greenstorm | Entries tagged with threshold

It's easy to forget what takes thinking. Right now, with all the snow outside, I don't have a lot of ability to do outside and thoughtlessly wheelbarrow things. Even snowblowing, which I try to do every 6" of snow, requires a fair bit of strategizing about where, exactly, the piles of snow will go and how to get them there (it can throw roughly 15' and obviously not through solid objects). Being in the house, I decided to tidy it a bit, and then the skillcult apple seed sale loomed and some scionwood became available elsewhere so I worked on making some decisions about which of those I wanted for next year.

Tidying the house is A LOT of thinking work. And not just tidying, but "should I get rid of this?" and "what things should go together in an area, which things should go into outside storage, and where should things go while they're waiting to leave the house or go into those areas?"

I made my seed order, made inroads on the house, and yesterday and today can't stay awake or think or follow a book. It's been awhile since I had to repeat audiobook spots four or five times, and I'm back to that.

So I guess I need to take it in smaller bites, though I'm not sure how.

There's about eighteen inches of snow out there right now, most of which fell in the last five days. It's good insulation against the -20.

All would be well except that Solly has realized going in the house keeps her from chasing deer away, which is her reason for existing (see: guardian dog). She's escaped from the house and will only come near me when we're nowhere near the house and I've shown her that my hands are totally empty of collars and leashes (she can get out of a collar in about twelve hours, so there's no grabbing her by a collar). She's sleeping in the chicken coop at the bottom of the garden, which is a nice 6x6' building full of straw, so she's nice and warm and dry. It's right where the deer come over the fence. I've been taking her food& medication out there in a bowl (which she stays away from me, since my hands aren't demonstrably empty, but will eat the food if I step back). I'm not chasing her, since she's not supposed to be walking at all.

I've given some thought to putting her in the small fenced garden & greenhouse with the geese. It's a smaller space, but I'm not sure how they'd all feel about such close proximity. She's allowed to stand and lie down, gentle range of motion is fine, but mostly rest. So we need to come to an accommodation we can both tolerate.

It's funny, Solly is such a ridiculous sweetie I'd forgotten just how intense these dogs can be when something gets into their guardian button. This is a dog who loves to lie on the couch or on my lap on her back with her paws in the air, but she's smart enough to connect the dots between going inside for a bit and being kept there for longer than she wants, and being inside and not being able to chase the deer away, and she's fully willing to deprive herself of all those things PLUS food in order to keep those deer away (she won't even let me feed her near the house in case it's a trap). Plus walking hurts her. The pain meds are making a difference but that just makes her do more mobile stuff.

I should be problem solving that but I snowblew her a path around the chicken coop so she doesn't have to drag her legs through the deep snow and I'm letting her chill until my mind is online again. I could catch her in the chicken coop by closing the door, but after a couple days of walking her to pee and otherwise leaving her in there she'd just have the door off. This afternoon I talk to the vet who might be able to do surgery "locally" (only 2 hours away) and then to possible funding sources.

The tornjaks in the province are all sold, so I don't need to make any immediate decisions on puppies regardless. It looks like there might have been some drama in the (quite small) breed group?

Whiskey is headbutting me for snuggles so I should go. I want my legs to work soon so I can get some water. I'm thirsty and the relative humidity is like 13%.

I know I'm treating my body well when I wake up and it asks for movement: a stretch, a twist, just where the prospect of engaging it doesn't cause dread but instead feels inviting. With the animals moved up closer to the house for the winter and snow on the ground I've been resting more and it's been good for me.

(Little Bear appears to have just intentionally pulled the curtains down. He takes increasingly flying jumps at them until the momentum brings them down. I've redirected him to eat a mechanical pencil. Sigh)

Last night I had a dream -- a good dream. I'd flown to a multi-day workshop, it was either in th maritimes or a scandanavian country, and stayed with a handful of other people at the home of the workshop instructor while we did the workshop. I have lots of specific memories of it: a wooden covered seat out front by the driveway, which I stopped and examined to see if I could make something similar when I got home; a back garden with a grain patch; a mostly-underground house profile. But mostly I remember how the house was set up to have space for many hobbies but still had a clear, tidy look with space.

Part of that will be the dream and part of it the size of a house and the type of hobbies. Still, it's a bit of a reset for me in thinking about how my house should be set up. I've known I'll need to shift things downstairs for Solly to be indoors. I think I'm better able to think about it in chunks now, the house I mean. Maybe I can steal the little cabinet under the stairs for something. I really would like to get a sliding door on the downstairs bathroom so I can get into it easily without doing the public-toilet-stall dance. Things like that. The house has been horrible here and I have had more survival-oriented things on my mind; it's also hard to think about how to make something decent when all the tiles are loose on the floor and there are huge holes in the drywall from plumbing work, but. Maybe a chunk at a time.

At this rate I'll never have time/energy to do pottery this winter. The winter is moving shockingly fast. I think it's always this time of year I think the winter is very mild, but the real cold tends to come after solstice.

Speaking of Solstice, I might need to build her a house in the goose enclosure (which is a garden in summer and is right behind the house) and is roughly, what, 80'x60'? Staying inside is no longer a pleasure for her, and she'll be a lot happier to at least be able to watch things. Guardian dog houses need windows or they won't use them.

Speaking of dogs, the Tornjak puppies in this province are still available. They probably will be for a bit, but if I'm going to integrate someone, winter and young is probably better. Four dogs is so much! But Thea and Avallu deserve retirement, and as I learned at one point they deserve sick days and a partner to trade shifts with too. It's heartbreaking because there are so so so many LGDs in California and through the... middle southern states? ...that they're being put down all the time. Between integrating an adult into my setup (probably impossible) and lack of good breeding (including heartworm and hips/elbows/knees) I can't do it, but oof. Tornjaks really are a breed apart and I like to continue their existence, but I'd also like to continue the existence of other, living pups.

Ha! I had another dream. Someone had come to read the meter, onto the property, and I caught Avallu and was telling the meter person "don't you have a note that there's a dog who bites here? But it's ok, I'm holding him right now".

We have a virtual meter or whatever they are, but they were both such ordinary dreams, or I guess would have been. A workshop in someone's home would actually work well for me, I think, where I could pop in and out of rest.

Anyhow, virtual vet appointment on Solstice on solstice (ha) to see if the person in town will actually do her surgery or not, and what it'll cost, and how well it tends to hold up.

I think I've been taking Threshold for granted and haven't been tending the actual house how I should.

(Don't tell me Little Bear tore down the curtains so he could pee in them. He is SO BORED even though I let him hunt in the space between the floors. Poor kiddo.)

(Just licking himself noisily)

Too much people in the last little while. I spent a bunch of time at the studio which had a bunch of ambient folks and some time on the phone with disability folks and it's just been too much.

The pill fluctuations are catching up with me too; with PMDD it's the change in hormones that's the problem, not necessarily the levels, so I'm back to steady on the pill to suppress my body's cycles which had started to wake up. I have to remind myself that I lived through this monthly for decades, until it became super constant; I can get through this bit ok until I stabilize. The bubbles of hatred and despair and pain are just very unpleasant.

Being outside makes everything ok, though. Moving around, looking at different things, making garden beds and planting bulbs and splitting firewood-- those settle me and give me peace. I've nearly finished putting in the peonies and have added some grapes and a toka ownroot plum and three manchurian apricots, which may well be hardy here. They're all miniscule plants, of course, 2.5" pots, which take longer to mature but they're what I can afford. I can't spend as much time doing these things as I'd like, of course, or I lose use of my body, but any day that contains them is a better day.

Today the plan is to screw some pallets together to make a winter pig shelter. They can't stay in the back, and since the rescues are full they need to stay here, so I'm going to bring them in closer. We'll see how much of it I get done, but even if all I can do is move the pallets today, pound the t-posts tomorrow, and screw things together the day after then that's how it must be done. Weird to think I used to be able to do something like this in one bite in the dark after work, and work the next day.

The days are getting distinctly shorter. I think we're below 8 hours of sunlight now. I hadn't realized how this would impact my ability to be outside; because I need good long rest periods between pieces of activity I end up running out of daylight even if I'm only spending two hours outside total unless I start very early.

