Erin's land journal

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.

Might as well update about the animal situation.

Solly and Thea are working great as a team all night. I put them in the front at night (the grain is all there) and Avallu in the back with the geese, Thea I put in the back during the day with Avallu so she can go in and eat and I can keep Solly mostly on her puppy food.

Avallu is getting more ok with Solly, but after two incidents where he was pretty sure she belonged only on the porch we need a little more than current levels of ok. In the evenings we often do cheese o clock, where they all see each other through the fence and get lots of cheese. I think they may have got too much cheese, so I may need a lower-fat alternative for some of these evenings. Avallu is doing well listening to commands even when Solly is in close proximity, but he's also very respectful of the fence. Solly is very wary of Avallu after the last couple incidents but has a seemingly limitless well of optimism and is coming around with enough cheese again.

I've definitely made some mistakes during this intro but I suspect everyone can be convinced to forgive me.

The geese are sleeping right up close to Avallu many nights and spending more time than usual up by the house. I can tell when there are no bears around because they go into the orchard. They've taken care of this spring's goslings well and those are now fully feathered. The orchard is pretty well mown at this point and the geese are starting to gorge on grain to fatten up for fall, they've gone from roughly a quarter bucket of grain per day for the 31 of them to closer to a whole bucket.

I have an ancona drake swap lined up for later this year, so he can cover this last two year's ducklings.

Incubator full of chicks should hatch while I'm gone. Things will be set up for mom to just plunk them into the quail shed under lights. These are mostly chanteclers but with a half dozen silkies. If I'm going to do silkies I might as well do seramas, which are the sweetest chickens on earth, but there are none to be had up here. Also Clyde the new rooster (his previous family got him as Bonnie and when he started to crow had to part with him) is doing well. He's a brahma, so he should get very big, but right now he's young and pigeon-sized with ENORMOUS FLUFFY feet. He's also smart, social, and I like him a great deal. I have not yet evicted the previous rooster from the bottom coop and put him in yet, I'm planning to do that when the chicks are a bit older, so right now he's sleeping under the truck canopy at night and hanging with the muscovies during the day. His crow is growing in adorably; I guess I have a thing for adolescent rooster crows.

The three boars have been shedding, I can scratch them with a rake and all the curly wool comes off and leaves growing-in guard hairs. I think they should move to the back to guard that entrance, though really Baby and Hooligan are the better defenders against bears. Did I mention Hooligan kinda bit me when I was stealing her babies? She didn't break skin or even bruise me, but she put her teeth on me in warning after I'd ignored her barking and other warnings. She is 100% a perfect temperament in this regard: she lets me play with her newborn babies if I'm not harassing them, catching them, and making them scream and she loves being scratched behind the ears but she can gauge situations in which it's appropriate to defend and does so with careful escalation. I'm just very impressed with Ossabaws in general, but also her in particular.

We do have at least two bears back there, one big and one small, that appear unrelated. The big one doesn't mind bear bangers, air horns, dogs, or yelling so I'm worried about what will happen come fall. Two bears in that territory is already a lot and it's only August. When bears go into their super calorie-seeking mode before winter they're less cautious and maybe it's not safe to have the pigs back there then? On the other hand the whole herd of pigs may actually be better defenders than the dogs, at least until the whole pack gels and maybe even after that.

The poor cats are withering away from lack of love and attention since I've been into the office several days the last few weeks. Also Demon is not a fan of a New Person in the house to farmsit and complains loudly when she's not around. I expect he'll come around. They continue to break down all doors into my bedroom to sleep on the bed, to my detriment.

Ducks are ducks. The anconas are in the covered area, and I want to make more covered areas for bear/lynx/raven/fox/coyote protection for the littles in future years. One broody ancona made a nest just inside the chicken house so I can barely squeak the door open and squeeze in and she will not be shifted. Everyone likes lamb's quarters weedings from the garden.

It's good? At least until the bears finish eating my neighbour's chickens and turn more attention on me.

We're supposed to get our first real snow of the year in the next 24 hours: 20-30cm.

Shortly thereafter it's supposed to drop to -23C or lower. It's going to be very hard on the plants; the soil is still dead dry.

Last night I was out with the headlamp and then this morning out with the headlamp again.

I got the tillers under cover, got some roofing on next year's split wood (but there's still maybe 2/3 cord to split, and the splitter is still out there, and I didn't do the aspen yet).

