Planting, Dancing and Bullying

It's raining now after two days of the most perfect spring weather. I managed to sew a lot of flower seeds as well as some peas and yellow string beans.
On Friday I bought Forsythia x intermedia "Lynwood Gold". The three naked branches leave a lot of room for imagination, and I hope it will grow thick and flower lavishly.
I did manage to finish the socks for Walter's dance recital on Saturday. This is how they turned out, I was rather pleased, even if the project was quite quick and easy.

The dance recital was great, and I couldn't be prouder since it was the first time I saw my child dancing with a proper dance club. I think even Ralph felt a bit envious watching his brother, but I doubt that will be enough to make him join the dance club as well.

I'm at school three days a week - Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. As luck would have it, both on Thursday and Friday "things happened" at school, and I've been thinking about bullying prevention and attendance problems for three days now. I have some sort of a plan in my head that I wish to implement, but I must admit, the task seems daunting.
This video might be a good start - at least to know which methods have been proven to be less than effective, and it is a nationwide problem that has not really been addressed on a national level in my country, so I need to put together my own materials, translating and adapting from strategies that have already been proven to work.

I do hope to make a difference, but I feel sooo new to all of this...

I'm no Princess

But my husband got quite romantic today and took me (without the kids, yay!) to Rundale Palace, the most opulent and impressive palace in Latvia. I've been there three or four times, and, to be honest, not much has changed there, but it's the first time in my life that I'm really really REALLY interested in the palace park.

So we drove a bit more than an hour to Bauska, quite a sleepy city that looked weirdly deserted. It was great getting there, there's nothing like talking all the way about all the things that I want to talk about without the kids listening.

Someone had poured some washing liquid or detergent in the fountain.

We saw a wonderful private garden that I would have loved to see more of.

We spent quite a long time looking for a place to eat. Any place with reasonable food at a reasonable price. Everything was closed on Sundays. I thought Sundays were the most profitable days, but I suppose it's just me.
Finally we found a strange place called "The Tavern". It looked rather cheap and dirty, a bit like a diner in American movies where a frumpy exhausted wife serves some mediocre food and her grumpy husband stands behind the counter. Only it wasn't like that. The food wasn't particularly cheap, and I must say, not too good either, and we waited almost an hour for it. But we were hungry and willing to overlook anything, even the very sour raspberries that tasted a lot like vinegar.

Then we went to the palace. It's huge and it's astounding, and as soon as you get in you feel that you would never want to live there, and you wonder how on earth they kept warm in there.

But we weren't allowed to take pictures (I didn't want to pay for that, knowing that I could never take better pictures than on their web page), so this is the only one I took, because there is some man in the painting with a fly above the lip.

You can't really see it in this photo very well, but there's a fly. It reminds me of this very popular picture. It must be a thing - an insect on the lip. A note to myself - must research.

All in all, I was quite happy when the tour was over and we were out in the park. It was a feast for my eyes, and Arthur indulged me, so we went to look at every plant and every gazebo.

I definitely want a pergola, and Arthur promised to make me one - "some day".

On the way home we were stopped by the police for speeding. We were very disappointed, because we hadn't noticed the sign and we don't ever go over the speed limit on purpose. After some 20 minutes spent nervously waiting for the policeman to write the ticked for 40 euros, we were set free with just a warning, and the policeman told Arthur to by flowers for his wife (me!) for those 40 euros. As if I needed flowers - it was enough to be set free without the fine!

Upon our return home we found out that kids had had two other kids over, and they had spent the whole day with them. As soon as the old folks are out of the house, the young ones are having a party!

It's Sunday night as I'm writing these words, and tomorrow is a new week with (hopefully) a lot of work. And I have to get my stuff together about the weight-loss stuff, it's getting me down a lot lately.
Tomorrow.

Summer Heat Wave

It's so hot it's very hard to get down to work. We spend our days swimming in the river, and I spend my nights translating.
The garden seems a bit tired - or it might be just me. Lobelias have spread and filled out all the space, so it looks nice. It's always interesting to see which plants take over the garden. It's lobelias this year because I've sown literally hundreds from seed and now I have lobelias everywhere. Surely it's going to be something quite different next year.

Each year my knowledge and understanding of gardening grows, and so do my ambitions.
There are things I know I won't be sowing again any time soon - like the leafy goosefoot (chenopodium foliosum) that I'm quite disappointed in. It's called "spinach strawberry" in my native language, and it tastes nothing like strawberries. If anything, it tastes like spinach, a bit bland and to some extent even a bit unpleasant. It gets better if it's very ripe, but still... It does have some ornamental value, however.

