Officially Fall

It was quite an exciting transition to fall this year, with a full Harvest moon on the very day (or the day after, depending on whose calendar you were following). And then, the night before last, we had frost! Quite a coating of ice on the roof of the car at cat-letting-out time. However we had taken old sheets and some fleece and covered the tomatoes, and when I took them off the next day they were fine - and oddly so was everything else. I KNOW that I saw - and even scraped with a fingernail, to no avail - that ice!
I've become a real convert to the Scotland's Gardens podcast (and the TV equivalent, Beechgrove Garden) as they seem to have such sensible advice, and the climate seems a lot like what we have - at least until we get to the sub-zeroes anyway. So they talk about covering with fleece, and I wonder if it's a special gardener's fleece or just the regular stuff? I could have sworn that I had miles of the stuff, but I couldn't find more than a couple of pieces when I went looking on Sunday. I shall have to institute a more thorough search.
It was the 70-mile Yard Sale last weekend and, while I didn't find any wonderful yarn bargains this year, I did get a home-made tortilla press (for $3) that I'll take to Toronto for Emily in mid-October. I also bought a Fru Dagmar Hartrup rose at the greenhouse in Wood Islands (25% off). I think it's going to go to that sluggardly eastern end of the rose mound. The tag promises plenty of suckering (hurrah!).
The Room has most of a floor now, and we're struggling with trimming off the doors - the floor is higher so the doors are too tall - or is that too long? We cut the vertical members of the bathroom door last night on the table saw, and were trying to hand-plane away the bit in the middle. They are 2-panel Douglas fir doors. It's hard to get a proper angle on doors for planing. I plane best on a horizontal surface - floors, for instance. Maybe I have to get the door outside and go up on the roof or something?

Fallish weather at last

I'm not complaining, but we had rather a lot of hot muggy weather, including another spate of it at the end of August. I find it quite enervating, and don't get much done at all, including blogging of course. We had a brush with a hurricane (Earl) a couple of weekends ago, though, and things are more like normal now.

On the garden side, we are awash in tomatoes, especially the cherry ones, although, because I grew "Sweet Million" some of them make for - quite - large - cherries. I've been taking them in to work for people to eat, as well as serving them with everything at home, and even roasting them.

I made a kind of bruschetta topping (recipe at Canadian Living) with halved cherry tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, breadcrumbs and feta, roasted in the oven for 45 minutes, then scooped over French bread toast slices. We had the rest with dinner last night. This was more elaborate than the usual roasting - just halved, drizzled with olive oil and in the oven for 15 minutes, then cooled, bagged and into the freezer. I think these will be really easy and tasty, added to pasta sauce or whatever. I have always found them annoying to peel for salsa, as they're so small, so this takes care of that too.

I made a couple of batches of salsa from last year's tomatoes (blush!) which were discovered at the bottom when I cleaned out the freezer to make room for this year's bounty. I'm sure they will be fine.

Everyone agrees that this was a year unlike any other for garden growth, and I have yet to try to harvest all the onions and carrots, although I think all the beans are done and frozen. Potatoes we are eating, and while each plant has only a few, they are huge, knobby yellow ones. Not Yukon Gold, but I can't remember what they are. I made Irish-style roasted potatoes with them yesterday and they were great.

We have been working on an in-the-house project too - we took out a wall and filled in a door, the net result being that, when completed, we will have more space for arranging furniture in the living room (as we don't have to allow a passageway to that former door) and a TV- or guest-room which feels quite a bit more private. It now has its own short passageway and closet, rather than being just off the living room. This has been in the works since we re-did the downstairs bathroom, so as a guest room it will have its own private bath. Now, when we get the dollars together we want to give it its own separate entrance, off a deck and possibly a little sun-room...a granny suite!

