Apples and pears

No, me old china, I am not talking about the stairs. I am talking about actual apples and actual pears.

The twiggy little branches on my dwarf apple tree are leaning towards the ground. I can’t help wondering if they will be able to bear the weight when the apples (seven of three varieties are fully grown.

Ditto the pears.

I’m guessing the twiggy branches can indeed bear the weight, else what would be the point of these dwarf trees? Still, it’s pretty funny looking.

I’m also wondering about these red Bartlett pears (one of my faves). They are a fraction of the size of the other pears. Are they actually going to grow to the size of real pears? (If they do, the twiggy little branch will reach the ground.) Or are these meant to be dwarf pears on a dwarf pear tree?

Time will tell.

Botany 101 Part 2

I know I wasn’t stoned when I was sweeping the roof yesterday.  Aside from chance being a fine thing, there are certain laws you don’t want to break when you’re on a roof and as far as I’m concerned the most important of these is gravity.

So, no, I wasn’t stoned. I’m therefore not sure why or how I could have imagined that, in addition to sweeping the pine needles off, there was no need to de-moss the roof. Went back up ladder this morning planning to clear out the gutters. Perhaps, if I ended up feeling ambitious, washing the skylights, too. As soon as I got on the roof it was obvious to me that de-mossing was not optional. Back down the ladder to fetch the scraper.

I’ll be honest. Until I started weeding the path I hadn’t given moss a lot of thought. I could sum it up thus: moss is green stuff that grows where the sun does not shine. If you’d told me it was caused by alien spores this would have sounded like as good an explanation as any other.

Happily, this is not my roof.

Moss can be quite attractive in many circumstances, although not on your roof, where, left to grow untamed, it will eventually lift the tiles off the roof, which will cause a leak, which will result in a large bill for retiling the roof. So, not good on a roof.

Weeding the garden path I realised, as reported yesterday, that moss sprouts on wet, mushy pine needles. (Source still a mystery. I could look it up. Or I could stick with the alien spore theory.) As I was scraping large patches of moss off the part of the roof where the sun does not shine, I turned one patch over and what should I see? Pine needles!

Why have I never put this together in my head before? Previously the only connection I’d made between the moss on my roof and the pine trees surrounding the house was that the trees blocked the sun which encouraged the moss. I did not see dead pine needles blown onto the roof as the source of the problem.

Why did no one ever teach me this fascinating fact in a science class?

Okay, to be fair, perhaps someone did try to teach me some less fascinating version of this fact and it just didn’t take in my head. I know we took some form of botany. I vaguely remember having to memorise the names of flower parts.  The only things I remember from all the science lessons I took in school are the laws of gravity and inertia, and throwing up in the dissect-a-frog biology class. (Not my fault the teacher didn't believe me when I said I had to go to the toilet now. )

 Anyway... Roof now de-mossed and gutters cleared. Skylights will have to wait for another day. There is a gin and tonic calling my name.

Up the garden path

Okay, strictly speaking not the garden path, but the path from the house to the driveway.

Back in May, this thistle grew to a height of three feet before I finally stopped walking around it and actually pulled it up. 

Having done so, I looked up the path and found myself thinking: Wasn’t this path originally much wider? When exactly did it become so overgrown with weeds? It’s a gravel path. How is it possible for there to be so many weeds?

The answers to these various questions are: (a) yes, (b) slowly over several years and (c) nature – as became clear on closer inspection.

Down on my hands and knees to start the weeding, I realised:

-       Over the winter lots of pine needles fall

-       Lots of rain falls on the dead pine needles, turning them into a mushy pulp

-       Moss grows on the mushy pulp

-       The combination of moss and mushy pulp is all the encouragement many weeds need to sprout.

There you have it. Botany 101.

I could, of course, have simply sprayed the whole path with Roundup. (Oh, ha, ha. As if that would ever happen.)

I managed to weed (and widen) the path for about the first ten feet from the house, then Juneuary set in. Too wet and too cold for weeding.

This week I finally got back to and finished the job.

Quite the difference, n’est-ce pas?  (Roxie is clearly impressed.)

