(Long time no post, I’m sorry! But I went to a hearing in Janesville Monday night that I want to give a heads-up about, late as it is, if anyone still reads this:)

A public hearing in Janesville, Wisconsin Monday evening allowed the community to comment on the proposed Wisconsin Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (WPDES) permit being finalized by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) for Rock Prairie Dairy LLC in Bradford Township in Rock County.

Rock Prairie Dairy LLC is owned by Todd Tuls, who, with two similarly sized CAFOs in Nebraska, is recognized as Nebraska’s biggest dairy farmer.

Mr. Tuls will send his son TJ, a college freshman, to Wisconsin to run the new facility.

The proposed dairy, a confined animal feedlot operation (CAFO) and “factory farm” in every sense of the term, would milk 4,600 cows three times a day and house a total of 5,200 (including dry cows and heifers), according to a company handout available at the hearing and confirmed by a DNR fact sheet.

The WPDES permit would be issued for the maximum allowable period of five years, expiring March 31, 2016.

The proposed site of the operation is in the watershed of Turtle and Blackhawk Creeks, two tributaries of the Lower Rock River. Construction has already begun, based on other permits already approved by the DNR and other agencies.

According to DNR permit drafter Mark Cain, there would be zero discharge from production. Liquid manure would be strained out of the sand bedding and solid manure from six freestall barns, collected in four manure storage facilities and sent via a dragline hose to fields where it would be injected straight into the soil.

This reflects a change in the permit. An initial draft proposed “center pivot nutrient applications,” or spray irrigation with liquid manure. After a February letter from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services expressed concern over “Public Health setbacks for manure spray irrigation,” Tuls removed the center pivots from the application, but Cain says that they’re not ruled out permanently and could be added at a later date after further review and permit modification.

The liquid manure storage facilities, or lagoons, one of which is already built, would be lined and covered with high-density polyethylene (HDPE), with bio-filtered vents.  One is lined with cement.  The three remaining would be lined with HDPE, and leak detection units would be installed under the liner. The capacity of all four is enough for a projected 397-days of manure.

Solid manure would be stored (with enough storage for a year of production) and then spread over more than 5,200 acres of leased farmland in the area as “nutrient management,” replacing a portion of the synthetic fertilizer currently used on those lands.

The draft permit specifies that applications of solid manure “will not occur within 100 feet of a private well or other direct conduits to groundwater or within 1,000 feet of a municipal well.”

Cain said that Rock Prairie Dairy’s provisions are more protective than other Wisconsin CAFOs but admitted that compliance would be self-monitored and -reported by the factory farm, submitted annually to the DNR.

All 5,200 cows would be housed at all times and fed a mix of conventional feed and sweet corn silage made from the waste from Seneca Cannery in Janesville. Excess sweet corn silage could also be applied to land in the area under a provision of the permit.

Members of the audience distributed pamphlets with pictures of a release of 320,000 gallons of purple leachate coming off of 26,000 tons of silage at Traditions Dairy, a mega-dairy near Nora, IL in late September and early October, 2010. This dairy was also designed to be zero-discharge, and dumped this leachate on 5 acres, causing a tributary of the Apple River to turn purple within 24 hours. Samples of the leachate-contaminated creekwater showed a Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) of 400, twice the level of raw sewage.

Tradition Dairy Leachate

Local resident Dr. Margaret Palera, in an impassioned speech in opposition to the permit proposal, showed maps of the proposed site and pointed out that it’s located directly over a large recharge aquifer in the Turtle Creek Watershed.  Turtle Creek Watershed has been “a priority watershed project under the Wisconsin Nonpoint Source Water Pollution Abatement Program,” but a post-project evaluation report found that “there was no discernible watershed-wide reduction in nonpoint source (runoff) pollutant loads” and so it is still an area of concern, according to a 2001 “Lower Rock River Water Quality Management Plan” published by the Walworth County Land Use & Resource Mangement Department.

Dr. Palera suggested 350-foot setbacks between manure applications and direct conduits to groundwater given the volume of manure, a three-year rather than a five-year permit and a prohibition on spray irrigation of liquid manure.

Miriam Ostrov, a staff attorney at Midwest Environmental Advocates who has been working on behalf of community members like Tony and Dela Ends of Scotch Hill Farm in Brodhead, a family farm with a small herd of dairy goats, pointed out remaining deficiencies in the permit application. For example, she said, “the draft permit fails to require groundwater monitoring of land application fields” for standard contaminants like “nitrate, fecal coloform and chlorides.”

Julie Waite, who with her husband Jeff and three children has a small family farm in southcentral Wisconsin, pointed out that the land leased for the land application of solid manure is largely tiled, so that manure runoff could leach through into groundwater. She pointed out that there are 150 pathogens in manure. A 2003 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report entitled “National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System Permit Regulation and Effluent Limitation Guidelines and Standards for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)” confirms that ”more than 150 pathogens found in livestock manure are associated with risks to humans.”

Comments on the proposed permit can be sent to:

Mark Cain, Permit Drafter
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources - South Central Region
3911 Fish Hatchery Rd.
Fitchburg, WI 53711

The comment period ends Tuesday, May 17, 2011.

But, loosely, here goes:

On July 1st, we cleaned and moved the chicken coop and run.  Very exciting, I know, but it needed it.

Rosie, Queen of the Roost

Mae West

Karma (and Cordelia behind her)

On July 2nd, I transplanted some brassicas (mostly brussels sprouts, if I remember right) and seeded collards, kale, scallions, cucumbers, cauliflower, broccoli, beets, carrots and turnips (don’t ask me now where I seeded those last three things because I have no idea…).  I had made a note to remind myself to watch for squash vine borers, especially since I’d taken the row cover off the kabocha, delicata and costata romanesca squash plants when they’d started to blossom and needed to be accessible to pollinators.  When I checked that day, it was already too late.  I tried to cut them out of the stems (found several little wigglies in there behind their obvious entry points) and then wrapped the stems with aluminum foil and also laid some of the foil down as a mulch around the base of the stems.  The delicata and costata romanesca plants weathered this OK, but within a few weeks the precious kabocha (planted for the second year running from seeds I originally saved from a beautiful squash bought from some farmer friends) plants had all withered and perished.  We got so many lovely kabochas last year, and several kept through the entire winter to be cooked and eaten in February and March, not to mention the frozen puree which we even now haven’t quite finished, and the incredible kabocha squash pie with ginger butterscotch sauce I made for Thanksgiving, so this is a real heartbreaker.  Next year: war on vine borers.

