(Very) amateur gardening and foraging

I have many friends who are amazing – and often professional – gardeners and foragers. I am not one of them. But at the end of a long (and fairly frustrating) week of desk work, it felt lovely on this hot, Friday evening to take a walk around my property. 

Before I get back to work for a couple more hours, I would like to share my photos with you.

Embryonic zukes. I'm hoping for a deluge
(this is the first year a zucchini plant has lived to maturity in my garden).

My first few raspberries!

Kale and other greens.

My main garden area is a chaotic, haphazard mess with treacherous
footing. It hardly feels like it interrupts the woods at all and I love it!

Flowers planted – or soon to be planted – in my scattered
hugelkultur beds and my "septic meadow".

The black walnut tree (a gift from my folks) that I planted the first year I owned this land.
It's doing well, but I think I'm going to move it next spring as it is fairly close to my
well and I don't want any juglone in my water supply...

Old dump (one of several).

Sweet little oaklings are shooting up in the sunshine
available since so many big trees uprooted this winter. 

I marked the spot where I found some chanterelles with a flag of green tape.

Indian Pipes – a chanterelle companion/marker.

One small chanterelle, with requisite slug.

Weird little standing stone beauty spot.

I wonder if there are chanterelles hidden under those downed trees?

Salinger leads the way onward.

I only have three acres, but I am endlessly amazed by the variety
of the terrain. The brook that forms the boundary line at the
back of The Crooked Wood is surrounded by a grassy wetland.
The footing here is treacherous and always puts me in mind
of the Marshes of Morva in Lloyd Alexander's Prydain. Someday,
when I have time, I plan to build some corduroy paths through
this area so I can explore it without losing my boots.

The most open skies in The Crooked Wood.
With signature crookedness, of course.

Crooked fallen tree beauty spot.

Crackerjacks, I think these are called. The berries taste like wintergreen;
I don't like wintergreen. At all. They are very cheerful-looking though. 

In my earlier post about gardening this year, I pondered whether I would have the budget to invest in some nut trees, and shortly after I wrote that post, some friends announced that they had some leftovers from a big order they had placed that they were selling at excellent prices.

I bought six – two hazelnuts, two heartnuts, one Persian Walnut and one Ultra-Northern Pecan. I thought I lost three of them in the late frost that hit in June – all of the leaves on the Walnut and one of the heartnuts turned black and shrivelled up and the pecan tree was just a stick.

Amazingly, they bounced back and all six are currently alive and well.

The Persian Walnut, thriving. 

The Ultra-Northern Pecan. Just a stick for the longest time,
the leaves on this tree still seem small and tentative, almost
as if they are saying "Is it okay to come out yet?" It's 36 degrees
with the humidex, baby, and it's not going to get any warmer
(At least, I hope not).

When I was digging the holes to plant the nut trees – all six of them in one day after a winter of desk work, which was a bit of trial by fire – I described the process as "piling in with a pickaxe to uncover rocks – and air". Quite literally, the was very often NO SOIL in the places where I hoped to put my trees. So, I cleared out the rocks and had to bring buckets of soil and compost to make the holes habitable.

Here is a picture of one of the many trees that uprooted on my land this winter,
illustrating that trees living with their roots in rocks and air are
very likely to tip over if the wind blows hard enough. 

Looking up the hill at the cabin. 

Approaching the back door. In time, this chaotic
tangle of dead wood will be transformed into a garden.
In time. Probably lots and lots of time.

Thanks for coming along with me on this little tour. If you garden or forage, I wish you a bountiful summer! 

Permissions #1: The Driveway Application

(No doubt the first in a long series of posts about seeking permission to do things on my land...)

I submitted my driveway application today.

I had been going to submit it way back in March when I was going through the process of buying my land.

The application needs to be accompanied by a $300 refundable fee. You submit the application, they tell you what you need to do in terms of culvert size and (re)location (if the placement you desire is not okay with them), and after you put the driveway in, they come to see if you have complied and if you have, they give you your $300 back.

(Something in me finds it very funny to think that $300 is the price of compliance around here. Well, now we know.)

Anyway, I got the money order made up in March - and then, I couldn't decide where I wanted the driveway to be. I hemmed and hawed, waiting for all that snow to melt. In the end, I accepted that I had no idea what I was doing and needed more time. I postponed doing the application, waiting until I had a better sense of what I wanted to do.

At some point between then and now, I lost the money order. 

Damn, I do stuff like that all the time. 

I live in chaos - usually busy, often tired, often rushing, and chronically resistant about putting things away (or indeed putting things anywhere other than where they land when they arrive in my life, which is why my car is always such a mess).

So many pieces of (necessary administrative) paper end up buried, misplaced and/or completely lost. 

