Greenstorm's Journal

Montana morado corn in the ground yesterday, mostly showing the hint of root tips. I've grown it once before and it ripened well, though wanted a bit more water than it got at the far end of the top field.

Pigs also got out; electric installed in that corner.

Bruises on my torso starting to show where Robs pulled his "running really fast to pull the leash out" trick. It's been awhile since I had rope bruises, and they were definitely more fun to get before. He's doing that trick much less, which is good because I have to keep the lead wrapped once around my torso to catch it since my hand strength kinda sucks.

Morden mixed corn and sweet corn grex should go in the ground today. Part of the issue is I can't think about where they should go or decide where they should go, because that requires all the brain stuff: knowing what order they'll pollinate in, which parts of the yard are too distant to pollinate between, microclimates for different parts of the yard which will influence both pollination and ripening time, and size of different fields. Integrating that information so I could plant everything so it wouldn't cross pollinate, due either to timing or location, and would all ripen depending on the ripening needs of each type, used to be easy for me. Now it's impossible. I'll do something and it'll work or not anyhow.

I'm beginning to see what fully died in the frost and what didn't. The runner beans did surprisingly well. More on that later.

Journaling 1000000% improves my mental health. Too much writing 100000000000% destroys it. Please be impressed by my discipline in not trying to spreadsheet my way through the corn think but just doing something, which helps it not harm me.
Solly has her x-ray appointment in 3 weeks and 2 days to get her ok to run free off-leash. She's getting increasingly unhappy with the current situation, though her innate good temper shows through always.

I think a skunk (skunk family?) is living under the back chicken house, and I think it's had some run-ins with the foxes.

Pears in the ground yesterday: Talitsa, Beedle, Marshal Zhukov, Chizhovsky from Prairie Hardy nursery. I tucked them in the southwest corner of the upper field, marking the corners of the walkway, where the soil is very sandy. They get a touch of afternoon-evening shade from the spruce for now but it's probably not there permanently.

Also popped a Ptitsin #5 plum down by Josh's shed, and a Big Red cherry in the front yard bed where one of last year's cherries didn't make it.

Even after all these years it's still tempting to pull up an elderberry cutting and make sure it's rooting. I got them in a little late this year. We shall see.

Everything has been tilled once, even the far pig berry patch, though we're again too dry to till properly.

I'm glad I'm getting corn in late, in hindsight, because the corn bed/cornfield is where I've been playing with Robs. Couldn't have done that if it was seeded. When I dig up dandelions he takes them from my hand and shakes them, and sometimes digs them up himself. He's an intense but short-lived digger so far.

Tonight is the last frost in the forecast, so I'm calling it the last frost. Tomatoes really do need to go out so they'll have to take their chances on being covered. It's an exciting set of trial varieties this year, I'm quite pleased with the list. It's really looking like Russian breeding is the way to go, we just don't have the research dollars here except for hothouse varieties, and between the Harper years and the current government I think we never will. Yet another public good sheared off into a "fund-it-yourself" "hobby".

That got dark fast. To brighten it, my figs are doing nicely and they will be repotted soon and hopefully grow fast to block my western window.

I also ended up popping runner beans in pots instead of ourdoors when the frost appeared in the forecast and I'm afraid they've woven themselves onto my shelves. They may need a bit of a shearing, we shall see.

This is my first permanent garden, where I haven't had to move away within a year or two. As a result it's my first long dance with perennial weeds. The whole thing is rather fascinating. When I was a kid I'd read things in, for instance, Organic Gardening magazine or gardening books which said to put down a cover crop and then till it in. I didn't have a tiller, I was a kid and the most I could afford was seeds. I got this idea that tillers would chop up green stuff into quite little pieces and incorporate them into soil.

Fast forward three and a half decades and I have a tiller. It doesn't chop up long pieces of anything, they just wind around the axle which holds the blades. Smaller things, less than eight inches or so, it does incorporate as long as they're not in clumps that are too dense. Now maybe a tractor-drawn tiller would do a better job but mine is pretty powerful for a hand tiller. I kinda wonder what those books were on about, back then.

Theoretically if you till a field full of perennial weeds, you break them up into pieces and from each piece a new weed grows. If you till a field of annual weeds before they go to seed you mostly kill them. So over time a field that gets regularly tilled will tend to accumulate perennial weeds.

