Erin's land journal

So up until yesterday I had never had stitches and never broken a bone. I'm actually not sure how, since I know I got the lump removed from my ribs and that didn't require stitches somehow, maybe they glued it up. But anyhow.

One of the things I most notice about my mind when it works (other than, you know, the big periods of it blanking) is that my micro-decisions are erratic. That's what worries me most about safety, honestly. I can sort bigger decisions out, but small short-term ones are especially necessary while driving and cooking: where do I set this down, what direction do I turn, do I touch this or get a hot pad, where do I look, how quickly do I move?

In this case I for some reason decided to hold a potato in my hand while cutting it. Unsurprisingly the knife went through the potato and, because I was slicing rather than wedging, went really deep into my thumb. I felt it-- I have a pretty advanced sense of "weird thing inside my body" -- and immediately clamped it, popped into the bathroom, wrapped it in toilet paper (I knew that was a bad idea at the time, toilet paper always sticks. I really should keep gauze, which does not stick, somewhere very very easy to get at because of course when I'm bleeding I don't want to go digging through first aid stuff), put pressure on it and popped my hand in the air.

I thought for maybe five minutes, got as far as googling "emergency rooms BC" and couldn't find the thing which says whether they're open or not, only what wait times are in the big ones. Then I thought fuckit, turned off the stove, tossed the roll of fencing wire out the back of the truck (it was loose because i was going to unload it, so I either needed to strap it down or toss it out) and drove to the hospital.

The wound itself was a really interesting experience. Whenever I took pressure off and peeled back the covering to try and look at it, a lot of blood came out. However it's really easy to put pressure on the ball of your thumb with your other fingers, and it's easy to elevate a hand. My hand and arm were pretty bloody from peeking, but it wasn't actively bleeding as I drove. That's good because I had a ten minute wait for construction on the way in (it's a 10-15 minute drive into town normally). I kinda wonder what the construction people thought because I drove with my hand on my head, since I couldn't hold it up muscularly and my head was a convenient resting spot.

The hospital was-- you know, I actually really like small town institutions. There's a fascinating juxtaposition between systems that are designed hierarchically, created for big-city high-throughput areas and indiscriminantly rolled out to the smaller locations, and the actual people in the small location who are the flexible elements in the system and generally roll with practicality. There are such diminishing returns in tailoring the systems for small locations - if you do a bad job only a couple percentages of people or metrics will be angry - that no one bothers. But it also means few people bother to enforce.

Anyhow, the hospital is also the regular medical clinic (closed on weekends, yesterday was Saturday), the labs, the community health location, etc. The emergency area shares a parking lot but has a seperate door. On that door it says, in permanent signage: go to the main clinic, doors are open.

Of course the doors are not open at the main clinic, it's only open daytime weekdays if that. So I ignore the sign, go in, look around at the three unlabelled doors that come off the airlock/vestibule thing, and choose the small one to the side that, I can see through the glass, looks like a waiting room. Already I'm picturing trying to navigate this with a crying child, active bleeding, or as a non-local.

In the waiting room there's one person in a chair, who leaves. There's a window with a computer type station behind it, like you'd expect for check-in, an ipad set up in a corner, and confusing signage ("press button for nurse" "register here" by the ipad, "go to main clinic, IT IS OPEN" (it is still not open). Eventually someone wanders by behind the glass and I say, "what do I do?" and she says "register over there" and points to the ipad station.

As always the ipad will not register my finger touch, so I stab at it a bunch of times and it pops up a sign "your call is in queue, if you hang up your spot in the queue will be lost" and I wait. I am impressed that they have managed to create a waiting line in a clinic with no other patients. That's some top-notch bureaucracy there.

It doesn't take many minutes to get through on the ipad. The person takes my medical card number, is silent a minute, and says, "you've spoken to the nurse"? I say no, and she says I need to do that first, and she hangs up.

I go back to the window and someone comes by and looks at me inquiringly. "I need to register" I say, and she says "no, you do that on the ipad" and, frustrated, I say "no, you told me to register there, I was JUST THERE and they told me to register here, and now you are saying to register there. What is going on?". Someone else walks up and sits down in front of the window and says something soothing, and after a minute says "ok, I need to take your vitals" and sticks a blood pressure cuff through the little window in the plexiglass, takes a thermometer and puts it in my mouth through the same window, and then clamps one of those thingers on my finger.

