Lyndon Penner's Somewhat Premature but Enthusiastic Book Fan Club

Here's Lyndon, standing next to the Miscanthus sinensis 'Morning Light' in my garden--a plant he is poignantly envious of, since maiden grasses don't flourish in short-season gardens east of the Rockies.

I, along with an unknown number of Lyndon's garden/nature/wild kindred spirits west of the Rockies are eagerly awaiting the forthcoming publish-ment (I made up that word) of his BOOK in 2014 entitled something pious like The Short-Season Yard but promising to be oozing with his irreverent, way funny, at times scalding, borderline restricted--yet thoroughly educational--scribings on Horticultural Matters of Import.

I have to say I'm simply astonished at the dimensions of Lyndon's knowledge and enthusiasm for the Green World and secretly wish I had a 'Lyndon App' to fill in my gaps with fascinating facts.

Lyndon has been a New Friend highlight in this past year, as he gypsies his way to and fro, teaching horticultural courses from Alberta to Saskatchewan, leading nature interpretive walks in Waterton National Park, and roving to the West Coast when the rainforests call.

This is his first book contract and he wrote it so fast the publisher's head is spinning.

I'm starting the book fan club now.

The link to the Amazon order-your-book-here page: Short Season Yard

His Jadecypress blog link: One Voice Calling Out From the Garden

This Dec/Jan  :)

Liz & Len's non-profit Made-in-Nepal Jackets!!

Here's the link to friends Liz n' Len's website for their fundraising business. They met a family during a trek in Nepal in 2011 and have, with tremendous effort, organized the import of these super-colour-fragilistic jackets, which are selling like hotcakes here in North Vancouver. All the proceeds will fund the education of the two little kids in Nepal..

Check out their new website and line up for Christmas!      Jackets for Jasper

Last Days of Hammock Season...

The sun is setting on the Hammock-able days of 2013.

Napping was never as much fun, don't you agree, Pooey? Stop staring at me.













The Japanese maple has shaken off its facade of green and now matches Hammock's crimson stripes...
...bare feet have retreated into gray wool socks...
...the magnolia canopy is becoming a golden lacework rather than a dense green...
...Daylight Savings Time ends next week...

...So now's the time to gaze skyward/toe-ward in a sea of colour., cram your homies (or as many as will fit) into Hammock for a photoshoot.














My ca-tree-dral....

Outdoor Art, Printed on Aluminum Panels by Diana Zoe Coop

Diana is one of my clients. One of her other distinguishing features is that she creates these glorious works of art. If you can imagine, her garden has much the same colour palette--so close in fact, that you can hardly tell where the real plants end and the painted backdrops begin.

She has recently had a couple outdoor soirees to showcase the pieces that she has had printed on aluminum panels so that they can be installed on outdoor surfaces. This is an AMAZING idea for our dreary winters! Imagine having year-round colour when you look out your window in November...December...January...February...March...

I also love the idea of gardening around the painted panels...so the Real and Imagined blend together.

The backdrop for the show in these pictures is the spectacular private Japanese garden of Diana's friends, over on Richelieu Ave. in Vancouver. If you are rich, famous, or lucky (1 out of 3 ain't bad, like me) you too can visit this piece de resistance on the Vancouver garden scene. On this particular day, the rain rained non-stop, which did in fact serve to showcase the purpose of a permanant poly-pigmented panel in your panorama.

Ideally, one would install the panels on an upright surface, like a fence panel, the wall in an outdoor alcove, or any 'garden room.' Art pieces are essential for the contemporary modern style. Don't we all aspire?

Sooo many mushrooms!

Mushrooms everywhere!!
The picture to the right was the last straw: mushrooms at the beach. I can't go anywhere these days without noticing mushrooms, never the same variety twice it seems, in multitudes of colours shapes sizes and habitats.


(Me and visiting mom at said beach, moments before finding Beach Mushrooms. WTF what-the-fungus)

Something to do with the weather...a hot  dry summer punctuated with just the right amount of rainy deluges...a wet September...a dry October...and voila: Fungi Fiesta.

Mushroom pickers must be delirious--I don't know much beyond the basic life cycle myself, and the general precaution not to eat any unless they have been approved by a seasoned mushroom-ologist (mycologist). But I can feel their joy.

There's something wonderful, anyways, how mushrooms erupt from the forest floor..or the beach..like little people in big hats, oblivious to their vulnerability.

