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.

Despite everything, this summer is truly a glorious one.

The last three summers have been drought and wildfire smoke, and before that the heat dome. 2020 I spent in a state of basically complete panic that was probably a combination of PDA and work from home interacting, along with the ambient covid panic. I can't remember 2019's summer offhand but I think I changed jobs at that time; 2018 was a wildfire evacuation. I moved into this house in 2017 at the end of summer and that was the last summer like this, with birds and the smell of clover everywhere. Threshold loved me as much then as it does now, part of my body, a fully enveloping love like finally having real skin or gravity.

This year I've only closed the windows for wildfire smoke a couple days. We've had actual rain, the kind of rain patters I remember from before the drought: little wandering thunderstorms bringing cloudbursts and sometimes thunder as they pirouette across the landscape. There's no heat dome; outside it drops to about 10C at night and when I wake up the house is cool; during the day the sun can be a little hot between rainstorms but long cool mornings and the endless stretch of near-solstice evening give lots of time for moving around.

There are more bugs than I've ever seen and my body feeds noseeums and blackflies as well as mosquitoes when I go out in the evening. I leave the fan running in the bedroom, facing out the window, and a window on the north side of the house open downstairs; it pulls the cool air in but also disrupts the mosquitoes and any who get into the house can't fly against the air current. I picked that trick up from an Ologies bug episode, where the entomologist said the best way to keep mosquitoes off a patio was to put a fan at ankle level. They're bad fliers, he said, and like to be low, so they can't fight the air current enough to bite. I love that kind of elegant solution. When I came in from the garden two days ago in the evening my face was covered in blood, half from swatted mosquitoes and half from blackfly bites.

The garden rolls out like a carpet and then fills in like details on an oil painting. I'm putting in paths and trees and trellises, a little at a time, and yesterday I picked up a bunch of perennial flowers and they're waiting in the wheelbarrow to go up and in. I've put in a kolomikta kiwi trellis. I've put in a strawberry bed with six kinds of strawberries. I've put in baby lindens and silver maples and elms and ash and oak and hazel. In one tomato and pepper bed the hazel, cherries, and haskap are there, no bigger than the other little pepper plants and spaced in between them to line a path that does not yet exist, to a spot that is still weeds but will later be a portal.

I have somehow become a person with elderly animals -- not elderly in the way they act, but at ten years old they start to get yearly bloodwork at their vet visit to make sure everything's ok. Whiskey, Hazard, and Siri fall into that category and today is Avallu's birthday; he's 9. Yesterday Whiskey followed me out to the garden and followed me as I wheelbarrowed woodchips from down here to up in the back garden a couple times, then got the zoomies and ran along the path very fast, bounced off the wheelbarrow I was pushing, and kept going. He does not feel elderly.

Anything could happen during the rest of the summer. It's windier than it has been, with tornadoes surprisingly nearby, and the wind strips moisture quickly. We're only saved by the little wandering rainstorms that come regularly. There is a lot of fire elsewhere and strange heat anomalies and floods. Politically we've lost the idea of human life as important and human well-being and rights are so far out of functional equations as to be laughable. There are many wars, even if we don't call them that anymore, and no one with resources is interested in holding back the tide of disease. Systems infrastructure frays and I suspect one day we will wish we had our current access the things that right now we think of as irritating because they are becoming inconvenient: border access, medical systems, air travel, relatively free telecommunications, year round fresh foods, so many things.

This won't be the last glorious summer like this but it might be mine. Even if it isn't I draw a line here: I love being alive, I love inhabiting my life, I very very very much want to know what happens next, but this summer would be enough.

Cool wind and the scent of overnight rain through the window. Warm covers and a cat sleeping on the bed while others wait for breakfast. Thai black rice, coconut milk, and sugar in the rice cooker with apricots waiting. Aspens rustling outside silkily. A pile of woodchips waiting for their wheelbarrow, steaming slightly as they compost. Wiggly dogs and the sound of roosters in the distance and beyond that robins and sparrows. Nearly clean sheets and parsley, mint, and tomatoes from the garden waiting to be turned into tabouli downstairs. Reading again! by audiobook, the closest I can ever have to revisiting my childhood home. A nephew? Even a few people in the world who really want me alive.

It's very good to be here.

I think the solstice interregnum isn't a success, exactly. I'd been hoping to take a week off from the outer world. Instead I talked to both mom and Josh yesterday -- I normally have something like 2 phone calls per month, not 2 in a day! -- did a bunch of insurance and gun license renewal paperwork, and as one would expect after all that basically collapsed. Pretty much zero garden, and then this morning I had to run in to pick up some mail (neither couriers nor the postal service deliver to houses here, so when the dog food I order comes in, the dollar store which is the depot for courier services holds it and calls me to come pick it up).

