works of wanderlust

Category: life & stuff

Generally just words and thoughts on the progress of my day-to-day.

  • Meta Monday & Spring Galleries

    I spent nearly twenty hours just lingering in the gorgeous outdoors of my own backyard this past weekend doing all manner of activity, from doing serious chores like tending to the garden, patching my lawn, completing the installation of my irrigation system, to partaking in more leisurely activity like cooking barbecue, playing with the dog and sketching spring foliage.

    Sometimes when you manage a small personal website like this it’s important to stop after a weekend like that and remind visitors that the whole point of an internet blog is to highlight those things in words and pictures.

    To that end, I’ve been updating my galleries as well as my posts.

    Enjoy!

    Some photos from Spring 2022

    [foogallery id=”3848″]

  • Garden Irrigation Project, Part One

    It’s a Flourishing Friday and for the next few months I’m going to use these end-of-the-workweek-days to post something about my efforts to be a productive vegetable gardener. Y’know… vegetables that I can perhaps later cook into a delicious cast iron grilled meal.

    Yet, it’s still deep in the cool spring and though I got a wee start on the growing season last weekend by tilling my small veggie plot and plunking my spuds in the thawed ground, there’s not more much to be done in the way of planting seeds and nursery-grown seedlings until the weather warms up a bit more.

    In the meantime I decided to invest in and install a homebrew irrigation system to prepare my gardening efforts for a more productive (literally) season.

    The idea of automated irrigation systems isn’t new and in fact there are all sorts of ready-to-install setups that can be ordered online. I found some bits — including tubes, brackets, nozzles, connectors, and even an electronic timer — and worked out the measures to not only set up a misting spray for the garden box, but there should also be enough to divert a line to where my wife likes to hang her flower baskets each year.

    Setting to work, and even as my grass struggles to come back to life for the spring, I split the sod open and did the first step: burying some three-quarter inch PEX tubing six inches below the soil.

    Sorry about the imperial measures! Plumbing kit around here still hasn’t gone metric.

    This tube will ultimately act as a protective sleeve through which I will snake the smaller one-quarter inch irrigation hose (ordered and due to arrive this weekend) to traverse it safely below the ground to reach the garden plot (where the plants will be growing) to the house (where the water supply is emerging). This way the tubes and water will run safely below the ground where it won’t be stepped on or mowed over (or chewed up by the dog when she’s bored.)

    I’ve spent sixteen summers tending this particular garden patch and over the years I’ve made various enhancements. I’ve routinely enriched the soil. I’ve improved the drainage. I’ve added a four square meter (slightly raised) box that I dug a meter deep into the foundational clay layer upon which the neighbourhood is built to give a proper soil bed for carrots and parsnips and the like. I’ve even put up some low fencing. And through all that I’ve rotated crops and managed weeds and tilled and pruned and managed the small bit of dirt in my little backyard in the middle of the Canadian prairies.

    But water has always been a challenge. Consistent, timely watering shouldn’t be this hard, particularly those last two summers while I was working from home. Somehow it just never works in my agenda’s favour. The day gets ahead of me. The sun gets too hot. The evening gets too busy. The excuses roll off my back with ease and indifference by mid-summer. The garden and those veggies ultimately pay the price.

    My new irrigation system, at least the way I’ve planned it out, will make sure that at least a couple times per day the most delicate of the plants get a good misting and enough moisture to carry them through the hotter months. An automated timer at the faucet will trigger at set times in the morning and in the evening, the cooler hours of the day when evaporation is lowest, to water the lettuce, parsnips, tomatoes, carrots, and beets, keeping the soil moist and optimizing growth. Rather than me finding twenty minutes each morning to clamber out there before work, drag a hose across the yard, soak every spot, and hope I remember to repeat that night and again every day for the four months, a forty dollar gadget will take on that job for me.

    Yesterday evening I trenched that bit of PEX pipe under the sod where the little automated watering hose will hide safely below ground carrying the fresh water to my delicate yet-to-be-planted veggies. Later this weekend, I’ll add in the water tubes and set up the nozzles.

    If it all works out, I’m really hoping this could be a very productive gardening summer.

    And if nothing else, I can sip my coffee with my pajamas still on and watch the garden water itself for once. Even that sounds great to me.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • ch-ch-ch-changes.

    It’s been nearly a month since I’ve dropped a post here, I realize, but with the world swirling in chaos and my life sometimes feeling like a lot of the same, I now find myself needing to write yet another explanation post.

    Winter Hoarfrost

    I’ve been thinking a lot about my professional life these days.

    I’m locked up in golden handcuffs, as they say, doing a job that pays entirely too well, can be occasionally cushy, and gives me a lot of flexibility in life. On the other hand, I have no passion for the work, I’m a cog in a bureaucracy and rarely seem to have any effect on anything, and my work life is a never-ending series of video meetings on what amounts to the same general topic day, after day, after day… after day.

    It’s boring and frustrating and unremarkable all at once.

    I’ve been reading about midlife career change.

    I’ve been talking to people who have pulled the plug on something in their forties and reinvented themselves.

    I’ve been pondering budgets and possibilities and realities of economy and family and obligation and how it all fits together into a giant jigsaw that is my career choices.

    This morning I took the first tenuous step towards a massive change.

    Not a plunge. Not a flying leap. Not an irreversible veer.

    A step.

    And it may amount to nothing. Or it may turn out to be everything.

    Only time will tell.

    But if and when something comes out of that first step, and it’s time to take a second… third… and on and on, then I’ll likely have a lot more stuff to say, and be able to be much less cryptic about it.