Greenstorm's Journal

Two days of pottery classes learning teapots and after both days I come home and crash hard. I sleep and sleep and sleep and it's a challenge to get myself up the stairs or sometimes hold my phone, let alone lift anything heavier.

This is supposed to estrange me from my body. I'm supposed to be angry, frustrated with it, to stop believing it's an ally.

In dog training they say that behaviour is communication. My body is an ally. Together we experience joy and pleasure, this weekend and pretty much all days, in greater or lesser quantity. It supports me in taking care of it. When I consider there to be a need it bends its boundaries and allows them to be repaid later.

My society is not an ally. It proscribes the joy I'm supposed to be able to feel, reduces pleasure to a scarce commodity traded for a bucket list of abled activities. Like my body, my society has communicated with me through behaviour: when I have a need it will deny it and leave me without.

I've always been estranged from society. I have no interest in being estranged from my body. Human right or immense privilege, if food or shelter is withheld from me because of my body's capabilities that's not my body's fault. It's my society's. Likewise if joy is supposed to be accessed only through certain body abilities that's an external imposition. I've always had more things I'd like to do than I could reasonably do, both through number and ability. While this doesn't mean I have no loss or grief around some of them that is nothing new n my experience of life.

And so I stagger home to bed, fall asleep, wake up, type with my fingers burning, call the cat over to snuggle, and head back to sleep.

I do not understand how I can have so much trouble with most transitions, but also do so well with seasons. Still, I do well with seasons. I love the seasonality of this place. I'm fully ready for each season in turn to shift my focus and my activities. Maybe it's the predictability, the feeling of processing through familiar sets of activities and so I can improve or alter what I did previously but don't need to start again from nothing. Maybe it's the feeling of building on last season's work so I never feel disconnected from the past, and knowing next season will build on this season's work so I don't feel that abrupt slicing loss of transition.

Either way, gardening is pretty much over and I'm ok with that (!?!!!???? !! ? !). I have turnips, the last of the soup peas, and some beets to bring in. I have the favas to look over, and the beans to see if any pods ripened. It's been too dry for me to plant winter grains, I daren't run the tiller or I'll turn my soil into dust, so I'll till once the rains start and wait to plant grains till spring. Maybe I'll do a test patch of barley. I've dug one hole for next year's as-yet-unordered apple trees, and I'll try and at least half-dig the holes for all of them, so when they arrive in the thick of spring planting I can just bang them in the holes and be done. The freeze/thaw will loosen the soil at the edge of the holes and help prevent circling roots in my clay, too, and I won't have to remeasure my circles of protection.

I do still have a couple roses to put in the ground, and the garlic that isn't yet arrived, too. But still, hoses and nurturing and watching and trying to guess what'll happen-- that's over. I have a half-dozen dairy crates of corn drying in the woodstove room. There is another dairy crate of corn (saskatoon white) waiting to be shucked, and a crate of melons (none ripened on the vine, but I'm going to let them ripen as far as they can and take seeds from those that have fully formed seeds), and maybe 4 flats of green tomatoes (many of which ripened in the last couple days, gotta get on that). I have two shelves of squash, and outside there is half a bucket of beans and a bucket of cucumbers that need to be pickled.

The barley crop is in, a fact that needs its own post to describe how much of a joy and a relief it is. I don't grow barley but the farmers one town over do; that's why I mostly fed my pigs until this year's shortage. Straw is available, $55 per large bale (that's the 3 x 3 x 8' bales) and I'll be getting some the week Josh comes up and we'll figure out how to unload (normally it's tying the bale to a tree and driving the pickup away from the tree, but I'd like to stack them two deep).

With straw comes the ability to lay in my king stropheria mushroom bed for next spring. I need to put it in the shade, somewhere that doesn't flood. Problem is, the shade is what stays frozen till late in the year, I might split the block and try two places.

With the barley harvest comes barley. Rolled barley, or barley and oat chop, is $450/ton this year. The bagged feed I've been using is $1100/ton, and in the last month I went through a ton and a half of feed. So, just financially, this is a relief. I've been running a negative balance on my credit card the last couple months, just absorbing the higher feed costs, because I can't not feed the animals and I couldn't butcher while it was hot.

It's also a relief to have the barley, and soon the barley and oats, because feed makes a big difference to the texture of the animals' fat. Barley and oats make a firmer fat, while the bagged feed make a softer fat. I prefer the firmer fat. I've read a bunch on this, I guess feeding on acorns makes a softer fat which folks like more in prosciutto but which is not so great in bacon, for instance. Acorns also supply tannins, which keep the fat from going rancid as quickly (smoke does the same thing, which is why so much rustically-preserved pork is smoked). Soft fat is hard to manage for slicing thinly, it's hard to butcher with, and I'm not as fond of the texture for eating. I'm of half a mind to give the pigs a full month on barley before I butcher so the fat can convert a little, rather than get the butcher in as soon as possible. Honestly I may not be able to get the butcher up sooner anyhow, it's a busy season. And my mind may change once it starts freezing enough to put the hoses away and I need to carry water by hand for over a dozen pigs.

