned the rest away.
In the beginning I named myself
And like any good self I remained
While the world burned away.

When the story is complicated there’s an ending close behind
No one can abide uncertainty
At least I can’t, and the wide world isn’t talking.
The flowers I ripped up last year are growing.
It’s just us two here.
Humans didn’t stay.


#54 Global warming as a failure of relationship 3

Humans once said they yearned
For the nature they actually spurned
They judged it by looks
And wrote lots of books
Any wonder the atmosphere burned?


#55

There's something about that last glimmer of light,
Sky some sort of deep aquamarine and bright enough
To show up the wind-tossed aspens as they hiss against it.
You don't understand, it may have been light this late,
Until an hour before midnight,
In the city too. But if it was
There were too many streetlights
And it never made a difference.

The sky is glimmering. The aspens are hissing. The fan tosses white noise and breeze into my warm attic-shaped room. Summer is beginning, and I am home.

(If there is a projector screen, put a set of randomized landrace pictures on it while I'm talking, changing every 20-30 seconds, and say: "I brought some eye candy for the talk: everything you see up there was produced using this growing method I'm about to talk about, most of it in very difficult conditions. We all need eye candy at this time of year, right?")

I want to warn you up front, I have a bit of a tomato bias. I'll try not to make every example about tomatoes. What I'm about to say is common to the way I grow and think about many different kinds of seeds though.

Do you remember trying to buy seed for spring 2020? Catalogues sold out so early, every catalogue, and what used to be joyful anticipation of spring gardening turned into competition and sometimes despair as everything you wanted disappeared?

You know when you plant some seeds so hopefully, maybe that new beautiful tomato, and there you are with blankets at the end of the year trying to protect it from frost-- and every single fruit is still green?

Have you ever thought maybe you'd save seed, but then realized that if you wanted to do it the recommended way, everything would need to be so far apart you'd need a dozen gardens?

You know that feeling when you've gone down the seed catalogue and you want the corn that looks like jewels *and* the corn that is bright orange *and* the blue sweet corn, or you want the purple stripey tomato *and* the yellow-and-blue one *and* the tiny red one on a huge vine *and* the one so dark it looks almost black *and* the super early one *and* the multicoloured one that's supposed to taste so good *and* the neat-shaped cherry one that looks almost silver because variety is fun and amazing, but then you look at the total of your seed cart and it's a thousand dollars and you only would plant one plant from each packet and suddenly having fun with this hobby feels so expensive?

Yeah. Me too. All of those.

First I wanted to grow every tomato, but I didn't have space or money. I lived on the coast then, and I just rotated the tomatoes I grew. It was fun.

Then I moved up here. You know what happens when you're a gardener that moves from the coast to the north, right? You spend a year growing things that don't ripen even a little bit. You think, I need a greenhouse the size of my whole garden. You look at your bank account, and at the cost of greenhouses. And then you adapt.

In my case I didn't want to adapt by growing only tomatoes that do well up here -- both of them bred by Andy Pollock -- and giving up on something new or pretty every year. What was I going to do?

This is when I first heard about Joseph Lofthouse. He lives in super high elevation in Utah, a place where frost can come at almost any time, the nights are cold, and the seasons are short. It's not a place where seeds from the pretty catalogues do well. Sound familiar?

It sounded familiar to me. I found inspiration in the story of how he bred his own varieties to do well on his land, following in the footsteps of Andy Pollock and his persistence, but also with the flair of someone who loves to go out into the garden and pick tomatoes of every single colour. This is what he did:

We know that seeds grown here, from here, probably will do better than seeds from somewhere warm and maybe covered in plastic and even pesticides, right?

We know that organisms, including plants, tend to take after their parents.

This is a hard one, but, we know that if something dies, it probably isn't well-suited for the conditions we're growing it in.

Well, what Joseph did was to get a ton of seeds from all over. He grew all of them, and made sure they crossed: that is, of the ones that survived long enough to provide pollen, that pollen from many different fathers crossed into many different mothers. It's basically the opposite of keeping the variety pure like you're supposed to do in seed saving. It sounded crazy, but it was actually brilliant.

He harvested the seed from that first year. Not many plants did well; there wasn't a ton of fruit, but what he got was crosses of all the survivors. Next year he could grow out that scant handful of seeds, and he got plants that had all the traits needed to survive in his difficult climate-- and mixed in with that, he had traits from any fun and beautiful varieties that survived long enough to provide pollen. Not all of those seeds would survive and flourish but many of them would, and as long as he crossed and then saved what survived they got better every year.

