spring snow

Just beyond the garden fence, raven is out for his morning stroll. A little spring snow deters him not at all.
A junco perches within the safety of the garden.
Snow gilds the queen anne's lace.
A lovely spring garden.
Junco has flown into the oak tree, everyone's favourite place to sit.

a most bountiful bounty

Eleanor and Ira, who have a camp on the eastern side of the island near the lighthouse, came by for a visit this week. Ira brought me some scarlet runner beans from his garden at home on Cape Sable Island. They are for planting in my garden next summer. What an inspiration! These beans make me want to pay more attention to all the seeds I plant next year. I think as I'm narrowing down what I want to plant I'll be able to get everything I need from Nova Scotia seed companies. That would be another step toward local eating.

I haven't finished putting this year's garden to bed yet. There are still tomatoes ripening out there, potatoes to be dug, red kale, dill, a late harvest of mesclun (and -- oh, no! more beans) and even a bit of summer squash.

Our freezer is packed with squash soup and various other delicious meals already made, and swiss chard and collards and kale and of course serious amounts of beans, as well as island foods that came from beyond the garden:

applesauce, dehydrated apples, apple tarts, apple bread, fresh apple cider, wild raspberries, chanterelles, mackerel and mutton.

And, from off the island, these fabulous wild blueberries Skipper brought back all the way from Advocate Harbour. It's almost ridiculous how well we eat. We do spend a lot of time growing, foraging, harvesting and processing. But that's all part of the interest and fun.

grape harvest

Elizabeth Hyde planted our grape vine, long ago: a concord, I think. After Elizabeth died the house and the land more or less went to sleep, but those vines continued to grow along the ground up where she had her big vegetable garden. Skipper, who always kept an eye on things, built a wooden fence around them to keep the sheep and deer from plundering them. So when we first arrived, the vines lay tangled and forlorn inside and over the remains of a weather-beaten wooden fence.

After our first year we took down that old fence and included the vines inside the new vegetable garden. Ambitiously, Greg built an arbour for the grapes. We pruned them and trained them, sort of. But there was only so much we could do besides tearing out the single huge trunk and starting over. Which I wasn't that interested in. The arbour was pretty enough in the garden's second summer, with its vines growing this way and that and its translucent leafy canopy. Last year we got maybe a cup of grapes, and Greg made one little jar of grape jam. I figured we had built the arbour for the benefit of our bird friends, and I left it at that.

This year I paid no attention to the grape arbour. As summer went on some vines got too long and started hitting me in the face as I walked into the garden, so I whacked them off. But that was as far as any pruning went. Gradually, though, I started noticing that there were clusters of grapes forming here and there. Oh well, I thought, the birds will be happy this year. I did not get my hopes up. I barely looked at the arbour. After all, I had collards to consider, and chard, and beans. Important things.

Quietly, behind my back, the grapes grew.

This past week was apple harvesting time around here. The big-time action was all in the apple trees, but in the middle of the week Greg mentioned that he thought the grapes were ready to harvest, too.
So I picked the grapes, about four and a half gallons once I took them off their stems.

Though we should have been putting two and two together all along, the bounty of the grape arbour caught us off guard. I had thought that the birds would swoop in at the last and stage a gigantic avian grape-fest, and that whatever we got would be an afterthought, their leftovers. But now instead we had oh-so-much of a good thing, requiring immediate attention. The rushing torrent of apple momentum would have to wait.

Jam was what we aspired to, not merely jelly. Not something smooth and simple and jelly-like, but something dense, more complex. But it turns out that jam -- as opposed to jelly -- is complicated to make. There are many time-consuming steps. These are the ones I did: taking the grapes off the stems, then separating the pulp from the skin of each and every grape. So that you end up with a pot of pulp, called must, and a separate bowl of skins. As far as I know there is no machine for doing this, or at least not at our house.

After that I turned everything over to Greg. I can't even tell you how many steps came next, since I stayed out of the kitchen. There were many, many steps, involving rarely-used and mysterious equipment and supplies. All evening, until midnight, the kitchen was filled with the purple aroma of grapes and the reading out loud of snippets from various recipes pulled off the Internet, which sounded like nothing so much as the muttering of charms and spells.

