Taking it slow

Life in lockdown is not so different from normal life for me. I don't have small children out of school to worry about and I can work from home with no great difficulty. With Mike and Child2 here with me, I don't feel particularly isolated, and I'm still in regular contact with my father and my aunt in England. We have plenty of space for a long walk with the dog (although he's getting on a bit and not as keen on a long walk as he once would have been...). I know we are luckier than a lot of people who are cooped up with less ability to get out in the fresh air.

What has changed is the pace of things. Not that my life Before was exactly a whirlwind of activity, but now I am not rushing to get out of the house before 7.30 to see my mother-in-law in her nursing home before going off to work, things feel much more leisurely. The library where I normally work was closed to staff from 23 March and I went in on the 24th to finish some jobs and pick up a few things (including the office orchid!). Working from home involves connecting to my desktop remotely and this can be a frustrating experience: there's a bit of a lag across the network and it feels like I am working in slow motion most of the time.

I think my brain is on a go-slow anyway, with a low-level background level of panic which actually reminds me of my state of mind back in May 2007, just before we left England for Canada. It's quite hard to concentrate on anything for any length of time: reading fiction seems beyond my capabilities at present, for example, and my sleep is disturbed. I feel unproductive as a result, but I am not going to beat myself up about that: if we can't make exceptions for ourselves in exceptional times, then when can we?

Outside of work, I'm focusing on watching the garden come back to life and getting comfort from the usual cycles of plants and wild birds. Humans might be making a mess of things, but Mother Nature is still doing her thing. Hope you are safe and well wherever you are reading this.

Belated Canada Day blooms

I generally start the growing season with some sort of plan for the front garden bed that I can see from the kitchen window, but they rarely work as I expect them to. I grew cosmos this year, but only two of the plants survived and they are currently very tiny and spindly.  I also planted some miniature sunflowers, which have come up and should be flowering soon.

Star of the show at the moment though are these poppies, which I am fairly sure I did not sow. I don't know where they came from, but they're very pretty, and with the cilantro blooming at the same time, they are looking very patriotic. Shame they came out just after Canada Day!

A lot of this bed is given over to perennial edibles: sage, lovage, borage and horseradish, so the annuals have to be squeezed in between those. The bees and wasps love the borage and lovage: at one point this week I counted eight blue mud dauber wasps enjoying the lovage flowers. These wasps aren't at all aggressive and they eat spiders, so if you're not of fan of spiders, these are the good guys!

Garden Bloggers' Fling, 2015

I'd been aware of the annual Garden Bloggers' Fling since the first one, back in 2008 when it took place in Austin, Texas. I didn't think I'd ever get the chance to go to one, but when I realised that this year's was in Toronto, I jumped at the opportunity.

I wasn't disappointed. The event was superbly well organised and in total we visited 30 gardens and parks in the three days that I attended. Those doing the optional Niagara excursion on the fourth day would have seen even more. It was a real pleasure to spend time with so many passionate gardeners and designers. I feel like I have learnt a tremendous amount and have definitely made some new friends.

It's hard to know where to begin with describing the Fling: there was so much crammed in to the three days. I'll just pick out a few themes from the 563 (!) photos I took.

There was an interesting variation of scale, from the huge formal garden of the Aga Khan Museum

 to the intimate gardens of Cabbagetown, once home to Irish immigrants.

The Toronto skyline was ever-present throughout the Fling, either up close when we headed by ferry to the Toronto Island gardens on Friday,

or glimpsed from a distance as it was from the Aga Khan Museum

and from the Hugh Garner Co-op roof garden.

This coming weekend is the Peony Festival in Oshawa, and peonies were a noticeable feature in many of the gardens we visited. From the subtle and understated,

to the bold and beautiful,

and the downright outrageous.

There were a lot of Alliums around, too,

The importance of pollinators was another theme of the Fling: we learnt about the Fairmont Royal York's rooftop garden and bee hives on Friday and at the Toronto Botanical Garden on Sunday we were told to plant up our containers to 'attract guests'  like this honey bee who was busy visiting the salvia 'May Night' at the TBG.

We saw some interesting human-made objects, too, in the course of the Fling. I completely fell in love with the reclamation work going on at the former Don Valley Brick Works, where an industrial site has been turned into a fascinating space for people and wildlife. The 'Watershed Consciousness' artwork on the site is amazing.

I also (inevitably!) loved the way that archival images have been used to tell the story of the site's past.

You don't need a lot of space to make effective use of objects. I'm not generally a huge fan of garden art (or of city skylines, now I think about it) but I did rather like this little elephant in a Cabbagetown garden.

