Goatie Poopie Dog

Today my DH and I spent most of the daylight hours working on the farm. How much did we get done? Oh, about 1 percent. Maybe. Hopefully.

The big project was getting gravel on the main paths that my DH uses to feed the animals every day. He has an unstable knee that won't see surgery until late spring, so traction is crucial or he'll tear what's left of the support system. He turned Brian and Finn, the Great Pyr puppies, loose in the upper pasture so that the goats would be on their best behavior. Then we got a load of gravel and went to work. He loaded up the wheelbarrow and ran it up and down the hill, while I cleared out the accumulated manure and old, slimy, moldy alfalfa that had turned into a disgusting slip-n-slide near the gate where we fed the boys alfalfa on the way to the shed where they got their grain. I slung pitchfork-fuls of this fragrant slop over the fence into a pile, to be delivered to the veggie garden later.

Meanwhile, Chase, the border collie mix, ran along outside the fenceline, following Rory up and down the hill and occasionally making a run at the fence in a lame attempt to scare the goats into running. At some point we stopped paying attention to her until Rory let out an oath of disgust. "Chase, no!!"

I looked over and guess who was playing in the pile of ick? Guess who had rolled in it thoroughly and now was covered in partially dry goat poop, mole hole dirt, and whose fur was stained green from rolling in rotted, piss-soaked alfalfa? Well, I can tell you this. It was not me.

Chase was so gross, so filthy that Rory didn't want to let her trot through the house to the bathroom, so he picked her up at the door and carried her straight to the tub.

Her white fur is now once again white, and her black fur doesn't look suspiciously olive-toned. Clean dog. She got a lot of exercise today, watching us work, so she's curled up in an adorable ball on the sofa. The way she's acting, she worked harder than any of us. And maybe she has.

We've had some beautiful days, with lots of opportunity to work outside. I hope Mother Nature keeps them coming. There's plenty more out there to do. Next time, though, I think I'll stage a second wheelbarrow outside the the fence right next to the goat shed to avoid future, ah, breaks to play.

Weeds, Tea and Soup

The garden is growing really, really well.  Too well, in some cases.  Can you have too much bok choi? Apparently so.  Sadly, the goats don't like it, which I find weird, but useful in that the deer haven't bothered it at all.  I guess I have to eat faster.  Something to think about--bok choi, when cooked, forms a nice, not-too-thick gel.  It might be a good ingredient for soups.  If an experiment comes out all right along those lines, I'll post about it.

Anyway, I noticed something that produced a duh moment for me.

I have areas in my garden where not just the plants, but the weeds are positively huge.  It made me realize that the places that have small weeds are under-fertilized.  Sooo ... when I put the beds to sleep (heh) in the fall, when I put down my homemade fertilizer and cover things over, I can put extra in the places where the weeds are really pitiful, and less where they're gargantuan.

Not that I'll have weeds, of course.  Everything will be perfectly manicured and weeded by then.

But if I did have weeds, I could totally use them as a gauge for how much fertilizer to put down.  Aaaand, the beauty part, if I overdo it in the fall, its not going to burn my veggies because I won't have any in the ground at the time.  It'll have time to mellow for many months before I plant again.  Remember, though, if you add amendments in the fall, if they're super water soluble, they'll just wash away into the soil too deep for the plants to reach them in spring, so either protect against rain or just wait until after your seedlings sprout in the spring.  Don't fertilize when you plant seeds.  It messes them up when they germinate.  If you must, scratch the fertilizer in at least six inches, preferably farther, away from your seed line.

Speaking of fertilizer, I have a scary bucket of chicken poo waiting by.  I haven't decided what to do with it.  It's super hot, and only partially composted.  I'm tempted to spread it between the smallest of my zucchini plants and maybe make tea with some of it to water with around the fruit trees.  Chicken poo is awesome fertilizer, but you have to be careful.  It burns, baby, burns!  There's really no way to measure how hot it is, so I'll have to guess.  In cases like that, it's good to remember that you can always add, but you can't take away the damage from too much once it's done.  It's not like too much salt in your soup, where you can stick in a couple of celery stalks or add potatoes to fix it.

Soup again.  I must be craving it.  I think I'll make soup for dinner tonight.

Watch out for the weather.  Stay hydrated in hot spots, and look out for lightning.  We had an incredible lightning storm just east of us.  It sounded like fireworks show off in the distance, and for a while I thought that's exactly what it was, a post-4rth show, until I looked out the window.  Often there were multiple flashes at once.  We don't usually get that kind of weather around here.  I was very, very glad I could appreciate it at a distance instead of being directly under it.  It must have been terrifying.  Here's the weather report for it.  Photos here.  BTW, it takes three to four hours for me to drive from my home to the worst-hit areas of the storm, but I saw the closest edge of it quite well from our deck.

Blood, Sweat and Seeds

When I got home I had two M&Ms cookies with a cone of whipped cream on top, and then I went to work.  You'd think after a full day at the day job I'd want to put my feet up, or maybe at least cook some dinner and watch a movie or something.

That would be far too sensible.

We had rain in the local forecast, and I remembered I had all these old seeds I hadn't gotten around to planting.  Bags and bags of them.  And I thought, I'll just scatter them around and the rain will soak them in and what comes up, comes up.

But of course it's never that simple.

