My sister-in-law, the mad daylily collector, was among 2000 who rocked our local Run for the Cure this past weekend, to help to raise funds for breast cancer research. She’s one good reason why DomestikGoddess.com goes Pink for October — well, even more pink than usual. She also comes from a long line of photographers, and that’s where this next bit comes in:

Yesterday, my friend Gui mentioned that Flickr’s gone over to the pink this month, too. Yahoo! will donate 1 euro for each pink photo added to the Pink 2008 Flickr group, up to 30,000 EUR for five charities in Europe that support breast cancer research and treatment. You can add up to 5 photographs each day until the end of October.

How cool is that? An easy way to support a good cause — easy as pinning on the pink ribbon, but way more creative — with the added benefit of getting much-needed funds to fight breast cancer. If you can’t manage the cash to donate to the cause right now, yourself, why not upload a couple of pics and let Yahoo! make a donation for you?

These are my favourite dwarf daylilies, by the way. Don’t ask the name, it’s Strawberry something-or-other, but I never can remember: to me, they’re just “those pretty bright pink ones”! I’m a lousy photographer, as we know, but couldn’t resist grabbing a shot of these daylilies just as their blooming season came to an end.

p.s. If you post a pink pic to Flickr’s Pink 2008, feel free to drop a link in the comments so we can all come over to your place and go ooh and ahh!

Related posts:

1. Pink Ribbon Pick – In Great Taste Cookbook
2. Bunco for Charity
3. Warriors In Pink

Two cheap products with incredibly stupid names have just made yard work a lot easier, and I couldn’t be more delighted.

See, my garden tools are good quality — every garden guru will tell you that’s important — but they’re geting old. (Aren’t we all?) And I have to confess that I’ve never cared for my tools the way all the gardening books say you should. Sharpen the blades, oil the wood, lubricate the moving parts, clean off the mud after using them, store away carefully in a dry place to prevent rust… frankly, who has time for all that?

Particularly at the end of a hot day’s labour, when all you want is a long refreshing shower and some sort of beverage….

As it turns out, however, a bit of time put into proper garden tool care will actually save time (and effort, and unladylike language) later on.

Okay, really I did know that…

But the whole tool-sharpening business is just too difficult and time-consuming (whetstone? grinder? file? what?) — or too expensive, if you tote the tools to the place you get your lawnmower fixed or a full-service hardware store for sharpening.

The Easy Way to Make Old Garden Tools Work Better

Let me introduce you to Jig-a-Loo and the Samurai Shark.

I told you, these products have incredibly stupid names. One sounds like something you’d see advertised on a late-night TV shopping channel, or in a third-rate Ninja movie. And the other one sounds, well, just plain rude…

But don’t be fooled. These two are my new best friends!

They’re cheap, and they work, and you can grab them both at Amazon.com if your local hardware store doesn’t have them in stock.

Here’s the scoop:

Jig-a-Loo is a silicone-based lubricant spray that goes on clear and dries fast. It has a sharp unpleasant solvent-type odour when you first spray it, but that goes away almost immediately. Use it to loosen rusted-together nuts and bolts, fix squeaky doors and sticky locks, lubricate the moving parts of things (like the sliding window in my back door, or the handles of my ancient garden shears) so they move more smoothly and easily…

In short, it’s a great substitute for a spray can of WD-40, the home handyman’s traditional all-purpose lubricant. But Jig-a-Loo doesn’t have any grease or oil, so it’s not going to add to your cleaning problems. And you can use it on leather, wood, metal, and most plastics and fabric. Oh, and it repells water, too — if they could train the little orange can to put itself away in the cupboard when I’m done with it, that would be perfect.

Samurai Shark — I almost can’t say that with a straight face! — is not much more than a plastic handle with a couple of blades and a knob or two to adjust them with. Fortunately, it has two things going for it:

1. it is cheap, and
2. it works.

Sharpen anything from your dainty embroidery scissors to hefty lawnmower blades with this tool, including those serrated paring knives that the knife-sharpening kiosk guy won’t even look at.

It’s remarkable how much easier those heavy garden chores become when you’re not fighting to chop through sod or to divide perennial plants with a dull spade. Simply astonishing. And believe me, both your arms and your shrubs will appreciate it if you prune with sharp secateurs instead of hacking through the branches with a dull blade.

The first day with my Samurai Shark, I rounded up all the garden tools and sat on the back verandah in the sunshine. I spread out the instruction leaflet beside me, weighted it down with a coffee cup, and worked my way through the pile of tools.

