Godzilla and the Garden

Gardening is a love-hate relationship. At the beginning of the season, I can't get enough of seeds and soil, weeds and watering cans. I sing while I dig and whistle when I plant. This all changes by mid-summer, when I start to curse all creatures with six legs, moan about weeds and lapse into a state of meh regarding anything with leaves.

There's a school of thought among the all-natural parenting population that says if you engage children in growing their own vegetables, said children might begin to put these vegetables in their mouths. Since my son Dylan does not eat any vegetables except potatoes and my daughter Jade has begun turning up her nose at all things green, I figured it was time to put this theory into practice. When my kids were destructive toddlers, I’d restricted their access to the gardens, making them wander around the borders or water daintily from the edges. No wonder they were disconnected from the food I tried to force them to eat. They thought gardening was a spectator sport.

One sunny spring day, we hopped in the car and drove to Country Depot to pick out seeds. Jade picked peas for herself and watermelon for Daddy. Dylan wanted a "beanstalk" so I bought him some scarlet runner beans, which can grow up to six feet tall. I chose lettuce, cucumbers and kale for myself, and threw in some carrot seeds for D. The lady at the counter said, "Wow, you must have a big garden!" and I smiled politely while mentally face-palming myself. Like eating at a buffet, our seed appetite was way bigger than our 12x40 foot garden stomach. I'd have to improvise.

Back home, we spent a productive afternoon hoeing rows and planting seeds while tree swallows swooped and serenaded us. The kids approached their tasks with the intensity of chess players, examining each seed before poking a careful hole in the ground.

This is good, I thought as my offspring got progressively grimier. This is one giant teachable moment about appreciating the earth. I sent the kids to fill their tiny watering cans so they could “give the garden a drink.” Sitting back on my heels to draw artistic labels on each garden stake, I smiled. This had gone better than I'd expected. In a few months, I’d be able to post photos of my darlings holding up their prize produce at the Ripley Fair. I was interrupted from this pleasant reverie by the shrieks of my daughter as she ran down the backyard slope, soaking wet and wailing incoherently. I sighed. My son would need some lessons on the art of watering.

The next morning, when Dylan fled the breakfast table and ran to the garden, I was thrilled. It was working! I'd captured his interest in growing food! Soon he'd be filling his plate with raw veggies and my husband would bow before me in awe. All for the price of a few seeds. Okay, a lot of seeds.

Jade and I followed Dylan down to the garden, where we found him not so much appreciating his earthly labours as furious that nothing had grown since yesterday.

"WHERE ARE MY BEANSTALKS?" he demanded, stomping through the freshly planted rows like Godzilla bearing down on Tokyo.

"AHHH!" I screamed. "GET OUT OF THE GARDEN! YOU'LL HURT THE PLANTS!"

"I can go get him," said Jade and began to chase Dylzilla through the garden like a pink version of Mothra, at which point I chased them both out with a rake. Before "GET OUT OF THE GARDEN" could become my summer refrain, I changed it to “WALK GENTLY IN THE GARDEN!” The irony was that my kids loved being in there and I hated that they couldn’t stay out. Never mind that there was a sandbox ten feet away; they preferred to plow through the garden like relentless little backhoes. Teachable moment, I reminded myself as I ground my teeth and helped my daughter repair yet another squashed row.

On top of the near-daily destruction, it was harder than I thought it would be to convince Jade and Dylan that the seeds were, in fact, growing. I YouTubed videos of seeds germinating. They were unconvinced. I acted out the life cycle of a plant. They rolled their eyes. Every day that they went to the garden and found it empty, their interest waned. What had I done to raise two such hardened skeptics? I talked about the magic of nature and preached patience. After seven days without so much as a sprout, when I started to sing my "Have Patience!" song, Jade snapped "Earth, air, water, sun, I KNOW MUMMA, I KNOW. But WHEN are they going to GROW???" I started asking myself the same question. Maybe the constant Godzilla reenactments had smushed our poor seedlings. It would be very difficult to refrain from screaming "I TOLD YOU SO!" at my kids, which was really not the teachable moment I’d been hoping for.

Then, finally, praise Gaia, it happened. The first crinkled pea shoots poked through the earth and the kids danced around, squealing with glee. "I told you so," I muttered under my breath, then smiled. Each day, something else popped up: beans fist-pumped the air with their tiny curled hands; a green mist of carrot tops appeared; cukes and melons stood upright, flaunting bow-tie leaves. The miracle of life had survived my children’s feet. Better yet, now that the kids could see the plants, they handled them with surprising gentleness.

After the initial surge of excitement over the appearance of our seedlings, Jade and Dylan started to lose interest again. I recognized the familiar signs of garden apathy. Instead of succumbing to it this time, I doubled my efforts to keep all three of us committed to our garden project. I coaxed (and sometime dragged) the kids down to help weed and water the fruits of our labour.

“I didn’t know gardening would be so much WORK,” moaned Jade, lugging her watering can around like it was filled with bricks.

“Funny,” I said as I raked, hoed and weeded, “I thought I was doing most of the work.”

Learning to garden means learning how to deal with failure. Since I had never been particularly adept at accepting my various horticultural fails, I wanted my kids to learn how to take things in stride and not get discouraged when things didn’t go as expected. This lesson repeated itself several times: we found all six tomato plants withered beyond recognition one morning, cause undetermined. Some kind of voracious bug devoured my kale and put huge holes in the cucumber vines. Half of the peas that Jade had planted didn’t sprout and Dylan accidentally uprooted one of his beanstalks during a weeding frenzy.

With the frustrations came the triumphs, though: handfuls of fresh peas eaten straight out of the pod (well, Dylan picked and Jade ate); a ridiculous bounty of beans and lettuce; cool, mutant carrots borne from improper thinning methods; dark green watermelon babies that lay heavy and content on the ends of their vines. The swallowtail caterpillar we discovered on one of our carrot tops was the crowning glory of our gardening experience. We took “Pippy” back to the house and tracked his transformation from a bright green eating and pooping machine to a dusty looking chrysalids, until one morning he emerged onto his stick, a velvet-winged butterfly.

