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.

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.

… They are a comin’.

The past week and a half has been a complete whorl wind (hence the lack of updates here). A whorl wind in a good and a bad way.

I work for a small, daily community paper. Or rather, I should say worked (in a few weeks). I like my job, it’s not the dream job, but it’s a job that gave me some level of fulfilment, and my co-workers were fabulous.

On July 2nd we found out a competing paper bought us.

On July 5th we found out they were shutting us down.

On July 9th we found out they’re shutting us down as of July 16th.

That puts about 30-odd employees completely out of a job, not to mention the casual and part time staff that are now out the extra income. Not even including the 110+ carriers we employ (many of which were adults).

In a town of just under 10,000 people, that’s a big blow.

There’s no one person to blame (not even the company that bought us), but a large and long line of things that maybe could have been done, but weren’t. But it’s in the past, nothing can be done about it now.

Me, personally, I’m fine. I don’t have kids, or car payments, or a mortgage to worry about. Life will move on, and I’m positive there are bigger and better things ahead of me. In fact, things are looking hopeful with me getting a position at one of the other papers in another market that the company that bought us out operate in.

Which, of course, brings me to my next whorl wind event.

We’re moving. Me, B., and the dog are all picking up and moving on. And we’re moving on in a few months. To Victoria, in fact, a city that I’ve lived in before and quite enjoyed. Victoria is warm, it rarely snows, and it has the best gardening weather in Canada.

Nelson doesn’t hold much for any of us anymore, and it’ll be nice to be closer to family.

Of course this now means I have to orchestrate the moving of the seed bank. I’m excited with the prospects of having the seed bank in a much more highly populated area, especially one that is renowned for its gardens and gardeners. I smell good things in the future.

I did say this was a good and bad whorl wind. It’s mostly bad because I feel for my wonderful co-workers who are here in Nelson, who do have the car payments and the kids and are now out a rather good job. I also feel bad for a paper that’s been running for 109 years and is now being shut down, no longer to be a part of the history of this town (or, I guess rather, relegated completely to history).

But it’s mostly a good whorl wind. I’m excited, I’ve been itching to move for a while, and this is a good kick in the ass to do it. As I said, I feel good and wonderful things in the future. Scratch that, it’s not just a good feeling, I know there are good things lined up for the future.

Take a look to your right. Top of the column.

See that little picture? That’s a new thing I got going.

See, I take a lot of photos, and sometimes I don’t always want to jibber-jabber on about said photo (despite evidence to the contrary), so they end up not getting posted. Sometimes the photo is all there needs to be said.

In a galaxy far, far away I used to have a photoblog, and I miss that silly old photoblog.

So I’m sitting here, nursing a broken toe (broken in, quite potentially, the most stupid way ever), listening to Buddy Holly, and decided I wanted to do something about that. That something is the picture in the top right hand corner of the column over there. You can click the photo and it’ll take you to a full size of the image. It’s as simple as that. Considering it’s summer, it’ll probably be quite frequently featuring plants, but it won’t always necessarily be featuring plants.

Mostly it’s about what strikes my fancy at any given moment.

So enjoy the thing, I’m looking forward to having a sort-of-photoblog again.

I first saw this commercial on TV some time ago when it first came out. Unfortunately, I was unable to find an example online to post a link to, so their website with “eat local” information will have to suffice, here.

For anybody not familiar with it (perhaps the American readers who happen by this blog from time to time) it proclaims that it’s time to stop eating “fake” food and instead it real food – which is of course the Hellmann’s Mayonaise. But they’ve been pushing that on consumers for a while, the fact that their product is made with real ingredients.

Here I want to say – I am a mayo lover, and yes, we do buy Hellmann’s. They make a good product, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Short of making my own mayonaise, I’m probably not going to get much better.

But their latest spin to their campaign has me uncomfortable. It’s the “eat local” fad that’s become so popular.

This warrants another side note: I’ve been a big believer in local eating before it became the latest cause (and before I had ever heard of the term “localvore”), and I’ve had a vegetable garden so I could eat really local before that also became the latest cause. Not that either of these things are bad fads mind you, I think it’s great people are starting to see the benefit of supporting local food producers, growing their own foods, etc. I also don’t think it’s bad that a large company is talking about the benefits of the idea of eating local to consumers by having it in an advertisement (and creating a website for it).