This morning I came downstairs to discover magic jars of grape jam, more than I can count, a rich dark colour amidst the brightness of the apple harvest.

remembering a hummingbird

This place where we live is a small patch that for a couple of centuries now people have been making into their own. Its house, stone walls, crumbled cellars, apple trees, wells and old fields are evidence of the long-ago work of domesticating a bit of acreage on an island filled with bogs and rocks and forest and surrounded by the sea. It's a project we embrace, most days.

But around and beneath and above and even within this place lies another, vaster place, which is wildness. The two places live side by side and intermingled. Sometimes that other country, that wild place, is distant and impossible to discover, and sometimes it is very near. Sometimes it encroaches. Sometimes it brushes by, lighter than a feather.

This summer we hung up a hummingbird feeder for the first time. We delighted all summer in watching the frequent visits of two female hummingbirds to the feeder -- so frequent that, if you just stood for a few minutes at the front door, you would see them there, all day, every day, without fail. Because they became so familiar I thought I was getting to know them pretty well.

But then, as summer was coming to an end, I met that young hummingbird up in the vegetable garden. At first, when I saw him sitting so still for several minutes at a time, I didn't have enough to go on. It didn't fit with what I had seen near the feeder. So I thought he might be sick or dying. Why was he allowing me to get so close? I began to spin a sort of hummingbird tragedy in my mind: the little bird, somehow left behind or blown off course as his relatives all flew away across the Gulf of Maine, now lonely and afraid and stranded in the vegetable garden. It's a pretty good story, and it could be true.

Or not. It could be that he was merely on his way, alone or more or less along with others, and had stopped to rest for a few hours before moving on. The day I saw him was both sunny and windy, not a good day for flying east against a strong westerly wind, but not a bad day for being close to the ground in a relatively protected sunny garden. It's possible that he was feeling perfectly confident and able to take care of himself, within the limits of being a very small bird with a great distance yet to travel. I did not need to invent pathos where none was required, there being a big enough supply of tragedy in the world already.

Until my tutorial in the vegetable garden, I had not known that hummingbirds sit for long periods of time, stalk their prey, blink, swallow, and unroll their amazing tongues, a skill I associated only with frogs and snakes. He was, though young, an excellent teacher.

But I still don't understand what I saw that day: where he came from and where he was going and why he had come to the garden. I expect there are interpretations that I even don't know enough to consider. I only know that for an hour he became a small portal into the vast wildness that surrounds us.

hurricane watch

We don't expect much drama from Hurricane Earl when he arrives tomorrow morning. By then he will likely have melted, wicked witch-like, into something that more resembles a gale. He'll either be windy rain or rainy wind. Either way, we're ready. Greg has put away all the signs, chairs, chariots, garbage cans, and boats: anything that could fly or crash.

Today he picked the ripe-enough apples that might blow down, and I picked more beans, since their brittle plants are likely to blow away,
and the basil, since it could get smashed too.
The tomatoes dangling greenly I leave in the hand of God. The kitchen is ready for Greg to turn it into an applesauce and pesto factory tonight. I'm sure it's pesto and applesauce the authorities mean when they talk about storm preparation.
We don't need to worry about losing power. There will be plenty of wind for the turbine.
And -- all on their own initiative, I might add -- the hens have decided to go on hurricane watch. They have taken up a strategic position from which they are staring in three directions for signs of Earl. When the last hen has laid her day's egg, she'll join the guard. Her assigned position will be looking east, so I think she will miss all the excitement.

