State of the Garden Address - the aftermath of the long sog

It's been just a touch wet in Alberta lately. 

Ok, significantly more than a touch.  Even here in Edmonton where we avoided any serious flooding (largely due to the fact that our river is in a significant gorge/canyon) it has rained almost EVERY SINGLE DAY for almost a month.  This has been good and bad in several regards:

Good: Plants are well-watered.
Bad: Cucumbers hate to be well-watered, they are kinda dead looking now...
Good: Save money on the water bill when nature does it for you.
Bad: Weeds like water too.  Chickweed, creeping charlie, quackgrass, thistle, stinging nettles...

The garden itself is progressing though, it finally dried up enough today to weed the damn thing, so I thought I'd provide an update and photographic evidence of the current state of affairs.

Progress!

On the left you can see my peas flopping over, they are badly in need of some support, so I'm going to pick up a trellis hopefully tomorrow.  Next to them is the beans, which are absolutely flourishing.  Next over we have the swiss chard, which is kind of spindly but still growing.  Then comes the lettuce, which you can see I netted off a whole row for it but it only came in in the very front.  I don't know if this is due to the varying degrees of sun in different parts of the garden, or if I accidentally pulled baby lettuce when I was pulling weeds.  At any rate, I've re-planted the bare area and hopefully will get something by the end of the summer.  Lastly on the left are the onions, which are around the air conditioner.  They are doing absolutely marvelously, I am able to harvest some of the stalks while the bulbs continue to grow underground.  I think these are going to be exceptional when they are eventually harvested.

First on the right are the carrots, doing average-ly well.  The spinach is next, doing pretty good too, I'm well in line for a second crop and I'm hoping to keep this batch from seeding for a bit longer.  In the front is the strawberry plant, which has sent off a runner, so hopefully there will be two strawberry plants soon!  In the back corner you can kind of see my roma tomato plant.  It isn't gaining much height, but is starting to get actual fruit now.  Off camera are my two pepper plants, which look about the same as when I got them, with maybe the very beginnings of some fruit.  Also in an off-screen corner (front left) is the parsley plant, which is getting really huge, but I did buy it already started so I'm not really shocked on that.  Been pulling nice herbs off for about a week:

Parsley, looking nice and full.

So nothing really earth shattering is going down in the garden... but take a look at this:

HUGE.

 

My cherry tomato plant is a MONSTER.  Everything is going right in this pot apparently, I don't know what is so magical about this spot or this pot or the soil or the plant or whatever, but everything is working in perfect harmony to create a giant tomato bush!  It's surrounded by violas and marigolds (the last survivors from the starter-plant holocaust) to attract the bees.  It has infinite amounts of lovely little yellow blossoms, but no fruit quiet yet.  I have really high hopes for the yield on this plant, it's going to be good!

I also took some photos of some of the flowers around the yard that are really popping right now, like my peony in the front yard:

poof.

Peonies are so floppy, this one is caged up with chicken wire and posts quite high on its stems, but it's still flopping almost totally over.  I don't know if it's really avoidable.  Today the peony plant is beautiful, so I thought I'd nab some photographic proof before it explodes in a petal storm before too long.

Also looking really good is the rose bush in the front:

Lovelies.

The bush is a bit leggy, but it has a whole bunch of buds and a couple of flowers including these two lovelies.  They have a beautiful smell too!  I love their deep fuchsia colour, it's not at all what I had expected when I initially saw the bush.

In other unphotographed news, I pulled about 3 cups of rhubarb off the plant, we are in line for another harvest in about three weeks, will probably get 3 or 4 pulls all told (about 12 cups or so in the end).  A pity the DH doesn't like rhubarb!  The pumpkin plant is the only survivor of the large vegetable group, it has three fruits going at last count, thank god they are miniature pumpkins.  Hoping one will work as a jack-o-lantern though if frost holds off long enough. 

That's about all for now!  I'll post back when things start bearing more fruit or we have some more interesting flowerings.  Cheers!

About 10000 leagues over my head - it's poetry month

There is a fat worm in these waters

in these lands a predatory worm:

he ate the island's flag

hoisting up his overseer's banner,

he was nourished from the captive blood

of the poor buried patriots.

- "Munoz Marin" by Pablo Neruda

Book Club pulled poetry this month.  And I picked a book so far over my head that I pretty much drowned in it.

