Erin's land journal

It rained yesterday, and the night before that. It's been a good soaking rain, the kind we rarely get these days. This is the May long weekend and the previous couple long weekends folks have cancelled their quad parties in the bush because it's been so dry that sparks or the heat of the vehicle could start fires (I still do not know what a "poker ride" is, though I have suspicions). This year things may have been cancelled for rain, though we definitely had sunny periods, but the spate of fires that comes immediately after this weekend seems unlikely to materialize.

The ground had been almost too try to till in my clay soil, even a month or two before last frost date. I had been picking away at it, a hundred or two hundred square feet at a time, and had done a first pass on the pig winter field (which needs a better name) and the upper field, and was just starting on the back field that has snowmelt running down over it for weeks when the snow first disappears. This will make my second pass much easier.

I'd got some pre-started brassica greens in the ground, then the other day put out the broccoli and kale, and yesterday planted some peas finally. We're still dipping below zero some nights -- never the nights when it rains -- and there are tiny delicate skims of ice on the water in containers on those mornings if I get out there early enough.

Yesterday before the rain I planted three heartnut and three buartnut by the fence in the back field to see if the juglone they produce (when they're a little bigger) will suppress the aspen from coming across the fence from the neighbour's place.

When Josh was here we drove into Alberta and picked up some excellent hardy plums and apples, which we planted. The apples are leafed out now, they went into the orchard (mostly on siberian rootstock) and the plums look to be following suit shortly.

Those bulbs I planted last fall have been coming up -- no peonies yet, but squill, daffodils, muscari, etc. They aren't so much coming up en masse, as makes sense for the first year, but there's a nice long season of them. A couple test daffodils in the orchard have not yet been eaten by geese, which is excellent news.

Many of the bulbs were planted in little clumps around the baby apple seedlings I put in last fall. Not all of those survived but many did.

I'm hauling my peppers and tomatoes onto the deck everyday for hardening off, and festooning the livingroom with them every night. Yesterday when I brought them in the were wet with rainwater.

I also put some beaked hazel in, and an order of hardy roses from corn hill. I have a bundle of hazelbert waiting to go in as well, but those last dead spruce trees from the winter field were felled right onto the spot I want them to go and apparently chainsawing destroys my body.

Wheelbarrowing in moderation and tilling seem ok for the hour of activity per day though, so I've been doing those, bringing up the chicken compost to the fields. The tiller is so good because it's rear tine so it pulls itself along and I have the handles to lean on as I walk behind. I'm being as kind to it as I know how, checking the fluids regularly, but haven't yet brought myself to change the oil. It's still starting well.

The front yard has been mostly fenced off from the geese, except for a trio who keep getting out, laying an egg in the dog house which Thea then eats or cherishes, and asking to be let back in at the gate. They are keeping my grass down somewhat so that's fine.

I hired the neighbour a couple down to chop up the fallen south fenceline aspens and burn the tops for me. He did an excellent job, was great company, and I now feel more comfortable about the fuel load by my house and more comfortable in the neighbourhood. I need to cover that south bank with compost and chips and plant into it -- I already put two little leaf lindens but want to add some elm, ash, and oak plus a shrub layer of some kind, likely usask cherries and currants. that's the same slope my clove currant is thriving on and my haskaps do well on too, and it gets more heat than anything else in the area. Maybe some wild plum or plum seedlings to?

A semilocal (Edmonton) vocational high school was doing a scionwood sale as a fundraiser so I ordered some sticks of apple and plum. Its in the fridge (I have a (small) seed fridge now given me by a friend) while I figure out rootstocks. A friend locally has a bunch of apple suckers, someone else in a cold climate has been successfully grafting apple onto *wild saskatoons*, someone was having a sale on wild plums, I have some plums that the tops died off and they're just mustang rootstock, plus there's topworking on existing plum trees. So I have some options, I'm just limited to an hour or, if I'm lucky, two, per day.

The whole thing makes me happy but it makes be even more of a recluse because leaving the house takes up two days worth of activity and I would rather be gardening. Pottery is on hold. Disability paperwork is mostly settled. Most other things can wait.

