Heat pumped that is! Oh friends, I have been so busy with the garden and all the things. Two weeks ago we had a heat pump installed. It was a good time to do it because the contractor wasn’t busy, it was neither cold nor hot outside, and our 25-year-old central air conditioner unit and just as old gas furnace were close to end-of-life but hadn’t died yet so we had time to shop and choose. We are now efficient and all electric. The heat pump will both cool and heat our house through the existing duct system. In Minnesota we are required to have backup heating because when temperatures get close to zero fahrenheit, the heat pump probably won’t be able to keep the house warm enough, so we had an electric furnace installed. Expensive, but we also got a significant discount between power company rebates, city rebates, and federal tax credits (won’t get the tax credit until we file next year, but it will be awesome).

The weather has been so mild the heat pump has yet to turn on to cool the house. There is a whole-house fan as part of the install and we have that running, recirculating the air throughout the house. Which means the cooler basement air gets redistributed. We are looking at a brief heat wave, however. Today through Wednesday we are expecting temperatures close to 90F/32C. So at some point the house will warm up enough for the heat pump to turn on. It will be so much quieter than our giant air conditioner roaring away.

Friday was the huge Friends School Plant Sale. James and I make an annual event of it. We were out the door around 6:30 in the morning to bike over to the State Fair Grandstand in St Paul and pick up our wristbands for entry. We got group 15. I think last year we were group 11. After we got our wristbands, we biked back across the Mississippi River to Minneapolis to have breakfast at one of our favorite places—Seward Cafe. We hadn’t been there since before the pandemic. They are cooperatively owned and they closed during the pandemic and didn’t re-open until last year with limited hours and menu. So for the past several years we’ve been enjoying plant sale breakfast at Hard Times Cafe, also really good. But it was great to be bak at Seward enjoying a super green tofu earth breakfast with a bottomless cup of coffee.

Fueled and overly caffeinated, we biked back to the fairgrounds to await our group entry. We found a shady place to sit and enjoyed watching rabid gardeners and the wheeled contraptions they had put together. A lot of just plain wagons, but others had DIY carts with multiple shelves on which to put flats of plants. Then there was the person who just had two of those giant blue Ikea bags. James and I each had a box that fit inside the crate baskets on our bikes. My list was only a page long—quite short compared to years past.

We waited about an hour and a half before our group was called in. It only took us about 30 minutes to get what we wanted and another 10 minutes to get through the checkout line. Then we carefully packed the taller plants in my side pannier, and the rest went into James’ rear basket and my front basket. Here is what we got:

• Jostaberry (fruit bush, gooseberry-black currant cross)
• Serviceberry, variety Honeywood (fruit tree)
• Rosy sedge (native perennial)
• English thyme (culinary herb)
• Wild boneset (perennial medicinal herb)
• Lady fern (native perennial)
• Wild lion’s foot (native perennial)
• Wild pearly everlasting (native perennial)
• Betony (perennial medicinal herb)
• Black cohosh (native perennial, also medicinal)
• Wood poppy (native perennial)
• Adam’s needle yucca (native perennial)
• Jalapeño pepper 4-pack (since my seeds didn’t germinate)
• Tomatillo, variety tomate verde (never grown them before so trying it out)

Everything except for the peppers and tomatillo are planted and those two will go in next weekend if it doesn’t suddenly turn cold on the other side of this heatwave, which it totally could!

Meanwhile, I’m working at hardening off all the indoor seedlings. We had an unfortunate gusty wind day last week and the row cover fabric I was using to protect all the squash starts partially blew off and four of the squashes were burned to a crisp. So, starting those over again. I don’t technically need to start the winter squash indoors, but I do to keep the critters from digging up and eating the seeds from the ground.

Yesterday evening when the sun was out of the garden, we started planting the onion seedlings. I don’t know what I was thinking back in February, but dang, I have a lot of onions! Well, I do know what I was thinking. I sowed the pots with fewer seeds than the year before and also planned on thinning them, which I did, to make them easier to remove from the pot and plant, which they are. But, to make up for fewer plants in a pot, I planted more pots. I’ve not counted, but we’ve probably planted close to 50 red summer onions and twice as many sweet yellow storage onions. Even if only half of all of them produce onions we can eat, that is still a lot of onions. Good thing we love onions in this house.

The garden peas for shelling are all sprouting up strong as are the purple snap peas. The collards, radishes, non-heading broccoli, parsley, chard, cilantro, and leafy greens are also at various points of sprouting. The carrots haven’t come up yet, but they take longer to germinate. Nonetheless, I’ll be seeding more carrots this evening along with more radish, some borage and non-bulbing fennel, and sunflowers.

Stevie, our North Star cherry tree, had a rough go of it their first year in the garden. They got a little rabbit chewed, and then last summer a fat squirrel decided to climb the spindly little branches and broke them. Poor Stevie went into last winter looking pretty much like a 6-foot tall stick. I was not confident that Stevie would survive, but they did! And they even bloomed, not a lot, but there were flowers. Yay!

