Greenstorm's Journal

Finally getting decompression time. Walking in the garden, eating 3-4 smallish meals a day, lying around with the cats watching America's Got Talent highlights, bringing water to the chicks.

Something down in the back garden really wants my chickens. It's tried digging into the chicken coop from multiple sides, basically tearing the insulation off the sides of the quail shed until there's only plywood left. Not sure why the dogs aren't disincentivizing it, but it might just be that it's so close to the fence and down in the back. I haven't found the tracks of whatever is doing it so I'm guessing it might be smaller than I think -- no coyote or fox trails in the grass that I can see? But who knows. The bears are awake now so it could be anyone.

I'm very glad we made that quail shed with a solid floor rather than a dirt one. It means no one can dig into it. As part of the general moving (baby chicks into quail shed, quail shed chickens into chicken coop) a couple chickens tried to sleep under the quail shed instead of being shut up in the coop for the night. I didn't see them around this morning, it being light so early, but I'm hoping they made it. Otherwise whatever it is can eat chickens whole or take them whole without much feather scatter, which is another data point.

Solly is super interested in me moving the animals. She comes and watches as I'm kneeling next to the quail shed at midnight with a broomstick trying to get the chickens out or as I'm walking the pigs around. She knows she's not allowed to chase animals so I think she's trying to figure it out. It would be nice to have a trained herding dog about one hour out of every week, but those dogs need a sense of their own presence and Solly doesn't have that very well. The other dogs know how to walk past any animal without disturbing it, she's less good at that.

It's been too wet to till even if I had the wherewithal to fix the tiller (I left gas in it over winter, it needs to be drained and refilled) but yesterday I planted a couple sour cherries and sea buckthorn and burr oaks in the upper fields. My seedling apples have almost all survived except the ones that drowned in the clay/water seep that goes down the hill across my property. I will likely start putting my tomatoes in by hand today and just deep mulching instead of tilling, though I sill need to till to get the corn in.

Ok, enough thinking. Naptime.

Now that I'm home, and still on leave from work, I am finally able to sort some of the stuff out I'd intended to get to originally. My capacity is tiny, which is to say I have a couple to a few hours of movement/doing things if they're interspersed with resting per day, one phone call every second day or so whether it's practical/medical or for social, eating several times a day but minimal food-making, and that's mostly it?

So I managed to arrange for someone to pick up the pigs tomorrow, I'm keeping Baby and Hooligan back because they're old and friends. I unloaded the truck, which took 2 days and a furniture dolly (boxes of clay are roughly 40-50lbs and I just couldn't lift them the first couple days). I went in to my specialists appointment and they eventually gave me a bed to lie down on since I couldn't sit as long as I needed to without my head supported.

In February I'd ordered chicks with a friend and we got the reminder email last week, but I somehow thought they were coming next Sunday. Well, yesterday-Sunday she messaged me to ask where at the airport to pick them up. So yesterday I cleaned out the bottom chicken coop (6 wheelbarrows of light bedding) so I can move the silkies over into it so I can put the chicks to brood in the quail house. The quail house bedding is moister, so heavier, and I need to move everyone over at night when they're sleeping, so it'll be a couple days. Meanwhile the babies are brooding downstairs in a giant rubbermaid tub brooder on the sofa. Little Bear is interested but there's lots else going on.

When your memory sucks every day is a surprise.

I also had a talk with my supervisor, who-- you know, I think I need a lot more words to say "it's still bad and I don't get to see my doctor till after the leave is over because Healthcare so I can't really plan at this point"

A friend brought me by soup and bread. Another friend helped me out financially. I feel safe, and I feel like I shouldn't feel safe.

I haven't had capacity to do pottery yet. That's hard. Because I can do only one or two things a day I need to have food lined up and no animal/work/medical stuff, but because I can only do one or two things a day most days contain something I need to do, I can't get it all out of the way to clear my schedule.

My housesitter killed about half my tomato plants by number, and more than that by variety %. I still have maybe 16 flats of peppers and tomatoes, and I started a bunch of squash and leafy greens and re-started some of my precious northern cantaloupe seeds. I'm getting to the point where some of these I don't have backup seeds for, either because they're an F1 or a rare unobtainable variety or whatever. That isn't to say I can't get other seeds and start them next year - it's too late now to start more tomatoes or peppers -- but it's a loss. Turns out the plants started dying after a week and instead of messaging me to ask what to do the housesitter decided to wait till I came back to explain. Who knew what could have been saved in that time?

