Rambling About The Garden

 I was taking this photo yesterday, in what I thought were cloudy-ish conditions, but after looking at this shot on the computer I realized two things: first, the dry dry grass in the foreground detracts from what is otherwise a rather magnificent display of vegetable gardening (and one that I was hoping to boast about), and second, I need a more overcast day to take garden shots.

Oh heck, I'll boast anyway. In this shot are 13 types of edible plants or vegetables: tomatoes (Jaune Flamme, Juliet, Green Zebra, Tigerella, Black Krim, Sungold, Yellow Pear), beans (Flambo, Hutterite Soup, Blue Lake, Cranberry Bush, Scarlet Runner, Broad), beets (Touchstone Gold, Chioggo, Bulls Blood), radicchio (Palla Rosso), peas (Sugar Daddy), purple sprouting broccoli, onions (Kincho), lettuce (Valmaine, Tango, Tropicana, Red Sails), salsify, celeriac, artichokes, strawberries, and raspberries. Ignore that rude grass.


This shot was obtained by leaning precariously out my bathroom window, screen balanced carefully on my head, with a telephoto lens on the camera. My neighbour, who was exercising her dog in the back yard, looked a little uneasy when I shouted cheerily "Don't worry! just trying out the telephoto!"






Here is a perfectly amazing radicchio. Why did I take so long to discover them? Radicchio has it all: looks, taste, and style. Red Sails lettuce comes close, with its beautiful frilly, red green ruffles, but radicchio wins with those mesmerizing green swirls.

Little sweat bee on onion flower head.

 The box in that pot incurred some frost damage this winter, and is now sitting out the summer in a shady corner of the deck, trying to regrow.

 This bench is strategically placed to block the sprinkler from watering so much of the grass. I don't think it's aware of how useful it's being, but it's such a cantankerous bench that if it DID know, I feel sure it would crumble, just to annoy me. It flipped over in the spring - for no good reason - with a number of snapdragon starts on it, causing most of them to dangle perilously close to the fence, where they were eventually pillaged by marauding chickens. I was not pleased, so the bench was banished to the Really Horrible Dry Part of the backyard. Until now, of course.

Speaking of pillaging chickens, here are Prunella (roosting on the compost screen, hiding from Pip) and Pip (looking around for more seedlings to rip and shred). Pip and Prunella are sisters - they should get along, right? Last month Pip decided that she was sick of Prunella, no doubt because Prunella makes it a habit to shove everyone aside when they get their afternoon snack. She's a good size, too, so the shoving frequently gets out of hand. Sometimes it's accompanied by a peck or two (in the case of Fern).

Pip took to really tormenting Prunella, stalking her, pecking her, and attacking her in rather random ways. It put ole Prunella off her laying, which was when I had to get involved because if there is one thing Prunella is good at it's laying eggs. That hen lays every single bloody day, which is impressive given her very advanced years. So, just as Pip took to following Prunella around with malicious intent, I took to following Pip around, only instead of malicious intent  I had a bamboo pole.

(sensitive types may want to look away at this point) 

Whenever Pip attacked Prunella, I banged Pip across the back with the pole and squawked, trying to sound like I was saying "STOP THAT YOU STUPID BLOODY CHICKEN!" Eventually Pip decided that it wasn't worth having me shout and chase her around with a pole, and she stopped terrorizing Prunella, but not before Prunella decided she was really really really uneasy around Pip.


This shot shows Prunella lumbering up from her comfy roost and looking a little concerned. This is because she's noticed that Pip has noticed her, and she's no doubt starting to worry that it might be the Formerly Mean & Horrible Pip and not the Newly Chastened Bamboo Pole in Butt Pip.

Fortunately I was able to utilize my chicken language skills and tell them they are a pair of fools to put so much energy into fighting.

 Royal Wedding sweet peas. So far these take the top prize in the Best Smell In The Garden contest. They pipped the lemon verbena only because the verbena requires human intervention to release its scent, while the sweet peas can scent the entire top floor of the house in a matter of minutes.

 Toffee, who takes the prize for Most Fearful Cat On The Block, is sitting here, surveying his territory in a safe part of the yard (where he can dart in the cat door should anyone challenge him).

I hate to say this, but I think he thinks that concrete frog is looking out for him. Moments after I took this photo he licked Froggie, as if to say "you're a pal, thanks for looking out for me."

And I thought the chickens were weird.

How My Week Went

 Another in the "My Life As A Fabulous Cat" series 

by guest poster Toffee

This is how I prefer to spend my day: lying sideways on a flat surface. Not only does this position set my face off to perfection (as well as resting my ample girth), it also causes the slaves to exclaim delightedly about how cute I am. And who doesn't like a little slavish worship?

If only they would obey my Look But Don't Touch dictum, particularly the young slaves. 