On July 3rd, I made sorbet out of some blueberries from work and harvested lemon thyme and Thai basil.  The lemon thyme, believe it or not, was for the sorbet, and it was delicious.

Lemon Thyme

Thai Basil

Gardens of Goodness Blueberries

Firming Up

Blueberry-LemonThyme Sorbet

That morning, we came home from the DCFM bearing plants:

'Glut' or 'Glow' Astilbe

Heuchera & ???

'Chandler' Blueberry

It took me a while to get these transplanted– especially the blueberry, which I potted up, so I had to try to figure out how to make its growing medium acidic enough– so in the meantime, I seeded some things:

Bean Pot

I also discovered that the dratted squirrels had been active (story of the month of July):

Dratted Squirrels

Things were looking pretty good otherwise.  I had thought we wouldn’t have any cucumbers this year because they germinated so poorly and then transplanted so dismally, but by early July, we had five plants growing nicely, by hook or by crook, so I caged them up.

Caged Cucumbers

The whole raised bed was doing alright, although the kale still looked stunted after their harrowing experience with aphids upon transplant.

Collards, Kale, Cucumbers & Parsnips

The next raised bed was doing well, too, getting a little more jungle-y every day.  Matt rebuilt the tomato trellis from last year in a new orientation for this bed, so the vines wouldn’t shade too many other things, and I twined the little guys up on strings.

Carrots, Scallions, Lemon Thyme, Beets, Cherry Tomatoes & Basil

By that point, I was pretty sure that the tall, wispy volunteer there on the left of the forefront was a cosmos, ‘tho for sure I didn’t put it there.

Matt's Wild Cherry Tomatoes & Basil

When Matt attached the trellis frame in the new orientation, he also attached a cross-piece at the bottom so that I can anchor the string to that rather than tying it to stakes at the base of the plants, since those just kept popping out all last season.

The Tomato Frame

I love it when Matt builds me things…

Right behind the tomato frame is the new Vitex agnus-castus plant I bought this year at Four Elements’ open house in Freedom, WI in June.

Vitex agnus-castus

The many passionflowers whose pots I scattered all around the garden were growing admirably and beginning to embrace their stakes.

Passionflower

The salad spiral was looking a little hairy.

Salad Spiral

And three kinds of bitter Italian chicory might perhaps be too many…

On the other side of the garden in the herb bed, the feverfew was beginning to bloom.

Flowering Feverfew

I’d been eating about a leaf a day as I passed this plant, but more recently I’ve forgotten, and lo and behold, the headaches have returned (‘tho still not too bad or too frequently).

On July 4th, I focused more on El Jardin del Elefantes.

Elef 7/4/10

Elef 7/4/10

It was looking so neat in those days…  Now it’s just a tangled jungle.

Some of the garlic and potatoes were already ready to harvest (which I promptly did) on July 9th.  At home, Matt and his dad had finished building a new, bigger and better run for the ladies, with multiple doors and even a fancy, almost Frank Lloyd Wright-esque perch that his dad built for their roosting pleasure, and we installed it, with some frustration for minor details, but with great pleasure in the final result (‘tho not as great as the ladies’).

Chickens 7/9/10

The oats, shallots and garlics I was drying in the “barn” were looking rustically delicious.

Drying Oats, Shallots & Garlic

Meanwhile, the milky oat tops I’d harvested and dried a couple of weeks previously were ready to be threshed and made into tea.

Dried Milky Oat Tops

The first cherry tomatoes were just about ready.

First Cherry Tomatoes

In the weeks following, I continued to monitor the garden and harvest whatever was ready, but I didn’t keep very good notes at all.

On July 18th, I transplanted flowers, cucumbers, collards and the blueberry bush, which had just about finished fruiting (and oh, were they good).  I don’t think I got the soil mix right and can’t make sense of my pH tester, so I’m still working on that.  I also made an incredible sorbet from perfect Door County Bing cherries.

Door County Bing Cherries

Cherry Sorbet

On July 22nd, I harvested the biggest Yellow Borettana and Yellow of Parma onions and the remaining garlic and shallots and a bag of potatoes, mostly the All-Blues.  I hung the onions, garlic and shallots up in the garage to dry (except what I took inside for us to use right away).

On July 29th, I seeded fall peas, but I’m not sure they’re going to work, because they’re still not up.  I think the soil may be too warm for them to germinate.

Throughout July, the string holding the cherry tomatoes to the trellis frame kept disappearing.  Matt witnessed squirrels working on it.  We think they’ve been stealing the string for their nests.  So, after three or four re-stringings, and with no string left to continue that fruitless pursuit, Matt took some wire and attached the tops of the remaining bits of string to the frame with that.  We’re hoping the squirrels don’t go for the wire, or regret it if they do.  Dratted squirrels…

But really, the garden grew like crazy in July, with plenty of sun and plenty of rain, and its bounty has been loading down our table.

I started off the month with mulching, first with straw (what I had) and then with cocoa shells (on sale at an Ace in north Madison).  I’m not sure how much I needed to, since we had so much rain during the whole month of June, but well, there it is.  On June 3rd, I seeded brussels sprouts to transplant in mid-July and seeded some more greens in the salad spiral.  I went over to Elef. on June 4th and took some pictures because things were looking so good.

Potatoes, oats, peas, etc.

Beets, Cabbage, Squash, Tomatoes, etc.

You can see that I put row cover over the brassicas (to protect against cabbage moths– would have worked better if I had wider pieces to really come down to the ground on either side) and the cucurbits (to protect against vine borers– now I need to go back and wrap the stems with aluminum foil for the same reason, since I can’t keep them covered while there are flowers being pollinated).  The tomatillos and tomatoes are staked and the oats are getting tall but not heading out yet.

Garlic, Winter squash under cover, etc.

The garlic leaves have yellow tips already but are forming nicely.  I had already cut scapes (earlier that day, actually).  The cabbage is straining underneath its blanket but the buckwheat is still short.

I took another picture of the tomato row after I mulched the first time:

Beebalm, Buckwheat & Tomatoes

I weeded a little on June 6th, but it really wasn’t possible to do much with so much rain coming down all the time.

