Ringing in the New Year Right

When we moved to Reno in 2010 we had a 5 year plan. 

 Live, love, grow in Reno and then come home to the PNW. 

 In 2016 we realized we had overstayed our plan in Reno and we desperately wanted to move our family back to the Evergreen State. In August after we completed the legal adoption of our two sons, my husband started applying for jobs in the Seattle area.  We were three months pregnant, expecting our third son and fifth child in the middle of January.  The months went by and he got a couple of nibbles, a phone interview, but nothing solid.  Then in February two days after our son was born the call came that would signal and turning tide. A biomedical research company north of Seattle was interested in him for multiple positions.  Two weeks later they flew him up for an in person interview and a few days after he came home he received a formal offer.  We wanted as little down time between jobs as possible. He gave his current employer his two weeks notice and told his new boss he could start in three weeks. Those three weeks flew by.  We got a real estate agent and started packing up non-essentials.  The week before he left we got a curveball thrown our way.  Our adopted sons have a younger sibling, a two year old girl, and she needed a forever home.  The week my husband started his new job in Washington was the week that she started living with us full time.  From the end of April to the middle of June I was a single parent to six kids, 3 months, 2 years, 4 years, 6 years, 8 years, and 10 years old.  Me and the kids worked to sell the house and the livestock from our homestead.  We had a herd of Oberhasli dairy goats in milk, a flock of 35+ chickens and a trio of Guinea Hogs. We found homes for all our animals and a buyer for the house.  I got temporary legal custody over our future daughter #3.  Five days after the kids got out of school for the summer, we got out of Reno for good. My husband had been house hunting in the Northwest and ten days after the sale of our Reno house we were getting the keys to our new digs North of Seattle. The rest of the summer is a blur of signing the kids up for school, unpacking boxes, re-carpeting bedrooms, an emergency re-model of the kids bathroom, 4th of July, filing for permanent full-time custody, getting the new house re-sided, birthdays, establishing care with new doctors, and I'm sure I'm forgetting more.  

2016 and 2017 were about moving forward.

 Just keep moving. 

 If we stopped to really think about all the plates we had in the air we might have crumbled under the weight of reality.  After living months on top of months of just nose to the grindstone, get it done and move on, it has been hard to slow down and settle.  We are in a new city, with a blossoming family, in a new home, the kids are at a new school, we found a new church.  Its all been a lot to process.

I find myself thinking back to Junk Farm and what joy I found in that project.  Urban farming was something to delight in.  I like the bustle of city neighborhoods.  The challenge of small spaces.  I felt like part of something bigger.  I never felt alone. 

It's time to settle. 

At least for a little while. 

And what better way to do that than with a garden?  

Time for some light reading.


 

   

Eclectic Gardening

I know what I said, I was done! I had moved on from my seed purchasing phase and moved into my land prep phase. Well, at this exact moment that is true but three weeks ago I had a moment of weakness. My order of seeds from Territorial Seed Co. arrived and a day later I received a Burgess Seed catalogue.  Those seed companies sure know how to time things.

Hello, my name is Katherine and I am a shopaholic.  I cannot pick up a seed catalogue without poring over the pages and coveting anything green and grow-able in Zone 7.

As you may guess after that confession I made another purchase from Burgess.  I needed to get seed potatoes.  When we were living in our Stead apartment we grew potatoes in a terracotta pot on our porch and were rewarded with Lilliputian results. At the time I had not purchased "seed potatoes" I just used some that had started to sprout in our cupboard.  This time I wanted to do it right.  So under the guise of making a wise purchase, I mean, we did NEED potatoes. I took the opportunity to add a couple other things to my cart.  If I'm already paying shipping might as well make the most of it...right? RIGHT!

Enter my mini orchard.  In addition to the Fruit Cocktail tree (super cool, they graft two kinds of peach, a plum, a nectarine and an apricot onto one tree), and 5-in-1 Pear that I had ordered and planted in November, I was now in anticipation of an Hardy Almond, a pair of Kiwi vines, Sugar Sweet Cherry (a self-pollinating variety of Nanking), and two Paw Paw trees.  Say, what's a paw paw?  That is exactly what I was thinking but when I heard that it was also called a Sweet Custard Apple I had to satisfy my curiosity.  True, its also called a Poor Man's Banana in some places but that's hardly as delicious sounding.  Add in my pre-order on that Negronne Fig and my excitement level is bordering on unhealthy.  Now all I have to do is pray that each lives through its first 3-5 years and I will be up to my eyeballs in exotic, eccentric, delectable fruit!

This seems like a good time to fill you in on my fruit list.

 

Cantaloupe
	Hearts of Gold
	Minnesota Midget
Grape
	Canadice
	Niagara
Raspberry
	Canby
Trees
	Almond
	Apple
	Cherry
	Fig
	Fruit Cocktail
	Paw Paw
	Pear
Vines
	Kiwi
	Vine Peach

Not that I am not "real" with you all, all of the time.  But I just need to take a time-out and "get real".  My fucking stupid laptop did it to me again, again!  I had a sweet ass paragraph all typed out and I was just going back an re-reading it for continuity's sake and then somehow my stupid, fucking, remedial, ar-tarded laptop hi-lighted and deleted the whole thing.  WHAT THE FUCK LAPTOP! But this stupid, asinine piece of equipment cannot silence me! Nay! I say! Nay! WHAT IS DEAD CAN NEVER DIE! WINTER IS COMING! A PETERSON ALWAYS PAYS THEIR DEBTS! (Adam and I just watched the third season of Game of Thrones in like two days, too much?)

To continue, if my laptop permits, I was saying that I had kickass plans for a fruit collection that would make Adam and Eve's mouths water.  But then something happened that tempered my excitement.  I went to a work bee with my Perma buddies (shout out to Northern Nevada Permaculture!) and mentioned my grand plans.  I knew that a fig tree was risky, time consuming and potentially a waste but as I said before I am a romantic.  My buddies, who have been facing the subtleties of Reno's intermountain desert climate for most of their lives, informed me that while cold was a problem it wasn't the only one.  Fruits like Fig, Paw Paw and Kiwi can live in the cold but they don't do great in excessive wind, drought, or aridity.  Hmm, my neighborhood sometimes feels that a wind tunnel, and I wasn't planning on buying a dehydrator because it gets so hot and so dry here.  I think this is a bad sign.  I knew it would not be easy, so even though this news deflated me (only a little bit) it also encouraged me and gave me insight on where to place my new plants and how to prepare the area.  My ingenuity and inherent, innovative genius will surprise you when this exciting subplot is continued in the upcoming chapter "The Side Garden".  Don't touch that dial.