The Year Without a Winter -- 6 February 2010 -- In December of 2008, Spokane got more than five feet of snow. This year I don't think we got five inches. We're usually buried in snow for all of January, and this year the streets are dry and I've been riding my bike in the sun, sometimes barefoot.
The good news is, I might be able to start working on my land a couple months early -- except that I've committed to spend three weeks of March and early April in Seattle, because in other years the roads were not 2wd accessible until mid-April. I'll drive up in a few days and see if I can get in, and if so, I can do some work and hauling.
The bad news is, unless we get an unusually rainy summer, eastern Washington will have the worst drought in the USA, there will be huge fires, and the spring might go dry. It has run through some very dry summers, but has not yet been tested after a dry winter. I'll have to get some food grade 50 gallon barrels and spend a day filling them.
Perennial Root Vegetables -- 22 January 2010 -- When I was in Portland, I was invited to an exotic perennial root vegetable tasting, including scorzonera, skirret, oca, jerusalem artichoke, dahlia, yacon, daylily, mashua, and wapato. To me, the wapato tasted like dirty socks, but I loved the raw mashua, because of its spiciness, and the yacon, which is sweet and crunchy like an apple. Neither of those grow in my climate, but my other two favorites do: Jerusalem artichokes, aka sunchokes, are not great, but good enough that everyone should grow them because they're so easy and productive. And the big winner was
skirret. The root looks like a bunch of pencil-thin white carrots, and tastes like a carrot but sweeter, and when it's cooked it gets soft like a potato. Eric Toensmeier's
Perennial Vegetables says that you should not buy seeds, but find living plants of a variety that does not have a woody center, and one source is
Perennial Pleasures.
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