Greenstorm's Journal

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's snowing. My chimney is fixed. There are flashes of sunlight here and there.

I had a great talk with Tucker about stuff, was able to tap out when my emotions were big but not too big, and we had a lovely weekend.

And... I just had a really great lunch.

I have some fatty loin chops in the freezer for quick meals. I'd been eating them with a bunch of chimichurri sauce to offset the fattiness but it's winter now and my parsley/oregano isn't available for chimichurri. I also don't have a big pile of sauerkraut this year and didn't really do any potatoes (though in hindsight I did buy a big bag of potatoes which are now downstairs).

I also have two kinds of wheat kernels, marquis which is a hard red bread wheat and ac andrews which is a soft white wheat. Most recently I'd ground the ac andrews and it behaved oddly, but I had some ground left over. I decided to make some bannock and fry it in with the pork chops to use up the fat and give me a carb. I also tossed a bunch of my pickled carrots (jalapeno, garlic, carrots, salt brine) on the plate too, they're ultra crisp and definitely a veggie.

This was a pretty great choice. The bannock was perfect. It's not only the fresh grind of the flour that gave me flavour; I think there's something about soft white wheat that makes me think of tortillas. The grain had that sweet/parched/toasty/aromatic flavour from frying, with a little bit of crispy not-quite-deep-fried taste around the edges from the lard it cooked in. I'm out of milk so I added a touch of powdered milk to it (proper bannock) which gave it a ghost of sweetness. The low-gluten fully-whole flour made such a soft and pillowy bread between the flaky/crispy outsides. Then the pork chops are always glorious, about 40% streaked and marbled fat, seared and meaty and silky with the fat just on the edge of melting at serving temperature so that it's textured like butter in the mouth. And then slightly soured, cool, bright, garlicky carrots with an entirely different type of sweetness and a crunch so loud it's almost too much within the confines of my own head. They were the perfect offset to that soft and fat.

This is where I want to be at with my 75% calorie project: not constrained by rules about what I can't eat but instead drawn in by a celebration of place and relationship. Mom brought me the carrots and we made the pickles together with her and my brother; the place she got them is itself a real place (Desert Hills in Ashcroft) I could get to and see and walk the soils. They have goats that climb a tower for treats and Mexican farmworkers who make tamales and sell them from a fridge in the back and have an ongoing relationship with the site. The grain was brought up from the lower mainland by Josh (soon to be my own grain I do hope) from a, no, _the_ grain CSA in the lower mainland who experiment with different varieties and know me as the person up north who probably is the most distant CSA member. And then my pigs about whom I've said more elsewhere. Plus a little dried milk, baking powder, and salt from the store that tie me in to my civilization and back me up when I need variety or just want to engage in the worldwide commerce that humans have always done and that I'm rich and fortunate enough to partake in.

Anyhow. That was a good lunch. Outside the sun is bouncing brightly off new snow and one sunbeam falls through the curtains to lie across my hands as I type.

Time to get back to work.

Edited to add: "had some ground left over" by which I mean flour. Ground wheat is flour. Sigh.

Our third first frost scare is coming up in half a week or so. One of these is going to be The One. I didn't do much for the previous two but I'm giving serious thought to pulling all the green tomatoes for this weekend.

Given the size of the trial it hasn't been very productive but that is kind of the point: the entire harvest came from fewer than half the plants, and half the harvest will have come from maybe 10 or fewer of the 55. If I plant those productive ones in the same space next year I'll be swimming in tomatoes.

A bunch have made it onto the permanent list:

Minsk early is the earliest of prolific tomatoes, more on the acid side but wins for sheer quantity.

Bloody butcher is the earliest. It drops off in production after that but that's ok.

Mikado black is really tasty, and has a good balance of ripening fully within season/producing several lovely unblemished fruit/tastes good.

Taiga is not very productive but it ripens and is tasty.

Cole, Glacier (unevenly sized), Moravsky Div, Cabot, and Katja (large fruit but may need to ripen inside) all go into the pretty productive/not necessarily the best flavour but they sure put out fruit that can ripen category. Stupice doesn't compete as well as I thought in there. Silvery Fir Tree will be a little on the later side, along with Katja, but does have a lot of fruit set.

Karma miracle ripened some and is prett tasty; I may have missed some fruit since it retains a lot of green when ripe.

My grocery store green cherry performed well and is tasty. It stays.

Sweet apertif did ripen some this year. Matt's wild cherry and Sweet cherriette ripened outdoors at the same time and had similar fruit: Matt's was an enormous sprawling plant that should have been on an edge and Sweet Cherriette was very compact and determinate.

A bunch didn't do as well as I'd like:

Galina was tasty but is just starting to ripen yellow cherries, it seems late for cherries? I may try it again but not super sold on it.

