Greenstorm's Journal

Brought the squashes in over the last few days. They didn't cure on the vine, the leaves of the vines were killed by frost but the vines themselves were still green, they hadn't dried up.

North Georgia Candy Roaster was the most prolific.

Red kuri and sundream were pretty good, sundream maybe a touch earlier?

Burgess buttercup had nice large squash and were good and early.

The lofthouse squash produced excellent small-sized squash that ripened ok, but not many per vine.

Gete Oksomin did several squash, I'm curious about how they cross pollinated or not with all the others.

Potimarron only did a couple but was in some shade.

Little gem did well.

Candystick delicata, algonquin pumpkin, sweet mama, and blue kuri didn't produce but they weren't in the main patch so who knows.

Gold nugget did great in the corn patch and produced a bunch of tiny ones.

Sweet meat produced 2 squash and I don't know how ripe they are, we'll see how they go. Pretty squash though.

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.

Working from home again, it's been awhile since I've haven't had to go in for something whether it be a meeting or a field day. It feels so good to be home. I made some rose cedar soap, canned the last of the rhubarb (after scraping the last of the very very burnt sugar off the bottom of my pot), and now I'll get to go outside. The quail have been sized up to a bigger brooder now that they don't need heat anymore.

Plans for this week include sorting out hay (there's someone doing small squares in town, it looks like), cleaning out the chicken and quail barns and adding cages to the quail house, putting the sides on the woodshed, and figuring out the pig housing/field situation. I've also found a new ancona drake since mine seems to be shooting blanks, but he's a five hour drive away so that'll take logistics. I'm also going to pick up a pekin duck trio for some larger meat ducks that are hopefully a little less independent than the cayugas.

Bathtub Goose, with whom I have bonded really closely, isn't seeming well today. She was limping a little yesterday, so I gave her some nutritional yeast, but she's not walking much today. We'll see how it works when I get her outside.

The potatoes are flowering in dazzling array of colours and shapes. The piglets are fat and healthy. The americauna chicks are growing nicely. There are berries to pick and maybe canning to do.

It's ok.

In honour of Lughnasadh and just generally having mental health, I gave myself a harvest day yesterday. I picked 4kg of rhubarb, a bunch of sweet ciciley seeds, two kinds of mint, a snack's worth of snap peas, some dandelion greens, and some borage flowers. Borage went in white wine vinegar, mint went into bunches to dry -- the dehydrator is great for some things but has no soul for herbs -- macerated half the rhubarb with sugar and cooked the other half down into sauce, and now have to can the rhubarb.

I was also super exhausted all day and had something like 4 naps, but at least I got some stuff done.

Sweet ciciley really is an excellent and generous plant. Hopefully I can naturalize it in some spots. I do really enjoy things that actually ripen here.

On the other hand I'd like to move some perennials out of that space so I can put pigs in to plough it.

The day before I spent some time with Ron - we picked up take-out and sat by the river and chatted. I always forget how much I like people when I'm not with them. That's a lifelong thing for the most part: I fold so contentedly into myself after awhile in solitude that I can't imagine that an outside presence could be pleasant, and then it is pleasant. I mean, I think Ron is a good friend? He cares about me for sure, he knows and has boundaries and respects mine, we enjoy each other's company, and we have some hobby overlap (he's making yarrow salve right now, but also has been doing a bunch of canning and we talked about the texture of canned sausage a bunch).

There's a chance Ron will be hired to a fairly high staff position in my office. It would be nice to feel like someone has my back there, and nice to work in proximity to Ron without him being my boss directly.

At this time last year I got my first muscovy "ducks" (which are not actually ducks in the same way coastal redcedars are "thuja" and not "cedrus" or rose of sharon isn't a rose- their common name is a legacy of our tendency to reuse colonial names instead of using new names for new species). There were five of them, all female: Lilac, Silver, Cream, Chocolate, and Chocolate II. Later in the year my family brought me up a drake from the coast ("Drake") and the little flock was completed.

We can discuss how I name my animals some other time.

The muscovies overwintered in a little shed I modified out of a lean-to. The girls had relatively rough feathers; they hadn't had water to bathe in where they came from, just drinking water. Bathing encourages their waterproofing gland and makes them sleek and weather resistant. I didn't let them out because I wasn't certain they'd stay, but I did give them a very small outdoor yard that had a tub of water to bathe in. They bathed a lot, and pooped a lot, to the point where I needed to chip ice-shit mixture away from their tub to empty it.

In the spring Chocolate started sitting on a nest of eggs even before the snow was gone. She hatched 6 adorable ducklings and mothered them well. Lilac and Chocolate II hatched, and Chocolate II stole the babies, taking care of a total of 18 little ones. They were also adorable. As the weather warmed the Silver and Cream also sat but with less success and I lost some ducklings both to an unknown issue (narrowed down to niacin deficiency from too much foraging, heat stroke, or mushroom poisoning) and to the evacuation.

