Weekly Update

Now that summer is officially here I notice I'm posting less. I've finally decided to deal with the mess we developed over the winter. We've been reworking some of the rooms in this house, because they weren't working as is (they sound like something on sale at IKEA, don't they). And I've been trying to manage the mountains of paper I seem to accumulate. I can tell that I worry Richard in this regard: I can tell he thinks I have Old Woman Smothered by Piles of Paper in Her Own House headlines in me. But it's hard to chuck out all those drawings the kids make. I find old ones and they have enough nostalgia in them to sink a ship.

I've also been working on the garden. I had been collecting beach stones from up island in order to make a long and winding path from the concrete walk to the road (a steep slope) but in a fit of "I hate that spot under that stupid pine"- itis I used them to make a long and winding bed. I laid down newspaper (5 less piles to smother me with later!), sod and several bags of fill and then planted the butterfly plants Max and I had collected. There is the beautiful varigated 'Harlequin' Butterfly Bush, the 'Yellow Sovereign' Phygelius, a silver edge Lavender, and a 'Red Fox' Veronica. And since the adjacent bed was bursting slightly at the seams (who knew Jacob's Ladder could spread quite so fast?), I removed some plants from it and added them to the mix (geraniums, marigolds, evening primroses, and rock plants).
Then, seeing that the pansies were getting the Dreaded Mildew, I went and bought something to replace the ones in a wooden planter I bought last summer. Here it is with some new plants.

The top bit has a 'Shadowdancer Betty' fuchsia while the bottom part has Selaginella 'Aurea,' Corsican Mint, and Pratia 'Celestial Spice' in it. And some more rocks. I like rocks.









Here's a closeup of the bottom bit (you can click for Added Depth). I'm half in love with it, I think. I love the different shades of green.
I'll put up some pictures of the Family Room (where the school stuff is kept) when I've officially finished, providing I don't get smothered by papers first. Here is a picture of the room after I emptied the bookcase (which was driving me nuts and was the real reason I needed to redo this room:


Now, I feel compelled to point out that those piles aren't always there - they are from the bookshelves. Ahem. Just so we all know. I'm not really that messy.

Other amazing feats I've managed this week:

I have discovered that I like potatoes when I grow them myself.

That dust follows me where ever I go.

That my kids still expect me to do history and botany even though it's summer.

And, most amazing of all, I can now get Toffee to close his eyes, roll onto his back, and purr all without touching him. All I have to do is repeat "Toffee, Toffee, Toffee" over and over again, in a soft voice. Pretty amazing, eh? Ha. I can see you all seething with envy at this. Yes, some of us spend our summers beefing up our Latin skills, or taking up Greek, some of us learn to quilt, or go overseas and visit enlightening museums, but I, I have managed to get a cat to turn over and purr on my command. I consider that a well-spent first week of July.

Flower in the Garden

I'm taking that title from a cloth book FDPG used to have when she was 3 months old. We have a picture of her holding it and looking very quizzically at it, as if reading.


I was hanging out with some friends at the park the other day, when one mother asked me where we lived. I told her, and mentioned casually (well, as casually as an obsessed gardener possibly can) that I was turning the lawn into a garden. This is my Lure Remark, designed very specifically to see who I'm talking to: a garden enthusiast, or Someone Else. (snobby, aren't I)

I was totally unprepared for her answer. She turned to me with a slight look of disinterest, arched her eyebrows, and said "Hmm, what do you grow - flowers?" Since there isn't Hear-O-Vision on Blogger, you'll have to imagine the disdain the word "flowers" got from her. I was shocked. Horrified, even. I was that Edward Gorey woman in the Masterpiece Theatre intro, dropping her scarf and saying "Ohhhh! Ohhhh!" over and over again. She didn't like flowers! Say it isn't so! I wanted to transport her immediately into some high meadow somewhere, á la Sound of Music, and do some kind of fancy Cinderella waltz with cascading flowers (brought in by helpful talking animals), but I was too flabbergasted. Plus, I wondered a bit how she'd like dancing in meadows if she didn't like flowers...

