greenstorm | Entries tagged with garden

I'm starting to harden off some of the tomatoes. Some of the others are still being potted up. My general tomato growing principle is to start enough that they don't all fit under my lights along with everything else, but bring them outside for the whole day for the last couple weeks to a month, and just bring them in and pile them everywhere the rest of the time.

It's chaotic, but it's using my house in the way I prefer to. It also results in very well-hardened-off seedlings, and somewhat clear surfaces indoors after everything is planted out because all the surfaces had plants on them.

Yesterday I planted chiddham blanc wheat, the going to seed parsnip mix, and sprinkled some black swan poppies over them. This is in the upper field, in one of the bays between apple trees, which is also how I planted the favas and radishes. It'll be the second time I plant parsnips, the first was maybe year 1 or 2 of my garden and they didn't germinate well, or maybe I just wasn't prepared for how slowly they germinated. It's also an interesting test of the wheat; I planted it in June or July previously and it overwintered gloriously and grew well. This, well, we don't seem to be having a spring this year so I'm not sure if it'll get its vernalization (cold temp) in order to grow properly, or if it'll overwinter. We'll see.

In theory planting grains like barley and wheat and rye in the late summer lets them establish, then they overwinter and use the water from winter in order to fruit. It's a strategy for the same climate as bulbs: find some way of using that very early water (and in a deciduous forest, sun, but that's not relevent to these particular plants) and then be in a dormant state, either seed or bulb, during summer drought.

We're catapaulting right past spring though. It hasn't rained since that last big snow, and it's not going to do more than sprinkle anytime in the forecast. I've had other years where I find it so strange to be watering a month before last frost date, and those are the years where fire seems close and scary. Nothing is leafed out yet. We are getting very hot days right now, and a bit of frost at night.

Deciding when to plant is maybe more dependent on soil temperature than air temperature. If the soil is warm, throwing something over plants will protect them from frost because it holds the heat the soil is radiating up. If the soil is cold there's not so much heat to radiate up, and the plants can be frosted regardless, and they'll also grow slowly. These hot days have me wishing for a soil thermometer.

The ephemeral creek has dried up into wet mud, which means I need to keep more of my own water out for the birds. I finally blocked off the greenhouse yesterday. There are four geese sitting in it, and I had a delightful moment when I stepped into the greenhouse and all four turned their heads in perfect unison and hissed at exactly the same time. The sitters are 4 saddlebacks and 1 mixed girl. Everyone else is excluded from that garden now. Goose eggs take roughly 28 days to hatch, and usually geese don't start sitting full time until they're more or less done laying, so there should be young ones at last frost date. Then I can move them. If I make a covered enclosure to the south of the greenhouse they can hang out there and suppress weeds while being safe from ravens. I wonder if I can do that in 28 days? I wonder if I can block them in the greenhouse somehow so I can plant half of it (they're all on the south side)?

Come to think of it, it's warm enough that I could keep my tomatoes in the goosegreenhouse (which is different than this greenhouse, which currently houses geese) if I kick everyone out.

I'm really very interested in this batch of tomatoes.

Some of them are from the sweet cheriette/karma miracle cross, and we're into the F4 this year. That means last year I grew out a diverse set of plants and selected seeds from different ones, which got labelled things like "prolific cherry" and "two largest fruit plants" so when I grow out seeds from those I get to see both how much diversity there is within a selection and how different the selections are from each other. I only have between 6 and 12 plants from each selection but it's still neat to see the differences. I'm also growing out some of the uluru ochre/mikado black ones, some from black fruited and some from ochre fruited selections, and of course those throw some very obvious dwarf plants, which is always neat. Then there's some of the silvery fir/zesty green ones, some of the original zesty green plant seeds (which I now know was a natural hybrid plant) and some of the red-fruited seeds from one of the selections of those seeds, and then a bunch of F1s I didn't realize I had lying around.

And then of course the usual mix of fancy long season (relatively) tomatoes and short season/cold hardy ones, including a new saraev one, saraev spring frost and one of the "sub arctic" line which I remember reading about as a kid.

Next things to plant: dango mugi barley, ceres wheat, martoc favas, root veg (turnips, carrot) which I'm not sure where they'll go, and I'm considering planting corn under clear plastiic on the south slope because it is WARM.

I would also like to put up the rest of my concrete reinforcing wire trellises and get the acorns in the ground, but to do that I need to prep The Circle and that requires a bunch of raking, which I find challenging.

Theoretically my rootstocks are at the post office for pickup today so I can also do some grafting as soon as they start waking up.

There's always more to say about the garden but that feels like as far as I can do memory and cause/effect thoughts before my mind snaps. Neat to walk to the edge and stop, when so often I've had to push past that and have it snap aand just be blank for so long.

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

I planted the first seeds yesterday: the fava mix I've been shepherding since the beginning, a pink hybrid radish called Orient Ruby, and Olympia spinach. Both big radishes and spinach are sensitive to daylength, which often means they can't grow well in spring here: by the time the soil is thawed, the days are too long for them and they bolt.

I don't do any gardening for certainty. I do it to learn the plants.

In any case, I planted them in the upper field in one of the bays between baby apple trees and covered them with frost cloth. Instantly Little Bear and Hazard came and played in the frost cloth; Bear absolutely adores going under fabric and skulking. I'd forgotten about that. Last year he would run straight through the relatively lightweight cloth.

Next is grain and peas. I haven't grown peas much, but I'm trying for more diversity than just tomatoes this year. Last year the fennel, kohlrabi, and broccoli were such successful additions that I'm following that path a little more. I also have a bunch of old soup peas, of course, I can't remember the provenance of the oldest ones but still. And I want to plant my dwarf soup peas again if the seeds will sprout.

