Extending the Season

If you listen to the local garden pundits, you'll hear that our garden season is greatly delayed. Depending upon who you listen to, this delay could be anywhere from one week to one month. Not that I like to listen to pundits, mind you, but over the years I've noticed that this is sometimes to my detriment (I do have my occasional moments of insight). Well, to my garden's detriment, really (yeah, we don't see you out there shivering in the cold, sheila).

But the thing is, we seeded our plants a while ago. I want that season to get a move on already. I do not want to hang about waiting until it warms up properly. Of course, this forces me to examine how immature I can be my ability to be philosophical about the outdoors as it pertains to my garden. I've never been very good at waiting. Richard jokes that the people who make the Little Miss and Mister books should have made one for me, titled Little Miss Impatient.

Some of us find that incredibly funny.

Some of us don't.

The Waiting Room, awaiting its closeup its eventual deliverance very patiently

Anyhow, the cold frame Waiting Room was getting rather crowded, as you can see, so I sent the pumpkins, mini-gourds, and watermelons off to their new homes one hot sunny day last week. I even went so far as to plant a few of the tomato plants, because they were too big for their pots too. And then my dad comes over and says "#@%, what are you doing planting THOSE now? They're going to FREEZE."

Oh, I thought. Should I tell him about Little Miss Impatient? How I channel a book character? Or will he laugh me into my compost pile?

I decided against it.

"They'll be fine," I said. "They face south. It's hot here."

He looked a little skeptical, but being my dad, he nodded and said I was probably right. And when he left, I felt a little panicky. Say they did shrivel up in the cold night? Say it rained for another 300 days? So I dug around in the garbage pile I have, a pile of old bags from Bag It Yourself soil places, and hauled out a few. Then I got a few tomato cages and fashioned a mini greenhouse.
Like this....
It's funny, in this picture they rather resemble a bunch of old ladies at the beauty parlour, awaiting their wash and set, don't you think? I might just nickname them Mary, Jean, Beatrice, and Alice. The Wash and Set Ladies.
As for the Tigerellas, well, since I only have about, uh, lemme see, maybe 4 million of them right now (why oh why did I plant all the seeds I saved last year? Sometimes I am SUCH an idiot) I figured I'd abandon some in the wilderness to forage on their own do a bit of an experiment with them: will this new Season Extender work better? Or worse? Will they live? Or won't they? Tune in next week for the exciting conclusion to How The Tomato Grows (cue soap opera music). Gosh, the possibilities are thrilling.

Here's the Waiting Room after the Exodus. It's only been 4 days since I took the other WR photo, and already the zucchini (Ronde de Nice) have grown substantially (they are the 3rd row down if you start at the top of the photo). You could barely see them before.
So there you go. You too can ignore Experienced Garden Pundits! Live to garden another day! Channel weird little cartoon characters just for the heck of it! Am I Human? Or am I Gardener?

(guess I shouldn't listen to YouTube music videos while I write, should I?)

Lewisia Lately

I've written before about my Lewisia Love. I'd forgotten that I'd initially purchased them on an Escape From Renovation Hell expedition. And I wish I didn't remember how much of the renovation budget I blew on them, but when I went into the Greenridge Archives to get that link the price flew out at me and I turned into a pillar of shocked salt. Knew I shouldn't have looked.

Ah well. Look at that colour. Doesn't it singe your eyeballs just a little?









And this one. It's like living with a bunch of goofy old ladies with a penchant for gaudy eye shadow and radioactive lipstick.

Or a bunch of little girls, for that matter.

Heck, one of my sons used to like wearing nail polish. I'm sure I've seen that colour before. On someone's toes. Not saying who, of course.









Here we are again.

Sigh.

I feel a song coming on. A little something in Broadway, perhaps? Some tap dancing? A flirty skirt? Hugh Jackman to twirl me, lewisia in between my teeth?

All Glass On Deck

The guy who owns the house across the street is replacing its rotting siding this week, and a greenhouse window, which had been attached to the house, was sitting in the middle of the lawn when I came home from swim lessons with the kids. I'd glanced at that window several times and thought it would be nice as a cold frame. Seeing it sitting there, in the middle of the lawn, made me think it might be going to the dump. But the landlord was just leaving in his truck. I dashed after him as he drove down the street in his truck and asked him if he was planning on reusing it after he'd finished the siding. And if he wasn't, could I have it. Sorry, he said, his neighbour wanted it. We'd never met before, so I felt rather guilty about giving him my best Sad Winsome Gardener In Need look, but I did it anyhow. "Oh, darn. It would be perfect as a cold frame," I said sadly but bravely. "Thank you anyhow." He waved uncertainly and roared off.

