The pleasures of summer

It's berry picking season in the area around Northern Town and I'm determined to stock up on as many as I have time to gather before the berries start to drop. This weekend after ManNorth unexpectedly left on a two week posting to the south (more blogging to follow), I took the opportunity to share the berrypicking time with other friends from NorthernTown and went picking on Saturday and this evening after work. (It's always a good idea to avoid going out alone, even near town and I'd assured ManNorth that I'd stay safe as bear encounters are rare, but possible in the area. That, and spending time with friends is fun!)

I've found that there is a special technique necessary to be speedy and gentle enough to avoid jarring the bush and knocking off all the fruit in pursuit of an individual berry.

Now, when one (womannorth) isn't particularly good at this technique, the berries are each as small as a pea and there is a limited amount of time to do the picking, one may resort to alternate methodology:

Berry rakes and campfire waterbuckets!

Now this is the way to do it! Simply scoop up the berries, raking the teeth of the scoop through the entire plant. Is this cheating? No, I don't think so. This is an efficient way to collect lots of berries quickly. (Of course, after Saturday's excursion, I found I spent almost an equal amount of time indoors cleaning all the twigs and leaves from the berries that the rake had also collected. However, that was time indoors while seated on a comfortable couch and protected from the myriads of black flies and mosquitos determined to render me a dry carcass. This was a fair exchange, I thought.)

Don't believe me? Here's a horrible 20 second video I took today as an example. (Horrible, because of the poor technique admittedly, but most horrible because of all the bugs. Obviously.)

Now that I've mentioned of the local wildlife, of which I am certain you were simply fascinated by, you miiiiight just be interested in seeing another animal that had also been enjoying the berries. (Actually, there were at least 6-8 of them, but this was the only one that stuck around after I startled them to cluck at us in annoyance and disapproval from a perch atop a spruce tree. )

It's a ptarmigan!

(Can't see it? Look at one of the tree tops near the right hand side of the photo.)

This is how one sneaks up on it to get its photo.

It was on to us.

C'est finite!

Heh, heh. It's kinda cooold.

There was ice on a pond next to ManNorth’s workplace this morning and frost on the vehicles in our parking lot. Temperatures dropped overnight (despite the 24hours of daylight) to -1C.

This makes me laugh just a wee bit for a few reasons:

1. Because it’s just so ridiculous to be seeing ice in July at the same time one is contemplating going out to pick wild blueberries and ward off hoards of mosquitoes.

2. Because it’s not really that unusual, given that we live 200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle

3. Because making headlines in the news over the past few days was how darn warm another arctic community that is 320 kilometres south of the arctic circle has been for the past few days and how much has been made of this temporary warming in that community and how everyone is speculating that it is related to climate change and global warming etc etc..

Now, I certainly don’t deny that our climate is changing but what often gets forgotten is how variable weather can naturally be. For instance, when cold arctic air blows south to chill Northern Town and create sheets of ice on wee duck ponds, the air has to come from somewhere. The thing to remember is that where it came from isn’t suddenly a vacuum, devoid of air, but is being replaced with air from somewhere else, whose air is also being replaced.

So to just speculate a wee bit here, not knowing the actual patterns of air movement that caused this but, as a result of low pressure systems sucking in air from high pressure systems, creating something known as global winds and pressure gradients, could not one tell a simple story of cold air in Northern Town coming from the arctic which sucked up warm air from the south to pass through TemporarilySwelteringOtherArcticTown to replace it?

But one is speculated to be evidence of global warming while the other one just has sucky cold weather? Mmmm?

Yep, this makes me chuckle, just a tiny bit.

Brrrrrrr!

What was that I was saying the other day about it being warm enough for T-shirts and shorts?
Yes, well that was a short time ago. (Ahem.)

I must not have been paying much attention to the weather these past few days because today's high was a balmy 11 degrees Celsius (53 Fahrenheit), only 3 degrees below the 24-hour high and tomorrow's high is forecast to be a lovely 8 degrees Celsius (46 Fahrenheit).

Compared to a typical daily average temperature in January of about minus 27C, don't these warm July temperatures in Northern Town just make you think of piña coladas and Hawaiian lei or something?

Hmm mmm, says half the town as they wish they were in Hawaii...

Of course, ManNorth and I are faring well and didn't mind needing to pull out a wool sweater or two this evening!

(Mom & Dad, don't worry: It will be looooooovvveeely when you come to visit in September.
Just remember your sweaters and your gloves and hats, 'kay?)

Garden denizens

Using willow twigs as plant stakes is fine, but what they are really great for is for making things. Things like baskets or, in the case of my garden, birds!

One day after seeing willow baskets in the greenhouse that had been made by someone to hold their hanging plants, I began thinking about how the pliable twigs could lend themselves to other uses, such as for sculpture. I thought that I probably could create a bird for my garden by winding willow twigs together. So, I had a lovely walk through the woods one evening with a pair of pruning shears and a large bag to collect my twigs and then came home to spend a fun weekend on the couch surrounded by twigs, pliers and thread (which I used sparingly and only for the really ornery twigs that wouldn't stay in place).

What do you think? Here is bird #1(for which I was happy that it simply looked bird-like):

and bird #2 (I love her feet!):

and bird #3 (He's a bit more difficult to spot when visitors try to find all four birds.):and bird #4 (For some reason, it's this one's belly that I'm most proud of.):

I ran out of both my willow branches and my weekend after finishing the hummingbird but still intend to get some more branches for a big raven or owl to perch up on the top of the frame and maybe also have a go at creating a squirrel who could run along the edge. We'll see about that (as I created these birds more than a month ago and have yet to make more) but for now, I like the unique contribution they make to our garden. I've also been asked to do a workshop on making willow birds and may do so, but secretly, I like the idea that only my plot has them in it.

