Hostas: a non-gardener's best friend

Continuing on with the theme of gardening without actually gardening, I have decided my best friend in the perennial beds is the humble hosta.

I admit to having moved to Mucky Boots with a prejudice against hostas in tow. It dates back to the first house Kim and I had, a little place in Toronto with a postage-stamp backyard filled with hostas. I remember them as being slimy and slug infested, and as my introduction to gardening they creeped me out.



So when we got here and I saw all the hostas in the perennial beds I was disappointed. How stupid could I be? Because not only do hostas come in a huge variety of colours and sizes, and fill out a bed in a mounding, lush way, they require nothing of me except a few minutes to clean them up at the end of the fall. They're supposed to be shade lovers, but the ones we've got here seem to tolerate part sun, full sun, moist soil, dry soil, and everything in between.

Just look at that bed: variegated hostas and finer-leaved yellow hostas in the foreground, and an enormous green hosta in the background.  If you hunkered down and looked underneath you would find some of my arch-nemesis the creeping bellflower, but the hostas do such a good job of staking their territory the bellflower never seems to get past the ground cover stage.

And although I hesitate to put this in writing (because as soon as I do I'll be proved wrong) we don't seem to have a problem with slugs. And it's not like we don't have slugs here - look at this sucker, for instance. 

But they don't seem to trouble with the hostas. In fact the only thing that does any damage is an occasional deer that comes to chomp off the flower spikes.

And here's another good thing: hostas give you more hostas. Not only do they tolerate being divided, they like it. Last fall Kim and I went on a hosta-dividing spree and now we have even more hostas doing their lovely thing without a bit of input from me. 

That's a bit of a lopsided friendship: I badmouth the plant and it responds by giving me things. I'm trying not to feel too bad. I'm just trying to mend my ways.

How to garden without gardening

I have been laid up with a sore knee all spring. For a while I was limping along, but for the last month it's been bad enough I've been on crutches or using a cane but mostly parked on my butt. The vegetable garden has been my priority on the days when I can get around a little, so the perennial gardens have mostly been fending for themselves. It's my annual spring arthritis flare-up, and while it has been something of a pain, it could certainly be a lot worse.



But this isn't about my knee, it's about my garden. Specifically, what happens in a garden when there's no gardener tending it, during the most fertile months of the year.

The plants grow.
The flowers bloom.
The weeds multiply.
The world does not end.

During my enforced sit-on-my-butt days (which feel like they have gone on, and on, and on) I have been keeping myself occupied by knitting and listening to audio books. A few days ago there was a moment in the book when a character, reflecting on a war brewing in the book's imaginary world, mused that there might be nobody to see the peonies bloom the following year, but that they would still bloom.

Isn't that the truth, I thought, and if I needed proof all I had to do was look out the window.



Do the peonies care that I haven't been fussing over them? Nope.

Do the poppies mind that they haven't been staked and are sprawling with abandon over their neighbours? Apparently not.

And it seems I don't even have to plant things in order to have flowers, as evidenced by these volunteer foxglove.

Yes, there are weeds everywhere, and I'm going to pay at some point for letting the annual weeds go to seed, but in the meantime they're acting as a pretty good ground cover which is good because I haven't got around to watering, either. 

There is a humbling lesson in all of that: how much do I really matter? I don't mean that in a self-pitying way. I mean it in a reverential I-am-a-mere-mortal-looking-Mother-Nature-in-her-glorious-face kind of way. When it comes down to it, the idea that I can control what happens in my garden is sort of ridiculous, and I think Mother Nature is being very kind to let me try.

But at the end of the day I am still a gardener, and I'm itching to get in there and start cleaning things up. But even though my knee is slowly starting to feel better I know the worst thing I could do is overtax it. So I'm thinking tomorrow I might set the egg timer for 15 minutes, and see what I can get done. The next day, if all goes well, maybe 20.

But that still leaves me today, one more day, to watch the peonies bloom.

Home from the fair

I have always wanted to go to a Mother Earth News Fair, and finally, this year, I got a chance. Kim and I spent a long weekend in Puyallup, Washington, hanging out with lots and lots of homesteaders, gardeners, environmentalists and food activists, going to workshops and demonstrations, and cruising the vendor booths. 

Here are a few highlights.

Best workshop (Miriam's pick): "Growing Your Health Independence" by Dawn Combs of Mockingbird Meadows. Lots and lots of specific and practical information about stocking a largely home grown medicine cabinet for common family ailments.

Best workshop (Kim's pick): "Top Bar Hives: It's All About the Wax" by Christy Hemenway. (Here's a link to her TED talk about the importance of honey bees) I probably don't need to tell you that Kim has come home already planning her first hive.

