Gardening dreams and August harvest

The view through my kitchen window

Dreams of gardens go drifting through my head at night; I am filled with flowers; enlightened by landscapes; swooning from scent. It is the overload of a day spent photographing lovely gardens for my magazines. My frustration is boundless – how can I teach that callous camera to see with my eyes, to capture the gardener’s meaning and give it back to her – or him – as a reward for the exquisite pleasure they have given me? Their gardens make my own efforts seem so puny, but I am glad that they have this power. The beauty they coax from the earth proves so much that is fine about the human race at a time when there are so many pressures for evil.

In my little garden, the annuals around the pool are laughing in the sunlight. Some are past their prime, but they had such a glorious youth that it is hard to blame them for feeling their job is done. The lobelia are very easily tired, the more so if they don’t get enough water, and addicted as they are to garden center fertilizing habits I have a hard time keeping up with their needs. The petunias are hardier, not minding the odd drought and the geraniums seem happy as long as there is plenty of room for their greedy roots and no competition from any other than their own kind.

Today is a lovely day, warm but not blazing and with gentle breezes that keep the mosquitoes at bay. I wish you could hear the music of the garden. When the wind blows, the wind chimes answer with tiny notes that suit the flowers around them. They have many voices, some low and cool, some higher and more delicately warm. They add variety to the whispers of the leaves and the rustlings of the smaller plants. Every now and then, there is a deeper creaking of a tree trunk, forced to speak by the pressure of the moving air. But the apples hang round and silent on their tree, concentrating on getting ripe.

Tomatoes are ripening on the vine

Tomatoes are also working toward that end. I see one or two turning red, but it has been too hot for their colours to develop. Tomatoes will refuse to ripen when the daytime temperatures are above 30 degrees C and the nighttimes, are above 20 C. The heat and, inversely, the cold below 10 C, interfere with the chemical requirements of the pigments carotene and lycopene that are responsible for the red colour in tomatoes.

Fingerling cucumbers will soon be 8 to10 inches long

 

 

 

 

Last week I picked two luscious cucumbers, about ten inches long each – they are the long, thin English type. Now I see two more showing promise at the top of the trellis. I give them a gallon of water to help them along.

My August garden would never win any prizes. The front yard is a disgrace – it is impossible to keep up with the watering so most of the perennials are simply trying to survive and don’t have the energy to bloom. This year the daylilies disappoint – even the weedy orange ones have not been spectacular. Ithas simply been too warm.

It is still some time before the faithful Clara Curtis chrysanthemum will appear in her pinkish-mauve dress, smelling somewhat unpleasantly of cat pee, but beautiful nonetheless. Still, the white David phlox is just coming into bloom and some blue allium are also showing. It is the annuals, however, that provide the colour now. This year, the vibrant oranges and reds and purples and yellows have added joy to every view.

Claire has gone home to Toronto but Ian’s mom is here from Jersey – I have promised to make them dinner, so I must fly away to the store. Glenn is still recovering (badly) from his second last bout with the chemo treatments. He wanted salmon for dinner and I am hoping he will feel well enough to eat it. Poor darling. He is so stoic about it all, but one more round then we hope it will be over and he can recover.

The long, long days of June

Now it is green – green with a depth of luxury that most people associate only with tropical places. Here in Winnipeg, at the joining of the mighty Red and Assiniboine rivers, there is an unexpected lushness in June.

The massive elms and cottonwoods that line city streets and haunt the riverbanks, the towering cedars and spruces and tidy ashes and lindens that guard our homes, all contribute to the affectionate blanket of green that wraps us in summer comfort, offering shade from the blazing sun and shelter from the temperamental winds that spring up spontaneously, gently at times, but on occasion with a frightening ferocity. Sometimes the wind is a great relief, especially when the air is heavy with humidity off the lakes. Then its cool fingers help dry drenched skin and caress fevered faces, lingering just long enough to provide a promise of the coming nighttime chill.

If June could last forever, no one would ever leave here. To be wrenched from so much beauty would leave too large a wound. The memory of our Junes keeps us happy through scorching July and golden August to the blaze that is September and October and then through the dark months until the glittering beauty of January and the final promise of spring.

