Mid-Summer Grass

Rain coming

Rain at last!  Not just a passing thunderstorm thudding down on my poor pea plants but a gentle English rain falling all night and followed by a still, damp day.  On Sunday we'd been sitting around trying to remember when it had last rained - nobody could.  So let's hope this helps the farmers who are having to sell off stock cheaply because there is no grass to feed them.  I cut the hay on my small fields with a neighbor, with me driving the mower and the raker but not the baler - too complicated and long for me.  We got 90-100 bales which Bart reckons is about half  what he usually gets, the grass is so dry.  We sold it to a local horse farmer who uses his teams of Belgian crosses to haul wood out of his bush during the winter.

Bart bales the hay...

... but not many this year

      This weather has given me new respect for grass, not just the hoped-for ability of my poor lawn to recover (how you Brits would laugh at my brittle, sandy wasteland) but at the beauty and variety of the grasses in my vegetable plot.  

Only Chicory survives in my 'lawn'

There's the Timothy grass, planted with clover by my predecessor for his horse, with its tight head and beautiful dark rose stalks, a quiet pale grass which must have been grown for golf courses as it sets off parallel to the ground putting out secondary roots as it goes and a strange, heavily tasseled grass that may have been the precursor for maize.  The wild oats sway delicately.  There were swaths of delicate bronze grass in the field and, in the spring, my all time favorite - little blue-eyed grass, an adorable shy thing with sea-green leaves and purple flowers with yellow centers. 

Timothy grass...

... maize-like grass

and the beautiful blue-eyed grass

      My soil is a pitifully thin sandy dust, with stones, so weeding is easy.  The only things that have done well so far are beans, squash, cilantro and zucchini but I'm hoping this rain will put new heart into the garden.  I've planted cucumber, woad, dill, carrots, peanuts, fennel, cantaloupe (in the greenhouse), black-eyed susan, forget-me-nots, green, acorn and spaghetti squash, cinderella pumpkin, tomatoes - cuban, broad ripple, black krim and tom thumb, marigolds, arugula, cat nip, perennial sweet pea, spinach, sunflowers, watermelon and three different kinds of corn.  Of most of them there is no sign. 

Bee buries itself in squash flower...

so much pollen, see on leaf below flower

     

      My corn is up but no cobs showing and the peanuts are looking good but I understand that you have to beat the raccoons to them.  I've lost the marigolds to who knows what.  Last evening I was sitting in the garden ogling a seed guide for next year - yes, the bugs have gone sufficiently to let me do that for the moment - and stood up when it was too dark to read.  Timmy was frozen in hunting position on the picnic table so I followed his eye-line to a white-tailed deer eating my sweet potatoes.  I pointed out to her that I'd bought those plants, I'd planted them, admired them, watered them and didn't think she had any right to them - so go!  Without hurry she turned and leapt the fences with a grace befitting a Grand National runner.  Good thing, or I'd have set Timmy on her.

Ready for the hunt...

...so put the sweet potato down!

     I've divided up the garden - which is far too huge for me in my first year - into little plots roughly 4m square, 40 of them taking about a third of the tilled space.  The top soil is only 6 cm deep so by banking up the beds I hope to double it and, using the weeds as mulch, keep the damp in.  The walks between the beds are composed of weeds so it looks like a turtle shell with the bare plates being the beds and the lush joints the weeds.  Long learning curve.  Lots of people have box beds for their vegetables but it was too much for this spring.  Maybe I'll build some over the winter.  In the meantime compost bins must be built and negotiations with the local horse owners increased.

Lush paths!