The ground is starting to freeze. I bet I can still get t-posts through the crust, it's not deep yet, but I'm not sure about digging anything and a bunch of stuff is likely frozen to the ground. I may have one hose encased in an ice flow on the north side of my house, which I think may not thaw till spring now, but I got most of the hoses and pallets up. I'd thought to move woodchips later in the winter but had forgotten that the outside of the chip piles, which are wet, freeze. I've moved most-ish of the chips anyhow, making the lasagne chicken-manure-and-green-deciduous-chip beds. I'd left bulbs-and-mulching the orchard until the ground on the way back there froze. It's more work slogging through mud, and anyhow, I just haven't had the ability.

A friend helped me take measurements for the automatic pattern thing (apostrophe patterns) where you feed in your measurements and it spits out a pattern. I just don't have it in me to self-draft leggings, and it's worked well for shirts in the past. Weirdly my arms are symmetrical now, biceps at least. I've lost 3" on my biceps in the last two years, which is not surprising but it makes me sad. I'm so much weaker now, and it's a combination of less physical activity and the illness.

Anyhow, the vast majority of my pants are in rags at this point. I have three pairs of comfortable-enough pants without holes, but none without stains, for winter. I have four additional pairs of pants that will work for winter with long underwear, two without stains, but that won't work for daily life, and of course I don't want to wear the ones without stains for daily life or they will stain. Either way I've been wearing the stuff with holes and trying to eke out the time between laundry, but if I can manage to put together several pairs of warm winter pants it will make a big difference.

Shirts that fit will be lovely too. I have several t-shirts -- they don't need to fit in order to stay on so I can buy them online -- but winter weather shirts that can handle chilliness and body moisture are beyond my price range, so it'll be good to put some more together. I did splurge on socks, as I have done at least every second year since moving north. Luckily I don't go through them as much as I used to when I was putting kilometers on them every day, and I don't need that level of quality, so it's a reasonable splurge.

Money is on my mind a lot. I have maybe eight months at most of the level of friends' support I've been enjoying. It's kept me alive through the worst of disability paperwork and learning to manage this, but it of course couldn't last forever. After that it will be back to survival expenses only.

As I go through the days I'm slowly saying goodbye to the luxuries I've enjoyed: premade food, steak sometimes, fresh veggies and even non-apple-or-banana fruits in the wintertime, fruit juice or pop or fancy tea or any drinks that cost more than a cheap teabag, milk and probably nut milks, gas for popping into town, a truck without check engine lights on, maybe regular membership at the pottery studio instead of saving my work at home to pop in and use the kiln every so many months, new plants, testing fancy clays maybe?, new sheets, electric blankets, keeping my home warm even in the shoulder season, running the dryer in the summer and midwinter (shoulder season is necessary I think), I know there'll be lots of things. In the meantime I need to sort out if there's anything that will substantially make my life cheaper at that time, and get it now. I've been thinking an e-bike, to get to town and back without gas, but that's only good in the summer. Maybe worth it? Maybe I can't maintain it well enough with my cognitive stuff and it's not?

I'm going to try and figure out some way of replacing my upstairs tile at least. Right now I can't wash the kitchen and bathroom floors except on my knees with a nearly dry cloth, because the tiles and grout and the MDF board underneath are so compromised that any moisture swells the MDF and further cracks or pops off the tiles and several are already missing or at an angle. So, I haven't been using my magic vacmop and in fact haven't been washing the upstairs floors at all. That just can't go on for the next 40 years. Even if I can just get it off and put well-sealed plywood in? It doesn't have to look like anything but I need it to function like a floor.

In the midst of all this, the ball I've been letting slip is meds. I've put off my covid shot, which I hear is a demanding one this year, because I haven't had enough recovery time lined up. I'm supposed to have started B vitamin shots a month ago, but again need to take the time to make sure if I have a bad effect I can recover. And I haven't been tracking meds symptoms except noticing the bubbles of intensity creeping back from hormonal fluctuations, and I notice them because they really are incapacitating.

Enough of that. I'll get the pigs tucked in somewhere warm today, or tomorrow, or the next day. I'll get the bluebells under the rest of the woodchips. Cats will snuggle with me when I rest by the woodstove. In a couple weeks I'll get the pottery area tidied so I can head back to my own wheel instead of the studio ones. It's a good life, full of things I love, and I'm very grateful to have it.

We've had the first frost, not last night but the night before. Here are garden notes.

Tomatoes:

Cherries: champagne cherry, green grape, green doctors, rons carbon copy, sungold select (almost a saladette, a bit variable), copper cherry, Hawaiian red currant, sunpeach, coyote, snow white cherry, pink princess get planted again of cherries.

Coyote and kiss the sky and one rozovaya bella were crossed and one of the two crossed kiss the sky plants sported into a saladette (!!!). The crossed coyote had that flavour. Growing these all out except maybe the roz bella.

Mission mountain grex second year the orange fluted gave me four orange fluted plants, nice and productive, and the yellow antho pear gave me variable breadth yellow antho pears.

Mission mountain grex first year I got an antho grape that didn't ripen, a beautiful stripe saladette that ripened decently, and a beautiful antho blush thing that I'm going to try again. Oh, and a micro I'll grow out this winter maybe.

Miracle cheriette project very satisfactory, great flavor, 2 larger and 3 cherries to continue -- one black, one large grape, and another grape with interesting calix shape. Those are the early ripening and prolific.
Otherwise utnyok, cesu agrais, sareaev 0-33, sugary pounder, rozovaya bella, black sea man, katja, jory, maya and sion, jd cooper are the slicers to do again, offhand.

Zesty fir and uluru mikado trial decent, though the uluru mikado weren't well watered and thus got a bit of blossom end rot -- they were in with the brassica greens I let go to seed and then dry down. Zesty fir plants are very well behaved and decently early.

Zesty carbon f1 grew a huge plant with huge tomatoes. Can't wait to see the f2.

I haven't got into the greenhouse yet but I know there are rozovaya bella and I believe JD Coopers ripe in there, as well as less-good-tasting Amy's Apricot and better-tasting snow white cherry. Also a bunch of other things but I'll write that up when I get in there.

Woody perennials: I hit up the garden center several weeks ago, I think on Avallu's ok-to-go-outside check, on their fall sale day. I had been flirting with a discounted quercus macrocarpa all summer and picked it up since the sale + discount made it worthwhile. So now I have two bigger macrocarpas in the front yard, as well as some tiny ones. I've also ordered some acorns, which-- I'm going to need to be doing a lot more from seed now, even big things, for financial reasons.

Also into the front yard were four "mystery" romance cherries (discounted because the tags had fallen off and then again on the sale" on top of the one from way back that already was there, and the three labeled ones (cupid, juliette, and I forget the third but it has a clay label) from this spring.

Then a sumac "Tiger eyes", a quercus gambelii, a lonicera Goldflame, a morden concord and a valiant grape, and there will be a named hazel variety. This is all part of screening the front yard as the aspens are gone, so I can hang out there. My house sits on a curve in the road and on a bit of a rise, so my front yard is a bit of a stage for anyone driving along that long curve. And lately a lot of people have been driving my and slowing down significantly as they go past my house. I used to think it was because of the pigs, but the pigs aren't visible from there anymore, so I think it's just because they can kinda see through the vegetation. I'd like that to stop.

I also have a bunch of black currants I haven't planted yet, and a row I want to plant something tall in to screen the winter garden but not screen it enough to shade the garden, maybe something 8' tall or so.

Oh! This spring I also planted most of a ring of swamp white oaks in the back upper field, the one that is basically a stream during snowmelt and dries up by June-somethingish. These oaks should be ok with that, and give me a nice big ring. I paced out the ring instead of measuring it, and it's on a slope, so it'll be interesting to see how it goes. They got mulched and not watered much, nearly all survived regardless.

Josh and I got a bunch of apple and seabuckthorn seeds on the trip up with Avallu and those will be started for next year. Seabuckthorn seems to do easily from seed.

