Erin's land journal

The saskatoons are huge in town, the size of grapes, and they're bending the bushes over. Mine were like that last year but without water this year are much more scarce. I wonder if the roots go down deep enough to drink from the lake water table in town? My hands are purple from eating them on my walk from the mechanic's at lunch.

It'll be interesting to see how they're doing out away from town. Bears are already showing up in town, or rather never left. The little one in back of my place has stuck around too. I hope we have a good salmon year. We've had a couple significant bear birthing years in a row now - lots of triplets- and it's no good having a bunch of starving bears converge on town, though it will inevitably happen sooner or later I think.

I've been enjoying the bird app. Lots of swainson's thrushes, song sparrows, violet-green swallows (though the salmonflies hatched and they fledged and I think a bunch of them went to the lake) and a while bunch of other sparrows, some swallows, some robins, the red-winged blackbird, some flickers. Amusingly it thought one of my ducks was a heron, and my young chickens were goldfinches. It can be hard to find a time when ducks, geese, pigs, dogs, and fire helicopters are quiet enough so I can hear the actual birds with the app, but every second day or so there'll be a moment when I'm walking Solly out back.

Did I mention I've been using the hammock out back daily to several times per day? It's by the newly planted orchard, which with the heat, the new dog, the new trees, and the garden I've been spending a bunch of time in. Even with the smoke I do take the dog out back (she's learning not to chase birds and cats, so she needs supervision still) and on my bad days I'm pretty wobbly by the time I get out there so having somewhere to sit/lie is amazing. It's a double hammock and set pretty low to the ground, so I can lie sideways in it or longways. Next step is to pop some sort of high-tech piece of warm-but-compressible fabric into a drybag and hang it on a branch for the cooler days out there. Goodness knows I won't get around to sewing all my warm bits till winter. I walked 8k today dealing with getting the exhaust fixed on my truck, so I should be good for it, but it's just so nice not to have to worry about staying upright so many times per day.

Still enjoying a little interlude of cool and kinda damp breeze before the heat is supposed to pick up again. The evac alert and order on the fire by my house is currently rescinded, which is lovely. As always, an unpredictable season and more so than most this time.

I'm never quite sure how much "normal" people keep tabs on the world around them. As a land manager there's a lot of input I'm used to about the landscape. So the other night I had open:

https://firesmoke.ca/

https://wildfiresituation.nrs.gov.bc.ca/map

https://www.lightningmaps.org/

windy.com

zoom.earth (less helpful with smoke)

Government weather page

Pages for each of a couple nearby fires as per the wildfire situation map

google maps

There's a fire 5-6km just west of the highway between here and Everywhere Else. Even if it doesn't threaten my property or the town, they tend to call evacuation in when access to a town will be cut off, for perhaps obvious reasons. There is a rough backroad out of town but I think parts of it are currently washed out, and there's a longer road that leads into Mackenzie but I think that goes through several fires, and if not it is at least a very slow logging road with lots of loose gravel and dust. So.

Good: it's getting cooler because it's evening, there's a lake right there for the firefighters to use, they'll prioritize it because it's right close to us.

Bad: it seems to have grown roughly 30 hectares in a couple hours, everything is so so dry, there are so many fires right now.

I can hear the planes heading back and forth, I'm not far from the little local airport they use to refuel.

I do not currently have a way to transport my animals properly: I could take the dogs, the cats, and some geese or ducks or chickens. It's way too hot to put them in the utility trailer and I don't have a proper livestock trailer.

Seems like it's easier to write daily during the week, and when I'm at work. Makes sense. I'm lucky to have that spaciousness at work. It does mean I'm not going to the field, but my excuse is that a little fire showed up on the wildfire map across the road I was going to take into the bush today. We've had some rain, but fires have been moving very quickly and being out of contact along or past a road with a fire on it makes me twitchy. If it did blow up there'd be no way to let me know.

We have a safety system when we're in the field but it's missing the crucial component of being able to be contacted while I'm out there-- I can always call out but there's no agreement on, for instance, always running on a certain radio channel so they can get me.

The province lost another little community last night. It lost Lytton awhile back now, a train wheel against the track sparked a fire fight near the town, and it seems like within half an hour after the spark the town was gone. That was the day after Lytton had hit the "hottest spot in Canada ever" record two days in a row. Last night was Monte Creek, a little outlier town west of Kamloops. A big fire had been building in the mountain for days but a big wind drove it downhill, across the highway, and through the town.

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.