Joseph's climate was rough, and in many cases it was a couple years before he could start to select, not just for what survived, but also for what he liked to eat. From a beginning with no melons that would ripen, where he had to take the melons in and set them on the shelf until the seeds were just barely ripe enough to germinate the next year, he eventually selected a cantaloupe with a rich, strong scent and just the right size for his needs. From a handful of corn kernels that was all that was left of a huge patch after weather being eaten by what seemed like every animal for miles he eventually was growing a beautiful, jewel-like multicoloured corn that was so strong, and held its ears so high, that the raccoons couldn't get to it and they gave up and left him with the whole harvest. He selected one squash that was small and so sweet and tasty that it can be eaten raw, on a platter with carrots and other dippers. He selected another squash that was big, deep orange, tasty, kept well, and-- you know, it ripened for him reliably. No big deal, right? (laughs)

And from an astonishing number of tomato seeds, wild tomato relatives, tomatoes of every shape and size and colour, he decided he didn't like tomatoes. (Rueful smile, laugh). So from tomatoes he selected yellow and orange and multicoloured fruit that weren't the tangy strong tomato taste we love. He didn't select for bland supermarket tomato either, though. With so many different plants in their ancestry, wild ones, weird ones, once he had them ripening reliably he was able to select the flavours he liked to eat: sweet, fruity flavours like... well, I'm going to read you a quote.

"Once I started growing genetically diverse tomatoes, and tasted things like melon, mango, sea urchin, and guava, I abandoned all efforts towards growing red tomatoes. I cull any reds that I find. I don’t save the seeds from reds for sharing with people who love red tomatoes. I don’t want my legacy to be the creation of one more red tomato.

Our taste testing panels consistently choose orange tomatoes as the most tasty."

(Makes a face). I love red tomatoes, but you know, a tomato that tastes like mango or melon sounds pretty magic too. I'm not saying you need or even want to grow a tomato that tastes like sea urchin. I'm saying that maybe you can, not only grow a tomato that ripens in your garden, but maybe you can do that, and you can also have a ton of variety. With this method you're not constrained to what other people like, to what they've already done, you don't have to worry that we're a tiny market here and no one breeds anything interesting for the north. If you want a tomato that tastes like sea urchin-- and one that tastes like melon-- and one that tastes like the best summertime BLT tomato-- you *can*.

And you can do it without competing for the catalogues every spring, and without buying separate seeds any time you want a little variety. And you can do it while sharing with your neighbours-- that makes it even better.

I've talked about how powerful landracing is. I've talked about what it can do to make hardy plants and to make tasty plants. But what is it, exactly?

Well, there are only a couple steps:

1) Save your seeds. Every year that you save seeds from your own yard, or are given seeds from your neighbour, those seeds get more and more adapted to your conditions. They'll do better every year. That's what Andy Pollock did, adapting Early Girl into Pollock.

2) Celebrate diversity, encourage cross-pollination. Usually when you save seeds you try to get rid of the unusual ones, the ones that don't look like they're supposed to. With landracing those unusual ones are where the fun really starts! A plant with two parents that did well is pretty likely to do well itself, and if it's a cross it's also a new variety that you've never seen before. Save it! Grow it! Visit it and enjoy the fact that it's brand new and it's yours. Encouraging pollinators, planting different varieties really close together, even looking at the flowers and saving seed especially from plants with flowers that are friendliest to pollinators-- that means you'll have even more crosses, even more new varieties, and even more chances for the perfect combination of characteristics that's exactly suited to you.

3) Encourage selection by the local ecosystem.
There's something really special about starting those seeds in February or March. About setting up lights, carefully watching those first green leaves come up, about making sure the temperature and water is just right. It's a habit to watch the weather forecast and mother's day and the full moon and try to decide, do I plant now, or a little later? Do I need to run out with blankets, or put row cover over everything? In an especially cool year, or for a lot of us in a normal year, we try to find space in the greenhouse or cover everything in hoophouses or spend every day watering in the dry year. We baby our plants. We love them, and we want those fancy tomatoes, so we try to make sure every single one has the best conditions and will survive. Even if it takes so much work on our parts.