I came home, made lunch, and fell hard asleep. Little Bear curled up on my legs and slept with me. It was the kind of sleep that feels like a hard cleansing rain to the mind, and where it takes a long time to remember how to move my limbs.

I want to go outside and do more gardening but I still feel exhausted and weak. It really is incredible how doing that mind work -- paperwork, socializing -- leaves me literally bedbound but if I can garden without any of it then I remain functional. I wish I knew the mechanism.

I've decided to attend a local(ish) SCA event in early July. It's in the big town nearby, a weekend's camping event. I can drive in and out as I choose, decide whether to stay the night or not and when to come back. I imagine I'll be able to sit or lie in the grass a lot. It's outdoors, which is obviously a lot comfier for covid. My local SCA friend has invited me to make some garb up this week, she does a ton of period sewing, so I'll bring some linen and maybe some wool and see if I can get my head around fabric craft again. I have actually been considering hand-sewing or hand-finishing some linen things for awhile; it's more straightforward than a sewing machine and much slower, so I may be able to handle it. Or, it might trigger the same issues as reading, and it wont' work. We will eventually see.

In the meantime I have fajita filling in the fridge and some wraps, a bunch of fruit, and I'm trying to work up the energy to walk back outside. The world is intruding into my thoughts again. When I try writing about it, it sounds terrible, but eventually I'll capture what I'm trying to say maybe.

I have tattooed on my side the "to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven" passage -- it goes on for quite awhile, ending "and enjoy the good of all his labor, it is the gift of God" on my upper thigh. I put it there because I need reminding.

It's summer solstice in the year 2025. I'm alive. The days have swelled and swelled until they burst the barrier between light and dark and sunlight bleeds over the horizon even when it's supposed to be night. I live further north than I had ever thought I would. My garden here, where I've lived longer than anywhere else in my adult life, is rewarding my attention this year. I don't have much attention to give, these days, but the form and amount seems to suit Threshold, this land I've partnered with. Living with this land is like having bones supporting my essential self.

I wear reading glasses now. Normally when I catch sight of myself in a mirror I get stuck, frozen for anywhere from a few minutes to maybe half an hour or so. Maybe for the first time, this morning, I caught sight of myself wearing reading glasses in the reflection of my laptop screen and smiled because I looked like a comfortable silly human. I did not get stuck and I was not indifferent. I had a moment of joy -- that's me, being a silly human, with cheap blue-green plastic reading glasses, watching an Agatha Christie show in bed.

This week I'm going to practice being inside joy like that. So much of my life has been joy thinking about what I will do, how to do it, following through, thinking, thinking. My, call it illness, has reduced both my thinking ability and my doing ability so I'll need to strengthen my other sources of joy to survive.

Many things have been weighing on me recently. Some have been taken off my shoulders by others, but I'm using this long time of light to take another off too: it will be dark again this winter, and I can set my long, slow, multi-year ghosting by Tucker aside to think about in the darker times. I can figure out how to process that dead, painful thing into fertilizer for what comes next at another time. I don't have to think about it now.

When I set this aside and step out the door the immediate embodiment of the long summer days will come meet me, wiggling her tail and chewing a stick. Hard to believe Solly has been here for two years now, and hard to believe she's ever not been here. She's the youngest of us all except for Little Bear. It's nice to have a young one around.

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.

The first tomatoes to ripen outside this year were:

Some hummingbird f2s. These are from Joseph Lofthouse and most are about pea-sized. Genetics are roughly 50% pimpinelifolium, 35% domestic, with some pennellii and some habrochaites. The ones that are ripening are all tiny, and on little, branched plants, mostly in racemes of 6-8. There are two plants with larger fruits that haven't begun ripening yet. I haven't tasted them yet but the fruits are on my counter waiting.

Mission Mountain Sunrise. These plants stay tiny and then just set clusters of fruit. I found one out there ripe before all the others, a gorgeous orange-and-black.

KARMA miracle x sweet cheriette F2. There was a set on my deck that ripened awhile ago, they were pink or orange cherries with a really zippy, lovely flavour like I liked from zesty green. There was also a bright orange grape shaped one in the garden I haven't tasted yet, I bet it'll throw some green babies. Sweet cheriette seems to impart both earliness and a good robust growth up here. Now that I'm sitting here I'm wondering if the ones on the deck were actually zesty green and my memory is failing me, I should check this.

