Greenstorm's Journal

When I thought I might live down south originally I always envisioned a fairy ring of redwoods (sequoiadendron in my mind's eye, though sequoia may be more suitable to Sayward and metasequoia might be more suitable to this particular landscape arrangement) with phyllostacys edula, the giant moso bamboo, in a ring within that. In the very center there is perhaps an opening, a pond or a meadow wet enough to keep back the bamboo rhizomes, or maybe just the location from which shoots are harvested in spring.

I'd shelved that when I came up here. Now I'm wondering-- what would a realistic spacing on that be? It would be huge, of course. Vancouver is crawling with sequoiadendron planted in weird places and thriving anyhow. Snow would take down the bamboo but it wouldn't mind.

Hm.

I'm trying to sort out my animal situation.

Animals take a lot of constant work, unlike the garden which requires bursts of seasonal work. To some extent that constant work is important for me since it gets me up and moving every day. To some extent it's a problem, because it makes vacations etc difficult. To a large extent it can be ameliorated with infrastructure where more $ = more freedom. For instance the difference between hauling water from indoors, hauling water from the spigot on the side of the house, short-hosing water from a field standpipe right next to the pig field, and having an heated or geothermal automatic waterer is a tremendous gradient from a ton of daily work to a once-daily stroll. Likewise feed has a work gradient from shoveling off the truck and hauling daily through tractoring to the location and finally tractoring to automatic feeders.

I had hoped to be in a different place with infrastructure finances by now, but between my 2019 job loss and shift and the chimney/roof repairs and the covid/abattoir situation I am not. So it's time to make some decisions.

I love geese. I'm at 28 right now - white chinese, brown chinese, roman, pilgrim, embden, and saddleback. They're low-care except for winter water, and keeping them inside in the cold of winter and then in breeding pens is probably going to make my spring a lot better. When they were free-ranging in spring there were significant poop issues on my driveway. I'm happy to increase my goose population (highest ever was 44 and that's an ok summer number, as would be a slightly higher number). I'd like to add a couple brown chinese females, several classic roman geese (non-poof-headed), maybe one saddleback pair or trio, and eventually either cottom patch or shetland (shetland probably aren't genetically viable anymore and are thus a functionally dead breed, which is sad because I love them). They are almost all rare, they're great lawnmowers, I find them super rewarding. I think it's fair to cap myself at 1-2 males and 3-4 females of any of the breeds that aren't vanishingly rare, with a cap of maybe 3 males and 6 females of roman, saddleback, or shetland (hahahaha, that would be the largest or second-largest shetland flock in north america but I can dream) and only 2 very rare breeds in that case. I'm not concerned about having too many geese, really, except insofar as I have housing for them. They will always be worth the feed bill for me and a bunch of people seem to like the meat so I seem to be able to sell them ok.

Ducks are very hardy, good layers, and ornamental. They're entertaining. They smell weird. They mess up water. In winter they eat a lot, and they're expensive to slaughter. They make a really great size bird for me personally to eat, unlike a goose which is so huge. I'm involved in Anconas, which are a newly created breed, cayugas which are basically living jewels, the snowblower duck line which is excellent farm utility, and pekins which I want to incorporate into the snowblower line for size but hopefully retain some of the great laying/brooding qualities. So I do want to keep ducks, they can hang out with the geese in winter outside of breeding season, but I don't want to overwinter more than two dozen-ish. I can sell ducklings pretty well in spring if I hatch them out, and probably hatching eggs. Selling whole ducks for food is less worth it between abattoir costs and how small they are; adding some size to the line might help.

Chickens make chicken eggs, which I like scrambled or fried or mostly boiled (duck and goose are too rich for me when cooked that way, though I think I could get used to duck soy eggs). They also make chicken, which isn't super replaceable by other meats for a bunch of things. They're good at turning over the litter in ways ducks and geese don't, and they likewise turn the top inch of soil pretty well in a garden while de-bugging and removing weeds. I'm settled mostly into hardy breeds (chanteclers and americaunas) and the longer I keep breeding here the better I'll be. Keeping a couple chickens is great. Keeping a bunch of chickens is a pain, this despite the hatching eggs and chicks selling pretty well. A dozen or eighteen chickens with two to three roosters, replacing about half every year? That sounds about right. I'll keep playing with my chantecler/americauna mix with a bit of whatever will bulk them out a bit.

Dogs keep everyone safe, they stay.

Cats are not completely aligned animals, they catch some vermin which is good but I'm allergic to them which is bad. However, I have these cats and they live here now. I manage them by controlling access to parts of the house and I should probably get a hepa air filter.

