Greenstorm's Journal

Activity options

*Plant fava beans
Cut 2x4s for indoor plant shelf
Bring in lights from storage
Take out jars, meat grinder, sausage stuffer(?), extra slow cooker, canner, and boxes of bottles to storage
Unload chicken feed into trailer or far chicken shed
Empty garbage out of trailer into feed bags and put in truck
Take out household garbage and put in truck
*Plant Mission Mountain Sunrise, Taiga X, and X Carbon plus maybe some extra peppers, some lettuce, and new potatoes
*Check arrival date for cat food
Prep breakfast and lunch for tomorrow
*Hang sheets on the line
*Feed animals
*Water animals
Cycle the pressure tank
Change downstairs lightbulbs
Taste and de-seed remaining squash
Block birds from main garden
Plant elderberry cuttings
*Plant apple seeds
Package corn seed and send to T and J
Package tomato seed and send to SoD
Pick up crow garbage
Make more duck nesting spots
Get out and clean incubator for chicken, duck, or goose eggs (def chickens)
Put screws into the laundry room wall for dairy crates for seed/laundry storage
Empty out old laundry basket
Tighten clothesline
*Test clay
Clean chimney
Wash floors
*Empty litter boxes
Fix dryer vent
Explore creating pig gate

Edit: *Done
Make a project list spreadsheet with costs (replace pressure tank, linoleum flooring for downstairs, re-cover old greenhouse, trampoline or aerial silks cost, replace mattress, stain siding vs replace it, aspen tree removal, all-season gravelling of the dips to the pig area and back area, cutting and creating the north gate to he property, re-covering the woodshed, might as well look into replacing the white shed's foundation while I'm at it, upstairs space-efficient office).

Hunkered down against the cold all night - my bedroom is pretty comfortable - but when I got up the wall thermostat came on, and when the sun came up it was -36C on the deck. That's Too Cold, and the temperature isn't rising with the daylight as we'd hoped. I was waiting for the temperature to rise a touch before I checked the animals -- no one is up and about out there, they're all staying in their warm shelters -- but it doesn't look like it's going to to that. I am displeased.

The house is making loud sharp noises from time to time. Some of them are icicles breaking off the chimney and falling onto the roof; others are just things shifting and settling. It's over a 50C temperature differential between in and out so I can hardly blame it.

I can see where all the draughts are this morning: the north window has ice on a spot on the frame, the crack between the patio doors (which to be fair always freezes like that) has frost for an inch or two on either side of the bottom, and the dog door seals at the bottom but not at the sides so frost creeps in there too (and the plastic gets a little stiff at this temp, so the outer of the three flaps doesn't always close perfectly, which is non-ideal). It's not cold enough for ice on the inside of the downstairs doorhandle yet.

I cut back the big peppers by the patio door and drew that side of the curtains, which I think means putting a light under the desk for them. Next up will be filming the north window so it can stop blowing cold air onto the sofa. It's a -- do you call it a dormer if it's got a flat top? -- kinda bay window thing and from the ground it looks to not be sealed under the eaves so well either, a piece of wood and some spray foam may go a long way out there. But, not at -36.

I also popped an oil heater in the downstairs bathroom, which doesn't have its own heat, and made sure the dryer vent flap was closed (lint tends to accumulate and prop it open a crack, so I gave it a good clean-out the other day, it does seem to be closing well now). That whole laundry room could use better insulation, including the 6' of dryer vent that I am certain has ice on it right now and including the plywood that the fuse panel is set into (but that's challenging because there are a lot of wires and I'm not sure how to insulate around them).

Work discourages outdoor work below -20C (must work in pairs, etc) and forbids it below -35C. I have to say, it does make me a little nervous to go far in this weather. If something happens I won't have my phone, because the battery doesn't work at these temps, so little things can quickly get big.