This is very weird, but there's not much else to do. I'm still holding a bunch of bloody kleenex around my thumb and keeping it elevated, it is still not actively bleeding. After a few minutes of taking and recording vitals the nurse behind the window asks me a bunch of questions, inputs them into the computer (it looks like she's new to this, no shade to her because I'm not in any clear distress but she is slow and needs to check in with someone else a couple times) and then says "ok, go register". I'm like: ??? And she tells me to go to the ipad.

So I go back to the ipad (there is only one movable chair in the room, so I bring the chair back and forth with me from window to ipad since 1) all the windows and ipads are at seated height and 2) I can't stand for long periods of time and am feeling kind of dizzy). I press the buttons, stabbing hard several times, and get into the queue again. I am now exceptionally impressed, they have somehow got me to wait in three consecutive lines even though there is literally no one else in the waiting room and none of those lines is to see an actual doctor.

It takes several minutes to get through the ipad queue, where the person on the ipad takes the same information that the nurse did (how long ago did you get the injury, how did you get the injury, what is your medical card number, what is your date of birth). It's hard to hear the ipad because there is somehow background noise in the hospital even though I can't see any people. The person on the ipad directs me on how to turn up the volume, which eventually has to acknowledge my finger on the volume button. "Ok, you can go now" the ipad says. "Go where?" I say, frustrated. There are no longer any humans in sight behind the window. "There should be a square room with chairs" the ipad says, and hangs up.

I sit in a chair in the empty waiting room. Someone comes in through the door from the outside and drops off a lab sample. Someone else is ?vacuuming?. The first person I spoke with pops her head out and says, very genuinely, "I'm sorry about misleading you earlier" and I am immediately charmed and feel bad for being frustrated, but she's gone before I can apologize in turn.

After only maybe 4 minutes a nurse pops out and takes me back to a room. I sit in a chair and she says "can I see the wound?" Of course the toilet paper is scabbed onto it by then, and it's a... you know a slash wound has lips, so even though the nurse brings saline to ease the paper off it tugs at the wound (painful) and the wound bleeds all over the little table in a puddle. The nurse says "I'm going to take you to another room, it will need sutures" and she brings me somewhere else, where she settles me in and, when I ask to lie down, she adjusts the bed/seat thing comfortably and is generally really nice. "I'll call the doctor in" she says, and leaves.

The way I understand it our hospital emerg isn't staffed overnight and on weekends, it's just doctors on call. On the other hand, the whole town is a 5 minute drive long. While I'm waiting I see a poster which lists "additional charges" for crutches, slings, and a couple other medical devices. Otherwise, though, I just ride out the wave of exhaustion from the adrenaline surge that got me there, notice that my phone is buzzing with a storm warning, and think that if the power goes out I'll just take a nap right there. It's comfy.

The doctor appears in maybe ten minutes. Given that the 10% of the people who come to emergency waiting rooms in the province wait 36 hours, I'm doing really well here: all my waiting has pretty much been administrative, not from overcrowding. He inevitably asks to see the wound, which is now covered in gauze but has still scabbed to the covering. I uncover it -- this hurts -- and it bleeds all over the pad the nurse put under it to catch the blood (she learns fast).

The doctor and the nurse confer a minute and go searching in the room for epinephrin(?) which they do not find. After several minutes of fruitless searching the doctor says to the nurse "if I stitch it up it will help stop the bleeding" and I guess what they were looking for was something to keep down the blood. In their search they have opened several of the wrong neatly tied packages, and though everything in the room is on neatly labelled shelves, the shelves are all labelled by use ("wound kits") and not by drug type. My blood, which had got on the doctor's gloves, is now in a couple places. "You must have hit an artery" he says, and I express surprise that I have an artery in my thumb. "They're all through the body" he tells me, laughing (he's not laughing at me, just generally a laughing sort of person, I'd say).

They pull out another pad to soak up blood, and then another, and put my hand on it. "You're ok with freezing?" the doctor asks, and I heartily agree. "This is my first stitches, please freeze me!" He does, and we joke about dentist freezing, that I'm a careful person since this is my first stitches, and just generally chat and laugh with each other while he freezes my finger (VERY WEIRD feeling) and stitches it up (VERY WEIRD even though I was frozen, there's some sort of proprioceptive sense that wasn't frozen but no touch sensation, VERY VERY WEIRD). I thank him, he thanks me (?) and heads out.