I got this out to write because it occurs to me that I don't do art about things, for the most part. If we're going to consider pottery art and gardening not-art, I still do them both in order to be inside the thing I'm doing. Everything is aligned: mind, body, that whole subconscious apparatus that figures out how to interact with the physical world and performs the calculations necessary to throw a ball, the discernment apparatus and the appreciation one. Everything works together in one direction.

I have done pottery about wildfires. I have and will do it about The Waste Land. And I will eventually do it about Avallu. Those are important things.

So you'd think I'd do pottery about the garden. I don't. My experience of the garden might inform my pottery but it's not a thing I alchemize into some body of work. I'm not sure why that is.

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.

We actually got a snowfall warning last night and it snowed all night. It's not colder than any particular April day, and the snow is struggling to stick and melting into the soil but because it snowed all night there's still a blanket of wet, heavy white on everything. It's a couple inches deep. The sky is white. It's very calming. There's no question about it staying long; in Vancouver there were "snow days" and this will likely last a day and water the ground gently.

The last few days I've been wandering around checking to see which of my discounted perennials from last fall managed to survive. I have no experience with herbaceous perennials in this kind of winter, and in Vancouver it never really got cold enough for a perennial to look fully dead; there was always some little bit of green at the centre of a rosette or the base buds of a dead stem. Here, the first day I looked around I thought several things hadn't made it: eryngium, trollius, leucanthemum, perovskia. The salvia and strawberries had clear tiny green though. By yesterday there were bits of sprouts on all the above except the perovskia. The coneflowers aren't showing anything yet either. I don't see the dicentra or pulmonaria but they're in shadier areas, along with the hostas, so the ground is still frozen there. I wouldn't expect to see much there, though daffodils are already pushing up. Alchemilla made it in one spot, the other is still frozen. I'm very happy about that, I really love alchemilla. And there's the plant which I always forget the name of, super grey fuzzy leaves with neon pink flowers on tall spikes, that used to be in my grandma's garden. It came through evergreen! Can't see the coreopsis yet. Some of those pink peony buds are pushing up!

I'd like to add: rockfoil, columbine, daylilies, ?delphinium (they don't like clay), sanguisorba, baptisia, persicaria, nativer/hardier coneflowers, that tall lobelia, more hen-and-chicks semper-(viren? viven? I confuse them, I can't believe they survive the winter here) and either more sedum or just take cuttings from my current ones, maybe some of the new ajugas, and nepetas.

It's really neat to start to gently become friends with the new plants. Last year was just shoving them in the ground and maybe making them a label. Now I get to go walking with Solly (now at 10 min 4x/day) along the edges of the beds and sometimes on my own, bending and poking at what's coming up or at the center of an apparently dead rosette to see if there's that hint of unfurling green yet. I get to learn what the sprawl of each plant's dead leaves look like: still there, or did they rot away under the snow in the winter? I get to learn when they start to green up, whether the crowns have multiplied into multiple buds, whether those first leaves are simpler than the older leaves or just smaller. I get to learn whether the new shoots come from the crown a couple at a time or all at once.

Soon I'll learn how fast they unfurl, how they sit before they bloom, how much they multiply over winter for real and how they respond to, well, everything. I love making new plant-friends. There's something about-- the plants have been around for mostly centuries, I think the domestic florist sanguisorbas are fairly modern, and people will be looking at them and growing them after I'm gone. The plants aren't going anywhere. I can make slow friends with a plant, learn about it, and then for the rest of my life when I meet that plant it'll be an old friend calling to me. It might be a surprise, in a city on a corner or back lot somethere. It might be in my own garden, the same plant year after year as it responds to different seasons and my knowledge deepens. Either way it's a pleasure that I can rely on.

The woody perennials are slower to come out. That's for the best since it's still cool, but the amelanchier buds are silvering with bits of fur as they swell, the manchurian apricots and a few of the mirabelle plums have green stems, the sea buckthorn is definitely thinking about opening buds, and even the tiniest of the corylus, the beaked ones which grew more slowly than the hybrids, are getting that indefinable robust feeling that shows up before the buds actively swell but when the plant isn't hunkered down being frozen solid anymore.

In the herb garden it looks like a thyme survived, the horehound and sorrel look good, the mint looks good, and the clary sage is happy. Weirdly the weld in the upper garden is good but the woad looks like a green smear, not sure if there's a crown left in there, but in the herb garden I can't find the weld but there is still at least one or two each of woad and chinese woad.

Looks like the roses that were ok in fall are still ok, though it'll be a bit, with the maybe exception of stanwell perpetual. The scotch roses don't seem to transplant well here, but we'll see if stanwell comes back from the roots. For this year I ordered a couple ramblers from the save-the-ramblers project and finally found a source for Hazeldean (!!). I should probably take some currant and rose cuttings.

I somehow ended up with something like 270 tomato transplants, though very few peppers since the aphids got to them. I did a bunch of perennial onions this year that I should start hardening out, the goal is to put them in the perennial beds. It's time to put favas in the ground outside and brassicas inside.

As of this morning the vet has told me to take Solly on walks for 10 min 4x/day for 7-10 days, then 15 mins, then no more than 20 until she gets her x-rays in 8 weeks. 20 min 4x a day will be at the upper limit of my ability, so the disability people had better be done with me until after that. I cannot express how much joy I get being in the garden again, and having to cut myself off from that in order to only do medical calls or paperwork for months is a real problem.

In the meantime I have been told the florist in town (my town, usually too small for a reliable coffee shop, has a gift shop/florist) has a bunch of cardboard regularly, so I'll see if I can grab a bunch from her to re-sheet-mulch everything and get ahead of the grass and potentially summer drought a bit.

