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Good things that happened today: good performance review at work somehow, starting a potentially fun but also one-off no-commitment project at work, talks with coworker, talks with Tucker, and a "community and health" fair with all the volunteer and health organizations in town set up in booths so I could talk to the BJJ guy, the thrift store lady, see my name on the brochure for the garden club, talk to the thrift store person, run into a bunch of people who I sometimes recognised, run into my neighbour several down who might want to buy piglets, catch up with another pottery studio volunteer, etc. Also people asked me how I was doing and I could answer "good" without hesitation.

Worrying things that happened today: I lost my hands while I was typing at work, as in I forgot where they were and couldn't feel them or understand where they had gone, my vision is still weird, I specifically stood in the grocery store trying to buy a small package of regular oreos by scrutinizing and reading all the packages but somehow came home with double stuffed ones, I had to put off a task that involved copying a set of numbers from a document into a spreadsheet because I couldn't figure out how to remember things long enough to alt-tab or hold the whole structure of copy-pasting and switching windows in my head at once, I was freezing cold all morning, and my water pressure is getting way too low so I'll need to resort to interim solutions.

Glad to be back in win-some-lose-some territory instead of lose-some-sit-some-out.
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I've been brushing Avallu some every evening, just taking out a basketball-sized amount of hair or so every night. He's starting to blow his coat, gently and not spectacularly. He's very happy when I go find him every night and bring him in for brushing.

Tonight I took off his collar and brushed under it. He was super super happy, tilting his neck to help me get the spots I was missing and then lying down with his head along my leg and closing his eyes and sighing happily as I very gently worked through the under-collar fur with a brush. For the most part his coat is very non-matting but that neck spot, under his ears, and the very backs of his feathers can get really dense and also really matted. I was just quietly brushing him, he was slowly falling asleep making little happy sounds, the house was quiet. Everything was exactly right with the world.

After having brushed out tonight's basketball-sized amount of hair from mostly that narrow band around his neck (and having spent lots of time petting him and snuggling) I went to put his collar on and even with all the hair removal it barely fit. I had to carefully part and de-poof quite a bit of his fur to get it on.

I hate to think that he's halfway through his life now, or more. The bond increases with all of them every year.
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Oops, I started that last post to say I've been playing with hair colours: green at the tips, turquoise at the roots, paler brown green in the middle at first, now blue outer streaks and turquoise midlayer streaks over a green base. It's pretty and I'm kind of wanting to wear my hair down to appreciate the gradient effect it gives. This is a lot of hair so it's a big canvas!

Home

Nov. 30th, 2022 09:04 pm
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This is the kind of thing I really enjoy. Tap thawed, bringing everyone a last round of water, but not too much so I'll be able to knock the ice out of the bowls in the morning. Marvelling at physics, at the way the water freezes in the rubber containers from outside in, and expands as it does, so the bottom of each frozen dish ends up with a point of ice sticking out from the bottom. Peeling flakes of straw off the big square bales and bundling them into the wheelbarrow, not because they're heavy but because they're unwieldy and I don't have a calf sled. Carrying the straw into the pig houses and being surprised every time how warm it is in there, even with all the open holes in walls and at the top of the roofline for ventilation and even with the front of the A-frame broken off. Fluffing up the straw in the middle of the swarm of interested, excited, and sometimes even frolicking pigs as they gather to fluff their bedding and search for missed kernels of grain-- much tastier always than the grain sitting in their bowls right there. Digging out my beloved cordless drill and remembering so many nights of patching up pighouses in storms and snow while I put the front back on. They've been through colder than this, and finding the houses warmer inside than I expect it makes the whole thing less of a desperate bid for my animals to survive and more just a way of spending time together. I love the improvisation of sticking my toque on the faucet to see if that helps thaw it, or finding just the right piece of plywood so I can cover the straw with that so I can shift a piece of metal roofing down to go on the wood so I can... etc.

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

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

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

Home

Oct. 15th, 2022 07:43 pm
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Many years ago I had a single session with a counselor who asked me, what if you could do what you wanted without worrying about what other people wanted from you? and it was somewhat life-changing. I danced with that question daily for a couple years and I'm pretty sure it changed a bunch of my behaviours in the end.