What I do have a problem with is when a company starts saying that you should eat their products because they’re local, when in fact they aren’t. Nation-wide does not equal local.

The whole point of eating local (among with many other reasons) is to not only support the food economy in your area, but also to help do things like, oh, say, cut down on the copious amounts of fossil fuels being used and pollutants from those fossil fuels being used by having ingredients trucked all around hell’s half acre just so you can get your food.

Hellmann’s says in their latest campaign that by eating their product with “canola oil from the prairies” and “Canadian eggs” (since they don’t specify I’m going to guess which not only come from all over Canada, but probably for the large part, don’t come from anywhere near where I am located – probably Ontario) you’re eating local.

No, Hellmann’s, that’s called eating Canadian. Which is fine, I’m all for consuming products in all their forms that are Canadian made. I like Canada, I am Canadian, supporting Canada through my hard earned cash is not something I’m going to stick my tongue out at.

However, dear Hellmann’s, that is not me eating local. Let’s get our facts and terms straight. Eggs trucked in from farms in Ontario, to your plants, canola oil trucked from Alberta, also to your plants, so it all can be trucked to me, in the Kootenays of B.C., is not me eating local.

Me eating local is buying the apples from the orchard just outside of town. Or buying my eggs from the chicken farm 30 minutes from me. Eating local is me harvesting my veggies and fruit from my garden. Buying lettuce and herbs from the farmer at the farmer’s markets on Saturday and Wednesday. See how all those people are within, say, a 40-60 minute drive from me (at the most)? That’s eating local. Eating canola oil from the prairies or eggs, even if they’re from as close to me as outside of Vancouver, is not what I would call, eating local. Eating Canadian, yes, but eating local, absolutely not.

So Hellmann’s, let’s get our facts and terms straight. You can make your point without pandering and misrepresenting yourselves, which is what I really have a problem with, not any of the ideas you’re talking about in and of themselves.

If we want to not make the idea of eating local completely worthless, we have to do just that, eat local, and not confuse it with eating foods produced in your own country. Especially when that country is as big as Canada is.

There have been several off-handed comments I’ve made toward our current Prime Minister on this website. How saddened I was that he was voted back into office, what a conniving prick I think he is, how I think he’s a liar, a cheat, and completely underestimates the Canadian people. Ya, I don’t like him much. It’s pretty obvious.

Today a friend shared a link on twitter (you can see my three latest twitter posts in the right hand column on the top) to this website:

What Is Stephen Harper Reading?

The idea behind this website can be summed up by its author, Yann Martel (who wrote Life Of Pi) much more accurately then I ever could (probably because he’s a professional writer and I am, you know, not really):

“The Prime Minister did not speak during our brief tribute, certainly not. I don’t think he even looked up. The snarling business of Question Period having just ended, he was shuffling papers. I tried to bring him close to me with my eyes.Who is this man? What makes him tick? No doubt he is busy. No doubt he is deluded by that busyness. No doubt being Prime Minister fills his entire consideration and froths his sense of busied importance to the very brim. And no doubt he sounds and governs like one who cares little for the arts.But he must have moments of stillness. And so this is what I propose to do: not to educate—that would be arrogant, less than that—to make suggestions to his stillness.

For as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister of Canada, I vow to send him every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness. That book will be inscribed and will be accompanied by a letter I will have written. I will faithfully report on every new book, every inscription, every letter, and any response I might get from the Prime Minister, on this website.”

Yann Martel

Every two weeks Yann Martel sends Stephen Harper a book (or in the latest case, a screenplay) which is inscribed by Mr. Martel and is accompanied by a letter detailing his thoughts and reasons for sending that particular text.

I think it is an inspiring idea, perhaps even if it is in vain. Not in vain due to anything Mr. Martel is doing, but in vain because I don’t think Harper cares enough about the thoughts and opinions of Canadians, and especially Canadian artists, to actually ever read any of these works, or write back himself to Mr. Martel. But, regardless of that, it is inspiring what Mr. Martel is doing.

It’s just something I felt the need to share because I thought it was quite a moving website.

I was so happy for the City of Vancouver today when I read that city council unanimously voted to allow the keeping of chickens in backyards in urban Vancouver.

Go Vancouver!!