It's not the orderly process I'd expected. Something will show up, a single plant in a field, one year. If I let it go to seed the entire field will suddenly be full of something. For instance my weeds might flip from grass to sculpit for a year or two, then to scentless chamomile, then to canada thistle, then back to grass. I'm not sure if this is a moisture thing, a cultivation thing (spacing between rows etc allows different things to establish?) or what.

So I might have the tornjak I'm going to get tracked down, but the whole thing is such an absurd and uncomfortable situation that I'll get it down afterwards, whichever way it goes.

Garden's pretty close to too dry to till, I'm watering regularly. Almost all the plants I ordered over winter arrive this week, many are very small and get potted up for next year, others will go out into the garden pretty soon. Obviously with lots of water.

Bringing tomatoes in and out every day-- oops, I forgot to put them out this morning.

Solly is doing exceptionally well both tempermentally and with her surgery. She and Thea really want to play, but she's very responsive to me telling her not to (she's always ALWAYS on leash outside) and although she's not super into the warm weather and keeps leading me to the cool spots as suggestions (under the woodpile, to her shady doghouse, to another cool shed) she'll come along with me when I suggest. I mostly let her lead the walks and she's got a boundary patrol that changes slightly depending on temperature and what smells like what. She barked in the house the other day to alert me to the pigs being out; they were by the back carport and she could smell and hear them through the doors. She's such a good girl.

There are currently 4 cats lined up in a row along the foot of my bed. They're sleeping. They get along so much better when they have outdoors, I really need to get more height type enrichment spots for them before next winter. I do wish I had square walls, it would make the engineering part easier. Curved walls that go up and in, and you don't know what's behind them, makes it hard to put weight-bearing anything even when you get the angles right.

The violet blue swallows have arrived. I like them so much. We had some juncos and some white crowned (?) sparrows first, so many sparrows, and while they're neat they don't have the same effect on me. The swooping to hunt and the particular sounds they make are so lovely. Also they make the mosquitoes disappear; they arrived two days after the mosquitoes hatched and it's safe to be in the garden again. They may be nesting under my eaves outside the bedroom window, or maybe just sitting on the powerline there and swooping a lot. They move on later in spring.

I have a pretty long to-do list for the property that I am probably going to launch into here.

The pigs are in their back field but the fence needs reinforcement, and they need enrichment and shade and a scratcher. The problem is that sinking even a heavy duty steel t-post in for the scratcher will get bent pretty quick, but I guess that, like food dishes, they'll just keep going through. Tires and willow branches are good though. They're sleeping at the top point of the field and have fully ignored their little house thing.

Obviously I need to till as much as possible, including the back field before it, too, dries up. I'd like to move the compost from the old lean-to greenhouse that's collapsed into the garden but that's maybe not going to happen.

I'd like to disassemble the old collapsed greenhouse.

I need to make an enclosed duck run that's fox-proof so I can save some of the ducks, and ideally put a group of muscovies into their run I made last year (they can fly so I'm less worried about keeping them safe than keeping my garden safe).

I need to actually finish making decisions about what goes where for the plants that have arrived. There are different kinds of microclimates, like some spots are colder but more even for instance, and sorting out that stuff takes thought. I'm particularly low on thought right now.

I really want to get more napa cabbage, turnips, and carrotsparsnips into the ground.

Somethign south slope terraces continued.

Oops, there goes my brain. Time to go.

I made it outside yesterday. I have to, to walk Solly, and during our second walk we wandered into the shade at Avallu's point and sat there where he always used to. She was very happy to curl up next to me with her head on my lap sometimes or in guard position others.

A couple days ago (?) I'd visited someone* I knew through the pottery studio. She had got her own kiln and stopped coming in, but she owns the florist in town and now sells her work through there. She's added bigger pieces to her repertoire and refined her mug forms and it's neat to see.

Anyhow, I stopped in to the store, chatted a bit, looked at her work, and also asked if she had spare cardboard because the rumour mill had mentioned she might. Well! I came home with a ton of cardboard and some bubble wrap and that foamy sheet stuff. She was grateful to be rid of it and I was grateful to have it, I guess she needs to spend $100/month to get rid of it otherwise.

I use a lot of cardboard to mulch berry shrubs and to lasagne bed new beds. In fact, lack of cardboard stops me from doing a lot. This huge batch of it, in very useful huge pieces maybe 3' x 5', removes a significant bottleneck for me.

