Tomatoes for 52 weeks

It has clearly been a tomato year and I started by planting 4 different heirloom tomatoes. Each with different qualities. I tried to cut down on my total number of plants, but ended up with 51 plants PLUS several “volunteers” that I just could not bring myself to uproot.

I started the seeds indoors in February. (which is WAY too early), just could not help myself.  I have a greenhouse, but planting seeds I start them inside in a tray and leave them for a week on top of my hot water tank.  Then as they start to grow I transplant them into pots and put them out in the green house. This year started off pretty cold, so I kept 11 plants in the greenhouse with all the windows wide open so that I would have plants into the fall with tomatoes, and I could just close all the windows then.

One great variety I grew this year and plan to save is called Alicante an English heirloom that was supposed to moderate sized but has grown huge. The others are Brandywine, Zapotec and Narn. I have harvested at least 350 lbs of tomatoes so far. Given away 4 large  boxes of them. 

Ken and I have been having great fun canning tomatoes. We have 50 pints of roasted tomato sauce in our little cold room

I quarter the tomatoes in large roasting dish, add oregano and basil from my garden, as well as lots of garlic, olive oil and salt and then roast them in the barbeque for 3-4 hours.

We then let the sauce cool for a few hours and I try to pick out some of the larger more obvious skins, then I put the whole lot through the blender and usually the next day we can them.

It is kind of funny, for Ken and I it is a major event this canning. We have it all down to a science, we get all the jars ready and the hot water bath boiling and the sauce boiling and then I pour the sauce in the jars, Ken puts lids on and into the boiler...

We tend to wonder how his mother who is almost 90 does this all by herself.

Then again it is fun for us to do it together. 

The thoughts of this yummy  sauce all winter long is great.

We use the more clear  liquid part of the pint for a pasta sauce Ken makes every tuesday ( the day that I work and he does not work) I use the sauce for pizzas on the days that he works and I am off and on Thursdays which are the days we BOTH work, we can just have the sauce over pasta.

Last year just before the first frost (about now)  I took all of the green tomatoes and put them in the basement on shelves with news paper. Throughout the fall we were eating tomatoes from the basement, last one Christmas day. I would go once a week or so and get rid of any bad ones.  My goal is gradually to no longer have to buy produce at the store anymore.

I am going to take the very best looking tomatoes off of the very best looking plants and save the seeds.   The way I see it with all of these concerns about labelling /non labelling GMOs at least I will know for certain where most of my food comes from.

Ken and I are extremely excited that we have just registered to vote in this next US election. After 14 years of living there and paying taxes there, at least now we will have a chance to vote.  The way things are going, it does not seem as though they are going to need our vote.
MUCH LOVE TO ALL
janet  jankenb    @     gmail.com

I have just gone through the garden, picking the raspberries and strawberries, added a few peaches from the  market and hemp hearts, greek yoghurt and made my daily smoothie. For years I have contemplated this, but it never seemed enough to carry me though to lunch, but with the greek yoghurt, which is very high in protein and the hemp hearts, I am totally full. 

We currently have 120 raspberry plants and about 50 strawberry plants. I only purchased one raspberry plant at the very beginning of last year. On one of hottest days of last summer a patient of mine brought over about 10 plants that she had just cleaned out from her bushes.  Then a neighbour threatening to get rid of all of his raspberries, invited me to help him out.

So early this spring I got a few of his. The thing I discovered was that many of these that we were given are ever bearing raspberries, (or fall bearing), they seem to produce some fruit in the spring and then a big crop in the fall. They are much bigger than the other raspberries.   So this summer in the heat of the summer, when it looked like we were going to get cooler weather (which we did not) I went and dug up another 20 or so of the neighbours raspberry bushes. I then spent weeks hovering over them trying to keep them alive with cloth covering, watering, watering, watering. AND was thrilled to see little buds coming out at the end of august.

So finally 2 weeks ago I went and got all of raspberries from his yard, bringing my plant total to 120.  Those ones do not look great but from experience I now know that they will survive, I will just have to wait until next summer to enjoy them.

My Oregon friends will think I am nuts, but we have also planted Blackberries, the thornless type.  Although there are some wild blackberries here, they are only in very select places.  We have found wild raspberries on the back on our property, in fact it was Chewy who first discovered them. He was eating berries, and sure enough they were raspberries. Since then I have found that there are many areas around here with wild raspberries. I unfortunately discovered this a little late for raspberry picking.  Most raspberries only produce in June, and the wild ones here clearly fit into that group.

So LOTS of berry smoothies next summer

Woke up with a start today, drip drip drip of rain on the gutters, and a low pitched howling of the wind. I glanced up at the clock to a blank screen.  OH SHOOT, I had read the forecast on my iphone for rain, but had not considered storm, whoops.  My thoughts immediately focused on my freezer, an object of significant activity of late.