Afterwards, I came home and comforted myself with a wander in the garden. The flower garden, I stress. I stared for a while. I contemplated. I shut my eyes and smelled. And wondered why more people don't see the The Importance of Being Earnest having flowers in their gardens.

So without further ado, here are some recent bouquets from my Flower Garden. All pictures are clickable if you want Big Views.

Here we have some sweet peas, fragrant and soft as clouds.

Next, a mixture of sage flowers, heuchera blossoms, sweet peas, and alchemilla.

And here we have another mixture, this time some Maltese cross, some yarrow, lysimachia, alliums, double coreopsis, and some centaureas. I like the drama of the primary colours.This is part of Cloudscome's Sunday Garden Stroll, and you can see her and more gardeners on their own strolls at her blog: a wrung sponge.

That Old Chestnut

We were at my ILs for dinner the other night, and some family member, who shall remain nameless (I'm tempted to call this person "resentful old bat" but I'm trying to restrain myself), brought up the old "what about socialization" remark. We were discussing this person's intent to move their own child from a Bad School to a private school, and without any comment from us we heard why they thought homeschooling was neither appropriate nor beneficial. Not just for this child. For any child. Ugh.

I hate when people say this. I've heard this old chestnut once too often, and I am getting very sick of hearing it, particularly as my kids are always in attendance when people say this. If you've ever met my kids, the terms "socially awkward" "weirdly introverted" "badly behaved" "obnoxious" "rude" "in need of intervention" just don't apply. My kids are polite. They say please and thank-you. They don't interrupt. They play well with other children. They don't whine, beg, ignore requests, or act like brats. They're nice kids. They're fun even. And I am not the sort of person to foreground what wonderful homeschoolers we are. I would rather talk about my garden don't even talk about it. So it burns me to hear people who know my kids (and me) toss off that thoughtless remark as if it's got any relevance whatsoever to my situation. Richard says that these people are just reiterating comments they've heard from other sources, and aren't thinking very carefully, but still, these people are adults. Can't they think for themselves? Shouldn't they be thinking for themselves?

Fortunately, this time I had had enough glasses of wine that I could find it mildly amusing was able to comment objectively without getting too incensed. I joked about how great their kid's school experience must be that they were ready to part with ten grand each year to change that school experience and how we were homeschooling to avoid that very aspect of, err, "socialization," but that we weren't having to part with huge quantities of money for the privilege. Then we all laughed rather immoderately, except for the resentful old bat unnamed family member, who continued to stew.

The next day I groused a bit to Richard, who was, understandably, feeling caught between a relation rock and a wife hard place. He urged me to ignore it and move on. It's not as if we even see them very often, which is true. So I did. But I get the feeling that my skin is getting thinner by the syllable. Not a great feeling, really.

An Old Dog Learns Some New Tricks

I'm participating in Cloudscome's Garden Tour today and while I fully intend to inundate you with a number of garden shots (gardeners can be very tedious this way, can't they), I also want to make a note, mostly for myself, of some of the new things I've tried this year. I don't know about you, but I'm always thinking "Hmm, I need to remember this - this is a great idea" and then promptly forgetting about it.

First up: window box lettuce. Window boxes have always been a sort of bete noire for me: I love them, and I love having them bursting with bloom in front of the window, but in every house I've ever lived in (and I've moved around a fair bit) they have been near impossible to access decently. This house is no exception, and seeing as how it's the first house I've ever owned I feel compelled to change my relationship with the window boxes. The window boxes in this house are pretty high off the ground and one of them is so inaccessible that I've actually left it, just to spite itself (mature, aren't I). The other one, once the new windows were installed, is easier to get at, so, instead of planting something that I could deadhead and cosset continually, I planted lettuce and spring onions. I can't think why I didn't do it before. Now we just slide open the window, remove the screen, and pluck. Nice for impromptu sandwich preparation.

Next, I'm growing some of the celery plants in these terracotta drain tiles. And they are already 5" taller than their unprotected compatriots. I don't know if they will be blanched at all (I doubt it) but it will be interesting to see what colour they end up.















