In the Garden

As far as I'm concerned, the garden season officially opened yesterday. I planted a window-box full of Japanese indigo seeds, and managed to fit it on the actual windowsill, in-between the rest of the pots of Mom's cuttings of coleus and iresine.

Then I went outside and cleaned up a bunch of the dead stuff in the garden that I never got around to last fall. The snow has retreated from the west and south sides of the building, even if it will be a while before I see some of the other beds, and it was a lovely afternoon. I even had to take off my coat after a few minutes, which hasn't happened in, oh, 6 months!

And voila, there are things growing! Even if the snow hasn't retreated far yet, all the bulbs and things are eager to get going as soon as possible. The chives are up. The daffodils are up. There are little points of crocuses coming through.

There are clusters of red-tinged tulip leaves.

And the brighter red buds of rhubarb are breaking the ground as the snow retreats.

No doubt about it now, winter is over!

What Not To Wear - Garden Edition, and Farewell Ash Trees

I know I was complaining about the gnomes at work...but it can get worse. There are some pretty questionable ideas about garden decoration in this area that I kind of wanted to share. (I will apologize if these happen to belong to anyone reading this...)

Don't know if I mentioned before, but my neighbours managed to acquire light-up flamingos and tulips. Yeah.

Down the road a piece, one also finds the following:

A random tiny toadstool, about to dive off a rock.

A collection of garden statuary that looks to be the outdoor equivalent of dollar-store kitsch figurines.

And a polar bear in the middle of a yard where all the plants grow in concrete-edged circles...

Sometimes I feel like an intervention might be in order.

I took pictures of the ash trees lining my street. This is probably their last week.

Probably they've been there as long as the buildings here have. But they've been doing badly - only a few branches are leafing out this year, and what with the emerald ash borer beetle around, they've been marked for removal.

The other side of the street is already cut, and looks bare.

I'll miss the classic canopy overhead - it'll take years before the replacement trees get big enough to look shady and substantial.

Bucolic

That is definitely the way to describe my weekend. Saturday's class went really well, and everyone had fun. I think it was just a great combination of people. It was supposed to be 1-4, but at 4:30 everyone was still there talking - always a nice sign.

Anyone who thinks the perfect Sunday morning means sleeping in and having a leisurely brunch would have been out of luck at the farm this week. By 9:30 or 10, everyone was up and fed, dishes done, Mom was taking the dog for his walk before work, Dad was taking the lawnmower for a walk before church, and I was hanging my second load of laundry on the clothesline - slightly delayed, since I hadn't wanted to interrupt a pair of flycatchers who seemed to be discussing the possibilities of the shed eaves near the clothesline as a nest-building site.

After the parents went off to their respective destinations and the day started getting warmer, I settled on the porch to do a little picking. Not banjo, like in some country song, but llama fibre. It's a mindless task, but rather nice to do it on a sunny spring day in the country. All the birds were chirping like mad, about mates and territory, and nest-building. Maybe some of them will have llama-lined nests from my discards!

The llama is my cousins' from last year's shearing. Lots of second cuts to pick out (it was Shawn's first time shearing, and he hadn't been thinking of it going to me at the time), but I got about a 50% yield, and what I was keeping was nice.

It was so nice to be able to sit out and enjoy the spring, and I spent the whole morning there. From the porch I could look out to the front border and the new bush, and to the left, past the apple trees, a gleam of yellow was visible from one of the gardens, where crocuses and daffodils, and forsythia were in bloom.

I wasn't alone in enjoying the weather, or the fibre, either. Abby was stretched out on one of the other chairs, and Rex was busy holding the door closed. Then Gail wandered over, and helped with the picking. She can't resist raw fleece - behaves like it's catnip.

It was, despite the help, a productive session, since about half the garbage-bag-full got picked. I spent the rest of the afternoon in the dye garden, hacking back the greenweed, and collecting the weathered stems from the madder. Last year's experiments showed that stems dried green give an olive colour, but stems that weather overwinter like these will give a peachy-pink similar to bedstraw. No point in wasting them!

 

Only A Little Grouch

It's hard to be really grouchy when the rhubarb is up and showing a patch of crumpled green leaves, and the scilla will be in bloom any day. But a string of little annoyances means I'm a little disgruntled, at least.

