This tree is another effort at trying to grow a maple tree. Along with the redwood, which I posted yesterday, I ordered a baby maple tree to make another go given my failed attempts at germination. It didn’t survive the week-long postal journey here as well as the redwood did – most of its leaves died. But it’s got a few. We’ll see how it does.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km; errant erranding, 4hr]
This tree is a coast redwood (sequoia sempervirens). I made an effort starting a few months ago to germinate some redwood seeds, but that effort ended in abject failure. So I decided to spend a bit more money, and buy a redwood sapling, which arrived on Monday. I have transplanted it into this little bucket with some potting soil, and will keep it in the greenhouse for now. Maybe it will survive.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 6hr]
This tree served as a backdrop for this portrait of my green chili, which I harvested from my greenhouse this morning.
I installed the green chili in a batch of my fish curry, which, since Arthur considers it acceptable despite being called “curry,” I have been making now and then, as it’s currently my favorite of the dishes that I make.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km; fishcurrying, 1hr]
This tree is the same maple tree I posted a week or two ago. It died in the heatwave.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 6hr]
This tree is in front of a much older tree.
This is a hot red pepper flower in my greenhouse. Maybe I will grow a hot red pepper.
[daily log: walking, 4km; drilling/pounding/walking-back-and-forth-carrying, 5hr]
This tree a sugar maple tree – about 2 days old. I had mentioned a month or so ago that I had bought some seeds for exotic trees that I was going to try to germinate and grow and eventually plant on lot 73. Well, out of the 4 little planters, this one is the only one, so far, to germinate: a little baby maple tree.
[daily log: walking, 4.5km; retailing, 6.5hr]
ㅁ a lone radish seed survived the mouse-pocalypse and grew pale and round.
– a pseudo-haiku.
This tree is near the stair up into the treehouse.
I saw a first tomato flower in my greenhouse.
[daily log: walking, 3km; retailing, 6hr]
This tree is a dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) – as is its near twin beside it.
I am fond of these trees – they were abundant in my neighborhood in Goyang City, South Korea, where they’re planted all over as ornamentals. They are strange trees – they closely resemble the redwoods I grew up among in northern California (although smaller), but they like to lose all their needles in winter, like deciduous trees.
Here are some dawn redwoods in Ilsan, Korea, in the snow. I took this picture in January, 2017.
I ordered these seedlings as an experiment to see if a mail-order tree could survive the unusually long shipment time to this island. I think it might work out – they arrived in a damaged shipping tube, but were seemingly intact and healthy when I opened it up. If they survive, I might buy some other exotics to plant around my lot. I like trees – you might never have guessed that, right?
Incidentally, the company I bought these seedlings from (Jonsteen Company) was founded by a guy I went to high school with, and the company is headquartered in Humboldt County, where I grew up. Jon and I graduated in the same class. He was a very popular guy, and a musician, and an athlete – all things I wasn’t, in high school. But he was always kind to me. Once he let me drive his corvette.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
This tree (the small alder on the left fairly far back) saw me plant a bunch of raspberry plantlets that I got from my boss Wayne who was weeding and thinning his raspberry patch. I was thinking that if they establish themselves here, on the berm of the flat area that’s over the septic field on lot 73 (left side of photo), I’ll have a nice raspberry patch in future years.
Meanwhile, in my greenhouse, my single healthiest plant right now is a pepper plant I bought at discount in town because it was looking decrepit. And now it’s flourishing and has a charming little 3/4″ green pepper growing on it.
[daily log: walking, 3km]
This tree (well, group of trees) is merely a group of seeds in a baggie. I purchased some exotic tree “seed kits” to try to grow here. It’s too difficult and expensive to get saplings delivered, so I thought trying to grow a few interesting trees from seeds was the best, inexpensive option. The seed kits include the seeds, a little mini greenhouse thing, some specialized soil and such, and detailed instructions. I got 2 coast redwood trees and 2 eastern maple trees. The seeds in the picture are redwood trees. We’ll see if I can grow actual trees.
We had some cessation to the rain, so I worked outside on my treehouse while Art got reoriented to life-at-Rockpit.
[daily log: walking, 2km; banging and sawing, 6hr]
This tree oversaw the greening of a huckleberry bush.
Meanwhile, in my garden, there was some critter that had been breaking into the greenhouse at night and eating all my newly-planted radish seeds. So I borrowed a couple of Art’s mousetraps and set them in the planters. And lo, this morning, a very fat-looking dead mouse was caught in one of the traps.