Perennials: This is the year I started planting perennial flowers that aren't roses. I haunted that sale and got a bunch of $5 and $3 plants, daylilies and salvia and some verbascum and russian sage and ecinacea and whatnot. I have ordered some peonies, some common (inexpensive) cultuvars and a bag of root fragments that are unlabelled, they'll take a long time to bloom but I have more time than money (I hope).

I also found a lead on inexpensive daffodil bulbs and am putting a bunch of them in, underplanting with a bunch of smaller bulbs as you might expect. Basically any new bed that goes in will have bulbs in it if I can do anything about it (which means fall planted, mostly, since I am unlikely to go back and put bulbs into existing beds).

Weeds: the aspen suckers are nuts this year, which is unsurprising. They take about two years to get 8-10' tall or so and over an inch thick, so there are a couple clumps I missed last year that feel like real trees now and need different equipment to cut down. If I cut them twice a year I can use the really robust hedge shears. It's all really hard on the hands, like I lose the ability to hold cups after for awhile. I've been trying to track down proper ratcheting pruners but it seems like they're out of fashion.

The invasive thistle is everywhere. If I deep mulch yearly it's easy to pull out once a year, also hard on my hands but keeps it from going to seed. Thing is, I need to cut the aspens before I deep mulch, so there's this whole particular sequence that needs to happen and it kind of needs to happen everywhere at once? normally I do cardboard then compost then mulch, but when mom was here last spring she took out most of the gardboard and I've been using the rest to build beds, so grass has cme up to complicate the aspen/thistle removal. I'm definitely getting into a sense for what yearly maintenance will look like. The south slope bed is my oldest one, and honestly I haven't had many longlasting beds I got to handle in a non-professional capacity, so it's interesting to play around with it. The soil is improving steadily, which is good and also maybe why the weeds are so intense. If I can get 6-8" of mulch on everything and the aspen suckers cut down by mid-april I'll e in good shape.

The scentless chamomile which took over the untilled spots in the winter garden dyes fabric well and lastingly, which is nice. I'd still rather have edible chamomile, but this stuff pulls out easily in spring. I'm ok with it. Clover seems to outcompete it too.

My feral gai lan did some good seeding this year, I'm collecting a lot of the seeds and going to move them up from the winter field to the apple field. The back field is lots of clover and grass where the oaks didn't go in. The clover is self-seeding now, which is excellent, but the grass is a bit of a challenge.

I'm losing typing coordination so I'll set this asde for now. But. Good gardening year, looking forward to nxt.

Oh, two kinds of sunflowers did super well. And I need to write about herbs.

Doing pottery is so good but oh my goodness my core stability muscles. Working on the wheel I notice my lessened finger strength (all my strength is lessening, because obviously I'm a lot less active than I used to be with everything, and I've been using aids like wheelbarrows to move feed sacks etc) but it's when I stand up and then try to get myself home, and then try to get myself out of bed the next day, that I notice the core stuff.

Working my way through the backlog of stuff I wanted to make though! And I still have my skill, and I'm pretty fast so I can make a bunch of stuff in my window of ability. Another pottery studio person was there and she was newer to pottery than I am, and she didn't get through the quantity that I did.

(She also had most of the glaze kiln full of her work, which is absolutely gorgeous linework with fine black glaze tips and then colour, it is a privilege to watch her develop her style and to understand her experimentation and iteration on the way to her goals)

It's chilly here, perfect weather to stay in bed and recover. When it's chilly enough all 4 cats get on the bed, they really like the electric blanket. Not that it matters as much as all that, I can't stay awake right now for anything.

In a couple days I need to figure out my woad harvest and what to say to the doctor I'm seeing (my own doctor is unavailable till mid October so I'm seeing an interim doctor in the hopes of coaxing my referral out, but my prescriptions are also running out. thank goodness they let pharmacists fill in the gaps)

In the next week and a half I need to set the farm up to run while I'm gone. The auto waterers are set up, I need to empty the quail house for the auto goose feeder (they are going through *so much* food right now as they fatten up, it's astonishing. Well over twice as much what they were two weeks ago) and build a little auto feeder for the garden muscovies, as well as putting a pallet house up for them if I have time. It's doable in the time I have but I'm hanging myself up on making a door. Which way does the Z support run? Looking things like that up remains challenging.

I'm getting some nice tomatoes from the miracle cheriette line in a number of flavours, which is fun, and it seems to have switched from broccoli to zucchini bounty.

Writing too often is bad, because it uses up energy. Writing often is good, because it helps me remember who I am, and I'm an external processor so it lets me think through things.

Thinking through things is bad, because it uses up energy and I'm no longer good enough at it to get an energy return from optimizing things. Thinking through things is good because, well, maybe it isn't.

Whiskey went in to the vet to get two teeth pulled the other day, including his one long, cracked fang. I made the backseat of the truck into a bed, took him in, napped, went to the extra fancy garden center's half-off sale (my birthday was at the beginning of the week so) and learned that hellebores overwinter here (!!!!!), bought a grape vine and some flowering perennials, ate at an overpriced restaurant that had air conditioning, napped in the truck again, picked up Whiskey, got stuck in traffic, and came home.

I'm still recovering but so is Whiskey so we're doing it together. I can't believe how lucky I've been in my animals. They're just all so... loving. And, all things considered, unbelievably well behaved. Little Bear hasn't broken a dish in a year or something?

It's interesting to observe my symptoms so clearly. Normally I don't do a day that big, but if I'm going to crash it's because of an accumulation of things on top of what I thought I could manage already, like I visited a friend and then have to answer disability questions unexpectedly or have a doctor's appointment and then something emotional happens, in the same two week period. But I've had two days now that were extremely big days, the Friday which was two interpersonal things plus whatever else it was, doctors I think and scheduling an appointment, and then the Monday which was the vet, and I was still wobbly on Monday tbh.

There's a distinct delay before the issues set in, which I think is why it's hard to be really knife-brutal about cutting things off at the time. I don't immediately collapse (well, I sometimes do, but less often) but instead there's this pause of a day or two. I can get out ahead of it a little by using the pause for very intense rest.

Anyhow, it's all the normal stuff plus some extra sore muscle and audio comprehension stuff this time.

Still, this weekend the town is having its big fair celebration thing. Actually the town has lots, summer solstice is not celebrated but the date is Aboriginal Day, there are some others, and this weekend is Caledonia Days which has events throughout the town, centered around the beach (which is in the middle of town and is lovely and basically a big park).

The art studio will be doing an open house Friday afternoon/evening and I've decided to go in and head down to the pottery part of the studio and do some throwing/answering questions/showing folks around. If my intention was to keep my energy levels very smooth and not crash again it would be a terrible idea, but I feel the strong need to reclaim my own power over my life right now. All the medical stuff comes when it feels like it and I need to respond, I don't really have a choice in how much energy it takes or when it's timed. So sometimes I need to in turn make a choice to use my energy for myself, and for interacting with my community.

The only thing I need to do the following week is to set my place up so I can leave it when I take Avallu to surgery. That means buying a couple more float valves for the animals, moving the pigs to an area close in but fresh with green, setting up autowaterers and maybe finally making my auto-feeders. That's a lot to do but I have a couple weeks to do it, minus a doctor's appointment with not-my-doctor to hopefully get my ?years overdue? referral for the gynecologist I hope.

Fall is coming. My house was 15C on the main floor this morning. It's cozy in bed and I'm not ready to close the windows yet. Dew is heavy outside in the morning. Litte by little I'm tucking parts of the garden in for winter, though I won't get to all of it I think.

I'm alive, still alive into my bonus time, and glad of it.

The groomers found a sore spot on Avallu's butt and I made a vet appointment for him, which we went to yesterday. He travels well in the car and he looked hopeful at the groomers turnoff, which was nice to see.

The vet found a rectal hernia, which is going to need surgery. That is, without surgery he'd be looking at anaesthesia in a month or two; with surgery he has an excellent likelihood of doing great and everything turning out well.

The surgery needs to happen in a big city; not the little city close by but Vancouver or Edmonton, and it's not even close to cheap.

