I'm daffy too - at last

The whole blogosphere has been posting raptures to spring this last while, with gorgeous photos of spring flowers and flowering trees, lyrics to the sun and warmth, panegyrics to the spring.  Some of these posts have been up for over a month (you know who you are, down there in New Orleans!).  All of them have showed spring signs much more advanced than mine, even Anvilcloud, who lives north of me, for goodness sake.

Ten days ago, my bulb garden looked like this.  You can see its present glory up in the header.

The red maples have flowered and the tips of the leaves are now showing.  Even the buds on the oak, which is always late, are bulging.  The birds are singing their hearts out, all except the woodpecker who is doing his spring drumming on the metal chimney of a close neighbour.  Loud does not cover it.  In between the bouts of pounding I can sometimes hear a northern mockingbird, I think.  I haven't seen it but the string of borrowed song phrases is pretty certain.  I can see flower buds on the lilacs and when I look out across the woods,  I can see a haze of green everywhere.  Lovely!

And, of course, the blackflies are here. While the rest of you are celebrating the sunshine with sandals and shorts, think of me with heavy socks pulled over my gardening trousers and sweltering in my bug shirt.  Thank goodness we have a screened porch where I can enjoy the bird song without being attacked.

I will have to get the hummingbird feeders up - the little guys will be here very soon now. And plant the gladiolas. 

It's not just the birds that are delirious with spring business.  But I have no intention of banging on the chimney.

PS There is now something more in my garden.  My most creative neighbours have decided to celebrate my birthday by hiding garden gnomes around the place.  I found one in the daffodil bed to-night, and I have  notice that two others are around somewhere.  Hilarious!

The Penultimate Travel Post

We're home. I have the dust conquered, the laundry mostly done, JG has cut the lawn twice, once in the rain and I'm........... tired. I need a vacation to recover from my vacation. I want to write up a trip diary and the pile of maps and mementoes is more than daunting. I'm right back into the Board schedule (I am off to Toronto for a three day conference on Wednesday) and I feel burned out. Not motivated. All I want to do is sleep in my own bed, where I can get the knee comfortable enough to allow me to snooze for at least four hours at a time, catch up on my reading and stare at the sky. No energy. No concentration. I'm a sad mess. Obviously, holidays are bad for me.

It doesn't help that once you point my husband's face in the direction of home, he just wants to get there. We drove from Colorado Springs to Fort Erie in two and a half days, trading the actual driving every few hours. We stopped at Fort Erie to visit my MIL, who is just adjusting to her new nursing home, and then we put the foot on the pedal and came the rest of the way. Long days and lots and lots of trucks on the interstates. More than I ever remember seeing in past trips. What recession? Commerce is alive and well in the US of A. But trucks make the driving tougher, for me, especially when they pay no attention at all to the speed limits and play leap frog with one another. Uphill. Lovely.

The holiday was made easier in one way by our time staying at the YD's condo. Normally JG wants to be on the move every day when we take one of these marathon trips and so it was nice to have a few days at a time where we did not have to pack and load every morning, unload and unpack every evening, after trolling for a suitable motel. And we had Effie, who is a great help with finding accommodation. Effie is what we named JG's nice new GPS (a Garmin, for those of you interested in these machines), for her efficiency (my father once had a marvellous executive secretary of that name) and so that we could tell her to Effie Off when she tried to make us drive through city cores instead of taking bypasses. When you tell Effie to look for hotels, she comes up with a list by location; I would find a location where there were three or four places listed and we would go there and look for a good spot. Worked beautifully.

Even so, Effie is not an unmixed blessing. I would not rely on her totally as she has some quirks, the most annoying being this desire to have us drive down town. She has some choices you can pre program, fastest route vs most Interstate being one, but she has a low opinion of bypass routes and babbles on trying to persuade the driver to turn off the bypass until you shut her off. Her screen is not really big enough to show the detail we wanted on secondary roads and scenic drives, either. But she is a wonderful help with a lot of stuff. In the USA she shows speed limits for almost all roads (her Canada info is not as detailed, alas) and gives you a countdown to turns with warnings that correlate with the speed you are driving. I also use state maps, an interstate map of all of the USA and touring books (the National Geographic Scenic By Ways book is excellent) and find that this combination gives me everything I need.

More than I want, sometimes. Unfortunately I married a man who thinks it is lots of fun to drive a road that crosses the continental divide three times in two hours. He combed the maps in search of places we could see snow and did we ever find a lot. He's picky about his snow, too. The snowbanks in the Rabbit Ears Pass in Colorado was dirty, he thought, and he was all for driving Independence Pass between Aspen and Colorado Springs to get clean stuff for a photo op. Luckily it was still closed. I am not a happy passenger when I am ascending to 11,000+ feet on a road with no shoulder or guardrail. And I could not drive such a road if my life depended on it. I get dizzy, short breathed with sheer terror and tense to the point of pain from holding on to the car so it will not fall over the edge.

And no, logic has nothing to do with it.

All worth it, for the sheer glory of the scenery in the mountains and on the plains. We drove along with John Denver's Colorado Rocky Mountain High ringing in our ears, stopping at every view point and pull off we could find, taking huge numbers of photographs or just looking and listening. There were some joys that were entirely unexpected. One, for me, was finding tiny villages in New Mexico lush with cottonwood and lilac all in flower, ringing with bird song, tucked into the crevices of the dry and harsh plateaus in places where the rivers ran. Another was a high mesa just east of Raton where there are constant small ponds again alive with birds, dotted through the sere land.