All of the above need minimal alteration/infrastructure changes except maybe more goose houses. Now for the difficulties.

Pigs. Oof. I started pigs as tillers for the garden and they're fantastic like that. Like chickens they'll eat anything. Ossabaw pork is unrivaled and can't be bought. Lard for soap is a lot of fun. I really believe in this breed and it's vanishingly rare and getting rarer by the day with the way feed costs are going. They require the most outside inputs in terms of feed and I was going to say butchering help, but that's not entirely true. They require more labour from me for butchering because there's no one who can do them justice, who works on regular pigs. Handling 3' of backfat and a 2" loin eye instead of 7/8" backfat and a 4" loin is just... folks who butcher commercially run on muscle memory for grocery store cuts, and my pigs are nowhere near that even a little. Also castrating them is really, really emotionally difficult; there's a shot in europe you can give boars that essentially functions like castration and I wish that would hurry up and be approved here. Breeding is less controllable: with birds you remove the eggs and you don't get babies, sometimes you even need to put them in an incubator to make babies. With pigs it's super difficult to keep a boar separated from the females when they're in heat, both of them will go through most fencing, and then a boar can't be kept alone so he needs a companion, and she needs a companion, so that's at least four pigs if you're separating the boar. Pigs can be artificially inseminated but Ossabaws can't since there's no frozen semen for them. So anyhow, I really, really want to keep pigs on the landscape but they're a tremendous amount of work. I need to reduce the numbers I have and keep them low. I wish so much there was a vet within a couple hours that would castrate for me and/or that shot would be approved (I just looked this up and Improvest* was I think approved and starting pilot trials in 2010, it was in a 2016 piece of legislation that's now defunct, but I can't find it in modern legislation, gotta look into this more so this is super promising, it reduces boar taint and keeps girls from getting pregnant, this may let me keep pigs! Yay!). I also need to keep extending my fencing if I want to keep pigs and extend my gardens, but I guess that's true anyhow (I'm lookin' at you, deer/moose).

Muscovy ducks are not entirely practical here, but they are lovely. They're sweet animals, they make beautiful sounds, they're beautiful. Their feet will frostbite in ambient conditions in winter so they need to be confined either with electric heat or with deep-bedded compost. They make a completely different meat to other waterfowl, basically a clone for beef, they lay sporadically but prolifically when they lay, and they are good incubators. Locally there is a disease (?) which kills them when they are young and go out on the land, so they need to be kept indoors when young until they're a considerable age. So, these are an optional pet-slash-incubator, and they require an indoor either heated or deep-bedded composting space

Costurnix quail are weird in the practical/impractical scale. They lay like champs, year round, tremendous volumes of eggs by body weight. The eggs are annoying for practical purposes but really great in salad dressings, tartares, etc. A couple in a greenhouse are tremendous helps in reducing pests. They make lovely noises. They take up almost no space. They're fiddly to eat, have short lifespans, and need to be kept in groups with many more females than males so they're not the most practical meat animal. They need to be kept enclosed at all times since they have no sense. Their infrastructure is out of scale with everyone else's so they really need their own setup, though I'm having some success sharing a completely enclosed space with chickens. I'd love to have a couple in each greenhouse all summer, which requires the greenhouse be sealed, but it's hard for me to have animals for the summer and get rid of them over winter. Along with muscovies these are definitely on the luxury list. Unlike muscovies these are one-more-different-thing, since the muscovies can go in with chickens/ducks in a deep bedding situation, but also unlike muscovies they can be set up with significantly easy auto-feeders and auto-waterers.


Ok, those are the animals. Now what increases my capacity?

-Pig immunocastration shot. Look into this.
-Automatic feeders. Easy to make for birds, harder for pigs. Might be worth it to buy one in for pigs. Have to figure out how to keep them from being buried by deep bedding for the birds (deep bedding rises the floor by 2' slowly over the course of the winter). I should make the bird ones anyhow.
-Hand-filled automatic waterers. Easy for chickens or quail. Hard for waterfowl in winter (55-gallon-drum with a hole cut on the side?) but easy in summer, and not really a thing for pigs unless I built a tank that filled their bowl via float valve and somehow couldn't be destroyed.
-More livestock houses. Working on it one at a time.
-More rotational pastures. Working on one or two added per year.
-Standpipe by the barn. $$$. This might happen in the future but won't happen now.
-Tractor. See standpipe issues above.
-Plumbed-in automatic waterer. I should probably actually cost this out but it would make chores into basically floating on air and so I suspect it's nor affordable.

Ok, gonna let that marinate for a bit.

