Greenstorm's Journal

Alright, so I'm going to have 6000-7000 square feet of garden at Cor Viriditas this summer. The bed is roughly triangular. It's going to take an extended three-sisters planting (corn, squash, beans) with plants I've known to grow well under widely-spaced corn (tomatoes, tomatillos) shade-tolerating greens (lettuce, chard, mache, magenta spreen, shungiku, brassicas, chicories) and some pollinator attractors (calendula, borage, fennel, cilantro). I'm saving back seed from most of this, so if it's a complete failure I can try again next year.

Let's sort out how much seed I need. Generally I'll plant 1-2 seeds per plan desired; because it's a chaos garden I expect germination gaps to be filled in by whatever is close by,

I've collected some short season corns and some PNW corns for this mix: gaspe is my favourite, saskatoon white, saskatchewan rainbow, oaxacan green dent, early riser, new york red, carol deppe's magic manna and cascade ruby gold, lavender parching, painted mountain from six or eight different places, a couple bits from seed trades. My plan is to make three groups: dent, flint, and flour and plant them at each corner of the triangular bed, with sunflowers in-between. There will absolutely be cross-pollination between types but perhaps a little minimized. Within each group the corn plants will be spaced fairly widely to allow undergrowth.

What this means is roughly 1500 square feet each of flour, dent, and flint corn for a total of 4500 square feet of corn. Call it 3 square feet per plant and I'm looking at 500-1000 seeds of each type. The rest of my corn will go in the freezer.

Squash will be almost all maxima, with a corner of pepo out of curiosity (I'm playing with hull-less pumpkins for the animals and trying out a few bush delicatas). Again they're short season, including the buttercup and red kuri that actually ripened last year (hopefully with some cross-pollination), potimarron, north georgia candy roaster (this makes fabulous pickles from the unripe fruits), sundream (super cool resistance/short season), nanticoke, lofthouse mix, lower salmon river, blue hubbard (I love large squashes I can keep in the cool room and chop chunks off as I need them, I'd like to steer in the direction of large), gold nugget (I think the shortest season squash? grows well among corn), a few more kabocha types. They'll be primarily planted into the corn patches, seeds mixed as evenly as possible. Give each squash plant 50 square feet over the 4500 square feet of corn garden and that's 90-180 squash seeds for the garden; the rest go in the freezer.

My landmate is going to start some tomatillos, promiscuous tomatoes, and pepper grexes I've sent her. We should be able to pop those starts in when we seed the bed. I'll have 6 shelves x 3 flats each x 50 cells = 900 plant capacity for starts. 200 will go to peppers, 50 to tomatillos (I have a sweet ground-cherry-tasting one I saved seed for last year), and much of the rest to tomatoes (I sent on my "promiscuous A" good-tasting mix, my orange/red bicolour promiscuous, I think another promiscuous one, and then a bunch of largely self-supporting favourites and open-flower-architecture named cultivars: Brad, Silvery Fir Tree, KARMA purple and KARMA MF, Minsk Early, Uralskiy Ranniy, Mikado Black, Maya & Sion, Grocery store green, I think KARMA miracle and a couple others?). So call it 400 tomato plants? They'll be in amongst the corn, and at the edges of the corn. They'll be smallish when they go in but since everything else is being direct seeded that's likely ok, they'll grow enough that some will not be overtaken and it's those vigorous ones I want to save seed from.

Beans are primarily dry bush, they'll be mixed in the center with the sunflowers, peppers will be to the south side of the sunflowers. There's roughly 6000 - 4500 = 1500 square feet of this moat. Call it 800 square feet of sunflowers at 4 square feet each, that's 400 sunflower seeds if planted 2 in each hole (I don't fully trust some of my older seed, though I suppose I could start these indoors too and just put out 200 plants). Beans are 1/square foot, 200 square feet. I'll put a dozen or two melon plants on the south side of the sunflowers in a patch with the peppers. I'll have 200 pepper plants in total, roughly (100 hot grex, 100 sweet grex) that don't really get their own space but instead go in amongst the center.

Aforementioned leafy greens and some roots (beet and turnip grexes, fall radishes, salsify) will be scattered throughout for imediate weed suppression, creating a seed bed, and immediate harvest throughout the spring/early summer.

This is the most hands-off gardening I've ever done and I think it'll be educational as to the new property. It's been awhile since I worked with light as a limiting factor. I expect plenty of things to be shaded out; the seed from what remains will be good for this kind of mixed underplanting. In year 2 I'll move this mix to rotational pig fields, using the saved seed, to help supplement my hog feed through fall and winter.

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).

Exserted orange tomato has ripened, three on three different plants. It's surprisingly uniform for an outcrossing tomato. I'm getting regular cucumbers, I got my first tomatillo (amarylla, small but basically an eating-out-of-hand fruit when ripe), the gaspe corn (the short one) is tasselling.

Last week I had two vehicle incidents at work, I wasn't harmed nor was my vehicle damaged in either (I wasn't driving during one but I was involved in some of the decision-making). Those always leave me shaken.

Last weekend Tucker and I took a trip to Quesnel, evaluating it as a place to live. It has a little downtown that's super walkable, a nice walking track, and walkable bridges going into and out of the downtown. It sits at the confluence of two large and quick-moving rivers and it smells like river. It also has a pulpmill which definitely effects the air north of town and the highway north runs right through it; many country roads feed into the highway without a light and the left turns across a couple lanes of what would sometimes be heavy truck traffic was sketchy.

The rivers carve deep into the landscape where they meet. The downtown is near water level, in the V formed by confluence, while residential, farm, and industrial lines the surrounding steep, tall banks. There are a lot of switchbacks and limited flow up/down the cliffs. In at least 2 places there were impassable washouts into the surrounding area, where detours added 20-50 minutes. A couple other washouts were very rough drives as they repaired the roads. I could see why folks were selling their houses on the far side, and it definitely led to accessibility concerns. Last winter was very, very hard on roads but as Tucker pointed out the climate isn't going to get better and there's a lot more left to slide.

A couple years ago there were big fires around the town -- not close enough to see on a short drive -- and there were evacuations. Then the lumber industry tanked for awhile and the post-pine-beetle cut reduction occurred so Quesnel lost a lot of jobs. It had a plan to diversify the economy, more than many places, but it was still hit hard. This seemed to manifest primarily in a lot of infrastructure for folks in rough places: addiction centers, emergency shelters, outreach centers. It's also a very pretty town, hanging baskets, lots of interpretive signs, public art and lots of benches. It seems to be full of massage therapists, health food stores, and restaurants that have existed for over twenty years. I guess it's got a bit of a Vancouver vibe that way.

It's only really livable if one can find a place close in enough to bike or walk into town, maybe? Maybe the most livable place we could afford with some land still? But it was nice, and nice too to get out and try some good restaurants and poke around some streets. It was good to wander around a climate warm enough to grow grapes. The north does seem to have finished with masks altogether -- I suppose Quesnel is southern interior rather than north, but still.

I came back and my new surprise ducklings are still all ok, the pigs didn't break out, and the grocery store has 17 crates of dairy for the pigs. A good cap to a rough weel, all-in-all.