Greenstorm's Journal

-snowsnowsnow but ground not frozen yet. bulbs going in.

-grouse in the crabapple tree eating crabapples. hazard wanted me to help him hunt them.

-tons of disability phoning and forms last week, used most of typing/writing

-art studio nice and full a couple days, for mug fundraiser and the fibre people just hanging out

-off birth control pill = digestive system fixed, feel like myself, charge into things like conversations or cooking but still have brain fog so sometimes ultra mess up. F'rinstance, looking into the sidemirror, seeing my driveway as I try to back into it, brain somehow deciding I was trying to avoid it rather than back down it it so correcting to back into ditch (caught myself before I went actually in the ditch in the snow, but still, it's that kind of thing). Also more muscle and joint pain. Also waking up ultra dehydrated in a puddle of sweat most nights. ARGH. No dangerous levels of S thoughts. Currently seem to be going back and forth two days on, two days off as the symptoms of each option end up sucking. Maybe I should call the nurse line and ask for advice.

-woodstove season is nice

-pulled my back pretty badly for a couple days, the same spot I pulled when I first moved into the house. Getting up and down from the toilet etc was pretty bad. Drugs, rest, gentle movement & time fixed it

-the cats' winter coats are deeply velvety and they fight on my bed at 7am when they get hangry before breakfast

-ate three meals a day for awhile, though admittedly it was mostly bologne sandwiches, scones, pears, and greek salad. Having an abundance of those things that were easy to make was great. I felt rich, luxurious, and generally good. Maybe also linked to food not meaning a ton of pain

-super crashed out after disability stuff and pottery thing

-peonies going in the ground shortly, into the snow

-all pig rescues in "northern" and "interior" BC are full (that is more than a couple hundred kms from the border)

-happy to be alive. Not relieved, but actually happy.

-I know I'm forgetting things

Tonight I have more access to my emotions than I have for awhile. This is maybe five or so days off birth(er, actually PMDD hormonal) control, though I'm still on the sertraline stabilizer. I had missed having visceral access to this huge breadth of love. I'm curious how it will relate to my energy use (did I mention they've developed a technical medical term, "energy envelope"? I always appreciate when language cateches up with me).

I have no more problem solving or day-to-day thinking capacity. The grocery store was using a different door while they painted outside their normal one; I went in, couldn't figure out what to do, where to go, or what I wanted despite having a list so I got a random item and bought it because I was in some kind of autopilot. I still can't reliably get the sequence of bathroom-->toilet seat up-->pants down-->pee-->toilet paper-->flush toilet-->wash hands as much as I'd like. But I can feel the feeling of missing people.

And I can do narrative better. Siri and Whiskey seem to sense that it's a rough night and are staying close, protectively.

The big sky is coming back for the winter. There's ice on the north side of the house that will probably still be there in April. My bedroom is warm and comfy. While, surprisingly, being off the pill has removed all pain below my belly button, I'm getting stronger and more reliable pain in the window an hour to three hours after I eat. It's a stupid metaphor for loneliness, pain after the brief pleasure of eating or company.

I remember now that love and loneliness are two sides of a single coin for me. Access to one seems to mean access to the other. And yet, here I am loving my home and my self and my life at the same time.

Poly means always being lonely for someone, or is that just a human thing? I don't think most people feel it often?

We've had the first frost, not last night but the night before. Here are garden notes.

Tomatoes:

Cherries: champagne cherry, green grape, green doctors, rons carbon copy, sungold select (almost a saladette, a bit variable), copper cherry, Hawaiian red currant, sunpeach, coyote, snow white cherry, pink princess get planted again of cherries.

Coyote and kiss the sky and one rozovaya bella were crossed and one of the two crossed kiss the sky plants sported into a saladette (!!!). The crossed coyote had that flavour. Growing these all out except maybe the roz bella.

Mission mountain grex second year the orange fluted gave me four orange fluted plants, nice and productive, and the yellow antho pear gave me variable breadth yellow antho pears.