She also, like every human to enter my house without intimate knowledge and care for me, threw out the "rotten" tomatoes in a bowl on the counter -- my seed tomatoes that the parent plant is now dead, so that line's done -- and I'm pretty sure fed one of my prosciuttos ("moldy cheese") to the pigs to get them in the pen when they got out, and despite very very very careful instructions to take only the meat from the downstairs bedroom freezer (which had frozen and thawed) to lure the pigs in used the gorgeous salmon Josh brought me from the freezer in the carport instead.

A ton of things in my house are unique, irreplaceable, and don't make a lot of sense to people without exposure to the concepts behind them. When people visit and try to be well-meaning (and don't have unique homes of their own) generally irreplaceable or hundreds of dollars worth of stuff gets destroyed. Other people's houses are frequently inexplicable to me but I don't think I destroy stuff like that? I've finally got mom trained, pretty much, and Tucker and Josh understand. But it's frustrating and I think it's yet another reason I wish I had more space-- space to entertain separate from the living space which contains what I do with my time everyday.

Anyhow, that aside we've had good rain on and off, more than we've had in awhile. I'm hardening off my tomatoes. Something on my back deck eats lettuce but all the leafy greens other than lettuce I planted out there before I left are doing well. I have a silkie - looks like a giant white cottonball -- who can somehow hide effectively in an empty field. Little Bear had his first shots, is microchipped, and will shortly be fixed and I have a vet. Every time Little Bear goes to the vet they exclaim "he's such a delightful cat" so who knows what happens back there.

I need to get the wherewithal together to till my garden but we still have some lows in the forecast, even though the actual temps have been turning out very high. With the loss of so many tomatoes I started a sweet corn grex. My southmost garden is now fully planted, more or less, and waits only for a path and little greenhouse. It's woody perennials, needs underplanting with herbacious, but still. Has lots of haskap, hardy cherry, ribes, elderberry, etc and lots of blossoms this year.

Some apple seedlings from last year survived -- I knew my winter would kill some, since those seeds are from california -- and I'd like to catalogue them when I have wherewithal. I sorted through my seeds and put away anything I'm definitely not growing this year (missed the favas window, pulled out individual squash seeds, chose my corn path, put away the tomatoes and peppers, etc) so I only have a single dairy crate of seeds left out that I'll be putting in. The year is shaping up.

Every night Little Bear stalks me up to bed and settles in with me and Whiskey.

Solly has been sleeping in the muddy stream to keep cool, and here I thought she was just getting out.

The goose nests were eaten by the pigs when I was gone, but there might be a couple they missed.

The ambient temperature here varies between 10-27C indoors and 4-25Coutdoors (barring a little frost here and there) and is comfortable open window weather. Somehow n Vancouver a much smaller range was sticky and both too warm and too cold.

I'm not strong enough right now to unscrew the hard-water-encrusted thingers under the sink tap so I may need to hire the job out, annoying when I know exactly what I need to do but less annoying than not having running water in the bathroom sink.

I'm slowly sorting through "what if rest doesn't increase my capacity, it just maintains it, and I'm like this now". So: instead of telling a friend I can go for a walk with them, I would probably invite them over? So: I need to plan my systems much better and more efficiently. So: I need a cart so I'm not using the same wheelbarrow for chicken manure and bringing groceries in from the truck?

Threshold loves me. I love being here. All that, good and bad, and things are ok.

The psychologist I was referred to asked twice if I had things I enjoyed, hobbies, etc. Of course they want to steer me towards depression. The first time I just said yes. The second time I said "Yes, tons of stuff, the best is my tomato breeding program where I'm finally into the F2, so after 3 years of work I get to see the results finally, to see it opening out into a whole bunch of possibility-- and of course we're starting the little pottery studio in town, and there's a garden club" and I think he finally believed me. But it's hard for people to believe, I think.

