Fifty

I turned fifty about forty-five minutes ago. Today may be the official day, but yesterday was the party. Yesterday was the second-most perfect day ever, and now today is the rest, re-read cards and eat leftover cake day.

Everything about yesterday was wonderful: the garden...



and the table.



The food - oh, the food!

And the cake.

The flowers from Margaret and Madeleine's gardens...

...and most of all the company.

Happy Birthday to me!

The last wall

Big announcement: we have painted The Last Wall.

We have been renovating this three-story house from top to bottom, which has meant, in part, painting every single wall. Make that scrubbing, patching and painting.  And on Friday, more than three-and-a-half years since we began, we finished the last one.

There's still some trim to paint in various locations around the house, but we're done with the walls. We're so close to being finished the Longest Home Renovations on Record we can taste it.

The best part? We finished with just a bit of paint left in the can. And then we went out for lunch.

Infusions

I've been infusing up a storm all summer long. Oils, that is. Rose petals, mint, comfrey, lavender, chamomile and lots and lots of calendula. In olive oil, rice bran oil and grapeseed oil. 

[The former Math teacher in me feels compelled to note that with six different herbs/flowers and three different oils, there are eighteen different combinations - just in case you were interested.]

Why, you might ask? Soap! Salve! Luscious, skin-friendly cream! Plus two delightful afternoons with the three completely charming girls (ages 8, 10 and 12) who live next door: one spent picking leaves and petals and cramming them into a jar to infuse with oil, and a second spent turning the oil into this salve.

The jars have looked so beautiful on the verandah in the sunlight it's almost a shame to use them.

Laundry

I've been thinking a lot about laundry these days, mostly because the laundry room is one of the rooms we're currently redoing. Which means our washing machine and dryer are living a life of leisure on the front verandah, having a little holiday while we make their special room a bit more special.

I'm aware of this every time I take off my clothes, because the knowledge that we're going to have to go to the laundromat if we want clean clothes is making me give a lot more thought to whether any particular item can be worn just one more time. This is a good thing, because we've been pretty cavalier about the amount of laundry we do. We can certainly afford to be more frugal in our clothes-wearing and clothes-cleaning habits, for a whole variety of reasons: energy use, hydro bills, time and effort, and wear-and-tear on our clothes. So even once these last renovations are done and our washing machine and dryer return to their rightful place, I hope the habits we're forming now stick.

We made our first trip to the laundromat yesterday, partly because the dirty clothes pile was reaching toppling height, and partly because Kim's current dental adventures (dentist visit for tooth pain followed by crown followed by more pain followed by emergency root canal followed by infection followed by antibiotics  followed by very uncomfortable side effects from the antibiotics - all of which is probably going to be followed by a search for a new dentist) meant she wasn't up to installing baseboard, but she was game for sitting in a chair at the laundromat while I fed coins into machines. 

In case you lost your way somewhere in the middle of that ridiculously long sentence, we went to the laundromat yesterday. And it was a very good reminder of how sometimes being poor can make you poorer. Because it cost $2.75 to run a medium sized load through a washing machine, and about the same to get it dry. Five bucks a load? Plus soap? Plus whatever it costs on public transit to get there? Wow. This is where I start thinking about community cooperatives, where people could share washing facilities without being gouged by laundromat owners. My mom always wonders why every family has to own their own set of luggage - couldn't we all share? I wonder the same thing about washing machines.

Speaking of my mom, being at the laundromat made me think of one of the happy memories from my teenage years. Our washing machine broke down one summer and it took a few weeks to get repaired. So my mom and dad would take the laundry to the laundromat - just the two of them - and spend the evening having a laundry date, sitting on the hood of the station wagon and eating bean salad from the local KFC. Even as a fourteen-year-old I thought that was pretty cool - that my parents liked each other's company enough that doing laundry together could make a date.

Since I'm writing about all things laundry, you might be wondering how things are progressing on the last phase of The Slowest Renovations of All Time. Here's the Before picture of the laundry room, which you've already seen. (Do I need to tell you that wallpaper was not one of the selling features of the house?)