Being a past resident (and hopefully, resident again after the Olympics, since I refuse to be there for such a – for lack of a better term – shit show), Vancouver will always hold a dear part of my heart, even despite it’s problems (most people would speak of the current gang shootings going on, but I’m thinking more of the outrageous rent costs and bad bus service). So when what I consider one of my two home towns does something to actually back up all their fancy talk of “sustainable urban living” it makes me proud.

I’m not so proud of the town I’m currently living in though. My current town, which touts itself on being forward thinking, green, into sustainability and all that, has really done little to further any of those causes. I could go into an extremely long diatribe as to why it hasn’t (a great location for an indoor year round farmer’s market to support local merchants which is being sold off to some industrial mill or some such crap is at the top of the list), but one of the main sore points for me is that in this town, where it is entirely feasible to do so, we are not allowed to keep chickens in the back yard (or even bees for that matter, which is ridiculous). Hell, if you have more than two pets of the same kind, it’s technically considered livestock, and they could come and fine you if they so choose (although I have yet to hear of this actually happening, I’ve read the bylaws, and yes, they state exactly that).

I’ve wanted chickens since we moved into our house a year ago, and have more than enough room for it. But, I can’t have chickens, not even one or two, because its against city bylaws. I have a problem with people and places who say they support one thing (in this case, green sustainable living practises) but in fact do everything they can below board to prevent such things from taking place (like not allowing people to keep chickens).

There are people currently in my town who keep a low profile and keep chickens in their yards. One of them in fact, lives quite close to me, and never are you met with any of the problems that all these nay-sayers against chickens in an urban environment say you’ll be met with (there’s certainly no increase of rats in the area – hell, I haven’t even seen a mouse, I don’t smell anything when going by their house, nor is there cawing at 4 in the morning because they don’t keep roosters). One of the biggest things I hear against keeping chickens in cities are these:

1. Increase of predators
2. Chicken welfare (people don’t know how to take care of them).

Let’s look at these two points:

1. Predators, especially in my area, are already out and about. Every year there’s bears wandering around due to people not cleaning up their fruit trees, and people who leave their garbage out at night during summer. Coyotes? They’re around anyway. And don’t even get me started on the cougars who come down looking for cats whose owners let them stay out and roam around all night. If you’re saying predators are the reasons not to have chickens, we might as well ban all fruit trees and cats, as well as keeping your garbage outside your house at all times.

2. Chicken welfare. Yes, this is an issue, but it’s no more an issue than people keep dogs, cats, hamsters, fish, guinea pigs, or any other live animal. There’s people who don’t know how to take care of their pets properly, and there’s lots who do. If you’re worried about animal welfare and your answer is to just not let people have those animals, then by that same train of thought, nobody should be allowed to keep any kind of pet. Ever.

It’s flawed logic, and that’s the problem. I’d wager (a very large sum) to say the vast majority of people who are interested and would keep chickens, are the kind of people who would do everything they can to ensure the welfare of their animals.

New York City, Seattle, Richmond, Burnaby, Victoria, and now Vancouver are the big cities who allow chickens to be kept within urban limits. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard of any large scandals coming from any of these cities where somebody was keeping chickens in a horribly unfit way. The animal control officer in Victoria says he gets about 12 calls a year, and most of those are complaints from neighbours about flies and smell.

Compare those 12 complaints, to all the benefits people in Victoria who do grow chickens get. There’s the owners themselves who have a steady and economical way to provide themselves and their family with protein. Not only that, but the chicken manure is a great additive to the soil which creates less dependency on chemical and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides (since healthy soil makes healthy plants). On top of all of that, it’s doing its part to say no to factory farm hens (which are awful, horrible environments for chickens – funny how the BCSPCA and Animal Welfare people don’t seem to be going against factory farms as vigorously as they should be). Lastly, there’s a huge amount of waste created by having to truck all those eggs from hundreds of miles away to a grocery store near you. You want to lower fossil fuel emissions? You start by allowing people to walk out to their back yard to get some eggs. As it stands now eggs have to be usually trucked in from miles away (tens or hundreds of miles), and on top of that, every time you drive to the grocery store? Yep, there’s more fossil fuel emissions.

