Spring Happens

I haven’t written a blog since the violets and buttercups were blooming. Now the tulips, fruit trees, dandelions, Quince, Locust, Frittilaria, Iris and Lupine have all bloomed. Is Spring officially over when a bear tears down your bird feeder (5/27/19)? There is a lot to catch up on and nobody needs a really long article to read. So I am going to boil it all down to 10 topic areas and call it good.

Speaking of articles, The local Colville paper, the Statesman Examiner, ran an article about our winery on May 8th. Unfortunately unless you subscribe, you can’t look it up online. So I scanned it and there is a link here. The Silverado Express, another local paper, ran an article about the history of Tatapoo Rock that I wrote for the Heritage Network. That also is not available online so here is a link to the article on Tatapoo Rock, a landmark that is key to a lot of local history. The North Columbia Monthly is printing an article this month, Composing Compost. That article is available on this website. An article from earlier about Biochar published in the Monthly is also on this website . It prompted a talk with my brother-in-law Roger Ellison, who also makes and sells biochar among other things from his homestead, Thornbush Farm, on San Juan Island.

As you might have gathered, many of the articles are on various elements of Regenerative Agriculture . Postings about compost from Barr-Tech near Sprague, Washington prompted two of my friends to order semi-loads of compost and I bought a ton of it from one of them. It is part of the mix in the previous blog post Composing Compost 2 . I also continue to stack up pine straw and other forest litter that my wife, Cheryl, is collecting to reduce fire danger. It will be shredded into compost material too, although I have plenty from pruning the grape plants this spring.

Perhaps the biggest boost to my knowledge of Regenerative Agriculture came from attending the Global Earth Repair Conference at Port Townsend. I was pleased to meet Ronnie Cummins from the Organic Consumers Association in person. That is where I first heard about Regenerative Agriculture. I also listened to a talk by Peter Jackson on bio-remediation and decided to buy a book on Korean Natural Farming, JADAM by Youngsang Cho,. There is a lot to learn about growing your own microbes for fertilizer and pest control. It fits in well with making wine. You are bound to hear more about that in this blog. Doniga Markegard did an amazing job of presenting her experiences raising cattle a natural way. Much of it is in her book Dawn Again.

Sales of Grape Plants have been big this year despite not having as many plants on hand as I could have sold. I held the line this year and will release several hundred two year old plants next year. Of course it was also the season for pruning and starting new grape plants. There are about 300 of them putting on growth on the greenhouse-crushing pad. Many of this year’s plant sales were through the Ferry Conservation District, a unit of the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and I have purchased a very nice greenhouse kit through the NRCS. It is 20 feet by 24 feet, 14 feet high and still under construction. So you may see more about that also.

On May 9th, my sister Jeannette and her husband Bill visited and we went hunting for morel mushrooms. The weather was dry and the competition heavy on last year’s Boyds Fire burn. We did alright but the next week it rained hard so we went back and did even better. Younger folks willing to climb steep hillsides are bringing back more morels, but we are still working our way through the ones we have. Our younger neighbors Tom and Amber sold over 10 pounds of them at the Farmers Market today (6/1/2019) for $20/lb.

Speaking of the Farmers Market, it started a month ago. Cheryl and I are there in the center of Colville every Wednesday and Saturday selling wine, plants and maps. It is getting too late for plants, but we will stay on with wine and mapbooks. The rain presented a problem. Since our van broke down last year, we have been hauling the chairs, tables etc. in our 1975 Chevy Pickup. We needed a canopy for the truck and put a request out on Facebook. That worked great and we had one the same day and an even better one the next day. So now the truck bed is dry but that was far from the only “technical difficulty” we had these last two months.

The Map Metrics website crashed while our host tried to make it more secure. It had to be rebuilt from scratch. My main mapping and finance computer crashed losing all of the programs but thankfully not the data. It ran Windows 7. Some of my programs won’t run on anything later than that and our computer repair guy says that Microsoft made sure that any new hardware won’t run old software. Luckily he found a machine running Windows 7 in his back room and I am using it now. The list goes on including a new WiFi setup and a new satellite TV setup. But you get the idea, lots of down time and expensive repairs.

Some things can’t be repaired or replaced. Several friends of ours died in the last two months including our old neighbor, Clarence Tieszen; a fellow member of our Slow Food group, George Wells; an orcharding neighbor Jim Corvino; a long-time rock club hostess, Lucie Bristow, and our one-time dental hygienist, Kelley Wood. So in a time of very good-looking growth in the vineyard and new buildings and ideas we have to remember that most growth relies on a transformative dose of death.