Today I Turned the Irrigation Off...

… For the first time since April. Gosh, it felt good to do it. We are expecting rain. Hopefully it will do a lot of good for the fires that are still burning (without causing landslides in the burn scars), it will prevent further fires, and it will clear out this horrible smoky air we’ve been living under for two weeks.

An aside: I was extremely glad not to have small children during this smoky period. We all had to stay indoors - and everyone was out of school - and honestly I was a little crazy, so it’s good that my kids are in the self-sufficient age.

Today the air was merely ‘unhealthy’ rather than ‘very unhealthy,’ so I decided to prepare for the rain and spent the entire day outdoors. I may have overdone it, especially considering I have a cold. However I got so much done. First I turned off the irrigation system and said a little ‘hooray’ to myself. Then I made sure the rain barrels were clean and ready to be filled. I took all the floating row cover down too. It’ll be around 50 at night, so the plants will be fine, and everything will benefit from a nice soak. Above you can see the north garden, which has greens, shallots, garlic, and two beds of chard that I just replanted.

Above is the south garden, which has all kinds of kale, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, potatoes, peas, fava beans, carrots, leeks, and parsnips.

Then I spent the rest of my day clearing out the pollinator gardens. All the summer flowers had turned black with frost, so it was time to put them in the compost. This took a LONG time. Having a full and glorious flower garden means a lot of plants, and I got slower and slower removing them as the day went on. At least the compost pile is overflowing with biomass. And it was fun to uncover bulbs coming up (the narcissus are already blooming, it gets earlier and earlier each year), and surprises I didn’t know about, like a huge tomato vine that had sprouted underneath all the zinnias. It even had five large fruits on it.

After the beds were cleared and raked, I took all the spring seeds out of cold storage and sowed them with some compost; lupines, poppies, echinacea, flax, delphiniums, and phacelia. This rain will water them in and start the process for them to grow and bloom in spring. I need way more seeds though. I don’t have any clarkias, or tidy tips, and that just won’t do!

I’m sure you’re all looking forward to and planning for Thanksgiving. I hope you have a wonderful holiday filled with all kinds of family, good food, and good friends. On Friday, we are spending the day in Pt Reyes visiting a large cow farm and exploring their milk and cheese operation. We’ll be sure to take our boots as we’ll likely be touring in the rain (another cheer!). I’ll write on Saturday about what we experience and learn there. My first born turned 17 this week and he adores cheese, so this is his birthday celebration. :)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hard to Think

It’s hard to think about anything other than the fires right now, especially the one north of us in Butte County. The devastation and loss of life are horrific. And due to a strange weather pattern called ‘inversion,’ the smoke is just hanging in the atmosphere. Our local air has been in the ‘unhealthy’ or ‘very unhealthy’ range for a week now. I’ve read reports that it’s like smoking a half a pack a day. We all feel it - sore throats, weepy eyes, chest congestion, coughing, runny noses. All the local schools have been cancelled, and people walk around with masks on. I bought my first case of masks (N95) to have here at the house, since smoky conditions seem to be getting more common in California.

I work one day a week at my school as an intern. I’ve mostly been doing transplanting of all the cuttings that other students start in propagation classes. They need to be looked after, because they will be put out for our spring plant sale. Some have been quite interesting to work on, like sugar cane (a story for another time). I work with a young woman who is a fairly recent immigrant from China. Her work ethic astounds me - she has an art history degree from UC Berkeley, but she isn’t having any luck finding a job in that field, so she is working full time at the San Francisco airport, plus taking classes in Horticulture at Merritt, plus doing this internship. She even helps support her family and is still somehow cheerful and happy at work. I have to say, this so-called ‘laziness’ that people talk about with millennials? I just don’t see it. What I do see is young people working hard in a ‘gig’ economy, trying to make ends meet. Tom sees that same ethic in his students at City College. These young people do not have the same advantages we had and work harder than we did.

I digress. What I wanted to say was that this young woman I work with has lots of questions. It’s always very interesting to see what she’ll ask me next. Sometimes she asks me about American holidays and how we celebrate them (she’s cooking a turkey this year for Thanksgiving and is so excited!). We’ve talked about the ‘Green Revolution,’ and how to bring up children, and the difference in education in China and America. Yesterday we talked about the fire a lot, as the greenhouse in which we were working was filled with smoke and it was hard to breathe and concentrate (school was finally cancelled in the middle of my class today). And she asked me, what causes these huge fires? Is it really just because the forest hasn’t been thinned out enough? In other words, is Trump right and it’s all about managing forests?

Mid-day. Usually there is a large mountain right there ahead of me.

