Why Does My Thumb Hurt?

For the last several days I’ve been wondering why my thumb hurts so much. Not the thumb itself but the squishy bit at the base of my thumb. What did I do? I couldn’t figure it out. It’s gone from hurting just a little to a near constant ache.

Then today I was planting more seeds in pots to start indoors. I planted saved seeds from fennel, Genovese basil, Tulsi (aka sacred basil but it isn’t really basil), tarragon from the free seeds box at the public library, and Ruby Parfait Celosia from Fedco Seeds. I covered the seeds in all their little pots, picked up the water spray bottle and…that’s why my thumb hurts! Mystery solved. Now that I know the cause, I can make sure I don’t hurt it worse.

Thankfully the peppers and tomatoes are all big enough now I can carefully water them with my small watering pot so that eliminates half of what I had been spraying before. Sadly though the jalapeños still have not come up. At this point I’m pretty sure they aren’t going to, which makes me sad. The original seeds I saved two years ago from jalapeños in my CSA box from Eduardo. We saved the seeds because he was leaving farming and we liked his peppers. Last year they sprouted right up and the plants were productive even if the peppers were not as hot as previously nor as large. These seeds are saved from what I grew last year. And nothing. I’m guessing that the original peppers were probably a hybrid variety and they have run out of oomph as their genetics fell apart. The plan is to buy jalapeños at the plant sale in May, and since the catalogue doesn’t say whether they are open pollinated, I won’t save seeds and will plan on buying open pollinated seeds from my favorite Minnesota seed company for next year’s garden. If that is the worst of the garden failures this year, then I’m doing alright.

Earlier in the week I thought I had a missing seed tray of angelica. I realized they weren’t on the shelf with all the other seeds. Did I not plant them? But I had a distinct memory of planting them. Briefly I had a horror that I planted them in pots with the lady’s mantle by mistake. The angelica instructions said surface sow and the seeds are tan and big enough to see, and I saw no tan seeds in the lady’s mantle pots. Where could they have gone? I was getting really anxious about it when I went outdoors yesterday to move all my cold stratifying seed pots to a sunny corner of the deck so I could start watering them regularly, when what do I spy? The angelica pot! And then I remembered that they needed some cold time and I put the pot outdoors after sowing the seeds.

One might say I am clearly juggling too many seed pots if I am losing track like that, but I am inclined to say it is the rest of my life that is interfering with my ability to keep track of all the seeds. If I didn’t have to keep track of going to work, making sure I don’t put my shirt and pants on inside out and backwards, or somehow knowing where almost all of the things that James misplaces are, then I wouldn’t have “lost” the angelica. But now it is found and my anxiety over it is gone. Time to find something else to worry about!

Like Mrs. Dashwood. She will be 9-years-old at the end of next week. She is still chugging along but clearly slowing down. She takes longer to leave the coop in the mornings, she spends more time sitting in the sun than running around scratching in the garden, and sometimes we see her just standing there gazing off into space. I will not be surprised to open the coop door one morning to find she keeled over in the night. That is preferable to her getting sick. It was so hard watching Elinor’s heart take several days to give out as she got slower and slower, panting laboriously yet valiantly trying to carry on. Mrs. Dashwood is not dead yet, and who knows, she might have months of elder chickenhood ahead of her.

Carrying on with my sourdough experiments, I baked a Danish rye bread this weekend. There are a few things that I didn’t get quite right, but it tastes delicious nonetheless.

We have passed the Vernal Equinox and I am hoping the wild weather swings might start becoming a little less wild. The days ahead this week look to be gradually warming up well above freezing with nights hovering just below or a few degrees above freezing. There are some chances of rain or snow, but hopefully it stays rain. We need the moisture. The ground is slowly thawing and we’ve had so little snow over the winter that we have been declared “abnormally dry,” and areas of the state are actually in moderate drought. Not good for farmers as we get closer to planting season. Think liquid thoughts for us!

Reading

• Books: my in progress pile is large and my TBR even larger so I am shuffling between books, stuck in “the middles” at the moment.
• News: The news this week was pretty crappy. Columbia University caved in to Trump’s demands. A court ordered Greenpeace to pay $660 million for its role in protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. And then there was that executive order dismantling the federal agency dedicated to funding library services. For more information about that and some concrete actions you can take, the American Library Association has got you covered. There is so much resistance happening y’all but most of the media is not reporting it. One thing that is getting some attention is lawyer hero Rachel Cohen who sent a strongly worded warning letter to her law firm colleagues, and when the firm caved in to Trump’s demands, she resigned.

