Greenstorm's Journal

Today I was human basically all day. I did my landrace gardening talk for seedy saturday. I was pretty worried about it be because my memory is awful, but I managed to get through it only glancing at the paper a couple times in the twenty minutes, and people seemed pretty interested. Then I dished up seeds for folks and it was pretty great to know my seeds are spreading to a bunch of people in town, including a bunch of people on my road (lots of new neighbours!).

I stayed after and chatted with gardeners, then went and did my grocery store animal pick up and chatted, then called my mom back and talked to her for awhile.

So much human!

Now it's evening and I'm trying to sort out food, there's some goose borscht on the stove, and singing some more. I have accepted that singing is one of my good stims, and I'm on the fence about trying to learn to do it "better" (more supported, with less chance of damaging vocal cords) if I'm doing to do it a bunch.

In potentially related news I went down one increment on the sertraline and feel... not necessarily less tired, but less evenly tired. But also maybe less calm.

Spring/summer plant:

Pickling cucumbers

Fava beans

Snap peas

Soup peas
-Bouchard dwarf, grown out 2021

Tomatoes (promiscuous, all mix, breeders, solanum peruvianum)

Peppers (hot grex & sweet grex maybe?)

Corn
-Gaspe wide pool
*Atomic orange 2 sources (Julia and Baker Creek)
*Montana morado Siskyou
*New York Red flint Great Lakes Staple Seeds
*Homestead yellow flint Great Lakes Staple Seeds
*Saskatchewan Rainbow flint Heritage Harvest
*Cascade Ruby Gold flint (2020) Adaptive Seeds
*Saskatchewan White Flint Adaptive Seeds
*Assiniboine Flint Heritage Harvest Seeds
*Floriani red flint Annapolis and Great Lakes Staple Seeds
*Oaxacan green dent Yonder Hill
-Early riser yellow dent Yonder Hill
*Harmony Grain mixed Experimental Farm Network
-Double Red Sweet
-Blue Jade Sweet
*TNC f1 wax corn agro haitai
*Astronomy Domine Sweet
-Magic manna flour & starburst manna flour (grown here)
*Painted mountain flour Sweet Rock farm

*pollen parent for detasseled gaspe mothers


Lettuce

Chicories
-trieste sweet
-variegata di castelfranco
-diva
-pancalieri a costa bianca
-cardonella barese
-bitter is better mix (adaptive)

Leaf & stem brassicas

Squash grex (maxima winter bred into gold nugget)
-Sweet mama William Dam
-Sundream Bee & Bird
-Boston Marrow Heritage Harvest
-Mandan Banquet Heritage Harvest
-Sweet Meat Heritage Harvest
-Blue Kuri Adaptive
-Little gem red kuri
-Lower salmon river Annapolis
-Buttercup Denali
-Silver Belle
-Lofthouse Buttercup Experimental Farm Network
-Latah Snake River
-Sweet Meat Annapolis
-Potimarron Adaptive
-Blue Hubbard Heritage Harvest
-Arikara Heritage Harvest
-Burgess Buttercup Heritage Harvest
-Desert Spirit Experimental Farm Network
-Nanticoke Experimental Farm Network
-Lofthouse Maxima Julia
-Hokkaido
-Pueblo Highlands Experimental Farm Network
-Warted Hybrid Veseys
-Winter sweet Veseys
-Wild bunch mix Veseys
-Bitterroot buttercup Uprising via Anna
-Plus pkt each Saved Red Kuri (Threshold), saved buttercup (Threshold), Gold Nugget (Heritage Harvest), North Georgia Candy Roaaster


Squash grex (pepo)
-algonquin pumpkin Heritage Harvest
-Thelma Sanders sweet potato secret Seed Cartel
-Mandan Heritage Harvest
-Gill's Golden Pippin Adaptive
-Candystick Delicata Experimental Farm Network
-Celebration Veseys
-Heart of Gold Veseys
-Table Sugar Veseys

Zucchini

Glutinous barley

Wheat

Beans (dry, runner, and snap)

Sweet physalis (amarylla tomatillo? Upright ground cherry?)

Potatoes? (need to obtain seed potatoes since I sent mine down south)

Heading cabbage? (hopefully not too late)

Turnips

Beets

Carrots

Parsnips


Later:

Napa cabbage

Winter radishes

With Tucker gone and work back to the office all my socializing is occurring off of Threshold in public spaces. There's a very real shift in how I feel and behave in private already; I'm more pushy, more contrarian; my thinking is more nimble but has more momentum: it's harder to stop or turn a thought. I'm starting to think internally using my own mind again, if that makes any sense, rather than the hybrid thinking/socializing tool my mind had become. I have more patience and time for some of my inner workings and so they subside into mystery and I can allow them to do so: I can sit and wait out something that's occurring in the back of my mind even when I have no knowledge of what it is and I can follow instincts without first identifying and then analyzing them.

