sacha chua living an awesome life

This weekend was very much a home sort of weekend. I planted pansies in the front flowerbox. Planted peas and beans in the back, too. I want to see how much I can learn about gardening during my semi-retirement. I love the way plants grow. For example, the spring onions I transplanted to a pot keep inching upwards, and there are rows of seedlings peeking out of the mounded rows in the back cage. Yay! Maybe this week I’ll buy a 6-cell pack of cherry tomato seedlings and get those started too.

Prepared and froze Japanese croquettes, getting through most of the bag of russet potatoes that we bought. Future yumminess! Also prepared yakiudon, which W- helped me cook. We’re getting better at improvising dishes based on whatever looks good at the supermarket. It takes us a while to shop for groceries, but it’s social time.

Life stretches before me. I think it would be wonderful to get really really good at gardening and cooking and all of these other things that make life better.

If you leave a little bit left when chopping green onions, you can grow new ones. The ones on the right are remnants from last week’s cooking session. Look at how quickly they’ve grown! It’s fascinating to see the difference day by day.

We don’t grow many plants indoors because the cats like chewing on things. I wish I could grow herbs like parsley and rosemary throughout winter, or start seeds for tomatoes and basil, but we don’t have the sun or space for it. We have a spare room upstairs, but it’s dark and carpeted, so working with soil is less fun. Oh well! When the weather warms up enough, I’ll jumpstart the garden with seedlings and set up the greenhouse for more seeds.

I bike through High Park and along the lakeside trail on my way downtown. There are many trees along the trail, and they’re starting to fuzz up with brown leaf buds. I’m sure we’ll see more green soon!

What will we plant this year? The garlic we planted last fall has survived the confusing weather. It now pokes out through the chicken-wire that we stapled over the box to thwart squirrels. We’ve been cooking with a lot of cilantro, parsley, bok choy, and green onions, so I’d like to grow those. Snow peas and sugar snap peas, mmm – I hope it’s not too late. Lettuce might be nice, too. And I’d love to give bitter melon another try, and maybe zucchini.

I want to spend more time gardening this year, so let’s see how that works out!

After seeing me lug my tank of a bicycle up and down six steps all spring and summer, W- decided to get a bigger shed. Now I can store my bicycle in the shed! (Well-locked, I hope.) I have my very own shed key. By golly.

He had folks come in and install it, which was good because it took much less time than it would’ve taken us to build it ourselves. The garden tools are there now, too, and we’re looking forward to moving some of the less-frequently used items to the shed as well.

In other news, the garden is doing pretty well.

We rehabilitated the front and back planter boxes, mixing in plenty of composted cow manure into the sandy soil. I like being able to feel the soil changing character as we mix more organic matter into it, pulling out roots and raking it back to a fine texture.

I planted edamame. We’ll see if it makes it in before frost. I also planted lots of basil. It’s a bit late to be starting things from seed, but none of the vegetable plants in the home centers looked particularly good, so we figured it was worth an experiment.

Lavender did so well in the part of the front garden near the stairs, so we replanted the front box with more. We paired it with some yellow flowers, also perennial.

I’m going to set aside more time to enjoy tending to the garden.

W- and I spent Sunday afternoon gardening. We dug up the boxes, amended the raised beds with nine bags of sheep manure, and filled the deck planter boxes with soil. We had bought twenty bunches of seedlings the day before at this corner store that had a large variety of plants and sold them cheaper than Home Depot or Rona did. Somehow we managed to squeeze all of them in.

I love gardening with herbs. Pulling up weeds among the lavender sprigs, separating the basil seedlings, planting cilantro in the boxes – all those scents wafting through the air, sticking to my fingers. The memories of tastes: basil in pesto and salad and sauce, oregano spicing things up, rosemary sprinkled on potatoes or sausage. And then the softness of a fine tilth, still a touch sandy but better than it was when we started. Our garden doesn’t have a lot of colour, but maybe we’ll plant more flowers next year. Other people’s gardens and the Toronto parks are filled with vibrant colours. This week, the tulips are putting on a show.

