works of wanderlust

Category: cast iron guy

  • No Mow, May…be

    It was drizzling this morning as I stepped out to take the dog for her first stroll of the day, and for the first time in nearly six months I could tell that the lawn was starting to turn a familiar shade of green.

    That’s not an exaggeration, either. As recently as this past weekend I spent the better part of my days out in the yard raking and cleaning and pruning and tidying and the dominant shade in my life was the colour brown.

    But a little bit of TLC and a few days of light rain, and spring greenery arrives in force around here.

    All this yard work got me thinking deeply once again about my small patch of grass.

    I’ve never been a golf-green-perfect lawn guy. I keep it trim because grass can be low work and nice to walk upon in bare feet. It’s essentially backyard carpeting, and a bit of mowing and a bit of fertilizer and a bit of pulling some weeds makes for a pleasant outdoor space. Yet, having taken a lot of ecology and botany in university I look at the picture perfect lawns of my neighbours and rarely first see the intended suburban paradise, and usually instead ponder the effort we put into this single species of invited invasive plant we uniformly call grass. Biodiversity is rarely represented in suburban lawns, and many of my neighbours put countless amounts of time, energy and resources into perfect sod.

    In fact, I was thinking about lawns so much that I was getting ready my rechargeable mower batteries thinking that the yard would be due for a trim as soon as mid-May.

    Except.

    Except, I’ve stumbled upon this online campaign twice now to support that aforementioned biodiversity and support neighbourhood ecological health by skipping the mowing bit for a month.

    #NoMowMay suggests waiting until June before cutting the grass.

    Skipping the mowing for a month is not exactly much of a hardship in Western Canada, I would caveat here. I may get to avoid mowing altogether simply by virtue of the weather. It could start snowing again before the week is out and the effort would be impossible. Or, on the other hand, the grass could be knee-height by the end of the week and I could be sending search parties into the backyard for the dog when she goes out to pee. This time of year is a botanical prognosticators nightmare.

    The sentiment of #NoMowMay intrigues me tho.

    I like the idea of thinking forward and holistically about the ecology of our spaces, rather than purely cosmetically.

    I like the idea of putting insects and seasonal cycles and the complex system (even if it is a little artificial and of our own creation) of nutrients and water and growth and light ahead of a few minutes pleasure of being barefoot in the grass.

    I like the idea that the lawn is actually more than backyard carpeting.

    Sure, my little Canadian lawn just coming out of its winter hibernation might not be impressively overgrown by the end of May, but in its own way I think there is a lot to learn from letting nature do its own thing for a few weeks in the spring. It might be worth keeping the mower in the shed until June, despite what the neighbours might think.

  • This Spuds for You

    May is planting season around here, the month usually starting by ensuring the root veggies are in the ground and ending by poking hundreds of more delicate seeds into the soil.

    The weather cooperated long enough for me to till the recently-thawed layer of topsoil in the corner of my yard which I keep open for an annual vegetable garden.

    … and then to plant a small bag of seed potatoes, neatly covered up with dirt and marked with a makeshift stake in the ground nearby.

    A local gardening guru was recently a guest on the CBC morning radio show and he was discussing a strange topic to which the answer was, in fact, potatoes.

    As it turns out there is a strong community of home gardeners who think deeply about things like caloric yield and nutritional output per square meter of soil. In the event of an “end of the world” type scenario, maximizing how much food one can grow in a small plot of land is something that enough folks have given enough thought to that aforementioned guru used it as the topic of his weekly radio segment.

    His calculations showed potatoes were the winner, being both one of the most reliable and highly producing plant that can occupy your backyard in the event of cataclysmic events of the kind that wipe out the global supply chain, but leave you enough time to become a backyard subsistence farmer.

    A similar calculation played out in the science fiction novel (and later film) The Martian where explorer astronaut Mark Watney finds himself left behind and stranded on Mars after a mission failure and hasty evacuation, and needs to use his botany skills to stay alive long enough for a rescue attempt some months (or years?) away. The science-driven narrative turns to the humble spud, the only fresh food sent along on the space voyage and intended as a happy holiday dinner on another planet, as the means by which meticulously calculated cultivation keeps the astronaut alive long enough for the plot to proceed.

    I planted nine hills of potatoes yesterday which by late summer should yield enough tubers for a couple plates of fries and a few roasted dishes alongside maybe a campfire steak or two.

    And ideally that’s all I’ll need them for.

  • Stir Fried Campfire

    It had been far too many months since I had found myself with a good day to build a small campfire in the backyard. But Saturdays, even chilly ones in mid-Spring, can sometimes avail themselves of enough freedom and opportunity to reignite something interesting, sometimes literally.

    My plan to have winter fires outdoors this past cold season was met by a couple struggles with weather, timing and general distraction. I lit up the pit a few times while there was snow on the ground, but by choices of days were never ideal and I spent multiple hours outside in the dwindling light of dusk trying thaw the ice from the bottom and sides of my fire pit for long enough to sustain a flame of anything worthy of the name.

    So with the snow consistently melted and the remaining autumn leaf litter cleared, I dusted off everything — pit, grill plates, benches and tools — late yesterday afternoon and burned a couple hours worth of wood to both get rid of the winter remains and kick-start another season of backyard cookouts.