Gladioli are starting to burst open, and the blood red silk is spilling out. I love gladioli, but I hope they wait a bit. I planted them later on purpose - to have flowers to give the teachers on September 1. I do hope they wait just four more weeks... But you can't keep a flower in the bud if it's determined to come out.

I've harvested the onions - not a lot, and not very big, but those are just some nice side-effects of having spring-onions up till now.

On Friday we got the firewood delivered. It's one of those seasons - like you have a strawberry season, and then there's the car repair season, and there's firewood season. I will have to find time to put it all away in neat rows in the shed... But not today. It's just too hot.

It was just as hot yesterday, and I suggested we went on a nightly roadtrip to the seaside. It was the best decision - the trip was not as excruciating in our AC-less car, and the beach was rather vacant, if not for some youths in tents. The water was just perfect, and I did just a tiny little bit of skinny-dipping in the dark while the kids had their sandwiches in the dunes. Made my husband excited about swimming in the sea as well.

I'm longing for a thunderstorm. The last one was four days ago, and it seems like an eternity. Everything is dry, and I'm tired of this heat. Will I really have to go downstairs to the cellar and search for the electric fan? I hate wasting electricity on things I can do without, bet I have a huge job to do this night, and perhaps it's time I admitted I really can't do without it.
But four days ago we had a thunderstorm that was also long overdue, and I sat on the stairs outside the house and let the water cool me down, and the dog was so anxious about the thunder I had to comfort him constantly.

Oh, good times. Weather.com is not my friend and predicts some rain no sooner that next Thursday with temperatures over 30 degrees Celsius every single day...
But it's summer, and in just seven or eight months I'll be ready to give up anything just to have some warm weather again.

Scales (on Plants, not in the Bathroom by the Mirror!)

Trout got his tuxedo out of the trunk and he put it on. [...] It had a greenish patina of mold. Some of the growths it supported resembled patches of fine rabbit fur. [...] He dabbed at his tuxedo with a damp rag, and the fungi came away easily. “Hate to do this, Bill,” he said of the fungi he was murdering. “Fungi have as much right to life as I do. They know what they want, Bill. Damned if I do anymore.”

This quote from Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions" came to my mind this morning when my husband came in and told me the potted oleander had scales. Yes, scales know what they want, and yes, they do have a right to live. But not on my houseplants, thank you very much!

I went outside to check, and sure enough, all the lower branches and leaves were infested. 

There are many different types of scales or mealybugs, but what they have in common is the waxy coating they use to stick to a plant that makes them quite resistant to many common insecticides. I've read recommendations to spray oil under the leaves to suffocate them, or to use specific insecticides, but it wouldn't be practical in my case when the oleander is not too huge (about a metre high) and I can deal with the problem in a more direct way. One popular suggestion is wiping the leaves (especially the undersides) with some alcohol. Basically any alcohol (not beer or wine though) that dissolves fat, or, in this case - wax. I have to say - it worked like a charm! The only alcohol I had at home was my husband's shaving lotion, but it worked great. I dabbed some lotion on a cotton pad and gently rubbed the scales off of all the infested leaves. The scales came off easily on the cotton. Now I just have to check the oleander in a couple of weeks and see if I've missed any. Here's to hoping the beasts won't like the smell of my husband's soft and sexy chin after shaving!

A Honeysuckle Foundling

It's been almost two years since we've moved here. This is, however, the first time I've noticed a honeysuckle by the shed. It's the first time I've had a honeysuckle, and for now I have to do with other people's experience from the world wide web.

I don't know if that's a universal thing or just my thing, but every time I move to another place, I want to make it my own by destroying what's already there. I destroyed a huge bed of irises in our previous garden and wanted to do the same here once we bought this house. Irises are kind of boring. It's awfully hard to weed them, they bloom for a couple of days and then leave an unsightly old stem till next year.
But I decided against digging them out - at least for now. They fill the flowerbed nicely, and the leaves look rather brave and heroic - much like gladiolus leaves.

This garden is teaching me to save and savour rather than to destroy and decimate.

The first autumn was bleak, dreary, very cold and rainy from the day we moved in. There were practically no apples in any of the eight apple-trees, apart from one crab-apple tree with dreadfully sour and astringent fruit. I suggested cutting down all of them - I hated the overshadowed, dark, wet, boring garden. It's not, however, that easy - cutting down eight apple trees. So we took down the crab-apple tree and left the rest. Last year they all gave such incredible apples we were ashamed of ever considering cutting them down.

And the hazels - I hated them, too. They blocked the view completely, adding to the doom and gloom of the shadows. They're so full of nuts now that I can hardly wait till harvest time. Our own nuts!

