Patience

I have been having a rough week - my inflammatory arthritis is flaring. It's always a lottery to see which joints will be affected, and this week it has been my shoulders. Flare-ups usually last 24-36 hours, but this has been going on since Sunday. It hurts. It really, really hurts.

I've got about 10 years' experience with this, so I know what to do to minimize pain and the possibility of joint damage: heat and not using the affected joints at all. Heat has been no problem since I invested in the world's best moist-heat heating pad. But immobility - I have a real problem with that, especially since there's so much I want to be doing in the garden. And the longer any flare-up lasts, the more I start fearing that it won't ever end, and I won't be able to keep up with the garden, and we'll have to move back to the city and live in a condo and eat packaged food from Walmart.

I know my mind is my worst enemy sometimes. So today I decided to treat this episode as a reminder from the universe that sometimes we have to stop doing, and just appreciate what already is instead.

Here's what I found to appreciate.

The big perennial bed around the crab apple tree is a marvel of coexistence to me. There are snowdrops, chives, aconite, fawn lilies, tulips, rhubarb and hostas all living happily together. And each of them looks more marvelous in proximity to the others.

Nearby is a tiny, spindly star magnolia tree we planted last spring. It didn't do very well last year, and we have been thinking of moving it, but there, today, were the first blossoms beginning to open.

This Japanese maple hasn't had an ugly day in its entire life. Bare-branched, just leafing out, in full green leaf, or in autumn glory, this tree is gorgeous from beginning to end.

The forest beds are full of ferns. Is there any plant more Dr. Seuss looking than this?

Also in the forest beds, the first trillium are flowering...

...and the fawn lilies have reached the English-barrister-wig part of their life cycle.

By the pond the marsh marigolds and these double primula are flowering. William came for a visit, to see what I was doing.

Even the bumper crop of dandelions in the chicken yard looks beautiful.

Easiest to appreciate: the classic Aussie smile.

Chickenless

The 18 chicks that were supposed to arrive at the end of March, and then mid-April, are still not here, and won't be until June. At this point we're not quite ready to believe we'll even get them then. The reason? Apparently the hatchery just can't keep up with the demand. We are very disappointed, as there's now no chance of our own home-grown (home-laid?) eggs before next spring, since if young hens don't start laying before winter, they won't at all until spring.

I'm trying to figure out why I am so disappointed. The best I can figure, I was counting on those chickens to make me feel like a real farmer. That's lower-case-f-farmer, not capital-f-farmer - I'm not entirely delusional. But somehow the chickens were going to make us official.

We've hunted around for local alternatives, but it's clear that for every chick looking for a home, there are about 10 homes looking for chicks. There are more options for buying adult hens, but they have a limited egg-laying lifespan, and without experience at figuring out how old a chicken is, we don't feel confident spending money on it. (For those of you who are interested, a hen's age can be determined by looking to see which of various body parts have been bleached, which happens sequentially as more and more eggs get laid. At least that's what we've read...) So, for now at least, it looks like we're stuck waiting for June.

It's making us reconsider the possibility of keeping one of the roosters we'll eventually get - it looks like having chicks to sell could be a nice little source of income.

Growing success

We may have been having trouble keeping our sprouts and bushes to ourselves and away from the mouths of deer and mice, but boy, can we grow skunk cabbage!

Varmints continued

Our problems with mice and deer continue. You may remember that I had a bit of trouble with mice eating the peas I had planted, and nibbling my seedlings in the greenhouse. You may also remember I dealt with the pea issue by covering the bed with a floating row cover. Ha.

I should thank all of you who might have laughed at me, and refrained, hearing this great plan. Why on earth would I think a floating row cover, even one securely anchored around its perimeter, would keep out a determined and hungry mouse? The very next day I lifted the cover the find the same neatly drilled holes in the soil where the peas had once been. Little buggers.

And there was worse news in the greenhouse. Sure, my chard seedlings had been nibbled to the ground, but chard is easy and quick to grow and I didn't feel so bad having to plant some more. But my pepper seedlings! My carefully pampered and prospering pepper seedlings - now that hurt. The mice didn't even fully enjoy them - they just chewed them off and left the decapitated bits on top of the soil.

