Saturday Morning

This morning is pure pleasure. A storm is coming over the mountains now, but at seven the sun was out and melting the frost on the grass in town. I took Jasper for a longer walk to the moraine to make up for working long hours yesterday. Now I am toasting bread on a piping hot wood-burning stove and smothering the bread with smoked salmon torte, left over from a catering gig for the Nature Conservancy. I'm waiting for the Joseph Public Library to open at noon so I can go get my library card and hopefully check out some books on local cultural and natural history.

Walking along the eastern lateral moraine of Wallowa Lake. The Wallowa Mountains are towering in the distance like ghostly versions of themselves, costumed with fresh snow that fell yesterday.

Ten Hands

From greenhouse to ground, we've almost finished filling the middle beds with onions, greens, and brassicas. I loved the steady flow of the morning, covering the plots with landscape fabric to keep out the weeds, plopping the plants down, and pressing them into place. Ten hands made light work.

New friends listen to a lesson in placing and planting.

Can't Stop, Won't Stop... Gardening

Conquered those pesky, path-inhibiting... poppies.

The spring rain and warm weather last week turned the yard here into a jungle, and when temps soared above 45 F and the sun showed it's face today, I couldn't resist getting the gloves out to fight back. Besides the seemingly infinite dandelions that grow here, I was particularly eager to tackle a mangy, hairy-leafed plant that was threatening passage along the paths around the house. I noticed these weeds were also poking through the landscape fabric, which gave me a bit of a pause, wondering whether they were perhaps an aggressive, but desirable flowering plant of some type. But their abundance along the paths boiled my blood and I took them all out, merrily piling them in three large mounds as I progressed. Just after I switched over to saving a small strawberry patch, BG appeared to check that I wasn't destroying everything in the little greenhouse. We joked about the amount of work the yard needed, and then eager for more info on the hairy-leafed guys, I gestured to my work and asked, "I decided to start with that weed over there, do you know what it is?" She glanced at my impressive piles before informing me that they were poppies. Then she looked at me sideways and hesitatingly added, "They'll put out nice flowers a bit later in the spring." Doh, I felt like a complete idiot.

Later, Jas and I headed back to Hurricane Creek for a run, and I was surprised to find decent snow cover on the trail about 3.5 miles in, just past the falls I mentioned last weekend. With warm and sunny weather in the forecast again during the week, I'm hoping the snowline will be knocked back a couple more miles. I desperately need to get my butt in gear and train over longer distances and with greater elevation gains before the Scout Mountain Ultra Trailrace in Pocatello, which is coming up in a meager four weeks!

A Radiant First Week

Today marks my first week in my new home, and it's been a good one. In order to make progress on my dissertation work at the same time that I try out life as a farmer, I knew I would need to establish a common flow to each week. The plan for now is for weekends, Mondays, and Thursday and Friday afternoons to be research time, and for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday and Friday mornings to be farm work days, except when I work at the Wallowa County Farmers' Markets. After having a rather light teaching assistantship this spring semester, and factoring in moving and other life activities, it felt like a packed week! Good thing I enjoy being busy (thanks Mom). Here's how the routine goes.

Every morning, I wake up, make a cup of tea, and climb up the back landing to take a picture of the mountains to the southwest. I'm curious to see how the extent of the snowpack changes over time this summer, and later, how senescence will transform the forest into a patchwork of evergreens and golden tamaracks. Jas and I go for a walk, I have a big bowl of doctored oatmeal, pack my bag and head to the farm.

JP refreshes himself from a delicious rodeo grounds puddle a few blocks from our house under a brilliant blue sky. The contrast between the snowline and treeline highlights the Hurricane Creek drainage in the background. 

My first days working at BYG were a blur, as we scrambled to maintain the overflowing greenhouses and get the fields ready for planting after the wettest start to the water year on record. I learned to harvest and wash greens, transplant pepper and tomato starts which we'll sell at the first market, and maintain the weedwhackers, We put the latter to exhausting use on Thursday morning mowing the cover crop before Beth came through on the tractor to till in the cuttings. The rain this weekend should help get the breakdown process started and prep our soil for planting. Friday we put in our first outside crops: yellow, red, and sweet onions, which were started on a farm in Texas and languished in BG's garage for a few weeks waiting for the sun to come out.

A bonus hoop house stores overflow peppers and brassicas until they are ready to plant in the fields, or sell at market.

New to the farm fields this year are egg and meat chickens, which we'll move around the field twice daily in chicken tractors to add fertilizer and keep harmful insects down. BG, SL, and I will share the protein and responsibility for care and maintenance. The egg hens are on site now and got to enjoy some chickweed harvested from overwintered kale beds. The meat birds will arrive next Friday. SL is finishing construction on the chicken tractors this weekend and I hope to get a picture of them in action soon.

BG points out the freshly tilled beds where we will add ~600 onion starts, which will grow into green, fresh, and storage onions of a few different varieties.

The evenings so far have found me sunburned and sore as my body adjusts to working hard outside. SV and I enjoyed Midwestern tacos at the Stubborn Mule on Tuesday night. The first of many, I'm sure. In lieu of running, Jas and I took a short jaunt up the steep E. Fork Wallowa R. trail at the head of the lake on Thursday, catching the last glow of the evening on the eastern moraine before our path was blocked with snow.

The sunset reflects brightly on Wallowa Lake from the darkness of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest.