Greenstorm's Journal

I'm cranky lately. It's because I don't know what's coming next.

Tucker is in Vancouver. He's living there. He doesn't know what's happening next in his life, so he can't give me a heads up.

Josh is in Vancouver. On both work and romantic fronts he doesn't know what's coming next, well, I guess the romantic front is pretty predictable but still. Since we decided not to live together he's not been one to co-plan his life with me. So I don't know what's coming next with him either.

I do trust both of them to stick around in some way but not to commit to a "how" and not to be able to talk about the future together past the next shared vacation or two.

A&E gave pretty much the best possible response to my very clear communication: that is, a communication that is realistic about their energy, abilities, and requirements for assessing whether this thing can work between us. Their timeline is basically till Christmas, with regular work on a plan; if we haven't come up with a plan by then we probably won't, but we also probably won't be much faster than that because they need to find their feet and assess their situation realistically. So the Cor is still on the table for me, which means I really don't know my future there either and cab;t yet talk it out until they figure out their stuff better.

And in the meantime A&E know and acknowledge that I'm the kind of person who, when I decide I need to do something and see a good opportunity, will just go do it. I will not necessarily put off what seems to be a great thing to hold open a maybe. So anything could happen. Maybe I'll meet an established and well-run group of land stewards who wants another person somewhere I can afford to join. So I don't know my own future possiilities.

And Threshold loves me very much and is keeping me pretty happy, honestly, as I begin to reduce numbers of animals a little and spend more time planning this space. I may stay here with her, and in that way too I am having a conversation about my future.

I like to think about my future because I like to plan out my options and my next steps. I like several paths laid out before me. I think in some ways it's a PDA response: doing the same thing every day for the rest of my life is a demand, and following only one path is a demand, but choosing every day to do my favourite option out of many is less of a demand. And someone else suddenly doing an action that forces an action on me? Definitely a demand, whereas with a conversation beforehand it could have been a choice. So I'm twitchy and uncomfortable in my relationships right now because no one can talk them out in advance with me, so I can't make choices: I can only react, not act. Well, I can't act in a collaborative, aligning-myself-with-folks way anyhow, I can just do my own ting and hope that the path of anyone I know keeps intersecting.

I guess that's why I don't like surprises. They're a constraint on my choice.

Hard to believe so many people don't have to do all these workarounds and live on the edges of their tolerances, but that the world is in fact built to hold their minds. They can just... do things. Not sure I'm ever going to get over that.

My ring will soon be on its way to me. I'm nervous. To wear it is a big commitment, and I intent to honour that commitment. We will see where this goes.

Anyhow, I'm tired and my eyes hurt from all that sunlight. Time to bring the plants in and eat some kind of food.

So trust gets broken when I expect something of people beyond what they give.

An additional layer of distrust comes in when I have to disbelieve someone's words or offers when they make them to me.

Originally A&E invited me down there to live and said I wouldn't have to work to cover, at least, my food and my animals and my housing.

I said I wouldn't go down without a budget and some sort of separation agreement, since I would be putting aside my house and my career for this; the payoff might be something that I really wanted, but nothing is certain and I wanted to understand the scale of the risk and put plans in place to ameliorate it.

Looking at the budget it was clear they couldn't offer what they said they could.

I asked for some work on how we could make this more realistic: alternative suggestions for income streams or cost reductions, basically.

They're offering the same sort of broad suggestions. I made them some budgeting sheets to put numbers in to see if their suggestions have a chance of working. It maybe makes sense to run suggestions past me before reality-checking them? But I'm tired.

So, a budget turns out to be a way of communicating about what-ifs and whens.

I think that was a really good talk. The budget with numbers in it was the structure I needed to be able to communicate, "what happens when this is this number? What can we do to change this other number?" and they were able to meet me there. We also got to an emotionally honest place for I think all of us, at least E and I, which is where we need to begin I think.

I had done a very rough budget using their expense numbers, put it through a year, and then added some scenarios. We were then able to talk through some scenarios and see where different ones got us.

They went away to input a couple different sets of numbers overnight (what happens if we don't build in buffers, what are some reasonable income assumptions, things like that). Then we'll talk again today.

I definitely have this cycle of feeling reassured when we talk, then finding something else that needs work within a couple days. I guess it's the difference between short-term goals (get our expenses on paper, discuss X) and the longer-term goal (have a general plan for finances for the next two years, decide on dates and fencing locations)

Incidentally, E came up with a really great fencing plan based somewhat on my sketches that I sent over and my input. It bounced back and forth a little and now is probably settled, and then she clearly asked me to give her an ordered list of priorities around perimiter fencing, clearing, internal fencing, etc. I am very reassured and feeling comfortable on that front. <3

We don't fight, we do get where we're going, we seem to be willing to open up about stuff, it's just going to take time to develop a communal shorthand I think.