This is my other preferred position, but for some reason the slaves don't like me doing this. They think it causes me to stay awake at night. Apparently I make too much noise while they're sleeping (but do I care? not I). Silly slaves: I make noises at night not because I am well-rested, but because it's the only time I get to claw the damn chesterfield. Note to Richard: that piece of cedar you screwed onto my favourite clawing spot? The one you hope I'll scratch instead of the material? It doesn't fool me. I'm a cat, not some dumb dog. Honestly.

When I tire of lolling, I like to sit in the window looking as atmospheric as possible. Here I am in the pose known as The Regal Egyptian. I usually sit like this until Sheila has the camera JUST about focused, then I move right when she clicks the shutter. This really exasperates her but it's so amusing. I do enjoy thwarting her. She's SO bossy.






The only trouble with annoying the slaves is that they get fussy about my Feed On Demand strategy and start paying attention to how much food I've had each day. Don't they realize that my ample girth doesn't get this way on a starvation diet?

Idiots.







Thus am I compelled to beg cutely.

Always a bit deflating to the old ego.












 To get back at them I resort to specific tactics.

Here I am biting the hand that feeds me.














Here I am hiding while they are calling me. This particular spot lasted well over an hour.

















My extensive yoga moves always get a rise out of someone, particularly if I'm licking a certain part of my anatomy.

Right in front of them.

Right when they're eating. 











  Tip: make as much noise as possible.

Nothing like a little suction noise, combined with some gnawing and chewing, to really get them all stirred up.














 Sometimes it backfires on me and they find me hilarious.

I hate being laughed at. It's so undignified.

  Luckily I have my balls to play with. I find this very therapeutic.

When FDPG isn't around I use her iPod for Selfie Practice. Is it me or does anyone else struggle with the screen button when taking selfies? Steve Jobs obviously wasn't thinking about cat paws when he designed that thing.

I meant to get more of my face in this one.








And this one.

This is probably the worst thing that happened to me this week. For some reason no one heard me knocking at the door.

I sat there for ages.














I hate when that happens, don't you?

Never fear, I'll get back at them.

One day.

(For more in this series please click CATS in the sidebar section marked LABELS or type How My Week Went into the search bar)

In Which Sheila Outwits & Outplays The Cat

 It's been cold here all week. Unusually cold. And by cold, I mean very, VERY cold. Cold as in -5 when I get up in the morning. Cold as in bringing the chickens' water into the basement overnight so it's liquid when we go out to free them in the morning (that's how they see it, let's face it). Cold as in putting the fleece liner in my raincoat.

Cold as in some of us spending most of our day sleeping under a blanket. Witness this lazy fellow. It's been a while since he's written a guest post, but don't be expecting one any time soon; he barely manages to rouse himself to eat, let alone put his little paddy paws to the keyboard.

One thing he DOES manage to soldier on with, depressingly, is finding soft, diggable toilet spots in the garden. No squatting in the bushes for this feline. Most of the time he doesn't even bother to cover it up, either. I suppose he thinks that's he's doing me a favour, leaving it out in the open for easier finding. I've tried to discuss it with him, but he isn't partial to my conversational methods, which generally involve a version of the old Who Flung Poo? joke.

So while he's unlikely to read this post because let's face it - he's a cat and who knows of a cat that actually reads blogs? otherwise occupied, I'll show you how I manage to outwit, outlast, and outplay his attempts to use my garden as a toilet. 

 First, don't throw out that old greenhouse you bought a while back. You know, the one with the plastic cover that disappeared during the first winter storm it met? Yes, that one: the shelves will not disintegrate, no matter what. And they make very fine soil protectors, as you can see from this photo. Here I have managed to outwit the cat AND the squirrels.

 Here I've combined greenhouse shelving with some wire row covers, along with a little chicken wire, because this is his Very Favourite Spot Of All. I have to be particularly crafty, because he is able to squeeze under the wire row cover, unless, of course, I block each end. Nothing like a little spot of cat poo in one's row cover to brighten the day.




I ran out of greenhouse shelving so I had to resort to plastic for this area. I also left the SuperMegaGigantic Marigold Shrub carcass right there, because if there's one thing that Toffee does not like, it's having to bushwack his way through the garden to his toilet space.

It's not terribly atmospheric, I admit, but the soil in this bed has finally turned into the most gorgeous crumbly stuff possible, and there's no way Toffee's little bum is going to - ahem - soil my soil.

Look at him! Does he look like he appreciates the lengths I go to keep him out of my garden? Of course he doesn't. He's got better things to do, evidently. 

Cold Weather Ramblings

 It's been cold here for the past few days. Noticeably cold. Cold so that even the Boy Who Wears Shorts All Year Long has taken to wearing jeans once in a while. The only real upside to all this cold is that it's sunny most days.

Here is a picture of a chocolate cake. A chocolate cake I gave away. It was part of a fundraiser at Max's school. FDPG and Dominic couldn't figure out why I would spend SO MUCH TIME baking and icing a chocolate cake that they would not be eating. I might have wondered the same thing once or twice, but it was still fun packaging it up in a proper cake box and taking it into the school.

