heart cockles

It has been very hot work gardening these past few weeks and I have been working on my own garden on the weekends and all last week I was prepping for a class I taught yesterday (30 plants, 3 hours, 11 Master Gardeners, 2 garden tours) and I AM EXHAUSTED. So this morning, I lay in until 9am. It was bliss. When I got up I thought I'd just make myself a coffee and some toast. Then is all went pear-shaped. I had to finish putting away yesterday's dishes (a couple of day's worth) to get to the coffee grinder, then I found myself doing up last night's dishes. I stopped partway through to grind the coffee and halfway through the grind I realized that it was our decaf that has been lurking about in the bottom of the coffee crock for ah-ges. So I interrupted the grind tried to dump the unground back into the bag. Mistake. Somehow I created a dusting of ground coffee and partial bits of beans everywhere, but mostly on the floor and the newly cleaned dishes. And then I thought, since there is so little decaf left, I may as well grind it all and put the extra in the bag and make a pot of it for me anyway. So, I dumped the beans back into the grinder and continued cleaning. The grinder started to make a really odd sound. The coffee still seemed to be grinding, so I thought maybe it had hit a hard bean. When it finished and I looked at the grinder I realized that a piece of the plastic from the base had torn off and was being ground with the beans. Yikes. I made the mistake of turning the grinder over. Coffee everywhere, again. In my cleaning up, I decided I had better clean the hopper and the rest of the grinder too. And the shoot. There is alot of coffee that gets clogged in a shoot. Coffee everywhere, again. Sigh. Anyway, the dishes are now done, the counters are wiped and the water is on the boil. Now onto breakfast. No bread. Just one old hotdog bun left over from last week's youth group event. Decaf coffee with ground plastic and a stale hotdog bun. One and a half hours later. And, I actually got up at 8, but went back to bed again. Can you start a day a third time?

It occurred to me just now, as I scraped the last bit of honey out of the jar, that I have lots of bottles and jars with little bits in them. I have jars of hand cream, some which go back at least 3 years. There are bottles of body lotion, some from Boots which must be 5 or 6 years old. I have chocolate that is a couple of years old, and some that I have had when we moved from Scotland in 2000. There is a tin of Kendal Mint Cake that goes back to at least 1997. And there is some crazy pasta from when I worked at Habitat in 1998. And so on. All these things have about one portion left, which I just cannot bring myself to use up, it just seems so final. However back to the honey, it was a gift from my friend, Niki, and was lovely and I felt quite sad to finish it off. Tomorrow morning, I think I will pour my breakfast cuppa tea into the jar and get the last bits of honey goodness. Then the empty jar will go into a place of honour. But behind it, is a jar of Greek Pine honey from Tesco that I bought in 2006 and it has the barest of scrapings in it. It will be for a very special day.   

A trip to Banff, again, at the end of April. C had a conference and I had 2 designs to work on, and prep for a course I substitute taught, so I was chained to my table in the room. We did get out for two short walks down the Bow River. And on the way back to the Calgary airport, we stopped at Lake Minnewanka for a wee explore and a picnic lunch.

Spring is well and truly over with our recent heat wave, but it bears repeating. I picked up a new client this year and she has a fabby garden tucked into the woods. It is not nicey-nice toodle-ly gardening. It is a little rougher than that and I tend to use the big tools. One day I found a treasure and, unfortunately in this case, the client and I have the same taste and she kept it. I would have loved to have the skull to hang in my office.

I found some photos that I had meant to post and they go back to Easter. C had me help out with putting flowers on a cross whilst the pancake breakfast was being et, and I realized that I must be a true gardener since I noted, that even dressed up, I have my secateurs with me. We had Easter dinner with my folks on my mum's new china. She found it in the great secondhand shop just across the street from our new house and I convinced her to purchase it. If I remember correctly, it was 8 dinner plates, 8 side plates, 8 bowls, 8 fruit nappies, 4 teacups and 6ish? saucers, serving plate, serving bowl and cream/sugar. All for $30. I think there might have been a few more pieces, but I can't quite remember. Never mind, isn't it lovely?

Today I heard on the radio a story about the great North American iconic food, the hamburger. Apparently, it is being claimed back from the recess of the over-processed and bland commercial chains. Well, anyone who has a BBQ know that. Anyway, what really interested me was a chef who claimed that if he gave people a pickle with ketchup and mustard (not Dijon, just yellow hot dog mustard) on it, they declared that it tasted just like a MacDonald's cheeseburger. So his thought was that there is no taste in the bun (cardboard) and the meat (fatty cardboard) and that he could do better than that.

Wow. Gardening season is in full swing. I had forgotten how busy this time of year can be. (And, last weekend I chose to substitute teach on Saturday.) This will be a month of 12 hour days 6 days of the week. So today, my only day off, I am at the desk compiling my 4th (of 5) plant list to fax to the nursery and a revised estimate and a completely new estimate for design clients. However, this is not the point of this post.

I am digging colour today. C brought me a sweet bouquet of orange flowers in a blue vase this morning, and I had dark brown toast with rhubarb jam (a lovely warm russet colour) on my Royal Staffordshire plate with its brown/terra cotta flowers and coffee (with cream) in my robin's egg blue mug. And I am wearing my walnut brown capris, my chocolate brown 50's style sweater and a black linen blouse that I bought at Mark's and Spencer over 10 years ago. Who knew that there was so much delight in brown?

This is your only warning. The last two days I have been working my buddy on a weeding/planting and lawn reno project. It is on a property that is a holiday place for a couple from Texas and in the early spring T found 2 dead deer, then he found another just recently. One is right in the garden bed we were working on and the smell was quite bad, but not as bad as it had been apparently. Poor T. It looks like the blue foamy insulation at the foundation base had been nibbled at and I think that they were so hungry during our snow periods that they tried that, it got stuck in their system and they died of malnutrition. Or it poisoned them. It doesn't look like they were killed by an animal and two of the deer were right up against the house foundations. Anyway, the decay process is quite fascinating. As you can see, there is even a crop of fungus that has sprung up near the deer. I think T will take the skull, but if he doesn't want it, I would take it in a blink. The people are not back to the house until July. Oh, and we got rained out before we finished up the day today. I think I was the wettest I have ever been. And grading lawn blend soil (lots of sand) is no walk in the park. We 'barrowed and spread and graded 8 yds. Like I said, gardening is not for the faint of heart.