While the nurse is bandaging my finger she asks "how was that experience?" since she heard that it was my first stitches. "Really good" I tell her truthfully. My finger is still frozen, it's bandaged, and I walk out the door an hour after walking in, though hilariously 35 of those minutes were registering in three seperate lines.

Anyhow, I'm clearly not doing pottery, gardening, or much farming (wet poop) this weekend. I need to somehow get into the clinic to change the wound dressing Mon or Tues since I was told not to do it myself. My finger hurts, and I really can tell its elevation relative to my heart. I got my first four stitches. And I had a really good hospital experience, which is lucky: most people in the province don't, and if I'd been a couple hours later our emergency room would have been closed for the night.

Anyhow all that typing was done with lots of arm movement and my arms low, so I'm gonna lie back down, prop my hand on a pillow, and contemplate how cleanly I expect the wound to heal compared to if I tried to manage it at home. Also, dude, I wonder how many people died from flint knives while cooking.

I'm starting to harden off some of the tomatoes. Some of the others are still being potted up. My general tomato growing principle is to start enough that they don't all fit under my lights along with everything else, but bring them outside for the whole day for the last couple weeks to a month, and just bring them in and pile them everywhere the rest of the time.

It's chaotic, but it's using my house in the way I prefer to. It also results in very well-hardened-off seedlings, and somewhat clear surfaces indoors after everything is planted out because all the surfaces had plants on them.

Yesterday I planted chiddham blanc wheat, the going to seed parsnip mix, and sprinkled some black swan poppies over them. This is in the upper field, in one of the bays between apple trees, which is also how I planted the favas and radishes. It'll be the second time I plant parsnips, the first was maybe year 1 or 2 of my garden and they didn't germinate well, or maybe I just wasn't prepared for how slowly they germinated. It's also an interesting test of the wheat; I planted it in June or July previously and it overwintered gloriously and grew well. This, well, we don't seem to be having a spring this year so I'm not sure if it'll get its vernalization (cold temp) in order to grow properly, or if it'll overwinter. We'll see.

In theory planting grains like barley and wheat and rye in the late summer lets them establish, then they overwinter and use the water from winter in order to fruit. It's a strategy for the same climate as bulbs: find some way of using that very early water (and in a deciduous forest, sun, but that's not relevent to these particular plants) and then be in a dormant state, either seed or bulb, during summer drought.

We're catapaulting right past spring though. It hasn't rained since that last big snow, and it's not going to do more than sprinkle anytime in the forecast. I've had other years where I find it so strange to be watering a month before last frost date, and those are the years where fire seems close and scary. Nothing is leafed out yet. We are getting very hot days right now, and a bit of frost at night.

Deciding when to plant is maybe more dependent on soil temperature than air temperature. If the soil is warm, throwing something over plants will protect them from frost because it holds the heat the soil is radiating up. If the soil is cold there's not so much heat to radiate up, and the plants can be frosted regardless, and they'll also grow slowly. These hot days have me wishing for a soil thermometer.

The ephemeral creek has dried up into wet mud, which means I need to keep more of my own water out for the birds. I finally blocked off the greenhouse yesterday. There are four geese sitting in it, and I had a delightful moment when I stepped into the greenhouse and all four turned their heads in perfect unison and hissed at exactly the same time. The sitters are 4 saddlebacks and 1 mixed girl. Everyone else is excluded from that garden now. Goose eggs take roughly 28 days to hatch, and usually geese don't start sitting full time until they're more or less done laying, so there should be young ones at last frost date. Then I can move them. If I make a covered enclosure to the south of the greenhouse they can hang out there and suppress weeds while being safe from ravens. I wonder if I can do that in 28 days? I wonder if I can block them in the greenhouse somehow so I can plant half of it (they're all on the south side)?

Come to think of it, it's warm enough that I could keep my tomatoes in the goosegreenhouse (which is different than this greenhouse, which currently houses geese) if I kick everyone out.

I'm really very interested in this batch of tomatoes.

Some of them are from the sweet cheriette/karma miracle cross, and we're into the F4 this year. That means last year I grew out a diverse set of plants and selected seeds from different ones, which got labelled things like "prolific cherry" and "two largest fruit plants" so when I grow out seeds from those I get to see both how much diversity there is within a selection and how different the selections are from each other. I only have between 6 and 12 plants from each selection but it's still neat to see the differences. I'm also growing out some of the uluru ochre/mikado black ones, some from black fruited and some from ochre fruited selections, and of course those throw some very obvious dwarf plants, which is always neat. Then there's some of the silvery fir/zesty green ones, some of the original zesty green plant seeds (which I now know was a natural hybrid plant) and some of the red-fruited seeds from one of the selections of those seeds, and then a bunch of F1s I didn't realize I had lying around.