A hundred tomato varieties-ish this year. Normally I would list them out for you (and myself in posterity) but making lists is hard and I'd rather be gardening. There are roughly three categories: "early hardy reds" "fancy trial tomatoes" and "my own crosses in F2 and F3".

Eightyish hot pepper varieties too, spanning all the major species except chinense. I do love those plants, they grow so differently from tomatoes. They'd rather err on the side of dry than wet. They flower and leaf so prettily. A colorado and the mystery athens peppers overwintered in the house and are doing great now too.

I also picked up a kaffir lime for indoors, which makes my house smell truly amazing, and some baby figlets are on order, because um. I guess I'm letting myself do what I want.

Yesterday I planted runner beans, marigolds, nasturtiums, woad, and chickpeas indoors to go out when the seedlings are big enough to make a visible row in the garden (difficulty of a bit weedy garden is that direct seeding plants I'm not intimately familiar with takes a lot of concentration to ID, not that I can;t ID nasturtium and runner beans). Runner beans are supposed to be happier in slightly cooler weather than standard phasesolus and I feel able to provide them support this year.

There are several projects that need doing, fencing and deconstructing excess pig buildings and making a woodshed and putting in some proper gates, but those can all be done later.

I really should take down the hedging cedars right up against my front balcony for fire reasons but I like the screen they provide from the road. The hope is to put a solarium there instead, with some sort of adhesive glass frosted stuff in the road direction, but that's a long ways away.

There's big stuff going on in the world, many people dying and many more deciding that some group or another needs to die. It's abhorrent. It's happening locally and internationally. I read about it more than I want, and I garden because I'd rather be doing that than reading. I can't tell you how lucky I feel to have this garden, better than I ever believed I could have in my whole life, and these cats and dogs and geese ranging around with their own individualities making up a community I can tolerate and that always wants me to be alive. They even take joy in my physical existence, which is so good for my heart.

Writing this feels superficial, but words have power, and so: I wish this for everyone in the world. A safe home, a loving community that feels joy in their existence. Safety. Life. Enough food of the kind that makes them stop sometimes and just say "this is so good". I wish this for everyone. Please.

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).

Two cool rainy days in a row, much-needed, and now we're back to warm. I hung my laundry on the line late last night in anticipation of the forecast, which is clear and warmer day after day until the weekend. I find the laundry does better outside than in the machine overnight, and the machine needs babying because of the low well pressure so it can only be run when I'm around.

Anyhow, we hit Warm a couple days ago, and 30C is forecast next weekend. For those keeping track, that's warmer than many of our summers ever get. In May. We're still having intermittent frost at night but I'm thinking seriously about planting my corn.

I'm doing this poetry challenge, 30 poems in 30 days, and I started by writing about plants and the land and now I'm writing about global warming. Go figure.

Tilled most of the lower garden before the tiller stopped running. I think I need to check the chain/transmission oil, it may be overheating.

Many of the apple trees have baby leaves, though the new ones don't yet. Some of the seedling apple trees have deep red leaves, I assume they're the offspring of my red-leafed crabapple.

I'm digging raspberries and giving them away, and turning the eggs in the incubator twice daily. It's a good time.

Finished planting things April 8. I got in to cells (most of which are germinating, but there will be some misses). One cell is mostly one individual for plant-out space planning purposes.

Allium (6, but I pack them pretty tight into cells and separate at plant-out)
Artichokes (18)
Asparagus (42)
Basil (48)
Dahlia (24)
Goji berry (2)
Ground cherry (24)
Peppers (144)
Potato (144)
Peruvianum (12)
Rhubarb (12)
Tomato (442)
Tomatillo (40)

Hm, my math isn't adding up, need to recount. Anyhow, 12 flats of 72 cells each I think. All planted between April 3 and 8. I will maybe do some cucumbers later, still not sure.

My apples were also starting to sprout, or many of them are, which is super exciting. I need to get them out of plastic bags and into soil.

Also I'm going to grow F1s for two more hand cross tomatoes: one that's taiga as the parent (pollen parent lost) and one that's carbon as the pollen parent (small red as the mother). They kind of sat on the counter all winter, so I'm not sure how they'll work, but it's exciting.