The instructions are needed (but be warned, the print is really tiny! — thankfully, there are also pictures) because this is not intuitive. Each kind of knife or blade will need to be sharpened in a particular way, using one or the other of the Shark’s two built-in blades. It definitely takes a few minutes to get the hang of it, especially if you’re not exactly in the habit of sharpening garden tools…

And then I sprayed all the nuts and bolts that hold together the blades of the shears and pruners and loppers and secateurs and scissors with Jig-a-Loo. Just one complaint there, which also applies to good ol’ WD40 as well as Jig-a-Loo — I can never keep the little straw in the nozzle for more than one spritz.

(What do you think, am I spraying with too much enthusiasm? Anyone know a good trick for this?)

The rest of the afternoon, I dashed about the yard doing all the garden chores I’d been putting off — trimming the long grass around the base of trees with my newly sharp-and-lubricated old garden shears, pruning the hydrangea with secateurs as sharp and smooth-moving as the day I got them, and generally being more productive in far less time than usual.

And now that it’s getting on for the season where a lot of the perennial plants in the flower beds need to be lifted and divided, I can face the task with a little more energy (I’ve been doing those darned pushups, after all, eh?) and with garden tools that work for me, not fight against me!

Related posts:

1. A Sword for the Discerning Modern Samurai
2. Garden Tool Stool
3. Pretty Useful Tools

This clever kit puts all the survival gear you need for camping trips or — more hazardous yet, dorm life! — into a space that’s only 8 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches. Better yet, that package is a shatter-resistant, leakproof, 32-ounce water bottle (with the lid on a loop so you don’t go losing it in the wilderness.

The water bottle comes stuffed with a nice selection of emergency essentials:

• Whistle
• Flashlight with AAA batteries
• Emergency blanket
• Rain poncho
• Multi-purpose knife with blade, scissors, nail file, tweezers and toothpick
• Waterproof matches
• Nylon-pouch first-aid kit with bandages
• Sting relief pad, antiseptic towelettes and zip-lock bag
• 3″ carabiner

Not bad at all — safety and convenience, for under twenty bucks!
A nifty gift idea from EddieBauer.com.

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1. The Ultimate Girly Gizmo
2. Life Essentials, Seriously
3. Tabletop Voodoo

The first rose to bloom in my garden is Rosa xanthina f. hugonis, syn. ‘Father Hugo’s Rose’ — the golden rose of China, as it’s sometimes called. I just call it Father Hugo — like a comforting old friend.

Every year this yellow rose surprises me with how very many buds appear on its long arching canes, how quickly the buds develop, and how very showy those pale gold cups of flowers are during their brief time of bloom. The leaves and buds are tiny, compared to many rose bushes; yet the flowers are relatively large although they’re single.

Yes, it’s an old-fashioned rose.

If memory serves, Father Hugo’s rose was written up with enthusiasm by gardeners as a new discovery just before the First World War: and who Father Hugo might have been, I have no idea. It’s not well known these days, giving way in popularity to the new and improved varieties with a longer blooming period and a tidier habit of growth.

True, this is not a rose for every garden or every gardener.

Winter wind and ice is hard on Father Hugo, breaking the long canes, and it sprawls around and spreads those long canes like a skirt on the ground. Use mulch, if you don’t want a constant battle to trim the edge of the lawn around it, the way my rose edges into lawnmower territory in its growth. The thorns are like organic barbed wire, too, so pruning back the dead wood in the spring is not a whole lot of fun.

But it’s all worth it for the early pale gold cascades of roses… lovely!

My rosa hugonis grows well on a gentle sunny slope at the edge of the driveway– it doesn’t seem to need very rich soil at all, fortunately — where it can tumble around at will. In a small garden, however, I think I’d be inclined to experiment with an espalier against a fence or wall.

Related posts:

1. Miniature Daffodils and the Joy of a Yellow Spring
2. Signs of Life in the Rock Garden
3. Tea and Coffee as Fertilizer!

We have our Garden Giveaway contest winners! Email addresses of our 3 winners have been pulled from our usual Mexican basket-hat by He Who Hogs The Power Tools, and the lucky ones have been notified of their great fortune:

Thanks to Comtech, a CatStop goes to JCF (who apparently has a very specific pesky stray cat in mind for discouragement), a SquirrelStop to Queen Marlene (her songbirds will be happy!), and a SlugsAway goes to Peggie (they say everything is bigger in Texas, so I don’t want to see her slugs!).

Thanks for playing! Your prizes will go out in the mail this week, so cross your fingers for prompt and efficient postal service… And for others, less fortunate, who must now weep over their pest-ravaged gardens in disappointment: Better luck next time! And there will be a next time, you know it!

Related posts:

1. Garden Giveaway
2. Garden Giveaway: 3 Great Products to Control Garden Pests
3. Insignia mp3 Player GiveAway

Ah, Springtime in the garden… from Wordworth’s dancing daffodils to Chaucer’s “grene and lusty May,” it’s all good — except for the harsh reality of garden pests.