It rains in June. This year it storms. Lightning and thunder and even hail have fallen, punishing us but nourishing the earth, releasing nitrogen for the plants and perhaps even rehydrating the parched soil if it rains long enough. When the sun comes out, it shines persuasively on this prairie opulence, calling on the spruces to lift their branches, the flowers to raise their heads, the small animals to come out and bask in its beneficence.

I do love June. I love the long, long days. I love the sound of the birds chorusing with the sunrise at four in the morning. I love the chattering of the squirrels and the whisper of the wind in the trees. I love the occasional rain coming down in harsh splatters, even when it tears the long awaited blossoms of my tree peony into silken, scarlet tatters only a day after blooming. There were no blossoms last year and only two this year. The rest were victimized by a fickle spring and late killing frosts. Such is the fate of the gardener.

It has been a strange year and I get strange reports from my fellow gardeners. I hear of trees that have green branches but no leaves, of apples that will not blossom and of lilacs that are weeks late into flower. The brilliant red Oriental poppies that usually bloom in May, this year have only just emerged (falling to the same fate as the tree peony) and hundreds of tulips thought it not worth the trouble to send up leaves. I have found some of them, lying inert and mushy under the soil, frozen and thawed repeatedly until there was no heart left in them for living.

Other plants, though, are fully pleased with themselves, looking well dressed and prosperous. The delphiniums are about to blossom and are upright and proud. Not so, the poor double pink peonies, which are prostrate on the ground – I was out of town and left them to their own devices when the sun coaxed them into opening too soon. If the rain stops, I will try to rescue what is left for my vase.

But peonies last longest when cut in the hard bud stage – you can even keep them, either wrapped or in a vase of cold water, for as long as six months so that y

The sun comes out

ou can please your daughter’s heart at her fall or winter wedding. Prevent mould by adding a few drops of household bleach to the water.

The Double Pink herbaceous peony is one of those bomb type peonies that were bred for the vase and always need staking. Peonies that can stand on their own two feet include the magenta ‘Big Ben’ and the lovely ‘Bowl of Beauty’, an anemone type peony. The Itoh intersectional hybrids are all upright without help.

This morning, the sun appeared. What heaven. It is heartbreakingly lovely.

 

 

 

 

 

Spring rain

I awoke to the sound of the rain this morning, just a few musical drops at first and then a hearty splash as it rained in earnest – for all of 15 minutes. Now it has stopped.

I worry about all the living things beneath the grass, only a little damp from the fast melted snow. The plants and the animals down there need rain; a good deluge lasting a few hours would soak the ground and clean the dusty trees.

It is very dry. Already this year, there are wildfires sweeping across the prairies and destroying homes and machinery. One man, 72, who lives near the peat bogs of eastern Manitoba, lost his 100-year- old home and outbuildings. He had no insurance because who would insure property beside a burning peat bog? And yet, the farm was fine for a century. Now he is homeless. The land that nurtured him for so long turned against him. It is that kind of year.

I gaze out the window above my desk. Raindrops cling to the window and to the leaf bud tips of the old cottonwood. And now – how lovely – the watery benediction has started again in a nice steady, gentle way, so good for the earth. The grass is flushing green in the dawn light and the earth is black with gratitude.

Teeming with life as it is, the rain must send shivers of delight deep beneath the surface, waking up the dormant bulbs and teasing into action the hair-like feeder roots of the trees and perennials. There are 600 million microorganisms in one gram of soil; what a party must be going on right now. All the tiny voles and moles, the snails and slugs and sleepy beetles, the worms and grubs coming out of their estivation will be stirring with a tingle of excitement, like a small electrical shock waking them from their long rest.

The frog-sicles, the frozen wood and tree frogs, will be thawing and the male frogs will be urgently looking for females.  In Manitoba, a whole list of frogs – the boreal chorus frog, the gray tree, the spring peeper, to name some – overwinter above ground and freeze into these frog-sicles each year.

It is quite an amazing thing: the heart slows, the blood stops flowing, there is no breathing, the eyes turn dead white, little frozen marbles in the frog’s head; 65% of the water in the body becomes ice. They start freezing, thanks to the aid of special ice nucleators – bacteria or blood proteins – before it even reaches 0 degrees C (32 F). This slow freezing gives the metabolism time to adjust. At the same time, high concentrations of sugar alcohol are forming in the cells. It works like antifreeze, creating a syrupy solution in the cells, which, surrounded by a protective layer of ice, do not completely crystallize.

