Life is Weird

 In more ways than one.

This morning I noticed a fairly large dark brown blob on one of the Birch sticks that I've had leaning up against the Studio wall lately. Don't ask me why I have sticks leaning up against the wall, I just do.They're on one side of the door, there's a Welcome sign on the other side. Seems sort of right, somehow. At one point, I had sticks there that were painted blue, yellow, green... now I have Birch sticks.

Looking more closely, I saw that the blob was a slime mold! Chocolate Tube Slime, Stemonitis splendens, to be precise.

Slime molds are totally weird. They are animal-like in that they move and feed. A slime mold plasmodium, the body of the critter, can move several metres. But they are also fungus-like in that they propagate themselves by producing spores. The spores are produced in or on fruiting bodies, which come in four types. One type is called a sporangium and that is what this one has. 

Chocolate Tube Slime starts as a blob of pearly white spheres, then they elongate to become tubes, and turn dark chocolate brown. Each tube is held up off the substrate by a thin black foot. Here's a sketch of just a few sporangia:

The growth I was looking at had thousands. Here's what they looked like overall on the stick:

Getting closer you can see the individual sporangia more clearly:

Getting really close, you can see the feet and the tops of the sporangia. You can even see some remnants of the white spheres, now just tiny drops of liquid.

None of these pictures are very good, I know, but these things are all of 2cm. long. 

Weird, eh?

Joy Of Mulching

 33 degrees Celsius today! And still hardly any rain.

But, after lunch and a morning spent on the computer, I went walkabout in the garden and the inevitable happened. I went and fetched a hoe and went after a few Sumach roots that were left when I dug over the vegetable patch this Spring and which had sprouted. It was amusing to see the sprouts in a line, with the ones nearest the parent Sumach the tallest and the rest getting smaller as they got further away. It was satisfying to pull up the largest, get hold of the root, and pull and watch the others get dragged under the surface and then out. The slope the garden is on is infested with Sumach and the roots travel great distances.

Only an idiot would plan a vegetable garden so close to a Sumach patch.

When you pull a long Sumach root, make sure you don't uproot something you planted! Luckily this one snaked through the Tomato patch and it pulled out safely.

I have 3 kinds of Tomatoes in the veg patch this year. Cherry tomatoes (my favourites), a regular Big Beef type, and what I call my '$15,000 Tomato'. Two years ago, when I had to get a new truck (brakes failed on the old one and gave me the biggest driving scare of my life) I ended up liking one at a service station in the City. Took it for a test drive, someone cut in front of me, the brakes worked. Measured the box, it was a full 6 feet so it would take the tables I need for my pottery display at shows and the Market, the price wasn't too bad... but I'm a cautious sort, especially when it comes to spending money, and I asked for a day or two to think it over. We agreed I could leave a deposit (yikes), think for 2 days, and then either cancel and get my deposit back, or commit and send them the balance. Meanwhile they would service the truck and get it ready.

I decided to get it. After looking for about 2 months I knew there was nothing much available that met my criteria. It was larger then I really wanted, but there simply were no mid-size pickups available. Oh, maybe on the West Coast, or downtown Toronto, but not here. 

When I went in to finish the deal and pick up the truck, I went in to meet with the guy running the office. He happened to have some odd lumpy orange and red striped 'things' on his desk. I picked one up and teased him a bit: 'What the heck is this?'.

 'Tomato', he said, in a charming Spanish accent,. 'Ah', he said, 'you take some good bread. You spread on some good fresh butter. You cut the tomato in thick slices, put on. Sprinkle some salt, pepper, a wipe of mayonnaise. Best tomato sandwich you will ever eat. Here, have one.'  

The balance owing was $15,000. I did the e-transfer, picked up a tomato, got into my new truck and drove home.

When I got there, I sent him and the salesman an email saying 'Truck is great, and thanks for the $15,000 tomato'.

I did what he said and indeed it was the best tomato sandwich I had ever eaten.

I kept a few seeds, and am now growing them myself. They are a long-season tomato so need to be started early, but even so I get some wonderful, odd-looking, strangely striped tomatoes in about September. They are worth the effort, although $15,000 might be a bit much.

The plants are over a foot tall and look pretty good. They have survived several nights of near frost and some incredibly hot days, like today. They've been very dry, too. I do water the veg garden, but that's never enough. Keeping the ground lightly hoed up gives a slight mulch effect and keeps the surface moisture in a bit. 

 

Having scuffled up the Tomato patch, I tied up the Peas. They were attaching to the sticks I put in, but I felt a string would encourage better climbing.

 

They are still pretty short, not having liked the heat we've been having, but blooming. There is a deep row of Daffodils behind them, which I planted there in a moment of madness some years ago. Soon as they go dormant, they're out of there.

  The Squash, Cucumbers and Zucchini were looking a big sad. They really, really, didn't like those cold nights.