On June 10th, I harvested the first shell peas (at least that I wrote down– I think there was at least one harvest before that).  There were also lots of nice radishes and the first Genovese basil.  On June 13th, Matt came over to Elef. with me to harvest another load of peas and take pictures.  In the nine days since the last pictures, the potatoes had really shot up:

Potatoes 9 Days Later

The oat experiment was progressing apace, with the beans doing just fine but the corn looking slightly hesitant:

Oats, beans & corn

The peas were still flowering beautifully, promising the bumper crop that we continued to reap:

Pea vine

The tomatillos and tomatoes were growing despite the lack of sunlight.  Here you can see that cocoa bean mulch I replaced the straw with (I put the straw on the garlic instead because it was getting really weedy):

Tomatillo & Tomatoes

The winter squash were flourishing under their straw mulch and row cover:

Winter Squash

The nasturtiums looked beautiful in the rain.  They left me a little birthday present:

Jewelled Nasturtiums

I had panicked a little about the slow growth of the ground cherries I’d pre-germinated and started at home, so I brought home a couple from Blue Moon Community Farm after a day of volunteering there, but then of course mine took of, so now we’ll have plenty of ground cherries:

Ground Cherries

I have to say that the red-brown cocoa bean mulch sets of the young fresh green of things like onions and carrots very nicely…

Onions & Carrots

And the buckwheat was really starting to take off, a little to the chagrin of the now-submerged pepper plants (can you see them?  I can’t see them, although this is the back of the row, where there’s a pepper-free space):

Happy Buckwheat

The Costata Romanesca zucchini were already flowering:

Costata Romanesca

Etc.  (There are more pictures, believe it or not, but you can see them on Flickr).

On June 14th, I seeded some more haricot vert, this time Fin de Bagnol, an heirloom variety from Seed Savers.  Embarrassingly, though, I can’t remember where I seeded them!  It was a rainy day and I was tired, what can I say?

On June 2oth, a flower-planting day, I seeded a few Platinum Blue Flowers (Echinops ritro, I think) at home, realizing as I did so that there were some volunteers of the exact same thing migrating over from the neighbor’s yard right next to where I was seeding.

On June 21st, I transplanted more broccoli and cauliflower at Elef. and seeded greens and more cucumbers at home (struggling to fill the spaces in the bed where the other cukes just weren’t thriving).

And then… the big news!  On Wednesday evening, June 23rd, Laura and Matt and I drove to Waunakee to our friend John’s Equinox Community Farm to pick up four 12 week-old pullets!  Matt and his dad had spent the last several weeks building quite the most perfect little coop I’ve ever seen:

Coop!

Side-View

We took these the next morning.  We’d picked them up after dark while they were a little calmer and just placed the whole cage we brought them home in inside the coop for the first night, since they didn’t seem to want to come out quite yet.  When we got up the next morning, we coaxed them out, opened up the coop door and waited for them to gather courage:

First Emergence

As you can see, the Araucana, whom we’ve since named Mae West for her bossy ways and buxom stature, was first, but the rest followed quickly on her heels to check out the new digs (literally– we’d placed their first run strategically over part of an ant hill to give them an opportunity to root them out):

All 4 Out

We named the Rhode Island Red Rosie, after a good friend:

RIR

We named the Australorp Karma, since Karma named a sow after me after we left:

Karma

And in the middle of this next one is the Dark Cornish that Laura named Cordelia:

Karma, Cordelia & Mae

We’re all pretty well smitten with them, bringing them treats constantly and losing lots of productive hours to sitting (with deck chairs arranged in a semi-circle) and watching their antics.

Well!  Tearing ourselves away for a moment, the potato box Matt built was thriving and growing.  I’ve added new layers of compost several times now and need to add more, but on June 25th it was looking pretty well-balanced:

Ozette Potato Box

Speaking of potatoes, I finally got a close-up of one of those All-Blue Potato flowers at Elef.!

All-Blue Potato Flower

I’d fertilized the corn with fish and seaweed emulsion the week before (and need to do so again now), so the oat-beans-corn experiment was looking better:

Oats-Beans-Corn

I finally took the straining row cover off the cabbage, hoping the interplanted thyme will help against the cabbage moths:

Cabbage & Thyme

Mammoth Red Rock Cabbage

Aren’t they gorgeous?!  The little bee balm plant I put in last year and that came back this Spring suddenly morphed into a gigantic mop of pink:

Pink Beebalm Blossom

Everything was blossoming, including the tomatillo (another monster):

Tomatillo Blossom

The newly-wrapped tomatoes were setting off the flowering buckwheat elegantly:

Spiral-Staked Tomatoes

Remember those D’atil plants I bought?  Well, they’re not thriving as I think they ought (probably all that rain, but maybe I do need some rabbit poop):

D'atil Pepper Plant

Here’s a new one for my garden (planted last fall), Egyptian Walking Onions:

Egyptian Walking Onions

Strangely, it reminds me a little of Klimt’s “Kiss”…

Ellie-Ganesha, sunburnt and peeling ‘tho he might be, is in a prime location to enjoy all the color:

Ellie-Ganesha

All cycles of life, abundant as they may be, come to an end, however, and the peas are dying back:

Pea Vines Dying Back

On June 26th, we went on the Tenney-Lapham neighborhood “Tour des (Chicken) Coops,” but that will have to be a whole ‘nother post, because we saw so many great coops and so many phenomenal gardens that I couldn’t possibly squeeze it down here at the end of this already-very-long post!

(taken the day of planting)

(taken about a month and a half after planting)

Gardens of Goodness Blueberries

+

Lemon

+

Lemon Thyme

?

Today’s Sorbet:

Blueberry-Lemon Thyme Sorbet

Firming Up

Finished

With recipe adapted from here and here.

Blueberry-LemonThyme Sorbet

What should I make tomorrow?

Door County Cherries

Thai Basil

Also coming up (hopefully), a review of the last couple months of gardening, since my last two posts.

Greens and radishes were popping up, and bulbs were starting to bloom everywhere.

April 14th was the new moon, and not planting or transplanting anything in that last week leading up to it (which apparently is not an auspicious time for anything but harvesting, weeding, etc.) was such a struggle that, in fact, I failed.  On April 10th, which I called a compromise day because my solar lunar wall calendar, made locally in Menominee Falls, seemed to think that it was an OK day to plant even though I couldn’t figure out why, I seeded more greens in the coldframe: Rainbow swiss chard and Grumolo Verde and Grumolo Rosso chicory (radicchio-type) that our neighbor brought back from Florence.  Then I gave in a little further and seeded more green cabbage, cauliflower and collards, rapini and Bianco Avorio cardoon (again from our Italian neighbor), fennel, basil and dill inside in flats on the kick-ass lighted shelves.

The new moon came and went on the morning of the 14th, and as soon as I could get out of bed (not having to work that day), I seeded yet more greens in the coldrame: the two kinds of arugula again, a lettuce mix and three kinds of individual lettuce (including a new one from Seed Savers I found recently: Yugoslavian Red), more catalogna puntarelle (another chicory, which our Italian neighbor apparently doesn’t know by that name, maybe because it’s Catalonian, not Florentine?) and more spinach.

