Plums

 

This has been a bit of an odd summer here at Mucky Boots, at least for me. A taking stock kind of summer. I've been taking a close look, in as gentle a way as I can, at what I can realistically commit to on the garden front, given that my arthritis seems to be a more constant presence in my life. It's not only a question of  what I think I can do, but what I want to do. What am I good at growing? How much can we reasonably expect to eat? How can I cut back or adapt what I do to make it a joy instead of a constant game of catch-up?

Part of what's needed is a change in expectations, and I am happy to announce that I think, finally, I have graduated from the Remedial School for Perfectionist Gardeners. My garden hasn't been perfect for most of the year (so what else is new...) and I've been fine with that. Really.

After four growing seasons here, Kim and I are also taking a hard look at what's working and what's not, what we're good at and what we probably need to give up on. And first on that list, for both of us, is fruit.

We're pretty good at berries: strawberries, raspberries and especially blueberries. But we suck at growing tree fruit. We had big plans for our orchard, and added a number of trees when we first got here, but we have learned that growing fruit organically is tough: there's a disease and a pest for every season and every kind of fruit tree, and I think we've encountered them all. Throw in the demise of the grand dame of the orchard, our Pink Lady apple tree, and we're ready to throw in the towel. So we decided this summer that we would take out a few of the trees that are either dead or on their last legs and transition into more blueberries.

And then Mother Nature gave us this gift: plums.



We planted the Italian plum tree in the vegetable garden a couple of years ago. Last year it had one blossom. This year it had more, many of which transformed into fruit. And this afternoon, while seeing to the chickens, a lovely purplish-blue hue caught my eye and I realized the plums were ripe and ready to be picked. Not too many - about three pounds, I would guess. But they're everything a plum should be, the essence of plummy goodness.

All of which adds to my conviction that to be a Happy Gardener you should hope for the best, accept that this year's garden will be different from last year's, marvel in the miracles that present themselves every day, forgive yourself for the things that don't work, and be grateful for the gifts Mother Nature bestows.

Like a handful of plums.

Busy as...

As a bee, of course. It's a miracle there are any flowers for them to be visiting, because the weather has been baking hot and many of the bees' favourite haunts are crispy and dry. (It was 36 degrees in the shade of the verandah yesterday afternoon, which is hotter than we have ever experienced it here at Mucky Boots.)

Thank goodness for the echinacea. It has been very forgiving of the heat and lack of rain, and as a result it was Bee Central this afternoon. The word must have spread I was out with my camera because all the bees in the neighbourhood were lining up for their photo op. All I had to do was point and shoot.



The bees love the globe thistle, too, especially once the stiff, prickly balls begin to erupt in softer purple flowers.

Here's one for my personal notebook. Every summer (and this one makes four) in early August I look critically at an unruly, sprawling, poorly mannered shrubby thing and think it's time I took it out. And then every summer, a couple of weeks later, out pop these. Would someone please remind me next year the thing's a fuschia?

And for no other reason than pure delight, here is a photo of the double-decker bee balm I grew from seed a couple of years ago. This is a single stem.

If you ever needed evidence of Mother Nature's sense of humour, I figure this could be it.

Singing in the rain

Kim and Frankie at Spray Lakes.

We're just back from a road trip to meet my parents in Canmore for the Canmore Folk Music Festival. I think you always learn something about yourself when you go on a road trip, and this journey was no exception. I learned that, compared to my parents, I am a wimp.

On the last evening of the festival it was me, Mom and Dad all sitting in a row in our little camp chairs, listening to wonderful musicians work their magic surrounded by the mountains and trees and blue sky. Only it wasn't blue sky: after a blistering hot weekend the clouds had rolled in and the wind had picked up. I was just thinking that maybe I should have brought my rain jacket when the first stray drops hit my bare head. Then the stray drops turned into light rain, and the crowd around me began to move as people lazily reached for sweaters and jackets. Then the wind became a little more persistent and people hunkered down a little more. Then the light rain turned into official rain, then heavy rain, and the crowd started to scramble, zipping up jackets and flipping up hoods, huddling under the tarps they had been sitting on, opening umbrellas. I had just suggested to my parents that maybe it was time to reconsider our priorities when the sky really opened and the rain began pelting down. I hung onto the rain poncho my mom fished out of her bag for me, doing my best to keep it closed while the wind did its best to whip it open.

And then it began to hail.

That was it for me. No more trying to be a good sport. I leaned forward to shout through the din that maybe we should call it quits (my parents' townhouse being a convenient half-block away from the festival grounds) and the forward movement let a big puddle of water that had been accumulating in a dip in the poncho slide right down my back, soaking my butt. But Mom and Dad just looked at me in bemusement, politely wondering how a daughter they had raised could let a little rain get to her. I ran. They stayed, for the whole rest of the evening, through rain and hail and  distant lightning that lit up the night sky, while I warmed up, dried off, and ate chocolate at home.