    I not only slow-grilled a pair of thick pork chops for nearly an hour, roasting them slowly over the coals and smoke, turning them into deliciously flavored hunks of savory meat, but I also attempted a simple stir fry: rice.

    Basic white rice finds itself in our home cooked meal rotation often enough that we usually have a cup or two of day-old rice in the fridge. My wife was planning on simply microwaving our leftovers to accompany the chops, but I suggested instead that we fry up some rice over the already-to-cook fire.

    Some scrambled egg, a few finely chopped veggies in butter, a heap of left-over cold rice, and some soy sauce, all step-wise added to my twelve inch cast iron pan, and sizzled up to a toasty brown with the smoke and the flame licking around the outside.

    It was delicious and nutty and savoury, and the perfect side to go along with two caramel-toned smoked pork chops that followed the bowl of stir fried rice through the backdoor and to the kitchen table.

    Sometimes I wonder what the neighbours must be thinking, but I guess if they could smell my outdoor cooking they’re probably mostly jealous.

  • A Neglected Blog Update

    I really hate writing those posts that wax apologetic for not writing for some span of time, promising to do better, and lamenting that life is just so busy that — gosh! — if only there were an extra hour each day…

    I’ve been refocused other places, and in the blur of spring snow storms and back to work and another mess of COVID infections in every other person I know, I’ve not had too much interesting to write about.

    Not too much…

    A little bit.

    I’ve been running a lot. I ran a ten miler (sixteen klick) race on the weekend, a race for which I aggressively overdressed as a result of waking up at 6am while it was still frosty outside for a 9am start when the sun had turned it into a nice day. I’d been training really well, too, completing a two week streak at the start of April as I ran every day to get into the spring fitness mode, and started the annual hill training regimen. The icy sidewalks cleared just as March ended and despite a few mornings with fresh spring snow the trails have been ideal for plodding along and burning in some mileage. All that said, and as April nears an end, I’m solidly bagged and could use a breather for a day or two.

    I’ve been drawing a lot. It seems odd that an old obsession has resurfaced so acutely in my life. My back-to-work bag is half-stuffed with sketchbooks and pens alongside my laptop and folios. I spend lunch breaks finding quiet places to sit and draw little mini artworks downtown. And back at home, I’ve been taking courses in watercolour, mostly online but in a couple weeks an in-person flower-painting session in the local conservatory, as I hone my painting skills and start to generate images that are more than just muddy smudges on expensive paper.

    I’ve been getting ready for adventure. Last summer we had bought ourselves two inflatable kayaks. The first was a cheaper model that was more of a toy, but it was in stock. The second was backordered, significantly higher end (as far as inflatable recreational sports equipment goes anyhow) and didn’t arrive on our doorstep until the fall as the waterways were starting to ice over. I’ve unpacked all that equipment and I’ve started making some plans for some down-river excursions as the days get a little warmer (it’s snowing again this morning as I write this!) A day-long traversal of the city by kayak in June seems like a great idea.

    And I’ve been cooking. Re-adjusting my bread-baking schedule around back-to-the-office has been a small challenge and reminded me why I didn’t do it so much back prior to pandemic times. And having cleaned up both the barbecue and the outdoor firepit, this upcoming weekend is looking hopeful as the seasonal inaugural outdoor cookoff, with some grilled meats and veggies atop an open backyard fire, complete with whatever I can think to cook in those cast iron pans that have been wasting their adventure potential indoors on a gas stove rather than over open flame.

    I’ll write more soon. I promise.

    If only there were another hour in the day.

  • Running into Spring

    Sunday Runday, the first day of spring, and yet when we stepped out into the last few hours of winter air this morning it was blowing and cold as if winter was reminding us that we all lived on the Canadian prairies and we don’t get to simply up and decide that the chill has left for another year.

    It had been nice all week.

    Well… nice enough that warm hats became optional and the concrete of the sidewalks made a strong appearance as the layers of ice finally melted into chilly, slushy puddles that slowly drained into the storm sewers.

    We’d gone for an eight klick run through a local ravine on Tuesday evening and returned with wet, blistered feet from sloshing through sloppy, water-logged melt still covering the aspalt trails.

    This morning, avoiding the wind, we tucked into some suburban walking paths that wend their way along the back fences of a couple neighbourhoods that back onto the thawing creek. Where we’d been snowshoeing just a weekend ago was now a briskly flowing waterway the colour of milk chocolate twisting between the naked trees.

    As we burst from the cover of the shelter paths and out onto the streets the wind was just starting to pick up speed and carried with it the hint of more snow.

    And as we rounded the last corner towards the parking lot the hint of snow had turned into a very real peppering of icy sleet blasting our bare cheeks for the final push towards our coffee social.

    It didn’t go unremarked that annually April is when our training proper usually begins. Longer distances. Hill repeats. Tempo runs. These start to populate our calendars as the snow melts and the sidewalks clear and the evenings offer a bit more daylight.

    It didn’t go unremarked that April is only just about a week and a few days away.

    I signed up for a short race in April in a nearby bedroom community after a friend suggested she’d like some company for a ten-miler and the first in-person she’ll have run in about three years. It wont be my first even this year, but somehow it feels like starting to be back to normal.

    Back to the office in April. Back to local racing in April. Back to hill repeats in April.

    Let’s just hope spring cooperates.