It’s September now, and our garden is getting yellow and droopy. It’s littered with black walnuts and chestnuts instead of vegetables, and the kids and I decided it was now okay to let the weeds do their thing. Jade still refuses to put a carrot anywhere near her mouth and although Dylan tried (and spat out) fresh beans and peas, he still screams in horror if anything resembling a vegetable lands on his plate. As an incentive to increase my kids’ veggie intake, the garden project was yet another fail in my agricultural and parenting history. But as a chance to hang out and get our hands dirty together, to share accomplishment and impatience and success and failure, to experience the communion of earth, sun, air and water? Major win, for Mumma and kiddies both.

Tangled Plots

I'm what you might call a greedy gardener. I have formal flower beds at the front and back of the house, a huge vegetable garden and a new hillside flower bed outside my office. I regularly neglect every one of them, yet I have a near-pathological urge every spring to BUY MORE STUFF. Often these new plants, purchased in a heady rush of excitement over their colour/fragrance/newness, are left to wilt in their containers because I haven't got the faintest idea where to put them, or I get busy with other things, or it's too hot out. I know. I should be banned from all garden centres within a 50 km radius or whipped with stinging nettles for serial botanical neglect. Thank heavens the only one who really notices is D, and I don't really listen to him when he starts ranting about how many times he's tripped over my nearly dead marigolds or wilted roses.

My enthusiasm for gardening bursts into action in April and peters out around July, or whenever the first bout of relentless humidity descends upon the Bruce. There’s something rejuvenating about spring gardening; I dive into the task of tidying up autumn debris with a big silly grin on my face. I don’t know if it’s the scent of fresh earth, or the way my muscles start to unwind after the laziness of winter, or the feel of my crusty old gardening gloves. Probably all three. There's deep pleasure in being outside without ten layers of clothes, digging in my patches of dirt.

There are so many gardens at Someday I hardly know where to begin tidying up all the gunk to make way for spring blooms. This year I decided to tackle the wild looking patch along the driveway that I like to call my "naturalized rock garden" (although it doesn't have very many rocks and looks more like a nature preserve than a garden). It's full of perennial treasures like columbines and bluebells and forget-me-nots, and over the years I've planted fragrant grape hyacinths, stubborn crocuses and crinkly-leaved primulas as part of my previously mentioned compulsion. Last summer, I even hauled six loaf-of-bread-sized rocks home from the beach. “See?” I told D. “Now it’s a rock garden.” D rolled his eyes and muttered something about crazy people and their stones.

Spring gardening has a lot in common with brushing a toddler's hair. You're tempted to rake through the snarls and tangles and sticky bits without mercy, but you know that if you do, it will all end rather badly. The trouble is that my so-called rock garden rests under four very large maple trees, and in the spring, every inch of the ground is covered in crispy dead stuff. I try to pick leaves off the flowers with one tine of the rake, but I always end up getting impatient. I start thinking how good a hot cup of coffee would taste, twang the rake a bit too vigorously, and a little bluebell head snicks off and rolls down the hill, causing me to shriek as though I've just witnessed Eddard Stark's beheading.

Once the cleanup is done, usually around May, my planting obsession takes over. Five years of wildly unorganized purchases have taught me that a crowded garden is not a happy garden. Stick too many plants close together and things start to tilt out of balance: one flower elbows out another, a gang of aphids show up, weeds strangle the roses and suddenly it’s chaos.

My preference for buying “care free” perennials backfires because I forget to thin and transplant them. The front gardens have been taken over by a fuzzy but determined troop of lambs’ ears; the harmless looking plant that resembles giant buttercups has morphed into a yellow menace, squishing my poor peonies and threatening my innocent mock orange. Daisies have exploded in unexpected places from heaven knows where. And don’t get me started on what were once two tiny patches of sweet woodruff I’d brought from my old gardens in Waterloo. Apparently woodruff takes the term “ground cover” very literally.

You’d think I’d learn a thing or two from my mistakes, and try to limit my flower-buying until I get my gardens in some semblance of order. Instead, I have a dahlia, a clematis and a geranium gasping for water in their pots by the garage, a husband who wants to strangle me and a slightly guilty conscience. If only someone would hurry up and invent a spray-in conditioner for tangled up garden messes. And a cure for obsessive plant buying.

Stones and Grumpy Love

Sunday, my friends, was a glorious day. Blue skies, sunshine, no humidity and a brisk north breeze to keep things lively. And best of all, I was able to soak it in for four hours straight.

D and I occasionally team up to do what I like to call "property management" and what he likes to call "a lot of damn stuff around this place." With our adorably feral children biting our ankles most weekends, it's rare that we get to engage in outdoor chores together (with the exception of the ever-popular dump date). When we do get an opportunity to hang out and do some sweaty, grumbly, my-back-is-gonna-kill-me-tomorrow type of stuff, I like to make the most of it. I'm not normally a gung-ho "Hey, let's dig a trench!" kind of girl, so when these occasions do occur, I really give 'er. Then even D grimly admits that I'm actually DOING SOMETHING on the weekend. (He does not consider parenting or sleeping in or drinking coffee and playing online scrabble to be DOING SOMETHING, which is one of his few tragic flaws.)

Anyway, Sunday's SOMETHINGS consisted of:
- distributing the four foot pile of wood chips that's been sitting in the driveway since April into the gardens
- starting my hay bale garden (more on that in another post, cause it's freaking crazy and deserves its own blog, let alone entry)
- scouring the side road for really big rocks to line the bottom of my new office garden
- attacking the scary grass around my arbour that comes up to my knees every single spring, no matter how many times I attempt to kill it
- raking our lawn, which resembles a freshly cut hayfield and elicited less-than-polite comments from an older neighbour

The tricky part was that we only had a few hours in which to do all this stuff, since Grandma, who was looking after the kids, had to be somewhere else in the afternoon. We dropped them off around 11 a.m. and I visited with my mother-in-law for a few minutes while the kids gleefully chased the cats around the swing set.

"Let's get doing this if we're doing it," commanded D, striding purposefully toward his parents' shop.