With much of our fall harvesting done, the significant amount of it frozen, the freezer has become of huge importance. 

So I asked Ken, the time, he said 6:25, I then asked if he knew how long it had been out. “It was on at 6:10 when I last looked”.  So at least that was a relief that it had not been out all night.

Next concern is about the office. It is Monday morning and Ken works Mondays.  Our office is small and central in a little mall 2 blocks from here. SO we have windows at the front and windows at the back and nothing else.  Our office runs off of computers, all the charts are electronic, but it is a secure internet based system, and so as long as we have our laptops charged, and our iphones charged, we have access to the charts.  

We have been here for a year and a bit now, and though the power goes out, it seems this year, once a month, we have yet to work a day in the office without power.

I fell asleep last night reading a book about a woman trying to make it on her own in Michigan in rural area on fixed income, canning, preserving and making it through the winter. Of course the chapter last night was when the power went out in snow storm.

SO the next place my thoughts this am went to was wood stoves.  We have been living in our house now for a year almost to the day. We moved in long before it was done, and it is still not completely done, but we ran out of funds and thought we would prioritize things as we would afford them.

Ken has been all for getting a big generator, I would rather spend the considerable amount that that would cost, to make our house more independant, such as a wood stove.  I decided that today is the day to look at wood stoves, since it is not cold yet, it will be soon enough, and I sure do not want to wake up cold in January.

I thought I would try to get back to writing blog, but in short spurts, when I am feeling like writing, so this is my first new  attempt.

Since the power was out, I could not post it until now.

So this is our new house, and there is a total neurotic next door who draws the property line in Round up, even though it is a spare lot. 

3 years cancer free

Well today 3 years ago I had a radical hysterectomy for endometrial cancer. Boy have things changed since then

I was told I had a 40-70% chance of a 3 year survival and here I am.

I really do not thing anyone can really understand the feeling of being told this sort of thing. The whole thing about cancer is really a big waiting game, the more time you can put between the cancer and the present the greater your chances of having beat it.

Not a lot of plans for today, but Ken and I have taken a week of holiday time and are going to vancouver to the wine festival. We have met a couple who tends to be as adventurist as we are, or more. We all go out every Sunday snowshoeing for HOURS. Last week it was 4.5 hours and over 1000 feet in elevation. So while in Vancouver we are going to do some sort of physical activity every day, and then go and eat and drink and be merry.

Our house is nearly finished and we are getting more settled all the time. It is hard to describe the incredible feeling of putting things in places, with NO QUestion in my mind of whether I would be soon moving them again. We are calling this our " final resting place".

We are both working just down the road at a small clinic. Ken works 3 days a week and I work 2. I am sort of the administrator as well and seem to have lots of things to do on other days as well.

I have several hundred plants growing in the greenhouse, getting ready for spring. This year I worked VERY hard at holding off planting tomatoes, so instead I planted perennials.

So I have lupins, hollyhocks, lavender, poppies, butterfly flowers and columbine growing, ... some better than others. (columbine takes FOREVER to germinate)

I have also started artichokes and celery. I am hoping to have TONS of flowers at the front of the property, so perhaps the neighbours who are obsessed with lawns might not frown so much on our yard.

We have done a lot of the work on the house ourselves, such as the flooring, shelving, tiling etc, so we are looking forward to having NOTHING to do one of these days.

Our dogs are still with us, Rex is going on 16 this year and has weakness in his hind end, and so at times is unable to get up. NO PROBLEM..... he is also getting stress incontinence and so is wearing a Kotex pad held on by a waist band. We just use the waist band to pick him up with. I think it is a BIT embarrassing for Chewy... though.

Rex just still seems happy and frisky at times.....

Life carries on.....

We really miss all of our friends in Oregon and I think often of them, and wish we were not so far away. We are planning a trip down there this year, details to still be worked out.

MUCH LOVE

janet

Let it snow

Well with the new year coming soon, thought I would write a bit about the last year.

Funny someone the other day commented on wishing us a happy new year, saying after the difficult year we have had.

I thought, now why would they say that?, we have had a great year. It has been tumultuous and with many stressors, but all and all a great year.

I guess compared to the previous years, that is.

Last New Years eve I was determined to stay up until midnite to make absolutely certain that the year was OVER, totally OVER. Oddly enough, things changed after that.

The whole move back here was hard, but as expectedly so. I guess we have gotten through this year with a goal, of a life that was as stress-free as possible. A life that we can be doing the things that we like to do the most. And I do think we are getting closer all the time.

Our kids are doing well, Dylan, the plumber who was in accident in September is still in a cast and it has been very trying to keep him getting to his doctors appointments despite him being screwed around by the clinics, being sent to the wrong places etc etc etc. He gets so mad at the system he does not want to go to the doctor at all, however he has a very fragile fracture that can lead to chronic wrist pain if it does not heal properly. From all we can tell, this ordeal should be over soon and we can stop humouring him.

