July 1st is Canada Day. The alarm woke us at 5:30. Bill got up to help me
get ready for a trip to my far away garden allotment. Packed a cooler with
water and some snacks. Dragged it down to the bike room. Unhooked the bike
from the wall rack, and attached the bike trailer. Loaded the cooler in to
the bike trailer, walked the whole lot over to the automatic door, and
rode out of the building, and down the hill to the bike path along the
Rideau river.
It is heavenly being out on the path along the river around seven on a
summer morning. There are enough other people to be reassuring, but not
enough to get in the way when I ride fast. The air is cool, the sun still
low in the sky and relatively tame. A short ride up from the building I
live in, I cross the river on an old train bridge. A lot of work has been
done over the years to restore the banks of the Rideau river to a
relatively wild state. I have discovered that just a short ways up from
where I cross the river, the trees are mature enough, and there are enough
of them that on the early morning rides, I can smell the trees. It is the
only place in the city I have found this to be the case. I am most
familiar with the relatively strong scent of poplar trees, and this is a
dominant note in the rich mix of odours in this stretch of my trip. But
there are many other individual scents making up the mix, most of the
scents belonging to different species of trees. Someday I will take
the time to learn the individual scents of all the trees around here.
I travel along past the relatively flat lower Rideau eventually passing
the rapids near Carleton University. Shortly after that, I have to make a
steep climb up to the top of Hog's back falls. I don't always manage to
ride all the way up this climb, depending on how much weight I have in the
trailer, but I did make it on Canada Day morning. Shortly after the climb,
I come out onto a road and cross a bridge over the falls. Leaving so early
makes the onroad stretch of the ride to my garden much easier. There is
very little traffic at that time of the day on a holiday or a weekend.
I arrive at my Garden 45-50 minutes after I leave the building I live in.
When I go to my garden this early on a Sunday, there are usually 4 or 5
other gardeners there already, but this Canada Day there was only one
other gardener there, although quite a few came later.
This was mostly a harvesting trip, but I took time to go over the beds in
my annual allotment, doing some light weeding. I tied up the tomato
plants, even though I had forgotten to bring yarn with me. I scavenged
bits from other parts of the garden. I picked eggplant. First garden grown
eggplants I have harvested in years. The weather has been ideal for them
this year, and I had very strong plants to put out. The Colorado Potato
Beetles are there, but seem to be mostly dining on the volunteer potato
plants I allowed to grow.
I thinned the swiss chard, and we had it in colcannon for supper last
night. I picked a cabbage. It was still fairly small but that is how we
like them.
It has been a hard year for this garden. There are still large open
patches, where carrots and some other plants failed to germinate. The hot
dry weather of this spring caught me off guard, and I should have been
using full summer techniques for planting, rather than my typical spring
planting techniques. Given that I was away from this garden for two weeks
through some very hot dry weather most plants were doing remarkably well.
I am experimenting with sweet potatoes this year, and all the slips I got
have survived. It remains to be seen if the summer will be long enough for
good production.
After filling the cooler from the annual plot, I went over to my perrenial
plot. I could have spent some time there weeding, but over the last three
years the plants have filled in quite nicely, and most of the weeding
would have been pulling out tall grasses struggling up through the dense
plantings. The grass will always be there so I let that go for another
week. I did pick raspberries though.
I think raspberries are a wonderful crop. I give them a bit of work in the
fall, and in return they give me their bounty. I like picking raspberries
because there is no ambiguity in the picking as there is with crops like
melons, or eggplant. The raspberry that is ready to be picked comes easily
into the hand as if the plant were saying "Here, take my sweet fruit, and
spread my seed."
I had watered the annual allotment but the perrenial allotment is well
mulched, and most of the plants fairly drought hardy, so I ate an apple,
refilled my water bottle and left for the ride home.
Often the ride home along the bike path is tense. The paths are crowded
later in the day. I was a bit earlier this Canada Day and so missed the
bigger crowds on the path. By noon the scent of the trees is no longer
easily detectable. The scent of the city predominates. But the path is
mostly shaded, even at solar noon, and the trip home quite tolerable.