The next ones to ripen will likely be a promiscuous tomato, Ildi, Brad F5, and some of the Mission Mountain Grez as well as some other cheriette crosses.

Corn is slow but it's looking like I'll get something from my morden field crosses and maybe from my sweet corn patch, which is pretty alright.

I harvested a bunch of brassica seed the other day: ethiopian kale (carinata), ultraviolet mustard, and a mix of napa cabbage, pak choi, the aforementioned two, and whatever else was around.

My cinnamon rose is producing hips; I'd like to harvest them and pot them up to hopefully germinate in spring, and do some layering on a couple of my rose branches. Cuisse de nymph did well this year too.

I have some lovely lettuces out there that are unlikely to finalize seed before frost. More interestingly, I have some turnips that are quite small, and densely planted. I'm going to leave them and see if they overwinter through both cold and voles and maybe give me some seed.

Some tomatoes are going to come in for breeding, and I have some F1 seed of zesty green x carbon that just ripened. The other F1s are a zesty green field cross and a taiga x early promiscuous tomato cross.

The dango mugi barley and khorasan grains look like they may ripen nicely, the former more certainly than the latter. The batanka wheat didn't really start up, so maybe it'll overwinter and be a spring wheat? We'll see. The sumire mochi barley only one stalk survived, and this is the second time I've had that happen. It's not happy here I guess.

My apple seedlings need to go in the ground to overwinter, but that means tilling somewhere. After I get the disability forms filled out I'm hoping to do that, but right now the thinking involved in disability stuff is just laying me out in bed.

Luckily I have a rotating selection of cats to help me with that and the show Time Team.

The transparent-type apples are near ripe, and I'm very much looking forward to them. The branches really bend under their weight, until the geese can grab and shake the apples off, but then the branches rebound and leave some for me.

I harvested a very large amount of rhubarb seed, an dI should remember to harvest some sweet ciciley seed.

That's all my mind will do right now, but it's the important stuff anyhow.

I walked down to the highwayside of my property today to hang a red dress along the highway. I very very rarely go there -- it's a wildlife corridor along the highway, in my mind, and not really for me to mess with. I noticed a bunch of stuff.

For one, there's a lot of water down there. The cattle dugout behind my fence trickles down into the aspen woods, and at the far end of those woods by the highway there's one of these ephemeral ponds. I had to look closely to make sure it wasn't a beaver pond, but of course there's not enough of a stream for it to be beaver. When the glaciers scraped over this land not too long ago, and when the big glacial lake was settling into the Prince George and Stuart Lake areas, a lot of clay-bottomed wetlands were formed. These are basically impermeable shallow basins that fill up with overland flow water, and then dry out by the end of the year if there's no reliable inflow.

There are also a lot of trails. They're obviously animal trails; it's unclear to me how much of the paths through grass, wildflowers, young trees, and larger forest are Solly, how much are large animals, and how much are made by smaller ones. That said, I saw droppings from the young moose, deer droppings, and at the southwest corner of the property many poops from a very large bear. I also mostly didn't have to duck for the paths through smaller trees. So it looks like my wildlife area is doing what it's supposed to and providing habitat, kind of as a tithe for using the rest of the land.

I think they also recently did some culvert work under the highway down there. My highwayside ditch is significantly wetter than I ever remember. We're still in a low-level drought, and the last couple years have been heavy drought, and it really matters seasonally what time I go there as to whether there's water. But still. Lotta water.

I didn't see clear signs of smaller predators like foxes, coyotes, or lynx but I also wasn't really looking. I know foxes hang out at my neighbours. I also see them on the highway or in parking lots every once in awhile.

Anyhow, Solly is doing a fantastic job in the back and she's a very good girl. Now if only she could stop eating her collars. Everyone has a microchip and their vaccines now (I would have assumed everyone who was neutered got a chip but turns out they didn't. That's now remedied) but as the stray cat reminded me it's nice for people to know someone is owned by some sort of clear sign, especially since she's so skinny. She is in fact skinny enough from jumping the fence and running around that I'm going to put her on a puppy or performance food for awhile and see if that helps.

Today was a very active day -- planted several garden rows with corn (gaspe x saskatoon bicolour ears), gold rush beans, batanka wheat, dango mughi barley, zesty green x silvery fir tree F2 tomatoes, some napa kind cabbage starts, and then marker calendula and radishes in with those seeds. I'm just doing a couple rows at a time but I'm working through it. Then there was the walk back to the highway.