I had started to bring the loaded trays of the oldest brassicas, alliums, greens and herbs outside each day to harden off, and the 14th was a beautiful day for green things:

It was so lovely that the poor, shaded tulip in the back of the “back 40″ decided to bloom.

I don’t know what kind it is– apparently one of the tenants here before us planted it– but it’s rather breath-taking and makes me impatient for the fancy tulips I planted in the Fall to bloom.  The bigger hyacinths (Peter Stuyvesant) had been considering blooming and getting a little more confident every day.

And, contrary to lore that says snowdrops should pop up and bloom in February (really?!), we finally got a snowdrop.

All of this blooming and almost-blooming coincided with a day the calendar touted as decent to plant more flowers, so on Friday I seeded Painted daisies, more echinacea and evening primrose and ground plum, Red Marietta marigolds, Variegated nasturtiums, strawflowers, Thumbelina zinnias and Zinnia elegans as well as more broccoli (including Romanesco this time) and cauliflower (they’re sort of like flowers, right?) inside and morning glories and calendula outside.

One of the places I seeded calendula was a new bed I started in front of the house next to Elef., which belongs to the same owner.  In exchange for letting us use his corner lot for our vegetable gardens, he asked us to plant perennials around the existing house next door.  I figured self-seeding annuals probably count.  But the soil around the house is incredibly rocky and hard, so I couldn’t get down very deep.  This is why, when we started our garden there last year, we trucked in load after load of compost, unloaded it in rows and just planted into that without trying to break up the soil underneath (we put cardboard down under the paths and mulched with wood chips, then mulched the rows with straw as soon as we had everything planted).  It worked pretty well for most things, although the monster daikon radishes I grew way too many of could only punch through the soil underneath so far before they started to bounce back up above the compost and stick their ungainly white shoulders out amongst the beans.  We’re planning on doing that for a lot of the beds we create around the house this year, but I figured I could scratch out enough of a bed for calendulas.  It took a while, but I got the seeds in and covered.  We’ll see how they do.

By this weekend, even my tomato seedlings were getting pretty big, let alone all the things I seeded starting in February, and I was dying to get things into the ground.

New Yorker (front) and Rose de Berne (back) tomato seedlings

This whole moon thing can be a real drag when there’s a beautiful weekend but the best day to plant doesn’t come until Monday.  So I tried to keep myself occupied, took a trip to the garden center to buy a strawberry pot, etc.  Finally, Monday morning (today) came, and I jumped out of bed, threw my gardening things together and headed over to Elef. for some planting.  The Ozette potatoes that arrived almost two weeks ago were finally starting to show some tiny itty-bitty little sprouts in the eyes, so I threw those into the last potato trench, covered them up, and planted Bohemian horseradish crowns at the four corners of the potato bed.  Almost all of the peas I planted in March are up, but there were a handful of little gaps, so I popped a few more peas in.  I’d run out of the Green Arrow peas I thought would last forever, so I tried a new variety– Sutton’s Harbinger– along with the Golden Sweet peas I bought another packet of (they really are good in stirfry).  Then I seeded more Hakurei turnips, some Shogoin turnips just for their greens (I learned my lesson on the roots last season), more radishes and– here’s a new one for me– some hulless oats.  I’m probably planting everything too intensively as usual, but I broadcast the oats over two beds where I’m going to sow corn and beans in a few weeks, in hopes that they’ll provide a green mulch without competing too much.  I’m sort of half-hoping to harvest some usable oats at the end of the season (thus the hulless variety), but we’ll see how it goes.  I seeded some more clover on the easement we established last year, and then I went around to the shadiest side of the house next to the garden to see how things are looking over there.

I knew I needed to get home to finish planting things before we headed to campus to help cook dinner of braised brisket, mashed potatoes with roasted garlic, mushrooms and spinach for 75, but I’d told the ladies we share the garden with that I’d see if the soil is any easier to dig on that side of the house, and I thought it might be time to dig and divide the hostas and lilies.  Next thing I knew, I was carrying clumps of roots around the sideyard, trying to decide where they should go, sweating to dig holes in the water-logged, stone-filled clay ground (there’s a river under that section– literally), etc.  I never do leave well enough alone.

Back at home, covered in soil, I raced around seeding Hopi Red Dye amaranth and Magenta Magic orach in the coldframe, then popping soil blocks of several different kinds of lettuce, mizuna and Crimson Forest bunching onions in, trying to stay within the spiral formation but getting a little wiggly.  I didn’t have time to get pictures today, so I’ll have to try to get some up in the next few days.  I transplanted the one Georgia Southern collard plant that germinated and the many Lacinato and Red Russian kale plants into the front raised bed around the parsnips and radishes.  I’d talked to our neighbor about where to plant the Canada Red rhubarb crown I bought, but couldn’t remember what she said, so dug it in along the garage in a warm, sunny little microclimate that hopefully will work OK for it.  The herbs I bought from the DCFM on Saturday– Munstead lavender, epazote (yet again, I had a helluva time germinating seeds of this, and only one is growing) and salad burnet– went into the herb triangle and the bed along the fence.  And my favorite, most hopeful planting of the day: Sparkle strawberries (the most wonderful variety I’ve ever tasted, and the jam they make…) in my big new strawberry pot.  This will definitely require pictures.

And then, the proof of how truly obsessed I am: After chopping and cooking for a few hours and then racing across town to a wake, when we got home just as it was getting too dark to see outside, I flipped on the porch light so I could see to finish seeding some more soil blocks: more Genovese and Thai basil, Mammoth dill and Giant Italian parsley; and the cucurbits! Double-Yield cucumbers, Costata Romanesca zucchini, Delicata & orange Kabocha squash and Moon & Stars watermelons (not that I have any idea where the watermelons will go this year…).

I do tend to get a little over-excited.

I planted the first seeds of the season on February 11th, but I spent some time in the basement a couple of days before that, collecting the ingredients for and mixing the soil blocking mix I used this year, wetting it and letting it rest and then making the soil blocks themselves.  For the first time, this year I tried a soil block mix.  I had purchased the ingredients late last summer or early fall, and they were stored in the garage, where things like compost and topsoil had frozen solid, so first I lugged everything down to the basement to thaw.  Then I mixed the base fertilizer, then the rest of the mix.  Not having a good sense yet of how much 2 bushels/2.5 cubic feet is, I didn’t have a big enough container ready to mix it in, so I ended up dumping the mix around from one container to another, trying to get it to be consistent from one container to the next when it was done but probably failing.  I made a huge mess and, since I hadn’t had my fingers in any kind of soil for several months, was in hog heaven.