Slimey Slugs and Snails, oh my!

Slugs and snails crawl into the garden at night, and leave their sticky slime all over whatever tiny bits of tender lettuce greens and flower petals they might not chew to a ragged edge or leave with great gaping holes…

Cats!

Stray cats take one look at that freshly turned, sweet, friable soil in your flower beds and say to themselves, “hey! check out the giant litter box!”

Squirrels? – please, don’t even get me started!

When all you want to do is lie in a gentle hammock and rest from your labours, watching the lovely songbirds come round for a gourmet meal — that’s when some greedy fat-tailed squirrel comes along to dangle upside down from the bird feeder, scooping out great fistfuls of expensive bird seed onto the ground as he stuffs his little rodent cheeks — guaranteed to scare away that rare shy Eastern Purple Whositbird that you’ve been dying to photograph since childhood…

Sound familiar, any of that?
Hang onto your sun-hat, then, Nelly — I’ve got the contest for you!

Garden Giveaway Contest

Here are the fabulous prizes —

1. 
   

   SlugsAway electronic slug and snail fence

   Keep slugs and snails out of your garden without using chemicals. Safe for children and pets, it can protect your garden all season on a single nine-volt battery.




2. 
   

   CatStop automatic outdoor cat deterrent

   Keep cats out of your garden, safely and efficiently. A motion-activated burst of ultrasonic sound startles cats, and teaches them to stay away.




3. 
   

   SquirrelStop automatic spinning squirrel deterrent

   Keep your bird feeder safe from squirrels. When a squirrel climbs on to the feeder, it triggers the SquirrelStop motor and makes the feeder spin! (Ha! Let’s see you try to stay on that amusement park ride, little seed-stealing rodent!) Works with any hanging feeder weighing up to 10 lbs.

Contech Electronics, based in British Columbia, Canada, is our gracious sponsor. They develop, manufacture and distribute a whole range of innovative technology for pets and gardens, including these three prizes.

Enter for your chance to win!

Read the contest rules here for your shot at 3 great prizes: there are 3 ways to enter. Residents of Canada and USA only for this one, please… and the deadline to enter is Saturday, 31 May 2008, at 11:59 pm (Eastern).

Related posts:

1. Garden Giveaway
2. Garden Giveaway Winners
3. Salad Garden Dreams and Slug Solutions

As those of you following the Canadian news (or my other River/Road post) may gather… we’ve had a spot of flooding, here in the St. John River valley of New Brunswick. And as I said yesterday,

When Nature gets nasty, know what we do around here?
We rush out and take pictures, of course.

Especially those of us who live up on high ground.

Here are the flood photos that He Who Hogs The Power Tools took yesterday and this afternoon, while I wandered about with the dog and chatted with other flood watchers:

Highway 105 at Keswick, NB, 30 April 2008


Highway 105 at Keswick, NB, 30 April 2008


Highway 105 at Keswick, NB, 30 April 2008


Mactaquac Dam, NB, 30 April 2008


Mactaquac Dam, NB, 30 April 2008


Corner of Brunswick and Carleton Streets, Fredericton, NB, 30 April 2008


Back of Crown Plaza Hotel, Queen St., Fredericton, NB, 30 April 2008


Officers Square, Fredericton, New Brunswick 30 April 2008

Related posts:

1. Where the River Meets the Road
2. Dedicated to the Boys in Red
3. Frothy Feathery Fairy Crown

Sweet spring in the garden, with all the fresh little green sprouts: it’s like heaven from now until harvest! Except for the harsh reality of garden pests. If pesky slugs, cats or quirrels are planting frustration in your lovely garden, my friends, this Garden Giveaway is the contest for you.

3 Great Garden Pest Control Prizes

SlugsAway electronic slug and snail fence

Keep slugs and snails out of your garden without using chemicals. Safe for children and pets, it can protect your garden all season on a single 9-volt battery.

CatStop automatic outdoor cat deterrent

Keep cats out of your garden, safely and efficiently. A motion-activated burst of ultrasonic sound will startle cats and teach them to stay away.

SquirrelStop automatic spinning squirrel deterrent

Keep your bird feeder safe from squirrels. When a squirrel climbs on to the feeder, it triggers the SquirrelStop motor and makes the feeder spin! (Ha! Let’s see you try to stay on that amusement park ride, little seed-stealing rodent!) Works with any hanging feeder weighing up to 10 lbs.

Contest Rules

This contest is open to Canada and USA readers only, sorry — otherwise I’ll go broke on the postage for shipping these things all the way to Uruguay. (Not to worry, there’ll be another giveaway contest for our international friends very soon!)