"Guess that's my cue," I muttered to Shirley and headed for the car. "Where are you going?" I yelled at D.

"I'm taking another ride home," he hollered over his shoulder. "Get going!"

I got going. At home, I poured myself a cup of coffee, took it outside and began to pitchfork wood chips into the rusty old wheelbarrow we'd recovered from one of the barns after our gorgeous new wheelbarrow got stolen (Note to any nouveau-country folks: don't leave anything near the side of the road unless you want a stranger to come and take it. Yes, that includes wheelbarrows full of recycling). My plan was to create a garden behind my office, which is on a steep slope of unmowable grass. I figured lots of wood chips, some ground cover plants and rocks would make it look like an actual garden instead of an errant weedy mess. D was not convinced. He hates anything to do with gardens, but he hated the pile of wood chips on the driveway even more. Sure enough, I heard a heavy rumbling as I dumped my second load of chips onto the slope. There was my man, chugging up the driveway in his dad's skid-steer. He started loading up chips into the bucket at a rate of five wheelbarrows. I cheered.

He went back and forth a few times and I raked the chips as he dumped them, all the while thinking that there was something kind of hot about a man driving heavy machinery in order to fulfill one's whims. I got as close to the skid-steer as I dared.

"Can I have a ride?" I yelled.

D shrugged, which I took for assent.

I surveyed the giant bucket and the ridiculously tiny cab that my six foot husband was crammed into. "How do I get in?"

D rolled his eyes. "Climb the bucket, woman. And hurry up."

I clambered up the bucket and plopped myself onto his lap. Kind of cosy. Could sexy-time in a skid-steer become a thing? That's when the first waft of stink hit me.

"Ugh...it smells like POOP! Why does it smell like poop in here?" I wriggled, trying to come to terms with the smell.

"Because Carm uses the loader tractor to clean pens. Geez, you've got a bony butt, woman. Now sit still and hang on."

Riding double in a skid-steer is an unsafe but awesomely fun thing to do. We finished the garden and I directed him to the arbour where I wanted to kill the evil grass growing around it once and for all by smothering it with wood chips. I hopped out and did my thing while D brought load after load of chips.

When I heard the motor cut, I wiped the sweat off my face and leaned in to the cab of the skid steer, waggling my eyebrows. "Wanna go inside and have some lunch?"

D stared at me. "No Kimmy, I do not want to have lunch. I want to get this done. Let's go get you some stones." I cheered again and we abandoned the skid-steer for the truck.

Once we were on the road, my husband leaned across the bench seat and touched my hand. I gazed at him. He was so handsome in his lumber jacket and brown hoodie, a tuft of curly hair peeking out over his forehead. He was getting me rocks and helping build my garden. He really loved me.

"I just want you to know," he began, and I squeezed his fingers affectionately, thinking back to the days when we used to sneak down side roads for different reasons than rock picking.

"I just want you to know that I have NEVER gone back down a side road to pick up stones that someone has taken out of a field so I could dump them on my lawn. Never. Ever. In a million years."

There was a silence as we turned left off the concession road and onto the bumpy gravel.

"Well," I said, "isn't it great how I open lots of new horizons for you?"

"Not in this regard, no," he answered, removing his hand from mine and staring straight ahead. A sudden vision of his brother and father's reactions to the situation flashed across my brain and I realized that D was risking deep ridicule to get me my stones. I sensed I was going to have to reward him richly to make up for this farming sacrilege. This became even more apparent after D smushed his finger between two of the rocks I'd chosen while unloading them. He jumped up and down wordlessly while I wrung my hands and made sympathetic noises. Then he jumped in the truck.

"Where are you going?" I said. "Are you okay?"

"I am NOT okay," he said through clenched teeth. "I am going somewhere where I can swear really loudly." And he drove off, with the windows rolled up. I didn't see him again until he came to bed after doing chores and helping his uncle plant an acre of our sweet corn.

I patted him timidly on the shoulder as he rolled into bed. "Um...thanks for all your help today," I whispered.

"You are a pain in the neck," was my darling spouse's response as he took me in his arms and kissed my neck. Ah, true love.

I have a feeling a giant rhubarb cake and a lot of shoulder rubbing is in his future tonight when my crusty but loving man gets home from work. And I think I'll keep quiet about the idea I have for building a new rustic fence in the corner of the back yard. At least until next spring.

Kimber of the Corn: Part III - The Sellin'

I hoisted up the sweet corn sign (painted on the back of my beloved sunflower sign), resurrected the trusty pink umbrella and filled the cooler with eight dozen cobs of corn. After setting the money jar in its hallowed place, I treated myself to a long shower to remove sweat, grunge and any stray spores. I hosed down Tilly too, and hung her on the clothesline. Looking more like the mistress of Someday and less like an underpaid farm-hand, I poured a tall, cold drink and sat down to pay some bills, hoping to distract myself from spying out the front window. I set a reminder to go out and fill up the cooler (and check the money jar) in a couple of hours.

With sunflowers sales, I didn't meet many customers, but because the corn supply had to be replenished frequently, I came face to face with buyers quite often. On the first day, I realized that selling corn - or anything, for that matter, that you've grown or made yourself - would offer a stern lesson in human nature. The exchange of goods for money means you get to see the good, the bad and the just plain rude up close and personal. And I saw all three within a span of two days.

Like the woman who wrinkled her tanned little nose as she picked through the selection in the cooler and said, "Not very big, are they?" I thought that 23 years of working in customer service centres would have prepared me for scenarios like this. "Don't take it personally," had been the catch-phrase in customer service, which was easy when you were distanced from the products and services you supported. After all, I hadn't personally paid the claim that Joe Customer was screaming about, and I didn't own the phone company that my friends threatened to boycott. I just worked there. 

But complaints about my corn? The corn I'd perspired my way through four weed-and-bug-infested rows to pick? From a woman who looked like she barely knew how to operate a can-opener, let alone shuck a dozen cobs without breaking a nail?

"Well," I said, after a pause during which I considered stabbing her with my pink umbrella, "it was kind of a dry summer."

