Greenstorm's Journal

Permaculture says "the problem is the solution" and "produce no waste" and honestly, even though these aspen trees on the south side of my house are a problem (shading the garden, getting into the septic line) they can be the solution to many things. Turned into woodchips, they'd be very useful for mulching etc. And.

I ordered a bunch of mushroom spawn, so when Josh comes up this fall we'll take down the ones we can without hitting the house or the power lines, and we'll innoculate them with shiitake and oyster mushrooms. This is another multi-year project, they won't fruit for a couple years, but since I'm here I'm going to do it. I also got a small amount of lion's mane and bear's head plug spawn, which will need to go into a conifer, and I do have some spare spruce.

The plan is to put the logs behind the goose shed, in the dip between the bird shed and the pig field. Water runs through there in spring and it tends to stay humid, it's shaded, it holds snow for insulation, and mom and I recently cleared it out so it's a space waiting for a use. It does have a bunch of coppiced/polarded willows, some very nice wild roses, and some saskatoon berries. All of those should be fine growing around the logs and keeping humidity up while the mycelia colonize their food source.

The logs should take a couple years to produce (shiitakes take longer, oyster shorter) and then should produce for a number of years. By the time they're a couple years from done, I should have a new crop of aspen trees looking to be taken down. So that's nice.

I'm also getting some winecap/king stropheria/garden giants to sow in a woodchip mulch in my garden bed.

As a plant person I've tried very hard to find hardiness ratings for the various fungi but haven't been able to. It seems like it might just not be an issue other than the tropical pink oysters, which I'm staying away from. I know the lion's mane and many oysters grow wild here. So, fingers crossed, but it is an experiment as is everything I do (I'm trying two kinds of shiitake, and two kinds of oyster mushrooms, too).

Incidentally, what I'm pretty sure are button mushrooms have sown themselves in the main pigpen and a little in the back field, colonizing the straw spillover from the pighouse in the main pigpen. At least, white mushrooms come up and grow there in spring and fall. It makes sense they'd have come from the expired grocery store produce; I only wish I had a clear ID on them so I could eat them.

I haven’t had a chance to edit yet but I want to get this up.

Okay, going back to basics a little bit. I'm going to dig into some of the foundational ideas as I tend to apply them, and clarify my thinking as they apply to Threshold etc. I was looking for some 101 articles for a friend and couldn’t find any that thought on an appropriate scale. It looks like folks minimize or discard parts they find inconvenient or grapple with, but I think the thing really sings better as a whole. Permaculture is often thought of as a garden or land design method, but it really is a design method in general: these same principles can inform the construction of built human environment, social structures, etc.

Ethics

Land care can be reductively thought of as maintaining the wellness of the land under stewardship, or reducing inputs or chemicals. The soil, atmosphere, water quality, etc should improve over time, both the parts of the world you have direct impact on and the indirect impacts you can shape in any way. Permaculturalists don’t put off this work until this or that eventuality, it is the foundational first principle. IME care is allowed to have its fullest meaning here: yes, work to the betterment of that land and the system it contains, but also allow your heart into it. Feel about the land and it will help guide your actions and bring you to understand what improvement actually looks like.

People care means actively building people’s well-being into the system: your own well-being (you are a people) and those of community near and far. This can mean anything from not setting yourself up for overwork to bringing your neighbour some eggs so they don’t mind your dog barking to making sure the folks who produce your tomatoes get a living wage, but more foundationally it means we’re not just gardening here. See and consider the people involved and use what you do to be kind rather than to be escapist. We’re all dependent on the people around us to live; a resilient and long-lived system therefore maintains other people’s well-being.

Fair share stands directly opposed to our current capitalist instinct to amass value. Instead it leads us to protect ourselves, not by hoarding, but by protecting those around us: the world is capable of bestowing tremendous and unpredictable abundance; if we keep what we need and share that abundance we’re building a community ethic that’s far more protective of us during times of unpredictable scarcity. This ethic builds resilience into the system for individuals, but it also builds efficiency into the system around the need for storage, uneven but intense work demanded by the land, distribution of specialized knowledge, and ability to average production levels across many people and systems.

Principles
Many of these somewhat overlap. I’ll try not to be too repetitive, but I’ll flag where I think they most strongly feed back into each other.