And packaging material means I can send mugs to people and all I need is the right sized box, I don't need to either store up amazon packaging for months, pillage the newspaper recycling in the mailbox and crumple it all up, or buy like $4 worth of filler in addition to the extremely high cost of mailing from here.

The packaging material is still in the back of my truck, but the cardboard is all staged. Last summer I hired a neighbour to burn the tops of aspens I'd had cut down along my fenceline and hadn't been able to deal with. There were a ton of aspen suckers, which I slowly picked away at. Last fall I ran a row of perennial beds, slightly raised, made with the trunks of those aspens and cardboard along

(shoot, that's about as much coherence as I can easily do in one writing. It's the reaching back and trying to order/correlate events, put causality on them, remember details, that's what runs my brain into a wall)

anyhow, I made a strip of beds parallel to the fence for peonies, and now I'm making another strip of beds, slightly terraced down the slope and closer to the fence, in which I will put hazel and oak and some taller decuduous trees to help screen the yard (elm, hackberry, and ash probably). YEsterday I (slowly) put down six pieces of cardboat and moved two logs in the space of maybe an hour and a half.

In the evening, after lots of rest, I planted my peas after bending some concrete reinforcing wire in half the long way to make a trellis (I did this with my feet and was pleased with the result).

So: lots lots lots of gardening relatively, and I'm happier today. Happy because distracted from my overall situation, and because I'm embedded in the immediate world instead of thinking about dedicating half my life to doing paperwork that, as above, stops my brain but I need to just keep doing it liek reaching my hand into the fire over and over for months on end.

Anyhow. IT was good. NAvigating staiirs is hard again today, I'm writing this in part because I'm waiting to be able to get up out of bed to go and pee before going back to sleep. The things you take for granted, riight?

*I visited her in her shop, which made it easy to leave when someone else came in

It's hot out! Still frosty nights but probably over 20C during the days. Solly lays down every time we go through shade on her walks, and really is only enthusiastic on the morning and evening ones.

I tried taking off her cone today. Fingers crossed for us all. She's a licker, but she was busy cleaning her front paws, and I'm hoping this will let her get at her bones and toys better. Besides, she was flexible enough to be able to reach and lick her wound with the cone on these last few days, I guess her leg is feeling flexible again.

I got the tiller working. It required siphoning out the old gas and putting in new. You're supposed to run the seasonal devices dry before storing them but I can never bring myself to do so. Maybe I should put the snowblower away and give it a try, anyhow.

The upper field is dry, the back field is a little squishy still but the puddles are gone. It's fascinating to use crocuses as microclimating tools. Places I'd think would be warmer, like a west slope, end up not being because of a couple degrees of angle in the wrong direction or a brief string of shade that I wouldn't expect to last long enough to have that impact.

All my apples in the main orchard are nicely woodchip mulched from last fall. I put in daffodils but the woodchip mulch is a ridiculous insulator: anything under it is still frozen, including any hose that runs under woodchips. The only exception is my perennial beds, which were layered woodchips and compost and maybe are just warm from compost still, or maybe the raised edge is south-facing enough to counter it?

About half of my scionwood has arrived. I'm going to try grafting one of everything on the wild saskatoons and one of everything on siberian crabapple rootstock: you can get two grafts out of a stick, usually.

I replanted some of the basketry willows along the ephemeral creek, some had grown up but geese had eaten others. The geese are excluded from the area currently, though it's occupied by a half-dozen muscovies who can fly around causing trouble.

The favas soaked last night, so I'm hoping to get them in the ground today. I should interplant them with spinach or radishes, something short. I had also considered alternating rows with a grain, wheat or the barley. I'll see what I do, I guess. They'll need watering whatever I do; we haven't had rain really, though that most recent snow was a lot of moisture for snow.

The first wildfire started in the area, though no one is worried about it. It did make it to 3ha, when usually they get caught below 1ha.

I'm mostly not heating the house anymore. Until the leaves come on the deciduous trees it's greenhousing when the sun swings around to the west. The point of sunset is moving really fast right now, but that's around 4pm at the moment. The temperature inside shoots up to 30C or so, I open the windows, then close them on the way down. By the next day midmorning the house is down to 18 but then it started to warm again, slowly then quickly. The basement has a tiny bit of heat going into it but that's mostly from the growlights down there.