"Humph," was all she said before she plinked some money into the jar and minced back to her SUV with half-dozen of my "small" cobs in her bag. 

"Never mind her," I whispered to my corny friends as I rearranged them in the cooler. "I think you're just right."

On the second day, I came out to find one of D's uncles filling up a bag. I was tickled to think that one of D’s relatives, flush with agricultural knowledge and experience, would stop to try some of our corn. We chatted about the heat as he filled his bag, but the words stopped coming out of my mouth when D’s uncle casually chucked a cob over his shoulder into the ditch.

“No good,” he said without looking up.

"Oh,“ was all I could manage.

"Some other ones were no good either, so I just chucked ‘em for you.”

"Right," I said, looking at the ditch. “I guess I’m kind of new at this.” 

“That’s okay,” said D’s uncle with a smile as he tossed another reject over his shoulder. “You’ll get the hang of it.” 

I resisted the urge to rescue the cast-offs when he left, and vowed to be more choosy during my next round of picking. 

I'd put a sign out in the morning to indicate "MORE CORN AT 3 p.m." so that customers would know to expect fresh stuff in the afternoon. My hope was to catch all the people coming home from work between 3 and 5 p.m. and entice them with sweet corn for their suppers. 

The sign caught at least one guy’s attention; as I pulled the truck up one afternoon, I saw a car parked at the end of our driveway with a young man leaning against it. It was 2:55 p.m.

As I hopped out of the truck, he called, “Right on time!” and dove into his back seat to retrieve two empty bags.

“You must really like corn,” I said as I filled up the cooler.

“I've actually never done this before,” he said, watching me intently.

I paused. “You’ve never bought sweet corn before?”

He shook his head. “Not from a real farmer.”

I almost swooned with pride. He thought I was a farmer! How cute.

“We live in Thunder Bay,” he continued, hovering behind me, “but we’re visiting my parents at a cottage and my daughter loves corn. I saw your sign this morning, and, well....”

I smiled encouragingly and waved him toward the cooler. “Well, you won’t get it any fresher than this. Help yourself.”

He hesitated, shifting from one foot to the other. “How do you pick a good one?”

Buddy, I thought, you are so asking the wrong person. I winged it.

“Well, uh, the heavier ones are more...mature. So they taste...chewier. The lighter coloured cobs are younger, and sweeter. So it depends on what you prefer, I guess.” Then I sighed and decided to be perfectly honest. “And some of the cobs are a little small, because we had such a dry summer.”

I saw his eyes flick over to the towering, robust rows of my father-in-law’s field corn beside our laneway.

“Um, that’s feed corn. For cows,” I told him. “Not the same thing.”

Thunder Bay guy looked embarrassed. I felt bad. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that I didn’t know the difference between cow corn and sweet corn. To make up for it, I told him to take an extra half dozen for free since he was from out of town. His face lit up. 

And so it went for the next ten days. Some customers were so sunny and pleasant, and so appreciative of being able to buy fresh corn that I wanted to give it to them for free. And some...well, I just wanted to feed them corn smut.

We sold almost everything we picked, but since we planted late and the summer was so hot, our yields weren't good and sales seemed to be over before they'd begun. We almost broke even on what D paid for seed, which I thought was pretty good for our first year. We even had people come to the door asking if we had any left. It was deeply satisfying to say, "Come back next year."

I packed up my sign and umbrella for the season, and shared a giggle with the bank teller when I deposited approximately ten pounds of rolled coins. Kimber of the corn was done for the year, having survived smut, raccoons, heat and the occasional insult. And best of all, I'd passed hubby's "test" without asking for help.

"You did good, Kimmy," D said as we walked back to the field and surveyed the dried-out husks and stalks that remained. "Next year, we'll do even better."

Damn right we will!

The Sunflower Project, Part III: The Harvest

Standing in a field of sunflowers an hour after sunrise is a sure way to make all the happy cells in your brain do a little dance. You're surrounded by a sea of gold and green. The birds are singing, the nearby alfalfa smells like perfume. A thousand cheerful flower faces nod in your direction and you can't help but grin and wave at them.

And then you start hacking off their heads.

This was me, harvesting my first - what's the collective noun for sunflowers? Crop? Bounty? Bunch? - let's say, DREAM of sunflowers. The kids were still sleeping, and I'd risen before D had even hit snooze once on his hideous WONK-WONK-WONK alarm clock. He'd looked at me with concern, then amusement.

"You're up early, Kimmy," he said, folding his arms behind his head and watching me dress. "Are you feeling all right?"

"Yup," I replied. "I got me some sunflowers to pick." I blew him a kiss and flounced out of the room, proud to be the first adult out of bed for once, and equally proud of the fact that I, Miss Kimberlee Lowry, was officially in the sunflower business.

I drove the truck back to the meadow, windows open, radio up loud. Weeds and grasses whumped and whipped beneath me and I felt very Country, with a capital C: an early morning girl, trucking it across the meadow to harvest her crop. Take that, Taylor Swift!

At the edge of the field, I killed the engine but left the radio on. My favourite kitchen knife, Pinky, lay on the passenger's seat. Pinky had a serrated edge and a candy-coloured handle, perfect for chopping flowers and fending off coyotes. I wore my trusty floral-patterned boots to combat the heavy summer dew and a jaunty Cuban cap. I was ready for action.

A few days earlier, I'd gathered a few sunflowers to take to friends' houses, just for practice. I was delighted with the bright bunches and pictured them decorating window ledges and kitchen tables. D did not share my enthusiasm.

"This feels wrong," he said after lopping off his first flower in the field. He thrust the knife back at me like a guilty accomplice.

"What are you talking about?" I said, artfully arranging a freshly-sliced bouquet on the hood of my car and ignoring the knife.

"I don't like cutting them. It's not...nice. Here, you do it."

I rolled my eyes, muttered something about men being insane and took back my knife. My husband could drag a calf out of a cow's uterus with a chain and winch and not even blink, but when it came to cutting off a flower, he suddenly became squeamish. What a weirdo.

