More tulips and bloomin' things

A few posts back I started the Tulip Library, photos of some of the different kinds of tulips that flower here at Mucky Boots from April to June. The sheer variety continues to bemuse me: how can such different shapes and colours, from simple red and yellow to the tropical-looking peach confection shown here all come from such inauspicious brown bulbs planted deep in the dirt?

However it happens, it's wonderful.

This one is as soft and pink as a baby's bum - I know, because I kissed it. How could I not, when it looks like this?

These ones make me think of a whipped lemon custard with raspberry sauce...

...and maybe I have desserts on my mind, but can you look at this one and not think of raspberry ripple ice cream?

And even a simple, Plain Jane red tulip can be gorgeous.

What's missing are what I called the Peppermint Patty tulips. Here's the photo from last year. No sign of them this year - maybe a hungry squirrel got the bulbs?

Tulips aren't the only thing flowering right now. The wisteria is just coming into full bloom...

... and the first oriental poppy has blossomed.

A whole row of allium is flowering by the house...

...columbines are busting out all over...

...and the first of about a million perennial cornflowers are blooming.

I'm grateful to have so much beauty to drink in, because Kim and I have been hard at work at the front of the house turning the wasteland into perennial beds and man, is it hard work. I hope to be able to show you the fruits of our labour soon, but right now we're still sweating with shovels and pick-axes.

Water

We don't have an irrigation system. This is a problem where we are, because even though our winters are famously wet, our summers are hot and very, very dry. Water restrictions for people on municipal water are the norm on Vancouver Island, and things get so crispy dry in the woods that the fire hazard is extreme for most of the summer. So we get caught between needing to water to keep our gardens going (we're happy to let the lawn go brown, but the trees and veggies and perennials need to be watered) and not wanting to use any more water than we need to.

We have been watering mostly by hand, which is a problem in two ways: it's very time consuming (although on a warm evening after supper, with the right frame of mind, it can turn into a Zen sort of experience) and it is not the most efficient way to get water to plants. Misters or drip systems are much better at delivering water to where a plant most needs it, in the most miserly way possible.

But irrigation systems are not cheap. On a couple of occasions we priced out all the hoses and connectors and misters we would need, and even assuming we would do all the labour ourselves it added up to a total that made us gulp.

Kim to the rescue. She found some soaker hoses on sale last year and, in typical Kim fashion, bought them in bulk. I think she came home with a dozen hoses. Throw in a few manifolds, some fancy connectors, and voila - a homemade irrigation system.

It is a bit complicated - mostly because there is only so long a soaker hose can be and still have enough water pressure to soak. This means lots of different hoses for different parts of the garden. So there is a 4-way manifold at the pumphouse, with one outlet going to the perennial beds, one going to the 4-way manifold in the veggie garden, one going to the 4-way manifold in the orchard, and one left free as a tap. The manifold in the veggie garden has one outlet for the artichoke bed, one for the raspberry bed, one for a blueberry bed and one connected to a wand for hand watering the rest of the vegetables. The manifold in the orchard has an outlet for another blueberry bed, one for the rhubarb, one for the blackberry, blueberry and gooseberry bed, and one for the greenhouse.

Are you still with me?

So, for example, if I want to water the raspberries, first I turn on the tap at the pump house, and then the outlet on the manifold that goes to the manifold in the veggie garden. Then I go to the manifold in the veggie garden and turn on the hose second from the right. The rhubarb? Go back to the pumphouse, turn off the outlet to the veggie garden and turn on the one to the orchard, go to the manifold in the orchard, find the right hose and turn it on.

It sounds worse than it is. It's all quite logical. And the nice thing is that the plants get watered well (I am notorious for waving a watering wand in the general vicinity of a plant for 3o seconds and considering the job done), we can do other work while the watering is happening, and with the soaker hoses we don't lose as much water to evaporation. The bad thing is we have to remember to turn the water off. I already anticipate I won't be good at this, so I have bought a couple of mechanical timers (no electricity required) that can be attached to the head of a manifold so that the water will automatically go off after the set amount of time.