The thermostat down there still doesn't work in spring, though it works in fall. I'm sure it has to do with the way the air flows through the area but it's deeply annoying. If it did work, I could keep downstairs at 20 and not have such extreme fluctuations, but it just doesn't turn the baseboards off when things heat up. Problem for another time.

Anyhow, gardens are good.

Well, at least some of it was PDA-induced. I got in my part of the form and immediately feel lighter and less like I want to die. Like, not at all like I want to die.

I've been unable to throw more than 5 pieces at a sitting for months, and yesterday evening I sat down and threw something like 8 pieces -- many were off-the-hump and several were cat food dishes, the easiest of pieces, but it was just nice to get outside that limit for once.

I've also been going outside, snuggling the dogs and looking at the snow melt back from the garden.

I'm probably going to come to terms at some point with how much energy I've spent, my entire life, working my way around my PDA into something that approached functionality. It's always involved having choices of some kind, and being thoughtful about making them. I can't describe just how little choice I have in my current situation; I do the disability paperwork how they want it, when they want it, or-- nothing. There's no changing jobs because I can't do a job. Even cobbling something together like attempting to full-time house or farm sit isn't possible because most people's houses are scented, and most farm sitting probably requires more than my body has in it.

I keep pretending I can keep the pigs but it definitely does make a big difference to my daily life to feed and water them. The birds are easier, but the pigs are really destructive so I need to be way more on top of infrastructure. But, yeah.

It's working on spring out there though. One daffodil is inexplicably coming up in a bare patch. The sorrel is spiking its first leaves up through the snow-- I guess that means it didn't get eaten by voles over winter, which bodes well for my whole herb garden. Buds are swelling on a couple things, dangerous with -11 forecast overnight soon but they have been moving that same forecast back one day at a time for something like two weeks so who knows.

I super forgot what else I was going to write, except that generally not being in fight-or-flight from PDA like I was for the last couple months is pretty good, and there's not quite enough ground revealed yet to garden but it's coming.

Snow fell the last few days, and a little even stuck. Canada Post is on strike and my bulbs are in it, but I think I planted them about this time last year, and the ground isn't frozen yet. I'm hoping they arrive not too damaged after sitting in a warm spot for over a month.

The provincial public service is on strike too, which I suspect means my disability application won't be accepted or processed until they're done, and after that I imagine a backlog-- no wait, I think this was a federal one? Anyhow, neither they nor insurance has asked me for anything in the last two weeks, which is nice.

The pottery class has one more class. We did glazing yesterday and the glazing area is pretty small, so I peeled people off one at a time and we worked on their stuff while everyone else got free play time, and most ended up scultping. This is excellent, since sculpting is not my strong point, and they got to do a bunch of it without my needing to instruct on more than the principles of attaching things. I like people doing people things, I guess.

It's seed swap season (did I already say that?) and the Canadian seed swap fb groups put up all their stuff and arranged groups -- the way it works is you send in ten of the same variety to a central volunteer, and get back nine different varieties (The tenth one goes to a prize that I guess folks get entered into, or into mutual-aid style packages). So groups of ten people, none of whom have the same variety to send in, get made in all sorts of categories: paste tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, brassicas & root crops (not sure why those are together), lettuce and herbs, etc. Then the landrace organization, who I believe are now labelling themselves as adaptation gardening people, have asked for seed donations in Canada so I'll send in a bunch of stuff to them; they distribute it free. They'll get some very fun tomatoes.

All this has prompted me to start seeding tomatoes more seriously. I have trays of now-ripe tomatoes on every surface downstairs and I need to get the seeds out of them, and ideally them into a salsa or something and canned or at least to pigs. Josh will be here in a week and it would be nice if there were some surfaces not covered in tomatoes for him.

Meanwhile my sauerkraut has gone from fermenting in the cool pantry to the fridge. It's perfect, crunchy and sour and lightly spicy since I put hot pepper shreds in most of my sauerkrauts. Now there's kimchi fermenting in that spot, I have a couple more gallons to make. I have yet to sample the test batch to know how I should tweak it but was very happy to find diakon at the grocery store here.

I enjoy chattering away about the garden and wish I had the wherewithal to do more. I do want to update that three of the muscovy babies from this spring survived -- two male -- and nine ducklings, and now there are seven chicks feathering out. The muscovies from Shelly's farm are doing well here, competing for my napa cabbage and flying all over to hang out on top of things, like muscovies do. It's like having animate jewels.

