I thought it seemed appropriate that I would use an image of my globe thistle for this post. Two years ago I started this plant from seed. Last year, as most perennials do, didn’t flower but gave out lots of lovely green, spiky, and slightly-ominous looking foliage.

This year, it grew to a height of five feet, and sent out five heads that would take an eye out if I didn’t watch where I was going poking around in the garden. The flowers unopened look more like a medieval torture device than a flower, but after a few weeks of those scary looking heads imposing over the garden, each spike produces a delicate little pale lavender flower. They’re beautiful plants, a mixture of thorn-like buds that would put even the most gnarly rose bush to shame, and soft small blooms that the bees and butterflies damned near fight over to get to.

I watched this plant very closely as it grew, knowing that it’d take two years to get to the point where I would see the fruits of my labour (so to speak). Caring, fertilizing, weeding, and taking general care of this flower just to see it produce five flower heads. I thought about taking it with me when I leave my place (as I’m doing with several other plants) but the thing about globe thistle is that it doesn’t like to be moved, there’s a good chance of killing it no matter how careful you are. Globe thistle likes to be left alone.

So, I’d rather leave it to the next occupant of this house so they can (hopefully) enjoy it as much as I did. And hey, as it turns out I’ll have lots of garden room and new adventures ahead, and I’m sure more globe thistle will be started in a few months.

I’d rather know it’s living happily, than risk bringing it with me. I hope its new caretaker will appreciate it as much as I did.

You know, for somebody who isn’t crazy about arachnids, I sure do talk about them on my blog a lot. I’m not crazy about them, but I do absolutely respect them and their place in the eco-system.

Daddy Long Legs (AKA Harvestmen or Granddaddy Long Legs) are not technically spiders, but often get lumped in with them. While they do have eight legs, their abdomens and cephalothorax (the two body parts you see on spiders) are joined, making them distinct from spiders. These guys are in the order of Opiliones, and date back about 400 million years, and have changed little since then (I love a living fossil). Just to add to confusion however, there is a species of spider called Daddy Long Legs (or cellar spiders) that do have separated abdomens and cephalothoraxes (cephalothoraxi? Not too sure on that one to tell you the truth). However, the little critter pictured above is not a spider.

Daddy Long Legs quite often can be found everywhere in the garden, and should be encouraged to stay. While some might scavenge on things like lizard and small bird carcasses (fact!), more often then not they are found feasting on things like mites and aphids in the garden. I’m a huge fan of a predatory insect – meaning they actively seek out prey, by hunting them down or ambushing them, rather then letting their prey come to them via a web. Daddy Long Legs mostly exhibit this behaviour, which is why when you’re out picking your dinner for that evening’s meal, you’ll often have to brush them off of your harvest.

There is a most unfortunate urban legend associated with these guys, as well as their spider name sakes. It goes along the lines that they are, in fact, the world’s most venomous spider (wrong), but they can’t hurt humans because their fangs are too short to penetrate human skin (also wrong). Fact is, they don’t contain venom glands at all, and their “fangs” are actually extremely small grasping claws, used for shovelling food into their mouths. Same goes for the spiders of the same name. But, if you’re a fan of Mythbusters, you probably already know this.

A few more interesting facts about these guys:

The number of ways these species have learnt to keep themselves from being eaten by their predators is fascinating to me. It’s examples like daddy long legs, with their sheer longevity of existence, and the perfect ways they’ve evolved to live, eat, and evade being eaten, is what gives me awe. While some people need to find that in the spiritual or religious (not that I’m knocking it, go for it if it floats your boat), for me it’s examples like these guys that show me the beautiful complexity of the world around us. Which, quite frankly, I find awe-inspiring enough.

The past few weeks have been crazy. Insane. And they’re about to get crazier. As I battle to save my sanity unfortunately this blog has fallen by the wayside. The above image is not a symbol for the setting sun of this blog or any ridiculous thing like that. It’s just a photo I snapped a day or two ago during some particularly bad smoke hanging above our town.

And it got me thinking of the things I won’t and will miss about where I currently live, as opposed to where I’m moving in, oh, three and a half weeks (shit! I have so much left to pack!).