I shuffled dejectedly back up the road and over to where my other neighbour, an older fellow, was standing with my kids, watching me race up and down the street after the truck. For some reason I amuse this neighbour. "You have no shame, do you!" he said. "No I don't," I replied, "I want something like that for my seedlings. It's perfect. But his neighbour is going to take it. Drats."

"You never know," he said, "the neighbour might not want it." "Who wouldn't want that?" I said, trying to stifle the image of my husband's rolling eyes and comments about all the junk I attract to our back yard if I were to acquire that window. I could think of one person who would not want that window. Not that that makes any difference to me wanting it, though. Oh no, no.

A few hours later the truck neighbour was back. He knocked at the front door. "Want that window?" he asked.

Do I?

Do I?

You bet I do.

And here it is. Happy as a clam on my deck.

How To Turn A Crappy Old Plastic Pot

...into something moderately aesthetic.

Or, as Dominic said " When I first saw that pot I thought it looked really junky. Now it looks like something you'd buy in a store."

That's the idea, you clever boy you.

I needed a Mother's Day present for my mother, so I went to Home Despot, thinking I'd get a container and some little plants to put in it. I bought some annuals: Potato Vine (Ipomoea batatas), Coleus, Bacopa "Taifun Mega White," and ivy geraniums "Pacific Merlot." I bought some soil. Then I went to the container section and did a double take. Thirty dollars for a pretty green planter? Ugh. Have I ever mentioned how cheap I am? (hope my mum isn't reading this) Or how tragic my bank account it? Or how cheap I —

Thus thwarted by ole Home Expensepot, and disinclined to go elsewhere in case it only got worse, I went home with the annuals and the soil and rummaged around in my garden storage area. No terracotta pots. Well, there was one, but it was the one I use to force my rhubarb every year. Couldn't get rid of that. No nice plastic pots either. There were two plastic pots that were the right size, but both of them looked pretty ugly: scratched and stained.

The wheels spin in Sheila's head while she considers various scenarios.

Then...a flashback...

Once upon a time, long long ago, I entered a garden competition for a Canadian home & garden magazine. It was a container garden competition. I was living in a little basement suite with lots of potted herbs and things, and it seemed like a fun sort of thing to do. I liked gardening, although at the time I knew next to nothing about it. But the second prize really appealed to me: an espresso machine. I could see that espresso machine sitting on my counter top. I could see it foaming and hissing. I could see me drinking espresso, laced with a little cream and brandy. So I entered that contest. In order to spice up my bland green and black nursery containers, I hauled out my acrylic paints and brushes (have I ever mentioned that I was a face-painting clown in another life?) and painted them with bright colours, wild animals, and geometric designs. They looked better than the plants did, to be honest.

And whadday know but I won.

Very sadly, I did not win the espresso machine. It was the second prize, and I won the first prize. I tried to convince the judges to give me the second prize, and to give the second prize winner the first prize (a gift certificate to a Colour Your World paint store) but they wouldn't go for it. So I gave my parents the paint certificate. Made me look exceedingly benevolent towards my poor, long-suffering parents and made their kitchen look pretty good.

Where was I?

Oh yes. Mother's Day presents.

After that little flashback, I knew what I could do. I hauled out one of the grubby, stained, scraped plastic pots (you know, the kind with the Faux Terracotta look) and gave it a mini power wash with my hose. I stared at it hopefully. It didn't look that bad now.

FDPG sauntered over to where I was standing, and stared at the pot with me. She chortled. "That's sure an ugly pot!" she said gleefully. "I don't think Nanna will like that much!"

Harumph.

And now, here it is, a few short hours and several coats of acrylic paint later. I'm not finished with it yet, but it's coming along. Instead of the Faux Terracotta, it now has a Faux Giraffe look. I'll post another shot when I'm done, assuming it looks better than this. If I don't post another shot, you'll know that you saw its best moment in time.