Lately, on and off, more frequently in the last few months, a question that feels similarly fraught keeps entering my thoughts. What if I'm happy? it asks me, what if this is all you need to be happy?. It crossed my mind several times today., up from once a day, up from once every couple weeks, up from every couple months.

I was visiting with my neighbour today, saying this spot feels a little too busy and too many people for me, and he asked what my ideal situation would be. For just a moment I wanted to say, actually, everything is good.

Today I split wood and did laundry and did the dishwasher and rendered lard and moved the sprinkler around and didn't go get expired groceries for the pigs and chatted with the neighbour and took a nap and there are potatoes in the oven right now.

What if?

What if it's possible to have enough, and this is it?

Capture

Oct. 5th, 2022 07:57 pm
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Good day. Field with a coworker and a colleague from one of the big companies, chatted with my coworker on the way out and the colleague in the field. Colleague is an off-grid, ran a survival school, sort of person.

Home, fed animals, set up with my star trek podcast to drill mushroom logs in a swirl of geese loudly and contentedly stuffing themselves for winter. The smoke from my chimney ran clear, the house is warm with a long slow burn from the birch, and I snagged a burger on the way home from work so I didn't need to make dinner. I finished the last hole in the log just as it got too dark to see and came in to chat with the friend who will make her way up for thanksgiving.

My cats are happy.

It's good.

Playtime

Oct. 2nd, 2022 09:10 am
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Took a week off from work to play on the farm with Josh. What this looked like:

Chopping and pickling 76 jars (roughly 50L) of hot mixed pickle, a batch of lightly syruped strawberries, and a batch of the "ploughman's pickle" from healthy canning website
Cutting down some aspen trees with the chainsaw for mushrooms
Fixing the deck and adding a window to the carport under it
Hanging pictures on the walls
Splitting some wood
Cleaning the chimney and devising a method for me to do it on my own (last time sucked)
Making shelves in the newly-repaired carport
Borrowing a really big trailer, picking up 6 large square (half-ton) bales of straw, and using his vehicle and a pulley and a rope and some trees to pull them off the trailer and put them in strategic locations where I'll need straw in the next year
Making and eating some chinese noodle dishes Josh has been playing with lately
Looking through the garden for any ripe-enough corn, for seed, and picking it. Hulled a bunch
Petting the cats a lot
Eating lots of roast-and-foget veggies, and biscuits, both of which are my easy-to-make contributions
Making creme brulee in the low-and-slow bake method, which doesn't require twice cooking
Discussing ways to re-roof the greenhouse
Making garden signs for my plants
Cruising past the dump a couple times getting some nice-looking bits of wood and wild sunflower seeds
Sleeping in late, till 8ish, most mornings


What this did not look like:

Talking about relationship stuff
Talking about sex stuff
Trying to do anything when I was less than 100% into it, which meant a lot less physical stuff
A ton of cooking, this time
Dispatching the roosters
Finishing splitting the wood, or coming close
Actually innoculating trees with mushrooms (I'll do that today)
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Usually when I'm working (except sometimes when I'm in the bush) I'm super unaware of my self and my body, maybe some level of dissociated.

Today I'm working from home after staying up until midnight last night bringing in a ton of garden stuff and then finishing some apple canning (all 4 vanilla applesauce batches done, 2 different caramel applesauce batches done, lime apple jam and saskatoon apple jam done, slow cookers on pause a couple days for apples since I'll be canning dilly beans, cucumber pickles, and maybe maybe jumble relish of some kind tonight). I had a listen-only meeting and had skipped breakfast to finish a little more canning, so I fried up some fatty coppa pork chops, then sliced a couple corn muffins and fried them in the pork grease, then made a cup of dark coffee-substitute (I can't do the caffeine but love bitter and roasty flavours).

I had lunch on the couch in a slightly chilly room, clothed head to toe in good smooth wool with the cool of the room just outside it. The sky is dark and threatening and wind is tossing the silver undersides of the aspens around and making them sing a silvery static song that turns the shifts in movement of air into sound. The pork was crispy, juicy-fatty, and salty. The cornbread was crunchy, moderately sweet, and warm with that particular taste of grain corn. Cutting through both sweet and fatty was the dark hot roasted bitter flavour: everything warm against the room's coolness, the whole a moment of indoor stillness as the perfect counterpoint to outside's constant windy motion.