Deadline to enter: Saturday, 31 May 2008, at 11:59 pm (Eastern)

Winners will be selected by my usual clever method of matching up email addresses with numbers, writing all the numbers on bits of paper, and putting the bits of paper into a hat (actually, a charming Mexican basket since I’m not a hat-wearing kind of gal). As usual, He Who Hogs The Power Tools will close his eyes, reach into the basket, and draw the winning numbers one by one.

First prize winner gets his/her choice of the 3 available prizes; then the 2nd prize winner gets to pick from the other two; and finally, the 3rd prize winner gets whichever prize has not yet been claimed.

Winners will be notified by email on Monday, 2 June 2008, and announced on DomestikGoddess.com at the end of that week.

3 Ways to Enter

1. Sign up to get Domestik Goddess updates by email, if you haven’t already done so, and you’ll be automatically entered for a chance to win.

or

If you’re already a subscriber, drop me a note (my email address is on the About page) or leave a comment on this other post to say “Count me in!”

or

2. Bonus! Get your name put into the hat twice by posting a note on your own blog to help spread the word about this contest — don’t forget to link back to this page, so I’ll see that you’ve entered!

or

3. Super bonus! Tell us your best story about garden pests for an extra chance to win. You can tell your tale in the comments on this other post, or send me an email, or post your garden-pest adventure on your own blog — whatever works for you — just make sure to let me know about it, so it will count towards a ballot in the giveaway!

All clear?

Good.

Remember, Canada and USA only for this one, please… and the deadline to enter is Saturday, 31 May 2008, at 11:59 pm (Eastern).

Now, let the Garden Giveaway begin!

Related posts:

1. Garden Giveaway: 3 Great Products to Control Garden Pests
2. Garden Giveaway Winners
3. Insignia mp3 Player GiveAway

So, we’re watching the river rise in the St. John River valley… feeling grateful for living up on very high ground… and the radio says this could be the worst flood in 35 years. Everyone’s talking about The Big One back in 1973 and wondering what will happen overnight.

When Nature gets nasty, know what we do around here? We rush out and take pictures, of course. And gather at the Department of Highways barricades to chat with neighbours and feel sorry for our friends and family who built their homes on the flood plain. Maybe bring a thermos of coffee and the dog… All of which is to say, I’m planning to go out and do just that, right now — to return later with a few scenic shots (low light levels permitting) of the soon-to-be famous Flood of 2008. Meanwhile, CTV News is doing a pretty good job with the video coverage at www.ctvnewsnet.com.

Related posts:

1. Where the River Meets the Road – Flood Photographs
2. Chuckling at the Carnival of Family Life
3. Baby Photo Album for Family Bonding

So my veggie garden is still under four feet of snow — does that stop a keen gardener from planning for a new planting season? Heck, no!

One of the first plantings that will go in (when Spring eventually arrives in Atlantic Canada) will be the salad garden of mixed mesclun greens and spinach and lettuce, not to mention some tasty lovely snow peas. These are all vegetable crops that prefer cooler air and soil temperatures, and will quickly fade when summer sun grows warm.

Stretch the Summer Salad Days

Did you know that you can grow salad greens in containers, if you don’t have a patch of earth for a garden? They look quite lush and lovely growing in pots, too.

Keep the harvest going by snipping off just the outside leaves, rather than the entire head of your lettuce plants. The plants will keep producing from the centre, and you get super-fresh salad for days and days on end!

Lettuce and spinach and other greens are easy to grow from seed. So easy, in fact, that I never seem to learn to scatter the seeds thinly enough — I’m always making allowances for seeds that might not germinate, and I end up with a crowded planting of tiny plants struggling against each other for light. Not so good for the air circulation, either, and some of my lettuce can end up composting itself if we get a few days of rain.

No big deal, though: just get in there with the scissors and thin it out. Cut off some of those tiny lettuce plants right at soil level when they’re just a few inches high, and start the salad season early. Thinning out will let the remaining plants grow better and avoid those nasty damp-related problems.

Slugs and Snails, Oh My!

Slugs and snails are the biggest threat to a nice salad garden, and you’ll have to be on your toes to keep ahead of them — they sneak out at dusk and can eat their way through a great deal of salad in one night, leaving silvery slimy trails all over the ragged green leaves, while you’re sleeping peacefully and all unawares… Unpleasant!

Some stores sell various kinds of “snail bait” and “slug powder” — but those are just another name for poisons. Nasty ones. And much as I find slugs to be one of the more disgusting creatures on the planet, I have no interest in sprinkling toxic chemicals around the vegetable garden. No amount of washing the lettuce would convince me that it’s not tainted. Some people swear by the new products made with iron phosphate, but I have no experience of them so you’re on your own there!

