On collecting the manure dividend

I harvested the first of the peas tonight. Which is the first of the vegetables. If you discount the spinach, which I planted in a crappy wet part of the garden to see how an 'above the ground' crop would do. And then really ignored, because even though I could see from the deck it wasn't doing so well, I don't like spinach enough to put the effort in.

I ignored it and ignored it, and then half-heartedly checked on it, and realised the tall ones were in fact dandelions, and then trudged over to the shed for the hoe (which was broken) and then didn't buy a new one, and, well, you get the picture...

So I have a lot of spinach gone to seed, which Bunny likes to nibble on when he's bored of dandelions.

And some peas.

I went out with a bowl, and even though I only had to go through one gate and not the two that led to our garden at home, suddenly I was nine again and it was Sunday after 10 o'clock Mass on a breezy summer day and I was picking peas for the Queen Mum to go with the roast beef dinner.

My fingers touched every pod and there was that old satisfaction when I found one that was bursting with goodness, straining against the pod.

Twist and pull. Just like Paddy showed me.

It was all I could do not to sit on the back door step and shell them immediatey, stuffing most of them in my mouth.

But Himself is working nights down on the waterfront this week, so I will leave them for him to enjoy when he gets home... seeing as he designed and built the special stands they are twined around.

There is nothing that man can't do with some 2 x 4 and a piece of netting.

If he decides he wants to, of course.


After a lot of work, and some sunshine and just enough rain our garden is starting to make progress.  The potatoes and corn are very vigorous, so I am hopeful.  The pumpkin patch had about a 10 per cent success rate, which is not too bad considering we were making it up as we went along. 

We only need enough pumpkins for Hallowe'en anyways... I can't eat the stuff.

We are on our second round of cucumbers as Bunny likes them too.

And the tomatos are succeeding against all the odds.  Just when they needed to be tended I took a huff with the garden and ignored it for about two weeks straight.  Then got a rush of guilt and watered the bejaysus out of the little seedlings three nights in a row.  It appears to have worked, we have about fifty sturdy plants now.

I can't wait until the greenhouse smells of tomatos... it is the best smell in the world.  Better than cut grass even.

This year I managed to get a bit of formal gardening done as well.  I put in a new small bed, and cleaned up the SEVEN beds we have found around the property. 

Holy of holies, it's exhausting though.  And back-breaking.  I have been to the massage therapist so often this year he's been reading up on gardener's elbow.  Basically what happened (I think) was that a woman who used to live here designed and planted all the beds.  Then she split up with her husband and they sold the house.  Before they left they mulched the beds. 

Seven years passed and nobody disturbed them.  Then along comes I, all vim and vigour last year and took out all the mulch. 

Twenty six years of pent up weedlings saw their opportunity and SPRANG FORTH AND MULTIPLIED.

I am getting there.

It will be manageable in about five years, I reckon.

I've decided to plant lots of Asians so there will be no ground cover underneath.  Hydrangeas, rhododendrons, wigelias, that kind of thing.

Starve the little bastards out, you might say.

A garden truly is a lifetime's work.

A brief interlude of rain

Tonight it is blowing hard from the north east (I think, Himself is not around to confirm this) and it is raining.  Thank goodness.

Thank goodness?

Yes, we have not had any rain for a couple of weeks and my exciting new triple drum gutter rainwater siphoning system is bone dry.  So if it hadn't rained tonight, I would have had to spend an hour hauling buckets over to the greenhouse to water the plants.

But it's raining.

So I have the night off.

Himself who is a hydraulics genius, constructed a simple yet ingenious (or genius) water collection and siphoning system using three old barrels we found in the yard, some recycled 2" x 4" (of course), a length of hose and a gutter.

I come home from work, I go to the greenhouse, I lift the hose up and turn a little knob, and hey presto, while the plants are being watered I can have a sit down and a little meditation on the day in the muggy warmth of the cozy framed building we put up last year.

