The extent of our civilization

It's been quiet around here recently, mostly because I've been madly busy with work, on or off the farm, or with campaigning to try and stay in work, given recent drastic cuts to funding for archives in Canada. The children and I spent a day in May demonstrating in Ottawa against the cuts.

It was great to see democracy in action like that and it's been wonderful to see the way that our small profession and those sympathetic to our principles have responded to the threats posed by the short-sighted decisions of the individuals currently in charge of Canada's national library and archives. There's an online petition with more details about the issue, if you are interested in what all the fuss is about.

As a consequence of losing a chunk of my income with these cuts, I took on a stall in the local farmers' market on Saturdays this summer. This has meant I've had to spend more time keeping the garden weeded/seeded and my weekends are correspondingly shorter. All in all, there's a lot less time for blogging, but at least I'm spending more time outside, one way or the other!

I went to the national archivists' conference was in Whitehorse this past week (more time away from those fast-growing weeds, ack!). The conference was the perfect place to be at a time of professional crisis like this: a sort of group therapy. The sense of solidarity among archivists from all over Canada (and beyond) was fantastic. A colleague of mine from Britain commented that she didn't think that UK archivists would react in the same way if there was a similar threat to archival funding over there. I think she might be right - and it's only when the Canadian archival system is under threat that you understand that its members do see it as a system, rather than just a loose affiliation of professionals. It's a shame the people at Library and Archives Canada don't recognise it as such...

The last stop on our trip to Ottawa on May 28th was the statue of Dominion Archivist Sir Arthur Doughty (the only statue in Ottawa to honour a civil servant). The words on the base of the statue are these:

Of all national assets, archives are the most precious. They are the gift of one generation to another and the extent of our care of them marks the extent of our civilization.

Labels

Labelling things isn't a strength of mine, as I've admitted before. Sometimes it matters, as with tomato plants - you need to know which variety is which if you're going to be selling them. Although even then, some people were willing to buy my 'pot luck plants' at the farmers' market yesterday - these ones were half the usual price of the labelled ones because I didn't know which variety they were. Not a labelling problem this time, but a self-seeding one. All those tomato plants had grown from seeds dropped by last year's plants in the greenhouse beds and consequently I didn't have a clue which was which.

Usually, not labelling things isn't a problem as the seeds germinate quickly enough that I remember where I've sown them and recognise the seedlings as they emerge. With basil, though, the seeds take so long to germinate that there's a danger of forgetting where I've put them. I was fairly sure that I had sown some in the greenhouse already this year, but today I thought I'd better sow some more, as I couldn't remember where I'd put them and was worried that I'd accidentally disturbed the slow-to-emerge seedlings by putting something else in the same spot. Labelling the area where I'd sown them would have helped, I'm sure.

Of course, as soon as I'd sown the second set of seeds, I found the original lot - tiny, but intact:

Apart from the stint at the farmers' market, Mike and I have spent most of this weekend in the garden, tilling, planting, mulching and sowing. And labelling what I've sown. Not.

As this is likely to be the neatest the vegetable garden looks for the rest of the year, here's a photo. At the very bottom is the garlic I planted last October, growing well. Above that is the bed into which I sowed beans, greens, carrots and parsnips today. Behind that, under a layer of grass-clipping mulch, is one of the potato beds (there's another opposite it).

Now all I need is some good rain to water everything in. I gave this bed a preliminary drink with water from the greenhouse tank last night. In my mind's eye I was going to be serenely standing there, creating rainbows in the last of the evening sunshine with the water from the hose, satisfied with my day's work. In reality, I struggled with the tangled hose for five sweaty minutes and then was swarmed by mosquitoes when I finally got the thing in the right place. There wasn't a lot of serenity involved.

Setting up shop

This weekend's project was to put up a sign advertising our excess vegetable plants. I was thinking of something smallish. Mike had (as usual: cf. the greenhouse) other ideas. I'm quite pleased with the end result, even if it is a bit enormous. I don't think it would win any prizes for sign-writing, but it fits in well with our home-produced ethos, so I don't really care!

My 'shop' is the verandah at the front of the house. And the virtual shop window is at GreenHill Greens.