First I planted some ancient marigold seeds out in the veggie garden, and then I checked out the area I had planned for my mass old seed dumping ground.  It's about sixty feet long and ten to twenty feet wide, depending on the section.  The kids had, as instructed, dug out the majority of the blackberry roots, so I figured I'd just toss the seeds on the bare ground and go inside and have dinner.  I grabbed a rake (big mistake) and went to break the crust on the soil.

Hard as a rock.  Seriously.  I felt so betrayed!  Normally the soil under blackberries is quite soft.  They form their own sort of (evil) duff that keeps the soil moist and suppresses weeds.  And a few of the areas were like that, but way too much of it felt like baked clay so hard that I understood why even the grass hadn't started to take root there (yet.)  First I debated attacking the areas with a hoe.  Couldn't find one.  Then I considered  a shovel.  Mind you, this is after work, and I knew it would get dark soon, and breaking up rock hard dirt with a shovel is no light, quick task.

The impending darkness settled it for me.  I would get the big rototiller.

One sweaty, sore, throat-sore-from-suppressed-cussing half-hour later I had the whole section tilled.  I scattered the seeds, keeping particular kinds more or less together, raked the now (mostly) soft dirt to roughly cover at least some of the seeds in case they needed to be covered to sprout, and went home.  I had just enough time to gather eggs from the coup and close the chickens in for the night before the dark swooped in.  I had to turn on lights when I came in so that I could find my way around the house.

So now I'm thinking (I'm crazy that way) that I'd just put a whole lot of work into seeding an area that may or may not have viable seeds scattered on it.  So sometime this week I'm going to do yet another ridiculous thing.  I'm going to get a bunch of fresh seeds of something tall, bomb-proof and pretty, like cosmos or baby's breath or bachelor buttons (or maybe all of the above), and mix it with a big bag of potting soil and scatter that around the area as well.

That should fix it up real nice.

And then I'll be done.

Except for putting in the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and other stuff.

Oh, and I have a few more discounted bulbs to put in.

But then I'll be done.

Really.

Mostly done, anyway.

Procrastination Bites

I'm hitting the final stages of the office tiling.  This is where I expected to hit a few snags, and I did.  

One really bad thing about procrastinating on finishing a job like, for example, knitting a sweater, is that if you pick that project back up and find you don't have enough yarn--good luck finding the same dye lot.  And so it is with tiling.  I had to match grout and tile.  The grout, eh, linen is a common color and even if it's a tiny bit off, as the floor ages a minor color difference will not show.  And if it's really annoying, I can probably find something that will stain or otherwise color it.  Tile ... that's more difficult.

They'd just put the bullnose in the size and color I needed (3x10, almond romance) on clearance.  In July.  All gone.  All of it.  But, they had some lovely 10x12, in the same color, with a pretty emblem in the center, still available (also on clearance.)  Clearance doesn't mean savings, alas.  It was pretty expensive compared to the 3x10.  Not only that, but I have to bevel a bullnose onto the tile and then paint the bevel the correct color.  I'm hoping to find some enamel that will work on ceramic and be pretty durable.  The only bonus to this is that I'll have twenty really neat 6x10 tile with emblems that I plan to use on an outdoor project in concert with the remaining twelve whole floor tiles I have left over and some tile we inherited from a family member downsizing into a new house.  

The floor tile I bought plenty of when I initially measured the office project.  Why I didn't buy another box of bullnose, I'll never know.  Oh wait, I remember now.  I thought they were kind of expensive and I wanted to wait until the next paycheck, and besides, I wanted to re-measure the remaining wall to get a close estimate of how many I'd need.  

I'm reminding myself not to do that sort of foolish thinking ever again.  I saved zilcho dollars and cost myself probably $20 over what I would have paid for the right tile.  Ugh!

I've never seen a zucchini like this before.  Ooo la la, baby!  It's probably a pretty common mutation, but it's my first one so I think it's neat.

I fed both of these to the goats.  They're oversized.  My zucchini plants are producing big fruit this year--10-12" still has tiny, immature seeds--but these are just a little too big to be really yummy.

The goats liked them, though.

It's Alive!

There's a lot of things to get used to when you move into a rural or semi-rural area.  No natural gas lines.  No DSL.  Spotty or minimal cellphone coverage.  More frequent brown and blackouts (which makes the woodstove more than a decorative item) that tend to last longer than in town.  Deer eating up your garden, not just occasionally, but every frickin' night.  Dozens of bunnies that you scare off as you walk the garden--but they'll be back in a few minutes.  (I had three small bunnies hop out of one of my herb whiskey barrels not long ago when I watered.)  And ...

SPIIIIIIDERS!  This one here is one of my favorites.  It's a garden spider, literally.  I posted pics a long time ago of the very first one I saw, evah.  Now I have quite a few, though despite the fact they're considered common I sure don't see many of them.  I see far more of the orange and black orb spiders.  One of the many fun things about them is the squiggle they weave into their webs.  Some scientists believe it's supposed to imitate a wheat shaft to help fool insects into flying too close.  No one's really sure.  Notice how she lines up the squiggle with the dark line on her body, and how that line design kinda looks like wheat too... or maybe something else.  Or maybe it's all accidental or still a WIP by evolution.  Anyway, if spiders terrify you, don't live in the country.  You won't be able to go into the garden, nor sleep at night.  Plus, there's never anything to do around here.  All I had to do today beside the normal barn chores was move the sicklebar mower, which was out of gas, from the lower property to the garage.  Ho hum.  (gasp, pant!)