FDPG's Latest Read

I am fortunate to live in a town with a seriously good bookstore. It's good in that it: a) offers a discount (on all items) to homeschoolers, b) makes a genuine attempt to order in anything you ask them to, and c) puts on a lot of bookish events for people. And so it was that I found myself there the other night, in regards to the c) category. A homeschooling mother here in town convinced one of this store's employee's (a homeschooling mother herself, I realized rather belatedly) to give a group of us a semi-virtual tour through the shelves of the YA literature section (YA being Young Adult).

Now I've bought books for my kids solely on the recommendations of other people, and some of them have been fortuitous finds. Some haven't. And we're lucky in that we happen to live in a province that offers options to homeschoolers, most of them with financial attachments I can live with. And these financial attachments offer me the opportunity to buy books for my kids that I wouldn't otherwise. That said, we still spend way too much time in the library (at least, according to Max we do), because there is only so much of the house that I am prepared to offer up to books. I need space for my hat collection, for one thing. And my seed sprouting activities. And my CD collection (Billy Bragg! Ron Sexsmith! The Cure!). And my cookery implement collection (currently groaning in storage boxes in the basement). Not to mention my cook books. Oh, and gardening books.

Well, you get the idea.

Anyhow, back to the fortuitous finds and this particular bookstore.

Thanks to Becky, whom I hold responsible for emptying that homeschool purse more than she realizes (with this and this and this and this, among other items), we've accumulated a lot of fun stuff to read and listen to, items that have both lightened my load as a homeschooling parent and given the kids much food for future thought (that they might not have gotten otherwise). My kids are now serious devotees of that thing known as The Audio Story. When we first started taking them out of the library (because I didn't see myself EVER spending $40 for an audio CD when I could get it free from the library...come to think of it, I still don't) I thought "Gosh, how quaint! I used to listen to cassettes too" (because 5 years ago the library collections were still largely cassette-oriented). Now of course almost everything is on CD, which is nice because they sound better and behave better in the kids' creaky cranky Freecycled ghetto blasters. And the variety! It's incredible. The kids have their favourite readers even (Jim Dale reading Peter Pan was an early favourite. Ditto the lovely Dr Who David Tennant reading Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III). Call me antiquated but who needs a DVD player in the car when you've got Our Island Story, A Little History of the World, or Norse Myths all ready to go? Anyhow, we are all big fans of the audio story here. Sometimes the kids listen to the audio version and sometimes they happen upon the book. Either way it's good.

Max likes adventure stories: Silverwing, Garth Nix's Keys To The Kingdom, The Thieflord (when he first started reading he loved anything by Cornelia Funke), The Gatekeepers series by Anthony Horowitz, Lemony Snicket's stuff. FDPG likes fantasy adventures or anything funny with dragons and goofy princesses in them: the Magic Treehouse series was her first passion, then she moved on to Dragonrider, The Last Dragon, The Unicorn Secrets, Dealing With Dragons, Talking To Dragons, the Warriors series...well, you get it. She liked them so much she got the books out of the library and read them over and over again. Right now she's rereading the Harry Potter series AND listening to them at the same time, mostly because she can't wrench herself out of that world. Who can blame her. We're reading The Mysterious Benedict Society right now (HT to Suji for the suggestion), which they are all pretty enthusiastic about, but I can't help but compare it to HarryPotterWorld. I miss the HPW. And Dominic, well, he loves goofy fun-filled stories like Ralph Mouse, Mouse on a Motorcycle, and Horrid Henry. Or even Flat Stanley and Geronimo Stilton.

Anyhow, back to the fortuitous finds and this particular bookstore. (didn't you just say that?)

Here are some of the book suggestions the Fabulous Bookstore Employee gave us. I bought this one right away, for FDPG, and she read it in one day she loved it so much. It's called Ottoline and the Yellow Cat. It's a perfectly gorgeous book, with perfectly charming drawings in it, and some perfectly hilarious postcards at the back (in case you forget the Who's Who) describing the characters thusly:

Her Radiant Luminosity: Maureen of Eastphalia
Her Ineffable Elevatedness: Tina of Trondheim

And it's hard cover too, which I usually avoid (because I'm cheap), but in this case I think the HC really works. It's a very tactile object, this book.

Here are a few other titles. I've checked out one or two and I can see them coming to our house in the near future, all going well with the homeschooling purse strings.

