Sculpin

When I said, “Don’t get me started on the rotting wood,” I thought that Josh might be writing about our P-Patch too, since he took some photos. And since he hasn’t, let me point out that he hauled out a big, heavy load of rotting wood on his bicycle. I don’t know how heavy it was; it was too heavy for me to pick up at the time. So a metric shit-ton of wood went on one Xtracycle wide-loader, and some peonies went on the other one. It was wildly unbalanced. I had to help push the bike up the path out of the garden; it was definitely not rideable. Which didn’t keep him from trying.

That was a long day. I was tuckered out.

On Tuesday afternoon, I watched a beehive being installed at the Picardo P-Patch. It’s amazing to watch somebody dump several thousand bees out of a box. The sound is tremendous. I got a lot closer than I was expecting to!

I’d heard of “re-queening” but didn’t know what exactly it involved, so it was interesting to watch Thane the bee guy put the queen in. It’s not the queen from the original hive, so it takes a few days for the bees to get used to her. She started in a little screened wooden box with a stopper, and he replaced the stopper with a mini-marshmallow. By the time the bees have chewed through the marshmallow, they will have accepted her.

After they’d settled down from the indignity of being shaken out of a box, you could see the newly-installed worker bees hanging out in front of the hive fanning the air vigorously. Thane said they were sending out pheromones that say, “This is home!”

It was during the bee dumping that I became exquisitely aware that my borrowed beekeeper’s mask was a little problematic. It had gotten severely squashed in storage, and I wasn’t quite able to unsquash it, so it kept touching my ears, which suddenly seemed like landing pads for angry bees. But while there were a few folks who got stung that day, I wasn’t one of them.

Later on I retreated a ways and took off that problematic mask. It’s weird to get bees stuck in your hair. They seem really, really loud. It takes a couple of seconds for them to untangle themselves. A few times they ran right into my sunglasses. POCK!

Thane’s doing some sort of project with a bunch of kids from U. Prep. “My goal is to get one new beekeeper a year,” he said; he sounds very committed to small-scale apiculture. So he looked intrigued by my interest in the bees, and I’m sure intrigued by his interest in teaching beekeeping. I’ve been interested in beekeeping for — sheesh, must be coming up on twelve years now, but there was always something keeping me from getting involved. My concerns these days have been (a) would I get freaked out by thousands of agitated bees? and (b) can I physically perform the required movements? But in fact I felt cautious but unfreaked, and the Picardo bee yard is a very handy place for me to further acclimate to the presence of tens of thousands of bees. As for (b), Thane has some possible technical solutions for my problems with lifting heavy things.

Thane mentioned some neat art one of his friends made. The guy’s a ceramic artist; he made a big bowl, glazed it, and put it upside-down on top of the hole in the top of the hive. It sort of functioned like a super, in a way. The bees came up and made a fantastic city of comb in it. At the end of the year he took it off and turned it upside down, shooed out the bees, and there was his art.

More bee art: a bee-made vase. (Updated to add even more bee-altered art.)

“The forcipules… of Lithobius centipedes are too small and weak to penetrate human skin.” You know, I always thought that too. But it turns out that if a good-sized one nails you right in the relatively delicate skin near your fingernail, it can draw blood. And then the itch comes. I’m not quite as pro-centipede as I was yesterday.

Josh and I adopted a P-Patch plot in Picardo Farm. I wanted to have somewhere to garden while we slowly rearrange our own garden beds, and I thought it’d be a good way to meet more of our neighbors, get good gardening advice, and perhaps apprentice to one of the beekeepers. In a fit of ambition, I reserved one of the year-round plots, and it turned out to be a pretty good mess. The guy who used to have the plot was pretty old and perhaps not particularly vigorous — certainly not particularly tidy. I think he just plain gave up sometime last summer. Quackgrass is everywhere, in thick stands, and there’s a ton of morning glory with big, juicy-looking roots. Out of a 10×20 space, Josh and I took out a full garbage bag of plastic trash and a bag and a half of the really nasty weeds. I don’t know how many bins of non-noxious weeds we’ve taken out to the compost there. And don’t get me started on the rotting wood. We put in several hours this weekend, and there’s still plenty of quackgrass to root out of there.

But there are also raspberries (lots of raspberries), blueberries, some huge rhubarb plants, and tulips. The light is great, and the soil’s fantastic.