What a great question, and you know what I admire? Someone who isn’t afraid to ask questions. I love that. I wish we were all better about being curious and willing to be taught. None of us knows everything. I do believe that if our government (both sides) was more willing to ask questions, we might actually get somewhere. I am so guilty of this too. Someone in my family expressed a view I didn’t agree with right before the election, and instead of asking why they felt that way, I just shut down the conversation. I regret that. It’s just my own fear getting in the way.

Ok, that was another digression, sorry. My co-worker’s question opened up a really interesting conversation which made us explore all the reasons that these fires become as destructive as they do. And I thought I’d share it with you, because there is a lot of false information out there. We probably didn’t think of everything, so if you have something to add, please share it in the comments.

Perhaps the most important issue is where people are choosing to live. More and more folks are moving to the Urban Wildland Interface, which is a zone of transition between unoccupied land and human development. The US Forest Service defines it as a place where “humans and their development meet or intermix with wildland fuel.” Right off the bat, you can see where this could be a huge problem. These areas are basically wild, and as such, have their growth controlled by fire. Fire is a natural thing for these forests, and it is what has kept them in check for millions of years. With people now living in these areas, fire is not allowed to come through as it normally would, and that causes brush and dead material to build up. These communities are often built with one road going in and out, to minimize disturbance from more people. Living in the woods sounds like an excellent proposition, but when you realize that it’s all combustible fuel combined with choked transport roads, it’s a disaster.

The next consideration is climate change. Due to just a slight elevation in daytime (and nighttime) temperatures, plants behave differently. You may remember from your high school biology that plants transpire - that is, lose water from their leaves. Water is pulled up from the soil, in to the roots of the plant, and then throughout the plant, and then out through the stoma (small openings on the underside of leaves) and into the air. Transpiration is what drives the water cycle through the entire plant. More heat = more transpiration. All this vegetation is extremely dry to begin with, this time of year, and the rise in temperature is making it even drier.

Also due to climate change, our rainy ‘season’ is compressing. Where we used to get rain from November to April, now we get rain in January and February (or at least most of it). That means the soil is saturated from this quick deluge, and a lot of water runs off rather than soaking in and making a difference later in the year, when the plant really needs it (those higher temperatures again).

Another factor is wind. When the mountains to the east of us (the Sierra Nevada) begin to cool down in the fall, they are cooling faster than our coast, and that acts as a sort of vacuum and causes air from east of the ranges to blow very hot and fast towards our coast. These are called the Diablo winds in Northern California, and the Santa Ana winds in Southern California. Wind was certainly a part of this fire event, with gusts up to 70 miles an hour on our peaks for days on end.

Something that is very strange about this event is that it happened this late in the year. We’ve still had hot days, yes, but our nights have gotten very cool, in many cases down in to the 30’s. This usually suppresses fire. But our plants and trees are SO dry after a very hot summer, and our rain is so late, and the wind was so gusty, that the cool temperatures aren’t making a difference this time. It’s particularly hard on the thousands and thousands of folks that have lost their homes, because they are sleeping in tents and cars. It is also strange to be cold and smoky here in the Bay Area. We are used to being hot and smoky. So, as I heard a climate scientist say on the news this morning, there is no ‘normal.’ You can’t even call it the ‘new’ normal because it could all change in an instant.

Forest management is certainly an issue, though as we have seen, it is not the only issue. According to the US Forest Service: “Federal lands comprise the vast majority of the 5.9 million acres of reserved forest lands” in California (link HERE). So that leads one to believe that much of the mismanagement of forests is actually not due to our state laws or restrictions, but to federal authorities. Not pointing fingers. There has been quite a bit of environmental messiness in our state, and so it’s confusing to figure out who to blame. Let’s just say there is plenty of blame to go around, and it may not be useful to look at it that way; rather, it would be helpful to start now and look ahead to what may come, and how best to prepare for that.

Dusk

Tom and I talk a lot about our retirement and where we want to live. Both the likelihood of big fire events and predicted sea level rise have us re-thinking locations, not to mention that the South is getting ever-hotter and the West is getting ever-drier. That means a house on the coast is out, as is a house in the deep woods. And meanwhile, our current little house here in Walnut Creek needs to be as prepared as possible.

For information on how to help the fire victims, please go to THIS page.