Reminder to myself; if I'm unhappy, step outside. Just step outside, if you can, even if it's just to collapse a couple feet from the door.

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.

Two days back on pills. Really a very surprising amount of pain. Weird to think I'd been used to this only a month ago.

Second snow is happening. This one may stick. The first is pretty much gone. Josh canner up and we made kimchi and sauerkraut, hung shelves in the kitchen, and brought wood in from the satellite piles into the woodgreenhouse. The rebel hen who sleeps there was distressed. I'm still bringing a bit more in.

Seed swaps need to go out today. I also need to handle some fundraiser mugs and call the gov disability people to see if they've got their medical info from the insurance company yet. Also this week need to do a disability update to the insurance company. COVID shot is scheduled toi. This is too much for the week but it all needs doing.

I hurt and I don't want to drive my truck in the heavy snow before the ABS system is fixed but here we are. Maybe a bit more rest first.

Still happy to be alive. It's so improbable, all things considered.

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.

The seed cleaning event yesterday went really really well. Someone I'd swapped seeds with (and nearly gone to live on her property once) several hours west of here is the person with the seed cleaning trailer; she loaded up her car and brought the stuff out and we set everything up on the lawn at the art studio and we cleaned seed for three hours straight in the sunlight. Then a storm showed up, blowing up the lake with exactly enough time to load things back into the cars before the first drops came.

We had enough folks bringing seeds that we worked steadily but unhurriedly the whole time. I learned to use a threshing board, bucket thresher (with basically a paint mixer with chains on it), various screen tricks, and a debearding device. We also used the office clipper, which uses vibrating slanted screens, a fan, two drawers, and several chaff ports to get seed really clean. My dango mugi barley, chiddham blanc wheat that thrived as winter wheat, and a bunch of last year's wheats got cleaned, as well as a bunch of brassicas. Other people brought carrots, orach, peas, lily bulbils, celery seed, coriander, lettuce (which can be done really well with the screens, we learned through experimentation), some things for IDing, and I'm sure other bits I missed.

There were between six and twelve people there the whole time, enough to chat happily and keep busy but not enough to overload the equipment. I came home with some brassicas and chervil uncleaned, but with the rest of my brassicas cleaned, and with some extra seeds (black chickpeas, white breadseed poppy, rye). The farmer with the seed trailer runs a farm called Woodgrain Farm, and so I contributed a hand-carved woodgrain mug to the thank-you basket (plus some soap and seeds) and she was super excited about that. I love when a piece finds the right home.

The trailers were created by a grant from one organization, but as always grants are happy to do capital costs and less happy to pay for ongoing use-costs, like moving the traler from one town to another so it can, you know, actually clean seeds. So I'm hoping everyone sends an email to the funding body talking about how excellent it was to have the farmer, skilled with equpment, come out with the trailer to our town.

I was tired before yesterday and my body is more tired now, but it was a joyful day and a joyful group of people all having fun and solving problems and learning together and ending up with an abundance of seed. Really very lovely.

Tomorrow is teaching clay for a couple hours.

I've realized that these two groups, clay and gardening, are what brngs me joy from the outside world lately. And I've successfully navugated changing my perspective on being in these groups. When I joined them I knew I didn't want to put myself into any leadership vaccuums, organize them, plan them, run a tight ship, and then ultimately burn out. I deliverately attended and did little pieces of things, did not fix things when I saw a lack, did not organize things to make them more efficient. I gave a couple ideas, supported a couple ideas, did some daily tasks, committed to a moderate amount of effort (which felt like a minimal amount of effort). I chose absolute uncontrol of anything. And while that seemed like it would be scary and lead to frustration and chaos, I knew it was the only way to proceed sustainably, and I knew it needed to be sustainable for me.

And it worked. IT was frustrating at first but less so now. IF I really want a thing to be done I have freedom to do it, and others work similarly. Folks don't get assigned things and run on a timeline by other folks; they step up or not, some things don't happen, some things appen less perfectly than they might, but no one burns out and everyone has fun. And we've been having fun for a couple years now in both cases? And it feels syustainable.

My body is being iuncooprtative, as my typing is likely showing, so I'm going to go back to lying around with cats. But: I'm happy. This micro-environment is good. The bit of how I interact with the world that I have control over is going as well as it can.

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.

Doing pottery is so good but oh my goodness my core stability muscles. Working on the wheel I notice my lessened finger strength (all my strength is lessening, because obviously I'm a lot less active than I used to be with everything, and I've been using aids like wheelbarrows to move feed sacks etc) but it's when I stand up and then try to get myself home, and then try to get myself out of bed the next day, that I notice the core stuff.

Working my way through the backlog of stuff I wanted to make though! And I still have my skill, and I'm pretty fast so I can make a bunch of stuff in my window of ability. Another pottery studio person was there and she was newer to pottery than I am, and she didn't get through the quantity that I did.

(She also had most of the glaze kiln full of her work, which is absolutely gorgeous linework with fine black glaze tips and then colour, it is a privilege to watch her develop her style and to understand her experimentation and iteration on the way to her goals)

It's chilly here, perfect weather to stay in bed and recover. When it's chilly enough all 4 cats get on the bed, they really like the electric blanket. Not that it matters as much as all that, I can't stay awake right now for anything.

In a couple days I need to figure out my woad harvest and what to say to the doctor I'm seeing (my own doctor is unavailable till mid October so I'm seeing an interim doctor in the hopes of coaxing my referral out, but my prescriptions are also running out. thank goodness they let pharmacists fill in the gaps)

In the next week and a half I need to set the farm up to run while I'm gone. The auto waterers are set up, I need to empty the quail house for the auto goose feeder (they are going through *so much* food right now as they fatten up, it's astonishing. Well over twice as much what they were two weeks ago) and build a little auto feeder for the garden muscovies, as well as putting a pallet house up for them if I have time. It's doable in the time I have but I'm hanging myself up on making a door. Which way does the Z support run? Looking things like that up remains challenging.

