Greenstorm's Journal

Some things feel too delicate to talk about. There's movement, flow, warmth like a slight stirring but words are too heavy to sit on the current and they fall to the ground, dead, missing the actual point.

But this is a journal and I want the thing to be here. So. I'll approach this a little bit sideways.

I've been wading into the small-scale plant breeding community a tiny bit. I've been hanging out on the OSSI forum and that sort of thing.

I did some variety trials last year, mainly tomato but also wheat, corn, barley, squash.

I'm planning to be on this land awhile and build genetics that suit it. Also Northern BC and the North in general needs this work. Short-season plants are useful everywhere anyhow since they can often successfully pull off a crop before (insert your natural disaster here). So it makes sense to do this both in community and personally.

I've been looking for community generally.

Several months ago an online course about landrace breeding by the face of the movement floated by. It was free at the time, he and the person who put together the course were looking for folks to give feedback. I ignored it since I didn't have time to take a course and didn't really want to do feedback anyhow.

Recently the course floated by again for $15. I'd just renewed my mortgage and so I knew I'd be gardening here this year and I'm feeling increasingly like I may actually be here the long time I'd hoped. I'd been enjoying my involvement with the Canadian seed swap group and gardeners online generally. It's starting to be time to think about seed starting and I've been acquiring seeds and cataloguing my saved and leftovers from last year and starting to think about garden design. And, now and always, I love talking about my garden and the lessons it's taught me and my plans for the future; the space I'd been missing in those gardening groups was talking about the scope of my project and the way grexes and landraces don't live in the same descriptive space as cultivars.

So I bought the course and did it in two days. It was largely structured around videos, with some readings. The first readings were known information to me: descriptions of what a landrace is, why genetic variability and hyperlocal selection in populations is useful, descriptions of some of the Lofthouse projects. I can't tell how well they did on that because I knew this stuff already, it was just comfy reading of stuff I'd been putting together slowly over the last many years and decades of growing.

Then they got into practicals: how to evaluate, how to field-record, sample video of assessing tomatoes and squash etc and determine what and how much seed to save. They talked about goals for the landrace. There was some discussion of how to handle small spaces (not my issue!) and in all cases emphasis on local community involvement.

And THEN I got an email saying that the first monthly zoom call for folks who took the course would be last weekend. Its designed for folks who are doing this work to ask questions and solve problems together. I hopped on it and it was just--

I don't know how to say any of this. Joseph Lofthouse, the guy who heads up this thing, wears dirty skirts made from ripping open jeans and sewing them back together, and he has visible nipples through his shirt and bare feet in some of the videos. I think he's taken a vow of poverty as well? The call had folks from Poland, Finland, PNW, Australia, southern US, Scotland, more Canadian folks, just a really mixed bag of ethnicities and plenty of older folks as well as younger ones.

It's a space where I feel ok. I feel ok to be there I feel ok to be my physical self and not like I might slip up. I feel ok to talk about the things that are on my mind, which are 70% gardening. I feel like I can offer useful things, advice and seeds and wonderment at what people are thinking about and achieving, and like folks have useful things to offer me whether it's advice or just puzzlement over weird bits or seeds or just camaraderie. Some folks have tried a hundred more kinds of squash than I have! Some have tried none! And I feel perfectly ok leaving (she/it) on my zoom name there. It's just... ok.

I don't have to be performing hipsterism or gender or lifestyle in any particular way. I can express my enthusiasm and folks share it. We have similar background contextual information, so we can talk about details instead of filling in the scaffolding.

Someone showed the seed library she set up in her local actual library for folks to take. I'd been thinking of dropping off some seeds at my library for folks, since it doesn't look like there'll be a seedy Saturday seed exchange this year! That's awesome.

Oh, but anyhow, after the call and the course I realized there was access to a forum as part of the course. A bunch of the folks in the forum were on the call, but not all. It's a very young forum but pretty responsive. So that's hopeful.

And the course was maybe six hours of providing background so that I can maybe give it to folks and then be able to talk about what I'm doing with them afterwards, and have them understand.

