Greenstorm's Journal

I planted some morden corn seed, saved from last year, yesterday. I also put in some zucchini seeds.

I've made a chart with all the sections of my garden so I can record when I water them. Hopefully I can set up an automatic timer on some of them soon. It's a lot of work just moving the sprinkler and connecting to the soaker hoses sequentially.

Today I put some asparagus seedlings in the ground in the tomato field, next to my row of apple trees.

The soil around the tomatoes was really warm yesterday. I'd like to get some mulch around them. I'm a little conflicted about whether to use compost, straw, or aspen chips. A combination of chips and compost seems to make sense, but straw is easier.

Did I mention my gaspe corn is tasselling? It doubles in size every time I water it, which indicates I should likely be watering more, but here we are. It was planted roughly 5 weeks ago.

Aside from planting corn something like 7 weeks before a potential first frost, I've also inadvisably put a copy of my F1 tomato crosses into aerogardens. This is the point where it's clear that they are not microdwarf tomatoes.

I was going to do pottery this morning but the person with the key is in Mexico for a couple weeks. Back to the dilemma, do I set up the nutrigarden or the pottery wheel?

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.

I wrote this up for the short-season corn group, posting it for reference:

The crows left me some plants this spring, though not nearly as many as I planned to trial. It's been a late year, a cold spring, and I got everything planted very late in roughly mid-June, though the end of August has been warmer than is typical. Here are my thoughts so far, I haven't harvested anything yet:

Gaspe has been more-or-less reliable for me for three years now. This year the plants ended up relatively large, in the past transplanting them has stunted them, and some had as many as 4 ears that look well-shaped. It's more prone to weird hormonal things, like an ear that sticks out the top where the tassel goes, but even those were well-shaped. Planted June 10th, tassels showed up roughly July 18. I'm anticipating maturity shortly. My seed is from Great Lakes Staple Seeds, John Sherck, and Heritage Harvest Seed.

Saskatchewan rainbow is a hair taller than gaspe, and it is less than a week behind it. It also has the multi-ear form and looks happy and healthy. I'm anticipating a harvest before frost from this one. Seed from Heritage Harvest Seeds, does anyone have more information on this one?

Atomic orange & Saskatoon White are in the mid-range, maybe 5' tall. 1-2 ears per plant. Both tasseled in early August. My Saskatoon White is the only one the crows left alone; it ended up being quite densely spaced, comparatively, while the Atomic Orange was hit hard and thus very widely spaced but it did fill in some. These might squeak in to seed viability for next year but it'll be touch and go. My atomic orange was from two sources, Baker Creek and a friend in California; Saskatoon White is from Adaptive Seeds.

Painted mountain and what I understand to be selections from it, Montana Morado and Magic Manna/Starburst Manna, will squeak in under the line in most cases or at least some ears from each planting will. Starburst Manna is the earliest of the bunch, Painted Mountain is uneven as expected in such a diverse mix, Montana Morado is last and may not quite make it. My Painted Mountain was sourced from 4 locations and there was a significant difference in germination and emergence speed between all 4, then the crows ate all but two types. The Glorious Organics source came in earlier than the Sweet Rock did. Magic Manna is from Adaptive and self-saved, Starburst Manna is from Snake River seeds and self-saved, Montana Morado is from Siskiyou Seeds and I expect would have done well if planted early into cool ground.

Cascade Ruby Gold Flint (Adaptive?) is going to be just too late for me, and Open Oak Party (Adaptive) will be a hair after that.

Early Riser (Yonder Hill), New York Red and Homestead Yellow (Great Lakes Staple Seeds) are only now starting to tassel. They have maybe three weeks till frost. So, the trial weeds them out for future plantings.

Open oak party is starting to tassel, though not to drop pollen. So is Early Riser, though it's a little behind.

I noticed with the gaspe that a couple weeks difference in planting time led to less time difference between maturities (I think, need to pull out all the relative dates and crunch them). I wonder if I'd got open oak and early riser into the ground three to four weeks earlier if it would have made a difference? Four weeks and there would still be the ghost of frost some nights, but probably gone by the time the seeds got above ground. With corn the growing tip stays underground in the seed for awhile anyhow, so frost is unlikely to kill the plant, but since they're so heat-activated they may not do much until it warms up.

Cascade ruby gold is dropping pollen happily but I don't see much silk. Saskatoon white looks like proper corn, full tassels, full silks, just kinda miniature (maybe 4' tall). Gaspe never quite looks like corn because it doesn't get tall enough to have that rows-of-stalks effect.

Harvested what I'm almost sure is a minsk early tomato from beside the corn and squash beds, and the spotted promiscuous tomato from beside the first promiscuous tomato.

I'm still intrigued by the super multiflora tomato volunteers. They don't seem to be setting fruit still but they sure do have huge clusters.