So I spent the rest of time splitting love among the cats. I can't imagine how someone can dump an animal that is so openly affectionate. Normally my imagination is pretty good, but my neighbour who's done some cat rescue says this is "the season" and having enough folks do it that there's a season? Ugh.

My counselor and I were brainstorming what I'd need to live on if I can't work anymore, and how that might look. I've been feeling that this life, which I love, has an expiry date and maybe so should I in that case. I can't imagine giving up my animals -- my family -- and my ability to grow things. I can't picture just languishing on Mom's or a friend's second bed until my body annoys them into kicking me out.

I could be happy here even if the deterioration continues; emotionally I can handle not being able to think or move much, just lying with my dogs, getting up when I can. As long as I can feed myself and run the house -- paring away the extra animals, if there was a way to get supportive infrastructure and maybe replace wood with fully electric heat, set up a hydrant in the field so I don't need to carry water, fix the road into the back pasture so I don't need to carry feed as far. I'm not sure how I'd do that with less money but it left me with a sense of hope, that maybe it wouldn't need to be November that this life is over, but could be longer.

Either way I'm happy now, and happy to have had this.

I could spend a lot of time being frustrated that more prompt access to the medical system might actually have meant I didn't have to worry about this, that it's possible a couple timely specialist appointments would have meant I'd be perfectly ok right now, but there'll be time to do that if I do in fact lose my job because of it.

I'm still struggling with the idea that I might have to go on disability just to wait for specialists to get back to me, not because I'm irreparably sick but because I just haven't got to that right pill yet, if it exists. I can't imagine shifting my whole outlook to being ok with a lesser and continuously lessening level of functionality for a couple years, then getting used to the idea of going back to work full time after that again. It feels dislocating? Though I've got used to things I can't imagine before, I suppose.

None of this should maybe be as alarming as it sounds, but things are definitely deteriorating and I don't see any reason they should stop unless I can actually manage to get appointments with folks -- my doctor is currently scheduling four months out except there's maybe one to two days per month you can call in to get an appointment, after that her schedule is full and you have to try and hit the window next month. I can call the nurse's line and see what they recommend but just doing this stuff takes basically 80% of the capacity I have, and I can't navigate the system and work at the same time.

Today was the Steven Edholm apple order day. He lives in a much warmer climate than I do in California, but he hand-crosses lots of neat stuff. This is the third year I've ordered apple seeds from him; I don't expect a super high survival rate but I do order carefully from crosses with at least one hardy parent (preferably the mother, though I'm not sure how much difference that makes). Open-pollinated seeds from a hardy parent are cheap, where hand crosses are less cheap but still a very small investment overall. For apples the big investment is land for them to hang out for 5-10 years before they fruit. In most places that's a big ask. Here a place without moose to eat the trees to the ground is a big ask (thank you, dogs).

Anyhow, he focuses on red-fleshed and long-hanging apples. Long-hanging apples don't work here between bears and the fact that they need many months to ripen and super cold temps, but I can peel off the short-season hardy ones and capture some of the flavours he favours: berry, cherry, savory.

Plus this year I have some crabapples from ecos/oikos farm to plant. In general I receive these too late to plant on any given year so they wait for the next year but it's possible this year's edholm ones will arrive by Feb, which means there will be time to rehydrate and cold stratify them before planting and I'll have two years' worth of seeds to plant, maybe 300 babies in all plus the ecos ones.

I cannot possibly describe how hard it is to wait to see which ones survived from last year. Some died in the drought -- they were being watered but they just crisped up anyhow. Some didn't put on any height and just hung out. Some shot up, mostly those with Wickson or Kingston Black as a parent. During the winter some might also drought out despite the snow, and they may become tasty treats for voles. Then I expect some to be cold-killed even though we still haven't gone below -15C or so. Granted, they are covered in snow so they're pretty insulated from snaps, but I have no idea what percentage will make it through. As always I am very curious about this winter's temperatures anyhow, and if it stays above -25C that's a good couple climate zones warmer than normal so then next winter will be another big test.

Parents I'm interested in: Wickson (a hardy, very tasty big crab that grows fast babies), trailman (a super hardy crab), Williams Pride (a just-hardy but very early and tasty apple), Sweet 16 (a descendent of Wickson and a more full-sized, very tasty, and hardy apple), roxbury russet (I adore russets but they don't usually ripen here. I'm planning to drive something like 12 hours one way to get a couple hardy ones, one of these years, but in the meantime investing in seeds crossed with shorter-season varieties seems like a good middle ground), cherry cox (cherry flavour!!), and some apples edholm has created basically with those parents crossed in for good measure.

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.