Our first cycle of tomatoes are already up.  I am hoping I didn't start everything too early.

Time will tell.

I haven't been blogging for a number of reasons.

Mostly, because my RSI is back and my arms are so sore after a day's work, I can't face the computer again.

But also, we had a beautiful early spring this year, so I have been out in the yard most of the time.

First of all, we had a fabulous March, so we started on our little woodstand.  Cutting down the dead wood and clearing out the seedlings to let in some light. 

Then we decided that the reason why the garden didn't do so well last year is because it's so shaded, so I started thinning out the tree stand behind the house.  Mostly alders and baby spruce.

Then Himself ordered a one tonne truck of horse manure and disappeared off to New Brunswick for a month.  Which meant that Queenie had to haul it into position in various spots around the yard.

I got it done just before he got home for a visit last weekend, and didn't he go and order another load!

Not much time for blogging.

Not much to talk about either, unless you want to hear about the difference in consistency between two year old and three year old horse shite. 

Or the best way to uproot a baby spruce tree.

Like Socrates, I have retired to my garden.

For a spell.

All Soul's Day - getting set to live in the dark

Today was such a beautiful day it was difficult to believe it was 1st November.

Positively balmy here on the Eastern Shore.

I got bitten by a mosquito.

The last time I got bitten by a mosquito in November, I was in Venezuela.

But of course the year has turned slightly and it got dark at 5.25pm so it is November.

Shannon and I went down to Lawrencetown beach to watch the sunset. Our sunset walks will be curtailed for a few months now, as I won't be home in time to walk her in the daylight, so I was happy our last one for a while was a beauty.

The surf was pounding the shore and about a dozen surfers were out bobbing on their boards like seals on driftwood.

Although there are generally at least two people out in the water when I am on the beach, I rarely see anyone actually stand up and surf in. They just bob around on their boards. Nova Scotian surfing I suppose! Not too much effort, just hanging out in the cold water for kicks.

The sun went down over Halifax Harbour and the nearly full moon rose simultaneously so we had half a sky of rose pink and slate blue clouds, and half a sky of luminous light filtered through the gauzy cloud the moon was veiled in.

Shannon picked around and sniffed stones (in the absence of trees) and I walked the shore and thought about my grandmothers and Jim and Eileen and Paddy Egan and Geraldine and Himself's Uncle Glen and all the other wonderful people I know who have passed over to the other side of the hallowed gate and wished them peace wherever they are.

Then we came home and I went downstairs to find something for supper and when I came back Shannon had an enormous block of Gouda (left on the worktop) in her mouth and a guilty look on her face.

Pulling expensive food off the worktop is the new chewing.

Anyways, we had a little row and she got put out on her line and sulked for a bit and so did I but we eventually made up and went for a moonlight gander around the neighbourhood.

It's too bright to let her out by herself when the moon is full. One of my well-meaning neighbours always spots her and brings her home.

Now it's about nine and cloudless: so bright out you can pick out individual trees in our wood.

The temperature has dropped substantially. I harvested the last of the garden today, probably in good time. I got a fair-sized bucket of onions - Spanish, red and 'normal' - and the last of the tomatoes and cabbage.

We had a middling garden this year, mostly because it was our first year and so the earth was not well composted or fertilized. I bagged four big sacks of leaves today for spring compost, and as soon as it gets cold enough I will start a proper compost bin.

We had plenty of radishes (of course), tomatoes and zucchini, and our corn was pretty good and our squash. Everything else was a little late, so our leeks and beets were small and our cucumbers never even tried.

Himself being an Aquarian loves beginnings. He loves getting the earth ready and planting. Tomatoes mostly, but he'll plant anything if you get him interested in the idea.

Then apart from watering, which is a manly chore that gets him out of cooking supper, that's it for him.

