Yet another long-awaited update

Oh my goodness, where to start? So many new things to write about, although one thing remains the same: six months later and Chris is still in Vancouver, though we’re starting to see a hint of a glimmer of the light at the end of that tunnel. That “approve” we got back in January was a big step, but we didn’t really know at the time that we still had a long way to go. Now the last batch of documents has been sent in, and we’re waiting for them to be approved (by a different agency than the previous one) so that an interview date can be set…  but then the interview could be anywhere from a month to three months away, so we hear. Oh, and Chris is going to have to go back to Montreal for the interview, because apparently that’s the only place in all of Canada where they process this particular kind of immigration request. Once the interview is done, however, he should be able to cross the border! So that’s the gist of things for the moment. I’ll let Chris write more about what he’s been doing, if he feels up to it!

As for me, I suppose the biggest news is that I’ve moved to this magical fairyland that has been alluded to in previous posts. Some folks call this place a nature preserve. Some call it Shambhalla. I have yet to discover my special name for this place, but it’s starting to become home. This 270-acre paradise is, in technical terms, a land trust managed by an environmental organization. They acquired the land a few years ago, mainly because it is one of the few areas with a relatively healthy population of the Kincaid’s lupine, which is relied upon for survival by the Fender’s blue butterfly. Both lupine and butterfly are considered endangered, and both only occur in the Pacific Northwest, and at that, mostly in the Willamette Valley. There are a few patches of this symbiotic flower/pollinator pair around, and now this one, at least, is protected, with plans for habitat expansion.

Aside from this, the land is quite varied, although typical of the Willamette Valley: oak savannah, dense douglas-fir forest and younger douglas-fir plantation, broad-leaf maple, some ponderosa pine, open prairie filled with grasses whose identity I do not yet know, a creek lined with water birch and willow, and of course invasives such as Himalayan blackberry and scotch broom. Among the more mobile, the four-legged, that is, we find numerous mule deer, a herd of elk, coyote, fox and bobcat, and their lunch, rabbit, at least one each of black bear and cougar (I have not yet seen very many of these with my own eyes yet, though I see their tracks and scat often). As for the winged, some nights I hear great-horned owls calling back and forth to each other. There are the usual suspects: jays (scrub and Stellar’s), crows, ravens, robins, juncos and chickadees, sparrows and kinglets, sap-suckers, towhees, kestrels, red-tail hawks. And the occasional unusual suspect, such as the Townsend’s solitaire I saw a couple weeks ago. Beautiful little thrush, likely just passing through.

So, how did I get here? Well, on this land is a house. A house and a barn. And some surrounding gardenable land, totaling a couple of acres. This is considered the “homestead area,” and on it live people who caretake the land in exchange for a place to live, and now I am one of those people. The other folks here are A and W, and their on-the-verge-of-crawling baby, C. I met them last fall through mutual friends, and when they told me that they were looking for more people to come live on the preserve, I almost jumped for joy. It’s pretty much everything Chris and I have been looking for: a place to live close to the wild, to do the kinds of work we love, and to live in community with others. And it’s in the part of the world that I have always called home. The only thing that’s missing now is Chris!

I’ve continued to be able to go up to Vancouver once a month, for five or six days at a time. Last time I was there we spent a lot of time planning gardens (there is ample gardening space on the homestead area, and much of it A and W have already been gardening in the two years they’ve been here, but there’s more useable land, and there will be more people to feed this year, so expanding the gardens is a priority.) Those of you who read our blog during last year’s growing season may remember how we tend to plant lots of different things that we have never heard of before. Well, we’re trying to scale that back a bit this year (a tough task for Chris, who has already had me get the likes of cinnamon vine and Queen Fabiola something-or-other). What we’re getting more into now, though, is native plants, and I’ve already got quite a collection of fruit-bearing native trees and bushes, such as serviceberry and high bush cranberry, and the fruit-bearing-but-not-palatable-to-humans such as twinberry and Indian plum. I’m sure there will be a lot more to write on this topic once these wonders start going into the ground.

Another exciting project just beginning to take shape is a kids’ outdoor summer camp that I’m helping organize and at which I will be one of the facilitators; Chris will likely become a part of this once he’s down here as well. It’s still in the early planning stages, but it will be a whole mix of science, gardening, awareness and experiential exploration, art and more… We’ll have some more solid information soon, so let me know if you have (or know of) kids ages 6-13 looking for something fun and amazing to do for a couple weeks in July or August! It will be held on some amazing land right at the edge of McMinnville.

So that’s it for now. It’s been hard to keep up with the blogging thing, and I know we always say that we’ll do better next time. Who knows. We’ll be sure to tell you once things start to pick up in terms of immigration though! And, you know, once Chris is here and we’ve got the garden going, I’m sure there will be lots more posts about that!

