Benign Neglect

The last time I made banana muffins I neglected to clean the muffin pans out (nice vintage Ecko ones from Value Village). I don't like having to peel a paper off my muffins so the pans had a few crumbs stuck to them. Once that hardened, I decided to give them a good (read: too long) soak. All that did was rust them up and leave stains on my sink. So I cleaned them up a bit, then decided to throw them out. Then I decided to offer them back to Value Village. Then I decided to list them on a free-for-the-taking site like declutterize or ReUseIt or freecycle. Then I decided to clean them with steel wool and extra-fine wet-dry sandpaper from Lee Valley. They still have a few stains on them, but they are in pretty good shape now. Remind me to write a note to myself to buy a few over-ripe bananas. And maybe some paper muffin cups, though I abhor the things.

There are few things that don't suffer from benign neglect -- dental health; my back yard; the vegetable crisper contents. In the garden, lilacs much prefer a sunny location over fertilization to bloom in the spring, and morning glory and nasturtium much prefer a poor soil, otherwise there's lots of foliage and few blooms.

And cat litter boxes.

I've got four of the poopy things. Cats, that is. Pet sites all recommend one litter box per cat plus one extra. I only have four boxes, but one of them is four feet long and two feet wide (it's an under-the-bed plastic storage box that didn't fit under the bed when I got it home). I was mortified when my attached neighbour asked me over. She was quite kind: asking me how I was doing, about the job hunt, and so on. Then she mentioned that the litter box smell was coming through our common basement wall into their upstairs. Augh! I immediately dumped and replaced the litter, after washing out the boxes with washing soda and sprinkling baking soda in the bottoms. I washed the floors with a liquid that's supposed to deodorize cat-smelling areas, and sprayed Febreze around.

Strangely, I suffer (or not) from life-long anosmia -- no sense of smell. So that makes benign neglect all that much easier for me.

And leave a comment if you want my very low-fat, no-sugar banana loaf recipe!

Is it necessary to water during a summer drought?

We haven't had a drought in Toronto this summer (yet). In previous years the August heat and funny weather can cause lawns to go yellow. But grass is resilient and it will recover quickly after one good rain, but home owners still use drinking water from the tap to keep it green.

Toronto.ca provides a LOT of information on lawns, including discouraging them. I say, "Nature abhors a lawn" (you heard it here first). I say, "Grass is one plant." Organic farmers discourage monoculture. A "nice" lawn needs pesticide and fertilizer. The City of Toronto will not pick up grass clippings, unless you hide them at the bottom of a yard waste bag under other weed and clippings.

Two years ago I had my back downspout disconnected. Incompetent workers created more issues with the roof (see http://diabetes-cats.blogspot.com/2009/03/this-has-been-day.html) than they helped, and I've had my eaves troughs and downspouts replaced and the rain barrel moved. My front yard is mostly xeriscaped (drought-loving summer plants).

What I should really do is take out the roses. I have two in the front. One is in a really bad place that doesn't get enough water, though it's survived, blooms only once in the late spring, and then gets eaten by bugs. I don't water or fertilize it. The other is a similar old-fashioned plant that I bought a few years ago. Now I love roses (mine are magenta). But I don't like maintenance.

My brother's blueberries

My bro has a nice big property in a small town -- two-bedroom house with a nice-sized deck and a patio, separate garage with workshop, a storage shed for his lawn tractor and other equipment, and a stocked trout pond, with a small covered bridge he built over the creek that feeds it. He loves to cut down old trees and plant new ones. And he bought some blueberry bushes this spring that have produced some nice big juicy berries, some of which he brought when he visited last week.

I've planted blueberry bushes before, but they didn't take. Besides, I like things I can ignore that will still produce. When I got my big silver maple cut down I lost all the boysenberries.