I'm getting some nice tomatoes from the miracle cheriette line in a number of flavours, which is fun, and it seems to have switched from broccoli to zucchini bounty.

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.

Despite everything, this summer is truly a glorious one.

The last three summers have been drought and wildfire smoke, and before that the heat dome. 2020 I spent in a state of basically complete panic that was probably a combination of PDA and work from home interacting, along with the ambient covid panic. I can't remember 2019's summer offhand but I think I changed jobs at that time; 2018 was a wildfire evacuation. I moved into this house in 2017 at the end of summer and that was the last summer like this, with birds and the smell of clover everywhere. Threshold loved me as much then as it does now, part of my body, a fully enveloping love like finally having real skin or gravity.

This year I've only closed the windows for wildfire smoke a couple days. We've had actual rain, the kind of rain patters I remember from before the drought: little wandering thunderstorms bringing cloudbursts and sometimes thunder as they pirouette across the landscape. There's no heat dome; outside it drops to about 10C at night and when I wake up the house is cool; during the day the sun can be a little hot between rainstorms but long cool mornings and the endless stretch of near-solstice evening give lots of time for moving around.

There are more bugs than I've ever seen and my body feeds noseeums and blackflies as well as mosquitoes when I go out in the evening. I leave the fan running in the bedroom, facing out the window, and a window on the north side of the house open downstairs; it pulls the cool air in but also disrupts the mosquitoes and any who get into the house can't fly against the air current. I picked that trick up from an Ologies bug episode, where the entomologist said the best way to keep mosquitoes off a patio was to put a fan at ankle level. They're bad fliers, he said, and like to be low, so they can't fight the air current enough to bite. I love that kind of elegant solution. When I came in from the garden two days ago in the evening my face was covered in blood, half from swatted mosquitoes and half from blackfly bites.

The garden rolls out like a carpet and then fills in like details on an oil painting. I'm putting in paths and trees and trellises, a little at a time, and yesterday I picked up a bunch of perennial flowers and they're waiting in the wheelbarrow to go up and in. I've put in a kolomikta kiwi trellis. I've put in a strawberry bed with six kinds of strawberries. I've put in baby lindens and silver maples and elms and ash and oak and hazel. In one tomato and pepper bed the hazel, cherries, and haskap are there, no bigger than the other little pepper plants and spaced in between them to line a path that does not yet exist, to a spot that is still weeds but will later be a portal.

I have somehow become a person with elderly animals -- not elderly in the way they act, but at ten years old they start to get yearly bloodwork at their vet visit to make sure everything's ok. Whiskey, Hazard, and Siri fall into that category and today is Avallu's birthday; he's 9. Yesterday Whiskey followed me out to the garden and followed me as I wheelbarrowed woodchips from down here to up in the back garden a couple times, then got the zoomies and ran along the path very fast, bounced off the wheelbarrow I was pushing, and kept going. He does not feel elderly.

Anything could happen during the rest of the summer. It's windier than it has been, with tornadoes surprisingly nearby, and the wind strips moisture quickly. We're only saved by the little wandering rainstorms that come regularly. There is a lot of fire elsewhere and strange heat anomalies and floods. Politically we've lost the idea of human life as important and human well-being and rights are so far out of functional equations as to be laughable. There are many wars, even if we don't call them that anymore, and no one with resources is interested in holding back the tide of disease. Systems infrastructure frays and I suspect one day we will wish we had our current access the things that right now we think of as irritating because they are becoming inconvenient: border access, medical systems, air travel, relatively free telecommunications, year round fresh foods, so many things.

This won't be the last glorious summer like this but it might be mine. Even if it isn't I draw a line here: I love being alive, I love inhabiting my life, I very very very much want to know what happens next, but this summer would be enough.

Cool wind and the scent of overnight rain through the window. Warm covers and a cat sleeping on the bed while others wait for breakfast. Thai black rice, coconut milk, and sugar in the rice cooker with apricots waiting. Aspens rustling outside silkily. A pile of woodchips waiting for their wheelbarrow, steaming slightly as they compost. Wiggly dogs and the sound of roosters in the distance and beyond that robins and sparrows. Nearly clean sheets and parsley, mint, and tomatoes from the garden waiting to be turned into tabouli downstairs. Reading again! by audiobook, the closest I can ever have to revisiting my childhood home. A nephew? Even a few people in the world who really want me alive.

It's very good to be here.

Solstice is definitely over. I'd been trying to be outside across sunset and there's no longer a sense that the day will go on forever. Even if by just a coupe minutes it's getting dark earlier and earlier.

It's still light hours before I wake up. Though, this morning I was awoken by a rooster on the front porch (not supposed to be there) and now a road crew. I'm never gonna complain about someone fixing my road, especially since it's already 9am, but with all the windows open to catch the breeze it's very noticable.

I've had a fun fact for a long time -- birds don't have capsicum/hot pepper receptors, so hot peppers aren't hot to them. I've known it in the context of coevolutionary development where the pepper fruits have evolved to allow birds to eat them and carry the seeds away when they're ripe, but protect themselves from anyone else (until humans and agriculture etc). Well, in practice this means if a chicken gets into the greenhouse she'll eat all the peppers off the pepper plants. Even the really hot peppers.

The greenhouse, which used to be the wood tent, is super full-- more full than it can accommodate for the full season. My plan is to exclude the animals from one of the other greenhouses and move things there. This is the point Josh asks, which one? Fair question. The goosehouse greenhouse will hold heat longer in the year and needs a good clean out for two years of deep litter anyhow, so it's probably the best. In the long run it would be nice to have all my greenhouses through the summer.