What a lovely moment.
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I got her out of storage and put air in her tires. They held. She needs a huge cleanup, there's old grease with hair and lint and road grime in the drivetrain and who knows what else is going on, she hasn't really been used in 5 years, but I went a hundred feet and it was like holding the hand of an old friend and it was really hard to make myself put her away.

Old friend, that's a theme this week. I guess I'm pulling from the best-of pieces in my past.

Bike commuting was definitely one of those best-of pieces. New person is just under 7km away and work is 12, which is very little on so flat a terrain. Even if it didn't feel so good, gas prices are a significant issue right now with the big truck.

I mean, I'm sure coming back up the bit of a hill is going to be a bit of a slog the first couple times, especially since I'll be slow and it's on big-vehicle highway, and folks around here have maybe less bike sense than many folks, but I think it'll be worth it.

Ugh. I need to go pick up my couch and do animals and water the plants and all I want to do is go biking. I cannot just take her out without giving her a look-over, but I sure want to.
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So Josh is a plant person and a foraging/fishing person, but this story is about the plant part. When he was working in Africa he had a garden plot and grew things there; when he was in school he had plants in his dorm; and when I met him his house was full of houseplants.

Since he's moved to a tiny condo he still has plants and he's been doing some plant trading; he's also been rescuing and refurbishing orchids until they bloom. A significant part of our communication is sending each other pictures of our plants and checking in on how each other's plants are doing.

So the other day he says "I have a lot of plants" and sent me a photo of his livingroom, and I said "you should have pepper plants" and he said "I could fit one in, bring me some seeds" so I started shortlisting pepper varieties. I had it down to ten or so and complained that getting down to one was going to be difficult, and he said he could take "maybe 4-6 kinds".

So anyhow, I get to choose 4-6 pepper varieties for Josh. Obviously they have to be relatively small plants, or easily dwarfed by pots. They need to be an array of heats and species, I think, and I'm also going for particularly beautiful ones.

I enjoy this.
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Today was warm enough to get the snowblower working. One of the issues was that its oil was only good down to -20C, so when I tried to start it at -30C it was basically sludge. There was also a lack of fuel stabilizer and old oil, but I had to run it for a bit to get the oil to pick up all the little metal bits since I hadn't changed the-- well, anyhow. It was warm enough to get the snowblower working.

I expected it to get up to -5C today and to be working on the snowblower, so I woke up and luxuriated in being in bed for awhile. Wood on the fire, find some clothes, and I got outside as it was getting properly light, about 9. It felt different out. The snowblower started prety quickly and while I was running it I took water to the geese, then checked the temperature.

It was 1C. It was above freezing!

Suddenly the snowblower was much more important. When the snow thaws and refreezes it becomes basically impossible to move and I had a lot of snow to move. Luckily with an oil change and enough time to work a new tank of stabilized fuel through it the machine was working. I spent an hour and a half muscling it around, getting it stuck on the pig hill, trying to figure out how to move snowbanks that were twice as tall as the machine. It was lovely and sunny and warm. When I came in for lunch and tea I realized I'd stepped out just to see if I could get it working and hadn't actually put on a shirt under my light jacket before starting work. I could hardly hold the phone because of vibrator-hands.

After a break I went out again, took a video for the youtube site, fed the animals, and got back to work. I widened a path to the back chicken coop -- and incidentally the truck canopy-- that I think the truck can fit back through. I did the driveway outside the gate and may have got two cars'-widths inside the gate. I unburied most of the trailer and the 4runner. The dog paths were impossible to move since they were roughly three feet of snow compacted into six inches. Without chains on the snowblower tires I slipped and had to near-carry in a couple places. Still, I got a lot done. I also managed to shake the snow off the cedars and clear most of the snow off the deck before I realized it was 4:30 and still basically light. In fact the sun is only down now, at 5.

The outside tap got thawed yesterday and I re-dug a path to it. There was actual water beading on the wire fence and the south side of the shed. It was so warm I took my toque and gloves off and never did put on a shirt. The long cold was a very serious hibernation, a hunkering-down and surviving. Today is the beginning of waking up.