But I see signs of recovery.

Next thing I knew, I was digging in the old chicken coop, filling a pail with the old bedding. It's rotted beautifully and makes a great mulch. Wish I had more of it!

 Here's a Squash, all tucked in with a thick layer of well-rotted chicken bedding.

 

 This whole business of mulching and planting is part of my program for making more vegetable garden. Last year I put an old tarp down where the squashes are now and solarized a nice 10 by 10 feet section. The soil there is pretty rocky and sandy, so the mulch is doubly needed. I've done this before and it works wonderfully well. It may not stay a veg patch - there's already a Crabapple planted at the side - but if I can get rid of the old chicken coop itself, there will be more room for edibles there.

Did you know that Crabapples seed themselves around? It never occurred to me that they would, and here I was wanting a tree with yellow crabs and asking for it at the nurseries and being told nobody wanted that, and then last Fall didn't I find 2 small ones that both had yellow apples. A largish one that has been growing against the hydro pole in my Herb Garden turned out to have large yellow crab apples, and later I was surprised to find a 2 foot high one behind the house with those tiny apples the birds like, in yellow. As soon as I figure out where to put it, it's moving. How lucky is that?

My Sampler Garden is under a lot of Maples, Oaks and deciduous shrubs. The leaves act as a natural mulch. A few things aren't able to push through it (violets, for example), but most woodland plants do. It's the garden that needs the least work, the mulch of leaves keeps most weeds out. Plus it's usually cool in there!

This small Walking Fern likes both the moss mulch and the coolth:

Mulch: air conditioning for plants!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Little Bit Of Rain

 It finally rained a bit this morning. Not much, just enough to dust things off a bit, but better than nothing. I was up early and the morning light on the wet flowers was wonderful, so cool, so refreshing.

 

 

A lovely, damp, Aquilegia canadensis flower with a small bite taken out of one petal!

Hesperis matrionalis, Dame's Rocket, white form. I love all white flowers. There is something tender and endearing about them.

A medium blue Siberian Iris. This clump has done well for me, in spite of being at the top of my very dry Hillside Garden. At least a hundred flowers this year.

The Pin Cherry tree that hangs over the end of the Hillside Garden is full of tiny green pin cherries, each one with a drop of rain hanging from it. The birds love the pin cherries. They make a fine jam, but it's so much work I'm glad to let the birds have them!

Poppies bending in the rain.

Rosa glauca, the flower arranger's dream foliage, has small but appealing bright pink flowers.

And my spade, which I seem to have left out last night, provided proof that we had had at least some rain!

More, please!

28C Musings and A Message To Readers

 When I came in the door from the garden the phone was ringing. The land line, you know, the one you don't carry around.  I picked it up and it was an acquaintance who does sometimes phone. 

"I called earlier", she said, "but I guess you were out."

"Well, I was in the garden, pulling euonymous."

There was this total silence. Now, this is not a person I know very well. We have several friends in common, so she probably knows me better than I know her. It took me a minute to realize that she probably isn't a gardener, so what I'd said might have sounded a bit strange.

I decided not to explain to her that I had gone outside with the firm intention of doing some easy, relaxing weeding. I was only going to pull the Forget-me-nots out of a small part of my rockery, and maybe reduce the nearby Ajuga patch a little. That's was all I was going to do today; after all, it was about 28C out there and the mosquitoes were hungry.

Ajugas are easiest to pull when they're blooming. For one thing, that's when you can find them. For another, that's when they are still attached to all the little baby Ajugas at the ends of their many runners. If you wait a bit the runners seems to disengage or something, forcing the little ones to take up independent living, which they do with great tenacity. At that point, instead of pulling one Ajuga plant you have to pull a dozen, and believe me, they hide and they hold on.

I pulled happily, filling my bucket many times and dumping it on the Hop Vine which always comes up through that particular compost pile. I've been trying to discourage it for years but it's still going. One year it got away from me and I didn't know it. I wasn't seeing it and started to think maybe it was gone and then I looked up into the Maple nearby. My illusions fell in little shattered bits all around me.

The Forget-mes were no problem. They come out easily. If you pull them before they form seeds they don't even stick to your gloves but once the little burr-y seeds form they stick to everything. Do not pull Forget-mes in a flannel shirt. 

Then I decided, in an uncharacteristic moment, that the little row of Cedars (Arborvitae really) which had grown up in the rock crevice had to go. They were only about a foot high five minutes ago but here they were, towering over my head at a good 7-8 feet. Ever cut down 3" diameter Cedars with secateurs? And then cut them up so you could put the branches on the compost pile and the trunks in the use-for-something-sometime pile? It was quicker than going to get the saw.

