Windowfarm 3.0

I’ve made several attempts at growing plants in my window.

Without a pump, the original version didn’t work very well. With small gutter containers, the second version worked fine for starting the seedlings, but then I couldn’t keep up with their water requirements, and they all died from dehydration.

Enter Windowfarm Version 3.0: Kratky Hydroponics.

How does this work? It’s a completely passive, set-it-and-forget-it system. No pump. No bubbler. No electrical stuff at all, totally silent, just sits there in the window and takes care of itself. It’s awesome.

I tried this out last summer with a couple of tomato plants I got at the grocery store garden centre (the day they were closing it down and giving plants away for free, no less). I planted several outside in the raised bed planter stairs, and they did all right … but late in the season when frosts were heading in, I uprooted one that had a lot of green tomatoes on it and stuck it in a Kratky bucket on the window sill … and it kept growing! And the tomatoes ripened! It was amazing and cool.

So what’s this Kratky bucket? It’s a big pail (I am using small ones because I’m just starting plants – a tomato or cucumber needs a very big bucket if it’s to live there all season, but I believe you can grow a lettuce to maturity in about 4 litres of nutrient solution). The bucket needs to be dark, so that algae don’t grow in the nutrient, and the plant sits in a net pot (a plastic plant pot with big holes in the base to let the roots come through) that is suspended in a hole in the lid of the bucket. I use a hole saw to drill a circle in the bucket lid, set the net pot inside the hole, then fill the net pot with some hydroton (expanded clay pellets made for growing plants, they look like cocoa puffs) and nestle the plant in the middle. The plant drinks the nutrient solution, which is right up to the level of the plant’s roots to start out with, and as the nutrient level drops, the plant grows roots to reach down to where the water is … and because there is air in the space between the bottom of the net pot and the surface of the nutrient solution, the plant doesn’t drown and the roots stay oxygenated.  There are a lot of great YouTube videos showing different gardening set ups using this system, if you want to learn more.

Now, because I live where the growing season is very short, I need to get my plants started ahead of time. And, if I can manage it, I’d like to grow some smaller things, like lettuce, over the winter. I don’t have a grow light set up (yet), but I do have a very bright, very sunny south facing window, and I have put my plants up there. So far, they aren’t looking terribly leggy or anything and they seem to be doing quite well!

I start the seedlings in rockwool cubes that I found on sale at the hardware store last year. Once they are well established, I tuck the rockwool cube with the little seedling in it into a net pot of hydroton and put that into a bucket of nutrient solution. I usually keep the bucket down where I can check on it for a few days to make sure the plant is doing well and hasn’t gotten dried out or waterlogged, then I put it up on the window ledge to soak up sunshine and grow. That’s all there is to it.

There you see a couple of cucumber plants and four tomatoes, happily soaking up winter sunshine.

I do realize that these plants won’t be able to live in these buckets all their lives – they are going to be too large, and they’d drink up all the nutrient solution in a hurry. Once the weather perks up, I’ll be transplanting them outside. I may leave some plants in straight up hydroponics buckets (probably smaller plants like lettuce, which will be okay in my smaller buckets), but the larger plants will be going into soil. I’ll be setting up some sub-irrigated planters outside, probably some large raised beds made from scrap wood or pallets, then lined with a waterproof liner, and fitted with a reservoir in the base (flexible weeping tile). More on that adventure when we get there … but you can see an example of what I intend to build here. Growing straight in the ground is a losing battle against quackgrass, so I am changing gears and putting my energy into building some planters that will be lower maintenance and still give me great yields.

I’m hopeful, anyway.

So hopeful that I started new seedlings today … some beans, some lettuce, some peppers.

I love growing things.

Deficit

I’ve overdone it. I’m now in deficit mode.

It makes me terrifically angry that doing so damned little by any sort of objective measure can be enough to flatten me like this.

In the past month I have had two eye doctor appointments for myself, one visit to the psychiatrist, one to the counsellor, and one to the dentist. Okay, that is a fair number of appointments, but still.

And I’ve taken The Boy to one appointment for him, and taught for four days.

Now, yes, that’s more than I usually do in a month. But I used to go to work five days a week and do stuff at home in the evenings and on the weekends. Even granting that I was running myself a bit too hard back then, leaving the house once or twice a week for an afternoon or a day ought not to leave a person so wrung out.