Well, I got a bit heated under the collar. Things got even more heated a few days later when Kim went back to the garden and discovered that deer had nibbled the tender leaves of the freshly planted Asian pear tree and the ends of a few of her new blueberry bushes. We should have expected it, but our problems with deer have been sporadic. We had planned to put a wire cage around the tree, and netting over the blueberries - we just hadn't got to it.

I had to figure out how far I wanted to go in the mouse-deterrence battle. Those of you who refrained from laughing at my floating row cover idea may have to turn away for a moment, because my next strategies were to sprinkle cayenne pepper all over the seedlings in the greenhouse, and plug in an electronic rodent deterrer. You can guess how well those worked. So now, for the first time in my life, I am baiting mouse traps with peanut butter every evening, and first thing every morning I make the circuit of all the traps and dispose of the dead mice I find.

I cried with the first one. Only its nose had been caught in the trap, and I wondered how long it had lived, and how much it had suffered. I hated myself. I don't kill things - I grow things. What was I doing?

It got a bit easier after that, mostly because all the mice I have found since then ( and there haven't been that many) have had definitively crushed heads. I could see that their deaths would have been quick. But it still doesn't sit easily with me.

Dealing with the deer problem was easier. No life and death issues there, just some wire fencing around the pear tree and some nylon bird netting for the blueberries. We used netting last year to keep the birds from the strawberries and the deer from the blueberries, gooseberries and blackberries planted along the fence, but we weren't totally happy with the system we had worked out, mostly because the netting kept get tangled in the lawn mower, and it proved to be a pain to keep out of the way when harvesting all those berries we had protected so well.

So this year Kim got serious and came up with a great way of managing it. She screwed stakes to the outside of each raised bed, pulled netting taut over the stakes, and then used more screws at the bottom to hook the bottom edge of the netting, providing good coverage without having netting dragging on the ground waiting for the power mower. When we want to get into the bed we just unhook the bottom edge of the netting and drape it up over the top, easy as pie. Blueberry pie.

These little hooks from Lee Valley have proved very useful. We used the net-to-wire hooks to easily fasten the netting to the existing fence, and the net-to-net hooks to tie back the excess netting at the corners. And they're cheap!

Missing scents

I have no sense of smell. It's not a permanent thing, just something that has settled in for a long (very long) stay. It has to with the chronic sinusitis I developed about 10 years ago and which has been hard to puzzle out and fix. My best guess is that it's related to food allergies - I started to be able to smell again when I was on a diet that included no gluten, no dairy, no sugar and no caffeine. It was great to be able to breathe again, but man, that was a hard diet to stick to.

When I realized a couple of days ago that this spring marks the 10th anniversary of my loss of smell I started to reflect on what that means. On what I'm missing. Good smells: coffee brewing in the early morning, woodsmoke in the air on a frosty winter night, the smell of wet cedar in the greenhouse. Flowers, a damp dog, freshly chopped rosemary, laundry dried on the line. Bad smells: kitty litter boxes, compost piles that need turning, roofs being tarred. Exhaust from the chain saw.

I've come to the conclusion that even though it is sometimes convenient not to be able to smell (when visiting an outhouse, for example), I am missing out on a lot, especially now that we live out here in the country. When I step out onto the verandah in the morning my nose should be assaulted by all the scents of a damp, green spring. When I cultivate the soil in the vegetable garden I want the smell of the earth to accompany the feel of moist, crumbling soil in my hands. Crushed creeping thyme underfoot in the perennial garden, the grass in the clearing baking under the hot summer sun, hyacinths in the spring. And lilacs - how I miss the smell of lilacs!

So I've decided to mark this 10th anniversary by doing my darnedest to get back on that gluten, sugar, dairy and caffeine-free diet. If past experience is any indication it will take about 3 months before I notice any difference, but if I start today that means I should be able to enjoy the first armful of basil from the greenhouse in early July in a whole new way.

Stay tuned. I'll tell you just how wonderful it smells.