If you're disabled you're supposed to be dissatisfied, unhappy. If you cure the unhappiness you're supposed to cure the disease, too, especially in "women". I have pain sometimes and a weird lack of function other times, enough that apparently I'm setting my jaw hard to get myself through things and have worn through the disc on both sides, which is what's causing the ear pain? But I'm happy. It's very possible to be in pain and also to be happy. And it's obviously possible to not do everything you want to do and still be happy, because in this near-infinite world how could anyone ever be happy otherwise?

Loving my life, and living in a life I love, has always been my most radical and least-understood act. Even when it's hard and it hurts and it's lonely. Even when it's not safe because of course it's never safe. Even when, even when.

I've been sitting up typing for 40 minutes now. The rain has restarted outside. I need to lie back down. Two cats are sleeping on the foot of the bed. Sometime later I'll go out and clear out another third of the bedding in the quail shed, or maybe do some pottery, or maybe do a run into town for more chick starter. I'll not chain multiple activities together, I'm learning that. And things will, for now, be ok.

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.

I had to take Avallu in to the emergency vet last weekend.

It's difficult here. There are basically no vets. There's a daytime emergency vet 2 - 2.5 hours away and no nighttime emergency vets. There are no farm animal vets, except some which do horses.

So if a dog or cat is not doing well I need to make the call early enough that they don't die in the 20 minutes of "first you need to pay for a virtual vet to diagnose and certify an emergency" and "then you need to load the animal and drive them into the vet".

I'll spare you the details but Avallu is ok. It was maybe a slipped disc and a UTI compounding each other? But I was afraid. He loves me so much and wants to do what I ask, but he was in a lot of pain. Loading him was rough.

The vets were great with him, though, and very good with my "he's dog reactive and person selective". They were polite to him and he was polite to them despite his pain, and they were adept at blocking all other dogs from his sight.

They were very busy, though. I ended up sitting in the car for six hours in 2.5AQI 200-300,mostly around the top end. That is where there's enough smoke it's hard to see the end of the street, and ash accumulates on the car in a visibly speckled layer over six hours. I'd left without a mask so by the end not just my throat, sinuses, and eyes were burning but also the skin on my face.

I'd also left in "shoot the neighbour's home, better cover up when I step outside to look at the morning" booty shorts, without putting on real pants. They show the bottom of my tattoo, which I think invited a young woman to give me a card and invite me to her church.

Oh well.

Pup is feeling better on painkillers, though he's noticably whiny when they wear off. He's moving though, and able to lie down, even on hard surfaces. He's also taking his pills well when they're encased in duck confit.

It's been a long time since I felt that level of adrenaline in my body. Over time, living here on my own, I've been allowing the barriers that keep me functional to wear down. I'll let feelings make me stop, let them alter my behaviour. Maybe I'll hug something. Maybe I'll cry. Maybe I'll go be curious about something. That all seems to be at the expense of calm, quick, measured behaviour in an emergency, though. I am not ready to lose Avallu and it took me a bit to get myself together when it became apparent there was a problem.

Money played into that too, but that's a different post.

Anyhow, pup is home and very loved and is not in big danger.

We've had several days with lightning and thunder in the afternoons, accompanied by high winds and-- by rain! Enough to bump the fire danger down from extreme to high, and in some places in the district even moderate or low. It's not enough to totally skip watering the garden, but it's enough to reduce the urgency. It's also enough to bring down the smoke level in the air, and it's cooled down here to perfect skin temperature.

Now, it was pretty extreme wind, and it's likely more of the lightning strikes will flare up when things dry out and warm up again -- the last round left three spot fires around the highway -- but for now, a reprieve.

Tucker came up for a week. At one point I'd asked the question, if a lot of what had been going on before was burnout, then what? Well, the "then what" is that he was able to engage emotionally and intellectually with what I was asking, to share his stuff and to be vulnerable and to make long-term plans and be realistic about the likelihood of those plans, to listen to me and be empathetic and loving, and to give me space to make my own missteps so I could overreact, catch myself, and apologise instead of it leading to a spiral. These are new skills for us and we need to be careful not to tear the new skills by overworking them but it was so nice. When my counselor said what I wanted from him might be mystery, it didn't land quite right. He is capable of surprising me, and that's fundamental to longevity of this stuff, but I think what I wanted from him was hope. Hope for visits like we just had: not perfect, but generative and close and loving.