Today was another day in the bush. I went to a sample site I for sure had to do, fairly close to a quite disused logging road called the Kuzkwa South. This was south of where I'd been working before by about 20km. I had my suspicions halfway up the road and then recognised it very suddenly when an unmistakable cliff loomed through the trees.

Inzana is a wide bowl with lumpy soil-and-tree crusted lumps those 20km north.

The Kuzkwa South road snakes up and down and up and down with astonishing potholes and quick corners though abrupt topography until grey-streaked peach cliffs suddenly loom up on one side and a little lake sparkles downslope through the trees on the other. The cliff is fringed with rubust, healthy-looking douglas fir and the lake is ringed wit birch. Everything looks so inviting to play on: the rock cliffs look like they're easily climbable, fractured like ladders, though the long talus slope leading up to them suggests keeping to the edges and to the anchor-points of clumps of trees. The lake is so sparkly, not distant at all but not close enough to have road dust: it it looks like just ten minutes of climbing through trees to get there.

I'd been there once before, briefly, in 2015, for work as a summer student. That moment of coming around the corner and seeing the cliffs and the little lake, the highly interactive landscape, has never left me. The spot is only just shy of two hours' drive from town and only really 20km off the pavement (the last 10km is very slow!) and I was giving serious thought to going back there camping when a pickup appeared going up as I was going down. He didn't have a radio so we did the truck-negotiation of backing up into a wide spot so we could go past each other and I figured this was not the weekend to go up. Hunting season, also likely not great timing. I wouldn't want to do that road in snow either. It took careful maneuvering to get around some of those potholes without getting stuck even with them dry and with a lot of traction.

I'll still keep that place in my heart. There are so many places in my heart.

The actual spot I was working wasn't bad either: there were clumps of huge aspen trees, 30m or so (well, huge for the area) and a spaghnum wetland that was nearly dried out so I could squelch across it if I didn't stand too still: it opened out into a pond that was still filled with water. This is probably the only month I could have walked that wetland: it had aquatic weeds on one edge.

The road in had those improbably large moose tracks and an equally large wolf track dried into some of the mud.

It was just pretty. Nice. It felt like home. I listen to podcasts on my phone when I'm out since I've given up my project of memorizing poetry: it's important to make noise constantly when you're out so the bears know you're coming and can make good decisions.

I can see the shape of my loneliness best when I enjoy things. I want to go home, tell people about them, take someone out to see those sudden cliffs and go scrambling up them together. I want that not always -- some spaces are just for me -- but sometimes. I want the option.

Either way, the landscape is doing its best to comfort me these days and I appreciate it.

Last night I slept terribly. I woke up at 3am and showered because I felt gross. I only got a few hours of sleep altogether. It reminded me of when I was a pre-teen on paxil and I'd wake up at 2 or 3 and just... not sleep. Hours of breathing exercises and deliberately relaxing everything, night after night, and no sleep. Just more hours. No one told me that was a side effect.

That means I'm probably taking my pill too early; it's done that to me before. If I take it at 10am I seem to sleep fine the next day but if I take it at 7 or 8 I I wake up at 3 and am AWAKE for several hours, while feeling awful. Not recommended. It's basically impossible for me to do things at 10am though, at least things I need to carry an object for. I can't reliably take the pill in the bush. If I can get myself biking or yoga-ing on most non-field days I'm thinking about stepping down the pills to zero.

So anyhow, on no sleep I drove an hour and a half on honestly pretty good forestry roads with the summer student and we got to the block and... climbed something halfway between a rock face and a hill. I wish I knew more about the geography of the Inzana to tell you but I can describe the scene. The whole area is an old, old, lake bed and so it sweeps out in a long, gentle landscape ringed with what I think of as small, older mountains. It's not a valley, exactly, because it contains many riverlets. Instead it's a very shallow soup bowl.

We don't have smoke here so the air is hazy-blue and relatively clear; fall is coming and the light is already golden closer up which creates a great sense of scale. I don't think anyone can quite understand how much space there is here and how few people. Huge layered rocks round up into the valley at intervals of several miles. The one we climbed was the biggest one near and I didn't have to lean far forward to use my hands as we scrambled over fallen tree-trunks. Sometimes the rock broke through the soil, and the trees that fell brought up the scant few inches of topsoil with them.

Ringing this hill, this outcrop, this 30-minute-climb to the center of the world, there were moose swamps. They were mostly dried up but the occasional glint of blue water made it through brilliant green reeds; all was just little glimpses between tree trunks. Beyond that was cutblock and trees and swamp and cutblock like a patchwork draped inside the bowl of the Inzana. By contrast the top of the knoll was crispy, still green with kinickinnick but columned with a short open forest of chasm-barked dust-orange douglas fir and a few vivid birches. As the elevation fell off down the hill the trees were taller and taller, while on top they were scarce enough to give a little shade without obscuring the view in the least. Off the crown of the hill lodgepole pines joined the douglas fir and near the toe the pines remained but the douglas fir were replaced by moisture-seeking spruce.