Oh, and if you are so inclined, we would really appreciate your energy/prayers/rationally-based thought processes for a speedy approval and interview! Hope you are all doing well, and no matter how strange you may be, don’t be a stranger!

An update, with good news in it!

Rosemary here, to tell you the good news that USCIS has approved our application for Chris to get permanent residency! We didn't have any real doubts that it would happen, but the wait has been long and torturous at times, not having any way to know where they were in the process, if they'd even started looking at our application yet, or how much longer it would take. So now we're waiting for instructions on what to do next, because this doesn't mean that he can cross the border quite yet, just that the longest part is over. Still have more documents to turn in, and the application now goes to the National Visa Center for yet further processing... not sure exactly how long that will take but from what we hear it shouldn't be too long. So we're very happy at least that things are moving along, and hopefully my next trip up to visit Chris will end in me bringing him home with me finally!

Aside from this, I have long been planning on writing a blog post with an update on things in general, but had been procrastinating as I always do (the reason why most of the posts are written by Chris). But this good news has given me motivation to write!

Just over a week ago I returned from another wonderful trip up to BC. I've been able to make it up to visit Chris for a few days every month, which would make this my fourth trip. Each time I've gone up, we've managed to get in a bit of camping, and this last trip took us out to Vancouver Island, where we camped along a logging road a few miles inland from the western coast, a bit south of Tofino. We spent both the last day of 2010 (which was Chris's birthday) and the first day of 2011 on a beautiful beach, catching some much-needed sun through our many layers of clothing, for it was also very cold!

You can see more pictures from our recent adventures in the new album to the left: Adventures in BC!

Aside from spending time up north with Chris when I can, I've been busy back in my hometown in Oregon, busy making connections and getting started on my new journey of midwifery. I've connected with an amazing living opportunity for us once Chris gets down here... but I will refrain from writing more details about it until it actually happens, for, as I have recently experienced, things don't always go as you plan and sometimes a last-minute wrench can change your direction entirely. But hopefully this one will work out!

It has been nice being back in my home region, which I have missed ever since I left it in 2003. I like that it rained on Christmas, and that the temperature these days is hovering around freezing and a few degrees above: it's cold, but not the bone-chilling, eyelash frosting, icy windy frigidness of Montreal at this time of year. And it's getting close to pea-planting time already! And bulbs are already poking their new shoots out of the ground. Oh, and I saw a furry white pussy willow last week! Though I'm thinking that pussy willow might be a bit confused, since we have had a very mild winter so far. I remember pussy willows normally being more of a February finding.

I hope that the new calendar year of 2011 is treating you all well so far! And I hope that I get around to writing more often here! Certainly once our new plans are in motion, we will share them with you...

News from Chris

Hello all, this is Chris, certified stranded alien, reporting from BC. I have been well, biding my time while the US immigration services process my documents. I have been living in North Vancouver, in the guest room of a friend of a friend's who graciously offered me to stay in exchange for some work on the house and the garden. I'm working on week-ends as a handy man to put some money away.

I've also been spending time learning about the local ecosystem, figuring out plant names, what plants were and are eating by local First Nations, the habits of animals and birds. I tasted licorice fern (wow!), encountered a mink in a canyon, and Rosemary and I came upon a bear scat full of mushroom remnants near Rice Lake, a short distance from the urban area. A pack of coyotes lives in the area, and I am determined to find out something about them too. I see bald eagles almost every day on their way to and from the port.

The crows are like a living clock, leaving their roost just after dawn and heading to it an hour before dusk. They come from all over the Vancouver area to roost together. Rosemary and I tried to follow them by car, but we didn't find their final destination, which is probably in the Burnaby area, just East of Vancouver.

Last week-end I went for a hike organized by the Ancient Forest Alliance to a group of old growth trees that escaped the felling during the early 20th c., called the "Temple of Time Grove of Giants" (!!), within walking distance of North Van. The size of these Douglas-Firs and Redcedars was pretty amazing (I think the tallest Douglas-Fir was 96 metres). My wonder was a little overshadowed by sadness though, because we had to walk for hours, go off the trail and up a steep hill, not get lost, to get to this "grove" of only a handful of uncut trees. Such lengths we must go to if we want to see what used to be everywhere!

Oh yeah, I've also started to work on publishing my thesis, which I left behind when I got my MSc a year and a half ago. Not that I really have a great interest in ground beetles, or want to pursue a career in academia at this point, but since I did all this research I don't want to let it rot in a drawer somewhere!

That's all for now. I'll make sure to post about anything exciting!

We have landed

We arrived a couple of days ago in the Vancouver area after driving across Canada from Montreal. Chris has a nice place to stay in Vancouver, and has made contacts with some friendly folks who have offered to show him around. He is studying his options for how to spend the next little while. Gratefulness for webs of interconnection weaving links with friends of friends across the continent!