Having said that, it's not getting any warmer so I'd better go out and take care of those animals in the scary cold. Bets on whether the water tap is frozen? If it's not, my little polar fleece sewn faucet cover gets "object of the year" award.

Went in to work. Got the flu shot (they bring someone in to give it once a year). It snowed 3". Did some work. Overheard a coworker on a hiring panel making mean and kinda prejudicial comments about the applicants. Was given a slice of cake. Learned that since our union didn't negotiate to pay the new higher professional fees (nor cost of living upgrade) I'll be paying $80 this year for the privilege of working, and if I become a full professional it'll be more like $200 per year. Got scent bombed in the supply closet. Got scent bombed in the bathroom. Came home at lunch to work from home through 3" of snow. Stopped and picked up a freezer lasagne I don't have money for because I'll be out in wet snow all evening and don't want to cook. Stopped to pick up a package for Tucker he asked me to pick up, but because he didn't tell them I was coming to pick it up they wouldn't give it to me. Went around the first car of the year that had spun out and was kinda in the ditch in the 50km strip of the highway downtown. Got home, by now there was 4" of snow. Turned up the stove so I can clean out the chimney tonight/tomorrow morning.

Will work from home this afternoon, go out into the wet snow to pick up sticks and do a first manual pass on the driveway at the part that has all the willow twigs, come in and sweep the chimney, eat lasagne, shower, and go to bed.

Things that need to get done:

Feed brought and stored, garlic planted, wood stacked, ducks separated, everything watered, roses planted, mushrooms innoculated, straw covered, pig house built, daffodils planted, lard processed, food eaten, animal carriers power washed, back of truck cleaned under mats

Things I'm doing:

Stacking wood, laundry, reading about seam finishing, sorting existing fabric stash, researching cost effective (eg seconds) fabrics available to me for sewing, deciding on details of patternmaking, heating lard, washing bedding, watering garden prior to tilling

There's some overlap!

It is definitely time to take down the gate up into the garden, and to put a gate across the barnyard/driveway so the geese are off my driveway and back in the grass. They're flocking now, all gathered together after the scatter of summer, and they sit close to my house and poop all night in front of my door. All of them.

The dogs should be able to go around the long way, I think the geese won't bother. I've wanted to keep the geese off the driveway forever, but letting the dogs access the house but not the geese is challenging. I keep meaning to take a piece of plywood and incorporate it into the fence, cut a hole in it, and put a dog door in it. I think the geese won't go through and the dogs will, at least for awhile.

The greenhouse fabric cover is wearing out; I need to take it off and ideally replace it with some sort of hard polycarbonate or something. It's a pop-up greenhouse, so it's made out of round pipe and I should be able to attach wood to it with those pipe fasteners and then put the sheets of plastic on top of that.

Josh is coming up next week and we're planning to take down a bunch of aspens for mushrooms, that should make next year better in both that greenhouse and in my lower garden.

The deck is still collapsing and still needs to be dealt with.

I should probably fasten the fence around the king stropheria mushroom bed more firmly.

Definitely I need to rake the whole everything, so I can take the snowblower around without anything getting caught and stuck in it.

I also need to haul straw in, put some by the pigpen, put some in the back field. In the spring it's too squishy to drive through the ditch/seasonal pond into the back, so it's hard to get materials back there. Right now it's all hard dry ground, if I haul the straw back now and cover it, it'll be there waiting when I need it.

Need to prune the willow so it doesn't drop branches on the driveway when snow comes. It would be nice to do the tops of the spruce trees to start moving it into a hedge too.

As before: holes for spring trees dug if I hava a ton of time.

