Sunshiny Goodness

Willits weather is funny, because it is completely unpredictable. It can rain in the middle of the summer, though it almost never does. It can frost in June, though it almost never does. It can be in the upper 70's for a week in January, though it almost never is. But there are annual trends, strange ones, by which you can judge how relatively odd the weather is, and people will say things like "Huh, this freakishly cool weather usually comes in June, not May," or "Huh, usually this week or so of beautiful weather hits in February, not right now." Which is what our Garden Manager, Ellen, said today. People who have lived here for more than 20 years can talk that way with some amount of confidence. For the rest of us it just seems like someone up there is rolling the dice to see what the day will look like.

As a bit of trivia, we here are apparently on the border of the Alaskan and Hawaiian jet streams, so when one of them has the hankering to go north or south a titch, well, we get unseasonable weather. I have come to think of all of the weather here as unseasonable.

The unseasonably nice weather in the past 5 days and the coming 6 or 7 days has us doing whatever we can in the garden. Weeding takes a high priority at all times, as does harvesting whatever is ready to be harvested. And this time of year, not being able to count on the cold coming back to stay, we prune when it looks like it could stay warm. Which was today.

Here we have Ellen hitting the Asian Pear tree hard, because it went wild last year. In the foreground are two Persimmon trees, one of which is getting the ax this year.

Another bit of garden trivia: two years ago the whole region had an overwhelming fruit year, and some of our trees, not pruned for bounty and not quite watched closely enough, split down to the ground. We lost a couple of plum trees and a peach tree. Or two peaches and a plum. Something like that. At any rate, the remaining trees got a good pruning last year, and then some unseasonably cold weather came along late Spring and took all the blossoms. No one anywhere near us had any fruit besides berries and such. No apples, pears, peaches, plums, persimmons... We were sad. The trees weren't, though, and put all their energy into new growth.
So today in the garden Ellen pruned, Margo weeded, and I harvested willow from our basket-willow stands. And we all watered for the first time this winter.

The beautiful weather came at a difficult time for Margo and me. In the apprenticeship program with Ecology Action we each plan and teach six classes a year to EA Director (and Golden Rule Advisor) John Jeavons and EA Garden Manager Carol. Our next classes will be presented this Thursday, mine on Grains and Margo's on Seed Saving. Naturally we would have preferred cold, rainy, prohibitive weather that would keep us out of the garden definitively. But there we were, in shorts and short sleeves, getting our vitamin D.

To follow up on my last posting about putting all our precious grain seed away in plastic, I got out our store of silica gel and baked it. Silica gel is useful because it absorbs water, but it is fun because it's treated with cobalt chloride, which is blue when the beads are dry and pink when wet. Now I think it would be less confusing if blue was wet and pink dry, but we don't live in a Harry Potter world and cobalt chloride doesn't work that way. All the same, it's a good time, the agricultural version of a hypercolor shirt.

So for posterity I put some crystals in a bowl of water to take a picture. Then I baked the whole bunch of them in the oven for a while at 200°F (that's how you're supposed to dry them) and put them in the bowl for another photo. I made some handy 1 cup envelopes out of paper, which breathes just fine, and am in the process of transferring seeds from plastic to paper. I will sprinkle some silica gel in the bottom of each jar, and watch it for a few weeks. If it turns pink, I'll put more in. That's how we learn, I guess...
Coming up next, by popular demand, threshing :)