Lavender Harvest!

Today I started cutting the lavender in the backyard. I have five or six "spots" where lavender has either been panted or has spread itself, and it's a bumper crop this year. I cut it back to the tops of the leaves, to keep it from getting too leggy, when the buds are just opening, and I spread it on cookie sheets all over the dining room table to dry.

Once dry, the flowers are crumbled by hand off the stems and put in mason jars for use in baking or drawer sachets. Did you know that if your lavender sachet has stopped smelling, all you have to do is crush it around a little with your fingers, and the scent will be revived? They can last for years, if kept dry.

I like to add crushed flowers to sugar cookies, a very Victorian kind of flavour, but my husband thinks they taste like soap. That's fine -- all the more for me!

Be sure to leave a lot of the flowers for the bees. I've seen very few bees this year, mostly bumblebees, but hopefully as the lavender blooms, it will attract more to the garden. I planted three whole beds of various flowers, but very little germinated (weird cold spring followed by blistering heat followed by torrential rain followed by cool temps again), and so far all I've gotten is one very tiny pink zinnia. A for effort, little flower.

In the Right Place at the Right Time

Yesterday I got ready for church and had about fifteen minutes before I needed to leave, so I went out and puttered in my garden (yes, in my nice dress). And came inside. And saw the tiny paintbrush I use for assisting with squash pollination. And decided I had just enough time to dash out and pollinate my spaghetti squash. So I slipped on my clogs and went out for just a minute.

And heard the quiet voice of my elderly neighbour calling for help. She didn't sound loud or distressed, but I heard her saying, "Help! I can't get up!" I called over the fence to ask if she was okay, and she called back, "No." I told her to hang on, I was coming.

Ran around the corner to her house (our backyard adjoin) and let myself through her gate, and found her. She'd been sitting on a white plastic chair to do some weeding, and the leg had broken and tipped her into the hedge, and she couldn't get her feet under her to right herself. I got her into a hug and managed to lift her up onto her feet and help her to her back door. She was fine, and I gave her another hug to wish her good morning, chatted about gardening for a moment (her tomatoes are producing already, and mine are just starting to flower), and then ran back home to leave for church. 

Feeling grateful that I followed that urge to go back to the garden, because there's no way I would have heard her from indoors. Grateful she was found right away and not left in the hot sun. Grateful I've been going to the gym and could lift her. Grateful I could be of some small service to someone else.

Hoping the pollination with the paintbrush worked. My spaghetti squash and cucumbers are blooming just fine, but my Delicata squash and zucchini haven't produced a single flower yet.

Update on the Vegetable Garden and My Personal Philosophy Around Gardening

It occurs to me that I usually just blog about the beginning of the gardening season, when I'm planning what to plant, and the end of the season, when I'm bottling tomatoes and drowning in green beans. But there's a very long middle part that deserves some attention too.

I've heard people talk about fertilizing and fussing during the summer, but I tend to take a hands-off simplified approach. If something needs pampering, I don't want it in my garden. If you give your plants treats at the beginning, they're going to keep expecting it, and there's simply no time or room for divas in my yard. They must pull their own weight or perish. I plunk the seedlings in, stab in a tomato cage where they're needed, set up the sprinkler, and wish them all luck. The only special attention anything gets is when the tomatoes and cucumbers start to blossom and I dose them with calcium. If there's a lack of bees, I might hand pollinate things with a tiny paintbrush. Now and then I yank out the worst of the weeds and drop them on the soil to return their nutrients to the earth. And that's it. This year I did add some mulch to several of the beds, to try to retain water, because they're predicting a harsh, hot summer. But so far this year, it's unseasonably cool and rainy and it hasn't been much of an issue.

A vegetable garden can consume all your time if you let it, and weeding is never done. There are strawberries and beans to pick every day all summer, and a glut at harvest time at the end. But I've been consciously trying to set aside time to go on long walks, to swim, to go to the gym, to read and write. To allow myself to slow down and just sit sometimes. The garden, like a pestering puppy, must learn boundaries. It must develop patience and wait its turn. As must we all.

The New Oven has Arrived

Had to rearrange furniture to get the thing through the front door, but the new range is here. As they were hauling the old one out, I reached out and patted it and murmured, "Thank you for 26 years of good service." The delivery guy paused and asked quietly, "Do you want a moment?" 

"No, thank you, I've said my goodbyes."

So now I'm reading the manual for the new range, and it provides helpful tips such as not letting your toddler open the door and crawl in. It also says some models have a Jewish Sabbath mode, so you can preprogram it to function at certain times without having to press a button.

The manual also says the warranty doesn't cover fire, flood, or acts of God. Presuming God might strike the oven dead if you press its buttons on the Sabbath. 