More weird weather

We have strange weather where we are. Vancouver Island as a whole is odd meteorologically speaking, and it was when we moved here nine years ago that I learned the word "microclimate." You are living in a microclimate when it snows a foot and a half and you call in to work to tell them your car got stuck on the first hill and they tell you there's no snow where they are. (Yes, this happened to me our first winter here, and didn't the Victoria residents get a good laugh at me, the Toronto import who was supposed to know how to drive in snow.)

Well, there are microclimates and then there is just plain weirdness. We knew something was extra odd when we moved to our new home a little over a year ago: we would shovel out from under the latest dump of snow and get to the top of the road only to discover that they had half the snow we did. I'm talking a few hundred metres away.

We got another example today. About lunchtime the sky got very dark and glowering, and we knew we were in for something. Then the skies opened up and it hailed. Man, did it hail. Not really big hail stones, but enough to knock the plants around a bit. It hailed like mad for about 10 minutes, during which time we got in the car to drive to town for some errands. We had trouble getting up the hill there was so much ice on the road, but at the top of that hill there was no hail. And a few hundred metres down the road the pavement was dry.

I am not making this up.

We're trying not to take it personally.

Big blow

All of you in other parts of Canada who usually have to suffer the glee of Vancouver Islanders about the cold and snow and bad weather you endure while we gloat about living in Lotus Land? Well, here's your payback. Yesterday while you were enjoying a gorgeous sunny, warm day, we were in the middle of a big wind storm.

We were woken early yesterday morning by the sounds of something big hitting the roof and rolling down the slope. Turns out it was just a smallish branch, but it made a real racket and gave us an indication of the day we were going to have. It blew and blew. It poured. The power went out twice. It even snowed for about 5 minutes early this morning before the storm finally gave up. It was a bit of a scary day, given that our house is surrounded by tall trees that were swaying madly in the gale. But everyone - people, pets, neighbours, cars, buildings - all survived fine. One quite large branch impaled the potato bed, javelin style, and another came down just beside the car, and there was tree debris everywhere this morning, but no one was hurt, nothing was damaged, and we didn't run out of toilets to pee in when we had no water because the power was out.

When we were lying in bed last night Kim commented that it was actually a good thing the chickens didn't arrive when they were supposed to, as we would have had a hard time keeping them warm enough with the power out for so long. So there you go.

I have no photos for you, as I was sensibly inside staying warm and dry, but try http://www.timescolonist.com/news/news/2756978/story.html?tab=PHOT for some pictures of the Mill Bay Marina, a little way down the highway from us.

Disappointment

There's something missing from this picture...chicks! Our 18 Red Rock Cross, Red Sussex Cross and Buff Orpington chicks were supposed to arrive today, but they didn't. The local distributor for the hatchery said they're swamped with orders - it seems lots of people are wanting a few chickens for their backyards. We have been assured they will arrive on April 14, so we'll just have to wait a little longer.

We borrowed this brooder box and the lamp from our always helpful neighbour Nick, and it fits very nicely in Bathroom #2, which you may remember has been gutted and re-drywalled. It seems there was a reason we put that renovation on hold - it was to allow its temporary incarnation as the chicken brooding room. Who knew.

Varmints

I am coming to the conclusion I got really lucky with my vegetable garden last year. I didn't know how lucky until things started to go wrong this year. Last year the goddess of gardening smiled down on me. But this year - this is the year of the varmints.

The first problems were with the peas. I planted snow, snap and shelling peas two weeks ago, reminiscing about how lovely the peas were last year, and how easy to grow they seemed to be. I did remember, as I coated the peas in inoculant and planted them in neat little rows, that our neighbour had some problems last year with birds or mice eating his peas before they could sprout. But not me. No ma'am.

I should have known better. Because the next morning I went out to admire my freshly planted bed and saw rows and rows of neat little holes drilled into the soil exactly where my peas had briefly been. They didn't even make it through a single night.

I waited until today, to see whether any escaped the notice of the scavenging creatures, but only two pretty little sprouts have appeared, out of about 200 that were planted. Time to plant again. Only this time, as soon as I was done, the entire bed got swaddled in a floating row cover, anchored all around the perimeter with rocks. No birds or mice are getting in this time. I hope.