I’ve been busy with physical therapy lately. It’s about what you’d expect from me: weak VMO, internally rotated femurs, sub-optimal hip muscles… if I’d realized how much of the body’s well-being comes down to the muscles of the butt, I would have been a lot more careful after being tossed through the air by a van and smacking my derriere on the pavement a few years ago. (“You’ll be fine in eight weeks,” indeed.) Fortunately, I don’t seem to have done myself a whole lot of real damage — no torn ACL or anything.

It’s been sort of fun working on the VMO part of all this — I get to run a small electric current through the VMO while flexing it. It feels like I’m ripping Scotch tape off the skin there. Dan the PT also has got me doing little tiny interval training: I boost my heart rate to about 135 for thirty seconds or so, then cool back down to below 110 for a minute, and repeat.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with oddball resist-dyeing methods. So far, my experiments have not been particularly successful.

Yesterday, Josh and I dropped by the open house at Two Cranes Aikido, which has moved to my neck of the woods. We’re thinking about giving it a try, starting probably in April.

A minor rite of passage: I had my first bike wipeout on January 13. Out on the tandem a block and a half from home, we hit a patch of ice and went down. My thought on the way down: “Oh, man, I really don’t want to have to tell the physical therapist about this.” Because, really, being out on that road that day was plain crazy. But I’m glad to have the first wipeout over with. I’d been fairly afraid of falling on the bike, especially since it’s a tandem—I’d imagined the combined force of bike, pavement, and captain all working together to snap my femur. But no, I just jarred a few joints.

I placed a super order at Raintree Nursery a few weeks ago during their winter sale. Arriving in the mail at some point are two kinds of strawberries, three kinds of lingonberries, two kinds of thornless blackberries, two kinds of blackcurrants, and a Stevens cranberry. (Oh boy oh boy oh boy….) I’ve gone plant-mad. I want to rip up the parking strip and plant it with raspberries. I want to train apple trees on wires into a living fence in the front yard. I want a greenhouse. Yeah, it’s January, all right.

I’ve just harvested 8.8 pounds of acorn squash. No idea what to do with them. I’m not really a winter squash person, I think; a neighbor gave us a seed start, and the vines just grew like crazy. My friend Ian suggests that I start by building a really big slingshot.

These squashes are such satisfying objects that I’d like to learn to enjoy eating them.

Fava beans are coming up well; gorgeous scarlet runner seeds have almost all ripened; harvested six pumpkins in various stages of ripeness, the largest of which is about 43 inches around; brought in the tiny Swallow eggplants, all of which together came to about 8 oz.

In other news, I started coughing on September 7 and still haven’t quite stopped. It’s just been relapse after relapse. Very annoying. I think I’m finally on the tail end of this. Of course, I’ve thought that before. If you’ve wondered, “Where’s Cam?” the answer is, “Hacking up a lung.” So attractive.

Our second pumpkin, my favorite, is curing on the dining room table. It’s forty inches around, with a rough skin. I keep going up and petting it. When it comes time to carve it into a jack-o-lantern, I don’t think I’m going to be able to watch.

There are two more big pumpkins and a medium-sized one in various stages of ripeness, plus some little guys that probably won’t ripen at all. Shouting, “Ripen faster!” in Vendetta-like tones does not seem to actually get them to ripen any faster, unsurprisingly, but it’s satisfying anyway.

I’ve put in about half the fava beans. My conclusion: chitting is kind of tedious. And if you happen to get a bad cold when it’s time to plant out the seeds, well, sucks to be you: you’ve got to get those seeds in the ground before the root gets long enough to be fragile.

Next up: moving some plants around. I’ve been planting some silver-foliaged plants in the walkway alongside the house. I haven’t generally been a fan of silvery plants, but they help me see the path better in the dark, so I’m coming around. (Especially for carnations; I love the scent, and they remind me of our wedding.) The volunteer lambs-ear that’s been coming up in back will fill in some spots nicely.

Josh and I had a bunch of volunteer pumpkin plants this year, courtesy of last year’s jack-o-lanterns, and we just let them go to see what they’d do. Become huge and produce pumpkins, that’s what they do. If we don’t lose any to rot and squirrels, we’ll have about a half-dozen of our own squashes to carve for Halloween. Some are orange now; some are still green. I brought the first one in to cure today — maybe a little early, but it was in a dampish, cooler spot and I was a bit concerned about the rot potential there.