I'm not saying it won't get cold again before spring. It will: a crust will form on the snow, the dogs will try and get out on it, I'll need to problem solve, a super cold snap might still happen, the truck may still get stuck in some of this loose weird snow-over-ice. At some point rivulets will start running down the driveway and I'll need to direct them away from the carport. I'll come close to running out of wood and the blanket of snow on the roof will come off and the house might get a little chilly. I need to get several tons of snow off the deck. But. Still.

Spring will come.

Now where can I find some good LED grow lights?
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Today was warm enough to get the snowblower working. One of the issues was that its oil was only good down to -20C, so when I tried to start it at -30C it was basically sludge. There was also a lack of fuel stabilizer and old oil, but I had to run it for a bit to get the oil to pick up all the little metal bits since I hadn't changed the-- well, anyhow. It was warm enough to get the snowblower working.

I expected it to get up to -5C today and to be working on the snowblower, so I woke up and luxuriated in being in bed for awhile. Wood on the fire, find some clothes, and I got outside as it was getting properly light, about 9. It felt different out. The snowblower started prety quickly and while I was running it I took water to the geese, then checked the temperature.

It was 1C. It was above freezing!

Suddenly the snowblower was much more important. When the snow thaws and refreezes it becomes basically impossible to move and I had a lot of snow to move. Luckily with an oil change and enough time to work a new tank of stabilized fuel through it the machine was working. I spent an hour and a half muscling it around, getting it stuck on the pig hill, trying to figure out how to move snowbanks that were twice as tall as the machine. It was lovely and sunny and warm. When I came in for lunch and tea I realized I'd stepped out just to see if I could get it working and hadn't actually put on a shirt under my light jacket before starting work. I could hardly hold the phone because of vibrator-hands.

After a break I went out again, took a video for the youtube site, fed the animals, and got back to work. I widened a path to the back chicken coop -- and incidentally the truck canopy-- that I think the truck can fit back through. I did the driveway outside the gate and may have got two cars'-widths inside the gate. I unburied most of the trailer and the 4runner. The dog paths were impossible to move since they were roughly three feet of snow compacted into six inches. Without chains on the snowblower tires I slipped and had to near-carry in a couple places. Still, I got a lot done. I also managed to shake the snow off the cedars and clear most of the snow off the deck before I realized it was 4:30 and still basically light. In fact the sun is only down now, at 5.

The outside tap got thawed yesterday and I re-dug a path to it. There was actual water beading on the wire fence and the south side of the shed. It was so warm I took my toque and gloves off and never did put on a shirt. The long cold was a very serious hibernation, a hunkering-down and surviving. Today is the beginning of waking up.

I'm not saying it won't get cold again before spring. It will: a crust will form on the snow, the dogs will try and get out on it, I'll need to problem solve, a super cold snap might still happen, the truck may still get stuck in some of this loose weird snow-over-ice. At some point rivulets will start running down the driveway and I'll need to direct them away from the carport. I'll come close to running out of wood and the blanket of snow on the roof will come off and the house might get a little chilly. I need to get several tons of snow off the deck. But. Still.

Spring will come.

Now where can I find some good LED grow lights?
greenstorm: (Default)
It's looking like blue oyster mushrooms, winecap/king stropharia, nameko, enoki, and shiitake will work here. Probably shaggy manes too, since they grow wild. But here's the thought process:

I have a ton of aspen, which is actually between 3 and 6 clones connected by underground roots so they're very robust. They send suckers up all through my yard and I don't cut the suckers down as fast as I should. They're bad for my septic, for my garden, and for my foundation. When I moved in there was a neat row of aspen on the south side of the property that was below the height of my roofline: pretty good to have deciduous there, I get shade in summer and the sun has access in summer. Since then the trees have grown so they're higher than the roof, and if I were to cut them they'd fall on the powerline.

Right now they're an annoyance. I need to expend effort cutting the suckers out of my lawn because although the birds mow the lawn they do not mow the suckers. I need to either carefully fell the trees without wrecking my house, fence, and powerline or live with increasing numbers of suckers and water competition in my garden and shade increasingly where I don't want it.

When I have an abundance of something, such abundance that it annoys me, that is a system failure on my part. It means I haven't yet seen and incorporated the actual richness of the place I'm working with. So the first place to go is: what needs a lot of the thing I have a lot of?