welcome to bean world

The beans are flourishing, and I am beginning to think maybe I planted too many of them. There are two trellises of pole beans and two beds of bush beans. The bush bean seed packet contained a few random pole beans put there by some trickster seed packet packer somewhere, so there are also pole beans sprawling around among their more upright and conscientious relatives and making awkward late night take-over moves, ambitious climbers with no place to go.The horizontal cross bar on one of the trellises -- an eight foot long 2"x 2" milled from island spruce -- sagged and sagged until at last it snapped in half under the weighty morass of twisted vines, spreading leaves and dangling beans. I don't care, though.
Every other morning I work my way around this trellis, parting a dense jungle of leaves and dodging bees to peer as deeply into bean world as I dare. The challenge is making sense of such manic, burgeoning complexity. I can only see parts of beans amid fractured shards of shadow and sunlight. They are rarely dangling properly as they are supposed to, more often wedged up behind the trellis netting or lolling across a twisted bunch of leaves. Some of them do hide in plain sight, growing larger and larger until even the most distracted seeker could find them, gigantic foot-long beans, cartoon beans, beans guaranteed to get your attention no matter what.
I begin my every-other morning bean harvest with a slow, patient, systematic search for normal-size beans. Be mindful, I tell myself. Be Zen-like. Appreciate the beans. Let the beans be your teacher. But pretty soon my disciplined approach breaks down into something primitive, Lord of the Flies-ish. Even though it's early, the garden is hot, and there are mosquitoes about, and my hands have a mind of their own. Half way around the trellis they assert themselves, not at all mindfully. Whatever they locate by accident, they take. Whatever they miss, they miss and don't even know it. My hands are in a hurry, and greedy. They are focused on the bottom line. So many beans! they think. Let's get this over with. My hands get impatient and they don't look back.

Later we eat a few of these many, many beans, which Greg has sautéed in olive oil with garlic and tomatoes. Briefly, I manage to allow a tiny sliver of amazement. What we are eating here -- what is giving us sustenance and keeping us from hunger -- these green beans, our daily bread -- came directly into our kitchen and thence onto our supper plates from the combination of seeds and dirt and sun and water and season: a miraculous harvest, even if there's a part of me that takes it for granted every single time.

monarch in lace

Maybe this monarch is preparing for an upcoming flight to central Mexico. Even though it has never been to central Mexico, it knows how to get there. I try to imagine what that journey is like from a butterfly's point of view. But I can't grasp it. It's beyond me in so many ways.

humming garden

There's not much reason to spend time in the garden these days but I do it anyway. Oh, I'm harvesting peas and bush beans and lettuce, collards and turnip greens and swiss chard and mustard greens. But mostly I'm just looking at things grow: squash, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, pole beans. It gives me an excuse to wander around surrounded by the sound of a hundred bees humming away.
They've been hard at work in the garden all summer long. Just because the season is turning slowly toward fall is no reason to change their ways as far as they are concerned. There's still lots for them to do.

When we first moved to the island we couldn't imagine how anything got pollinated, since there were no honey bees.

We've learned that's one thing we can cross off our worry list.

The wild bees take care of everything. They don't make honey so humans don't think they are just the end-all and be-all. But humans can be short-sighted that way.
There's a Grimms Brothers tale called The Queen Bee. The youngest of three brothers, who was dwarfish and insignificant, followed his two older brothers out into the world.
He may have been insignificant but he was kind. Maybe his own dwarfishness gave him empathy for other small creatures.
In three episodes of the story, he defended first ants, then ducks and finally bees against the cruelties of his brothers.
Then came the tests to break the spell on an enchanted castle and win the hand of the princess.
They were quite impossible tests.
But the grateful ants, ducks and bees came to the aid of the youngest brother and so he was able to accomplish them all, even though his older, stronger, and no doubt more handsome brothers failed.

I often think of this story.

fancy lace

Queen Anne's lace is one of the most common field flowers in North America, but somehow I'm only beginning to get to know it. I planted these seeds in my little wildflower garden two years ago. Now the garden is filled with what I think of as Acadian lace. It's one thing to admire it along a roadside but something else to watch it up close every day. I never knew it had so many lovely stages of development.
Its tiny flowers blush pink as they open.
I have only seen the small wild bee sipping nectar here, and small flies. The larger bees don't seem to visit.
Each fully opened flower -- made up of a myriad of tiny blossoms -- has a dark red heart at its centre. It fades away as the flower matures.
They have a graceful sculptural quality. Strong wind does not affect them, as they only bend and sway.
And they have a delicate sweet fragrance. I never knew that. These flowers remind me that the more I look the more I see.

picking peas

I pick a cup or so of sugar snap peas every morning now, and every morning the pea vines have gotten taller. Now they arch beyond the trellis, which is five feet high. To reach the highest pods tomorrow, I'll need to get on a rickety chair -- a derelict wooden one that's lost its back and is spending its last days waiting to be of some use in the garden. When I snap a pod dangling above my head, the fine early morning mist that still hangs about the vine and leaves showers down on my face, an island version of a beauty treatment in more ways than one.

