Fairy godparents in the garden

A few weeks ago our neighbour's dad visited them for a week, and while he was there he pruned their entire orchard. We were sort of hoping he wouldn't realize the friendly fence between us actually marks a property line, and would continue his pruning roll right on into our orchard, but he didn't.

We know the magic of visiting parents willing to pitch in. On her very first visit to Mucky Boots my non-gardening mom weeded the entire strawberry patch, obliterating every trace of the wood sorrel that had infested it. And my dad contributed to my combat-perfectionism-by-enjoying-my-garden-more campaign by assembling new garden loungers that came in a million parts, with nothing but his engineering expertise and some badly translated instructions.



The magic of visiting parents indeed. Fairy godparents in the garden. And we're being visited by some now: Kim's folks are visiting us from Ontario, and, bless his heart, her dad is a gardener and brought his pruners.



Their very first morning here they were on a mission: Ken watered, shovelled compost and spread straw mulch while Saundra helped me plant squash. And that was just the first morning. The next day Kim fired up Johnny D and loaded up the trailer with compost, and then she and her dad started in on the backlog of plants waiting to be transplanted while Saundra weeded, kept us all hydrated, and kept me and my sore joints from overdoing it.

Friends in the garden are as good as fairy godparents, and we were also visited by some of them on the weekend: Margaret and Julie came for tea.



This was Julie's first visit to Mucky Boots, and it was so much fun trailing after her as she recognized historic landmarks from her faithful blog reading: "Oh, that's the chicken door Kim had to crawl through when she locked herself in the coop!"

When the tour was done we had tea in the garden.





Those amazing lilacs aren't ours - Ken bought them for us at the farmer's market, to help me celebrate my new sense of smell.



Tea was accompanied by a treat, of course: rhubarb coffee cake made especially for Margaret, who thinks rhubarb merits its own food group. She has a point.

Clean

You would be excused if right now you're wondering whether we took the glass out of our kitchen window, it's so see-through.

No, it's there. But it's clean. So clean you can hardly see it. Last week we had our windows washed - all of them, inside and out - for the first time since we moved here. And lest you think we're complete slobs, we have done spot cleaning. The French doors onto the verandah, for example, that are normally covered in Frankie's nose prints. But most of the windows, and all the skylights, require ladders - big, tall ladders - for cleaning, and somehow that has just never been a priority.

What makes it even better is that it was a gift from my mom, whose speciality is the kind of slightly self-indulgent present on which the recipient would have a hard time spending money, but that is an instant quality of life enhancer.

A nice day spent watching someone else wrestle with ladders and buckets and sloping roofs. And now sunshine coming through sparkly windows and all the beauty of the garden on display. That's some present. Thanks, Mom!

Tulip Parade 2013

This is an annual event at Mucky Boots: the cataloguing of the year's entrants in the Tulip Parade. You'd think this would be repetitious, because it's not as if I plant any bulbs. So you'd expect the same tulips, appearing in the same locations as last year. And there is some of that. But there are also many surprises: tulips I swear I have never seen before, or in locations they've never been before. Someone has a sense of humour, and I'm guessing it's Mother Nature.

Tulips are the flowers that make me want to be a painter. An impressionist painter. Because when I step out the door and see the mass of green punctuated with bright splashes of colour from all the tulips, and when I try yet again to capture it on camera and fail yet again to capture what I see, I think the license I could take as a painter might allow me to show you how magical it is.

But for now, here is the Parade.

And because they don't get their own parade and the tulips feel sorry for them, here are some tag-a-long columbines.

Oh, and the tulips have also asked me to include a photo of the anemones my friend Elisabeth gave me last year, because they are newcomers to the garden and the tulips want them to feel welcome.

Lilac

Today is a happy, happy day at Mucky Boots. Yes, the sun is shining, and it's gloriously warm (the thermometer on the porch is reading 29 degrees - in May, no less). But all that is secondary to something I have been waiting for for years: the lilacs are blooming and filling the air with their scent and I can smell them.

Until my sinus surgery last fall I had virtually no sense of smell for years. Years and years. And of all the scents I missed, the only one that made me want to cry was missing the perfume of lilacs blossoming in the spring. Well, it's spring, and they are flowering, and I can't keep my nose out of them for more than ten minutes, making up for all those years of lost sniffing.



Lilacs!

How to turn orange in 30 days

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I have been on an elimination diet for the last six weeks or so in an attempt to figure out if anything I eat exacerbates my arthritis. I have a suspicion there is, and I have a good idea what it might be, but I thought I would try a systematic approach so I can find out for sure.

The program I am following can be found here, and it works like any elimination diet: you begin by restricting yourself to a small number of  foods least likely to be causing problems, and then once your symptoms have subsided you slowly add foods, one at a time, watching for any kind of reaction. The plan sets out three groups of food - Phase I, which should be safe for most people, Phase II which has foods that are more problematic, and then Phase III which contains the heavy hitters like dairy and gluten and nuts.

For someone with a chronic inflammatory condition like the arthritis I have, the suggestion is to stay on Phase I for at least 30 days. I won't bore you with all the other details, but what you need to know (for the purposes of this post) is that many of the Phase I foods are orange.

Sweet potatoes. Squash. Carrots. Peaches. Orange, orange, orange, orange. Yes, there are green foods too - green beans, peas, broccoli and zucchini. But ever since I regained my sense of smell I don't like broccoli, and zucchini is a stretch.


Here is a typical meal: chicken, rice and veg.


Here is another typical meal: chicken, rice and veg. Sigh.

I know I am not too compromised nutritionally because I am also taking a hypo-allergenic supplement while my diet is so restricted. The problem is, I am turning orange.

This first came to my attention about Day 30, when Kim was walking behind me and said "Your ears are orange."

"No," I said.

"Yes," she said.

"No they're not," I said.

"Yes, they are. You're turning orange," she said.

Then a couple of days later, when I was taking off my gardening gloves, I noticed that my palms had a distinct orange hue. I moved to a different light. Still orange.


I cook my orange vegetables in bulk these days.
If I had to choose between being orange and having arthritis pain I know what my choice would be. But still, I think it might be time to start eating some kale.

Magnolia

We have a lovely old magnolia tree by the pond. I can't say it was the reason we bought the property, but I know that when we realized this gorgeous tree was a member of our new botanical family we were both really, really glad.

When it blooms, this tree is a picture of abundance, grace and joy. A gift for the winter-weary, all wrapped up with a big pink bow.

Auction revisited

Yes, those are lamps from street lights for sale. I'm sure all kinds of people went to the auction looking for those.

The annual spring Coombs Farm Auction happened a couple of weekends ago and Kim and I went - we had so much fun the first time we went we decided to make it an annual tradition. (In my family, where we treat traditions with a level of seriousness and commitment most people reserve for their religious beliefs, we believe that if you do something, anything, twice it's a tradition and must be observed faithfully for ever after. Once, if you really have fun.)

If you're a long time reader of the blog and the above photo looks familiar, there's a good reason: the same players were there, bringing the same farm stuff (aka "junk") to be auctioned off by the same family raising money for a children's charity. Here's last year's photo, so you can aompare it to the one above.



Same sign, same guy, slightly different junk. Better weather, though.

This year I didn't try anywhere near as hard to find a diamond in the rough - I just took pictures instead.


Is this junk, or is this junk?


Old rusty barrels.


Dirty and cracked bottles.


Rusty, broken-down Ford tractor.


A fancy cabinet-style incubator with no top and a circuit board full of straw, chicken poop and feathers. It must be functional. For sure.