Tulip time!

I just love them. No other words necessary!

 

We interrupt these moodlings for gardening

As happens every year at this time, I realize that I have been neglecting my online moodlings. Never on purpose -- my head has moodling thoughts all the time -- it's just that life gets really busy with all that needs to happen outdoors. 

So you may not be hearing from me much over the next few weeks. If I get a chance, I'll post pictures of what's happening around the yard, but then again, maybe not.

In the meantime, here are a few images of our earliest blossoms to entertain you...

small yellow crocus

ever present violas

my favourites right now -- tulipa

and a few Dutch beauties

We worked very hard on Friday and Saturday to reduce the size of our lawn through lasagna gardening, also known as sheet mulching. Covered it with a layers of cardboard, compost, straw, and pine mulch. 

It involved a lot of rock wrestling, cardboard cutting, and wheel barrowing. I'll dig out my gardening books and figure out some good ground cover shrubs, and it will become more interesting over time. For now, it's a blank pallet with a lot of potential.

Our thanks to neighbours and friends who contributed cardboard and good will toward this future garden. If you have any ideas about what we should do with this space, I'd love to hear them! And if you don't hear from me for a while, you know where to find me -- out in the garden!

Oh Mother How Pretty -- A lullabye for Mother's Day

For Mother's Day this year, I'm remembering a lullabye I used to sing to my kids. I'm not sure if they remember how I used to bring my guitar into their bedrooms sometimes and sing to them -- there are so many things moms remember that their children never will. Do mine remember this song, I wonder?

I'm getting to be an old mom now, with a stiff chording hand and picking fingers that sometimes fall asleep as I try to play. They just don't navigate my guitar as well as they used to, so it's time to record Oh Mother How Pretty as I learned it in my teens from Joan MacIsaac, a wonderful folk singer here in Edmonton.

This is a small gift to my kids for as long as these moodlings remain, and a love song for my mom, too!

Happy Mother's Day to all moms, and to all those who nurture the people in their lives even if they aren't moms. You know who you are.

Simple Pleasures: Nature's tenacity

Yesterday, the sky was full of thousands upon thousands of sandhill cranes migrating north, sometimes playing in the thermals overhead, flying in spiralling clouds that looked as though they might crash into each other. Can you see them? I wish I had a better camera and could capture the sound that makes me look up every time!

Violas also appeared this week, pushing through a crack in the sidewalk.

And the scille that were eaten by some small critter in my yard? Well, a small patch of them survived!

In these days when human news seems to be going from bad to worse and I'm struggling to keep my chin up sometimes, there's nothing like nature's tenacity to remind me that greater forces are at work than human plans and economies.

Things are always changing, and that calls for adaptation. The cranes will adjust their flight paths, the flowers will bloom earlier or later, and wise human beings will find ways to work together for the common good.

Nature's tenacity is in all living things no matter what we two-leggeds do. These days, I'm finding that tenacity everywhere, and delighting in it. It's better than letting the news get me down.

Appreciating simple pleasures improves our happiness quotient!

The good ol' Chop and Drop

October 19th, 2021

Once upon a time, I subscribed to the tidy garden theory. A plant here, and another there, and nice clear black soil space in between (that had to be weeded regularly). 

That's changed over time. I took the Master Composter/Recycler course from the city of Edmonton 15 years ago, and learned many things. Through it, I rediscovered a friend/university buddy I hadn't seen in years. Mark had become an MCR educator who eventually became a Master Gardener/soil science fanatic too, and who tells me that bare soil is dying soil. 

Basically, bare soil is unprotected so it's getting baked and dried out, losing nutrients and moisture, and more susceptible to weeds. Mark taught me about using compost as mulch, and more recently, another MCR friend, Mildred, introduced me to her way of allowing plants to drop their foliage on the soil as natural fertilizer and protection.

Chop and Drop, she calls it, and I'm a convert. Rather than buying large quantities of garden centre mulch to cover soil and keep it moist, I use autumn leaves and leave my perennials to die back naturally in the fall. In the spring, I simply chop and drop anything that's left standing to tidy up my yard. 

Of course, chopped stems and stalks don't look quite as neat as bare soil or as uniform as wood chips, but they compost more quickly and actually started to feed the soil last fall as their nutrients leached into the ground during freeze-thaw cycles. Their stems are lighter and allow for some aeration as they decompose, even as they hold moisture in the soil.

In a world where we are facing so many environmental issues, Chop and Drop means that no garbage trucks are hauling my yard waste 85 km to the Ryley landfill, because it's being used to rejuvenate my soil. By reusing natural debris from plants to hold in moisture and enrich my garden, I'm not contributing to the destruction of trees for wood chips, I need no chemical fertilizers, and I've got my very own carbon capture and storage program!

April 29th, 2022

On April 29th, I chopped and dropped last fall's leftover stems and stalks in my perennial beds. It looks a bit messy at the moment, but once things get growing, it's barely noticeable -- except that it means I rarely have to water in the summer, and when I do, the moistened soil is protected by a layer of naturally composting leaves, stems and other plant debris.

The good ol' Chop and Drop is basically how God keeps things green and growing (the wind, birds, storms, and other natural things are the choppers and droppers). I highly recommend it. It can work in vegetable gardens too (but do it in the fall and dig the plant leftovers into the soil so they're absorbed/composted by spring). Your soil will thank you by being light and rich and full of life!

Give my front yard garden about a month and a half, and you won't even notice my chop and drop mulch...

Last June