Had my first day at my co-op placement Saturday, starting to get the garden center ready for the season.  Nothing wrong with that. But I now know for sure, and not just intellectually, that you can get a sunburn in April. Next week I bring sunscreen, or a hat (there's a no-scent policy at work, and my sunscreen's scented). And I'm having a few days of stiff muscles, since this garden center prep involved a quantity of shoveling snow, chipping ice, carrying things, and tying awning down.

I had to get up at 5:30 to make it to work Saturday, but was hoping to sleep in yesterday. Except the cat started waking me up at 5, and continued causing trouble until I caved and got up at 6:30. Then up late last night finishing stuff for our "Dragon's Den" business plan presentation in class today. Besides putting together the good copy for the paper to hand in, I had a felt-pocketed piece to sew up for the living wall we're using for a prop (living walls are what our theoretical business produces). Only, the sewing machine jammed partway through. So I finished the necessary sewing by hand. I don't mind hand sewing, but it just meant there was no time to make the wall as elaborate as planned. And now I have to get the machine fixed at some point...

Oh well. Today that project will be done with. Tonight will be Guild meeting, although I may not stay, since I have an irrigation quiz tomorrow morning. And then it's just the scramble to the end of semester.
(And that's my other grouch. Our list of permitted plants for our big design assignment is WAY limited. Very boring.)

Yes, there has been some knitting, if less than I'd like. Tomorrow maybe I'll show some off. I need inspiration for a semicircular shawl border.

 

A Little Ramble

Just like little kids, I think our whole class was excited for the class trip on Friday. Get to school early, don steel-toed boots, grab any other gear we wanted, and out to the parking lot for the bus! Or rather, busses. There are 60 in the class, and since someone had said a school bus takes 72, I was a little surprised to see 2 busses in the parking lot. Well, it turns out 2 was a good idea. Not only is it harder to squeeze 2 adults than 2 kids into a school-bus seat, but if you take Hort students to an orchard and a garden center, it is perhaps not surprising that a little shopping gets done along the way.

First stop: Mountain Orchard. A very fast stop, really. We had a ride out to the back of the orchard, picked a few apples, heard a talk by one of the owners about the history of the enterprise and some of the methodologies, trials and triumphs in the business, and piled back on to the wagon to return. Our co-ordinator wanted us back on the bus and on the way to the college ASAP, but gave us 5 minutes to go to the store and make any purchases we wanted. Yeah, you can imagine the bottleneck. Stampede to the store, and subsequent slowdown as two cash registers try to deal with the sudden rush. I think it was a good 15-20 minutes before everyone was back on the bus. I came back with a jug of cider, and a bag of homemade doughnuts.

Being a little late to the college meant that that felt a bit rushed too. The plan had been that we were supposed to be able to watch some of the testing for Landscape Ontario certifications, and do some networking over lunch. Well, by the time my group had been for a talk (a good one, though) by someone in LO, most of the testing stations were being cleaned up for lunch. We had a tour of the stations, minus people actually using them, and sat down to eat lunch quickly. I ate and was looking to see if there was anyone who looked likely for chatting to, getting my courage up - and our co-ordinator spoke up and said we were all to be on the bus in 5 minutes and ready to go. Off again, to our last stop of the day.

I finally thought about getting the camera out when we got turned loose at Rideau Woodland Ramble, with an hour to explore. Big day for them - apparently they were on the Regional Contact segment on the news Friday as well as having all of us show up. As a garden center, they seem to specialize in unusual trees and shrubs, and shade plants like hostas. As a ramble, there's wooded paths, a pond, some garden sculptures and seats, work in progress on a sunken garden and a wildflower meadow - all quite compact, as the property is only 7 acres.
I'm not normally much one for garden sculptures, but they do have a knack. Certainly their choices are a far cry from garden gnomes and flamingos:

And it was nice to have a little color to set off the plants. The emphasis is so much on foliage and form, tranquility and contemplation, that I rather felt glad I had just been reading a chapter on Chinese and Japanese gardens in the history of gardens I got from the library, and so was in the right frame of mind.

