Community Garden Mentor Bed

​We’ve been members of the downtown urban Garden Society since last year. We really enjoy going over and puttering in our allotment. It seems like every year there are some garden beds where there’s nothing happening for what ever reason. We got permission a couple of days ago to take over and renovate one of those garden beds. We’ve had an amazing amount of rain in the last few days so it seemed like the perfect time to get some of those weeds that would otherwise be baked into the soil. 

There are some volunteer plants, including Icelandic, Poppy, Johnny jump ups, and red aurach. I saved what I could while I was digging over the plot. It was a good thing that I did dig it over because there was a tree in it. Seems like gardeners have been cutting it off, but not digging it up. The poplar trees are really successful here, and if you don’t get on them when they’re little, it’s almost impossible to get rid of them.

After a couple of hours, I had dug it over, weeded it, top dressed it with compost and was ready to plant. 

People had to put leftover seeds in the shed. We used up somebody’s onion set, three or four different kinds of potatoes, carrots, lettuce, two or three different kinds of beets, mesculin mix, and some Swiss Chard. 

Pruning!

​This past winter was absolutely frigid. Even long, well established shrubs, and perennials had a hard time.

This American lilac with a beautiful blushing pinkish purple flower had been at the house as long as we owned it and probably long before. This past winter was a hard one for it as you can see from the amount that we pruned out that was dead. 

Hidden Lakes Walk

​The dog has been so good this weekend so I took her for a long walk around the hidden lakes trails. So hard! 

Now Scapa and I are relaxing on the couch. 

Longest day quilt retreat

​before my concussion 10 years ago, I was a pretty avid quilter. After my concussion, most of my energies were focussed on work because work pays the bills. Great thing about your brain is that it is plastic, and things that you want you will often achieve overtime and with effort. So one of the things I started doing two years ago is getting back into quilting. It turned out I had quite a number of quilt tops in my stash that needed to be quilted. This past weekend I have spent some time doing just that with support from the team at Bears Paw quilts here in Whitehorse.

Before quilting  

After quilting  

The piece pictured it’s actually really interesting story. The patchwork is a piece that I pulled out of a free bin at Gold, Rush Pawn  this past February. The backside is a printed panel that I got at Granville ferry, wooden spool the year before last in February. And the batting is a woollen one from Carstairs custom woollen Mills in Alberta. I wanted to use these pieces together as an experiment to see what I need to do to be able to use those woollen quilt bats from Alberta. I want to support Canadian! The key is lots of extra spray glue, and basting . I hand basted about every 10 to 12 inches. Then I also quilted it slightly differently than I would with a cotton batting, I worked from the edges, one end to the other. I think it was a success.  

Whitehorse Walks

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On our Way

​To ease the journey back to Whitehorse, we booked into the Fairmont in the airport in Vancouver. I’m so glad we did. It really made the whole extended journey much more relaxing. I think Scapa agrees.

Gardens and Landscapes

​Our garden is looking lovely. We put in a whole winter and spring ephemerals garden under the shade of our two large trees. We did a little bit of weeding and planting in other parts of the garden as well.

And this morning on my walk, I much admired the green, green grass. And so did the cows.