Kim put a smaller version of this system in place last year, and it seemed to work quite well. Our well water here has lots and lots of iron in it, and we were worried that it would accumulate in the hoses, plugging all the little holes the water is supposed to soak out of. (This is why the expensive little misters and drippers won't work well for us - according to our neighbour they plug up in no time, and once plugged they are unfixable.) One older hose is indeed toast, but all the new ones Kim bought last year were fine: the iron piled up at the end of each hose, so we just unscrewed the end cap, blasted out all the iron gunge, and we were in business.

Tooter and tulips

You've met Frankie the dog and William the cat. It's time you met Petunia.

Petunia, Tunia, Tuna, Tooter, Toots, Tooter Muffin - the list of her names is endless, perfectly fitting a cat whose personality is much bigger than her little body. She needed to be big for her britches to stand up to William, who was a grumpy, grown cat when she joined the family as a 7 week-old kitten. No problem.

Have you ever heard the Garrison Keeler song about a cat wanting in, then out, then in again, then out....? It must have been written for Tooter. She has completely destroyed the weather-stripping around every exterior door (inside and out) in both our old house and now this one, scratching to let us know she really, really wants nothing more than to be on the other side of that door. We have yelled. We have squirted her with water. We have tried waiting her out. Now we just get up and open the door.

Petunia is a fair-weather cat. In the winter she grows plump eating both her food and William's, sleeping by the wood stove and occasionally looking out the window to see if it's springtime yet. But once the weather improves it's hard to get her to come inside. The last few days she has been reacquainting herself with all there is to see and chase and catch and eat outside, or running to overtake me on the path so she can fling herself prone in the dirt and entice me into rubbing her soft, leopard-spotted belly.

Tooter is the best snuggler of any cat I have had. She considers it an unalienable right to make herself at home on my lap wherever and whenever I sit down. She hops right up, tucks her nose into my armpit, drapes one paw over my shoulder and purrs herself to sleep. She is better than a blanket on a chilly winter morning.

That's my darlin' Tuna Head.

(Added later: some of you have asked why on earth we don't just get a cat door. Well, one of Petunia's other qualities is that she is a Hunter with a capital H. She can catch anything that moves: mice, rats, snakes, frogs, and until we put a bell on her collar, birds. And being the loving animal she is, she brings these home - dead or, more memorably, alive - to present to us. If you ever get Kim over a mug of beer, ask her about the time she found a live, wriggling salamander inside the pillowcase of the pillow she was sleeping on...)

On a completely different front, a post in May would not be a post if there weren't any photos of what's flowering. So here are the latest tulips to bloom - luminescent flamingo pink ones hanging out in a happy bunch...

...and the first of the poppies to bloom - simple, fresh and exactly the colour of an Orange San Pellegrino drink.

Orchard Gate

Is that not a beautiful gate? Behold the manifestation of Kim's idea for a homespun twiggy gate to counteract the detention centre vibe of the new deer fence protecting the orchard. It's not quite finished - we're going to paint a sign that says "The Cloister" and hang it between the two overhead branches - but doesn't it look fine? Those twiggy bits are the branches we saved when we trimmed the ornamental cherry near the pond, and I think they were perfect for the job: straight enough to do the job but with enough individual quirks to make them interesting. We're thinking of the gate as a work in progress - for example, if we can get our hands on some more flexible, thinner branches, we might try weaving them into the spaces between the cherry branches.

Making the gate in two parts, saloon-swinging-door style, made it a bit tricky to mount - a task made more complicated by the fact the two fence posts are farther apart at the top than they are at the bottom. It was something of a challenge to make sure each gate was level in all three dimensions, plus level to its partner along the top. As a consequence we had to fiddle with the hinges a fair bit, but we kept our cool and it worked out pretty well.

Our neighbour liked the gate so much he hired Kim to build him one, too, which she whipped off quickly and hung yesterday. That's my sweetie!

Pile o' dirt

Somehow this pile of soil doesn't look as daunting in the photo as it does in real life, maybe because you can't see that it's really two piles. It's a whole lot of dirt - 6 cubic yards, to be precise. It was going to be 10, until lying in bed the night before it was delivered we reflected on how much work it would be to shovel and spread 10 cubic yards of dirt, which led to a hastily revised calculation and a decision that 6 would be plenty.

