Greenstorm's Journal

I can't think very well right now but I really want to record an experience.

With humans I'll often circle them a bit before they catch my attention and I interact. I think it's a lot of backbrain work, where I pick up on information about them and then eventually decide they're safe and interesting enough to spend my time on.

I grew up in the pacific northwest and was pretty much familiar with all the plants about me with the exception of the ornamental ones, which I picked up quickly as a tour guide at the botanical gardens and as a landscaper (consider those plants part of a friends group, with a formal introduction).

When I moved up north I had the experience, for the first time, of living in a place where I didn't know the ecosystem. I did not know all the plants. I was working in forestry and doing things like ecotyping which required me to learn them, and I learn plant names more easily than doing almost anything, so with a little effort I picked them up. But they weren't family, in a sense. I didn't have a multidimensional understanding of their habitats, related plants and animals, human uses, range of phenotypes, lifecycle, and a kind of bone-deep familiarity with them week-by-week through the year like I did back home.

Even now most of the plants here I'm familiar with in that way are the domestic ones.

This year I think I'm starting to develop that kind of deep relationship with amelanchier -- june or saskatoon or serviceberry, as you like. This is the time of year when it flowers, and even the first year there were whole power cuts full of fluffy white bushes in full bloom that were just so striking and noteworthy. This house came with what I'm fairly sure now is a Smokey cultivar, the one with a milder berry taste but the distinct overtone of almonds. The previous tenant said the sweetest saskatoons were behind the chicken coop.

Last year or the year before (what is time?) I noticed that pretty much every tree on the property, both deciduous and coniferous, have young saskatoon bushes under them. This must be from birds, nibbling, sitting, and then dropping seeds. It really drives home how drought-tolerant these plants are if they can grow, not only right on the south slope of places or on exposed areas, but also right in the middle of those snaky shallow spruce roots that instantly suck up every drop of water.

Someone in Canada with Oak Summit Nursery did some experimental grafting of apples onto saskatoons a couple years ago and it worked and the grafts are still good. It brings the apples into precocious (early) bloom and probably dwarfs them. One of the more interesting permaculture methods is grafting fruit trees onto existing native plants, so for instance on the Islands putting apple trees onto crabapple trunks, high enough to avoid deer and on that established and suited-to-conditions rootstock. Well, saskatoons are hardy far far colder than here, they're drought tolerant, what's not to try? It doesn't hurt that a developmentally disabled vocational school's horticulture class was selling scionwood to raise funds for a pizza party* so I have some apple scionwood around

And then I started poking around more. I learned that the first year the plants grow very slowly, only 4-6", and they don't start leaping until later. There are a bunch of species that seem to hybridize, though I haven't learned the differences between them yet. I haven't sorted out their evolutionary history yet, nor have I grown my own from seed yet, but those will come. My time and thought are, after all, very limited these days. At some point I'll taste different bushes more concertedly.

But I have... a new friend. It's a friend on the landscape, that I can easily see at this time of year when driving, and also that I know in several different spots and shapes in places around town and around my property. It's neat.



*there is nothing about that I don't love with my whole heart. My image of these kids working with plants and getting pizza, and being able to do it in high school, is one I hold as a shield against the darkness of these times

Today we spent the morning at work learning about pine rusts. I first was really exposed to them in the landscape context at this time last year. I had a little more emotional bandwidth then so I was even more awed by the intricate evolutionary dance that needed to occur for these constellations of organisms to exist.

Imagine, if you will, an organism that spends half its life on a tree and the other half on an herbaceous perennial, a plant that dies back to the roots every year. It goes back and forth, with a different set of spores -- basically a different body -- not just for each of the two host plants but also for a stop to have sex. So far so good, there are plenty of organisms that need to hop back and forth between hosts. Thing is, one of these hosts is parasitic on shrubs, basically. So now we have an organism dependent on another organism that is in turn dependent on (but also very robustly hosted by) yet another organism, which takes long-term vacations where it sometimes goes dormant on yet another organism (that's the tree).

It's a big and intricate chain of dependencies and this area hasn't even been out of the ice age that long to evolve something like that. I'm impressed.

It was good to get out into the field, to hang out in the sunshine with some folks, and to solidify some knowledge I had that was previously pretty shaky. I would never say my ID skills are now 100% but I understand what to look for much better.

As so often happens when I totally shift gears, on the way back I realized: I think one reason I've been reacting so strongly to the situation with J is that it's echoing the situation with A&E. Something appears to be on offer, but every time it gets talked about in a concrete way that offer gets smaller and smaller. With A&E it went from living there without needing to work, to not having my own space, to needing to work, and now it may be not on offer at all. With J it went from sex and connection, to connection and snuggles, to connection limited by a set of arbitrary and shifting monogamous boundaries, and depending on what happens next it'll be connection when there are no kids around, when no one is too busy, when there's energy, when there's not honeymoon feelings towards a new partner, all the normal things that happen when a monogamous person shacks up and disappears for a number of years.

