A collection of adventures, in reverse chronological order

Oh hello dear reader, long time no see. I'm sorry. I haven't had much time to sit down and to actual blog posts, though I have been tweeting like crazy. There have been so many adventures that Sam, Dan, Mr. Cupcake and I have been up to so I'm going to do some binge posting for the next hour. I hope you will bear with me.

Saturday July 12th, I received an email invitation from Slow Food Utah to participate in a Farm Mob at Sandhill Farms in Eden. Show up, do some garlic harvest work, bring food for sharing for lunch, take a dip in the reservoir after lunch. Sounded good to me! My friend Emma from Wasatch Community Gardens and I went together (we had participated in an apricot harvest the night before) and had a great time doing good hard work and meeting lots of neat new people.

The first thing Marsha told us was that we could have as many garlic scapes as we wanted. Garlic scapes are the part of the flower that you actually cut off, usually around June, so that instead of flowering the plant puts all of its energy into fattening the garlic bulb. You can eat them, though they are a bit fibrous raw, so you usually steam them.

This place was amazing. They had an acre and a half devoted to 50 varieties of hardneck and one softneck garlic.

Hardnecks tend to be more interesting flavor-wise, and they prefer colder winters (you plant garlic in October, harvest in July), but they don't store as long as soft neck garlics do. It is soft next garlic that you buy in the grocery store. I have grown both before. Below is a rack on which to hang more soft necks.

They also grow lavender, though not for sale. Emma was bundling up lavender when we first arrived.

Brief orientation and introduction to the farm. They were expecting about 15 volunteers, but between Wasatch Community Gardens, Slow Food Utah, and Real Food Rising (as well as some friends of the owners), 30 people showed up to help!

Above are teen leaders from Real Food Rising. We were cleaning the dirt off the garlic that had been harvested a few days earlier. We used toothbrushes to clean the dirt off!

A view of the field from the garlic workshop.

Lunch was pretty spectacular, and I didn't take a full table shot (the table was getting mobbed by hungry gardeners!) but I thought this wooden bowl was especially beautiful.

More views of the farm.

At the end of the day, Roody and Marsha made all the rejected garlic available to everyone - anything that was ugly or too small or had been stabbed by a pitchfork in the harvest. I'd say I came home with quite a haul!

Then, later that day, we had the second of two neighborhood garden parties. We invited all our neighbors, and I invited some friends from the U, from Twitter, and from my community garden. Sam was uncommonly social for the first while until more than five people showed up. 

At the end of the night, I had about half our liquor cabinet on the counter as I was mixing cocktails for everyone.


The next day, Dan and I got busy making jam with the 20lbs of apricots I came home with on Friday.

My garden plots. The sunflowers are now taller than me, and I just strung up my tomatoes yesterday. The lettuce is done and the earwigs seem to be eating the greens off my beets.

Since Dan and I are such conservationists, Dan dried out the apricot pits (since we had a lot of them) and cracked the shells to get at the kernels inside. This is what is known as bitter almond and is what Disaronno is made from.

That it for this one! 

A 20 mile bike ride along the Jordan River

Dan and I working on getting fit, so we have decided that, weather permitting, we will get out and do something active every weekend. We loaded up our bikes, water, and a picnic and drove down to Utah lake to cycle the Jordan River trail.

Mr. Cupcake rode in my under-the-seat pouch.

The view from the place where we stopped for a picnic.

We got close enough to these wind turbines to hear them swoosh.

My friend Steve once told me that hills (on a bicycle) are good. I didn't believe him at the time (probably because it was a painful endeavour) but on this day we did climb some steep hills and were rewarded with a view of the valley.

On our way back, some horses and a donkey were next to the trail on the other side of the fence. This donkey was lounging.

Sheep! I love seeing so many sheep in this state. In North Carolina we seldom saw livestock - just hog barns. There was an occasional horse corral but mostly it was crop land. Here there seems to be a good growing climate for grazing animals.

Looking south towards Utah lake.

It was quite a pleasant day, really, with an easy 79 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite applying sunscreen however, we did get sunburned and are nursing those burns still.