One of the hardest parts of landracing is letting plants die. Yes, really. We try a wide range of seeds because who knows? But in order for the seeds we save to be better every year, to be hardier every year, we need to let the ones that aren't hardy die.

The first year it feels like you're the worst gardener. It feels like your neighbours are judging you and the ghosts of that 105-day tomato plant is hovering around your head filling you with regret. But that's how you get plants that most likely will grow better next year. That's how you get seeds that spring out of the soil at the end of March, maybe get transplanted into a light frost, and still somehow thrive and hand you baskets of tomatoes by July 1 even though there's a drought. You let the ones that die in cool evenings or drought or too much rain die. You keep the ones that love your garden, so that every year they love your garden more.

4) Select for characteristics that you value

Once your plants are surviving, it's not just surviving you select for. How do you like to garden?

I mean, definitely taste everything and save seed from the tastiest, whatever that means to you. Do you like sea urchin taste? Do you HATE sea urchin taste? (laugh) I'm joking, but really, taste everything before you save seed and you'll get a landrace tailored exactly to what you like-- even if what you like is a huge range of flavours.

Don't like weeding every day? Select the plants that grow well even if you leave weed pressure. There's nothing in my garden that can't compete well with lamb's quarters, let me tell you. Love weeding? You'll get plants that thrive in that bare soil. Or do you love companion planting? Do it, and over time you'll get plants that do well with your favourite companions.

I don't trellis my tomatoes, I just pick the ones I can see. Joseph is the same way, and over time his tomatoes have started to hold their fruits up above the soil where they're visible, since those are the ones that get picked and tasted and saved for seed. Meanwhile my 11-year-old self, who used to grow tomatoes up the side of the house, would have selected for the longest vines with the least side-shoots and over time that little kid would have got easy-trellising tomatoes.

Do you grow in pots because your soil is awful? You're selecting for what does well in pots. Soon you'll have a container landrace!

Select for beauty. I know so much of my joy comes from a beautiful basket of every colour of tomatoes, or that perfect blue colour in squash, but I also love that pinky-tan squash with just a little hook by the stem and that football-shaped one that's so easy to peel. I put my corn in jars in winter on a shelf just so I can admire it. Do you love a rainbow of produce? Do you love only orange corn, or tomatoes? Do you love THE ORANGEST or THE BLACKEST corn or tomatoes? Select those and over the years they'll get more intensely beautiful for you.

Really, you can select for anything you like that you see in your plants, and if you select for it every year you'll likely get more and more of that thing. Your landrace will shape to the way you like to garden, to whether you like to transplant (there's a guy in Montana working on direct-seeded tomatoes. Montana! Direct seeded!) to whether you like to mulch or water or... anything.

This is a partnership with the plants, a relationship you're entering into, where you care for them and save the seed and in turn every year they get closer to what exactly you want.

Cross pollination is a good one to select for because it offers more options later on. With some plants that have difficulty crossing on their own, like tomatoes, it can even make sense to select for the ones that cross best even if they don't have other attributes you love, so that the offspring cross better in the future and you end up with more choices down the road.

5) Share your seeds.

Share your seeds because if you do this with your neighbours you'll have more variety to select from as they share seeds with you.

Share your seeds because you're proud of what you're doing and so many of them are beautiful. share your seeds because someone just said "you can't grow corn here" and you want them to take your corn seed home, plant it, and be proven wrong.

Share your seeds so you can discover that your neighbour secretly likes tomatoes that taste like sea urchin when they share the seeds back with you.

Share your seeds because we all need to be fed, and if you have seeds that grow well here it's an easy way to help people out in these difficult times.

Share your seeds because a tomato has 100-300 seeds in it, and a squash has 50-100, so if you're saving your seeds like you're supposed to it's the only way to prevent your seed collection from taking up your whole house.

Landracing is big, and there's lots of stuff I didn't mention: nutrient density, less fertilizer use, risk vs reward for the first couple years, how many of my plants are going to die and do I really need to let them die? If you're interested there's a forum where people who do this talk endlessly about what they're doing and share seeds. I'm also happy to talk aboutany of that afterwards at the table with anyone who'd curious, but in the meantime: does anyone have any questions?

(if no:

Okay, I have a question for you: if you were going to make a landrace, if you were going to have a nice variety of something that did well in your garden that you'd previously thought couldn't be grown here, what would it be?)