I wasn't thinking when I decided to put the trellis along the outer edge of a bed. The peas are easy to harvest from that side, but if I want to reach the ones that hang enticingly at the centre of the trellis on the inside, and I do, I have to teeter on the wooden frame of the raised bed, stretch over two or three feet, steady myself with one hand along the trellis frame, and then try to pick each of those peas -- which are clearly the very best of the lot -- with only one hand. A weird new yoga pose. Although you really do need two hands to pick snap peas. So it's far better if you can do it while standing well-balanced on the earth on your two feet. I'd be standing on chard if I tried that. It's what you could call a design flaw.

This western side of the island has such high winds that the trellises blew over during the garden's first summer. We lost the last of the peas that year. After that Greg sank the posts into concrete to keep them upright through the whole season. So where they are is where they will be: what you could call a permanent design flaw.

I'm bringing all sorts of things into the house these days besides the peas: huge baskets of collards and turnip greens, chard, kale, curly lime-coloured mustard, great piles of lettuce. I can vaguely remember all the work that went into this year's garden -- the raised beds, the winter seaweed, the spring digging, the compost. But the pea trellis is not the only design flaw. Some of the raised beds are too wide. It's a big stretch to reach into the middle to cut greens or pull weeds. My early miscalculations put me in awkward positions every day.

But there are essential elements that have nothing to do with either how hard I've worked or how many mistakes I've made: the balance of sun and rain, the pace at which summer has unfolded here on the island, the warmth of the season. Except for the watering, I have little power over any of that. So when I'm picking the peas or cutting the collards my basic position is amazed.

honeysuckle from the old hotel

The first summer we were here I saw a honeysuckle vine dangling above the ruins of the old hotel in the field next to our place. Maybe the Perrys planted it there once upon a time, when they had the hotel. (Folks say it was more of a bunkhouse, really.) Or maybe it was planted by the Rennehans, who lived there after that.

The next summer I went back and took some cuttings. I rooted them over the winter, and planted them in the new wildflower garden. They didn't do very well, but one of the cuttings at least didn't die.

The next winter I re-read Evelyn Richardson's classic We Keep A Light, about her life in the 1930s on the island of Bon Portage, which is not far from here. She wrote that she carefully placed a honeysuckle in a patch of soil at the top of a big boulder, out of the way of harm, and later spied a lamb who had climbed up onto the boulder nibbling away at it. Ah ha! I thought.

So I stuck alder branches along the outside of the fence. Last summer they kept the lambs from reaching inside the fence and eating the asters. I hoped they would be equally effective for honeysuckle.

This year the honeysuckle is doing beautifully. I'm glad that it's a honeysuckle that's native to Atlantic Canada.

I can't really identify which of the many varieties of wild honeysuckle this is, but as you can see, it's quite fancy.

In the meantime, the honeysuckle is flourishing over at the old hotel, in places where no lamb could ever safely go. High up in a spruce tree, for instance. Deep down in the ancient cellar.

I have tried to take photographs of the old hotel before but they never came out very well. I have discovered that it's a challenge to photograph a jumbled pile of rotting boards, which is pretty much what remains. You need a focus.

A contrast.
Some tiny story, maybe of how a vine can plant itself in nothing and blossom where you least expect it, or will keep coming up year after year even when everything around it has collapsed and even when there's nobody left to admire it.
Though we are admiring it now.

a day in the life of a bee

Those foxgloves that blew in on the wind last year and planted themselves in the little garden next to the house?Yesterday they swayed back and forth like the masts of a ship in a storm at sea.
A bee flew round and round, trying to decide which flower he liked the best.
He just couldn't make up his mind. They all seemed so -- beckoning.
I imagine the range of choices and all that swaying was making him a bit woozy.
But he kept going, true to his beeness no matter how great the challenge.