Unfortunately, that's not it. But fortunately, I don't mind weeding, thinning, weeding, thinning, weeding, thinning, harvesting and finally pulling and cleaning up. Usually it's up to me to remember to do it, and he is pretty good at helping.

If he can't think of anything to begin instead.

I got him and Littl'Un to help me clean up the main garden a couple of weeks ago, but I have been on the road a lot recently due to work commitments so when I went in the greenhouse today it was the first time in over a month.

It was a tomato plant mausoleum. Tall, rotting tomatoes groaned under the weight of their fruit and leaned against each other in an orgy of decay.

It took over an hour to clean out.

GRRRR.

I think I need to hire a garden help who's a Capricorn. They're good at detail. Or another Cancerian... even better... the plants are their children.

Anyway, we have successfully completed one cycle. Hopefully it will be the first (and worst) of many. I am kind of annoyed (in a bizarre gardner way) that I am going away because the next three weeks present the cleaning up and readying for winter tasks that I like the best in the garden (it's cool, there aren't many bugs, you can't really mess it up). Hopefully we'll have a really mild November and I can get some work done when I get back.

When to do it though...

... why do they put the clocks back anyway? I hate gardening in the dark. I hate walking the dog in the dark. I hate cooking supper and not being able to watch the sun set. I hate wanting to go to bed at 8.30pm because it's been dark for so long.

GRRR.

Lucky I have a fortnight to prepare myself for what's coming.

Cabbages and cherries and things that go slime in the night.

Despite being at the tail end of sick in our house - Himself was the sicker and was taking killer antibiotics - we managed to have a nice weekend and get lots of yard work done.

I suppose I get to do the flower beds because I am a girl. And girls like flowers.

I am not one of those girls particularly.

I mean I like a nice herbaceous border as much as the next person, but you can't eat one nor can you donate it to Feed Nova Scotia come harvest-time.

Having said that, someone who used to live here put a lot of thought into the flower beds in front of the house. So I feel like I should resurrect them.

Currently they are buried in buttercups (hundreds of stringy roots with nothing to pull onto), dandelions (we all know about those bastards and the way they snap off and grow back), and some feathery weed thingy that has a root system comprised of interlocking elastic bands with a plant popping up every three centimetres along the elastic.

Really.

It has me stumped. I've never seen it before.

So I weeded and weeded and weeded and weeded and weeded and eventually cleared most of the weeds from one bed and saved about six plants, a hosta, some silver lace and a couple of gladioli that sat shivering in the cold tundra that was the newly weed-free zone.

Which meant of course that I had to go to the garden centre and buy fill-ins. I got a tray of Creeping Jenny and Allysium and some foxgloves (I am determined to have hummingbirds this summer) and hopefully they'll cover the bare ground before the buttercups rebound.

Mmmm, planting bedding is sooo much funnn.... not.

Himself and Justin who was over for a visit were playing with power tools nearby, in order to avoid weeding.

PZWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE..... 36 volts, man... that's a nice piece of iron, dude ... PZWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.................... listen to that, man.... hey, let's 'fix' the deck......

Prob'ly shoulda dug the bed out, said Justin, in between drilling holes in the deck.

Prob'ly.

The second bed is so much worse than the first one I don't know how I am going to even start.

Prob'ly should dig the bed out...

Goddamn, I hate giving into weeds.

As well as the beds in front of the house, we have four big deep beds alongside the driveway, made of old railway sleepers, which are quite nice but are painted a disastrous shade of rust.

To hell with flowers I thought. Just got in and dug the dandelions out and we planted veggies there.

Himself put the fully loaded 36 volt drill down and made himself available to supervise this, as veggies are much more interesting than flowers.

So I/ we/ us planted cabbage, broccoli, beets, chives and parsley.

Ho hum, a couple of hours passed and I was passed out in exhaustion on the couch with a nice glass of pinot noir when Himself went out to check them for the umpteenth time and realised that crumbly old sleepers are where SLUGS live.

So now we are on slug patrol.

