Greenstorm's Journal

This is kinda embarassing. You are going to laugh so much at this, especially the poly folks.

Or actually, maybe it's too much tonight. Call it small-town monogamous drama that involves everyone in town I have any interest in and takes the new person off the table and leaves it at that. Disappointing, extremely silly (from my POV), involves a bunch of suffering, is probably not surprising, and will take time to resolve itself.

Plus A&E are wanting to get back in touch.

Seriously, why do I do anything except garden? It all ends in tears.

On the other hand I feel so confident now in my actions. I'll do the right thing, and I do, and it comes from a place of care and connection and not these relics or torture devices society saddles us with. I'm free to offer myself clearly and set boundaries, freer than I've ever been. This situation fucking sucks but it hasn't shaken me, really.

I am sad, disappointed, and looking forward to doing a heavy lift for awhile. I mean, at least I'm here, to be here for folks if they need? But when do I get folks to be there for me?

Also, as Nicholas said, "My vague feeling is like hell you need this shit, and I'm trying to formulate the sentence "can't a person just get laid without drama" around your particular choice of pronouns and identities without much success so let's just leave it at that? Ugh."

Gah.

Alright. Here's to recentering myself.

This week was really not good.

At the beginning of the A&E thing, my position was that I liked where I was, and if something better was offered I would do it. Tucker left, and once the Sayward location was pinned down I was kind of in a holding pattern waiting for it to begin.

It's not going to work out as I was led to believe, and the people involved are the ones who led me to believe it. This whole time I've been trying to be cautious about it and not commit myself emotionally until I had verified everything; on some level though I assumed it was a formality and that the general shape could follow what A&E proposed.

It wasn't and it can't. They're scrambling to put other plans in place but what they've proposed doesn't show a lot of evidence of thoughtful consideration either. They'll be moving to Sayward this month either way; they'll own the place and will start living there regardless of what happens with me.

So I've learned two levels of information with this process: one is simply that the plan as proposed won't work. But the second is that the folks involved promise before they verify, they get themselves into situations without thinking things through thoroughly, and don't seem to do much in the way of research and budgeting on new endeavours. In other words, they aren't folks I want to be casually financially entangled with; if they leap into something that requires a bunch of digging out, I need to limit my exposure to that. So, if I do end up doing this, it needs to be and to remain very financially and emotionally structured. I'm not able to leap into something before I think it through and do some sort of risk assessment, then leave someone else to pick up the pieces; I need a structure where I'm not responsible for someone else's pieces without first accepting the risk.

It's a big emotional adjustment. I was already starting to lean into it, no matter how much I was determined to go through verification first, and this is not a fairytale ending.

Instead of a fairytale ending I have my periodic reminder that I'm the one in charge of making my life sustainable, in charge of making it work for me, no matter what. People have my back in emergencies, yes, but it's my job to make sure my life isn't a continuous emergency because folks don't have the ability to bail me out of that.

Before all this happened I was feeling overwhelmed and isolated on the farm. It's my job now to remake Threshold into my home. If I'm able to come to an agreement with A&E, given the pacing so far, and without overextending myself into an unpaid and unwanted business advisor role, I'm expecting that move is six months to two years out as a very rough ballpark. I think it will take them that long to come up with a convincing, fact-backed answer to "what can you offer, and what can you not, that I need to handle myself?"

And this is what I mean by sustainability: I was using all my free time and more to try and sort the details of the situation, and racing through the things I needed to do here without enjoying them. Instead I'm going to shift my focus back here, and with my leftover energy I'll put it towards the garden there, and I'll let A&E sort their financial stuff as they will, and I will observe how it goes. If they ask for help with financial organization I may provide it but their finances aren't my finances right now. Whatever they're going to commit themselves to is on them, and the level of risk analysis they want to go through beforehand is also on them. My experience with nonplanners is that when things go sideways they tend to blame anyone nearby: they didn't do the analysis of what could go wrong at the beginning, and those analytical skills don't tend to materialize partway through a project, so if something goes wrong it's likely put onto whoever is closest. I won't take that role.

In that way I can back away from resentment and anger, I can keep myself centered and stable, and I can focus on what it'll take to maintain myself here. Starting with my garden, with making some decisions about what I'll plant here; with reducing the pig herd significantly to reduce work and cost; with maybe paring down on the geese once they're done nesting; with deciding to bring in wood for this winter and exploring the cost of a heat pump for these big shoulder seasons. I need to figure out how to maintain my hot water heater and pressure tank for the well. I have a roof and a chimney and a good wood stove.

I'll also pursue my diagnosis and accommodation at work, and/or consider whether other companies in the area have something useful for me. I'll keep an eye out for remote work. I'll draft up a list of companies in Sayward area I may want to work for, so I know who to reach out to when that happens.