The last time I saw that first money order, it was in my wallet. I thought I cleaned it out onto my desk in early May, but it seems more likely that I would have taken it out before I went away on a trip in April. Who knows? I have conducted a fairly extensive search, but it has never been seen again.

It definitely didn't help that I lived in three different places in April, in addition to traveling for 10-days. Plus, I burned a number of boxes of papers earlier this summer, clearing out a lot of useless things – but perhaps accidentally, a few very useful things?

Fortunately, the bank is able to put a caution on the money order and retrieve the funds. And all my carelessness cost me was an extra $7.50 to have another money order issued.

Once I got the replacement money order today, I went (almost) straight to the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal with my application and submitted it.

This is me trying to turn over a new leaf – the Do It Right Away leaf.

But more about that later, I think.

For now, I'm just happy to report that I am one step further ahead with my project.

My friends and I cut down more trees on
my land last week. Here is a photo of the
clearing where I think I'm going to put
my Tiny Home.

Car Chaos

Yesterday was a beautiful day. The cold I came down with this week has been dragging on, so while I felt fairly energetic, I figured I better not expose myself to people who hadn't already come in contact with my germs.

Plenty of projects at home to take care of, I thought, and decided to tackle a big one: cleaning out my car.

As I believe I have mentioned before in this blog, I am a messy person. A chaos muppet. When faced with a clean-up job, I procrastinate. I doubt my car has been truly cleaned in a couple of years. Sure, I've loaded some things into it and unloaded others, but emptying it out to the floor mats just doesn't happen very often.

And, when you take into account that I have moved 3 times in the last 14 months, never fully packing or unpacking for any of those moves, you might have some idea of the strange assortment of things that had gotten forgotten, abandoned, eaten, drunken, neglected, stranded and/or ground to dust in my car.

Or do you?

Did I, even?

Not really. And so, to entertain myself during the boring task of cleaning out my car yesterday, I took an inventory of everything that was in there.

I find it a shockingly and hilariously long and varied list – with some of the items too numerous for individual mention graphed in a bar chart for your convenience – as an extra treat if you make it all the way to the end of this post. 

Here, for your entertainment and enlightenment, starting at the trunk and working counter-clockwise, follows a list of the contents of my car on May 29, 2015:

THE TRUNK

• 1 half of a large garbage bag of paper to be recycled (from my move out of my winter rental a month ago)
• A basket with the remnants of my land-warming toast (glasses, sparkling wine wrapper, etc, from May 16)

• 1 cardboard tube from a bottle of 10-year-old Irish whiskey
• 1 unopened box of Kleenex (in the plastic wrapping in which it was sold along with 5 other boxes, many months ago)
• 2 rolls of paper towel in their wrappings
• 2 stone book ends
• My purse
• 1 undergarment, 3 socks and a t-shirt
• 1 bag of used books to be donated to the Waldorf School book sale
• 1 bottle shampoo
• 1 bottle conditioner
• 1 guitar stand
• 1 string of fairy lights
• 2 Eco-friendly reusable produce bags
• 1 uneaten bag of Jelly Tots (which were immediately eaten)
• 1 empty (and punctured) bottle of sunscreen
• 1 container used to pour water into my steam cleaner
• 1 hot pink skate guard
• The plastic cover from a stack of blank DVDs containing my old glasses, hollyhock seeds, a short capo, dead batteries, used stamps for donation to the Lion's Club and other detritus.

• 1 copy of The Pocket Rumi
• Peppermint foot lotion
• 7 bungie cords (assorted lengths)
• 2 packages of beads and one of shepherds hooks to make earrings
• 1 ball of sock yarn
• 1 pair of thread snips ("antique" ones which have been in my family for years)
• 1 defunct stick of deodorant
• A scattering of loose coffee beans
• 1 bag of assorted rug hooking supplies
• The Little River Folk Society's banner
• 1 empty clementine crate
• 1 lighter
• 1 bag containing hand-me-down cat food from someone's finicky cat
• 1 pad of paper
• 1 pink owl barrette 
• 1 random L-shaped piece of transparent acrylic that says "Personal Stamp Exchange"
• 1 drug store bag containing foam ear plugs and a defunct Lipsyl
• 1 obsolete Canadian Tire Advantage card
• Empty packaging from some kind of gift cards
• A ziploc bag full of Chimes Ginger Chews
• The top of a tea tin (the tin, lidless and empty, is in my kitchen)
• 1 roll of green masking tape
• 1 flattened cardboard box
• 1 scrap piece of 3/8 inch plywood
• 1 random bit of wood