It's for the sloped, weed-covered wasteland at the front of the house. You may remember that we hauled a bunch of rocks from the quarry to build some retaining walls. Since then we've bought about a dozen shrubs to populate the garden - pieris, azaleas and viburnum - but we couldn't plant them until we added about 6 inches of topsoil on the flat parts and a whole lot more to fill in the areas behind the retaining walls. Hence the 6 cubic yards of dirt.

Kim did all the hard work placing the rock for the retaining walls (which is in part what aggravated her old elbow injury), and since she's now operating one-armed, it will be up to me to transfer all that soil to its new home. I'm up for it. I know the key thing is to do a modest amount every day, rather than trying to blitz it. I'm secretly quite proud about the muscles I now have in my arms, after a year of shoveling and digging and loading and hauling. And they're bound to be bigger by the time I have moved all this dirt...

Varmints epilogue

If you've been reading this blog for a while you'll know I have struggled this year with mice in the garden, especially when it comes to my peas. I planted a whole bed full of peas one day, only to find the next morning a whole bed full of little holes where the peas had briefly been.

Well, we have been finding those peas everywhere. I assume the mice must have eaten some of them, but they also dropped a number that have since sprouted in the potato bed, the blueberry bed, and the pot full of catmint. The best were the sprouts Kim found the other day, growing out of a knothole in one of the raised beds. It's almost endearing enough to make me reconsider my feelings about mice. Almost.

We have also had some issues with the local deer, which in the past have shown a preference for the tender young growth in the orchard. So we had a deer fence built along one side of the orchard, and then on the weekend we raised to deer-proof height the existing fence on the other three sides. That was easy enough to do: we screwed cedar boards into the fence posts and strung three strands of wire to a height of about 7 feet.

We were warned by experts that the wire alone could prove a hazard to deer - they might not see it, and could injure themselves trying to jump the fence and getting hung up on the wire. The remedy is to tie flagging tape to the wire at regular intervals, preferably white since it's most visible at night when deer are most active.

With all that white tape fluttering in the breeze it looks like a wedding in the orchard.

Apple blossom heaven

Our orchard is full of young sprigs of trees: Asian pear, cherry, pear, plum, peach, apricot. But anchoring the fruity family are three venerable apple trees. The crab apple and the Cox Orange Pippin are looking pretty fine these days - leafy and blossomy and bursting with spring. But the Pink Lady is in another category altogether - that tree is nothing short of magnificent. It's stately, and shapely, and absolutely loaded with creamy pink blossoms. Today Kim and I were finishing the deer fencing around the orchard (Kim working one-armed to save her sore elbow) and I had to keep putting my tools down to take yet another picture of that amazing tree. Here are just a few of the pictures I took today.

Warmth

Today felt like the start of summer to me. Yes, I know it's only the end of April. But today the sun shone and the air felt warm on my bare white arms newly freed from their winter fleece. The birds sang, the bees buzzed, and I could practically hear the rustling as everything grew around me. It was a great day.

Today was also the day I officially declared my arthritis flare-up over and went back to work in the garden. A good thing, too, because Kim is now out of commission for three weeks as she recovers from an eight-month-old injury to her elbow that she is now getting treated for. It seems we are both learning about patience and human frailty this spring.

I overdid it a bit - typically - but tonight I'm feeling happy tired, not miserable tired, which is a good sign. I potted up a whole mess of growing seedlings, took out half the shelves in the greenhouse, transplanted about half the tomato plants into the greenhouse beds, transplanted all the summer and winter squash, the spinach, chard, and cabbages into the garden, seeded some new radishes, cilantro and basil, and found a way to keep the floating row cover from smothering my newly emerging carrot seedlings. (You may remember that one of my 2010 gardening resolutions was to grow better carrots - the floating row cover is keeping them safe from the carrot rust fly.) I spread compost on the bed where I'll seed beets in about a week, I found homes for the chamomile, calendula and nasturtiums I've been growing, I played a bit of B-A-L-L with Frankie, and arranged the potted sunflowers along the new orchard fence to help it look more like a cloister (that's the perfect word, Paula!) and less like a detention centre. I stacked empty trays and put away empty seedling pots, gave everything a good drink, and finished off the day by sitting on the verandah to enjoy the sunshine. Like I said, it was a great day.