Threshold doesn't mind that I've been exploring my options. She's still here for me. In the beginning that was the point. Now, it is the point once more. Threshold has my back.

So one of the reasons I came up to Fort particularly is to work with my friend/ex-boss Ron, who moved up here about the time I first took a summer student position in this town. In fact, we started in the same month-- he was friends with the folks who worked at my old job and so he felt maybe more integrated than me. Anyhow, I worked the summer here, went and tried another place the following summer, and in the middle of that summer texted Ron to say "can I come work for you permanently henceforth" and he made it happen. We worked really well together but I tended to keep a layer of distance, because he was my boss, though the structure felt pretty non-hierachical.

Since that company dissolved I've been going over occasionally during Saturday morning coffee, when a bunch of the folks who worked together at the old company would hang out at his place. It was generally a small-group setting, with folks I like, but it was still a group setting.

Well, Ron sold his house and is moving away at the end of the month. He asked if I wanted anything from the house and I went over and poked around and there was some stuff we put on a list and discussed prices for; I dug up some starts from the glorious old rose that lives at the house; and we just talked. We talked about his plans for the summer, moving into a truck he kits out and doing some contract work, and about my plans for the move. We talked about, I don't know, just stuff.

I'd forgotten what it was like to just hang out with someone I enjoy. A friend. I'd forgotten that I could just enjoy someone's presence; that there's a space that's not "intimate because we're involved in some sort of a co-project and it's intense" and "I'm doing this interaction because I'm supposed to and taking what I can from it." Just... it was nice. I enjoy him. It was good. And he's not busy tearing himself into pieces because of self-loathing or doing some sort of weird self-harm through overwork or whatever and that is also very, very nice.

So I've got myself a bedframe for down south out of it, and a hammock stand, and a couch the animals can go on. If I can enough pork, I will give him canned pork in trade. I've got the amazing old rose which lives at his home. I have a BBQ/smoker that needs fixing up. He may come and visit over the winter, and/or maybe if A&E are into it he could live in his truck rig there over the winter on and off for some $, it would be nice to have a friend there for a bit.

Love for me feels like pain. When I experience love, I also experience pain, they're almost inextricably linked. I'm reasonably sure it's a PDA thing, that pressure rising to meet the inevitability of my emotion and locking together into one fused experience. I cried on the drive home, music on, windows down. So much of my interpersonal has been so frought lately and it was good to just be able to just love someone and to have it be ok and not mean anything other than it does.

Meanwhile A&E have taken some time to digest the budget numbers and are starting to brainstorm scenarios down there and put them forward. As is my role I'm going to push for numbers. I suspect I need to ask them what it'll take for them to put numbers to their proposals, rather than for them to hope I'll do it for them. We'll run through a couple scenarios and see what makes sense; as before I've been acting as the reality check. I'm very tempted to tell them to take a small-business course, or at least something involving making a business plan, because I don't know that I'm the person to do all this instruction.

This process may involve me targeting fall for my move instead of midsummer. We will see. Gosh I want to spend time on a project with someone who can lay out steps and do reasonable troubleshooting right now. I miss that kind of interaction.

Anyhow I'm home with fancy roses and I'm about to put food in the oven. Things will be ok.

Landscape designer
Farm planner
Genetics acquisition, plant and animal
Bookkeeper/business planner
Therapist/counselor

Exhausted

1) two year loose household budget

2) legally looked-over/signed compensation plan

3) three month logistics schedule

One of the aspects of codependency, poor boundaries, and the lack of individuation that comes from those is an underlying sense that other people should know and do things for you, that if you ask for something it doesn't count, and that if they force you to ask for those things they are doing you an injustice.

This is... not quite like whack-a-mole for me, but more like weeding a garden with a very thick weed seedbed. There are a lot of ways believing other people should read my mind and preserve me from discomfort manifests. Now, I'm weird, and there are a bunch of things I learned early on I need to ask for; some things I sorted as I went along. I *still* remember learning to ask for the support I wanted around poly; I still remember how hard it was to ask for time or sex or attention in the beginning.

Thankfully I no longer feel like, if I ask for something and my partner does it for me, that act of service doesn't count. In some ways nowadays I feel like it counts more than if they spontaneously did the right thing; it means that they listen and put energy into acting on what they hear.

I've been thinking about the thing with A&E and how that is going. I've been pushing for written budgets, for written and discussed vision and values statements, for discussion on visitors and autonomy and expected daily interaction. I've viewed me being the one pushing for this as a sign their commitment is less, that they haven't thought this through, that they're naive and setting it up to fail where I'm the realist. And I've been resentful at initiating this stuff, feeling like they should know better than to leave it without discussion at the outset.

I think it's time for me to dig into this a little more, though. I'm asking for what I need to feel secure and they are stepping up and providing. They do need some specifics, some details, some structure, but they have so far come through when I provide that.