Observe andinteract is interpreted, often, as sitting back for the first year on a new property to see what happens where. Certainly it emphasizes the importance of not coming to a place with the template you carry in your head on what your space should look like; instead look around and let the particular characteristics of place inform the systems structure and outputs. But! It’s also easy to get lost in watching. You are part of this system, and you can’t entirely learn about it just by sitting back and watching. Try things, small slow things, and see what happens. Learn from that interaction through observation, then interact again. Think of this as a series of conversations between you and the land: you need to both listen and speak to have a good conversation. Do both. This links up to accept feedback which is gained through observation, notice and respond to change, and understand what in your space is a truly renewable resource. Don’t forget to observe, not just the plants and animals and weather and sun patterns on the land, but also the people nearby and what works for them on both a practical and social level.

Catch and store energy of course speaks to systems like passive solar and storing water on the highest feasible point on the property so it doesn’t need to be pumped upwards to work. I also think of it as storing personal energy: when you have a burst of wanting to work outdoors or think about the system, put that to use instead of letting it drain away. It’s easier to catch energy if the system focuses on work you like to do rather than what you dislike; I don’t like weeding or mowing so I have a low-weeding system mowed by geese, and I do like occasionally scything weeds and feeding geese. In this way things that might drain away my energy, like weeding, are replaced by something that works with my natural interest and energy cycles, like big bursts of feeding pigs scythed weeds. This rides on the back of the fundamental observation to know where and how energy flows through the system, where it gets stuck, where and how it originates. Energy is the fundamental building block of renewable resources and they will store it in a good design, similar to how my aspen saplings go from an energy drain (cutting them all the time to keep my lawn free) to a source of abundance (cutting them once a year to chip for chicken runs or pig food, or every couple years for biomass). Waste is unstored, uncaptured energy, so producing no waste keeps the energy in the system.

Obtain a yield stands with interacting in that it situates you as part of the system. Permaculture is not an intellectual exercise. It’s a way to design systems that work. A system works if it produces some sort of abundance. A lot has been written on the way a yield might be beauty or appreciation or relaxation; it can also be food and learning. I want to tie this into the permaculture tool of function stacking though: everything in the system should serve multiple purposes (the guideline is at least 3) so everything should be producing yields for everything else. Make sure you’re a part of that system, and that you’re not shy about taking what you need from it. This is the way the system continues: if it doesn’t provide for you in the form of satisfaction, joy, food, money, whatever-- you won’t keep doing it. That’s just basic sustainability.

Apply self-regulation and accept feedback because you won’t get it right the first, second, third, fourth, or millionth time. Plan for an iterative process with lots of observation. Small and slow changes, allow for course correctiona and deep observation to inform them.. There is a lot to learn about how all the elements in the system interact. Change is a constant. Your system is never finished, it’s constantly moving and you are required to constantly learn with it. Use self-regulation and don’t lead with all your resources even when it’s so exciting in the beginning; don’t be crushed when things don’t work out as you’d hoped. Save some space, time, money, and energy for the next step, when you know a little more. The land and the system are excellent teachers full of free lessons, that is, feedback.

Use and value renewable resources (and abundance) can be read as just, substitute electricity or wind power for gas. When capturing energy well and using small and slow solutions instead of large-scale industrial solutions, though, this principle takes on another meaning. Observe what’s available in abundance in the system. What recurs? What is there so much of that it feels like waste? What can it do? Design your system around that, even if it’s not the system you expected going into the process. Every site is different and every steward is different, so every system will have different resources of value, and different levels of abundance and renewability in them. I have an abundance of water and grass so I use geese as my lawnmowers; they incidentally produce a yield. Understand the difference between this and a solar-powered lawn-cutting robot and a hand mower and a sheep and just not having a lawn. Each one of these relies on different personal, ecological, and industrial resources.

Produce no waste because waste is a sign of an inefficient system. Building these systems is a real intellectual and observational exercise and requires a lot of learning through iterated design and feedback. It takes time to observe waste in a system, rethink it as a renewable resource and figure out how to incorporate it either with intervention or by letting it flow itself back into a system that you add complication to. But producing no waste is also a support to the ethics of land care - to not treating some other place as a dumping ground for undesirable leftovers. In a lot of ways it just means that putting on permaculture lenses turns waste into a yield.

Design from patterns to details is direction for those of us who tend to get lost at one end or the other of the scale. Sure, this one trick is cool, but does it serve the greater pattern? Sure, the greater pattern sounds great, but can it be supported by detail? And detail must be supported by observations for a robust system, and will sometimes not work out, thus giving us valuable feedback and prompting us to change the system over time on both our anticipated pattern and in the details that make it up.

Integrate rather than segregate goes a lot of western thought. One of the reasons given for the colonization of the Americas was that when plants and animals were integrated in space and time we could not understand them as a human-developed, productive system. Learn the relationships between all elements in a system, how and what types of energy flow between them, and how to translate it into abundance elsewhere in the system rather than waste. This in turn can be efficient with energy as natural forces can take over a lot of our work: drop leaves into mulch where they grow to feed a neighbouring plant instead of being carted away to compost and then carted back, run the pigs through the orchard rather than picking up all the apples and moving them. Integrating well, rather than setting up a competing set of individuals, should draw from a good observational knowledge of the elements and is supported by the tool of function stacking.