I got all my lumber (2x4s, spare house wood, etc) under cover but not up on racks. I had to pry some of it off the ground, pretty much everything has a couple inches of gravel frozen to it at this point.

I got the garlic covered in straw.

I raked the snowblower path from the house back to get twigs etc out of the way, but I didn't get the front of the driveway done.

I got the animal carriers split, clamshelled, roughly cleaned (there was some frozen stuff I couldn't get off) and put under cover.

I got extra straw to everyone to keep them warm.

I picked up a bit more garbage and organized some things, put all the cardboard in the cardboard pile.

I got the hoses strung up on the deck, but only one got put away (I snaked it through the rafters on the goose shed, which is honestly where I should put some of the 2x4s)

I did not get the far-back straw bales re-covered for a third time after the wind blew the tarps off; my plan was to bridge between the two with some treetrunks and put some roofing over so I can get the pigs back there in the spring. I need to do that tonight, during "at snow; at times heavy".

I did not get the back side of the animal carrier A-frame reattached where it blew off.

I did not get the missing metal panel from the pigpen reattached; I need to cut several metal panels and put them up for that.

(Doing this now) I did not let the fire go out and clean the chimney, but I really should do that before the hard cold comes.

I did not test-start the snowblower or pull the garden textiles off it (they have not been stored in a bin safely).

(Did half of this) I did not get all the flower pots from my deck moved off the lawn out of the snowblower path.

I have not yet wrapped the apple trees and berry bushes to keep voles from eating the bark.

Busy times.

I think this is the first time I've eaten an entire loaf of bread I made on my own. I have a recipe for a no-knead dutch-oven loaf I made a lot, but it was definitely bigger than I could eat all at once. I got a smaller dutch oven at one point to help shape it. For awhile I experimented with sourdough but couldn't get the intense sour taste withotu accompanying lacto flavours. I made some pretty loaves but just never did eat a whole one (I really don't like stale bread, so after 36 hours or so I usually won't eat it anyhow).

The other day I tossed together a loose pizza dough recipe in the style of no-knead, starting with 2 cups flour instead of the 3 or 4 I used to use. I think I was intending to make a pizza dough but habit took over and I tossed it in the dutch oven and it came out really nicely. I ate the whole thing over the course of 3 days -- I think the 90-ish percent hydration and olive oil I put in it kept it from feeling stale. I did two sets of stretch-and-folds, one before bed and one when I turned on the oven this morning to preheat it, and the loaf seems to have kept a nice shape.

So that's nice. Not sure why I'm baking bread again but I'll take it, bread at the store is between 3 and 5 dollars and it's not always great (though sometimes the airy cake texture of cheap white bread is fun).

I got some of my garlic in the ground last night. Everything is a race in the last sliver of light after work, then I put on my headlamp and feed the animals. I still need to get my daffodils in.

I got 200 gallons (!) of milk from the grocery store for the pigs, since the cooler went down with the power outage. Luckily it's in gallon jugs so it doesn't take me too too long to get it poured out for the day.

Both bulbs and milk is going to be complicated because the cold is here. It finally got real cold last night, -10C, which is more in alignment with the temperatures one would expect for this time of year. Days are still barely above freezing for now, and there's only a skiff of snow so far but that won't last. Hoses are frozen/I disconnected them last night and hung several of them to try draining, so I guess that means I'm bucketing water (and milk) now. I should figure out who I want where in terms of animals.

I do wish we'd had a good rain. I'm planting the garlic into dry dry soil, and I'd probably best put a sprinkler on it if we get a day a couple degrees above freezing. I want to cover it with straw but can't do that until it's watered in, I think.

Canned some goose, want to can some pork in the "beef pot roast" style since I realized it fries up really nicely when canned but the flavours in my al pastor and carnitas are sometimes just too much for me.

Money is a big issue right now too, the juxtaposition of the smithers/butcher trip, the last month's worth of feed for all the pigs, my property taxes, my house insurance, and a couple other bits and bobs makes me realize how much I overextended myself on feed over the summer. I do not like carrying a balance on my credit card but here we are. Time to get digging. There's some stuff about work, not having ratified a new contract, and so having not even the token raise we normally get, but I'll keep that out of here. We're not getting cost of living increase anyhow.

Oh! There's the timer on the bread coming out of the oven. Time to leave this and go see how it turned out.