Apparently, in a rare episode of garden alignment, slug genocide was taking place in Ireland at the same time.

Poor slugs.... there's nowhere for them to go.

Firstly, we cooked a big pot of mussels and ate them on the deck and then we smushed the shells up and sprinkled them round the cabbages.

Didn't work.

Not enough mussels.

Last night, we were out at 10.30pm with a torch killing them with a kitchen knife.

Thirty eight.

If you're interested.

This evening we found two, so we have put beer in jar lids and are hoping that the slugs will die happy rather than at the hands of Himself the Slugvader.

Of course, none of this healthy constructive positive gardening activity can call itself the real action of the weekend, which was the official planting of the cherry trees.

While I was deciding between the yellow bedding or the blue, Himself found some CHERRY TREES.

To go with the tomatoes, no doubt.

So we've planted our first trees here. A nice little milestone.

Saturday night, we tested our fire pit (built for Polly's visit in August). First impressions are pretty good - nice draught, not too much smoke, hopefully we'll have a wind-free week and we can have a couple of nice evenings in the yard.

Farming dandelions while Aloysius sleeps on

The sun finally came out today. As well it might, it being the end of May and therefore the day before SUMMER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I woke up at 5.30am because a) it was an amazing sunrise which my body obviously wanted me to see, and b) the virus that felled Himself and Queenie has morphed into the streaming nose bit, which is good because that means it's nearly over, and bad because I was sleeping with Aloysius Snuffelupagus last night.

No, I didn't know his name was Aloysius either. There you go. You never leave this blog without learning something useful.

I lasted until about 6.40am and then I had to get up to get away from the noise.

I banged the door on the way out of the bedroom just to drive the point home.

But it was worth the early start to sit on the deck and listen to the birds justa singin' their little hearts out. Susan Boyd my ass - I counted eleven different melodies, most of them coming from pretty drab little birds.

We have a lot of smallish, brownish type birds that I haven't nailed yet. As well as blue jays (but they don't sing, they scream), a pair of wood pigeons who sound like owls, a pair of robins nesting in a tree near the driveway, chick-a-dees, the woodpecker of course, and a bird that sounds like a blackbird but I don't know what it is here.

Today, Raven visited us. That's the first time I've seen him.

Raven is of course, very important in Aboriginal storytelling, and his role in stories is very ambiguous, so I don't know if Raven is good or bad.

Whatever Raven feels like being I think.

And Bunny was sitting in the gravel pile munching on dandelion flowers.

How do I get Bunny to sit in the lawn and do this....

I wish I had a million Bunnies.

I should just call what I do in the yard what it is and tell the world I'm a dandelion farmer.

Anyway, I can't type for much longer because my hands are sore from weeding. I spent all day on the flower beds and really you can't tell I did.

The problem is my response ability. It's not up to a Canadian summer yet.

In Ireland, around March, weeds start to poke their heads up, and you mutter, yes.... hmmmm... must weed that bed.... and eventually you either get it done bit by bit, or you are useless, and the weeds get big and then you have a problem.

In Canada, around the end of April, the ground is still frozen for the most part, and it's about minus 3 in the morning, so there's nothing to be done unless you get a great day. Then in May, you start getting everything ready (Irish style) ... buy seeds, plant seeds, water seeds, mow lawn, get compost, draw garden plan, browse stores which open on Mother's Day, etc.

Then it's late May and suddenly its plus 10 in the morning and there are a gazillion fucking weeds where there was nothing but mulch the day before.

So instead of the nice day planting you had planned you spend the day communing with the fecundity, wondering if this is a plant or a weed.

Thankfully, the plants are similar enough so that I know what is a weed and what is a plant, but they come up INTERTWINED...

Anyways, because of the early start, quite a bit of the list got done. Himself got up and even though he is still ill did his best to help out with the heavy stuff.

