Far Reaches Farm

We are entering the zombie phase of flower show preparation where the day after day of bare-rooting, bagging and label-making until 10 or 11 at night is starting to catch up with us.  Our friends are starting to take pity on us and are bringing us food and volunteering to help work.  The immortal Stephanie works the 6:30pm until we fade out shift and Beverley is here right now helping Sue bag by cutting and folding labels and stapling them on to bags.  This was the year that I was finally going to help in the bagging operation by getting all my label descriptions done early and printed out.  This was the year where this show prep was actually going to done at a normal pace and be kinda pleasant.

It was no shock at all to Sue when she discovered that my promises during the year once again did not materialize.  It is always easier to find work outdoors or in the greenhouse with real live plants than to sit in front of the computer and write about plants.  And Sue is such an amazing bagger and has done it for so many years now that I am hesitant to intrude upon her domain and I certainly don't want the quality of the bagging to suffer by my being involved.  (At this point I am mentally ducking a bagged plant being hurled at me)  So even though it might appear that I am a bit negligent or not holding up my end, it is really out of concern for maintaining the highest possible quality that I have distanced myself from the process.

Truth be told, it is that we have an unprecendented number of new offerings this year - over 100! - that necessitate new label descriptions and photos.  That quantity totally taxes the creative juices and required a trip to see Joe at the Wine Seller downtown to see what he thought would be nice pairings with Crocosmia 'His Majesty' or Trillium albidum or Ranunculus aconitifolius 'Flore Pleno'.  We did bring home a nice Cabernet Sauvignon which went beautifully with the Chocolate Cosmos.

It takes an insane amount of time to dig or unpot or divide and then bare-root thousands of plants but we just can't bring ourselves to buy everything in from Holland a few weeks before the Show.  It just doesn't feel like we are really a nursery doing that.  We are hung up on growing most of what we offer ourselves so we can control the quality and set ourselves apart with a much larger diversity. The main comment we hear from customers is "It is so nice not to see the same plants that you see in every other nursery".  True enough. 

Gardening and loving plants is such an affirming and energizing pursuit.  (and when comes to acquiring those new plants, it is a pursuit let me tell you!)  We have a very short period here of minimal plant activity which luckily coincides with short days and bad weather where our activity is fairly minimal as well.  It is January 14 and we have hit the tipping point for spring.  Half a dozen different Galanthus in flower, Hepatica are threatening to bloom. several forms of Narcissus romieuxii, Scoliopus bigelovii, Arum creticum, and seeds are sprouting! 

Rhododendron moupinense is in full flower in the shade garden with luscious pink and white apple blossom flowers.  We didn't actually realize it was in bloom until Elizabeth, one of our volunteers, asked "Which rhody is that in bloom in the shade garden?"  The fact that we missed this ourselves indicates the monomaniacal focus which prepping for the NWFGS is requiring of us.  It's all good.  Off to walk the dogs on the last bit of beach before the tides are no longer favorable.  We hear it has been raining everywhere but here thanks to the rainshadow.  Lucky us!

Tuesday December 8th and its 4 am and 19 degrees.  Heaters in the greenhouses all working.  Back to bed.  It is a 2 dog night and luckily we have two warm and snuggly Mexican dogs.

Thursday night at 8pm.  Enough cold already!  Last night was the coldest yet at 16 and tonight should be a balmy 20 or so.  Tired of checking the heaters.  Eric Clapton runs through my head - "I don't like, I don't like I don't like - propane".  Actually I love it as it is saving the family bacon.  Looking at our formerly beautiful Melianthus major in the garden, we are thinking of naming it 'Limp Noodle'.  It will regrow from the base - sure it will.

December 22 and everything is thawed out and we can assess what did well and what didn't.  Very few surprises.  Our "panic planting" outside our shade garden 2 days before the Jeffrerson Land Trust party here in August showed the most damage which reinforces the credo of not fertilizing late in the growing season.  It was the manure mulch that did it and plants desperate to get out of their pots and the exuberant soft growth they carried into winter.  The ironclad Grevillea victoriae is dead.  Buddleja coriacea is toast.  Not really a bad toll considering all the other goodies in the same beds which came through fine and we do have backups to replant.