And in semi-path related news (well, the path is in the photo), a reminder while I was eating dinner last night of one of the many reasons I love living on Gabriola. I looked up from my book to see this.

Bambi eating weeds ten feet away from me? Fantastic! (Bambo rampaging through the garden? Not so much.)

Blackberries!

Whatever trials and tribulations, successes and failures there may have been over the past six summers, one thing remains gloriously constant: the bounty from the wild blackberry that was in situ long before we bought the house, long before Pat and I spent a weekend in the 1990s fencing in the sunny corner of the plot.

It gets trimmed back every autumn. That’s it for plant care. It’s never been given a drop of water. But every summer it produces more blackberries than I could possibly eat. I always give Pat some. I always end up with bags of blackberries in the freezer to keep me going over the winter. I always have lots of blackberries to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Yes, it sometimes scratches me, but that’s a small price to pay. (Oh, and the bees love the berry blossom.)

This bowl is the first of what will be many pickings over the next few weeks.

I filled half the bowl from inside the garden. For the other half I had to go round to the road to pick the ones hanging over the fence.

Over the past few summers a number of little pine trees have sprouted on the other side of the garden fence. I didn’t try to stop them. They provide a bit more privacy and they deter bloody Bambo. So, no problem.

Well, that’s not quite true. 

When I carried the blackberry bowl around to the road, I discovered the little pine trees had grown to the point that I couldn’t actually get to the fence (and the blackberries). Thus the inclusion of the secateurs in the photo. A great deal of pruning was required before I could start filling the bowl again.

Job done. Access created. Blackberries picked. And now I’m going to have some for breakfast. Yum!

Things I did not know

There are a couple of interesting things I’ve learnt this summer.

For one thing, I’ve discovered that hummingbirds abandon you.

You put out a feeder. They go mad for it for a few weeks and then they disappear. Bit ungrateful, if you ask me. At first I just thought they were specifically abandoning me, so I posted a query on one of the Gabriola groups on Facebook. It prompted the following discussion.

ME: Hardly any hummingbirds using my feeder in the past couple of weeks. Anyone else noticing this or is it just me who's being rejected?

 Top of Form

·         Us too. There's definitely been a slow down from the frenetic feeding of the past few weeks. Maybe there are so many flowers around that their need for supplementary nectar is lessened?

·         I saw one by the garden yesterday, otherwise, nary a hummer in sight!

·         Sometimes when the wild honeysuckle is in full bloom, the hummers spend their time on that. Although I thought that had already happened.

·         I think the Rufous hummers have migrated south now and only the Anna hummers are here now and they stay all year round. 😃💕

·         The Rufous disappeared all at once at the end of June. We have about 6 Annas left and they will overwinter.

ME: So (as a newbie), keep the feeder out year round or...?

·         Yes. The birds who are here year round will still need it ☺

·         I have read that if you decide to keep your hummingbird feeder up year round, it becomes a very important source of energy for our local hummers (usually Annas). You will have to make sure it is always available and that it doesn't freeze. We bring ours in overnight whenever the temp goes below zero and put it back out first thing the next morning. We've had two female Annas come to the feeder all winter and it's always nice to hear the buzz of their wings. For more info Anna’s Hummingbird Information Page.

Yes, I bet it is nice to hear the buzz of hummingbird wings in the winter, but I have to be honest. Am I really going to remember to bring the feeder in when it might freeze? Am I really going to remember to change the nectar every week when there is no appreciable reduction in volume in the feeder? In other words, how likely am I to be responsible about feeding hummingbirds in winter? Let’s be honest: not at all likely.

So, methinks better to store feeder in shed until the spring and leave the winter feeding to the more conscientious. The question now is, given the dearth of hummingbirds I’m currently seeing, should I retire it forthwith?

The other thing I’ve learnt this summer is that butterflies love lobelia – especially (for some reason) the cobalt blue variety.

Who knew? Although only one butterfly hung in there to have its photo taken, there were three going at the lobelia when I went indoors to get the camera.

Having written this down, I decide to do an internet search. Apparently the appeal of lobelia to butterflies is very well known.

This same internet search reveals that lobelia are also supposed to attract hummingbirds. So, where the hell are they? Now I really am taking this personally.