I am a wimp.


Frankie the Travellin' Dog asleep in the car.

I learned something else: Frankie the Farm Dog likes hotels. We've had this trip planned for a while, and of course we booked Frankie into a kennel. But in the last six months or so he has begun to show his age, and we started to feel awful about leaving him behind. So we did something we've never done before: we brought him with us.

Since it would take two days of driving to get to Canmore, this would mean finding a pet friendly hotel along the way. I was more than a little worried about how Frankie would do, since he's a creature of habit and routine and any changes in his environment make him anxious, but much to our surprise it turns out Frankie quite likes hotel life. He likes elevators, and long hallways, and drinking from hotel toilets. He was a butt-wiggling happy dog in the hotel on the way to Canmore, and a butt-wiggling happy (though somewhat tired) dog in the hotel on the way back home. Go figure.

Treasures in the garden

On the radio this morning I was listening to a gardening expert trying to deal with the collective angst of southern Vancouver Island gardeners over the dry, lackluster states of their gardens.

Count me in. I'm missing the dewy, lush freshness of the late spring and early summer. The heat is nice, but we haven't had any rain in a month, and I refuse to water the perennial beds any more than is necessary to keep plants alive. Which means the garden is a place of tough, stringy, crisp-around-the-edges survivors these days.

But August is also the month a few flowers finally come into their own. The pots and pots of echinacea I started from seed last year are flowering with slightly goofy purple abundance, and the lilies that are scattered in ones and twos throughout the perennial beds are finally unfolding.

The double bee balm is earning its name, with two tiers of petals. . .

. . . and the sadly neglected roses that I do nothing to except hack back every year are looking beautiful enough to make me reconsider my gardening priorities.

In the vegetable garden some stray onions I swear I didn't plant are flowering, along with the hollyhocks I started last year.

The globe thistles are turning from silvery green to purple, and then erupting in tiny petals which the bees just love. Me, too. There's something about these prickly, quirky plants I find really endearing. Maybe it's because they make me think of a plant Dr. Seuss would think up. Maybe it's because as someone who has spent my life perfecting niceness, I am fascinated by something that is so defiantly prickly. Or maybe it's sheer gratitude: the thriving communities of globe thistles growing in even the driest, scrubbiest looking perennial beds go a long way to help me preserve a few shreds of self-respect as a gardener this time of year.

But the best treasure in the garden? That's easy. My mom and dad, come from Calgary for lunch.

Summer garden

This is my third summer at Mucky Boots, and even though each year has brought different weather, I am starting to recognize patterns in the ebbs and flows of each season. Early spring, with wave after wave of different spring bulbs, is full of excitement and relief that winter is over. Then come the poppies and the peonies, and the garden is lush and green. And right about now, when the warm weather hits, there's a shift change: the rain stops, the soil dries, and the dewy moistness of a few weeks ago settles into hot, baking summer.

It feels like a bit of a trying time. It's harder to work outside, in the heat of the day, and there are fewer emotional benefits: all my friends in the garden seem hunkered down, closed up, doing what they can to make it through the hot, dry weeks ahead. The perennial beds have gone from a riot of purple, pink and red to more uniform green, with a side of baked-earth brown.

But there are still plants to admire, even if I have to go hunting for them now. Many are ones I grew from seed last year, that are flowering for the first time now. Here's a bit of what's braving the heat these days at Mucky Boots.

This is double-decker bee balm (otherwise known as bergamot). The flowers are just starting to emerge - I think the small green pod coming out of the top of the flower will open as well, forming the second layer of petals.

This echinacea looks more than a bit strange to me - are these petals going to unfold, or is this just an anorexic blossom?

This mallow and the nasturtiums below, grown from seed this year, are flowering in the herb garden. I picked up a few different varieties of nasturtium, but neglected to label them properly, so now I don't know what's what.

There is lavender growing everywhere on the property, including about a dozen bushes in the vegetable garden. They're really earning their keep these days, attracting masses of bees that I'm hoping will then go on to fertilize some of my bean and squash blossoms.

The summer bulbs are starting to flower: lilies, crocosmia, gladiolas. The crocosmia are old friends - we had many of them at our old house and loved them, so we planted a bunch of bulbs last spring. This is the first year they're flowering, and the colour is so welcome in the parched garden.

What's flowering in your garden these days?

Garden update

Miracles happen all the time here at Mucky Boots. A pullet lays her first egg. A crocus pushes through a crust of snow. I catch up on my weeding. Frankie goes for an entire afternoon without barking.