And here we have a drinking fountain for bees, butterflies, and other small, winged insects. No more tragedies of drowning in the birdbath for me. I lost 4 Mason bees in the spring this way and it was very sad.

You just fill a container with small rocks and some water, and if anyone loses their footing, they will have something to crawl onto. There is enough evaporation each day that mosquitoes won't be an issue.










Mulching. I bought a bale of straw and so far I've mulched the artichokes (pictured), the blueberries, marionberries, and raspberries, and all the tomato plants scattered about the garden. I haven't had to water as much and the weeds are down. Plus, Toffee has a lovely place to lie and preen. He even blends in with it. For some reason this convulses the kids, but then again, they think ANYTHING that cat does is hysterical. He can sneeze, or lift a leg, and they all shriek with simultaneous laughter and adoration.









Some new beds. I just finished this one yesterday - that's why it looks rather sparse. I took cardboard and newspaper, laid it on the ground (weed/grass block), and covered it with many many bags of soil, manure, and topsoil. This one is walled from seashore rocks we picked up on holiday last week (see here). Some people bring back postcards and tans, I bring back rocks. You can't tell from this photo, but most the rocks
are miracles of texture, colour, and mixtures. Some have bands of white, some are marbled green, some are red with granular white crystals, some have black and white blotches, some sparkle, some glisten, and all are incredible when wet (not a claim I can make, sadly).
This new bed is going to house our Butterfly Garden, which Max wants because he loves butterflies. We bought a new buddleia, ever-so-charmingly named Harlequin (varigated leaves). We also have some Jupiter's Beard, crocosmia, roses, and a lot of balloon flowers, just in case the anise swallowtails have picky eating habits.


This bed exists solely to showcase (well, one day it will) the two perennial fuchsias. One is named Alba and the other is called Genii (I think). A little artistic license in some driftwood and seashells and green rocks from last summer when I only collected green rocks.







I don't know if it was just a good year or if it had anything to do with all the kelp meal and fish fertilizer I heaped on them, but the strawberries are particularly sweet. Last night we dipped a few. And wonder of wonders but not a single word was uttered as they were eaten. Not even from FDPG. Now, that is a miracle.





Here is the vegetable patch from one end.






















Some pansies. These overwintered - and have been blooming non-stop all spring.









Some alliums.











The Mason bee house, some lysimachia, balloon flowers, roses, some raspberries and a peach tree, all jammed into one walled area. Oh, almost forgot to mention the fig, tucked in at the right there.










Blueberries. I planted them only 5 weeks ago but one plant already looks loaded.












And finally, the lozenge bed from a different angle. You can't see the reason for its name at this angle but you can see the mock orange, the coriopsis, the centaurea, and the California poppies, among other things.

So that's my tour here at Greenridge. Enjoy your Sunday. I'm off to plant some huckleberries now.

Tag, I'm it!

I got tagged by the ever-so-charming Kris Bordessa the other day, and as far as I can tell, the purpose of this tag is as mysterious as some of my children. But I'm game. In fact, I sort of like the idea of performing strange orders for no obvious reason. So here we go:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Okay. I've acknowledged Kris, I've got my book, and here are my sentences:

(from Diana Wynne Jones' The Game)

Flute stood with his arms folded, surrounded in leaping hissing heat. He did not look entirely friendly. "Until this morning," he said, "I had a thousand and one golden apples. Now I've only got a thousand."

But now that I've got your attention (Sheila discreetly coughs), can I post this bit too? It's too funny not to tell someone about. I was so enthralled with it that I even woke Richard up last night, at 11:45pm, to read it to him. To his credit he laughed (rather wanly) and said "that was pretty funny - why are you still reading?"

(from Eva Braunn's Homeric Moments: Clues To Delight In Reading The Odyssey and the Iliad)

There is something to be said for learning Greek quite apart from the reading of authors. My father, a physician who was educated in a German classical gymnasium, cherished the following story: His Greek professor, bidding goodbye to a student being withdrawn by his father for a business apprenticeship, was heard to say sorrowfully: "What a pity he couldn't stay for the irregular verbs! One more month and he have had something to sustain him in life."