Josh is into his third year of university in the humanities, sociology, psychology anthropology political scienc etc. It was hard to explain to him why the whole family might not want to watch the movie about the final year of Tolstoys life... He is extremely well read on politics, and Ken and I have a lot of fun talking with him, but the conversations would not be the type many others might engage in.

He came home this term with questions about what he needed to get a social work degree. WE looked it all up and he has almost all the credits he need to apply for the fall, and the grades look in keeping with what he has, so it appears that at long last he has direction. Everything we read about social work seemed to be JOSH..... a job with his name written all over it. THere even seemed to be jobs out there in this field. So we are excited and more importantly HE Is excited.

We have taken up snowshoing this year, and I have included a photo from a few weeks ago. The guy who has built our house, with his wife, have taken us UP to the snow. We drive up in a 4 seater, 4 wheeler to an area of higher elevation and more snow. It is great fun.

I am getting closer to the 3 year mark for my cancer, closer to the “beat it” stage. Hard to know if it is ever safe to tempt fate by using those terms..... like “beat it” or Survivor”.

I have been feeling pretty cocky for quite awhile, and recently was doing some research for a woman in India with the same cancer.

She posted several questions on line and I wanted to get her the newest information, and since I am a doctor, I have access to complete studies for free.

Turns out that some things have changed with regards to prognosis and cancer. They have looked in the past at status of lymph nodes as a prognostic indicator, and if the cancer has spread to them it means the risk of recurrence is higher. There is something else that has recently gained a lot of attention with regards to several cancers, including prostate, cervix and endometrial cancer, and that is Lymphovascular invasion.

Lymphovascular space invasion (LSVI) denotes a worse prognosis, and thus warrants more aggressive treatments. what this means is that the cancer has invaded the lymph system, and/or blood vessels of the organ of origin, in my case the uterus.

Why is this important? Well I guess it underlines how important the aggressive treatment was and I find it kind of scary, wondering some days if I really have beat it, and when I CAN say I have beaten it, BUT anyways, I am still having the pain after meals, guess I always will, it seems to be a lot worse lately.

I am not really worried, but I am not totally unworried, if that is a word.

Ken and I have been working hard to get the clinic so that it is running seamlessly. There has been a lot of extra work involved, but it IS going great. We have incredible staff that we just love working with, a real team. We are getting further and further from the politics.... well sort of.

I recently had an interview in a newspaper (the closest city to us), essentially telling “our” side of the story on how we left Interior Health, and I have also convinced another doctor who has left to tell them HIS story, so that the public can see that the doctors are leaving, not because of “personal reasons” as interior health tells everyone, but that Interior health is really driving the doctors away from Chase.

Hard to be totally out of politics.

I have also found out some very cool news, that all US citizens no matter where they are, can vote in the US elections. You just have to sign up. Ken and I became US citizens about 3 years ago. SO I feel very special, being able to have a say in the election of a country whose political policies affect the entire world, yet only US citizens can vote for who leads this world power.

The other really interesting tidbit..... What act can cause you to LOOSE your US citizenship???

To join the military of another country.

I am throwing around ideas for how to spend the third anniversary of the cancer, and the latest idea is to fly to New York and have a day “in the studio” with Ben Wisch, the producer of my last cd, and record my new song “It is so hard to be a good dog”

And then send it out as a single. WOOF WOOF.

Speaking of dogs, Rex is now over 15 years old. he gets around and does not seem to be suffering, but he is dribbling urine all the time though.

So we have gotten him a doggy diaper, essentially a cloth diaper that we wrap around him with a “kotex” in the appropriate place to catch the urine...

Just thought I would put that out there in case anyone else ends up in a similar situation :)

Happy New Years, and love to everyone.

Janet

winter comes

Hi all

Well it is starting to get cold here and we are snuggled into our warm little house.

The geothermal system was installed last week, and we are just waiting for a few checks on the furnace before switching it over to full geothermal heat.

The heat will come through coils in the ground that circulate 8 feet down, where it is warmer.

They then go through some sort of compressor that, I do not totally understand, but that is how we "extract" the heat.

The big thing on this system is that it requires electricity to circulate the fluid, and to run the fans.

However the only source of heat in this area would either be a propane furnace, Or an electrical one, and if you are totally heating your house with electricity it is expensive.

We did not do this for the money, because it will take us years of electricity savings to pay for the rather expensive geothermal system, but the way we look at it, we can pay for the system when we are working and then when we are retired, we will not have to pay large electrical bills.

We are hoping to get a solar panel next year that ties into the grid. This area gets far more sun than Oregon and so that should also cover the costs of electricity, and eventually we will have no bills, and no dependance on "outside" sources.