Poetry and I have had a tumultuous relationship at best.  And most of that was because I was forced to memorize Keats and Shelley in Jr. High, followed by an overly generous helping of Atwood in High School.  

But having to pick a book, I decided I'd like to read something by Pablo Neruda.  I took interest in Neruda after reading The Dreamer by Pam Munoz Ryan.  So this seemed like a good chance to actually read some of his poetry...

Which is how I ended up with Song of Protest.

There are so many things wrong here, and sadly, they are all things that are wrong with me.  I can't even begin to actually review this collection of political poems.  Firstly, I feel like this is really a set of poetry which would have been EXTREMELY powerful in the time period and place when it was written, which was more than 20 years before I was born.  Or, it would have a great deal of meaning if I was really familiar with South American history.  Which I also am not.  And lastly, it was just hard for me to wrap my head around some of the subject matter in the poems, particularly Neruda's overt bromance with Fidel Castro...

So this was just one of those things that I didn't get.  Totally my bad.

But we can't all be experts in everything, so I guess I'll let myself get away with not having a handle on poetry.  After all, I'll always know a lot about parallel parking and 1980's Japanese pop music....

(pikara, pikara...) 

Patricia Wrede's "Thirteenth Child" (book review)

I have to admit, I have been very lax lately in my reading of books for younger teens.  I'm so keen on the 15-18 older teen books that I've been reading them almost exclusively over the last few months.  So recently, when I was at the library with no particular books in mind, I decided to peruse the books aimed at the 12-14 crowd.  And that is where I picked up Patricia Wrede's Thirteenth Child.

I love the cover!

  
Thirteenth Child is difficult to classify in terms of its genre.  It could be called a fantasy book, or magical realism, or historical fiction, or perhaps most aptly, alternative historical fiction.  Thirteenth Child (and the series that follows it) is set in the early days of the American Wild West.  Except the frontier is populated with a wild variety of magical and non-magical creatures, as well as some ice-age holdovers like mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers.  And the creatures are not the only ones who possess magical abilities, humans possess these abilities as well to varying degrees. 

Wrede does an excellent job of keeping enough historical accuracy to make the time period recognizable, but at the same time integrating these interesting, magical aspects of the storyline. The story's heroine, Eff, is considered by some to be an unfortunate, cursed thirteenth child.  The story follows Eff as she leaves her home community at a very young age, and strives to leave behind the stigma of her birth order and prove herself to not only be a good person, but one who is safe for others to be around.  The story covers a fairly large stretch of time, starting with Eff at age five and ending at age 18.   While I found some of the progression through time to be a bit lurching, this doesn't damage the overall quality of the story. 

I very much enjoyed Wrede's descriptions of the people, settlements and creatures in this re-imagined America.  There is just the right amount of history and magic in this tale to make it approachable and appealing to younger teens.  And with Eff's brother Lan and his friend William filling in substantial roles, and getting into several serious misadventures, this work has appeal to teen boys as well as girls.  Overall, Thirteenth Child is an engaging story, and I will likely give the sequels a try as well.

Happy Reading.  :)

Runaway Devil (Book Review)

"The most disturbing outcome of the trials is that neither JR nor Jeremy Steinke ever took responsibility for the death of Jacob.  Only they know for certain what happened in that house, and one of them is not telling the truth."

The book club genre for this month was true crime.  Honestly, I've not read very much of this genre.  That may have to do with the fact that I'm generally a very fiction-heavy reader (reading 2 of them at the same time as this book) and if I am reading about a true crime, it is usually involving an air crash incident.*

*Sidenote:  If I could do it all over again, I would totally be an air crash investigator.  Mayday is my favorite TV show, and I think my personality as someone who is ridiculously organized and meticulous (read: anal retentive) in their work would lend itself well to that type of career.  But I never pursued the sciences as actively as I should have.  *sigh*...

 I wanted to pick a book about a Canadian crime, and I ended up choosing Runaway Devil: How Forbidden Love Drove a 12-Year-Old to Murder Her Family by Robert Remington and Sherri Zickefoose.

The story of Runaway Devil was a really big case in Alberta back in 2006, when 12-year-old JR and her 23-year-old (!) boyfriend planned and carried out the murder of her parents and little brother in their Medicine Hat home.