Meanwhile, what with it raining today, I went down a kind of rabbit-hole on my server stuff. I built an email server. I’m not sure it will really work, or even prove useful. But it might – a lot of the problems I’ve run into with developing my own websites has been a lack of an email system that I fully control. So maybe it will work out.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
This tree saw the chilly dawn.
I ended up running into town for work for the morning – since Jan is traveling and out of town, I was the only person that Adrienne could call for backup.
The sun came out today – not the whole day, but a good part of it. My greenhouse got warm. And lo, a lettuce sprouted (lower left, below).
[daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 2hr]
This tree saw the sun make an appearance and illuminate my little greenhouse (maybe pick the small alder tree that I planted last year just to the left of the door). So I worked in the greenhouse preparing some planters for planting soon.
[daily log: walking, 2km; digging in the dirt, 2hr]
This tree was outside in the returning snow.
This lettuce was just planted in my little greenhouse.
[daily log: walking, 2km; digging in the dirt, 3hr]
This tree was witness to the fact that my “studio” (a plastic storage tent structure) had been subjected to high winds and therefore dislodged from its moorings.
I spent some time putting rocks and logs on parts of the “feet” to hold it in place temporarily, but will need to reengineer the base of it. Meanwhile, I got distracted sorting the dirt in my greenhouse, because I want to temporarily store some of the things from the studio up in the green house.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km]
We set out fairly early, though not as early as last time. We left the dock at just after 7 AM. Interestingly, Arthur was actually somewhat reluctant to go – I had to convince him that today was a good day to go because of the weather forecast. Arthur was anxious about the freezer problem – we don’t have a “spare” freezer, since we’d taken it to be (hopefully? maybe) repaired on Monday. I only commented, “Too many fish for our freezer is a problem we should be glad to have.”
The sky was blue and cloudless, the water was flat like a mirror – all day, except some bumpiness out at the open ocean.
We went first to San Ignacio, and trolled the east side from north to south. All we found was a single miniscule black bass.
So we pulled in the lines and set out for Siketi. We trolled through the channel there, and a caught a fish right off the reef just west of that channel. It was a medium-sized coho. We kept trolling westward to the east side of Noyes, and down to the opening into the ocean there, and crossed and trolled up the west side of Cone Island – which I don’t recall ever having tried before. We caught nothing and so we crossed back over to where we’d caught the one, and trolled eastward through the same area.
But no more fish. Finally, we decided to stop at around 12:20, and motored back home.
We had the engine-hiccupping problem in Bucareli halfway across – about the 50 minute mark on running the big motor, but the fuel tank was still almost full. The engine hiccupped again halfway up Port Saint Nicholas. It’s a mystery what it is, to both of us. I revved the motor to full throttle for a while, hoping to provoke another hiccup, but no such luck. The problem is completely un-reproducible, which makes it hard to diagnose.
We got home.
Year-to-date totals:
I had started borscht this morning before leaving, so we have some borscht for dinner. Relatedly, after getting back, I found a beet in my garden. I should have checked earlier, it could have gone in the borscht.
This summer seems much grayer and wetter than last summer, as I remember it.
My greenhouse struggles with long series of overcast days and drizzly weather. My vegetation is overtaken with mold or mildew or somesuch fungus. The leaves wither.
Some plants are still okay: tomatoes seem reasonably healthy, the beet greens are untouched, the new lettuce is bright. But my bean plants wilt in the wet, the squash and cucumber flowers have been attacked, the spinach is laconic.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
ㅁ The potato plant grew until it was very tall, Sometimes in sunlight.
– a pseudo-haiku.
I have some plants flowering in my garden.
That means I can hope for some fruit later on.
Here is a large yellow squash flower and a small purple bean flower.
Here is a small tomato flower.
… Francis Bacon, that is.
A historian and author, Ada Palmer, has a long-form essay on her blog, from a few years ago, on the subject of how Francis Bacon “invented” the concept of Progress in the 17th century. I also find that in general, the essay is quite well-written and fundamentally optimistic about the human condition, a la Steven Pinker but less controversially so.
Anyway, I recommend reading it if you’re looking for a dose of philosophical optimism.
In other news, an interesting mushroom showed optimism amid my latest cohort of lettuce.
My garden was making radishes. So I decided to try an experiment. I made two jars of spicy pickled radishes, improvising a recipe found online. They look very nice.