In fact, what we notice as mushrooms are the fruiting/spore-producing bodies for the root structures or mycelium that form networks in the soil. A year like this reveals how much lies hidden most of the time--there are varieties emerging this year that mycologists haven't seen for 15 years!


I've also noted that the mushroom patches on my clients' properties--usually just over the bank on the green belts or under trees in low-traffic areas--have generally exploded in size...probably indicating the true size of the underlying mycelium.


I just like photographing them because they appeal to my gnome-like sensibilities.











Friend Brenda, Amanita,Puff the Magic Dragon, and me.
I somehow missed the shroom stage of my life. Brenda thinks that's funny, and a little sad.

Honda Ruckus Update, Summer 2013

This is for the Ruckus clan out there... a chronicle of Honda Ruckus experience so far.

So Ruckus exhibit A (2009 model-- Red) is my original Ruck, which lasted from Jan. 2010 to May 2012/18 000 km before it needed an engine rebuild (...bearings...for whom that means something). It also needed the brakes replaced at the same time.

Prior to that, I had replaced the worn knobby stock tires with faster 'German' tires (note the smoother tires on Red) and also (somewhat catastrophically) replaced the clutch after shredding it carrying too much weight (we won't talk about that). Note that I'd followed the recommended Honda maintenance schedule/had taken it in for all its checkups/changed oil etc. When the bearings went, it started making a high-pitched whine. When it 'died' everyone involved decided that I rode it hard, up and down these crazy North Van hills in torrential rain, almost year-round, loaded to almost-the-max on a regular basis. Therefore, I should change the oil every 1000 km.

So Red became the property of homie Dryden (exhibit A-1), who went on to have the engine rebuilt and brakes replaced with a local mechanic. I got Ruckus exhibit B (2012 model--White with awesome red seat). A year + 3months has gone by, and my odometer is in the low 8000 km. I'm feeding this baby premium gasoline and changing oil...roughly every 1000...and the only trouble I've had is with the battery, which I've had to replace twice--my fault again, because I let it run down even when I had it on a drip charger over the winter (and put it back in the bike too early, thinking I would start riding regularly...but left it for two weeks).

Meanwhile, this spring Red failed again. This is apparently very unusual--so Dryden took it back to the same local mechanic, who (I think) felt bad and gave him a super deal on putting yet another engine in it. However he did say there was a whole lot of water in the engine and Dryden did figure out why, which he chalks up in the same category as my 'we won't talk about that'. Basically, in the future I won't haul lumber on my Ruck and Dryden won't park his under a waterfall. It's all rather elementary in retrospect :P

Then, at about the beginning of July, Red choked n' died again...and D was ready to kick it into the ditch. He has this (annoying) habit of talking about the Honda Jazz he rode trouble-free for five years (same engine!!)/carried his girlfriend around on (did she weigh 40 lbs??) etc. etc. I can't explain this, other than the fact that a Ruckus may look way tougher than it is, so people (like me) tend to use it harder than it can handle... There was that trip to Cortez island...and the back road to Grouse...and that load of lumber...

That's when one of my Ruckus connections offered to 'tinker' with Red and discovered one disconnected wire. He then plexi-glassed the under-seat compartment just for the satisfaction of it, and returned it to Dryden in shiny working order. This was a grace-full deed indeed. And I'd be jealous about the plexi, except for the fact that I need my under-seat compartment clear for hauling tools, and my network of bicycle-tubes woven into the frame actually works very well, to quickly loop over and secure the heads of different-sized pruners/tools stored under the seat so they don't slide forward into the foot pad.

So ya, for people who tend to just hop on and go, we ARE learning a few things...by trial and error. (Rid

ing in flipflops is also not recommended.)
Kidding. I would never ride in flipflops. Dryden...?
(We also look tougher than we actually are.)

My Favourite Vancouver Musicians of Summer 2013...

Gotta plug 'em...these video links are just good ones I found on Youtube--not from the performances I actually saw.