Here are two earth-friendly solutions that work for me to keep slugs and snails out of the salad garden:

One is the traditional trap baited with beer. You set a shallow dish into the garden soil just so the lip of it is even with the top of the ground, then pour in some beer. (Feel free to use the stale dregs left in the bottom of bottles after a barbecue — no need to waste the good stuff on your slugs and snails!) During the night, the slimey crawlies will come out and head for the lettuce… but they’ll get distracted by the beer, slip in for a drink, and drown. Ha!

The other solution is physical control — and no, I’m not going to suggest going out with a flashlight and hand-picking your slugs and snails out of the lettuce. Although I do know some people who actually do that. Ugh.

No, we’re talking about slug prevention here.

First, you make sure there’s not a lot of litter in the salad garden, such as fallen leaves and such, for slugs and snails to hide underneath in the daytime. Then, you put a little barrier around each lettuce plant.

A sprinkling of “diotomaceous earth” — ground up fossils, as I understand it — will scratch their little slug bellies, so a ring around the lettuce will keep slugs at bay. But I always worry about the cats and dogs getting into it and then licking their paws, and the white granules are not particularly attractive in the garden. Also, I’m not 100% convinced that diotomaceous earth is the way to go from an environmental perspective: surely there’s a finite supply of fossil bones to make it? And what’s involved in the processing and packaging and transportation?

I don’t know the answers, but these are questions that keep coming to mind — and I’d prefer not to do too much in the way of deep thinking when out playing in the garden.

Wood ashes work the same way as diotomaceous earth, by the way — and some gardeners swear by coffee grounds, cornmeal, and natural bran — but all of these barriers will only work if they’re dry. One good heavy dew in the late evening, and the slugs and snails can move right back in. Crushed eggshells and cedar chips are more effective, as they keep on working in all types of weather, but how many eggs can you eat? I don’t use cedar chips mostly because they keep the ground from warming up, and in this short Canadian growing season we really need to let the sun reach the soil as much as it can.

Generally, I just put a low collar of some sort around the lettuce plants. Cardboard won’t do it — the slugs and snails will just laugh merrily and climb right over it. What you want is a strip of copper. Slug slime reacts in some way with copper to basically electrocute the slugs. Ha!

And that’s where this iron plant crown (from Wisteria) comes in.

Granted, the crown is supposed to be for decoration — perhaps to make the lettuce plants feel important? at $39.00 per, they should! — but I say, if you’re going to have slug barriers around a bunch of garden plants, why not make them in a whimsical shape? And if, like me, you like to put the occasional pretty ruffled lettuce plant in among the garden flowers, too, a decorative iron crown might be the perfect finishing touch.

To make the crown a useful slug-proofing solution, however, just plain iron won’t do. Fasten a strip of copper around it to repel the slimy pests.

I’ve also had pretty good luck with previously-enjoyed tinfoil (aluminum foil) in place of copper. Now, I won’t swear that it will work for you, because tinfoil isn’t mentioned in any of my gardening books, but I first tried it because (a) copper can be pricey, (b) I am almost pathologically thrifty, as gardeners go, and (c) I had a slug emergency one year — and it works for me.

Crumple up your scraps of tinfoil left over from kitchen and barbecue use, and make a tiny obstacle course for slugs and snails to struggle across on their way to your plants. And if you hide the tinfoil inside a lovely crown, looking like something out of a garden fairytale, no one will be any the wiser to your frugal trick!

[Thanks to The Finer Things for finding the crown!]

Related posts:

1. Garden Giveaway: 3 Great Products to Control Garden Pests
2. Green Garden Art
3. Garden Like an Astronaut

I love some of the funky recycled stuff and general green goodness at EcoOutlet, but damn their blog for reminding me that it’s getting to be That Time of Year Again… Spring cleaning, I mean!

But let’s not think of that just now.

Let’s think of guilt-free eco-friendly frivolities to pretty up the garden… you know, for when the garden finally emerges from under the snow once again. Which I’m pretty sure it’s going to do… some time…

Reclectic Garden Lanterns

Made from the waste and recycled materials that result from the production of aerosol and soda cans in India, the Reclectic Lanterns are all produced using different remnants and mis-printed pieces so each one will be unique in appearance. — EcoOutlet

Related posts:

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The green-living experts tell us that the average family could reduce their garbage by as much as one-third, just by composting kitchen scraps and other organic wastes. Looking at the foot-path worn down from the house to our own compost bins, I believe that waste-reduction estimate!

The worst part of composting, for me, is the stinky old plastic ice-cream containers I keep under the sink to collect the veggie peelings and crumpled tissues and spent tea-bags.

One of these days, I’m going to brace my wallet to get a stainless steel beauty… maybe even one like this Canadian-sourced unit that mounts right in a kitchen countertop.