Ronia by Astrid Lindgren
Secret World of Og by Pierre Berton
Van Gogh Café by Cynthia Rylant
A String in the Harp by Nancy Bond
The Nose From Jupiter by Richard Scrimger
Fly By Night by Francis Hardinge
The New Policeman by Kate Thompson
Wind Rider by Susan Williams
The Garbage King by Elizabeth Laird
Sceptre of the Ancients by Derek Landry
Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life by Wendy Mass

I'd like to add our own favourite Diana Wynne Jones, in case you aren't familiar with her.

The Game
The Chrestomanci series
House of Many Ways
Howl's Moving Castle
Castle in the Air

I realize I am not giving you links on any of this stuff, but you all know how to use google. And amazon. Go to it.

So there you, my action-packed night out.

Haul Soil

I've been gardening in a big way this week, mostly because my dad and his truck have been bringing me yards of soil. (oops, here I go blogging about the garden again) Anyone ever moved a yard of soil? I've done it twice now. It's a lot of work. I feel like flourishing my arm muscles at bit, except no one can see them (and I don't see me taking a picture of them because everyone here will snicker). But now I have two long beds on the sloping part of the yard where we plan to put the Lumina pumpkins, the Rouge Vif D'Etamps pumpkins, the Sweet Dakota Rose watermelons, the gourds, and everything else that is starting to spill out of that cold frame of ours.

I've been adding to the artichoke bed too, so we now have nine artichoke plants (I have to quell the sound of Richard's voice gleefully whispering "fartichokes!" to me everytime I mention them). But I love artichokes. When we lived in California you could get giant packages of baby artichokes at Trader Joe's, and we'd boil them until soft, then toss them in the oven drenched in pesto. Or just stick a fork in them and eat them soft and warm. They were always my pregnancy craving food. One reason why I remember them so fondly, I suppose, now that the kids are getting big. Funny how you remember those early baby days so fondly, even if you didn't feel so fond at the time. I know I didn't. I felt completely bewildered by what I'd done.

The twins are showing signs of developing Garden Obsession. Each morning they race outside, while I'm opening up the cold frame, still in pajamas, to compare whose potato plant is bigger. FDPG has her nose slightly out of joint because, for some mysterious reason, Dominic's beets are coming up and hers aren't. But we don't talk about that. Instead we discuss the new leaf that appeared overnight, or the tiny green loopers threatening to eatmy apple trees all up, or the tiger moth caterpillers that are spilling out from the fir trees where they should be, furry little beggars. Or even the new robin's nest in the willow tree, where the twins spend all their time swinging or climbing or hanging. One does wonder what made the robins chose that tree (Sheila clears her throat expectantly).

I have some sad news to impart: Henry the Pig From Guinea died on the weekend. It was very sad. FDPG and I cried, then we took him outside and held a funeral and cried some more. We buried him next to the monkey puzzle tree that died in the winter (oops, hope Sandy isn't reading this). He was very old for a guinea pig (seven) but it was still a wrench to see his hairy fat body lying in his cage, like that, so still. So final.

Max was at a Scout camp or he would've been at the funeral too. Richard wanted me to put Henry in the freezer so Max could see him but something in me balked at that. Besides, the freezer didn't have a lot of room in it. As it was, Max was surprisingly broken up about ole Henry. It was his pet after all. And to think I mistook all that grumbling about cage-cleaning and greens-gathering for indifference. Shame on me.

Here is Henry before he went off to join the Army. I think he was in the Rick Mercer Battalion, where they don't have to wear helmets unless they want to (Henry didn't want to), and where everyone is celebrated, regardless of sexual affiliation (luckily for Henry).

Going To The Museum

FDPG and I went down to the fancy museum in the provincial capital on Saturday. We went to see Treasures: The World's Cultures From the British Museum. I'd bought advance tickets for the curator's talk and tour for Max and I ages ago, but by the time the dates come up he was booked on a Scout camp at the same time, so I made FDPG go with me. She loves history, and was more than willing, but we both underestimated what the curator's lectures would be like. I had visions of a gripping, technicolour IMAX sort of thing (since the lecture was held in the IMAX theatre it seemed likely) and FDPG had visions of Corinthian helmets in a gripping, technicolour IMAX sort of thing (because that was the item she was most intent on seeing and that's how her mind works), but in the end neither of us were on the money. The curators were very nice, very erudite English lecturers, and they spoke in that way only witty English people can ("It rather delights me to see the Lewis chessman piece as the poster boy for this exhibit"), but it was a little on the dry side. No Powerpoint fireworks. No dramatic mood music. Just a few slides and a lot of talking. A lot of talking about Oceania and Melanesia, too; places we weren't sure had any connection with the items in the exhibit. And FDPG and I were the only people there under the age of 60. Good thing she isn't the kind of kid to give me a "What the hell are we here for?" look. Enough of the people around were giving me that very same look. I probably could've ignored her just as easily as I ignored them, but it was nice she didn't. I tend to quail under FDPG's fierce gaze.