I dumped in water from the sink downstairs, which is hot and softened,  not ideal for plants.  I worried about it, but since all my buckets were full of blocking mix, I couldn’t really even lug water down from an unsoftened supply upstairs.  I let it settle for an hour, knowing that at least the heat would dissipate, and went upstairs to get my seeds ready.  The first planting would be: Yellow of Parma, Ailsa Craig & Yellow Borettana (cipollini-type) onions; He Shi Ko & Crimson Forest bunching onions (scallions); garlic chives, wild leeks (ramps, which need to be seeded at 70 degrees for a month, then moved to 30 degrees for a month, then back to 60 degrees), borage, epazote, feverfew, ground plum, passionflower (P. incarnata), Creeping thyme and Wild Zaatar Oregano.

This year, I’m attempting to do as much of my garden work as possible in phase with lunar cycles, so I should say that I was trying to get this seeding done before 3:24pm on the 11th, when the moon would move out of capricorn into aquarius.  The moon was in the fourth quarter, which wasn’t ideal, but I was balancing all this lunar business with timing when these transplants would need to go in the ground.

I made 110 2″ soil blocks, which filled a little over two standard trays, and seeded the alliums, herbs and flowers.  We didn’t have shoplights set up in the basement yet, but I’d bought a small heating pad, and I put the two filled trays on that and clear lids on them so that too much water wouldn’t be lost.  Several days later, when seedlings were starting to emerge, we perched three shoplights (each with two 40 watt fluorescent bulbs, about half cool white and half soft white, I think, no special grow-lights) on tool boxes so that they’d hover an inch or so over the dome lids.

In a week or two, at least half of the alliums were up and there were a couple of really nice borage seedlings.

Around the time I took these pictures, I started to suspect a problem with damping-off.  In fact, you can see the rust-colored surface the soil was developing in spots pretty clearly in the borage picture.  I assume this is a mould of some sort.  I’ve never dealt with damping-off before, so I wasn’t sure at first, but within a few days, it was clear.  We took all the dome lids off and aimed fans at the trays, and I started replacing the water in my spray bottle with chamomile tea, which is supposed to be anti-fungal, but although it would die down for a couple days or so, the fungi kept returning.  The beautiful borage seedlings died, as did lots of the alliums.  The edges of each tray fared best, so I suspect that the number of soil blocks I was cramming into each tray (50, 5×10, same as I did last year and the year before) led to a drastic reduction in airflow between and around the blocks in the middle.  You can see how closely the blocks are spaced.

Also on February 11th, I started stratifying some Prairie onions (A. stellatum) Northern Bedstraw (Galium boreale).  I mixed the seeds in with some wet peat moss and put them in tupperware containers in the back of the fridge.  Both need to stratify for 2 to 3 months for best results.  This is my first time trying it, so we’ll see what happens!  It’s been a little over two months now, so I need to figure out where I want to plant them.

Still struggling against the dreaded damping-off, I realized on March 2nd that I’d forgotten to seed leeks, so quickly made 10 more soil blocks, seeded them with Musselburgh leeks, and added them to the third tray next to the Creeping thyme and Zaatar.

It was starting to warm up a little, and I wanted to get some things going outside, but the glass in the window on top of the coldframe Matt built last Fall had broken, so Matt went out to start cleaning it up.  It turns out that the glazing had dissolved, so the panes fell straight out, only breaking when they hit the frozen soil.  Word to the wise: install windows on coldframes with the glass up, wood and glazing down.  Luckily, we had another one just like it in the garage, also from Matt’s aunt and uncle’s house, so he put it on to start warming the soil.  Until it warmed a little, we couldn’t get the last pieces of broken glass out.  The greenhouse effect worked its magic, and within a couple of days, I could dig out the glass (with gloves on), but the compost I wanted to add to the raised bed to top it off was still frozen in the garage!  So I had to set that out to thaw, and I ended up getting impatient a day or so later and dumping the big frozen chunk from the bottom into the raised bed so that it could finish thawing– hopefully more quickly– in there.  It did, and I was able to rake everything even and start seeding on March 9th.  First in were Astro & Sylvetta arugula, Claytonia, Good King Henry (Chenopodium bonus-hendricus), Dutch & Verte d’Etampes mâche, Crimson Forest & He Shi Ko bunching onions and Bloomsdale & Strawberry Spinach (the latter not a true spinach but in fact another Chenopodium, C. capitatum).

On March 13th, I made more soil blocks and seeded lots of Glory of Enkhuizen & Mammoth Red Rock cabbage, Early Snowball cauliflower, Rainbow & 5 Color Silverbeet chard, Champion & Georgia Southern collards, Florence fennel, Lacinato & Red Russian kale; Encore mix, Jung’s Sweet Repeat Mix, Amish Deer Tongue, Ithaca, Little Gem & Speckled Amish Butterhead lettuces; mizuna, Echinacea purpurea, Missouri Evening Primrose and Italian parsley.  At that point, I was out of room underneath the existing shoplights, not to mention the single heating pad, so we needed to implement our plan: The Lit, Heated Nursery Shelf.

This is a recent picture of it, not from right after we (almost entirely Matt) finished it, when no one was in the mood for pictures.  It’s hard to see because only three of the lights are currently on (one of it’s best features is its adaptability, because its lights and heated shelves can be turned on and off separately, depending on what’s needed, while the lights continue to be on the same 6am-9pm timer), but it has four shelves, all of which are rigged for heat and three of which are rigged for light (the top, fourth shelf can also be lit if we hang lights from the ceiling, but we shouldn’t need that this season).  It’s on wheels, which is very handy.  Soon to be added are mylar to keep more of the light in by the plants and less out in the basement and linoleum to protect the cement board from moisture.

Since transferring to this system and discarding all the diseased soil blocks (where seedlings had failed due to damping off or never germinated), things have really taken off.  I think the DIY heating shelves provide a much more even, closer-to-ideal bottom heat range of 70-80 rather than the steamy 90-100 the purchased heating pad started to ratchet up to, and the new lights are better built so that more light is aimed at the plants instead of the rest of the room (aforementioned mylar to further improve this ratio).  It’s open enough to have good airflow.  Coincidentally, it started warming up so much in the last two or three weeks that I’ve been able to take trays outside to start hardening them off, and the sun does wonders against fungi, etc.