Listening

• Podcast: Listening to the Land: Land as Mother with Satish Kumar. This was so good y’all. I have heard of Kumar before but knew nothing beyond that. Turns out he’s pretty amazing! A former Jain monk, he is closing in on 90 and still quite active. He is a peace and nuclear disarmament activist, founder and director of Schumacher College international center for ecological studies, author, and speaker. You may have heard of him because of his 1962 peace walk when he and E.P. Menon walked from India to Moscow, Paris, London, and Washington D.C.
• Podcast: Crazy Town: A Temporary Techno Stunt: Tom Murphy on Falling Out of Love with Modernity. Murphy is a professor of physics at University of California, San Diego. He talks about how he went from shooting lasers at the moon to trying to “solve” our energy predicament and falling out of love with modernity.

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

This past week James wizarded up some chickpea cutlets that we had for dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy. He also made some everything bagels. And for a sweet treat he made cookie dough. The vegan version of cookie dough is made from chickpeas so you can eat it and not feel too guilty! We make ours with hardly any sweetener, the chocolate chips are enough.

Blizzard

Not only a blizzard of busy-ness but an actual snow blizzard too. No post last week because When I came to Sunday afternoon I was pretty much done. We had a blizzard Tuesday night into Wednesday morning that made roads and visibility so bad even the buses stopped running, which meant neither James nor I could get to work. Both our workplaces remained opened, which meant we had to take vacation time for our unexpected snow day. It was nice until the afternoon when we had to go out and shovel the heavy wet snow, some of which was drifted up to my knees because of the wind. A week later the snow was melted. By this last Friday it was 75F/24C! And yesterday it snowed. Thankfully it was a rainy kind of snow and nothing stuck. Ah spring!

Last weekend though was gorgeous; not 75F gorgeous, but warm enough to be out in only a windbreaker. We took advantage and finished pruning the apple trees. I also pruned the grapevine and crawled into the raspberry patch and pruned out the old canes. Somehow I managed to get some nice scratches through my clothes. Those raspberry thorns don’t mess around.

James generally works Sunday through Thursday so he got to be home for the beautiful Friday. The chickens got to be out in the warm sun all day long. They were so happy. I had to laugh when James texted me a photo of Mrs. Dashwood enjoying a dust bath with the message of Dashwood down! Dashwood down!

As chaotic as the spring weather has been, the birds are becoming more active and migrants are beginning to return. Robins are everywhere! The cardinals are calling to one another. The juncos fly in and mob the witch hazel in front of the kitchen window. The sparrows are getting loud and competing with the juncos for witch hazel occupancy. This Thursday, March 20th is World Sparrow Day in addition to being the Vernal Equinox. A double celebration!

The time change last weekend also knocked me for a loop. I didn’t begin to feel normal until around Thursday this week. The stupidity of changing the clock twice a year really has to stop, and pretty much everyone agrees it should. What no one can agree on is whether to set the time permanently on Daylight Savings time or non-Daylight Savings time. Clock time in general is ridiculous. In my grumpy time-lagged haze last weekend I listened to a To the Best of Our Knowledge podcast called The Tyranny of Time. One of the guests was historian David Rooney who has written a book about clocks and time. He pretty much said the invention of timekeeping beginning with sun dials had a political and economic agenda from the start and has always been about control. This did not make me feel better about the time change, but it did make me want to strive to free myself as best I could from the “tyranny of time.” I can’t do it completely since I need to work for wages, but I can find ways to break away from the clock when I am not at my paid job. The conditioning is strong and it is not easy!

Seed starting is going apace. All of the peppers from two weeks ago have sprouted except for the jalapeños. Since they are saved seeds I am worried something is wrong. So I re-seeded the pots today. They could just be extra slow to germinate and I might end up with a lot more plants than I expected, or something is wrong with the seeds and I will need to purchase some plants in May. Of course I am hoping I am being impatient and I end up with more jalapeños than I planned for. 

Last weekend I sowed tomatoes and every one had sprouted by Friday. This was extra exciting because three of the varieties I am growing from saved seed. I have never saved tomato seeds before because they take a bit of extra work, a sort of fermentation to remove the protective coating on the seed. Apparently I did it right! So growing on from last year is Hungarian Heart (sauce), A Grappoli D’Inverno (all-purpose plum type), and the mystery Alley Tomato, a small red cherry James found growing in a crack in the alley pavement behind our house and which we transplanted into the garden. In addition to these I am also growing Council Bluffs (slicing) and Orange Peach. Orange Peach is an orange tomato that is slightly fuzzy like a peach! It supposedly makes excellent tomato jam. How could I not give it a try?

