I went down to the garden today, thinking I could harvest a few veggies.
You know. A handful of green beans, a cucumber or two.

This is what I came home with:

The beans are mostly Rattlesnake pole, with pretty purple streaks on the pods.

They have purple flowers and are planted together with Scarlet Runners, which makes for a very pretty tripod. Which you could see if I’d had the foresight to bring my camera with me. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

As you can see, that’s substantially more than a handful. And that’s five cucumbers (counting the curly one), with several slightly smaller ones left on the plants. And some portulaca, and a little baby carrot, and the sage is about 1/5th of the plant.

Ah July.

I think we’ll be eating green beans for a while.

…in knots.

Garlic scapes: spontaneous, not trained to do this!

Nature’s awesome.

This garden thing, it doesn’t actually require all that much time or effort, in the grand scheme of things, but having a 14.3 pound baby strapped to one’s front has quite an impact on one’s ability to plant, water, weed etc.
Still… we’ve been managing.
We’ve got bush cucumbers;

and carrots (that’s the sage planted last year in the background, doing very well indeed)

and my favourite – peas!

There are also pole beans and garlic and asian greens; photos to come.

Managed a few minutes today to pop some carrot seeds into the ground at the Community Garden. The peas I planted about a month ago are on their way, and last years garlic is satisfyingly tall and green, as is the sage.
Like so (unfortunately my real camera is suffering some kind of lens malfunction so we’ll have to settle for crappy cell phone pictures until the batteries for the backup camera are charged):

I was accompanied by Himself (you can see his snazzy orange stroller in the corner of the above picture), and he managed to refrain from wailing just long enough for a quick portrait of sorts.

I’ve also been working on another quilt. This is more of a “salvage an old comforter and cover the nasty old sofa” quilt than anything else. It’s extremely basic, with squares of various stash fabrics separated by strips of a duvet cover that generously sacrificed its previous identity for the project. The central panel is put together (thanks to the OH looking after His Royal Poopiness for a good chunk of Mother’s Day – hurrah!), and while it’s nothing special, I’m confident it will be more attractive than both the floral comforter I’ll be stuffing it with and the aforementioned nasty old sofa.

(You may notice, if these are the sorts of things that you notice, that I managed to piece it such that no fabrics repeat in a given row or column. Considering the severe case of new-mommy-brain I’m sporting these days, I thought that was quite an accomplishment, though it did require a modest amount of taking-apart and re-assembling to pull it off.)

That is all.

I know, stating the bloody obvious.
Nonetheless…

I cleaned up the community garden plot on the weekend, so now it looks like this:

That’s a little patch of garlic at the end under the straw. It should sprout up in the spring and deliver one head for each of 8 buried cloves next August or so. And just so I don’t get impatient, I should even get scapes in June to satisfy the fresh garlic need.

That little bit of remaining green at the other end is the sage, which should die down and rest over the winter, but come back as a nice little bush next year.

I’ve been making some headway on the knitting front, but this is the only picture I have so far:

Being a gift, I won’t go into details yet, but it’s pretty fun knitting and nearly done now.

I’ve been spending the rest of my time finding maternity clothes at thrift stores and trying to wrap my head around the inevitability of the whole deal. But apparently I’m glowing, so I suppose it’s all OK.

Yesterday, after the ultrasound, between hot lemonade at Jet Fuel and Departures at the Carlton cinema (great movie, BTW; a bit of a tear-jerker, but in a genuine rather than manipulative Hollywood way, and quite moving and charming), I stopped in at Allan Gardens Conservatory to kill a few minutes and enjoy the plant life. I hadn’t been there but once, and that about 15 years ago, and was quite pleasantly surprised by the experience.

It’s in a kind of crappy spot, in the middle of what was a century ago a lovely park in a classy neighbourhood, now frequented by individuals unfettered by the chains of middle class lifestyle conventions. Although it’s got a nice off-leash doggie run too. But the conservatory itself is great, and even though absolutely free and open to the public had only a few people wandering around or sitting chatting, none of them apparently of the above genre.

Here are some of the things I saw (oh, and go easy on the shoddy photography – it was a spontaneous visit with only the cell phone camera so little accounting for things like focus and exposure).