I definitely won’t miss the smoke that hangs in the air as it blows in from the west and the south of us from the raging forest fires that occur every year. While it does give some awe inspiring sunsets, when it gets really bad it makes those with even the healthiest of lungs pant like a female dog in heat.

In a strange weird way, despite the fact I bitch and complain about the heat here (where it routinely gets to the mid to high 30C range, higher sometimes with the humidex), I will sort-of miss it. Not for myself, but for my tomatoes and peppers, which love it. It’s taken me several years to suss out which varieties thrive in the kind of heat and humidity (coupled with water rationing) we have, and besides passing that information on to friends that still live here, I won’t need that information anymore. I’ll be starting a-new, testing which tomatoes like the temperate, mild climate of Victoria (although I suspect it’ll be a lot less of a problem to weasel out the ones that don’t do well in those conditions then it has been here). Having lived in Vancouver for years previously already has left me with some of that knowledge, so I won’t be starting over from scratch like I did here.

I’m looking forward to the next gardening adventures I’m to have on the west coast, my brain is already flying with what I’m going to plant. Especially since we’re this close to ensuring a nice little house with a nice little yard that can easily be converted to garden rather then lawn space.

Of course something that’s still up in the air and weighing on my mind are my seeds. My tomatoes are all setting fruit now, and I doubt most of them (if any) will be ready for harvesting in the few weeks we have left. Fortunately, a friend can be relied upon for harvesting, fermenting, and saving my numerous tomato varieties and then sending them down to the coast for me to put in my seed bank. All that bothers me is the fact that I’m not doing it myself, and being the control-freak I am at times, that gets under my skin a bit. But I’ll get over it, I’m sure.

Hopefully I’ll post here a few more times before we leave. I’ll be digging up a few choice plants I’ve grown to love, and couldn’t bear to part with (my globe thistle I started from seed, my lemon bee balm, my ornamental bee balm, and my crazy green echinacea that cost me way too much money for me to leave behind). I’m bringing a few tomatoes and peppers I have in pots with me as well, and I’m worried about how they’ll fare, stuck in a hot moving truck for a day until we get to our new home. But if I don’t try, I’ll kick myself for leaving them behind.

I must apologize for the lack of updates lately. Mostly to myself then anybody else quite frankly, as I greatly enjoy writing in the ol’ blog. But life has been hectic. Moving, job offers, taking a new job in a new town, having to get a license and a car for said job within the span of a few weeks, moving to a new city where we don’t have a place to life worked out yet.

See, I’m generally not very comfortable with uncertainty. I like the illusion of complete control over my life (I say illusion, because as we all know, it’s impossible to have complete control). But that illusion keeps me sane sometimes. So when I feel like I have very little control over the previous three weeks and the forthcoming six weeks of my life, it rattles me quite a bit.

How appropriate for this post that I’m including an image of a surprise lettuce cross-pollination that come out of the garden. This is something that I can’t always control, what pollinates what, despite all effort to the contrary. But gardening as well is quite often about the illusion of control rather then actual control.

Lack of control in the garden I’m a lot more comfortable with then seeming lack of 100% control in my life. I find an unexpected cross in the garden and I’m excited about the possibility it brings. I know that if the cross turns out to taste bad or grow poorly it’s not the end of the world.

Somehow I need to translate that into the rest of my life at times.

I am not a rose person.

There are two large, old, climbing roses that grow up against my house that I am constantly cursing and threatening to rip up (even though I never would – I respect a plant that is at least 50 years old). I have absolutely no interest in taking care of roses, or of even cutting them and bringing them in my home.

But wild roses are a different story.

I love wild roses because they seem untameable, with there legions of thorns bidding you away. I also love them because they’re simple; devoid of the big showy blooms that most most people have growing in their yards. If I had it my way I’d rip up those two climbing roses I have, and instead plant some wild roses.

Wild roses hold a special place in my heart. They’re my home-province’s official flower, and as one may expect, they grow everywhere there. In the house I grew up at we had a big old wild rose with a swath of lily of the valley that grew underneath it, right up against an old white fence. Wild roses make me think of home, and of family, and of old memories.

