Tien Chiu

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Garlic, garlic, garlic!

I had terrible trouble with garlic rust this year, so I harvested about half my garlic early, and the rest when I got home from ANWG. Because of the rust, and because I planted my garlic a bit too close together, I wound up with only a little bit of it. By Tien standards.

I wound up with 196 bulbs, not counting the 20-30 itty bitty ones, which were about the size of the small, cardboard-tasting heads of garlic you buy in the grocery stores. (Not that I am biased or anything 🙂 .) I grew twenty varieties of garlic. If you look at the first picture, you can totally abandon any idea that all kinds of garlic are alike!

I’m particularly enchanted by Godfather’s Italian, which has huge purple cloves and large bulbs. Here’s a crop of the first photo showing just the Godfather:

Godfather's Italian garlic
Godfather’s Italian garlic variety

I got it from Filaree Farm, which is an organic seed farm specializing in garlic. They sell over 100 varieties! And here I am growing only twenty. The soul of restraint.

I haven’t yet tasted any of the garlic. Garlic-tasting is a bit of a conundrum. I attempted a side-by-side garlic tasting with a friend earlier this year, and discovered that when you try tasting lots of garlics at once, your taste buds overload within a few cloves. (No real surprise there – garlic is notorious for its pungency and persistence!) So I will just have to try them one by one. Starting with the Godfather’s Italian, of course! I will have to see if it tastes as delightful as it looks. And I can’t wait to try Georgian Fire – reputedly the most fiery garlic there is, when eaten raw. Pesto here I come!

Other garden produce is barreling in. The mulberries and a few cherries are done, and the last of the apriums (apricot-plum cross) are on the kitchen counter, but the peaches are getting started, and the Santa Rosa plums are in full swing. Tomatoes are just starting to ripen – I plucked the first Sungolds off the vine two days ago, which means the deluge should come down in a few weeks. And the horseradish is up, the raspberries are raspberrying, and I’m way behind on picking the blueberries! Summer is here in all its hyper-productive bounty.

And now I’m off again! I need to tie up the raspberries, weed the irises, and cross-pollinate more killer mutant ninja tomatoes. A mad-scientist world-dominating tomato breeder’s work is never done…

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ANWG report!

I’m back from ANWG, where my classes went super well! I had seven students in my color workshop, and a full house in both painted warp seminars (40 students total). There was a lot of enthusiasm for the online course I’m developing on painted warps, and the color mixing tool was a real hit as well. And it was wonderful getting to see lots of old friends, and meet new ones!

I particularly enjoyed wandering the exhibit halls, where there were many inspiring pieces. I was particularly taken by the grand prize winner, a jacket titled “What Rubbish” by Marlene Randall. It was a handwoven jacket woven from strips of denim jeans, lined with an indigo-dyed recycled sheet, and embellished beautifully with sashiko and an embroidered yellow flower. It was well-cut and exquisitely sewn – beautiful!

Marlene generously gave me permission to post a photo of “What Rubbish,” so here it is:

"What Rubbish," by Marlene Randall. Winner, Best in Show at ANWG 2019.
“What Rubbish,” by Marlene Randall. Winner, Best in Show at ANWG 2019.

Another piece I found inspiring was titled “Rainbow Gathering,” by Kathleen O’Hern. This piece was a set of interwoven copper wires in a distorted grid pattern (lots of curvy bits!), with brightly colored, rainbow-y “squares” woven tapestry-style in the grid, in checkerboard fashion. Only, because the grid wasn’t square, neither were the squares. I loved the dynamic feel of the piece, and the way the colors spanned the rainbow without being in “marching rainbow order”. A very nice use of color!

And I bought four gorgeous blue-and-green tea towels from Laura Fry, because they’re gorgeous and I needed towels for the gym. Yes, I know, sacrilegious, but I go to the gym almost every day, and I like having beautiful gym towels! Pix soon, I promise!

But the most surprising thing about ANWG is that I came home with a tiara!

Tien in a tiara

I was awarded the tiara by fellow teacher Mary Lessman, who gives tiaras to people who have “changed her life forever – for the better, of course.” She says she never tells them how they have changed her life, just that they have. What an honor! Thank you, Mary.

I joined the Tiara Tribe (there are currently 26 members) that evening, in a special ceremony attended by six other members of the Tribe (and a bottle of whiskey!):

Mary did share with me half the reason (not the whole reason) I was getting the tiara. She told me that her sister has been struggling with bipolar disorder, reads my blog, and had found my writings on bipolar disorder very helpful to her. I’m really glad to hear that.