The worst thing about the postfreeze inspection is finding those plants you forgot to bring in the greenhouse or at least cover.  Every year there is always a key plant, a treasured item of slow production and high value that turns to mush and this year is no exception.  Why we didn't bring in the 7 flats of 4" Trillium kurabayashi seedlings is a mystery for the ages.  Beautiful little 3 year olds.  They would have just about paid for a new greenhouse that would have saved them.  The only good thing about such losses is it usually spurs us on to taking action that ensures this won't happen again.  At least with that particular genus.  So no more Trillium seedlings in pots as we visualize in-ground Trillium growing beds.  One of the new projects for 2010  We're not giving up on the idea of a new greenhouse either as we want to avoid whatever the Trillium disaster of next winter might be.  This really is farming.

Just a quick note to say that we are healthy again.  See prior blog entry a time or two ago.  After my ecstatic "I'm back!" optimism following our grueling med course to rid ourselves of our unwanted bugs we picked up plant hunting, we faced a long slide down but we have been steadily regaining strength and subsequent tests have came back negative.  Actually getting better each week.  Hiked up to Silver Lake in the Olympics and popped up to the ridge above and nearly scampered among the rock outcrops looking at alpines.  This was an impossibility the last couple of years.  I was out picking our blueberries with Sue last week and she reminded me that I couldn't even do that last summer.  Wow.  I really think I am back for good this time.  Time to start planning that next collecting trip..........

I know I've been delinquent on the blog but it is spring and are we ever busy!  The dire economic news has translated to very busy springs for everyone in the nursery business.  Stay home and garden, feather the nest.  We are thrilled as our sales are up quite a bit from last year and we continue to get new folks in from far away despite the Hood Canal Bridge being closed.  Last weekend we had folks from Federal Way, Vancouver, Olympia, Seattle and Bellingham come to the nursery despite our comparative enforced isolation.  Where there is a rare plant, there is a way, I guess.  We really thought May would be a time of perhaps a more leisurely pace and we could get the new shade garden finished and get cracking on the new bog garden.  We've made good progress on the shade garden but it has been with stolen moments.  One of the exciting things that happened last week was our friend and sculptor David Eisenhour installed 5 of his pieces in our shade gardens.  These are stainless steel and bronze magnified representations of seeds which David has examined under magnification.  They are a great addition and melding to the elements in the garden and we are thrilled to be able to offer his pieces in an outdoor garden gallery setting.  And the shade garden is looking so good right now - so much repressed anxiety being cast aside after this dire winter and the sheer joy at finding that you are still alive is translating into some fairly frightening growth and great flowers.  We are definitely going to have the shade garden done next month and maybe a good start on the bog garden as well.  Don't you just love listening to Obama speak?  Brings the pleasure of the English language back to the political scene.  I don't miss the incomplete sentences and truncated or made-up words of the past 8 years at all.

Another reason I haven't been writing is that one of my horticultural keystones has passed away.  I had no idea how important Steve Doonan of Grand Ridge Nursery fame was to me until I realized he was dying from cancer.  Steve was my longest running plant influence who inspired me to wide-eyed amazement way back in high school when he would lecture at rock garden study weekends with his cousin Phil and Phil's wife Kitty.  Now there are plant people!  Steve was bursting with life and enthusiasm and could instill an unhealthy lust in a person for the most obscure plant just through his love and mastery of growing that impossible alpine.  He always seemed immortal and there was no hurry to glean those nuggets of hard-won knowledge from him as he was always going to be there.  I am so diminished by his absence.  The plants that seemed to dance when he was around now are wearily plodding.  I expect that will change but god how I miss him.  I have his last phone message on our office phone machine and it always causes in me a surge of acute surprised hope tempered quickly by reality.  They broke the mold with that boy. that's for sure.