I also have four little uncastratated suckling pigs I need to slaughter as suckling pigs shortly. Three of the four are living in the lean-to greenhouse and associated enclosure in a life of luxury as of yesterday; I need to catch the last one and put him in there. I do hate catching piglets, they scream at just the wrong frequency for my nervous system and then the whole herd of pigs starts barking and grunting menacingly and following me around trying to rescue the babies. I understand why the bears stay away. I wouldif I could, my heart is always pounding by the end of it and it takes awhile for the adrenaline to dissipate.

I always tell myself I'll set up a big carrier with feed in it just outside the main pigpen so the escapee piglets get used to it, and then I can just close them in and carry them away. Maybe I'll actually do that this time? There is a new set of piglets this week, and one mama sow I'm very impressed with, she'll be a keeper.

So I suppose this is the season where my attention is turning from garden to animals, from harvest to slaughter, and then from there to seed sorting once the seeds are dried.

I'm also feeling the pull towards sewing, towards warm snuggly clothing. It's still a fairly recent revelation that clothing doesn't have to hurt my body as long as it's made of the right materials and tailored right, and I'm looking forward to playing around with that this winter. The gears are in motion for me to approach that activity in a seamless transition, nosing around at patterns, clearing a table for a sewing table, cutting out patterns, making a mock-up for loose leggings and one for a short sweater or wrap dress to wear over leggings, just a little bit of something every week as the snow comes and everything else subsides.

Meanwhile Tucker is here. I had wanted to do a bonfire with him, as I've intended to do every year for the last five or so, but the burning ban is still on despite the frost -- did I mention it's dry out? -- so maybe we'll try to just arrange the pile for his next visit. In the meantime I get snuggles and doubtless a shared brunch of two, which are much-needed.

I've come up with a lot of ways to handle being upset. I write, I talk it out, I distract, I sit and feel it, I dance it out, I connect with new things, I connect with old things, I connect with my garden, I find patterns, all sorts of strategies depending on what's going on.

I do not have great strategies for what to do when I'm happy. I usually have a strong impulse to share joy or to make a plan to hold it. What I don't know how to do is sit with the intensity of it. I also don't know how to share it. I don't do joyful projects with other people in part because I don't do projects with other people (Josh excepted) but if I did I wouldn't know-- if you share the experience of making something, how do you then share the experience of pride and happiness and future-anticipation and whatever with someone? Do you just sit around and assume they feel the same? Josh will sometimes (years later even) comment on how happy he is with the pigshed we made and I'm happy with it existing as a memory of time we spent together doing the project, thinking together and working together, but I don't know how to share that with him.

When I'm happy with someone, say we're sitting in the car singing together or lying next to each other being close or sitting around a fire toasting meat or far away not talking and they do something that makes me feel like the world is perfect and wonderful and the moment rings like good crystal, I'm not sure how to share that. I know how to do things to make people feel loved, to learn their love languages and give them those things, but that's about creating a feeling in them and not in sharing a feeling when I have it. And love is different than happiness anyhow, for most people it implies a set of prescribed actions and thoughts and I'm just talking about happiness, about joy.

And when I'm planting the seeds of tomatoes or peppers I've crossed and they come up and I've created something in partnership with these plants, my mind and the world together, I can turn the energy into plotting out the next steps in the breeding process to distract but I don't know how to just sit and hold that feeling without it being so intense and overwhelming. Same as people, really.

I can deflect, distract, pour that energy into trying to drive towards a future with more of the same but I can't, I don't know, inhabit it.

When I'm upset the world comes apart, but when I'm happy the world also comes apart. When I'm upset I can talk through it and get support but when I'm happy? I go into myself, where I'm alone. Maybe I can write and hope someone finds and relates to that message in a bottle flung into the internet. But how do I share that experience? Or, how do I share myself, when I'm happy? How do I remain close?

Sometimes I just cry, and am held, and maybe that's the closest I've got so far.

Sometimes I play, like a dog with zoomies will frolic, but my play is weird and usually focused on wordplay and absurdities and few people can meet me in that space.

Anyhow, I don't know how to do this and it's probably part of why joy tends to come with an edge, I guess the edge of isolation and loneliness.

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).

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.

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.

Ok, let's see if I can get back to some freewrites for awhile.

YChang's "The Struggle Continues" is gone from the internet, felled by the end of Adobe's flash player. I don't even remember how many years ago I found that, it was definitely before youtube, definitely before videos were a regular thing.

The struggle continues.

This morning I am unknotting my muscles one by one. I am breathing, in for three, hold for three, out for three, hold for three: like that. Lower my right shoulder a quarter-inch. Relax that side of my trapezius. Breathe again.

The sky is milky grey and dripping. Sometimes there's a single metallic drip sound from my chimney. There is a rooster out there calling the food call and a duck calling, maybe flirtily to a drake?

