works of wanderlust

Tag: backyard adventures

  • May Long Weekend Gardeners

    It’s a sunshiny Flourishing Friday and on this upcoming Monday Canadians across the country will be celebrating our role in the Commonwealth and thinking fondly of dear Queen Victoria’s Birthday for Victoria Day, a Canadian statutory holiday celebrated on the Monday preceding May 25 in every province and territory, and … well, actually … mostly just having a day off from work, to be honest.

    What the May Long Weekend more typically marks is the official start of summer weather, at least on the Canadian Prairies, where campers and gardeners and adventure seekers who have been hibernating for the long winter will emerge and begin the short seasonal sprint to warm weather fun.

    For me, for at least a few hours this weekend, it means finishing the planting of my vegetable garden.

    As of right now many of the heartier, stubborn, perennial, or fall-planters are already in the ground, and in some cases sprouting.

    My garlic and onion patch has made a clear effort to get ahead of the spring rains and is aggressively showing it’s greens.

    I transferred my rhubarb plant from my now-101-year-old granny’s garden about fifteen years ago as literally the first thing I ever planted in this space, and it has also decided to make its annual appearance on time and in force.

    If you are a fan of this sour-stalked vegetable, or understand that it is an excellent baking balancer to sweet-fruited deserts, you won’t be surprised that of nearly all the garden products we grow this little plant has the longest queue of friends inquiring about “is your rhubarb ready yet?”

    I’d like to write that my carrot patch is thriving, particularly after I spent a bit of time and money installing a low-flow irrigation system a couple weeks ago and covering the whole bed in bird netting to keep the swallows out.

    While I’m sure a subset of the little green sprouts in the photo above are actually carrots, they are easily confused with another vegetable which I made the mistake of planting about five years ago that has never exited the garden fully: dill weed. Dill is lovely in small quantities, but each dill plant produces about ten thousand seeds and some of those seeds sprout this year, some sprout next year, some sprout in spring and others sprout in mid-summer. Some of those dill plants are a meter-and-a-half tall and easy to remove, while others grow barely taller than the carrots and hide in the foliage until one day you are delicately untangling their crowns from the other vegetable tops, spilling seeds into the soil in the process.

    I’ll let a couple grow. I like dill. But about 99% of what has sprouted needs to be removed as soon as I can tell them apart from the neat rows of carrots that I planted.

    At least they are well-irrigated, I suppose.

  • 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″]

  • On Visual Storytelling

    As the summer draws nearer, I’ve got it into my head to make some movies.

    Well… filmmaking. Video production. Out in the wilds with a camera and an idea, at least.

    I initially set up a Youtube channel for this blog over a year ago with dual intentions.

    First, I needed a place to upload little video clips to accompany my posts. My cheap little hosting setup is pretty flexible, but streaming video directly from a discount blog host doesn’t make much sense when there are free services like Youtube.

    Second, I had this crazy idea of trying to make some short films. Not a vlog. Not ranting into a camera lens. Not just reading my posts either. But putting together a little script, gathering A-roll and B-roll and mixing it all into a little short film about a very particular topic.

    There are plenty of examples of this already on Youtube and my subscription list provides me plenty of inspiration.

    So…

    I’m finally jumping in with both feet and I’m going to make it happen.

    I’m working on the first two films right now, gathering footage and writing the scripts, and this morning I finished editing and recording a short introduction and trailer for my new project: VIDEO REDACTED

    To be clear, there’s not going to be any regularity, routine or schedule to this new thing.

    It’s just a thing for now. It’s sporadic … and an effort I’ll pick away at until I can make that thing at a quality I’m happy with. Uploading as I find time and inspiration to make more of those things.

    But stay tuned.

    Oh, and I’m supposed to say something like “please like and subscribe” right?

  • 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.

  • 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.