When I was looking for places to put the herbs I've been growing, I decided to just place them, in their pots, in various nooks and crannies in the vegetable garden. I'll have to find more permanent homes for the perennials, like the thyme and chamomile. But I may just leave the calendula and nasturtiums in their pots - I like the idea of being able to move them around as the plants around them grow, and as other spots in the garden open up and need a bit of colour.

One of the best things was realizing how late the light is holding these days. This picture was taken at 7 this evening - gone are the days when Kim had to call me on the walkie-talkie from the workshop because it got dark so early she couldn't make her way back to the house.

It isn't just me who is enjoying the verandah these days - we have a family of birds nesting in a gap in the eaves. The parents have been swooping away every time we open the door, and a few days ago we began hearing the faint peeping of the newly hatched little ones. Now, three days later, that faint peeping has turned into lusty, insistent demands for food at every hour. Those parents must be run ragged.

Experts

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know how much pride Kim and I have taken in doing as many things ourselves as we can: bathroom renovations, flooring installations, workshop siding, new garden beds, hauling rocks from the quarry. Well, there are some times when it's just more sensible to stand back and let the experts do what they do best.

Yesterday we had a new fence put in to help us protect our growing orchard from deer. We tried caging each tree, but the cages are so cumbersome when it comes to mowing and weeding and mulching and fertilizing, and we questioned their ability to really protect the young trees from a determined deer. So we decided a while ago to put in a new line of fencing. The orchard is already fenced on three sides; two of those sides would have to be heightened by a couple of feet, but that's a job we could manage ourselves. All we needed was an 88 foot straight run of deer fencing. We had a very brief conversation with our friends at Cowichan Rental about renting an auger to dig the holes for the posts, but they very kindly and quickly talked us out of it: some tools are really meant for experts.

So we called around a bit, and everyone referred us to Gordie, who is a retired logger and heads a crew with three other retired guys. They work ten long days in a row, go fishing or camping for six days, then come back to start up all over again.

They arrived yesterday morning just after 8, and although we somehow thought they'd be around for most of the day, they were gone by 10. And man, were they a smoothly functioning crew. They got right to work, every man with a job to do. And did they ever have some cool tools! The best was a gizmo that attached to the front of their tractor, that pounded in the fence posts with 30,000 pounds of pressure. Our rocky Glenora soil was no match for this mean machine.

Runner-up in the cool tool contest was the metal bar they used to stretch the fencing material across the posts for nailing. It looked like a medieval torture device, but it sure did the job: the fencing was locked in with metal spikes, then the bar was hoisted to a vertical position and attached to the tractor with a big chain. They backed up the tractor, pulling the fencing taut, and then all the guys got out their hammers and started pounding in staples to attach the fencing to the posts. Lickety-split.

Now that it's done we're having a few second thoughts, mostly because it makes the fruit trees in look like they're in some kind of orchard prison. But Kim has some ideas for a homespun twiggy gate that we hope will tone down the penitentiary aesthetic.

History

I've always had a thing for history. But beyond knowing a little about the two other sets of owners our house has had in its 16 year history, we don't know much about this piece of land. A little glimpse of that missing history found the light of day yesterday.

Our orchard is at the back of the property, where the fruit trees fight for sunlight with much bigger maples, red cedars, firs, alders and hemlocks. Last spring we had some trees limbed and one taken down in an attempt to get more light into critical parts of the garden. The hardest decision concerned two hemlock trees that were growing out of the stump of a big old growth cedar - they put a few of the trees in the orchard in shade all through the morning. Eventually we decided just to top them as a compromise, but it became apparent as the growing year progressed and we added more trees to the orchard that the hemlocks had to go.