Anyway, with the heat and all, it's taken almost all summer to get to the stage where we should be able to paint - and then the floating floor, purchased YEARS ago, will go down - and then I have to decide on the colour to paint the woodwork - and paint and install it - and then it's done! The demolition and the plastering and seam filling are just killers when you don't know what you're doing - which we do not. However, two new things have helped - an inside corner trowel - magic! And I watched Eileen's brother-in-law, a professional painter, fill in little cracks with painters' caulk (it's called ALEX because it's acrylic and latex). I wish I had met him years ago. As a result. the cove moulding in The Room looks super - no dark lines, cracks, or gaps anywhere, and Alex washes off your hands with soap and water. I LOVE Alex!

Sure is close these days!

We went to the Victoria Playhouse Monday night to see Papillio, a trio of people we know - Jennifer Publicover, flautist, Colin Jeffrey, violinist, and Phil Schappert, guitar-and-vocalist who is also a PhD in insects (I don't know what that would be!) . He named the group, which is butterfly in Latin. It was a great show.
Anyway, it's barely a couple of weeks since we saw Rose Cousins in the same venue (although she had a bigger crowd) and she mentioned it's being CLOSE - as in the weather: close means humid, or muggy, in PEI-speak.
I'm glad she said it, because I hadn't heard the word used in that way for years. I'm trying to use it myself now, and the weather is cooperating by being "close" almost all of the time. It was quite 9 o'clock last night before it cooled off in the house, although it was nice outdoors by that time. The humidity has been high, and last evening the wind died, so the nice breeze that makes this kind of weather bearable was missing! However, we have a fan in the east-facing window of the room across the hall from our bedroom, and if you set it to "suck" there's a lovely westerly breeze in our room all night. Heaven!
I haven't had to consider using the A/C unit yet. Of course, if anyone was sleeping upstairs that would be different...it's much hotter up there as there's so much roof. When the girls come to visit in August I'll have to get it out and hook it up, if the weather continues as it is.
It's all great news for growing things, however! We have phlox paniculata out all over, as well as monarda (above), hemerocallis and lilies, the later roses (The Fairy and Alba Meidiland mainly), and the grass! It's growing like weeds, mainly because that's mainly what it is!

Old and wild, or nearly

And speaking of roses, my "Ring around the Rosie" Plan is working, although not EXACTLY as I had anticipated. Last year I planted several rugosas around the old poplar stump, more to cover it up until it rots than for any other reason. I stuck in a couple of the "wild" roses that grow along the back road in the middle. They grow quite long and rambling canes, and have quite sweet white blooms in clusters. My Botanica's Pocket Roses has an extensive wild rose section, but nothing really matches these ones. I suppose they could be a garden escape. I have noted with surprise this year that there are plenty of them in the landscape - they are the only things blooming at the present time (in the wild) and so are quite noticeable. They are in ditches and side yards all over the area. They sort of look like rosa helenae, but no thorns - however they look to be great ones for scrambling up trees, etc. I'm thinking of setting up a trellis or obelisk on the stump for next year. It doesn't have to be very attractive - it will be covered in short order.
The site was also colonized by feverfew and malva moschata, which makes a nice show. I'm not too terribly pleased with the progress of the rugosas, however - not much growth, and nary a bloom. One looks to be too far out into the fairway, but I'll leave it till the spring to move it. I did put the white ones in THIS spring...I suppose I shouldn't be expecting too much. I added a rugosa from Henry's as well - there are now three in fairly close proximity. I'll keep an eye on them as well, for possible redistribution in spring. I had tried to seed foxgloves there too, but there isn't a sign of them yet. However, they ARE biennials.

It's time for roses.

I am just so impressed with this rose - I put it in spring 2008, and in spring 2009 I discovered that it had been gnawed by mice - but the plucky thing just grew up from the roots, and this spring it grew plenty of canes and buds. The flowers are semi-double (about 25 petals) but the buds are quite pointy... and the most attractive thing, I think, is when the buds start to open. They make a lovely little whorl which gets bigger and bigger, over a day or more. And then they LAST, both on the bush and cut, for many many days. Now, if only I could remember what its NAME is? Or, failing that, if it would just sucker me some babies so I could plant them everywhere. That would be almost as good.