It’s absolutely ridiculous to say no to allowing laying hens into an urban (or semi-urban) environment. It baffles the mind how just now people are starting to yell and scream about this. And what about the individual’s rights? The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms lists a whole slew of rights that should fully allow us to keep chickens. What about the individual’s right to security? Does that not include the security to feed yourself, especially at a lower cost? What about freedom of belief and freedom of conscience? I think the right to keep chickens fully goes under these two basic charter rights. And then there’s freedom of expression. I don’t think it’s too far a stretch to say that the freedom of expression should allow me to express my ideas of sustainable living in my terms by guaranteeing myself a constant and healthy supply of eggs from chickens I know aren’t caged, stressed, and never see the light of day.

I’m all fired up, it should be obvious.

I have a city councillor on the same block as me, and one who is a great believer in sustainable living. Perhaps I should have a talk with her.

It’s deceptively like spring here.

I say deceptively because I don’t like to count my chickens before they’re hatched, so they say. It’s been about 2 weeks of temperatures above 0 (that’s Celsius for all my American friends), or hovering just below it, and to boot, yesterday it even reached just over 7C. I was dancing outside without a jacket.

Okay, not literally (I don’t want the neighbours to think I’m crazy), but I was dancing in spirit, and definitely without a jacket. The tomatoes are popping up like crazy now in the indoor seed starting garden (now housing around 80 plants I do believe), and plans are starting to form and take shape with how the new garden in the front yard will happen, with all sorts of crazy terracing and exciting thoughts (just where will I put that corn so it doesn’t cast shade on anything else?).

I’m also starting to plan around the house projects for the summer (yes, there will be things that don’t involve gardening) including refinishing some old wooden doors, exterior and interior painting, and all that good stuff. Also, the darkroom hopefully will be complete in only a few months (there’s all sorts of fun plumbing issues to figure out with that one, and I’m certainly no plumber), and also at the age of 25 I hope to finally receive my driver’s license (I know, 25 with only a learner’s license in my wallet, isn’t that crazy?).

More and more snow is melting every day, and I’m just holding my breath hoping for no more cold snaps, no more big dumps of snow, and I’m actually starting to believe that in fact all that might be over (until, of course, next winter).

I’m very excited too that every day I look and find more and more tomato seedlings popping up. I just love watching them grow! I love it so much I’ve decided to pick a specific tomato and take a photo of it every day at approximately the same time to document its growth as closely as I can.

Wanna see the progress? Go to populuxe.ca/tomato. There’s a photo uploaded every day.

Although I must admit, I’m not too crazy on coppermine (which is the album software I’m using) it seems to do some weird compression with my images when I upload them (even though I’ve changed all the settings not to) and the images are all very slightly fuzzy. But oh well, you take what you can get!

Here’s some photos of the latest sprouts:

From left to right: Tomato ‘Rhodes Family Heirloom’ (large bi-coloured meaty beefsteak-type), Tomato ‘Sophie’s Choice’ (an heirloom from my hometown of Edmonton that is now endangered), Bee Balm (you can never, ever have too much bee balm).

I am also extremely excited that my Seeds of Diversity catalogue and Winter Issue came. I was so excited by the 30+ pages of tomatoes listed that I almost started hyperventilating.

So I decided a little while ago that it was time for me to get a blog up and running again.

I’ve been blogging off and on for really, much longer than I’d like to admit, and after a semi-brief break of not blogging for almost a year, I decided again it was time.

So why do we blog?  For me, it’s certainly not some delusions of gradeur where I imagine people are actually interested in reading about one little life in one little corner of planet Earth contained within our one little solar system in our very large universe.

It’s certainly not to make money (which always amazingly to me, is something people actually do via blogging!), or to promote anything in particular, or to stun people with my amazing intellectual prowess (which, with the more blogs I read, is what I think people are trying to do).

No, I imagine the reason why blogging keeps sucking me back in, even after the several times I have sworn it off, is that I just like writing, and I like having a history of myself I can look back on.  It’s nice to have one handy place where you can record your current projects and your methods.

So what will this blog be?

At this point, I’m not entirely too sure.  I imagine some sort of amalgamation of the stuff that I do, but very importantly, not including the work that I do (although it may seep in from time to time unwittingly).

What do I do?

I take pictures, I watch movies (a lot), I garden, I knit, I spin, I’m just learning how to sew, I try my hand at home improvement every now and then, and there’s various other sundry things I can be found doing on a day to day basis.

I will demand with myself that I write in this at least once a week, at least in the beginning, and hopefully we’ll go up from there.

And now that the introductory post is over, let the games commence.