And then of course the usual mix of fancy long season (relatively) tomatoes and short season/cold hardy ones, including a new saraev one, saraev spring frost and one of the "sub arctic" line which I remember reading about as a kid.

Next things to plant: dango mugi barley, ceres wheat, martoc favas, root veg (turnips, carrot) which I'm not sure where they'll go, and I'm considering planting corn under clear plastiic on the south slope because it is WARM.

I would also like to put up the rest of my concrete reinforcing wire trellises and get the acorns in the ground, but to do that I need to prep The Circle and that requires a bunch of raking, which I find challenging.

Theoretically my rootstocks are at the post office for pickup today so I can also do some grafting as soon as they start waking up.

There's always more to say about the garden but that feels like as far as I can do memory and cause/effect thoughts before my mind snaps. Neat to walk to the edge and stop, when so often I've had to push past that and have it snap aand just be blank for so long.

I remember picking Avallu up at the airport. When he was let out of his crate I was surprised he wasn't taller, but he kept coming out, such a long body. He moved like floating, effortlessly, with his tail held up like a flag even when baby Thea kept chasing it and he kept it canted to one side a bit for awhile.

I didn't know his language -- he spoke german -- and he didn't know mine. His handler had come over to drop him off and he definitely knew to look to her for guidance, but when I took the leash he looked to me. At one point he looked up at me and she said, "tell him he's doing well".

We drove home that fall, Tucker and I, with this giant dog. We walked him fairly frequently, in a park in Quesnel, by the Fraser at a campsite where he politely didn't roll in a rotten fish -- he'd been taught not to because people put out poisoned meat in his area, apparently, so for the longest time he only ate when given permission. We learned to communicate more in body language than language I think; it comes more naturally to me.

He's probably the most magnificent athlete I ever spent time with. He could jumo anything and make it look effortless. That September, when he got home to Threshold, we went into the tall grass in the back and he breached through it like a frolicking dolphin. In the winters, whenever he went outside he'd roll in the snow like a squiggled line drawing of pure joy.

He always wanted me to be iin his sight, especially outdoors. He'd put himself somewhere he could see me and ideally also see as many sightlines as possible. When he was near me he'd lean his butt against me and keep his eyes out on the horizon. He took my protection very seriously, and he loved me like an angsty teenager with quick jealousy and absolute intensity.

Avallu had very firm ideas on who could be on the property. He has both bit and nipped people he didn't approve of; he's also bared his belly to those he did. For his sake I learned boundaries I might not have learned any other way. I learned to lift my hand in a stop because it was faster than saying "wait stop" before people opened the gate and came in without prior permission, a layer of physical negation that was terrifying, but was worth it to keep him safe. I learned to only let people in the house if it was worth managing Avally safely and kindly: did he have somewhere I could put him where he would feel ok? Was it for an amount of time I was ok putting him away for?

And when he caught on to what I was doing I could see the relief in him when I came up to the gate and told him to get to his safe place before I let anyone in. By that time he trusted me to handle the issue, and he knew that being in his safe place meant he didn't have to be on guard.

His fur smelled like safety. He was there for me so many many times. I felt safe with him in the yard, so safe I could leave the house unlocked and the keys in the truck, but I also felt safe with my face in his fur. He loved me. He wouldn't leave me; he would neither tresspass his boundaries for me nor would he be offended by mine. We would just be together as much as we could, supporting each other as much as we could, and we did. I always kind of thought of Thea as the spirit of the land here, and Avallu as my own partner.

You always know they're going to go away. I wanted him to go before me, because I didn't want anyone else to have him who might think of him as a burden, as a reactive dog, instead of as the most steadfast partner who gave his entire life to keep mine safe. He's gone away, he's gone before me; he started vomiting yesterday and I made a vet's appointment for next week, but this morning I needed to get Tanya to help me lift him into the truck because he couldn't stand.

His spleen had ruptured and he was bleeding into his abdomen. It was cancer. I wish his last day had been something kinder than being manhandled into the vet's, but I was there with him with his head on my arm until the end. Every time the vet assistants came in he laid down his head to rest, and when they left he would lift it, panting, to keep watch. Even to the end.