With aspen, well. Moose eat it some. Aspen leaf miners like it. Geese don't really like it. Pigs like the leaves but not the wood or twigs. I can mill the bigger trunks to make siding for pig houses; that requires some level of chainsaw mill, it requires getting the trees down in the first place, and it produces a pretty useful product. Still there will be slabs that are all wane. Ramial woodchips are, so far as I understand, made from young softwood like aspen suckers and are great for soil building, but they use equipment and I'm not sure I can justify equipment cost for more soil building, since I get so much from the animals. Mushrooms use woodchips and are directly edible.

Directly edible foods are a powerful incentive. I'll do work for them beyond what I'll do "just" to improve soil, partially because my animals contribute so much to my soil-building that I don't feel the need for a lot more going into it (at least until I'm no longer importing feed). And in this case I can put together many uses: if I have a small woodchipper I can keep producing woodchips through yearly grooming of the aspen suckers (even if I cut them all down once a year I won't draw this resource down to nothing, they're very robust), feed it to my mushrooms, then get rich soil out of it. This requires the infrastructure of a chipper and provides incentive to actually do the work of cutting and chipping, because food is a pull (something I want) rather than a push (trying to get rid of something I don't want).

If I get a small chainsaw mill I can mill lumber and use the heavy wane for more woodchips if the chipper will take them. And/or I can cut logs and innoculate with shiitakes, which I believe perennialize better in logs vs woodchips (though this still needs research). If I cut down the adult aspen, I can leave a new set of suckers to grow up in that same area that will be ready perhaps when this round of pig barns needs more siding (or I could cut half now and half in a couple years and have a more complex rotation).

Because there's less leaf area after the trees are cut they should take less water from the soil, and I can plant my burr oak and ginkgo seeds on that south strip. They'll be somewhat sheltered by the small pines and suckers, I'll need to keep them a little watered, but by the time the aspens have grown enough to be taking up a lot of water they should be fairly established. Then, after a couple more rotations of aspens, I can phase the aspen rotations into the back, away from my septic and foundation, and move to cutting every sucker as it appears and not leaving any for rotation by the house. The ginkgo and oak will produce food/nuts and will be less harmful to the house, though the aspen suckers will still always come up from the soil and need to be cut to feed the mushrooms.

(Josh has been finding and harvesting acorns and ginkgo nuts from the city and he'll bring them up; we're hoping some will be hardy here)

While I'm thinking about it, I've been meaning to convert my original garden to a mandala perennialish garden since it's got somewhat shady from the aspens and the house, and it's flat rather than south-sloped. How cool would it be to place the mushrooms in rings of alternating species as deep mulch to perennials and berry shrubs? That would be good multi-use stacking of the kind of shady moist space mushrooms like, it would be aesthetically very satisfying to have planted fairy rings, it's very visible from the house where I'd be able to track when the mushrooms were ready, and it's a great way to feed the perennials by converting my woodchips through mushrooms, where manure might be a little hot for them.

This system also just works better with my brain, where "hey, I want to make mushroom beds" allows me to incidentally cut the aspen suckers in service of something else, whereas "I need to do lawn and septic maintenance by cutting aspen suckers" doesn't enthuse me in any way. It's that pull I mentioned, rather than the push, and so it makes necessary work fun and joyful rather than a chore.

Pull rather than push is a fundamental, vital part of any human system because we participate physically and intellectually in systems that bring us joy and that in turn is self-reinforcing for a working (and improving!) system, whereas if we set ourselves up for work we don't enjoy then it will not get done, no matter how important it is, and neither the property nor our lives will be improved and will probably decay as the property succumbs to neglect and we succumb to guilt and inadequacy. Of course each person's good, fun work will be different and a system needs to be designed as much around individual incentives and skills as around light, water, and heat availability.

Anyhow, I realize I talk about outcomes but not about process here a lot, and this was a great opportunity to put the process I've gone through in the last couple days up here. I'll try to daylight more of these processes because my thoughts are more robust when I write them down. I live in a web of shifting incentives and plans change fairly frequently so I hold the "why" of everything in my mind a lot so I can go through this process (for instance, having my veggie garden right off the back porch had a lot of "whys" that have evolved away so now it makes more sense to have perennials and berries there).
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It's looking like blue oyster mushrooms, winecap/king stropharia, nameko, enoki, and shiitake will work here. Probably shaggy manes too, since they grow wild. But here's the thought process:

I have a ton of aspen, which is actually between 3 and 6 clones connected by underground roots so they're very robust. They send suckers up all through my yard and I don't cut the suckers down as fast as I should. They're bad for my septic, for my garden, and for my foundation. When I moved in there was a neat row of aspen on the south side of the property that was below the height of my roofline: pretty good to have deciduous there, I get shade in summer and the sun has access in summer. Since then the trees have grown so they're higher than the roof, and if I were to cut them they'd fall on the powerline.