I’d never heard of such a thing before, but HWHTPT was drafting up a kitchen plan just last week that called for Blanco Solon’s organic waste bin to be installed right beside the prep sink. The minute I saw it… well, there’s a new entry in my Kitchen Wish List scrapbook!

Why bother, you ask?

Because of the best part of composting.

While my garden sleeps away the winter months under a blanket of snow, our coffee grounds and carrot peelings are turning into a gorgeous rich soil amendment and fertilizer that’s light-years beyond anything the garden centres have to sell in their big plastic bags.

When spring comes, I’ll scoop out the oldest compost from the bottom of the bin and run it through a wire mesh to catch the finest bits in my wheelbarrow, then use that fine dark compost to get my young seedling plants off to a wonderful start on the growing season.

Frugal, green, and productive of food and beauty… vegetable waste is turned back into yummy homegrown vegetables. In my books, that’s as close as you can get to household magic!

Technorati Tags: kitchen, composting, containers

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While our friends Down Under are basking in gardening season, we in the Frozen North can’t see our gardens for snowdrifts… ah, but that never stopped a keen gardener from planning ahead for a new season’s harvest!

Me, I’m dreaming of sweet strawberries, fat gooseberries, tart white currrants, raspberries bursting sweet on my tongue, blueberries hanging in dusty indigo clusters…

Too easy, from the vantage point of winter dreams, to forget one of the great frustrations of growing your own food — the constant battle to defend it against wildlife! And birds, in particular, can be quite tricky when it comes to raiding the berry patch.

Sure, you can spread a fine mesh netting over the strawberry beds and currant bushes, but it’s not at all attractive. Plus, if you’re growing a lot of different berries, the cost for bird netting can get ridiculously expensive.

Some gardeners have had good luck with stringing fine line in a criss-cross fashion between poles in the garden, but I am not one of those people.

If the strings is too loose, the poor little birds can get tangled up or trapped down below among the fruiting plants — not nice, either way. And if the strings are too loose, it’s just a lovely perch on which the birds can rest while they decide the best way to get through and eat your berries anyway.

And it’s not that I would ever want to live without songbirds in the yard — I’d just prefer them to go eat the bitter wild chokecherries and leave my garden alone!

There are sticky substances to smear on bird-popular tree limbs, motion activated noisemakers, and all manner of hi-tech electronic devices designed to drive the birds away. And then there are the bright balloons with big scary eyes, and glittering reflective tape that you’re meant to drape about the yard. I can’t tell you from firsthand experience if they work or not — but who wants to see a mess of strange scary objects all over the yard, amongst the pretty fruit and flowers?

A more discreet solution that works quite well for my hobby-farmer friends downriver is to fool the birds into thinking the berry patch is full of snakes. They cut up an old length of garden hose into pieces about 16 or 18 inches long and lay those bits of hose among the garden plants.

Apparently, to the birds, the recycled hose looks like so many snakes, lying in wait for lunch! So the birds stay clear of landing in the berry patch.

But do you know those big plastic owls that some city folk use to scare pigeons away from their balconies? You’ll see a fair number of those out here in the country, too, perched on poles around the kitchen garden. My own experience is that the berry-stealing birds are scared of this watching “predator” at first, but by the time the crop is ripening, they’ve figured out that there’s nothing to fear.

Now they make a version of the owls with rotating heads. Obviously, movement helps… maybe.

At least with the fake garden-hose snakes, you can easily move them around from time to time…

Which brings me to the beautiful copper garden snake I found at Modern Artisans. I’m not sure if it would protect the berries from birds as well as my friends’ old hose sections do, but at least it would be something lovely to look at in the garden…

You know, something more decorative than a lot of bird tracks in the dirt and sad strawberry plants from which every fruit has been stripped!

There is, however, one thing that has worked for me with strawberries, over the years. I have given up completely on the usual large red berries and grow only white strawberries.

Yes, white!

Well, more of a creamy off-white, the colour that normal strawberries are before they start to turn red and ripe…

These strawberries simply stay that colour — they ripen beautifully without ever turning red, so the birds (and kids) can’t tell when they’re ripe and ready to eat.

White strawberries are not quite as large as the more widely grown red-fruited varieties, but they bear a great many berries to make up for it. The tiny Alpine strawberries are available as white ones, too, but mine are a hardy old-fashioned bunch that I swiped from my grandfather’s garden, and the fruit is larger than the Alpine strawberries.

As sweet as you could ever wish for, though, with a faint sun-warmed pineapple flavour — just as sweet as those wild strawberries we used to pick at the sunny edges where hayfields met hedgerows, back in that endless summertime when we were kids…

Technorati Tags: birds, berries, garden

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3. The Practical Magic of Wind Chimes

Full moon, clear skies, cold weather. Bitterly cold, like minus-25° Celcius bitterly cold (minus-38°C with the windchill)… far too cold for me to even think about trying to do the conversion to Fahrenheit for the benefit of our American friends.

