Many years ago in the spring, before any green had shown itself, I remember a Mourning Dove flying up beside the cars as we drove by. I was deeply moved by the subtle warm colors of its plumage, and was conscious that, in the frenzied green activity of summer, this would just be a dull, plain bird.
It is so important for us to go through times like that. It gives us a chance to see beauty in places where beauty had not existed for us.

It seems very foolish to me that people would go looking for more extreme beauties when they could find them here if they just look up-close enough. You should learn to look more closely for beauty where you live rather than traveling to find it, because the more garish and brilliant beauty gets in each country, the more poisonous the animals that live there get too. The only thing that will harm you here is yourself, or your neighbor, or your your neighbor’s car. I suppose your neighbor’s dog might do some damage, but so might your own.
We don’t have any poisonous snakes, or ticks, in fact the most poisonous thing around could as well be the ladybug, and only if you ate her. We do have biting and stinging insects, but they’re avoided if you take precautions.

Last October, while looking through a book of JRR Tolkien’s illustrations, I was struck by his obvious attention to the individual character of each tree. Ever since then I have also been struck by the profound beauty and character of the trees around me.

In February of 1998 we spent 14 days without electricity. It did not really bother us but did inconvenience some more conventionally living people in the area. We had a jolly old time, as we heated with wood and propane, and had an artesian well nearby. The only awful thing about it for us, was listening to the trees crack and splinter as the ice load grew too heavy for them to bear.
The ice storm of ’98 really changed our tree line, although you don’t notice much now. You have to look closely to see the damage and imbalance lower down in the crowns and it is amazing how much they have recovered.

I love this land we live in, I love being overwhelmed by the beauty of twinkling raindrops obscuring my vision through a car window as I fly past and the dreary landscape with its subtle shades and shapes. I love the old houses, the homesteads and outbuildings, and wish I could make the ugly new bungalows disappear. I think about this land being cleared by hand years and years ago, of fence rows piled high with stones, hand harvest from fields by children of the pioneers, so that Dad’s plow would not get broken and the crops could grow. Those rocks would seeth up out of the earth every year, and every year have to be hauled out.
I wish I could see the land as it was before man came, life and death keeping its balance, and the trees ruling over all.

So many people seem to view forest and the natural land as an ornament, oh look, There is a poodle! And oh look! There is a forest, isn’t it cute. Or else people look at natural land with a bloodthirsty eye, and they’ll say to you “do you have any idea how many billions of dollars I could get for this if it was turned into a subdivision or golf course or an apartment building?” They rub their greasy little hands together contemplating how much better off they will be when this is bulldozed. I wish the’yd think of their kids’ kids, if not mine and yours.
I wish it were as easy to set up a sustainable ecosystem as it is to build a Wal-Mart store, And I wish it were as easy to reverse the damage as it is to cause it.
I wish they taught people to think for themselves in school, or gave them permission to do so. I wish they had realized when they were cutting out Shop from high school that it takes 4 years to grow a Plumber, the same as it does grow any tradesman, and until they can build their houses without any plumbing or electricity, they have no right to discourage young people from being anything other than doctor, Teacher, lawyer.

Red Hot Ice on the car

White Hot Ice keeping a grip on the Sun

Little bits of sun in the shade

more colour in fresh oil paint! My mom had a 45 minute date with young rhubarb shoots, to be continued

Salad Cat!

She Loves bags and boxes, clear ones most of all.

I worked my self out in the garden, puling up trees and raking rubble, I also planted the Black Raspberry canes. I’ll show you what I did on Monday, now I need to fight this throat thing in bed.

Kluang Yellow (Selenicereus megalanthus)

and Red skinned/white fleshed Kluang (Hylocereus undatus)

I prefer the yellow as it has sweeter meat and it is stickier. The two poor Dragon fruits got cut up and passed around, I had to take care to save some seed from everybody’s gastric enthusiasm. I did get some planted, and they are now safely settled on damp potting soil and have little to no risk of being ingested. I really like the bottom half of an egg carton for this job, and a big zip lock keeps them moist.

It will take my seedlings 2 or 3 years to bear fruit, when a leaf cutting would only take 7 or so months! Although am willing to wait, I am tempted to get myself a green house and grow them to sell.

Here is the web site of a pitaya producer: http://ilovepitaya.com/

Cleared a solid patch of black raspberry canes and saved all the good stems. They are trimmed and waiting in the garage to be planted when I get back from a Kingston funeral tomorrow.

also, some more sunshine for you

and an update on Rhubarb growth

Not Wimps, Chickens!
I have always loved them.
If you have the space, it is nice to get fresh egg, and we have often had chickens. When I was young I would sit in the barn and sing with them, watching them scratch and peck. They were such good company.
When I was 15 I worked long hours to prepare a room of our barn for 12 heritage breed chickens. I scraped, hammered, insulated and painted. My mom was worried that I would damage my knees. I chose Barred Rocks, Araucanas (they lay blue and green eggs) and Silkys. As they grew I spent a lot of time with them. One of the Araucanas was named Agnes, and I would hold her sing “O Agnes won’t you go with me” a song I learned from my mother, and she would close her eyes and ruffle her feathers.
I never got any eggs from them. A not so neighborly neighbor reported us to the County and they gave me 30 days to get rid of them. I suspect it was the rooster I was keeping with the hens that triggered the complaint, I was not very attached him and would have gladly given him away if only they had said something. Now it was too late, and I sadly shipped them off to a friend who took very good care of them.