Here's another one: after a cool, wet, cloudy spring that went on and on and on, somehow it's summer, the sun has reappeared, and the vegetable garden has hit its stride.

What's making me happy? The winter squash, which took forever to germinate, but is now doing better than in past years. Good thing, because after reading Carol Deppe's The Resilient Gardener, I devoted a whole lot of garden space to winter squash this year.

In previous years I have started squash early in the greenhouse, thinking that winter squash needs a long enough growing season for the fruit to properly ripen. But squash don't like being transplanted - the seedlings go into shock and take forever to recover. Last year I didn't have enough seedlings and direct seeded some additional squash at transplanting time, and those plants quickly caught up and did better than their transplanted kin. So this year I swallowed hard and waited. And waited. Then seeded, and waited some more. But the seeds finally germinated and now they're going gangbusters.

The peas took forever to get going, too, but we're now stuffing our faces with sugar snap peas fresh off the vine every time we go to water the vegetable beds. And the peas are still flowering, so there are many more pea snacks in our future. Hot on the heels of the sugar snap peas will be the shelling peas, but the snow peas have been a no-show. After seeding, then seeding again, I have only 3 or 4 plants straggling their way up the trellis. Go figure.

I worried about the beans. I knew I was pushing the temperature envelope when I planted them, given the cool spring, but all the varieties I planted germinated beautifully. These are French filet pole beans planted at the north end of the bed that also has yellow bush beans and two varieties of dried beans.

Quinoa is one of the new crops I'm trying this year. It's just an experiment, and I figure it will end up being a lot of work for a little amount of quinoa, but between this and the dried beans, I'm trying to see how much protein I can get out of the garden.

Sharing a bed with the quinoa are garbanzos, in the same quest for protein from the garden. I was so surprised when these started to grow - I expected something like a bean plant, but these look more like vetch. They have just started to flower, and they're lovely.

Ground cherries, or cape gooseberries, are another of the experimental crops this year. You've probably had some as a garnish on a dessert plate: they're orange, and come in a papery husk. I have four plants growing in the greenhouse along with the tomatoes and basil. Nothing serious here - they're being grown just for fun.

I have grown fennel every year we've been here, and it has been a successful crop for me. It has even bulbed nicely, which doesn't always happen. My biggest problem is actually eating it, which I've written about before - it's expensive to buy at the grocery store, so I think of it as a special occasion treat, which means I tend to save it in the garden until it's past its prime. This year I have been determined to eat it at its peak. My favourite: apple and fennel salad, with slivered green onions and grated carrot, dressed with a light vinaigrette. Yum.

Unlike everyone else around here, the brassicas have loved the cool, wet spring. The cabbages have somehow avoided whatever bug was eating them last year, and are forming beautiful heads. I'm also growing broccoli for the first time, and it has me a little confused. It's purple. Does broccoli even come in purple? I don't remember ordering it that way.

Summer

Summer arrived today, with temperatures warm enough and sun bright enough to send us scrambling for straw hats and sandals.

We mowed. We trimmed. We weeded. The orchard is finally looking respectable, and the perennial beds around the house got a good, long drink. And then, because Kim's still fighting bronchitis and my joints are still aching, we hauled out the garden furniture and put our feet up with a cool drink and a good book. Feet up: that's not a sight you see very often at Mucky Boots.

Petunia is the Lounging Queen, clever cat. She has a thing or two about setting good priorities to teach us.

End of summer

It feels like fall at Mucky Boots. There's still a full week of August left and it continues to be hot and dry, but there's something different about the sun light - the angle? the intensity? - that speaks of autumn. I need a fleece when I go out to the verandah with my early morning coffee now, and dusk is signalling bedtime for the chickies earlier than it used to. But the biggest sign is the irresistible urge I have to buy new school supplies. I'm about to turn 48, and this is only the third time since I was 5 that I haven't returned to school in September, either as a student or a teacher. That kind of ingrained patterning is hard to change - and why would I want to? Why give up the hopeful imagining that comes with embarking on a new year, the feeling that anything is possible provided I have enough sharp new pencils and different colours of sticky notes?

I'll be absent for the next while: I'm heading here with my mom for this. How lucky can I be? I wish you all a peaceful and happy end-of-summer, and I'll see you here again in September.

Rain

After an endless spell of hot and dry weather: finally, rain - all day today and probably tomorrow. We are saying "Aaahhh," the plants are saying "aaahhh." The chickens are a little confused.

We have all the windows open, letting the cool air flow through the house, and I have just gone for a walk around the garden in nothing but a t-shirt and shorts, feeling the rain on my skin and the damp grass under my bare feet. Heaven.

Globe thistle

I just love this plant, and we have masses of it here at Mucky Boots. It reminds me of some people I know: so emphatically and unapologetically prickly you just have to stop and admire.