Procreation is their first urge after the big thaw, coming even before food each spring. The urgency of this need has them singing now in ditches and other wet places, a sure sign that spring is here to stay – the frogs seldom get it wrong.

We are doing a television show

This spring, we will be starting a garden television show on our local community access channel. On Saturday, we filmed the first segment of the first show. We went to the garden center of our friend and client, Kevin Twomey of T & T Seeds and explored his seed catalogue operation. We also planted the first few trays of seeds that we will grow in his greenhouses and which will become part of the show.

Both the show and the planting party this weekend were spearheaded by our sales leader, Ian. The camera work this time was done by our manager, Steven. The planting was being done by members of the staff and Steven’s daughter, Kate. Several of our other staff was there for the planting and many of them will be part of working on the show – editing, filming, and setting up venues as we explore some of the city’s loveliest gardens during our 13-week season.

We’ll share some of the segments with you here. We hope we can capture the magic that makes Manitoba such a special place.

Spring is knocking at the door

It snowed heavily on March 2 and then throughout the following week.

On Thursday, March 8 the blowing snow stopped traffic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s a balmy 14 degrees Celsius today as I pore through the grower’s catalogues and write of what’s new and what’s hot this spring for the next issue of the Gardener magazines. The snow is slipping down city drains and seeping into already unfrozen top soil. What a contrast with just four days ago, when the March wind tore holes in our coats and crept into our bones, causing the snow that had fallen and piled up in pillowy hills all week to drift and sting cheeks and block vision in accident-causing white-outs.

You can see the water melting and dripping from the roof.

And now this double digit, bud-swelling weather! If it freezes hard again, I shudder to think (as my mother used to say) what will become of our poor friends in the garden. The 14-day forecast, though, shows this unusually warm weather continuing.

Perhaps I should go outside to cut some branches of forsythia in case the emerging buds get frozen off. At least that way, I can watch them bloom in a vase of water indoors. Forsythia is chancy here in Manitoba where late frosts can nip the blossoms of many woody plants.

Daylight savings time came to North America last night, at 2 a.m., and startled me to wakefulness at what would normally be five o’clock this morning, even though the clock said six. I rise every Sunday at this hour to prepare for my weekly garden show on CJOB. The lines were largely silent this morning as even the most ardent gardeners ignored the clock and slept until the accustomed hour.

My guest, Carla Hyrcyna, and I had fun just the same. We talked about all the exciting new plants coming on stream this year – well, not new, but exciting in their variations. The growers have been very busy this past few seasons improving on improvements. Now we have double everything, even cosmos, surely the quintessential single flower, a thing of perfection in itself. We have double poppies and double echinacea and double-double cosmos, not to mention double zinnias and double petunias and double impatiens. And now we even have double osteospermum, for heaven’s sake!

To me the beauty of osteospermum was its brilliant, highlighted blue centre. I don’t see the point of doubling that up and making it look like one of those absurd Easter Bonnet type echinaceas (remember when echinaceas were actually called purple coneflower? They are everything but purple now – white, yellow, orange, red, pink, green . . .).

Still, all these variations intrigue me and I will no doubt buy and plant all sorts of these eye-candies this spring. Carla has just come back from Europe, Germany actually, where she saw some exciting things. She was impressed with the use of orange-scarlet blossoms with black florals and with the fluorescent cactus and eye-popping succulents. I’m still trying to get my head around black petunias!

Glenn is home now. They let him out of hospital on Feb. 24 and the first two weeks were pretty rough for him, but he is slowly mending and gathering strength for the battle still to come.

At the office, Ian is filled with spring fever, dying to get into the greenhouse and begin planting seeds. He has visions of hanging baskets filled with edibles such as cucumbers and beans, which he will hang in my garden. We are going to do an access show on Shaw TV this summer – 13 weeks of ideas to fill. I am sure this will be one of them.

March 11, 2012

Hearing Plants growing and other wonders

February 10, 2012

 

The fog has cleared and the temperature has dropped. The sun is still shining through the clear, cold air that is bothered by a brisk wind. It is cheek sparkling weather.