The cedars had a lot of last year's leaves caught at their bases. I was going to leave them there but then I tripped over something. Seems an old Euonymous vine I planted there years ago was still going. It was just doing it under the leaves. I pulled. Ten feet of yellow stem, with roots along it, came up. I rummaged around in the leaves, found more yellow stems.... I pulled, clipped, wound into a bundle, pulled, clipped, wound into a bundle... that darn Euonymous had turned into over twenty feet of many many stems, all rooted (shallowly, thank goodness) in the large crevice the Cedars had been in. It had also, very sneakily, sent skinny, hardly noticeable little green stems with small green leaves into the adjacent fern and Trilliums patch. Pulling those wasn't so easy as I didn't want to damage the good guys. So I had to pull gently, clip, carefully disentangle, grope for the end of the stem, repeat. And repeat, and repeat. 

In the 28C heat and no chance of rain again today. They said 'risk of thunderstorms' on the news, but I think it should be 'slight hope of thunderstorms' but anyway they didn't happen and everything is terribly dry.

This Euonymous, by the way, was sold to me by an actual rock gardener. I don't remember what species it was, but it was supposed to stay small. When it first bloomed I was intrigued, it was such a strange flower. I had never seen one before. 

 

Then, still being completely naive on the subject of Euonymi, I bought and planted an E. fortunei. It looked great in all those English gardening books. Yep, and it looked great in my rockery. All over my rockery. All over all the other plants in the rockery, and the  rocks, and my paths and for all I know, some number of small animals. It took hours of work to dig it out and for a year or two it keep sticking tentative little yellow leaves up above the soil. 

 

No more Euonymi for me, thanks. 

 

 Now, a Message to My Readers.

 I know that I am writing this blog entirely for my own amusement. I know that and I'm good with that, but I wouldn't mind having a few more readers! It does begin to feel a bit like the sound of one hand clapping if nobody is reading. In July, feedburner is going to stop handling the email notices about new blog posts that you have been getting. I have to either change the format of this blog, or find another program to do the same thing, or ??? There are options, I don't understand all of them yet... it may be possible to do it completely seamlessly, or it may not. In any case, please, stay in the boat! I'll let everyone know soon.

Meanwhile, one thing I do know: I would like more readers. 

I know there are lots of you keen gardeners out there, and you all know others, so here's a bribe! Kind of a double bribe!

Anybody who shows that they would like this blog to continue, by subscribing, or leaving a comment or sending me an email or phoning on the old land line or otherwise communicating with me, will get their name put into a (virtual) hat. To keep it fair I will only put any name in a maximum of 3 times, that way someone who leaves lots of comments will still only get 3 chances. On Sept. 1, 2021, I will draw one name and that lucky person will win the Tilley Hat of his or her choice. Any Tilley hat, any colour, style, size, up to a value of CAD $120.00. That's a pretty good bribe, eh! 

And, just for fun, I will select one name for a second prize: a Japanese Hand Weeder from Lee Valley Tools in Ottawa. This is a short hoe-like tool with one sharp edge and is the best weeding tool I have ever used. My criteria for selecting the winner of this prize will be... completely arbitrary. I'm going to pick what I think was the best or most amusing or most unusual communication I received all summer to win this prize!

My contact info is in the box at the top to the left of the blog text. If you decide to play, do be sure I have your name and a way to get in touch with you should you be the winner! 

Good Luck!

Aaaack!!!

 

 It begins!

Twenty Degrees!

 

But I still have some snow! Want some?  There's a nice big pile of it where Mr. SnowBlowerMan throws the snow from three different directions so it becomes a dense icy pile and never melts until about the time farmers are taking off their first hay crop. If you want some, just come on over. Bring Scotch.

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Snowdrops are out - actually, I tell a lie, they've been out for a week already. This is Galanthus morrowii, a larger-leaved species, but just as charming as the more common G. elwesii.

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Dirca palustris, aka Wicopy, aaka Leatherwood, aaaka quite the earliest shrub to flower at my place. In fact, just about the first flower, period. The blooms are small, only about an inch long, but the black furry buds are cute. Kind of like my cats' black furry butts, but a lot smaller!

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I was delighted to find four separate clusters of purple Crocuses in a small bit of open woodland behind my Rockery. I planted 100 crocus bulbs in 2019, and had one flower. I figured the squirrels had gotten them, but it appears they missed a few!

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A miniature daffodil called Tete-a-tete. First, earliest, smallest, cutest, most invasive daff in the garden. I rarely see a seedpod yet Tete-a-tete seeds itself around. Adorable in a small wineglass. Wine is even better, but if you're out, these tiny perky blossoms will make you feel better. If you have wine, pour yourself a glass and go sit in the sun beside these little charmers and enjoy both. When your glass is empty, pick some daffs and put them in the glass.

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A False Morel, a tiny one, but it will get bigger, and there will be more of them. Seems too early for mushrooms, but these show up in a certain spot every Spring. Totally inedible, but they do signal that the True Morel might be up as well. I searched where there were some last year, but didn't see any. True Morels are scarce, False Morels not so much.

