Breakthrough #2 – rain and growth

It was so great to finish up the house painting last week because we could finally turn our attention to our art and to the garden.

June 14th and later on July 14th. Wow!

The drought-like conditions were getting pretty scary around here. When you are on well water, as are most people in and around Bear River, the finiteness of the supply is always on your mind and I think of it everytime I turn on the tap. Our well is drilled and it has ‘lots of water’, but I can’t actually see into it because it’s buried and it’s capped. How much is ‘lots’ of water anyway? The whole thing is a mystery to a city girl like me…all I know is that I don’t want the adventure of no water. So, I’m very frugal with watering the garden. We have a rain barrel and I really, really get it now why saving rainwater is so useful. That rain barrel starts overflowing not long after the rains come. I use it to fill my watering can inbetween the rain, but I could use much more. Some people in Bear River have quite large holders for water and have designed the house roof to collect water.

zucchini, squash, cucumber, potatoes, runner beans

The soil here is very loamy, but the hot sun bakes the ground and when I scratched the garden surface the day after the rain, I found a top 1″ layer of dry soil followed by damp soil. This is good. Previously, after my tentative watering, I found the opposite. What I thought was a thorough watering was only dampening the top 1/2″ of the soil. Deeper the soil was dry and warm. I don’t know how farmers can stand the uncertainty of the weather and the fickleness of it!

tomatoes

The other wonderful report I have is that the ticks seem to be gone!! This heat is too much for them (me too, sometimes) and they have retreated into the earth. I still found one on Fluffy a couple of days ago, but she’s been skulking in the tall grasses, catching field mice and, apparently, the last-stand tick.

wonderful, fragrant dillweed

I can’t tell you how LIBERATING it is to walk outside without lots of bug prevention stuff on and to have a renewed feeling of confidence about walking around! I pulled weeds for hours yesterday without a bug jacket on. Of course what I’m not telling you is that now there are deer flies and mosquitoes vying for your flesh, but they are familiar.

Gardening – the Reality Bites

A year ago I was sitting behind my computer in my air-conditioned office in Toronto. I had a picture of a Bear River landscape on my screensaver and the Bear River Working Artists studio tour brochure attached to the side of the filing cabinet. I used to gaze of out the window and instead of seeing the brick wall, I would see myself walking through my beautiful garden while a breeze lifted the scent of flowers my way. I would reach down and pick a red, ripe organic tomato for my 100 mile lunch.

The fantasy did not include wearing a bug jacket, getting used to wearing a black mesh screen in front of my face, or drinking water through the mesh. You see, if you take off the hood to have a drink, guaranteed when you zip that hood back on, you will have trapped a couple of black flies.

If you go inside to drink the water, you have to do a tick check first so the darlings don’t hide in the house waiting to start exploring when you’re in bed.

mechanics’ gloves ’cause they have lonnnnnng cuffs

The fantasy also didn’t include profuse sweating causing dripping down my face. This is due to the bug resistant outfit that includes socks that I pull over my pants (to keep out ticks), rubber boots (for that authentic gardener look), gardening gloves (to keep away ticks, black flies and now mosquitoes), head gear (which includes a warm, wide brimmed hat to keep the mesh from sticking to the sweat on my face), and long pants.

my designer Lee Valley shovel bought to celebrate the move

I was sitting on the porch steps, drinking my water through the mesh, just taking a break from weeding by transplanting some seedlings. I wondered when it got normal for me to wear a soaked-through shirt, with dripping face and wet hands and feet. I felt quite proud of myself that I hadn’t even noticed what a disgusting state I’d gotten myself into.

Well there is no point in going on and on about it. I have the satisfaction of living the dream of creating my own Garden of Eden. The trouble is that stuff is growing at an alarmingly slow rate. Well, the plants that is, not the insect life.

I know that it’s wrong to compare, but here is a photo of my garden results and a neighbour’s. You can guess which is which.

Mystery Garden A:

Mystery Garden B:

I am determined not to let myself be consumed with garden envy, but just in case I might veer into that direction, I went out and bought myself some instant results.

Ticks in Bear River – chapter 2

We are back in Bear River and it feels great to be here! a month has gone by and this time, everything is green, birds are singing, and the tick counts are in the millions.

I have to talk about ticks again because I’m slightly obsessed and fascinated, all at the same time.

You may recall that we had encountered dog ticks just over a month ago. It was a fairly hysterical meeting as far as I was concerned and I could have sworn that I put 3 of them in a sealed jar to get identified by friends. No use getting hysterical over the wrong insect. (although my internet sleuthing tells me that like other 8 legged critters with fewer body segments, they technically aren’t insects).

Well, that jar had remained closed for all this time, and guess what? There are only 2 now and one of them is STILL ALIVE. That’s right, ONE MONTH LATER. So, in the interests of science I filled the jar with water and now, 3 days later, the live one is submerged, swimming, and clinging (eating?) the dead one. It is all so gross, but you can see my fascination. Well who wouldn’t be fascinated with something that is so darned prolific and that can suck blood like a vampire.

We have moved to this idyllic little house in the country and when I look out the window I see vistas of fields, woods, blue sky and probably by my reckoning, one million ticks in the grass, waiting for me to come out and play.

Our landlady Linda feels badly about the ticks and if it’s any consolation, she mentioned today that she hears that the tick count is particularly high this year. Linda is the type of person who will take on a project or an outcome and do it effectively and efficiently, so when I found out that even Linda couldn’t banish the ticks, I knew it was time to take even more serious measures. Surely someone could save me from the ticks? Folklore has it that ticks, like me, are snobs about cut lawns and much prefer tall waving grasses and meadows and natural looking surroundings. Which is one of the reasons we moved to Bear RIver in the first place–for that authentic country look. But hey, if I have to shave my head for the next 6 weeks in order to be able to feel Ok about going outside, so be it.

So, for piece of mind and to solve the problem, we called up Steve to come and please mow the grass, as  he has done for Linda in the past, only this time, please double or even triple the lawn area.

Steve shows up with a riding lawn-mover, a weed whipper, and bare arms. He smiles and tells me that mowing the lawn won’t solve the problem, as we might be living in a tick ‘hot-spot’ and these ‘hot-spots’ move around all the time. Steve is unimpressed with ticks and while Larry and I are suited up like we’re handling hazardous waste, Steve wades into the high grass without even tucking his pants into his socks.

He says that ticks are part of the total lifestyle here and there is no way around it….you have to come to accept them and work around it.  He spends a good deal of time assuring me that ticks will crawl on you for 2 days before they latch on. He says that he’d gladly live with double the tick levels if only there were no blackflies. (Which are out now too!) He even showed us how to burn the ones you pick off yourself, which is why there is a burning candle in this photo:

Seeing Steve out there in his beach wear gave me lots of confidence that I could spend the day gardening with my haz-mat suit on and some stategic squirts of DEET.

Thanks to Steve’s casual acceptance of these critters and his laisse faire attitude, Larry and I spent over 7 hours outside today gardening.  We o-so-carefully checked each other over when we came in from gardening and picked off a dozen of them between us and a few off the cat..

But while writing this, 4 hours later, I found a tick under my shirt, crawling on my skin like a wind-up toy. It’s shaken my confidence again and I’m wondering if Steve does phone counselling. The good news is that he said they only last 3 months. I was too afraid to ask when the 3 months ends.

Nobody really tells you what childbirth will feel like and nobody really tells you about ticks in Nova Scotia either. Like Steve says, it’s just part of life.