Let’s just say it’s cold enough — if I may be so indelicate and unladylike (which I damn well may, because it’s that cold) — it’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. So, naturally, I’ve spent the evening scoping the Interweb for a brass monkey — just to test the truth of the old adage. Lots of the cute and morally improving See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil monkey trio to be found… but none of them seem to be anatomically correct.

And then, and then, this!
Look, Ma — it’s a genuine Brass Monkey Freeze Indicator!

Made of gleaming solid brass, this monkey stands six inches tall and comes with the necessary physical equipment to test the winter weather.

How fast it works depends on how cold it is. If Part B is still attached to Part A, then the environment is probably not dangerously cold. But if Part B is detached from Part A then the environment is below 23 degrees Fahrenheit, which is cold enough to…

What, only 23°Fahrenheit?
Wait, that’s, umm, minus-5°C — a lovely spring day!
Well, make allowances: the brass monkey’s created in tropical Texas, not a tough Canadian primate at all.
(But I still want one.)

Technorati Tags: colloquialism, brass monkey

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Today, I dashed into town to stock up on essentials, and while there stopped in at DJ’s mother’s house. Well, I’m ashamed to say that a parcel was waiting for me there since Christmas! (You know how it goes, never enough time in a day – especially when we seem to get a blasted snowstorm every third day…)

More later on one of the other goodies just unwrapped, but I had to show you this amazing vase — one of a pair I’m now delighted to be able to call my own.

Wondervase, they call it.

In a flat cardboard package, you find a flat plastic envelope — the medium size is 6″ x 11″ which seems a very useful size. Fill it with very warm water, right up to the top. The bottom flattens out and the whole thing becomes quite surprisingly stable.

So far, so good — but the real fun starts as the plastic warms up and becomes flexible.

You can bend it, fold it, twist it, and generally shape it into the mad funky vase of your dreams…

I can see getting a fistful of these vases and keeping them on hand for garden season — a quick and unusual way to present a gift of home-grown garden flowers to our visitors!

Truth be told, I’ve been playing with this all afternoon…

Tip: The instructions say to pour out the warm water and replace it with cool water, to make the vase hold its strange new shape, but I found it works better just to let it cool down on its own, less of the vacuum effect to suck in the sides — especially if you make the shape very narrow at the top, like this crazy twisted “bud vase” I shaped up around the handle of a wooden spoon.

All I need now is a long-stemmed rose!

When you’re done with the vase, you rinse it out as you would any vase, because you know it’s bound to get a bit gunky inside after a week or so with flowers in it — then soften it up again with warm water and smooth it out flat.

Besides the enormous amount of fun I found this Wondervase thing, it’s a huge bonus just to be able to pop it into a drawer with my dish towels and such. Because if you ever saw the ungodly mess that’s the inside of my china cabinet, you’d know I couldn’t possibly find the shelf space to store an ordinary vase…

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You know grosgrain ribbon, right? That sturdy multi-purpose ribbon with strong ribs going across it?

Striped, solid, or even printed with polka dots though it may be — yeah, you know grosgrain when you see it.

Grosgrain ribbon makes a regular appearance in our old family photo albums — mostly in striped ribbon belts with D-ring buckles, worn low on wide-belled hip-huggers or tight at the waist to cinch in a polyester shirtwaist dress.

My mother had an apron trimmed with apple-green grosgrain at the hem and pocket, too, as I recall…

That’s no doubt why grosgrain ribbon says “1970s” to me, more than any other material — except perhaps Mylar wallpaper… and Formica surfaces with tiny metallic flakes… and guitar-driven rock, played very loud…

In short, it’s a shortcut to retro decor style, with a bright new twist.

All this comes to mind because I’ve been looking through John Loecke’s new book, Grosgrain Style: Quick and Creative Projects for Accessorizing and Decorating with Grosgrain Ribbon, dropped into my dainty white hands this week by Random House, the publisher.

Designer John Loecke shows how to use grosgrain ribbons to trim almost any item of domestic decor… from glassware to picture frames… from chandeliers to slipcovers…

He divides the projects up into chapters by room, esssentially, but makes the point that a lot of cross-over is likely to happen, once your imagination gets playing with ribbons.

I think my favourite project of those showcased in the book must be the small-scale ribbon belts… used as casual napkin rings!

This comes from a designer whose own closet boasts a rainbow of ribbon belts, grosgrain ribbon watch bands, key fobs, you name it… So of course there’s even a chapter here on using grosgrain to funky-up your own personal accessories — necklaces, bangles, canvas sneakers, totes, and of course those classic D-ring grosgrain ribbon belts.

