Icelandic Breakfast Additions - cod liver oil

​yes! These are my people - breakfast includes cod liver oil. 

Down the hatch! 

Iceland!

​I arrived yesterday, and was so pleased to be able to be reunited with my woolly girlfriends. My flight was somewhat delayed as was the lineup that I chose for customs and immigration. And my first interactions with the Icelandic culture have certainly been very interesting.

 I absolutely loved the blue Lagoon. It was the perfect way to deal with jet lag and delayed flights. The meal at the lava restaurant was superb - as was the service. It is so rare to have impeccable service.

All of us left our phones in the lockers rather than wander through the delightful pools with the distraction of a phone. The downside to that is we have no photos of our amazing experience. When you look at the photos of Iceland, you think that they’ve done something to saturate the colours and alter the light. The quality of the light here is remarkable. There’s something so crystalline and hard about it that makes colours more distinctly themselves and shapes very certain and clear. I am just sitting in bed and enjoying a cup of tea and watching the sun begin to light the sky over the low mountain behind our hotel. 

The low wisps of grey that you see are not cloud, they are steam from active geothermal vents. 

On My Way To Iceland!

The journey begins! I left the house before 10 this morning and will arrive just after 9 am tomorrow in Iceland - over the pole it’s not so far away. It’s easy to forget how close Canada is to our near Arctic neighbours. 

As I wait for the Iceland Air gate to open here at YVR I’m treating myself to a pot of tea in the jetaide bar of the Fairmont. Very relaxing. 

Autumn Harvest

​The last from the DUGS garden. Now asleep for winter, with $3 of garlic planted in anticipation of next year.

Autumn Gardens - Clean up

​I find it difficult to face, but it really is getting near the end. The downtown urban Garden, where Chris and I are members we need to get the garden beds cleaned up by the end of the month as part of our social contract. It’s very hard to admit even to myself that Wynter really is just around the corner here. Especially after this past winter with extended periods of -40. There are still moments of joy in the garden.  

Autumn Gardens - Fava Pasta

Broad beans or fava beans are one of my favourite treats. It is very time consuming to prepare, but the result is delicious. ​

Autumn Morning Fog

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Mushrooms!

​I love how the cooler weather brings out the fungi. 

Fruits of Autumn

​it’s a good berry year! 

Autumn is Here

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DUGS Garden

​The garden we adopted after another gardener abandoned it is doing really well. And so are our main gardens - we had more than enough new potatoes for a lovely dinner party last evening. 

The Good, The Bad, and the Trolley

​Whitehorse has a trolley that runs a few times in the summer. It used to run more often and farther, but then it didn’t run it all for a few years. So when I saw they were doing a fundraiser titled as above, I said that looks like a great date night. And it was!

Beautiful Whitehorse Days

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Atlin

​Birthdays, sunshine and cool breezes. That was this weekend in Atlin.

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.