I need to get my fall grain and favas in soon.

My spring favas do have some pods, but it's really only some that do. Super interesting. I wonder if they needed frost to trigger pod formation and I planted them too late and missed it, if it's a water issue, or if it's something else. Hopefully the pollen from the podless ones got into circulation though.

I guess it's time to take the ducks out of the greenhouse area and clear both it and the south slope for those winter crops. I ended up with a bit of an issue since the corn and tomatoes and squash won't finish until a little later than the grain needs to be planted, so I don't think I can put things above in the big garden for winter. I could probably do a barley or fava and gaspe or saskatchewan rainbow rotation if my grain will overwinter, but I can't do full-season corn or tomatoes. And there's not time to run the pigs in for long in between, that's for sure.

The greenhouse is a cloth pop-up greenhouse, the first I ever bought, and the cover is worn out so I need to take it off for the winter. This will leave me without any greenhouses again and no money to replace the cover. I might be able to sort out a roof on it from odds and ends anyhow. I thought I'd have a big greenhouse by now, a 10-20' x 40-50' or something, in my 5 year plan.

That's life I guess. I have more garden space than expected anyhow, and keeping grain etc around my perennial plantings while they establish isn't the worst thing.

Tomatoes are almost all up from the micro plantings. My own F1s all have at least one plant, which is exciting. I'm interested to see how the cross between the dwarf sweet baby jade and the micros go, both Hardin's mini which has unusual foliage (I think it's reduced by different genes) and the aerogarden seeds which have standard mini growth.

Waiting to see which corns actually produced seed before frost, and which crossbred, is so difficult. There's nothing to be done about it though. I wanna see!

I've stopped hand-pollinating the corn because the saskatoon white is in full flower and cascade ruby gold and the glorious organics painted mountain (and some of the sweet rock painted mountain) and atomic orange and even a little of the assiniboine flint corn are in full bloom, dropping pollen everywhere. I assume there's enough in the air that it'll get where it needs to be at this point.

A couple gaspe and saskatoon rainbow have four(!) ears, though I'm not sure what's inside the husks, maybe just nubs.

I can't wait to open the ears at harvest, corn is one of the few plants that you can tell if it's cross-pollinated by looking at the seeds.

I don't think cascade ruby gold is going to make it before frost, it's really only starting to put out silks now. It's magnificent though, super tall. Maybe next year? Maybe if frost holds off till mid-sept? Magic manna, by the same breeder, is much shorter and has its silks out earlier despite being planted later.

It's really beautiful out there. Gonna need to water again though.

Cascade ruby gold is suddenly as tall as my head and I can see tassels in the crowns. Montana morado is also showing tassels, it's waist height. I may yet get something off them! 

Thing is, if there's a frost, even a light one, it'll kill the growing bit inside the seed. It's better to harvest early and dry indoors slightly unripe than it is to let them frost. I'm going to have to be vigilant this fall.

Saskatchewan rainbow corn in full pollination mode yesterday. 

Second gaspe is developing some nice tassels and dropping pollen

First gaspe was doing a ton of pollen and silks were starting to brown

A couple morden had silks but not much pollen yet

The first saskatoon white tassel was looking like it might drop pollen by tomorrow

Cascade ruby gold was showing the first hint of tassels deep inside their crowns. 

Magic manna tassels emerging, is definitely faster than cascade ruby gold

Painted mountain had some tassels starting to emerge. 

Last night I took most of the floating row cover off the garden. I left it on the new gaspe, on the montana morado/gaspe, on one patch of early riser/gaspe, and on the oaxacan green/gaspe beds: they still had young gaspe in them and I wanted them to be safe.

On the other hand, I took it off of my bouchard peas (interplanted with a brassica I'd forgotten about... maybe turnip? I don't think radish?) and they're looking nice in there, short (my other soup peas are a couple feet tall, these are a couple inches, but they're a dwarf variety so they never get that tall in the end). The turnips or whatever they are have some pest damage but the peas themselves are pristine.

I uncovered the painted mountain and it is gorgeous. There are two beds (actually three, but I didn't give my deep attention to the third) and they were both crow-picked and interplanted. They're on a south slope but they get some midafternoon shade for a bit and they are big and fast and robust. The seeds I added have grown in quickly. The surviving original plants are beautiful, and especially the seed from glorious organics produced very robust stalks.

Magic manna had poor germination, perhaps as expected, but some of the plants are tillering nicely.

I also planted a bunch of seed last night. I tossed some mixed brassica seed in with open oak party corn. I put in rows of a lettuce mix: lettuce, some mixed chicories, a little arugula, and a couple diakon seeds. I put in amarant cabbage seed which will hopefully head up over frost, it's supposed to be aphid resistant. I put in napa king F1 seed, just a few, for kimchi. I also should put in some more beets and turnips, another cabbage, some more napa cabbage, the orach I was given, and maybe some fall peas?