(if appropriate: ask for interest, set up seed stewards)

(Goodness my presenter's voice is colloquial)

This is the first time I'm doing a meme on here. amazon_syren asked me five questions; if you would like me to ask you five questions comment below. If you would like to just chat but would not like to be asked questions, also comment below. Ha.

1) Based on this year's harvest, are you wanted to try any new varieties of corn next year? Or planning to cross-breed any varieties you've already grown?

The first year, the test year, was about figuring out my foundations and what was realistic, but also about doing my first crosses. Realistically, corn grown anywhere on my property will cross with corn anywhere else on my property if it pollinates at the right time, so many of my saved seeds will be crossed. Specifically I'm interested in most of the crosses I did with my best-performing varieties, gaspe and Saskatchewan Rainbow. There are definitely varieties I'd like to get my hands on, and I am hoping to get a wildly mixed set of seeds to keep a slow drip of genes coming into the projects.

So: new varieties, the landrace grex from my group. Crosses: gaspe x montana morado, gaspe x a little bit of everything, saskatchewan rainbow x a little bit of everything, morden x a little bit of everything, morden x either magic manna and/or painted mountain (to make an earlier flour mix), gaspe x cascade ruby gold, gaspe x atomic orange, and a three-way saskatchewan rainbow x atomic orange x montana morado.

2) How do you sew stretchy knits for waist-bands? Do you use a serger or is there a trick to it? (I've never managed to do well on stretchy fabrics, so I'm looking for tips and tricks, if you've got them).

I'm a waist-band minimalist in a lot of ways. I don't have a serger, and I also wear long enough tops that my waistbands are covered. Last iteration of sewing, I just took elastic that I thought was pretty and that was wide enough, gave it a good stretch before I sewed it to break it in, cut off a piece that sat around my waist comfortably, and sewed it into a ring. I put that ring, pretty side out, on the outside top of my pants waist and did two strips of zigzag stitch to hold it in place, on along the top edge of both the elastic and the pants, and the other through the bottom edge of the elastic and also through the pants. It's held up.

For knit long underwear and outer pants I'm planning to do yoga waistbands with a different fabric than the main pants this year, basically a folded and slightly shaped band 3-4" wide in a stretchy and more snugly-cut fabric than the rest of the pants that replaces the top couple inches of whatever was going to be going on there. But basically the trick to not popping the thread is to use a zigzag or lightning stitch for the initial seam (my machine has a really nice zigzag stitch for this) and if you want reinforcement do a zigzag or decorative stretch stitch over the seam in a visible way, that also captures the raw edges somehow ("overstitch").

For the arenite pants they do an elastic casing, will report back.

3) Pigs: How are they?

Oh my, this is a lot.

Pigs are an amazing survival tool. American colonization happened on the backs of pigs, dropped off in river bottoms on the coast and left for years to multiply. They foraged their own food and in turn became a very low-difficulty, high-calorie supply for the invading armies/colonists. They also were an amazing weapon in a land with no fences, rooting up and destroying indigenous plantations. So ecologically on my farm pigs are calorie batteries, calorie recyclers, and disturbance agents. They're great for turning and piece of land into a garden: happy to dig up stumps, turn over sod, eat down many annual weeds, all the while fertilizing as they go. I have to be careful because I do not always want disturbance on my farm, but they let me make great use of so many things I couldn't otherwise make useful. My breed is also fatty and furry and well-insulated, they're fantastic in the cold and it's easy to put together a shelter for them, it doesn't have to be fancy, though as living crowbars they'll tear it right down again so I'm glad they're easy to put up. They'd do better on a bigger farm where I wanted more disturbance more often, or maybe I just have too many pigs.

On a more social level they're great at driving home social relativity. Pigs and humans have a very different sense of personal space: pigs communicate through touch both with their super sensitive noses and through just shoving each other. I've had to learn to speak the shoving language and get comfortable with that. It would take a lot of cruelty to get them to not touch me at all, though by shoving back hard and fast they treat me as a fairly high-ranking pig and therefore don't throw me out of the way as they do the young piglets. They are curious, friendly, and they show when they're cared for well by frolicking and playing. Really they love playing, and any tarp that strays into the enclosure turns into a tug-o-war game. Like any varied population they have individual personalities; some get particularly attached to me (can be annoying, they follow me around and squeal) and some keep their distance. Mamas are happy for me to watch them birth, for the most part. Except for the noise they make, which really does set off my sensitivities sometimes (think continuous loud rusty gate when they're excited), they have excellent temperaments to partner with humans as long as the human is willing to go halfway and speak their language of physical touch.