Use small and slow solutions to learn through observation and feedback and also to reduce the sunk cost fallacy and thus resistance to change. Holding some energy in reserve, be it physical, financial, or emotional, reduces the system’s immediate impact on the land. That energy comes from somewhere, and it will have an impact on the landscape in proportion to the amount of energy used. Fast solutions are flashy and attractive but they don’t grow with the landscape, they tend to leave a hole somewhere else in the world and thus violate the ethic of land care, and -- if something does well in your system it will often self-propagate or grow somewhat easily, reducing the resources required in the end.

Use and value diversity is a hard one for me to speak to because diversity is a joy in itself for me. I think it goes without saying at this point that diversity increases resilience, that when you have many different resources then if one fails the others can still provide: in a wet year maybe the corn does well but the squash fails, or the early corn dries but the late one molds in the field. Diversity allows for more building blocks for the tool of function stacking, which allows the system to catch and store many different kinds of energy and reduce waste when the elements are well integrated. But also: diversity is beautiful. Many of us are just drawn to variety, to a corn with varied colouring or a meal with many elements, and that is a yieldin itself.

Use edges and value the marginal which is basically how to integrate instead of segregating diversity in a slow and small way. When things bump up against each other they can interact, each one lending its own properties to the specific edge between it and its neighbour. This overlap creates a unique set of properties, a diversity of combinations from which surprising properties can arise. Margins are where the elements of the system web into the system itself.

Creatively use and respond to change because change is the one certainty. It is going to happen. A system that doesn’t anticipate and embrace change is a dead system; a system that sees change as an asset and a resource will always have plenty of resources - change is definitely a renewable resource. Resilience and sustainability are a measure of how well a system takes advantage of the inevitability of change. On the other hand change is generative; it opens up opportunities which will allow a system to improve, even if it needs to break first.

Tools

Zones & sectors are a method of understanding energy flow in a system: where is it easiest to apply human energy and attention, and when energy comes in where does it come from, in what forms and what patterns?

Function stacking - input, output, time means that anything within the system should serve more than one function, and that things which provide functions should be appropriately spread over time. For instance, a plant may provide food, shade, and mulch; in turn food plants should ripen across the whole season if you want to eat off them as fresh food, or all at once if you want to have a canning bee. A pond may provide potential energy storage, water storage, plant habitat, heat storage, and fish habitat. The further a designer takes this principle, the more they can see subtle function interdependencies, the more they will understand their system and be able to optimize it.

View relationships, not objects which I think is basically what the above is describing.

Alright. So it's my job as a land steward to create a system that fits into the larger ecosystem. Sometimes that's fun and easy. Sometimes it's challenging. With the crows, obviously, it's challenging.

Here's a first brainstorming run:

Like with coyotes, crows are smart and it makes sense to cultivate a resident population that has behaviours that help me and that don't harm. My friend T had a raven issue (apparently where they are ravens are territorial, here I get a ton of them) and they killed the problem ravens, then had a pair of ravens move in that didn't do those behavioural issues. Having crows here does keep ravens away, which helps for not having farrowing pigs eaten but causes obvious crop problems.

So categorically, options seem to be trying to keep all ravens away through killing them or scaring them (this seems unlikely to work long-term since if I kill them more will move in, and scare-based stuff tends to loose effectiveness over time unless I get a bird-chasing dog or something); training them not to go after my corn; or making my corn inaccessible somehow. A fourth option, giving them something else nicer to eat, isn't a real option because of how population dynamics works: they'll just keep multiplying until they can eat both my garden and my offered decoy food.

I suspect what works will be a combination of these things. I definitely prefer less infrastructure and inputs, and will be working towards breeding corns that the crows tend not to bother (taste? strong roots before a shoot comes up so they can't be pulled? who knows what the plants will figure out) but I need enough seed for heavy selection to make this work.

Right now cost is a bigger issue for me than amount of input, I think. I also like to reduce plastic use, especially short-lifespan plastics.

Killing/Scaring

Killing the current set *might* cause a different set to move in that doesn't have the learning that pulling up corn is fun.