Right now they're an annoyance. I need to expend effort cutting the suckers out of my lawn because although the birds mow the lawn they do not mow the suckers. I need to either carefully fell the trees without wrecking my house, fence, and powerline or live with increasing numbers of suckers and water competition in my garden and shade increasingly where I don't want it.

When I have an abundance of something, such abundance that it annoys me, that is a system failure on my part. It means I haven't yet seen and incorporated the actual richness of the place I'm working with. So the first place to go is: what needs a lot of the thing I have a lot of?

With aspen, well. Moose eat it some. Aspen leaf miners like it. Geese don't really like it. Pigs like the leaves but not the wood or twigs. I can mill the bigger trunks to make siding for pig houses; that requires some level of chainsaw mill, it requires getting the trees down in the first place, and it produces a pretty useful product. Still there will be slabs that are all wane. Ramial woodchips are, so far as I understand, made from young softwood like aspen suckers and are great for soil building, but they use equipment and I'm not sure I can justify equipment cost for more soil building, since I get so much from the animals. Mushrooms use woodchips and are directly edible.

Directly edible foods are a powerful incentive. I'll do work for them beyond what I'll do "just" to improve soil, partially because my animals contribute so much to my soil-building that I don't feel the need for a lot more going into it (at least until I'm no longer importing feed). And in this case I can put together many uses: if I have a small woodchipper I can keep producing woodchips through yearly grooming of the aspen suckers (even if I cut them all down once a year I won't draw this resource down to nothing, they're very robust), feed it to my mushrooms, then get rich soil out of it. This requires the infrastructure of a chipper and provides incentive to actually do the work of cutting and chipping, because food is a pull (something I want) rather than a push (trying to get rid of something I don't want).

If I get a small chainsaw mill I can mill lumber and use the heavy wane for more woodchips if the chipper will take them. And/or I can cut logs and innoculate with shiitakes, which I believe perennialize better in logs vs woodchips (though this still needs research). If I cut down the adult aspen, I can leave a new set of suckers to grow up in that same area that will be ready perhaps when this round of pig barns needs more siding (or I could cut half now and half in a couple years and have a more complex rotation).

Because there's less leaf area after the trees are cut they should take less water from the soil, and I can plant my burr oak and ginkgo seeds on that south strip. They'll be somewhat sheltered by the small pines and suckers, I'll need to keep them a little watered, but by the time the aspens have grown enough to be taking up a lot of water they should be fairly established. Then, after a couple more rotations of aspens, I can phase the aspen rotations into the back, away from my septic and foundation, and move to cutting every sucker as it appears and not leaving any for rotation by the house. The ginkgo and oak will produce food/nuts and will be less harmful to the house, though the aspen suckers will still always come up from the soil and need to be cut to feed the mushrooms.

(Josh has been finding and harvesting acorns and ginkgo nuts from the city and he'll bring them up; we're hoping some will be hardy here)

While I'm thinking about it, I've been meaning to convert my original garden to a mandala perennialish garden since it's got somewhat shady from the aspens and the house, and it's flat rather than south-sloped. How cool would it be to place the mushrooms in rings of alternating species as deep mulch to perennials and berry shrubs? That would be good multi-use stacking of the kind of shady moist space mushrooms like, it would be aesthetically very satisfying to have planted fairy rings, it's very visible from the house where I'd be able to track when the mushrooms were ready, and it's a great way to feed the perennials by converting my woodchips through mushrooms, where manure might be a little hot for them.

This system also just works better with my brain, where "hey, I want to make mushroom beds" allows me to incidentally cut the aspen suckers in service of something else, whereas "I need to do lawn and septic maintenance by cutting aspen suckers" doesn't enthuse me in any way. It's that pull I mentioned, rather than the push, and so it makes necessary work fun and joyful rather than a chore.