But it does. Even with my medication, it does. The drugs help, a lot: I took extra the day I saw the dentist, and I am sleeping at night, though I still don’t fall asleep quite as fast as I’d like, it’s such an improvement over how it was before I’ll not complain. But I look at the dishwasher that needs unloading and I think … wow, that’s … wow. Let me rest for a few minutes then I’ll tackle that.

I’m going to go climb back into my recliner with some yarn and a story and make another shawl. Because I just can’t wring anything else out of me right now, not even tears. And I truly do feel like crying.

I’m just too wrung out to be bothered.

New shawl design: A Dash of the Waves

Like it’s predecessor, A Dash of Colour, this shawl is a one-skein adventure, meant to work well with colourful sock yarn. It requires almost no counting, minimal concentration, and the lace repeat section is actually random, so you don’t even have to worry about things lining up properly or being all perfect. It’s not supposed to be.

A really easy, really quick knit, this is loads of fun and looks really cool when it is finished … in fact, it looks like it must’ve been a lot harder to knit than it actually is.

Wanna make one yourself?

The pattern is available right here:

Boots are finished and on the feet they belong to!

Didn’t take much scrubbing at all to get the final fitting done … and with the top cuffs turned down they look fantastic!

They also fit nicely inside her existing snow boots … she says she’s gonna wear ‘em all day now, which is good, because if they finish drying on her feet, they’ll be the perfect fit.

Yay! I’m so happy with how they turned out.

Creative process

I was part of a conversation today about finding the time to do all the things that interest you. There’s a lot of stuff that I want to do – and I am realizing, especially recently, that I only have so much energy to go around, and I cannot always do all the things I would like to do.

Still, I am able to plan and organize when the need arises: it’s one of the skills from my old life that has remained with me. Fortunately I don’t have to do it very often, because it takes a lot more out of me these days, though I can still pull it off when necessary.

But for all the things that come from deep inside, the creative things … well, I simply leave the working materials easily accessible, and then work on the thing that calls to me that day. This drives my family nuts, because I have baskets and piles of yarn all over the house, and they cannot understand why I need them all out. I have multiple projects on the go, and they are scattered everywhere, waiting to be picked up. I feel anxious if it’s all put away, I need it out where I can just run my hands over the skeins, and think about what that yarn might want to be. To have the things that are intriguing me right where I can see them, even if they sit there for several weeks before I pick them up.

Sometimes, I go weeks without spinning. But if I’m in the midst of designing a shawl, or just in a knitting mood, or a weaving one, then that’s what I do.

Every now and then a deadline pops in the picture and I have to hustle and do that thing whether it is the thing I feel like doing or not. But really, my life is better when I simply do the thing that calls to me the loudest. Yes, many things call to me to try them. I let them simmer in the back of my mind while I do the other thing that is currently occupying the front of my brain … and then all of a sudden, at one moment, the thing that was simmering will come right up to the boil and I HAVE TO GO DO THAT RIGHT NOW!

So I drop whatever I was doing, and do the new thing. And when it releases me, then I go to whatever calls me next. It truly does feel like being captured by an idea, by a project … my mind is snared by something, and I cannot rest easy until I let the work find its way out into the world through my hands.

It is very unplanned. Very much the exact opposite of the way I am accustomed to living: I am a very skilled planner, organizer, project coordinator - it’s just one of my gifts.

It is also a skill that is completely irrelevant to my creative life. :) Because that is … soul work. It comes from somewhere deep inside, where there is no time, no calendar, no schedule. Just … just that powerful life force, demanding to be expressed, first in one way, then in another.

It seems to work best when unforced. I think by letting one thing sit, even for months on end, you allow the creative energies for that pursuit to simmer, letting the flavours blend, letting the energy build. Then when you finally realize that it is ready to burst out into the world, you simply cannot contain it … and it rushes out of your hands, all on it’s own, with all that pent up energy and strength and time behind it, and it comes to life.

Which is the whole idea, right?

That’s how it works for me, anyway.

I would love to hear what it’s like for you.

Nineteen

My daughter Jessica would’ve been 19 today.

Mostly, now, it is not so hard to remember. Mostly, now, it just … is.

She was little, and broken, and the angels took her to heaven not long after she arrived. We got to say hello and goodbye. She taught me a lot about how precious time is. She changed my life in many ways, and I am grateful.