In other garden news, huzzah!  Tomatoes at last!

With the cool weather it's been a long, long wait for ripe tomatoes.  The plants are huge, though.  The leaves are packed together very tightly against the fence they're growing up.  They're as tall as I am.  If the tomatoes didn't turn red, I'd never find them in there.  I also have eggplant developing, but the fruit is still pretty small, about the size of a golf ball.  This variety of eggplant doesn't get more than 3" across and stays pretty round, so we're a bit less than halfway there.  Hopefully we'll have plenty of time before serious cold weather sets in.  We still have rhubarb and currants.  We're waiting on grapes, cucumbers and pears.  Apples are done/fallen (the goats are very happy), blackberries are mostly over with (though there are plenty of green ones, once the rains set in the berries are pretty yucky and mold quickly) if not done, marionberries are done, blueberries sort of never arrived but are sort of done, herbs are in bloom and for the most part sub-optimal unless you're a bee, in which case they're perfect.

Cedar Waxwings

I didn't know that cedar waxwings drank nectar.  The hummingbirds were not amused.

By the way, the plant is called a red hot poker plant (also known as a torch lily and by other names.)  I got the start for this one from my friend Jane.  The leaves on these amazing plants can look somewhat shabby, especially at winter, but they're worth having around for their spectacular displays and their magical bird-attracting powers.  They also are a favorite of bees and some butterflies.  

If you want a red hot poker plant give it plenty of room.  They spread slowly and steadily and are difficult to dig out.  If you want to contain one to a certain area, put it in a big plastic container (like the kind nurseries keep large trees in) and bury the container.  

By the way, slugs love red hot poker plants.  Start baiting for slugs in early spring by sprinkling some English formula slug bait deep under the leaves in a couple of places.  Don't worry about getting the middle--in fact, if you get some slug bait on the stalk buds in the center of the plant you run the risk of poisoning the birds should rain fail to rinse it all off.  Just lift up the draped leaves on the sides and shake the slug bait underneath.  Doing it this way will hopefully limit how many animals get into it.  If you have a lot of wildlife or household pets you need to protect, use wildlife-safe pellets or just put the regular slug bait under a rock or heavy pot.  The slugs will contort themselves to get to the bait.  If you don't bait for slugs you may get a lot of deformed flowers, if you get any at all, during those bad slug years.

It's easy to get starts for the red hot poker, or you can grow them from seed.  Divide the red hot poker in the spring (although you can get away with it almost any time of the year) or get seeds through a catalogue or from a neighbor.  If you want blossoms through the fall you have to deadhead the spent stalks.

I think I'll go sit in my garden some more.  It's been a beautiful day.

A Gardening Day

I've got dirt around my wrists.  You know what that means.

I've had my gardening gloves on.

After what seems like forever we had some actual sunshine around here.  The dry (if cloudy) weather preceding it helped drain the sludge (aka garden soil) so that today it was workable.  I planted my quaking grass, holy mole peppers, anchusa, and love lies bleeding seedlings.  I also managed to transplant my pampas grass starts into gallon containers.  

I'm still a dizzy muffin but I'm feeling much, much better today.  Just in time to go to work tomorrow.  Ugh.  Went to the doctor and the doctor said, no more monkeys--actually, she looked confident that the treatment I'm signed up for will work.  So, come July, I'll have to suffer for another week and then voila!  Things should get better.  Not instantly, but over the course of the following months.

I wrote a weird story (probably too weird to be publishable) and worked some on Signet while I reclined on the couch last night.  I know, I know, again with the rewarding being sick thing.  But it felt good to play in the Masks universe again without (shudder) having to edit the manuscript.  I much prefer first draft writing over editing, at least for now.  Maybe I'll change my mind after the master's course.

Speaking of rewards for being infirm, apparently we get punished for getting better.  Not only do I get to go back to work (um, yay?) but the girl is out of her cast and is now in a brace, which means she gets to do all the non-fun parts of PE, like running, again.  Well, I enjoy running but I suspect, gauging by her expression yesterday, that she was less than thrilled.  She prefers team sports, which will be off limits until that brace is off.

I've had my rest and some water.  Time to go plant a few more things.  Tomorrow's forecast--covered by store ceiling followed by cloudy skies.  

Handwriting and Butterfly Wings

I'm getting better, but after a day of trying to do just a couple of things (I selected laundry and vacuuming) I'm all tuckered out.  I've found that sitting at the computer isn't conducive to writing in my condition because muscle soreness makes sitting in the kneeling chair uncomfortable, so I'm going to give a notebook and a good ol' fashioned pen a try.  I haven't hand written in a long while.  I'm looking forward to it.

I went for a short walk in the garden today to survey the storm damage.  A lot of annuals were crushed, though none look like they were fatally hammered by the hail.  At a distance the garden looks pretty normal, but when you look more closely you see torn leaves, stem ends where leaves and buds used to be, broken branches, and debris all over the ground.  The debris is the most interesting part.  The wind was pretty fierce and so leaves from all different kinds of plants are mixed together.

My vote for prettiest debris:  the torn petals from the tree peony look like butterfly wings on the ground.  Sad but beautiful.

Beautiful Day

Another beautiful day.