 The last of the summer tomatoes. Look at them: they look so fresh, don't they? You'd never know that they were green nubs on the vines that I hauled up at summer's end, destined for the compost bin. They've been sitting in the window frame on the deck for the past 3 months, ripening veeerrrrryyyyy slowly.

 Mason bee cocoons sitting in a bleach solution. This is the time to open up your bee houses and clean them out. I was rather Darwinian about the idea of cleaning bee cocoons at first, but after watching several generations of bees get chewed to tragic extinction by mites, I now do the Excavate & Rinse Then Bleach routine. It's neither fun nor amusing, but the survival rate is significant enough to keep me at it. In fact, you'll be surprised what survives the bleach routine. I've got a portable little magnifier, so I can see them all. Weird AND gross.

 With all the cold weather we've been having, Toffee has been spending more and more time indoors, mostly hiding in out of the way places where we can't find him and toss him outside. Today he spent approximately 7 and a half minutes in the Great Outdoors. Three of them scratching at the door to be let in again.

Tying up the ends of summer

We're in pre-Fair Frantic Mode right now, which means the kids are spending large amounts of time using up my printer ink, accessing my Costco film account, demanding I buy them yet another tri-fold board (I'm boycotting ed. boards right now because I only have about a thousand of them in my basement), and arguing with me about deadlines.

Example:

"WHAT? I have to have my poster board in tomorrow? But you said it wasn't due until Friday! FRIDAY! Why didn't you TELL ME that it was due on Tuesday! Now I'll have to work all night!!! ARGH"

Take note, new parents: there will be many a time when your children will maintain that you said certain things, things you know you never said. Do not attempt to argue with them. That is the way of folly. Learn to do this instead: an expressive eye-roll that hints at boredom and exasperation. Walk away, perhaps trailing a finger along the schedule you stuck on the fridge; you know, the one with all the fair requirements written down on it (make sure you use pen). Cough dramatically as you do so. Maybe glance at them in a super fake but sympathetic manner. Do not laugh like that kid in The Simpsons. They will get the message faster than they will if you argue with them. Or laugh like that kid in The Simpsons. Trust me.

Some time later you might point out that spending large amounts of time laying on their bed listening to music or eating endless amounts of toast while reading various books or newspapers isn't the best way to beat a deadline.

And through it all I wonder where summer went. It seems to be ending, and, as is usually the case with summer, we're not ready for it to go. The kitchen table is covered with canning debris - how can we possibly start eating indoors now? I still have 400 lbs of peaches, pickles, apples, and beans to deal with!

What I won't miss is seeing the cat take his morning poo on the garden path. It will be too wet out there and he'll have to revert to his usual hide-behind-a-bush-in-the-front-garden spot. Does anyone else have a cat who poos on the grass? In the middle of nowhere? And doesn't cover it? Isn't this what dogs do? And to think that I thought cats were vastly more intelligent than dogs.

But wait! There's more!

Spring showing itself in the garden

New hellebore flower

Richard Parker, I presume?

What's that I hear? The happy jingle of my crunchies?

Toffee basks in the glow of familial worship

Random New Camera Photos

Cheeky primrose defies the pot of Mondo grass sitting on its head

Did you see that oh-so-critical word in that title up there? No? Well, go back and have another look. I'll give you a hint: it's not RANDOM. Got it now? No of course you haven't. Not to worry, this is my blog and I am here to inflict all my rambling witticisms on you, not to mention all the photos I'm taking with my new camera.

Sheila pauses and looks somewhat smug

That's right. My NEW camera. My old camera bit the dust (quite literally) one sunny day far far away and is now resting comfortably in Camera Heaven (that's what I tell the kids so they don't get too upset). It was a charming little point & shoot that I loved so much I put it in my This Is What I Get Should We Divorce record with Richard. He chose the espresso machine (like most sensible couples we only get petty over essentials). And while the old P&S was just a little slip of a thing, this new camera is a DSLR. It has weight. It has heft. Has a case that's bigger than my purse. Has a manual that is bigger than my purse. Comes with a DVD of instructions, but I haven't looked at that yet because, quite frankly, it scares me somewhat to think that I might not be able to understand what the heck they are talking about with all those weird f-things and apertures and stuff.

 But I digress. I promised to inflict photographs on you and inflict I shall!

Come closer and we will swallow you in one gulp

Sheila's Tidy Spot

Wait! What's that I spy with my little telephoto lens?

Why! It's a cherry plum, in full blossom!

Budding Pear

Sheila Gets Atmospheric

Toffee and his unwittingly obscene tail

Toffee's version of the Catwalk

He knows how to work it, doesn't he?

The trees are infested with these things!

Finally I can see what is off in the distance!

This reminds me of something from Spirited Away

 So there you have it. My new toy. I feel maternally thrilled with it, too, so no telling me that I'm out of focus or anything or I might mail you that instructional DVD.

By the way, is it me (oh please don't say it is) or it Blogger doing weird things? I do not like the new formatting palette I have and I don't like how I keep getting mysterious links added all over the place. If you have any thoughts (nice ones only) or tips do send them.