Keeping the pig and bird food extremely tightly controlled so they can't eat any of it ever might help keep the population low and the level of interest in my garden commensurately low. This would involve a bunch of infrastructure: each field would need an enclosed pig feeding structure (or maybe only in winter and early spring, since that's when I'd expect the most starvation to occur). Birds are easier to make an enclosed feed structure for but harder to exclude crows from that structure since they are also birds. There is almost always some kind of food the birds get at when I do grocery pickup at the store, grocery pickup might be a casualty of this or I'd need additional indoor shed space to store the food plus the garbage it makes.

Scaring crows involves movement, noise, and things that look like predators. A dog that chases crows would be great, though keeping it out of the garden would be important and I have trouble imagining how to keep it hostile towards them instead of acclimatizing over time. It's possible that a radio and some gunshot noises or something that sounds like people and bangs, if deployed only during the seeding window, would help keep them away for a season or two before they figured it out. It might be a helpful layer of control but certainly not dependable.

Almost everyone recommends killing one and hanging it up to scare them, or getting "halloween crows" to hang up, whatever those are.

Training

Maybe it makes more sense to call this "convincing" the crows.

If there's something that makes the corn taste bad maybe the birds would stay away from it. Since I do a pre-soak anyhow it wouldn't be difficult to soak it in something. I see there is a commercial repellant called "avipel" that I would need to look into.

The crows aren't eating the kernels at this point, but it's possible that if I low-level poisoned some and set them out (think stomachache, not death) then the crows would leave the corn alone in future, or maybe if I set some out each year before seeding. That has some drawbacks: dose so as not to kill anything is important, I'm neither looking to kill them nor to get bad stuff into the food chain, I'm not sure what would produce that effect, if the poisoning agent had a scent maybe the crows would just not eat whatever smelled like that.

I have limited water pressure and power up there, but there are motion-activated squirting devices that are supposed to also deter deer etc. I'm not sure how well they work, or whether the crows could outsmart them, and they're not cheap, but I've been considering them for a couple years now.

Maybe running an electric fence wire right over the row of corn might shock them if they couldn't avoid touching it when they pulled the corn up? Not sure how well grounded crows are and this would take infrastructure.

Removing Access

Floating row cover is working best for me this year, but it's a consumable plastic item (lasts a couple years) that also costs money. It does make the corn grow faster and protect from frost. They do seem to try pulling the corn up when it comes off but there must be a size where they give up on that. I have 5' wide strips right now, square blankets that would cover most of my garden at once would make it easier to keep bird out from the edges. This costs money.

Piles of twiggy branches may help keep the crows from getting at the beds, or if they can make their way into the twigs (they do move through trees no problem, after all) it can keep them from flying away quickly so maybe they will feel unsafe/I'll be able to get one with a pellet rifle and then they'll feel unsafe.

Netting over the field would also help with harvest time, since I suspect I'll have an even bigger battle there even if I bag each corn ear. This would involve a lot of posts for infrastructure, and I think there are some downsides for small birds (they can get caught in the mesh?). Posts are something like $15-20 apiece right now, this isn't a cheap option.

Polytunnels, either high or low tunnels, with either mesh or actual poly on them: these are expensive, they'd mess with my breeding a little bit (if I used poly they'd be warmer so I'd get better crops), they'd need irrigation inside. On the other hand they'd do the job, they could function as barriers to cross-pollination so I could control that better, high tunnels might be good overwinter spaces, I could grow way more stuff, they're generally great. These would also need irrigation if they have poly on them.

Hilling, which I did this year, involves pulling soil up against the stem once the corn is a couple inches tall. If only the leaves are sticking out, the birds can't grab the base of the stem to strategically pull out the roots and the plant is less likely to be injured, plus they just don't seem to go after them as much once hilled. This is cheap, a little labour intensive, and only works once the corn is a couple inches tall so it needs to be got to that point to start (maybe through row cover or a bad smell/taste).

Deep planting is what I tried doing this year, putting the seed in deep and tromping the soil down around it fairly firmly so it's not easy to grab the seedling and pull up the root but instead the top just breaks off. The crows wait until rain/watering when the soil is soft to pull, but it seems to still help and allows for some regrowth at least.

Mulch isn't precisely a barrier, but I tried putting fresh green mulch down in the hopes the crows would have trouble seeing the new sprouts to pull. Because they slowly walk across the field from one end to the other this didn't help much; they're not just flying over and spotting things that way. Also I know the infrared on dying plants (like ones cut for mulch) is much different than on healthy ones and I'm not sure how crows' vision is.

It's possible a deep straw mulch would be helpful at obscuring the seedlings until they were too big to pull. It would soften the ground, making it easier to pull. On the other hand it would add organic matter and retain moisture so it would be good for the plants, and big bales of straw are relatively cheap, though they're labour-intensive and need to be bought the fall before.