I just glanced outside and it is snowing.

I would love to post pictures but lack a part to the camera, hope to rectify that soon, in fact hope to write more soon. Life is really settling down. We have a new computer system in our office which was a huge step, and one that I really had not planned on making given that Ken and I both work part time, but for a variety of reasons it had to be done now. The BC government reimburses us for part of the costs, since they want everyone to be on electronic medical charts.

It has been a huge expense and we have had to shut down the office for a few days and pay for the staff to be there, for training sessions.

Anyways it is working and we are all learning quickly about how to use it and so life should soon settle from that perspective.

We came up to Canada with the plan of working "for" someone else, so that things like employees, payroll, ordering supplies, dealing with computers, we thought.... would all be taken care of by someone else. Turns out when you work for someone else you lose any level of control over your situation and we started to feel that we had jumped out of the pan and into the fire.

We left Bandon because the hospital situation, we had battled, for years. We could see what administration was doing and no matter what we did we could not change it.

The years of stress over that situation, we felt, perhaps, might have had an effect on me getting cancer, and so decided that whatever it took we were NOT going to stay in such a "poison" environment.

We got here and immediately started to see that being employed by Interior Health was in many ways, the same situation. Only difference was that we left an issue with ONE administrator out of control, and came to a new situation with MANY administrators out of control. We decided that we just could not go on and deal with these stressors on a day to day basis. The only way we could carry on in medicine is if we could be in a situation where we could just practice medicine, and in order to do that we needed to have our own clinic.

So here we are at "this stage of life" basically starting up a clinic, learning how to do payroll, how to order supplies, etc etc, and once we are past this setting up stage, we WILL have a situation where we do not have to deal with politics anymore. We figure we will live a lot longer and happier if we can just go to work every day and not even have to think about really bad administration.

So the idea is to QUIT complaining about all the work at the new clinic and just be glad we do not have to deal with any of the Wathen's of the world, or the Interior Health's of the world.

It has been extremely sad to read about the Bandon hospital. Dr McClave recently showed me a a letter I sent to the board, in 2003, in effect, predicting all of this. While I read about all of the "excuses" given for why the hospital is doing so poorly I would have to say it is really really bad administration, that has not only NOT dealt with issues as they came up, but he has created many of them as well. He has been running that hospital on a personal level for years, making decisions based totally on his own personal biases, which inevitably have always been wrong.

He has not had any one seeing over him as he has always made sure that board members are elected who will just believe everything he says no questions asked.

The sad thing is that several people are losing their jobs, but I see no evidence that he will be.

Mad world, its a mad world.

I had my appt at the cancer centre last Friday and got the thumbs up, CA 125 is low, and no evidence of recurrence. I go every 3-4 months.

I am still having a lot of the effects of the radiation, but I guess I am working with it, trying to balance what I eat etc. I am beginning to lose weight, as I just cannot eat full meals, and some days am so nauseated I just cannot eat much. I guess that is not such a big deal at this time, to lose 20 lbs would be great, not sure after that.

We have been living in our house for about a month, it is not finished, however most of the unfinished "bits" are things we just have not decided what we are going to do. For example we have two bathrooms with showers tub etc, but we do not have bathroom sinks yet

Basically because we wanted to do something clever and have not sorted out all the details yet.

Our main bathroom I have decided to use an antique sewing machine, tile the top of it and place the sink on the tiles.

it has all these cute little drawers.....

the master bath we have not sorted out yet.

I will write soon love janet

a song placed in a movie

Hi all

I have been meaning to write, but cannot get the pictures out of my camera, lost that little piece that is supposed to transfer the pictures

However in the mean time I have gotten some news that I think is pretty incredible.

Several of my songs have in the past been chosen to be place in "libraries" for companies who try to place songs for movies.

Today I was informed that my song "for whom" from the cd "For all of his wealth" has been chosen to be in the next Men In Black movie entitled "The Dark Watchers".

THe director/writer has written about me on the website http://www.thedarkwatchers.com/p/music.html

We have exchanged several emails since then and he is quite interested in my stuff. He seems to have a common "stealth activism" principal as me.

He said that though he writes Sci Fi movies, there is a deeper message, and this one is "back to the garden" sort of message, which I can see why he chose the song.

He says on the site that that song speaks to everything he believes in.

Yesterday we started on our geothermal heating system which involved pipes that circulate fluid 8 feet down in the ground, and will be our main source of heat.

I guess I do have lots to write about, but am so excited by this new news I am having trouble collecting my thoughts.

Anyways check out the site.

I phoned Josh and told him about it, and he said he would check out the movie, I said it would not be out until 2012 and he said, well the world will have ended by then.......

SHEESH.

Love

Janet