Naming is also a bit of an issue for these things. The winter pig field is no longer a pig field, and so calling it "the winter field" is a bit weird because, well, in winter everything is just snow. The pigs go into the goosehouse greenhouse in the winter. The upper field is upper, for sure, but the back field is upper-- it's just back and upper. I guess the fields could be named winter, spring, and summer: that accords with their time of planting really. But the green houseshave the same issue: the wood tent is now the greenhouse closest to the house, the goose house greenhouse is more the pig greenhouse, and the garden greenhouse, well, technically they're all gardens, right? I'm very happy to have names evolve because I know what I mean, but describing what's going on to Josh is a bit harder.

Maybe someday the names will settle and I'll paint signs for everything.

I went on an (informal) garden tour at a friend's garden and it's a truly lovely place, but I noticed a distinct lack of labelling. I always want to know what things are -- she has a lot of ornamentals, and also varieties are interesting to me and they're harder to sort than just what species it is by just looking. I think I was spoilt by working at botanical gardens for so long. The task of making ceramic tags for all my plants is enormous but I have been picking away at it and will continue to, replacing my popsicle sticks and sharpie. I don't like unlabelled plants, though labelling is very hard to maintain. This is maybe only the second year my tomatoes have stayed well-labeled so late.

It's been hot and I'm definitely running myself down, so an hour or two in the evening is the most real gardening I get to do. I wander around in the mornings but it mostly feels too sticky and I feel too exhausted and slow. Even so, yesterday I weeded the shaded haskap patch, next to the goose greenhouse, from Canada thistle. It has a cardboard and then deep chip mulch so it's a very easy weed, though I'm not getting all the roots the thistles do need to come quite a ways to get back into the light. And I got them before they bloomed.

I also got most of the hardy kiwis planted, even the ones that got eaten off by the (chicken/cats?). They line one of the pathways in the upper field, and will seperate the ploughing area from the strawberries. Hopefully I'll plant the strawberries today. I have six kinds: kent, seascape, honeyoye, ft laramie, flamingo, and natural white. I'd like to keep them all seperate and labelled, though apparently the white ones want to go in close to red ones for pollination. We;ll see what I can do. Also up there from earlier this spring is my mammoth raspberries and some apples.

The couple days before that I got in the shade garden, pulmonaria and alchemilla and hostas, which I believe I'd mentioned but couldn't remember pulmonaria's name. It's the plant I learned the doctrine of signatures on, though, so it'll always be so distinctive to me.

Speaking of which, there's a plant growing from seed near the tap on the north side of the house. I've been looking at it when I use the tap, trying to figure it out. At first maybe it was dandelion? But no, it was developing that grainy, slightly silvery texture and distinctive shape of the chard/beet/sorrel/dock family. Maybe it was sorrel? It would be a great place for sorrel to grow but how would the seed have got there? Could it be dock? How would dock seeds get there? If it was I'd been to pull them pretty quick...

...then I realized they were the rhubarb seeds I'd sprinkled there last summer coming up. As they develop some are getting redder stems and some greener. I'm very pleased. I have pallets along the side of the house, flat on the ground, to stop the ducks digging up my foundation when it rains. The rhubarb is under one pallet so I'm hoping that'll keep it safe from maurauding birds until its bigger.

The birds are supposed to all be away from the house but the muscovies fly over the fence and the chickens sometimes ignore it. Plan is to create a new enclosed chicken coop since the previous one that was here when I got here is super sagging.

Yesterday was close loud thunder and heavy rain in the evening. I went out to pick some feral gai lan and was soaked. These periodic deep soaking rains are lovely, it's been a long time since we've had them, and it's absolutely a perfect time for me to be laying down paths of woodchips on my very sensitive clay soil.

The corn is growing well. I have a lot of mulching and weeding to do and still some planting. My solstice break is over but I've more or less used it to reshape my habits and spend more outside time and less online time. I'll try to hold onto that until equinox, when I'll maybe try and do it all again.

Now if you'll excuse me, the cat has discovered that if my window is open he can sit on the front deck and meow to get my attention, and apparently I'm letting it work.

Oh goodness, where even to start. Yesterday I disappeared into the garden. I'm sure I did things but I don't remember what I did, other than in the late evening as the sun was setting I planted saskatoons in front of the spruce hedge. They seem to grow well even under spruce, and even though they were planted into the crevices in a matt of thick roots I have hope that, if I water them, they'll do as well as the other saskatoons I planted there. Once those bushes are well rooted the spruce can eventually come down.

The US bombed Iran yesterday. I was going to say "started a war" but we have a lot of weasel words to avoid that term these days. Someone or other in some gov or other was like "this could be viewed as an act of war" and I just... y'think?

I hda a bit of an online chat with a friend, brushed dogs lots, I'm sure I did other things. I rested as needed but the biometrics on my watch are telling me I'm overdoing it. Still, I made it through a shower and clean hair (I wore sunscreen, which means a full scrubdown every evening or my skin falls off) and... oh, I ran seeper hose irrigation and watered things that way.

We're under a smoke advisory here and the purpleair site (we pretty much have to use private business sites to know air quality unless we're right in a big city, because of course wildfire smoke is primarily in big cities) says that both my town and the town next door have bad air quality. Having said that, it doesn't seem that bad here? I probably should get a monitor, more money to replace yet another function that I consider the gov should do. It just doesn't smell like smoke... though I guess I have been choking a lot more than normal, but that also happens when I overextend myself and my swallow muscles get lazy. Anyhow, it's felt like my place has been in a little oasis of clean air so I've had the windows open and been outside without a mask.