Also I feel like the community needs a name. Apocalypse Insurance is the farm, Cor Viriditas (sigh, I was hoping it would be Cor Viridis, figures) is the land (I think for E it's Refuge), but the group of us is as yet unnamed. A has us on a fb chat as "The Sayward three" which I believe needs more vision.

It's my firm opinion that NRE exists to get us through the tremendous amount of work required to onboard new humans into intimacy. It's both fuel and motivation; without it the process would be such a slog it would never happen.

I don't have NRE with A&E.

Struggles:

1) Being the practical one in the room, who requests numbers and fact-checks. I like to be able to hear about plans and figure that whoever suggests it will reality-check it themselves; otherwise every conversation is stressful because I need to screen what's said for viability and then call out that viability. When I bring it up A says that yes, they can learn to do this but it's obviously my role right now. Functionally, though, this means I need to set up all the checks-and-balances systems myself or else be hypervigilant about stuff until they can take it on. This is more about deciding if things should happen or not rather than how it should happen, whatever it is.

2) In relation to 1, keeping an eye on appropriate scale and timelines during the operationalization. Knowing that x needs to happen before y which needs to happen before z, if they each take n number of days then x needs to be done on this date, y needs to be done on that date. Knowing that we have xx hours to devote to things, so we must cut off talking about or devoting resources to y so there are resources left for z.

3) Knowing when something is a statement of fact vs a negotiation. I think this is a communication issue that goes both ways. E spent weeks on a couple map proposals for fencing so I assume she must be very attached to that proposal; I would have sent over a ten-minute sketch and asked if that's on the right track before working more deeply on the proposal. I say "it looks like there's not going to be enough money in the system, I suspect I'm going to need to work more than you said in the beginning, should I be looking into this job?" and they hear it as a statement of what'll happen rather than a proposed solution I'm hoping they'll add to. There are a bunch of these; it's not surprising because I have a ton of trouble with this stuff generally (see also: PDA, declarative language).

4) Setting and holding my boundaries, over and over, when pressed for time, in casual conversation, over and over: "no, I won't talk about that unless we have something to visually look at together" and "I can't do that now, I need to work". They don't push when I state the boundary clearly in the moment. They do the same thing again two days later, and I need to restate. This is probably very good for me; I find it super hard to catch dissonance before it becomes annoyance and then drives me to state the boundary at that point. I'd like to be able to notice and state the thing before it is uncomfortable for me so this will hopefully get better with practice on my end. I would also like them to remember after a couple re-states and stop doing the thing.

There was a lot of this last weekend, which led to me taking yesterday (the snow morning, 10cm of snow!) off and just reading a bit and going back to sleep. I feel reasonably recovered. I knew this was going to be a process. This is one reason I value my old friends and partners so much: we've done this stuff, I do not have to do it again, and I know they can make it through the process.

The fact that every time I talk to them specifically (like the talk is about how things will go down when we're there) I'm more reassured than the previous time I talked with them, that's good, right?

Now am I more reassured every time I talk to someone outside us about it? Not yet.

Yesterday I ordered 15 chestnut seedlings from Zero Fox Tree Crops. They're descended from the Kelowna Gellatly chestnuts; basically someone planted a bunch of European and Chinese chestnuts there maybe 70 years ago and the trees have been thriving in close quarters ever since. Kelowna is harsh winters and very hot summers so it's different than the Cor, but it's a good start.

There's a second place I'll be getting trees from, called Nutcase on Denman Island, who have a mix of European, American, and I believe Japanese chestnuts. They've been doing some selection on them. Those trees may be able to wait on June though, or even getting seed from them this fall rather than seedlings.

If this sounds like a lot of trees, it is! Here's the thing: chestnuts are wind pollinated. They like to be close, and in groups. Given my experience with them in Agassiz, they like to be on slopes. Behind the house there's maybe 1/6 of an acre of steep slope with alder (a very short-lived) on it currently that really needs stabilizing, and that strip is a total of 3.5 or so acres of hill. I haven't been up there but it's older trees with what may be some gaps. Chestnuts may not produce so much in the shade but they can grow closely shading each other and a little bit shaded by other trees; rhododendrons and pawpaws (which also won't produce much in the shade) and loquats (which would love the shelter) can live at their feet. My plan, at least on the slope, is to make a relatively dense chestnut forest.