Then it looked like this...

...and now it looks like this.

I know our choice of flooring might not be to everyone's taste, but I laugh every time I see it. In a good way. I love that floor. In fact, because I love it so much, here's a longer view of the mudroom and laundry room.

Burger and milkshake, anyone?

Peach

I want to say we grew these, but the reality is the tree grew these. We really had little to do with it. The tree just did its thing, minding its own business, hanging out in the vegetable garden with the cabbages: it blossomed beautifully in the spring, grew fruit bountifully though the summer, and now, in early fall,  has presented us with fifteen gorgeous, juicy pounds.

We've already eaten a pound or two, more have gone into a crumble for dessert after tonight's supper, and some will be made into jam. A handful were earwiggy and were given to the chickens, but that doesn't feel like a loss. After all, the peach tree shades the entrance to the coop, so the chickens have been eyeing the ripening fruit hanging above their heads all summer, waiting for some to fall. It seems mean to whisk it all away without giving them a taste. And for them, the odd earwig is a bonus. 

(Want to know how fast can six chickens devour a peach? Fast.) 

The last push

When we moved to Mucky Boots we knew the house needed a lot of work. The kitchen. All 2.5 bathrooms. 90% of the flooring. Most of the light fixtures. Every wall needed painting. I thought it would take a year once we left our jobs, although in retrospect I have no idea what I based that on. It's not like I actually knew anything about home renovations...

Fast forward three years and we're finally embarking on the last big project: the mudroom, laundry room and powder room on the main floor. After that there will be lots of loose ends to finish up, but once this last job is finished it will be downhill all the way.

We actually started this project a couple of years ago, when we demolished the powder room. But then we discovered that the empty room made a great space for brooding baby chicks, and other projects claimed our attention, and somehow more than two years have passed without any progress. Two years of stained vinyl flooring, damaged baseboard, dog-scratched doors, institutional fluorescent lights and unbelievably ugly wallpaper as the main entrance to our home. It will be so nice to get this project done.

But in the meantime there's some mess and disruption to get through. Kim and I emptied every room, moved the washer and dryer, took shelves off the walls, repaired every hole, stripped the wallpaper and removed the baseboards. So now our dining room is holding the relocated contents of the laundry room and mudroom, and looks like this...

...and our front hallway looks like this.

But the experts have arrived to install the new floor, and so our porch looks like this...

and the laundry room looks like this.

Already a big improvement. 

Johnny D

Every August since we've been here (and this makes #4) this is the conversation that crops up.

Kim: "Lawn tractors are going on sale."

Miriam: "Maybe we should get one."

Kim: "It's a lot of money."

Miriam: "We have a lot of lawn to mow."

Kim: "It would be nice."

Miriam: "It would also be one more thing to take care of."

Kim: "Do you think they come with cruise control?"

But somehow, by the time we talk ourselves into taking the plunge, the inventory has sold out and the sales have ended and we wind up exactly where we started: tractor-less.

Not this year. This year the stars aligned themselves perfectly in the universe. The threads of (1) being tired of mowing and mowing and mowing with our gutless mower, (2) tractors going on sale, (3) our research into the best model for us being up-to-date, and (4) having money in the bank account, all came together, and we brought home Johnny D, the newest member of the Mucky Boots Family of Tools That Make Our Lives Easier (which also includes our Miele vacuum, our Mikita cordless drill and Ruby the Truck).

We (by which I mean Kim) have (has) now mowed everything in sight, easy as pie. 

Yes, it has cruise control. And no, I'm not kidding.

Mucky Boots poppies, delivered

If you've been hanging out at Mucky Boots for any length of time, you'll know that poppies are one of the superstars of our gardens. In the spring the orange creamsicle and yellow San Pelegrino poppies bring early colour...





and in the heat of the summer the oriental poppies bloom and bloom.