Glenn is still tucked away on the 6^th floor of the Health Sciences Centre, beating back a slight infection which appears to be at bay. Shauna has gone home to Toronto and Lori and I are keeping watch. He is in good spirits. We want him home to complete the mending.

Little blooms of good fortune keep popping up both in business and in my other life as an inveterate volunteer board member. I care only if the good fortune extends to Glenn.

Last Sunday, Shauna, Mr. Tomato and I had a good time on my radio show, talking about wondrous things that we have learned while writing 10 Neat Things. Mr. Tomato had a few wonders of his own to tell. He says that in the springtime, on a still June night, he can hear plants growing. He says that if you are very quiet, you will hear the pops and crackles and tiny snaps that herald the emergence of new shoots from the ground and leaves breaking open their waxy covers. He has told me this before and I believe him. Next spring, I plan to test this myself on one of those magic nights near the solstice.

I wonder if hearing plants grow is like the sensation of lying on the earth and “feeling” its magnetic pull on my body, curing any ills inside. I like to fall asleep like this with only a thin blanket between me and the sod. I awake refreshed and renewed. This connection with the earth goes back a long way.

When my sister and I were very young, growing up on the prairie, we were told that the Indians used to lay their ears against the ground so they could hear the thrum of hoof beats from many miles away. We tested this theory for ourselves, but we never did hear the hoof beats. We did hear, though, the approach of distant trains when we laid our heads against warm, steel railroad tracks that crisscrossed the land then.

Carole and I found such mystery in the everyday things of the earth. This delight is with me still. Now Glenn and I watch the pigeons acting out their imperatives on the gabled roof of the old hospital building outside his hospital room window: the puffed up male and his courtship of the female; their brief coming together; their winged celebration when the deal is done as they swoop up into the sky together in an airborne dance of joy.

Glenn remembers when he decided to keep pigeons. “You were supposed to lock them up in the coop for two weeks so they would bond with their new home,” he said. “I did that, then finally I let them out. I waited and waited for them to come back, but there was no sign so I locked up the coop door and went on my way. Later our neighbor said to me, ‘Hey. Glenn. Your pigeons were back trying to get in, but they couldn’t, so they left!’” Glenn laughs his wonderful spontaneous laugh, thinking of the temporarily disillusioned boy he once was and how he was taught a lesson in patience.

Life is beautiful.

Sunshine and fog

February 4, 2012

All is sunshine this morning. It glistens through the thick hoar frost on the Amur maple grove next door and picks diamonds out of the soft white snow.  Glenn, who has been through a difficult surgery this week, is on the mend in the hospital and our daughters are both here with us. The girls and I will spend the day with Glenn and then go out for “dinner” this evening, but more to talk and laugh than eat. We revel in the aura of happiness that surrounds our family when we are together.

This has been a week of fog and mist. It swirled around the streets, collecting under lampposts and coating the trees. It obscured the road ahead and shrouded the world in mystery. It hid the ugliness of melting snow and sand, even in the cruelest part of town. I was thankful for its comforting blanket which muffled threat and unkindness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The weather is strange. We had four straight days of that fog, but the day before the fog moved in, we were visited by sun dogs, which put on a brilliant display on either side of the sun. Maybe the unusual weather has something to do with recent solar activity, although most scientists say that solar storms have a greater effect on communications and technology than on weather.

Nevertheless, NASA predicts that 2012 will be the year of massive sun storms, part of an 11-year cycle, ramping up steadily until next year. Last Sunday, January 29, was one of those nights, when there was a solar flare that hurled billions of tons of plasma toward earth, the strongest such flare since May 2005.

The projected activity on the sun will magnify the chances of seeing the aurora borealis here in Winnipeg this February and March. We often see the lights, sometimes in summer. They illuminate the sky with swirly white rays, that fill the viewer with wonder. It’s just another bonus of living in a northern clime.

Winter Dreams and Ten Neat Things…

The morning sun on the cottonwood outside our house.

I love the sky in winter. These December mornings are so brilliantly pink as we approach eight o’clock and then, for a brief moment just before 4:30 p.m., a rosy glow lights up the western sky.

A rosy sunrise from my kitchen window, with the ceramic wrenhouse that waits for those busy little birds to bring it back to life next spring.