How can you not love a book with footnotes like these? Okay, now off with your heads you all - go read something, follow those cryptic directions, then let me know what you've done!

That Summer Feeling

We went up island for an extended Long Weekend last week. My parents own a house on the east coast, in a protected little bay where the swimming is good and the summers are hot. I've gone to this beach every year for as long as I can remember. My grandparents found it when they were heading to another place, missed a ferry and had to spend the night here. They ended up buying a little cottage and moving in, where they lived until they both died, many years later. My early memories of this place are of old ladies in bathing caps and black swim suits, drinking gin and smoking Black Cat cigarettes; of wooden outhouses that I dreaded in the middle of the night; of smoking hollow blades of grass with my friends in the beach dunes, certain we were beyond cool; and finally, of being able to wander and wander and wander, free from parents and school and city streets.

It's perfect for kids: long stretches of warm sand, lots of sand dollars, crabs, moon snails, bullheads, eagles, kingfishers, and ospreys, and a wild, rocky reef that stretches way out into the ocean. The reef is where you can see most of the strange and exotic ocean life around these parts. And by strange and exotic I mean things like moon snails and oysters and rock crabs and multi-coloured seaweeds. This picture shows an eagle perched on a rock out on that reef. He sat there for a while, watching me approach, then floated up into the sky right after I took this shot.

A moon snail shell. Sans moon snail. If you've never seen one of these creatures, imagine a large, squooshy gray mass slid inside this shell, with a giant paw emerging from the opening. I suppose I could have said "imagine a large gray slug" but that would leave out the lovely weirdness that is a moon snail.













A moon snail collar. Technically I suppose it's comprised of moon snail goo, conjured up from an overnight rest, but I've never researched it. I don't really want to know, to be honest. Imagine if I were to find out that it's something from their death throes, as a seal consumes them, or a war wound from a surly crab (lost on the Crab Highway). No, I'd rather think of this as bits of leftover blankie from a Moon Snail Snooze.



Here is a teenie tiny bullhead Dominic caught; he waded around after a little mass of them as they basked in the warm shallows as we walked the sand. He scooped it into his moon snail shell, and proudly rushed over to show everyone his prize. You can see it if you look very carefully at the sand in the bottom of the shell. The bullhead is sitting very still and quiet (and yes, I do realize that everything sits still and quiet in a photograph). If you need further visual assistance, click on the picture and it will give you an enlarged view.

Sibling Rivalry Alert: almost one second after Dominic caught his little bullhead, FDPG plunged into the water and grabbed her own little bullhead, with her bare hands. This kid has been watching too much Survivor, methinks.

Can you see his bullish head peeping over the tips of her fingers? If not, click on the picture and you'll see a larger version.



A starfish. People keep telling me they are now called Sea Stars, but I like the word starfish, so I'm stickin' to it. (should have prefaced that with an Old and Crotchety Alert, I guess)








Finally, a razor clam shell. FDPG likes to call them fairy wings for crabbies. I like the colour, because it's so ephemeral. One minute it's glistening wetly in the sun, next it's dry and dull, all the magic having fled.

Lies My Father Told Me

Technically the title should read "Weird Stories My Husband Told The Children" but it doesn't sound so atmospheric, somehow.

See this picture? I overheard Richard, while we were wandering on the beach on the weekend, telling the twins that the reason these waves are imprinted on the sand is because it's really a Crab Highway. "You know how crabs walk sideways, right?" he said confidentially, "well, these troughs are so the crabs can get from one end of the beach to the other without running into each other during the night, because let me tell you, it's grid-locked here come high tide. The crabs are EVERYWHERE!"

But wait, there's more!

Apparently the reason he needs to shave in the morning is because his family was so poor when he was a little kid that they had to eat cat food every day, and now he grows whiskers from eating all that cat food!

But wait, there's more!

Richard was having a coffee with God one day, and told God that he needed to invent something more interesting, just for him, so God invented beer. And now Richard has to drink beer so he doesn't make God feel bad.

Hmmm. I wonder what else he's told them.