I am certainly not the first person on the internet to share the hack of using old window blind slats for garden plant markers, but here’s my preferred method for cutting them so the marker has one pointy end for sticking in soil and one square end where the plant information can be written:
I think I’ve only seen them squared off on both ends, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to shove a marker in next to something you would like to remember to move when the time is right (and that time isn’t right then) and the soil is perhaps a bit hard and unyielding.
I was lucky to get metal blinds from a friend who was replacing hers, giving me what I imagine will be a lifetime supply. I only cut a few at a time as needed as I find them easier to store in their original length; I put a shower curtain hook through the holes at one end and hang them on the wall.
Bonus content: I’ve found dozens of uses for metal shower curtain hooks in the garden. They are cheap, reusable light-duty hooks; buy a package and you will be hooked.
My attempts to find a reasonably-priced wooden scrub brush with a handle to use outside to clean garden buckets, tools and feed and water dishes for the hens have never been successful. There are tons of plastic ones, but the bristles start falling out after just a few uses and the plastic breaks down over time.
A couple of years ago I found a small wooden brush, much like the scrub brushes my mother used to use to clean floors, but this one had a hole for a handle. The bristles seem to be non-plastic, probably from hogs, probably from China. Not ideal, no doubt a by-product of industrial farming, but better than plastic, I guess?
The brush worked okay, but was a bit too big and unwieldy for smaller items and, as I’m often cleaning things in sub-zero temperatures, not having a handle meant wet, cold hands.
Yesterday I looked at the brush and thought I might be able cut it in two and add a handle to each half, thereby creating a more nimble tool and getting two brushes out of one: one for garden things and one for hen things. So that’s what I did.
Cut the end of the handle at a bit of an angle for easier scrubbing.
I pulled a wooden rake handle from my bucket of “pointy things used in the garden” (rebar, many old broom and rake handles, a couple of pieces from an old TV antenna) and cut one end so it would sit flat against the top of the brush. I screwed the handle on, cut it to the length I needed, and that was it, quick and easy. I added a hole at the end to attach some twine to hang it up and I’m all ready for more comfortable scrubbing.
The handle turned out to be made from a beautiful and extremely hard red wood. I’ve no idea what kind it is, and possibly it, too, is from China. It was a surprising pleasure to drill into it, pushing hard against the firm tight grain, and watch red curls come out in the drill bit. It is satisfying to know I am reusing this piece of wood after the rake head it once held fell apart, ensuring the tree that stretched and grew towards the light, sheltered birds, animals, insects and bacteria, brushed against its neighbour, felt the rain and watched the moon and sun dance across the sky, did not fall in vain.
My third crop of garlic went in the ground this afternoon. I started with two bulbs of Phillips, a hardneck variety purchased from Hope Seeds, in 2020. That duo yielded 22 bulbs that I planted last fall, with the miraculous result that all 150 cloves planted grew! I credit the aged chicken manure produced by our little flock for the good outcome.
Phillips proud of Phillips.
I kept the 50 largest bulbs to plant this fall and the rest I have been using in the kitchen. Local garlic is wonderful but expensive, so it really is a worthwhile crop, even in my small garden. It doesn’t take a lot of work, and having something to plant in the fall when everything else is going dormant and there is less to do in the garden is very hopeful.
I plant garlic in rows 6″ apart. Luckily the dibber I use to poke the hole for each clove has a shaft that is exactly 6″ long, so it’s easy to space them out in the bed.
But equally as lucky, if I just want to poke a hole with my finger, is that I know that my hand is 6″ long, and my index finger is almost 3″ long, pretty much the perfect depth for a garlic clove. One of our set design teachers at the National Theatre School taught me that trick, to measure your hands and fingers so you would never be without a measure. It is one of the “handiest” hacks I know!
My hand is a half a foot, but a whole hand!And 3″ wide.
My mother and I took a short detour on our way home after a recent appointment. I wanted to pick eelgrass from the shore to place around my tiny asparagus bed, a trick I learned from local master organic gardener Paul Offer, who generously taught an organic gardening course at our community school for many years. He said asparagus likes a little salt – it’s probably one of the few cultivated plants that does, I imagine – so some eelgrass scattered around suppresses weeds both by blocking light and from the trace of salt from the seawater in which it grows.
We drove down one of the many dirt roads that lead to the Conway Narrows, the body of water separating the mainland of PEI from the Conway Sandhills. I have written many times about the Sandhills, and my mother’s connection to them as possibly one of the last people to have lived there when, as a child in the 1920s and 30s, she spent every summer with her grandparents at their lobster cannery at Hardy’s Channel.
There are not many remote, wild places on PEI, but this is one of them. It is rare to see another human, except maybe an oyster fisher in a boat. During spring and fall migration it is common to see large flocks of geese and ducks as they move north or south.