So now, it was just me, Pinky and a big-ass field of sunflowers. As I began snicking off the chosen ones (Ooh, here's a nice one. Wow, you're a big fellah. Aw, look at this little baby one!) and stacking them in groups of five, my mind started to wander. I had two pails ready at the end of the driveway, and my not-so-fancy sign ready to go. Where had I put the peanut butter money jar? Oh right, it was rattling around in the trunk, a few loonies and quarters inside to give people a hint. How many sunflowers should I pick, anyway? Some were giant, some were teeny. Should I charge different prices?

I would have continued in my business-venture ruminations had five bees not interrupted me by dive-bombing my face. I did what I always do when attacked by an insect: I screamed and ran. When I finally outran the bees, my piles of sunflowers were nowhere in sight. A bead of sweat rolled down my nose, and the back of my neck felt sunburned. The tender insides of my arms had burst into an angry-looking rash. The bees found me again.

After six trips back and forth to the truck, stumbling over rocks and ruts and tangles of ragweed, I decided that you don't pick sunflowers so much as slaughter them. Choose a victim, grab it by the neck and SNICK! Off with its head, to be plunked onto the pile of other unfortunates. It was kind of disturbing if you stopped to think about it. Maybe D had a point. All these bright, happy faces that had greeted me so warmly now seemed to wear worried expressions.

Eighty sunflowers, a nasty rash and four bee attacks later, I decided the harvest was complete. I bumped the truck back down the meadow and unloaded everything at the end of the driveway. The pink beach umbrella got anchored, the money jar got thumped in the grass, and eighty sunflowers stood at attention in various buckets. I was sweaty, irritable and pretty much never wanted to see another sunflower ever again.

As I drove back to the house, I wondered how soon was too soon to start checking the money jar. Inside, I poured myself a strong coffee, slumped into Nana's old armchair in the front porch, and settled down to spy on prospective customers, hoping I hadn't slaughtered all these lovely flower friends in vain.

My sunflower dream was now reality, and so far, reality was kinda itchy.

The Sunflower Project - Part I: The Fantasy

When you're married to a man like D, you learn that there is no such thing as a casual suggestion. As I've mentioned before, D likes to keep busy; he enjoys projects, especially if they involve the operation of farm equipment or other dangerous machinery.

So it was with a complete lack of sense that I mentioned, one languid evening last summer, that I would love to have a row of sunflowers - just one row - along the north meadow fence. My husband stopped sorting the recycling long enough to fix me with a squint-eyed stare.

I was gardening at the time - pruning the butterfly bush, tearing out old chamomile stems, trimming back the sweet peas - simple acts that allowed my mind to wander. For some reason, it wandered to sunflowers. I'd driven past a giant field of them along the 4th concession earlier that day; all those friendly sunflower faces had made me grin. I'd been charmed. And, more importantly, inspired.

"Sunflowers make people happy, you know," I said, tossing a handful of weeds in D's direction. He snorted. D hates recycling, mostly because I can never remember how to sort it to meet Kinloss dump requirements, and partially because he grew up in a household that burned their garbage - no sorting required. Now was probably not the ideal time to share my daydreams, but what the hell.

I peeled off my garden gloves in a slow, strip-teasy manner. "We could do family photos in front of them." My husband pretended to stare morosely at the recycling, but I knew he was peeking at me out of the corner of his eye. "I could even sell some." I tossed aside my clippers and took off my hat, shaking out my hair. "Just one row?" I said, sauntering over to him. He grunted. I threw my grubby arms around his sweaty neck. "Oh come on, I'll do all the work - pleeeeeeease?"

That's how it began. A casual request. I wanted sunflowers, for no other reason than to look at them. Sunflowers make me happy. D likes me happy. And D likes to plough and furrow and do other farmery things with his dad's tractor, so wasn't I a sweet gal, giving him the perfect excuse to operate heavy machinery? I pictured myself walking behind the tractor, planting seed after seed like some thrifty farmwife from the Laura Ingalls Wilder era. I could see the row of shining sunflower faces as they beamed at me in the early morning light. Clearly, I was still daydreaming, since I am never awake to see early morning light, but the dream was definitely tantalizing. And all I'd had to do was ask.

Fast-forward to April, 2012. It's a miserable spring morning. Someday is shrouded in mist. I am huddled in my office under a blanket, trying to type a report with one hand when I hear the hollow clop-clop-clop of horse feet echo up the laneway. I get up and look out the window to see two giant Percherons slow to a stop at eye level with me. They are pulling a wagon loaded with damp Mennonite boys.

I intercept a jovial Mennonite man who informs me he's here to remove all the fences in the back fields for my father-in-law. This is news to me, but I graciously point him to the doomed fences in question and go inside to make them some coffee. So much for my meadow, I think, and so much for my sunflowers. D's dad is obviously going to plough up my lovely little meadow and plant feed corn or soybeans or something equally useful and boring. Humph.

After I've delivered the coffee, I phone D at work.

"Yeah, Kimmy?"

"Did you know your Dad told a bunch of Mennonites to come take out all our fences?"

"Yeah Kimmy. Dad wants to plow up that field and use it. Those fences are no good anyway. Why, are the guys there now?"

I can tell he's bummed to be missing the fence destruction party. "Yeah. But...my meadow..." I whimper.

"It's a field, not a meadow, and it's not ours anyway," he says, and I sigh.

Later that night, we walk out to see the results. My meadow looks naked and forlorn without its rail fence borders. I hate the thought of stupid soybeans and wonder whether I can talk my father-in-law into planting something pretty, like flax.

Now skip ahead to late May. I'm working in my office, windows open. The phone rings. It's Nancy from the Lucknow Co-op with the list of sweet corn seed varieties that D has asked for.

"Sweet corn varieties?" I echo, bewildered.

"Yeah, we've got Golden Bantam, Peaches n' Cream, Honey n' Cream, Big Jim, Bodacious, Miracle...tell your husband the first two mature early, the rest are at 72 days."

"I will tell him," I say more perkily than I feel and hang up.

I dial D at work.