A note to Mary’s sister, if you are reading this: Thank you for letting Mary tell me that. Because, while I write my blog for the world, I wrote my essays on bipolar disorder especially for you, and other people with bipolar disorder/mental illness. Thank you for letting me know I made a difference. That makes a big difference to me. It’s why I write.

Anyway, I came home from ANWG feeling refreshed and inspired. I spent almost two hours in the exhibit halls, absorbing the creative spirit, and came home feeling an urge to do new work again, for the first time in almost three years. And I think the business is finally at the point where I might be able to start taking weekends off again and do that new work.

I’ve been working more or less nonstop for the last three years, learning how to build online courses, set up a website, do email marketing, teaching online courses, and incidentally setting up and building a business. It hasn’t been drudgery by any means – I’ve been working seven days a week on it partly because it’s been a fascinating and totally engrossing project – but I don’t think it’s healthy to have been so obsessed, either, so now that I have a glimmer of inspiration, I’m going to try to hang onto it this time.

So I’m going to start sketching out this new project. I need to manage it on two fronts. The first is sketching out the creative side of the project, which is still pretty unformed. It has a similar theme to the Tangram woman book project I did in 2010:

But I want to express the progression from very locked-down, logical, not-creative to more creative, free, open in jacquard-woven imagery. The idea is to go from flat, black and white imagery (no pile) in the bottom left, to brightly colored, luscious pile velvet in the top right. I think that will make for a really interesting piece!

But that also means weaving velvet. Ricki (my studio helper) is almost done threading the TC-2 (for which they should be awarded a medal!), but I still need to put together the tools – in particular, a velvet cantra and bobbins to fit it. It will be easier if I can do the 3D printing design myself, so yesterday night I installed FusionSoft 360 on my computer and I’m going to start learning how to design things for 3D printing today. Say a prayer for me – CAD programs are supposed to be difficult to learn to begin with, and on top of that, I’m terrible at 3D visualization, so I expect this to be a pretty steep learning curve.

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Off to ANWG!

I know it’s been awhile, but I’ve been heads-down working on my seminar and workshop courses for ANWG. I’m pleased to say that they’re now complete, and both are going to be fantastic. (Yes, I’m well out of the “worst-ever” phase!)

The workshop course covers color and color mixing in weaving, and the painted warp seminar is an overview of designing with color in painted warps. Both come with handouts summarizing the content, so students don’t have to frantically take notes the entire time.

Both courses embody my “art science” mission, which is summarized on this slide:

slide text: "I believe color makes sense. It can be analyzed, understood, and explained in simple, rational terms. If you learn how color works, you can design with color!"

I’m particularly proud of my painted-warp presentation. I wove nearly 100 samples while researching painted warps, and while I have by no means exhausted the potential of the topic, I now know quite a bit on the topic. Plus, I have a lot of great eye candy!

I’m planning to develop the presentation into a full online course later this year. Here are a few teaser slides.

This one shows the effect of light wefts vs. dark wefts (click to see the larger version – if reading by email, you may have to go to the blog post on my website – sorry!)

painted warps with white, gray, and black wefts
Light vs. dark weft

The brain tends to react to light patches as if they were brightly lit areas, and to dark areas as if they were poorly lit areas. Since, in our evolutionary history, things have been lit from the top (i.e. by the sun), the brain assumes light areas are on top, dark areas on the bottom.

So if you use a light-colored weft, weft-dominant areas will appear to be on top, forcing the warp-dominant areas into the background. If you use a darker weft, it will sink to the bottom, pushing the warp-dominant areas to the top.

The brain is more interested in things on the top (accessible) than things on the bottom (likely inaccessible), so it pays more attention to the stuff on the top.

The practical upshot of which is, if you use a lighter weft, the eye will look at the weft and not the warp.

This slide is a little less intellectually complicated, but makes great eye candy:

It shows the effect of a progressively more warp-dominant draft. Here I’ve taken a warp painted in the same set of colors, and woven three samples in the same threading and treadling, but changing the tie-up to be progressively more warp-dominant to show how changing the proportions of warp vs. weft changes the appearance.

(If you are interested in learning more about what I teach, or want to read some of my free articles about color in weaving, hop on over to my teaching site, warpandweave.com!)

