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| Kaffir lime and bay trees - indoor plants; Deb Marshall photo |
Yes, it snowed two nights ago.
Everyone around us got white cover, but amazing – we didn’t.
For once, being in the snowbelt worked in our favor. Those weather gods have
strange senses of humour.
I’d like to report that the seeds I’ve planted over the past
two weeks – all things that like cool soil, like peas and fava beans and
lettuce and parsley root and beets and carrots – are up and flourishing, but
the truth is that the only thing I’ve seen any sight of is the very first
sprout leaves of some lettuce. The onions and leeks are doing ok – those go in
as very small plants – but everything else? Might have been eaten by chipmunks
or are mouldering under wet soil or have washed away in all the rain and I’ll
find them at the far end of the back forty jumbled together sometime in August.
The peach trees arrived and got planted; I like to think
that all this rain is good for them. The raspberries also arrived and are
planted, in kinda mud, but they’re showing signs of leaf buds so it may be ok
in the end. The asparagus crowns got planted in the rain; and then someone dug up several of them and
tossed them onto the ground – which probably didn’t hurt them because there’s
been almost no sun and it’s wet, so they didn’t dry out – so I planted them
again, in the wind and the rain again, two days later. The rogue asparagus that has lived in
a corner of one of my raised beds for several years has produced 4 thick stalks: I picked two and
ate them with great relish. It may be the only fresh vegetable we get this year.
Catmandoo has decided that two of the new beds I made this
spring are just giant litter boxes I constructed for his magnificent Self, and since it’s too
cold and too wet to plant anything I haven’t already tried planting, I haven’t
disabused him of the idea yet. I spend my free time making more new beds and
paths – I’m on my second pallet of pavers and bricks. Catman has decided I’ve
made the paths for him, walking on them keeps his tootsies dryer than strolling
through the grass, which likes this stupid weather and is growing nicely.
The happy news is that I heard and got a glimpse of Buzzy
Boy on Monday, so I know he survived the winter and made it back here to his
hummingbird-feeder domain. I also saw a lone bumblebee before the rain set in
for real on Monday, wandering aimlessly around the onions and garlic, hoping to
find a flower.
All that’s in my garden and flowering right now are a few
late jonquils, a handful of tulips, and some really tiny flowers on some
perennials I planted last summer and have no idea what they are, now. One’s a
heart-leaved something-or-other (tiny pink flowers) and another is a spreading
happy green low thing (tiny blue flowers), and there’s a short hangey-down yellow
and purple spotted bell-like flower that makes me madly happy to look at, but I
have no idea what it is. When I look at my garden map where, in theory, I
recorded all the perennial things I planted last year, it says they’re balloon
flower, but they’re not like any balloon flower I’ve ever seen before. I think
I must have been sniffing too much catnip when I made that map!
For the next two weeks I’m on plant-the-garden vacation. I
take two weeks because when I take only one, it’s guaranteed to rain the entire
week. If I take two, there are usually at least 4 or 5 dry days. Not sure about
this year, though. There was another year when it rained two weeks straight –
the year The Husband and a friend were trying to re-roof our house – but at least
it was warm. 36-degree nights are not warm.
I don’t even have photos of the interesting un-named plants because it’s been raining too hard to bring the camera outside!
If it rains for the next two weeks, maybe we’ll get to
Montreal for a day, where it will also likely be raining. But there, at least,
it will be raining in French.
Merde, il
pleut encore! sounds so much better than the English equivalent…
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