Always Dusk

This morning we saw the sun for the first time in days. There has been so much smoke in the air that the sun is usually obscured, like a permanent dusk. The smoke we are experiencing is coming from the Camp Fire up in Butte County, which is about 150 miles northeast of here. Of course it is burning in Southern California too, so basically the entire state is under smoke cover. The reason we had a little sun and clearer skies this morning was because the wind picked up. Which yes, blows the smoke out, but also strikes fear because wind + fire = catastrophe. So we’re never really sure which we’d rather have, wind or smoke. What we really need is rain, but we haven’t had significant moisture since April. And as I’ve said before, it doesn’t help matters that the president continues to express opinions (not facts) about the fires in California. There are myriad reasons for the problems with fire here, and there is no simple solution.

Meanwhile, we try hard not to look at the news all the time, try to stay positive, and pray with all our hearts for those affected. Our beloved Camp Okizu is in the path of the Camp Fire at the moment, and the town it resides in, Berry Creek, has been evacuated.

As for our own preparedness (we live under a mountain that has been under a red flag warning for days now), I’ve made sure our Emergency Binder and supplies are up to date, and that’s about all we can do.

It’s finally lettuce season, and we could have a salad every day if we wanted to. There’s nothing better than going out to pick greens for a scramble with our chicken eggs and a little bacon, or for a lunch chicken Caesar. I’ve given up on one bed of beets and kohlrabi - after replanting three times, and having it all eaten three times, I sowed in a cereal rye cover crop. At least I can improve the soil in that location if nothing else. Everything, everywhere else, looks great.

I rescued the butterfly you see above. Or at least I think I did. I found this Gulf Fritillary in the same bed I was seeding to rye, on the soil, barely moving. I think she must have overnighted in there and got too cold (it’s been in the 30’s at night). I carefully moved her to a warm spot on the fence; she graciously allowed me to photograph her as she fanned her wings, and then she flew off. Hooray. The frost is getting to a lot of things - many of our zinnias bit the dust last night, and the tithonia is looking peaked.

My urban-farmer-friend Nils grew popcorn this year and generously gave us a couple of ears. We let it cure for a month and a half, and then shucked it last night and popped it on the stove. It was the best popcorn we ever had.

Popping corn on the stove is something I did not do a lot of when I was young, but Tom did, so he handled that part of things. I do remember popping corn on top of our wood stove back in Maryland. It does taste so much better than air popped.

I saved a few kernels even though I think this is an F1 hybrid and the next generation may not come true. I may order an heirloom variety and try to find a place for a few stalks next year. The problem with corn is that you need to plant a certain amount of it in a cluster, for best pollination. So finding room for it is questionable. Anyone have a spare veg bed I could rent out for the summer?

This is Not What I Wanted to Write About Today

Or rather, I was going to write about this, but it was going to be a little blurb at the end, not the main subject of my post. Above is my new fun tool, a leaf vacuum mulcher. Yep, you read that right - it vacuums up the leaves rather than just blowing them around! Then it shreds them into tiny little pieces and spits them out into the collection bag. Those shredded leaves can then be added into your compost! I got it for $65 on Amazon, but the price has now raised $20 for some reason. It’s still worth it. Plusses, besides collecting and shredding your leaves: It’s electric, it’s not too heavy, and it’s simple to put together and use. Minuses: it’s LOUD, and it can’t handle any branches larger than a pencil size, so using this over wood chips is probably not a good idea. Since I only collect the leaves on my driveway and sidewalk, that’s not a problem. And apparently it doesn’t do so well with wet leaves (very rarely a problem here in dry dry dry CA). But I think this thing is going to save my aching hands, and on top of that provide a whole lot of goodness for the compost pile and the chicken run.

But as exciting as this new tool is, this wasn’t going to be my blog subject. Rather, I was planning to write about the field trip I took today with my Nursery Mgmt class. We went to visit Dark Heart Nursery, which grows and sells cannabis clones to the cannabis-growing industry.

Here’s the thing: I’ve learned a LOT in my classes, but most I’ve already sort-of learned, or read somewhere, or knew the overview even if I didn’t know the details, or had already practiced doing in my own garden. Cannabis is the complete opposite for me. Other than smoking a joint once in a while in my 20’s, I have zero knowledge of it - how to grow it, or how it is grown in big nurseries, or the business side of these things, not to mention the legal ramifications. So I went in to the field trip with complete ignorance and enjoyed learning about the whole process tremendously.

Dark Heart has an indoor nursery and a tissue culture lab, and it was a truly fascinating place. I’d love to tell you all about it. However, we had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, so I am not able to say anything else about the place specifically. Dark Heart is one of only a few of the legal, permitted clone providers in California (where cannabis use and growing is legal, but highly regulated), and I learned so much about the business behind it.