There's a moral there, somewhere. 

 

Happy Spring!

Hoya, Hoya, or, The Pride That Goeth

 

 I was taken to task, politely but quite firmly, by someone who asked why her Hoya plant wasn't blooming. 

Her post, on Facebook, included a very nice picture of a healthy looking Hoya carnosa.

Now I've had Hoyas, several species and several variations of the main houseplant, H. carnosa, for over 50 years. In fact one of the plants I have now is a distant offspring (are things grown from cuttings 'offspring'?) of a plant that covered the better part of a 20' by 20' brick wall inside the building where I worked. It's only light, other than the artificial office lighting, was a skylight overhead and about 10' away. One evening, after working late, I snuck over to the plant with my scissors and nipped off a small tendril with, I think, 2 or 3 leaves.

After a fairly long time, much coddling, regular talking-to and a certain amount of dark magic, it rooted and put out new growth. It eventually became quite large and after a few years, maybe not 7 like the old wives' tales, but at least 5, it bloomed profusely and did so every year.

So I felt confident that I could help her with her question. I suggested that perhaps it wasn't getting enough sun - it was very dark green, with few of the usual tiny silver splotches that Hoya leaves get - or that perhaps it wasn't old enough, or that perhaps, she had made the mistake which I've seen other people make of cutting off the finished flowering stems. I then went on to say that once it did bloom, she'd love the sweet scent from the flowers.

Well.

Somebody immediately leapt in and told me in no uncertain terms that they had a Hoya that lived in a   window, which was firmly curtained, overhung by a giant Spruce tree right outside, and faced due North, which bloomed all the time.

OK. 

Somebody else promptly refuted my idea that Hoyas needed to reach a certain age before they bloomed. Apparently she regularly roots small pieces and they always bloom the same year. 

Great. I'm happy for her.

Then a veritable storm broke out about the scent. 'Oh, I can't be in the same room as a blooming Hoya'. 'I always cut the flower stubs off because the scent is over-powering'. And more, many more, of the same.

All of which goes to show that whenever you think you know something about a plant, the plant will quickly make a fool out of you. If you know for a fact that a certain plant needs lots of sun, someone will be growing it under their deck where the light never goes above deep gloom. If you state confidently that such-and-such needs steady moisture, someone will be growing it on a rock with no soil and full sun. Or underwater. Or in zone 1A. Or in an old boot beside the kitchen door where the cook empties the dishwater over it three times a day.

And no, I can't show you a picture of my plants. They aren't blooming.

Weird Fungi - 2

 It's Hallowe'en..... spooks are abroad and the woods are filled with scary things....

One of them starts with what looks like an egg pushing up through the ground:

Barely 2" across, it seems to have a slightly crinkled surface. It's white, more or less, and dry-looking. It doesn't change for several weeks. Eventually, one day, it begins to grow:

The top splits and an odd little white process appears. The surface has darkened and split. More days go by. It's getting cold at night, but underground much is happening. Our Egg is preparing itself for a sudden burst of growth:

The Egg splits completely open and a spongy white stalk with a slimy brownish-greenish knob on top elongates:

Unlike practically every other plant (or fungus) in the woods, it grows in an ominous curve. Quickly, almost overnight, it reaches it's full growth:

Growing horizontally across the ground, surrounded by fallen leaves and twigs, our weird Fungus #2 turns out to be a Stinkhorn.

Stinkhorns are so-called because, well, because they stink. Get your sniffer close to the 'knob' and you'll wish you hadn't! The smell, very unpleasant to us humans, attracts flies. The flies pick up spores from the slimy top and carry them to new locations, thus spreading the fungus around. The spores are produced in huge numbers and form the slimy surface of the 'knob'. The 'Egg' was an early stage in the fruiting body's development and, when cut open, shows the eventual structure in embryonic form. It is fairly common, growing on rotting logs or wood chips.

And yes, the man who named it agreed with what I'm sure you are thinking! He named the genus Phallus, and since his name was Ravenel, it's now Phallus Ravenelii, that is, Ravenel's Phallus. 

His response to this bit of taxonomic teasing has not been recorded.

Have a Happy, Safe, and Spooky Hallowe'en!

Snow!

 Mind you, not a lot of it!

Just a dusting so far, but it's coming! 

I guess Hallowe'en is the right time to scare us with that news! Have a good weekend; stay safe!

Weird Fungi - 1

 I was surprised, amazed, delighted, astonished, gob-smacked to find a fungus I had never seen before but had been wanting to see for a long time, when I was pulling out old Goldenrod stalks this afternoon.