When I was a teenager I couldn’t wait to get out of Alberta, and move to the seemingly-so-exciting west coast of BC. I don’t regret the move, BC is nice (and a lot less colder, which is my main problem with Alberta), but what I do miss are the sights and sounds of Alberta. Big open sky, huge fields of mustard and wheat and canola. Bison and muskegs and pigeon hawks. The way Alberta seems to radiate yellow and orange and gold. The night sky that is so big, it can feel oppressive to somebody who didn’t grow up there. Northern lights of pink and green and white.

It’s funny how sometimes you don’t recognize beauty until after you’ve been away from it for so long.

Excuse me for a second while I collect myself.

I briefly thought of writing all the expletives that I was actually saying aloud just moments ago in the garden, but decided against it.

Okay, just one:

Goddamned asshole weeds!

I’m not a nazi about the weeds in my garden as some people are; meticulously mulching or pulling by hand or spraying with pesticides (if the latter were the case, I might as well just buy my food at the grocery store). I, for the most part, have a live and let live policy with the weeds. If they get too hairy I’ll pull them, but other then that I just leave them.

Except for the root vegetables.

Gardening for the most part is easy, it’s fun, it’s calming. Even when I am pulling weeds generally, it clears the mind, almost meditative. I don’t meditate normally (I’m much too high strung), so pulling weeds is as close as I get. I’m pretty lackadaisical about it, leaving big swaths of weeds, or just hacking away at them with the dutch hoe.

Except for the root vegetables.

For most other vegetables even just the basic of weed prevention or pulling will suffice, and when you rip them out, you don’t have to worry so much. A little tug won’t bother them.

Root vegetables, however, are a whole different kettle of fish. Since the part you’re eating is the root, they’re particularly fussy about having their roots disturbed. So when the weeds, which have been just flourishing here lately due to the massive doses of rain and my lovely rich soil, grow right up next to, let’s say, a beet (see that picture above?) it takes me almost an hour and a half to weed three five-foot rows to make sure I’m not completely decimating my beet crop in the process. But of course you can’t just leave all the weeds there, oh no, because the roots interfere with the root formation of my root crops.

GAH.

I love gardening, I really do, I would never spend so much time and energy on something I didn’t enjoy. But every once and a while, I just need to curse it all, come inside for a cigarette. Then about twenty minutes later I’m putting the gardening gloves back on, going outside, and finishing what I started.

It’s a really good thing there aren’t any really young children next door to me, because you’ve never heard so much swearing when somebody is in their garden. I put sailors to shame.

The fifteenth of the month of course means it’s Bloom Day. I took a whack of photos, but decided just to focus on a few that are currently blooming. Of course, it was only after I took all the photos did I realize that 99% of what is flowering right now is yellow.

This columbine I started last year, but since it’s a perennial and I started it from seed, I knew I was going to have to wait until this year to find out what colour it was since it came from a pack of mixed columbine colours. I was hoping not for a purple since I already had a purple long-spurred columbine, and thankfully, it wasn’t! A nice pale-yellow Columbine greeted me a few days ago.

My mizuna started bolting a few weeks ago and I’ve let it go to flower. It’s just in the final throws of blooming, so soon I’ll be able to harvest my seeds, which is really what I was after. Also: the small mason bees that have a home somewhere close to where I am are absolutely loving it – whenever it’s sunny these day they practically swarm the plant.

I love Osteospermum. I also love saying Osteospermum. But I don’t like how the vast majority of starts or seeds you find for it are either white or purple. I have enough white, and I’m no fan of purple. So when I saw these rusty orange Osteospermum plants I snapped them up.

I know a lot of people do everything they can to keep buttercup out, but we reserve a spot in our yard where we let it go crazy. The bees love it, and it’s such a cheery corner of the yard. How can you say no to all those bright little flowers?

See this picture? In it there is the entire explanation why I don’t cut my lawn rigorously.