I put together my resources and I'm now waiting for a call from the referral vet in Vancouver. Money resources, driving resources, somewhere to stay in town with a big dog that does not also have scent or pot issues resources, pet sitting resources...

Three days ago I noticed bats dropping past my window. I knew they'd come to nest in the point of my roof's overhang-- not, this time, in the actual roof, which would be bad for the house. But three days ago I'd just come upstairs and they were dropping into the sky just as dusk started to deepen. The next night I looked for them but didn't see them; last night I glued myself to the window and counted twenty-two bats dropping and when I had to sit down there were still little cute bat noises up there.

Little Bear sat at the window with me but he was uninterested in bats. He watched cars and mosquitoes though

After driving my pup around for six hours, starting to process the news, sketching out what resources I had, closing the windows against wildfire smoke and then thinking fuckit and opening them again, and counting bats, I passed out on top of my covers with the light on and my teeth unbrushed.

My watch says I slept well and long, interrupted only by some wet cats coming in from the night rain at first light. They lay on me for warmth while the bats sounded like they, too, were coming home through the open window. Maybe they don't like the rain either.

To take my mind off things I sketched out a budget of my current expenses, which is no more able to be molded to the reality of my income than I'd thought, and listened to an audiobook by Ben Aaronovitch, which was fun, before I fell asleep

Now the air coming in through the window smells like wet smoke and it's burning my nose. A cat is asleep by my hip and I've made it under the covers. My mouth tastes bad. Everything is growing outside.

I should get up but I'm not sure I'm ready to face the day yet.

Rain in the afternoons. Our wildfire danger system is a 4 point scale (which is calculated through a series of amazing other scales that all lead into each other). Low, moderate, high, extreme. The last several summers we've sat at extreme all summer pretty much. Right now we're at moderate. There's not even smoke here, though the center of the continent is still burning up. I can leave my windows open. I can relax in ways I haven't for years during the summertime, knowing it's deeply unlikely I'll need to evacuate. I don't need to keep all the animal crates prepped and the trailer ready. It's so beautiful and peaceful.

The garden is slow; there are beautiful lettuces and fennel and kale and the kohlrabi is sizing up and the tomatoes are growing well, but the peppers are in stasis and the corn isn't doing much. This is the Fort I remember.

On the other hand, the KARMA miracle/sweet cheriette cross I made is in the F2 now and it's ripening here and there already. I made the cross because sweet cheriette is super early and miracle is tasty and fairly cool-tolerant, and I do seem to have successfully created a bunch of early plants. I'm tasting them as they ripen, I think I've tasted 5 now of the maybe 20 I've planted. They're very good! I'm discarding the ones that are too sweet but I'm still left with lots to proceed with. I also have a set of zesty green/silvery fir but they're a bit slower.

I discovered a place the next town over that sells 4' long trim ends, usually pretty checked or with wane on them, but it's a 4x4x4' cube for $50 so I get to play with that. At that price it's actually cheaper than firewood, although it won't burn long enough to use exclusively it's still going to be a help this winter if I can get several of them squirreled away. Anything that's good enough to make dog houses, duck houses, garden chairs, etc with is a bonus.

I've also been doing some fabric dyeing. Scentless chamomile most recently, horsetail, willow and yarrow are on the list. The tansy I did last year was gorgeous, I'm going to try some goldenrod, and I want to do rhubqarb root but getting it means being mean to my plants so it's hard. I'm also very curious what aspen does. I've been dyeing cotton shirts since they're cheap and I can easily test for wash/lightfastness by wearing them a bunch, and linen is so expensive.

I met the person who's been doing a spinning residency in the art studio yesterday. She has a bunch of light wool so we're going to play with some dyeing. That will be fun.

I need to be very careful not to overload myself right now. It's so tempting to think that the internet can combine with rest, and even audiobooks do take some energy -- much less than the internet. It's a learning thing.

I've been spending a ridiculous amount of money on fresh fruit but it means I've been eating the most delicious peaches and apricots. It's so luxurious. I make up for it from the garden or eating the cheapest canned sardines on rice the rest of the time. My easy canned food has tripled in price with the weirdness going on with the US, trade war or whatever. Cleaning the rice cooker isn't no work, but it's what I got.

Meanwhile I follow some folks in gaza, kids who reminded me of me at that age who used to do little videos about things they loved to do. People talk about the bombing and famine as being traumatic, and of course it is. But kids watching their cats slowly starve and die, feeding the cats lentils and watermelon, that's... the cruelty administered to that population, the level of care put to considering every type of indignity that can be inflicted, the goal is very clearly to craft a forever war, a set of folks who can never heal but only return what they have been so skillfully taught. The kids I follow don't seem like that at all, but.

It's a dark note to end on, but these are dark times.

I just finished my first fiction audiobook that was not a re-read. I'd gone through things I'd read before, and I'd gone through various dinosaur and nature things (the latter needed lots of rewinding to capture, so they're more work to read). I wasn't sure if I'd be able to follow a plot the way I am now.

So this was a popcorn book, Mrs Pollifax, chosen from a list of things I wanted to read because of an older protagonist and bececause they were sorta like Agatha Christie, and because the library had the ebooks. And... I really enjoyed it? The narrator was fantastic, I caught enough of the plot not to sit around being confused, and it was just a nice ride. I had not been able to go on a nice ride outside myself since... well certainly since the accident in 2016. I'm so grateful I get this back, and so grateful for the community of people that helped me figure out how to access ebooks through the library. I would not have been able to do that on my own.

I do need to be a little careful with it -- this is one of two escapisms I know I use that really work for me, and I can't use it to escape from awareness of my health situation or else I'll be stuck in bed again. Like I said the other day to a friend, I always need to keep myself well enough to tend the animals. But that's just something to manage, as anything that brings joy needs to be managed.

There's more to be said there, but it can wait.

It is funny that I spent so much of my time when I was younger connecting with people through writing and screens, and now that's lost to me. Reading is completely utilitarian, whatever happens with my eyes and that brain system of comprehension takes much too much for me to think or categorize or feel at the same time. But I finally am able to get a ghost of elsewho back.

I will add that I scored a truly enormous bundle of 2x4s for $50 from a mill the other day. They're trim ends, and some will be good for building bird shelters and furniture, while others can be burned this winter. It's not a bad price for that much wood even for firewood, though kilned wood burns too fast to use alone if I have a bunch it'll make winter much easier. I also got a case of use-today apricots very cheap and will embark on some water bath canning, and I finally started scouring fabric to test scentless chamomile for dyeing and picked a bunch of flowers. My hope is to test the flowers, then the leaves, and see if there are different colours between the two; then maybe try iron mordanting or indigo overdye. It's just neat to see what colours things make. Sadly this is with cheap t-shirts from the department store sale but I'm hoping to sort myself out more linen to play with.

So that's a lot to do. Luckily the garden is in and growing well and it's been raining enough I haven't even needed to water it. There are lots of weeds -- some are very very tall, but those are in the perennial areas between the plants, so they're not shading things out too badly. Sign of good soil and water, high weeds.

Despite everything, this summer is truly a glorious one.

The last three summers have been drought and wildfire smoke, and before that the heat dome. 2020 I spent in a state of basically complete panic that was probably a combination of PDA and work from home interacting, along with the ambient covid panic. I can't remember 2019's summer offhand but I think I changed jobs at that time; 2018 was a wildfire evacuation. I moved into this house in 2017 at the end of summer and that was the last summer like this, with birds and the smell of clover everywhere. Threshold loved me as much then as it does now, part of my body, a fully enveloping love like finally having real skin or gravity.

This year I've only closed the windows for wildfire smoke a couple days. We've had actual rain, the kind of rain patters I remember from before the drought: little wandering thunderstorms bringing cloudbursts and sometimes thunder as they pirouette across the landscape. There's no heat dome; outside it drops to about 10C at night and when I wake up the house is cool; during the day the sun can be a little hot between rainstorms but long cool mornings and the endless stretch of near-solstice evening give lots of time for moving around.