So yesterday Bud came with his crew and took them down. We were sad to see them go, but very happy about the new light that flooded into the orchard as they came down. And when they were gone we had a chance to really appreciate the old growth cedar stump they were growing out of. There's a slice of history! You can see the notches the lumberjacks cut for the boards they stood on as they cut the tree down. Some of those notches are 8 or 10 feet off the ground, which must have required something of a balancing act. We wonder how many years ago that was, and whether they had gas saws by then or were still doing all the cutting by hand. It's fun to imagine what the property looked like then: no people, no fences, no garden beds, no buildings. no property lines.

On a side note, the young fellow in Bud's crew who actually climbed the trees to cut them down is a recent immigrant from the south of England, where he learned his trade. Somehow that doesn't quite make sense to us, but he certainly seemed to know what he was doing. And he was thrilled about the cedar stump, and being so close to its history.

Seedling progress

Patience has been a necessary virtue the last ten days or so as I have waited for this nasty arthritis flare-up to subside. I'm doing much better, but I have learned from past experience that pushing things too far too fast is the best way to prolong the misery. (Not that I've always practised what I've learned, but that's another story...)

So I've been trying really hard to not use my shoulders in the garden this week. When you think about it, that doesn't leave much. No digging. No hoeing. No weeding. No mowing the grass. No zipping around with the string trimmer. No building garden beds or bean trellises. No mulching new perennial beds. What's left, for heaven's sake?

What's left is puttering in the greenhouse. Five gallon pots are too heavy for me right now, but little seedling pots are exactly my speed. So, with lots of time on my hands, my greenhouse is full of the most pampered, happy seedlings I've ever grown. Seven varieties of tomatoes. Red onions, yellow onions, Welsh onions, leeks and shallots. Swiss chard, spinach, and cabbage. Four varieties of winter squash and two of summer squash. Four kinds of lettuce. Three kinds of beans and a few melons just for fun. Parsley, basil, chamomile, calendula and lavender (yes, I have two tiny lavender plants I started from seed, which may be my greatest accomplishment ever). Two varieties of echinacea, bergamot, marigolds, hollyhocks, sunflowers and nasturtiums. All grown from seed. And that's in addition to the Chinese greens, arugula, peas, carrots, radishes and green onions out in the garden.

According to my records from last year, we're ahead with the onions and tomatoes, and quite far behind with the spinach and chard. I'm not sure how that happened, given our spring this year has been so much milder than last year. But there you go: shoulders and chard, each on their own schedule. No sense pushing either.

Tulip library

When I was little I really wanted to be a librarian. I used to arrange my books in various orders (colour and size, and then when I became more familiar with alphabetical order, the more usual ways). I'd make little pockets for the front of my books, with sign-out cards, and invite my family to visit my library and borrow books. (It seems to me I charged five cents a book, which is maybe why I don't recall having many customers...)

I think that instinct to catalogue and organize is resurfacing, because I have felt compelled this spring to take pictures of every plant growing in the garden (maybe you've noticed). For example, the tulips - at least the ones blooming right now. I seem to remember from last year that the tulip show went on and on, and the later varieties included some parrot tulips that were so outrageously frilly it didn't seem they could possibly be real. But even now, early in the season, there's an amazing diversity of colour and shape. So here's what's blooming today - in no particular order, and I promise I won't charge you five cents.

Dogwood

The Pacific dogwood is flowering, which is almost enough to make up for my lousy week. In our old neighbourhood on the Saanich Peninsula, the neighbourhood with the manicured lawns and sculpted perennial beds, these were carefully cultivated specimen trees. When they flowered we would drive past the few nearby and admire them and wish we could have one, too.

In our new neighbourhood they grow wild, and are everywhere. Nobody takes care of them, and they still put forth masses of creamy, buttery yellow flowers. It reminds me of when I first came from Toronto and was astounded that I could pick buckets of wild blackberries by the roadside for free. And they were even better than the plastic-packaged blackberries I bought at the grocery store, half-a-pint for $5.99. I was amazed by the bounty then, and I feel just as surrounded by dogwood riches today.

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!