my favourite things of the week

From August 14 – August 20, 2023

*My mother’s echinacea

It’s funny how I can be so drawn to colours in flowers that I wouldn’t dream of wearing or decorating with.

*Hanging out in the shade, looking across the dykes toward the Minas Basin

I could have stayed there enjoying the breeze and lack of mosquitoes all day, but haven’t yet figured out how to make lunch cook itself.

*This poor, tattered monarch

The Butterflies of Nova Scotia site says that, after a flurry of spring egg-laying, monarchs are uncommon during the summer. This pale, raggedy thing is definitely a holdout.

*A red admiral butterfly

Unlike the restless monarch, this red admiral was practically begging to have its picture taken. It landed right in front of me and delivered a variety of photogenic poses. A natural model.

*Cat-sitting Madeleine, The Plant Vandal

Maddy’s favourite things are yelling complaints in the night, running away when you try to be nice to her, and breaking off pieces of jade plant.

‘Fowey Harbour, Cornwall’ by Frank Brangwyn (1887)

I adore this painting. Everything about it.

*I also adore this guy

Another natural model.

*As many green beans as we can eat

My peas were kind of a washout this year, but the beans have taken up the slack, for sure.

*Looking back at Willowbank Farm from the shady cemetery


my favourite things of the week

From July 31 – August 6, 2023

*A small, but healthy garlic harvest

(In front of a mint plant the size of a minivan.)

It’s been a banner year for raspberries, too, but I keep forgetting to snap a picture before we eat them.

*This sassy cardinal

*This old newspaper’s tip for summer

Why didn’t I think of this?

*Communing with cows on Church St

*These words of wisdom

“We can just let people be who they are and we can believe that the freer each person is, the better we all are.”

Glennon Doyle

*The view from TapRoot Farms after picking up our CSA boxes

*Haying time on Wellington Dyke


sunflower season

Sunflowers aren’t my favourite, but we’re having a bumper crop this year and the bees like them, so that’s good enough for me.

July and August are so outrageously hot and humid most of the time that I spend very little time in the garden. I nip out for fifteen minutes here and there to pick flowers and veg and then run back to the comfort of the A/C. My great-grandmothers would be ashamed of me. Or maybe just jealous.

June already

It’s been a challenging year so far, thanks to issues that aren’t mine to discuss in a place like this, and every time I think of the blog, I sigh and think ‘maybe tomorrow’. It’s hard to know what to write when I have both a lot and nothing to say, and I haven’t even been able to drum up any enthusiasm for posting photos or book reviews or ridiculous memes. Maybe a giant bouquet of lilacs can bust me out of this funk?


and so it begins

The forty million bulbs we planted last November are just beginning to poke their heads up and the prizes for earliest risers go to:

Glory of the Snow
Striped Squill
Snowbreaker crocus, I think
More Glory of the Snow

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