There are more bugs than I've ever seen and my body feeds noseeums and blackflies as well as mosquitoes when I go out in the evening. I leave the fan running in the bedroom, facing out the window, and a window on the north side of the house open downstairs; it pulls the cool air in but also disrupts the mosquitoes and any who get into the house can't fly against the air current. I picked that trick up from an Ologies bug episode, where the entomologist said the best way to keep mosquitoes off a patio was to put a fan at ankle level. They're bad fliers, he said, and like to be low, so they can't fight the air current enough to bite. I love that kind of elegant solution. When I came in from the garden two days ago in the evening my face was covered in blood, half from swatted mosquitoes and half from blackfly bites.

The garden rolls out like a carpet and then fills in like details on an oil painting. I'm putting in paths and trees and trellises, a little at a time, and yesterday I picked up a bunch of perennial flowers and they're waiting in the wheelbarrow to go up and in. I've put in a kolomikta kiwi trellis. I've put in a strawberry bed with six kinds of strawberries. I've put in baby lindens and silver maples and elms and ash and oak and hazel. In one tomato and pepper bed the hazel, cherries, and haskap are there, no bigger than the other little pepper plants and spaced in between them to line a path that does not yet exist, to a spot that is still weeds but will later be a portal.

I have somehow become a person with elderly animals -- not elderly in the way they act, but at ten years old they start to get yearly bloodwork at their vet visit to make sure everything's ok. Whiskey, Hazard, and Siri fall into that category and today is Avallu's birthday; he's 9. Yesterday Whiskey followed me out to the garden and followed me as I wheelbarrowed woodchips from down here to up in the back garden a couple times, then got the zoomies and ran along the path very fast, bounced off the wheelbarrow I was pushing, and kept going. He does not feel elderly.

Anything could happen during the rest of the summer. It's windier than it has been, with tornadoes surprisingly nearby, and the wind strips moisture quickly. We're only saved by the little wandering rainstorms that come regularly. There is a lot of fire elsewhere and strange heat anomalies and floods. Politically we've lost the idea of human life as important and human well-being and rights are so far out of functional equations as to be laughable. There are many wars, even if we don't call them that anymore, and no one with resources is interested in holding back the tide of disease. Systems infrastructure frays and I suspect one day we will wish we had our current access the things that right now we think of as irritating because they are becoming inconvenient: border access, medical systems, air travel, relatively free telecommunications, year round fresh foods, so many things.

This won't be the last glorious summer like this but it might be mine. Even if it isn't I draw a line here: I love being alive, I love inhabiting my life, I very very very much want to know what happens next, but this summer would be enough.

Cool wind and the scent of overnight rain through the window. Warm covers and a cat sleeping on the bed while others wait for breakfast. Thai black rice, coconut milk, and sugar in the rice cooker with apricots waiting. Aspens rustling outside silkily. A pile of woodchips waiting for their wheelbarrow, steaming slightly as they compost. Wiggly dogs and the sound of roosters in the distance and beyond that robins and sparrows. Nearly clean sheets and parsley, mint, and tomatoes from the garden waiting to be turned into tabouli downstairs. Reading again! by audiobook, the closest I can ever have to revisiting my childhood home. A nephew? Even a few people in the world who really want me alive.

It's very good to be here.

Solstice is definitely over. I'd been trying to be outside across sunset and there's no longer a sense that the day will go on forever. Even if by just a coupe minutes it's getting dark earlier and earlier.

It's still light hours before I wake up. Though, this morning I was awoken by a rooster on the front porch (not supposed to be there) and now a road crew. I'm never gonna complain about someone fixing my road, especially since it's already 9am, but with all the windows open to catch the breeze it's very noticable.

I've had a fun fact for a long time -- birds don't have capsicum/hot pepper receptors, so hot peppers aren't hot to them. I've known it in the context of coevolutionary development where the pepper fruits have evolved to allow birds to eat them and carry the seeds away when they're ripe, but protect themselves from anyone else (until humans and agriculture etc). Well, in practice this means if a chicken gets into the greenhouse she'll eat all the peppers off the pepper plants. Even the really hot peppers.

The greenhouse, which used to be the wood tent, is super full-- more full than it can accommodate for the full season. My plan is to exclude the animals from one of the other greenhouses and move things there. This is the point Josh asks, which one? Fair question. The goosehouse greenhouse will hold heat longer in the year and needs a good clean out for two years of deep litter anyhow, so it's probably the best. In the long run it would be nice to have all my greenhouses through the summer.

Naming is also a bit of an issue for these things. The winter pig field is no longer a pig field, and so calling it "the winter field" is a bit weird because, well, in winter everything is just snow. The pigs go into the goosehouse greenhouse in the winter. The upper field is upper, for sure, but the back field is upper-- it's just back and upper. I guess the fields could be named winter, spring, and summer: that accords with their time of planting really. But the green houseshave the same issue: the wood tent is now the greenhouse closest to the house, the goose house greenhouse is more the pig greenhouse, and the garden greenhouse, well, technically they're all gardens, right? I'm very happy to have names evolve because I know what I mean, but describing what's going on to Josh is a bit harder.

Maybe someday the names will settle and I'll paint signs for everything.

I went on an (informal) garden tour at a friend's garden and it's a truly lovely place, but I noticed a distinct lack of labelling. I always want to know what things are -- she has a lot of ornamentals, and also varieties are interesting to me and they're harder to sort than just what species it is by just looking. I think I was spoilt by working at botanical gardens for so long. The task of making ceramic tags for all my plants is enormous but I have been picking away at it and will continue to, replacing my popsicle sticks and sharpie. I don't like unlabelled plants, though labelling is very hard to maintain. This is maybe only the second year my tomatoes have stayed well-labeled so late.

It's been hot and I'm definitely running myself down, so an hour or two in the evening is the most real gardening I get to do. I wander around in the mornings but it mostly feels too sticky and I feel too exhausted and slow. Even so, yesterday I weeded the shaded haskap patch, next to the goose greenhouse, from Canada thistle. It has a cardboard and then deep chip mulch so it's a very easy weed, though I'm not getting all the roots the thistles do need to come quite a ways to get back into the light. And I got them before they bloomed.

I also got most of the hardy kiwis planted, even the ones that got eaten off by the (chicken/cats?). They line one of the pathways in the upper field, and will seperate the ploughing area from the strawberries. Hopefully I'll plant the strawberries today. I have six kinds: kent, seascape, honeyoye, ft laramie, flamingo, and natural white. I'd like to keep them all seperate and labelled, though apparently the white ones want to go in close to red ones for pollination. We;ll see what I can do. Also up there from earlier this spring is my mammoth raspberries and some apples.

The couple days before that I got in the shade garden, pulmonaria and alchemilla and hostas, which I believe I'd mentioned but couldn't remember pulmonaria's name. It's the plant I learned the doctrine of signatures on, though, so it'll always be so distinctive to me.

Speaking of which, there's a plant growing from seed near the tap on the north side of the house. I've been looking at it when I use the tap, trying to figure it out. At first maybe it was dandelion? But no, it was developing that grainy, slightly silvery texture and distinctive shape of the chard/beet/sorrel/dock family. Maybe it was sorrel? It would be a great place for sorrel to grow but how would the seed have got there? Could it be dock? How would dock seeds get there? If it was I'd been to pull them pretty quick...

...then I realized they were the rhubarb seeds I'd sprinkled there last summer coming up. As they develop some are getting redder stems and some greener. I'm very pleased. I have pallets along the side of the house, flat on the ground, to stop the ducks digging up my foundation when it rains. The rhubarb is under one pallet so I'm hoping that'll keep it safe from maurauding birds until its bigger.

The birds are supposed to all be away from the house but the muscovies fly over the fence and the chickens sometimes ignore it. Plan is to create a new enclosed chicken coop since the previous one that was here when I got here is super sagging.

Yesterday was close loud thunder and heavy rain in the evening. I went out to pick some feral gai lan and was soaked. These periodic deep soaking rains are lovely, it's been a long time since we've had them, and it's absolutely a perfect time for me to be laying down paths of woodchips on my very sensitive clay soil.

The corn is growing well. I have a lot of mulching and weeding to do and still some planting. My solstice break is over but I've more or less used it to reshape my habits and spend more outside time and less online time. I'll try to hold onto that until equinox, when I'll maybe try and do it all again.