On hotter days, I wear a cotton scarf wrapped around my head while I am
gardening. I wet this periodically with cold water, and keep from getting
heat stroke by doing this. There is no shelter at the far away allotment.
To avoid sunburn on my shoulders and arms and still stay reasonably cool,
I wear an old cotton shirt over a tank top, and a sarong over my bike
shorts. On the hotter days I will soak the shirt before getting
on the bike for the ride home. This keeps me cool through the first half
of the ride home, but is mostly dry by the time I get home. Nevertheless,
although I am very hot and tired by time I get home, the wet shirt keeps
me from getting really sick from the heat. Canada Day morning was cool
enough that I did not need any extra cooling help either while gardening
or for the ride home.
I took a short nap, had some lunch, and then got ready to go celebrate
Canada Day with the rest of the family. We walked from our building over
to the Rideau center where we picked up buns to snack on over the course
of the afternoon. We walked from there to Major's Hill park near
Parliament Hill, and watched a few shows there. Then we crossed the Ottawa
river on one of the bridges to Hull. Most of the downtown area is closed
to traffic for most of Canada Day. The bridge we crossed is divided into 3
parts. A wide pedestrian bycycle section. A two or three lane paved car
section, and another two lane metal section. The metal section was being
used by shuttle buses between Ottawa and Hull. We stopped in the centre of
the bridge while a bus passed and felt the whole bridge vibrating around
us. We walked across on the section normally occupied by fast moving cars.
We split up in Hull. My daughter and husband going to the Carnival at
Jacques Cartier park and my son and I going to he Canadian Museum of
Civilization. It was the first time in ages that we had been to this
museum and my son responded to the extensive collection of totem poles as
if he were seeing them for the first time. He connected big time to the
idea of a religion or mythology that recognizes animal spirits. We
rejoined the family at our assigned meeting place, and then went back to
the museum, where both children got heavily involved in acting out what it
would be like to live in the Haida village represented there.
We went back across the bridge, watched the police trying to stem the flow
of alcohol from Hull into Ottawa (Liqour and beer stores are closed in
Ontario on Canada day but beer and wine can be bought at corner stores in
Quebec. Ottawa is in Ontario, Hull is in Quebec). Each year someone
usually gets drunk, has to go to the bathroom, can't wait through the line
up, and climbs the fence around Major's Hill park not realizing that those
bushes are really trees, and the fence is there, because the ground drops
off in a sheer cliff right there. There was a much clearer and more
obvious effort to control drunkenness this year than I have noticed in
other years.
We found a good place to wait the remaining two hours for the fire works,
and shortly after we sat down it started to rain, stopped, started,
stopped. Then the sky opened up with a deluge accompanied by lightening
and thunder. Twenty minutes before the fire works were to start we left.
We had to wait for my daughter to give up and realize that this really
didn't make any sense. It rained and rained, and we were totally soaked. I
took my sandals off for most of the walk home. Watching the dark wet
ground carefully for broken beer bottles (a common Canada Day hazard). We
were close to home, the rain had stopped briefly, we were part way up a
hill when we heard someone say, "Look they're doing the fireworks after
all". We turned around and stood for twenty minutes, dripping wet and cold
and watched the fire works. Then the sky opened up again and the rain
poured down for the rest of the trip home.
When we got to one of the side doors of our building, there was a big
annoyed looking toad there to greet us. It seemed to be sheltering in a
dry spot beside the door. I didn't think toads were bothered by the rain,
but maybe it too found the deluge overwhelming. My husband opened the door
carefully and held it while the rest of us walked through to make sure
that we did not disturb the toad.
It was a fitting end to a long day.
sph
Sandra P. Hoffman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.flora.org/sandra/
----------------------------
The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due,
not a garden swollen to a realm;
his own hands to use,
not the hands of others to command. --Sam Gamgee