This morning I woke early, turned on the fan to pull cool morning air in, and went back to bed to sleep in and to listen to an agatha christie audiobook. I'm having an experience I haven't had before -- the absolute freedom and joy of having an accessibility device, in this case the audiobook version of my old friends. Honestly even holding up a book takes something out of me, apart from the weird reading thing after my accident AND the weird vision thing. I can read a book I don't even like, or think "I'm not sure I enjoy this" because I don't need to fully minmax every letter in every word. I can lie in bed and read like I used to, comfortably, freely. It's life changing, or maybe life restoring?

I'd been going device-lite during solstice so I missed a text from the tree company; they showed up with chips, I rushed downstairs and put Avallu in, got delightful woodchips, the dogs were exceptionally well-behaved, it was very good. I carried a purring Siri around for awhile out there.

Then I came in and learned my brother's wife had their kid. It might have been yesterday? I hadn't checked that communication channel for a bit. Looks like it's a boy, and there are pictures of my mom and other brother there with the kid (but not my antivax brother in the picture, I've been really worried about that with measles being a big thing now and obviously covid is still around). I need to call Mom and get the details. Between Mom and my sister-in-law's (?that's such a weird thought) huge family with lots of her own sisters and parents and aunties I'm sure they're being well cared-for.

So, big 24 hours, and much better than expected given world events. I now have an abundance of chips to do paths as well as mulch. I need to get my hardy kiwis in the ground because the cats are eating them. I'd like to trellis the tomatoes at some point -- oh yes, I mulched some of them! and plant oaks and graft apples. The first flower clusters on the tomatoes are showing up, 3 weeks after the plants went in the ground more-or-less.

Yesterday was outside a lot. I went out in the morning and pulled wheelbarrowsfull of thistles and finished planting my shade garden (hostas! alchemilla! er, the what's-it-called with little purple or pink flowers that under the doctrine of signatures treats lungs and goes in a shady place and has silver spots on the leaves!). Then a deep nap, sunscreen, and more outside play. I even managed to get out for a third time as the sun was setting and stood in the centre of my circle where the elm is growing, hissing and muttering to the setting sun until I had its location. All the cats accompanied me except Whiskey.

I read an entire audiobook yesterday: Mysterious Affair At Styles, an old friend, as are all poirot and marple stories. I hadn't realized just how much of a difference it makes being able to access that familiar-- you know, from my preteens to early twenties I spent much much more time with books than people. Agatha Christie's gently satirical, aware humour is a parent's voice to me, and I hadn't been able to read in flow state since roughly 2016. It brings a piece of myself back to me. So strange that I'd always had difficulty understanding and interpreting verbal language as compared to written, and now my mind is slowed so much and whatever it is that broke in my mind was so pervasive that listening is easier than reading.

There are so many things in my life that are, not unpredictable, but the complete opposite of what would have been believed about me in the beginning. Yet here I am, more myself than ever. Especially more now that I can visit my old book-friends. I'm still listening only to fiction I'd read at least a dozen times before or science fact where I have a framework pre-existing to hang the info on, and I rewind and reread freqently. I'm curious about reading unfamiliar fiction. I'll learn about that in the fullness of time.

In the meantime I can;t access all my old book friends since they're not all audiobooked, but I haven't run to the end of what I can access yet. I do miss specific voices and people, but I do have some. So.

I made a lovely supper last night, put on clean sheets, and went to sleep after midnight, after the sunset.

This morning I woke at 6am with wildfire smoke coming in the window with the light. I got up, closed everything up, turned on the filters, and went back to sleep. I'm very glad the air was clear yesterday but I very much want to plant oaks today. Theoretically we're provided with a smoke forecast so I could try to plan my day around less smoke.

The tomatoes want trellising. The blackcurrants want in the ground. Things want mulch and more weeding. Eggplants need into their final pots in the greenhouse. Things will grow, ripen, and then fade and die. The seasons keep turning. I'm within them. It's good.

I've been pushing myself harder than I should to get the garden in. We've had weather that goes back and forth between too hot and dust-dry to work the soil and rain (that clay soil really needs to only be touched at the right time), mostly courtesy of these very intense drying winds we had for the last two or three weeks. I don't want to complain too much about it -- basically the prairies are all on fire right now, with tens of thousands of evacuees -- but it has impacted the pace at which I can put things out there.

Something is happening with the garden out there. I'm not sure how to describe it, but it's what I've always wanted from a garden. I'm putting in permanent paths, originally because I can't remember anymore where things are supposed to be if they're invisible. I'm putting in more bones, hazels lining the paths and shaping edges of things with trees. I'm putting in perennial flowers this year? Echinacea and sedum and daylilies and that sort of thing.

And then of course the tomatoes are going in, I now have at least one of each variety in the soil. The sweet peppers are in, the hot peppers will go in today hopefully.

It's becoming something recogniseable. Not an ad-hoc this or that, but places within the larger place, an entity that swirls through time forwards as well as back into its history. I love it here.

I was chatting with someone online the other day and realized I've somehow come into the crone stage of life unexpectedly. I never would have thought I'd take issue with interacting with humans as much as I do now, but here we are. I don't share values with anyone anymore. It's possible this is still the remains of the breakup with Tucker and the way that's playing out, but I don't think so. Maybe something about how the bad things in the world are getting closer and the way folks react to that. I'd write about that more but I've finally learned discipline around keeping away from emotional things now that I'm unwell: every feeling indulged is minutes to hours I lose from later in the day doing other things, eating or gardening or rescuing a gosling with lost parents and finding it a foster (yesterday's task).

Maybe that's why I have trouble handling people right now. There's anger sitting next to that feeling of being dismissed and I don't really want to work through it until the garden is in for the year. That does sound pretty classic breakup, no?