Speaking of outside, by mid-March the snow had melted and we were starting to see little bits of green out there:

I scattered a mix of giant crocuses, two types of hyacinth, snowdrops and scilla in a small bed beside the front door (right in front of the lilac which looks like it will bloom any day now) in October, and although later than most of the bulbs in the neighborhood because of less sun or poor soil or both, they did finally start to come up.  So did the greens I’d seeded in the coldframe:

I seeded the “Salad Spiral” again this Spring:

But the chives I’d brought inside in a pot last Fall got a headstart on the ones left outside and took off on the porch:

Also on the porch, there was a tragedy.  This was before we’d quite finished the nursery shelves, and I wanted the tray of alliums, which was starting to recover from damping-off, to get a good dose of sunlight in the south-facing porch window, where Matt had built a plant shelf.

I went outside to check on all the growing things out there, and when I came back in, one of the cats had jumped onto the tray on the shelf to get a little bit of sun herself, flipped it into the air and scattered plants and soil across the porch floor.  I saved as many as I could and swept the rest of the soil away, but I no longer had any idea what allium was what (sweet, storage, cipollini or scallion).  So I seeded a new tray just like the first (but weeks behind) and hoped they’d be ready in time.

With things on their way at the home garden, I decided to visit El Jardin del Elefantes (our shared garden a bike ride away, so called because of the plastic elephant statuette from Matt’s grandparents’ house that has become the garden deity Ellie-Ganesha).  By March 18th, the garlic, shallots, potato onions, multiplier onions and crocuses I’d planted at the end of October were all up and demanding more light.

I had planned to seed tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos and ground cherries along with broccoli, basil and dill on March 23rd, but I didn’t remember until March 22nd that I wanted to try pre-germination this year.  I went ahead and tried it anyway, wetting 17 paper napkins and sprinkling seeds on each of them– ground cherries from two different sources; Ancho Gigantea, Black Czech, Bridge to Paris, D’atil, Fish, Habanero, Hinkelhatz, Pasilla Bajio, Peacework & Puya peppers; USDA G32460 05G1 tomatillos (a large, tasty tomatillo we used to make most of our salsa verde a couple years ago and liked much better than the small, yellow, overly sweet variety I grew from a purchased transplant last year); and Cosmonaut Volkov, Matt’s Wild Cherry, New Yorker & Rose de Berne tomatoes– before putting them in several unsealed ziploc bags on top of the fridge (for the warmth) to wait.  I went ahead and seeded De Cicco broccoli, Sweet Genovese & Thai basil and Mammoth dill the next day, and– lordy!– turned the compost pile (it had gone anaerobic and not broken down much, so was not a pleasant task).

On March 24th, I went back to Elef. (my shorthand for our offsite garden) to seed Golden Sweet and Green Arrow pod peas and carefully strip off the burlap I’d used to hold down the mulch in the Fall and waited to remove until then because we had some cold weather in between my first and second visits.

Back at home, members of the salad spiral were growing steadily:

On Friday, April 2nd, I went back to work on the small farm where I worked last season.  That first day, I seeded carrots, lettuce, radishes, peas and beets for them, and felt like a slacker for not having done so yet in my own gardens (except for the peas, that is).  I had planned out all my garden activities for the season based on local patterns (in the 2010 Wisconsin Garden JournalSarah gave me for Christmas) and favorable lunar phases and positions, and along came this glorious, warm, early Spring and messed up all my plans!  Figures.

The following Monday found me back at work on the farm, digging potato trenches by hand under a suddenly very hot sun.  Embarrassingly, I sunburned my face and got a mild case of sunstroke…  Feeling achey and exhausted but determined, I went home and took a 10-minute nap, then went back out to plant more of my own garden.  At Elef., I raked off mulch and weeded the areas I needed, then dug more potato trenches.  Luckily, these trenches were in soft compost rather than sun-baked hardpan clay soil, and I only dug about 9 feet.  I planted All-Blue Potatoes I had ordered from Seed Savers Exchange and set out in the sun on the porch for two or three days until the eyes sprouted and saved another section for the Ozette potatoes I ordered from Potato Mountain but which hadn’t arrived yet.

Then I seeded Lancer Parsnips; Atomic Red, Chantenay Red-Core, Cosmic Purple, Dragon, Jaune Obtuse du Doubs and Lunar White carrots; and Early Scarlet Globe, Easter Egg Blend & French Breakfast radishes in alternating rows (the radishes in the same rows as the parsnips, to mark the spot until they germinate, and the carrots alternating with them).  You could say I got a little carrot-happy while placing seed orders this year…

By then, the promised rain was starting, and I watered everything in (tripping on the fence and falling in the process– long day) and got into the car to drive home, but the rain stopped, so I got back out, and seeded Bull’s Blood, Burpee’s Golden & Cylindra beets and Skirret.  After watering those in as well, I couldn’t help but stop to admire the row of garlic, etc.

The rain started and stopped again, so I went back home and planted some more!  I raked off mulch in the two front raised beds (the two that weren’t converted to coldframe in the Fall), saving space for tomatoes, peppers and basil in the middle bed and cucumbers, kale and collards in the front, and seeded more beets (Detroit Dark Red this time) and carrots (yes, more varieties! Muscade, Parisienne, Science Fiction Mix and St. Valery) in the middle bed.  In between, I transplanted some of those feline-benighted mixed alliums.  In the front bed, I seeded more mixed rows of Lancer parsnips and French Breakfast radishes.  One wouldn’t want to be too far from fresh radishes, carrots, beets, scallions and parsnips when one wants them…  During all of this, I spotted my first two mosquitoes of the season.

Believe it or not, in that flurry of seeding, I had forgotten to seed Hakurei turnips (my favorite), so on Tuesday after an easier day at work, I went back to Elef. and seeded the turnips and transplanted the rest of the mixed alliums.  I think I managed to get through that whole day without falling into, on, over or down anything (it wasn’t until that Friday that I fell down half a flight of stairs at work)…

The season was really getting going and I was feeling a little, umm, obsessed.  Spring’s that way, I guess.  More adventures in the life of La Agricultora Torpe in the next installment (date TBD)…

I left off when I was about to tell you about quite possible my favorite part of our trip– the dinner we ate right before leaving Tallinn, Estonia– and I was reminded of that dinner pretty recently when I attempted to imitate one part of one of the dishes we had there.  The restaurant was called Aed (Garden), and it was listed in our guidebook as having very good vegetable dishes (other stuff, too, it just indicated that good fresh vegetables might be rare there– something I would question the guidebook on).  It sounded good, but we had no idea how good.  We eat a lot of great food, but I still think it was the best meal we’ve ever had, and there must have been some kind of alchemy involved.  We had very little wine, but we got so giddy that, by the end, we were sitting there giggling at each other, and we stayed too late and had to run to make it back to the cruise ship just as they closed the gates, and we giggled the whole time we were running, too.