Doing this made me wish we had one of those "101 Hikes in Utah" books or a book on cycling trails/routes. Not wanting to spend money just now (we're going to Scotland in October), I went instead to the library yesterday and got all kinds of books on hikes, cycling trails, trees, wild flowers, and birds. Birds! While we were on this bike ride, I saw a bird about 12" long, black body, yellow/orange head with a long black beak. I don't know much about birds but I'm starting to take an interest. Dan has the Audubon bird app on his phone and when he looked it up, he figured it's a yellow-headed black bird. I couldn't get close enough to take a picture, they fly away so fast! We also saw a goose couple and their 5-6 so-cute goslings swimming in the river. On the way up the hill at the end of the trail (our turn around point by the wind turbines), I saw a gorgeous lizard I haven't looked up yet. About 8" long with dark stripes along the body - the body was brown/beige and the tail was a sage green.

I love being out in nature. I don't recall if I mentioned it here but when we lived in North Carolina, I felt like that place had no spirit to it. You have to remember I have spent most of my adult life living on the west coast in the rainforest among a culturally-saturated Coast Salish territory where the First Nations People and environmentalists were united in their love for Mother Earth. There was none of that in North Carolina, not where we were. The indigenous populations had been wiped out generations ago, and in a region that grows tobacco, well, yes this will sound judgemental but there was little care for the environment that I could see. Compared to what I was used to, at least. Heck, even Korea 12 years ago was composting food from every apartment building - long before North American cities even thought of it!

We had a friend visit us in North Carolina last September. Someone who we knew from Vancouver Island but who was raised in Virginia. I mentioned to her my thoughts about not feeling any spirit in the land in NC and she knew what I meant. Given the region's history, it's possible that there is just too much blood and suffering in that land (slavery, civil war, continued segregation and systemic racism) and that it has never really recovered or healed. That makes a lot of sense. That was also a big reason for me wanting to return to the west. The west is where my heart is.

It's also far less densely populated, which we like. It hasn't been settled for as long as the east has, so it is relatively young by modern society standards. People here understand the beauty of the place and work hard to preserve it. (I say that, but there are a number of mountaintop-removal sites and a highly productive oil and gas industry in the Uinta basin). Nevertheless, there is a culture here of getting out and being in nature, be it hiking, cycling, skiing, camping, snowshoeing, and everything in between. It's very motivating.

It's also nice to feel safe walking around in this city (I am digressing, I know). I'm sure I mentioned this before. I used to live two blocks from work in Kinston and people would be concerned about me getting home safely if I walked. Having been the victim of a peeping Tom when I lived in Japan, having all the people walking by our house and looking in all the time in Kinston freaked me out, I was always on edge. I never felt safe there, in that house.

I'll awkwardly wrap up here because I do want to end on a positive note. I love it here. In terms of ticking all the boxes, Salt Lake City is the best place I have ever lived. Cowichan Bay is a close second, but the circumstances under which I was there (waiting for immigration, away from Dan) mean it couldn't be first. I do miss living with chickens and having my other best friend to hang out with every day. :-) Salt Lake has given me a launching pad for my career which I had, until last year, all but given up on; I found community in gardening; I have lost 28 pounds since we have been here and it has come of fairly easily, thanks to diet and being more active!; the house we live in is great and comfortable; Dan works more reasonable hours and I get to spend more time with him; financially it is far better for us, my work notwithstanding; and as of Friday, the vodka Dan made for Sugar House Distillery was on sale to the public. They sold 200 bottles the first day. Things are good. 

Adventure to the Uinta Mountains

My mum had been visiting for 17 days, left on Wednesday last week. It took us a few days and an entire weekend, but I'd say we're pretty much back to normal now. In fact, we had an entire long weekend with no real plans* so we decided to go for an adventure by just getting in the truck with a picnic lunch and head east.

We had never been to Park City before, where most of the skiing happens. I'm not a skier and even if I could afford that sport, I wouldn't be. It's winter, it's down hill on slippery things, no thank you. (I tried once as a 14-year old, had an accident that resulted in 18 stitches in my scalp, declared NEVER AGAIN). It was Memorial Day here in the US, so only about half the shops and restaurants in Park City were open. I didn't take any photos there. If you've seen one expensive tourist resort town (Banff, Tofino, Asheville), you've seen them all. We decided to continue west towards Strawberry Reservoir and beyond.