It’s very satisfying to watch these guys grow. Next year I’d like to tear up the front lawn and plant it with great big ornamental squash — maybe have some Galeux d’Eysines in the mix.

In other garden news, I’m chitting a whole lot of fava beans for green manure. Every year I mean to do this; finally this year I’m getting around to it. Gives me hope for the other umpteen things I mean to do every year.

Used to be that I knew fall was here on that One Day. People who’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for a while know about that day, I think. We have seasons here, but they’re a little bit subtle. One day, the clouds come scudding in just right, and you know that autumn has arrived.

But this year, I think, I’m coming to identify fall in a new way: bean-saving season. I’m saving seeds from the green beans (“Ura”, I think) and “Scarlet Emperor” scarlet runner beans to plant next year. I let the pods dry most of the way on the vine, then bring them inside to dry all the way on the kitchen table before popping them open. The green bean seeds aren’t much to look at: plain, smallish white beans. But the scarlet runners! When I was planting them, how did I miss how gorgeous they are? They’re big, shiny midnight-purple beans with lavender-pink splotches. It’s a pleasure to pop open the drab, crunchy pods and find these extravagantly beautiful beans inside. I’ve collected over a hundred grams of them so far, just from fifteen vines or so, and there are still plenty of pods left. It’s occurred to me to try to keep the house cool next summer by growing scarlet runners all over the outside walls. At this rate, I should have enough to do the whole house and maybe still have some to trade!

Plum season is just starting. I experimented today with drying plums in the solar cooker. I have a little black perforated pan that fits nicely in the top, but not so well that it doesn’t prop the lid open a little bit for ventilation. It’s close to a perfect set-up, and keeps the fruit at a good 180-200 degrees. The plums are concentrating their juices pretty well, but not fast enough to dry in a single day, and the cooker can’t hold much. If I really were to go to town, I’d make a large solar dryer and finish off the half-dried plums in the electric dehydrator. But I think this year I’ll be making a lot of plum jam. Maybe this will be the year I learn to can it.

Yesterday I put in some time digging out the new bed. I’d dumped some extra compost there when I’d bought several yards, so I carefully lifted up the good stuff and moved it to a prepared bed. Then I started excavating down through the native dirt; Josh wants it down about a foot before he puts the sides up. I got about six square feet dug out before calling it off for the day.

I am always amazed at how tremendously crummy the soil is, if I can even call it soil. It’s many different kinds of crummy at once: a mix of clay and sand, with almost no organic matter, packed down pretty hard and full of rocks. I’m too light to get through it with a shovel. I’ve been out there with a pick-axe, levering out rocks as big as both my fists put together and sifting out gallon after gallon of pebbles. (Fortunately, I have a use for those pebbles, so it’s like I’m going prospecting for rocks.)

Some of you know that I’ve been persuaded by the arguments of Peak Oil proponents. I won’t pretend to forecast the future, but it seems pretty likely to me that trouble is coming; my hunch is that the market economy will produce some small ameliorations, but not swift, complete solutions. If you have any thought of growing a vegetable garden against difficult times, and you have a place to do it, start it now. Do it before the fuel surcharges on delivered bulk compost go high, if for no other reason; if you’re in Puget Sound, you probably have crummy soil too that would do well with a good deal of compost just to get things started. Do it now because unless you are a buffed-out professional landscaper, it takes longer than seems reasonable to turn lawn into vegetables. Much longer. And there are a lot of mistakes to be made.

A few months ago, Josh and I watched an episode of “Gardening with Ciscoe” in which Ciscoe Morris plants potatoes in a big garbage can. He suggests that you put good potting soil on the bottom, mix in some organic rhodie fertilizer, and plant the potatoes way down in the bottom. As the vines come up, he said, you keep dumping in wood chips, or shredded leaves, or bark, or what-have-you. Supposedly the little potatoes will form all along the vines throughout the whole garbage can. We had a lot of shredded bark on hand, so we used that.

Well, with all due respect to Ciscoe, it didn’t work worth a darn for our Caribe potatoes. We got a potato or two on the vines in the bark, and a few more down in the potting soil. But the overwhelming majority were right where soil met bark. That’s not a lot of space, and we did not get a lot of potatoes. They’re still good, but it wasn’t exactly cost-effective.

Next year, we’ll try it with dirt like normal people. Live and learn.