I do think a group like this needs structure is likely to fair or at least be hella stressful at the worst possible times without it.

I also think that anyone in such a group needs to be driven to ask these questions of themselves on some level, in some way-- they need to be a little bit curious or accepting of how other people work, and to be able to accept systems in which people are truly different from each other and yet where everyone's needs and preferences matter. They need to be, on some level, active rather than reactive. I remain a little concerned about that.

But as for me not being provided with what I need to feel secure around structure before I ask? For being the one to drive spreadsheets, lists, budgeting, formal (as in articulated statements, not as in signed in blood) of values and intentions? Can I accept this as my role, complementary to E's role as the social interactor, or A as the financial end, accept the work of making these asks as in service of my own comfort, as long as it's not onerous, without resentment that I am the one doing it? Evoking people has always been something that I'm good at.

Funny enough, I may need to run that by folks, say, "look, I'm doing this work, I see you are each doing this other work, are we agreed that this is a division of labour that's occurring and we're good with?" before I can let it rest, but maybe if I do that I can.

Alright, so I'm going to have 6000-7000 square feet of garden at Cor Viriditas this summer. The bed is roughly triangular. It's going to take an extended three-sisters planting (corn, squash, beans) with plants I've known to grow well under widely-spaced corn (tomatoes, tomatillos) shade-tolerating greens (lettuce, chard, mache, magenta spreen, shungiku, brassicas, chicories) and some pollinator attractors (calendula, borage, fennel, cilantro). I'm saving back seed from most of this, so if it's a complete failure I can try again next year.

Let's sort out how much seed I need. Generally I'll plant 1-2 seeds per plan desired; because it's a chaos garden I expect germination gaps to be filled in by whatever is close by,

I've collected some short season corns and some PNW corns for this mix: gaspe is my favourite, saskatoon white, saskatchewan rainbow, oaxacan green dent, early riser, new york red, carol deppe's magic manna and cascade ruby gold, lavender parching, painted mountain from six or eight different places, a couple bits from seed trades. My plan is to make three groups: dent, flint, and flour and plant them at each corner of the triangular bed, with sunflowers in-between. There will absolutely be cross-pollination between types but perhaps a little minimized. Within each group the corn plants will be spaced fairly widely to allow undergrowth.

What this means is roughly 1500 square feet each of flour, dent, and flint corn for a total of 4500 square feet of corn. Call it 3 square feet per plant and I'm looking at 500-1000 seeds of each type. The rest of my corn will go in the freezer.

Squash will be almost all maxima, with a corner of pepo out of curiosity (I'm playing with hull-less pumpkins for the animals and trying out a few bush delicatas). Again they're short season, including the buttercup and red kuri that actually ripened last year (hopefully with some cross-pollination), potimarron, north georgia candy roaster (this makes fabulous pickles from the unripe fruits), sundream (super cool resistance/short season), nanticoke, lofthouse mix, lower salmon river, blue hubbard (I love large squashes I can keep in the cool room and chop chunks off as I need them, I'd like to steer in the direction of large), gold nugget (I think the shortest season squash? grows well among corn), a few more kabocha types. They'll be primarily planted into the corn patches, seeds mixed as evenly as possible. Give each squash plant 50 square feet over the 4500 square feet of corn garden and that's 90-180 squash seeds for the garden; the rest go in the freezer.

My landmate is going to start some tomatillos, promiscuous tomatoes, and pepper grexes I've sent her. We should be able to pop those starts in when we seed the bed. I'll have 6 shelves x 3 flats each x 50 cells = 900 plant capacity for starts. 200 will go to peppers, 50 to tomatillos (I have a sweet ground-cherry-tasting one I saved seed for last year), and much of the rest to tomatoes (I sent on my "promiscuous A" good-tasting mix, my orange/red bicolour promiscuous, I think another promiscuous one, and then a bunch of largely self-supporting favourites and open-flower-architecture named cultivars: Brad, Silvery Fir Tree, KARMA purple and KARMA MF, Minsk Early, Uralskiy Ranniy, Mikado Black, Maya & Sion, Grocery store green, I think KARMA miracle and a couple others?). So call it 400 tomato plants? They'll be in amongst the corn, and at the edges of the corn. They'll be smallish when they go in but since everything else is being direct seeded that's likely ok, they'll grow enough that some will not be overtaken and it's those vigorous ones I want to save seed from.

Beans are primarily dry bush, they'll be mixed in the center with the sunflowers, peppers will be to the south side of the sunflowers. There's roughly 6000 - 4500 = 1500 square feet of this moat. Call it 800 square feet of sunflowers at 4 square feet each, that's 400 sunflower seeds if planted 2 in each hole (I don't fully trust some of my older seed, though I suppose I could start these indoors too and just put out 200 plants). Beans are 1/square foot, 200 square feet. I'll put a dozen or two melon plants on the south side of the sunflowers in a patch with the peppers. I'll have 200 pepper plants in total, roughly (100 hot grex, 100 sweet grex) that don't really get their own space but instead go in amongst the center.