It is only days now until we reach the bottom of the year, not Dec. 31 as you might think, but Dec. 22. This day will be eight hours, five minutes and 21 seconds long, the shortest day of the year. (The winter solstice occurs Dec. 21 at 11:30 p.m. in Winnipeg this year.)

Now the days slowly start getting longer, picking up momentum as time goes on and lengthening faster and faster. By New Year’s Eve, we will already have gained four minutes and 32 seconds.

Somewhere between March 16 and March 17, we will reach the moment when there will be equal number of hours of sunlight and darkness, not counting predawn and twilight, even though the vernal equinox does not occur here in Winnipeg until March 20 at 12:14 a.m. When that happens, you can almost hear the breath and pulse of all the sleeping animals and plants beginning to quicken ever so slightly.

We – the plants and animals and those who garden – won’t care, as our internal clocks will be already have been rousing us from our deep winter torpor. Each day after the shortest day, we feel the thrum of the earth slowly stirring and begin to look forward to spring. I used to get such spring fever as a child.

Still, there are yet many beautiful days of winter to come. We have had only two mornings of hoarfrost, when fog dissolves into a world of crystal and white. We have seen only two brilliantly sunny, but icy, days to showcase twin sundogs.  We have not yet seen the northern lights this year. There is yet but a thin layer of snow, and it is threatened by a warm front and treacherous freezing rain.

I have known it to rain on New Year’s Eve here one year then plunge to -40 C the next.

The real time for savouring winter is January when the temperature plummets to -40 C. (This is where Celsius and Fahrenheit meet on the bottom end of thermometer). The intense cold releases the music of snow, when it is crunched underfoot. That squeak, squawk, creak happens when the temperatures fall below -10 C. Then the display of diamonds, reflections of sun on the simplest of snow crystals that form when the thermometer drops, litter the earth and light up the day.

We have yet to be heartened by the “bonspiel thaw” in early February, when an annual warm spell melts all the carefully cut snow sculptures created for the Festival du Voyageur.  The thaw seems ironic, when this festival is our annual celebration of winter.

Finally, just as we are longing for the winter to pass at last, fickle March blows in and often brings heavy snow dumps and alarming but exciting blizzards in one last battle with the lengthening days and the returning strength of the sun.

And through it all, we rest warm and cozy, before our fireplaces or television screens, flipping through garden magazines and seed catalogues or searching the net waiting impatiently now for it all to begin again.

Ten Neat Things…

Three weeks ago, Shauna, my youngest daughter, and I published our Book of Ten Neat Things. This is a collection of the e-letters about neat things in the garden and the wide wild world around us: it could be Ten Neat Things about spiders, or owls, or petunias or even snow. We look for things that make us go Wow! I didn’t know that! Or that make us laugh or fill us with wonder.

Shauna and I like to say we often think with one brain. She would be writing about something in Toronto and I would be writing about the same topic in Winnipeg. It’s weird, but kind of marvellous at the same time. Shauna has stopped writing now because she is going back to school to learn fashion design, or some such thing, but I carry on because it makes me happy.

We have written more than a hundred of these e-letters over the past three years. People were telling us that they collected them and passed them on to friends, so a book seemed a natural extension.

Now The Book of Ten Neat Things is on our local newsstands and hopefully, when I have more time, we will extend distribution to newsstands in other areas of Canada. You can see a sampling of these e-newsletter HERE. You can even order a copy through our website at www.localgardener.net or by calling us at 1-888-680-2008. Sorry folks, the toll free-number only covers North America.

 

 

Garden Beginnings

Hoarfrost on our window...

It’s a warm day today, only minus 7, so there is hoarfrost making lovely patterns on the windows where the seal has broken. Everyone says I should get this fixed and make sure the house is airtight, but I don’t think that is all that healthy. A house needs to breathe a little for the health of us all.

I vowed to stay indoors today and do the things I need to be doing, but I long to be outside.

When I was a child, my whole world was the outdoors. We lived on a farm near Dauphin, Manitoba, not far from the lake. Nearly all my earliest memories are of the outdoors, exploring the small wood next to our house, talking with the horses, watching bees, tasting the salt lick that the cows used.

One day, I climbed a tree at the end of the road near the front gate and then couldn’t get down. I thought I would be left there forever. Then there was a year, before I started school, when it turned unnaturally warm in February and we were able to play outside on the brown grass without coats and no snow.