The four chickens we have now were purchased for $1.25 each from an egg farm. They sure looked scruffy when they came, never having been outside a cage in their lives, but they are doing better now. I taught them to take a worm from my hand this afternoon, as I was moving soil out of their yard.

It is nice to be viewed as a bringer of good things.

Having planted a few seeds from my miraculous dragon fruit on a little soil in a plastic bag, I went on with my life, doubtful that such an amazing fruit could be so easy to propagate.  Little did I know that those little crunchy black seeds were as easy to grow as they were to eat. Within a week they were sending out fuzzy little root fibers, lifting their black skined heads up off the soil.  I happily transplanted them onto rich soil in an egg carton.  Their growth has not been abated, and today they shed their little black seed skins.

I am excited about having baby dragons, and will keep you posted on their development.

I’ll take you on a walk with me, it is time to tap the trees!
Each spring when days get warm and the nights still freeze

We wander out to take some blood and boil it into gold

(when sap freezes it expands so trees must keep it down
morning comes and up it goes to swell each bud some more).

Warm wind blew hard, I, tee-shirt clad and bare about the knees,
Found the tools and then skipped out to greet our tall yard trees.

The first I tapped dripped nice and fast, it’s trusted to provide
But Thinks-it’s-an-oak gave none at all, you’d think it had just died.

The Faucet Tree came thick and fast, buckets and spiles three
The youngest out back has only one, “much growing still for thee.”

Birds they sang as back I came pausing by the rhubarb patch

Rejoicing in days with life and hope in our first balmy batch.

“And I thought they were indestructible!”, I said to myself as I examined the compact disc I had just taken out of a sturdy cardboard envelope. Evidently they aren’t. My computer’s drive is still open, waiting to receive the CD but it is no longer a disk. It has been reduced to a piece of plastic and damaged information glued to the back of a piece of paper. Oh well, I’ll just have to sending and get another one.
I guess CDs are another one of those things in life that are only of value if protected.
On the wall above the microwave, hanging on a nail is another CD, my brother decided to experiment with it. Yes, he put it in the microwave.

Why are we always surprised when things we trust in prove untrustworthy? Coiled fluorescent light bulbs, baggage handling (of course not all of us trust that) and that when we Turn on the tap, water will come out.

The night before last I left the window open in the laundry room, thinking it was warmer out then it was. The next day, the plumber blew up. The rubber hose of his blowtorch cracked, and he ran out of the house with his hand on fire. Suddenly his day was a lot worse than mine, although I had not previously thought that possible.

A friend of mine has been constantly in and out of the hospital lately, fear is clinging to her body. She used to straighten shoes by doorways, now she’s being chased by the possibility of cancer, after a good friend of hers was diagnosed with a breast tumor.

What is the difference between having cancer and not knowing it, and being afraid that you have cancer and not having it? If you have seen The Secret, you heard the testimony of a woman who cured herself within six months by the power of positive thinking. Hundreds of times per day she would say “Thank You For My Healing”, fully believing that she was healed. She watched numerous funny movies with her husband and laughed as much as possible. The tumors shrank and then disappeared.

It seems as if these days, knowledge only leads to fear. Many years ago I realized one of the reasons God does not explain things to us, is that we do not have enough love to bear the information. Love and charity. Wisdom is knowledge applied, and when knowledge is misused, it can do a world of damage.

The bird that goes to bed when she is tired will still get her worm

As I sit here the warm late morning sun is floods in through my window. I think about sleep as I watch my Abyssinian kitten rolling around on her bed in ecstasy. If you have ever known and Abyssinian cat, they give you the impression that when been filled up with enthusiasm they forgot to say “when”.
I wonder if animals ever have sleep disorders? I suppose being in Abyssinian is just one long sleep disorder, go go go and then sleep when you fall over.
I get up when I have to or when I’m too fed up with my laziness; Any time from a 9 to 11, And I generally go to bed out of disgust for my inability go to bed any earlier, usually around 12 or 1.
This is a bad system, but I think I may have found the solution. Yesterday when searching around for Dragon Fruit legends, I stumbled across a blog of great interest. The author points out that setting strict rising and sleeping times does not work, specially for insomnia, when the last thing you want to do is lie in bed with no hope of getting tired. His protocol is this: set your alarm clock for an early hour and get up 3 seconds after it goes off for at least 30 days in a row. Ha! you say, impossible! But he’s not done yet. He claims the trick is to take your conscious mind out of the whole process and to turn it into “beep beep beep, click, stretch, inhale, feet on four”.
I’m sure that all you early risers are thinking “well, that’s what I do anyway”, and that is great, but it’s not so easy for those of us who try to decide to get up.
Dr. OutOfBed also prescribes practicing getting up 1 to 3 times a day until you have no trouble getting up for real.
He also has a thing or two to say about going to bed; only go to bed when you can read anymore.

I will most definitely try this system, I need to start practicing because I had no success in getting up this morning. well, I Did stand up, I just crawled back into bed right after. It seems to me that 6 is a really good time for me to get up, and I may move that to 5 once the days are longer.

The oh so admirable blog and I’m referring to can be found at http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-early-riser/