Added bonus I can send some pork down to Josh with him.

In farm news the muscovies are coming out of every corner with babies. First a chocolate mama showed up with 9, then a lavender one with 7 the next day, and the black mama who's mysteriously nesting in the pile of feed bags had one. I've consolidated them all with the chocolate mama in the quail house along with the geese and anconas. I'm pretty sure there's a humidity component involved: when things are dry and the nests are dry I don't get so much of a hatch. Then when it rains or if I soak the bedding around the nests (not in the nests) things move better.

Hopefully I got all the babies off the ground quickly enough that they'll do ok. I think there's a disease in my soil that catches them if they're not taken off it in time, and I've lost a lot to it over the years. I'm considering building more enclosed space up off the ground for that reason. Having the aspen chips is really nice in that regard: it's going to be a brutal season to get straw.

In light of the pottery studio dissolving I'm keeping an eye on kilns. They've hired a studio manager and have mentioned that no personal work will be done in the studio -- I haven't talked to the studio manager yet, this had come through the program director. It's such a shame to have a lovely studio, two brand new kilns, all those wheels and equipment, and only use them for classes and not allow anyone who's taken a class to do follow-up work. And maybe they'll get to that point. But I have re-learned the lesson that, for things important to me, people and organizations are not necessarily reliable.

Mostly looking at kilns is a hobby right now: they can be got pretty cheap because they're super heavy and hard to move, but that money is not in the plan right now. Good to keep an eye on what stuff looks like. At this rate I might be able to go down south for pagan stuff and maybe...

...a very soft and purring cat just came and sat across both my arms. I guess that's it for this update.

No elderberry resolution, but I've been thinking:

One of my major fencing issues is that dogs need to be able to pass through all fences to protect livestock and also to access the house with their food etc. I want to keep geese, pigs, and ideally ducks and chickens out of the area around the house though. I'd been thinking I'd need to build a dog door into a piece of plywood in the fence, to let the dogs through, but today I had a new idea. What if I made part of the fence a 2' wide/tall section of roofing tin? The dogs can easily hop over that without it training them to hop over normal fences. Pigs will be unlikely to pass through it unless very motivated since they don't like going through something they can't see (it would be a secondary fence system for the pigs in case they got out of electric; not a primary system where they'd have time to learn to hop it). Geese could fly over it but if there was food and water and grass on their side they'd be unlikely to, and likewise the ducks. The top is sharpish, so they're unlikely to hop onto it and then over. Chickens and muscovies will just fly over but with just them around the house there should be less of a mess and I may end up confining the chickens anyhow.

That said, here are the elderberry considerations:

Fence along the road: this would be a really great place to have them. Those spruce trees are dying and it would be nice to replace them with a screen that's not just aspen. The soil is relatively rich and something with reaching roots could capture ditch water. However, it's pretty grassy and there's a dog trail there so the babies would have lots of competition and not be well protected. They'd also be shaded by the remaining spruce trees. This might be a better place to plant test apples?

South fence by the berries: they'd be just south of three apple trees on antonovka rootstock (very small now), and south of my berries, but there's a big slope here. If they're at the bottom of the slope they'll get good moisture without baking too badly and they won't be shaded by the apples, but they will shade some of my berries over time. The bottom of the slope has pretty dense turf, though the rest of the slope has been well cardboard-and-mulched. This area will always be fighting off grass since the grass will be coming through the fence from the neighbour's pasture. It's certainly not a candidate for more apple trees, and theoretically the elderberries would be able to compete well after a couple years, especially if I cardboard them regularly.

Pig fence south: this is between apple trees on B118. It's pretty sunny, receives a ton of moisture from the slope of the winter pigpen to the north, and will be between my potato bed and the pigpen so would have relatively little grass competition. They would shade the garden after a couple years but it's a good slope, so when the sun goes high in summer it would be fine. There would mostly be shade in fall as the sun got lower. This is a high goose-activity area so they'd need to be well protected; the apple trees here got some nibbly setbacks. This area is a bit shaded by the house, a fold in the ground, and the sinking shed.

