#Gains

People in the PNW love to complain about "February Fake-out", a week or two of spring weather that comes between cold spells. This year, our fake-out began in mid-Jan, and ran all the way through this week, when the temperature finally fell below 40º in earnest. It's not East Coast cold, but with 20+ mph winds, the Real Feel™ is about 10ºF. My cold-tolerance threshold has not yet broken, but it came close when I had to leave my frigid bedroom in the middle of the night to sleep closer to the wood stove. It's the coldest it's been or will likely be this winter. Despite this short-lived cold snap, you can't get very far in conversation without hearing concern about this winter's mild temperatures and what that will mean for plants, crops, and fire season. But all I care about is the extension of daylight in the here and now. The difference was imperceptible at first, but there's a good 90 extra minutes of light every day compared to the beginning of the year. The sun is working longer hours, which is helping me get to the gym before 7am and lift. Until the beginning of this year, The Orcas Island Fitness Center was just for showering and taking a sauna when time. Since January, I've been trekking in early Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and reacquainting myself with the squat rack. I miss Ironside Traning, where I built the strength to squat and deadlift well past my bodyweight, but the weight room has everything one needs, and the ritual of driving into town before sunrise, lifting, and listening to a little Cashew Curve is giving me life right now.

The end-of-day ritual is in transition. I think Sarge and I need to start taking walks when we clock out of work before the sun goes down and it's time to retire by the stove. From November-early February, I went on an extensive Keri Russell Appreciation Journey, watching 3 seasons of The Diplomat, and 6 seasons of The Americans. If you haven't watched The Americans, I urge you to do so. As a burgeoning marriage and family therapist, there's a lot of great material on relationships and loyalties, plus the production and costume design is an impeccable homage to the 1980's. But it's time for a hiatus from tv, except for the occasional DVD or half an episode of Rockford Files or Hunter, which for some reason are always on. And the theme song to Rockford Files is one of the best ever composed.

In the last two weeks, I've pruned 4 plum trees, the apricot trees (one of which has just started to blossom), and I've "finished" the cherries. I taught myself how to use a pole saw pruner, learning that the saw part is useless (at least with my current sawing technique) but the pruner part is genius. There was a minor fall off of a step ladder resulting in a bruised shin, and a downed apricot branch managed to knock the lens out of my eyeglasses, so I have added safety goggles to my ensemble, a 3-legged orchard ladder to my wish list, and a note-to-self to not prune on the property alone. Happily, there are new tenants in the cabin since the start of the month: Gillian (human), Ox (canine), and Phoebe (feline). While plans to make the cabin an artist residency still stand, I am repeatedly coming to terms with the fact that this property will need to go through several phases first. I think the "micro-farm and artist residency" is phase 3.0, and we're currently in 1.3. Having more sentient beings on the property full time is an important stage in the evolution, and we collectively feel we've lucked out, especially Sarge, who has never lived around cats before.

Speaking of sentient beings, I know you've been patiently waiting for an update on the ragwort, and I want to honor that. Since I arrived here, I have been a sentry and mercenary of the tansy ragwort, spending hours with my Grampa's Weeder, accelerating arthritis, tendinitis, and probably bursitis in my hands, arms, and shoulders to wrest these prolifically invasive plants from the ground they non-consensually colonized. I know more about tansy ragwort than I have ever wanted to know about something I dislike. I've known for months that, when pulling ragwort, you need to pull every last root tendril from the ground to ensure it doesn't continue to propagate, but in January I discovered that a completely-uprooted ragwort plant can reattach itself to the ground and reroot within a day or two. I've labeled my ragwort eradication efforts sisyphean more than once, but now it's an episode of Black Mirror. A couple weeks back, I saw the San Juan County Noxious Weed Control Board post some information on Facebook. I reached out directly, and received a visit from Jason, who was familiar with the property and, in fact, had already met Sarge while doing weed control (gorse) for my neighbor's property between the cattle gates.

You know how, when you have a really sore throat and you go to the doctor, you only want to hear "This is the worst case of tonsillitis I've ever seen, no wonder you're miserable!" to validate your pain and courageousness? Same for when the weed control guy shows up. He confirmed the severity of ragwort ("it's basically a carpet"), the futility of manual extraction at this point, and commended me on my efforts and newfound expertise. Then he reminded me that seeds can sprout up to 15 years after they scatter, so I may be doing generational repair for years to come, all depending on how effective our herbicide treatment goes next week. I'm not crazy about going the herbicide route, but if the choices are between letting this highly invasive, toxic, and downright smelly weed proliferate, sacrificing my time and body to manual removal, or working with the county and their FREE resources with an approved herbicide, the answer is now obvious. I'm glad I spent the last 9 months getting to know this asshole plant, and I will be glad to put an end to its reign of terror. Jason is also going to help me take out some of the gorse, which poses a fire hazard, and he's given me some tips on the blackberries and hawthorn.

Once the tansy gets sprayed, I plan to scatter a lot of clover and grass to fix the soil. Replacing the gorse, blackberries, and hawthorn with non-invasive species will be take longer and be more labor intensive and expensive. Is ridding this property of all invasive plants feasible? Should that even be the goal? I have time to answer that. Over the last few moths I've been scheming up a crazy idea about building dead hedges as a way of repurposing the dead material and maybe even doing a little bit of groundwater control in the process. There's a strong chance that tansy ragwort content will soon be replaced by dead hedge-building content, so prepare yourself.

In other news, to keep cars from getting stuck for the rest of winter and spring, I had some gravel trucked in. Of course, the gravel truck got stuck, but Tyler the driver ingeniously pivoted, pouring the gravel while backing up and compacting the gravel at the same time. Bonus deal, Tyler offered to excavate some of my bamboo, for a privacy wall he wants to build. You can actually get people to take bamboo??

I am on my second pair of work boots. The work-designed Chelsea boot is such a strong signifier, it can actually raise your gardening acumen and lower your tolerance for large crowds in just one wearing. I got my first pair of Blundstone Chelsea boots, somewhere around 2020. It took me 3 years to wreck those. This summer, I went with a different brand, Ariat. After not even 6 months, water was seeping in through the soles and cheap plastic was coming off the heels. I sent them back, caked with mud, got a refund, and spent $100 more on a pair of Danner Boots. I am head over heels in love. They are so solid. Please, please, please don't tell me that Danner supports MAGA or was backed by Jeffrey Epstein, please let me have this brand limerence for a few moments...and if these fall apart in less than a year, they're getting sent back.