"Yeah Kimmy?"
"Did you order a bunch of sweet corn?!"
"No."
"WHAT?"
"I did not order a bunch of sweet corn," says D in the patient tone he usually reserves for our three-year-old. "I ordered a bunch of sweet corn seed. Kimmy, I gotta go. We'll talk tonight."

I pounce on him the minute he walks through the door and perform a major freak out, which contains the following points:
1) I work full time! We have two small kids! Why the hell do you think we need an acre of sweet corn? (Half-acre, D corrects)
2) Who's gonna pick it? Who's gonna sell it? Have you lost your freaking marbles??? (I bet if you stopped reading that Game of Thrones crap you'd have plenty of time to pick sweet corn, D suggests)

I'm about to storm out of the kitchen and let D deal with supper on his own when he grabs me by the waist and sits me on his lap. I squirm and growl.

"Now Kimmy, just listen," he says. "I used to pick sweet corn - shit, did I ever used to pick sweet corn! More corn than you can even imagine! You can pick, oh probably twenty dozen in an hour. Hell, you could probably pick even more than that. I'll help you, don't worry, it's no big deal."

I groan. "But I don't WANT to sell sweet corn. We're too BUSY. I asked you to wait until NEXT year. You never LISTEN to me!"

D gives me a squeeze. "Oh, but I do. I have your sunflowers out in the garage, and me and Carm are going to plant them tomorrow night."

I stop squirming. "You bought sunflower seed? Really? From that guy on the Fourth?" I envision the bobbing row of bright faces and squeal with joy. I'm so excited I forget to ask where we're going to plant the row. I even forget about the corn.

"See, I listen to you sometimes," D says and he gets a kiss instead of a kick. And I putter around the kitchen, smiling like a sunflower, forgetting that when you marry the son of a dairy farmer, nothing is ever as easy as it sounds.

She's back, and she's....old.

You'll have to excuse my recent bloggy absence. Between Easter visit with the rellies, turning the big four-oh and trying to find a fitting way to honour the second anniversary of Rose's birth, it's been a helluva couple of weeks.

I've been thinking that I'd like to set up an annual award of some kind at the local public school in Rose's memory. Something that an average kid can win, nothing hugely monetary, but something worth having. I just have no idea what it should be or how to go about doing it. The ideas flitting through my mind seem to revolve around giving the award to a child who demonstrates an environmental conscience, or a child who tries to make her or his school a better place. But that's kinda vague. Then I started thinking it would be an award only female students could apply for, but then would I be fostering an attitude of unfairness? Hmmm. If any of you out there in bloggerland have experience in this kind of thing, or even some suggestions, please post 'em here.

Turning 40 seemed like it should have been a bigger deal than it was. I think having my big day sandwiched between Easter and Rose's birthday made it flow by quite easily. Several of my friends' experiences with achieving their fourth decade have been less than pleasant. I've heard stories from other 40-somethings who obsessed about their birthday to the point of anxiety or depression.

I suppose it's one of those milestones where you're supposed to look back on your life and figure out if you're where you wanna be, if you've achieved what you've wanted to achieve, blah blah blah. Frankly, I think my best years are still ahead of me. I get to grow older with a delicious man who challenges and satisfies me; I'm living in a place I adore with a lake that isn't going anywhere; I'll watch a baby girl who makes me giggle every day grow into a beautiful woman. I'm relatively healthy, not struggling financially, and I have been blessed with family and friends who truly care about me. So what if I'm "half-way to dead," as one poignant birthday card stated? At least I'm having a good time getting there.

To me, 40's just another number. 20, 30, 40 - whoop-dee-do! Now, knowing my younger sister is going to turn 40 in a few years and that my older sister is going to turn 50...THAT kinda freaks me out.

Hausfrau apathy

Today, I just couldn't take it. I couldn't take the dirty dishes, the dirty floor, the dirty laundry, the dirty dog. The mounds of thank-you notes waiting to be written. The garbage waiting to go to the curb. The clothes to be packed for tomorrow's excursion to Waterloo with Jade. Individually, any of these tasks would be quite manageable, welcome even. But collectively, it made me want to crawl back under the covers and hibernate until a fairy godmother appeared with a manservant in tow. Preferably a hunky one that looked like Hugh Jackman.
Normally I don't mind domesticity. I like cooking and laundry, and I enjoy writing little thank you notes to all the generous folks who have showered Jady with gifts. But there was just something about it all today that seemed overwhelming - almost suffocating. D is a great help around the house and usually does the dishes, most of which he did last night at 10pm, leaving just a token few "to soak". He even threw in a load of laundry before he left for work this morning. I can't really complain
about having too much to do; I just didn't wanna do any of it today.

So after surveying my arena of domestic chaos, I decided that Jade and I would be better off outside. And that's where we spent most of the day: picking beans, peas and cukes from the garden, plucking gem-like red currants off the bush to make jelly, playing with Black Betty the cat and Neko the dog. Jade got her first feel of grass on her toes (loved it),
her first look at apples on the tree up close (grabbed them) and her first view of a kitty cat (fascinated by it).
I even hung out her wet laundry to dry later in the afternoon since my mood had improved considerably.

Sometimes, you just need to flip the mess the bird and go do something fun. The mess will still be there; garden harvests, sunshiny days and wee babies won't.

The inconstant gardener

When we moved to Someday farm from Waterloo, I missed very little about my old house. It had its charms and I was fond of it, but I certainly didn't miss the cupboard doors that wouldn't shut, the bathroom plumbing that misbehaved at inopportune moments, or the mold growing stealthily in the basement. No, I didn't care so much about the house; what tugged at my heart after we'd settled in at Someday were all the wonderful green and yellow and purple and pink things I'd left behind outside.

I lived at 139 Moore for over 10 years, and in that time, I'd managed to amass an impressive (and motley) assortment of flowers, plants and shrubs. I had gardens everywhere I could dig them. They were crazy and unmanagable but I loved them all the more for their untidy beauty. I enjoyed tinkering with my naturalized boulevard and chatting with passersby; I shared ribbon grass and russian sage cuttings with complete strangers who complimented me on their abundance and traded plants with neighbours. Gardens are great conversation starters.