Pull rather than push is a fundamental, vital part of any human system because we participate physically and intellectually in systems that bring us joy and that in turn is self-reinforcing for a working (and improving!) system, whereas if we set ourselves up for work we don't enjoy then it will not get done, no matter how important it is, and neither the property nor our lives will be improved and will probably decay as the property succumbs to neglect and we succumb to guilt and inadequacy. Of course each person's good, fun work will be different and a system needs to be designed as much around individual incentives and skills as around light, water, and heat availability.

Anyhow, I realize I talk about outcomes but not about process here a lot, and this was a great opportunity to put the process I've gone through in the last couple days up here. I'll try to daylight more of these processes because my thoughts are more robust when I write them down. I live in a web of shifting incentives and plans change fairly frequently so I hold the "why" of everything in my mind a lot so I can go through this process (for instance, having my veggie garden right off the back porch had a lot of "whys" that have evolved away so now it makes more sense to have perennials and berries there).
greenstorm: (Default)
Pigs/Geese: winter over in greenhouse and then move through fields

March/early April onto frozen ground as the greenhouse thaws enough to plant: field #1 from frozen ground to 1" thaw: barley, kale, cabbage gets planted when the animals leave.

April till mid-May into field #2 for and tomatoes, squash, and corn go in after.

Mid-May into field #3, either perennial pasture or fall/very early spring plant of grain (rye?).

Quick sweep through haskap and apple pastures to pick up excess fruit. in summer/late fall as required.

Mid-Sept back into field #2

Oct back into field #1

Nov back into greenhouse.

That's 3 fields minimum plus orchards and greenhouse. It supports a rotation, either a 3-year one or a couple years in field #3 which could also be planted with a good hog mix. Realistically it would be better to have several field #3s if it's not going to be perennial pasture and they could step through maybe 1 per month.

Requires mobile hog housing and some sort of watering infrstructure.

Hm.
greenstorm: (Default)
Pigs/Geese: winter over in greenhouse and then move through fields

March/early April onto frozen ground as the greenhouse thaws enough to plant: field #1 from frozen ground to 1" thaw: barley, kale, cabbage gets planted when the animals leave.

April till mid-May into field #2 for and tomatoes, squash, and corn go in after.

Mid-May into field #3, either perennial pasture or fall/very early spring plant of grain (rye?).

Quick sweep through haskap and apple pastures to pick up excess fruit. in summer/late fall as required.

Mid-Sept back into field #2

Oct back into field #1

Nov back into greenhouse.

That's 3 fields minimum plus orchards and greenhouse. It supports a rotation, either a 3-year one or a couple years in field #3 which could also be planted with a good hog mix. Realistically it would be better to have several field #3s if it's not going to be perennial pasture and they could step through maybe 1 per month.

Requires mobile hog housing and some sort of watering infrstructure.

Hm.
greenstorm: (Default)
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.

Soiled

May. 15th, 2020 07:35 pm
greenstorm: (Default)
In the last week I've put in:

1 each of my indeterminate main tomatoes in the greenhouse (fingers crossed). Quinoa, two kinds of bunching onions, cabbage, and brussels sprouts transplants are out in the main garden, interplanted with oregano and parsley and thyme.

Cylindra beets in the greenhouse (maybe this was 2 weeks ago?).

Fluid sown oxheart (pr seeds) carrot and kral parsnip (pr seeds and heritage havest mixed) out in the bed, intersown with some radishes, some radish and arugula was in the fluid with them for row marking.

Fluid sown kurada nova carrot (west coast) in the greenhouse.

Put in super sugar snap peas (william dam seeds), lutz green leaf beet (heritage harvest), purple top white globe turnip (stokes) and albina veraduna (pr seeds) beet. A little bit of lettuce is intersown with the lutz.

Still to go: another round of beets, rutabaga, a bunch of bush beans (dry & green), yellow soup peas, some climbing beans, cucumbers (pickling and slicing), zucchini, napa cabbage, more parsley, the longer season corn. To transplant: gaspe corn, all the squash, the remaining tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, pickling cukes.

Grains and potatoes still need doing.

Soiled

May. 15th, 2020 07:35 pm
greenstorm: (Default)
In the last week I've put in:

1 each of my indeterminate main tomatoes in the greenhouse (fingers crossed). Quinoa, two kinds of bunching onions, cabbage, and brussels sprouts transplants are out in the main garden, interplanted with oregano and parsley and thyme.