After the lectures we were escorted on a tour of the items in the exhibit. Well, actually, I dashed off to plug the parking meter while FDPG elbowed the old ladies who tried to push her out of our place in line.

They had divided the items up according to continent and time period, and in the middle of the entire exhibit they had something called an Enlightenment Circle, where one could go in and play with various items: writing implements, listen to a Rosetta Stone inscription read out in 6 different languages, roll carved stone rolls across Silly Putty to see what they spelled out, and so on. But exhibit was quite spectacular. FDPG saw the Corinthian helmet she'd coveted, as well as some coins from Greece and Persia, and we both stood spell bound at the Egyptian items they had on display. And everything was lit so wonderfully, things seemed to glow. Only one item was a reproduction, which made everything else all the more magical.

But I couldn't take any photographs, sadly.

Afterwards we went to the place where they rob you of any remaining cash Treasure Shop, just to see what they had there, and discovered some of the things we'd seen on-line on the British Museum website. Umbrellas with Egyptian art on them, neckties with hieroglyphs, lots of kids educational materials, and lots and lots of beautifully painted mugs. FDPG was quite taken with these ones, until we up ended them to see their price tag, and even she knew better than to ask me to buy her one.




I have always had a weak spot for anything with Anubis on it. But this Anubis cost $1000. "Why don't you make one in papier-maché?" said Richard the Slightly Idiotic, when we got home and I showed him this photo. "Gosh," I said, "why don't I? I'm sure I have a spare 200 hours to whip one up."

I think he was joking.

I don't think I was.







FDPG and I got into a rather spirited conversation about Bastet, the Cat Goddess. FDPG got her mixed up with Seknet, the lion-headed goddess. So we wrangled pleasantly about it for a while, until we saw the tag on this baby ($1000 as well: don't see myself doing this in papier-maché, do you?) and it read BASTET CAT. Whereupon I crowed only a little. And FDPG glowered only a little.











Rosetta Stone bookends, anyone?

















The chess sets they had for sale, while horrifically priced, were incredibly amusing: this one is Caesar and Cleopatra facing off. Another featured the Roman and the Greek gods squaring off.



And yet another featured the Poster Children of the Exhibit: The Lewis Chessmen. Here's what the BM says about them. And here's another view.

And of course FDPG had to get one of the replicas when we happened upon them. It's a very tactile object and we have all spent a lot of time holding it and rubbing its edges. "I LOVED these pieces. This knight makes up for that boring lecture," I overheard her telling her dad, later that day.












I bought a small papyrus, genuine-hand-painted-in-Egypt-specially-for-tourists print. I almost got the Bastet print, just so FDPG and I could wrangle pleasantly when we got home, but this one has a shot of Horus, and we all love Horus around these parts. I keep hoping we're going to see him strolling around the back yard one night, with his hawk's head sharply at an angle, eyes on the lookout for Osiris or Isis.










The one thing I was disappointed not to see was a book of postcards featuring all the items in the collection. There was a coffee table book, with lots of scholarly comments next to each photograph, but I wanted postcards, so I could tear them out and stick them up on the walls around here. So we could all look at the collection. And wonder. Because it's definitely a collection worth wondering about.

Even if I did have to resort to gift shop pictures.

When we got home, Dominic was waiting for FDPG with his Rock Monster Lego constructions. "Come see these!" he shouted at her as soon as she walked in the front door. Off she went. A minute later she was back in the kitchen, and Dominic was slamming his bedroom door. "What's up?" I asked her. "Oh, that Dominic," she said, "there was me having a really boring morning and all he can talk about it Lego."

Gee, FDPG. I'm SO glad you had a good time.