What my gardens lacked in respectability and neatness, they made up for in personality. My seven foot high raspberry patch pulled me into a prickly embrace every morning when I went to pick berries for breakfast. Clematis vines stretched happy purple faces up the sour cherry tree and along the south wall, growing as high as the eavestrough. Dozens of rose of sharon shrubs bloomed serenely along the east wall where they'd sown themselves from my neighbour's fertile plant. My grapevine produced sticky sweet and sour fruit every year that my husband, dog and feathered friends enjoyed with equal pleasure. Peach and green striped tulips were the pride of my spring, tomatoes and herbs the pride of my summer. I didn't care so much about leaving my first house as I did about leaving my first gardens.

Thankfully, Someday already had many beautiful plants, shrubs and trees for me to discover when we moved here. But there was one thing missing: a vegetable plot. Truth be told, I'd never had a big vegetable garden before. I'd grown berries, herbs and tomatoes successfully in the city, but little else of edible interest. One year I attempted to grow two rows of popcorn; I can still remember my neighbour, an accomplished gardener who grew tomatoes from seed and zucchinis the size of baseball bats, shaking his head at me as I flicked earwigs off the cobs and chased squirrels away in vain.

Shrugging off my past failures, I pictured myself gloating over a green space teeming with with spicy herbs, giant tomato plants, fuzzy cucumbers that twined wandering fingers around the soil, orderly rows of peas, beans and onions. I'd even grow sweet corn. I was now a country woman, and I wanted me a vegetable patch!

My husband ploughed up the foot of the apple orchard with his uncle's tractor (and would have kept going if I'd let him) and hemmed in the space with weathered timber. He warned me that corn and watermelon probably wouldn't grow but I ignored him and planted lots of both, along with the other aforementioned veggies. How hard could it be?

As I've mentioned, I am not a tidy gardener. My watermelon vines overflowed onto the lawn, cucumbers kept climbing up the tomato cages and my peas clung to the nearest corn stalks. It looked a bit wild, but I didn't care. I planted everything myself and with the exception of the corn and watermelon, my crops were bountiful and beautiful.

This year, my garden is wilder and more overgrown than ever, thanks to the arrival of my baby daughter during prime planting time. I couldn’t dig up the garden, spread the manure or plant the seeds, so I enlisted my very tired hubby to do both. Carrying baby Jade in a sling one mid-June evening, dodging bats and mosquitoes, I called out instructions to my patient man on where to set the tomatoes, the herbs, the cucumbers and the onions. He even planted my beans and peas from seeds I’d saved last year. I felt a surge of relief a few weeks afterward when everything sprouted. And then, busy with baby, I proceeded to tend my garden in imagination only.

When my husband informed me we’d be getting our barn roof repaired by local Mennonites, an alarm went off in my head. Mennonites had impeccable gardens with neat, orderly rows and vegetables that behaved themselves. I could not let anyone, let alone a Mennonite farmer, see my garden in its current state of chaos. Baby Jade went in her buggy and I went to work on a warm August day. I pulled out pigweed by the fistfuls, hacked at stray dandelions and desperately tried to train my tomatoes into some semblance of order. I realized that I’d completely forgotten to cage three out of my six tomatoes, and there were two unidentifiable yet important looking plants that I couldn’t remember asking my husband to put in. Gah, I thought. I am a terrible, terrible gardener.

And then, in the midst of my sweaty gardening angst, I started to laugh. I looked at my dirty toes, my mud-caked nails, my dirt-smeared arms. I sniffed the aroma of bruised mint and pruned tomato vines. Jade was cooing in her buggy and the birds were singing. I'd forgotten what fun it was to dig in the dirt and I was having a great time. My garden didn’t have to look perfect. It didn't even have to yield much of anything. It was there for me to work in and learn from. And I have a feeling that it will be there again next year, waiting for me to dig in and learn some more.

Spring has Sprung...

There were four sure-fire ways to confirm that spring had arrived when I lived in Waterloo: the gradual disappearance of the giant mountain of snow (also known as Mount Hussey - thanks Muffy!) in the SunLife Financial parking lot; discovering the many “treasures” my dog deposited on my lawn throughout the winter; the reopening of the local Dairy Queen; and the appearance of shorts-clad university students on their front lawns, along with living room couches, boom boxes and coolers.

The harbingers of spring are a bit different, but no less welcome here in the Bruce. Watching saucy robins bob around the lawns and trees is always a happy sign of warmer weather in both the city and the country, but up here you get the added bonus of sighting vultures, kingbirds, herons, kingfishers and goldfinches. It's a birdy-nerdy's paradise.

Nature walks are also more of a treat in the country at this time of year. I’m fascinated by the carpet of bluebells that has appeared in my in-laws’ south pasture - the only other place I've seen that is in Ireland. Down in the private lanes of Tout’s grove (D says the snootier cottagers live there), shy periwinkle flowers and their waxy green leaves peep out at me from under piles of leaves. My brother-in-law’s backyard in Blair’s Grove is a serene ocean of white, blanketed with thousands of trilliums.

I'm a girl who likes to follow her nose. In another life, I think I could have been a perfume maker or tester; I absolutely love smelling nice things. Down by the lake right now, there's a gorgeous aroma of poplar in the air that could be bottled and sold as an anti-depressant. I love walking under those sinewy old trees as their fuzzy catkins drop down on my head like scented confetti.

Back at Someday, the Pine river has woken up; we can hear it rushing over the rocks on these still, spring nights. D and I have had several shore-side discussions about whether the groups of fish that wriggle languidly around in the shallows are edible, but we haven’t tried to find out yet. For now, we’re content to hike through the woods to the edges of the riverbank and spy on their afternoon spawning parties. They swim together near the shore, so thick you could practically walk on them. I think they're trout but D is convinced they're "suckers," whatever that is.

I used to enjoy springtime walks around my established gardens in Waterloo to note the earliest flowers: violets, sweet woodruff, crocuses. I’m still somewhat wistful for my old garden stomping grounds, but there's a certain charm to exploring Someday to see what’s coming up in all the unfamiliar soil. Did any of the bulbs I planted last fall escape the squirrel feasts? And what the heck are those droopy, freckled flowers that appeared seemingly overnight in the kitchen garden?