Now if you'll excuse me, the cat has discovered that if my window is open he can sit on the front deck and meow to get my attention, and apparently I'm letting it work.

I think the solstice interregnum isn't a success, exactly. I'd been hoping to take a week off from the outer world. Instead I talked to both mom and Josh yesterday -- I normally have something like 2 phone calls per month, not 2 in a day! -- did a bunch of insurance and gun license renewal paperwork, and as one would expect after all that basically collapsed. Pretty much zero garden, and then this morning I had to run in to pick up some mail (neither couriers nor the postal service deliver to houses here, so when the dog food I order comes in, the dollar store which is the depot for courier services holds it and calls me to come pick it up).

I came home, made lunch, and fell hard asleep. Little Bear curled up on my legs and slept with me. It was the kind of sleep that feels like a hard cleansing rain to the mind, and where it takes a long time to remember how to move my limbs.

I want to go outside and do more gardening but I still feel exhausted and weak. It really is incredible how doing that mind work -- paperwork, socializing -- leaves me literally bedbound but if I can garden without any of it then I remain functional. I wish I knew the mechanism.

I've decided to attend a local(ish) SCA event in early July. It's in the big town nearby, a weekend's camping event. I can drive in and out as I choose, decide whether to stay the night or not and when to come back. I imagine I'll be able to sit or lie in the grass a lot. It's outdoors, which is obviously a lot comfier for covid. My local SCA friend has invited me to make some garb up this week, she does a ton of period sewing, so I'll bring some linen and maybe some wool and see if I can get my head around fabric craft again. I have actually been considering hand-sewing or hand-finishing some linen things for awhile; it's more straightforward than a sewing machine and much slower, so I may be able to handle it. Or, it might trigger the same issues as reading, and it wont' work. We will eventually see.

In the meantime I have fajita filling in the fridge and some wraps, a bunch of fruit, and I'm trying to work up the energy to walk back outside. The world is intruding into my thoughts again. When I try writing about it, it sounds terrible, but eventually I'll capture what I'm trying to say maybe.

Yesterday was outside a lot. I went out in the morning and pulled wheelbarrowsfull of thistles and finished planting my shade garden (hostas! alchemilla! er, the what's-it-called with little purple or pink flowers that under the doctrine of signatures treats lungs and goes in a shady place and has silver spots on the leaves!). Then a deep nap, sunscreen, and more outside play. I even managed to get out for a third time as the sun was setting and stood in the centre of my circle where the elm is growing, hissing and muttering to the setting sun until I had its location. All the cats accompanied me except Whiskey.

I read an entire audiobook yesterday: Mysterious Affair At Styles, an old friend, as are all poirot and marple stories. I hadn't realized just how much of a difference it makes being able to access that familiar-- you know, from my preteens to early twenties I spent much much more time with books than people. Agatha Christie's gently satirical, aware humour is a parent's voice to me, and I hadn't been able to read in flow state since roughly 2016. It brings a piece of myself back to me. So strange that I'd always had difficulty understanding and interpreting verbal language as compared to written, and now my mind is slowed so much and whatever it is that broke in my mind was so pervasive that listening is easier than reading.

There are so many things in my life that are, not unpredictable, but the complete opposite of what would have been believed about me in the beginning. Yet here I am, more myself than ever. Especially more now that I can visit my old book-friends. I'm still listening only to fiction I'd read at least a dozen times before or science fact where I have a framework pre-existing to hang the info on, and I rewind and reread freqently. I'm curious about reading unfamiliar fiction. I'll learn about that in the fullness of time.

In the meantime I can;t access all my old book friends since they're not all audiobooked, but I haven't run to the end of what I can access yet. I do miss specific voices and people, but I do have some. So.

I made a lovely supper last night, put on clean sheets, and went to sleep after midnight, after the sunset.

This morning I woke at 6am with wildfire smoke coming in the window with the light. I got up, closed everything up, turned on the filters, and went back to sleep. I'm very glad the air was clear yesterday but I very much want to plant oaks today. Theoretically we're provided with a smoke forecast so I could try to plan my day around less smoke.

The tomatoes want trellising. The blackcurrants want in the ground. Things want mulch and more weeding. Eggplants need into their final pots in the greenhouse. Things will grow, ripen, and then fade and die. The seasons keep turning. I'm within them. It's good.

I have tattooed on my side the "to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven" passage -- it goes on for quite awhile, ending "and enjoy the good of all his labor, it is the gift of God" on my upper thigh. I put it there because I need reminding.

It's summer solstice in the year 2025. I'm alive. The days have swelled and swelled until they burst the barrier between light and dark and sunlight bleeds over the horizon even when it's supposed to be night. I live further north than I had ever thought I would. My garden here, where I've lived longer than anywhere else in my adult life, is rewarding my attention this year. I don't have much attention to give, these days, but the form and amount seems to suit Threshold, this land I've partnered with. Living with this land is like having bones supporting my essential self.

I wear reading glasses now. Normally when I catch sight of myself in a mirror I get stuck, frozen for anywhere from a few minutes to maybe half an hour or so. Maybe for the first time, this morning, I caught sight of myself wearing reading glasses in the reflection of my laptop screen and smiled because I looked like a comfortable silly human. I did not get stuck and I was not indifferent. I had a moment of joy -- that's me, being a silly human, with cheap blue-green plastic reading glasses, watching an Agatha Christie show in bed.

This week I'm going to practice being inside joy like that. So much of my life has been joy thinking about what I will do, how to do it, following through, thinking, thinking. My, call it illness, has reduced both my thinking ability and my doing ability so I'll need to strengthen my other sources of joy to survive.

Many things have been weighing on me recently. Some have been taken off my shoulders by others, but I'm using this long time of light to take another off too: it will be dark again this winter, and I can set my long, slow, multi-year ghosting by Tucker aside to think about in the darker times. I can figure out how to process that dead, painful thing into fertilizer for what comes next at another time. I don't have to think about it now.

When I set this aside and step out the door the immediate embodiment of the long summer days will come meet me, wiggling her tail and chewing a stick. Hard to believe Solly has been here for two years now, and hard to believe she's ever not been here. She's the youngest of us all except for Little Bear. It's nice to have a young one around.

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

It rained yesterday, and the night before that. It's been a good soaking rain, the kind we rarely get these days. This is the May long weekend and the previous couple long weekends folks have cancelled their quad parties in the bush because it's been so dry that sparks or the heat of the vehicle could start fires (I still do not know what a "poker ride" is, though I have suspicions). This year things may have been cancelled for rain, though we definitely had sunny periods, but the spate of fires that comes immediately after this weekend seems unlikely to materialize.

The ground had been almost too try to till in my clay soil, even a month or two before last frost date. I had been picking away at it, a hundred or two hundred square feet at a time, and had done a first pass on the pig winter field (which needs a better name) and the upper field, and was just starting on the back field that has snowmelt running down over it for weeks when the snow first disappears. This will make my second pass much easier.

I'd got some pre-started brassica greens in the ground, then the other day put out the broccoli and kale, and yesterday planted some peas finally. We're still dipping below zero some nights -- never the nights when it rains -- and there are tiny delicate skims of ice on the water in containers on those mornings if I get out there early enough.

Yesterday before the rain I planted three heartnut and three buartnut by the fence in the back field to see if the juglone they produce (when they're a little bigger) will suppress the aspen from coming across the fence from the neighbour's place.

When Josh was here we drove into Alberta and picked up some excellent hardy plums and apples, which we planted. The apples are leafed out now, they went into the orchard (mostly on siberian rootstock) and the plums look to be following suit shortly.

Those bulbs I planted last fall have been coming up -- no peonies yet, but squill, daffodils, muscari, etc. They aren't so much coming up en masse, as makes sense for the first year, but there's a nice long season of them. A couple test daffodils in the orchard have not yet been eaten by geese, which is excellent news.

Many of the bulbs were planted in little clumps around the baby apple seedlings I put in last fall. Not all of those survived but many did.