It's a funny kind of mom's day.  Mourning Nikita's loss, mimosas, chocolate covered donut holes, a beautiful letter from my daughter, transplanting plant acquisitions from the Mother's Day sale in downtown Camas, reading critiques of my opening for Masks on Flogging the Quill, going on a mad photographical spree when the sun peeked out for about ten minutes.  It's a good day, but in constant flux.  The washing machine of my life is in the agitation cycle.  The pics, in order, starting with the upper left, akebia vine growing through our deck upstairs, honeybush bought at the Mom's Day market, black-headed grosbeak (safety first grosbeak) and mourning dove.

Also today, got a nice rejection from an agent.  Haven't found a mean one yet.  Denied!  It's encouraging, though, since they're all so encouraging.  

Don't Want to Stop

Yum, I love the sunshine.  Yay!  I've been gardening like a madwoman.  It's one of those things where everything hurts, especially my back and my legs from trying to support my back and my hands which are no longer accustomed to pulling blackberries.  Yanking blackberries is hard, nasty work, but rewarding.  So why the rush?  Because it's time to put out some of the seed I have set aside for broadcast and I have to work tomorrow.  I have no expectation that the weather will be nice on Saturday (or ever again until June) so I'd like to get it all done now.

All is strong word.  Let's say a lot.  I'd like to get a lot now, and get the crimson clover and wildflower seeds sprinkled out there in sufficient quantities that the birds can go to town and there will still be plenty left over to sprout.  Out there, at least the part I want to seed, happens to be covered in blackberries.  So there we are.  

In the meantime, my greenhouse is set up and the seedlings have been transferred to a location where they can have sunlight in sufficient doses to keep them from getting even more straggly.  I've filled about half my hanging baskets and set them in there too, and some pots with calla lily starts (the red/orange kind) and started my tomatoes better-late-than-never.  It got cold last night, but the greenhouse kept everyone safe and warm.  Looks like it's going to be a great growing season this year.

But only if I can get enough blackberries pulled before the rains come and stay until June, like they almost always do.  I guess all I can do is keep my fingers crossed and enjoy what I've got going so far.  Not too many years ago it rained solid from February through the first week of June and nothing got planted--nothing--before June.  That was a sad kitty year for the kitty gardener.  I'll count my blessings.  But first I've got to go pull some more blackberries.

Here are some of the plants waiting for warm weather, sunshine, frost-free nights and plenty of blackberry-free zones to grow in.

April Fools

I woke up to sunshine this morning.  I was so inspired by spring and growing things I've decided to walk out on my job, dye my hair green, and run around naked in my garden all day.

That was supposed to be the beginning of an April Fool's entry but you know what?  It really sounds appealing.  Well, the dyeing my hair green would be a pain, with the lightening first to a lighter brown or blonde and then finding and going to a salon that carries the right green for part B, and it would probably be expensive.  Maybe food coloring would work, but if it didn't, well, I'd have to live with the lack of success for a long time, being a long-haired weirdo.  I look really terrible in short hair.  Trust me.  

But besides that, the rest sounds great.  Someday when my garden is tall and all filled in I can garden naked or mostly naked if I want, no joke.  Right now there's too much exposure (ha ha) to the road and my neighbors, though I used to work topless when I worked in sheltered areas.  Ironically, we've cleared too many blackberries for me to work in a comfortable state of dress (or undress, in this case.)  But soon, soon now, the plantings will mature to a size that we'll have privacy again, without an invasive non-native species taking over what should be gardens and pasture and wildflowers and woods.

I'm reveling in my freedom today after reading about some real hardships.  A good and wise friend pointed me to her blog (waving hi!) and I spent about an hour catching up.  It pointed me to a wonderful and yet heartbreaking article about an all-woman village that both filled me with joy and anger.  My heart wants to react with counter-violence but I figure that's a no-win.  The men will escalate if the women fight back, and probably kill them all.  I'm so filled with feminine pride after reading about their success, and enraged by the poopyheadedness of the men.  When people can't see that beating women for being raped is wrong, they are more than blind and ignorant.  A blind man can understand.  An ignorant man can learn.  I don't think that these men can see, or learn to be other than what they are--a product of a culture that places blame solidly on the shoulder of people who can't or aren't allowed to defend themselves because they're too terrified to challenge the people who are responsible--the rapist, the abuser, and too often, the religion that they twist and interpret to condone, or that outright condones the savaging of their neighbors and kinfolk because they were born with a uterus.

Blessings on the women of the world who are suffering today, not for choices they've freely made, but because a glint of self-value shone in their eyes and an asshole couldn't stand it and had to crush it.  Blessings on the victims of rape, blessings on those who stand up and embrace courage and provide hope for their sisters.  Many, many blessings on the village of women that's growing around the world, and blessings on the women who haven't heard and don't know and need a place so much and will never live to see it.  May they be touched by peace, grace, and love.  

I think I know who the real April fools are today.  

P.S.  Katherine is doing great.  She's very kittenish and playful and is healing well.

They're Here!