All in all, this has to be one of the most exhausting three days I've had. It was packed full of sensory, social and learning experiences; I will be thinking about this event for days and months to come. A hearty thanks to the Toronto Fling Committee for all their hard work!

Garden in!

The Victoria Day weekend is the traditional one for putting tender plants in the garden, but I was slightly nervous of doing so when I saw that the temperature was going to drop to 4°C/39°F in the coming week. I went ahead anyway, and the next time I looked at the weather forecast it had changed to 7°C/45°F - so with any luck all will be well.

It's been a madly busy week in the lower vegetable garden, which has only just dried out and warmed up after the cold Spring. There has been a lot of weeding and manuring leading up to the last two days when I've been putting in the tomato, corn, squash and brassica seedlings which had been growing on in the greenhouse. Last year I lost most of the cabbages to rabbits. so this year I'm experimenting with scattering some ground-up dried cayenne peppers around them as a deterrent. 

The tomatoes are all in the ground and surrounded by a mulch of grass-cuttings.

In the much drier upper vegetable garden I'm experimenting with some grain crops this year: barley, oats and wheat. The idea is to become a bit more self-sufficient in grain for the chickens in the future, but I imagine that this year we'll probably just keep any grain we gather as seed for next year.

Hatchlings

Transformations are going on all around the farm. The Eastern Black Swallowtail caterpillars which were eating my dill plants a month ago are now gorgeous butterflies:

The barn swallows have fledged and are learning to fly. This morning the adult swallow seemed to be giving the four youngsters a pep talk in the barn.

Two robin broods have already been hatched and fledged in the barn this year and now there's another four eggs being incubated in another robin nest in there. I'm not sure if it's the same robin or a different one.

My chicks are growing rapidly. At two months old they look like half-sized versions of their adult selves. They enjoy running outside in the evenings after I've put the adult

chickens away.

It's interesting to have different varieties of chickens this time, instead of the Buff Orpingtons we've always reared so far. The Welsummers have particularly attractive plumage (I very nearly wrote 'foliage' then!):

Dill weed

The dill is taking over the greenhouse and in the last week I've been pulling the plants up before they flower and set more seed to perpetuate the problem. In the process I noticed that there were some black swallowtail caterpillars on some of the plants. I made sure that I left those plants in place. It's quite amazing to watch how rapidly the caterpillars will chomp their way through a frond of dill.

But I think it would take a lot more than half-a-dozen of these creatures to deal with my superabundance of dill.

Exercising democracy

We became citizens of Canada just a week or two after the last Ontario elections and there hasn't been an election at any level of government since then. Today's Ontario election was the first time I have had the opportunity to vote in this country. It's something that's easy to take for granted, but after living here for seven years without a vote, I have come to realise how important it is to have that small role in a democracy. When I didn't have it, I felt excluded from a significant part of local, provincial and national life.

Our polling station is 10km (6 miles) away - so it's not like being in a city where you can just stroll down the road to cast your vote. I decided to make an event of it and rode my bicycle to the town hall in Hillier. It's a nice route, as much of it is along the old railway line and consequently it's fairly flat (important as this was also my first bike ride this year. Shameful, I know!).

In one short stretch of my journey I encountered three separate snapping turtles, all scraping out hollows along the edge of trail and laying eggs in the depressions.

Definitely not something I've ever seen while going to cast a vote in England!

Wordless Wednesday

Toads

I've been seeing quite a few of these little brown creatures hopping rapidly around the greenhouse recently. I believe they're American toad(let)s. To give you an idea of scale, here's the same toadlet with my index finger. (Very obliging of it to sit still for this photo, I thought. Also, note the cleanliness of my nail - you can tell this was taken before I did my daily hour of weeding.)

I think toads have an undeservedly bad reputation. A prime example is to be found in the opening lines of Philip Larkin's poem Toads. They have been in my mind since I started noticing the toadlets (although I was convinced that the poem was by Ted Hughes - sorry Philip). I first read the poem at school and have only just reread it now. I appreciate its message more these days than I did when I was seventeen!

Toads 

Why should I let the toad work

Squat on my life? 

Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork 

And drive the brute off? 

Six days of the week it soils

With its sickening poison - 

Just for paying a few bills! 

That's out of proportion. 

Lots of folk live on their wits: 

Lecturers, lispers, 

Losels, loblolly-men, louts- 

They don't end as paupers; 

Lots of folk live up lanes 

With fires in a bucket, 

Eat windfalls and tinned sardines- 

They seem to like it. 

Their nippers have got bare feet, 

Their unspeakable wives 

Are skinny as whippets - and yet 

No one actually starves. 

Ah, were I courageous enough 

To shout Stuff your pension! 