D Order shampoo
1/2 Order spring bulbs and garlic
O Map new circle planting
O Plant last roses
O Make soap
O Render lard
O Freeze and remove soap from molds
O Till south slope by house and plant fall grains & put on row cover
O Pickle squash/beans
1/2 Pick apples
1/2 Sauce apples (caramel?)
O Juice apples (?)
O Apple jam (lime, cardamom, or vanilla?)
O Lots of water bath canning the above
O Cook a duck
O Can pork from freezer
O Pork belly into salt pork
D Rearrange storage
O Wash floors
O Make biscuits
D Clean sheets
D Clean quail house for roosters
O Feed old eggs to pigs
O Build feed storage shed on aspens?
O Empty big trailer
O Remove sides on small trailer
O Get straw
O Sort locations for large straw balls
O Empty gooseshed bedding to prep for small straw
O Sort pig straw storage
D Walk through garden
O Sort pork chops for Monday
D Cardboard on south slope
D Prep A-frame for winter
O Bonfire pile

Tucker is coming up over Solstice. Mom is coming up in the beginning of July. I'm going to talk to Avi about coming up July/Aug, and likewise Nicholas. Also gonna try and get Tucker to come back up in there somewhere, ideally once a month or so? Josh will be here in Sept. The plan is to take Angus to the Salt Spring Apple Festival in Oct, if it happens. Kelsey will arrive in PG in Sept and be super busy but at least closer. I'm reaching out to talk to her more and it is, as always, wonderful.

Met one person in the next town over in the queer group online to go walking with, not a date or anything, just... someone maybe likeminded.

Starting to maybe gather people for the fall harvest festival here, I need to talk to them about the date.

I'm wearing my ring. It's a gold ring, on my wedding finger. Realized I'm not sure what to say when someone at work asks me about it: "oh yeah, I'm wedded to my land, agriculture, and the goddess Demeter" I guess. That'll go over well. I guess I spent the last couple years worrying about what would go over well and it didn't serve me; I'm grateful to my interactions with J for breaking me out of that cage. No sense in climbing back into it now.

So regardless of what happens I enjoy the problem. Er, problem I meant in the sense of something to solve but I don't like that word to refer to a land relationship. I like the process anyways.

So here we have a property.

Cool, wet, zone 8ish in terms of freeze but with:
1500 base 5C degree days historically, moving towards 1800 in the next 20 years at a conservative estimate (all this is based on Canadian gov data, including Canadian gov climate change models, I have used the most conservative in all cases)
600 base 10C degree days historically, moving towards 800
100 base 15C degree days historically, moving towards 200
Frost-free season 200 degrees historically, moving to 240
200 days with rain per year, anticipated not to change
Mean maximum August temperature moving from 20C to 22C
Mean minimum winter temperature moving from 0.6C to 0.8C
Mean winter temp moving from 2C to 3.2C
Mean summer temp moving roughly from 15C to 16C

Mean annual temperature (which is an ultra weird measurement, but sure) moving from 8C to 9.4C

More usefully,
70 days with some time below zero (frost days) historically, moving to 42
9 days where it doesn't rise above zero at all during the day, moving 6 days
0.4 days below -15C, moving to 0.2 (obviously a notional concept, but it means it should hit that every so many years)

0.7 days with some time above 30C, moving to 2 days
8 days above 25C, moving to 18 days
There are zero expected nights above 20C in near future
Highest temperature of the year is anticipated to be right above 30C

As you can see, it's not warm very often, but there's also not a lot of freeze. Sunlight is an issue in winter with the level of overcast.

There is plenty of moisture, though I haven't figured out the actual precipitation I'm expecting it to be relatively high, and to follow the mediterranean pattern of the west coast: lots in winter, sometimes a bit of "drought" (many days in a row without rain) in summer. Humidity is around 80%. This means that growing without irrigation is definitely possible with correct breeding and varieties BUT there's hella disease. I know of my own knowledge that powdery mildew is a big problem in the area: the general humidity keeps spores around and the drought stress of summer makes the plants susceptible.

The soil is listed in the BC soils survey as silty clay loam for much of the property, but that's a pretty high level survey.

