Under cover

I scrubbed my running shoes the other day - they were a mess after a summer's worth of dust and dirt - and when I was done I turned them upside down on the veranda steps to drain and dry.

And who was hiding underneath when I retrieved them the next morning?

This little fellow.

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.

New kid

There's a new kid in the Mucky Boots flock, and it ain't a chicken. It's a rabbit. 

We first spotted it a couple of weeks ago, hanging out in the back pasture where the chicken tractor and chicken yurt are, and now we see it every day. Just a regular rabbit, but it doesn't seem afraid of either us or the grown-up chickens wandering around very close by. Gump and his flock cruise around the pasture eating grass and bugs, and there's the rabbit right beside them, nibbling back dandelion stems like pasta strands. Does s/he think s/he just blends in?

We're charmed, even though the little bugger has found a way into my vegetable garden and is helping itself to my lettuce...

...but we're also a little concerned, because Miss Comfort Queen herself, Petunia the cat, is an expert and somewhat bloodthirsty rabbit hunter. We know this because a few times a year she leaves the bottom half of one on the door mat. (Yes, the bottom half - neatly severed at the waist line, and no, we don't know what she is doing with the top half. Perhaps that's where the tastiest bits are.) We love our Petunia, and want her to live out her kitty destiny, but we'd rather she left this particular rabbit alone.

Come to think of it, Petunia gives the adult chickens a wide berth - after all, most of them are bigger than she is. So maybe our rabbit is hanging out with the chickens for a little protection.

What a smart rabbit.

Tofino

Did you miss me? I've been enjoying a wonderful week with my sister, who was visiting from Toronto. We went thrift store shopping, played with the chickens, planted potatoes, went to an auction, cooked and ate and talked and talked and talked. And we went to Tofino overnight, so she could get an ocean fix.

Since it was a special visit we spent a night at the Wickaninnish Inn. This was the view from our window. 

The Inn is on Chesterman Beach, which wasn't busy midweek, so there was lots of room for walking and thinking and listening to the surf.

And now my sister is back at home with her family and things seem awfully quiet here at Mucky Boots. Come back soon!

Wake-up call

There are clock radio alarms, and Mickey Mouse windup alarms, and discretely beeping digital alarms.

This is a Mucky Boots alarm.

Good morning everyone!

Sleepover

We love having visitors at Mucky Boots, especially ones who bring their own toothbrush. Because we live an hour away from our friends in Victoria, and because that hour's drive involves the notorious Malahat Highway, our guests often feel they need to leave early in to make it back over the Malahat before it gets too dark (at least that's the reason they give us...) So a visit that's also a sleepover is lots of fun because nobody's watching the clock, or watching how many glasses of wine they've had - we're all just enjoying ourselves and each other's company.

Our friend Donna has come for a visit today, and aren't we tickled pink! For all kinds of reasons: Donna is a wonderful friend, has a laugh that fills the room and a heart that's even bigger, and she is a superb musician who always remembers to bring her viola. So this is what I got to listen to as I puttered in the kitchen making supper.

Lucky me!

We have a lovely guest room just for these occasions, with the world's second most comfortable bed, a lovely view of the garden, beautiful paintings on the wall. Fluffy towels in the bathroom.

Doesn't it make you want to come to stay?

Hungry bear

We've had a visitor in the neighbourhood the last week or so - a very hungry bear. We're used to bears passing through a couple of times a year, but this one is making himself at home and doing a lot of damage. A few of the small farms have lost some sheep, and many neighbours have had their garbage cans and compost piles raided.

Apparently the bear was feeling the need for some fruit in his diet, because one night last week he/she climbed our biggest apple tree to get the few apples left at the top, breaking many large branches in the process (and leaving some fairly disgusting piles of fresh fertilizer on the grass). So now our lovely tree looks like this...

...and our truck looks like this.

The Block Watch communication lines are humming and the local conservation officers are on the case. The farm down the road (which lost some sheep) played host to a bear trap for most of last week, but it was taken away yesterday as empty as it arrived.

I know this is just part of life in the country, but it makes me more than a bit nervous all the same.

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.

He's back

Yes, this is our little psycho bird, a Western Tanager, back for another day of doing his best to get into our house. He's an early riser, and this morning it's our dining room windows he's trying to get through.

He hovers in front of them almost like a hummingbird, then either bumps into the window or flies away. I have turned the lights in the room on, and off, trying to determine if it's his own reflection he's after, but it doesn't seem to make any difference. The window can't be acting like much of a mirror because he sees me as soon as I move into the room and flies away, which made getting these photos an exercise in patience.

What do you want, little guy?

Under siege

Like the looks of this little guy? Think he looks cute and harmless? Think again. This bird is psycho.