I had forgotten to bring buckets with me, so I grabbed two grocery bins from my trunk and quickly filled them with the dried grass that a high tide had helpfully deposited on some wild rose bushes, so it had been well rinsed in the rain and then dried well in the sun and wind.
The quiet and calm of this place, the undulating dunes on the horizon, the absence of motorized anything, is a portal to another time. I was there at high tide, which prevents a walk as the beach is completely submerged, but at low tide you can walk a long way and see cranberry bogs and peatmoss hanging off the low bank, seabirds and shells and all sorts of treasures.
It is possible, in a couple of places, to walk through the water over to the Sandhills at low tide, but you really need to be aware of the weather and tides to do so, and it isn’t recommended unless you know what your doing. I’ve actually only done it once – we always boated over when I was a child – and it was a bit too wild, even for me!
There was no time for wading or strolling anyway as my mother wanted to go see “Jimmy Mick’s place” while we were out that way. Jimmy MacDonald was a customer of my parent’s, a veteran of the First World War, long gone now. The electricity lines end at the intersection of the Luke and Murray Roads, and you keep following the later road, which is only really one lane at that point, to a turn the bend and there is Jimmy’s old house. It is in remarkably good shape for something that hasn’t been lived full-time in for decades, the roof line still straight, windows and doors intact. Someone has kept the grass cut around it. With the over-inflated PEI real estate market, even this ancient abode could now likely fetch more money than Jimmy ever made in his entire life.
We used to go out to Jimmy’s place to pick blueberries in the shrubby fields. The fields are all woodland now, and I doubt you could pick a cup of blueberries where once people could fill buckets. One of my mother’s great loves was picking wild berries, spending hours each summer gathering strawberries, raspberries and blueberries. I did not inherit the love of berry picking, and would dutifully accompany her and various great aunts when I was a child, but would only pick for a few minutes before wandering off to explore or head back to the car to read.
Our visit to the land of Jimmy Mick complete, we headed back home. The roads out there in the Black Banks (the blackness because of deposits of dark peat moss) are narrow and muddy in a few spots, and in a couple of swales I closed my eyes and gunned the car to get through, my mother and I laughing each time, well aware we could get stuck and relieved when we didn’t. We turned onto the Luke Road, a much better-kept route, but still narrow and muddy in places. We soon reached the pavement and drove in modern comfort the kilometer or so to our house.
You can still see a few older houses in our area ”banked” with dried eelgrass each fall. People collect truckloads of it and put it around the outside of the bottom of their house to keep out cold drafts in the winter, using stakes to keep it in place. Eelgrass was also used as insulation inside house walls a long time ago, which wasn’t really that effective, but better than nothing. My mother used to sleep on a straw tick mattress at the lobster cannery, and I bet you could throw some dry eelgrass in there, too, if it your mattress flattened and needed some bulk.
I remember learning to operate a dory with an outboard motor when I was about 8 and the feeling of the motor bogging down when I would steer into a shallow area and eelgrass wrapped around the propeller. I’d have to stop the boat, tip the motor up slightly, and then run it in reverse to clear the blades to continue on my way.
Reenactment of propeller-stopping eel grass.
And yes, eelgrass is long and slithery like an eel, but there are also eels in eelgrass. When you learn to swim in a muddy-bottomed river, as I did, you get used to the silky feel of eelgrass brushing your legs as you move through it, and you sometimes feel an eel rush by, too, if you set your feet down in the wrong place. People who learned to swim in concrete pools or oceans usually find the river swimming experience unpleasant because of these encounters, and it probably is.
Lobsters live in eelgrass, too, and I would sometimes come face to face with them when I played Jacques Cousteau in the river as a child, each of us surprised to see the other, and both retreating in opposite directions. I never caught a lobster, as that’s both illegal without a license and pretty tricky with bare hands, but it was always fun to see them.
Eelgrass is under threat in some areas of the world, which is astonishing to me as it is such a ubiquitous part of my seascape, lots of it in the water just steps from our house. I will gather it as long as I can.
Hail to the 5-gallon bucket, the ubiquitous hold-all and do-all. Preppers seems to have a million uses for them, so look for them on the coat of arms of some future post-apocalyptic government. I am not a prepper, but I like to be prepared, and have many empty 5-gallon bucket, so I reserve the right to some day become a prepper. I’m ready!
I love using these buckets in the garden for weeding, but have always wished I could get the handle to stand up to make the bucket easier to grab and go. This week I cracked it. Bucket, meet bungee cord.
The handle stays up, so I won’t be grabbing the side of the bucket to move it when I’m on my hands and knees in a flower bed, which has always meant eventually breaking chips off the side of the bucket. And it’s easily reversible if I want to let the handle fold back down.
The bucket handles are mostly made of metal with a plastic piece that you hold. That plastic piece seems to break down long before the bucket does, and carrying a heavy bucket while only grabbing the thin metal bit is uncomfortable, so I take a piece of old water hose, cut off a suitable length, split it lengthways, and tape it over the handle. Ready for a few more years of puttering.
