An interesting observation

I was walking the dog today, and some kids were playing with a tennis ball that got away from them and bounced right up to Brio. Now, you have to understand that Brio is extremely fond of balls and will play fetch for hours. If you go to the park without a ball, he will bring you twigs and leaves and old water bottles, placing them before you on the ground and then waiting tensely, eyes on the object, waiting for you to throw it for him. He'll hold that pose for minutes on end, hardly breathing, waiting to explode into action. So when the tennis ball rolled up to us today, I loosened the leash and figured he'd go fetch it.

Only he didn't. He didn't bat an eye, just walked past it as if it wasn't there.

It made me wonder if dogs have a sense of ownership. This was clearly someone else's ball, not his, so he left it alone. And I recalled that when my grandkids were living with me, Brio wouldn't ever touch their toys left on the floor. He'd only play with his own. No one ever told him to "leave it" or taught him not to touch. He just did it on his own. So...yeah. I think dogs understand the concept of ownership, of mine and not-mine. Interesting! I hadn't pondered that before. 

Harvest Season

It's my favourite time of year again -- curling up to watch a movie with bowls spread around me...No, not snacks. Shelling beans! I have grown about 16 different kinds of dry beans in the past, but my favourite are Beka Browns, and that's the only kind I planted this year. So prolific, and so delicious! I am always amazed at how rewarding dry beans are. Your rate of return is amazing, and they keep for ages. Each little crisp pod is a present, waiting to be opened to reveal its inner treasures.

Of course, there are also tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, cabbage, cucumbers, beet greens, and green beans in the garden right now. The zucchini and cukes look like they're slowing down, though, and while I was away the green beans set a lot of seed, so they are slowing production now too. This is the best bell pepper season I've ever had. There's nothing more satisfying than giving away bags of tomatoes to neighbours, and the crunch of a homegrown cabbage is soul-satisfying. Keeping a garden is the best instant-happiness-inducing therapy I know of.

It's a dangerous time of year for me, though. I start eyeing the real estate ads and fantasizing about acreage, with vast garden plots and a woodlot and a stream and room for chickens and maybe an alpaca or two... Don't worry, I'll come to my senses again once harvest season is over. Meanwhile, it's stir-fried cabbage for supper and maybe a puff-pastry tomato tart for tomorrow's lunch.

Wow! What happens when you turn your back on your garden for a few days...

Went out to get a few greens for my morning omelette. Came back with this. (Well, one bowl of tomatoes and one container of cherry tomatoes were already waiting for me on the counter. Still...)

There are also a bunch of green beans too big to eat, which will remain in the garden to provide next year's seed.

Just a quick note...

Flew in from Utah tonight after two lovely weeks with family. In case you were wondering where I'd disappeared to. Too late tonight to write further!

A Word of Warning to the Un-Wise

There was a Facebook post this morning that made me cringe. A girl found a tall flower growing in the yard of her fairly-new house, happily assumed it was garlic, and decided to eat the bulb. She posted a picture of herself and her dog with her pungent half-consumed garlic. It's giant allium, not garlic. Technically edible but so strong it can cause vomiting, and it's toxic to dogs. What person would willy-nilly decide to eat something she can't identify? And most of the people commenting on her post were just as clueless, cheering her on and congratulating her on her amazing garlic.

If you don't know what you're doing, folks, don't do it. I mean, yes, everything is edible...at least once. But it's better to educate yourself before risking your health/life. I'm all for foraging, but do some research...

It reminds me of a story a friend told me about her grandmother, who thought the sack of daffodil bulbs was a sack of shallots. She cooked them up and put herself and her husband in the hospital.

A Homemade Day

This morning I made myself a quiche with a whole bunch of stuff from the garden: onion, lamb’s quarters, kale, bok choy, sunflower leaves, nasturtium leaves, and basil. The peppers and tomatoes in the garden aren’t ripe yet, so those were store-bought, but theoretically in a few weeks I should be able to make it all from the garden except the mushrooms and, of course, the eggs. If I could just have chickens, I could do the whole thing from scratch, really. I threw in some store-bought cheese too, but if I took the time, that could have been homemade also. I had a slice of homemade bread with the quiche, with homemade grape jelly.

This afternoon I’ll be cleaning the cured garlic, readying it for storage. Last night I cleaned the dried lavender and froze a bag of it, enough for hundreds of cookies to come.

Yogurt is now percolating gently in the slow cooker. There’s the prospect of lettuce/spinach/kale salad with strawberries for lunch. My husband is in the kitchen pre-making dinner with home-bottled tomatoes and zucchini fresh from the yard (the good Italian grey kind, not the dark-green baseball bat kind). And I have a glass to hand of homemade grape juice, bottled last year.

Life doesn’t get better than this.

A crazy week, with more to come

We've been up at the church we're renovating, finishing drywall so that the painters can come back to finish the remaining bits. I've never enjoyed drywalling, but it saves money to do it ourselves. I'm also scared of heights. Airplanes and cliffs, no problem, but chairs and stepladders make me feel woozy. So picture me standing on top on a scaffold, dust mask and protective glasses suffocating and blinding me, while I mud and sand the ceiling overhead. Dust raining down on my head, coating me completely. No air conditioning, of course, and it was about 28 celsius in the room I was working in. Completely mud-soaked by the time I finished. I still have one more sanding to do next week. I turned on the Bee Gees to distract myself, though, and at one point found myself dancing on the scaffold, so it was okay and --maybe-- a little fun.  

Meanwhile my long-suffering husband was downstairs drywalling and framing out bulkheads and doing all kinds of complicated math, and running back to Mississauga for band events before coming back up. Then we took a day to steam-clean the carpet the tradespeople had messed up downstairs, so we don't have to replace it right away. Bodies aching now.

Came home tonight, mowed the lawn and did three batches of laundry. Tomorrow I will visit with my niece, who is in town for a conference, which will be lovely. Then the next day it's back up to the church to finish the drywalling and start moving furniture downstairs to allow the painters to complete the upstairs in August.

I look at people sitting on their porches in the cool of the evening, and I wonder how on earth they find the time to sit down.

Visible progress at last!