I'm hauling my peppers and tomatoes onto the deck everyday for hardening off, and festooning the livingroom with them every night. Yesterday when I brought them in the were wet with rainwater.

I also put some beaked hazel in, and an order of hardy roses from corn hill. I have a bundle of hazelbert waiting to go in as well, but those last dead spruce trees from the winter field were felled right onto the spot I want them to go and apparently chainsawing destroys my body.

Wheelbarrowing in moderation and tilling seem ok for the hour of activity per day though, so I've been doing those, bringing up the chicken compost to the fields. The tiller is so good because it's rear tine so it pulls itself along and I have the handles to lean on as I walk behind. I'm being as kind to it as I know how, checking the fluids regularly, but haven't yet brought myself to change the oil. It's still starting well.

The front yard has been mostly fenced off from the geese, except for a trio who keep getting out, laying an egg in the dog house which Thea then eats or cherishes, and asking to be let back in at the gate. They are keeping my grass down somewhat so that's fine.

I hired the neighbour a couple down to chop up the fallen south fenceline aspens and burn the tops for me. He did an excellent job, was great company, and I now feel more comfortable about the fuel load by my house and more comfortable in the neighbourhood. I need to cover that south bank with compost and chips and plant into it -- I already put two little leaf lindens but want to add some elm, ash, and oak plus a shrub layer of some kind, likely usask cherries and currants. that's the same slope my clove currant is thriving on and my haskaps do well on too, and it gets more heat than anything else in the area. Maybe some wild plum or plum seedlings to?

A semilocal (Edmonton) vocational high school was doing a scionwood sale as a fundraiser so I ordered some sticks of apple and plum. Its in the fridge (I have a (small) seed fridge now given me by a friend) while I figure out rootstocks. A friend locally has a bunch of apple suckers, someone else in a cold climate has been successfully grafting apple onto *wild saskatoons*, someone was having a sale on wild plums, I have some plums that the tops died off and they're just mustang rootstock, plus there's topworking on existing plum trees. So I have some options, I'm just limited to an hour or, if I'm lucky, two, per day.

The whole thing makes me happy but it makes be even more of a recluse because leaving the house takes up two days worth of activity and I would rather be gardening. Pottery is on hold. Disability paperwork is mostly settled. Most other things can wait.

A hundred tomato varieties-ish this year. Normally I would list them out for you (and myself in posterity) but making lists is hard and I'd rather be gardening. There are roughly three categories: "early hardy reds" "fancy trial tomatoes" and "my own crosses in F2 and F3".

Eightyish hot pepper varieties too, spanning all the major species except chinense. I do love those plants, they grow so differently from tomatoes. They'd rather err on the side of dry than wet. They flower and leaf so prettily. A colorado and the mystery athens peppers overwintered in the house and are doing great now too.

I also picked up a kaffir lime for indoors, which makes my house smell truly amazing, and some baby figlets are on order, because um. I guess I'm letting myself do what I want.

Yesterday I planted runner beans, marigolds, nasturtiums, woad, and chickpeas indoors to go out when the seedlings are big enough to make a visible row in the garden (difficulty of a bit weedy garden is that direct seeding plants I'm not intimately familiar with takes a lot of concentration to ID, not that I can;t ID nasturtium and runner beans). Runner beans are supposed to be happier in slightly cooler weather than standard phasesolus and I feel able to provide them support this year.

There are several projects that need doing, fencing and deconstructing excess pig buildings and making a woodshed and putting in some proper gates, but those can all be done later.

I really should take down the hedging cedars right up against my front balcony for fire reasons but I like the screen they provide from the road. The hope is to put a solarium there instead, with some sort of adhesive glass frosted stuff in the road direction, but that's a long ways away.

There's big stuff going on in the world, many people dying and many more deciding that some group or another needs to die. It's abhorrent. It's happening locally and internationally. I read about it more than I want, and I garden because I'd rather be doing that than reading. I can't tell you how lucky I feel to have this garden, better than I ever believed I could have in my whole life, and these cats and dogs and geese ranging around with their own individualities making up a community I can tolerate and that always wants me to be alive. They even take joy in my physical existence, which is so good for my heart.

Writing this feels superficial, but words have power, and so: I wish this for everyone in the world. A safe home, a loving community that feels joy in their existence. Safety. Life. Enough food of the kind that makes them stop sometimes and just say "this is so good". I wish this for everyone. Please.

Today is the first day in a bit I've felt like there could be any good in the world ever again. I can't quite put my finger on it yet, but it seems like it could be possible? This morning was well above freezing, misty out, and Solly came up to me when she saw I was outside. She's grown up so much in the last year and a half, picking up that maremma solemnity and stoicism I never would have imagined from her as a puppy.

I make a point of giving her some pets and ear scritches whenever I see her, so she knows she doesn't have to do anything fancy for attention, and she's stopped jumping. Today she was being good and I had enough self-awareness to notice and get down there with her and give her a ton of love and we just sort of leaned into each other and snuggled for a good long time.

The garden club is having their seed swap March 15, and I think they asked me to start a bunch of seeds for them so I can do a demonstration on separating seedling tomatoes again this year. I should double check that. People realyly like getting to go home with free baby plants, and it's a nice trick to know you can start them all close together and then split them apart a little later, to save space under lights in the beginning.

I still feel like I'm carrying around a huge weight. I hate that the way to reject a dynamic I don't like is to-- ugh, I don't know. Enough about that sort of thing right now.

This weekend Josh comes up. I don't even remember what we were going to do, maybe smoke salmon and something about changing the outside light bulbs that need a ladder? The last few days I haven't been able to keep food in my body or move much so I haven't got the house ready for a visitor. I think the cats peed on something, I have a trial cat litter that was supposed to be natural but smells like porta potty fluid that I need to empty entirely and replace, there are garbage bags of cat litter and cat cans waiting to go to the dump (I wish there was a way to do these cats with less waste but also not too much actual weight, the wet food that keeps them healthy is truly awful for garbage), sheets need to be cleaned, vacuum broke and floors blah blah blah, need to bring more wood in, I don't even know.

It's been a long time since my body was this bad and it's had me thinking about what I really would need to live here, assuming that I can't always pace things (relationship thing and disability police requiring a ton more documentation happened both in the same few days). I probably need a non-wood-burning way of heating the house even in winter, whether that's some sort of electric furnace/heat pump or a gas fireplace downstairs or whatever. Something that doesn't require a couple armloads of wood a day anyhow. Ideally something that if my head is fuzzy I can walk away from and it doesn't damage it. Today I forgot to close the catalyst bypass and the chimney got a lot of flame up it -- it's kept clean enough that it didn't catch fire, and it was nowhere near the heat the catalyst pumps out, but it was a lot of oxygen and flame in a way that would have caught anything that was in there. I smelled the heat and went and closed it up and checked the chimney from the outside, no harm done, but still.

Josh is here for a couple days, which contains a doctor's appointment where I need to get a ton of paperwork done (imagine being able to actually talk about medical stuff with the doctor!) and then next weekend I'm assisting with the wheel throwing class at the pottery studio.

Body aside, which it never is, I'm glad I have committed to more in-studio people-type clay stuff. I need to keep bits of community going. You know where you see people do cool stuff and they think stuff you're doing is cool and you exist in the same space? I'll maybe need to find a place in the building to set up a cot and rest between bits.

My cat was just sleeping beside me and woke up with a cry. He looked around sharply and it took a minute for him to relax and accept pets. It seemed pretty clear he'd woken from a bad dream. I wonder how he processes that?

My poem-a-day is going well. I want energy to plan my garden, but I don't have it. My enthusiasm is admittedly a little dim right now too, though I imagine it'll come back with time. I still haven't done my one-week internet-free pottery retreat I'd planned to do this winter.

Those are things I can look forward to. There are things.

Last month was a bad month. Fear and paperwork. When I write things here I re-live them, and I wasn't quite able to write about them because I wasn't done living them. In many ways I'm not.

It snowed for three days after all that, maybe 18" of snow here: over my boots. My snowblower is in the shop so although I have been doing some shovelling and knocking snow off roofs a feeling of isolation remains. In this case it's soothing, peaceful: I'm insulated from everyone else, though I do keep shovelling the arc of the gate so it can open if I need to get out in an emergency. The roads have been terrible, and this morning the snow turned to rain so I can't imagine it's any better out there.