I've had new problems in the greenhouse, too. Damping off, which I didn't have any trouble with last year. For those of you who haven't grown vegetables, that's when perfectly healthy seedlings suddenly keel over like they've been cut off at ground level. It's due to a naturally occurring fungus in the soil, which is why many gardeners (including me, now) use sterilized starting mix rather than homemade mix using soil from the garden. And something ate many of my lettuce and chard seedlings. Some were nibbled. Some had completely disappeared. I am not amused.

First and last

Our friend Donna came for an overnight visit yesterday. She brought her viola, and all afternoon the house was filled with viola and guitar duets - mostly gypsy jazz - and lots of laughter as she and Kim made fabulous music together.

While they played by the fire I played in the kitchen, putting together a supper equal to the special occasion. As well as crispy roast chicken and potatoes, the meal had a last and two firsts. The last of the rutabagas, pulled up the day before to make room for new plantings, mashed with butter and a bit of cream. The first of this year's salad greens. And the first of what we hope will be many asparagus spears - carefully cut it into thirds so we each could have a taste.

Wonderful company, wonderful food, wonderful music. It can't get any better than that.

Blueberries

You may remember that this new bed (and its sister in the background) was built in an attempt to satisfy Kim's appetite for potatoes. Well, she has decided that even she can be satisfied with the two beds we have set aside for potatoes in the fenced-in portion of the vegetable garden, and so these beds have been dedicated to blueberries instead, Kim's second favourite thing.

She worked really hard getting the beds filled and the soil to the right pH (blueberries need acid soil), but today she finally put plants in the first bed. Once the other bed gets planted, which should happen tomorrow, we will have roughly doubled our blueberry bush count to a total of 35 plants of seven different varieties: Bluecrop, Hardy Blue, Chandler, Brigitta, Spartan, Northland and North Country.

She was disappointed with the plants we bought from a nursery on the Saanich Peninsula last weekend. They came in big gallon pots, but when she loosened each pot to ease out the plant, out came a tiny, very root bound plug. And that from a reputable nursery that specializes in blueberries. We took pictures, and will call them tomorrow to let them know of our concerns. It will be interesting to see what they say.

But right now the newly planted bed looks lovely. Kim stapled the tags to wooden stakes that she planted in the bed along with the blueberries: not as lovely as Paula's copper tags, but it makes us feel like we're official somehow.

Here was the best moment of the day. First, for those of you who aren't Canadian, Tim Horton's is a coffee chain that figures prominently in many Canadian's sense of national identity. Kim had been telling me that she'd heard that Tim's adds something to their coffee to make people happy when they drink it. So later in the day when I was going out to run an errand I asked her if she'd like me to pick her up a happy coffee, and she said "No thanks. I'm happy enough already."

What's growing

Come with me on a tour of what's growing and blooming these days at Mucky Boots!

The magnolia by the pond is about to burst into blossom. Remember the toddlers in fuzzy slippers? They're about to start dancing!

When we moved here we were so happy to see there are a couple of dogwood trees on the property, including one in the chicken yard and this one in the perennial garden by the pond. In a few weeks this bud will be a beautiful saucer-shaped, creamy white flower.

Also in the perennial gardens is this ribes, which looks its best at this time of year, and the winged euonymous, one of the "ugly plants" I am trying really hard to appreciate more. At least it's leafing out, which makes it look more like an actual plant and less like a weird alien insect.

In the vegetable garden the first official spear of asparagus has appeared...

...the garlic is looking happy, despite having to share the bed with a few stray snowdrops and tulips...

...but the tulips are looking a bit sad, I suspect because of the several late frosts they have had to endure.

In the greenhouse the overwintered lettuce is coming back to life. It is Anuenue, a variety in my very short gardening career I have come to love - crispy, juicy, tasty. What more could you want?

The green onion seedlings (seeded in groups as per Eliot Coleman) are almost ready to transplant outside...

...and the squash seedlings have erupted with a vigorous "Ta Da!" Some seedlings emerge so tentatively and slowly they look like they'd really rather stay in bed a while longer. But when squash are ready to emerge they get right to it.

And that's what's growing at Mucky boots!