Worst workshop. Ever. Hands Down: "The Half-Acre Homestead" by Lloyd Kahn. Despite its description, and despite the respected and long standing reputation of the presenter, this workshop was a series of photos of "homesteading tools" thought to be useful. Like a pitchfork. And a shovel. And nails hammered into a kitchen wall to hang cooking implements from. A cappuccino maker. And a spatula for scraping plates into a compost bucket. When the presenter started flashing photos of marijuana vaporizers (as a homesteading tool? Really? Is that because homesteading is so horrible?) I left. At the point so had half the audience.

Second worst workshop: "Homestead Healthcare" by Amy and Joseph Alton (aka "Nurse Amy and Doctor Bones").  I had my doubts about this one because the presenters are the owners of a company that sells medical supplies to doomsday preppers, but the workshop description was benign enough I thought there might be something there for me. Nope. Pretty quickly we were into isolation techniques for when the great pandemic hits, and how to keep "your women" from getting pregnant because then they wouldn't be able to contribute 110%. Who has women? Do men still own women? I left before they started talking about treating gunshot wounds and zombie bites.

Favourite signs that you're not at just any country fair: The candy apples? Organic. Those cinnamon-sugar mini donuts? Gluten-free. The pony cart rides?



Those ain't ponies...

Best Vendor Samples: First place goes to Bob's Red Mill, which was giving out gluten-free granola packets, nifty gizmos to keep open packages closed, and dough scrapers. The runner up is Mary's Crackers, which was giving out packets of, well, crackers.

Most Nerdy Fan Moment: Ed Begley Jr? Nah. Joel Salatin? Nope. Not even Barbara Damrosch. For me it was meeting Erica of Northwest Edible Life. I embarrassed myself. Read her wonderful post on the fair for a much more thoughtful take on the weekend than the one you're getting here.

Happiest Moment: Picking up Frankie at the kennel and being greeted by a happy dog instead of a stressed out one.

Halloween in May

At about 11:00 last night, Kim let Frankie out for a last pee before bed and then waved frantically at me through the kitchen window. "Bring your camera!" she mouthed through the glass.

The full moon was spectacular, but taking a picture in the dark with my little point and shoot?

I underestimated the super powers of said point and shoot, because all I did was (you guessed it) pointed and shooted  (okay, shot) and this is what I got.

Go ahead, click on that baby and get an even better view of our Halloween moon.

I don't know what to be more impressed by: Mother Nature or my Canon PowerShot.

Working smarter and ageing gracefully

There is a property down the road from us that I call The Storybook Farm, because it looks like it has been transplanted straight from a children's book about an English country farm. The buildings are faced with stone, there is a matched set of five black horses in the paddock, the potager garden is full of lavender plants lined up with mathematical precision, and the flower pots lining the drive are always beautifully blooming. It's a lovely place, one that fills me with awe every time I drive past it, and while these people exert more control over their garden than I want to or am capable of, they clearly know what they are doing.

So when our third spring at Mucky Boots came around (in other words the first spring I had my head enough above water to notice) and the middle of April came and went with their garden still full of winter stalks and dead stuff, I thought something must be wrong, and even though I don`t know them, I worried. I shouldn't have, because in short order everything was looking as spiffed up as I had become accustomed to. Maybe they were just a little late getting started, I thought with the tiniest amount of self-satisfaction.

And now, near the end of our fifth spring at Mucky Boots, I think I get it. They really do know what they are doing: it's all about working smarter.

My practice has been to dip into all my garden beds multiple times through the spring explosion. I usually manage to get the winter clean-up done before the fast spring growth starts, but pretty quickly I'm going at the creeping bellflower wherever and whenever it appears, and trying to clean up the spring bulbs as soon as they start looking bedraggled. And weeding, weeding, weeding. I figure each of the many beds in the perennial garden gets six or seven passes before the hot weather hits and growth settles down.

Well, I have learned a thing or two. For example, I have learned that the best way to deal with invasive perennial weeds like the creeping bellflower is not to try digging it up, which only compounds the problem as all those little root filaments birth new plants, but to cut it down once or twice a year and never, ever, let it flower. So now instead of going into attack mode every time I see some, I let it be and do a complete pass through the garden when the quantity of it merits.

Here's another example. We have such masses of spring bulbs here (especially winter aconite, snowdrops and bluebells) that when they start to die back the garden looks a bit shabby. In the past I have cut back individual plants as they reach the point of no return, but now I pretty much wait for the bulk of them to reach that point, then I clear them all out (the exception being when they are smothering other perennials just getting started). That's way less work. It means living with a bit of a mess for a while...



...but it also means I can stress less and enjoy more.

That's especially important given that the Annual Spring Arthritis Flare-Up seems to be a regular fixture in my life - just when there's lots of work to do, and just when I'm excited to be getting down to it, my joints require me to carefully weigh the necessity of each task.