I am unknotting my mind a piece at a time. It's safe here. Without central heating the fridge is my usual source of background noise and it is blessedly quiet right now. I can hear the spaciousness of this main room, of the cathedral ceiling and out into the empty cluttered kitchen. A car drives by on the road. The highway is, for the moment, also silent.

I am letting my mind fall open like a mouse poking its nose out of a hole: twitching, waiting for cats. I am letting my mind fall open like a flower blooming in a jar: petals opening one-by-one to lie against the walls, a small bud eventually rumpling outwards to pack itself into the space.

It's cold here. My arms and thighs are tight with goosebumps. Yesterday I was too hot, too cold, too hot again, lightheaded, my arms had no strength. The latter is normal for me on and off, the former is not.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Put my shoulders back down a fraction of an inch; they'd risen again. Breathe in. There's resistance in my sternum, a prickling pressure that is only suffocating when I read it as physical. Breathe out. Breathe in.

The sky is dripping. I want to go lie between the rows of my tomatoes on the soil. I want to curl my knees up to my chest and feel warmth coming up into me from the ground, stored from the sun, but the ground is not warm right now and the sky is dripping. Once I've hauled a blanket out there to wrap around me it's just not the same.
( This is a long, stream of consciousness write )
My hands seem too heavy to move on the keys, maybe in part because of the cat on my arms. Maybe in part it's because I'm coming to the space that needs a pause.

It's ok. I'll still be here when I get back.

Today I got five new first fruits from the tomato trial: those green cherry tomatoes with seed saved from the grocery store, cole from annapolis seeds, the silvery fir tree from annapolis, sweet apertif from Casey's, the wild cherry thing I got from Corrie which is maybe from salt spring seeds, and a Brad which had ripened still in a transplant pot. Gonna save seeds from everything so I didn't eat them out in the garden.

Noticing the differences, collecting the fruit and the data, seeing everything next to each other and its fitness or lack thereof to my situation: this is the best thing. It's fulfillment and bone-deep joy and whatever happiness looks like.

My life still has other stuff in it that's at issue but my core is happy.

I just wish I could spend some hours talking with someone else who understood.

Took some time off work this morning and then went outside again after work this afternoon. Sun has just set and 'm resentful of coming in but so, so happy.

Did:

Some fencing.

Tilled part of the garden, that lovely tiller really does start up nicely. Going to do a starburst garden this year, I can see it from my deck so it'll look neat.

Tin roof on two pig sheds.

Made a third pig shed and put a tarp roof on.

Both of the above in the strong wind.

Put fresh hay in the pig sheds.

Plus the normal chores.

Brought all my plants in tonight after planting more flats earlier today and every surface is covered in plants. I even cleared my coffee table off so I could put plants on it. Just a couple more flats of melons and squash and I'll be at max transplants for the year, I think. Right now roughly 15 flats going in and out every day and 7 under lights inside.

These are the days I feel properly alive, properly a part of the world and my environment, perfectly suited to my life.

tOne of the things about living in the North is, fruits and veggies are super expensive. I've decided to grow most of my food by calories and that's led to certain decisions. If I had to grow most of my food by dollar value it would look very different.

In the summer and fall there's a ton of stuff to grow and forage, and in early winter all the pickles and sauerkraut and whatnot is great. By March, though, I get pretty tired of pickled or root veggies. This year I didn't do any microgreens but I did give myself permission to buy, not just veggies, but even whatever fruit I wanted at the store. I don't know if you've ever been poor, but spending $5-7/lb on okra or asparagus or red peppers when they barely have any caloric value is kind of an amazing luxury -- let alone spending $3/artichoke, or buying the expensive organic name brand apples.

But. It's spring. What does that mean? Today will be my first harvest of stinging nettles and dandelions (thank goodness for perennials and how quickly they get going) and the lamb's quarters is up and its seed leaves are almost parted enough to show a first true leaf in the greenhouse.

Today I did more indoor starts: my cucumbers (morden early, boston, and national pickling; suyo long; sweet success; and mideast peace), some poppies (ziar, red corn, hungarian breadseed, blue breadseed) and a couple melons (oka, sweet granite, and blacktail mountain watermelon). The melons are a gamble -- they'll only grow if it's an exceptionally hot year.

Still need to do my summer and winter squash and a couple more melons. Then it's only flowers left to do indoors, I think, except for a continuous half-dozen lettuces per week.

It's looking like we're getting some rain in the next couple days, and not just "40% chance of showers" but actual "rain". I'm working on getting a bunch of roofs up for the pigs in their new field and even some walls. That will keep me pretty busy this evening.

I also want to get some seeds in the ground outside before the rain tomorrow. We'll see if time allows but it would be great if so. My little tiller started up on the second pull after sitting all winter -- I didn't even winterize it! -- and the fence on last year's potato patch is coming along.

It's a good time of year. Now if only I didn't have to go to work in the meantime.