First, there’s an entire wing filled with all kinds of chrysanthemums, and others scattered in other spots too. I don’t care what people say about mums (the basic ones are certainly ubiquitous on porches around here come October); I love them. And they do come in all sorts of lovely forms:

Then there’s the tropical/jungly wing (somewhat cool for the tropics, but pleasant when it’s only 7º C outside). Mmmm… swampy:

I missed getting pictures of the orchids in the epiphyte house, since they were in their own little glass-partitioned room. Don’t want people stealing them, maybe?
Speaking of stealing, I scavenged a couple of fallen leaves from some nifty jade plants in the succulent house, where I also so these beauties:
This agave:
These round cacti which sport a nice combination of fuzzy and spiky:
This wobbly cactus with curious floral (ahem) appendage:
And this is a particularly crappy picture, but I had to share it nonetheless because I was completely charmed by the cactus with polka dots (!!):
I mean really, it’s covered in little round dots of tiny bristles. Like Roy Lichtenstein in the desert.

I’ll definitely try to go back whenever I’m in the area (which of course is practically never) and have a half hour or so free (which is shamefully frequently).

Oh, and since I know you’re wondering; no, we didn’t get a printout from the ultrasound. I mean, they all look the same at this point anyways and I’d rather wait until it’s all pink and touchable to take a gazillion pictures.

This afternoon saw the launching of Phase I of Operation Winter Deck Preparation.

Alternatively known as Ripping up Soggy Dead Plants and Trying to Tidy up all the Loose Soil and Decaying Botanical Bits. So now my deck looks like this:

As you can see, I still have to take care of the tomato & tomatillo plants. And the yucca needs to be repotted (looks like an Expotition to Canadian Tire will be required to find a decent inexpensive lightweight pot as Fiesta Gardens only has the fancy-schmancy sort). But that’ll pretty much take care of it. It’s so satisfying getting the deck all tidied up at the end of the season. (Of course what you can’t see in that picture is the corner containing the bag of dead stuff and the pile of detritus that’s accumulated since last fall… I’ll get to it, I swear.)

It’s also fun bringing in the houseplants, especially since it leads to cute photo ops like this one:

And I had a charming little surprise while moving things about, some evidence of just how wet this year has been (excepting the 20-day dry spell we had in September). My very own little fungus!

Isn’t it darling? Here, a close up:

Not being any kind of expert on fungi, I have no idea what sort it is, and I quickly realized that googling “common fungus” results in too many pictures that I just don’t want to see this close to dinner time. Or ever, really. (Interestingly, adding “wood” to the search eliminated all the anatomicals, but brought up quite a variety of recipes!)

This weekend I’ll be tackling the community garden plot, which will mostly mean harvesting (and then freezing in nice meal-sized batches) the remaining plentiful kale, planting some garlic bulbs, and I suppose ripping out the lovely little alyssum flowers. I will try to provide pictures of the carnage, cause I know that’s what sells on the internets.

I pulled them up mercilessly, yanking by their stalks and ripping their grasping roots from the soil.

Now their little corpses lie curing on my kitchen window shelf.

And that’s how you harvest onions.

Actually, I didn’t really do it quite right: their stalks hadn’t fallen over yet, and some of them never really bulbed properly, but I figure they’re as good as they’re going to get given the lateness of the season and the fact that I planted them as seedlings in early June instead of as sets in mid May.

I’ll try again next year. But these ones look nice in the sunlight in my window, n’est-ce pas?

This heat wave is starting to get me down.

Yes we have a/c in our house, but it’s turned to a very environmentally friendly 24ºC (that’s about 75 in “real degrees” as my stepfather refers to Fahrenheit). And while I entirely agree with this, it is worth noting that the thermostat is on the first floor of the house (a separate apartment along with the basement). Meanwhile the second floor (our main living area) stays a degree or two warmer, and the third floor (our bedroom and workroom) gets, mmm, I’d guess about 3-5 degrees warmer still what with the full sun exposure and lack of good insulation.

So, fine for the light housework and lounging about reading over the weekend, not so cool for the sleeping and working.

But enough of my kvetching. There is after all an outdoor pool a 3-minute ride away that, though chock-full of rowdy youngsters, is nonetheless very refreshing and I had a lovely swim there yesterday evening and fully intend to do the same today (unless it starts raining before I get a chance). And I do have two perfectly good fans to keep the air moving, which makes all the difference. Besides, the heat wave is supposed to break tomorrow and then I’ll be whining about how none of my jeans fit…

The heat and sun have been marvelous for the tomatoes and sunflowers. Witness (the sunflowers anyway, the deck is too hot to spend time there taking pictures):

Also in the garden, a fantastic cucumber vine support, lovely and organic looking:

And I though this was just funny:

And here I thought you needed sheep to grow yarn…

Today, a few random things.
This lovely shot of the calendula at the community garden plot, taken by the OH:

It reminds me of Leni Riefenstahl’s photos of German Olympic athletes…

A ladybug, so cute, how could I not include it? I mean, really, it’s a ladybug.

And this, I don’t even know how to express the retro-nerd hipsterness going on here.