There has been a large plant, or maybe I should say, plantation, of Solidago Altissima at the top of the steps from the driveway to the side door for almost as long as there's been a side door. It's fine until after it blooms, then it is just a big mess and too large for the space it's in. At that point I pull all the stalks, and the following year just as many new ones grow so the patch stays about the same. So that's what I was doing, pulling out stalk after stalk of spent Goldenrod, when I noticed small whitish bumps on the bases of some of the stems.

A quick closer look showed me that the larger bumps were Bird's Nest fungi! Here you see some

of them on one stalk. (I put it on the junipers to make them easier to see).

They are very tiny, only about 1/4" across. And very odd! 

To quote Mushrooms of Ontario and Eastern Canada: "The fruitbody of a Bird's Nest Fungus looks like a tiny nest with eggs. The 'eggs' (peridioles) are packages of thousands of spores contained within a hard outer wall. ... the eggs are anchored to the side wall by a structure that contains a long, thread-like tail (funiculus), with a sticky base (hapteron). Falling raindrops cause mini-explosions in the cone-shaped cups and the splash propels the eggs out of the cup. Eggs can be shot nearly 2 m away from the cup, and they attach to a suitable substrate by means of the sticky base."

I'd read about them in my mushroom books, but had never seen them. Here are a side view and a bird's-eye (pun intended!) view:

 How cool is that!

A Small Peach

 Ate my Peach crop today.

At about 3:40 EST this afternoon. The sky was overcast, with high clouds crossing rapidly from the South West. About 24C. Very little wind. Don't know what the barometric pressure was. Forecast was for scattered showers later, but it was dry at the time.

Things were, of course, happening. Somewhere south of my Peach tree, a minor government official paused in his study of a long report to get a cup of tea. On his way back to his desk he wondered if he'd still have a paycheck tomorrow. With four small children and a wife to support, the question wanted to fill his mind, but he resolutely put it aside and got back to his report. Further south yet, a much younger man surreptitiously reached for a young girl's hand; his heart skipped a beat when her hand met his halfway. A thousand miles to the east of them, a woman quietly removed her hand from the wrinkled hand of her old father, studied his face for a few minutes, not sure of her own feelings, and called the nurse. Further east yet, and somewhat north, a small group of children played a skipping game, oblivious to the war clouds gathering over their elders. Not far away, desert areas were too hot to cross; goats and men stayed in the shade. Despite the heat, two babies were born. In a vast city, far removed from the need to cross deserts, cars honked, men and women scurried and heat radiated up from cracked pavements. In a small town not far away, bargains were made, not always in the bargainer's best interest. Life, everywhere, was happening.

And I ate the edible portion of the only peach to ripen on my accidental Peach tree.

It was delicious.
 

Fall Is Here

 Well, what can I say? It's been a summer. Hot, very dry, no rain here from early May until the end of July. Tons of bugs. Never seen so many chewed up leaves, or so many butterflies. Some kind of nasty yellowish caterpiller ate an entire Mugho Pine. The weeds got ahead of me by June and it has stayed that way. 

Fall arrived last Sunday, about 8:30 pm. I was at the road making my weekly donation to the Garbage Gods and watched a fog develop over the Marsh. It started as a small white cloud hovering above the cattails, and grew bigger as I watched. In the morning there was fog high in the trees while on the ground spider webs captured some of it as dewdrops.

In the fields and my Hillside Garden, the Goldenrods are blooming.

As are the Coneflowers.

And the Japanese Anemones.

In the Beaver Pond I found a Bur Reed I have never seen before. It took me a while to find its name, but I'm pretty sure now that it is Sparganium angustifolium. From a slight distance, it looked like an orchid blooming in the shallow water, but closer up it seemed to be a Sedge. Bur Reeds are similar, I guess.

After a rainy August, the woods are full of fungi. Mushrooms and lichens literally everywhere! I took Rosie for a walk to the back of the property yesterday and came home with 409 images on my camera's memory card! Closer to home, here are some of the fungi that have appeared on some old wooden rounds I've been using as stepping stones (stepping woods?) in the Sampler Garden. They are all quite small - the rounds are only about 12" across - and I was down on my stomach photographing them.

Since I was back at the house, I let the kittens out and they joined me exploring the stepping stones. Yes, kittens. Since I was on the ground trying to focus on the tiny fungi, this meant they were walking on my head. What happened was, a friend called and asked me if I wanted a kitten, she had to find homes for four of them, and since my old cat Pepper passed on last year and I've been having a problem with mice in the house, I said I'd take one. When I got to her house to pick it up, somehow she managed to convince me I should take both of the last two... they'll play together, she said. They'll catch more mice, she said. They don't eat much, she said. Well, of course she's right, but I'd forgotten the 'kitten phase', which is when they basically trash everything they can get onto, into, or under. Which is everything. But they're cute and they'll grow out of it. So here, drum roll, please, are the two new members of the Team. Tiger is slightly smaller than Fred and has a few white hairs.

