Greenstorm's Journal

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.

When it warms up everything smells like hot dogs
Smoky fires kept dampened as
Sun rewarms our cluster of homes.

Earlier in winter the air was crisp with
Sweet pine smoke, sticky balsam, and the lower scent
Of charred birch.

Each house with its particular scent
Particular smoke pattern
The intimacy of strangers living through the same
Circumstances.

If you have pine I know where you spent your
Fall. If birch, I know where you spent your
Money, or social capital, or long rambling time
Driving down dusty roads to find it.

When you wake up you light up a smoke
Signal from your chimney, defiant against the cold,
One spark among many with the message: we
Survived the darkness. We
Are still here
Together.

Edited to add: I love these line breaks, they make me feel like I'm listening to an alien

Every day there's more sunshine.

We had a fresh blanket of snow two nights ago and through into yesterday early afternoon. I popped out on work breaks to snowblow, working from home, and it was the kind of fine dusty-sand snow that blows all around and is easy to snowblow but hard to walk through.

Today it's very sunny, -20C. That sounds cold but with the sun at least making it above not just the horizon but the trees there's so much directional radiant heat and everything is bathed in light. The air is cold enough that it's full of glitter, sparkling like a christmas card or fantasy movie set.

I have a friend at a similar latitude in maybe Sweden whose geese are starting to posture. I should split off a couple groups for breeding before they pair off inappropriately.

I started seeds for the garden club meeting in two weeks, we'll be splitting the tightly-packed seedlings at the first leaf stage and everyone will be potting up some micro tomatoes and small pot-friendly peppers. It's much too early to plant indoor starts for planting outdoors at the end of May, so this is a way to get our hands in the dirt and play with seeds and build some community without having overgrown seedlings later on. Plus it introduces people to micro tomatoes and I do have a ton of micro seeds. The club is providing soil and pots (I am also bringing some pots scavenged from the grocery store program's poinsettas). This makes me happy.

My apple seeds will arrive soon and I will soak and stratify them. I have no money right now but am hoping to order a couple more haskaps and some oaks for this year. Maybe I'll sell some pottery to do it?

Speaking of selling pottery, I have the kiln lined up to buy from my mentor in spring, but money is a definite issue. I'm considering doing a "help set up my ceramics studio" kickstarter/indiegogo/maybe patreon sales type thing, though it makes me nervous. I do love the idea of crafting items for people based on a couple data points though (big or small, handle or no handle, texture or no texture, colour family, choose a word if you like).

-30C. Lake freeze up last night.

My cubicle window at work faces out over the lake. The sun is low now and comes in even near noon with extra light bouncing off the water. It's warm on my neck above the thick sweater I'm wearing. The water is very low and though it's not frozen yet the ground is. In the mornings when the air is below -10C and the water still holds onto its summer heat the whole expanse, lakes and rivers, steams and smokes with the pink sunrise colouring it.

Outside we skipped fall and went straight into winter. The birch trees didn't have time to drop their leaves and hang limply yellow. My driveway is frozen and mud season is over. Under the deepening crust of hard soil the ground is dry, dry, dry. My little seasonal creek hasn't been full at all this year. We have no snow yet, nothing to insulate the cold from driving into the ground.

My house is cozy and the geese bunch together overnight in a single social entity. In late spring they'll pair or trio off and spread to all corners of the fenced area, but for now they stay close. Every night the moon is bright enough to cast shadows inside my bedroom window and give me a clear view of Solly watching from atop her pile of woodchips. In the mornings I put on the kettle for tea and bring around unfrozen water to everyone while it boils; we all drink together.

Nights come early and hard. By 6 my body is done and can only lie there in the companionship of cats and the warmth of the fire. I do chores before work because I can't make myself move to do them after. Every night I think of the weightlessness of a bath but go to bed instead.

Building a doghouse is waiting for a free day. Clay is waiting for a free day. Snow and freezing rain lurk at the end of the weekly forecast over and over, waiting to surprise me by suddenly approaching closer.

They say winter is a time of rest but it's a time of carrying full buckets instead of hoses, of managing water that will accumulate where it stands until April, of shoveling snow and carrying wood. My mind might like to rest within this rhythm but work won't allow it, though I have a week or two more of walking the bush alone before I need to focus on jumping through mental hoops. Hopefully I'll be up to it by then.

In the meantime I prepare for a week in the field, with sunlight warm on my neck.

From +10 during the day to -13 overnight the last two days. Ground is frozen. That was very quick.