And all summer long the self-seeding corn poppies keep the blueberries company in the vegetable garden.

Poppies as big as a side plate and as small as a loonie. Poppies in ballet tutu pink and bordello velvet red. Poppies reaching five feet tall and poppies no higher than my knee. Poppies in May and October and every month in between. Mucky Boots would be a much drabber place without its poppies, for which I can take no credit. They were here when we arrived and I haven't done much to make their lives any better except admire them unreservedly - I rarely water them, never feed them, and when they finish blooming I hack them to the ground. And they repay me by growing fresh new greens and sometimes a whole new set of flowers.

For the first time this year I have been collecting the seed pods, thinking I would broadcast them in the field behind the greenhouse and in empty spots in the perennial gardens. (I would love to see poppies deliver a knock-out punch to the creeping bellflower - cheerful exuberance beating out sneaky infiltration.) 

I have been so conscientious about collecting that I now have many more seeds than I can possibly use. So here's your chance to get some of that colour for your own garden: drop me an email at mstanford at shaw dot ca and I'll send you a little packet with a mixture of poppy seeds. 

Johnny Appleseed's got nothing on me.

Bumper crops and bummers

This year marks my fourth as a vegetable grower, and among the many lessons I have learned as I fumbled and bumbled my way from seed to supper, the one that is staring me in the face right now is that I can never predict which crops will do well and which will struggle.

There are so many factors that go into a crop's success. How did I prepare the beds? Did I plant the seeds at the right time? What grew in the beds before? What's growing next door? What has the weather been like? How regularly have I fertilized and watered? What have the various bug populations been doing?

The failures are a disappointment. My tomato crop this year is a bust: the plants are reasonably healthy and I've taken care of them pretty well, but the yield is going to be pretty close to pathetic, compared with previous years. And my two squash beds, the vigorous one and the wimpy one, are going to result in no more than ten winter squash, half of them on the small side. That's pretty pathetic, too, for almost 100 square feet of growing space.

Fortunately there are successes, too. 2012 will go down as a bumper crop for all things allium at Mucky Boots. Every single clove of garlic that Kim planted produced a new head, most of them a really good size. The red and yellow onions germinated on schedule, bulbed beautifully, and are now drying on the front porch. The green onions were thick and juicy and we ate them all up. The shallots grown from Paula's seeds are stars - big and rosy and tasty.

And blueberries - oh, blueberries! We're in the middle of a bumper crop, and I don't think there's anything I'd rather have bumper. (I know "bumper"isn't a verb, but it feels right, and in any case it's my blog.) Blueberries and yogurt for breakfast. Blueberries and cream for dessert. Blueberries by the handful every time I pass a bush. Bags of blueberries for the freezer. The flip side of the success/failure coin is we lost a handful of plants to the heat and drought when we were on our road trip. Rats...

Another success: I grew melons. Or, I should say, I am growing melons. There's still a lot that could grow wrong. But this is the first time, among three attempts, that I have actually reached the melon stage. Four plants, four melons. I am no more surprised than if I had grown four bananas.

Here's a success and a bummer all in one: kale. This was my year to make friends with kale, and thanks to your recipes and encouragement I think I can safely say kale has found a permanent home in my garden. That's the success part. Here's the bummer part.

This is what my kale plants look like now, after I found them infested with tiny powdery white eggs this morning. Yuck. But the next generation is already on its way in a bed far-removed from this disgusting mess.

What will go down on your gardening success/disappointment list this year?

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.

Happiness in the garden

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know I wage a chronic battle with my perfectionism. Perfectionism and gardening don't mix, because at least half of the charm of a garden is its unpredictability, its determination to do its own thing. A garden can be encouraged, and nurtured, but it can't be controlled.

Maybe, finally, in Year 4 of my life as a gardener, those lessons are starting to sink in. Maybe somewhere in my psyche a little controlling part of me is throwing in the towel and giving in. Because this year, for some reason, I am really enjoying my garden.

