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Jan.22nd . . anticipations
There are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter.
One is the January thaw. The other is the seed catalogues.
- Hal Borland
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| I have taken to having lunch on "sunny"days in the not yet finished plant room. Here I have mentally measured walls for the light units, windows for pots, copper rods for hanging baskets. If I had not promised Tom that I would not start "filling" it up before he was finished - I am sure I'd be running plant experiments already and he'd have been objecting loudly to the lack of space to work! |
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January is the quietest month in the garden. ...
But just because it looks quiet doesn't mean that nothing is happening. The soil, open to the sky, absorbs the pure snowfall when it melts, while microorganisms convert tilled-under fodder into usable nutrients for the next crop of plants. The feasting earthworms tunnel along, aerating the soil and preparing it to welcome the seeds and bare roots to come.
- Rosalie Muller Wright, Editor of Sunset Magazine, 1/99
To which I add from previous springs observenceof many many piles of earth - the voles have a great earth moving party!
Today I realized that in six months I will be 60 - the first thought from this was Wow! we will have been here at Apsley Acers for a decade. How quickly time passes. How enmeshed in my psyche this self professed personnalized Shangrila has become. Slowly we have gathered about us the items which make our world work for all layers of our collective being.
With the turning of 50 I experienced a total explosion of good upwards power and internal strength. A freedom to make personnal choices, for growth in so many areas which has continued full force forwards. Here I am 10 years later; so many of those original choices are still in play - some have evolved into truly wonderful corners for our world. I have grown on so many levels. It has been a wonderful decade.
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| Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination. You are always living three, or indeed six, months hence. I believe that people entirely devoid of imagination never can be really good gardeners. To be content with the present, and not striving about the future, is fatal. - Alice Morse Earle, 1897 |
This year Kristl Walek owner of http://www.gardensnorth.com has beguiled me once again with her yearly dissertation about her featured collection. After the heat of last summer the idea of growing plants that actually like extreme hot and dry is appealing. Add in their enjoyment of sandy soil and I truly view them as upcomming treasures.
I've put little inked stars in the corners to mark where the Artemisia's begin; she is listing six, and in my mind's eye I can already see and smell unique wreaths made with a mix of fragrant boughs of each.
This catalogue is all about plants that will grow in our zone 4, I do at times lament that some of her plants require the warmth of zone 5, but this is curtailed as I have few corners with such micro-climate conditions. It is with this same catalogue I add each year to our list of wild edibles for about Apsley Acers. Have yet to make a decision for this year.
Today being Sunday - it is a bit special at the moment - amidst these times when one week sometimes runs into the next. A day of personnal indulgences - I have my weekly coffee, sometimes I even have breakfast - today - I made us a toasted bacon and tomato for lunch. The bread is super delicious right now - I have been doing a Candida cleanse and trying to keep my intake of "yeasts" low - so it is on my current NOT to Often list. I like many of my friends make lists. Keeping them all straight is tough when ones rememberer is broke.
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One mail-order plant catalog "Garden's North" is folded open to its newest collection titled "Some like it Hot " .
Latin names skim across my thoughts like dragonflies above a summer pond— Colutea arborescens, Halimodendron halodendron, Lewisia cotyledon are visual unknowns astrisked to web search for photos at a later date.. But by afternoon, designs have begun to tangle in my mind's eye, and the marked list of plants is far too long. Another day will be needed to weed it down to affordability.
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There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you ..... In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.
- Ruth Stout
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| On a list to which I belong - the International Jewelry Designer's Guild at Yahoo - we have been discussing "Artist Statements" and the components there of. The following is an excerpt from my own statement; the full content is available here at the page bottom .
"The large windows in my studio showcase the constant changes in the world about me, whether it be the exquisite colour of autumn; white cloaked evergreens of my own personal winter wonderland or a young fawn rambling in spring with its Mother. By watching all these and other intimate details my imagination and inner design strengths find their base.
A hardwood ridge crowds this view from my studio's windows. It births the breezes for summer cooling; it blazes with vivid colour each fall; then slowly the trees loose their leaves and stand as a bone-like skeletal sentinel structure, awaiting spring; this barren season momentarily allows my eye to actually perceive the ridge's height. When the soft infant leaves appear, and the sun's rays warm and develope them to their full fledge greenery; my momentary extended view decreases, till once again the ridge is enclosed with the secrecy of summer."
Today we are definately at the "bone-like skeletal sentinal structure " stage. Just to the right of Tom's workshop you can see the toe of the aforementioned hardwood ridge.
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Bare branches of each tree on this chilly January morn look so cold so forlorn. Gray skies dip ever so low left from yesterday's dusting of snow.
Yet in the heart of each tree waiting for each who wait to see new life as warm sun and breeze will blow, like magic, unlock springs sap to flow, buds, new leaves, then blooms will grow.
- Nelda Hartmann, January Morn
A new phenomenon is that as soon as I get settled with all the bits I deem necessary with which to enjoy + 80 degree temperatures and sun shine - (which on a sunny day the plant room easily achieves) - it seems as soon as I sit down - the sky begins to gray and the sun disappears. I am fortunate that without sun the room now maintains 60 degrees and with my shawl I can remain engrossed in what ever day dreams have taken me on flights of fancy. |
In the depths of winter I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. - Albert Camus
The high - lo thermometer has become an addiction. Each day I check to see what the overnight lo was and am pleased with the results. My dream of all year round greens and who knows what else are definately looking like a possibility.