Appetizer: Rabbit, Sea Buckthorn Berry Sorbet, etc.

Alas and alack, Matt’s camera (our only, because mine died right before the trip) battery died after I took this one, so we don’t have a photographic record of the rest of that fantastic meal.  I remember the tastes, though…  My entrée was duck, and every single ingredient of every single course was divine.  There wasn’t a whole lot of seasoning, but we didn’t notice the lack because the ingredients were so good.  In fact, I think anything more would have been a distraction.  We asked our water about the food and the chef, and he said they believe in “Pure Food” and that Estonia, with access to wonderful fresh food, has a special affinity for the “Pure Food Movement” (contrary to the claims of the guidebook– who would you believe?).

So do you wanna know which part of that meal I tried to copy?  Several weeks ago, I went down to Carandale Farm and walked around with Dale Secher, asking questions about his experimental fruit plots.  He showed me his beautiful sea berry trees (these are the same as sea buckthorn berries, also sampled to delightful effect in various forms in Finland; I had expected them to be bushes or shrubs, but they were most definitely trees, especially the males, which they allow to grow taller so that they’ll shower pollen on the more closely pruned females).  I unfortunately didn’t have my camera with me because I went straight from work at Gardens of Goodness, but I did come home with a souvenir: a whole flat of frozen sea berries, the larger, sweeter Russian variety that he prefers.  I had bought two small containers of the other, smaller variety at the market and made neat neon orange jelly out of them, but these were better, and what I really wanted to make (at least with some of what turned out to be a half-gallon of sea berries) was some sea berry sorbet like I ate at Aed in Tallinn.

Carandale Frozen Sea Berries

Sea Berry Sorbet

Sea Berry Jelly

The sorbet’s really good…  I have to say that it’s not quite as good as Aed’s, but then, what could be?  It was a magical meal.

(I still have a few cups of sea berries left.  What should I make?  I’m thinking… liqueur?)

Not long after we got back to Helsinki from Tallinn– it might have even been the next day– we took off for Turku, the former capital of Finland.  It’s an older city, and you can feel it, but wandering along the docks, it also feels more industrial, more active in some ways, than Helsinki.  While we were there, they were building the world’s largest cruise ship right there on the waterfront.

Turku Waterfront

Our first full day there, we rented a couple of bikes and rode down to the end of the waterfront, over a bridge and out to the end of Ruissalo Island and back.  It was a gorgeous, sunny Spring day.

Rent-a-bike

We stopped off at Turku Castle (Turun Linna) on the way, our second visit to this impressive medieval building (which we never managed to see during their visiting hours, so we only saw the outside and what we could see of the inner courtyard without picking any locks or breaking down any doors or gates).

Turku Castle

Across the Water

It was also a seriously windy day, but on the way out there, the only annoyance from it was that I kept losing my hat.  I happened to be wearing a kerchief underneath it, so I took it off, used my two hairclips to attach it to the inside of the hat and used it to tie the hat onto my head.  Brilliant!  (First I tied it around the outside, resulting in some much more ridiculous-looking pictures thanks to Matt)

Ruissalo-by-bike

We made it out to Saaroniemi, stared out at the bay for a while–

Swallow

– and ate lunch at a deserted little cafe there (it clearly wasn’t the busy season yet).

Café

Anyone wondering where we got our suave hats?  Answer: H&M, in Turku.  Nothing quite like an American department store to supply one with overpriced but cheaply-made goods needed in a hurry to make up for lack of forethought.  Although I have to say, I particularly like that hat on Matt, and I’m glad he still wears it.  I left mine behind at our apartment in Espoo for the next guest.

There were very cute sheep relaxing on pasture on the island.

Finnsheep

Does anyone know if they’re Finnsheep or some other breed?  I’m not actually sure.  Doesn’t it look like they’re singing?

Despite the wind picking up and making the return trip much more difficult than the way out there, we made it back (huffing and puffing) to the mainland in time to catch the Handicrafts Museum briefly before dinner.

Wheel, Swift, Carders, Drop Spindle, Baskets & Fiber

Sod Roofs

Dinner was in a boat on the river with the leader of Slow Food Finland, Pena Arvela, who was very kind, helpful and erudite and could have easily drunk both of us under the table.  We went to a little wine bar after dinner, and he and the owner treated us to some fantastic stuff.  Speaking of drinks, during dinner we asked him what Finnish beer, wine or spirit he’d most recommend to us.  He didn’t speak highly of many local concoctions, but he did mention a liqueur called Mesimarja.  We had to hail several waiters before we could figure out an English translation: Arctic Bramble Berry.  We tried some, of course, and it was indeed quite nice, enough that we picked up a couple bottles at the Duty Free on our way out of the country.  These days, I particularly like a splash of it in a glass of sparkling wine.  Mmm.

The next day, we took a bus up to Rauma, which was founded in 1442, contains “the largest preserved coherent medieval wooden town area in the Nordic region” (from the town’s website) and is therefore a UNESCO world heritage site AND is the home of our new friends Tiina-Maija and Eemeli (her son, who when we met him before his christening was called Epeli; and her husband, whom we met briefly, Jarkko? sorry, Tiina-Maija, I can’t remember!).

Epeli & Tiina-Maija

They gave us a fantastic gift: the use of their apartment in Espoo for almost two weeks, before we even met them (they’re friends of my dad’s).  So of course we visited them in Rauma, which is a beautiful little old town.

Rauma

Rauma Old Church

Tiina-Maija humored me by taking us to a lacemaking shop/museum where they still handmake lace (lucky for us, they were just setting up to teach a group of school kids how to do it; her hands flew while she put in these pins and swapped bobbins around)–

Lace-making

– and a little museum where they had an old flax wheel on display.

Wheel & Flax

On the left is a simple, small masonry stove, which we saw tons of all over Finland (we very much want one).

She even took us out into the countryside a little ways to show us a farm that raises a very rare breed of cattle called Itäsuomenkarja (we think).

Itäsuomenkarja

They were beautiful, and the farmer was so nice to take the time out of her busy schedule to show us around.  Tiina-Maija translated, which was key, not only because of the language difference, but because (as my dad is very quick to point out), listening is a whole different thing in Finnish, with many special little noises being made to indicate attention and understanding, and I’m not very good at it.  This is a near non sequitur, but I was listening to an interview with Barbara Kingsolver on NPR this morning, and as she was listening to a caller and about to answer, I swear I heard her make one of the intake-of-breath sounds (a little gasp, sort of) that Finns make when they’re listening.