 At Harmony Arts in West Van, the Boom Booms played for the wine-tipping crowd and had everyone jumping right left & centre on command. Total good-time reggae/latin/rock good-vibes good-buddies band:

The BoomBooms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llzg8QnqZ-A



At the Kickstart Festival at the Roundhouse, Christa's poetic lyrics blew me away and her  Tom-Waitsian vaudevillian tongue-in-cheek forays hinted at videos like the one below :


Christa Couture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNKdlmEwMH0 and this one too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zp0T5BMMznw


I think I have a musical crush on the stand-up bassist in this band...let me rephrase that: I have a musical crush on the stand-up bassist in this band... The Twisters...swing/blues/rockabilly...also at Harmony Arts this summer. They fell right out of a boxcar, I swear.
The Twisters and this one too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNKdlmEwMH0

Sunflower-Bean House, Take Two...plus Mexican Epazote

Here it is in bloom n' pod. I'm aaalmost 6 feet tall, so that's me for scale.
Lots of beans. I'm a bean-pusher now. Eat Beans! Even the big ones are good--these couple torrential rains we've had have pushed up production.

  '
Bean wigwams do work better than bean teepees, I  have to say. Is much easier to walk inside and gather beans within a curved dome.

Sunflowers are nice any which way...

Here's a view looking down the front path, and also from INSIDE the bean dome/wigwam (bottom photo).

One day, a man and his son were walking by on the street and they looked inside our gate at the garden, saying 'hey it's like another world in there!'

Ya, here we are, in our own little world :) :)


So I should mention that the large mass of greenery-going-to seed in the right front portion of the photo above is a patch of Epazote--a Mexican herb grown from seed (from friend Monica Juhas). These plants grew a couple inches tall last year, survived the mild winter, and launched sky-ward this year.  A handful of fresh epazote leaves are added to beans (the mexican-style dried beans) while cooking to reduce 'gassiness.' Now, I've asked the Mexican guys who habituate around here if they've heard of it and they just say they eat so many beans they don't get gas from them at all. Well la-de-dah.
I feel a little lame that I haven't even experimented with epazote yet. What am I waiting for? I guess I've been a little busy eating Scarlet Runner beans, fresh-up.





From inside the geodesic bean-dome....

Leaf Stepping Stones: Experiments....

Here's the results, barely peeled, of leaf-mould stepping stones.

First I laid large leaves face-down in soft soil (technically you're supposed to use sand) so that the most pronounced leaf-veins were facing up. Then I bermed the soil up around the edges, about two inches high, creating a mould in which to pour concrete.

I used one whole bag of Sacrete concrete mix, meant for projects of 2" thickness, for this batch of experiments.

In the largest (rhubarb) leaf, I poured about an inch of concrete into the mould, then pressed a leaf-shaped cut-out of mosquito netting into the surface and poured the last inch in. This step was possibly pointless, but I didn't have chicken wire handy, which in my mind would have helped strengthen the set concrete (like rebar). I should probably Google these things like normal people, but sometimes I forget that Google exists, which is odd.

This next one is a squash leaf, which is more stubbornly clinging to the set concrete, so I'll have to wait until it dries and crumbles off before I can really see the imprint.

The last experiment is a hosta leaf, which broke because I accidently added too much water to my second concrete mix, making it too soupy. I hastily dipped the soupy surface off and poured it over a hosta leaf. The mix was too much of a slurry to be strong, but the vein-imprint is still very cool.

So all of this is in preparation to finish Bev's fountain, which has a large concrete Gunnera leaf as the waterfall feature. We are going to make 'stepping stones'/'facing stones' in actual pan-moulds so they are a uniform thickness. We'll either do leaf imprints (putting leaves in the bottom of the pans) or set black stones into the surface in swirling patterns, depending on how the spirit moves us :)

(...Time passes...)

...Here are the concrete leaves, holding the edge of the garden bed next to the entrance pathway..

Bean And Sunflower House--Progress Report

So far, so good. The structure that I manically built out of bamboo stalks one evening in May is thankfully being swarmed by the Scarlet Runner beans. The sunflower 'walls', which I transplanted too late, right at the beginning of a hot spell, are finally looking robust. I coulda-shoulda planted beans on both sides of the archway over the path, but the Rudbeckia daisies (now in full bloom) filled all available space at the time and I didn't have the heart (or the time, natch) to pull them out

 Anyways, the archway and the bean-dome are making me happy because it's nice to walk underneath for easy access to the beans.

I'll post another pic when the sunflowers are full-on, and when the tomatoes (planted at the feet of the sunflowers) are producing. Everything is pretty late up here in the high altitudes!

There's Pooey, coming for a visit. What a name, I know. For gardeners, cats named Pooey are somehow fitting.