Mucky Boots lullaby

This is the sound we go to sleep to these days, courtesy of the residents of the pond at the back of the property. Happy Spring!

William's getting old

This is William. He's one of two resident cats at Mucky Boots, and as best as we can figure (he was adopted from the SPCA) he's about 15. Kim has had him longer than she's had me.

William is a cat with personality - mostly grumpy. In fact, he's the grumpiest cat I've ever met, although part of me admires the steadfastness with which he maintains his grumpiness. He's not interested in pleasing anyone. For example, if he is on the road in front of the car as we drive towards the gate he won't deviate from his own course an iota, but trots in front of the car, turning around every few steps to meow in annoyance at us as we follow him, very slowly, in the car. What a cat.

William loves being outside, and up until a couple of months ago he would come in only to eat. He has the worst fur in the world for a cat who loves being outside so much: long, fluffy, downy and prone to matting if you even look at him sideways. Did I mention he hates being brushed? As a result, Kim and I are always at him with scissors, trying to keep the mats under control.

A few months ago William had to have most of his teeth removed, because of a genetic problem that caused them to erode below the gum line. And now, all of a sudden, he's an old cat. He wants to be inside much more, and likes curling on the floor by the wood stove. He moves more slowly. He sleeps for most of the day. But yesterday he followed us out into the sunshine to bask in the warmth of the artichoke bed, against the wall of the chicken coop. I hope he has many more warm days in the sunshine.

Building queens

Kim and I have been on a building binge. All thoughts of finishing Bathroom #2 have evaporated, and instead we have been sawing and hammering up a storm outside. It began with the chicken yard makeover, which meant a new gate and repairs to the fencing. Then I decided I wanted a new trellis for the spot where I'm going to attempt to grow cucumbers and melons this year, so we built that. And then Kim's thoughts turned to potatoes.

Kim loves potatoes. Much of the expansion of the raised bed real estate in our garden is attributable to Kim's desire for potatoes - lots and lots of potatoes. Last year we built a huge new bed that doubled the area we had allocated for potatoes, and that still wasn't enough. So today we built another new bed, this one measuring 16 feet by 3 feet. We have run out of room inside the deer fenced part of the property, so we had to build the new bed outside. We're not sure if deer like potatoes or not - I guess we'll find out.

Kim has all kinds of plans for this bed. Potatoes, yes. Onions, too - yesterday she came home with some red onion sets she saw in the garden store, to supplement the seedlings I started a few weeks ago. For those of you who haven't grown onions before, "sets" are like little onion bulbs. It's a lot easier to grow onions from bulbs rather than seeds - onion seedlings, according to what I've read and my own experience, are a bit temperamental. But sets can flower too quickly, resulting in small onions. It will be interesting to see how the sets and the seedlings compare.

Now Kim thinks even this new bed won't be enough to satisfy her, and she's got her eye on another spot along the deer fence. That will be tomorrow's task.

Apology

I just want you all to know I have been working very, very hard to develop my appreciation for what was formally known as The Ugly Plant and has now been identified as coltsfoot. Every time I pass the little grove of plants near the pond I stop to reflect on the wonderful variety that nature provides, and on how rewarding more subtle beauty can be. (Can you sense to effort I am going to here? It was the remark that came via email about the plant being like a botanical Rorschach test, saying more about the viewer than the attractiveness of the plant. Ouch!)

Today I decided that with the gradual opening of its flowers (we're talking a two week process here), the coltsfoot looks like very, very slowly exploding fireworks. How's that - any better?

Vanity

This is an actual photo of me. This is not a costume. This is really what I looked like that day.

Something has happened to my sense of vanity - it seems to have disappeared, and I'm not sure where it went. There was a time, not so long ago, when I would have been appalled at the thought of having my picture taken looking like this. Now I think it's kind of funny. (I especially like the hat, and think it adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the whole ensemble.)

How did this happen?

Take showers, for example. Having a shower used to be the first thing I would do when I got up in the morning. Now that would be a waste of time, since my mornings are usually spent in dirty, sweaty work. But that leads to scheduling issues. Suppose Kim and I have spent the morning wrestling a countertop and vanity out of a bathroom, destroying much of the drywall in the process, and then decide to go to the dump. Would I bother getting out of my dirty clothes and having a shower, just to go to the dump? Of course not. So we go to the dump, and get a little dirtier and sweatier hauling all the debris out of the truck. But that's no problem, because everyone at the dump looks dirty and sweaty.

