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!

Watching the birds bathe, and other stories

 It's been a busy end of summer and early autumn. You can tell by these two pictures that we've been working hard to put the garden to bed...

September 14th

October 7th

What you don't see is the missing flagpole. It was right in the middle of our onion patch, and had to be removed so our neighbour's power lines could reach his renovated home next door to us. Lee worked extremely hard to move mounds of soil because its base was encased in concrete that went down six feet. Then he had to take a sledge hammer to break up the concrete, and we managed to give the pole away on Kijiji a few days later.

All that's left in our garden now are the pepper plants in the covered box, a few carrots and beets that can wait until after frost, and the garlic that I planted this afternoon. I'll leave the borage and other flowering plants until they no longer provide food for the bees that are still buzzing around, then compost them, too.

The real reason for this post is to share a little video. While I was planting garlic this afternoon, there was quite a commotion behind me in our garden birdbath, and I realized that I was being splashed by a noisy group of sparrows who hadn't noticed me. 

Of course, when I turned around, they all took off, and the next thing I knew they were bathing in our little fountain instead. Our greenhouse/shed window faces it, so I went into the shed, waited for a few minutes, and took the little video below with my daughter in mind. She loves the birds in our yard, but doesn't see them as often since she left home last spring. 

So Suzanna, this one's for you... and, of course, for the rest of my handful of readers. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did!

A busy month

Since I dropped the online moodling one month ago, it's been a pretty busy time, to put it mildly. Looking back at my list of to do's, I see that I managed most things...

• 3 apple pies (with more to come yet, I hope) and plenty of other fruit baked into yummy things
• Jams made
• Veggies blanched and frozen
• Apples and plums picked with my 92-year-old Italian friend, Ralph, and a couple of wonderful visits with him and his lovely wife, Lidia (that included delicious Italian cookies and espresso to keep my nerves jangling for the rest of the day)!
• Plenty of dog walks through autumn splendor
• Jay gone back to school (grade twelve!)
• Compost sifted, dug into garden boxes and started up again for the winter with freshly pulled garden stalks, plus Red Wiggler worms shared with several vermi-composting friends
• Tabs kept on my in-laws, mostly by phone
• Tomatoes gathered from the L'Arche community garden bed with my friends at Day Program (and another fun time with the Library Lady)
• Lovely sunset strolls with my hubby
• Minutes taken for the monthly L'Arche board meeting
• Hot dogs handed out at my very last Welcome Back School Barbeque and Meet the Teacher Night
• Almost finished reading The Brothers Karamazov
• Next spring's tulips planted
• Letters written to a few friends, and last but not least
• The garden went from this...

to this...

still a bit of work left...

And there were special visits from friends who don't come to town very often anymore, we had a September Taizé prayer, I prayed with seasonofcreation.org, and life moved along as it does. At times I was tempted to cut short my "time off" from moodling because I really wanted to write about something, but at other times I wondered if I'd ever pick it up again. 

But I'm back, after a very busy month. Did you miss me?

What's a long weekend for?

Well, it's not usually for working outdoors for twelve to fifteen hours a day... most years we try to relax on the August long weekend. But this year,

we went from this...

to this...

in less than 72 hours!

After long and careful consideration, my most amazing hubby decided that it was time to turn our hobby shack into a greenhouse. He researched materials, got neighbour Jim and his truck to help transport the Lexan polycarbonate sheeting, spent several hours at different hardware stores on Thursday and Friday, and on Saturday, he was ready to go. 

We went from a closed in room...

to a wide windowed roof...

Unfortunately, I forgot to take a daylight shot through the new window materials... but you get the idea. Here are some pictures of the process (mostly for Lee's dad to see, but if you're interested, scroll down.)

Day 1: Uncle Don lends a hand with removing the old shingles...

on just the greenhouse section of the building.

First cut through the roof... thirsty work!

I was amazed at what these two did in the three hours Uncle Don was with us.

I was just cleaning up around the edges, mostly, pulling nails out of boards, 

tossing dead shingles onto the rubbish heap, and moving lumber around.

After my uncle left we laid the tar paper bed for the polycarbonate.

Oops, can't install it yet. Needs to be taped with aluminum foil first

(a lengthy process).

Getting dark, and ugh, those mosquitoes!