 

Bachelor buttons

Cosmos

I hadn’t started to appreciate the garden yet. That happened at my grandmother’s house, where I remember wandering at eye level among the cosmos and bachelor buttons. I recall the smell of the garden and the sound of the insects, busy in the heat of a prairie summer’s day. It pleased me to be there with her. The flowers pleased me as they lolled about in the sun. Those memories, though, are marred by the sound of my little sister crying at the front door of the house, where granny had placed a feather on the doorstep to keep her inside. Carol was afraid of feathers. She called them “bite-bites”. Perhaps she had had a run-in with a chicken once.

I loved my sister. She was the first person to ever consciously evoke this emotion in me. Oh, I suppose I must have felt love for my parents, who doted on me, but I never identified the feeling as I did one day when Carol and I were playing. We both had small, wheeled vehicles — hers was a little trike with a wooden seat, mine was a bit more sophisticated and grown up, me being 15 months the elder. We were racing each other around the house and eventually, we crashed. As we struggled to untangle from one another, Carol put her small hand on my forehead to help herself up. I felt a rush of love, a physical warmth that made me want to hug her. I was three or four.

When I had just turned six in January, my mother sent me to the local one-room schoolhouse at the invitation of the young teacher, even though it was midterm. It was an exciting time. Mom ordered a new outfit for me from the Eaton’s catalogue and when the package arrived it contained a white blouse with puff sleeves and a pretty collar trimmed in a thin margin of eyelet lace. There was also a red, white and black, plaid, pleated skirt with straps. I felt so important dressed in those lovely things.

The first morning of school, Mom decided I needed a hair wash. There was no running water at the farmhouse, so after giving me a good lathering at the sink, she carried me outside and dipped my head in the icy rain barrel. She always felt guilty about that, but I didn’t mind a bit. It certainly woke me up.

I was pretty good at schoolwork, but pretty bad at the people side of things.  Mom had once dragged me kicking and screaming to a birthday party for a boy on a nearby farm. His name was George Abess and I was afraid of boys. I think I enjoyed myself once I got there as he had an older sister, but I wasn’t about to repeat the visit unless under duress. Now here I was at school, surrounded by boys, one of whom told me years later that they thought I was cute and tried to make friends. My reaction was to hang on tight to the schoolyard swing and throw stones at my would-be suitors.

Even here, I gravitated to the outdoors, wandering alone through the bushes surrounding the schoolyard, avoiding the other kids. I was preoccupied with sorting out the letter Q (written the old-fashioned way) with the number 2, both hard for me to get my fingers around. But by the end of being six, I could read all ten books in the Colliers Classics set of short stories and poems Mom had. A magic gateway had opened.

The little Manitoba town where I started life . . .

 

December 10, 2011

And Now It’s Winter

Snowflowers

One morning, just two weeks ago, there were snow-flowers all over my yard, clinging to the trees and shrubs and scattering over the ground. These were soft, fluffy clusters of snowflakes that sparkled in the sun, their glitter the only hint that they were snow and not some gift of cotton from the sky.

Now these fluffy bits have all disappeared, gobbled up by the real snow that will stay for the winter. It is not as playful. There is a hard edge to it that says, “I mean business!” Its relationship with the sun is stronger, more of a partnership. The snow rejects the sun with vigour, not succumbing to the bright rays, but tossing them back to the sky with an arrogance born of the knowledge that it is now the stronger of the two.

But, oh . . .both are beautiful.  And I am so glad to see the snow, to feel that hard edge of winter bite into the daylight, to see the brilliance of the weakened sun as it reflects off the snow. Now the trees loom larger against the sky as they sleep the deep sleep of dormancy, their idle limbs rimed with snow.

Under the snow, near the ground, small caverns are opening up. Crystals form and gather as they slightly melt from the heat of the earth, leaving little tunnels behind where small animals scurry about in the half twilight looking for food. Overwintering insects lie curled up in leaves and under debris here; juicy stems and half frozen leaves provide winter forage.