So pigs are good ecologically, great socially, and good for getting me outside a human-only perspective.

4) What is a favourite Traditional Food Of Your People? Why do you love it, and how do you make it your own?

This is a hard one! I don't really have a people. Maybe I should start with a story about my mom's mom. She lived in a small town in Iowa and had a ton of kids but she was still what my mom describes as adventurous with food. For instance, as early as the 50s she experimented with chow mein: canned bean sprouts, canned mushrooms, spaghetti noodles. It made an impression on my mom and I grew up with my mom as, honestly, not always the best cook but always adventurous: together we made feijouada and wonton soup and sticky rice in lotus leaves and a million things I don't remember, stepping our way through recipes in, among other things, a time-life "cooking of the world" series. She utility-cooked the standard midwestern noodles + tomatoes + ground beef type foods, and we ate a lot of rice, and she did a lot of 90s-era stir-fries, but I'd say the thing that got passed down on that side of the family was primarily a sense of play and adventure. Anything I wanted to make with reasonable indgredients, I was supported in that. So pretty much all my cooking now, from charcuterie to whatever I'm going to do with the duck fat on my counter when I get home to the duck-tonkatso-miso-with-spaetzle I'll probably have for dinner tonight builds on that legacy of play.

However. I memorized my grandma's pancake recipe and have been making it since I was 7. I eat the pancakes off a plate with my fingers, sometimes spreading with jam or dipping in syrup.

My grandma-in-law is jewish and I picked up a love for kugel and for a pseudo-matzo cream-of-wheat-and-egg dumpling in lipton's dried chicken soup packets from her. I make those straight up these days, no spin needed.

Mom always used to make muffins on the weekend for us. They were chocolate chip muffins; sometimes she made a particular coffee cake. Those feel like love to me, though I make pandan muffins with hemp seeds rather than chocolate chip half the time now. I still make that coffee cake.

And I still do the midwestern brown-some-hamburger (pork nowadays, or goose confit), add a can of tomatoes, some pasta, and some garlic powder and cook a minute thing that is probably the biggest Food Of My People, when I'm feeling up to it.

5) Favourite book(s) of 2022?

The new Hardy Apples book by Robert Osborne is probably the only thing I read cover to cover this year. I really, really enjoyed the Noma cookbook though. No fiction this year, and I think Braiding Sweetgrass was last year? Very little book-form reading, I'm afraid.

To shake off a bad day I went into the garden and did a bunch of manual tomato crosses.

The garden had my first ripe tomato, an orange promiscuously-pollinated one with light green speckles on it. That's kind of neat, since the plant next to it has still-unripe fruit that are pale green with darker green speckles; this one was dark green while growing and ripened into the speckles. I think they're quite fetching. The flowers on the plant weren't deeply exserted, but the anther cones were open and a little reflexed and the end of the stamen was visible.

I should probably test its neighbour for ripe-when-greenness. It's really where having this many tomato plants falls apart: I don't handle the fruit until they show colour, so I don't know when they're ripe if they're green-when-ripe.

Anyhow, the crosses from today are as follows:

Mother	Father
Lucinda	Minsk Early
Lucinda	Taiga
Mikado Black	Minsk Early
Silvery Fir Tree	Taiga
Silvery Fir Tree	Uluru Ochre
Taiga	Mikado Black
Taiga	Minsk Early
Uluru Ochre	Mikado Black
Zesty Green	Mikado Black
Zesty Green	Minsk Early
Zesty Green	Uluru Ochre
Minsk	Zesty Green

The minsk early/zesty green one is questionable, it was a weird flower with a bunch of catfacing and so I couldn't emasculate it properly, and then the minsk early has regular leaf red fruit and zesty green has potato leaf green fruit, both of which are recessive, so I won't really know in the F1 whether it crosses properly. Oh well.