Tissue culture is not a new practice; many highly sought-after plants are developed in a lab instead of grown from seed. If you remove the meristematic tissue of any growing plant, it can be grown into a clone (remember back to your high school biology: the meristem is either the shoot tip or the root tip, rapidly dividing cells that develop into the plant. They are like the stem cells in our bodies). It’s a way to replicate the plant while keeping it free of disease, which is a huge concern.

Cloners/growers like Dark Heart are then selling their starts to large growing establishments who then grow the plant up to produce flowers, which they then sell (along with distillations of flower and edibles made with the flower) to dispensaries, who then sell it on to the customer. Here in CA we are also allowed to grow six plants per person (or is it household?), so dispensaries also can sell plant starts.

Just as I’ve learned that your local nursery sells plants that they get from other larger nurseries, who buy their cuttings from even larger nurseries, there are many more pieces to the chain than I ever knew. And if you add labs and tissue culture to that equation, then there is yet another link in the chain. So if you are buying a 4” plant for $4, you have to think that the nursery bought it for $2, and those nurseries had to buy a bunch of cuttings, or seed, and then grow those plants out; or in the case of cannabis, they’ve been grown in a lab. By the way, the lab workers all have graduate degrees, and that seems to be required, mostly in molecular biology. The myth of ‘a bunch of stoners in ripped shirts growing weed for fun’ died for me today after I heard some of the credentials of the employees. It’s a serious, serious business.

That’s about all I can say without violating the NDA. The science-y stuff was really interesting but also seemed like a very boring job, unless you like working in a lab. The nursery was a bit better, but still seemed very repetitive. I guess sometimes desk jobs can seem pretty repetitive too. Mostly what I left feeling was that this was a respectable way to earn a living. I mean, all this stuff happens in grapes and the wine industry too, and those folks are looked to as artists. There doesn’t seem to be much of a difference between that and cannabis, except that cannabis has been only recently legitimized.

In other news, we’ve had some interesting bird encounters lately in the garden. It seems that Northern Flickers have moved into our neighborhood and are delighting us with their hawk-like cries. Something that is not delighting me is the newfound knowledge that sparrows, namely song sparrows, like to eat my greens. Yes, I have caught them in the act, several times now. I always wondered why the leaves of my greens looked like they had been torn in half. Oh, well, there is plenty for all of us.

From That, to This

Our composting systems are far from perfect, but they do yield some nice rich dirt a couple of times a year. I have three dedicated compost areas.

One is a plastic worm tower with the different levels, and I collect from that every three months or so.

The second is a 3x3 redwood bin that my dad made for me, and to which I add worms every other year. This is where all the non-chickeny kitchen scraps go (non-chickeny just means the things that chickens won’t or shouldn’t eat, like garlic peels, coffee filters, paper towels, whole eggshells, etc). I collect a bucket or two from the bottom of this bin every six months or so.

The third pile is in the chicken run, and this is where all the yard scraps go - leaves, old plants, stems, etc. I also add soiled chicken bedding here. It gets knocked down by the chickens every couple of days and strewn about and scratched in and pooped in, and then I hill it up again. Repeat, repeat, and repeat. The chickens turn the compost pile for me, in other words.

To reach the good, composted stuff here, I have to move all the loose, fresh stuff off the top with a garden fork. Then I can dig down deep and find the gold. I sift out all the big pieces - bark, sticks, and the occasional rock, with a screen Tom made to fit on top of our wheelbarrow. More often then not, I end up balancing it on a garden trug because the trugs are easy to maneuver in and out of the chicken run.

It’s a little herky, but I make it work. In the summer, decomposition moves very slowly despite the heat of the pile, because it’s very dry. But still - down deep under the pile - things are cooking. The microbes never stop working for you. They are eating and pooping constantly, aren’t they terrific!

And so, I start with this….

… and I end up with this. Enough to fill an entire 3x8 bed.

This bed won’t be used until March, when my asparagus crowns arrive. At that point, I’ll dig out some trenches in which to put the crowns, and fill it back up again, and likely will add another layer of compost at that time. Meanwhile, I watered it well and covered the entire surface with coffee chaff, to protect it from erosion, compaction, and the sun.

I may not be making perfect compost, but as one of my lecturers (Dr. Stephen Andrews, UC Berkeley Soil Science professor) once said to me, “the best compost is the one you make at home!” Already inoculated with all our good local microbes, and made with our own plant and food residues, which means no waste.

If you’re not already composting, I encourage you to find a neglected corner of your yard, and start a pile today. Even if you don’t grow food, the finished product will work wonders on your ornamental garden plants. You won’t need any fertilizer, and you’ll be taking food waste out of the municipal landfills. There is no ‘perfect’ system - whatever you make will work great!