I'm very very happy with my selection of tomatoes and peppers this year. I didn't get everything I wanted in the ground -- woad and weld but not coreopsis for dyeing, no flax, and the squash and corn are going in late. I did get some juglans in the ground, though, and I have a fun selection of blackcurrants to put in the wet part of the back field this year, and some swamp white oaks for around them.

I'm getting a sense of how much land I can handle in annual crops in my current state, and perennializing the harder-to-handle parts, I guess.

I follow a couple of accounts in gaza of kids who remind me of me when I was that age, doing things they love as best they can. One of them is a gardener who has cats, he shows us every time he gets a new tomato or squash on the plant as the flower fades. I know one of them will eventually turn up dead, or rather, the feed will go dark and I'll have to assume that's happened. There's no way out for the folks there.

And now LA is rising up against-- well. That's just happening now, calling in the military. And I think, what would it be like to have a society that rises up to put itself in harm's way for you (I mean, at the same time as the rest of the society is putting you in harm, to be fair) instead of thinking it's too hard and letting it happen?

Dark thoughts interwoven with gardening as we move solsticewards.

It rained yesterday, and the night before that. It's been a good soaking rain, the kind we rarely get these days. This is the May long weekend and the previous couple long weekends folks have cancelled their quad parties in the bush because it's been so dry that sparks or the heat of the vehicle could start fires (I still do not know what a "poker ride" is, though I have suspicions). This year things may have been cancelled for rain, though we definitely had sunny periods, but the spate of fires that comes immediately after this weekend seems unlikely to materialize.

The ground had been almost too try to till in my clay soil, even a month or two before last frost date. I had been picking away at it, a hundred or two hundred square feet at a time, and had done a first pass on the pig winter field (which needs a better name) and the upper field, and was just starting on the back field that has snowmelt running down over it for weeks when the snow first disappears. This will make my second pass much easier.

I'd got some pre-started brassica greens in the ground, then the other day put out the broccoli and kale, and yesterday planted some peas finally. We're still dipping below zero some nights -- never the nights when it rains -- and there are tiny delicate skims of ice on the water in containers on those mornings if I get out there early enough.

Yesterday before the rain I planted three heartnut and three buartnut by the fence in the back field to see if the juglone they produce (when they're a little bigger) will suppress the aspen from coming across the fence from the neighbour's place.

When Josh was here we drove into Alberta and picked up some excellent hardy plums and apples, which we planted. The apples are leafed out now, they went into the orchard (mostly on siberian rootstock) and the plums look to be following suit shortly.

Those bulbs I planted last fall have been coming up -- no peonies yet, but squill, daffodils, muscari, etc. They aren't so much coming up en masse, as makes sense for the first year, but there's a nice long season of them. A couple test daffodils in the orchard have not yet been eaten by geese, which is excellent news.

Many of the bulbs were planted in little clumps around the baby apple seedlings I put in last fall. Not all of those survived but many did.

I'm hauling my peppers and tomatoes onto the deck everyday for hardening off, and festooning the livingroom with them every night. Yesterday when I brought them in the were wet with rainwater.

I also put some beaked hazel in, and an order of hardy roses from corn hill. I have a bundle of hazelbert waiting to go in as well, but those last dead spruce trees from the winter field were felled right onto the spot I want them to go and apparently chainsawing destroys my body.

Wheelbarrowing in moderation and tilling seem ok for the hour of activity per day though, so I've been doing those, bringing up the chicken compost to the fields. The tiller is so good because it's rear tine so it pulls itself along and I have the handles to lean on as I walk behind. I'm being as kind to it as I know how, checking the fluids regularly, but haven't yet brought myself to change the oil. It's still starting well.

The front yard has been mostly fenced off from the geese, except for a trio who keep getting out, laying an egg in the dog house which Thea then eats or cherishes, and asking to be let back in at the gate. They are keeping my grass down somewhat so that's fine.

I hired the neighbour a couple down to chop up the fallen south fenceline aspens and burn the tops for me. He did an excellent job, was great company, and I now feel more comfortable about the fuel load by my house and more comfortable in the neighbourhood. I need to cover that south bank with compost and chips and plant into it -- I already put two little leaf lindens but want to add some elm, ash, and oak plus a shrub layer of some kind, likely usask cherries and currants. that's the same slope my clove currant is thriving on and my haskaps do well on too, and it gets more heat than anything else in the area. Maybe some wild plum or plum seedlings to?

A semilocal (Edmonton) vocational high school was doing a scionwood sale as a fundraiser so I ordered some sticks of apple and plum. Its in the fridge (I have a (small) seed fridge now given me by a friend) while I figure out rootstocks. A friend locally has a bunch of apple suckers, someone else in a cold climate has been successfully grafting apple onto *wild saskatoons*, someone was having a sale on wild plums, I have some plums that the tops died off and they're just mustang rootstock, plus there's topworking on existing plum trees. So I have some options, I'm just limited to an hour or, if I'm lucky, two, per day.

The whole thing makes me happy but it makes be even more of a recluse because leaving the house takes up two days worth of activity and I would rather be gardening. Pottery is on hold. Disability paperwork is mostly settled. Most other things can wait.

A hundred tomato varieties-ish this year. Normally I would list them out for you (and myself in posterity) but making lists is hard and I'd rather be gardening. There are roughly three categories: "early hardy reds" "fancy trial tomatoes" and "my own crosses in F2 and F3".

Eightyish hot pepper varieties too, spanning all the major species except chinense. I do love those plants, they grow so differently from tomatoes. They'd rather err on the side of dry than wet. They flower and leaf so prettily. A colorado and the mystery athens peppers overwintered in the house and are doing great now too.