Welcome to our garden!

Naturegirl (who truly takes amazing photos) recently posted about the trials and tribulations of gardening in small spaces (i.e. a small shady backyard) and I realized that I've not shown any photos of our garden space here in the far north. With 24 hours of sunlight each day for almost two months straight, plants grow wonderfully, so long as they are watered and warm -conditions which an attentive gardener and the shelter of a greenhouse can provide.

I'll save the photos of our sad, sad looking balcony plants for our home archives and take you all on a tour of our community greenhouse where ManNorth and I were fortunate enough to have rented a small plot for our own garden this spring and summer. These plots are a hot commodity in NorthernTown and we missed getting a plot last summer by only a week after our arrival last year. Although we were on a waiting list, no spaces opened up for us until this spring.

We began working our plot at the end of May and had planted our seeds and seedlings that we had started indoors (in small flats and empty buttermilk cartons, of all things) by the beginning of June. Working the plot initially meant breaking up the somewhat frozen soil, mixing in lots of compost and watering, watering and watering again.

Here's what our plot looked like then:

The tall bushy plant on the left is actually a tomato plant we had started indoors almost a year ago. Since it started producing flowers and fruit in the winter, we figured it had earned the right to join the garden, irregardless of its tall, leggy twisted shape. The plants in the foreground to its right are some of the pepper plants that we had also planted the summer before. These had begun flowering and fruiting under our grow lights in the winter and were still producing new flowers. About halfway back and in this order from the front to the rear of the plot are the tomato, bean and cucumber plants we had started in milk cartons full of soil. The twigs poking up all over the place to stake and support all the plants are willow switches that we gathered up from piles cut and discarded by road crews, clearing the snow from roadsides all winter. (Unfortunately, the twigs were all still alive and not only put down roots, but flowered and grew leaves. To avoid a garden full solely of willow bushes next year, we've pulled out most of the twigs and have stripped the leaves from the few that remain.)

As you can see from the photo of the greenhouse below, we'd gotten a bit of a jump on all the other gardens.

This is what the greenhouse looks like now, only six or seven weeks later:

The blue barrels, which act as water reservoirs, are filled in the spring when the pipes are still frozen by a greenhouse member who is also a volunteer firefighter (as all the town firefighters are). He'd arrive with the fire truck and hose and pump water from the truck to fill all the water barrels for us. Since the pipes have thawed, garden hoses are used to fill the barrels and gardeners use small green watering cans to then move the water from the reservoirs to their gardens. This is an organic greenhouse, so all members agree to leave the Miracle Grow (TM) at home and fertilize only with organic compost or organic fertilizers. The same goes for pesticides, although I've yet to see more than the occasional spider or fly in the greenhouse so pesticides aren't at all necessary.

This scarecrow above, planted in a communal garden and next to a disfunctional fountain hidden in some rocks, is not only pointing directly at our plot (now sporting a dark brown wooden frame), it is wearing a face I sewed for it, an old purple shirt I no longer needed and my old field hat (Hey now, no comments are needed from the peanut gallery: it was hot, sunny and for my field work I was literally bending over plants in cow pastures for 14 hours a day. The hat was wonderful). The pants were already a part of the scarecrow which had been created by someone else and then sadly neglected since last year. I'd grown tired of stepping over it as it lay on a walkway in the spring, sans head, and decided that I'd spruce it up a bit.

Here's our plot as it looks now, complete with a frame that ManNorth and I built and stained.

And from another angle:
The lettuce and swiss chard are in the front (I've had to cut back the swiss chard after they began bolting and so they are slightly hidden by the lettuce) and our enthusiastically growing zucchini plants are hiding the peppers that are still flowering and fruiting behind and under them. The tomato plants have grown almost as tall as the frame.

Here are our greens close up:

(On the left is a row of parsley, basil, thyme and onions)

And from the back, here are our cucumber plants (which have yet to produce more than one 2cm long cucumber):

I planted sweet peas at the edges of the frame near the middle of the plot simply for the visual pleasure of them and for their gorgeous smell!

Above are our volunteer peas which must have grown from seed dropped from the garden in our plot the year previous. We didn't weed them out and they now tower above our beans and cucumbers. I don't think that they are snow peas but if one catches them before they get too big, the husks are also edible and somewhat sweet.

I've many garden photos and will post a few more soon, especially of some unique decorations that now populate our garden...

Weather in our neck of the woods

A few days ago Grammarphile left me a comment asking about the weather up here.

In short, yes, we get to wear shorts, but only shortly. ;)

It is currently about 11 degrees celsius outside and given the cloud cover, today's high is likely not going to reach above about 22 C, at around 6pm or so.

Last night when I rode my bike home from the greenhouse, it was cool enough that my jeans and jean jacket were comfortable but I could have done just fine with just the jeans and my T-shirt.

A few weeks ago for about 4 or 5 days, we had temperatures in the high 20s which felt sweltering compared to the usual refreshingly cool temperatures the rest of the summer.

Incidentally, the sun will set over Northern Town for the first time in four days, although only for a few minutes! With some increase in the amount of dimness and darkness at night, the temperatures will continue to drop further and further each night so that my morning walk to work is likely to continue involving a light jacket. (We had our first snowfall in the third week of September last year so summer is rather short. Fall celebrations start happening in August!)

So that was the (relative) short of it. Here's the long of it:

For comparison, here are the annual temperatures in Windsor, Ontario where I grew up:

A May Post

No time this morning for a story so here are two photos I took in the middle of May.