Buttercup, dandelions, and hawk weed, all of which are demonized in our lawn-worshipping culture (and grow like wildfire around my neck of the woods), are also extremely attractive to pollinators, and especially bees. When bees first wake up in the spring, there often isn’t a huge assortment of flowers out for them to feed on. Dandelions are often in abundance in early spring, and are a huge source of food for spring bees. While throughout the summer I try to keep the dandelions moderately under control in my yard (simply because I don’t want them seeding everywhere in my gardens making weeding that much more of a chore), in the spring I let them grow wild everywhere.

Now, this may be to the dismay of my extremely meticulous lawn-loving neighbour (although I must interject, he’s never said anything), but the bees just go crazy. I have hundreds of bees all over my lawn in the spring time, initially attracting bees and hoverflies to my yard with my swaths of bright yellow flowers overtaking everything that isn’t concrete. By the time the dandelions start to seed, the other flowers in my garden and on my trees have started to come out, giving the pollinators another food source to gorge on. Then out comes the weed whacker, and four hours later all that remains are a few dandelions on the outer edges (the bees love them so I can’t get rid of them all) and the buttercups that grow along side of them.

Perhaps entrusting myself to catch the dandelions right before they seed with a weed whacker isn’t the most efficient way to maintain a lawn. But letting the “weeds” (just a few of note in my lawn are the aforementioned hawk weed, dandelions, and buttercup, along with speedwell, clover, and oxeye daisies) do their thing without trying in vain to keep a clean monoculture of grass actually saves me quite a bit of time, all tolled. Creeping thyme and oregano have also made themselves at home in my lawn, making it a polycultural bed of life. It never requires watering, and actually needs next to no maintenance. I’d know I’d much rather be sitting in a chair, sipping an iced tea in the shade, then toiling over cutting and maintaining a lawn any day.

Let’s talk about spiders for a moment, shall we?

I know, a lot of people kind of get freaked out and a shiver rolls down the spine, but bear with me, because I’m going to take you on a little journey.

I used to be scared of spiders. The technical term for my level of fear was actually shit-scared. Run the other way, screaming, and if they were any bigger then a penny I’d put a cup over them and then have to work myself up to actually dealing with the spider. If it moved at all while I was trying to slide a piece of cardboard under that upturned glass I’d run away again, let out a little squeal, and would have to spend the next twenty minutes re-working myself up to the point where I could try again. As you can imagine, the process took a while.

So when living in a basement suite in Vancouver, BC a wolf spider infestation overtook my home I was effing petrified. They were in everything. I’d wake up in the morning and there would be hundreds of babies gathered around the lights. The bigger ones would be in my sheets, my towels, my bathtub; any where that was dark and warm. I was bit more then once happening upon an unsuspecting wolf spider the size of my fist. After a few weeks of it I had had enough and called an exterminator. When I got home after the mandatory “stay out of your apartment for 6 hours” I came inside and entered a spider grave yard.

At the time what I was most worried about were black widows and brown recluses. Brown recluses were, and to my knowledge still are, not located in the lower mainland, but I was freaked out. Black widows are known to be in the area however, especially in dark, warm utility rooms – like the one that was attached to my basement suite. Now, black widows look a world of different than wolf spiders, but if I had an infestation of one, my non-arachnologist mind thought I might have the other. Fortunately, the exterminator verified that in fact they were wolf spiders with no black widows in sight (which make a very distinctive web, especially when compared to those of wolf spiders).

During those weeks where I was dealing with the infestation before I had it professionally taken care of, I read. A lot. My mind works in a way that if I’m frightened of something I have to understand it. I guess I’m looking to either verify my fears, or to teach myself that there’s nothing to actually be afraid of. At this particular point in time I was still relatively new to gardening as well. I had come to live with the spiders in my garden, but just barely. I had been gardening full-force, on my own, for about three years.

After the infestation, and the research that I immersed myself in during it (I actually had a long talk with a arachnologist working at a local university, these guys really love talking spiders), my view on spiders completely changed. Knowledge really is power, personally and in the grander scheme of things.