Well, maybe not the actual fellow in the photo (which isn't mine - it comes from here). But one of his relatives, who lives in our neck of the woods, spent the day dive-bombing our house, bashing into windows, going from deck to bedroom window to living room window, all around the house, doing his very best to somehow make it through one of those pieces of glass.

It started about 6:30 this morning. Petunia started to make her bird hunting noises as she prowled the window ledges in the living room where I was eating my breakfast, then I began to get glimpses of brightly coloured flashes in my peripheral vision, and then the first thump on the window got me out of my chair to have a look.

I'd never seen a bird like this before, and its colouring made me think it must be a finch or some sort of exotic bird. We're used to mostly plain-Jane brown birds around here - anything this brightly coloured must come from a pet store, I thought. But when I did a quick Internet search I discovered it is a Western Tanager. Huh. Who knew.

But back to the siege. This determined little bird flew around the house all day, from window to window, hovering and flapping and thumping into the glass. Why?

I thought maybe it was trying to fight its own reflection in the window, thinking it was seeing a rival. But that didn't make sense with the sun direction, and in any case most of the windows were shaded.

Until I discovered it was a normally occurring bird species, I thought it might be a household pet that had escaped and was trying to get back home, any home.

Maybe it just likes our taste in home furnishings. In any case, we're waiting with some anticipation for the morning, to see if it comes back.

Here are two interesting tidbits about Western Tanagers I found out today. (1) The red colour on their heads is not built-in. It's a result of the insects they eat. And (2) if you are stocking a bird feeder in hopes of attracting a Western Tanager, they respond well to cut fruit, nectar and baked goods.

Baked goods.

Does that mean freshly baked croissants, or would day-olds do?

Butchart gardens

My mom and dad came for a visit this past weekend, as a way of helping me feel better about missing out on the family Christmas. It was lovely to see them, and fun to pretend it was Christmas even if we couldn't find a restaurant anywhere serving a roast turkey dinner.

On Sunday we went to the Butchart Gardens, a world famous 100-year-old garden built on the site of a old limestone quarry. When the family is here it's a tradition to tour their 12 Days of Christmas light display, so of course we had to go. There's not much in bloom in mid-February even here in Lotus Land, but it meant the bones of the garden were the stars of the show.

It's easy to imagine the old quarry in this photograph. This deep pool is the site of the "5 golden rings" verse of the Christmas light display: each fountain is circled by a ring of golden lights that shine in the dark.

Each generation of the family that owns the gardens has included beloved dogs, so leashed dogs are welcome to visit. Lucky Frankie.

For me the highlight were the garbage cans. I know that sounds a little odd, but they were quite beautiful. Each was housed in a cedar box with a lovely planter on top. I went around taking pictures of them all, watched by some perplexed Japanese tourists.

Margaret and Mary visit Mucky Boots

Margaret and Mary drove up from Victoria today to have lunch with us. Margaret comes regularly, and sometimes brings our friend Mary with her, and we just love their visits. We love the great conversation and easy laughter, we soak up the encouragement and all the "oooohs" and "aaaahs" at our latest construction project, and their visits are always the perfect excuse to lay out a great meal for sharing.

This visit had a secondary purpose: Margaret wanted to collect some eggs. She grew up on a dairy farm in Yorkshire and has fond memories of egg gathering. Yesterday we gave the hens a pep talk to encourage them to produce some especially lovely eggs for her today, and they obliged.

The eggs were lovely, but Hector stole the show, letting himself be picked up by both our visitors for a cuddle and a photo op. Good boy, Hector.

On a completely different note, we had a frosty night here last night, and all day the temperature hovered around freezing. Kim found the strangest frosty-snow-like stuff growing on some pieces of wood in the chicken yard this morning. It looks like hair, or very fine feathers, and it's definitely frost because it melted away to nothing when we touched it.

After marvelling at it and taking some photos this morning we left it on the porch and discovered this afternoon that it had continued to grow all day. Has anyone ever seen this before? And what on earth causes it?

Added note: Kim at Golden Pines is bang on: it's called "frost flowers" and here's what the Guide to Frost says about it:

Some of the stranger ice formations you're likely to find in the woods are called "frost flowers" or "feather frost". A typical example looks like a small puff-ball of cotton candy, a few inches across, made up of clusters of thin, curved ice filaments.

Frost flowers usually grows on a piece of water-logged wood. It's something of a rare find, meaning that conditions have to be just so before it will form.

Not much has been written on this unusual phenomenon, and to my knowledge it has never been reproduced in a controlled laboratory environment. It appears that the ice filaments are essentially pushed out from pores in the wood as they freeze.

It's something of a misnomer to call this frost, by the way, since it freezes from liquid water, not water vapor.