How they taste… not sure yet. I’ll report later. Korea has pickled radishes, but they’re not spicy. Korea also has radish kimchi, called 깍두기 [kkakdugi], which is generally quite spicy. So I guess this recipe is kind of a meeting-in-the-middle of those two concepts.
I grew a radish.
Later I ate it.
A beet appeared in my greenhouse.
A ladybug visited a bean plant.
I played with hydrology today, somewhat disappointingly.
ㅁ I built a greenhouse on the corner; my garden isn't very big. I just laid out plastic tubs, and filled them with dark soil. I planted some seeds, water daily, keep watching, shoots sprout, grow.
– a nonnet.
The problem with growing in a greenhouse is that you still have to water your garden even when it rains all day.
Let’s look at lettuce. It’s growing well.
Juli said (on the phone) that lettuce and onions shouldn’t be next to each other. I didn’t know that. I told her it was too late. The lettuce and onions seem okay so far – but times are early to judge success.
Unrelated nonsense…
“This sentence has seven syllables” has eight syllables
“This sentence has eight syllables” has seven syllables
This is a tiny pine tree. These types of trees are quite common in the muskeg, between 7 mile and 8 mile along the road out here. But on these two lots here at 8.6 mile, I have only ever found one of them, lurking gloomily up the hill a hundred feet or so among many alders and sitka spruce.
I uprooted this baby from along the road at 7.5 mile and planted it in front of my greenhouse.
[daily log: walking, 2km; chainsawing and woodsplitting, 2hr]
“Tarp and Bean” sounds like the name of a roadside inn in a post-apocalyptic fantasy novel.
I finally got around to finishing my effort to “unfloor” my studio (green tent storage facility). I had hoped that putting down a large tarp as a kind of floor would help limit the moisture. But much of the moisture inside is due to condensation, and the tarp just collected that and made a little lake in the middle of the floor. So I resolved to get the tarp floor out – just have a muddy floor.
That’s what I’ve completed. I did it without taking out the stuff in the studio. It was like a large-scale implementation of the “tablecloth trick” – where you yank out the tablecloth and all the things on top of it remain in their places.
Here is the tarp drying.
Here is the interior with its new mud floor.
Here is a bean appearing in my greenhouse.
This is not a greenbean, but a black bean. It wasn’t clear that these would grow here, so the fact that I have a sprout is a good first step.
The leek is growing in the form of a small sprout.
I worked on my firewood collection for a while in the morning.
I saw some lettuces growing nicely in my greenhouse.
I created a really messed-up topo map on my server. Something went wrong with the algorithm. I later learned it had to do with not deleting some temporary files left over from a previous run of the same program.
Another day in my moss-covered, misanthrope’s paradise.
Arthur was really mad at my brother Andrew earlier today. But he couldn’t remember his name. It was funny, because the target of his anger floated from “person to person”: “damn Aaron” … “what was Jeffrey thinking!” …
The reason he was angry was because we were putting the boat railings back in the water after their winter hiatus.
Last year when he was here, my brother Andrew had ambitiously taken on the task of trying to improve the safety of how the boat trolley is mounted on its cables. Andrew had added these extra U-bolts and changed the configuration of how the cable attaches to the trolley. Arthur hadn’t been opposed in principle to this improved safety, but we were now finding that we’d increased safety at the expense of reducing the flexibility of the system, such that it had become essentially impossible to get enough slack in the cable to re-attach it to the rail-brace down at the bottom in the water
So I spent more than an hour removing one of the supplemental U-bolts at the base of the trolley so that we could increase the slack in the cable. Once there was some slack, we were able to re-attach the cable, and we could tighten things back up.
But now the U-bolt is gone. Andrew would not approve. Arthur thought it had been overkill anyway. We know what Arthur thinks of safety: “Better to be lucky than smart!” is his operating motto.
Meanwhile, a second radish appeared in my garden. The greenhouse was actually hot today, for the first time, I think: a combination of a sunny day and warming temperatures. Here is the second radish, on the right, with the first radish, on left and more in the foreground and out-of-focus.
And the patch of lettuce is doing well.
And then there was an itty bitty lettuce leaf.
A joke seen on the internet:
“My snail was losing in races, so I tried taking his shell off. But it just made him more sluggish.”
I went out to my greenhouse this morning, just after dawn. It was snowing outside. But inside the greenhouse, I think I detected a radish rising.