Crosses done today:

In the garden:

Taiga, exserted unemasculated x minsk early (offspring should be RL, might have bee-crosses)
Zesty green (karma miracle?) exserted unemasculated x silvery fir tree

On the deck:

KARMA purple exserted unemasculated x silvery fir tree
Carbon exserted unemasculated x sweet cheriette (offspring will have red fruit)
Zesty green (probably karma miracle) exserted unemasculated x silvery fir
Zesty green (probably karma miracle) exserted unemasculated x sweet cheriette (offspring will be RL)
Emasculated uralskiy ranniy x minsk early (then realized I'd used the wrong pollen donor and stuck some silvery fir tree pollen in there because why not?)

Also: Karen olivier's breeding, but even just "most" of the even slightly more complex flowers, are very open right now for the first couple fruits. In the mixed patch a lot of the plants have their first few flowers pretty open and then some seem to close up for subsequent flowers. My mixed patch is planted from the earliest fruits from last year's plants, if I recall correctly.

I am going to make a gross generalization here but: the propagules from original American crops (potatoes, in the case of potatoes; seeds from sunflowers, squash, corn, and beans) are enormous and easy to handle, and they don't require a very finely prepared seedbed. Seeds from the old world crops tend to be smaller and fiddly, even the grains like rye but also crops like turnips and cabbages.

In turn this means that American crops would be easier to mindfully place, since it's easier to place those larger seeds on the landscape one-by-one instead of scatter them or pour them into a row. It might also lead to less thinning? Which maybe affects which part of the lifecycle selection occurs in? And then the seeds are more noticable when they emerge. I'm not sure, but intuitively it seems like they should be easier to plant into an already vegetated landscape with larger seeds, since they can hold more energy and thus get themselves up into competition better.

I realize modern crops don't always compete well with weeds, but still, the potential is there.

This morning on the gardening chat we were talking about how to keep crows from eating the seedlings of corn and beans. Someone said they planted their corn into tiny cleared patches, maybe 8"x8", six or eight seeds at a time, and then only weeded the rest of the patch when the corn plants were pretty tall. He said this tended to keep them from being eaten, and then when he weeded them they looked spindly for a day or two but just leapt into growing.

I had already been marvelling at how American crops have so many seeds where the seeds themselves are just such gorgeous objects: corn and beans are more beautiful than many human-made art objects at that scale. Er, hm, this implies that domestication isn't a form of making, but anyhow. That beauty was selected for, it isn't an accident.

But in my case the whole experience with these American crops is so lovely: I get to handle beautiful seeds, I don't need to worry about the soil being tilled into flour because the seeds are big enough to navigate bigger clumps of dirt, I can see where I'm putting the seeds in the furrow for spacing. The seeds can be buried more deeply so birds can't immediately eat them, because they're so big. Granted, their size also makes them a snack for the bigger birds, but I am sure the little songbirds would be happy to eat smaller seeds too, so.

And I think some of this might translate into a totally different planting experience altogether: more gardening than farming, less tilling and more careful placement. Milpa gardening bears that out somewhat.

My thoughts on this are obviously pretty unformed still but it's all very interesting. It's also not true across the board, as my carefully transplanted tomatoes will show. But. It's just easier to have a relationship with those big North American crops.

So.

I grew some micro-mini tomatoes this year. I planted Moment and Fat Frog. I took a cutting from each and put it in the aerogarden. Tomatoes from moment (aerogarden), moment (pot on the lighted windowsill) and fat frog (pot on the lighted windowsill) ripened all at once, so of course I did a taste test (fat frog in the aerogarden is well behind, I think it didn't pollinate its first cluster).

I scraped out the seeds, put them to ferment, and then did a taste test. Now, every time you buy micro tomatoes they say "don't overwater them, they won't taste good" so I was expecting the hydroponic ones to taste watery and the potted ones to taste good.

In fact, the opposite was true. The aerogarden ones were sweet (very little acid though) and the windowsill moments were bland. The fat frog had one good one, two ok ones, and one really bland one.

So that's maybe good news for growing tomatoes inside in hydroponics, but also just really interesting. I wonder if shifting the kinds of nutrients I used in the hydroponics owuld make a difference? I definitely grew the windowsill ones a little dry.

On the other hand, the windowsill ones were also cooler, and got longer but less-intense light.

Anyhow, the seeds are fermenting and that was neat.