South fence by the house: mom cleared this area under the aspens last year. It gets lots of sun and is more open than I'd like. It needs plant screening, though because it's on the slope it could use some tall screening to actually impact the yard. This wouldn't shade any garden space. The ground itself is pretty hard and dry both because it's the south-slopiest and because of all the aspens there. The aspens need to go but maybe putting plants under there before the aspens are gone would damage the plants when the aspens were coming down.

Pig fence north, between pigs and woodfield: this is a little complex. The fence is currently at the top of a short, steep slope; the pigs can access the slope. They're eroding it. They love lying on it in the sun. If I plant on the slope itself it would stabilize the slope, and the elderberries would be down a bit so they wouldn't shade the woodfield garden too much. On the other hand I'd need to move the fence to the bottom of the slope for that since the pigs would just uproot the elderberries. The fence is lots of wood right now and shades the woodfield so that would be good to do. The spot gets near full sun. If moving the fence was easy I'd definitely decide on this spot. As it is I could plant directly on the other side of the fence from the pigs, on the flat, and the roots might still help stabilize. They'd shade the woodfield garden though and that's the sandy flat garden that's my most conventional growing conditions. If I'm ever going to get root crops it'll be up there. OTOH I have been thinking of putting apple trees up there, and elderberries to the south of apples is a perfect shade situation. Also then I couldn't run pigs in this field for a couple years, and after that not for long.

Woodfield fence north: northernmost edge of my property. Always nice to have screening around this sort of area. If I plant apple trees in the woodfield they will shade the elderberries but not for a couple years at least. Right now it's in full sun and if I retain it as a field it will remain that way. Again the grass creeps through from the (other) neighbour's pasture but depending on how close to the fence I plant it's clear right now and I can cardboard around it. I'd like a mixed-species hedgerow to end up here eventually and I will certainly plant other things in here so the elderberry seems like a good start. Any perennials here will require me to mostly exclude the pigs from this area.

Between woodfield and back field: this is a bit messy right now, that fence is falling down. Because it's a north-south line rather than an east-west one it creates less shade, and is itself in the shade of two spruce trees for a bit of each day. I'd have to redo the fence but I guess if I put them here I wouldn't be letting the pigs in much so they could replace the fence in some ways. There's a bit of grass, sod, and aspen in one corner of this space, preserved as a bit of a refugia for critters in the middle of the long garden. Not sure how much competition it would be for the babies.

Between the back field and the back pasture: at the base of the slope back field garden, to the south, there's a ridge of soil pushed down by pigs. It's a foot or two in from the fence, where the electric fence was, and it's a long, great planting site. Shortish woody perennials here would give nice shade to the bottom of the garden and they could be planted on that berm. However, they will shade the garden. This is a spot I've been considering a mixed hedge just because it's so easy to plant into. I don't want too much visual screening because I want to be able to see into the field from the house. Again grass will come through the fence but less so since my pasture is grazed. A row of sour cherries and plums would be stunning here. Elderberries would be a bit taller but could be cut back?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Between not having a keyboard and being pretty survival-oriented, I haven't been posting much besides data collection. However, future me will want to know: it really feels sunny lately, and I didn't wear a coat to work yesterday, just a scarf and jacket. The sun just goes on and on after work, and on my coffee break walk with a coworker it was brilliantly bright out.

I'm planning to plant peppers on March 1, I think, and tomatoes mid-March (or maybe everything mid-March?). Mid-March gives me roughly eight or nine weeks until plant-out, maybe 10. I guess true potato seed and tomatillos should be April 1st. I have some pretty exciting plans.

The muscovies are laying. The geese are fighting and it's time to separate.

My driveway is a 6" slab of polished skating rink with a few inches of snow on top. We keep getting an inch of snow at a time, then a thaw.

I'm going to pick up my pork from the Vanderhoof processor tomorrow and see how their work is.

Entering a very busy period here: Tucker visit, another contract due at work, hair dye appointment, work conference, then the landrace speaking thing. Very social too, I guess.

Well, I may not be doing well generally, but I do feel more like myself whenever I spend some time outside.

The difficulty being, today was between -24 and -20, plus wind chill in the afternoon which takes it to "frostbite in minutes" according to the weather report. So I kept hopping out for anywhere between fifteen minutes and an hour, hopping back in, warming up, and hopping back out. Everyone got water twice, food twice or three times, and fresh straw.