Meanwhile, in total world domination-land (what am I doing wasting time on weaving, anyway, when there are worlds to conquer??), I am almost done with my first round of cross-pollinations – which is to say, I have done two cross-pollinations with almost every plant in my spreadsheet of desired cross-pollinations. Next up is to do the second-tier crosses, the ones that sound interesting but which I’m less sure I want to pursue. Also to check and see which cross-pollinations didn’t “take,” and redo them.

Some of the cross-pollinations, though, clearly did “take”. Like this one:

photo of baby killer mutant ninja tomato
baby killer mutant ninja tomato!

This one is a cross between plant 280 (which provided the pollen) and plant 295 (the “female” plant, which is bearing the fruit). I use plant numbers to prevent the FBI, the Justice League, and the Avengers from figuring out what I’m really up to and foiling my evil plans. Just kidding! It’s much easier and quicker, and results in smaller labels than trying to write up the entire variety description on a label going onto a tiny flower. (At least, that’s my cover story!)

Looking it up in my spreadsheet, 280 is a 5th-generation plant from a cross that was fuzzy with red and yellow striped fruit. All I know (so far) is that it’s fuzzy and has striped fruit when green. If it turns out that I don’t like the plant for some reason – maybe the fruit taste bad, or they turn out to be an ugly chocolate brown or something – no harm! I just won’t save and plant the seed. But if I do like it…I have a cross between it and Fuzzy Mix to turn loose upon the world. (Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!)

Meanwhile, I have harvested nearly all of my garlic. I had terrible trouble with garlic rust this year, so I harvested early. I don’t have photos of the crop yet, but the bulbs are almost cured, so after I return from ANWG I will take photos of the crop. Despite the rust, I have a ton of garlic (that’s what happens when you plant 20+ varieties), so no worries about shortages this year! I had dreams of a grand garlic taste-off, but an early experiment with a friend led to the conclusion that after tasting four kinds of garlic, the only thing you can taste – even after rinsing your mouth and eating all the bread, parsley, and other palate cleansers you possibly can – is garlic, even if you don’t eat any more garlic for the rest of the day! So there is simply no way to taste 20 kinds of garlic at once. Ah well. I suppose I’ll simply have to enjoy them one by one. Photos once I have cured and trimmed all the bulbs.

Off to ANWG! My flight leaves in a few hours.

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Evil tomato breeders for a tastier tomorrow

I’ve been hard at work on my painted-warp presentation for ANWG. I have over 60 samples, and am still weaving more. I’m now in that entirely predictable stage of existential despair (familiar to anyone who has ever written a book, taught a class, or done any other sort of presentation) wherein you realize that:

  1. there is far more to the subject that you ever realized
  2. you’re not going to know everything perfectly before you have to go teach it
  3. even in your ignorance, there’s no way you can fit even 1/100 of the absolutely vital things you know about the subject into a 2-hour lecture.

Elizabeth Gilbert, in her marvelous TED talk about the creative process, references “that point when you’re writing a book when you’re convinced that it’s going to be the worst book ever – not just bad, but The. Worst. Book. Ever.” That’s about where I am right now with this presentation. I’m well aware that it’s a phase, I’ve been through it before with just about everything I’ve ever written/presented/taught, and everything has always turned out just fine – but it’s frustrating nonetheless.

So what do the tough do to relax when the going gets tough?

Well, duh – take over the world, of course!

The adorable little tomato plants are now blooming and preparing to take over the world. Which means it’s time to get going on my nefarious tomato breeding plans.

My plans with Fruity Mix are fairly modest. It got cross-bred with something, so for the next several years, I’m just growing out 30-40 plants per year and selecting from the offspring until the flavor breeds true in all the offspring. That will take 6-7 years, following which I will start breeding it to other things.

Fuzzy Mix, on the other hand, is small, fuzzy, extremely productive, and also very drought-resistant, because of its thick, leathery leaves. It has nondescript red oval fruit, and the flavor could best be described as “dilute battery acid,” so it definitely needs some breeding work. Here’s what a mature Fuzzy Mix plant looks like:

Since I don’t have a whole lot of space, and I have to work with container plants anyway since my soil has a tomato-killing fungus in it (verticillium wilt), I’ve decided to breed smaller tomato plants rather than full-size tomato plants. In particular, I think it would be interesting to breed tomato plants that would work for the patio gardener – moderately sized, attractive tomato plants that bear tons of tasty tomatoes and can survive neglect. Fuzzy Mix, as a small, fuzzy-leafed, drought-resistant tomato, brings a lot of good genes to the table, and if I can cross-breed it with a tomato with good flavor and attractive fruit, I might get some really cool results.