Chinese Lantern plant / Physalis alkekengi

 We don't pay them much mind until they ripen to a bright orange, but these pale green lanterns were glowing in the morning light last week in Jim and Rojeanne's garden.

(Chinese lanterns are really really invasive and very very easy to estabish from fragments of roots--only plant them in beds that you don't mind being cheerfully invaded.)

Himalayan Blackberry Warriors

Blackberry season came early this year! Wa-hoo.

Anyone from Vancouver is familiar with the invasive Himalayan blackberry vines that take over every sunny hedgerow, schoolyard perimeter, beach access pathway, railway-track siding...you get the picture.

 The downside, as a gardener, is a lot of Indiana-Jones-style battling with thorny blackberry monsters that launch ground-seeking whips, often arcing overhead, into new territory.

Sounds daunting, until you check out last Saturday's haul from housemate Jordana and my 2.5-hr pick-a-thon around one school playing field... That's a whole lotta blackberries :) We even took ski poles to pull down branches that were out of reach. Serious.

So these all got washed, drained, spread on cookie sheets and frozen, than poured into zip-locks and packed into the freezer. We have plans for crumbles, pie, chia-seed/no-sugar refrigerator jam, and blackberry wine....o ya, that sounds good.

 As I recall from my pioneer-style childhood (thanks mom, I think), food preservation takes way more patience than the initial pick-a-thon, and just as much--or more--time. For years, I raised an eyebrow when people of my generation and younger got all whimsical about wanting to preserve/can the old-timey way. What? Spend your whole summer picking, cleaning, chopping, boiling jars, stirring, straining, pouring etc. etc. until you never want to see another bean/tomato/plum/cucumber/peach/ you-name-it again?

We do forget, in our ready-made food lives, that entire summers used to be set aside for preserving food for the winter and it was not glamorous, and usually involved a wood stove in the heat of the summer and some sense of slavery on the part of whoever did it. Funny, that's how we did it when I was a kid.

Now, we can make preserves as a kind of Pioneer Therapy, to feel just connected enough to our food without having to cut into our entertaining lifestyles. My home garden is, for example, just enough to have fresh veggies through the growing season but not enough to actually have to pickle anything. That would be craziness.

So why the heck am I out picking gallons of blackberries?? What's going on.

I even got grumpy tonight because the great big job of freezing the blackberries was not finished and I saw one blackberry in the enormous pot in the fridge starting to mold (one day later...I'm writing late Sunday eve). My pioneer instinct kicked in, while the homies watched a movie--a really awful horror-sounding one that was wrecking my Laura Ingalls vibe man. 'C'mon,' I said to them, 'this is about survival.' Jordana replied 'I want to survive. Just not right now.'

So ya, it's nice that we have the option.

I finished the blackberries...after not very politely asking them to turn down their Sunday-wrecking soundtrack--for which I apologized later, while also making mental notes about how being all pioneer-y is over-rated. Funny thing is, whether you're sweating over a wood stove or navigating another episode of Communal Living, those blackberries are going to taste darn good in the middle of winter.

Common roadside chicory vs. Root chicory

Into the wild blue Shuswap country...

Up to visit the folks a couple weeks ago and the wild chicory is in summer bloom, as if an impressionist painter in a Cerulean Blue Period swept a brush along the roadsides.

When a plant appears this beautiful but 'weedy' I like to find out if it has some use...and of course chicory root is a well-known coffee substitute or flavour enhancer.  I'd never known anyone to dig it up and use it however--maybe because it grows on relatively polluted roadsides...or maybe because it is only one of many versions of the genus Chicorium.

So I did some research and it appears, according to various sources such as Ontario Agriculture and intrepid wild-crafting bloggers, that a coffee-substitute-loving person can dig up the roots of  common chicory (Chicorium intybus) in the fall and dry them for grinding and brewing.

In the spring, the new leaves can also be gathered and used as greens. (One is advised to gather them in less travelled areas.)

However, there is also a form of chicory that has been specifically developed for the root: Chicorium intybus var. sativum. Here are some pictures (right and below) borrowed from an Ontario Agriculture website, of the substantial leaves and roots of Root Chicory...  This is the variety that is cultivated and makes root-gathering really worth your while.

And there are also all those leafy vegetables like endive and radicchio that are closely related and confuse the issue further.
I am content to clarify the coffee-chicory question. So. Back to the blue blue Shuswap.