Then it's lunch time and we decide to go to Tim's for a bowl of soup, but we're all covered in drywall dust. Do we go all the way home, have a shower and change, and then drive all the way back into town for lunch? Of course not. So we go to Tim's, as we are (and we don't stand out too much - Duncan is a blue collar town after all), and somehow I have found myself in public in a state I never imagined allowing myself to be seen in. Not only that, but when we pass the grocery store I remember we're out of cream and I actually go into the store to fetch it.

It's kind of liberating, in the same way as my decision a few years ago not to wear high heels anymore. Liberating in that it priorizes function over form. Inside over outside. Sense of self over the opinion of others. I'm pretty happy about that.

But I don't want you to think I don't have showers anymore. I do. Regularly. Really.

Chicken yard makeover

I am so tired. We have been working for two days to get ready for the chickens that arrive at the end of the month. Yesterday we focused on the enclosed yard around the chicken coop - after 18 months of no chickens, it was a clogged mess of fallen branches, debris from last year's weeds and way too many volunteer big-leaf maples, so the first order of business was to clear it out. At the same time we replaced the rotted boards all around the top of the fence and removed the old gate, which was falling down and in a really awkward location. Then while Kim went to get lumber for the new gate, I cleared out the path to the coop door, which was inches deep in evergreen needles and rotting fallen leaves. We had no idea there was such a nice path underneath all that gunge!



Today Kim started with the supports for the new gate, which we decided to relocate to the end of the path to the coop. We used some extra pieces of broken granite to provide a base for the supports, so the wood wouldn't come in contact with the soil. Then Kim built the supports around the existing round fence poles.

About the time it started to rain we got to move into the workshop to build the gate itself. Kim had a great plan, and we were able to use up some of the wood and fencing material we had leftover from other projects, and by the time we were both ready to drop, it was done - almost. We ran out of carriage bolts, so we'll have to wait until tomorrow to finish it up and hang it, but we took time to see if it would fit. It does! Frankie, especially, is very impressed.

Ugly plants

Spring is a gorgeous season. Everywhere you look there is something beautiful to see. As I wrote here, even spindly, punky volunteer trees can make you stop and appreciate their tender green buds.

But I'm having a little trouble with one or two of the plants in the garden. Like the one shown here. I don't know what it is, and based solely on where it grows (in the uncultivated forested area by the pond) I think it must be a native plant, rather than something that was put there. It appears early on - about the same time as the crocus. It has the thick green stem of a stalk of broccoli, and when it first appears the head is a cluster of tightly closed buds that eventually open into nondescript white flowers.

It's wrong, and I don't feel good about it, but I find this plant just plain ugly. Every day as I walk past it on the way to the greenhouse I try to find something to like about it, with no luck. I feel uncharitable and unkind and ungenerous, but when I leave it behind I don't like it any better than when I started.

It's not the only plant I feel an uncomfortable revulsion for - there's the winged euonymus, too. We have three or four of these shrubs at the front of the house, and before anyone protests, yes they do have spectacular fall colour. But have you looked at it when it's bare? It looks like an alien insect of some kind. Every branch, big and small, has three ridges that look like scales running the length of the branch. It makes me think of a five foot high locust. Ick. While I have worked really hard to find something to appreciate about the broccoli-like white flower, with the winged euonymus I don't even try.

As an antidote, here is a picture of the first of the fawn lilies to bloom. These are a native plant, and they are in many of the perennial beds here at Mucky Boots. The flowers start off looking like sweet drooping pigtails, and as the flower ages, each pigtail curls up so the whole thing looks like a British barrister's wig.



Added later: Thanks to expert detective work by Joyce and Yvonne, the "ugly plant" has been identified as a coltsfoot - either sweet coltsfoot or arrow-leaved coltsfoot, not the medicinal kind that grows in eastern Canada and Europe. Thank you everyone for your encouragement to find things to love about this plant!