Computer work is abstract, but I’ve been building other senses into my life. Drawing teaches me to look more closely, and painting (digital – less clean-up!) gives me a new appreciation for colour combinations. Touch comes from kneading dough and working the soil and cuddling the cats. My husband and I both enjoy cooking, so that takes care of taste and smell. Sound is the one sense I tend to forget. I tend to find music distracting and earphones have a high failure rate in our household (aforementioned cats), so I usually work in silence. Maybe I’ll play around with that.

Hooray for perennials! Even when my newly-planted seeds are growing unencouragingly slowly, at least I can look at the perennials and enjoy their returns. The strawberries are green and leafy. The sage, oregano, and thyme are ready to use in cooking. The blueberry bushes in the front have grown their leaves back, too, and the lavender plants are getting bushier.

Of the seeds I planted, the peas are doing the best. They’re almost at the point of reaching the twine that I’ve rigged up for support. I’d say that the lettuce and carrot seedlings were inching along, but they haven’t reached an inch of height yet. They’re centimetring along, that’s what.

Next year, I think I’ll plant more tulips and daffodils. They look pretty in other people’s gardens, and I like the cheerful colours. With the community-supported agriculture program, I don’t have to try to grow as many vegetables, so I’m fine with turning over some of the garden space to decorative plants.

It’s unseasonably warm by all accounts. The historic average for the next fourteen days is a high of 7C and a low of –2C, according to The Weather Network. Instead, we’re seeing highs of up to 25C and lows of 4C. Not that I’m complaining – I like the sunshine and the warmth.

I’ve shifted from baking season to ice cream season. This amuses Canadians, as it’s always ice cream season for many of them. Yes, even in the dead of winter, while I’m wrapped up in a fuzzy bathrobe and bright pink polyester socks, my darling husband and his daughter munch away on frozen treats. Brr.

But now that the sun is shining and the days are warm, I’m up for ice cream as well. My first one this year was a coconut raspberry ice cream from an ice cream parlour on Dundas Street West. For 75c, you can get this tiny cone with a small scoop of ice cream, which is enough to enjoy the taste of it without being overloaded with sugar.

I’ve also started gardening again. Because we’ve set our community-supported agriculture box to bi-weekly instead of weekly, I don’t feel inundated with vegetables, and I can actually contemplate planting more. I planted lettuce, peas, and a few other early-season crops two weeks ago, and they’ve just started germinating. Instead of rigging up the drip irrigation system, I’m watering the garden by hand, carefully dispensing water into the sandy soil. It takes more time, but it’s relaxing work, and it means I pay closer attention to each spot. Mrs. Wong tends a huge and highly productive front-yard garden down the street and she waters by hand. Maybe it will work for me too.

Things I’m looking forward to growing:

Bitter melon (ampalaya): W- loves this, and it rarely shows up in our neighbourhood markets. We managed to grow it the other year, and the two plants that survived gave us plenty of bitter melons for pinakbet and other dishes. Last year, our vegetable plants didn’t really get established. With this year promising to be warm and sunny, maybe we’ll have better luck.

• Blueberries: We had an enjoyable blueberry harvest last year – a few handfuls, but much appreciated. Looking forward to seeing what they’re like this year! I might try covering some of them with a net and leaving the others unprotected.
• Strawberries: Yum yum.
• Basil: We love pesto. Fresh basil makes tomato sauce even more wonderful, too. In addition to Genovese basil, I’m looking forward to trying lime basil. I liked the lemon basil and Thai basil that I grew the other year, too.
• Peas: The sugar-snap peas are always a big hit. J- sometimes goes out to graze on them.
• Carrots: We’ll give them another try this year. We grew them three years ago and they didn’t turn out as well as we’d hoped.
• Nasturtiums: This climbing vine might be nice near the porch and near the back fence. Edible flowers can be a peppery garnish for summer salads.
• Lettuce and spinach: I’m going to keep giving these greens a try.
• Edamame: We just don’t feel like boiling water sometimes, but edamame is worth it.
• Cat grass: I usually grow a small patch of oats at the beginning of the patio-stone path. This makes an excellent cat trap. Leia(cat) likes running out and exploring the garden, but she’s usually distracted by the cat grass patch. This makes it easy for me to put down whatever it is I’m holding, get out, and scoop her up.
• Catnip: I scattered some catnip seeds in one of the front garden boxes. If they grow, great. The catnip will be in the box with the colourful annuals, so I don’t have to worry about it taking over the rest of the garden.

How does your garden grow?