The property is on a slope, with the main garden area in probably a 100-to-500-year floodplain for the Salmon River as far as I can tell from maps. The garden is at the base of a slope (there's a waterfall on the property coming off the slope) so it's water-and-nutrient receiving from the slope flow.

Just listing off this information you can see this is a leafy green veg paradise. Lettuce, kale, carrots, parsnips, all will overwinter here easily without cover unless there's a rare -15C cold snap, and even then it might just bite back the lettuce a bit. There isn't a ton of heat in summer -- that's the base 10C and base 15C growing degree days -- so squash and tomatoes will have the same trouble ripening that they do here up north and their prime growing temperatures coincide with the least amount of moisture and that powdery mildew issue. Crops that need to dry down in the field (beans, corn, small grains) need to be carefully-timed so they ripen within that dry window or they, too, will mold.

Perennials, including woody perennials like trees, need to be able to survive freezing. They also need to be able to ripen fruit in cool weather, if they are fruiting trees, and most importantly their microsites need to be assessed for drainage and/or have high moisture tolerance in winter. I think quince rootstock is good for this, for pears and quince?

With no snow cover in winter and little freeze, a clay-leaning soil will be sensitive to damage through overworking. This isn't a place to cultivate heavily. It is a place where annual and perennial weeds won't get easily knocked back by frost, so keeping the soil covered/weeded is a year-round project to avoid banking weed seeds and root propagules. Up north it's ok to let the soil be bare under snow and in spring before ploughing; down there I'm not so sure.

Therefore my first instinct is, when the land is cleared, to seed any bare soil with two things: a mix of desireable leafy greens (kale, lettuce, miner's lettuce, corn salad, spinach, chard, chicories) immediately in cool weather and then, when summer begins to heat up a little, planting squash, potatoes, corn, and other smothering warmer-weather crops through the greens mix to keep continuous cover as the earlier greens go to seed. Hoe out the first 30-50% of the greens to throw up flower shoots, then let them flower and seed to contribute to a seed bed of desireable greens as the squash etc is growing.

The first goal is to maintain a fall/winter/spring in-ground seedbank of harvestable greens (a yield even the first year of both seed and food) that both don't need to be planted and serve as a smothering mulch for other weeds. Yearly maintenance on the genetics of this greens mix is required: just remove anything that bolts before it produces tasty leaves. If that maintenance isn't followed then earlier, bolting genetics will take over and the usefulness of the greens seedbed will be lost. These greens can easily be ploughed into the soil in later years once the seedbed is established, but some good (non-bolting) specimens should be left to seed most years to maintain the soil seedbank. Further genetics work is as easy as eating leaves rather than cutting the whole plant, and leaving the tasty ones to seed while hoeing out the less tasty ones (or whatever the desired traits are). This might just mean carrying a couple wire flags when harvesting and putting them next to the best plants.

The second goal is to keep the soil covered with potatoes, corn, etc while getting off a crop for animal feed/winter storage. When the greens crop goes to seed the annuals like spinach and lettuce will die and/or reduce to stalks rather than ground-covering rosettes. The squash/corn/potatoes are all crops that don't require well-tilled seedbeds and can be popped in through existing greens. They also don't require much maintenance so in the first year of the project can happily produce some yield and cover the ground without a lot of intervention; it's to be expected that crops with the least person-energy requirements will do best in the first year when setting up everything else will keep people busy.

During this time assessment of water tables, soil fertility, microclimates, microtopograpy, local genetic resources, etc can occur in preparation for putting in perennial crops. Having known crops in place over the cleared area will also allow rough assessment of soil capability: nutrient or oxygen deficiencies will show up in a recogniseable way which should allow remediation before perennials are put in.

Anyhow, this is what I do for fun but I do think I want a cup of tea now.

Social: how do I keep or create community when social media is a problem for me/I like its reminders of folks I know

Time use/work life balance: Assuming 9 hours for sleeping, 2.5 hours for cooking & eating, 8 hours of working, 30 minutes of laundry and toothbrushing, that leaves 4 hours for administrative details, friendship, hobbies, house maintenance, family, etc per day. Then if I'm supposed to get groceries, exercise, do mental health exercises...