At the very end of Grosgrain Style is a section of Ribbon Notes and Resources — easy to find when you need to look something up, because the edges of the pages are printed as if bound with a bright green grosgrain ribbon.

And in here, in the Glossary of Basic Tools part, I found a piece of pure gold:

Sold on rolls and in a variety of widths, this double-sided, pressure-sensitive adhesive holds like glue without the mess… And, unlike glue, Sealah tape is washable, and because it’s both acid- and lignin-free, it will not yellow over time, changing the color of your ribbon.

Am I the only person on the planet who didn’t know of this magical Sealah tape?

But I digress…

This is intended to be more of an inspiration book rather than a step-by-step instruction manual, but I think the designer-author achieves both of those purposes to some degree.

In Grosgrain Style, John Loecke inspires with a bright host of project ideas (beautifully photographed by Wendell Webber, by the way) and gives the basic techniques and materials information that you need to take those ideas as a starting point — to run away with the grosgrain concept, and make each project your own.

Technorati Tags: home decor, books, reviews

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This past weekend was Thanksgiving, here in Canada, and I think I’ve figured out why we have our Thanksgiving so much earlier than the Americans do — it’s to take advantage of the fabulous Fall weather.

Around these parts, the colourful autumn leaves near at their best in the first week of October, and the apples are practically falling off the trees.

The weather is cool enough that you can cook up a big huge turkey dinner without overheating the kitchen to the detriment of the cook, and frosty nights make the ripe apples sweet… yet the sunny days are still warm enough for us to go out in shirtsleeves — on Saturday, the younguns were out in shorts and tee-shirts!

We get a lot of the seasonal yard work out of the way, on the weekends around Thanksgiving time, and entertain a lot of guests — sometimes both at the same time, as in the case of apple picking — and still (somehow) have enough energy left over to take the dogs for a hike in the autumn woods.

Here’s a little bit of show-and-tell (for Lara’sTalk About Tuesday to share the joy. No pictures of the big Thanksgiving turkey dinner, however — everyone was too busy eating to bother with a camera!

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Tired of the same-old same-old Thanksgiving decorations?

You can’t go wrong with the classic turkey (or a cocky classic rooster, for that matter), but here’s a fun new twist on the rustic Autumn yard art.

No carving.
No mess.
Reusable for years to come, of course, and very affordable at $11.95 (or less) at Gardeners.com.

Just push these simple iron silhouette pieces — turkey or rooster — head, wings, legs and tail — into a squash or a pumpkin, or any similar large round vegetable, come to that… Instantly, you’ve got an amusing vegetable sculpture to strut its stuff on your front porch or lawn!

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This photo was taken in my yard on Sunday afternoon.
That’s my hand.
And those are a few of my “girls” — did you know all worker honeybees are female?.

This is for someone signing himself “Gary” who emailed me this morning. Gary wanted to tell me that “Chicks are not good with bugs” and therefore he “can not believe” in the existence of my bees, he says…

Uhm.

Who on earth pretends to be a beekeeper?

I mean, it’s not like pretending to be a proctologist when you’re stuck beside a really boring gabber on a long plane flight. It’s not like pretending to be interested in football for the first three weeks of dating a Riders fan. And it’s not at all like pretending you enjoyed your mother’s deep-fried wombat casserole…

Really.

So the question remains. Does “Gary” think that I’m sadly self-deluded, or that I have some mysterious and sinister purpose in claiming membership in the fraternity of apiculture? We’re not sure, and — alas — I can’t ask him directly, because he used a fake email address.

So all I can do is say, “Yes, Gary-whoever-you-are, I do keep bees. See? There they are now.”

And guess what else? —

Chicks are good at whatever we want to be good at!

Oh, what the heck, I’ll throw in a portrait of one of my queen bees getting ready to lay an egg, and another photo of some field bees coming home with saddlebags of bright yellow pollen…

Just to share my joy in the miracles of Nature. And because my little honeymaking girls are pretty darned sweet.

(Click the thumbnails for bigger pics, if you’re interested.)

And if you’ve got the slightest doubt that these are the bees of a Domestik Goddess, check out the lovely retro 1950s ice-cream-parlour green that I’ve custom-mixed and used to paint the bottom boards on all my hives.

My honey-collection boxes (not shown here) are a lovely coordinating retro pink, by the way. True. And I’ve got the photos to prove it.

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Grinning pottery cats with one-of-a-kind cheeky characters will chatter away to keep you company in the garden whenever a breeze is blowing.

Mouse and Moon’s Susan Long makes these Zacibo Cat windchimes in every colour under the sun, glazed and unglazed… Just like real cats, these critters will entertain themselves quite nicely in the garden while the weather is fine, but you’ll have to bring them indoors when the frosty winter weather comes along.

Technorati Tags: cats, pottery, windchimes

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