The part of my heart that led me to get that first cactus on my 5th birthday, that made friends with the violets and cherry tree and lunaria in my little garden when I was 7, that planted shrubs and trees in houses that would never be my own and put a mutabilis rose in the community garden since there everyone could enjoy it and I could never have it, that built a greenhouse in the backyard of a rental house with every scrap of money that didn't go into food, that left the valley for my first solo vacation to go to a permaculture course-- that part of my heart has always been very solitary but especially lately.

Bits of my heart were fluttering with feeling kinship around some of the Indigenous seedkeepers for whom the plants are relatives; who have a kinship and personal emotional bond with their plants. I recognised myself in that but I am not Indigenous to this place nor do I come to my seeds based on bloodline or lineage; they come to me and we form our partnership over time. My life, like Indigenous seedkeepers, is about helping the seeds along. Unlike them, this separates me from my community and I don't have history to draw on around it.

Now, though, I feel like I have a place to stand with my love for these plants unveiled. Many of these folks also relate to plants as creatures, as living things to relate with. They're not mere background; they're not just means to the end. They are a joy and a meaning in themselves.

I've needed this place so much. I'm hopeful. I'm not certain, and I know nothing endures, but I am hopeful.

And hope wants to move quietly and cautiously in me so as not to be disappointed, but it also wants to shout and run and share.

So anyhow: if you're at all interested maybe take the Growing Modern Landraces at https://growingmodernlandraces.thinkific.com/

The general rule is: spend time and effort on something in proportion to how well it serves you, to how well it nourishes you, to how good it is for you.

It's so easy to forget, and it's so easy to lose sight of what something does for me underneath the layers of what I think I should do for something and under what I'm in the habit of doing.

Relationship is hardest for this.

If I were asked, would I sacrifice my happiness to make someone else completely happy? the answer might be yes some days. But the truth is that being unhappy is not supportive of someone, it's not helpful to them. It just freights more weight onto whatever they're doing. They can't trust you to care for yourself so they have to step back, guess, elide and carry that nebulous burden in addition to whatever they need to sort out for themselves at that time.

That kind of deal - my unhappiness for your happiness - is only good if it's cleanly communicated and truly agreed. Guessing at what makes someone else happy and then doing it for them without ever checking in, especially when the thing makes you unhappy, that's just a way for everyone to waste emotional resources.

I'm writing this because I'm seeking a guide.

Arranging clean trades, and having clean communication in general, is complicated by folks not knowing what they want and also by folks saying what they think you want to hear. In the former situation iteration makes sense and I find it reassuring: let's try this for so long and then check back. Let's collect data and update our plans based on that new data. I love data. In the latter situation there's no way out under your own control. You cannot make yourself know what someone else wants in order to take that into account. You cannot make someone tell you what they actually want instead of what they think you want to hear. I don't know how to be reassured in that scenario.

I'm writing this because I'm not reassured.

I've always believed that more, and more accurate, information on the part of all parties leads to better choices. The more someone tells you about how they feel, how they think, and what they want, the better decisions you can make together. This of course works both ways. When information is restricted a process becomes less collaborative; instead of creatively seeking situations that take all that information into account you're reduced to guessing blindly at what will work and saying no to what doesn't work for you. You're left with tearing down, with vetoing, instead of working together to build. It isolates us all.

I'm writing this because I'm a builder.

I know that not everything needs to be talked about before it happens. I know that structures, even good structures, can be set up through the gentle give-and-take of daily actions instead of through conversation. Conversation needs to have a place in my life though, and a big one.

And-- I like conversation. Conversation and gardening are the two hobbies I actually like. Everything else just follows from those. I like getting to know people. I like seeing what's in there, learning to understand how it goes together. That understanding, and the acceptance of it, is how I express my love.

Love for someone who keeps me out is impersonal, it lives with my love for people generally. It's the one way I know to make my more immediate feelings fade. People are or me, or they are not. If not, well there are plenty of folks who are if I can manage to find them.

I know this about myself. It's not new. It's not debatable. Things can always surprise me but there's no reason to expect things to be different.

Remember this.