Tarped it down for the night before calling it quits on Day 1.

Day 2: I started removing shingles and Lee caulked the new windows.

Of course, he's a much better (and faster) shingle remover than I am!

We spent a good part of the day building up the roof so it would be level 

with the polycarbonate sheets before shingling.

Then we laid very sticky ice dam.

Lee put steel valley liners on top, and we were ready to start shingling,

but first we wanted a good night's rest.

We were very grateful to our girls for setting up a wiener roast for supper.

A lovely pink sunset closed Day 2.

Day 3: shingling valleys -- not for the faint of heart.

My arms are aching tonight from cutting shingles all day.

We did pretty well for beginning roofers.

Lee figures we tackled the toughest challenge first.

I figure he's right.

Storm clouds threatened, so our neighbour Jim helped out.

Just a little refreshing rainstorm, didn't last 5 minutes as the guys tried 

to nail the old metal cover back over the ridge pole.

Lee trimmed off the edges...

and we both cleaned up.

I can't believe how far we got in just three days. We'll shingle the back side after a good break, and we can finish the inside at our leisure.

Thanks to Jim and Uncle Don for their helping hands, but thanks most of all to my amazing Lee! It was a weekend of the kind of work that makes a person feel tired in a good way.

What did you do with your long weekend??

The difference a few years (and a lot of work) can make

The sun is shining, the bees are busy everywhere I look, and life is beautiful in my little corner of the world. After two good rain days, things are shooting up with the long daylight hours we're having this solstice (the sun didn't set until 10:07 last night), and I've been wandering around with my camera, glorying in it all. Can't help myself... it's lovely to have a garden.

It's a fair bit of work, too... and when I look back over the years, I'm amazed at the changes that have come about through many summer work days. Both front yard and back have been transformed into something different than what they were when we moved in. Below you'll see two pictures of our back yard, taken eight years apart.

When we came to this home, there was a large rock garden/fountain that didn't work anymore (top picture). The previous owner had drilled holes through the little concrete pool at its base so mosquitoes couldn't breed there, and the pump was beyond salvaging. The garden itself was lovely, but shot through with crab grass. So in the summer of 2008, we decided to dismantle it so we could have a larger vegetable patch, and we moved the perennials to the front yard.

Taking the dragon's teeth (as we called the fountain) apart was a huge job. Lee took a sledge hammer to it, and discovered that the fountain builder was a serious guy. There was rebar throughout! And more rocks than we knew how to use.

Once all the rubble was moved out of the way(a half-ton truck load) 

we had to sift through the soil to get rid of the crab grass. 

We let it lie fallow that year so we could root out 

any crab grass that we might have missed.

The following spring, we planted potatoes in that patch...

And this year, we moved the dirt around some more

and built raised beds.

True, our boxes aren't as pretty as the original rock garden/fountain,

but we'll be eating well come autumn, when the flowers are long gone. 

And just so you know, many of those flowers are thriving in our front

yard where the people who walk nursing home residents
around our neighbourhood can stop and enjoy them.

See why I love my little corner of the world? 

The promise of good food, and enough beauty 

to make me happy. Come visit anytime!

Courage, sacrifice, humility, and hard work

Do you watch TV? I've pretty much given it up, as I don't find present-day TV shows to be terribly inspiring. My one hour of television per week lately is a show I don't really like, but watch in order to know what my daughters are into. Having embraced Voluntary Simplicity makes it really hard for me to watch television because so much of it is about excess, and it makes me sad to see people so focused on stuff. If I really did watch TV, it would probably be mostly nature shows and concerts.

Of course, if somebody came up with a channel that shows programs about courage, sacrifice, humility and hard work, that might be worth watching. I want to be inspired and encouraged in my efforts to make the world a better place. That's why I subscribe to KarmaTube.org. Its subtitle is "Be the Change." I'll add it to my links today, in case you want to check it out. It sends out a video link each week that encourages us to immerse ourselves in being the change we want to see in the world, as Ghandi said so many years ago.

If you have the time, here's today's KarmaTube video. Jacquelin Novogratz has met a lot of people who inspire courage, sacrifice, humility and hard work, all things the world needs more of. And if anyone knows of a TV channel that plays more of her kind of stuff, I'd be interested... except that watching TV takes time away from being the change I want to see in the world...