I should qualify that: I mean my vegetable garden. The perennial beds around the house are still a bit problematic for me. But every time I walk through the gate into the vegetable garden I stop for a moment to take it all in and I feel a distinct sense of peace and joy and satisfaction.

Not because the vegetable garden is so orderly this year, but because I have allowed it to be less so, and somehow the beauty of it is enough. It feels to me like my garden is full of happy, relaxed plants doing their thing instead of being continually fussed with. And because I have done more companion planting this year, each bed is a lovely co-mingling between flowers, herbs and vegetables. 

So here's a quick tour of what's making me happy in the vegetable garden these days.

The last few fennel plants that didn't get eaten are going to seed in a sea of softly waving fronds.

The pink popcorn plants are producing tassels...

...and the Leaning Tower of Hollyhock looks like it's dancing.

The deep purple clematis and bright red poppies in the centre of the garden are looking more muted but just as beautiful, in a different way.

The onions, planted in Eliot Coleman's groups of four, are close to being ready to harvest.

The most recent additions to the garden, the melon and cucumber plants, are beginning to flower, and there are even two small melons. This thrills me, since my previous attempts to grow melons never made it past the seedling stage.

Kim was working in the vicinity the day I moved the melons and cucumbers from the greenhouse into the garden, and helped problem-solve the issue of a trellis. Instead of constructing something new, we decided to experiment with using already made structures, in this case a large chicken cage with doors removed, and the lid of the brooder box Kim had constructed for the broody hens in the chicken coop. 

So far, so good, although we'll see what happens when the plants get larger!

Want to add some happiness to your garden? Plant bee balm, especially a double-decker variety like this. 

Pure joy. Guaranteed.

Ick

So there I was, sitting with Kim in a lovely park in downtown Duncan, watching a 100 mile hot dog eating contest.

(I feel a need to digress for a moment to explain that we didn't set out to watch a 100 mile hot dog eating contest - we were in the neighbourhood having lunch and were drawn in by the fun everyone seemed to be having.)

(I should also pause for a moment to explain that a 100 mile hot dog eating contest is one in which the hot dogs and buns are grown and made within a 100 mile radius. Yes, people do grow wheat on Vancouver Island, and make hot dog buns out of it.)

(I should also clarify that no claim was made as to the condiments on said hot dogs.)

Back to the story. There I was, on a lovely sunny afternoon, watching four grown men gamely chowing down on tasty hot dogs but apparently very dry buns, when all of a sudden something hit me in the chest.

(I need to explain that if I had had my camera with me at the time, I would certainly have taken a picture. But since I didn't, and because I don't want to violate anyone's copyright by using their photo in my blog, I have decided to provide you with a handy link to an excellent picture of what hit me in the chest. For the sake of dramatic impact, it is very important that you click on this link.)

(In case you didn't read the fine print accompanying that photo, I would like to inform you that the object that landed on my chest was about an inch-and-a-half long. That's the body. The antennae were at least another couple of inches. Are you understanding the title of this post yet?)

So there I was, no longer watching the contest but instead paralyzed in my chair, goggling at the enormous insect sitting on my chest. The paralysis ended with a convulsive, repulsed flinging of said insect onto the ground, whereupon it crawled back towards us and began to climb up the leg of Kim's chair.

Kim leapt to her feet, and between her dancing on the spot in a mixture of phobia and ex-Science-teacher fascination, and my incoherent sputtering and pointing, we began to attract more attention than the 100 mile hot dog eaters. First two little kids crossed right in front of the stage to come and see what was going on. Then the people behind us stood up and craned their necks to get a better look. Then the parents of the kids came over with their cameras to take photos. Then one of the kids managed to convince the bug to crawl up its arm so he could parade through the audience showing everyone.

I suspect it was a welcome diversion for both the 100 mile hot dog eaters (chewing and chewing and chewing those really dry buns) and their audience (trying gamely to keep up the level of enthusiasm despite the slow pace of eating).

Who says life in a small town can't be exciting?