Quiet dogs
I put up vinyl film on my main window and the front door pane yesterday and I am SHOCKED by how well it keeps my reactive dogs from barking at passers by. I was home most of yesterday and we would normally have several alerts. We had none. I resisted because I like natural light. It is a shade darker in here. But the alerts are stressful for my dogs and sometimes freak me out with their suddenness. This is infinitely better and a primary step to calmer dogs. Fritz is calmer in the morning on meds and wilder at 4pm. Until 6 weeks passes, I won’t have a good idea of how well it’s working or whether it’s making him hyper. The behaviorist also suggested a pheremone plug-in. This seems to be peak woo-woo science to me, but somehow they have isolated a mother dog’s pheromone profile that can evaporate from a solvent base while plugged in like an air freshener. If it works, I’ll take it. One reactive dog who was polite was easily managed. Two reactive dogs, one of whom is an impolite puppy, is a lot. That is a different magnitude of insanity in this home.
Taiga is currently pouting at me for reasons I cannot discern that I believe have to do with my inability to provide sufficient pets.
We’ve had a bunch of rain over the past week and spring is kicking into high gear. I planted persimmon slips and the dogs killed one in a game of chase. The other looks dead, but my friend who works on persimmons and other trees says that they like to sleep in and that it may not be dead. The Red Haven peach that I planted has not sprouted and I think it’s dead. But the other peach variety that I planted is still leafed out and alive. The native plum trees are just going gangbusters, and the persimmon from last year has now fully leafed out.
But most exciting is watching the chaos field sprout. Yesterday was super rainy so I took the dogs up there for a quick run in the morning and the afternoon. I pulled a ton of milkweed shoots out of the food patch (common milkweed is very abundant up there) and the bindweed is contained but still sending up shoots, so I pulled a ton of those out, too.
That mix is predominantly legumes, curcubits, greens, corn and sunflowers. Okra is in there, too, but it’s not been warm enough for it to sprout. This is a mix over here of mustard greens (which can decontaminate a patch of dirt high in lead if you grow them and then dispose of the mature plants like toxic waste), kale, and beans.
This is a mix of a snap pea, a squash plant, and a re-surfaced Trail of Tears bean. A lot of the larger seeds rose to the surface with all the water; whenever I see them, I push them back into the dirt. That’s a little extra, but why not?
Last year, I planted potatoes over here. I didn’t succeed in harvesting every little seed, so there are also a couple volunteers sprouting up that I’ll leave and then harvest. These somehow do pretty well, maybe because they don’t get cut up and have a full potato as seed, or maybe because they took to the space already and have adjusted to it.
I also love catching a bean mid-sprout.
But I am most excited about the rainbow popcorn, which is sprouting up all over.
I think that there are 8-10 of these plants, and I also saw some seeds that had risen to the surface, like that sneaky snap pea you can see left of the corn shoot.
The beds that I planted with row crops that are too delicate to go into a chaotic spread like this are beset with weeds, and something is eating my beet and chard shoots. We have our seedling sale next weekend, and I’ll be up there for four hours without dogs. I plan to work on the water catchment and weed in between sales, which I’m honestly curious about. Not sure that we have the best stock or that we’ll get many buyers, but the minimal money we make on this sale offsets costs for our summer internship program.
I’d really like to read a book written by a scientist about food security. I had a couple that took my builder’s theory courses who run a homestead. They have chickens and sell eggs and grow a garden and all of the things that instagram feeds a certain algorithm, but they are telling me that their equipment is all from the 1940s, that they barely can take care of costs and their jobs are epidemiologist and software engineer. These are not blue collar people. Corn and soybeans might pay off in sales, but not vegetables. Not dairy, which basically sells for the same now as it did 40 years ago with an exponential increase in costs of production. Community gardens don’t grow at scale, but I do wonder what more of the same, politically, will do to food.
I’ve read books about topsoil degeneration, and seed saving, and feminist ecocriticism, and autobiographical accounts of seed saving, and instructional books about - for lack of a better word - homesteading, like four-season gardening and how to map out enough space for livestock and a kitchen garden to feed a family. Sepp Holzer’s books about his version of permaculture and Paul Bogard’s books about night and topsoil are very enriching. But I’d prefer not to leave the gaming out of our food system’s future to MAHA homesteaders and speculative fiction, like The Hunger Games. Obviously no one writes the book you want to read until you write it, but I’m not a botanist or a supply chain agricultural expert, so I actually can’t pull a Jordan Peele and write my version of Get Out.