I'm thinking pretty seriously about keeping a clone of each F1 in the aerogarden so I'm sure to get plenty of F2 seed. Not sure how that will work for full-sized tomatoes; I guess I could try kratky finally for them? F1s have no real need to be tested in soil or anything like that, they just exist to provide as much F2 seed, and thus as many variations in offspring, as possible.

Spring was so slow and cold and now it's so fast, snow is almost gone except for on my mushroom bed and the north side of my house as the sunset swings around and sunlight covers more ground every day. Last year was ultra dry - many wells ran out in January - and we got normal snowpack so it's looking to be a dry spring and likely a bad fire season. Fingers crossed.

Costing out re-covering my greenhouse with soft plastic (cheap, need to redo frequently) or hard plastic (expensive, only needs redoing every 20 years).

Whatever is going on with me is still going on; anytime I do things I'm super exhausted after for sometimes days. Luckily I don't need to do too much right now. Hopefully I'm recovered by plant-out time.

60 "kinds" of tomato/360 individuals planted today ("kind" includes categories like "promiscuous 2022", specific varieties, and F1/F2/F3 groups"). I ran out of labels so the rest go in tomorrow; those will be currants, extra earlies, greens, and a few blacks. It's such a nice mix of known quantities, new known varieties, my own crosses which are complete unknowns, and complete unknowns brought in from elsewhere.

kind | number of plants

#2 promisc orange 6
atomic sunset 2
bayou moon 2
big green dwarf 2
big hill 6
black strawberry 2
boronia 2
brad's atomic grape 2
brown and black boar 2
bundaberg rumball 2
chinook 2
chocolate champion 2
cowboy 2
emerald city 2
exserted orange 2021 12
finger lakes long 6
finger lakes round 6
grocery store green F2 18
gunmetal grey 2
jd's special c-tex 2
karma apricot 2
karma miracle 6
karma miracle x sweet cheriette (NE) F1 6
karma peach 2
karma pink 2
karma purple multiflora 4
karma purple x silvery fir (NE) F1 6
kiss the sky 2
longhorn 2
mark reed's large 4
maya & sion's airdrie special 2
mikado black 2022 6
minsk early x zesty green F1 6
moonstone 2
native sun 2
polaris 2
promisc "a" early-mid Aug 2021 48
promisc #2 6
promisc bh series 6
promisc gone to seed 12
promisc green freckles 6
promisc orange/red bicolour 12
promisc q-series 6
promisc tasty firm bicolour 12
promisc weird green berry tropical 18
promisc wildling 6
promiscuous 2022 30
ron's carbon copy (2021) 2
rozovaya bella (2021) 2
ruby slippers 2
saucy mary 3
silvery fir x mikado black F1 6
sugary pounder 2
sweet baby jade 2
sweet baby jade x unknown mini F1 6
taiga 6
uluru ochre 3
uluru ochre x mikado black F1 6
yellow brick road 2
zesty green x silvery fir F1 6
zesty small green 12

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.

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.

Dents are coming up: open oak party, early riser, and oaxacan green. They're coming up more unevenly, I'm not sure if it's a quality of the seed (viability or genetics!) or because they're in heavier, clumpier soil which is both harder to get the furrows even and introduces more variability in each individual plant's journey to break the surface. I went to look because I got spooked by the crows making food-calls in that field but so far it seems to be ok.

I do love the corn names.

Soon the flours should be up. We have a good slow rain today. Tomatoes are starting to root in.

In a couple hours I go pick up Tucker for solstice.

I'm not sure I mentioned, but I planted the flint corns first because it takes longer for water to penetrate the seeds, so it takes longer for them to sprout. The flour corns are going in last because they sprout so much more quickly.

Interestingly, in my 4 different sources of painted mountain in growing this year, the one from Salt Spring Seeds grew its radicles way earlier than the others. The glorious organics and sweet rock were a little mixed. The annapolis seed source hadn't developed any radicles when I planted. All were set to soak at the same time. I found that super interesting.