Canadian blueberries are on special at a few places right now. The cultivated ones are huge and sweet. I should buy a few more and freeze them. Wild blueberries grow low to the ground and are a trial to gather (not to mention that black bears like them too), though they have way more of the valuable anthocyanins and antioxidants, and cost more in stores. One year at camp, my mother picked enough to make 36 500ml jars of wild blueberry jam. That's back-breaking work, and goes to show you how bored she was while my dad worked as Arts & Crafts director.

I bought 9 dry pints of BC blueberries today and am in the process of freezing them for the fall and winter -- they're good on hot cereal!

The Garden "During" File

This is the mess in the back. The weeds were over a foot high before my Big Bro took his gas-powered weed trimmer to it. The electric lawnmower was sort of incorporated in the weeds...but it's worked before after spending the winter outside.



Some of the raspberry canes are up to eight feet tall. They bear fruit the size of the tip of my thumb well into the fall. They aren't doing as well this year due to the rain and cooler weather; last year, even after the 'coons got at them (I could tell by the visible seeds in the poops they dropped on my lawn), I still got enough fruit to make 25 jars of jam.

I plan on building a raised bed for strawberries (I'd like to find a bale of straw somewhere), and moving the asparagus to a sunny location, where I'll also be reminded to fertilize and mulch. I also have rhubarb that I moved and separated this spring.

And the gooseberries are now in a sunny spot, but they didn't like being moved this year and didn't blossom, though they have survived pretty well. I'll have to figure out how far back to prune them.

Family visit and "garden" update

My older brother came to visit on Sunday for a few days. He likes to invite himself; I arrange vacation time; he doesn't show up (well, he's done it twice: once because "I don't feel too good" and once because his car wasn't feeling too good). This time he made it! We sat on the porch and drank beer on Sunday and had pizza for dinner. We ate Thai food on Monday (not much open on the civic holiday). Then we drank our dinner on Tuesday and slept early. Wednesday we had a lovely grilled steak with home-made cole slaw and potato salad. I made a loaf of Jim Lahey's No-Knead Bread with whole wheat flour and oat bran, and we had that with balsamic vinegar and olive oil -- yum.

And he's such a helpful person! He helped me move to this house in 1999, and we exchange items (for example, my mother's portable dishwasher went from Waterloo, QC to Granby to Toronto to Stanstead, and an area rug of mine made a similar trip). My back yard is in shocking condition. The lawnmower was decomposing into the weeds, the raspberry canes are taking over in the back, I left nice clay/ceramic pots out that crumbled in the cold and ice, and I had the biggest dandelions and broad leaf weeds I've ever seen. But he brought his gas-powered weed trimmer and tackled the worst of the mess for me.

I don't have grass any more, since I let a spot of yarrow (mine is pink) take over. I still have a few strawberry plants from Manitoulin Island that are growing in the shade of the raspberry canes, and I have some lumber, so I'll be making a small (4'x4') raised bed to move them to. I'm using corner bead (cheap!) to attach some 1x6 pine planks that came from the old deck I demolished (I hate to throw stuff away -- that was in 2000, I think!).


Two years ago I had two of these Lee Valley grow bins with the strawberries coming out of every hole, and I sold or gave away about 50 more plants. But I neglected to water the bins and I got exactly one strawberry (click the image to have a look: centre left), and the plants were gone the next year...


And my asparagus did NOT get its mulching and fertilizing in the last couple of years, though the plants are mature enough to provide several meals if I treat them properly. I've used it in quiche with home-grown tomatoes and basil. They're also shaded by canes, so I'll attempt to move them too.

Naturally I didn't take a Garden: Before picture. Maybe I'll post a During one.

Dipladenia -- found!

I've decided to never walk past a display of Dipladenia (if that's what these are) without at least checking out the prices. These are a bit hard to grow, let alone find in a garden centre; in fact, I've only ever found them in the little fruit-vegetable-flower markets that thrive on Toronto's Danforth Avenue. One of the things I find appealing is that when the flower buds start to unfurl they're white or nearly so, and then the colours start to brighten up.