Rosie thinks they're great, something to chase, something to lick until it's soaked, something to carry around carefully when Mom isn't watching. 

She expects to get her favourite sleeping chair back when they're a little older.

Snippets

Some observations from a late Spring over-shadowed by a world pandemic.

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It's still cold and wintery here. In the woods, winter takes a bit longer to arrive, and a lot longer to leave. Other gardens, those in open areas or in the City, already have blooming daffodils; I have snow piles. I did have the idea of getting started on the Spring clearing up one day last week when the sun shone and the air was warm. Didn't last long. The ground was still frozen.

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There seems to be a squirrel family setting up housekeeping in the top of the hydro pole. This miserable pole is in the corner of my Herb Garden, near the house and visible from my office. Given all the rock here, burying the hydro line was pretty well unaffordable, but if I ever win a lottery, I'm getting rid of that pole. Meanwhile, I practice not seeing it. Anyway, all day a squirrel has been running up to the top of the pole with suspiciously fat cheeks, and coming back down clearly cargo-less. Crazy place for a nest. One year a small black bird lived there.  How do I get the top of a pole closed off to wildlife?

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Speaking of wildlife, I've been having a dickens of a time with mice this year. I'm too soft-hearted (or maybe just too squeamish) to kill them, and every time I catch one and remove it to the far end of the driveway, another one moves in. I finally convinced myself they were coming in through the opening around the breaker panel, so I blocked them from leaving the laundry room. Worked, except there must still be one or two loose in the house because I occasionally still find signs. A leaf on my Hoya nibbled... a hole dug around a geranium's roots... mouse spoor in a desk drawer. I'm getting a cat. Just as soon as the humane societies are open again.

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The winter was long, but not particularly cold. I'm very surprised, though, by the amount of lichens on the trees and shrubs. Sumach branches are covered. Every fallen branch I pick up is covered. I have never seen so many lichens before.

                                                                            
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There seems to be a resurgence of interest in vegetable gardening. 3.76M chipmunks are delighted.

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On a short walk along by the marsh yesterday, I was surprised to come across a small patch of False Morels. We had just had a flurry of snow pellets and they collected on the top of the larger one. They're often in or near that spot, but I've never seen them so early.

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The next image is a tiny tiny fraction of the millions and millions of Springtails we had in the snowbanks a few weeks ago.

I always figure that lots of Springtails means lots of bugs all summer. So prepare yourself, the mosquitoes and blackflies are going to be fierce this summer.

Unless they aren't.



                                                                              
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Let's look at Snowdrops instead. Why aren't my clumps spreading? Oh well, at least they aren't shrinking.

Now if the air would just warm up a bit, maybe we could get this Spring business on the road.

Bleah.... February

Half-way through February, which is good, but still 13 days left, which is not so good. February is the nastiest, dullest, most tedious month of the gardening year...so here are some tricks to get you through it.

1. Do some dreaming. Dream of daffodils moving gently in a warm breeze, dream of a tiny brook trickling among the roots of blue irises, dream of the sweet smell of roses early in the morning....

2. Work on your excuses as to why your main perennial border is a dud in August. Write them down because you are going to need them.

3. Sow some fern spores. It's such a tiny job - a tiny pot, a tiny lid, a tiny bit of soil, teensy-tiny spores, but if you do it right it can take half an hour and give you a real sense of achievement. And maybe, eventually, some ferns.

4. You can order seeds. Way too many seeds.

5. You can remind yourself that you are warm, you had a nice dinner, the dog is behaving herself (more or less), and a little bit of snow isn't that much of a problem. I know, doesn't work, but you can try.

6. You can start an argument with a friend about what is a native plant. If you win the argument, start another one with another friend. Just for fun, take different positions with different friends. No two people agree, so this a great February waster, and can get your blood pressure right up.

7. Forget to water your houseplants. You're bored with them, you can't remember when you last watered them, and who wants 18 pink geraniums anyway. Then when they wilt you can feel bad, which makes a change.

8. Make impulsive decisions about the garden, such as deciding to plant carrots and beans in the suddenly-about-to-be-former herb garden. And decide to put some asparagus roots into the fence row garden because that's the only place in your whole garden that gets sun all day and the daylilies are a dead bore anyway.

9. Collect all the garden pictures on Pinterest into a new board called 'Antidote to February'. Look at them a lot. Actually, collecting all the garden pictures might take the rest of the month at that.

10. Dream some more.

Let me know if any of these work for you.

Looking Back Some More

Mind you, not everything went well in 2019. Gardening can sometimes seem like lurching from one disaster to the next: the squirrels eat all the Basil plants you put out yesterday... raccoons dig up and bite apart the 10 large Peonies you planted in a carefully colour-shaded row, leaving you a mixed-up pile of much smaller plants... the puppy romps through the clump of Ladyslippers that is finally blooming... you plant a group of rare dwarf shrubs and it doesn't rain for 8 weeks... you know, the usual stuff that happens in a garden.