Along with tractor mending and garden bed building, I've got another wasp nest to empty.  A neighbor says that WD-40 shot in at night gets rid of them so I'll suit up and try the ones in my barn this evening.  There's a big door at the back, near the stable, which I don't often open but,  wanting to put a few bales in there, I slid it quickly across only to find myself in a haze of wasps.  The stings really hurt for a few minutes and then itch madly for about two days - they'll have to go but I'll leave the nest since I believe that deters others?  I finally did get Jesus down from the cross at the front of the property despite his guardian wasps - he was very heavy in a glass box.  I put him in my barn, aware that if he disappeared within three days I would have some serious reconsidering to do.   However, my French-Ontario neighbor has asked for him for her driveway entrance so I was saved any theological deliberations.  I'd already given her my statues of little girls in bonnets sitting on benches, my baskets of solar powered flowers, that the previous owners had left and now I will see Jesus nailed to a tree every time I leave home.   Still, I'm glad he found a welcome.

The resorting to WD-40, rather than some lethal insecticide, was precipitated by a wasted journey to my local hardware store only to find it had closed 15 minutes earlier.  This was very annoying; it's a twenty minute drive on back roads to Combermere - which is my nearest metropolis with a hardware store, general store, laundromat and boat launch so to do any real shopping I have to drive to Barry's Bay, twenty minutes in the other direction.  I knew the hardware store in B's Bay was still open (it was 15:00hrs on a Saturday - does that strike you as a responsible hour to close a hardware store?) but I wasn't going to spend ?? on gas and another hour driving around after poison, so set off for home.  But I took a different route to visit the restored pioneer church at Rockingham, now just the deserted church, a store converted to a house and an old farm - but once a thriving community of Brits who arrived in the 19th century to carve out a new life from the bush.  

Interior of Rockingham Church

Exterior of Rockingham Church

Children's headstones, with lambs

The church is lovely, as plain as could be, with a tiny organ, lectern and pulpit - I'm so glad that hard working people saved it from decay.  So many of the one-roomed school houses, tiny churches and log barns have gone or are disappearing.  The entire, neglected history of this area after the arrival of Europeans is there to be found by scratching your nail across the surface of the land but it is so biodegradable that it will disappear in a decade if action is not taken.  My own land is criss-crossed by stone fences built as the land was cleared but they are delicate and easily destroyed, being just piles of stones rather than walls.  They represent days and of back-breaking labour, sweat in the hot sun digging stones from the fields, labour of horses pulling the flat beds across the fields, hopes of rich yields of wheat in a new land.  And people are selling them off for pretty stones in the city!  Round here people still live close to the bone and can't believe that gardeners will pay by the pound for the rocks they hate.  But these fences are as archaeologically precious as medieval plough marks in England; they are the skeleton of struggle in a land that doesn't pay to be farmed.

       We're all focused on the Olympic Games, attention turning east to follow the fortunes of young athletes agog with excitement in London.  It's great to see the old city looking so good.  I'll miss the opening ceremony as I'm going to help out a friend on Friday with her junk (ahem, antique) shop in Maynooth - rather surprisingly the gay capital of our area.  It's a lively little town about 40 minutes away and she likes painting en plein air so I look after her shop while she paddles round lakes looking for painterly scenes.  It's quite good fun with all the visiting tourists and I enjoy the little town with its farmer's market, pottery, intriguingly complete general store and excellent cafe with GOOD COFFEE.  I emphasize this as there are only two places within 150kms serving good coffee - the other being 'Rural Roots' in Bancroft.  You don't know how important sitting in a cafe with good coffee is until it disappears - savor your Starbucks!

It's all very well sitting here chatting to you but there are pressing things to do - I must check if the toad who hides from the heat in the old stump is making the most of this rain,  there are baby flycatchers to check up on in their nest under the eaves of the chapel (Go, flycatchers, Go) and I want to take a water spray to my neighbor.  She's found that spraying your marigolds with a mild mix of Tabasco and water gets rid of the bugs and I've found a hand-held pressure spray for her.  You can see that my day is filled with urgent tasks and I therefore have good reasons for not writing to you more frequently.  Not.  Sorry for my bad correspondence but I think of you often.  And miss you.  I hope the sun shines for the Olympics and that they are a great success, both to your team and ours!  Most of all my they be fair and friendly.

Toad (centre front) hiding in old stump

Take care and we'll talk again soon.

Lots of love.

(p.s. the American spelling, which still jars a little, is because it's not my computer)