While obviously this was a disgusting crime, I want to focus mostly on the quality of the investigative writing and the style of the book itself rather than passing too much judgement on the individuals involved in this real-life horror story.  Remington and Zickefoose are both journalists who covered the story for the Calgary Herald.  And while the journalistic writing style often falls prey to sensationalism, in this case the authors have managed to do a pretty good job of avoiding the melodramatic.  Which is challenging considering the subject matter of forbidden (not quite) teenage love and family murder.  Remington and Zickefoose do an excellent job of discussing the backgrounds and lives of the murderers equally, and provide many different perspectives and sources in their analysis of the crime, ranging from court records to social media postings and recorded conversations.  The book is not a difficult read from a vocabulary standpoint, but from my experience true crime books don't tend to be exceptionally difficult in their language.  The book is for the most part put together in a sensible chronological fashion, and there weren't too many places where I was confused about which point in time they were referencing.  I also appreciated that they included photos of the parties involved (excluding young offenders) and provided an update on the situation as far as it was available when the book was published.

So while true crime is not my usual choice in genre, I felt that Runaway Devil was a generally well-written investigative look at a truly horrible multiple murder.  I would recommend this book to fans of the genre, or those with an interest in crime and current events in Alberta.

Garden is planted! - my urban garden

Firstly, I guess I should say something about the "blogging-hiatus" I've been on lately.  It's been a while since I've posted, and I've been unemployed the whole time.  So really, you'd think I'd have tons of time for this, but I just haven't been indoors very much.  The yard has been the obvious victim of years of neglect by the previous owners, so I've been working hard to bring it into some kind of control with large amounts of weeding and chopping and rototilling and the general moving of dirt.  Things are finally coming together so I have a little time to take a break and say a bit about how it's all going.

So, the indoor starters had an accident.  As many of my Facebook associates are already aware, I had a moment of gardening stupidity and accidentally irradiated the baby plants on my back step after forgetting them outside for an entire afternoon on a very hot day.  So there wasn't much left that could be salvaged, pretty much just the marigolds made it through.  Lesson learned, but at a high price. 

Returning then to the garden.  Originally, the plan was to rototill the far corner of the yard, which in a previous life had once been a sandbox.  This has been both a boon and a problem.  It's all very nicely churned up for planting, but with being so incredibly sandy nothing can go in this year.  The plan is to compost on the sandy area, so that next year it will have a bit more soil to work with.  In what soil there is, I've planted the very large crops - the pumpkin, zucchini and cucumber - so that they can eventually sprawl over the sandy part as they grow. In the meantime, I wasn't going to totally take the year off with the main garden, and staked out a smaller bed next to the house as the home for this year's garden. 

The plans!

It's not a huge space but really quite manageable, especially seeing as this is the first year for the DH and I to be gardening without the direct supervision of someone who has done this before.  The only change I made to the diagram is I swapped the spinach and carrots around because I wanted a longer row of carrots.

All planted!

You can't see it in the photo, but the peas will grow right against the step, and will eventually have a cage or trellis to lean on.  I left that rather large gap down the centre so that I can navigate my way to the back without crushing anything.  It's hard to see them in the shade, but on the right there are pepper, jalapeno, strawberry and basil plants that I bought at a local greenhouse.  The day lily at the back used to be WAY bigger than it is now, we got it down to a more reasonable size, but couldn't extract the whole thing without killing it. 

So we will see what develops.  I'm a bit concerned with the soil's hardness, but hopefully that won't impede things too much.

More posts will be soon to come, I promise I won't leave it so long this time!

Cheers.

Indoor starters week 4 - my urban garden

Like watching the proverbial paint dry, doing a weekly update about the growth of my indoor starter plants seemed like a less than exciting offering to you, my fine readers.  So as you might have noticed I haven't done an update since week 1 in order to give the plants a bit of time to really get started, and so as not to bore a ridiculous amount.

At any rate, here we are at week 4!  I would like to say spring is sprung but that would be the filthiest of lies because I walked from the bus stop to work in near blizzard conditions this morning and got thoroughly soaked by the snow/rain.  So nothing is going in the ground anytime soon, I can't even dig the garden beds as they are once again made into mudholes.

So indoor gardening continues to be "where it's at".  Behold the plants at the end of week 4:

There's an intruder in the plant room too!