Then, there are the gardening mysteries. Two of them in my garden stand out for 2019.

Early in the year I bought a beguiling little plant of Leadplant, Amorpha canescens.  A prairie plant, it has lovely soft grey-green leaves composed of many tiny oval leaflets arranged in a ladder formation, sort of like one of the Jacob's-ladders or a tiny Sumach. Mid-summer it has spikes of soft blue-violet flowers. I saw it growing at Beaux Arbres, where it made small shrubs at the ends of several of the garden beds. Naturally I had to have one, in spite of the fact that I most certainly don't have a prairie.

I planted it, but in the general rush of things, didn't pay it a lot of attention. It didn't have a label, gardening disasters happening in other people's gardens as well, and I was in too much of  a hurry to go and get one.

Come July I was kind of wondering where it was. I looked around for it, no longer quite sure of what it was supposed to look like, and with no clue as to where I might have planted it. I thought I'd run into when weeding, but I didn't. A few weeks later, well into August, I was dumping some weeds on a compost pile far at the back of my Sand Hill garden, and used the garden fork to tidy the pile a bit, and what did I find when I turned over a big forkful of old raspberry canes? Yes, one Leadplant, growing nicely although somewhat contorted due to having had to stick its head up through the prickly canes. What I'd like to know is, how did it get there, given that I had not used that compost pile all summer?

I re-planted it, and this time I make a good mental note of where, and checked on it regularly. Last I saw, before the snow came, it was growing just fine and beginning to recover from its right-angled posture.

The second garden mystery hasn't had such a good ending, at least not yet. Back in September of 2018, I was given a plant of New England Aster, 'September Ruby'. It was incredibly root-bound, and had only one bud, which never opened, but it was a variety I didn't have and I wanted it. I would have purchased it, but the nursery owner kindly gave it to me. I took it home, carefully teased the roots free (as much as I could, anyway), and planted it near a couple of other colour forms of New England Aster. I figured I could keep an eye on it there, and also the colours might be interesting together. 'September Ruby' ought to be darker and redder than the type, if the name is anything to go by. The plant stayed green and appeared healthy into the fall.

In 2019, not a sign of a darker, redder, form anywhere. Now, did it not bloom and the plant is still there? Did it bloom but in the same colour as the other ones? Did I pull it out thinking it was a weed? Should I have checked all the other compost piles? I couldn't believe it, and for days I'd go out there and check every Aster in the garden to see if any had darker flowers than the rest.

I know my garden is rather wild and rather out of control and rather weedy.... but really? Two mysteries in one summer?

Looking Back

A rare pleasure, only to be indulged in occasionally, is looking back at the gardening-year-that-was. And 2019 had a few good moments...

For example, I feel a smug sense of satisfaction that I planted my bulbs at the right time. Most years I either plant them too early, which means tulips being fooled into sticking their noses above ground in the middle of the mud season, or else I'm out there planting daffodils with an axe. This year I was lucky enough to have a sunny day in November which was warm enough that the ground actually thawed and it only needed a trowel. It had been very cold for several weeks, but I said to myself, 'just wait, there will be a warm day yet' and for once there was.

One thing I'll tell you right now: you don't have enough bulbs. You don't have enough tulips, you don't have enough daffodils, you certainly don't have enough crocuses, and we won't even mention the small Irises, the Pushkinia, the Muscari, the Eranthus... Don't bother arguing, it doesn't matter how many you have, or how small your garden is: you don't have enough bulbs and you know it. None of us do.

Not that my Hillside garden doesn't have a lot of daffodils in it. I planted many different varieties of them about 15 years ago, and they have done very well. They like the clay soil and the good drainage, and every small group of bulbs I planted has now become a substantial clump. From one or two bulbs, they have become clumps of several dozen. But it occurred to me this Spring that it was all too yellow and white! It needed some red to perk things up.

Being, as always, sadly short of shekels, I wasn't able to order all that many but I think what I got will make a fine show next April. I got two tulips: Abba, a short early double red, and Apricot Delight, a medium sized mid-season pinkish/yellowish. Not having a clue as to where the daffodil bulbs were lurking, I just spread small clumps of these two tulips all over the Hillside. It doesn't really matter anyway, because wherever they bloom there will be daffodils nearby and it will all look good.

Abba is short and early and should make a fine contrast with the many Tete-a-Tete daffodils which, by the way, have seeded themselves around most prolifically.

Apricot Delight will, I hope, be delightful a little later when the many larger, and often paler, daffodils bloom. Somehow the main season daffodils don't have the same bright glowing spectrum yellow of the earliest ones, but by then our eyes are searching for more subtle colour anyway.

