Greenstorm's Journal

We can't plan to have lives together but I do feel loved. Even now.

I don't know what that means.

Maybe it's me having the same blind spot I see in people when they can't understand why I'd love another person too.

Also the network of people who care about me is definitely present and I'm much more mindful about using it.

What if everything does end up being ok?

What if, sometime in my life, there's once again someone from whom I don't need to guard my heart somehow?

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/

400 accessions and counting. Started Sweet Baby Jade tomato seeds. Should start my non-annuum peppers but I need to look up which ones need how many individuals to pollinate.

Ok. I made it through the last couple days. Cautiously, hopefully, the last week might have been the worst. It was that acute shock/loss thing where my emotional self just felt like TV static turned on extra loud all the time and I numbly went through the motions -- there were lots of motions, because a LOT of pig processing to do -- and I couldn't sleep well and I couldn't think about anything else and everything felt like numb exhaustion and pain. I mostly forgot the ends of sentences before I was done the beginning and I had no nouns.

Last night I slept 8 hours with only one brief waking, and instead of zombie-ing up to get back to work on pork I hung out and snuggled an chatted with Josh a bit. I still feel completely exhausted but I can think again and I have a self. It will at some point be ok. I may even get to actually connect with Josh rather than just do stuff beside him, that would be nice.

Frost was forecast for the garden last night and it didn't come, which is good because I didn't take in all the beans and tomatoes. I did bring in a couple potted peppers. We should have another clear week at least. Fall is coming fast. The dew was so heavy and chilly. Grasses are going golden.

Most of the primals are processed. I did a lot of chops and boneless tied roasts this time -- well, Josh ties the roasts -- and a bunch of canned tonkotsu stock. By the end of it I should have a 5 gallon bucket of lard rendered for soap, and a bunch of leaf/cooking lard too. The last couple pieces I want to break down for jerky and sausage. I'd really like to try making hot dogs, emulsified sausages are not something I've tried before and they're challenging. Also I want some more snacking cooked sausage, like garlic sausage, and I have a ton of bacon and a couple coppas and prosciuttinis to get in cure. So basically the play part begins.

Currently I may be trading some pork for some laying chickens, some pork for some roofing labour (though that will still be a lot of $$$), and some soap for some super beautiful jewelery a friend of mine makes (northern chickadee studio). That makes me feel a little better. Right now I'm hoarding a ridiculous amount of meat and I want it to make its way into the community.

Counseling shortly. My mind still isn't together enough to know what to say; the ability to think feels like a vastly underused muscle and so I can follow a piece of thought and then an anvil descends to weigh it down, but at least I'm thinking. I'm so, so glad my therapist is deeply poly. I need that perspective as I figure out what to do.

Right now I'm setting down the throughline of the relationship with Tucker, the constantly-in-this feeling. It was really hard to put down. I'm not sure if that's the thing I liked about it so much? What's left if I set it down? What do I want from the remaining relationship? If he's doing these trips a couple-three times a year and they're always this bad, is there a way to incorporate that information into a workable plan? Way back I'd tossed around the idea of having a relationship six months of the year or something, and just... not... the rest of the time. Would that help?

What do I do now?

What I can't do is just sit and wait for other people to change. That doesn't and hasn't worked.

So glad I hunted down this counselor, and so glad I'll get to talk to Kelsey on the weekend too.

Well, time to get at it.

Today I'm putting up some duck eggs as century eggs. They'll be put into a ratio of 1 litre water, 40g lye, and 60g salt. They should be in there from 3-4 weeks, then into a vac sealed bag.

I'll also be putting up some goose eggs similarly but haven't got a container for them yet.

I'm using 1- to 2- day old eggs, no older.

The duck eggs are clean and washed, the goose eggs are less consistently clean and are also washed.

Edited from the future: goose eggs didn't get done, try duck eggs 10 days next time.

Tasted and bottled some booze the other day. It's been quite awhile.

Blackcurrant port and Seville orange bochet are bottled, and they're lovely: the latter is off-dry and the former is nice and rich. I did the blackcurrant port when I was about to leave Vancouver, to use up the berries in my freezer before the move. I did the bochet also in Vancouver in March 2017, when I found a 40lb case of Seville oranges; that's when I bought my food processor to deal with them.

Sometimes hoping for the future pays off, and booze is such a good teacher in that regard. Need to do some more racking and see what else is good.

I'm planning the orchard. I've ordered birds (blue-egged quail, a greater breadth of breeding chanteclers and cayugas). All my seeds have arrived, mostly.

Preserving animals means worrying that no one will carry on after me, that my life's work will be lost because someone eats the pigs and doesn't keep breeding them or that there won't be enough genetic diversity to my geese and so the lines will die out (at least in north america).

Planting trees, though: that's weightless, and it's a rope into the future. I sit looking at my apple trees and wonder: who planted those? what types are they? what were they thinking when they placed them there? what did they do with the apples? I'm planting my apples on BUD118 and Antonovka, the trees could live a hundred or more years. I live in a place that is... not sheltered from climate change, though it is that, but resilient to it already. Someone will eat an apple that I plant, even if the moose eat most of the new growth when I am gone and the bears tear down most of the tree limbs. Or maybe by then we will be eating the bears.

So this year: I have all my animals, and I am planting trees.