I think it is contrasts that will stay with me the longest. The huge rock formations in their many coloured striations. The equally huge sky. The creeks, swollen with snow melt, rushing down their stony beds. Driving from summer to late spring to early spring as we climbed a pass and dropping down and down to summer once again. The roar of the wind at the top of a pass and the eerie quiet of the inland plateau below it. Black cattle against a green, green hill. The sight of the huge dome of the state capital at Jefferson City seen across the flats as we drove toward it. So much land and so few people.

And, a silly thing, many many squashed raccoons on the highways in the Midwest. Until, as we reached western Kansas and the high plains, there were no more and the roads were clean. It's strange, the things you notice and will remember, sometimes.

At some point I am going to sort and cull my photographs and probably do one more trip post about them. And then I'll be done. Sometime after I have a few more naps.

Even Among These Rocks

The east side of our house is in the rain shadow of the roof and also gets almost a full day of summer sun. The only thing that grows consistently besides weeds is a hardy dwarf lilac. I am happy to tolerate the weeds, which the relative dryness and the thinness of the soil render dwarfed. Except for this year. This summer, when it rained every day, almost, the weeds flourished, reaching an abnormal height and girth. They came under the notice of my husband who is not a gardener but who loves with equal passion his lawn and tidiness. 'The weeds have to go', he decreed.

And so he formulated a plan, based on the presence in piles around the garage of clean and rounded rocks we winnowed out from the gravel when we built the garage pad. Large, heavy round rocks, glacial inclusions in the pit run gravel. We would lay down chicken wire, he planned, to deter the chipmunks from digging winter dens*. On top of the wire we would lay gardener's blackcloth, thus choking off the weeds. On top of the blackcloth we would place the clean and beautiful rounded rocks in their various colours and then we would scatter screened gravel among the rocks and the result would be neat and tidy. Right.

JG pulled the weeds over several days and between rainstorms, muttering to himself. Luckily I was busy and could not help. He also trimmed back the lilac to a mere wisp of its former self. I was recruited to help with the chicken wire, the laying of which is a two person job unless you wish to drive yourself crazy. It comes in rolls. It needs to be cut to length, straightened and set firmly in place. On a slope. Where the ends stick up and catch the next strip as you try to get it straight. After you lay the blackcloth on top of the chicken wire, the result is a slippery surface where the rocks need to be carfully positioned so that they will not roll.

We have a Kabota utility ATV. We filled the back of it with the rocks from the piles around the garage site. Several times. Lug rocks from pile. Place in Kabota. When the holdall bed is filled, drive the Kabota to the side of the house, unload and place the rocks. Repeat. We soon ran out of rocks. Undaunted, JG ferried us off into the bush and we raided the rock piles that the pioneer ancestors had made when they tried to farm the place. Climb rock pile. Throw down rocks. Pick up and heave rocks into Kabota bed. Drive rocks to the barn apron and unload them onto plastic sheets. Pressure wash rocks. Since you ask, this step removes moss and dirt and makes them as clean and colourful as the ones from the gravel. Reload rocks into Kabota. Drive to the side of the house. Unload rocks and place them artistically. Change some around to increase artistic effect. Repeat.

After several days of this, we had covered the blackcloth with rocks. JG decided that screening the gravel we had (crushed stone) would not look right. So he foraged off to town with the big trailer and got a load of pea gravel. The bulk of this was shovelled onto the rocks and worked in with the hose, a final finish being given to the whole by using a trowel and pail full of pea gravel to fill in any missed cracks. This is the result. I must admit it looks splendid, but Oh, My Aching Back.

*In fact, they have done so in other years and have been live trapped and disposed of. Do not tell Little Stuff this; when she is here on a visit, she and Grandpa drive the dispossesed chipmunks far off into the bush and let them go. Judging by the numbers we have of the little pests, they get back before LS and Grandpa do.

Lilac Watch, with butterflies

We have a Japanese lilac beside the kitchen door. It blooms later than the ordinary lilacs and has smaller blooms but a lovely scent. This afternoon it was covered with bees and wasps of many varieties and both regal and common swallowtail butterflies. I stood on the kitchen porch, dodging drunken bees, and took these pictures.
This is a Common Yellow Swallowtail.


This is a Viceroy or a Regal -- I haven't got a good shot of the tail to tell which. Most likely a Viceroy, however, as it is too early here for the milkweed butterflies.


I took these on 'fine' with a Coolpix 8700, on auto, cropped the result and equalized the light using Corel's PhotoPaint. The Swallowtail is not as bright as it should be as the light kept changing on me.

This should have been the 'Travel writeup' Monday Mission. I am ducking out tonight, but hope to get it up on Tuesday.

Lilac Watch

The lilac is now in full bloom. The purple ones are everywhere -- we passed two fields of them this afternoon. That's an unusual sight, as lilac usually only spreads by putting up suckers at the planting site in eastern Ontario, but in places where there is limestone close to the surface it really thrives and will spread. It was absolutely beautiful.

My white is a new plant from a very old stock, a bush planted somewhere around 1900. I have purple ones of the same vintage or even older, but the white I am nursing along, as I love this kind the most. Almost as much as the hybrid double purple which is really not hardy in Zone 4, but is doing its best.

The blackflies and mosquitoes are also in full presence, which is why Little Stuff is done up in netting. She is also glaring at a bee that was investigating the blossom nearest her. She does not like bugs. So her mother bought her this netting suit to make her stay with her grandparents a little easier.

She goes home tomorrow, to her 4th birthday party. I am slightly limp, but it's worth it. Only, what do you say when the kid comes up with "Grandma, how do you make water" as we are putting along in the fishing boat. I ducked. "Grandpa will know," said I.