Fall is coming. It wasn't loud with insects. There was no traffic hum. There was just the glint of occasional water through dusty trees. The Inzana stretched out all around.

Every area in Fort has its own particular character. Sakineche is mountanous with tall, narrow trees. Tchentlo is rich and lush with a riot of growth and huge trees mixed with little ones. The Kiwalli is pines on shallow hills like a prairie full of grass. The Cunningham is winding and hot and dotted with little lakes. But I think I love the Inzana the best, love that gentle patchwork bowl with its rocky crags long since ground into arcs by glaciers, love the water that lays out expanses of bright swamp, love the relatively sedate flow of its creeks.

Or maybe not? The Driftwood also lies close to my heart, densely forested and craggier with fire-scarred flanks of shallow mountains hemming it in and such fast-rushing streams that steam in fall mornings.

Then again, Mackenzie had so many beautiful places.

Anyhow, the climb was hard and we were on and off blowdown trees in shoulder-high bush, maybe a third of the time walking narrow trunks like balance beams or hitching over them when they crossed our path. I was tired and I hadn't slept and my body knew it, and my side felt and feels weird and my shoulders hurt because they'd been holding tension and then they had to hold my pack too.

But it was beautiful, and it was a place few people have ever been or ever will get to see, and it showed up for me today. I am grateful.

Today was the work flight. The world remains amazing from a helicopter. It's such a varied and intimate way of looking at the landscape.

We went up there with... my ipad. And. That was it. I had maps with waypoints that we used to navigate, and I pointed a lot. And I took lots of notes and pictures. It was a bumpy day; by the end of the 3 hours my stomach was a little displeased but that seemed to be pretty good: when I climbed out of the helicopter the pilot said admiringly, "you didn't puke or anything!"

And it was beautiful and free and lovely. I saw local communities I hadn't seen before. There were 300 swans, roughly, on the river between the two lakes where they overwinter. I got to think about something other than COVID and relationships. I got to ask the pilot, who's flown here for 2 generations, what's changed and what most surprised him.

When we flew over some of the many, many frozen lakes we saw lots of snowmobile tracks and a couple folks out walking. Speaking of social distancing, they were tiny specks on a huge empty shining surface. There were folks up in the back end of nowhere living in trailers. Many of these communities are from three to a dozen homes, speaking of social distancing.

In the world, several small communities have barred visitors: many islands in BC, more remote towns, and some First Nation reserves.

Meat and eggs are sold out of our local stores, but I saw a supply truck this morning so maybe not anymore? The liquor store is closed. I have a 5-gallon bucket half-full of eggs at home that gets fuller everyday and could put 250 pounds of pork cuts in my freezer out of my herd without batting an eye.

I need to do my tomato and pepper starts, I'm a week late at this point.

I have acorns growing. Maybe someday the oaks will feed another generation of pigs, will be ground into flour to ride out another person's isolation. First they need to get their roots into the ground.

Today was my first day in a helicopter. They're pretty normal for my line of work, not frequent but normal from time to time. Everyone is surprised I've worked in this field as long as I have without being up in one.

They are such an incredibly intimate tool to learn the landscape. We covered a lot of distance, but part of what we did was to count swans on the river and look at individual pine germinants, couple-centimeter-tall trees, on forests that had been burnt by wildfire.

They allow you to transcend the limitations of space and scale in ways I hadn't imagined.

I love this area. I love the mountains with rocky snowy peaks and whitebark pine; I love the wide generous valleys; I love the hills with cobbled slopes that catch the sun. We spotted about twenty moose and spent five minutes in an area I'd struggled to walk around one small part of for an entire day. I saw forests that used to be meadows: our pilot's family had lived in this area for a couple generations.

There was snow on the ground, not deep but great for contrast. There was a perfectly blue sky with sun. Low clouds and mist lay along the so-many-lakes here: Takla Lake, Tchentlo Lake, Pinchi Lake, Hatdudatehl Lake, Purvis Lake, Stuart Lake. They were all trying to freeze but the water was still warmer than the air so they streamed cloud up to hide themselves.

My connection to this landscape is so private, intimate, and important to my soul. So much of the trip I was thinking, I can't take pictures because this moment is sacred just to me. So many of the pictures would mean nothing to you.

I took some anyhow, to remember.