My Very First Rhodo!

After all the deer damage we seemed to have this winter on our shrubbery, I have one rhodo bud that they all missed! Here is my very first rhodo - ever! It seemed to take quite a long time to come out but today it is showing itself very nicely.

The garden has been planted and is mostly a picture of small black stakes. I'm singing that old prairie tune again - we need rain!! It only rained twice in the month of May, and not really very hard. This past week I've been watering and have succeeded in having a few plants germinate. The perennials are looking fairly nice, although we must wait for later blooms. Last Sunday, I planted an entire new bed with my SK Siberian irises, daylilies and some ornamental grasses, both new and old.

Happy gardening, readers.

Singing To the Best of Them

Many of you readers probably don't know who this is - Arlo Guthrie of Alice's Restaurant fame. Last Saturday I went to a good old-fashioned sing-a-long with 30 other people. What a good time we had! A group of Kaslovians gets together once a month with one top-notch pianist, a couple of guitars and a couple of harmonicas. I know that it helped that the woman who hosted us had a baby grand piano and an even grander view of the Purcells and Kootenay Lake. We sat in a big circle; there's a super songbook and everyone picked a song. It was when the woman next to me picked "City of New Orleans" by Arlo Guthrie, that I knew that I was in the right place. I, of course, selected Connie Kaldor's "Saskatoon Moon", but we sang from Gilbert and Sullivan, Flanders and Swann, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and another of my favourites, Stan Rogers. I know that next time I'm aiming to pick "Rise Again". The other neat thing about this event is that it was totally alcohol-free. I haven't had such a good time in ages.

Wednesday Walkers

I've been raving to my SK friends about the wonderful women I've met who gather every Wednesday for lunch and a walk. Yesterday, we crossed Kootenay Lake and walked to a place called Fry Creek Canyon. Here we are on the bridge which crosses the chasm, hardly able to hear one another because of the roar of the water. Yes, the B.C. snow melt is coming down the mountains! For this special day we did invite a few others to join us (notice the men) and I was happy to be able to include Andrea and Demitri who were visiting at the time. We also had a wonderful tour of a small community where people are pretty much living off the grid and have lived close to the land for several decades. Wednesday Walkers is one of my weekly highlights!

The Waves

Here is the finished product. It actually looks pretty nice and it's wonderful to have a place to track dirt BEFORE entering the house! However, we do find that the surface undulates quite a bit so I just have to call it our friendly driveway, waving to greet us every day. We may have to pick up some bricks and put down more sand under it in a few areas but we'll see what it does when a good rain falls and where the water travels. I'd have to say I was a bit disappointed in that part of it all - the look of the finish - because we did work very industriously at this project. There's lots to love about it and I have to say it was good arm exercise!

Pounding the Pavers

We got our delivery of paving stones on Friday afternoon. It took a bit of time to get everything unloaded as we had 8 pallets (see left) unloaded from a Nelson truck. We got right to work and you can see one empty pallet. Saturday we were out of town but this morning we got busy once again with a soft, gentle rain coming down. It seems to be going fairly quickly. I bring the pavers up to the area and Dave lays them in place and pounds them with his mallet. I can manage about 20 pavers in the wheelbarrow. There are 360 paving stones in each pallet for a total of 2880. We've managed to work our way through 3 pallets now. Our pattern is shown at right - pretty simple and straightforward and so far we haven't had to do any cutting. It's coming. Pounding these pavers, we hope, will level out the driveway and give us a place to clean pots, wine jugs and all the stuff we do and perhaps we'll track a little less dirt into the house???

Gate Expectations

It's taken nearly a year but we have our gate up in the driveway! It was always so awkward trying to get the wire to hook over the post especially in the dark. It's so good to have a replacement. I think it looks pretty stylish, actually, and this picture doesn't do it justice. I still have to get out of the car to open the gate - we don't actually have a closing on it yet and are just using a bungee cord so the next step for me is to see if we can get an automatic opener. That might be beyond these gate expectations but it's great to have this improvement. Dave's getting to be a pretty fine woodworker don't you think?