It's amazing what you can buy around here. (Some year I'm going to buy a fig tree---when they're on sale they usually come with a few fruit already on them. I understand that figs are finicky and require much coddling through cold weather.)

Anyways, I found these two specimens the other day, $4.99 each. They need repotting, and I'm nearly ready to do that (just have to mix a bit of coir in the potting soil).

AUGUST 4/09 UPDATE: The Dips have been repotted and they seem to be quite happy in their biodegradable ("green") pots from http://www.greenpots.com/ (but mine are black, for some reason...).

They are tender perennials, which means that I will have to bring them in in the fall before the frost starts. The other issue with these lovelies is that there's not much definitive info on over-wintering and then getting them to bloom again. These are Grown in Canada, by the way.

A 55th wedding anniversary

My mom and dad got married on this date in 1954. He was 31 and she was 22 when they married, apparently in a bit of a rush (no, she wasn't pregnant; Douglas was born on July 12, 1955).

My dad died very suddenly in 1986 at 63 years of age, of a heart attack, at home. He'd been retired for four years (after 36 years of teaching), and was involved in the Masonic temple, raising funds for a teachers' retirement home, travelling with Mom, bee-keeping and gardening at their huge rural property, setting up his work shop, and volunteering as a steward for the United Church. His own father had died of heart disease at age 59, just before he and my mom met at the school where they both worked.

Dad's first teaching job was at the Knowlton Academy in Quebec. He bought his first car without knowing how to drive. (He figured it out, though -- he was my first driving teacher, on an Austin Mini 4-speed, and he WAS a teacher at heart. I learned how to steer from him, which is the next best thing to know about driving, after how to stop.)

Mom's first year of teaching was in Buckingham, Quebec -- when she was 18! She graduated from high school in Aylmer, Quebec, then did an additional year in Ottawa, Ontario, to get "qualified" to teach. The next year she went to MacDonald College (at McGill University in Montreal) to get her teaching diploma. After her diploma her next job was in Waterloo, Quebec.

Teachers made pitiful wages in those days. Most teaching couples of my folks' acquaintance worked summer jobs. My Grade 5 teacher worked on her husband's dairy farm all year round. My father worked as the Arts & Crafts director at a boys' camp in the Quebec Laurentians for several years (including the summer I learned to walk; my brothers and I went to kids' camp in later years, mostly learning to develop a thick skin, along with canoeing and swimming); or Dad took extension and summer courses (Industrial Arts, Biology, History) in New Brunswick (we spent the summer camping in a tent), Montreal (MacDonald College; married couples' housing), and New York state (Oswego; camping again).

My mom went back to teaching full time when my dad entered university to get his BA in 1966 or so (anyway, he graduated in 1967; in 1979 I was the next BA in the family). A few years after he finished she studied for her Special Ed. diploma -- and got it, with excellent marks -- and she then taught full time again (we kids were mostly grown) until she retired in early 1988. (When she agreed to do some supply teaching a year or so later, she quit early: Sunday nights were stressful because of all she had to do to prepare for teaching on the Monday!)

I think Dad did a year full-time at Bishop's University (driving out to class from home early every morning, a one-hour trip), and Mom was the bread-winner. He needed at least a BA to continue teaching high school in Quebec. I remember he worked nights for a summer at a glass plant in town (he'd worked at the Rolls Royce engine plant in Montreal during WWII before he got his teaching certificate). We had Carnation Instant Milk, spaghetti, ground beef, oatmeal, and fresh produce (green beans, carrots, lettuce, chard, tomatoes) from the garden in the summer. I think the mortgage on the house they bought in early 1963 was about $90 a month.

So I'm recalling those years as I sit at the computer wondering how to get by on my EI (when it actually starts), without any fresh food from my property, or valuable/portable skills in a huge city where I have many contacts but no one (that I've contacted) to put me in a job. Feeling sorry for myself!