Pawpaws are super hardy here but are marginal in their ability to ripen fruit in our cool climate. I need super early ones for this, and I'm approaching this in two ways: I've acquired seed through a Canadian charity drive for the Ukraine, and I'm going to order grafted known cultivars like Pennsylvania Golden and KSU Chappell.

In all cases where I'm planting seed or seedlings I'm anticipating a long wait for a lesser individual return; that is, many of the trees will not do well in the climate, will not fruit appropriately, or will not taste good. 15 trees might be 3 or 5 good ones; likewise 40 pawpaw seeds may give me one or ten or twenty individuals who will grow here by the time they're seven years old and producing fruit. On my fiftieth birthday I can cut a bunch of them down and plant seed from the ones that did well, beginning another ten year cycle.

I'd really like to run some grapes and kiwis of various kinds up these trees -- one of my favourite plant memories is a nice regular fuzzy kiwi climbing fifty feet into a cedar tree at UBC Botanical Gardens in Vancouver -- and also keep some kiwis down where I can monitor and actually harvest them (hey, I wonder if squirrels will be distracted by kiwis and leave me some chestnuts?). I plan on nailing down some grapes soon, but maybe waiting on the kiwis unless I find something really unusual. Or maybe not? There's going to be such a big nursery full of pots for awhile as the property is prepped. Even the back hill I'm planning here may or may not get a retaining wall put up, and that needs to be done before the bottom part gets planted.

I do know that I need to grab muscat-type grapes while I can; it's pretty hard to import grapes into the province from the rest of the country, for disease prevention reasons, and nothing can get in from the US. So, if it's rare I snag it. If it's less rare I can pick it up locally and not have it go through the trauma of mail. Tonight it will be Jupiter and Osceola muscat/Es 8-2-43.

And maybe some kiwis.

And maybe also some plums.

When I thought I might live down south originally I always envisioned a fairy ring of redwoods (sequoiadendron in my mind's eye, though sequoia may be more suitable to Sayward and metasequoia might be more suitable to this particular landscape arrangement) with phyllostacys edula, the giant moso bamboo, in a ring within that. In the very center there is perhaps an opening, a pond or a meadow wet enough to keep back the bamboo rhizomes, or maybe just the location from which shoots are harvested in spring.

I'd shelved that when I came up here. Now I'm wondering-- what would a realistic spacing on that be? It would be huge, of course. Vancouver is crawling with sequoiadendron planted in weird places and thriving anyhow. Snow would take down the bamboo but it wouldn't mind.

Hm.

The as-yet-unnamed property. Viriditas? Maybe, maybe not. Hole in the wood? No. Greenheart? Maybe, maybe not. Its heart is the meter-in-diameter trees that guide a very flashy creek across it. Big. Old-ish. Mossy. Trickles of water over rock in summer, a roar at certain times of winter. That's the heart.

Before you come to the heart you are on a logging road that mysteriously starts being paved. There are plantations all around: second or third growth (probably second) all well-spaced straight uniform conifer trunks with jagged stumps of shaded, partially-jettisoned lower limbs, all dripping with green moss and undergrown with sword fern (polystichum munitum, stick'em like you do with a sword, munitions like weapons: sword fern). The road is pretty straight for a bit. Then the trees are less uniform, there's a spot that wasn't replanted by a forestry company, and a driveway goes in both directions: east and west.

Follow the driveway up west and, after a narrow band of bigleaf maple and spruce and improbably large alder there's a thicket of salmonberry (rich moist indicator) with some young bigleaf maples and spruce and alder coming up through it. This is where the fields will be. The soil is sandy brown under dead winter leaves. The end of this space is marked by a little lean-to-camper-shelter building that someone was living in so we couldn't poke around; that's the edge of the rich sandy soil full of salmonberries, the demarcation between that and the heart.

The heart is cautious. I'm not sure if it's beyond words or if it's waiting to see what I'll do before giving them to me or if I was just busy, my whole body an antenna picking up every scrap of information from the land while a human was trying to talk to me at the same time. It's a place that, if given my full attention, could fully occupy it. The big potato-chip bark spruce trees, the braided stream through mostly-soil-sometimes-rock, the start of skunk cabbage: the heart. It's not to be disturbed by the likes of me and my farming machinations.