Mr. Cupcake getting some high-altitude fresh air.

The above is overlooking Strawberry Reservoir. We missed the turn that would have had us go down the western side, but thought "hey, we have a 4x4 truck, we can do back roads" and carried on up to 9,300 feet to find this.

To the right is a several-hundred-feet drop off, so we had to turn around and go back the way we came to a more reasonable road. But there was some significant bouncy road driving first.

The perspective is hard to tell from this photo but I would say we are angled down about 35 degrees. It was steep.

This is the same steep hill, coming back the other way, having found a dead end.

We ended up driving as far as Duchesne before turning south and came back to the Salt Lake Valley through Spanish Fork. I love that view of Spanish Fork when you come around the corner and see nine massive wind turbines moving gracefully.

We drove through several different landscapes in the course of the day and no, I didn't take photos of them all. My favorite is the red rock formations. It was nice to be in a coniferous forest! I love the forest smells on a warm day.

Interestingly, after sitting in the truck for the entire day, my fitbit thought I had walked more than 5,000 steps. I guess that's what happens with all the bouncing we did while off roading!

There is so much to see and do in this state. I can't wait until we have camping gear and can start doing some exploring in destinations further than a day trip.

*Well, we were supposed to help a friend move on Sunday, but after asking her twice what time and what her address was, and hearing no response, we had a free day with no plans!

My Cannon Greens community garden plot

Eep. It has been a month since I have posted.

Lots has happened in the garden, not the least of which is that I have acquired a second garden plot, right next to my first one. See, there are deadlines for these plots and if gardeners don't have their plots weeded/planted out by X date then they are forfeit and become MINE. I had weeded my neighboring plot and around it in hopes that it might become mine and then it did, on Thursday, so that night I dug it up and amended the soil with manure, planted everything out on Saturday, and on Sunday we built a structure to hold up the peas and tomatoes. Below are photos of this evolution.

 April 24. I wanted that plot on the left.

 While weeding that plot on the left I discovered some volunteer lettuces and onions, which I transplanted to my bed since they were unclaimed.

 Mulched around my entire bed.

The garden ran out of wood chips soon after this, and since we get them for free from the City, we have to wait until their next pass through our way.

Oh look I have weeded that plot. It's like it wants to be mine.

May 8. Things are growing. The weather turned very cold after this, near freezing and everyone was worried.

 May 13. This is a pet project of mine, to clear the weeds along the fence line, hoard cardboard and put it down, get some composted manure and topsoil on here and then plant sunflowers. I started a week ago and had some help from gardening friends who also want to see the garden become beautiful.

 On Thursday May 15 at 12:32pm, I received the email that said I was the proud new owner of plot 33! I wasted no time and got it all amended that night.

 On Saturday morning (May 17) I had planned to spend about five hours at the garden getting stuff done. My new gardening buddy Jasmine took this photo of me before I started planning out all my starts. The weather had finally warmed up and everyone was planting out their tomatoes and peppers, so I filled my new bed with 34 tomato plants - some that I had grown from seed, some that were donated to our garden after Wasatch Community Garden's annual plant sale the weekend before.

 The irrigation line on my new bed was twisted, but it was later corrected. The white bits are just chunks of ice that I emptied from my cooler just as I was leaving the garden.

 There is a string of pea starts along the left side, then a string of peppers and other sundry plants, tomatoes mostly in the middle, then salad greens on the right side.

 The Sunflower Strip is coming along. Emily and Alfred helped cart the manure!

 Ever since getting interested in permaculture, I have wanted to create an herb spiral. I laid down a bunch of logs in a spot where I think the spiral should go, to get a sense of a good location.

Meanwhile,

 I had drawn up a schematic of the kind of trellis I wanted for my garden, since I have peas and tomatoes that will need to climb. Dan helped me with the design, we took some measurements, bought supplies, and set to work making a modular portable trellis that could double as a hoop house in the winter, and that we can take with us one day when we move to a place where I can have my own land.

 Dan took a stop-motion video of us constructing it, but this is the bones of the structure. It still needs a cross bar along the top but as the plants grow, I'll be stringing up jute twine and it will be a green tunnel. I'm pretty excited.

The view of the garden from where I park my truck. I can't wait to see it in full green!