This has been the most difficult year in terms of health for us.  We put on a game front during sales day and trudged through the critical work as well as we could but it was all we could do.  I spent 2-3 days each week from spring into fall either in bed or unable to function.  The other days I was perhaps 30-40%.  Sue was not much better but she is made of sterner stuff.

So what was going on?  Sue had chronic headaches, intense fatigue, memory loss, foggy thinking and general malaise and I had the same less the headaches but with edema around my eyes.  Got ringworm which became strep-infected signaling a compromised immune system.  There were other lesser symptoms but these were the biggies.  Last year in 2007 I had little energy or clarity of thought.  Hiking in the Olympics was a trial rather than a joy.  This year I couldn't even walk the dogs let alone hike.  Various doctors suggested anti-depressants, vitamins, supplements, test for thyroid, iron deficiency, cancer, etc.  No suggestion seemed right and no one addressed the cumulative symptoms as a whole and were quite dismissive of particular symptoms.  "People get allergies"  "You're not so young anymore"  "Stress does funny things"  "Nothing seems wrong - take a vacation"

Meanwhile I'm getting worse and Sue is catching up to me as well.  I start researching obscure cancers, environmental toxins, mercury and lead poisoning, early Alzheimers anything I can think of but nothing fits.  Maybe I am just really old before my time and this is going to be the way of it.  Which didn't help the crushing apathy one bit. 

Finally in August a friend came over to show her mom our shade garden.  We hadn't seen her for probably a year as we had little energy for optional socializing.  She hopped out of the van and it wasn't "Hi - so good to see you" but it was "I've got to talk to you about parasites - we found out we have them and if we do, then you have to have a bunch of the them the places you have been".  She and her husband had been so ill that they were barely able to function the past year.  Her husband was unable to work.  I asked her what the symptoms were and it was spot on with what we were going through. 

They had gone through the same laborious and expensive and fruitless attempts at diagnosis that we had plus some.  In desperation, she went to a acupuncturist in Seattle and told him her symptoms and he said "You have parasites.  I travel a lot in Asia and have had them 9 times."  He then said that finding help for this is very difficult and referred to her to a doctor in New York City who is known for his work in this field.  They went and saw him and he found a protozoan and a bad bacteria.  They got treated, took months to start gaining strength back and are finally starting to feel like themselves again.

So I went to a naturopath they recommended who does testing as we couldn't make trips to NYC and sure enough the results came back positive for Blastocystis hominis.  This is a little protozoan-like thing with several life stages including some cyst stages where it is pretty much bomb-proof.  It is the most common parasite and found literally all over the world including here.  It is transmitted via poor hygiene through food or water most often.  Looking back on symptoms and exposure, our plant hunting trip to India in 2003 seems most likely.  With this information in hand, there was still no acknowledgement that this is even a problem from the medical community in this country.  So we go online.

We find a site parasitetesting.com which is is in Arizona and is a lab dedicated to parasite testing.  Lots of good information on effects and symptoms.  We learn that this thing has been found in joint synovial fluid and linked to infectious arthritis.  That it can move from your gut to your liver and cause serious damage.  That its metabolic byproducts are toxic and can cause brain damage.  All good stuff.  The chief parasitologist at the lab encourages a herbal treatment as conventional weaponery is very hard on your system.  This dovetailed with our philosophy so we embarked on a 75 day diet and herbal treatment regimen.  Basically a Mediterranean type diet eliminating sugars and minimizing carbs which the blastocystis thrives on.  The herbal therapy was very expensive - we were close to a thousand bucks when I got a bowel obstruction from the treatment.  Talk about pain.  Couldn't eat more than a thimblefull without excruciating pain and gastric distress.  So pretty much just quit eating which worked.  This went on for a week during which time we went to Bellingham and gave a lecture to the Whatcom Horticultural Society.  They always host us to a nice dinner prior but needless to say we declined.  Finally I quit the herbs and slowly got better.  Blasto still going strong.

