The moving process was a bit chaotic and disruptive, as moving processes tend to be (or at least they are for me. When I moved to Richland in February 2009, I spend every waking hour either at work or at home setting up the place and building new furniture). We moved in here nearly a month ago, and set about fast unpacking, reassembling homemade furniture, and I got to work as soon as I could building a garden. You see, it's Portland, and the winters are quite mild and wet here, so I have this idea that I can get a garden going for the winter in the yard we have here - growing crops that are cold weather resistant. More on that in a bit.
Most people back east think of Portland (and Seattle for that matter) as being coastal cities. Neither of them is. Portland is situated on the south end of the Columbia River where it is fed by the Willamette River. The Willamette cuts the city in half east-west. The east side is mostly flat, with the exception of a few odd buttes that poke up here and there. The west side, where we live, is exceptionally hilly. It contains the downtown area, which is flat on the North end, and hilly on the South end, and a mix of hills, streams, and the occasional incursion of the Tulatin Mountains, a low, mossy, forested range that leads out to the west. Portland itself is about 90 miles from the coast. Seattle is even further form the coast, especially by car.
Portland is a rainy city, to be sure. Its 40 inches of annual rainfall make it about 6 times wetter than Richland was. It's no wetter on aggregate, however, than Maryland was. The devil is in the details though. Whereas precipitation is spread out relatively evenly throughout the year in Maryland, the vast majority of it comes, in Portland late October through May (up to nearly 7 inches per month by December), as the figure below testifies. The heavy green line is rainfall and the heavy white is snowfall, compared to the similar colored dashed lines for Baltimore. The rain here is also generally lighter - falling more often as prolonged light rain and drizzle, rather than thunderstorms or downpours. The cooler half of the year, thus sees very little direct sunlight. The flip side of the coin is that the late spring through early autumn are spectacular. These times are punctuated by bright sunshine and very cool temperatures by summer standards. The temperature graph below shows that average high temperatures stay below Baltimore's highs except January-March, when they are warmer. Low temperatures likewise stay below Baltimore's lows during the summer, but are warmer than Maryland's lows from October to April. Humidity is low in the summer - the air tempered by the coolness of the Pacific. In the winter, however, the humidity is often near saturation and supports lots of moss.
As I mentioned, we moved into a place on the West side of the city, well above the downtown area, in a hilly, urban setting carved from intermittent dense forest that still clings to the sides of the roadways. There are many protected wooded parks around, providing plenty of trails for hiking and running - that is, when we're in the mood for hills, hills, and more hills.
Our house is the same square footage as our Richland townhouse, but on one story. It has three bedrooms instead of two, and we turned one into my office. I've started working from home, and am still getting used to it.
The verdict is still out on the telecomuting thing. It's the end of the fiscal year at PNNL, which means a mad scramble to finish projects and papers. When we first got here, we had to wait 10 days to get internet installed, which meant I was commuting by bike into the downtown area to work out of the conference room of the small PNNL Portland Office (not enough room for me). The house here also has an 800 square foot deck, which makes it nearly the size of the rest of the house! The bedrooms are rather small, but the living room and kitchen are quite large, compared to our old place.
The wooded nature of this area is going to make gardening a particular challenge, as only certain pats of the yard actually get much sunlight. The only good place was the side yard area. It's about 6 feet wide by 30 feet long, and slopes downhill from the main entrance of the house down to the deck. Aisling and I built a terrace system into the side yard.
This involved hours of first pulling up an anti-weed tarp that was laid down below an inch of mulch, tilling the soil and shoveling it into flat sections, building brick terrace walls, tilling some more, and mixing in peat moss and garden soil. The native soil is heavy clay, dry from the summer, and I thought it would benefit from some lightening and some nutrients to get it started. Hence the ready-bought soil and peat from Home Depot. In the beds we created, we've planted broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, spinach, kale, arugula, carrots and swiss chard. It will be interesting to see what comes up and what survives the cold weather. Already some things have failed to come up - and this is not due (at least not yet) to the poor weather or site selection. We have some blue jays that seem to be very fond of the tiny sapling leaves of these plants (especially the broccoli and carrots). The carrots nearly all came up, but are now nearly all gone. So...we'll see. The winter crops are just an experimentation, and I'll keep in mind the bird issue for the spring planting. In the meantime, I've also started lots of clover in the beds alongside the crops. Clover is supposed to fix nitrogen into the soil (meaning that it uses the sun's energy to convert atmospheric nitrogen to nitrous compounds in the soil). Nitrogen is one of the three key plant nutrients. So the cover crop of clover provides a very valuable organic fertilizing role.
Our first weekend here we took full advantage of the city and saw The Decemberists live in concert. They're a band from Portland that I like a good deal, and have been listening a lot to recently. I wasn't a big fan of the setlist, with the exception of some of the new songs they played off of an album they're putting together right now.
The next weekend, we went touring around the nearby farms doing lots of U-pick in the middle of harvest season. All-in all, we picked about 8 different types of fruits and vegetables, and bought ready-picked versions of about 10 other types. Much of last week was spent tirelessly canning and freezing the excess. We now have 8 jars of blackberry/raspberry jam, 8 jars of kernel corn, and 14 jars of tomato sauce to last us into the fall and winter - as well as a solid cache of frozen vegetables. The coolest things we got were golden raspberries (really tasty on the vine, but boy did they soften up fast!) and elephant garlic (garlic the size of large onions). We also got the best plums Aisling and I have ever had and some really delicious asian pears!
This past weekend, we enjoyed the last free weekend before Aisling started school by doing a 65 mile bike ride - out and back to the vista house - a lookout point on one of the most scenic vantages of the Columbia Gorge. Aisling nearly died on the way trying to impersonate a frog. (Okay,what really happened was that she was pretty sure she swallowed a bee and that it stung her throat on the way down. She was afraid it might swell and constrict her airway. Paramedics arrived on the scene at the vista house, and it eventually just turned into a slightly embarrassing- for Aisling - false alarm.)
We stopped at an amazing Thai place on the way back. Nothing much from the outside, but they lead you around to the back (in the summer) where the restaurant opens up into an outdoor patio canopied by grapevines. I was able to reach up while we were waiting for our meals and pluck fresh grapes off the vine into my mouth!
We stopped at an amazing Thai place on the way back. Nothing much from the outside, but they lead you around to the back (in the summer) where the restaurant opens up into an outdoor patio canopied by grapevines. I was able to reach up while we were waiting for our meals and pluck fresh grapes off the vine into my mouth!
School is officially in session for Aisling as of this week. The beginning of 2 years of graduate school at OHSU. On Sunday, we both attended a potluck get-together with some people from her grad program. They mostly seem like some cool people, and we both look forward to counting some of them as friends.