Rosemary is back in Oregon with her family, with many projects (including petitioning for Chris' papers).

More on our adventures soon.

Starting a Garden from Scratch

This year, like last year, we started a new garden where there had previously been grass. We have therefore had opportunities to try out various strategies. Here’s the outcome of these experiments.

Garden bed preparation

Last year, we tried turning over the sod so that the grass would die and the roots would be exposed and dry up. This doesn’t work: grass is feisty, and just grows up around the edges of the sod, even if the part beneath dies. The implications for fertility and soil life also seem mediocre with this process.

Both times, we tried removing the grass and shaking the earth off the roots. This also leaves a lot of roots and also weed seeds which have been lying dormant, and therefore it takes no time at all for a little jungle to spring up from the earth.

We tried sheet mulching, and this is probably the most successful method. The trouble is it takes a lot of compost and mulch to cover a large area, so this year we: a) removed the grass and superficial topsoil and composted it, b) removed the rest of the topsoil, c) loosened the subsoil, d) laid down the cardboard and replaced the topsoil on top of it, followed by dry mulch (bracken or hemp). This was a long and difficult process which we could have avoided if we had had masses of compost and just done the sheet mulching straight on top of the grass. The ground was very compacted (it had been a horse pasture), which was another reason we wanted to loosen the soil before sheet mulching.

The results were very good; we found that the soil stayed moist for a long time under the cardboard, and we had little trouble with weeds. I think the cardboard took care of any remaining grass roots, while the mulch on top took care of the seeds left in the soil. Sheet mulching was perfect for the nightshades and perennial cabbages. In the future, I think we'll try making it thicker, with more carbon mulch, mixed if necessary with blood meal or some other high nitrogen material, for additional on-site compost production and increased benefits from the sheet-mulching.

For beds in which we wanted to plant seeds (greens, beets, carrots, flowers), we decided not to sheet mulch as this didn’t seem compatible with starting seeds. The greens we planted early did alright because they grew fast and out-competed weeds anyway. Our kale and beet patch was very weedy, though the weeds were mostly very small. Presumably over the years there will be less weeds as the seeds that were present in the ground run out.

Start Small

We didn’t! We really wanted a big garden, something that would be challenging and full of food and lessons. The thing is, the bigger it is, the more dispersed your energy gets and the less effort you can spend on it per surface area. Therefore a larger garden will be less productive per unit of surface area. We definitely observed this as there were always, at any given time, parts that weren’t producing. This is the basic principle of square foot gardening. While in Montreal, I saw square foot gardening as a sort of punishment or affliction that city dwellers have to put up with due to space restrictions. Now I appreciate the underlying tenets: the smaller the garden, the easier it will be to take care of it, and the more productive it will be per unit of area.

The other thing is that we burned out a little after the mad rush to plant of the spring, and pulled back after that from the garden. I think that if we had started fewer plants of fewer varieties, we would have been less overwhelmed and more contented with our garden during the summer. We felt the pressure also to plant any successful seedlings as it was very hard to discard any, but in the end our garden was a bit too dense and unwieldy. So, when starting our own seedlings, we need to remember that some of them will need to be sacrificed for the others to grow optimally.

Also, a new garden usually takes a lot of raw materials: compost, mulch, sticks for trellises, maybe some garden furniture, stones or other landscaping stuff. Therefore starting small and really enhancing the fertility and beauty of the garden seems like a better course of action than spreading mulch too thin to be effective or running out of compost/manure half way through. After the first year, hopefully mulch plants will kick into action and the compost pile will be yielding, which will provide the resources for a successful expansion.

Plant Selection

I think that starting with lots of perennials and a few annuals would be a good balance. Perennials need time to get established, so I’d recommend putting them in first, so that in the second year there will already be a bunch of stuff growing and you can concentrate your energy on expanding on that. If you plant just annuals the first year, you will have to start all over again the next time. Annuals are not the best use of energy (or money), in the longer run.

On the other hand, it's good to make sure that some really reliable producers are included: I'm thinking about chard, beats, kale, herbs. Stuff that most likely you'll get more of than you want, unless you try very hard to mess things up. And also, I wish we'd used more earlier producers. We had very little before mid-July and the first tomatoes. Early producers like turnips, beats, greens, spinach, kohlrabi, while not the most exciting to eat (I think), are really nice to have around for their fast growth. They really help to extend the season both ways.

Planting patterns

We were a bit obsessed with companion planting this year. It must be said that in winter, when the garden is just a dream and we long to be outside with the sun warming our bones, thinking about plant combinations is like fantasizing! In the end though, companion planting is a nebulous pseudoscience which should be taken with a pinch of salt. It’s very hard to know what combinations are going to work (marginally) better than others, which you learn by observation rather than book/internet research anyway. So, no point sweating over that too much!

