And welcome to the new folks who’ve decided to stick around.
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Today, I thought I’d give a tour of what’s currently growing around the property at this point. So be prepared for lots of pictures in this newsletter!
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First off: huckleberries. There are two types of huckleberries: black and red. The black ones can be commercially grown. The red ones only grow in the wild. They grow really slowly, like an inch a year. However, we have red huckleberry trees that reach above my head. They tend to grow in dead stumps. When they start fruiting I’ll post pictures of them.
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This is a picture of one of the black huckleberries bushes that we have. (We have two, because even though they’re supposedly self-pollinating, they do better with a friend.) These bushes are just starting to berry. The fruit is more tart than sweet. And our bushes produce really small berries. They'll turn black when they're ripe in a couple of months.
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Next, wintergreen! If you’ve ever tried wintergreen Lifesavers, or some other type of breath mints that are flavored wintergreen, you’ll know what the leaves and berries of this plant taste like. I’ve tried growing wintergreen for years. I keep buying—and killing—plants, putting them in different areas of the property that I think they’ll like.
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Finally found the right place. This bush is thriving! I don’t know if it’s clear from the picture or not, but there are dozens of little berries forming. (They’ll be bright red when they get bigger, which will be in a couple of months.) While you can eat both the berries and the leaves straight from the bush, they’re REALLY strong. I intend to harvest the berries and leaves, then dry them for tea.
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We planted three blight-resistant hazelnut trees in the yard a few years ago. It takes time for these sorts of trees to mature. This is the first year that they’ve started throwing nuts. I’m really excited about trying them! Hopefully we can get to the nuts before the squirrels eat them all.
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There are also a lot of wild hazelnut trees on the property—the beaked hazelnut which is native to the PNW. I went looking this morning, but I couldn’t find any of those nuts starting in the trees. Either we won’t get any this year, or they’ll start forming later.
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We have three cherry trees in the box (an enclosed area where most of the fruit trees are, protected from the critters). Last year, we had a TON of cherries. This year? Not so many. But we will have a few. This is one of the champaign coral cherries.
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We will get a lot of blueberries this year. We have several blueberry shrubs. Most of them are just regular blueberry. We also have a couple of bushes that produce pink lemonade blueberries, which are delightful. We trimmed those bushes back a couple years ago. Maybe we trimmed them too hard, because this is the first year in a while that we’re getting berries from them.
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This is a picture from one of the regular blueberry bushes.
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Last year we had so many cherries and not many apples. This year? We are going to get SO MANY apples.
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We have two apple trees, a Fuji and a Honeycrisp, because our apple trees do not self-pollinate. There are huge charts out there that will tell you what two type of tree you need to pollinate your type of apple.
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Allowing the tree to grow all of these apples might break the branches. So after they get a little bigger—maybe come July—we’ll go through and probably harvest about half the apples that you see now growing.
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And last but not least, the grapes! I always find the process of the grape bunches forming fascinating. All the vines are now awake, and busily producing fruit.
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So that’s about it for me this week. Next week, I’ll be in Portland visiting my niece. Expect pictures and stories from there!
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What is growing in your area at this time of year?
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June is here! And with that, there's a new book on sale in the Knotted Road Press store.
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For the month of June, The Long Run Omnibus is on sale for merely $9.99! That means four novels (yes, FOUR novels) for the cost of two. What a bargain!
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In addition, this collection is only available on the Knotted Road Press store. (Though if you go to see Leah at a live sales event, she will sell you the paper version, also for a bargain, at just $40. That's $10 a book, instead of $15 for each.)
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Judit—a hard-headed captain of a starship who may swear too much in Hungarian—gets hired by a powerful alien to break the stranglehold that the Universal Trading Cartel has on, well, everyone in the galaxy.
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Follow Judit and her quirky alien crew as they con their way across planets and through star systems, as well as all the corporate machinations.
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This omnibus contains all four books in this completed series!
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They say history doesn't repeat itself, but it will frequently rhyme.
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However, what about crimes that get repeated? How are they similar to the original? How are they different? And why?
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The devil is in the details, after all.
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Come see what the syndicate members of MCM have done with crimes that riff off of events from the past.
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MCM. So Criminal, It's Good.
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