Someone mentioned that they plant into their weeds, making a little 8" wide opening and putting in several kernels of seed, then only weeding the rest of the weeds when the corn is a foot high or so.

I've noticed that two plants growing close together are less likely to be pulled up than plants evenly spaced. Maybe put 2-3 kernels together per foot, instead of spacing 4-6" in the row?

The crows didn't really touch my Saskatoon White. I wonder if that was a fluke or if it means I should just grow more Saskatoon White?

Today this went into pots, last part of the entry is where seeds were grown. Specifically aiming to sow my own seeds anywhere I saved them, vs leftovers from previous years. The tomatoes are to maybe do some crosses before the heaviest of summer hits or are microdwarfs.

Onion Andy's green mountain multiplier, Experimental Farm Network
Tomato Bloody butcher, Myself
Tomato Bunny hop, Growers blend
Tomato Carbon, Secret Seed Cartel
Prickly pear Colorado, Experimental Farm Network
Dahlia Dahlia coccinea, Cultivariable
Sorrel French sorrel, Julie fb
Tomato Tasty firm bicolour grape/berry, Myself
Tomato Grocery Store Green, Myself
Tomato Hardins mini, Growers blend
Tomato KARMA miracle, Myself
Tomato KARMA purple?, Myself
Tomato Lime Green Salad, Myself
Tomato Lucinda, Woodland creations
Tomato Mikado Black, Myself
Tomato Minsk Early, Myself
Tomato Native sun, Myself
Tomato Pygmy, Growers blend
Tomato Ron's carbon copy, Myself
Herb sage, Stokes
Onion Shallot multiplier, Steph OSSI forum
Tomato Silvery fir tree annapolis originally, Myself
Root Skirret, Experimental Farm Network
Sorrel Sorrel, Richters
Daylily Stella D'Oro, Lisa Allard
Tomato Sweet cheriette, Myself
Tomato Taiga, Myself
Herb thyme, Richters
Sorrel Transylvanian sorrel, Adaptive
Tomato Uralskiy Ranniy Myself
Prickly pear Vineland hardy, Experimental Farm Network
Rhubarb Victoria homestead, Seed treasures
Tomato Zesty small green tom (karma miracle?), Myself
Tomato Weird promiscuous green berry firm reddens tropical, Myself

Because I did this, the stirrings of "maybe someone will buy a place in the lower mainland and want me to move there" have recommenced this afternoon. We'll see what happens. I'll keep planting; peppers in March, Tomatoes 1st of April.

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.

Further to my last post, the friends I do want to keep close are nearly all in some sort of depressive/emotional crisis. Most of them are externalizing it too, which means they're still in the "the world is objectively terrible and so I have to be emotionally destroyed and nothing can be done" which is-- I mean, that's where it's depression and not the much more manageable grief and feelings about change that one honours and uses to inform one's continued *living*. It's mirrored so similarly in so many people. Folks wrote about the covid mental health crisis months ago but right now it's worse than I've seen it.

In a lot of ways it feels like my society has become a death cult that cannot acknowledge the existence of death or change. It sits there staring at the drain it's circling, waiting to be sucked down, throwing the stopper as far away from itself as it can manage. Everyone wants it to be over but not too many people want to build anything after; they hope that if that dies then the next thing will just happen. Systems that are good for humans don't just happen; they take deliberate organization and work and compromise.

And I've always found the best way to make a change is to add something better to replace the thing I want removed. It's a bit of a permaculture concept too: design for the way that people behave naturally, for the way energy naturally flows, and the system will be more robust. Instead of removing caffeinated drinks from the diet, try adding non-caffeinated drinks you love. Instead of yelling at yourself internally to just put the thing away, make a good spot for it to live close to where it's used. Instead of struggling not to call your mean ex, make a standing date with a friend or friends for the particular time of day when your willpower is lowest. Introduce better things and they will displace the bad things. It just takes a but of thought to know what it is you're seeking in the thing to be replaced, and make sure that your alternative has a way for that need to get satisfied. With that thought up front, the rest just ...flows.

Which is maybe why everything feels like it's dying in my little social sphere. There's so much disassembly and so little building. For all that I live very present with death around me in the systems I manage I am a builder, and I like to contribute to building good systems or, maybe better, supporting folks who build.

Anyhow, in the midst of this I extra appreciate Josh. He's always broken the mold for folks I tend to spend time with and this doesn't seem to be getting to him in the same way it's getting to ...everyone else.

Depression has always been my greatest nemesis: it takes all my friends and loved ones from me year after year after year. They struggle, they resurface, I get them back sometimes but so much is lost. In the past I've promised myself I wouldn't date folks who are prone to depression, or who are prone to depression and who don't have explicit ways of handling it when it comes up other than to numbly wait until it subsides. I hadn't extended that to friends, though, and I guess the above principle still applies: if I'm removing those folks, who am I replacing them with?