A bunch just didn't set much fruit at all. Cherokee chocolate comes to mind particularly.

Northern ruby paste started setting very late, as did old italian pink. Alas.

Northern Sun ripened one fruit per plant that I could see. It's normally a little more reliably early? Maybe it needs to be deflowered when planted.

Lime green salad doesn't seem to have ripened this year, we'll see when I go in to pull the plants. It was one of the few to ripen outdoors two years ago after being frosted back in June. Maybe another try? It tastes good. It didn't ripen on the deck or in the field though. Very nice bush form.

Czech bush ripened a couple fruits early on and then just... slowed way down, I'm not sure it'll give me many more big enough to ripen indoors even. Very strange. Too bad, it is a very nice plant form.

The panamorous tomatoes, in which I'm including exserted orange, had the most reliably producing row. A couple plants were pretty loaded down but especially exserted orange just kept trickling them out. Some plants did nothing, one looks like it did some small green weird fruit -- that's the wild genes -- and I'm looking very much forward to planting my saved seeds from them next year and seeing what happens. I have two seeds stuck to a piece of paper from a tomato that only had two seeds on it, the paper reads "zesty yum! best"

There is a single tomato in the corn patch that volunteered from, I guess, grocery store fruit seeds and looks like it'll ripen. I'll keep seeds from it too.

There's more, but basically I've learned a ton and am very happy with this knowledge. Still need to rate everything on some basic features: earliness, reliability (if I have multiple plants of that variety), flavour, yield, plant shape/ease of cultivation.

It looks like I may have enough squashes ripen, or close-enough-finish-indoors ripen, to be able to evaluate those. Most of the grains are cut. but I still have triticale, rivet wheat, ladoga, korassan, and the two late-planted cedar isle wheats to harvest. OF my three varieties of pickling cuke I think I can eliminate boston, which is producing well now but was last to start compared to Morden and National. Sweet success was absolutely the best slicing cuke, I think because pollination in the greenhouse was an issue and it's parthenocarpic. Suyo long will get another chance.

Famosa F2 cabbage was first to head, and made small savoyed heads with lots of earthworms in them. Sorrento rapini was an excellent early veg and should be generously seeded until it volunteers, it far outdid conventional broccolis or even kinda-conventional broccolis. Mammoth red rock cabbage was slow to head and maybe is more reliable than copenhagan market? Copenhagan market has a couple huge heads out there and some small ones.

It wasn't a great bean year, and I'm still sorting out my favas. They fell over. Russian black looked like they'd be done first since they podded up first, but the lofthouse ones may be ripening first.

No word on the flour corns yet, I'm letting them go as long as possible.

The beauregarde soup peas did a truly fantastic job. Small plants of maybe 8", not vining or climbing at all, lots of peas per plant. I want to experiment with more soup peas. I get along with them better than I do with beans anyhow.

This is a reminder to plant more basil next time.

Ronde de nice zucchini has just started pumping out fruit in the last two weeks. Maybe it needed much more rain? I think the pollinators were pretty sparse in the main garden this year so that may be it too, or they needed a specific temp to pollinate that I was not getting. The field squash didn't start to take till a little later either, even with and pollination.

I'm very excited to see what I get for squash next year since I have at least a couple different ones that definitely cross-pollinated. The lofthouse squash, sundream, burgess buttercup, gete oksomin, and especially North Georgia Candy Roaster are on the list.

Yesterday we pretty much finished rendering the soap lard, and I have a 5 gallon bucket full of it. It's a good thing I love making soap; also what an amazing object to have! Overnight last night/tonight the cooking lard from leaf fat is rendering.

21 500ml and 8 750ml jars of stock are done and in the pantry.

Cheryl has been given her meat for the chicken trade; Ron has not yet.

Tomorrow the coppas actually go into cure and 3 more primals get broken down. The pace is slowing.

The chickens hopped the fence yesterday and were in the grain trial so I chased them out, then we harvested eveything that was ripe. That means amolinka, bishop, Ble de arcour einkorn, blue durum, ceres, marquis (pr seeds planted May 6 but not the cedar isle stuff planted may 11), pelisser, pembina, reward, and white sonora. Pelissier and blue durum are exceptionally beautiful: almost lavender coloured heads with dark awns. The einkorn was green long after the other wheats started to go golden, but it was as ready as the rest of them yesterday.

Still remaining in the grain trial is rivet (which I love and really want to ripen), rouge de bordeaux, braveheart triticale, and khamut from salt spring seeds. Also the two cedar isle patches, AC andrews and marquis, are still unripe.

There were a couple stray bits of ergot in a couple of the wheats, and also in one barley. The triticale has a bunch. It seems to be easy to pick out since it replaces the grain with a huge black fungal body, and I'm further told that it floats where the rest of the grain will sink.