Mother's Day

Yesterday I set up my stall in the library in Deseronto again for the annual Sidewalk Sale. If the weather had been better, I would have been outside and there would have been lots of customers. As it was, it was cold, windy and wet and, consequently, very quiet indeed. I didn't manage to sell as many seedlings as I did last year. But it was only two fewer, so not terribly bad. One thing I changed this year was the range of tomatoes: there had been one would-be customer last year who had wanted beefsteak tomatoes, which I didn't have. This year, I grew Marmande tomatoes and the same man came back and bought 12 of them. Which shows that it pays to listen to your customers, I suppose!

Child1 came with me and was a great help in setting up and taking down the stall. During the (many) quiet spells of our stay our location next to one of the public access computers turned out to be ideal for her. I sat and read one of the library books - so it was ideal for me, too!

Today is Mother's Day and it is the first time that we've actually had one of our mothers here in Canada for the day itself. We put a bit of an effort into setting the table for lunch for once: the lilacs are in full bloom already, which provided an easy bit of floral colour (flower-arranging not being one of my strengths), as well as being a reminder of the mother who was missing.

I always feel ambivalent about Mother's Day: I know it's a fairly ancient idea, compared to Father's Day and Grandparents' Day, but even when my own mother was alive I thought it was a celebration designed only to provoke guilt and spending (and sadness, if you'd like to be a mother but can't be).

However, my cynical old iceberg of a soul is capable of being partially melted when I'm presented with something like this:

Although (if I'm completely honest) it may have been the correct placement of the apostrophe that caused me the greatest delight. ;-)

Vegevangelism

I spent much of today ensconced in Deseronto Public Library, attempting to sell some of my young vegetable plants to people. The day started well, with local vegetable expert Vicki Emlaw (who runs a company called Vicki's Veggies) being interviewed on CBC as we were driving over. She was explaining about how wonderful heirloom varieties of vegetables were (audio file on CBC's site). And guess what I was selling?

I sold nearly all of the tomato plants (Purple Russian, Riesentraube and Amish Paste)and most of the peppers (Cayenne and Tomato). The three 'edible baskets' of Red Robin tomatoes and mixed salad leaves all went, too. The cosmos plants were popular, but the red cabbages (I sowed far too many this year!) were a complete failure: not a single one sold.

It was pleasing to have sold the plants, but the really fun part of the day was getting to talk to people who have never grown vegetables before and persuading them to give it a go. Quite a few initially-dubious window-shoppers went away clutching a tomato plant or two.

Rabbit-repellent corn

I had a bit of bother with last year's attempt at a Mohawk-style Three Sisters bed. The corn part of the partnership just didn't work very well. At the time I blamed poor germination, but later wondered whether it was the fault of those cute little rabbits that were lurking on the fringes of the vegetable garden last year. This time round I decided to sow the corn in cardboard tubes in the greenhouse to give them a head start and perhaps make them less tasty for the furry blighters. Using the tubes means that the roots will have minimal disturbance when they go into the ground. The seeds had a 100% germination rate, which seems to bear out the rabbit-muching theory.

The weather is looking promising now (no sign of a frost in the forecast), so I've put the first sowing out into one of the lower vegetable garden beds. These have all been supplemented with extra soil this year in an attempt to prevent a repeat run of last year's tomato-drowning catastrophe.


The runner beans have been sown there too and the squash plants were sown in the greenhouse, enjoying a more sheltered start.

We enjoyed our first rhubarb harvest last night. One of the three plants that were planted in the tyre garden last year died, but the other two are looking healthy enough. You can see the asparagus plants are enjoying being in their tyres, too!


I've transferred the plants I hope to sell tomorrow into plastic boxes. Mostly they are heirloom tomatoes and peppers, but there are also some red cabbage seedlings and these cosmos plants:


Purple Russian are THE tomato plant to have this year, I understand. ;-)

The chicks are coming along fine. They are starting to look a bit tatty as their feathers are coming through. I'm sure they're growing, but that is hard to detect when you're looking at them every day. Where there is a noticeable difference is in their combs: those do look a bit bigger now than they did on Monday. You can really see why they're called combs, too!