But. What I really want, I guess, is folks who can lift their eyes towards something meaningful to them and who find satisfaction? in moving towards it.

As the poem says,

"With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy."

I've been listing my multivariety tests here, so. Haskaps (also called honeyberries or I think they have about a thousand other common names) are a pretty hardy berry in the honeysuckle family that was grown a little in Japan and Russia. A number of years ago the University of Saskatchewan and then a couple places in the states started breeding them, to alter the only moderately palatable berry and kind of inconvenient growth form into a potentially commercial berry.

They don't grow well where most people live -- my understanding is that in zone 8 or higher, maybe even zone 7, they perform poorly. But they are very happy campers up here, even surviving a couple years in 1 gallon containers through the winter. Their flowers are frost-resistant down to -7, so a late frost doesn't destroy the crop, and most of the berries are done by July. My observation is that hummingbirds love the yellow elongated bell-shaped flowers, and they do seem to bloom about when the hummingbirds come through.

They don't self-pollinate, so you need a couple, and they don't all bloom at the same time so if you get only a couple you need to be sure they bloom in the same window.

I got a couple haskap bushes awhile back, but this year I treated myself to some plugs of many varieties. They're going to end up in the west side of the pigpen. Here's what I have, with breeder. They're in plugs unless otherwise specified.

Haskap/honeyberry varieties:

Borealis (1 gal) (U Sask)
Tundra (1 gal) (U Sask)
Boreal Blizzard (U Sask)
Boreal Beast (U Sask)
Boreal Beauty (U Sask)
Blue Treasure (Berries Unlimited)
Aurora (U Sask)
Honey Bee (U Sask)
Blue Banana (Berries Unlimited)
Wojtek (Polish)
Giant's Heart (Berries Unlimited)
Strawberry Sensation (Berries Unlimited)
Zojka (Polish)
Kapu (Maxine Thompson)
Tana (Maxine Thompson)
Berry Blue (Russian)

I'm mostly going to talk about pigs.

So I don't have a nearby pig mentor. I do a lot of internet learning, some common sense stuff, some panic internet learning, and some talking to folks who live in the area. I don't think I know anyone nearby who farrows (breeds) their own pigs, though. At least no one within cell and internet service -- pigs make a great off-grid animal.

And there are very few folks around who have Ossabaws - half the size of a normal pig and half the domestication, I understand. In fact, I think I only know of 3 others in the province, and maybe a couple on the other coast.

Some things I can learn by paying money - I can take the piglets to the vet and get the vet to teach me to castrate, for instance.

Some things I can learn by chatting with local people - like how pigs will bury themselves in hay or straw when it gets cold, so they can overwinter around here really well. Keep a draught- and moisture-free house and when there are enough of them they don't even seem to need their extra straw.

Some things I can learn from the internet, like how mama pigs make a kind of terrifying contented noise when all is going well.

Some things are more nuanced, though, and come from my own pigs and my own situation. For instance, Rapunzel and Nox co-raised their last set of babies. When I set up a farrowing hut I assumed they would share. They did not share, Nox had her babies in the barn, and I think they either got squished by the other pigs, eaten by the other pigs, or... it seems unlikely she just had the one, and that one didn't make it.

The males definitely come into interest in breeding by 3 months, and they definitely have boar taint by 6 months.

Piglets, when they're just born, always look like they are going to die any minute now. Some animals are born without fur, fat and wiggly, and they kind of look like they should be helpless. My piglets (ossabaws are very hairy pigs, so YMMV) are born with enough hair and fully-formed enough that they look like they should be able to run around immediately, and they kind of can. You can see their ribs, and their hind legs don't work quite right, but they have fully formed hooves and ears and their eyes are open. Every time I think I'm going to lose them, even Rapunzel's piglets which have tripled in size since they were born on christmas eve just short of a week ago.

My girls always seem to get very affectionate right before they farrow. The week before they all want lots of ear scratches and snuggles. This is without me giving particular treats or anything like that.

The boar checks on new babies and any weird happenings. When babies are very new he checks on them every 10 mins to half an hour, maybe for the first couple days. Every time I went up to the babies he'd come up, see who I was, and wander away. It's only my junior boar who chases away ravens, but that one is not very friendly with me and I need to get rid of him before he grows tusks.

Piglets are very skittish when they're babies. They mellow out some if you handle them as they get older, but the first ten weeks are kind of a write-off. Well, maybe the first two weeks are fine.