I finally snagged some pics of the grosbeaks.  Today was probably the most bird-diverse day we've ever had.  The grosbeaks mingled with juncos, varied thrushes, house finches, chickadees, robins, stellar jays, scrub jays and our lone nuthatch.  All at once.  Unfortunately it was raining when they all came so I could only sneak out once during a dry spell when the grosbeaks had chased the juncos out of the feeder.  By looking at our feeder it appears that we have only a slightly heavy sunflower seed mix, but looks are deceiving with this mix from Costco.  It includes quite a few shelled sunflower seeds.  It also has peanut pieces, but I don't know if the grosbeaks like those.  They're really picky about what they want as far as feeder food.  If you don't have enough sunflower seeds, they'll move on.  Our flock today was about ten individuals, mostly male but a few females.  I've seen as many as a dozen and maybe this year we'll see even more.  They tend to return to the same feeders on their migratory paths so there's an opportunity to get more and more each year as the chicks accompany their parents.

Also new today, hyacinths.  I'm sure they've been around for quite some time in the valley, but seeing them in full bloom here for the first time gave me one of those yay moments.  The low-growing tulips are stretching their necks, and all the early daffodils are open now.  The daylilies are tall enough that the fish don't look silly.  Roses are sending out their first leaves.  The tree peonies are opening their first flush of purple leaves and the regular peonies have buds peeking out.  Primroses are going crazy.  Hostas have their noses poking out.  Pansies have got their faces painted on.  The daphnes are getting ready to pop open while the lenten roses have been open for a good month and are wondering what everyone else is waiting for.  The place is starting to look up.  Maybe someday I'll have a garden that looks good year-round, but for now I have to wait until spring for my show and I'm so glad the opening act has started.

We had just enough sunshine that I managed to dash out and get our Christmas tree from this year planted, and I yanked more baby blackberries and put out slug food.  I know every year I lose quite a bit to slugs and most of the time I shrug it off, but this year I was very disappointed to see that slugs had destroyed several of those kewl tulips.  I don't know what's more heartbreaking--seeing a bud eaten down to just a little color showing or having the stem chewed through and the blossom laying in the mud.  The stub, I guess.  At least I can bring the blossom in.  Die slugs die!  I need to encourage more snakes, although this time of year the snakes are still napping most of the time and won't be eating much in slugs.  

The equinox is the day after tomorrow.  I don't know if I'll be doing anything special except welcoming the day.  I have to work, drat-0.  Maybe I'll celebrate by coming home to a clean house.  That means lots of work tomorrow.  Cleaning out the house is a semi-tradition here at the household on the equinox, not exactly a party, but really rewarding.  The mini-cleans I've done over the past weeks will help set the stage for a great spring cleaning, I hope.  Yay clean house, yay birds, yay spring!  Even when it rains, when the flowers are blooming it's a beautiful day.

Debt Races and Strawberries

Still waiting for all the various checks and accounts to clear and adjust.  I wonder if in the future we'll have the capability to track things better.  Then you can have horse races with various institutions.

"And they're off!  IIV has the lead, but they're slow coming around the bend as an employee is sick, creating a backlog  of  unconfirmed funds.  Golden Express is edging up--oh!  Due South leaps to the finish line, bypassing the home stretch!  Risky move.  They must have a helluva claims department."

I'm not surprised we've seen no movement in the snail mailed stuff, but I'm hoping it will happen sooner rather than later so that I can pay off any extra balances that will inevitably be there thanks to fees, late purchases and so forth.  It would have been nice to have checks cut for the exact amount.  We did, in a way, ask for checks to be cut for the exact amounts but we knew that information would be weeks outdated when it came time to close.  And so it was.  I was surprised to see that Radcon stuff appeared after that last balance check.  It's nothing we can't handle in one payment, though.

One payment!! Woot!

Meanwhile, in the rock garden, I'm contemplating the strawberries.  I'm pretty well settled on yanking them all out, and yet, they're strawberries.  I mean, who doesn't love them?  They're sort of messy, but they're a fun ground cover, but sloppy and invasive and uneven and this is a really tall variety ... but they're strawberries.  I mean, c'mon.  Strawberries.

One lone daffodil stands fully opened while its sleepy neighbors snuggle inside their protective sepals and murmur "five more minutes, mom."  The small pink flower on the mid-left is an anemone.  The anemones in that bed are mostly pink although we have a few other colors.  Here you can see how big the chionodoxa are by comparison to the daffodil.  By the way, that one pink anemone is the first one to pop up every year, often weeks in advance of all its sisters, brothers and cousins.  Weird.

How does your garden grow?

The grosbeaks have stubbornly refused to come back.  I think they know I'm waiting with camera in hand.  Either that, or someone around here has an all sunflower seed feeder out, rather than a heavy mix.  Guess I'll be getting sunflower seeds at work soon.

But even if I don't have sunshine on the wing around here, at least I have some flowers.  chionodoxa isn't grown as much as I'd expect considering how well it does in our area.  Maybe it's because it's a small flower, but I don't see that as much of an excuse considering how many people grow violets, snowdrops (the normal-sized ones) and lily-of-the-valley.  I have blue and lavender and they're both great to tuck into those small places where you can bend down and get a close look at them without having to put your nose to the ground, like in a rock garden or under deciduous shrubs in a raised bed.

This is the first year I've grown low-growing tulips.  I had no idea the variety I picked out was so early.  I don't have a hint of bud on my other 'normal varieties' and I have only a few of the early yellow daffodils, yet here are some Greigii tulips I got at work.  They're not the earliest of the tulips, either.  I may have to look into getting some Kaufmanniana tulips to add to my collection.  Or maybe these are Kaufmannianas.  That's the trouble with buying generically packaged bulbs.  Often the scientific names are left off, sometimes because the plant is so hybridized it's not truly one thing or another and is then designated generically species.  In this case it would be Tulipa spp.  I guess it doesn't matter.  What matters is that they're early enough that the slugs didn't get them all, and I get to enjoy a nice show to carry me over until the garden comes into its own.