I brought in a bunch of broccoli raab seeds from the sorrento from William Dam seeds. I made no effort to keep it from cross-pollinating with other brassicae but I think only radishes were also blooming at that time, if anything. It'll be interesting to see. The ones I let go to seed in the greenhouse have dropped their seeds and are trying to grow me some of a fall crop already, though it may be too late for that.

The crock got half-filled with cucumber pickles. I'm pretty happy with the way the cucumbers turned out. They're very sweet compared to bought ones, except for a single bitter one (we cut off the very end and tasted them all out of curiosity). I grew boston, national, and morden pickling cukes this year. National produced first, morden and national were similar in production. Boston started later but seems to be ripening more all at once; Aug 23 or so was the first serious pick from it so it might not make it in a cooler summer.

I brought in several lovely ripe mikado black tomatoes the other day from both deck and field. I think it's in the lead as the best black tomato here this year. The tomatoes are fairly sizeable, slicers, and have great form. I will be tasting them soon. Meanwhile cabot, glacier, minsk early (the most productive) and moravsky div have set and will ripen large quantities of fruit each. Matt's wild cherry is finally hitting its stride. Katja probably will, as likely will silvery fir tree and a couple others. I think the trial can be considered a success: I learned a lot a lot a lot. The chickens have discovered the garden and are helping me eat tomatoes. Boo.

I harvested several unripe North Georgia Candy roaster squash from the vines and ate them like zucchini in a pasta sauce the other day. That was really good. I also tucked some into the pickling crock and am curious how that goes down. A lot of the squash look pretty immature, we'll see how much more heat we get this year to ripen. In future I might try to grow them up a trellis on the inside of the greenhouse/woodshed. Of the squash trials, burgess buttercup started putting out female fruit and squash earliest. Several of the kuris and the lofthouse squash are catching up, and gete oksomin and north georgia candy roaster seem to be doing ok. Fingers crossed I get some seed from something to plant next year. Again no attempt to keep things from pollinating each other; it was a hard pollinator year I think too. Likely that's because it was so warm then so cold then so warm over and over.

Though maybe bees should be in my three year plan. I'm getting some honey from a friend who has bees in town. I bet she could teach me.

I need to remember to call the bird butcher in Smithers to set a time for ducks and geese.

Harvested the first of the grain.

Hordeum nigrinudum barley from PR seeds was ripest and I couldn't dent it at all and which the voles left alone, but all 5 were well into the hard dough stage: faust from Ellen, previously via Salt Spring Seeds and which voles liked; Excelsior from Salt Spring Seeds and which the voles absolutely devastated and which also tasted pretty good during the ripeness test; Arabian Blue also from salt spring seeds; and purple dolma barley from the experimental farm network and which the voles really left alone.

Prelude wheat from PR seeds was undentable hard and nice and tall, the heads were beginning to bend. Ethiopian Blue Tinge wheat from salt spring was surprise ripe, at least it was in the very firm dough stage and difficult to dent. It grew closer to knee high, like barley, while the other wheats grew more like shoulder high.

I also harvested most of the bouchard soup peas since the pods were yellow and various levels of deeply wilted and dry/papery. They were in the ground exactly 3 months.

Ceres might be ready soon.

I'm pretty sure there's ergot growing on my triticale! That's... something to think about.

They're in my house drying, all of them, some in brown paper bags and the three bigger harvests (purple dolma and the wheats) in cardboard boxes.

I went out originally because someone on the forums was asking something about uniformity or what they looked like and I wanted to take pictures for her. Then I realized the voles were making serious inroads on my barley and the wheat was ripe, so... I cut it and brought it in.

Do you know those moments when you fit so well and so perfectly into the world that nothing else can possibly have space to feel bad? That feeling of bliss where there is nowhere to go but down, but it doesn't matter because it's just so good in that moment? The feeling of completion where there's no seam between you and the entirety of what is supposed to be? The times when you are given more than you could ever need until it lifts you, like water lifts you, stealing all the weight of everyday? The world-stopping moments when you know you are fully loved, right down to your core and without room even for the shadow of a doubt?

These couple hours of tasting and taking pictures and cutting stalks with my hand-shears and disentangling stalks of different kinds of grain: this is what I was made for. I am so lucky to get to do it.

Edited to add: I somehow forgot to mention just how beautiful these grains are. Hordeum nigrinudum is a two-row awned barley: it looks like a children's drawing of grain but in a dark midnight purple, two short rows of grains in a neat plane on either side of the stalk. Excelsior and purple dolma have marbled green/beige and purple leaves and husks; purple dolma has rather disorganized looking seed-heads like a quick linework sketch while excelsior has rows that wrap around the head and husks that part slightly to reveal very uniform glimpses of shining dark purple-almost-magenta-but-too-dark kernels against the matte husk. They're beautiful. There's nothing better.