So I’ve planted a whole bunch of interesting tomato varieties and am doing an abundant assortment of crosses. Probably the most interesting set are crosses with some microdwarf varieties from tomato breeder Dan Follett. His microdwarfs will mostly top out at 11″ and under, though a few are a bit taller. Because the varieties he’s sent are mostly experimental (i.e. not stable yet), I’m not sure what the fruits are going to look or taste like. So I’m doing speculative crosses – cross-pollinate first and decide whether to save seeds later, after the fruits have matured and I’ve had a chance to taste them.

Since I know you’re just dying to know how one cross-pollinates tomatoes (I mean, doesn’t everyone want to know how to take over the world??), I thought I’d share some photos of the process.

First step: steal the electric toothbrush from the bathroom. If your spouse objects, explain that you are engaged in secret activities that will eventually result in total world domination. If your spouse makes unhappy noises about not wanting teeth stained with tomato-plant juice (spouses can be extraordinarily short-sighted!), temporarily placate spouse by promising to use a different toothbrush head.

Next step: collect pollen by using the tomato-pollination toothbrush head to vibrate a mature flower from the male parent, causing it to shoot a small burst of pollen onto a piece of black plastic. (The label on the plastic lid is the plant number of the plant providing the pollen, for recordkeeping purposes.)

This particular plant is one of Dan Follett’s crosses, and goes by the sexy name of 70X F4 R/Y. Here’s a pic of the label, which contains the description I got from Dan:

Translating this into English: this is a fourth generation selection of a cross between Red Robin, Rose Quartz, and Girl Girl’s Weird Thing (I’ll spare you the exact details of the cross-breeding). The previous generation was 9″ tall, had the multiflora gene – multiflora means a ridiculous number of fruit on a single fruiting branch, with red fruit/yellow stripes, nipples on the end of the fruit, and extra good flavor. I’m not 100% sure but I think the RL (nearly PL) refers to “regular leaf, nearly potato leaf”. I keep meaning to ask Dan, but keep forgetting.

I want to breed this one to Fuzzy Mix for a few reasons. First, I like the idea of a ridiculously large number of red and yellow striped fruit in a cluster; it sounds like it would make for a very pretty plant. Looking at this particular plant, it looks like the fruit come in an umbrella of fruit rather than long strings (like Sweet 100 or Sweet Million):

Plant #277

Second, it has a very attractive, upright, open growth habit. You might have noticed that Fuzzy Mix is a very dense bush – so dense, in fact, that it’s impossible for air to get into the center. Not very attractive and might promote disease. This tomato has a nicer shape than Fuzzy Mix. So if I can get the pretty fruit, the clusters of fruit, and the growth habit of this tomato type, and the fuzziness and drought resistance of Fuzzy Mix, I’ll have a pretty nice container tomato variety.

Okay, so what’s the next step?

Step two is every feminist’s dream (well, according to some folks, anyway): emasculation.

Tomatoes are self-pollinating, and in most cases have self-pollinated before the flower even opens. So to cross-pollinate a tomato, you have to catch a tomato flower before the pollen is released, cut off the male parts (okay, guys, you can uncross your legs now 🙂 ), and then pollinate the female parts with the pollen you collected earlier.

So here goes.

First, you find a tomato blossom of the right maturity. Too small and the stigma (the female part) will be too immature to accept the pollen. Too big and the anthers (male bits) will have matured and released their pollen, pollinating the stigma. So you want a tomato blossom that is almost but not quite mature. Full grown but not quite opening yet, and definitely not bright yellow. This one looks about right:

Next, you take a pointy but not razor sharp object and open up the flower. I used the tips of my embroidery scissors, as you can see. (Yeah, those are the good sewing scissors…shhh, don’t tell anyone 😉 )

Now that the flower’s been opened up, you can see the stigma – it’s the little greenish yellow thing sticking out in the center of the flower. You keep that, and cut away everything else. Congratulations! You are now a card-carrying, tomato-castrating feminist – you have just emasculated your first tomato flower:

The next step is to pollinate the emasculated flower using the pollen you collected earlier. Drag the stigma through the puddle of pollen. Use multiple pollen-puddles if you want to be sure:

Congratulations! You have cross-pollinated your first tomato flower, and taken your first step towards breeding your very own killer mutant ninja tomato variety. You’ve joined the ranks of Evil Tomato Breeders for Total World Domination (or at least a Tastier Tomorrow)!