And crocuses, purple ones. Lots of purple ones! These I  mostly put lower down and nearer the house so I'll see them as the snow goes. The last package of them I put in the  woods at the top of the Rockery. That should be nifty when I take the path to get the newspaper!

African Violets, Oh, My

Some very kind friends just brought me an African Violet plant. They were giving it to me to help me feel better after my first cataract surgery, which went fine, by the way, and it's a very pretty one:

Now, AVs and I have a history.

Many years ago, back when houseplants were the newest and 'in-est' thing, I got one or two at the grocery store and I liked them. They actually grew, which was more than you could say for other houseplants such as, for example, the Diefenbachia which had a new leaf every three years, or the Snakeplant which sat there, month after month, needing dusting but never doing anything that anyone ever noticed.

So I got another African Violet.

And another one.

And another one...

Then I discovered you could make more plants by nipping off a leaf and putting it in water. To my delight, in a few weeks there were baby plants at the bottom of the stem. I separated them and planted them and pretty soon I had several dozen African Violets.

This was fun!

Found out there were white ones.... pink ones! Dark reddish ones, doubles, semi-doubles, ruffly ones, miniatures, giants... I went wild. I joined the African Violet Society and entered AVs into local plant shows (and, yes, won some ribbons).

Soon I needed lights to grow more AVs. We had a house we'd bought partly because it had a large finished 'rec room' in the basement and we thought it would be perfect for our daughter and her friends to play in. Ixnay on that, though, they refused totally to play 'in the basement, yuck'. Apparently there was a rumour of spiders. We allowed tricycles. No good. We installed a ping pong table. Nope. We bought a terrific doll house and dolls. Nope again. Finally it just sat empty. So I took it over and built long shelves and hung lights and before you could say 'African Violet, miniature, dark red, variegated foliage', I had several thousand plants and a serious watering habit.

A few years later we decided to move (for other reasons) and to my surprise and relief the people who bought the house wanted the plants too!

Since then I have not allowed African Violets across the door step.

Until today.

Thank you, Lynda and Gord!

A Walk In The Woods

Ah, a fine Fall morning! What better than an early walk in the woods?

Rosie and I head out into the woods behind the house. It is still a bit foggy, but occasionally the sun comes out. It's not exactly cold, but the air leaves no question in our minds: it is Fall. Leaves fluttering down around us gently underscore that we may not have many more such days before the cold comes, and we should enjoy this one.

Going past the garden I'm amused to see the individual flowers on the New England Asters curled up tight. They do this at night. They bloomed in my garden for years before I realized that they close up at night; sometimes you even see a bee asleep inside. The foggy morning has left drops of dew on the petals.

Something else amusing is the way falling pine needles don't make it down to the ground, instead getting hung up on various twigs such as this Maple twig. White Pines lose one-seventh of their needles every year, and do so mostly in October. So every October the small trees below the Pines are festooned with needles like tiny hats. The ground is covered too, walking is a bit slippery!

The mosses have rebounded since we've had some rain. It's been very very dry again this summer, in fact the trees, especially the Maples,  have all shown serious signs of stress.  Looking up at a large Maple, you expect to see the leaves held horizontally over your head, but when the tree is really stressed they hang vertically. I'm glad to see them being umbrellas again today. Many of the leaves are very red this year, including this one that landed right in front of me on the moss covering a large boulder.

There are a number of large boulders at the back of my place, like this one. I believe they are glacial erratics, that is, rocks that were dragged (pushed?) along by a glacier until they either ran aground or dropped out when the glacier melted. There is one on my neighbour's property which is right in the middle of an open flat area, so it must have been a 'dropper', but here at my place there are a row of about 6 of these huge rocks all right at the edge of the rocky ridge. This one, like the others, is about 7-8 feet high. I tried to get a picture of Rosie on top, but she leapt off before I could catch her.

I think this jawbone must be from one of Rosie's cousins. Either wolf or coyote? It's about 4 inches long, so too small for bear, or am I wrong? There was only one piece, I couldn't find any more although I searched for a while. Also couldn't find any of the other teeth. The bone was still hard, so it probably isn't all that old. One thing for sure: I wouldn't want this jawbone's former owner thinking of me as lunch!

There were quite a few mushrooms. Not nearly as many as last year, but still quite a few. The brown and white one here which I believe is called Honey Fungus, is all along the edge of the Beaver Pond. One book says it kills trees, I certainly hope that's not the case! They grow in clusters and there were hundreds if not thousands.

This one Puffball (no idea which Puffball, there are many) was small and perfect. In spite of the many tiny bumps on its surface, it was incredibly smooth, and as delicately coloured as a baby's cheek.

The Phollotia, on the other hand, looks like it really should shower and put on some new clothes! A bit sticky, a bit ragged, a bit scruffy.

 We got back to the house too soon, as Rosie's expression makes clear!