I'm going more wordless now for awhile and my mind feels like a shape moving through pondweeds in murky water. I can feel the stirring of its motion but who really knows what's in there?

I think that's ok for now. It's the thing I was worried about, losing touch with humanity. Not long ago I wrote that I have a foot in both worlds, plant and human, and that's one of the reasons I feel so inhuman. Now I have maybe just a toe in the human world and the concept of inhuman, well, that's outside my current frame. Maybe the marker of a human is wondering if they're human enough.

Meanwhile my cat loves me more. He's been climbing onto the back of the sofa, hugging my shoulder, and purring for hours. From this I learn that I'm deeply conflicted about one of my strongest recieving love languages, which is demonstrations of joy in my presence. On the one hand making someone happy is such a joy; on the other it's a demand where I feel that if I fail I'm deeply impacting someone else's happiness. Of course that's not how it works but it's interesting to see it so clearly laid out; Whiskey is a great teacher that way because my interactions with him show up my reactions more clearly than the complications of reactions to humans. I know that what's going on is, in fact, all me.

Yesterday was a very social day. The landrace gardening zoom call was in the morning and I was a bit of a focal point of that. Over noon was the local seed swap at the library; the last seed swap I attended there was my last pre-covid social event years ago. I chatted with one of the big gardeners from a gardener family, with one of local herbalist friends, and with a person doing the local CSA (which sold out in 11 hours). It was nice, I got some tomato seeds out there, I got some locally grown seeds and some seeds to put in the garden here even if I don't stay, and we're going to have another one closer to the last frost in late May. I'm going to plant a couple more tomatoes to give away there.

I also reconnected with my neighbour, the one the dog bit, and gave them some eggs. Apparently he likes duck eggs so I gave him a bunch of those. He's seen the fox that lives at his place and there's also a big mink that I don't think has eaten many of my animals but it's something to keep an eye on.

Despite so many contacts and so many events yesterday it felt more spacious than expected. Probably not making time to socialize closely or intimately with anyone helped there. When I woke up the light was strange so I looked out and it had snowed: the sun was rising in a clear bright sky and reflecting off the fresh coat of white everywhere. It was nice to be able to go back to bed and ignore it for a couple hours.

Now I have today for cooking, for thinking, for petting my cat, for planting tomatoes and peppers, and maybe for setting up the pig fence.

Maybe the activities sound the same as normal but they don't quite feel the same. I'm doing them while I float, submerged, beneath my surface. We will see what comes next.

Building something garden-y into my life every day is good for me. Even if it's just topping up the reservoirs on my aerogardens, some sort of involvement keeps me feeling a little more connected and even-keeled.

Today I overhauled an aerogarden; it was the lettuce one, and the lettuce was bolting. I cut back the overgrown plants, pulled them out of the unit and then out of their baskets; they'll go to the geese. I disassembled the little pump inside the unit to remove all the roots wound through it, wiped and rinsed everything, refilled it, and reseeded new sponges with some cimmarron and australian yellow lettuce and trieste sweet chicory, plus a cutting from my hungarian black pepper plant. I also left one of the original lettuces, cut way back and with the roots cut way back, just to see if it bolts immediately again or what it does.

My tomato aerogarden has sprouted several seeds in each cup so I need to pull a couple of the extras out. It's hard to kill them so I may try putting a couple of the babies in soil.

I need to cut back the aerogarden basil really hard, the sweet basil I can just dry but the thai basil I'm not sure what to do with. I looked up some salads, there seem to be some good cold meat/lime/chili/thai basil ones that look appealing.

Speaking of hydroponics, I'm also thinking about setting up some kratky (basically set-and-forget little-equipment) hydroponics for greens but I haven't made the move yet. I don't love the idea of buying rockwool and netpots for it (everything else can be bits of recycled things) so I'm looking into alternatives.

On the soil end my peppers are doing well, all except the capsicum praetermissum which sprouted germinated but didn't emerge when moved to soil. Most of them have their first or second true leaf, and they got watered with the aerogarden reservoir hydroponic solution which should be good for them. Habaneros are up, 100% germination on my yellow habs -- I got them as part of a blind seed trade so I'm not sure what I'll do with them all but they seem happy. The microdwarf tomatoes are also turning into lovely sturdy plants, and the sweet baby jade are slowly taking up space.

I put together a couple soil pots of cilantro, since the cilantro did poorly when I tried it in the aerogarden. My understanding is, it isn't much of a cut-and-come-again crop so I'll probably be cutting them once, then discarding.

In the meantime the pepper crosses I did dropped their fruits, so I need to try again.

Still need to clear out all the shelves for starting transplants; I also need to figure out how many starts I'll grow, so how many I'll keep and how many I'll sell or donate.