I also have a Sweet Baby Jade that I pollinated with Hardin's Mini, generic aerogarden "heirloom" micro, fat frog, and moment pollen. It has two tomatoes growing from the crosses, I'm very excited. Plus, I have a generic aerogarden "heirloom" micro I pollinated with sweet baby jade that has a fruit growing on it. Eeeeeeee!

Still waiting on my matchbox x black hungarian F1 to germinate, and my black hungarian x matchbox fruit to ripen.

Evolutionary breeding, which includes landrace breeding, is another thing I'm into in a big way this year. In the beginning it requires a fair bit of space and curation for little return: I really try (and enjoy) to get a breadth of genetics that somewhat lines up with each aspect of what I want, and then all of that goes into a space at a density where it's likely to interbreed. Most of those plants will fail to produce a crop, or to produce seed. It's therefore taken a lot of land and research to get not a great crop. Of course some work is also removed: I did only the most casual weeding last year on my tomatoes, squash, and corn for example (and actually the squash in the weeds were the ones that set seed).

In subsequent years only the plants that can tolerate the climate and treatment set fruit and pass on their genes. This philosophy of gardening means that instead of committing to starting early transplants, amending soil just so, creating and maintaining a greenhouse and maybe little wall'o'water or hoop houses, trellising or staking or caging or Florida weaving (I still love Florida weaves) I just... don't. And the plants eventually learn to do ok.

I can still absolutely do the kinds of work I want: if I liked watering every evening I could keep doing that, it would be fine. But tasks I don't like - I am not a weed-free gardener, for example, and I find staking the number of tomatoes I like growing to just not ever get done - can go away. That work can vanish and as long as there's still a wide enough set of genes in the populations for selection to function and I'm being thoughtful about what selection pressures are occurring, gardening gets easier every year.

Nowadays people apologise for loving me in the way that I love other people. Thy say, sorry I don't contact you more. They say, sorry it went so long when we didn't talk.

Before people said to me, if you really loved me you wouldn't see other people. If you really loved me you'd ask for permission before you kissed someone. If you really loved me you'd set other people aside (I guess that's the test of "real love", being willing to give up the fake ones)

That's all a work in progress. But before all that there's another love.

In the last little while I've found community on the internet. People I'd only read about, people who had put their hands on the genes of my favourite varieties, are there forming communities and posting in forums and making podcasts. Today I listened to a podcast where someone wrote in and asked, how would you advise a high school student to become a plant breeder? He answered, at length, listed some books, said to hone observation, said to get started. He was not condescending. He was straightforward. The whole time I thought, where have you been all my life?

Later on I read someone's post on clearing out their spare room and setting up a pepper grow station. Somewhere else a commenter mentioned the beauty of a particular tomato's blossom. A celebrity in this kind of thing said he breeds, among other things, because he's an animal that likes certain tastes and he wants to be able to experience them. The whole time I was reading I thought, I love you, I love you, I love you.

My whole life I have never had the right kind of love. Love is my animating force; it is a holy gift; it is what I was made to do. I notice things and I love them.

I've always loved plants; I've never really been around people who also loved them. I've been around people who gardened because things were neat, or as a means to an end, or because it was relaxing. It's only recently, reading about how Indigenous seedkeepers bring the concept of relationship with a plant, of plants as relations, that I've heard whispers of myself echoed in humans.

And now there are people who do this and it seems to also be a part of their lives and of their hearts. Curiosity and love and exploration and the joy of creation move them. They also give up chunks of conventional life in favour of this work.

There's no way for me not to love anyone who does this. For so long I couldn't love anyone in this way. But.

So much of my love is turned away because I'm not doing it right. Love is a supposed to be channelled in a particular way in our society. This isn't about sex. It's not about children, honeymoons, getting married, whatever it is that I'm not bothering to look up on the list of romantic relationship elevator characteristics. It's not ok to bring love to the table if I'm not bringing these other things; it's not real love if I don't bring these other things. I can't bring love to someone who's married, to someone I don't want to fuck, to someone of the wrong age or gender. And honestly I am complete shit at differentiating between how I'm supposed to love and how I'm not, let alone doing it properly.

So after whispering I love you under my breath I hesitate to reply to a message. I dampen the shining in my eyes and remove the heart emoji and the exclamation point from the keyboard. I sit the night to let emotion seep away. I don't want people to see how shabby my love is, how something so inconsequential lights me up. I don't want people to think I'm doing it wrong because I don't want them to go away.

I guess I've been trained well.