Fireplace is started for the winter. The heat is so relaxing. There's just something about it compared to electric. The heartbeat of the winter is beginning with a small 2-log load of wood morning and evening.

Water went from using hoses to water buckets freezing completely through overnight in 2 days. Need to dig out water deicers.

In the field at work this week plus kiln opening last night. Home for 8 hours last night. Suspect I'll have a big crash Friday, we'll see.

Thaw has been proceeding remarkably quickly. Every day snow is peeled off and water trickles downhill. Yesterday I took some time to walk the property after work. It's been awhile since I could do this in the afternoon; the snow crust is firm from overnight frost but mushy in the warm afternoon so previously it meant stepping through knee-deep snow which isn't really much fun. Yesterday I stuck mostly to my previous tracks and dog trails and the snow never topped my farm boots.

My south slope is nearly clear of snow. I planted haskaps and romance cherries on this a couple years ago, together with three apple trees on antonovka (full sized) rootstock: September Sun, Wealthy, and Goodland. The Wealthy was girdled by voles back to below the graft union two years ago, and all were nibbled by geese that year; this year the September Sun and Goodland have new shoots of a couple feet from above the graft line, and what used to be Wealthy sent up several good shoots from the antonovka stock. Antonovka is supposed to make a pretty ok apple tree.

With the snow gone I was able to get a good look at that south slope. Last summer/fall I'd done cardboard over it with year-composted chicken bedding over that and coarse unchipped aspen saplings over that. While that was supposed to help alleviate the fact that it's a hot, baking-dry hill with layers of shade and organic material it did also prevent water infiltrating evenly during our super dry hot fall and I was concerned voles would find a playground under the cardboard all winter and just girdle everything.

While some of the haskaps have die-back, I imagine either from the drought or from the quick, deep cold we got when we dropped below -30C with no snow on the ground, some do not and the apples look good. I couldn't see any vole damage on the apples or the romance cherries, which I believe to be the voles' favourites. While the hillside looks deeply messy, it also has a satisfying understory look to my eye: I like those bigger, inch-or-so branches beginning to go brown and black and signal a very slow slump into soil. My plan is to continue to add a layer or two like this every couple years: some slow-decomposing material, some cardboard, and some animal bedding. I want the soil to develop a top organic layer with embedded wood in various stages of decomposition. This is also probably the fastest-decomposing place on my property, just because it's so warm and sunny.

Into that messy-looking slope of branches and bedding I need to (very quickly) seed some lettuce, poppies, calendula, edible chrysanthemum, and maybe a couple other greens and/or flowers. I'd like them to get the jump on whatever weeds are in the animal bedding.

Come to think of it, maybe I should put the poppies in a location that doesn't have edible greens/flowers so there are no mistakes when picking. They go well with small grains, I think.

Just above that steeper south slope is the spot I planted my garlic trial. I'm very interested to see if any of it survives.

Meanwhile the rhubarb is still under several feet of snow: microclimates are real. Increments of slope and shade make such a huge difference. I can't quite see the ground in my field gardens: it's a plain of slowly-subsiding snow punctuated by cornstalks and lamb's quarters seedstalks and around each stem is a dip that almost, almost shows the ground. Any object sticking out of the snow collects heat on the south side, melting more deeply, and most of them screen heat on the north side to leave a little mound. Metal fences collect heat and stand in their own dips. It is a good time of year to learn about sunshine and heat.

It's also seed-starting time. I'm trying to remember to pick up soil on my way home from work today so I can get everything started this weekend. I want to not just start tomatoes and peppers and potatoes, but also get the apple seeds from my fridge into soil. I'm very curious to see how they do.

I do not have a labelling solution for this year and I'm upset about it.

I'm debating buying more apple trees this spring (the best time for planting trees is always yesterday, the second best is now). I have elderberry cuttings I can almost get into the ground. I need to figure out which dimensions of frost cloth I want to get, which means remeasuring my fields and deciding on planting patterns/bed shape. I am not ready to make those decisions, but it needs to happen so the frost cloth can get here on time.

My first greenhouse's cover is definitely destroyed. I'm costing out plastic and wiggle wire to re-cover it. Five winters isn't a bad run, and the frame is still good. It was one of those pop-up ones. I also need to figure out how to re-cover the woodshed, ideally with something more permanent, and maybe I need to decide if I want it to stay there first.