• 1 porn DVD (title withheld) that a hilarious friend of mine found lying on the street in Shelburne and left in my car as a hilarious joke (I didn't find it for months – and thought someone completely different had left it in my car – AWKWARD!)
• 1 empty paper potato bag
• 1 piece of driftwood
• 3 copies of my most recent CD, Blackbirds
• 1 wrapper from a ball of mozzarella (What the–?)
• Shattered fragments of mussel shell
• 1 (losing) bingo scratch card
• 2 black plastic bottoms from reusable shopping bags (one of them badly torn)
• 2 pieces of metal and 2 pieces of plastic with no known use

Mystery metal and plastic bits

• 2 toy "baseball" bats - one red, one blue
• 1 eyeglass case, containing my "old" sunglasses
• 1 loonie, 3 quarters, 2 dimes

BACK SEAT – PASSENGER SIDE

• 6 Blue beer bottles
• Several dozen quilting magazines, looking for a new home
• 1 Printer drum for recycling
• 1 Yoga bag containing 2 socks and nothing else
• 2 yoga mats
• 3 origami cranes: yellow, pink, orange 
• 1 bag from The Source containing two batteries for my guitar tuner
• 1 surplus phone I've been meaning to give to friends every time I've seen them over the past three weeks
• 3 pieces of throw rug undermatting
• Another undergarment
• Another t-shirt
• Paperwork from my recent land purchase
• The business card of buddy at the department of transportation
• 1 new package of blue-tack
• 1 dishcloth
• The USB and power cable from the printer I dropped off as e-waste last week
• 1 never-worn scarf that I've been meaning to find a home for
• 1 hoodie
• 1 unopened package of guitar strings
• 2 Hair elastics
• 1 Box of buttons handed down to me by my mom
• 1 eyeglass case (empty)
• Another undergarment
• 1 mitten
• 1 unopened package of what I still think of as "typewriter" paper (100% recycled)
• 1 plastic bag containing a sweater, a skirt, a package of earring backs, a Ziploc bag full of bay leaves, a dish scrubber and some unopened mail from 6 or 8 months ago (I have not idea how these items come to be in the same plastic bag)
• A bag from my last gig containing CDs, a patch cord and some general flotsam
• ANOTHER undergarment
• 1 plastic knife
• 1 broken windshield wiper and the packaging – and assorted unnecessary spare fasteners – from the new wiper
• 1 empty, clean sauerkraut carton (don't ask!)
• 1 copy of Canada's food guide
• 1 empty, flattened arrowroot cookie box
• 1 Tupperware container that belongs to the mom of one of my best friends from high school (which I have been meaning to drop back to her ever since I cleaned it out after enjoying BBQ leftovers late last summer)
• 1 seemingly clean Ziploc container inside a very dirty, sticky plastic bag
• The packaging for a 2 terabyte external drive
• 1 half-empty box of Twinings orange, mango and cinnamon tea
• 1 tuner pedal
• 1 dime

FRONT SEAT – PASSENGER SIDE

• Something that used to be fruit - it looks like it might have once been a pear or apple (I'll spare you the indignity of a photo)
• 1 emergency multi tool in unopenable packaging (the joke is you'd need one of those multi-tools to get it open)
• 1 map of NS
• 1 thank you card written from my mother to my then-boyfriend
• 1 battered William and Kate "collectible" postcard (I have NO idea where this came from)
• 1 unopened box of official Scrabble scorecards
• 1 container of Purel
• 1 tin of ginger mints
• 1 empty envelope
• 1 folding fan
• 2 twonies, 3 quarters, 1 dime, 1 nickel and 2 pennies

FRONT SEAT – DRIVER'S SIDE (in, around and under):

• 1 completely intact Remembrance Day poppy
• 1 Hair elastic
• The decimated remnants of the cardboard floor mat the Rust Check guys put there three months ago 
• 1 pair foam ear plugs in a plastic case
• 1 loonie, at least, I think it's a loonie:



It is a loonie! I shined it up with a little Coca Cola this morning

CENTRE CONSOLE

• 14 CDs and/or cd cases, mostly mismatched
• 1 Stick deodorant
• 1 Package of clasps for making necklaces
• Expired throat lozenges and cold medication
• 1 Empty, and somewhat crushed, paper wrapper from a roll of loonies
• 1 Package of thumbtacks
• 1 Small wooden figurine of an orange cat
• My wallet
• 1 orange sharpie
• What appears to be a solar universal phone charger - I did not remember that I had this and can think of so many times that it would have been useful over the past four years. 
• 1 roll of transparent Scotch tape
• 1 unopened eyeglass cleaning kit
• Defunct air freshener 
• 1 copy of Edgar Allen Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue

BACK SEAT – DRIVER'S SIDE

• 1 Broken hand fan
• 2 Small ziploc containers, one badly cracked (clean)
• 1 Pyrex food container with plastic lid (clean)
• 1 Bag containing an unfinished crochet project
• 1 "Frankenspanker"

• 1 Microphone "pop" screen
• 1 pillowcase 
• 1 small bag containing odd socks
• 1 piece of drycleaner's plastic containing one sock (Hunh?)
• 1 mason jar
• 1 facecloth
• 1 literary journal
• 1 
• 2 empty cardboard boxes which used to contain tea bags
• 1 long lost cookie
• 1 cordless phone
• 1 plastic cap of a USB thumb drive (I think I lost the drive a while ago)
• 1 quarter, 1 dime

EMPTY!