Up on the horizon I should figure out when to plant my barley, oats, and favas. I'd also like to fall seed tomatoes, brassicas, parsley, and just see how they'll do.

The benefit of growing my own seed is that seed is no longer a scarcity. I can put a couple thousand tomato seeds in the ground in fall and still have plenty left for spring sowing indoors in the traditional way. I can plant some favas to overwinter and if the plants don't make it, well, I can replant in spring without it costing a million dollars in wasted seed. It's a relief; money is tight right now and will be in the forseeable future.

The acorns I planted are not yet up, a couple may be peeking through the soil a little. I planted them a little deeper than acorns naturally grow, normally they fall on the ground, get covered by a couple leaves, and send their roots down from there. These I actually put in the soil to keep them a little away from squirrels, so it may be a bit before they come up.

There are zestar apple trees in town - a kind I've wanted for awhile - but I'm out of money. I've been hoping they'll be marked down but I suspect they'll instead go into the garbage. That makes me sad.

Still not within my budget but a little less time-sensitive, I've been looking at fruit seeds: sea buckthorn, buffalo berry, crossed sour cherries, mongolian cherry, maybe some interestingly-bred saskatoon, linden, and ash (I know, not fruit, but useful). Those can be fall planted with my apple seeds and they should pop up in spring.

Yesterday I interplanted the soaked gaspe corn into New York Red, Oaxacan, and Early Riser corns. I also gave it a little additional bed of its own. I should put the last couple kernels in with the atomic orange, I'll need to be strategic in how I protect those. The other beds were still under row cover.

I also planted out another row of tomatoes, the dwarf short-season ones from Victory seeds: uluru ochre, bandaberg rumball, dwarf saucy mary. I put some of my breeders in there too: carbon, KARMA purple, lime green salad, lucinda (I have lucinda in four seperate places and I'm so excited about it), ron's carbon copy, a couple others I can't remember offhand.

My deck is sagging, so my previous plan to put all my breeder tomatoes out there got curtailed a little bit; I don't want the weight of all the pots on there. I settled for putting out one of each, and I'll put some peppers out there but most of the peppers will end up in the greenhouse lean-to/birdshed/woodshed thing. That left the remainder of my breeding tomatoes to also go out into the garden, which incidentally has room since it has less corn than expected.

I also put in a bunch of the soaked and rooting painted mountain corn into the painted mountain blocks that had been picked apart by birds some before they were covered. I'm going to have a bunch of pretty narrow beds, since my row cover is only something like 5 or 6' wide, but that's ok.

I have a bunch of painted mountain sprouting corn seed left over. I'll need to find a place to tuck it where it won't get eaten, I guess I should use it as a test under those willow branches. I have a bunch of those branches and it would be good to know whether they work; it's just sad to reseed the completely picked-clean beds knowing they may be picked clean yet again. That or I could try it down by the house on the south slope of the garden, where I put my wheat trial last year. It has some shade there but why not?

My bouchard peas, which I increased last year, got mostly covered and seem to be doing pretty well. I'm excited about that; they're a really nice low-growing small soup-pea that seems like it should intercrop with corn or barley/wheat really well.

Meanwhile I made chocolate chip cookies with rye flour yesterday and they were good; it almost makes me want to challenge my worries about ergot. Even my triticale got ergot last year but it was 1) irrigated and 2) in a little shade. Maybe if I tried overwintering the rye and dryfarming it...?

We had that couple days of big heat and now we have some rain forecast and then more heat on the weekend; I'd be pretty happy to get alternating heat and rain all summer. My garden would love it and the wildfires might keep quiet. Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile I've got my old roses doing well in pots. I should get them into the ground within the next month so they can establish well to overwinter. First I need to cut down a whole bunch of aspen suckers, though. Every task leads back to several more tasks. There's an enormous maybe 5" aspen root going into my old garden just under the soil that was too big for me to easily cut through without digging around it. I suspect it thickened up fast while stealing irrigation water the last couple years. I expect to find many more as I go through that spot along the fence. I maybe should avoid putting the roses there where they'll compete? But the haskaps are already in that general area, and I would like to make it into a nice perennial garden.

The roses in question are R. cinnamomea (double), R. gallica officinalis/apothecary rose (pre-1300), Fantin Latour (1938), belle amour (pre-1940), Chloris (pre-1815), maiden's blush (~1400), Mme Plantier (1835), and Henri Martin (1863). I could interplant them with oaks on the north side of the fields, I suppose. Roses will do well there and I'm working on building a hedgerow-style mixed planting as of this year. They're further from the house than I'd prefer for regular enjoyment though.