The parallel was further carried out by the presence of a North American version of a teahouse - a little cabin, furnished with a couple pairs of tables and chairs, one of the coffeemakers with little individual cups of different teas and coffees (Keurig?), paintings on the walls, and a back entrance facing a spot with a birdbath and some bird feeders. The chickadees were bold and active, and I stood hardly 5 feet away and tried taking pictures of them as they came in for a bathe or a sip. Alas, they were too active for a really clear photo!

  

Productive Fun

A whole ‘nother weekend busy, and no photos to show for most of it. My excuse is that I was too busy to take pictures (really I just forgot – ssssh!). Saturday and Monday were spent at the Experimental Farm for their sheep-shearing festival. Besides shearing, there were dog trials, and demonstrations of fiber crafts, showing the kids (and parents) what happens to the fleece - knitting, spinning, weaving and finger-weaving (ceinture flechee).

And a lot of them wanted to try their hands at things. So fascinating, watching the cool preteen’s eyes widen as they get the drop spindle to work, or the reluctant boy go from prodded by the parents to enthusiastic must-do-another-row on the loom, as they realize that you can MAKE things. The little ones are fun too, especially when you get the occasional REALLY enthusiastic ones who want to do it all themselves, right away, and who are therefore trying to sit on my lap and remove my hands from the roving about 10 seconds in at the spinning wheel, before they’ve even attempted to treadle.

Despite all the help, I got two skeins of this spun and Navajo-plied over the two days. Wool/mohair/angora batt picked up at Rhinebeck a few years ago from Maggie’s Farm. I have a kilo of the stuff, it’s soft and gorgeous and I’m spinning more or less right out of the bag, just fluffing it a bit first.

Sunday, for a change of pace, I gardened. Not even mine. A family friend broke her foot, and hasn’t been able to get in and do any work this season, and the weeds were taking full advantage. More than half a leaf bag later, things are looking better but not done, so I may go again. It may be more work to weed a bed when it’s getting overgrown, but the results are as dramatic as one of those super makeovers, and very satisfying to look at.

New Season, New Experiments

Dyeing season is beginning again, and I’ve got a couple experiments going already. My bathroom windowsill faces south, and generally does not have a cat in it, so it is holding two bottles of things soaking for dye.

One is avocado pits and peels, which are supposed to give pink. I tried this last summer, and was disappointed in the results, but I only had time to let it soak (in ammonia water) a couple days, and most people seem to get better results with longer soaking before cooking/dyeing. Looks hopeful – it’s really dark red-brown and there’s only the remains of one avocado in there.

 The second bottle is plume poppy (Maclea cordifolia? I'm sure that's not the spelling, but anyway...) roots. Every year it tries to sprout from runners in the garden, and I have to dig the runners up. The runner roots are orangey-yellow, as are the sap spots on my hands (it washes off easily, though). So I chopped up the runners from this session, and popped them in a second jar, along with water and ammonia, same as the avocado. There is some color coming off, (more green than I expected, but that may be the ammonia) and I don’t doubt there will be more runners to add.

Now with any luck the weekend will have some decent weather and I can start cleaning out the dye garden.

Defying the Weather

There was a bit of a conversation on Ravelry the other day on pet peeves – things you’d like to say but don’t. One person mentioned how she hated talking about the weather, and someone else said not to talk to Canadians, then. Well, it’s true. We do talk about the weather a lot, we even joke about the fact that we do. Maybe we just like it as a nice neutral way to start a conversation. Maybe it has to do with the fact most of the country can have such extremes of temperature. It’s definitely a richer subject for conversation when it has such variety, and we’re always having to (or wanting to) think about the next season.

Right now I’m commiserating with a friend and fellow gardener about the cold and wind this past week after that nice warm spell. The gardeners are itching to get out and start doing something – she’s trying to apply dormant oil, which needs to go on when the day is above freezing. I got out this weekend and did some cleaning in the gardens. Despite the cold, guess what? My rhubarb is coming up!

(I always think it looks a bit odd coming up. Red and greeny-white streaked, some years it looks more like flesh than a plant.) And there are buds in the daffodils and scylla and hyacinths. See, the scylla are even showing some blue!

Another week and I'll have flowers. Less than a month and I'll be eating rhubarb. Not bad considering April doesn't start until Friday.