Rows

We’ve been resisting planting in rows, which we saw as an unnatural imposition of puritanical will upon the naturally flowing patterns of the plant world. The fact is, I think that some things benefit from being planted in rows, especially root vegetables (our broadcasted carrot seeds didn't come to any good, and we were mostly powerless to effectively care for them, spread all over the place as they were) and some alliums that need to be fairly weed free and thinned correctly. It’s virtually impossible to effectively weed young plants that aren’t in rows! Rows make is easier to identify young seedlings, and to thin them when the time comes, and then also to harvest them. Ease of harvesting was something we totally didn’t consider at the end of a rugged winter, when it was unimaginable that harvesting, that holy sacred grail, could ever be anything but pure bliss! It's really something that needs to be planned for in order to make the best use of the garden's gifts!

On the other hand, bigger plants that grow for the whole season, like tomatoes or peppers, don’t seem to need to be planted in lines as much (except maybe for ease of trellising, and, again, harvesting). Plant guilds, which are something we are just beginning to explore, also brings an end to the need for rows, but this is sort of beyond the scope of a veggie garden.

Conclusion

My biggest take home messages from this year are: we must make sure to manage our energy for our own pleasure and for the benefit of the garden (start small, don't waste energy on marginally beneficial plants, use perennials rather than annuals when possible), and relax about the theory: stuff like companion planting, soil fertility, etc., which you learn as you go along anyway, rather than sweating over volumes of gardening books that usually don't agree anyway. A creative balance of experimentation and sure shots will ensure learning and satisfaction will both flow from the garden.

Three Sisters Musings

So now I’m sitting in the back of the motor home, and we’ve just passed Ottawa. This is a good time to spend reading and writing blog posts! Reading through Toby Hemenway’s “Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture” (what an awesome book!), I came across a discussion of the Three Sisters. Since returning to Turtle Island (aka North America), I’ve also had conversations about this guild with other gardeners. One of our friends even has a tattoo of the Three Sisters on his calf! So here are some more thoughts that came out of all this. It seems to me that the main benefit of this guild over separate patches is to the corn, which, according to one Jane Mt. Pleasant of Cornell University, yields about 20% more (measured in calories) than corn grown alone. Plus you get some squash and some beans in the deal, but I think that if you want a serious amount of beans, you need a separate bean patch (which is easy enough to do).

I’ve been puzzled by the mound pattern of planting for the corn and beans that I have seen in several instructions. They describe mounds about 20 inches across and 12 inches high, or some variation of these dimensions. I never quite understood the point, except maybe so that the ground would heat up sooner in the spring. The method described in Gaia’s Garden seems to make more sense in this respect: corn is planted 3 or 4 kernels per hole, about 3 feet apart. No thinning is done as you want 2 or 3 stalks per hole, which explains the planting distance. It’s only when the corn sprouts that you mound it, which helps warm the ground and speed up the growth of the corn. Beyond this, bean and squash planting occurs in the same way, about two weeks after the corn has sprouted. The author recommends inoculating the beans to ensure the presence of nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

Another thing that could really help boost squash and bean production is adding some pollinator attractors, just like the Anasazi of the Southwest added the Rocky Mountain bee plant (Cleome serulata), thereby bringing in the experience and blessings of the insect nation. We noticed that our squashes were aborting from lack of pollination, and to be fair with the bees, who are undoubtedly doing their best as it is, the squash flowers were fairly few and far between at any given moment, and they were hidden beneath a dense canopy of leaves. In addition, pollination would require pollinators to visit a male flower first, and then a female flower, of the same squash species! So, some early blooming flowers would be a small compensation for the efforts of insect visitors.

In the future I’d try the method described in Gaia’s Garden. I think a lot of people get discouraged after trying the Three Sisters once, especially if they are used to another method that worked pretty well for them, but considering the variations in the planting instructions it is only to be expected that results will vary.

Our changing plans

So, we still have a few posts in the works to conclude about our garden this year, but first, something entirely different.

We have both flown back to North America, and our plan was to go from Montreal to Oregon, to live there (where Rosemary's family comes from). We talked to a US immigration officer who said that we could just go there and apply for me to adjust status then (it was a bit complicated applying from France).

Unfortunately, we were informed at the border that this was not true, and I was denied entry (this was a few hours ago). Since we don't have a home in Montreal anymore for me to stay at, we decided the best would be for us to drive through Canada instead of through the US, and to drop me off in BC, where I could wait for my papers. Rosemary has to go back to the US to petition for me, but if I'm in BC we would be able to see each other during this process that could take 1 to 6 months.

So we're happy to have a plan again. The thing is, we don't know anyone in BC, so we've been appealing to our friends to try and make some connections. Do you know of anyone in BC whom I could stay with for a bit? A farm that takes workers?