But I know, all too well, that's the stuff 

That dreams are made on: 

For something sufficiently toad-like 

Squats in me, too; 

Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,

And cold as snow,

 And will never allow me to blarney

 My way of getting

 The fame and the girl and the money 

 All at one sitting. 

I don't say, one bodies the other 

One's spiritual truth; 

But I do say it's hard to lose either,

When you have both.

Visitors: expected, unexpected and missed

There are various creatures we expect to see at this time of year. Colorado potato beetles and their offspring, for instance.

Check. (And ewwww.)

Then there are creatures that we don't normally see. I went for a bike ride yesterday and saw two very tall birds in a field beside the road. I thought at first that they were herons, but when I looked at the photo more closely I realised that the colour was all wrong:

They're actually Sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis), which usually pass through but don't breed in this area, from what I've seen online, but this looks like a parent and youngster to me.

Then there are the expected-but-missing. This year it is the caterpillars of Monarch butterflies, which are usually munching their way through the milkweed plants by now.

There are some milkweed plants down at the bottom of this photo, and if you look really closely in the middle of the dark area at the top, you might just see a small flash of orange. This is only the fourth Monarch I've seen this year and there are widespread reports that there have been fewer sightings of this particular visitor than usual.

I spent a while this evening inspecting a lot of the milkweed plants in the hayfield. As usual they were host to many different insects: ladybirds, spiders and beetles.

But I didn't find a single monarch caterpillar. Around this date in 2009 I hadn't noticed any Monarchs but the caterpillars were easy to find. I hope their numbers recover.

Growing fast

The barn swallow chicks are getting to look more like adults. And seem a bit menacing. Or is that just me?

The regular showers we've been getting, combined with summer warmth, have worked their magic on the tender crops. There isn't much difference this year between the greenhouse and the outdoor tomatoes and peppers.

The Tigerella tomatoes are starting to show their stripes:

And the rainbow chard in the greenhouse is just gorgeous:

Barn babies

A pair of barn swallows have occupied one of the old nests in the small barn. This week the chicks hatched, so I've been keeping the top half of the stable door open for them, to help them keep the hatchlings fed.

I stood near the nest for ten minutes or so this evening, trying to capture a photo of the parents in mid-feed. They didn't like me being there much, but it didn't stop them feeding - every two or three minutes one of them would arrive at the nest and three little gaping mouths would open.

In this picture the adult is feeding the rightmost chick.

And in this one it's giving me a suspicious look.

The light levels in the barn are low and all the birds are constantly moving, so it's hard to grab a photo that isn't just a blur!

Barn swallows are listed as a threatened species in Ontario (although it's hard to believe around here - there seem to be loads of them. Mind you, there are loads of barns, too, so perhaps that's not a coincidence...), so I'm happy to give this family its nesting room.

The only drawback to having the swallows in our barn is that their nest is directly over the handle of the old freezer we keep the chicken feed in. It's now beautifully caked in swallow dung. Oh well, I expect it will make good compost.

It must be Predator Week...

We've seen barred owls a lot this winter: one swooped in front of the car just the other day. I've seen this one near our pond a few times, but the dog usually chases it off before I get a chance to snap a photo. This evening the owl came quite close to the house and I went outside and inched my way towards it, without the dog handicap, taking pictures as I went.

Lovely, isn't it?

Walk on by

Keep going, Mr Fox. Nothing to tempt you here...

Unreliably icy

Yesterday morning the lake had frozen over. But today it has turned mild again.

The stream running down the western side of our property has partially frozen over, making the usual interesting patters in the ice. These bubbles looked vaguely biological: like frog spawn or a diagram of a cell and its organelles.

Up in the woods, the ice was more geographical-looking, with contours forming around the bases of the trees.

There's a dead ash tree in that area which something's been having a good nibble at:

The Weather Network's forecast for next week is for some 'proper' winter weather:

I think we'll be stocking up the house with wood this weekend!

Spiderfly

One of the over-ripe tomatoes in the greenhouse had burst on the edge of the raised bed last night and was proving to be a magnet for flies and wasps. I was surprised to see a spider nibbling on some of the fragments of tomato: vegetarian spiders aren't exactly common (there is one, apparently, out of 40,000 species!).

A closer look reveals the truth of the matter: it's really a fly cleverly disguised as a spider.

After a bit of internet-delving I think it's a member of the family Tephritidae (fruit flies); a species with the rather unattractive name of Walnut Husk Maggot (Rhagoletis suavis). According to Wikipedia, the genus name is partially derived from Ancient Greek rhago "a kind of spider". The BugGuide site also notes that some members of this fruit fly family "mimic jumping spiders. The wing-waving apparently deters the approach of jumping spiders, important predators of the flies."