I'm no wizard, but I can hear the stones when they call!

There are different kinds of hearing, I've decided and the the calls I hear from stones are of the visual kind. After it rains, or after I've run the sprinkler for awhile, the stones that have been exposed by my artificial rain 'call-out' to me, asking to be picked. Fortunately for me, in contrast to previous ground I have worked, stones are relatively few in number. My flat, level patch consists of thick layer of fluvial silt overtop of sand.
I've been working at this ground for the past four growing seasons, since returning here from a large city in South Western British Columbia in 2018.
I've had a mixed bag of failures and successes. I seem to be finding ways to 'fail-differently' each year.
Now, I believe my efforts are taking on an additional charge of urgency. The zeitgeist, or 'spirit of these times', is fearful, reactive, and chaotic; my aim is to keep myself out of the fray as best I can.
Our move to this place in 2018 and my retirement from 'politics' has proven to be a prescient move.

I'm not sure how active this website is, but I certainly appreciate its existence. My aim will be to do a lot of reading and 'information mining', perhaps starting with "Winter sowing trick to extend the season for higher latitude gardening." I'm at 49 degrees North latitude, hard against the Canada/U.S. border (Washington State).

I hope all is well with all who read this, and I'm happy to provide an opinion, answer questions, or offer advice when I'm asked.

Cheers,

Paulie57

Hi Paulie57.

We don't always talk but when we don't, our archives are crammed with information.
You'll find loads of information here to repay your time spent reading.

Hi Paulie57,
I know about the "fail-differently" each year. I and my garden buddy experience it each year in our garden. This year it was broccoli and cabbage. Not a good year for them, but a great year for other things, so canning is progressing at speed. Good luck with your winter sowing, we are still working on that one.

mountainmoma's picture

I feel that too, unfortunately it can hobble me and slow me done, very counter productive

It can surely be very discouraging and I have found that switching tracks for a bit can sometime tame my discouragement. I have come to believe that it may be through no fault of my own that some things fail. There is also the weather and bugs and diseases to take into account and sometimes there is just nothing you can do and a particular crop fails. As for our cabbage and broccoli failure, I think it was because it became very hot very early here and stayed hot. They don't like that. We are trying some fall plantings of these crops to see what we can get. Good luck with your efforts.

In general, I've found mid-summer plantings of the brassicas to be more successful than the early Spring plantings. There's less stress on growing plants because there's less heat and fewer bugs. However, that doesn't mean we should give up on the early plantings, entirely, does it?

They are about 6 inches high right now, we might get something before the cold closes in. We have never tried fall planting of brassicas, so we will just have to wait and see.

Hm. . . I'm wondering if a good antidote to the counter-productive sense of urgency we sometimes feel might be found in the olde gardening adage, often found on or near sundials: "Make haste but slowly"? That's where I was yesterday. I took myself out to the local sawmill to load up on free fir end-cuts to take back to the garden to split, (primarily for exercise, but also to fuel my campfires). I was all about loading the truck during my first hour, unloading it during my second hour, and spending the rest of the day with my splitting maul doing the rest of the work. It didn't work out that way! I loaded up all right, then went home, got distracted by something indoors. It wasn't until after 5:00 p.m. that I roused myself, moved the truck the short-distance over to my garden, and unloaded it. By that time, it had started to rain, (thank the gods!), so the allure of splitting wood in T-shirt and shorts in the rain quickly disappeared! I yielded, and went back inside the house to shower. The end of 'work' for another day.

David Trammel's picture

One of the things I think marks Green Wizards as a little different from the run of the mill sustainability or prepper site, is that we opening admit that there is a meta-physical side to the Universe and encourage the discussion of it. After all the founding document of Green Wizards was written by an Arch Druid, lol. Few people love trees like a druid. Civil discussion of the metaphysical and religious, I think that is something missing in the World today. Christian, Muslim, Jew, Pagan, even Atheist should feel welcome and encouraged to discuss how religion fits into the World of the Long Descent here.

That said, there is a lot more to getting ready for the Collapse than religion. We've been slow here for a variety of reasons, many of them my fault but I'm hoping that in the coming year or two I can change that and get us a lot more activity. Now that I'm retired I should have lots of time to get things rolling. We are certainly seeing more new members, like you Paulie joining. Whether that's the pandemic or the realization that something seriously wrong with the way things are, or both is something I think about.

A decade and a half ago, when I first read Greer and the Arch Druid Report, I had the feeling the Collapse would have happened by 2021. Now in 2021, I wonder whether I'll see it by 2051. Then I look around and see situations that tell me the Collapse is already here, just not recognized by the vast majority of people living in it.

Interesting times indeed.

David Trammel, Like you, I've been interested in and have read many of the online web platforms devoted to discussions about "Peak Oil" that started to gain traction in the early 2000's, John Michael Greer's excellent The Archdruid Report website being one of them.
One of the frustrations of these years, for me, has been not seeing the crisis, understood as 'Collapse' arrive on schedule, but now I just laugh about it; I realize that collapse, if and when it comes, doesn't always arrive at 09:12 precisely, like a train pulling in to the station. Now, because I've been alive for a long time, while it's easy to discern a generalized deterioration in our society generally, ggoing back as far as the years just before the first and second North American oil crises -- about 1974 -- (the year I graduated from high school), I realize it's probably much harder for the kids born since then to share my longer-perspective.
I think Tim Morgan's depiction of the current Western situation as one where the evidence doesn't support an argument for an immediate, total collapse. Instead, he suggests that 'pockets of collapse' will show themselves, and will mainly arise in economic sectors that rely heavily on discretionary spending, that is sectors that sell goods and services that people don't actually need: things like restaurant meals, air-travel, tourism, etc.
I have no problem acknowledging the metaphysical thread running through this green-wizards website. When I'm in my garden, sitting beneath the shade cast by the two fir trees I planted over 30 years' ago, watching the honeybees visiting the flowering corn stalks, the yellow-jackets falling into the beer-trap I've so cunningly set up, noticing the hummingbirds visiting the flowers of my climbing beans, seeing the brood of quail hiding in among the corn plants, and seeing a couple of cats doing their cats stuff, I realize that there's magic going on all the time; I'm not the magician, necessarily, but at least I'm close to where the magic is happening. TAnd that's probably enough.

I've never heard stones, but there were a couple of weird incidents with last year's tomato starts... the human mind is a very odd thing.

Welcome to greenwizards, and I'm delighted to find another fairly local to me person on here.

This year my sole surviving winter squash plant set a grand total of one fruit that was undersized and didn't fully ripen. But my cucumber a few feet away was doing really well, and I'm still picking the last cucumbers off it. Still can't figure that one out.