Greenstorm's Journal

The painted mountain and magic manna (which is a selection out of painted mountain) look quite similar, as plants. They're silking and pollen dropping, for the most part.

Weirdly cascade ruby gold is starting to drop pollen but I see very few silks in it. The tallest tassel is 8' tall or something like that. Maybe it needs water?

Saskatoon white has two different flower colours but looks pretty uniform otherwise. It's had silks out for a couple days now.

Atomic orange is in full silk.

Saskatchewan rainbow has so so so many cobs on the plants, I can't wait to open them.

The first open oak party tassel is visible, it's definitely not going to make it. Likewise homestead yellow and early riser, though they are all huge plants.

There are a bunch of big green tomatoes in the promiscuous patch, I need to get in there and do some pruning. Likewise Mikado Black has a bunch of quite large tomatoes about ready to turn, and I suspect Minsk Early is about to give a bunch of smaller ones. Meanwhile the northern mixed row is variable, some plants have a bunch of nice-looking fruit and some really do not. There's a weird potato leaf plant that has tiny marble-sized fruit that don't look like they're getting any bigger. That might be a bee cross, and woth checking out the F2 on.

I should plant everything further apart for screening purposes, though planting it close together for pollination purposes was a legit idea. I'm likely to miss fruit in this jungle though.

A second melon has started, on a different plant, that looks similar in shape to the first melon. It would be hilarious if I got melons but not squash this year?

One particular squash has elongated football-shaped fruits on its female flowers, yellow with a green patch, and the three plants spread across my different plantings are super super vigorous both from seed and from transplant. I'm curious about which squash it is. Tons and tons of flowers on all the squash but not very many squashes growing. There are some, though, and lots of busy bees in the flowers.

Bees *love* arugula and I think are neglecting the rest of the garden for it.

The bouchard peas are sizing up nicely. They're such manageable little plants, I put them in with turnips and they're all the same height.

Lots of flowers on the beans but no baby beans. Um?

Some pods sizing o=up on the favas finally.

I need to plant the fall favas soon. And sort out my fall grain.

I've been cutting heads off the dango mugi barley on my deck as they hit hard dough stage, I don't want birds to get them. That is a very, very successful seed increase, I'll have something like two dozen heads from 5 seeds planted this spring at this rate.

Planted seed for dwarf, micro, and F1 tomatoes for the winter.

Transplanted a bunch of peppers into 1 gallon containers.

Bought a bunch of hydroponics stuff in prep for winter.

I'm really, really enjoying the garden right now. Even the raspberries, which I totally neglected, are being nice to me.

Feb: pigs usually farrow
Feb 1: goose eggs begin. Geese into breeding pens.
Feb 15: duck eggs increase
March 1: chicken eggs increase, goose egg max production. Ducks into breeding pens.
April 1: geese out for spring maybe
April 6: bring out hoses, will need to disconnect and drain at night for awhile
April 10: let geese sit for max grass for gosling
April 15-30: move pigs to rear pasture
April 20-30: let ducks sit
May 1: last chance for cool butchering weather for pigs
June 1: goose eggs mostly done
June 15: geese start into back pasture as babies get big enough
Sept 15-Oct 15: butcher ducks and geese, good pig butchering weather
Sept 20: pigs into cornfields
Oct 1: hoses in, birds in from summer pasture
Oct 10: pigs into brassica fields
Nov 15: ducks and geese indoors for winter
Nov 15: pigs into winter pen when ground freezes

Good talks with Avi. He's pencilled in end of July/beginning of August. I suspect there may be a Tucker return after that. I love these people a lot, you know?

If I did calligraphy I'd send an invitation registered mail to Nicholas.

My foot is healing up quickly; I'm giving it lots of breaks and time up in between gardening. There's still some swelling, I'm hoping it gets circulated away rather than needing to abcess. The pain is way down, anyhow, even as much as two hours after being on it.

Corn is almost almost all in. Just some flour corns left to go. Most of the enormous amount of painted mountain is in finally so just the various magic mannas (cream, starburst, and mixed), papas blue, oregon blue, and montana morado to go. Well, and Morden. And a succession of gaspe. But still. The ground is pretty dry, they keep calling for rain and we keep not getting it. That plus my heel make tilling a little harder and that plus the fascinating composition of the soils in those fields means that the plantings are a little ad hoc, but that's ok. The flints are at least segregated in the wood field, the dents are surrounded by painted mountain in the middle, and the flours will go at the end of the far field. I'm putting in blocks of beans etc as spacers in some cases. I'm mixing in a bunch of greens and herbs, both scattered and in rows. I don't know that the greens will have longstanding great quality given they're competing for moisture with the corn and they're on a south slope, but at worst I'll harvest a little and they'll go to seed, giving me weeds that are not wild mustard. There is a little bit of lamb's quarters growing, which I should try to leave to go to seed, but it's a very clean field since it was under grass for so long. Wild mustard and a little cress are pretty much the only weeds right now.

Okay. Facilitating the landrace gardening group meet'n'greet tomorrow morning. I'd better get some sleep. Just, I need to not forget to seek out and spend time with my people. It's good for me.

I've been running full speed except when taken down by vaccine or medication stuff, trying to recover from losing so much weekend time. I was feeling stretched awfully thin, but the butcher called and postponed, he'd going to come next weekend instead of this weekend. Suddenly everything looks possible again.

The tomatoes are in the ground. The squash is in the ground, except for the summer squash. The main greenhouse is planted. It's been warm! 23-25C during some of the daytimes, and even above 10C some nights. The garden is growing surprisingly fast. I am picking a couple buckets of lamb's quarters for the pigs every day. Things have gone from salad-grazing to chopping-back-huge-amounts pretty quick. We're supposed to hit 27C on Tuesday, so I should do a good water of everything Monday. We're close enough to the solstice that I bet I'll be able to hear things growing.

I appear to be putting in a big deck garden. I really should hook up automatic watering to it. Hopefully it stays warm enough to ripen things!

Really, all I want to do or think about is the garden. I need to powerwash the carport and get the freezers and maybe some shelving set up, freeze a bunch of bacon, I think it's too warm to smoke it.... but I just want to sit in the garden and let its rhythms pull me from one activity to the next.

I really should get up the florida weave for the tomatoes too.

It's nice times, though. I can feel my shoulders coming down from around my ears some. Finally.

Getting away to the coast for a couple days. Definitely, every time I leave, I do several days' work in one day and then spend the first while super tired. Well, not every time, but often.

This time the first frost fell across my trip. I pulled in all the non-greenhouse tomatoes to ripen, and all the beans. Canned some tomatoes, pickled the beans. The cabbages and kale and grains will all be fine, and the greenhouse tomatoes should (?) be fine but also have a fine crop of slugs. I should run a duck through there, except, well, frost and I'm gone anyhow.

Anyhow, I was up with the canner until 1am, then up to do chores before my ride into town at 4am. Got into it with Tucker about living situation stuff - the discussion has been outstanding for awhile and there's just no good time - and that went somewhere between badly and better than one might expect for that time of night. He may not be able to stay in the relationship in the way I need. It was a hard night, though I'm super glad to have had the canning going. Sometimes I just need that feeling of accomplishing some concrete task.

We'll see what comes of everything. It would be just like my life to hand me a double breakup with my employment thing happening and I will certainly live through whatever happens, but I'd really rather not. I like my people quite a bit.

I can't wait to get home and snuggle Avallu and the piglets and I'm barely even at the airport. Hopefully the Mysteries have something to offer me this year (they tend to).