 I also sowed some perennial herbs: Lamb’s Ears, Lady’s Mantle, and Horehound. None of these have sprouted yet, the packets all say they take awhile. I’m trying to be patient and not worry, but I whisper encouraging words to them everyday.

Today I sowed seeds for Angelica, Lemon Balm, and Treasure Flowers (aka Gazania). The Treasure Flower seeds are a gift from my friend Care of Care’s Books and Pie. And if they do well I will think of Care every time I see them in the garden. A real treasure!

With all the seed starting and pruning on weekends, my attic project has stalled, I haven’t picked up my knitting in months, and it’s been even more months since I’ve picked up my spindle. I’m never going to get good at spinning at this rate. And my poor loom is gathering dust next to my sewing machine, which has been used a couple times in the last months to make bulk food bags and to patch a pair of pants. Talk about the tyranny of time! Actually, more like the tyranny of capitalism that makes me have to work for wages instead of for myself on a small homestead.

Before I go, I want to point y’all to a couple excellent resources for those who are politically inclined to protest the current U.S. government shitshow. 5 Calls is a civic action website that will provide you with the phone numbers of your senators and congressperson and scripts for up to 41 current issues. Then there is Democracy.io where you can email all three of your representatives at once, no copy and pasting, no filling out the tedious website contact form, one and done.

Finally, there is Jessica Craven’s Chop Wood, Carry Water newsletter. It’s a political newsletter with current news, scripts for phone calls on urgent topics, and also things to celebrate which makes it upbeat rather than depressing. She writes several times a week and I’ve yet to not feel energized after reading her.

Reading

• Book: Perennial Ceremony: Lessons and Gifts from a Dakota Garden by Teresa Peterson. Peterson is Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota and a citizen of the Upper Sioux Community. She lives in Minnesota so it was an extra pleasure reading her book. She writes about her garden and her childhood and she includes recipes for many of the foods she grows. They aren’t vegan recipes so I will not make most of them, but I might see if I can get James to veganize her Honey Thyme Apples and Eggs breakfast recipe. And I might give her Two-Day Dill Pickles a try since I am growing cucumbers this year.
• Book: The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan. I’ve been pecking away at this book for months (pun intended). Tan’s drawings are beautiful, the text of her journal is not so very interesting, though sometimes there are moments. It’s mostly just a journal of the birds that come to her yard everyday and what they do. The amount she spends on seed, suet, and live mealworms is astounding. But at least she is spending her money on food for birds and not jetting around the world or buying sports cars and other useless things, so that’s something.
• Article: How To Be a Fighter When You Feel Like a Punching Bag by Kelly Hayes. Good advice from a veteran activist for anyone who wants to do something but is feeling overwhelmed and stuck.
• Essay: Taking the “Shoulds” Out of Reading by Molly Templeton. Who of us hasn’t said “I should read more classics,” or “I shouldn’t read such junk,” or “I should read that book/that author?” Templeton gives you permission to knock it off already.
• Poem: Solip Cystic by Raquel Gutiérrez. “I am required to resist the distractions and the easy wine/ that facilitates the annihilation of the other/ and their daily bread”

Quote

“I know too little to know what’s ordinary. But I have heard experienced birders call the Lesser Goldfinch a ’trash bird’ because it is so common and numerous. I heard others call a House Sparrow a ‘junk’ bird, an invasive, like the European Starling. I understand the antipathy. Invasive birds usurp habitat and resources. But I can’t help but feel discomfort. The rhetoric is often the same as the racist ones I hear about Chinese people.”

~Amy Tan, October 20, 2019 in The Backyard Bird Chronicles

Listening

• Podcast: Green Dreamer: Sandor Katz: Fermentation as a catalyst for social transformation. Sandor Katz is a fermentation guru and I might be a little biased because I own a couple of his books and have read a few more. But if you are at all interested in fermentation both as a process of food preservation and as a metaphor, then give this one a listen.
• Podcast: Team Human: Helena Norberg-Hodge. Norberg-Hodge is an amazing woman whose work I have followed for a couple of years now. She’s all about localization and doesn’t talk about it from an abstract intellectual level, but from real world experience.

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

There were baked beans made with beans from the garden, split pea soup, cherry hand pies made with frozen cherries from last summer’s garden for Pi(e) Day, and all the usual deliciousness.