I'm not fully sure how to divide the animals for winter. I'd like to get the goosehouse mucked out fully but it's slow going for me; if I do it right I can put aspen chips in it, and they're easier to muck out than straw when they've semi-composted. I'd like to use the actual greenhouse in the spring, so I want whoever is in it to not nest in it, or to have a place to go in February that's snug for nesting and predator-free in that lean time. Right now Solly is somehow getting in to sleep in it and I think she's only letting the chicks in with her. For that matter, I'd like to get the pots of frosted dead tmatoes out of the woodshedgreenhouse and put wood in there. Hopefully Josh can help with that.

This is probably more going on than I should have. My mind feels a little clearer, though I still can't remember students names from one moment to the next and when washing my hands I've been drying them before rinsing them lately. My muscles feel softer. Still off the pill, eating hurts less and is easier, though my muscles really do feel like they're made from sticks and playdough. At some point I expect my hormonal system to notice it's supposed to do things and start up again, at which point I'll rev up the pills and the various eating medications I've been given, but right now I have a little calm space.

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.

Rain in the afternoons. Our wildfire danger system is a 4 point scale (which is calculated through a series of amazing other scales that all lead into each other). Low, moderate, high, extreme. The last several summers we've sat at extreme all summer pretty much. Right now we're at moderate. There's not even smoke here, though the center of the continent is still burning up. I can leave my windows open. I can relax in ways I haven't for years during the summertime, knowing it's deeply unlikely I'll need to evacuate. I don't need to keep all the animal crates prepped and the trailer ready. It's so beautiful and peaceful.

The garden is slow; there are beautiful lettuces and fennel and kale and the kohlrabi is sizing up and the tomatoes are growing well, but the peppers are in stasis and the corn isn't doing much. This is the Fort I remember.

On the other hand, the KARMA miracle/sweet cheriette cross I made is in the F2 now and it's ripening here and there already. I made the cross because sweet cheriette is super early and miracle is tasty and fairly cool-tolerant, and I do seem to have successfully created a bunch of early plants. I'm tasting them as they ripen, I think I've tasted 5 now of the maybe 20 I've planted. They're very good! I'm discarding the ones that are too sweet but I'm still left with lots to proceed with. I also have a set of zesty green/silvery fir but they're a bit slower.

I discovered a place the next town over that sells 4' long trim ends, usually pretty checked or with wane on them, but it's a 4x4x4' cube for $50 so I get to play with that. At that price it's actually cheaper than firewood, although it won't burn long enough to use exclusively it's still going to be a help this winter if I can get several of them squirreled away. Anything that's good enough to make dog houses, duck houses, garden chairs, etc with is a bonus.

I've also been doing some fabric dyeing. Scentless chamomile most recently, horsetail, willow and yarrow are on the list. The tansy I did last year was gorgeous, I'm going to try some goldenrod, and I want to do rhubqarb root but getting it means being mean to my plants so it's hard. I'm also very curious what aspen does. I've been dyeing cotton shirts since they're cheap and I can easily test for wash/lightfastness by wearing them a bunch, and linen is so expensive.

I met the person who's been doing a spinning residency in the art studio yesterday. She has a bunch of light wool so we're going to play with some dyeing. That will be fun.

I need to be very careful not to overload myself right now. It's so tempting to think that the internet can combine with rest, and even audiobooks do take some energy -- much less than the internet. It's a learning thing.

I've been spending a ridiculous amount of money on fresh fruit but it means I've been eating the most delicious peaches and apricots. It's so luxurious. I make up for it from the garden or eating the cheapest canned sardines on rice the rest of the time. My easy canned food has tripled in price with the weirdness going on with the US, trade war or whatever. Cleaning the rice cooker isn't no work, but it's what I got.

Meanwhile I follow some folks in gaza, kids who reminded me of me at that age who used to do little videos about things they loved to do. People talk about the bombing and famine as being traumatic, and of course it is. But kids watching their cats slowly starve and die, feeding the cats lentils and watermelon, that's... the cruelty administered to that population, the level of care put to considering every type of indignity that can be inflicted, the goal is very clearly to craft a forever war, a set of folks who can never heal but only return what they have been so skillfully taught. The kids I follow don't seem like that at all, but.

It's a dark note to end on, but these are dark times.