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 belated spring post

As I've missed writing about the arrival (and departure) of spring here in Northern Town, I've some catching up to do. The next few posts will try to remedy that as well as throw in some current news now and again.

So, without further adieu, waaaaaay back in April, when the landscape looked like this photo below (taken by ManNorth on one of his regular super-hero flights to check out the changing landscape) and community members were still building quinzees

and spruce bough shelters during ice fishing excursions, we were busy preparing...

...for our garden in the community greenhouse. We purchased a few small plastic flats to start our seedlings. The beans got off to a roaring start while the lettuce, tomatoes, swiss chard and various herbs took their time. Meanwhile, the peppers that we started last summer and which had begun producing fruit finally began to ripen. We realized that we had mistaken hot pepper seeds for bell peppers eeds (we saved both from fresh peppers we'd purchased at the grocery store) but were, and are, happy to have such festive looking and tasty hot fruit.

Daylength at the end of April was noticeably longer and already longer than most days much further south. (Of course, relative to a month of no direct sunlight in the winter, this may not mean much to any of you.) The photo of the peppers and tray of seedlings was taken at 11pm and illuminated by outdoor light. This is what the sky looked like outside at the same time as the sun slowly set.

Next post(s), stories from May.

Happy Vernal Equinox!

Today in Northern Town marks a day, like everywhere else in the world, in which day length is equal to the length of night. (This is actually not quite true: day is longer by about 14 minutes. The wikipedia entry I linked to has a good explanation for this.)

Today the sun is up and doing its best to shine through an ice fog that settled over our town during the night. The fog creates a lovely bright hazy effect, causing the sunlight to scatter and refract more than usual on an otherwise cloudless day. Combined with the normal reflection of light from our ever-present snow, sun glasses are needed even if one is facing away from the sun.

Although our calendars mark today as the first day of spring, all you bright readers out there surely realize that the timing of spring will vary according to latitude, as well as altitude. This means that although the fruit trees are in full bloom down on Vancouver Island, up here in Northern Town, it is winter as usual; our spring won’t come for a few more months. Break-up probably won’t happen on the rivers until the end of May and the beginning of June will see the first flowers begin to bloom, pushing through occasional clumps of snow left melting in the shadows.

This morning it was -39C without a bit of wind to blow away the ice fog. Our forecast predicts a warmer weekend, with highs of about -20C. Community members are glad as there is a carnival happening in one of the nearby hamlets (in celebration of the spring equinox, as best I can determine) and participants won’t be nearly as cold as they might have been as they enjoy the weekend’s events.

ManNorth and I won’t be heading to Western Hamlet to watch the sled dog races, snow mobile races nor to join in a potluck or dance a jig at the community dance. We’ll wait for Northern Town’s own celebration to come in a few weeks’ time when we’ll likely watch some of the sled dog races down on the river.

Yesterday I had a meeting in this nearby hamlet and after the meeting was done, joined a co-worker who wanted to visit a relative who lived there. We were treated to freshly cooked whitefish (luk zheii) and I ate baked fish eggs, or ik’in, for the first time. Unlike caviar, they weren’t “fishy” tasting at all and were so rich that only a few fork-fulls filled me up for the rest of the evening. (Of course, the homemade donut I was also served helped too!)

I had a rather embarrassing experience just before the meeting when I used the women’s washroom facility after our long drive along an ice road to Western Hamlet. I didn’t think to look before it was too late and when I needed it, I couldn’t find the toilet paper, and so made use of a box of tissues that was sitting on the tank of the toilet. Unfortunately, a handful of tissues emerged with the pull of a single tissue and having inadvertently handled them all, I wasn’t about to try to put any back. All of them were added to the toilet whereupon I discovered that the toilet wouldn’t flush. I took the back off the tank, thinking that perhaps the handle had disconnected from something and discovered that the tank was almost completely empty.
I moved to the sink to wash up and realized that not only was there no water for the toilet, there was also none running from the faucet. As there were no warning signs up on the door to the washroom, I thought that the facility manager should be advised of the problem and so although embarrassed about leaving behind obvious evidence of use and not being able to wash my hands, I sought out the manager (who is also a council member) I had just met for the first time minutes before. I explained the problem and then was mortified to discover that the building “has no water”, and that this was known to the general public and it was expected that I knew this too. I also learned later that even if the water had been on, no one in Western Hamlet flushes toilet paper or tissues and that the wastebasket next to the toilet should be an obvious clue to this. (There was no wastebasket in the washroom I used.)

Sigh.

The reason I attended this meeting was simply to introduce myself to the council members. Although not for the reasons I’d intended, at least now I know that they’ll remember me.

It's official. We have darkness.

After almost 2 months of 24hr daylight, we finally have darkness. A whole hour of it and some civil twilight on either side. (The Man informed me that civil twilight occurs when the sun dips below the horizon but doesn't descend more than 6 degrees.)

Do check out this site. It provides not only astronomical information for your locale but for any others you might be interested in. The best part of it is at the bottom of the page (after choosing stargazing and your city of interest) where the earth's shadow is shown. If you check in occasionally throughout the day you can watch it slowly progressing around the globe.

I copied this image taken at 8AM my time this morning.

It's a bit astonishing how heavily populated (and artificially lit) areas show up while they are in complete darkness. Look how large cities in southeast Asia show up! Until just recently the top of that shadow was just passing below where The Man and I live. Now it's brushing by ever so slightly and more so each day. I've also noticed that Antarctica is finally getting some sun and is progressing to longer and longer days as ours shorten.

A few months from now and I'll be posting photos of the aurora borealis taken during the (dark) daytime hours.