Mission mountain grex first year I got an antho grape that didn't ripen, a beautiful stripe saladette that ripened decently, and a beautiful antho blush thing that I'm going to try again. Oh, and a micro I'll grow out this winter maybe.

Miracle cheriette project very satisfactory, great flavor, 2 larger and 3 cherries to continue -- one black, one large grape, and another grape with interesting calix shape. Those are the early ripening and prolific.
Otherwise utnyok, cesu agrais, sareaev 0-33, sugary pounder, rozovaya bella, black sea man, katja, jory, maya and sion, jd cooper are the slicers to do again, offhand.

Zesty fir and uluru mikado trial decent, though the uluru mikado weren't well watered and thus got a bit of blossom end rot -- they were in with the brassica greens I let go to seed and then dry down. Zesty fir plants are very well behaved and decently early.

Zesty carbon f1 grew a huge plant with huge tomatoes. Can't wait to see the f2.

I haven't got into the greenhouse yet but I know there are rozovaya bella and I believe JD Coopers ripe in there, as well as less-good-tasting Amy's Apricot and better-tasting snow white cherry. Also a bunch of other things but I'll write that up when I get in there.

Woody perennials: I hit up the garden center several weeks ago, I think on Avallu's ok-to-go-outside check, on their fall sale day. I had been flirting with a discounted quercus macrocarpa all summer and picked it up since the sale + discount made it worthwhile. So now I have two bigger macrocarpas in the front yard, as well as some tiny ones. I've also ordered some acorns, which-- I'm going to need to be doing a lot more from seed now, even big things, for financial reasons.

Also into the front yard were four "mystery" romance cherries (discounted because the tags had fallen off and then again on the sale" on top of the one from way back that already was there, and the three labeled ones (cupid, juliette, and I forget the third but it has a clay label) from this spring.

Then a sumac "Tiger eyes", a quercus gambelii, a lonicera Goldflame, a morden concord and a valiant grape, and there will be a named hazel variety. This is all part of screening the front yard as the aspens are gone, so I can hang out there. My house sits on a curve in the road and on a bit of a rise, so my front yard is a bit of a stage for anyone driving along that long curve. And lately a lot of people have been driving my and slowing down significantly as they go past my house. I used to think it was because of the pigs, but the pigs aren't visible from there anymore, so I think it's just because they can kinda see through the vegetation. I'd like that to stop.

I also have a bunch of black currants I haven't planted yet, and a row I want to plant something tall in to screen the winter garden but not screen it enough to shade the garden, maybe something 8' tall or so.

Oh! This spring I also planted most of a ring of swamp white oaks in the back upper field, the one that is basically a stream during snowmelt and dries up by June-somethingish. These oaks should be ok with that, and give me a nice big ring. I paced out the ring instead of measuring it, and it's on a slope, so it'll be interesting to see how it goes. They got mulched and not watered much, nearly all survived regardless.

Josh and I got a bunch of apple and seabuckthorn seeds on the trip up with Avallu and those will be started for next year. Seabuckthorn seems to do easily from seed.

Perennials: This is the year I started planting perennial flowers that aren't roses. I haunted that sale and got a bunch of $5 and $3 plants, daylilies and salvia and some verbascum and russian sage and ecinacea and whatnot. I have ordered some peonies, some common (inexpensive) cultuvars and a bag of root fragments that are unlabelled, they'll take a long time to bloom but I have more time than money (I hope).

I also found a lead on inexpensive daffodil bulbs and am putting a bunch of them in, underplanting with a bunch of smaller bulbs as you might expect. Basically any new bed that goes in will have bulbs in it if I can do anything about it (which means fall planted, mostly, since I am unlikely to go back and put bulbs into existing beds).