Outside it's been super warm which means everything is ice with not-quite-standing water over it. The snow keeps melting on my roof and dripping down past the window. I could probably start greens in a sealed greenhouse if I had one, and maybe maybe they'd make it through the cold yet to come.

I probably need to chew on whether there's a realistic way for me to afford a proper sealed non-cloth-popup greenhouse, like the ones at https://plantagreenhouses.ca/ . Now that I'm moving my tomato production out of the greenhouse and into the field it's feeling like something that size would be worth playing in, even if it's not a 20' x 50' high tunnel. With the double walls I could even deep-bed animals in there until Feb, then use composting heat to do an early crop of greens. A really heat-efficient geodesic dome or clay-backed greenhouse will still have to wait, but I can probably figure out a happy medium there. Besides, the lean-to greenhouse is slowly falling in on itself as the shed collapses, so it's not so much in the running anymore.

I should probably budget out some options around re-covering the first greenhouse (needs to be done this year or next), dealing with the wood tent (needs re-covering probably this year) which could involve re-covering it as a woodshed or making it into a greenhouse and figuring out a new woodshed, getting a new greenhouse, and knocking down the falling-in shed or redoing its foundation and potentially doing a new lean-to greenhouse against it if it's salvaged.

Ok, not to get drawn too far into the future here: seedlings are growing, it's lovely. Next action is cutting back basil and starting the sage and rosemary seed and maybe thyme seed. Starting a pot of parsley probably wouldn't hurt either.

So last year I lost a packet of seed I really wanted to plant. It was a problem.

This year I'm cataloguing all my seeds in a spreadsheet-- not carrying them over from previous years when I bought them but doing a full inventory. Then I'm putting them in a cabinet. They don't go in the cabinet until they're catalogued. Theoretically they don't come out again until the packet is empty, and I just pull out the seeds I need to plant very briefly.

The activity itself is pretty fun, cataloguing, and I'm expecting the spreadsheet to be pretty helpful in building my planting timetable for the year.

I've got a couple new things I'm trying that I'm excited about: skirret, for instance, and scorzonera. Plus I'm trying a couple baccatum peppers and some new corns, a bunch of breadseed poppies, and things like that.

Anyhow, looking forward to completing the cataloguing and starting ot build a picture of what my garden will look like this year. It'll be big; it's also a moving target since some of the original garden is perennializing/turning into roses and haskaps.

Can't wait to see how it turns out.

Catalogued my tomato seeds from this year finally and listed them. It's pretty fun.

I'm still shepherding trays of tomatoes through the oven. This season worked pretty well: I brought in a ton of green tomatoes and they ripened at a good pace to roast a couple trays once or twice a week at a time when the additional heat was welcome in the house. The roasting made up for whatever flavour was lost picking them later and leaving to ripen.

In to soak in preparation for planting tomorrow:
Sugaree snap pea (Adaptive)
Beauregarde snow pea (Citizen Seed Trial)
Slocan snow pea (Citizen Seed Trial)
Lofthouse landrace favas (Experimental Farm Network)
Black Russian favas (Heritage Harvest Seed)

Planted indoors:
Yukikihari rice (Experimental Farm Network)
Hayayuki rice (Experimental Farm Network)

Also, my mint patch is buried under the biggest remaining pile of snow on my property, on the north side of the greenhouse. Ahwell.

I've been doing a dive into open-source seeds, modern landrace creation and grexes, and deliberate crafting of locally-adapted species. This is definitely my kind of thing: my land philosophy sits comfortably in the "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks/the land is your partner in selection/change the genetics to suit the land and not the land to suit the genetics/lots of different locally-adapted cultivars" space that a lot of these experiments live in.

I definitely have a direction to take my tomato trials next year: whatever produces this year, plus some of the multicultivar groups. Seems like one of the holy grails of this style of tomato breeding is to get tomatoes that cross-pollinate easily rather than self-pollinating. There are a couple varieties that do this (the specific flower architecture is recessive) and if I pull one of those in with my survivors from this year, then at the end of next year I should have some crosses, and some of those will be heterozygous for the cross-pollination flower architecture but won't display it, plus have a bunch of my survivor tomato traits. Those will self-pollinate, and about a quarter of them should be cross-pollinators with a bunch of my incorporated trailts.

So that's a bit of a direction, which is nice.

It means I really want a tunnel greenhouse, though. I mean, for other reasons too: birds in winter, snow-free area for hay storage, not dealing with these weird last frosts, etc. The cheapest I can find that'll handle snowload is ~$3500, which would be manageable but not this year.

Anyhow, for next year when buying seeds: wild mountain seeds and the experimental farm network, and maybe lofthouse if he's selling them. They're a bunch of high-altitude, cold-night breeders of squash and tomatoes who release biodiverse sets of seeds that can hopefully adapt to what's going on up here. At least they'll have a leg up.