Electrical tape, because my father used electrical tape to mend everything, and I have many vintage rolls to get through.
It is not uncommon to find empty mussel shells in the woods around our home, the two halves still attached to each other but usually missing one piece of one shell. Crows will pick a mussel from the shore, fly up onto a tree branch, hold the mussel with their feet while prying it open with their beak, pick out the meat, and drop the shell when they are done.
Yesterday I spotted a shell in birch and poplar leaves, probably 200 feet from the river. It will soon be completely submerged, slowly releasing calcium and other minerals into the forest floor over the next decades. Forests think and move in centuries, while humans count days and weeks and months and years. Is it any wonder humans can’t see what trees are doing, how they communicate to each other (and us)? They probably feel we need to slow down a little.
Last evening I gathered some dry grass from the shore below our house to use as mulch in my garden. It floats on the river and gathers after storms, a mixture of seaweed and terrestrial grasses. Other things can arrive, too: pieces of wood, branches, dead fish, feathers. As I gathered a few hay forkfuls, I picked out and disposed of a short piece of plastic rope, the plastic top off a coffee cup and a couple of plastic bags.
I left the mussel shells I found in the pile of grass, and they will disappear into my garden, breaking under my rubber boots, split by a hoe, freezing and thawing, rubbed by worms and microbes, catching the rain.
I appreciate more and more the riches I have around me, even if, to some, it’s just a pile of old dead grass. With an endless supply of fallen leaves and grasses, I don’t need to buy bark mulch that is trucked in from far away. The mulch I use would definitely not be welcome in a beautifully manicured neighbourhood, but that’s not where I live. It’s taken a while, but I’m getting more and more comfortable with the rougher look and letting nature move right up to my front door.
The crow and I gather from the shore, apart but together, same-same.
Just placed my annual order with Hope Seeds, a small operation in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia that sells heirloom and open-pollinated seeds grown in Atlantic Canada. I’ve been buying from them for over a decade and like that I can buy small quantities. They will also often throw in a package of seed leftover from previous years for me to try, which is a pretty sweet bonus.
I had given up on growing garlic a few years ago as I never managed to get my act together to plant it in the fall, and spring-sown garlic just doesn’t do well in my yard. I was organized enough to place an order late last summer and chose a rocambole variety called Phillips. The bonus packet Hope Seeds chose to send with that garlic might well have been a coincidence, but I like to think someone just couldn’t resist the temptation to send this combo to me. Small really is better.
Our hens spend a lot of time roaming around our yard in the summer, and the little plants that pop up in the vegetable garden are very tempting treats. Stern warnings and pleading has not deterred those little eating machines, so some sort of physical barrier was in order.
I found some rolls of page wire in our woods a few years ago and dug them out last month. There were four sections, all basically sunk into to the the ground and firmly attached with tree roots. My best guess is that the original fence was built some time in the 1930s and could have been taken down after the 1960 West Prince Forest Fire when what had been farm fields was allowed to grow up into the forest that surrounds us now. The wire is old and rusty, kind of brittle, but good enough for what I need. It was easy to find enough small spruce trees that had blown over in the woods to make the fence posts and so I’m now putting my rickety fence together.
Page wire
The person who rolled up each length of fence made sure that it was well secured, the ends wound around to hold the roll together. I wonder who took the fence down and what they thought would happen to the page wire? I wonder what they would make of using page wire to keep hens out of a vegetable garden (I know the answer: it’s a dumb idea because chickens can go through page wire, which is really meant for cows and horses…I have a plan, though!).
The hooks all broke as I straightened them, but the fence is good enough, and I’m happy the wire is being used after decades of sitting and waiting for me to find a use for it.
Last week I found out just how much chickens LOVE hostas. For some reason they ignored them for the past four years, but this year have been nibbling the new shoots to the ground. I now have various pieces of chicken wire propped around what remains of the poor plants and will hope for the best.
Today while I was weeding and edging a flowerbed, older hens Anni-Frid and Agnetha stood by as ususal to eat any worms or insects I uncovered, but they also plucked the annoying black flies that encircled my head. I guess a few flat hostas in exchange for pest control is sort of worth it. Sort of.
For all the new bakers and gardeners out there, two useful hints I’ve learned over my time dabbling in both pursuits:
If you have planted more than one seed in a pot and only want one plant (think tomatoes and squash, not parsley or basil), snip the ones you don’t want with scissors rather than pulling them out. The roots of the little plants will often be intertwined and you’ll end up dislodging the one you want to keep as you tug out their potmates.
Your recipe probably won’t tell you this, but always sift cocoa that is going into cakes or brownies. Even the freshest cocoa clumps together, and those clumps are hard to break up once you incorporate wet ingredients.
Bonus hint: make your own pots out of paper. There are ten billion online tutorials to help you figure it out. I roll mine around an old Keen’s mustard bottle. These are loofah seedlings because you should always try to grow something impossible to grow!