Going to the quarry

When Kim and I left our jobs to start our new lives here at Mucky Boots, we knew that giving up our dual-income-no-kids lifestyle was going to mean we'd be leaving some things behind. No more eating out a few times a week, or walking out of bookstores with a bag full of new books. And travel - would we ever be able to travel to interesting places again?

Yes, as it turns out. We get to go to interesting places - just ones closer to home. Like the dump. (I'm serious - going to the dump is kind of fun.) Or, like today, the quarry.

We needed big chunks of blasted rock to build a retaining wall at the front of the house, as part of our campaign to turn a barren, weed-covered wasteland into something more beautiful. The local stone store charges $300 a ton for the rock they have, which is fancier than we need or would like, but when we called around we found a quarry nearby that only charges $20 a ton. The only hitch: we'd have to go get it ourselves. No problem!

After an interesting drive up a very steep road with about a dozen switchbacks, we found the quarry, found the guy running the quarry, and found the pile of rock we could choose from. We loaded the truck with about a ton of rock (yes, we were very careful, didn't choose pieces that were too heavy for us, and used our knees), paid our $20 and were on our way back down the switchbacks.

And that was only half the fun! Once we got home we got to unload it all and wheelbarrow it over to where the wall would be built.

I'm not sure why I find going to the dump, or to the quarry, so fun. Maybe it's for the same reason people like travelling to more traditionally interesting places. I imagine people who go to Thailand enjoy the feeling of "Wow, I never imagined I would end up in Thailand!" I had a similar feeling at the quarry today. Never in my old life, my intellectual, professional old life, would I have imagined I'd have ended up at a quarry in my dirty pants, hefting big (but not too big!) rocks into the back of the pickup truck, enjoying the exercise and the challenge and the fresh air and the satisfaction of doing it ourselves. That's as good as a trip.

Gardening mistakes

Two days ago these were happy little tomato seedlings, growing up nestled in warm soil, surrounded by tomato siblings and protected by heat mats and plastic covers to keep them warm, all snuggled up in the greenhouse. Now they are nothing but limp little bits of former vegetation.

Remember the snow surprise we had overnight Monday/Tuesday? Apparently I picked that night, of all nights, to forget to turn on the heat mats. Argh! I wouldn't have thought that would spell the demise of my seedlings, but my max/min thermometer tells me it got down to -5 (Celsius) in the greenhouse that night (all of which I discovered after that cup of tea I promised myself).

I feel like an idiot, because I lost two flats of tomato seedlings last year - not by freezing them to death, but by cooking them. I went to work one morning, enjoyed an unseasonably warm day, and came home that night to a thermometer reading well into the 40s and my tomato seedlings gasping their last breath. You'd think I'd have learned something.

Well, I did, actually. I learned to crack open the door of the greenhouse when it got too warm, and to turn off the heat mats every morning and turn them on every evening. I just forgot. Once. Nature can be so unforgiving.

So today I did the sensible thing and went to Rona to get an electronic timer, which then got installed in the greenhouse with a really long power bar for all the heat mats. After a head scratching half-hour of reading the instruction manual I managed to program the timer to turn the mats off every day at 8 a.m. and turn them back on at 6 p.m. I just came back from a post-supper check, and am happy to announce it all seems to work. Lesson learned.

All is not lost: about 20% of the tomato seedlings survived, and with the exception of my 6 fennel seedlings which were also limp bits when I found them, everything else seems to be fine. And I still have lots of time to catch up - according to my admittedly sketchy records, we're about a month ahead of where we were last year. So I have reseeded what needed reseeding and have resolved to make checking the weather forecast on the Internet part of my morning/evening computer routine.

I hate screwing up. My life would be so much easier if I was perfect.

What?!

This is what we woke up to this morning. Something's wrong here - this is lotus land, after all, and it is March. But don't these snow-dusted primula look edible, like frosted violets on a cake?

Everything is crispy and frozen, and there's more white stuff expected tonight. But if there's one thing I have learned in my short time here at Mucky Boots, it's that some things are just plain beyond my control, and rather than worrying, I should just go inside for a cup of tea.