I know I need to redirect my attention into some of my garden groups. Those reliably bring me a sense of connection and joy. I was planting late last night, getting the corn into the ground, and tomorrow I'm off work to do more of the same. Being able to share that with folks working at the same level, even if they're far away, is really good for me. I've never spoken by voice, even, to someone who really gets into that stuff on my level-- or really their own level. Then again, I don't need physical proximity for that kind of connection. Description of goals, procedures, thought processes: that *is* the connection.

But I also still need to find someone to just have dinner with and talk. There may be a window where J can do that with me, but.

So I'm looking into the Pride and Poly groups from the nearest big town; probably they're not what I want but we'll see. I'm importing people this summer. Tucker has mentioned maybe spending a chunk of time up here this winter; who knows, maybe we'll morph into a Persephone/Hades relationship, winters only. But also it may be time to start looking further afield and actually attending permaculture convergences and whatnot. I also -- hah -- seems like a significant portion of the people I really like may be PDAers, but a PDA conference would be the most ridiculous thing ever. Sign up to and commit to a thing in advance? Right.

In the meantime these are my planting days, days where the earth receives me and we build and learn together. 24 corns! New dwarf tomatoes! So many kinds of squash! Melons! Ethiopian kale! A rainbow of potatoes! Beans that are as much jewels as the corn is! A billion kinds of lettuce! Brassicas of every description! Soup peas! Regardless of what's happening on my human side I have a deep comfort and satisfaction I only touched on for the first time last year with my tomato trial.

And I keep telling myself that one of these days, probably tomorrow, I'll have the time to jump onto the bicycle either in early morning or on the line between morning cool and afternoon heat and remember what it feels like to fly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Huh.

For the most part things turn out better than I expect them to.

That's another way of saying that I'm really pessimistic or really cautious about a lot of things.

I'm also -- you know, people said 'things will change when you get to University' when I was in high school. 'You won't be the smartest person in the room' they warned me 'you'll have to work at it'.

Well, I went to UBC and some of it was too hard and some of it was too easy and nobody gave a fuck about me or about the classes they were teaching. I never did any work there. I also didn't do very well. I also didn't do it for long.

Now I'm at BCIT. I'm doing a lot of things that basically I can take as far as I want to. I can sink a ton of work into them and really learn some interesting stuff, or I can squeeze an hour in here and another hour there between work and sleep and call the thing homework and it appears I do okay in both situations, and sometimes I do really really well. I have yet to figure out if my level of achievement is correlated with the level of work I put in. It doesn't appear to be. Instead it seems to be my interest in a subject that drives my ability in it. I would love to have time to spend on playing with these ideas and doing them more, cementing them in my head and also looking for the fun parts. I think I could make everything interesting if given enough time (or good enough teachers but hey, why ask lightning to strike three or four times?)

Want me to tell you a secret? I'm terrified at how well I'm doing. Every time I do okay to well with no prep, it makes me lazier for next time. Each time I do spectacularly well on something because I sorta-know my stuff, game the test, and have a meta-sense of the subject my expectations for my achievement are raised-- and I am very competitive with myself. That's why I'm the level of workaholic I am, I think.

So there've been a ton of things happening lately. Last week was the work crunch, this week was the school crunch. I've done a final exam in sustainable resources, a test in maps, and a midterm in math this week. Also a project worth 30% of my ecology grade is due in an hour and two english assignments are due today (one's finished and I'm halfway through the other-- seriously, this assignment included 'read several articles from forrex.org (the ecosystem management trade journal) and you know, that is a LOT of very technical reading). Eep, I've lost myself in my parentheses.

And last night I was up late working on the plant assignment, did some more today, but work ended early and I flew through as much of English as I could without heading home and grabbing my textbook. Now I'm livejournaling from our computer lab because, er, I have two hours to kill and honest to god nothing I can do.

I talked to the financial people and need to get somethign signed by someone who isn't in.

I went to the gym but didn't want to spend the time to figure out the system and gave up after scouting it out.

I can't work on my citizenship or tax stuff because I don't have the info here.

I didn't bring my laptop because it's heavy and I had aerial lift certification today, didn't wanna haul it PLUS the plant assignment (5" binder) PLUS my schoolwork.

I could run down the batteries on my devices but what's the point?

Well, better post this and I can hunt down the prof to deliver my plants assignment to. It really is a thing of beauty. 70-odd pressed and labelled plants, all alphebetized and sorted according to structure and family. Also it's a collection of the memories of plant walks taken with my favourite prof, and a collection of mental images of little micro-environments. Because I wanted to I handwrote everything instead of printing it off on the computer. I didn't want that to get in the way.

I'll show it to youif you ask me.