So as you can see there is LOTS more happening now than there was at the end of week 1.  Everything is up with the exception of a few pots that never sprouted a thing.  Even the peppers, which I had not seen hide nor hair (nor leaf nor root) of since the beginning finally broke the soil at the end of week 3, after I was beginning to doubt they were ever coming.  True leaves are beginning to form on the tomatoes and parsley, which means soon they will have to be thinned.  The strongest will be left to take over the whole pot for themselves and the other seedlings will be pulled to make room. 

In an effort to reduce the presence of mold in some of the pots I've cut down a bit on watering.  Rather than using the watering can I'm now misting the soil with a spray bottle.  I'm hoping to see much better performance from the shasta daisies because of this too, I feel like I've probably over-watered them a bit and they aren't growing very well as a result.

My unemployment commences on Wednesday, so hopefully the yard will dry up and landscaping can commence!  Stay tuned.

Re-reads: the few and the powerful

It is a very rare occurrence that I will re-read a book.

Primarily, this is because life is short and books are many.  My to-read list (AKA, the wait list) is seriously long and overpopulated with many wonderful, exciting and worthy works that I very much want to read.  And I'll never be able to read them all, but at the same time don't want to miss out on a new experience by re-reading an old favorite.

Yet they are favorites for a reason.  And favorites are the only reason I re-read in the first place.*

*sidenote: actually not 100% true.  One time I accidentally re-read Crabwalk by Gunter Grass thinking I had never read it before.  The book was so boring and unmemorable that I actually got 3/4 of the way through before I realized that I remembered how it ended.  :|

Blech.

 

For me, favorite books are actually quite rare.  I have read many books that I like and have enjoyed immensely, but there is a certain quality to those that are re-readable that makes them almost demand a second look.

I think that quality can best be defined as a sort of complexity which requires a second reading in order to develop the fullest possible appreciation for the work.  This complexity in itself is a very delicate balance.  The book has to be complex enough to require a second reading, but not so complex as to be initially off-putting in the first place, or so complex that I don't feel I would really "get" the book even if I read it a second time.

So here I would like to discuss two of my all-time favorite re-read books, and give a bit of an explanation for how they managed to pull me in a second (or third) time.

Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake

Just so good.

 I am actually re-reading Oryx and Crake right now.  It is the seed for this blogpost.  Prior to reading this book, I was very much NOT a reader of Margaret Atwood.  I remember being force-fed some poetry in high school, but generally speaking I was quite ambivalent about reading any of her novels.  But Oryx and Crake pulled me in; I could not resist the surreal, dystopian future and hopeless reminiscences of Snowman.  It is just such a good book, and it's an even better book the second time around.  The first time it is profoundly interesting, but I feel like all of the details and subtleties were lost on me.  I needed to read it a second time to really pick everything up in full detail.  Another reason why I am re-reading Oryx and Crake is because for a couple of years now I've had the sequel/prequel The Year of the Flood on my bookshelf, beckoning me to read it.  And I couldn't very well do that without first revisiting the book that started it all.  If you haven't read it, and especially if you generally dislike Atwood, I urge you to give Oryx and Crake a try.  It is such a marvelous book in so many ways.


Haruki Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World

I love this book more than chocolate.

In addition to possibly being my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE BOOK, EVER, Haruki Murakami's End of the World also has the distinction of being the only work of adult fiction that I have read three times.*

*sidenote: Now is not the time to discuss how many DOZENS of times I read (or had read to me) Art Cummings' There's a Monster Eating my House, an absolutely riotous children's book which is sadly out of print, but which I am grateful to have a copy of.  Another blog post, another day.

End of the World captures the exact essence of what makes a book re-readable for me.  It is an amazingly detailed magical realist novel (my favorite genre) which is at once thoroughly engrossing but also highly complex.  The first time I read this book I loved it.  The second time I read it I understood it.  And the third time I was able to relax into the book like the most comfortable of old sweaters.  It is a brilliant story about the nature of the mind and reality, and is my favorite out of many great works by Murakami.  To say I recommend this book would obviously be an understatement... I practically go around giving out copies of this one (actually have done this on people's birthdays).  It is simultaneously challenging and fascinating.  And the alternating dual-perspective chapters come together in such a brilliant way to culminate in a frustratingly wonderful cliffhanger ending.  READ THIS BOOK.

I'm somewhat hard-pressed to think of many more books I've re-read.  The re-read is a rare title in my reading universe, reserved only for those works that I hold in the absolute highest regard.  May there be more of them in the future... but not too many...