Back to the web and found a website in Australia www.badbugs.org run by this woman who suffered for years from blasto and finally was cured through the efforts of a clinic in Sydney.  She started this site to help prevent others from years of fruitless treatment and spending tons of money.  Lots of good info on this site linking blasto to depression, food allergies, chronic fatigue syndrome, colitis and irritable bowel syndrome among others.  Lots of testimonials and personal history from around the world which all corresponded with our experiences.

So we sent a small donation and she gave us the name of the drug cocktail the clinic in Sydney came up with and a link to an online Mexican pharmacy where we could get the drugs as two of the four are not available in this country and one of the ones that is available would cost us at least 1500 bucks.  She also gave us some personal diaries of a couple of folks who went through the treatment and their experiences with the side effects as well as some good info on rebuilding our beneficial flora after we killed everything off.

We ordered 4 different drugs and just finished 17 days ago.  It was gawd-awful but I am already feeling better and have a clearer head than I have in at least a couple years.  Sarah came to work last week and saw me on the tractor and said to Sue "What's with him?"  She has only been here since March and has rarely seen me do anything resembling much work.

I'm posting this personal info because I am convinced that this type of thing is an unrecognized epeidemic in this country.  I presented as a classic antidepressant candidate.  Sure I was depressed but it was because the life was being sucked out of me.  Everyone knows someone with irritable bowel, depression or chronic fatigue and who have not been told a definite cause.  There is a fellow in the Willamette Valley trying to get the Oregon Legislature to classify Blastocystis as a reportable disease as he had it, checked around and found 35 cases in the Valley in fairly short order.  It is widespread in this country and more so in third world countries and with all the travel and access to remote areas, it makes sense. 

So if you are not feeling quite right and are not getting the answers, welcome to the exciting world of parasites.  There are a lot of them, especially if you like swimming in fresh water outside the temperate zone.  But it is fixable with some difficulty and discomfort and I AM BACK, BABY!!!!!

We were hugely pleased to have Sean and Nathan from Cistus follow us home from the Fronderosa Frolic in Gold Bar Sunday and spend the night. They haven't been out to the nursery before so it was great fun poring over all the little obscure goodies that only a mother and a plant nerd could love and I have to say they didn't miss much. I also have to say that we always like it when folks show up at the nursery in a big U-Haul truck - it is so much more promising than when they ride in on bicycles.

Folks like those two are barometers for us on how we are doing growing and offering interesting and admittedly at times, esoteric flora. "Are they going to see anything new? And are they going to find it all interesting? Is there going to be anything we can send home with them or will it just be a pity plant?" These are thoughts I can't banish but they fairly quickly drove them away as they started making piles here and there. What joy to find someone other than Steve Hootman enthused about a Tupistra sp. from the Cangshan and pausing before the different Ephedra species. They went home with multiple dozens and were happily chumming plants of theirs at us from the back of the truck.

So we're doing ok it seems although I have to admit Sean couldn't keep his eyes off of our bare expanses of soil in our new unplanted display beds.  It has been awhile since he has had that luxury at Cistus.

Sue and I were devastated last week to learn of Peter Wharton dying from cancer.  Peter curated the Asian Garden at UBC and in the words of our friend Ted in Vancouver, he was the Asian Garden.  We had the opportunity (which now seems like an amazing gift) in March to spend time with him in the garden as we were donating some of our Asian collections which he had requested.  This was before he had any inkling of illness.  We walked all through the garden with him and were awash in his enthusiasm for the new plants that were developing in character as well as the grand new plans for the garden.  Peter has been there forever and for a garden to truly develop it is so key to have a consistent vision and direction and Peter's tenure there provided just that.  He was one of our key figures in our horticultural world and we will miss him sorely.

At the other emotional extreme, we were very elated to have one of our Cardiocrinum giganteum ssp. yunnanense turn out to be a very good pink.  We've a half dozen blooming in the shade garden and the pink one is  simply stunning.  To our knowledge, this is at least a very rare occurance if not a unique one.  One of Sue's first comments as we were talking about who we should immediately call about this was "Peter would have liked to have seen this."  