Knowing Your Plants

After a brief hiatus, here we are discussing Radcon 5 again.  

Apparently this panel has been extremely well-attended at other conventions.  Well, not at Radcon 5.  I brought an attendee with me (the unstoppable C.S. Cole) and Gayle, Gerald Nordley's delightful wife, decided the panel would be a great place to knit.  She was absolutely right.

Frieda Orsborn, my fellow panelist, had a wealth of herbal knowledge and she brought some magazines for reference.  I paged through one as we waited for others to show up (didn't happen, although two young men arrived, sat for a minute, probably realized we weren't discussing government moles, and left) and when Gayle asked about ephedra I got to laugh and tell her that it was being re-released to the public by the FDA and here's the article, enjoy!  (I do not endorse the use of ephedra, nor any other herbal product with a very few exceptions, and I'll explain why below.)

Despite the fact that the attendees of Radcon 5 weren't interested in the growing with roots plants as opposed to spy-type plants, we had a lot to say about them.  

For example, say that your fantasy has the characters moving from point A to point B or is describing village life and it sounds like every other fantasy.  You can spice it up considerably by flavoring your text with a healthy dose of what it's really like to  live off the land without modern agriculture and distribution/grocery stores.  

Your job as an omnivore is to be able to eat just about anything to sustain yourself.  A plant's job is to reproduce successfully, and there are several clever strategies by which to do this.  Edible fruit with an undigestible pit is a great one, because your seed gets distributed everywhere.  The trick is to not make your leaves and bark very nutritious or as many an orchard owner can lament to you, the deer (who have adapted to eat stuff that will give us the runs like crazy) will eat the whole tree down to a pitiful stub.  Other methods include relying on seeds that blow around, sprouting from the roots or tips that arch down to the ground and forming big thickets, or dropping seeds from toxic berries and letting those slowly spread your kind and being as poisonous as you know how so that hardly anyone wants to evolve how to eat you when there's a perfectly good apple tree sapling right there to nibble down to a stump (darn you, deer, darn you!)  There are strategies in-between, but remember this is developing with evolution and it's tricky to have totally toxic leaves and yummy fruit at the same time.  It's not something you can necessarily plan, as such, anymore than you can plan to have a boy as your first born without getting nasty (or lucky.)  

But I digress.  The point is that when your heroes head out into the wilderness, they need to find stuff out there that's edible to them that hasn't already been eaten.  If they're out there in the winter, especially in late winter, good frickin' luck.  Everything edible out there has been searched for and assaulted full time by the wild critters.  Also, think about hunting for a little bit.  We have an enormous abundance of deer right now (Kami shakes her fist at them helplessly from the house) and yet there's many a hunter with all kinds of equipment, including firearms, and all the time they can get off work, that will take days and days to bring home their deer.  Wild animals are great at running away from things that want to eat them.  So, your adventurers turn to living off the plant life.  They have options--pine nuts, certain leaves and needles that can make tea, some roots--but it takes a lot of time to find and collect enough of these things to get a halfway decent meal.  Yes, you can eat grubs, but finding and digging for them is time consuming and they're not very filling.  (If you want to try this, I suggest cooking them.  You don't have to eat them raw.)  Also, lots of green matter without starch is going to give them a nasty case of the trots.

Having your villagers wish for the first of the harvest in summer while they're picking greens in the spring can add a lot to your setting.  So can a real understanding of the cyclic nature of primitive agriculture and haphazard storage capabilities of a low-tech society.  It can also be great fun contrasting availability of items in a city where they have access to snow/ice year-round vs. a temperate city vs. the tropics where you can usually find something fruiting year-round.

You certainly don't have to include this stuff in your writing.  After all, folks read to escape the realities of starvation, feast/famine, and the joys of diarrhea.  But like I said, it can set you apart from everyone else and add some tension if you like.  

What about medicinal uses, Kami?  I want my herb wife to be able to heal my character who just got hurt.  I don't want to deal with infections and stuff like that.

You can do that.  But again, let's have some fun with this.  There's a lot of material out there with borderline or outright magical people who can heal heroes from the brink of death with a chocolate-coated magic pill.  The way to make things interesting is to take into account the guesswork involved in this sort of thing.  One of the reasons there are fewer herbs on the market than really ought to be has to do with how our bodies are only partially adapted to eating things that don't want to be eaten.  The gov tries to bring things down to the lowest common denominator, and therefore things get taken off the market or are never approved because an unacceptably large proportion of people are allergic or sensitive to what's otherwise a really good product.  When you use the whole herb rather than a refined extract, the chances that you're sensitive to one aspect or a combinations of an herb's profile of components is that much higher.  The combination/complexity can also provide more benefit than a refined version, or the components can cancel out the overall benefit.  Some systems, most notably the Chinese system of herbal medicine, maintain that medicines have to be crafted for each individual and can't be mass-produced for any real effect.  