These pigs seem to hit a hundred pounds live weight at six months and have very nice fat proportion at that time.

Pig fat texture will vary depending on what you feed.

At the moment I have my original group - the boar, who is half from Big Red, and four very diverse sows. They're all a little over a year now, the boar a bit younger than the sows. I have three left from the first litters, out of Nox and Rapunzel - one gilt, Apricot, who I want to keep; one boar who I want to either castrate and eat, or just feed to the dogs (the dogs do like pork roasts!), and one gilt who I will eat eventually. I have ten from the Penny and Sparky litter, with four boarlets who need castrating and six gilts. And this last litter, of Rapunzel's, has three boarlets and 3 gilts.

That's quite a pipeline. People around here seem to want pork, but I am still very uncertain about hauling them offsite for slaughter. Here they don't have much of a traumatic experience at all. Sales aren't legal when the animals are slaughtered onsite, and I'm not sure I'm up to making pretty retail cuts for people anyhow.

I absolutely love Ossabaw meat. It tastes like... food. It's not white, it's a medium-deep flesh red. It's succulent and hits a lot of my body's buttons. You can cook it pretty much any way and it's good.

So I think pigs are going to continue to be part of my life.

Gotta figure out how to fit them into the ecosystem permanently. They're definitely a disturbance species - they dig and cause change to the landscape.

Hm.

I notice that when I weed my garden, I only weed out the inedible weeds.

Weeds that are never edible I weed out immediately, especially perennials with rhizomes like grass or morning glory.

Weeds that I don't want many of I weed out when before they go to seed, like shepherd's purse or plantain.

Weeds that I especially like I leave tons of. Most of the leafy ones I weed out after they're done being tasty, but every two years or so I leave one or two extra nice specimens that have good eating properties to go to seed (like lamb's quarters). Something like pineappleweed where they pretty much need to go to seed to be good I try to ride that line between pulling them before too much seed falls and leaving them long enough to harvest some. Sometimes I'll leave a corner of my garden for a patch of something like pineappleweed. I leave dandelions if they're in a good greens location.

I will definitely pull weeds that look like they're going to crowd/moisture-rob/overshadow high-value crops.

In spring, when plants that will become huge are still little, I like to have a little something tasty growing between them. Weeds serve that function for me. My weeding strategy is designed with this in mind. I'm working on a spring "scattering mix" to add some chicory, radishes, cilantro, parsley, calendula, leaf or mini lettuces, arugula, shungiku, kale, purslane, chard, borage, dill, that sort of thing. My hope is to eventually have a solid seed bed for these tasty quick plants so they come up as weeds; some will do better in a wet spring, some will do better in a dry spring, or in a richer part of the garden, or in a sunnier part, or through a late frost. And of course I always want to keep lambs quarters and plantain and pineappleweed and that sort of thing.

Anyhow, I'd been doing this without being really explicit about it. Thought I might as well write it down because I noticed that when I was at the neighbours' place idly weeding I kept asking "do you want me to leave this stinging nettle?" or whatnot and realized many other people just remove everything they didn't plant.

I use the word fat in here. It kinda triggers even me. I do this deliberately to try and break down my unpleasant stereotypes. Tread lovingly with yourself here.

This is the tail-end of the marathon-three-days I spend at work/school. I should be at school this second, half an hour into class, but I dropped my bike off and they're keeping her for a week, which kind of broke my stride, and I'm sitting down and that feels amazing, and since about noon today I've really been wanting to write something.

I've been poly for a long time, and I've learned to erase some cultural norms from my psyche and to set aside others in order to do that. I know I'll likely always feel weird sneaky traces of poly guilt, for instance, which results in my believing that any given person is better off partnered to a monogamous person than to myself. This just sits there deep-down, despite my knowing that I am better off partnered to people who have other things going on in their lives (whether those other things are people or different passions) and despite being genuinely happy for my partner's pleasure when they're in a safe happy situation with another person.

I've also been skinny all my life. I don't feel skinny nowadays, I feel "normal" and sometimes jiggly and weird, but during adolescence and through my early twenties I was this same height, 5'8" or 5'9"ish, and 110 lbs, 120 max. That's really pretty skinny. In the last bunch of years I've gained both buoyancy and muscle to the tune of 20 or 30 lbs, topping out at my maximum weight when I'm in very good shape and literally sheathed in inches of muscle, getting softer and wider and dropping weight when I'm in poorer shape. And till a couple years ago I've always slept with tall skinny computer geeks with ponytails, basically.

This is a tangental way of approaching the idea that I've never had to deconstruct my ideas about fatness, though I have had to pull apart other received information like that about relationships. I've been the butt of hostility in the past ("skinny bitch" and "beanpole") but those days are over too.