Working on the Next Manuscript

I had all sorts of plans to work in the yard today, but it's raining steadily, so I'm pivoting and having a writing day. I'm working on a sequel to Monk With the Steel-Toed Boots. They're both murder mysteries, the first being set in a Buddhist meditation retreat in the Ontario woods, modelled after the Huong Hai Zen Forest, where I attended a 3-day retreat (the last day done in complete silence. I highly recommend it to anyone!). That book can be found here:

Monk with the Steel-Toed Boots

I enjoyed working with the main character, Gor Manookian, an Armenian-Canadian Detective Inspector, so I'm bringing him back in the sequel, Tiny Little Murder. This one is set in a Tiny House community, and I'm drawing on a friend's experience, since I don't have any direct experience living in a Tiny House. She built her own little house on wheels and has lived in it on a farm with her two kids for 3-4 years, so I turn to her when I have questions. There is something very satisfying about curling up with the laptop (by the fireplace in winter or on the backyard picnic table in summer) and documenting what my imagination comes up with. With coconut cookies on hand, of course.

Once I wrote the same book three times, keeping the same characters but swapping around who was the murderer and who was the victim, with, of course, different motives. It was a great exercise, and I kept the last version as it turned out best. I have heard other writers describe how they outline and plot beforehand, and I should probably try it sometime, but usually I just get a "movie" in my head and just take dictation. I don't know in advance how it will end any more than the reader does! I'll research stuff as it arises during the process, but there isn't much work before the actual writing begins.

Because my writing is indeed kind of like watching a movie in my head, there does tend to be a lot of dialogue. I think sometimes my plots are moved forward too much by dialogue. I am practising advancing the plot through action as much as talk. We'll see how Tiny Little Murder turns out.

I'm Officially a Dinosaur

Our oven/stove has been having trouble after trouble lately (fair enough, it's about 25 years old), so today we decided to bite the bullet and go buy a new one. We went to three different places looking for an electric range. The thing is, we didn't want the glass-top flat-top kind, because we like to use heavy cast iron pots and skillets, and those will scratch up the glass. Also, I do a lot of bottling, which involves boiling a large pot for several hours at a time, and the glass ones just won't hold up to that kind of use.

However, we discovered that each place we visited only had one coil-burner oven on display. Fine, we'll take that one---except every element now has a sensor on it that will turn off the heat if the burner reaches boiling temperature. 

Wait, let me get this straight. You can't boil anything on the stove? No, it's a safety feature, in case Granny is forgetful, so it turns it off for you when it reaches a high heat. So how do you boil an egg or a pot of soup or make mashed potatoes? You don't. No one cooks anymore. Or else you'll have to replace the sensor burners with regular burners. Except those only come in one size, apparently, which don't fit GE ranges (which of course is the only one we could buy). 

Someone (probably a man, let me bet) has designed a range that can't cook. I suppose any self-respecting Italian nonna uses a gas stove, but we are trying to get off of fossil fuels, and it would cost a lot to have natural gas installed into our kitchen anyway. So it has to be electric. So the new range arrives on Tuesday, and I don't know if I can boil anything on it. And I don't know whether my special, expensive canning coil burner will fit it at all. (Canning is so intense it melts regular burners. Canning burners sit higher so air can get under them.)

We also tried to buy muriatic acid for the pool today and were told that they no longer carry it because Health & Safety told them it's too dangerous. So demented Granny can't cook an egg and we can't treat the pool because someone is looking out for our safety. Thanks a lot.

Garden Centre Field Trip

Hubby and I had a spare hour this morning and decided to pay a visit to a favourite garden centre -- Bulow Garden Centre and Landscaping at 2667 Lakeshore Rd W, which is just east of Winston Churchill in Mississauga. This place has been in business for years and has a lot of unusual things I haven't seen for sale anywhere else. On previous trips, we've purchased a bench, a gong, and a garden sculpture from them. I didn't think to take a camera, and we had to dash between rain showers, but it was such a fun, interesting, and uplifting jaunt.

The owner came out to greet us and show us the water plants and bamboo we asked about. A pleasant chat, and then we were free to wander at will through swaths of antique-looking roses, quirky sculptures, lacy Japanese maples, unusual clay pots, banks of colourful angelonia, and lovely older trees. A dog snored gently in a big bed under a circular trellis. There were flowers I've never heard of, a range of succulents to choose from, and a peaceful, shady pergola with such a lush array of bushes and trees that I wanted to sit down on a bench and never leave. This woman is living the life I want to live.

Favourite things seen today: a bronze-coloured Buddha statue unlike any other I've seen, a pale peach climbing rose that made me want to go buy an English cottage just so I could grow it up around the door, a Gothic-shaped metal archway that would look great at the church, and a fantastic pink flowering dogwood that tempted me to rip out my vegetable garden to make room for it. It would be such an amazing addition to my Japanese garden.

Then the rain started pelting down and we ran for the car without buying anything. But it remains my favourite garden centre I've ever been to, and I highly recommend it if you're looking for something unique for your yard. I came away feeling refreshed, as if I'd taken a deep nourishing nap. There's nothing better than getting outdoors, surrounded by beauty, and meeting a person who has a passion for her business.