Canadians All In

The Saturday Market showed that the Canadians had arrived for the 'summer' in Point Roberts.  Summer in quotation marks because, except for the abundance of greenery, it still is pretty cold and wet for summer.  The Canadians have spent the 'spring' being exceptionally excited about the Canucks, which I take to be the hockey team, but because I am not a sports person, I don't know what the current status of their excitement is.  Largely, I know what's happening by the number of cars I see that have blue flags streaming from their roofs.

Back to the Market: the Point Roberts Garden Club made a wonderful appearance, selling their abundant excess plants for a dollar or two (probably not received with that much excitement by the now three local nurseries, but it's only competitive selling for a few hours).  People were pouring out the door with plants that needed to go right into the ground, which was a little problematic since it was somewhat damp outside, but within a few hours of the market, the sun had picked up, and then Sunday was a really lovely day for planting.

Ed dispensed with lots of postcards, even to locals, but mostly to Canadians and other tourists.  One couple, who allowed their two children to choose five postcards each (certainly the longest transaction of the day...children really know how to put energy into the act of choosing) was from Dunedin, New Zealand, also the home of the only people I know in New Zealand, but they didn't know my friends.  I must have looked disappointed because the wife comforted me in that distinctive Kiwi accent, 'Well, there are 125,000 people in Dunedin."  As compared with 1,300 or 5,000 here, depending upon whether you are counting permanent residents only or summer residents, too.  And I don't even know most of the 1,300, I'd guess.

I brought some quilted baskets and quilted postcards to the market, now that my used CD's have been prohibited (not just mine: everyone's used anything...said to lower the tone), and they received a nice welcome.  Probably have to work on more of them for the Christmas Craft Faire.

Like the Canadians, the hummingbirds have all arrived but their food supply seems to be very short.  Usually, by now, there are lots of flowers awaiting them, but the late season makes them dependent upon the sugar water feeders. The fuchsias,  which are the main source of food in our yard, almost froze unto death this winter and are coming up only from the ground, which makes it a long trip to all those red flowers.  We are cooking up a new bottle of nectar every day, as are our neighbors, and yet they are eating and eating.

So Good Memorial Day, Good Beginning of the Tourist Season, Good Growing and Eating to us all!

Trees Get Sick and Die

Like everyone here, we have a number of big-leaf maples on our property.  They are wondrous trees and only in the middle of winter when I feel saddened by the fact that I neglected to rake up all their enormous volume of leaf fallings, am I sorry to be their owner.

There is a pair of maples right outside our back door that grow straight and tall: about 40-50 feet tall and with a big spread.  They're not all that old, and you would expect them to live a very long time, indeed to outlive you so that you don't have ever to deal with getting them removed from their spot.  Unfortunately, one (and perhaps both) of these maples has run into hard times.  In fact, has run into being dead.  The last couple of years, fewer and fewer branches have had leaves, and this year, one side (it's a tree with a split trunk) of one of the maples has no leaves at all.  So, yesterday, in a brief spell of not raining, Ed and our two visiting 20 year/old grandsons took to cutting the maple down.

That starts first with planning the cut and the fall.  Step two involves getting out the 24-foot ladder and toting a massive amount of climbing ropes out to the porch.  Harnesses, belaying ropes, sliders, all kinds of stuff gets attached to trees, ladders, boys, and then up somebody goes with a pruning saw to start the cut.  Ed prunes stuff around here all the time and he figured it would work fine.  But he had forgotten that even a medium-sized maple tree is hard wood, not soft wood, and the pruning saw, after about 20 minutes of diligent work up on top of the ladder, wore out the grandson.

Next, the neighbor's small chain saw was appropriated and Ed went up the ladder with all the appropriate ropes now attached to him, and within moments, the top 15-20 feet and all its attached branches came crashing down.  Another fifteen minutes of rearranging and the next 20 feet of trunk was gone.  The neighbor quickly cut all the pieces into firewood; the grandsons packed it into his cadillac of wheelbarrows, and within an hour total, our dead tree was gone, totally gone.  Bye!

Unspeakable

One cannot, I fear, devote an entire blog to slugs, but really, they are awfully interesting as well as appalling.  Normally nocturnal, they were all over the place, all daylight long, the last few days in the damp grass and under the grey skies.  This early evening, here is a slug trying to eat a rock.

It's pretty surprising that they have time to seek out and eat my little vegetable plants when they are otherwise engaged in either eating or travelling across a 3-foot tall rock.

Oddities of the Season

Last evening, around 6:30 p.m., I went out to check on the slug activity in the kale bed.  There are still a few there each night, but mostly they are not eating the new kale.  This is because each of the young kale plants is now surrounded first by a thin cardboard tube, then a yogurt container, and finally by a circle of copper mesh.  They could parachute in, or tunnel, but it's much harder than it was at the beginning with just the cardboard tube.

However, on my way to the kale, I passed by a 5-foot tall forsythia.  At the 4.5 foot level, I found 2 large black slugs, each about 3-4 inches long and as thick round as my thumb.  They were posed on neighboring branches of the forsythia, each eating the little new leaves that follow the flowers.

I have never seen slugs that high in the air; indeed, have never seen them have any interest in a bush of any size.  Just one more strange thing in this strange spring-ish season.  At least they haven't discovered the peony buds.

Where's the Fainting Couch?

The weather people are predicting that the temperature in this part of the world will be, tomorrow, Thursday, May 19th, 2011, 68 degrees Farenheit.  What will we do?

A Vision in Pink

The streets of East Vancouver, today, were inches deep in light pink cherry blossoms and deeper pink plum blossoms. And me without a camera. Who could find fault with a day that had such a vision in it?

Another Excellent Day (to be followed by rain)

Good sun, blue skies, warm temperatures: who could ask for anything more?  The Canadians were visible today on the roads and in the stores, coming down early for a nice-ish weekend, perhaps.  Alas, I spent most of the day indoors with the quilters, working on a project.  But we quit early enough so that I could spend a little time weeding in the garden, which weeding turned out to be something of a botanical study.

There is a very common weed here which grows early and late and spreads itself around very freely.  I think of it as 'sticker weed,' because it's leaves have something of a velcro quality, easily sticking to anything that touches it and thus able freely to propagate its parts.  But I noticed something else about it today as I was uprooting about 3,000 plants per hour.

It is a plant that grows in a very spreadout fashion as if it were a vine, but it has a very sturdy stem that allows it also to stand upright to a height of 6-8 inches.  However, as the stem gets closer to the ground, it gets ever thinner, thinner than a human hair, so that, should you try to uproot the plant, it quickly breaks, right at the dirt-surface.  If you make an effort to hold onto it carefully, it breaks off a little below the surface, leaving its roots firmly entrenched.  And the roots are very shallowly placed but extend well out, 360 degrees, from the plant's stem so that even if you did get a little bit of root, you aren't going to get it all.  Later on, the plant will be covered with little white flowers, and these produce the seeds that travel with the stickery leaves to make yet millions more little plants.

All round, this is the most effectively protected pointless plant I've ever run into.  It's amazing it hasn't covered the entire earth to a depth of about 5 feet!  But it seems to be content simply to cover my yard to the depth, so far, of about 12 inches.