So the beds are done, the pruning is done... I made one serious error so one of my plants look like it shaved its head with a lawnmower... the path to the front door is freshly gravelled, the lawn is mowed, (we only have one million dandelions now), the whipper snipping done.

Himself even tried to do some transplanting in the greenhouse, but it appears to have been taken over by hordes of angry biting ants. Judging by the bites on his feet.

Those of you who know me know that several years ago, I had an extraordinarily bad night one night. It involved a tent, a carpark, a horde of biting ants, a one horse town in central Venezuela, and a carload of copulating gauchos. It was traumatic. Needless to say I won't be going in the greenhouse until they've been eliminated.

Getting places.

Finally.

Of course, after a day of sunshine, there will be one million more weeds tomorrow.

Surprises with the morning coffee

Facebook is full of Irish friends enjoying the sunshine of the June Bank Holiday weekend.

Goddamn them all!

Here it is not a bank holiday weekend.

It is raining.

And we are still struggling with whatever insidious virus felled us this week.

Himself is still asleep, so I made my morning coffee and perambulated around the garden.

I'm starting to realise I've bitten off a little more than I can chew.

Without a Paddy.

This morning, I found a pile of wild strawberries blooming by the side of the shed.

And a slug in the greenhouse.

Curled around one of the zucchini plants.

How did he get in???

Today I really need to start transplanting those seeds into the beds we put into the greenhouse.

The grass needs to be mowed again.

We have too much grass. We could just mow the lawn and nothing else and that would be a full-time job.

The flowerbeds need to be weeded.

The main garden beds need to be worked on - we don't even have them cleared enough for topsoil.

I need to whipper snipper around the yard.

I need to prune some bushes so they'll grow up instead of out.

And all I want to do is go back to bed.

Bah. Hate being sick.

The positive Greenhouse Effect

I was texting my sister Gypsy the other day and mentioned that we were building a greenhouse.

For Himself's cherry tomatoes no doubt!! ;-) she texted back.

Laugh!!!!

I nearly fell off the bus seat.

Regular readers of this blog will remember that last year, Queenie figured out the Canadian growing season after a couple of half-assed attempts. And managed to get a full crop of vegetables to harvest.

Of which achievement she was mightily proud.

But nothing, and I mean NOTHING, in that harvest (not even the potatoes) came close to achieving the greatness of Himself's cherry tomatoes.

After I annoyed him by insisting on growing boring old heirlooms, one afternoon he took a hammer out and gunthered a lopsided, triangular 'greenhouse' out of some plastic sheeting he'd appropriated somewhere, and a few 2 x 4s he'd appropriated from somewhere else.

And nailed it to the neighbour's fence.

Hot, sleepy afternoons in our shared back yard were spent admiring the cherry tomatoes growing like crazy behind the plastic.

As well as having to do most of the admiring, Queenie had to do all the harvesting of course.

Anyways, this year we have our own garden and lots of space so as a reward for being the Cherry Tomato Cheerleader-in-Chief last summer, Himself promised me that my heart's desire - my very own proper greenhouse - would be the very first project this year.

We spent the last two weekends working on it, with the help of Little 'Un last week (who insisted on digging for treasure while not hammering, and found a fresh spring right beside said greenhouse which will help with our irrigation system. Go the boy.).

This year, we're using greenhouse plastic, as opposed to glass. To make sure it all works well. If it does, hopefully we'll replace the plastic next spring.

I love my new greenhouse.

For a start, it has the same dimensions as the living room in my Dublin apartment.

Yes, you read that right.

Build 'em on the fly 'n' stack 'em high, as they used to say in Irish property developer circles.... ah well, at least now they're saying ... get me that list of hot countries with democratic governments and no extradition, we're headin' out boys!!

17' x 9', if you're that interested.

The apartment was 436 square feet in total.

And people wonder why I put up with Canadian winters!!

Anyways... back to the tomatoes.

I have a four foot bed running the length of the greenhouse, and a big worktable for seeding and potting.