Keep going up the driveway; it's definitely got a slight slope up now. The heart flows under the driveway through four culverts, three side-by-side and one additional. The forest opens out onto a wet lawn, brown and slippery with winter rain and dog poop. Here the soil is clay; ramshackle plastic fencing encloses an expanse of woodchips in which small trees and perennials are planted; beyond them woodchips surround some long thin unraised but undoubtedly heavily amended garden beds cradled in the curve of the question mark shape the driveway now assumes. On the other side of the grass from the garden is a small cobb structure with goats, surprisingly enclosed in equally ramshackle fencing and with little disturbance to the grass despite their couple-years-long tenure. That's for the best; a hole here betrays slick grey clay with no texture when rubbed between the fingers.

At the head of the lawn and garden is the house, but behind the house a steep sandy hill looms. It's covered in alder, leaning a little bit out for the light that is one of the major limiting factors here in the cloudy grey, and goes up about eighty feet: sunset will come quickly with that hill to the west like that. Anything that needs to have very dry roots will need to live on that hill: chestnuts, grapes.

The house itself is a rectangle studded with uniformly-sized windows. Irrigation for windowboxes hangs off it. The roof is flat. If it had angled wings instead of a straight rectangle, or if was stone, it would feel like a grand manor house. As is it's a big building waiting to see what happens next.

To the south, past the goats, less-even but still dense trees press up against the property line. In the milky-overcast noon sky they don't cast shade onto the middle of the lawn; when the sun is low in winter at least the deciduous components jettison their leaves and allow a little sun through. Hill to the west. Pass a waterfall, then a scatter of alder through grass and brush and a chainlink fence not far north: there's a neighbour past there that likes their privacy. Maybe a willow fence will end up there? And completing the circle, to the east, the driveway plunges into the deep shadowed green of the heart. Up here the property is about 200 feet wide, widening from the heart through down to the road to 400 feet. The house can feel the presence of her neighbours, of that plantation and of the privacy-loving neighbour of open fields screened by light brush and trees.

There's more, of course: the house has an inside, turning east from the forestry road leads to another several acres. I'm not there yet, though, I can feel the information and possibilities swirling and forming and re-forming into patterns and possibilities. Several things at a time, not every thing at a time.

Yesterday something happened that I'd been worried about for a long time.

Penny died. I wasn't worried particularly about Penny, but about any adult pig dying. It being Penny makes it emotionally harder; she's the last remaining of my first girls, she was looking sick for a day or two but I can't get a vet up here so I'm blaming myself for not trying an antibiotic shot the first day; I loved her a lot.

It being an adult pig is logistically a nightmare. I got the Ossabaws because they're on the small side, but she's still a 300lb dead weight. Even if I could dig a hole deep enough for her to not be exhumed by wildlife (maybe rent a tractor) the ground is frozen right now. So I had to get her out of the pig house, across the field, and up into the pickup truck before the other pigs ate her. To be clear, I could drag her about six inches at a time using every bit of my strength, then rest awhile.

I am very lucky to have two things: Tucker, who's still (barely) in town, and wheels, in this case a furniture dolly which seemed the better option than the wheelbarrow. He managed to make time to help me between his new job and his evening concert; it took us an hour to move her about a hundred feet and get her onto the truck. She had died early in the morning, so she was starting to swell up and there was intestinal leakage from front and back.

People say they can't handle watching their food killed. Apparently plenty of people leave their animals in the vet's for euthanasia because they can't stand to be there. Today, the day after, I wish everyone the kind of intimate physical contact with a dead loved one where they're using every ounce of their strength and breathing in shit and gas in order to dispose of the body, not in an honoured spot under a beautiful tree, but out where it will be scavenged in the snow.

I don't wish everyone doing that between a workday and and evening second job(third, is the farm a job?). I don't wish anyone thinking they might ever have to do it alone.

So today I'm numb and raw and angry and Avallu jumped the fence and was chasing cars (also there's a neighbour that will shoot him on sight if he's out) and I need to figure out a zoom presentation for tomorrow and vaccine card regulations before heading to the airport to view the new property and I don't *want* to.

I've spent the last hour looking over possible gene inputs for the Sayward property summer cover; cool tolerance is good but so is disease resistance and I can handle a longer season.

Luckily it snowed last night so I could find where Avallu got out by his tracks and patch the fence there. I'm going to be gone and Tucker will be coming by to feed once a day; he really can't be getting out.

I'll water all the plants well and set them up for me leaving.

And I'll take this long-anticipated event as a sign that sometimes I really do need to be around folks who can help. It's not good to be doing something like this alone.

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.