Weeds: the aspen suckers are nuts this year, which is unsurprising. They take about two years to get 8-10' tall or so and over an inch thick, so there are a couple clumps I missed last year that feel like real trees now and need different equipment to cut down. If I cut them twice a year I can use the really robust hedge shears. It's all really hard on the hands, like I lose the ability to hold cups after for awhile. I've been trying to track down proper ratcheting pruners but it seems like they're out of fashion.

The invasive thistle is everywhere. If I deep mulch yearly it's easy to pull out once a year, also hard on my hands but keeps it from going to seed. Thing is, I need to cut the aspens before I deep mulch, so there's this whole particular sequence that needs to happen and it kind of needs to happen everywhere at once? normally I do cardboard then compost then mulch, but when mom was here last spring she took out most of the gardboard and I've been using the rest to build beds, so grass has cme up to complicate the aspen/thistle removal. I'm definitely getting into a sense for what yearly maintenance will look like. The south slope bed is my oldest one, and honestly I haven't had many longlasting beds I got to handle in a non-professional capacity, so it's interesting to play around with it. The soil is improving steadily, which is good and also maybe why the weeds are so intense. If I can get 6-8" of mulch on everything and the aspen suckers cut down by mid-april I'll e in good shape.

The scentless chamomile which took over the untilled spots in the winter garden dyes fabric well and lastingly, which is nice. I'd still rather have edible chamomile, but this stuff pulls out easily in spring. I'm ok with it. Clover seems to outcompete it too.

My feral gai lan did some good seeding this year, I'm collecting a lot of the seeds and going to move them up from the winter field to the apple field. The back field is lots of clover and grass where the oaks didn't go in. The clover is self-seeding now, which is excellent, but the grass is a bit of a challenge.

I'm losing typing coordination so I'll set this asde for now. But. Good gardening year, looking forward to nxt.

Oh, two kinds of sunflowers did super well. And I need to write about herbs.

Throwing on the wheel requires finding a moment of absolute stillness and... armouring it. The clay will try to push stillness off-kilter. It can't be made still by simple force, but it requires assertiveness, a coordinated effort by every muscle in the body, if just for one or two full revolutions of the wheel. After that first, armoured stillness movements need to be relatively precise but gentle.

It was a good idea to get back to the wheel.

A friend mentioned that sometimes overstimulation for them feels like having energy. I feel like I have energy today even after taking two dogs in to the clinic in town for vax and doing pottery (mostly glazing but some throwing) for many hours, from 3-7.

I've been carefully staying in bed, resting. It's raining and cool but not too cool, the air is soft but not sticky, it's not too bright or loud. I have attracted four cats to the bedroom, which is either rain or the fact that I should be resting-- they pick up on that. I want to go down to the wheel or out to the garden but I am not. I'm being good for my future self.

I have buns and prosciutto and blue cheese and lovely fresh lettuce and herbs. I also have corn dogs but after the burns I gave myself canning I'm resting active cooking for awhile. I have a package of shrimp and a lemon for the rice cooker too.

Having been reminded by the wheel what stillness feels like it's easier to find it in myself for true rest today.

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.

It's later than usual for snow but not ridiculously so. October has been warm; this last day or two looks like it's finally going below freezing for good for the winter.

Things I have not done that I need to do:

Pull up the hoses and coil them

Power wash hoses, snowshovel, nets, anything else that's been sitting in the mud for the last two weeks since we finally started getting rain

Put my chainsaw pants on and actually cut up all the logs

Screw together the field fence

Put a roof on the greenhouse

Move the birch wood in

Build one or two doghouses with pallets

Build a roof over the feed area, or build a feed shed

Pick up weird bits from the yard in prep for the snowblower (Solly makes this hard, since she re-scatters things everyday)

Spread the woodchip piles

Put the rototillers "indoors" somewhere

All that said I'm still pretty easily winded from covid, and when I do too much in a day I get dizzy. Yesterday I spent the full day at the pottery studio -- this month Sundays seem to be when it's open, and hopefully that continues -- and by the time I got dinner in me the room was just spinning. I'm back at work now and it's definitely a struggle.

