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.

Well, I have to finally admit it, the garden’s been a bit of a bust this year.

Mostly due to the fact that in just under two weeks I’ll be gone, and have barely harvested a thing from it (besides the beans and greens – lots of those). It was so warm early in spring, but then it turned rainy and cold up until mid-June. The plants (especially the tomatoes) were stunted, delaying everything. I’m just now getting the first ‘Stupice’ off the vine, and the ‘Chocolate Stripes’ and ‘Silvery Fir Tree’ are just starting to show the earliest signs of blushing.

Sigh.

Oh well. Upwards and onwards so they say. I’m so excited about moving back to Victoria that it only breaks my heart a little bit to be leaving before I get the large portion of my garden bounty this year. There’s next year to set my sights on, which will come all the more earlier than my gardening season here in the Kootenays has been. That’s something to look forward to. I still have about a month and a half after I move before it gets too miserable in Victoria to do any gardening either, so that will take up a good portion of my time and ease my regret of not getting to see my garden through for this year. It’ll still be chugging along, and someone will be caring for it, and sending me my seeds. All is not lost. It’s rather bittersweet; I’m excited to get the hell out of dodge, but I’ll miss the garden at the same time.

The good news is I will get to do some of my own seed saving this year. My ‘Stupice’ will be harvested for seeds imminently, and my Slocan Snow Peas and ‘Sparkler’ radish are already being processed. I might even get to harvest a few of the ‘Irish Conners’ beans I’ve been shepherding this year.

As the house slowly transforms into a stack of boxes before my eyes (I lie, it hasn’t been “before my eyes” at all, in fact it’s been about as much fun as you’d expect packing a house up and moving it 750km can be), I am so ready to be gone. I’m ready to be done with the packing and get this show on the road.

I’m looking forward to new gardening adventures. Hell, we might even end up getting chickens, which are legal to have in your back yard in Victoria. It’s something we wanted to do for a while, but weren’t able to due to the fact it’s illegal here in Nelson. It will be nice to live in a place that puts its money where its mouth is regarding sustainability.

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 garden is slow this year. Very, very slow. A cool and wet spring saw to that. Just now things are really starting to take off, hell, I’ve only just harvested the pods I was saving for seeds from my Slocan Snow Peas this morning! Granted these snow peas actually do quite well in heat, so they had an extended life over most snow peas, but still, they are in fact snow peas.

This time last year I was harvesting tomatoes already. This year my first tomato (a ‘Tiny Tim’) is just on the verge of finally ripening.

You know what? I’m really, really glad to be getting back to a climate where things don’t only start ripening in August.

But back to the Slocan Snow Peas.

Generally I like to let pods go fully dry on the vine before I harvest for seeds (goes for beans, radishes, etc. as well), but there’s a mountain of rain and storms coming our way this weekend, and I want to avoid these guys going all mildewy. Most of them are almost there, some of them still have a good amount of moisture in them, but they’re all past the point of being fully ripened, so germination won’t suffer next year.

I wrote some more on the history of these seeds here at the Populuxe Seed Bank’s website. These will be available (not in huge quantity, but available) through the seed bank later this year or early 2011.

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.