I do often wonder what she would’ve been like if she’d been well and able to stay with us. I figure she would’ve probably been more of a rough-and-tumble sorta girl than a princess (because really, the likelihood of any girl of mine growing up to think herself a princess is vanishingly small). I suspect she’d have liked animals and probably been nuts about horses, like I was when I was little. Since we live out in the country now, maybe horses could’ve really happened for her, too, and not just been a dream.

And then I think of a young woman I know from our community, who is almost exactly the age Jessica would be now. This girl loves horses, and she rides beautifully … and she has a wonderful, open heart and a genuine smile. She’s got the same dark colouring as Jessica, too … and so when I wonder what my little girl would’ve been like, I think … you know, she’d probably have been like this. And that makes me happy.

Yup, it does. Seeing such brightness helps to lighten my sadder memories. With such wonder and beauty in the world, it’s easier to find hope and healing.

Week 1: Med Report

It’s been a week now of taking Prazosin to help with the PTSD symptoms. I’m up to 3 mg at bedtime: I can tell that it wears off by midafternoon. I don’t want to raise the dosage any further just yet, but my doctor did mention that sometimes a larger dose is taken at night and smaller doses during the day. I may try adding one mg at lunch and see what happens. I can tell when it wears off because the chest pain and what I can only describe as a ‘wound up sensation’ starts to come back … a sensation I wasn’t even aware of until the medication took it away from me and kept it gone long enough that I could recognize the inner stillness as something new, and strange, and wonderful.

I sleep. Yes, I actually sleep. I go to sleep far, far more easily than before – in what I suspect is the time frame it takes healthy people to fall asleep, usually half an hour or less, though occasionally a little longer. Mostly if I’m reading a good book and don’t want to put it down.

When I am asleep, I am deeply asleep. The Jawbone Up band tells me that I’m not rolling around as much, that I’m lying still for an hour or two at a stretch, then moving a bit for twenty or thirty minutes, then back under – which means I have made it into deeper sleep and am getting better rest. I can tell, too. I wake up feeling actually rested, not just like I’ve been lying down for a long time.

I am dreaming: I am having dreams that are strange, sometimes downright weird, sometimes a little disturbing, but not frightening or waking me in a panic. Mostly I wake up and go “hmm, that was interesting, wonder what that was about?” And often, the dreams fade within an hour or so of waking.

I am dizzy if I wake in the night: I don’t usually (which is new, I have been up at least once every night for the last several years), but if I am woken suddenly (by the dog coughing something up, for example), I can’t just bolt out of bed or I’ll be woozy and probably fall over. If I had a small child to look after in the night, this would be an issue, but since generally speaking I am free to just sleep right through, and all the other people in this house, including the children, are big enough to take care of themselves in the night, it’s not a problem.

I am not hungry. My appetite is most definitely suppressed. I can eat when there’s food in front of me, I do recognize when I am hungry, and I have reminders (including an alarm on the Up band to tell me it’s lunch time) that I need to eat something, but I’m not feeling very hungry. It makes figuring out what to cook a bit of a challenge, since I’m not sufficiently interested in food for it to seem exciting, but as long as it’s fairly easy to prepare, I’ll eat. The blender has been a big help in that regard, a smoothie is quick and easy and good for me.

I am … tired? lethargic? resting? I am not sure how to describe what it’s like for me during the day. I slept for ten hours last night and when I woke this morning the thought that was in my mind was “Wow, I guess I was really tired, I needed that.” I don’t wake up feeling like I have been in bed too long and am not rested … I wake up feeling well rested, but then through the day I still do not feel energetic. So I’m rested, but not replenished.

Getting things done is a lot more work right now. This could be because I’ve gone hard for the last two weeks and I truly just need some time to recover – I have no idea what recovery from a ‘busy couple of weeks’ is supposed to look or feel like. I haven’t done a very good job of that for so long, so I’ve no proper benchmark. I spend a lot of time reading. I have knit a little, but I’m feeling a bit too tired to feel much like knitting – which tells you something interesting right there.

I feel … I feel like you do when you are just getting over a serious illness, when you no longer cough all the time or feel that deadly aching exhaustion, but you still need a lot of time to sit and do nothing, to move at a nice slow pace, to stay in your jammies and not have to do too much.

Recovering from a serious illness. Hmmm. That might just be telling me something interesting, right there.

Hmmm.