garden

my week: Mar 24-30, 2025

We had one final little blast of winter last Wednesday and it was great.

By midday the snow was almost gone and I’m sad to think that might be it for another eight months. I live in the wrong place.

The yard was filled with birds all whooping it up and I watched a Blue Jay repeatedly dive face-first into the snow and wriggle and flap around in it, like Glen does on the couch when he’s hyped up.

These birds were more dignified:

Gardening activities are ramping up with every passing day. I sowed more peas, lettuce, chard, basil, tomatoes, calendula and strawflowers. I cut back raspberry canes, pulled weeds and started clearing away last year’s dead stalks. The bulbs are making progress, with tulip and daffodil leaves poking through and crocuses getting started:

Foster and I did our usual round of errands (farm market, Little Free Libraries, regular library, mail collection) and he scored two first edition Stephen King hardcovers from the early 90s. It isn’t every young man who’s willing to hang out with his mother when he could be doing something more exciting and I’m always grateful for his company. 

MLB season started on Thursday and I’m ready for another few months of frustration and disappointment. Thanks to all the extra tv time, I finished the baby blanket for the gift stash and am three-quarters of the way through a toque, also destined to be packed away until someone needs a hat. My goal is to create a cache of items so that if I drop dead tomorrow, my survivors won’t have to worry about their source of knitted accessories for a long time. I have no fortune to leave, sadly, but I do have lots and lots of wool. 

Aside from baseball, I watched a very good three-part series called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator on PBS. The parallels to another orange-hued dictator-in-the-making were depressing. Will his peers stand up to him the way the Roman senators did? Doesn’t seem likely. 

I’ve been reading Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood, Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz, Don’t Believe Everything You Think by Joseph Nguyen and The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell. 

My week: Mar 17-23, 2025

It’s been a quiet week – just the way I like ‘em – and, after a few unseasonably warm days, it has turned cooler again. If only it could stay this way. Evening walks with Glen have been a treat – chilly, damp, grey, bug-less. Just us and the four thousand gulls picking through the recently ploughed field.

There are no spring bulbs up yet, but they’re coming:

Merlin hasn’t detected any spring migrants yet, so it’s been all the usual suspects: American Crow, American Goldfinch, American Robin, Black-capped Chickadee, Black-headed Gull, Blue Jay, Canada Goose, Common Eider, Common Grackle, Common Raven, Gadwall, Hairy Woodpecker, House Sparrow, Killdeer, Mallard, Mourning Dove, Northern Cardinal, Northern Flicker, Red-winged Blackbird, Ring-billed Gull, Ring-necked Pheasant, Song Sparrow, Swamp Sparrow, White-breasted Nuthatch.

It hasn’t been a stellar photography week. Exhibit A: 

In my defence, he was waddling away from me as quickly as he could.

Exhibit B:

Again, in my defence, this was taken through a wet window across a rainy yard.

Exhibit C:

I forgot I’d changed the camera setting the night before (after an unsuccessful look for the aurora) and snapped what could be an intriguing album cover.

Now that I’ve finished all of Foyle’s War, I’m on to Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries in the evenings and I am loving both the soundtrack and the costumes. I’d probably skip the feather boas, but otherwise I’d wear her wardrobe in a heartbeat. I’ve been reading Three Blind Mice and Other Stories by Agatha Christie, A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman, What Your Body Knows About Happiness by Janice Kaplan and The Bean Book by Steve Sando.

An exciting visit to the Little Free Library:

I am powerless in the face of those kitschy covers. These were both published in 1959.

I spent quite a while moving books around this week in my never-ending game of Musical Bookcases. It’s a good opportunity to weed some titles I’m no longer interested in, I tell myself, yet somehow everything always makes it back onto the shelves. In other hoarding news, I made some progress on my yarn stash inventory (I should be knitting 16 hours a day, seven days a week), and finally got all the tea together to make an intimidating wall o’ loose tea packages in the pantry. No more David’s Tea shopping for me for the foreseeable future.

My week: March 10-16, 2025

For many years now, it’s been hard to see the point in blogging. No one visits, or, if they do, they don’t comment. I have persisted, half-heartedly, because I like the idea of recording things – books I’ve read, places I’ve gone, birds I’ve admired. I need to write things down or I forget.  

To minimise what has long felt like wasted effort, I had taken to writing only two monthly summaries: one of what I’d read and the other of photos of anything that had captured my interest. Eventually, I dropped the  ‘month in photos’ post, even though I enjoyed the opportunity to review the past month and pick favourites. Despite keeping a paper journal of everything I read, I could never quite give up on the book review posts, though, because the blog’s search function does come in handy sometimes.

Thanks to Feedly, I still keep up with about a hundred blogs, although the number dwindles every year. People get discouraged and give up, or switch to Patreon or Instagram or Substack (which pays actual Nazis to create newsletters, btw), or drop the personal (and, to me, more interesting) posts to focus on whatever bland content SEO demands.

I do enjoy the hardy bloggers who stick it out – like Lucy at Attic24, Julie at Little Cotton Rabbits, Barbara at Coastal Ripples and Pip at Meet Me at Mike’s – even though I am also guilty of not leaving comments. I guess it’s nosiness, but I love the glimpses into their daily lives. I like seeing what they’re interested in and what’s particularly trying to them at the moment and what they’re doing with their time. And every time I see them add another post I think again about how nice it would be to have years and years of detailed records of a life. How gratifying it would be to look back on. 

Anyway, all this blah blah blah is me trying to remind myself that even if no one ever sees a thing I post, future-me would be grateful to current-me for taking the time to jot things down. 