While we all know in theory what spiders do, without actually seeing them in action on a daily basis leaves a disconnect, and a misunderstanding, which in turn breeds fear for a creature that is vital in every ecosystem. This is why, I believe, from my highly unscientific casual polling, gardeners, in general, have a much greater love and respect for spiders then most people; because we are out there, every day, seeing what they do.

I used to be one of those people; the person that would, at any cost, kill a spider if they saw it (inside or out), because I was just so damned scared of them. I used to actually want to deter them from being in my garden because that disconnect of understanding what they do still going on in my mind.

Flash forward several years in the future to now.

If there was a church of the spider that you can become born again in, that’s me. I love spiders, in fact I actively seek them out in the garden to see how they’re doing, if they’re eating my pests, where they’re living. Crab spiders and jumping spiders are my favourite. These are two amazing families that do almost all my pest control for me in my garden every year. Both are active carnivorous hunters, and I assure you, very uninterested in doing battle with you, or even being near you.

In fact, the same can be said for almost all kinds of spiders. Yes, there are some aggressive species out there, and there are species that when bitten by can cause serious harm or death, but these are rare in the realm of spiders. Most are happiest when left alone and allowed to do their thing. Even the wolf spiders that made me confront my fears about all spiders lo those many years ago, are extremely uninterested in you. They set up shop in my basement suite because it was just that; a basement suite with a nice warm utility room that was dark. When I was bitten it was because they were frightened, and didn’t know what else to do.

I’ve talked to many a newer-gardener who was exactly like me; asking how to deter spiders from taking up residence near their houses and gardens. When asked, I usually present them an abridged version of the story I just told you here, because it’s imperative to understand how important they are in our gardens and in our homes. It’s amazing how many times people have told me, “I saw a black widow on my porch!”. Regardless of the fact this person might live in say, Montreal, where it’s utterly impossible for a warm-climate spider like a black widow to live. It’s misunderstanding, that’s it, and if we all take a few minutes a day to learn about spiders, I think a lot more love for our arachnid friends will happen.

They really are fascinating creatures, and in many cases extremely beautiful as well. So I urge you, learn about them, try to ID what you have in your home, read about their diets, how they live, how they build webs, when they breed, if they can change colour or not to suit their environment (see the crab spider pictured top). Learn all you can, and you might just find yourself learning to love something you didn’t understand before.

I love it when I spend a good healthy chunk of time in the garden. The best thing about the spring is that you aren’t all worried about your plants yet, because they either are still in seed form or are safely inside, and besides watering, don’t need too much worry or doting. So when you finally get to go outside, you’re all excited about whatever needs doing in the garden, including menial tasks like digging, raking manure, spreading bone meal, turning the compost pile – whatever.

My exciting menial task this weekend has been putting edging in around the front and back yard gardens. This involved getting my old friend, the lawn edger (which was the main tool I used to create the garden last year) and edging the garden since the grass grew all over it last year, hence my decision to get some edging and actually block off the roots. Even though it’s just the whatever-black-plastic-edging, which certainly isn’t very elegant (then again, pretty much nothing I do can fit into the “elegant” category), I know it’s going to save me a lot of frustration battling that goddamned grass that likes to creep over its borders and into my garden.

As I was knelt over in the garden yesterday looking at this blank canvas, all I could think of was hope. That’s what spring is about for me, hope. No worries at all of water rationing, or pests, or diseases, or battling weeds. It’s all about the hope of what is to come, the mind is just filled with harvest bounty and beautiful plants, bees and butterflies and hummingbirds and hoverflies (I really get a kick out of hoverflies) buzzing around my garden doing their thing. Spending time nurturing the plants, knowing if I do it right, they’ll reward me. Excited for what new, “crazy” varieties (according to everybody who sees my varieties) I’ll be growing this year, excited for what they’ll taste like and how they’ll grow. Excited that I have a good six months ahead of me where I can garden and reap the benefits.

All that hope makes me more then happy to do the menial tasks until the plants actually get planted outside.

This plot didn’t even exist last year at this time, so it’s a wonderful thing to know that I have no major digging or hauling of sod in the cards for me this year. I feel like I can really enjoy what spring has to offer without the back-breaking labour this year.