Can I keep the farm? It's the thing that I feel matters, and doing farm things is one of the few soothing parts of my life. It's also most of my life. Do I need to give up the farm to have people?

Ok, I've had too many bad days in a row. Highly likely it's where I'm at in my menstrual cycle, but since I don't have gynecologist access I guess we try the other route again.

Made a game plan for some practical stuff with a check-in and assistance person (pig stuff, car stuff).

Verified with my employee line at work that they can't help with this, but am waiting for a callback on someone who can hopefully help me make a list of things to try and help me be accountable to doing them in the 5 sessions I get with we-can't-find-anyone-who-does-trauma-or-gender-or-autism random person (but-we'll-try-to-avoid-someone-who-will-make-it-worse).

Going to run some reality checks with my counselor (is this the right direction?).

Have probably secured funding for at least some of this, not because my government or workplace are competent at mental health but because I have friends with money.

Then:

Speaking to an expert at somatic experiencing therapy to make sure they're not gender and autism hostile (maybe international if I can't super verify someone in Canada), and to a Canadian expert in atypical autism and to make sure she's PDA-competent.

This brought to you by crying my way through another diversity and inclusion workshop at work (they're pretty good! But I'm so intensely triggered by them and scared of the idea of any sort of honesty at work that it's pretty clear it's a trigger attached to a ton of stuff and not a reaction to what's going on at the time, and I can't ground and continue because it was just continuous and I couldn't get out of it) and losing another day to being in a terrible place and honestly being pretty tired of all this and I'll be damned if I give up the farm and let my life diminish into nothing and let this fucking trauma win. Also to having started bleeding, which always helps so much.

Because anything good I've done has been built on the back of a veiled "fuck you" to what it seems like the world is forcing me to do:

Year -1: What I've done: Page wire fence around the home couple acres. 5 fields plus main yard fencing mostly completed: orchard field, winter field, wood field, back field, main field plus fencing tacked onto the next field. 3 fairly permanent pig houses built in winter field. Raised beds removed and replaced with lasagna-bedded rich soil ~2000 sqft then ~3000 sqft (that last thousand is super competing with aspens though). Added one pop-up 20x12 greenhouse, one lean-to animal space/greenhouse 10x20. Taken down a couple aspens.

Refinance mortgage. Fence driveway "airlock" and two new fields in the back. Remove lean-to greenhouse. Get a quote for fixing the workshop foundation, if it can be done. Take down extra aspens and cut to season. Potentially run pigs in the small corral by the neighbours' house to prepare for orchard if they can be convinced. Re-side fabric pop-up greenhouse? Convert 2021 grain trial area to berries & grapes. Look into walk-in coolers. Wire in generator panel. Plant oaks in the back. Try making a small log cabin in field orchard. Plant woodfield in tomato, squash, and corn trial. Design main garden maze. Figure out the mud part of driveway. Exclude geese from main lawn/figure out guardian dog solution. Build postal box for driveway. Build pig houses in additional fields, ideally that can be used as greenhouses off-season (2-6). Replace deck and south roof. Egg stand out front?

Acquire tractor. Fix workshop. Quote for pole barn. Plant field orchard. Convert wood field to veggie trials. Front landscaping/trimming. Deal with workshop: either disassemble or fix foundation. If disassemble, quote for pole barn. Build on two more fields, extending back at least to the pond. Figure out guest house. Cut gate in north front fence. Financing for high tunnel greenhouse?

Refloor chicken coop. Build walk-in cooler, guesthouse, and root cellar maybe as a unit, if workshop isn't fixable. High tunnel greenhouse along north edge of property. Standpipe in by greenhouse and animal wintering pen. Culvert and fill back and side swales with earthmover.