Peter and our pink Cardiocrinum will always be linked in our minds and I can't think of a better association. 

Please don't get me started.    We have just taken leave of our senses.  We have allowed the feeding frenzy of the media and pundits and the b.s. of bloggers ( I know I am blogging) to drive and influence the election process.  We have made the whole thing into a Superbowl of sorts with all the attendant hype and corporate influence and the insane need to be bigger-brighter-faster-louder-longer each time.  We prey, with nothing short of some wierd lascivious intent, on every nuance and dropped vowel a road-weary candidate utters.  This is not an electoral process.  Not when it is fueled by such an ungodly amount of money that would be well spent improving education or health care.  Our candidates are so well versed in navigating the middle that it doesn't matter who we elect.  I suspect they will be remarkably similar.  Gone are the days when we could actually judge a man or woman by the content of their speech.  There is no way in hell that any candidate is going to give you a straight answer.  If they do, why their race is over.  I, for one, would dearly like to know where any of these folks truly stand and what they truly believe in and what they truly want to accomplish.  It all makes me ill.  It makes me jealous of Canada for Pete's sake.  Don't they have a very civilized brief election period?  What do we learn in two years that we can't learn in 6 weeks about a candidate?  And just how in the hell can they do their jobs when they are campaigning for half their term and positioning themselves to run for the other half?  Election Reform.  Please. 

Sue and I just gave a talk to our beloved town on our plant hunting travails and triumphs this last Saturday as part of the Jefferson County Master Garden Winter Lecture Series.  It was so much fun talking to friends and neighbors about what we do and why we do it.  It was such a relief looking out and seeing friends as well as faces you recognize but don't know but still gaining comfort from the recognition.  Thank you all for being there - we were pretty sleepless over this but you made it so easy.

The theme of the series is sustainability and what better than to feature us as local growers with recycle-reuse-and-exhaust every organic option first as a speakers.  Ignorance is truly bliss and we as pro nursery people know way too much.  We know what the conventional production nursery does in terms of prophylactic pesticide applications and it is appalling.  We try to grow healthy plants which largely create their own resistance as we don't do the pesticide thing.  Except for slugs and then minimal slugbait.   We have had to modify our techniques here to accomdate the local biota.  We can't drag flats across the floor but have to lift them straight up as there is a good chance there is a newt underneath hanging out for the winter.  The greenhouses are alive with frogs and the LBJ's (Little Brown Jobs), those homogenous wee birds in the finch-wren-sparrow complex, are simply annoying scratching our hazelnut shell container mulch all over hell and gone in search of stray nutmeats.

Our lecture topic of Plant Hunting in Asia felt right too excepting the carbon downside of getting there.  We know we have saved specific populations of a particular plant from extinction by collecting the seed, keeping careful documentation and growing it on here.  Someday we might be able to offer these plants back to their native country and that will be the best validation of what we do. 

Currently we do distribute plants from our collections to several botanical gardens and arboreta.  This is important to get the plants disseminated as there is nothing worse than having the only one of something and then losing it.  If you have that affliction, get over it.  Give a piece to your best friend at least because life and nature is fickle and it is great to get a new start of a prized plant back after you have lost it.  We are keepers of the flame for a surpising number of gardeners and when we start doing the tally nothing pleases us more than to give back to those who shared with us because it works both ways.  We have gotten Dactylorhiza back from Lee and Carlina back from Linda for example.  Plant people are the best.  With the exception of a few who have perverted plants to their own gain, I believe the world would be a far kinder and gentler and sensible place if it were run by plantpeople.  Except for those of you who keep trying to be Tropicalissimo in a temperate zone.  I mean, the economy can only stand a national party for so long before collapsing.  But maybe Neil is right.  It probably is better to burn out than fade away.  Are your ears burning Brian?