I've got a bunch of tomato seeds fermented and drying, though, the corn's in and there were some gorgeous gaspe x saskatoon white ears with a peaches-and-cream pattern in the mix. I pulled in a karma miracle, sungreen, sweet baby jade x "heirloom" micro, taiga, and sweet cheriette plant to do some crossing this winter, and I need to start some micros.

Pottery is super fun. Having the wheel in my house really helps; my skill is improving so quickly when I'm able to work even a little most days. I still haven't got a slurpee-cup-height cylinder thrown but I'm only an inch or two away. Most recently I've started attaching handles. I have two shapes I like: one is a classic rounded bellied shape and the other is a very geometric conic flare; I can make the former but not the latter. I'm learning so much all the time: besides handles, the most recent bit is that these big pieces need a lot of material left at the bottom, to be trimmed off, for stability. Funny that I've just learned to clean up the bottoms and take extra material away. Each technique has its place.

I've been working with two clays: p300 and m332, both by plainsman. the p300, a porcelain, is like sewing with silk. It does whatever I ask it to do immediately, it holds its shape. The m332 is like carpentry, it has a significant set of physical limitations and strengths. It's sandy and red and has absolutely gorgeous potential for texture, where the porcelain is pure white and smooth and I end up being uninspired by the surface except to cover it with glaze.

Kitten has settled in as a full member of the household. He still sucks on any bare skin he can find, but otherwise functions like a very energetic, exploratory tiny cat. He harasses the other cats, who set boundaries; climbs the curtains and shelves; snuggles lots; and sits on my lap and helps with the wheel. I think he wants to be called Bear or Little Bear. He's also apparently a smoke cat, and not a black one. That is, he looks black but his undercoat is white, and his belly is developing white longer hairs too. Between him and Solly it's feeling very animally lately.

Covid took my sense of smell but not of taste, and I found it remarkably easy to eat for a couple weeks. I think I didn't realize how processor-intensive food is for me until that went away for awhile. There's just so much going on in the whole nose/sinus area. Things are back to normal now, more or less, and I'm enjoying the bergamot in my earl grey tea again.

There's probably more but my cat is sucking loudly on the inside of my elbow and it's distracting. I should talk about eating with people from separate rooms over thanksgiving, but that might need to fade into obscurity.

I've been trying to write up the pottery studio meeting on Saturday for awhile. The tl;dr is that I'm hopeful about the new studio manager they've hired, I really do not get along with the program manager (she tried to suggest I owed them $700 for stepping in and trying to salvage willow cuttings last minute as a volunteer), I'm hopeful the new studio manager will shield us, we have access to the studio this month and some sort of revamp will happen in Sept, the pots I threw before this went down and couldn't get in are bone dry so I can't trim them but I'm gonna try water etching, I still super want my own kiln, the other folks in town who do pottery are pretty cool and I will try hanging out with them if the studio thing fails, I STILL WANT MY OWN KILN.

But here's the thing. I went out on Friday for half an hour, and did an hour of tilling one evening. I went to the pottery meeting for three hours Saturday. And that wiped me out completely for the weekend. I spent pretty much all the rest of the time in bed, back to 3 naps per day minimum. I made it down to pick up feed, which was an hour of driving, without driving into anything. So I guess whatever it is is still here.

I'm considering moving the pigs to the back, through the main area the bears come in through. Baby on his own could likely face down a bear, the whole herd I have no concerns about whatsoever. There are no little piglets right now, which helps. They'd enjoy the grasshoppers and long grass too.

I'm trying to double-feed the animals lately, giving them two days' worth of feed, then skipping a day and just topping up water. It gives me more rest time. Cautiously in favour?

This has been a catastrophic year for grain here: frost, then drought. The barley is barely calf high and the wheat was mostly ploughed back under. I'm trying to stockpile some feed before it gets ultra expensive.