It's the cleanest love I've ever felt for anyone. I intersect many lives in such a complicated way, and people are better off to limit their intimacy and go elsewhere for their deepest heart connections, and honestly I'm probably better doing the same. With Avallu, though, we were just together. And now we're not.

It's worth everything to have been with him, for him to existed in the world, it makes the world worthwhile that it could have been a platform for us to live together.

Thank you, pup. For everything. For every single thing. I will love you forever. When they find my bones in the soil all they'll know is that my bones loved you.

There was an American style mass school shooting in tumbler ridge, a small BC town, yesterday.

People have also been very upset about a bunch of gross stuff released through the Epstein files.

In Gaza they have devices that burn hot enough to destroy the corpses of the people they kill, another step away from us ever knowing.

At least in Iran there will be mass graves to dig up later.

When you look at the genes of humans you can see that, long ago near what might be the beginning of homo sapiens -- that date is a target that recedes into the past every time we learn something, so -- they're was a very small population bottleneck where very few breeding adults survived. A couple thousand.

When you read even just Agatha Christie's stories set in post-WW2 Britain it's clear that kind of post-apoc small-group-starting-over fantasy of the world being cleansed after mass death isn't a useful one.

I expect that even with only a thousand humans left we'd find ways to harden into groups, to find it tasteless to appreciate or mourn *them* because *we* were having so much trouble. Well, they would. I would not survive that kind of a population reduction, of course. Statistically no one would.

Movement helps so I stacked wood, I'm through 2/3 cords split and stacked for next winter, but now I can barely move or think. Whiskey comes and snuggles and helps a great deal. But still, now that I've been in bed a few days, I can feel interest in the future evaporating. I don't really have interest in planting tomato seeds.

I think that's the meds wearing off and my ovaries waking up and pumping goo into my mood signals. The goo always wants to convince me that the external world justifies it. Two days ago I was convinced everyone thought I was a super inconvenience and would be annoyed by any reminder I existed. Yesterday was less that and more a nagging feeling I was forgetting to do something very important that I should feel guilty for not having done yet. Lucky for me both feelings were familiar enough that I could place them as ovary-goo related, though that still *feels* incorrect.

There's gonna be a lot of transphobia on the Canadian Internet today. I guess people are already posting pictures of gender-whatever folks from tumbler ridge saying they did it, absent any information. I can't do pottery all day and I'm out of Agatha Christie, and not there-enough to read much else. I do wish more of my comfort reads were audiobooks at the library.

Maybe I should sort through this year's seeds anyhow.

I have a really good vet.

My animals are actually spread across two vets at the same pracrice, and both are great. As far as I can tell, they charge only a token markup on Siri's meds, and they're happy with me doing home testing to avoid both a trip in and the cost of his diabetes bloodwork twice a year (he goes in for normal senior cat bloodwork once a year). They go out of their way to help the community with things like vax trips, which is a four-t-five hour round trip for them and not a ton of money. They're fully accessible through text and are happy to give advice on things like torn nails free. They actively love my cats.

And when I took Solly in yesterday, after explaining the reason she's been limping, she took a look at my face and said, "she's on pain control now and I know this is a lot to take onboard, so if you like I can call you next week and we can go over this again when you've had some time to think about it"

Solly herself behaved excellently in the car and at the vet's, though when I left her alone to get xrays she was pretty scared. But as soon as we got home she took off like a shot in the -15 snowy dark and I couldn't find her. I assume she's inside the fence and you;d think I could follow her tracks, but no. And it was a long day, and I was kind of woozy from the one-two-three shot of finding my truck battery stone dead in the morning and running around in sandals in the snow trying to start it, the drive to and from the vet which is after all five hours round trip, and the heavy emotion of the vet's visit. The last thing we all need is me dropping in the coldening night, unable to get up. So I went inside with the idea that I'll find her in the morning.

She'll need to stay inside now except for controlled walks.

With five senior animals in the house -- Thea, Avallu, Whiskey, Hazard, and Siri -- I was not expecting to need to make life or death decisions about Solly anytime soon. But here we are.

Compounding everything, Solly won't be able to work. The other two dogs are in semi-retirement, and with the birds I really do need someone who can work in the summer. In the winter they get mostly shut up and it's easier for the pups to patrol. Solly was a superb worker. There's a tornjak pup, like Avallu, available in BC. I do not want a new dog. Getting Solly a partner had been interesting to me but if she isn't going to survive more than a year or two and she is going to transition to almost fully inside I want to mourn. But. The work needs to be done. Or do I transition to the idea that in three to five years I just... don't have outside animals anymore? The dogs pass, I get rid of everyone except a couple cats, I hand mow a couple of acres and have a garden?

That seems terrible. The reasonable terrible thing, like getting a desk job somewhere that thinks good social management is having ladies' nights or politely smiling through someone's kill-the-immigrants screed over dinner once a week or living in a house with nothing to do that's not either housecleaning or in a computer. Smart.

It's 3am. I cried some. Whiskey always comes when I cry, like I'd called him, and he snuggled a but but then I cried a little too much for him. I slept, woke up, pulled out the laptop. I am too old to cry, I can't see well now but I guerss I still have enough adrenaline to remember how to type, which has been going lately in normal circumstances. I expect I'll barely be able to hobble around tomorrow so I'm hoping my pup has forgiven me by then and I can get her inside. I need to rearrange downstairs so she actually fits there but that'll be a couple days.

The road gods were kind to me. Very little ice on the roads, unlike yesterday, and over half of the way the road lines or a reasonable facsimile were visible. We all made it home safe, or as safe as Solly gets to be.

It'smoments like these I realize just how much love I'm surrounded with. There is a lot to lose in my life.

My poor little girl. She's been hiding her pain really well.

-snowsnowsnow but ground not frozen yet. bulbs going in.

-grouse in the crabapple tree eating crabapples. hazard wanted me to help him hunt them.

-tons of disability phoning and forms last week, used most of typing/writing

-art studio nice and full a couple days, for mug fundraiser and the fibre people just hanging out

-off birth control pill = digestive system fixed, feel like myself, charge into things like conversations or cooking but still have brain fog so sometimes ultra mess up. F'rinstance, looking into the sidemirror, seeing my driveway as I try to back into it, brain somehow deciding I was trying to avoid it rather than back down it it so correcting to back into ditch (caught myself before I went actually in the ditch in the snow, but still, it's that kind of thing). Also more muscle and joint pain. Also waking up ultra dehydrated in a puddle of sweat most nights. ARGH. No dangerous levels of S thoughts. Currently seem to be going back and forth two days on, two days off as the symptoms of each option end up sucking. Maybe I should call the nurse line and ask for advice.

-woodstove season is nice

-pulled my back pretty badly for a couple days, the same spot I pulled when I first moved into the house. Getting up and down from the toilet etc was pretty bad. Drugs, rest, gentle movement & time fixed it

-the cats' winter coats are deeply velvety and they fight on my bed at 7am when they get hangry before breakfast

-ate three meals a day for awhile, though admittedly it was mostly bologne sandwiches, scones, pears, and greek salad. Having an abundance of those things that were easy to make was great. I felt rich, luxurious, and generally good. Maybe also linked to food not meaning a ton of pain

-super crashed out after disability stuff and pottery thing

-peonies going in the ground shortly, into the snow

-all pig rescues in "northern" and "interior" BC are full (that is more than a couple hundred kms from the border)

-happy to be alive. Not relieved, but actually happy.

-I know I'm forgetting things

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.

Throwing on the wheel requires finding a moment of absolute stillness and... armouring it. The clay will try to push stillness off-kilter. It can't be made still by simple force, but it requires assertiveness, a coordinated effort by every muscle in the body, if just for one or two full revolutions of the wheel. After that first, armoured stillness movements need to be relatively precise but gentle.

It was a good idea to get back to the wheel.

A friend mentioned that sometimes overstimulation for them feels like having energy. I feel like I have energy today even after taking two dogs in to the clinic in town for vax and doing pottery (mostly glazing but some throwing) for many hours, from 3-7.

I've been carefully staying in bed, resting. It's raining and cool but not too cool, the air is soft but not sticky, it's not too bright or loud. I have attracted four cats to the bedroom, which is either rain or the fact that I should be resting-- they pick up on that. I want to go down to the wheel or out to the garden but I am not. I'm being good for my future self.

I have buns and prosciutto and blue cheese and lovely fresh lettuce and herbs. I also have corn dogs but after the burns I gave myself canning I'm resting active cooking for awhile. I have a package of shrimp and a lemon for the rice cooker too.

Having been reminded by the wheel what stillness feels like it's easier to find it in myself for true rest today.

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.

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.