I also picked up a kaffir lime for indoors, which makes my house smell truly amazing, and some baby figlets are on order, because um. I guess I'm letting myself do what I want.

Yesterday I planted runner beans, marigolds, nasturtiums, woad, and chickpeas indoors to go out when the seedlings are big enough to make a visible row in the garden (difficulty of a bit weedy garden is that direct seeding plants I'm not intimately familiar with takes a lot of concentration to ID, not that I can;t ID nasturtium and runner beans). Runner beans are supposed to be happier in slightly cooler weather than standard phasesolus and I feel able to provide them support this year.

There are several projects that need doing, fencing and deconstructing excess pig buildings and making a woodshed and putting in some proper gates, but those can all be done later.

I really should take down the hedging cedars right up against my front balcony for fire reasons but I like the screen they provide from the road. The hope is to put a solarium there instead, with some sort of adhesive glass frosted stuff in the road direction, but that's a long ways away.

There's big stuff going on in the world, many people dying and many more deciding that some group or another needs to die. It's abhorrent. It's happening locally and internationally. I read about it more than I want, and I garden because I'd rather be doing that than reading. I can't tell you how lucky I feel to have this garden, better than I ever believed I could have in my whole life, and these cats and dogs and geese ranging around with their own individualities making up a community I can tolerate and that always wants me to be alive. They even take joy in my physical existence, which is so good for my heart.

Writing this feels superficial, but words have power, and so: I wish this for everyone in the world. A safe home, a loving community that feels joy in their existence. Safety. Life. Enough food of the kind that makes them stop sometimes and just say "this is so good". I wish this for everyone. Please.

Every election a different group of people turns into preppers, as if social support and the standard of living isn't drifting downwards so slowly the whole time.

There's so much I feel I can't say to folks around this: how exactly their responses echo the other side's responses on my off-grid etc groups four years ago, what access to medical care and standard of living and stability during climate events looks like over time, the complete symmetry in discussions on how to protect oneself from the other side.

I just removed the "" from the other side. It's like twisting a ripe peach with your hands and it comes apart into two halves and the pit pops out.

Someone on a local group -- in Canada -- just posted that they couldn't get a family doctor or dermatologist appointment in a reasonable time, and did anyone have tips for handling some skin issue. Everyone did have tips: keto, gut health, essential oils, various potions and amulets. Again I think about how if you can't personally access the benefit of something you need a reason why it's not really a banafit, you need to justify in your own head that it's better this way-- or if you don't, I would imagine that's when the torches come out? I've never seen that happen.

Even in myself, when I wait for a specialists appointment for long months to years, I begin to think that surely they couldn't do that much anyhow. Which is, of course, ascientific. But the feeling is there.

Everything was ultra muddy yesterday and the day before, things had thawed. I put down woodchips since I had access to them, though that means I need to keep the geese off long enough to establish a vegetation cover or it'll just break down into soil and more mud.

Last night it froze. I still need to plant my variety of sunchokes that I got from a semi-local tiny shop, one of these people who posts a couple videos on youtube of their garden and collects rare things. I ended up with skorospelka, stampede, red fuseau, clearwater, corlis bolton haynes, and beaver valley. May have to break through a frozen crust to get them in.

The peonies are in, and a ton of bulbs. This long slow fall has been a blessing for my body and my hope as I was able to put a little in the ground at a time for so long.

Assuming I achieve some sort of stable financial situation where I'm not doing paperwork all the time-all the time, I'm curious about whether I can write poetry still. My mind is so different from what it was, but poetry still feels like a mother tongue. It's just that my tongue is more often feeling silent these days, replaced by the experience at the inside of my eyes. Either way, these are times that call for poets and I feel the call, whether or not I can answeer.

Planting trees most days and I have planted roughly 130 apple trees this year over about a month and a half, most underplanted with daffodils and muscari and a couple crocus and various scylla (the crocus and apple trees are tasty so I'm hoping the other, toxic, bulbs will be some discouragement for voles, deer, etc).

The ground has frozen too hard to plant for a span of multiple days twice now-- it just thawed overnight after the most recent one. I've received my last bulbs, including peonies, yesterday. So the next two days I plant flowers, flowers that won't even be pretty for several years, flowers that don't feed anyone, but flowers that mark where people have lived when their houses are long gone.

It's almost time to turn indoors, to dyeing and sewing and pottery, but I do not want to go indoors. I want a sunporch, somewhere with windows, where I can be in the light from outside while I do these things.

Even more I want to taste the fruit of all these baby apples, to see which ones survive my climate (they all have an early hardy parent and a fancy parent, so like Wickson or Centennial or Trailman or somesuch and then something like Rubiyat or Roxbury Russet so nothing is guaranteed).

Winter felt early a couple weeks ago but we've settled generally into a skiff of snow overnight, melting by midafternoon, and I've been planting into that. The transition period will make the final freeze-up easier on me.

I really did never know how much I appreciated seasonality until I moved up here.

It's so neat, laying out the apple trees in rows and curves and aisles and nooks. Threshold is growing bones! I want to see. Three years, five years, I want to see what happens!

I also took my chances on a tiny webstore and got six varieties of sunchoke from a delightful human, several of which flowered for her. They stay on the landscape for a long time and I can't wait to eventually turn to helping them get seed.

You'll know I'm replaced by aliens if I ever get just the minimum diversity of a plant.

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greenstorm

April 2026

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Page generated May. 1st, 2026 03:48 am

Greenstorm's Journal

watching the cycle: leaves to mulch to soil to leaves

Entries tagged with garden

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Body/Garden

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Just plants

Snow is a blanket

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Seasonal

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Garden

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The dark slide begins

Solstice day 3

Solstice day 2

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Garden and relationships, with few relationships

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April 2026

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