Suddenly you can have a lot more fun with your herb wife as she hits and misses with your character's individual chemical tolerances and her local herbal availabilities.  Also, side-effects can be fun to play with.  Your character doesn't get an infection, but now he's nauseated, or groggy, or both and trying to fight the bad guy.

If you know your plants, you can also have a lot  more fun inventing poisons that don't exist.  They sound and act more nasty if you have reality to draw from.

We had a great time, the four of us, discussing plants and how to apply them to fiction (and real life too.)  We got a little bit into lore and how it develops (multi-use or very important core plants can become the center of an entire culture, even naming the people who use it) and chatted a bit about gardening.  (Why the heck is basil so hard for me to grow when everyone else can grow massive pots of it??!!) But mostly we talked at the edges of a really big topic, because an hour is not even close to being enough time to go deep with this stuff.

BTW, I'm always available to answer your plant questions.  I don't know everything, by any means, and I'll let you know if I have to research it because you may be better off researching it yourself.  But if your rhododendron is ailing or you want to know how hard it is to grow a camellia sinensis for tea, etc. I'm here for ya.  Know your plants.  Love 'em.

I Spy from the Sky a Slice of Pie

A picture is worth a thousand words.  Maybe even more.

This is our little acreage and our house with the slate-colored roof.  Tony's place is to the left and down with the red roof, and Tim's place is to the right and up, while Chuck's is across the road from us (his house is off frame.)  The smaller building with the darker, rust-red roof is our barn.  The line from the top right parallel to the right side of the pic is our east property line.  The trees at a 90 degree angle to the road to the right of Tony's house is our west property line.  If you put a straight edge on these two lines, they meet to form our southern (pointed) property end.  

The dark green trees are mostly doug firs, although we have maples in the mix.  To the left of our house are those big shade trees that are often in the frame when I take pictures of the gardens.  The apple green is all blackberries.  The darker lines in the blackberries are the paths we've cut through. 

That bright, not quite white area south of the house is the firepit patio.  The new goat pasture goes downhill past the firepit to the meadow (a subtle clearing with a round patch of trees) and runs east back to the property edge.  A lot of the original goat pasture is brownish--summer grass, not dust.  The only dusty (and muddy during the rains) area is the cream-colored line edging the barn.  In our driveway (which has a jog that runs off toward the barn) you can see a small, pale blue object--the Nova--and a darker object off to the side that's the Bruiser.  

The yellow areas are where the boy mowed and also areas I keep trimmed around the veggie garden.  In closer shots you can see the grape arbor, although it's not covered over this time of year, and the rosemary, but from this distance the only detail you can make out reliably are a line of trees--western redcedar--that protect us from the road a bit.  I planted timber bamboo west of them, but it'll be a while before that will be dense enough to cast a good shadow.  At the moment the only thing to distinguish it from the almost-identically-colored pasture grass is the darker (because it wasn't mowed) grass.

In summer the hike to the barn is not very far.  In winter, with the wind blowing like crazy from the east slogging through snow or skating on ice, it's at least a hundred miles each way.  

The dogs have a large area to play in (the green area between the house and the road,) but apparently that's insufficient because when they get out they all dash down into the ravine (where all the big trees are) and are gone for hours.  We're on a very steep slope, and even on four legs it's very dangerous down in that ravine which plunges into cliffs in hidden places, so we try not to let them escape and when they do I worry like crazy that they won't make it back.  Rumor has it that a herd of pigs were lost in the ravine.  That's where most of the cougar, coyote and bear reside.  Especially folks that have lived exclusively in urban areas would be shocked how quickly--in a few hundred feet--the territory around here changes from pastoral development to very wild with areas that are impassable to humans and sometimes impassable even to the animals that live there.

This is our little bit of the world.  It's fun to look at it from high in the sky.

Blog Action Day, plus Poopyhead virus epidemic

I guess someone decided that it was blog action day, and not just any action but green action. (Not greeeeeeeeeen!?) All I can say is that here in the Pac NW it's better than most places in that awareness is high. Apparently on the east coast, things like water efficiency, sustainable flooring and alternative insulation aren't even on the radar. One article I read in "This Old House Magazine" related that one couple hired a contractor purely for his willingness to learn how to work with green and sustainable materials because not a single contractor in their area had actually worked with the stuff. They wanted it because they'd come from California and they'd been educated to value it. Apparently in Florida, there just isn't a market for green buildings, not enough to attract a single contractor anyway. Such is the gist of the article, anyway.

Despite the constant barrage of eco-friendliness around here, however, at work I still see people ask for a plastic bag for something they could easily stick in their pocket or purse. Examples I had just in the last week:
A pack of gum (she got a dirty look from the person in line behind her but missed it)
Two small packages of cat toys (already in plastic)
A vacuum cleaner belt (which was already in its own bag too)
Two rolls of lifesavers
A lipstick and a small bottle of soap
A bottle of pop (the single serving size)
A single DVD

Then there's the bag for the bagged or luggable items. People want bags for diapers and/or adult protection undergarments despite the fact that they have a handle on them. Also, they want bags for pillows even if they have a plastic cover on them, outdoor rugs and doormats, wine boxes, the 12 packs of pop (the kind with handles,) large bomb-proof packaged toys (the kind where you require power tools to get into,) appliances, camping stuff (you really want a bag for your foldable chair in a bag? Okaaay ...) bedding in plastic carrying cases with a handle, and so forth. Many of these require our gigantic plastic bags of doom to contain. These giant bags have no handles--you end up looking like Santa Claus. BTW, if you want a free plastic bag for something else just ask. I don't have to put an item in it to give it to you, and I try to make that clear. Let's not do the ridiculous packing of the auto floor mats into a 30 gallon bag. I understand that some of these things, like the wine and the undergarments, are something you might want to hide from other customers, but on the other hand, you've just lugged them around in your shopping cart, and now all you have to do is get it to your car.