Working smarter, and not being in such a rush to clear out my beds, means I have had more opportunity to enjoy the special beauty of blooms past their prime, like the wonky tulip at the top of the post. Which is also smarter, because none of us is getting younger.  So in a spirit of affection and respect for all the ages in my garden, here are a few blooms ageing gracefully.

 

Looking for the really funny "Gotta love that cupholder" post? I'm so sorry, but because of technical issues I threw up my hands and deleted the post. But it was funny. Really, really funny. I'm still laughing...

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.

Clean

You would be excused if right now you're wondering whether we took the glass out of our kitchen window, it's so see-through.

No, it's there. But it's clean. So clean you can hardly see it. Last week we had our windows washed - all of them, inside and out - for the first time since we moved here. And lest you think we're complete slobs, we have done spot cleaning. The French doors onto the verandah, for example, that are normally covered in Frankie's nose prints. But most of the windows, and all the skylights, require ladders - big, tall ladders - for cleaning, and somehow that has just never been a priority.

What makes it even better is that it was a gift from my mom, whose speciality is the kind of slightly self-indulgent present on which the recipient would have a hard time spending money, but that is an instant quality of life enhancer.

A nice day spent watching someone else wrestle with ladders and buckets and sloping roofs. And now sunshine coming through sparkly windows and all the beauty of the garden on display. That's some present. Thanks, Mom!

Tulip Parade 2013

This is an annual event at Mucky Boots: the cataloguing of the year's entrants in the Tulip Parade. You'd think this would be repetitious, because it's not as if I plant any bulbs. So you'd expect the same tulips, appearing in the same locations as last year. And there is some of that. But there are also many surprises: tulips I swear I have never seen before, or in locations they've never been before. Someone has a sense of humour, and I'm guessing it's Mother Nature.

Tulips are the flowers that make me want to be a painter. An impressionist painter. Because when I step out the door and see the mass of green punctuated with bright splashes of colour from all the tulips, and when I try yet again to capture it on camera and fail yet again to capture what I see, I think the license I could take as a painter might allow me to show you how magical it is.

But for now, here is the Parade.

And because they don't get their own parade and the tulips feel sorry for them, here are some tag-a-long columbines.

Oh, and the tulips have also asked me to include a photo of the anemones my friend Elisabeth gave me last year, because they are newcomers to the garden and the tulips want them to feel welcome.

Lilac

Today is a happy, happy day at Mucky Boots. Yes, the sun is shining, and it's gloriously warm (the thermometer on the porch is reading 29 degrees - in May, no less). But all that is secondary to something I have been waiting for for years: the lilacs are blooming and filling the air with their scent and I can smell them.

Until my sinus surgery last fall I had virtually no sense of smell for years. Years and years. And of all the scents I missed, the only one that made me want to cry was missing the perfume of lilacs blossoming in the spring. Well, it's spring, and they are flowering, and I can't keep my nose out of them for more than ten minutes, making up for all those years of lost sniffing.



Lilacs!

How to turn orange in 30 days

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I have been on an elimination diet for the last six weeks or so in an attempt to figure out if anything I eat exacerbates my arthritis. I have a suspicion there is, and I have a good idea what it might be, but I thought I would try a systematic approach so I can find out for sure.

The program I am following can be found here, and it works like any elimination diet: you begin by restricting yourself to a small number of  foods least likely to be causing problems, and then once your symptoms have subsided you slowly add foods, one at a time, watching for any kind of reaction. The plan sets out three groups of food - Phase I, which should be safe for most people, Phase II which has foods that are more problematic, and then Phase III which contains the heavy hitters like dairy and gluten and nuts.

For someone with a chronic inflammatory condition like the arthritis I have, the suggestion is to stay on Phase I for at least 30 days. I won't bore you with all the other details, but what you need to know (for the purposes of this post) is that many of the Phase I foods are orange.

Sweet potatoes. Squash. Carrots. Peaches. Orange, orange, orange, orange. Yes, there are green foods too - green beans, peas, broccoli and zucchini. But ever since I regained my sense of smell I don't like broccoli, and zucchini is a stretch.


Here is a typical meal: chicken, rice and veg.


Here is another typical meal: chicken, rice and veg. Sigh.

I know I am not too compromised nutritionally because I am also taking a hypo-allergenic supplement while my diet is so restricted. The problem is, I am turning orange.

This first came to my attention about Day 30, when Kim was walking behind me and said "Your ears are orange."

"No," I said.

"Yes," she said.

"No they're not," I said.

"Yes, they are. You're turning orange," she said.

Then a couple of days later, when I was taking off my gardening gloves, I noticed that my palms had a distinct orange hue. I moved to a different light. Still orange.


I cook my orange vegetables in bulk these days.
If I had to choose between being orange and having arthritis pain I know what my choice would be. But still, I think it might be time to start eating some kale.