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Can you smell supper cooking? Tom remarked as he walked by a few moments ago at how good it smells! This morning I put together our evening meal. Our green largish old enameled cast iron pot received a cup of basmati rice to cover the bottom. A layer of frozen sliced carrots and once fresh halved onions (some like the potatoes are now starting to grow) from last season's harvest . Next from the hydroponic in my studio; chopped fresh celery stalks, a small red pepper and a few sprigs of parsley; plus a few snips of rosemary from a pot in the nearby window. Then I placed a ring of 4 attached chicken legs and thighs on top with some of my home made poultry seasoning and freshly ground pepper. Added two cups of water for the rice - then topped it to just covering with chicken broth. Simmered at 300 for an hour and then down to 250 for the rest of the afternoon. Stewoup?
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May the pot of prosperity boil over - May the Pongal that we cook, - the fragrance of turmeric - the taste of sugarcane, ginger and honey - Bring the joy of Pongal into our homes - May the blessings of the Sun God flood our lives.
- Bawarchi: Indian Festivals: Pongal
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| Somehow the northwestern winds are best at drawing snow down in heaps from a solid ceiling of clouds. Upon the heels of several days of unseasonally mild plus temperature with rain no less the weather forecasting people thrill at having the ability to traumatize most folk with their messages of gloom and doom of an upcomming winter deluge; which in hindsight was just a "snowfall ". This type of anticipated storm is preceded most richly by this heraldry of radar and heresay, bringing in advance a constant seasonal panic to almost everyone in its probable path — everyone, that is, who doesn't have to travel. As always when a deep snowfall cloaks our world in white wonderment; I get up at 3am for my nightly cold walk down the hall to enjoy the joys of an almost frozen toilet seat; an quiver of appreciation for the surrounding muffled hush, the deep sound of nothing all about is felt. I swear Tom sleeps with his one good ear open - as shortly after I regain the warmth of our feather bed - he scurries off to partake in a similar nocturnal ritual BEFORE the seat looses the warmth I had so recently imparted.
Winter storms are episodic by nature, whether they march on an arctic track out of the noth west disguised as an Alberta Clippers or ride in eastward from the Atlantic coast or as our past few storms billow in from the southwest northern states; all congeal thickly as they roar forwards. It's been a long time since our last episode of any magnitude, as the current norm seems to be deluge those who live below Lake Ontario not those who live north or sometimes as an alternative thought tons of snow is dumped on those unfortunates on the East Coast. We watch the TV in awe - astounded by the depth of the many white layers which befall our distant neighbours to the south and east. Reminders of what true winter really means, since winter up here ( yes -I am touching wood ) is now a pale, warm shadow of its ancestral self.
Many seeds require a period of cold, called stratification, before they'll germinate. Thanks to our milder storms, residents of the North Kawarthas like ourselves can consider ourselves only mildly stratified.
In the country winter snows mean a chance, when the gusts were strongest, to pretend that we'd been shifted northward in latitude to the shores of Labrador, or perhaps backward in time to the middle of the last glaciation, when ice sheets covered our area a mile thick; when snow skidded around the compass with the wind. Though lately our storms never reached the epic blizzard conditions from my childhood growing up on the North shore of Lake Superior, it can be strong enough at times to blot out the dark edge of tour forest, white out our visual world, weighing down the hemlocks, spruce and pine; with fluffy white cloaks. The falling, blowing snow steals color right out of the air, the occasional red berry is the only miniscule visual warmth around. By nightfall the snow about the pond is usually fox-deep.
Our resident fox walks his broken trail each evening, adding fresh excitement to Brian 's nightly stroll. On a full moon the old song of:
"A fox went out on a starry night .. he prayed to the moon to give him light .." has been heard sung past my lips. I too seldom join Brian and Tom walking the circle - on their late night constitutional but a full moon's light seems to have it's own special call..
There's no better day to plan a garden than just after a fresh snowfall. The landscape has a purity it will lose when the snow melts. The geometry of each bed is perfect at this moment, if hidden. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and begin to take inventory of the things I plan to do once the snow melts away and the ground begins to soften. Then I remember it's January, a month when only the onions and potatoes are optimistic about warmer weather.
If deep cold made a sound, it would be the scissoring and gnashing of a skater's blades against hard gray ice, or the crunching the snow squawks up when you walk across it in the blue light of early morning, or the way the almost perfect clarity of the raceous noise from a hungry Blue Jay peals through the air. The soil in windblown fields looks— and is — iron hard. It's all a paradox, a cold that feels absolutely rigid but which nonetheless seeps through our ill-fitting windows, between logs, and along uninsulated pipe chases. We have learnt which cupdoors left open prevent sink pipes from freezing - how slow cooked oven meals bring warmth to otherwise cold rooms; that venting the dryer inwards brings not only warmth but much needed humidity and to bring the dogs water dish into the cabin as it freezes solid in the back kitchen..
And yet beneath all this the glimmer of hope kindles - a lust for sunshine prevails.
((hugs))
Sharon
Comments or Questions? Email me ;-) |
I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it - the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it - the whole story doesn't show.
- Andrew Wyeth
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Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.
- Stanley Horowitz |
For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed. - Blaise Pascal
Walk in Peace in the warmth of Grandfather Sun's Smile.
Sharon
"Touch the Earth
If you have any comments or would like to contact me.
Comments or Questions? Email me ;-) - Sharon
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