Speaking of suckers, the Bourbon rose, Tuscany Superb, on the rose mound, is making more all over the place. I have put one in the bed by the (new) lilac hedge, which had a poor start but is taking off quite well now. The main one is blooming, but, because it is behind a Therese Bugnet, doesn't show up that well. I must do more pruning. Heavens knows I have plenty of Therese Bugnet! The Snow Pavement is also suckering along well. I wish the eastern end of the mound was filling in as well as the western one, but I fear the nearby trees are at fault for cutting down on the light. Also the varieties there may be at fault? But surely Hansa is one that should sucker out like a good one - it certainly suckers all over old dooryards.

Back to the Garden

My frustration with - I suppose - MY inability to use Blogger continues - can't get more than one photo in a post without them mixing up, getting out of order, or lining up, side by side, at the top, rather than where I want to use them to illustrate my very important words. Aah well. This photo at least illustrates TWO things, the snowballs planted three years ago in the former driveway which circumnavigated the house - until we decided that we needed wind protection on the North more than we needed to be able to get from the upper to the lower driveway (or vice-versa) through the yard. This is the first year that there have been any amount of blooms on them, and, because they're in the shade (on the North side of the house) they bloomed later, and stayed longer, than their bigger parents on the South. We planted several things there at that time, including alders to improve the soil, a lilac, and a Rosa Glauca. There were blooms on the lilac as well, and they were double ones - I can not recall buying a hybrid lilac but I MUST have, because while it is the same colour as the common ones, the bloom was hybrid - huge, double, and later than the commons.
The shawl is Haruni, in Malabrigo laceweight (it's a single-ply 100% merino wool from South America and is very popular on Ravelry). It has a very simple allover lace pattern in the body, and a very fancy edge with big doubled leaves which cause the shawl to curve a bit (meaning it's bigger than a simple triangle, I suppose). It's quite a tiny shawl, a shawlette really, and quite warm because of the wool. I got the yarn at Romni Wools in Toronto.

We're Back! And it was wonderful.

We were staying in Glengarriff in County Cork the second week, and one day we did some of the walks in the neighbourhood. There are many of these, and they are well-utilized. The above photo is of the waterfall walk in the local forest reserve. There was a high school group on a field trip there as well.



This is the view out our bedroom window in Glengarriff. The island you can see isn't Ilnacullen (the one with the public gardens - it's off to the right) - but it was a lovely, lovely way to start the day, looking at this. (Ilnacullen was wonderful too.)


One day two of our happy band decided to do a walk on the Beara Way, from Ardgroom to Eyeries. We dropped them off at Ardgroom, and went to Kenmare to shop. The yarn shop I was seeking had closed, unfortunately, though we were able to indulge in bread-and-butter pudding and cappuccino at jam, a very nice cafe there.
When we got back to Eyeries to pick them up, there was no sign of them. Our plan was to meet in one of the two pubs in town, and we visited both of them. Everyone we asked agreed that they should have returned - we had given them three hours, and most thought that was plenty - we were envisioning sprained ankles at the very least - when they showed up, an hour late. Apparently neither of them had a watch!
We waited in the pub with this view out the back window. Glorious! Apparently Eyeries was a film location a few years ago for a film called "Falling for a Dancer" and there were stills on the walls - believe me, Eyeries is a lot more colourful now.


Bantry was our local big town, where we went for groceries and other supplies. I even found a tiny yarn shop there, and bought some Happy sock yarn and a celtic cross cross-stitch kit for 'way too much money. We also were able to find free wifi on the street, as the wifi at our cottage wasn't very reliable. One day, we visited Bantry House and Gardens. This is the view from the front rooms.

More to come!