And now my car is basically empty. Here's photographic proof of the (almost entirely) empty trunk:

As long as this post was, there was still a fair bit more stuff that I found in my car. For the sake of efficiency, I have arranged the "too numerous to mention" items for you in a bar chart. 

And too numerous to even put in the bar chart (it would have dwarfed all of the other bars to insignificance) was the large amount of mail, both opened and unopened, mostly damp, puckered and stained. There were dozens and dozens and dozens of envelopes and flyers.

PS: Total amount of money found: $8.32. I plan to use all of that at the car wash. The outside of my car is just as dirty as the inside used to be.

Order or Chaos? A Personal Investigation of Muppet Theory

Over the past month, I've had more than one — hr-hrm — amorous dream about Bert or Ernie. The subconscious mind is a funny, funny thing.

After the second one of these dreams, starring Ernie, I posted about it on Facebook. Because I thought it was odd, interesting and funny and I enjoy posting odd, interesting and funny things on Facebook.

My post prompted my friend Todd (of 500 Kindnesses fame) to comment "You have an internal struggle between your inner chaos muppet and order muppet." I thought this was a pretty astute analysis, and was even more impressed when he backed his theory up with this Slate article: Are you a chaos muppet or an order muppet?

I don't think there is much doubt that my personality is dominated by chaos muppet characteristics. I like jokes (Ernie), cookies (Cookie Monster), music (Animal) and am a devoted feminist (Miss Piggy – or is she an order muppet? It's hard to tell, probably because she is both, as one of the few truly 3-dimensional muppet characters...).

If there were any doubt of my chaotic tendencies, one need only look at the way I live: 

My desk as I write this post – chaos abounds!

Yes, on the outside, chaos is definitely winning. However, I think Todd was quite right about the struggle between my INNER chaos and order muppets. It's not all so cut and dried.

I like orderly things, too. I relish sitting down to hours of digital typesetting – imposing order on messy documents — making columns of numbers line up or making translated sets of documents look comparable in very different writing systems, like Farsi, Arabic, Gujarati, Tamil, English. I love my desk work and can happily do it for hours. (Though I know being able to do it in my pyjamas is a big score for my chaos muppets).

Also on the orderly side, I long to de-clutter my life. Especially living in my tiny home this past summer, I saw how much unnecessary stuff is crowding my life. Paper, paper everywhere! Receipts to be recorded and filed for taxes, always done at the very last moment... I am getting tired of living eternally among lost and missing and unnecessary and unsorted things. I think my inner Bert is on the ascent. My Kermit, my Scooter, my Prairie Dawn.

I only hope that my chaos and order muppets will be able to find a sweet harmony — like Bert and Ernie at the end of this song:

#OrganizationFail!

I moved this past Wednesday.

Yep, I got totally out of the house I've been renting for the past 3 years and more.

It was a tough haul. Moving a month earlier than originally planned meant that I had to throw out all of my great ideas about getting everything sorted and digitized BEFORE the move.

It became a mad scramble to just get everything in boxes and shifted to the new house.

My old place was in a state of absolute chaos. For a couple of months, I've been really busy and I kept saying to myself: "Ah, hell, just throw it on the floor. It will all get sorted and dealt with IN THE MOVE." When people came and bought my furniture, everything went on the floor. "It will all get sorted and dealt with in the MOVE."

Only it didn't. Mostly things got packed up, willy-nilly.

So, on the one hand, I count it as a success, because the old place went from this:

Total chaos

To this:

Total calm

But on the other hand, the new place went from this:

The Tiny House, containing a functional

amount of stuff.

To this:

The Tiny House, containing the stupid
amount of stuff that I currently own.

When my cat, Salinger, came home for the first time after the boxes arrived, he was shocked and obviously appalled. He ran back outside at the first opportunity and didn't come back for 24 hours (until he was really hungry). I kind of feel like doing the same thing myself.

But it's my stuff. And I'm responsible for it.

Sigh. Time to start unpacking, sorting and seriously decumulating (with thanks to my friend Shelley for that word, which I did not know existed!).

Also, I need more built-in storage.