Meantime it's a great year for me getting my fall grains in. Because I didn't get the whole garden planted I have lots of space, and because we've got something like 2" of rain in the last week the ground is lovely for tilling. I'm starting to get the ground turned and decide which grains are going where, how far apart, etc-- some of them I'm just starting with 40 seeds and I'm not sure they'll overwinter, so I need to figure out how to safely plant and mark basically 20 pieces of grass in a big field over the winter. Very excited about it all, though, especially the glutinous barley, some of the wheats including my saved seeds from the ?2019 trials, and the ryes.

We're supposed to get our first real snow of the year in the next 24 hours: 20-30cm.

Shortly thereafter it's supposed to drop to -23C or lower. It's going to be very hard on the plants; the soil is still dead dry.

Last night I was out with the headlamp and then this morning out with the headlamp again.

I got the tillers under cover, got some roofing on next year's split wood (but there's still maybe 2/3 cord to split, and the splitter is still out there, and I didn't do the aspen yet).

I got all my lumber (2x4s, spare house wood, etc) under cover but not up on racks. I had to pry some of it off the ground, pretty much everything has a couple inches of gravel frozen to it at this point.

I got the garlic covered in straw.

I raked the snowblower path from the house back to get twigs etc out of the way, but I didn't get the front of the driveway done.

I got the animal carriers split, clamshelled, roughly cleaned (there was some frozen stuff I couldn't get off) and put under cover.

I got extra straw to everyone to keep them warm.

I picked up a bit more garbage and organized some things, put all the cardboard in the cardboard pile.

I got the hoses strung up on the deck, but only one got put away (I snaked it through the rafters on the goose shed, which is honestly where I should put some of the 2x4s)

I did not get the far-back straw bales re-covered for a third time after the wind blew the tarps off; my plan was to bridge between the two with some treetrunks and put some roofing over so I can get the pigs back there in the spring. I need to do that tonight, during "at snow; at times heavy".

I did not get the back side of the animal carrier A-frame reattached where it blew off.

I did not get the missing metal panel from the pigpen reattached; I need to cut several metal panels and put them up for that.

(Doing this now) I did not let the fire go out and clean the chimney, but I really should do that before the hard cold comes.

I did not test-start the snowblower or pull the garden textiles off it (they have not been stored in a bin safely).

(Did half of this) I did not get all the flower pots from my deck moved off the lawn out of the snowblower path.

I have not yet wrapped the apple trees and berry bushes to keep voles from eating the bark.

Busy times.

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.

I altered my pork carnitas recipe to try canning a bunch of pork al pastor, to clear out the freezer some. This uses the basic raw pack + spices method. We'll see how it turns out, but I'm hopeful.

While that was going I made some rose soap, fried up some lions mane mushrooms from smithers with a little kimchi, split and brought in some wood, picked out three roosters for canning when the canner is free and searched out more jars for them, fed everyone outside some, processed some of the grocery store food fo the animals (lots of removing elastics and emptying small cartons of cream today), and now I'm trying to decide what to have for dinner.

Given how early I woke up, I should probably feed the animals a little more, give everyone a little more straw (it's cold out now! Hard on my fingers, can't be great for them) and come in and have a bath and go to bed super early or something.

I also pulled some loin & belly chunks from the freezer to try making two soft spread sausages: one nduja-style and one bacon-style. Stuffing the sausage is my least favourite part, and it's the part that often prevents me from starting on the project, but I realized: if it's spreadable sausage I can cook (sous vide) it in vacuum bags, freeze it like that, and then snip a corner and squeeze it out as I need it. If I were smoking it and fermenting it I couldn't do that, but I'm aiming for the easy-but-done end here.

"Nduja" spread will just be fat/meat + calabrian peppers + salt + a couple drops of liquid smoke
"Bacon" spread will be fat/meat + salt + pepper + a touch of maple syrup + liquid smoke
(I could do a corned pork one, a little firmer, to make hash out of?)

That stuff will take a couple days to thaw outside in the cooler though, especially in this weather, so I'll worry about running it through the meat grinder later on.