Cylindra beets in the greenhouse (maybe this was 2 weeks ago?).

Fluid sown oxheart (pr seeds) carrot and kral parsnip (pr seeds and heritage havest mixed) out in the bed, intersown with some radishes, some radish and arugula was in the fluid with them for row marking.

Fluid sown kurada nova carrot (west coast) in the greenhouse.

Put in super sugar snap peas (william dam seeds), lutz green leaf beet (heritage harvest), purple top white globe turnip (stokes) and albina veraduna (pr seeds) beet. A little bit of lettuce is intersown with the lutz.

Still to go: another round of beets, rutabaga, a bunch of bush beans (dry & green), yellow soup peas, some climbing beans, cucumbers (pickling and slicing), zucchini, napa cabbage, more parsley, the longer season corn. To transplant: gaspe corn, all the squash, the remaining tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, pickling cukes.

Grains and potatoes still need doing.
greenstorm: (Default)
I tend to want to write in the evening and *do* in the morning. I tend to have time to write at work in the morning. It leaves me a little topsy turvy feeling.

I've been quite enjoying my life in the last couple days. As my coworker said, if my animals are happy, I'm happy. The geese are in full mating swing; the 3rd cohort piglets are getting out and eating my extra eggs, frolicking in the yard, and generally being a happy nuisance. The same could be said for the cats: Demon is definitely integrated and he's keeping Whiskey on his toes running up and down the stairs. I need a little more than animals, though.

Mom was up for an extended long weekend, Thursday night until this morning. We did some farm stuff, hanging a chicken roost and splitting off the chantecler breeding group. We repotted my African violet pups for the seed swap on the 14th. She came to some yoga etc classes with me. She was at the end of her soap from last visit so we made her some more. She dug snow off the top of my trailer while I carried hay. A neighbour also came up and shot 3 100-lb (2nd cohort) pigs for me. Two were boars for dog food; the third was for my freezer.

We gutted all 3 on the Saturday they were shot and hung my pig in the downstairs fridge; the 2 dog pigs went into the snow on the deck where they've frozen and I can use the reciprocating saw to cut them up for the dogs.

Yesterday we took my pig apart: skinned, took into primals, and I cut roasts and chops and wrapped roasts with butcher twine (!!) and we vacsealed them. Overnight there was a crockpot with lard, a crockpot with pork bone stock, and a crockpot with ribs. I sent the ribs home with mom this morning when she went because we'd had skirt steak and bits and pizza (with my lacto-fermented jalapenos and some anchovies, yum!) for dinner last night. I have bacon left to cure and a shoulder primal left to cut apart in the fridge, the rest is frozen. Nice to have a freezer full of pork again, and nice to be experimenting with roasts and chops (though I really do need to do some charcuterie).

I can unequivocally say the ossabaws are amazing to eat. Even at 6 months/100lbs they're dark and well-marbled, so tasty. As mom says: "it's like lamb". Also I really won't consider a larger breed, 100lb pigs are a really good manageable size and the adults at 250lbs are good to handle with two people. I can't imagine how folks do those huge pigs.

Anyhow, because it's morning I'm talking about the farming details: lists of activities, times, weights (40kg liveweight, 28kg gutted and head off, 20kg in the freezer). But what I wanted to say is this, again and again:

I fit well into this life. It's nice to have someone else, or some other folks, around from time to time. I wouldn't want them around all the time. But I really like the way my life is now. I've worked towards this -- towards the move from the city and this farm and career path and relationship style and all these skills achieved in a precipitous learning curve -- without knowing if I would actually enjoy the result. I mean, I was really really sure but that's not the same.

And here I am, in it, and I love it. Killing is sad. Animals are stressful, relentless, and rewarding. Maintaining land and a house is not cheap in money or labour. But now that I have the time to relax back and enjoy it I am enjoying this life so much. I absolutely need more land-connected people in my social media circles, on dreamwidth or other longer-form would be especially nice. I could use more in-person folks but I am working on that in various ways.

I'm a part of the thing I think is important, which is the land.

Now to prep for Avi's visit. I think we'll be killing roosters, and maybe jarring pork stock and rooster, and maybe making soap and splitting off a couple more breeding groups.

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