There are things I will never learn to love and am absolutely set on cutting them down. I've had too many broken toys, footballs, bike tires and cuts and tears from the huge, overwhelming hawthorns that seem to be the most readily available hedge material, growing quickly and hiding the owners from sight - until they realize that hedges need to be trimmed at the very least once a year, and the trimmings need to be gathered and taken away, cutting hands, and arms, and legs, and faces, and making the children wary of running around barefoot. No, I will never want a hawthorn hedge as long as I live. That one (we have three, so all of them!) will have to go in winter when thick clothes might save us from some nasty wounds.

The same goes for a huge plum-tree that is just casting a shadow over the far end of the garden and producing inedible, horribly sour little plums, all stone and no pulp. "Cut it down!" I insisted last year, but it was the first one to bloom this spring, and those two weeks when it was in bloom made up for all the gloom and shadow of the rest of the year.

We're saving money now, or rather, we're out of money, so we must do with what we have at home - in the pantry, in the freezer, in the cellar, and in the garden. It's easy throwing things away in times of plenty, but it's so nice to have things around when money is an issue. So I'm on a mission to save, to grow, to propagate.

So now I've found a honeysuckle creeping along the ground behind a huge stone by the corner of our shed. I have no idea what variety it is, or if it is of the poisonous or edible sort. I don't know how to grow it, but as it's doing quite fine on its own, I suppose I can do no wrong. Arthur made a trellis yesterday, Ralph was very eager to stain it with a pleasing green stain, and all that was left for me today was to tie the honeysuckle to it. Various sources suggested using women's tights cut into strips, but I decided against it. I might have to get the stems down for the winter, if it gets very cold, and the plant might not even like my tying, so for now I've just used some green woolen yarn. One vine has tiny beginnings of a flower, so I'm hoping to see how it turns out.

But right now I'm proud. Proud of my garden that has secrets and surprises of its own, proud of my husband for knowing what a trellis looks like, and proud of my son for doing a good job painting it.

How to Keep Cats Away From Plants (and to Indulge Your Inner Five-Year-Old)

A couple of weeks ago in the Botanical Garden fair I bought two actinidia kolomikta plants - a dioecious plant that requires both male and female plants to be planted quite close together (0.5-2 metres apart). Everyone I talked to, including the seller, a very kind and pleasant old man, warned me that I had to protect the young plants from cats since they supposedly find it more irresistible than catnip or valerian.
Keksis, our three-legged predator, didn't pay any attention to the plants, but the dog was very interested in digging under them, because I took away old boards and bricks from the side of our shed, and he was absolutely certain that rats must be living there, right under the new plants. I scolded him and began researching the subject of protection.
We've spent all money on plastering the house, so I didn't have any for the garden. I looked for "little fences" on Pinterest and found some that looked really sweet. This morning I went to a nearby wood, taking the dog and the hubby with me, and cut me some osier twigs - as many as I could reach without getting my feet wet in the quagmire. It turned out - too little, but I didn't want to go back for more, so I just did with what I had.

I made two little signs from old scraps of wood and children's set of acrylic paint - just to let the dog and the cat know they are not to touch the plants (or to dig under them)! I'm not stupid, I know they can't read, so I drew them pictures! (Apart from the wrong colour scheme for the dog, the likeness is quite good, if I do say so myself!)

So there you go! My wonderful actinidia plants and protection against Keksis and Rich!

And the Counting Stops at...

52 exciting and 5 boring days!

I've been so very busy with a million things, roadtrips and gardening, and school parties, and summer solstice, and entertaining guests, and doing laundry, and cooking, and reading, and planning! I can't keep up with counting any more, but now I see that I'm bored less than one tenth of the time.
This has been a valuable experiment, because now I can pinpoint the reasons that make me feel bored. I am bored most often on Wednesdays, because that tends to be a day when I'm slacking off. It turns out it's not work that makes a day boring, it's getting nothing done. Every day has some sort of a structure - if I have a lot of work, I dig in and might feel swamped, but I'm never bored. I might feel reluctant to work if the deadline is far away, but I need something to show at the end of the day, I need that sense of having accomplished something. Loading the dishwasher does not make me feel less bored, but weeding or planting something might.
There are days when we open our doors to friends and family, and I don't really "work" per se, but I do run around a lot, making beds, cooking food and taking care of things and people. I have nothing to show for it in the evening, really, but it can't possibly be boring. So it all depends.

What makes a life exciting? Surely it must be awareness. You have to be aware of the moment and it's preciousness to appreciate it and not to waste it. Boredom = wasted time. So it's not WHAT we do on a daily bases, it's HOW we do it. A person may feel bored sunbathing on a Waikiki beach and feel completely thrilled bird-watching in the back yard. Your life is exciting when you spend your time deliberately, and not letting it pass by without a thought or care.

Some pictures from May and June.