Aforementioned leafy greens and some roots (beet and turnip grexes, fall radishes, salsify) will be scattered throughout for imediate weed suppression, creating a seed bed, and immediate harvest throughout the spring/early summer.

This is the most hands-off gardening I've ever done and I think it'll be educational as to the new property. It's been awhile since I worked with light as a limiting factor. I expect plenty of things to be shaded out; the seed from what remains will be good for this kind of mixed underplanting. In year 2 I'll move this mix to rotational pig fields, using the saved seed, to help supplement my hog feed through fall and winter.

The as-yet-unnamed property. Viriditas? Maybe, maybe not. Hole in the wood? No. Greenheart? Maybe, maybe not. Its heart is the meter-in-diameter trees that guide a very flashy creek across it. Big. Old-ish. Mossy. Trickles of water over rock in summer, a roar at certain times of winter. That's the heart.

Before you come to the heart you are on a logging road that mysteriously starts being paved. There are plantations all around: second or third growth (probably second) all well-spaced straight uniform conifer trunks with jagged stumps of shaded, partially-jettisoned lower limbs, all dripping with green moss and undergrown with sword fern (polystichum munitum, stick'em like you do with a sword, munitions like weapons: sword fern). The road is pretty straight for a bit. Then the trees are less uniform, there's a spot that wasn't replanted by a forestry company, and a driveway goes in both directions: east and west.

Follow the driveway up west and, after a narrow band of bigleaf maple and spruce and improbably large alder there's a thicket of salmonberry (rich moist indicator) with some young bigleaf maples and spruce and alder coming up through it. This is where the fields will be. The soil is sandy brown under dead winter leaves. The end of this space is marked by a little lean-to-camper-shelter building that someone was living in so we couldn't poke around; that's the edge of the rich sandy soil full of salmonberries, the demarcation between that and the heart.

The heart is cautious. I'm not sure if it's beyond words or if it's waiting to see what I'll do before giving them to me or if I was just busy, my whole body an antenna picking up every scrap of information from the land while a human was trying to talk to me at the same time. It's a place that, if given my full attention, could fully occupy it. The big potato-chip bark spruce trees, the braided stream through mostly-soil-sometimes-rock, the start of skunk cabbage: the heart. It's not to be disturbed by the likes of me and my farming machinations.

Keep going up the driveway; it's definitely got a slight slope up now. The heart flows under the driveway through four culverts, three side-by-side and one additional. The forest opens out onto a wet lawn, brown and slippery with winter rain and dog poop. Here the soil is clay; ramshackle plastic fencing encloses an expanse of woodchips in which small trees and perennials are planted; beyond them woodchips surround some long thin unraised but undoubtedly heavily amended garden beds cradled in the curve of the question mark shape the driveway now assumes. On the other side of the grass from the garden is a small cobb structure with goats, surprisingly enclosed in equally ramshackle fencing and with little disturbance to the grass despite their couple-years-long tenure. That's for the best; a hole here betrays slick grey clay with no texture when rubbed between the fingers.

At the head of the lawn and garden is the house, but behind the house a steep sandy hill looms. It's covered in alder, leaning a little bit out for the light that is one of the major limiting factors here in the cloudy grey, and goes up about eighty feet: sunset will come quickly with that hill to the west like that. Anything that needs to have very dry roots will need to live on that hill: chestnuts, grapes.

The house itself is a rectangle studded with uniformly-sized windows. Irrigation for windowboxes hangs off it. The roof is flat. If it had angled wings instead of a straight rectangle, or if was stone, it would feel like a grand manor house. As is it's a big building waiting to see what happens next.

To the south, past the goats, less-even but still dense trees press up against the property line. In the milky-overcast noon sky they don't cast shade onto the middle of the lawn; when the sun is low in winter at least the deciduous components jettison their leaves and allow a little sun through. Hill to the west. Pass a waterfall, then a scatter of alder through grass and brush and a chainlink fence not far north: there's a neighbour past there that likes their privacy. Maybe a willow fence will end up there? And completing the circle, to the east, the driveway plunges into the deep shadowed green of the heart. Up here the property is about 200 feet wide, widening from the heart through down to the road to 400 feet. The house can feel the presence of her neighbours, of that plantation and of the privacy-loving neighbour of open fields screened by light brush and trees.

There's more, of course: the house has an inside, turning east from the forestry road leads to another several acres. I'm not there yet, though, I can feel the information and possibilities swirling and forming and re-forming into patterns and possibilities. Several things at a time, not every thing at a time.