I altered my pork carnitas recipe to try canning a bunch of pork al pastor, to clear out the freezer some. This uses the basic raw pack + spices method. We'll see how it turns out, but I'm hopeful.

While that was going I made some rose soap, fried up some lions mane mushrooms from smithers with a little kimchi, split and brought in some wood, picked out three roosters for canning when the canner is free and searched out more jars for them, fed everyone outside some, processed some of the grocery store food fo the animals (lots of removing elastics and emptying small cartons of cream today), and now I'm trying to decide what to have for dinner.

Given how early I woke up, I should probably feed the animals a little more, give everyone a little more straw (it's cold out now! Hard on my fingers, can't be great for them) and come in and have a bath and go to bed super early or something.

I also pulled some loin & belly chunks from the freezer to try making two soft spread sausages: one nduja-style and one bacon-style. Stuffing the sausage is my least favourite part, and it's the part that often prevents me from starting on the project, but I realized: if it's spreadable sausage I can cook (sous vide) it in vacuum bags, freeze it like that, and then snip a corner and squeeze it out as I need it. If I were smoking it and fermenting it I couldn't do that, but I'm aiming for the easy-but-done end here.

"Nduja" spread will just be fat/meat + calabrian peppers + salt + a couple drops of liquid smoke
"Bacon" spread will be fat/meat + salt + pepper + a touch of maple syrup + liquid smoke
(I could do a corned pork one, a little firmer, to make hash out of?)

That stuff will take a couple days to thaw outside in the cooler though, especially in this weather, so I'll worry about running it through the meat grinder later on.

Started mucking out the goosehouse. Can't get the organics smell off my fingers. Finishing pickles with my fingers smelling like this feels dodgy. Maybe I'll seed a bunch of tomatoes and see if that helps.

Today I put a dozen asparagus plants and two dozen shallot bulbs into the garden, just above the southernmost slope, in amongst the roses and ribes and cherries and apple trees I planted in the last few months. In general I planted the shallots in close to the trees and cherries, to hopefully discourage voles, and the asparagus in a wider ring mostly on the western part of the garden.

In doing so I tested out my drill auger bulbs planter thing, which I do think is easier than using a trowel but would be way better if my soil wasn't so dust-dry it just flowed back into the hole. Oh well.

King stropheria/ wine cap mushroom bed went in today. What I did:

Laid down a layer of cardboard

Laid down a bale of straw, one flake at a time flat like tiles, on top of the cardboard

Watered well

Crumbled my block of spawn over the straw

Set another two bales' worth of flakes over the spawn, again like tiles, so the spawn had one tile below and two above, for a total of roughly a foot of straw over the whole bed

Watered well

So altogether it was pretty simple. I had found some deck railing while at the dump the other day, so I scavenged that to block off the spot to the north of the storage container for the mushroom bed. The area is larger than the one bed, so if I want to double its size next year I can. I'm hoping there's enough time for the mycelium to get well established before it gets too cold out and everything goes into deep freeze. I'm also hoping it overwinters; my understanding is that it will, but I haven't found a ton of literature on trying to grow them this far north.

Usually when I'm working (except sometimes when I'm in the bush) I'm super unaware of my self and my body, maybe some level of dissociated.

Today I'm working from home after staying up until midnight last night bringing in a ton of garden stuff and then finishing some apple canning (all 4 vanilla applesauce batches done, 2 different caramel applesauce batches done, lime apple jam and saskatoon apple jam done, slow cookers on pause a couple days for apples since I'll be canning dilly beans, cucumber pickles, and maybe maybe jumble relish of some kind tonight). I had a listen-only meeting and had skipped breakfast to finish a little more canning, so I fried up some fatty coppa pork chops, then sliced a couple corn muffins and fried them in the pork grease, then made a cup of dark coffee-substitute (I can't do the caffeine but love bitter and roasty flavours).

I had lunch on the couch in a slightly chilly room, clothed head to toe in good smooth wool with the cool of the room just outside it. The sky is dark and threatening and wind is tossing the silver undersides of the aspens around and making them sing a silvery static song that turns the shifts in movement of air into sound. The pork was crispy, juicy-fatty, and salty. The cornbread was crunchy, moderately sweet, and warm with that particular taste of grain corn. Cutting through both sweet and fatty was the dark hot roasted bitter flavour: everything warm against the room's coolness, the whole a moment of indoor stillness as the perfect counterpoint to outside's constant windy motion.

What a lovely moment.