A blanket of snowdrops surprised me around the southwest corner of the house in April, rosy pink nubs of rhubarb have poked their heads out (I still can’t believe I’m the proud owner of four patches), and some kind soul planted lots of sweet woodruff and dozens of columbines everywhere, which makes me feel more at home. Last week I was delighted to discover wild violets springing up all over the lawn. When the sun warms them and they release their delicate fragrance, it’s like breathing in a benediction. They are my favourite flowers next to freesia.

Of course, to offset the delicious scents, there’s also the occasional whiff of manure that wafts over to Someday on the spring breezes. It took me several days before I realized I didn’t need to keep checking the bottoms of my shoes; “fresh air” is the norm up here now that the farmers are "back on the land," as they say. The unmistakable tang of run-over skunk is back, too, and if that isn’t a sure sign of spring, I don’t know what is.

But the funny thing is that where I used to wrinkle my nose at the smell of diesel fumes from the buses that roared up and down Moore Ave in Waterloo, or the sporadic smell of the dump that drifted down when the wind was west, the springtime country aromas don’t bother me. They are all a part of living in the Bruce, and are quickly becoming as homey and familiar as all the other harbingers of spring at Someday.

Man, oh man...I love spring.

What the what?

Okay.

Yesterday I spent a happy half hour in the sun. I looked for the first shy violets on the lawn, counted robins and admired the pretty pink nubs of rhubarb that were starting to poke their heads out of the dead leaves. I even raked some of the accumulated autumn detrius off the daffodils so they could breathe a bit better. It smelled like spring. It felt like spring. I was convinced it WAS spring.

This morning I awoke to another sunny, albeit chillier, day and looked forward to my afternoon walk with Neko. I thought I might rake some muck off the tulips. Maybe I'd even do some more Tai Chi in the sunny corner of the south field.

Then I looked out my window at 1pm to find Someday farm engulfed in a complete snow squall. That's right - snowflakes swirling, north wind gusting, God laughing. There are actually a few millimetres of accumulation on the ground, for Pete's sake! Not to mention the Weather Network won't even admit we have any snow. Although they do tell me it "feels like -13." Yeesh.

I love snow but I have to admit, my thoughts have turned towards spring these past few days and I'd resigned myself to seeing the last of the white stuff. And hey, isn't March supposed to go out like a lamb, since it lambasted us like a lion the first week?

Humph.

Melon-collie at Someday Farm

Upon returning from our sojurn in California, I wandered down to see how my garden had fared in my absence. The racoons had decimated the corn, but I'd expected that. What I didn't expect was the plump, beautiful watermelon that was waiting patiently for me. I could just hear it saying, "Hey! You're back! Finally. Now, are you just gonna stare at me or are you gonna pick me?"

I'd planted the melons from seed, like most of the things I grew this year. My beans and peas were a great success, but D was skeptical about the melons.

"They'll never mature," he said, condescendingly, I thought, for someone who's never tried to grow much of anything besides corn. "You planted 'em too late."

Secretly, I agreed with him, but didn't want to admit it. So when I saw this big green baby waiting for me amidst all its fuzzy leaves, I did a little victory dance. D's favourite food is watermelon, and I couldn't wait to see his face when I served him a juicy pink slice for dessert that night.

When I proudly carried my green melon into the kitchen, where both C and D were waiting, they started to laugh. "Are you sure that thing's ripe, Kimmy?" said C.

"Of course it's ripe!" I knocked it with my knuckles. "Hear that nice hollow sound?"

"I don't think she's ripe," said D.

"Just you wait," I said, and got out the giant knife reserved soely for watermelons and pumpkin carving. I handed it to D, who always does the honours. "It's gonna be delicious."

D obediently dug the knife in to the hilt and thumped the handle a few times. We all watched breathlessly as the melon separated and fell in two pieces onto the cutting board.

Not only was my plump green treasure totally unripe, it had a big rotten spot in it too! The horror! The shame!! The teasing that ensued!!!

My only consolation is that Neko enjoyed every bite. AND I have three more green treasures ripening in the garden, waiting for their turn. Maybe I should find some MiracleGro...

"Oh, I'm as happy as a big sunflower...

...that bends and nods in the breeze, Oh! That bends and nods in the breeze, oh!"

I first came across this cheery little song in one of the Little House on the Prairie books. Laura calls it Pa's "trouble song" because Pa sings it when he's worried about dying crops, cyclones, ravenous locusts, or any of the other nasty hardships those poor folks faced in the wilderness. Why someone would sing a happy ditty about sunflowers when they're facing dire circumstances is beyond me. But then again, I've never had to fend off hungry locusts.

I've never had much luck growing sunflowers in the city. They'd wither up or tip over or not bother to sprout at all. The chosen few plants that did make it to maturity were mercilessly decapitated by squirrels or crows, usually the day after I'd rapturously marvelled at the sunflower's bright, friendly face. But a happy accident occurred this spring on Someday Farm: a messy bird spilled a bunch of black oil sunflower seeds from the birdfeeder, and voila! 10 sturdy sunflowers took root, right beside our back door. No decapitations, no squirrels - just golden, joyful looking flowers that really do bend and nod in the breeze, oh!

As much as I've loved seeing them every morning as I come out the door, I've come to realize that while sunflowers in their prime are a thing of beauty, a sunflower slowly rotting on its stem is a true study in blechiness. Ah, but that is the essence of gardening, isn't it? Plants and flowers that were once so pretty and vibrant turn crispy and vile, seemingly overnight.

I thought that at least I'd harvest the seeds to repay the kind birds who'd helped me plant my sunflowers. You can imagine my yelp of disgust when I tried to pry them out and was met by an angry army of meal worms, ants and earwigs. Apparently I don't get to keep the sunflower seeds - the bugs have claimed unequivocal rights. Oh well. At least I haven't seen any locusts. Or cyclones. Yet.