I also hammered and sledged ice away from the tap so I could fit the buckets under it again. Each time a drop splashes outside the bucket it builds up another layer of ice, like a candle, until the ice on the side of the house is so thick the bucket doesn't fit anymore. It's a problem.

The muscovies got a heat lamp, which because the cord that runs out there got its plug frozen into the ice, meant running a chain of three extension cords out there. Then when I was fiddling with the heat lamp I had out there, the cold caused the casing on the heat lamp cord to snap in two places, so I needed to get a new heat lamp too.

I'm concerned about the pigs. They seem to be ok-- they aren't shivering in the mornings, and there are so many of them in those pig houses it stays pretty warm in there. But every time I give them straw they just pack it down under them instead of burrowing under it and using it as insulation. I guess they don't need the insulation yet. I keep giving them straw and they keep packing it down, though, it feels like a waste? Maybe after the butcher there'll be fewer and they'll go under. I don't seal up all the holes in the houses because the moisture needs to vent, to avoid frostbite -- but normally there's a lot more snow up against the sides of the A-frame as external insulation at this point, and then I go around with a shovel and heap some up against the walls of the square ones. I'll inspect in the morning and see, as usual. This really would be a whole different experience if I could just rest and be sure that everyone out there was doing well, but each winter there's a different set of situations during the cold spike.

This cold means super dry, which means my fingers don't freeze to things. That's good. It also means I touch metal things, which is bad: metal really does feel like it's burning at these temperatures.

It would be nice to have someone around who is familiar with these experiences. It really is very different from anywhere else. Yet another set of experiences that, when I describe them to people, they just look at me funny. I guess that's kind of my whole life.

This is the kind of thing I really enjoy. Tap thawed, bringing everyone a last round of water, but not too much so I'll be able to knock the ice out of the bowls in the morning. Marvelling at physics, at the way the water freezes in the rubber containers from outside in, and expands as it does, so the bottom of each frozen dish ends up with a point of ice sticking out from the bottom. Peeling flakes of straw off the big square bales and bundling them into the wheelbarrow, not because they're heavy but because they're unwieldy and I don't have a calf sled. Carrying the straw into the pig houses and being surprised every time how warm it is in there, even with all the open holes in walls and at the top of the roofline for ventilation and even with the front of the A-frame broken off. Fluffing up the straw in the middle of the swarm of interested, excited, and sometimes even frolicking pigs as they gather to fluff their bedding and search for missed kernels of grain-- much tastier always than the grain sitting in their bowls right there. Digging out my beloved cordless drill and remembering so many nights of patching up pighouses in storms and snow while I put the front back on. They've been through colder than this, and finding the houses warmer inside than I expect it makes the whole thing less of a desperate bid for my animals to survive and more just a way of spending time together. I love the improvisation of sticking my toque on the faucet to see if that helps thaw it, or finding just the right piece of plywood so I can cover the straw with that so I can shift a piece of metal roofing down to go on the wood so I can... etc.

At one point I had the front on the A-frame and was cutting a wider door in it -- there were two open strips, but the biggest pigs could not fit through them. I was using the sawzall which is loud and vibratey and one of the extremely round barrows was inside the A-frame, didn't like the sound, and tried to squeeze through the other side. He got stuck and was squealing and pawing at the ground and wouldn't try to back up even when I stopped and went to help; he eventually got through (and the front didn't come off!) and I finished the opening on the other side. I have to say, it was pretty funny, even if he was not pleased about it (he's also one of the biggest bullies to the other pigs, so that might be part of my lack of sympathy; he spends less time being worried than any of them except Baby and Apricot, I think).

I like it. When I know my animals are safe and comfy, I like just the work part of it: setting up for them, providing for them, bringing them things they need and things that will make them happy. And I'd much rather a job where I'm out at all hours saving the day than a non-flex 9-5 (well, 8-4:30) like I have now. It's just that those jobs tend to reward availability with longer hours and efficiency with more work.

All that aside, I'm happy tonight and my house is warm and my animals are sleeping in deep beds of snow. the wind that was howling all last night and sending the house shuddering and the fire flinching has let up. The house is quiet, my teeth are brushed, and my life would only be better if, instead of going in to work tomorrow, I could spend more than an hour with the animals in the morning and then come in to warm up and cut out some more clothes.