So, to keep it brief, this past week, I:

-celebrated Anna landing a permanent, full-time OT position only 20 minutes away (instead of the current six-hour drive to visit)

-started putting Merlin in the window again to listen to the birdies (no spring migrants yet)

-have been reading A Pelican at Blandings by Wodehouse, Undoctored by Adam Kay, Marple by Mark Aldridge, and listened to The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie

-sowed Brandywine, Sweet 100, SunGold and Roma tomatoes, as well as Bright Lights chard, Sugar Ann bush pea, Grand Rapids lettuce and basil

-tidied all the seeds and potting stuff

-cleaned out and reorganised all the pantry shelves

-opened all the windows because it’s been unseasonably warm for mid-March

-watched Blue Jays spring training baseball

-went to the farm market for fruit and veg

-scored a couple old music books at the local Little Free Libraries

-cooked a gigantic pot of chickpeas to freeze (but have since used four jars so so much for a huge freezer stash)

-worked on the never-ending blue alpaca lace wrap and a very chunky baby blanket (nothing exciting – just using up stash)

-sat with my boy, the maple-dipped doughnut 

my favourite things of the week

For October 23 to 29, 2023

*A Maritime garter snake chillin’ on a sewer grate

While chatting with my mother in her driveway last week, two excited boys rode up on bikes to tell us they had found! a! snake! After reassuring them this little guy was not dangerous and was surely more afraid of us than we should be of him and that no, they should not ride over him with their bikes, we returned to the driveway and those little buggers got a stick and pushed the snake into the sewer. Sigh.

*My mother’s hanging basket of nasturtiums, still going strong and feeding pollinators

*A giant crate of lettuce at the farm

Who’s that weirdo taking pictures of lettuce? That weirdo is me. But I mean, come on, look at all those shades of green.

*The leaves starting to turn in the backyard

I’m not sure why our trees are always behind all the others around here, but it’s starting to get pretty out there.

my favourite things of the week

For October 16 to 22, 2023

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks around here, what with medical appointments, dental appointments, a massive closet switcheroo (why do I always choose the worst times for these projects?), ripping apart the rickety front steps, and Anna moving out of her student apartment in the city.

*Two new, ridiculously photogenic grandcats

Their names are Nadja and Simon the Devious.

*Miss Madeleine’s tolerance of the new arrivals

*Cosmos, still giving it their all in mid-October

*One very confused lupin

*Storm clouds making everything look dramatic

*A most intriguing caterpillar

Research indicates this is the caterpillar of the hyles gallii, aka bedstraw hawk-moth, aka galium sphinx moth. The red horn on his rear end isn’t dangerous, apparently, but it certainly discourages one from touching it. All I know is he was big (about the size of my ring finger) and moved fast.

my favourite things of the week

For October 2 to 8, 2023

*Autumn harvest abundance at Taproot

*My boy

Who will perch precariously on the edge of a cushion because the (very plush) couch just isn’t cushy enough.

*The way the late afternoon sun glows across the lawn in October

*More butterfly spotting

I think this might be a raggedy Black Swallowtail, but if so, he’s missing quite a bit of his bottom edge.

*A peaceful hour spent listening to the birds and admiring the plant life at the cemetery

my favourite things of the week

For September 25 to October 1, 2023

I forgot to take the camera to our farm pickup this week, which figures, because there were giant heaps of bright orange squash, glowing red apples and knobbly yellow gourds sitting there begging to be photographed. Ah well.

*An extremely foggy sunset

We don’t typically get a lot of fog in this part of Nova Scotia so this was very exciting. Yes, I am aware that my idea of exciting is not most people’s idea of exciting.

*Spiderweb appreciation

All that mist in the air highlighted the yard’s four million spiderwebs and they’re pretty, but best of all is seeing a spiderweb without walking into it first, like usual.

*The Merlin bird identification app

Produced by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, this app can identify your photos of unknown birds or, better yet, listen to bird calls and songs and identify them that way. I knew our yard was a bird hotspot, but the Sound ID indicates there are probably four or five times as many birds hanging around out there that I never see. Even my mother let me add this app – her very first – to her phone and she is also utterly addicted.

*Chipmunk!

Unlike some fairly tame and sociable chipmunks, the ones living in our shed have zero interest in interacting with us. Imagine our mutual surprise, then, when this little guy popped out of the wisteria only to find one of the big dumb humans (me) watching her stupid Merlin app (what else?) on a quiet, foggy Saturday morning. I quickly snapped this bad photo with my phone right before he retreated to a safe distance and shrieked at me for five minutes straight.

*Telling our friends exactly what we think of them

Less than Angels by Barbara Pym was okay, but not my favourite Pym. I did LOL at this part, though:

“Things were said on both sides which might be regretted afterwards, and both felt the perverse satisfaction which is to be got from saying things of precisely that kind. It is very seldom that we can tell our friends exactly what we think of them; for some the occasion never presents itself, and they are perhaps the poorer for not having experienced the exultation of flinging the buried resentment and the usually irrelevant insult at a dear friend.”

*’Women decorating porcelain at Den Kgl Porcelansfabrik’ (1895) by Emma Meyer

my favourite things of the week

For September 18 to 24, 2023

*This week, I was lucky enough to do my absolutely favourite thing: spend time by the shore

*When I could tear myself away from the beach, I was admiring the hardy plant life

*Back at home, the mums are blooming like crazy, the only sunflower to get knocked down by Hurricane Lee won’t give up, and I continue to thrum and admire the clouds

*Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson

This was perfect vacation reading. One of the many passages that made me LOL:

“It’s the men who make the mistake. They see she’s got the looks and think she can’t have the grey matter as well, and they try to take her for a ride. Their mistake, of course.”

“They deserve all they get,” said Miss Pettigrew belligerently, but without the faintest idea of what they were talking about.