There’s just one step left, which is of course to label your new cross for record-keeping purposes, so you know which of the adorable little tomato fruits will be the one to bring down world governments and launch the world into chaos. I use a little bit of leftover weaving yarn and some indestructible Avery GHS Ultra Duty Chemical Labels left over from my yarn sample dyeing to label each cross-pollinated blossom with the numbers of the male and female parents:

labeled pollinated flowers

It’s important to sterilize your equipment between plants, of course. You wouldn’t want pollen cross-contamination, so I found a small container perfect for sterilizing scissors. Honk if you’re ancient enough to recognize what it is.

And where have the cats been? Alas, they have been feeling rather left out of all this world conquest, since they’re not allowed out of the house. Tigress, however, has not been idle. If she can’t get into the garden to hunt lizards and mice, she’ll hunt other things. Or so I am (oh-so-innocently) told.

It’s a darn good thing she’s also the most adorable cat ever!

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Setbacks, explorations, and total world domination!

Sorry it’s been so long since the last blog post! An entire week of food poisoning has left me alternately sick and playing catch-up. But I have finally more-or-less caught up, and I have much to report!

First, I have finally finished sewing warp and weft swatches to my painted-warp samples, and photographed all of them with help from my friend/assistant Ruth. And, of course, from Fritz, who helped us set up:

Here’s the finished photography rig:

The lights are LED panels, a mix of yellowish and white LEDs, that allow me to adjust the color temperature of the lighting. For photography it makes very little difference since I can adjust the color temperature in post-processing of the photos, but it will make a difference when shooting video later. I switched from large compact fluorescent bulbs because I think I’ll get more even lighting (with less heat) from the LED panels.

You might have noticed that one of my other assistants was conspicuously absent from the photos. Where was she? Not to worry, she was providing critical assistance by protecting another batch of samples:

We had a fan going in the room, and it would have been tragic if the samples had blown away! So she sat on them to keep them in place, and nicely pressed to boot. Such a considerate kitty!

Meanwhile, you may recall that the tomatoes, three weeks ago, were happy, healthy little tykes. No more. They are now happy, healthy killer mutant ninja tomatoes, chanting FEEEED MEEEEEE!!! as they start flowering and preparing for Total World Domination:

The Fuzzy Mix aren’t quite big enough to start breeding to the other tomatoes, but in another day or two the flowers should mature enough for me to start attempting cross-pollination. This will be an adventure of a new and different kind! I am armed with YouTube videos and an electric toothbrush for pollen collection. All I need now is an “Evil Tomato Breeders for a Better Tomorrow” T-shirt. (Fortunately, I have a Thermofax machine, so I can screen print myself one in no time!)

(And yes, I have completely lost my mind. But you knew that already.)

Some of the tomatoes, however, are microdwarf tomatoes that I got from fellow tomato breeder Dan Follett. They will not be conquering the world through giant growth, but through petite adorability. This one, for example, is a fuzzy fine-leaf microdwarf, and should top out at about 11″ tall. I find the foliage fascinating, and plan to try breeding it either to Fuzzy Mix or Fruity Mix or possibly both. I haven’t anywhere near the space to breed out all these crosses but oh my the temptation and the possibilities!!!

Anyway, I’m still playing catch-up from my week-long bout with food poisoning, so off I go again.

One more note before I go, though – health update is very positive! At my latest checkup with my diabetes pharmacist, she spent twenty minutes raving about how exceptionally well I was doing (“I never see numbers like these!”), and finally said I was doing so well that I didn’t need to see her anymore – I could just get my medication refills from my primary care doc. And I just got my blood sugar tested a few days ago, and my A1c (three month rolling blood sugar average) is down to 6.1, which is well out of the diabetic zone. This means my medication is working exceptionally well. I’ve also lost ten pounds in the last four months, which helps a lot as well.

Despite all that, I have not lost any strength – I can still deadlift 560 weasels (140 pounds), and squat 660 weasels (165 pounds), much to my (and my trainer’s) delight.

So while I intend to continue working at diet and exercise, things are going very well indeed. Hurray for that!