We couldn’t really thank them enough for sharing their apartment with us, but we did bring them some New York maple syrup, and I made Epeli a hat and socks which he probably only fit the day he put them on (and hardly even then; that hat wanted to pop right back off again, dratted fast-growing babies).

Epeli's Duds

Throughout our trip, it stayed light later and later, and on our way back to Helsinki, across from the train station in Turku, long after dinner time, I took this sun-lit picture of Matt:

Late Sun

Back in Helsinki, this sunset shot was taken at probably around 10pm (but since we never adjusted the time on the camera, I don’t remember for sure– at one point, I think Matt took a picture of the time on our cellphone against a still-light sky to prove it, but I don’t know where that shot went):

Helsinki Sunset

We were having a drink in a bar near the top of the Hotel Torni, thanks to our friends Maija and Heidi (although we took this picture when we went back on our own, since our first visit was after sunset).  Maija and her husband Jukka also introduced us to Eurovision!  It was a coincidence, but we happened to go to Seurasaari on Norwegian Day, which also happened to be the morning after Norway had won the Eurovisian Finals.

Norwegian Day Parade

Seurasaari is a neat open-air museum (where Maija and Heidi have both worked) showcasing “the traditional Finnish way of life…  in the cottages, farmsteads and manors of the past four centuries that have been relocated from all around Finland” (from the website).

Seurasaari

It was almost the end of our trip, but we took time out to relax at a little coffee shop that my dad and his friends liked for the view across Töölonlahti to Finlandia Hall.

Finlandia Hall

[Lest anyone continue to wonder, that schmutz in the upper left corner of most of the pictures is a spot on the lens of Matt's camera, which is currently in a box waiting to be sent back to Fuji for warranty work.]  Before my dad’s goodbye party, we squeezed in one more sightseeing adventure: Temppeliaukio–

Temppeliaukio

– where we caught a dress rehearsal in progress.  The acoustics are fantastic, and the violinist was incredible.  The quality of the light and the beauty of the stone also made it a memorable visit.

The whole visit was memorable.  We met wonderful people (including friends of my dad’s whom we were very honored to get to know a little bit, and to see how he lived during his year in Finland) and saw beautiful cities and buildings, heard great music, ate delicious food, and overall enjoyed our trip very much.  Next trip: more Estonia?

To state the obvious, Finland is very different from Mexico.  Or, more specifically, our trip to Finland this year was very different from our trip to Mexico last year.  It’s not that we expected it to be the same, but I think we had prepared ourselves for something as exotic, if in a totally different way.  Matt had been to Denmark, but I’d never been anywhere that far north, and I think we both had some sort of “Nordic mystique” in mind.  There may well be that sort of mystique, but in our quick two week trip we found Finland to be quietly lovely, very well organized and well groomed, civilized and dignified rather than exotic.

Our first full day there, we did the tourist thing and took a boat cruise around the islands off Helsinki, taking way too many pictures and giggling about ridiculous things because we were ridiculously jet-lagged.  Wandering around that particular harbor (Helsinki has many), we found my favorite building in Helsinki, the Uspenski Cathedral:

Somewhere we have a picture of the outside, I swear…  But the inside really struck me, with its colors and symbols and refreshing lack of crucified Christs.

My second favorite building was a type– the markethall (kauppahalli), most often adjacent to a market square (kauppatori), filled with food and craft and other vendors, and inciting all sorts of greedy and gluttonous feelings:

This one was either the Wanha Kauppahalli (Old Markethall) adjacent to the main market square, just called the Kauppatori, or Hakaniemi further north, in a neat section of town I think was called Kallio (after the famous church therein) that had a younger, hipper feel to it.

Of course, we focused on food during the entire trip, as per our usual.  Our first incredible meal happened a few days in, when we went with my dad to Aino right off the Esplanade Park near the Kauppatori:

This was a free range goose liver pate with sea buckthorn berries (one of my new favorite things) and greens.  Matt and I had eaten a late lunch while we were wandering around Helsinki, so only ordered appetizers (he had a mixed fish plate– fresh, smoked and otherwise cured, several different kinds of local fish– that was also great).  Feeling that we hadn’t done the place justice and hungry for more, we returned towards the end of our trip to have several more courses.  It was just that good.

Our first weekend there, we took a daytrip with my dad to Porvoo, up the coast from Helsinki, a port town full of historic wooden buildings with a quiet glow to it, especially around sunset.

Ironically, we had decent Spanish food for lunch in Porvoo…

The next day we took a day cruise to Tallinn.  We boarded a huge cruise ship, both of our first trip aboard anything quite like that, and moved ponderously off through the fog across the Baltic to the city which Helsinki apparently was built to rival in trade.  A city of colors and contrasts, Tallinn perched on the Baltic coast with its backside fore.  Our guidebook had warned us about the Soviet era port, so we were prepared for the worst.  Actually, it wasn’t that bad, but not very photogenic, so I’ll spare you and post prettier pictures of Old Tallinn instead:

We found the most touristy part right off, and saw our first mobs of European and American tourists of the trip, especially right around the Old Market, where we had an enormous lunch:

It was supposed to feed two, but it would have fed at least four hungry Americans, and we were trying to save a little room for dinner.

After lunch, we started to wander around Old Tallinn, amongst fantastic old stone buildings and up and down narrow cobblestone streets, walls and towers:

The occasional vista would show us Old Tallinn against a backdrop of the modern business structures of New Tallinn:

On a smaller scale, there were other photogenic contrasts:

It was a city of circles within circles, and in what felt like the innermost, we found the Russian Orthodox Cathedral:

It rivaled Helsinki’s and was quite lovely, inside and out.  Coming out the back door, we passed an elderly woman coming in, looking back over her shoulder, and at the top of the stairs just outside the door, we found a clue as to what she may just have been doing:

See the fish?  Lucky cat.

It’s getting late for me tonight, so I’m going to split this post and leave you with a cliffhanger: That evening in Tallinn, Matt and I had quite possibly the most incredible meal we’ve ever had, involving things like sea buckthorn berries and phusalis (guess, just guess, what rare fruit that might be in English), rabbit and duck, and such a heady good feeling throughout and particularly after the meal that we found ourselves giggling at unexpected moments (yes, without enough wine in our systems to explain it away).  More (with picture) later!