Shovelling and walking the daily chores in the deep snow are all my body has been able to do. It's such a relief after using myself up emailing to follow up with bizarre information and paperwork structures (to contact benefits, for instance, I call someone who transcribes the call, puts it into a ticket, sends the transcription to me to ok, then the ticket goes to the benefits people, who email me an answer which I can't reply to so if I want to reply I need to call with the ticket number, explain the whole thing to someone, who puts in another ticket...)

Enough of that. My difficulty navigating these systems does give me real fear -- for instance, the system that was supposed to give me stopgap money requires reports every 2 weeks, and I'd been keeping my eye on their online portal, turns out the online portal just keeps saying it's "in review" until I do my first report, there's no way of knowing online if I'm approved or not until after the report is done, so I missed my first several reports, several weeks of money, and had to reapply (which then means I need to go through the weeklong no-money-during-this-period after they process it, and before I get money from them).

Anyhow, I would not be here in my bed with my cats and dim snowy light coming in through the window without friends who just give me money to live. I might be in a shelter, but the shelters are only 12 hours at night, and I think a day or two of that and I would not be able to move anymore, so maybe the hospital? With a foreclosed house and that terrible stabbing feeling of letting down the creatures I love who rely on me.

None of that is why I started writing now, after so long. I started writing because Siri came in this morning and lay on me and fell asleep with my hand under his chin, then sprawled across me. He dreamed and his tail twitched and he growled in his sleep and then settled. He was curled right up against me, as if I was safe for him, and I am?

I pay money to keep hi alive and I do not resent it in the least. Given a choice between feeding him and giving him his meds and say, clothes that fit, or a mattress without holes from laying in it so much, there's no question for me. I've felt bad about or resented people before for requiring money, but not the cats.

My house is gothic arch shaped. It's perfect for winter: the snow either stays on the roof and insulates, or it slides down and covers the basement windows and insulates down there. Things are quieter and more still, muffled by the snow at point of impact and by the rampart of snow around my house.

I've always rejected the idea of money as love because it was too painful for me to think there were ways I was unable to love people, that I just didn't have much money so that would mean I couldn't love folks properly. Like, as they said, if I did love them I'd find a way to get money for that use.

But maybe I can start by thinking of money as community love. It's still too hard to think that I can't do for anyone what has been done for me in an interpersonal love sense. But for community? I can do other things, and not this one thing, and that's maybe ok.

Though realistically I can do basically nothing right now. I can shovel a little snow and eat crackers for dinner and pet some cats. I can write very little and I can't do any pottery, though maybe if paperwork stops then I can. I can't articulate the increasing fragmentation and polarization I'm seeing in meaningful ways.

Some days I can't even find what's beautiful. I was describing my situation to a counselor at one point and she said "oh, I'm glad you have pets" and, yes. This is the thing Siri brought to me: he showed up, he chose me, he comes and snuggles close to me in the morning with full trust, and between him and the others I can always access feeling loved. Humans are so far away these days, I'm grateful to have these other ones closer to me.

And honestly, since my cognition really started to go, and since there's been more distance with Tucker and Josh, I'm not sure where my comfort level is with people at all. I used to do it so easily.

Bits of rain out there, falling on the snow now. Each drop makes the ramparts a little more impassible: I should shovel my way out at least. Or I should properly rest, since yesterday did wipe me out pretty badly.

This piece of writing has no summary, no conclusion, no theme to brush past on my way out the door. It just ends as it began, with cats snoring, and winter light in the window.

Planting trees most days and I have planted roughly 130 apple trees this year over about a month and a half, most underplanted with daffodils and muscari and a couple crocus and various scylla (the crocus and apple trees are tasty so I'm hoping the other, toxic, bulbs will be some discouragement for voles, deer, etc).

The ground has frozen too hard to plant for a span of multiple days twice now-- it just thawed overnight after the most recent one. I've received my last bulbs, including peonies, yesterday. So the next two days I plant flowers, flowers that won't even be pretty for several years, flowers that don't feed anyone, but flowers that mark where people have lived when their houses are long gone.

It's almost time to turn indoors, to dyeing and sewing and pottery, but I do not want to go indoors. I want a sunporch, somewhere with windows, where I can be in the light from outside while I do these things.

Even more I want to taste the fruit of all these baby apples, to see which ones survive my climate (they all have an early hardy parent and a fancy parent, so like Wickson or Centennial or Trailman or somesuch and then something like Rubiyat or Roxbury Russet so nothing is guaranteed).

Winter felt early a couple weeks ago but we've settled generally into a skiff of snow overnight, melting by midafternoon, and I've been planting into that. The transition period will make the final freeze-up easier on me.

I really did never know how much I appreciated seasonality until I moved up here.

It's so neat, laying out the apple trees in rows and curves and aisles and nooks. Threshold is growing bones! I want to see. Three years, five years, I want to see what happens!

I also took my chances on a tiny webstore and got six varieties of sunchoke from a delightful human, several of which flowered for her. They stay on the landscape for a long time and I can't wait to eventually turn to helping them get seed.

You'll know I'm replaced by aliens if I ever get just the minimum diversity of a plant.

Everything in my body hurts.

But.

I've done more than one thing a day the last... two days? And the day before that I also did a thing.

I've needed to get the sides on the greenhouse so I can overwinter the birds in it but I haven't had the ability to piece together scraps to make those sides up -- they need to be wood or hard plastic so the birds can't tear or claw through them, and they need to be windproof. Jigsawing bits I have around is super challenging mentally, so I just... spent money on plywood for the north and probably east sides, which was ultra expensive. Because it's so expensive I decided to pull some leftover half-buckets of fence paint out and paint it before it went on the greenhouse, so I can clean it more easily with the power washer and so it hopefully lasts until the greenhouse rusts out (it's an old pop-up greenhouse Josh and I covered with new plastic using wiggle wire).

Three days ago I cut three sheets of plywood to size and painted one side of four of them, plus dug a rhubarb plant to split it and steal some of the roots for fabric dye.

Yesterday I glazed some pottery and had a video chat with my family over their thanksgiving dinner.

Today I painted the other side of the plywood, went in and loaded the kiln and mentored another clay person on how to run it, then came home and ran the tiller. Now it's raining and I'm so happy I got some ground tilled.

The spot I tilled was alongside the baby apple trees I planted two years ago. The baby asparagus next to them survived the summer under the weeds! Those trees are big enough now that I'm going to plant rhubarb and comfrey between them and the fence, both are plants with big leaves that will reduce weed pressure. Then, as per Steven Edholm's testing, I'll put some daffodil bulbs in under the apple trees to create a "living mulch" (the plants flower in spring, with leaves that suppress weeds, then die back in early summer leaving leaves as a mulch and the weeds in that area way behind). Plus, daffodils are a vole-unfriendly plant so hopefully they'll survive. I'll add a handful of muscari bulbs because that's what you do with daffodils, and a row of garlic bulbils because I have thousands, I didn't cut my scapes this spring.

Then, ahead of that, I'll put in a row of winter rye, a row of favas, and home horseradish. Then another row of this year's baby apple trees interspersed with bulbs and garlic bulbils.

Everything will need to be side/top-dressed with manure/compost.

So, it's very good to have it tilled before it rains! I think that was likely the last dry and snow-free window.

I've also picked some rose hips -- carefully, because it's easy to stand too long to do so -- in the last week. So altogether very good. It's nice to be able to put my energy towards things I enjoy. When I do I realize just how long I was hanging on at work with zero energy at all.

Profile

greenstorm

December 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Dec. 31st, 2025 10:12 pm

Greenstorm's Journal

watching the cycle: leaves to mulch to soil to leaves

Entries tagged with threshold

(no subject)

Dreams and dogs

(no subject)

Garden

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

The dark slide begins

Solstice day 4

Solstice day 2

Solstice day 1

Plants have always been the best friends

Garden and relationships, with few relationships

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

Growing Bones

Profile

December 2025

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags