Erin's land journal

I'm buying a truck.

I've been using the 4runner and a trailer for awhile but it's been challenging: I need to know when I'll need it, I can't pick up feed or something on the way home unless I bring and park and haul the trailer all day. I've been getting the grocery store food in the 4runner with the seats down and that sucks, honestly. It's bad for the vehicle even with cardboard down, stuff doesn't fit well. Problematic. So it's time for a truck.

I've decided on a 2nd gen Toyota Tundra with the 5.7L engine. They're a solid truck and they shouldn't blow up after 200-300k. The engine is the same fuel efficiency as my 4runner's current 4.7L but can offer more horsepower which means I can tow real weight if I need. After a trip to try some out, I've decided on a longbox (8' box). This is definitely going to be learning to drive all over again, but.

There are three in contention right now.

One is a pretty ok truck, it's got some bits of body rust starting superficially by the back taillight and where the gooseneck trailer rails were attached through the bed. Engine sounds ok, frame looks good. It's cheap. I would maybe have this one for 7 years?

One is a low kms truck (210k). It has flaky rust on leaf springs and coils. It has a perfectly nonrusty bed and a beautiful canopy and the engine actually just made me smile to listen to and to drive. I'm not sure I've had that experience before? It was a purr. This one would likely need some suspension work to make it to 10 years but should be fine otherwise.

One has heated leather seats and is too far for me to look at it. The other two have the transmission cooling haul system and airbag suspension; this one has an aftermarket heavy leaf-spring suspension. I'm considering getting it inspected by the local mechanic there that everyone in the toyota community recommends. No canopy, "surface rust", higher kms (290k). The heated seats on my 4runner make my bones stop hurting and it would be nice to keep that.

I have a broad, nonserious information-gathering part of my decision process where I basically accept all options. Then I slowly eliminate options. Before the actual point of decision it's uncomfortable where I just need a little more info than I have. I'm in that spot right now.

I get very, very attached to my vehicles. This is kind of like dating and preparing for a breakup at the same time. There are little licks of excitement and potential plus gloom and "nothing's gonna be as nice as the one I have now".

Then one morning I'll wake up and have decided and can start bonding and grieving.

A lot of the province is on fire.

Meanwhile I see damp grey clouds and patches of blue sky outside and it sprinkled rain twice yesterday. The apples are swelling and swelling; I keep the duck pools under them so they get several dozen gallons of water each per day, plus some fertilizer.

Tomatoes are starting to roll in.

The tomato trial has basically two parts: one is to gather information, and the other is to choose and collect seed from the ones that will continue on into next year.

Gathering information about plants and earliness is lovely. I walk along the rows, I count clusters of green tomatoes, I observe the plant growth form, I poke around looking for buried ripe fruit.

Continuation is more complicated. I'm still saving seed from everything that ripens, but. The panamorous row is a truly random collection of mixed wild and domestic genetics and it is producing a lot. What it produces is... fascinating. There are a couple cherry sized tomatoes, lots of saladette-ish size, and I just got my first beefsteak of the whole garden from that row (though Maya & Sion is coming right along behind, and maybe Taiga too).

Before I put seeds in to ferment, especially from the panamorous row, I taste the fruit. The panamorous tomatoes get sorted into A (tastes quite good), B (insipid, mealy, or has a weird acrid aftertaste that I associate with certain wild genes), and I have a tiny pile of Wow! Unfortunately the best panamorous tomato so far was densely fleshy with only 2 seeds. That might indicate an obligate outcrosser -- some of these have genes which prevent them from self-pollinating, so it's possible that ones with fewer seeds are obligate outcrossers which didn't get well-pollinated because our weird weather is hard on bees this year. It's possible that something else is going on. There certainly seem to be more seeds in the less tasty ones, sadly.

I'm keeping the B pile because any of these plants may themselves be hybrids so the offspring will be different than the parent, and/or they may have crossed with the garden tomatoes I planted in a ring around them. Any single one of those seeds may hold something amazing. And by increasing my seed supply in this way, and to this extent -- I'll have tens of thousands of seeds by the end of the year at minimum -- I can start hard selection for direct seeding and eventually self-seeding into an animal disturbance soil seedbank.

Basically-- I can plant lots and lots of seed and not too many plants will survive. The ones that survive will be the ones I want, and once I have enough survivors in that situation I can start tasting the first fruit of each and pull out the unpleasant ones so they don't contribute. Eventually, after a couple or a dozen years, I should have enough early tomatoes that I can pick some and others can drop to the ground and self-seed that way. As long as I keep removing the unpleasant ones there will be seed accumulated in the soil that will express itself over several years and the fruit should get tastier and tastier.

It's a multi-year project! There are a series of goals -- first, plants that ripen from transplants. Then, plants that ripen from seed. Then, plants that taste good. Then, plants that can seed themselves.

In the end the idea is to seedbank like this for many species. Bare land sprouts plants, it just does. If I can shift the seeds in the soil, it will mostly sprout plants that I want. Everything will sprout earlier than if I'd planted it after the soil warmed. There should be selection only for what doesn't sprout early enough that the cold kills it; I don't need to do anything for that to happen. This should allow me to get a really good early crop to work return out of the garden.

Gardening in this environment requires some knowledge; I need to have a good visual grasp of what all my desired plants look like when young. Then if I want an area to be only tomatoes, or only brassicae, I'll leave those sprouts there and weed everything else out. For warm crops, weeding everything else out might look like harvesting well-developed chard or lettuce or broccoli raab or lamb's quarters that started much earlier, leaving a patch somewhere to go to seed and replenish the soil seedbank.

Precisely what seed replenishing rotation looks like depends on how long a sufficiency of seed remains viable in the soil. We've mostly bred multi-year dormancy out of domestic crops without even trying; our seed is basically always saved from what we planted this year so it's a strong selection for most of the history of domestication. But. I bet you that with the quantities of seed that can be pumped into the soil when I let several lettuce plants go to seed (hundreds of thousands at least) or even tomatoes and tens of thousands, that it'll come along on its own.

So, yeah. I'm basically tasting a widening trickle of tomatoes and making decisions and occasionally wrinkling my nose or grinning. I'm walking a path that leads far into the future and may never arrive there. I'm using my sense of discernment and consequence. And I'm having a lot of fun.