During the winter the power company came along and straightened up the power poles along the road, they were leaning pretty badly. I honestly am pretty skeptical of the whole thing since my understanding is that if a mix of snow and dirt is used to prop up a pole, when the snow melts you're gonna have issues even if regular frost heaving wasn't a thing. But, that's not my problem. What I'm interested in is the bare, disturbed, and now snow-free ground outside my fence along the road there where I'm considering dropping some of my extra raspberry canes and some comfrey roots. I don't want to pay for something that deer might eat, so my first idea of haskaps wasn't great, but I have a ton of extra raspberry runners.

All the other apples seem to have come through without vole damage too, which is very strange. I know the cats were much less busy this winter than they were other years, and there's less vole damage than I've seen before so far. This year I really need to get vole collars on them all; I did most but not all last fall and it's just luck that everything made it through.

The Zestar! apples might have a bit of southwest disease damage, we'll see how they do. This was their first winter here.

So: spring, kind of unexpectedly early. I wasn't quite thinking I'd see the ground anywhere quite yet.

20" of snow in the last 24 hours, maybe a little more. Glad I snowblew halfway through. Looks like we're getting all our snow in Feb this year.

Not glad to have to drive in it, everything was the deceptive kind of whiteout, but folks were going slow and being careful.

Between not having a keyboard and being pretty survival-oriented, I haven't been posting much besides data collection. However, future me will want to know: it really feels sunny lately, and I didn't wear a coat to work yesterday, just a scarf and jacket. The sun just goes on and on after work, and on my coffee break walk with a coworker it was brilliantly bright out.

I'm planning to plant peppers on March 1, I think, and tomatoes mid-March (or maybe everything mid-March?). Mid-March gives me roughly eight or nine weeks until plant-out, maybe 10. I guess true potato seed and tomatillos should be April 1st. I have some pretty exciting plans.

The muscovies are laying. The geese are fighting and it's time to separate.

My driveway is a 6" slab of polished skating rink with a few inches of snow on top. We keep getting an inch of snow at a time, then a thaw.

I'm going to pick up my pork from the Vanderhoof processor tomorrow and see how their work is.

Entering a very busy period here: Tucker visit, another contract due at work, hair dye appointment, work conference, then the landrace speaking thing. Very social too, I guess.

Let's talk about something very real though: sun is returning. This time of year varies: I see a "warm", I see a "-32C", it's all over in past entries. This time of year is reliably steady: the light is coming back, I catalogue my seeds and start making decisions.

In 2020 I wrote Imbolc isn't spring; it's the evidence-based belief that spring really will come to exist so we should get ready and start planning.

This week I've been shelling the last of my corn. Corn is amazing for breeding for a couple reasons: it tends to outcross, or share pollen with the corn plants nearby to it, so if you want to mix two plants together you can plant them near without doing the kind of fancy tweezers-and-scalpel surgery needed on tomatoes; and if the mother has light coloured outer parts (skin layers, basically) you can see whether it has crossed with a darker pollen-father because the kernel will be a different colour (or sometimes the midlayers of skin).

So shelling corn isn't just gauging yield and admiring the beauty of the crop and evaluating how well it did. Shelling corn, if it's light corn, is also looking to directly see what was crossed and with what. Sometimes there are blue kernels, or red. Sometimes they're blue speckled or red starred. I didn't have original plans to do this but I find myself picking out the crossed kernels. I want to plant them all together and see the diversity that results in that patch: some plants taller or shorter, with redder or more chartreuse stalks or silks, stockier or slimmer, producing a clump of plants from one root or a single reaching stem. I'm almost done shelling (I'd left the corn to dry on the cobs for months stacked in dairy crates to dry) and soon I'll start setting aside the seed in small bags for each plot, then vacuum sealing and freezing the rest.

I'm starting to pull out my tomato seeds. In 2021 I grew a bunch of stuff, it was my first year landracing, and then it got sealed up into the vault because I was moving spring 2022. I kind of forgot about the details of it. Landracing is about adapting a diverse population to a very particular landscape, and in my mind that seed, grown and saved a year in threshold, was no longer adapted to my land since I was moving. Well, I found that 2021 seed and it's already a year adapted to threshold, so this will be its second year in its home! I remember things about it, there's a very sweet tomatillo for example, that I wanted to keep sweet for eating out-of-hand as a fruit. It's like someone gifted a year's work to me. There are all these pepper seeds. There are greens mixes carefully blended to go feral and create a seedbed of edibles.

Outside there are several feet of snow on the ground, 6" of ice on the driveway thanks to the recent warm snap, and it's supposed to snow 40cm. I will not start any transplants until March 1 at the earliest. Still, it's light for an hour after work, I have seeds to sort, and the next month will rush by so quickly.

The light returns.