I remember these because they fill me with little Kami outrage, or at minimum, little Kami eye roll impulses. Of course, being a model employee (but a model of what?) I smile and say thank you for coming in. On the reverse side, I've had people carry an armload of stuff and say they don't need a bag. I also have regular customers who come in either with their own paper or plastic bags or a permanent canvas bag. Yay them!

On to poopyheadedness.

There must be a poopyhead virus going around. This particular strain is making people obstinant with folks that they should be nice to. In a writer's workshop I'm running I set out in the guidelines (okay, they're not laws, I freely admit that--and the workshop is being held at a pirate-themed event) that writers need to include a 500 word or less synopsis with their novel portion. Everyone understood this, except Her. Her didn't submit a synopsis, and I didn't catch it until I started organizing the sessions. So I emailed her. Where is thine synopsis? Her response (paraphrased)? I don't see why I have to submit a synopsis. What are they used for?

I assume she doesn't treat editors that she submits to in this manner, or if she does, she'll never get published. Reading and conforming to submission guidelines is part of the test that publishers and editors use to determine poopyheadedness. If you appear to follow their guidelines in good faith (or at least have your ms in industry standard format) that is a signal to them that you have spent time researching, formatting and making things in all ways easy for them, and that therefore you are unlikely to be a poopyhead to work with. No matter how brilliant your writing is, it's unlikely that a publisher will put up with poopyheadedness in today's market. There's always another writer around the corner, just as promising, who is not a poopyhead.

Even if she felt like she didn't have to follow the submission guidelines because she knows more than me, which I guess is fine (who am I after all? Well, I know a lot of the pro writers and an editor or two and I do talk to them, but never mind that she couldn't guess that) there's the fact that she can safely assume that everyone else has a synopsis and that the pros who are reviewing her work will be expecting a synopsis. When they don't get one, what will be her answer? Um, I forgot? I didn't know? Or I didn't think it was worth my time? The excuse I like best is, I wasn't interested in your opinion on my synopsis.

Also had a request to be grouped with a particular writer, and when I said I couldn't guarantee placement with anyone and promptly went on vacation, the same person asked my good friend who graciously served as stand-in for me the same question. As if we wouldn't talk. Ha! Another writer asked to be in a one-on-one. Sometimes I wish I didn't have to be all nice and PR-y to these people. Out of my workshop, so there! And if you're one of these people and reading this, I hope you're blushing with embarrassment. You should. Grow up a little. You shouldn't expect special treatment. The "I paid good money" argument doesn't fly. So did everyone else, and btw $5 for a workshop with luminaries like Ursula LeGuin is not good money, it's a token fee to barely cover expenses for the workshop.

I thought the virus must be making the rounds in just the workshop, but yesterday I had a woman come in with her completed application. I inspected it and found that one of the job description packets was missing. There are two, and when I (and presumably everyone in the lobby) hand the applications out we let folks know that they need to be read, signed and returned with the application. (There is a small group of people who think we hand out those packets for their own records, which sort of makes sense but if you spend thirty seconds thinking about it you'd realize there's no reason for you to have something like that for your own records when you haven't even been hired yet.)

"Did you get both packets?" I asked, holding up the one for sales clerk.
"Yes."
"Well one is missing. Here, I'll get you an extra copy and you can sign it."
I've just turned aside when she says, "Do I have to have it in there?"
"Yes," I say, opening and disemboweling another application, removing the cashier packet and setting it on the counter. "They're not as likely to accept your application without it."
"But I don't know anything about cashiering." This is not mere protest--she has an edge to her voice that says I don't want to cashier.
I resist the urge to tell her goodbye, but that's not my job. I then resist the urge to go into sarcasm mode and say 'there's this thing called training ... Instead I nicely say, trying not to grit my teeth, "Well, they train you to do the job. Everyone starts out as a cashier here." Even the people who hate it. Yes, poopyhead woman, even you shall be forced to cashier even if you don't want to cashier, assuming you want a job.
She whips open the packet and signs it, giving me a dirty look.

Is she not applying for a job here? Does she not know that I got someone a quicker interview by letting our assistant manager know that the applicant who just handed this to me was dressed very nicely and was very friendly? If she doesn't recognize that we all have to work together and the only folks who have any say as to what duties they'll perform on a given day worked hard for that right, and they still have to have to do things they'd rather not do, she's not going to be a, ahem, good fit for the team, to put it in bureau-speak. So I hand over the application to the asst. manager when she's left and said, "she was very resistant to filling out the cashier packet and was pretty snippy." He didn't round file it right there, but he made the mental note.

Poopyhead virus. I've been around enough people with it, I might catch it, so I'll be sure to take extra vitamin C and get plenty of rest on my day off.

Happy Blog Action Day!

Boy, that sounded dumb. If it takes off I guess I'll just have to learn to appreciate the sincerity and proaction of the green movement.

But couldn't they have come up with a better name?