The bush cherries had a gorgeous bloom. They are currently thigh high and will eventually be about two meters tall. The thing I like about the bush cherries is that their fruit tends to be inside the bush, hiding beneath leaves, making it more difficult for birds and squirrels to get at, which means I get most of them.

Professor Plum also put on a gorgeous display and is still going, though clearly winding down. The Professor was covered in blossoms last year too but didn’t produce a single plum. But I think is was a weird plum year because the plum tress I usually forage from blossomed extravagantly and didn’t produce any plums either. Hopefully this will be a plum year and I will taste the first ever plum from the Professor.

The clove currant is currently covered in yellow flowers. The red currant, who joined the garden last year, is not flowering, but I am not surprised since they aren’t even as tall as my knee. The aronia is covered in white flowers and my mouth is already anticipating their earthy fruit in oatmeal and pancakes. The honeyberries are looking lovely and will hopefully find it within themselves to produce more than four berries this year.

One of the two gooseberries partially died over the winter and will need to be pruned and spend the next year recovering, but the other gooseberry is flowering. The black raspberries are leafing out and looking fantastic.

The highbush cranberry, who joined the garden last spring, is almost knee high, too small yet to flower, but is looking healthy. The mulberry tree is just over knee high and leafing out nicely. The three goji berries I started last year from seeds all survived the winter to my surprise and delight. They, like all the others, are about knee high. And Marlon, the peach is about two meters tall and leafing out nicely. Will they blossom? I’ll let you know!

The rhubarb is huge and I have a full freezer bag already. The second rhubarb, planted two years ago, is doing well and has decided to flower. I’m going to try and save some seeds and see if I can get them to germinate. One can never have too much rhubarb.

Oh, and the peony has flower buds on it! This is actually a big deal. I moved them from their previous location last spring because they hadn’t flowered in a couple of years and now it appears I am going to be rewarded for finding them a happier location. I’m also itching to try peony flower jelly. We’ll see if I get to do that this year.

We’ve been enjoying early spring greens—sochan, violets, curly dock, and feral arugula/rocket, as well as green onions. Also, sunchokes. So many sunchokes. I have not been aggressive enough digging them up these past couple of years and they have taken advantage. I have dug up enough to fill a 5-gallon bucket and they are still coming up in unwanted places! James has been adding sunchokes to meals when he can. He even made sunchoke soup, which was so delicious! He also made a sunchoke and lentil dal, also delicious. We are going to be tired of sunchokes before we manage to eat a 5-gallon bucket’s worth, so we are looking at ways to preserve them to enjoy through the summer.

Non-gardening related. Last weekend James and I volunteered at a fundraiser for Interfaith Coalition on Immigration (ICOM). It was a dinner fundraiser held at the multi-faith building where the Buddhist sangha James and I attend meets. The building is home to Buddhists, United Church of Christ, a Catholic congregation, a Lutheran congregation, and a Baptist congregation. ICOM is a separate organization not affiliated with any of the congregations, but I believe they were invited to use our space for their fundraiser and we all provided the volunteers to help run it. I spent three hours bussing tables while James got to wash dishes. We were exhausted when we were done, but we had a good time, and ICOM raised more than their $20,000 goal to help asylum seekers and immigrants.

I hope your garden is growing and flowers blooming and you are finding time, energy, and strength to get out in the world and do good work. Until next week!

Reading

• Book: Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya. This is the dark side of loving books, when you wrap yourself in books in order to avoid facing up to severe depression, your entire identity is in books because you are hoping that you find the one that will eventually save you. A short, fascinating memoir about mental illness.
• Essay: Urban Legend: The Harebrained Myth of Urban Sustainability and Why You Should Bet on the Country Tortoise by Jason Bradford. Small is beautiful, the future is rural.
• Poem: As a Kid I Was Told, “Don’t Step on a Crack or You’ll Break Your Momma’s Back” by Karla Cordero
• Interview: How Manosphere Content Placates Disenfranchised Men, Meagan Day interviews Kristin R. Ghodsee. Boys and men are lost, but thankfully this article does not once imply that women are responsible for their being lost, nor are they responsible for saving them.
• Article: Worsening allergies aren’t your imagination. Didn’t need an article to tell me my allergies have gotten worse, but it’s nice to have confirmation about why.

Quote

“I was more and more fixated on the idea of life as narrative structure, and narrative structure as control. Both my belief in the immovable genre of my life—the suicide plot—and my belief in the fantastical possibility of being saved by the right book—the reading plot—were further enabled by the idea that I myself had become nothing but a text. It felt so important to be able to give a clear account of what was happening in it—to show up to a meeting with a colleague, or a drinks date with a friend, ready to deliver a neatly organized book report. I alternated between being someone who was forever at the mercy of plots I had no control over, and being someone who believed they knew exactly how those plots worked: in other words, between being a character and being a critic. Nowhere did I take responsibility for being my own author.”

~Sarah Chihaya, Bibliophobia, p195