Tiny yellow/black fluffballs grew up into truly lovely birds faster than I could imagine. Muscovies are very quiet birds. They make a little hissing or trilling sound depending on sex, fly around some, and congregate in little groups to chat and look at the sky. Often they'd be perching on my deck railing when I looked out in the morning, and even still the youngest little girl will fly up to my railing to hang out.

Thing is, none of the birds I have can live well in the same sex ratio in which they're born. I ended up with very roughly 18 male muscovies to 8 females hatched this year. Once those eggs hatched the fate of most of those males was set. If I wanted to continue keeping muscovies - and I love them and would be very sad to be without them - either I or someone else would have to kill some. When I raised rats I carefully placed all my babies in pet homes. There are not pet homes for male birds. And... I was not going to ship my babies off to be confused and terrified before they were killed.

I had a taste of what was coming in the summer. Lilac had a prolapse: that's where the poop/urine/egg tract (it's all one hole in birds) inverts and there are parts hanging out the body that really should be inside. I hate it when this happens to any animal. There's a really high chance for infection if it's not dealt with quickly and it just hits my creeping horror buttons. We caught her, tried to re-insert the organ, but there was too much damage and things wouldn't line up right. Tucker helped me; we calmed her, held her down, and chopped off her head with an axe. When she had finished bleeding and twitching I plucked her, gutted her, cut her up, and put her in the freezer.

I don't remember if that was before or after I caught everyone and put them in a rigged-up trailer to evacuate them in the face of our wildfires. We drove for hours, then they had to be caught in the trailer and transferred to a small enclosure. The enclosure had a pool and plenty of straw so they were happy there until they had to be shepherded back into the trailer and hauled back.

Work was busy and the birds were still growing so I left well enough alone.

At some point they molted, growing new feathers to keep them warm over winter and it turned out Chocolate II was actually Lilac II.

When snow started to fall in October I realised just how much muscovies forage. Once the ground was covered my feed bill quadrupled. I started going through a full bag of feed a day, which I supplemented with corn to add carbs/heat/fat to help the birds prepare for the winter. When I went away for a week I left my petsitter with a pile of feed bags over a meter high so they wouldn't run out.

The males were starting to come into sexual maturity. They were tusseling over food, but more worryingly they were starting to mate. Open pools of water act as an aphrodesiac for birds so when I filled my kiddie pools every evening mating would start. Because I had double as many males as females, and because they mated on water, the females would be in the pools for a long time with their heads pushed under water over and over. Over-mating can also increase the chance of prolapse. It was time.

Josh came over last weekend. There was a bunch of stuff that needed doing in addition to the birds and we both did all that first: clean the chimney, assemble the snowblower, get straw. On the night before butcher I filled the pools many times so the muscovies could all play their game of diving into the pool, flapping their wings in a shower of sparkling water, and running out and away as fast as they could. They traded dives like kids waiting their turn on a slide. The next morning their feathers were frosted on the tips.

There were more muscovies to butcher than I had time and energy and choosing which ones would go on this first day was difficult. I kept some specifically in to choose among to breed later and some just because I liked them (Chocolate's first 3 boys, Friendly the black muscovy who eats out of my hand, and a gorgeous chocolate drake) and some were just harder to catch so they didn't make this round. We carried them to the large kill cone set up between two aspen trees at the far end of the yard, tucked them in there, and I held their feet while Josh cut off their heads. After the first one ravens began to circle. Some dogs were making a ruckus down the road and Avallu moved from one corner of the property to another to protect us. He didn't complain that the enticing blood smells made his job harder. Thea was locked inside so she wouldn't get her puppy curiosity and enthusiasm in the way.

Some I stroked their heads and I cried a little. Some were businesslike. When the head was cut off blood came in twin streams from the stump of the neck and stained the base of the trees an astonishingly red colour against brown leaves and the little bit of snow on the ground. When the heads landed on the ground they blinked and the beaks opened and closed; the bodies in the cones convulsed a bit and then eventually stilled. They were placed side by side in the snow until it was done.

None of this was easy. Not easy, either, was the following ten hours of wrestling with scalding and plucking and gutting and finally letting the carcasses freeze outside once they were gutted.

It won't be easy to cut up the carcasses, to slide breasts into the sous vide and then sear them, to confit or render down the bodies for stock. My feelings are sadness and some sort of resigned awe, or perhaps awe-struck resignation. Every human is made out of dead things: dead animals and dead plants that grew out of dead animals at some point in our past. That's a fundamental truth. There is meaning in putting my hand on the taut reality of that truth and feeling it thrum.

But honestly, more than anything, I love my animals. They are a self-contained society of alien beauty and behaviours. They enrich the world by their presence. If I am going to allow them to breed, if I am going to let their generations progress into the future with each one slightly more suited to my land as I gently steer their evolution, then some will also need to die. My choice is to be the person who kills them.

And so I have.