I even have a rack for my tools.

We are hooking up water barrels with a pump so we have running water, and Himself spent a couple of hours last night installing a drainage pipe around the base of the greenhouse to draw excess water away from the soil. Which will also make it more difficult for our yard rabbit to dig into the building.

All in all, it's very professional looking. And as it's round the back of our garage/ shed well hidden from public view, I have no doubt the Mounties will be round to search it come the first fly-over of the summer.

Well they won't find any of that muck!!!

Just peppers, courgettes, aubergines, tomatoes, chives, herbs, sweet corn, peas, beets, and hopefully, water melons!

I popped into the greenhouse this morning to see how things were doing on the seedling front and the warm, cloying smell of compost and condensation hit me and reminded me, as all my gardening efforts do, of an afternoon spent at home with Paddy in the greenhouse (which was also the boiler house) thirty five years ago.

I think maybe I shall get an old wood stump or two from our little copse, and place them in my own greenhouse, so I can sit there during a rain storm and listen to the shore and the birds...

You can take a girl out of her homeland....

... but she'll eventually get back to planting potatoes.

Pumpkin, schmumpkin .... The pratai are in the ground.

Won't it be lovely to have my own potatoes, grown by my own hand, to eat this winter.

I wonder could I get Himself to dig me out a root cellar! For all the potatoes and carrots and beets I'm going to have?!

I'm being super-confident this year, which is always a bad thing in gardening.

If he wakes up ever again of course.

Himself and Kitty are both asleep. Have been for a while. So I'm just sitting here with dinner all prepared waiting for hunger pangs to stir them. Also, Scheherazade is coming over for some food (for those of you who don't remember, Scheh is the first friend I made in Halifax and she is from Turkey originally).

I don't know why they are so tired. It's not like we were up to much last night.

We went all the way downstairs last night. That was about as out as we could manage.

We were hanging with Ms Maggie Beach and her friend and I realised that I don't talk about her friend much, even though he's my friend too (except when we play washer toss, when he turns into my sworn enemy forever) so we were discussing blog names for him.

Maggie Beach picked her own blogname. I'm all for letting people choose their own name. Her's is her porn name I think (you pick your middle name and the street you grew up on).

Queenie is Lizzie Oxmantown, which is a stupid porn name. My pole dancer name is worse, it's Midgie Neill. I would so be the pole dancer on the Canadien ad if that was my name.

Anyways, so our friend had to pick his blog name. First of all he decided on RaCy (because he's building a F1 car in his garage at the moment - I kid you not). Then Maggie decided it had to be his porn name. Which turned out to be Johnny Pleasant.

So after we all stopped falling around laughing at the aptness of it as his porn name, he decided he didn't want that, so we did the pole dancer's name thingummy and it turned out to be Teddy Grainger.

So Teddy Grainger it is.

Anyways, Queenie and Ms Beach go up to Teddy's house a few times a week now (and Kitty too), because he's got a home gym in his basement. Right next to the F1 car in his garage, although I think the car was being collected this morning, so no more throbbing house when I'm running myself to a standstill.

We do an hour - run on the treadmill and the cycling thing and the crosstrainer, and Queenie does some yoga stretches, and then we go home to eat dinner and have a glass of wine.

Very healthy.

Well, it is when you consider the alternative.

Queenie had to start working out. It is THAT TIME IN HER THIRTIES.

I do find it terribly boring though.

Anyways, Teddy had to pick his top bands for the greatest band on earth ever competition so he picked The Eagles (that's the Johnny Pleasant side of his personality coming through I think).

I am going to have to organise some kind of structured weekend of listening for us to arrive at some consensus on which band will get the title.

And the exciting news is, Mike and Cate our previous next door neighbours are coming to Halifax for a month this summer!

Much washer toss/ camping/ sitting around talking about librarianship/ drinking of beer/ BBQ-ing will ensue.

You better pick your blog names, then!!