Canada blog

Summer has brought remarkable profusion for a first year garden (and this was back in July!)

Tags: our home
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All winter I have been waiting, gathering thoughts, learning about native species, thinking about colour, height, flowering time, scent and more. I have never savoured the process of creating a garden this way before.

At last the sun has made a claim on summer for the Victoria Day weekend; my muscles may be complaining, but my soul feels sated with the pleasure of transformation. A day and a half of planting and a garden has emerged from our back yard.

There is, too, a sense of the garden that exists for now only in my vision of it, of an ongoing process of transformation to be wrought by nature in the months and years to come.

(Click into any photo for a mini-gallery and to see a larger view)

I still have the planting at the front to do that we were unable to complete in the Fall, hence the remaining plant pots. And Paul wants to give the deck an additional coat of protection, but we are nearly there in time for summer!

Last year’s efforts on our front garden are already repaying the hard work with the pleasure of breakfast on the terrace,  surrounded by tulips and narcissi, punctuated by fritillary.

Tags: garden, Home, Home and Garden, our house, Victoria Day
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Night shots of our pumpkin VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Tags: pumpkin
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What a wonderful roller-coaster ride! New experiences come thick and fast and I often don’t get around to blogging – the living is more important! So hear is a summary of recent  highlights:

• Nuit Blanche – an amazing Toronto-wide all-night street party based around weird and wonderful happenings (see my other blog, Passage to Joy, for our impressions).

Nuit Blanche - Smile

• Our first Thanksgiving – we were very busy working on our garden and deck, but still managed to celebrate with a walk amidst the fall foliage (very much part of the custom here) and the traditional turkey (sweet potatoes with maple syrup, topped with candied pecans will definitely be adopted for future years), followed by pumpkin pie (we prefer butter tarts, another Canadian sweet treat). In Canada, Thanksgiving is earlier than in the US (beginning of October) and relates very closely to harvest festival.

• Our ‘Canniversary’ – one whole year in Canada (and only two more before we can apply to become citizens). We celebrated with a party for over 30 of our friends. Even though it was October, we were able to sit outside on our newly completed deck and begin to have a sense of our back yard as the garden it will become.
• Halloween Canadian style – although we were here last year, we were still in B&B accommodation and didn’t really experience Halloween. Ours is a young neighbourhood, so it swarmed with small and not so small people in strange costumes, not all of them scary (a football field stands out!).  We hung out with our neighbours at the front of our house, enjoying the spectacle and dispensing candy (ours ran out way too soon – we’ll know better next year, though one young friend spent $120 and still didn’t have enough!). Joining in the spirit, Paul fashioned an expert Jack O’Lantern whilst I delved into the traditions of Samhain to create an incarnation of the blue faced crone for our door.

• CARP (Canadian Association of Retired Persons) Conference & Zoomer Show – I volunteered for both of these as a way of developing links within the field of re-visioning aging (Paul joined me at the Zoomer Show). I was given the key role of presenter liaison at the Conference and a similar role on the activity stage at the conference (I will be writing these up shortly!). The events are produced by the same organization as IdeaCity and the conference in particular was similarly inspirational.
• This week, our first frosts of this winter; the grey-green of the grass lit up by the blaze of fall trees in the hazy morning glow took my breath away!

Coming soon . . .

• Winter - in an El Nino year, rumor has it that we may be in for a particularly cold and snowy winter. The first flurries are expected in Toronto tonight. We are very glad we had arranged for our snow-tires to go onto our car this week and are looking forward to getting our skates on . . . ! I wonder how we will feel by April?

Tags: celebrations, culture, Festivals, Food, garden, milestones, our home, winter
Posted in Being Immigrants, Festivals, Garden | No Comments »

I spent last weekend creating a front garden, doing all the planting, following a whirlwind week of landscaping by the professionals – lots of rocks!

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Tags: activity, houses, our home, our house
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