Oof. This is hard to write. I'm not proud of this.

So, not thinking of this, and then diving into a really intensely hot sexual relationship with Angus (who has tended to carry 'a couple extra pounds' since I've known him) and then with Michael (who is more than twice my weight) I managed to be a total dickwad.

I have to be brief because this hurts to write. Think about this situation:

I meet Michael. We start sleeping together. I find him very hot, the way he thinks, the way we interact, but also his body itself, just the way his thighs feel and the line from his shoulder to his hip and his hands and the texture of his skin and the everythingness of him. And I keep saying to myself, not mindfully at all but in bemused wonder: I never would have expected to feel this way about you. I would say, in with that same bemusement, you are so fucking hot. And I didn't think about it.

And I would forward all this stuff about overeating and the obesity epidemic and whatnot because I'm pretty involved in food activism. Aaaaaand... finally the incongruity hit me. I poked at this in my head for a couple weeks, like a sore tooth, and realised what was going on. I was saying I never would have expected you to be hot because you're fat.

Except it wasn't graceful like this. After all this subtext, after accepting all these unspoken and unconscious endings to my sentences and not walking out on me, Michael had to endure a conversation where I basically said, "I don't know how to reconcile your body type with me thinking you're hot, any pointers?" and it hurt him pretty bad because, face it, it was maybe one of the jerkiest things I've done in my long career of being a dick.

So he was hurt and got quiet and I took it away and thought about it some more. And after a bit I stopped using the subtext. It stopped being woah, I'm shocked that you could be hot and started being just, you're hot. That made me happy, but I wasn't really sure what was going on in my head. Then today someone made a post on facebook and I grasped something more consciously.

It's true that carrying a lot of weight is a health risk.

It's true that stressing over things is a health risk.

It's true that working a desk job is a health risk.

Driving in a car is pretty goddamn dangerous, actually.

Smoking, drinking from plastic bottles, all sorts of things: health risks. In fact, cancer is the leading cause of death in Canada. Then heart disease, in which weight is definitely implicated. But, you know, people die, and statistics are statistics. No one actually chooses a mate by running a statistical analysis of everyone in the room and taking the person most likely to live a long time or we'd all want to date Japanese schoolgirls... oh, wait.

So the next argument, and one dear to the food movement, is that fat people are socially irresponsible because they do something which makes them unhealthy and thus a burden on health care and the rest of society, etc. The usual rebuttal to this is: we've all got our vices, so if you conflate attractiveness with health with skinniness, then also conflate attractiveness with health with nonsmoking AND not driving on dangerous roads AND not drinking to excess AND to not getting sunburns AND to using only glass containers and organic food AND teflon pans AND etc etc or you're a hypocrite.

But I've realised that it's much simpler than that for me, suddenly.

I find some people, and some bodies, maddeningly earthshatteringly attractive. I find some people and some bodies very much not. I don't control and can't anticipate this attraction; it's a gift when it's put in my hands.

And, separately, I worry about the economics of health: health care; the high cost of good veggies; eating well; desk jobs; yes, high fructose corn syrup and the subsidy pressure from the agroindustrial machine to maintain a steady cheap supply of that rather than fresh fruit and veggies and by the way more veggies would mean more farmers instead of more jobs where people sit down and that's socially unacceptable; and in the same category a lack of biking infrastructure and pesticides and the lack of self-worth driven by our lack of worthwhile projects to break our teeth on and thus teach us how to be effective in the world and how that leads people to do stupid self-harm or self-risk to fit in; a poor definition of health overall; no actual value placed on a culture where people can share knowledge about how to live well or have socially-sanctioned conversations about same; epidemic depression, the list goes on and on and on.

These two things, what we find attractive and what we approve of morally, are rarely connected and in fact often backwards-wired as per the girls-like-bad-boys stereotype. So it's really not cool what we do: we project all the guilt for our broken food culture and food system onto the people who bear the most visually obvious symptoms of it, then we use the threat of sexual and romantic rejection, which really drives to the core of our happiness as humans, to try and get them, any them that's not us, to make it go away. And we dangle romantic acceptance and sexual fulfillment as the carrots gained for successfully putting that societal skeleton back in the closet where we don't have to look at it. But, that's getting a little meta. My real point is merely the separation.

So there's how I was a dickwad with my projected shit and my inability to treat a human like, you know, a person instead of as a social issue. And that's why I try to be mindful about it now. And it's kinda incoherent because I've had a long week, but I really really needed to get this out. And I'd really like people to respond to it if they have something to say, gently if possible, because I need to hear the voices of my friends on this.