It is quite warm under the snow, hovering around or just above 0 degrees Centigrade as long as there is a decent covering of insulating snow –  a foot or more keeps the temperature constant. Voles and mice and shrews find it quite liveable. They create air holes to let in oxygen and let out carbon dioxide. You can find the holes – they are about finger size – and foxes, owls and coyotes can too. They use the holes to hunt for winter food. Ermine and weasels will dive right in and chase the voles in their own tunnels. Larger mammals will wait to detect sound or movement, and then quickly make their strike.

The Inuit call this snow layer the pukak. It can extend up about 10 cm or four inches above the ground. It won’t form in well-mown, debris-deprived lawns. Nor does pukak do well in moist climates such as that of Newfoundland, but here in Manitoba, in a perfect winter, in years where snow falls thick and fast and stays until spring, the pukak teems with life.

The skies come alive now, too, the clouds showing pink and rose in the morning and evening light. When the daytime sun shines, it takes on a curious, pale lemon glow that paints the air with well being. The quality of sound is affected and a crystal silence falls on a winter’s day. At night the silence seems deeper, as if we could hear beyond the shelter of earth’s atmosphere into the universe itself.

 

 

Nov. 27, 2011

 

Thinking About Snow

“Now the snow can blow,” said Glenn as he came in from doing the last of the chores. He tucked away all the breakable containers and puts plastic bags over some because he uses them to weigh down his pool cover.

Glenn has the breakable pots tucked into black garbage bags to keep them from getting wet and going through the damaging freeze-thaw cycle.

It’s a grey November day, the only colour a blaze of orange from the pretty summertime lime Berberis thunbergii ‘Aurea Nana’ in my front yard. This is the beauty that never gets more than a couple of feet tall and can be trimmed, if you are of a mind, into a well-behaved ball that stands out incandescently in the garden. I have three of these barberries. The largest is about seven years old. The other two are at least three years old and still very small, under 12 inches – they seem to take a long time to establish here in Manitoba. I can’t wait until they are all big enough to be showstoppers in the garden in summer and in fall.

The brilliant little barberry that blazes in the grey November day.

It always makes me happy to see them, although I have never seen them bloom or produce berries. But their smiling foliage is enough.

Snow Days

The other morning, as I left the house to go to my office, I noticed a scattering of white marbles all over the lawn. It looked as though we had been visited by a herd of albino bunnies over night, but it was just hard little lumps of hail. It keeps trying to snow, to do its natural thing here, but not just yet.

I read the other day that, before a cloud can produce rain or snow it must produce ice. The ice droplet forms around a nucleator (a particle that becomes the nucleus of a group of water molecules, in this case). Sometimes the nucleator is a speck of dust or a mineral, such as salt, but now it is believed that, more often, the nucleator is biological in origin, often a bacterium called Pseudomonas syringae, a plant pathogen the causes bacterial speck, a nasty disease, on tomato plants.  It can also attack canola and other plants.

Dust and salt particles work as nucleators at very cold temperatures whereas the biological catalysts do their job about around or just below 0 degrees C. Nucleation is also what allows a frog to freeze into a “frogcicle” (see Ten Neat Things, November 4, 2011) and it’s the same thing that causes a diet cola to explode when combined with Mentos candies).

Many of the bacterial nucleators are pathogenic in nature and falling to earth can break the walls of the plant cells they feed upon. In addition to tomato speck, Pseudomonas syringae can also cause frost damage to plants. On the other hand, a little scientific manipulation can also make the bacteria useful in protecting citrus crops from frost damage.

Bacteria may be implicated in drought

Without the biological vectors, rain has to get as cold as -40 C before it falls. The bacteria, however, cause ice to form at a much higher temperature so that rain can fall in temperate and even hot regions.

A woman named Cindy Morris, an Agriculture Plant Pathologist at the French National Research Institute, has proven that bacteria are good at making water freeze. She cooled a tube of water to about -6 degrees Celsius, without freezing it. When she dropped some bacterial culture into the tube, the water froze completely in less than two seconds.

Some scientists postulate that a lack of bacteria can create drought. If land is too closely grazed, for example, there is no host for the bacteria and hence no rain.

This hypothesis about bacteria and rain has been around for about 25 years, but it has only recently that there has been a renewal of interest and study on the topic of what is now being called bioprecipitation.

It is part of the wonder of gardening and biological life that never ceases to capture my imagination.

November 6, 2011