It’s Spring!
Social media super sucks right now and it’s got me all messed up. This sounds, and probably is, completely unhealthy, but when your livelihood revolves around being terminally online for 25 years, not having a public “home” or community on the internet is just fucking unsettling. I hate it.
I’m currently sitting outside under my carport, smoking a joint in the sunshine, grateful for the warm day…while the robin that’s nesting 4 feet from my head, right at eye level, gives me shit from the porch. 😅
She has 3 eggs she’s sitting on, laid about a week ago, and in about another week, they should hatch. She’s usually pretty good with cohabitating with us, but we’ll see if that changes once there are actual babies to feed. 🐣
She really only flies off the nest and gives me shit for sitting out here during the day, when the sun’s warming up the carport. I think she actually enjoys sitting on the nest when it’s like that because I watch her from the window and she closes her eyes, which I don’t see her do during the day when it’s not as warm. (I’m totally speculating and humanizing a robin, I realize, so please don’t take this observation as scientific fact.)
Sometimes when I sit outside under the carport with my laptop and I don’t make eye contact with her, she’ll stay on the nest. But if she knows I know she’s there, she gets paranoid and flies off to a nearby tree, or, as is the case today, she sits on the porch railing and gives me shit, which is pretty annoying so I usually give in. 😅📢🐦⬛🪺
At night, if I’m quiet, I usually don’t even wake her up unless I’m taking out the garbage because the bins are right underneath her. I worry about the black cat that we sometimes see creeping around on the security camera, and if it could reach the nest from the bins. 😕 I pull them out from the wall the nest is on, further than I hope a cat could reach without causing calamity, and just – here’s that word again, “hope” – hope I don’t wake up in the morning to anything horrific recorded for posterity on the cam. 😬🙏
Last Weekend…
This Weekend…
Next Weekend…
Last weekend we were busy outside, raking all the leaves and winter debris out of the carport and off the porch, and disposing of large, broken items that piled up over the cold months because the “curb” was under 8 feet of snow. Then I built this fucking fantastic egg chair for my crappy back patio area, as not to disturb the nesting robin every time I want fresh air & sunshine or to smoke a joint.
I built it almost all by myself except for four stupid screws that took both of my hands, my right foot, and both of Harold’s hands to screw in! 😅
Buuuut after all was said and done, I ended up putting TWO of the screws at the top in backwards, which I didn’t think mattered at the time, but realized yesterday WILL matter if my fat friends sit in it because the screw is anchored FIRST in plastic, THEN in the metal, rather than anchored firmly in metal, and THEN secured with plastic (if that makes sense). It’s supposed to be able to support 350lbs, but I would not trust that right now! So, I guess we’ll have to fix that! And stop laughing, it’s like, only the 3rd thing I’ve ever built in my life and I am not mechanically inclined! 😅
The grand plan is to turn my run-down, busted up, shitty assed, back patio area into some semblance of a peaceful, makeshift moon garden. 🌱🌕🧘🏼♀️
Tomorrow Harold is taking me and my friend Laura to Bradford Greenhouses, which is this MASSIVE, local greenhouse compound that has every imaginable plant that will possibly grow in our hardiness zone, in practically any soil or light condition. I’ve never been and I’m very excited!
I’m specifically looking for white foxglove and white bleeding hearts because the moon garden is inspired by this drawing I did in 2020, called “Moon Goddess In A Moon Garden”:
My back patio area is off the back of the carport, but the rest of the house extends few feet, leaving an alcove that’s got a small, crooked fence separating the patio area from the rest of the lawn. At the end of the patio are badly rotting railway ties, and over the 1/2 the surface of the patio area are badly placed, crooked, 12×12″ concrete slabs with grass in between them. The part without the slabs is just bare dirt and grass. It’s a mess. 😕 It’s also a completely underutilized space.
To reclaim the space, I bought and built the egg chair, and also bought a planter that has a tall trellis. I figured if I put the planter against the small fence along the side of the patio, which faces the neighbour’s yard, I could grow moonflowers and morning glories up the trellis and gain some privacy.
Moonflowers are big and white and only bloom at night in the fall, making them the centrepiece of the garden. I started ~50 moonflower seedlings on my kitchen table last month that are now all strong and healthy and ready to get their roots in some bigger dirt. I wasn’t sure how many I’d need to make the whole trellis full, so I just started 5 packages, which only cost me about $15 on the Mackenzie Seeds website. They’re the only company I know of that sells moonflower seeds in Canada, and you can usually find them IRL in rotating seed displays at Walmart and Canadian Tire. Probably Home Depot and Lowe’s as well, they’re pretty common.
Moonflowers should be started indoors about a month before last frost. Moonflower seeds have really hard hulls and need a little help, so the trick to getting them to sprout is to soak them in water for 1-3 days until they get soft or split. Then you plant them in peat pods and put them somewhere indoors where they’ll get light until they’re big enough to plant outside and all danger of frost has passed.
I put all of the moonflower seeds in a glass of water, then every night for three nights, I took the seeds out of the glass and put them on a paper towel. Then I picked out and immediately planted the ones that had split or were soft, returning the ones that were still hard into the glass with fresh water. Over three days, they all split or became soft, so they all got planted.
Of the ~50 I planted, ~40 actually sprouted and grew. It’s possible the ones that didn’t sprout got too squishy and were damaged when I pressed them into the peat pods with my finger. It can happen. 🤷🏼♀️
Harold had the idea that we should put down this anti-weed mesh stuff I have, then put white gravel or pebbles on top of it, to put the trellis planter on, so if we get home with enough time, we may go out and get those pebbles tomorrow as well.
Last weekend we also hauled two deep, circular planters full of dirt from the front porch, where they formerly (and poorly) grew tomatoes for the past 15 years or so, to the back patio. I want to find white foxgloves and white bleeding hearts to plant in them for the moon garden. They’re not night blooming flowers, but they are white and witchy and what I drew in “Moon Goddess”, so that’s what I’m primarily hoping to find at Bradford Greenhouses tomorrow. My mom suggested Night Blooming Primrose as well, because those bloom at dusk and then die by the morning, but they’re small and yellow and don’t suit my aesthetic of pink, black, grey, white and witchy as well as white foxgloves and bleeding hearts. They’re definitely a backup though!
What I call “Sunflower Alley” before and after the drunken flamingos cleaned it up (right)
To create even more privacy between me and my neighbours, I cleared all of the grass and weeds out of the little side garden in order to plant big, creamy, white sunflowers to match the theme of the moon garden on the other side of the fence. I only have one packet of these seeds, and I didn’t start them indoors because when I’ve done that in the past, the stalks always ended up skinny and limp, and often didn’t survive transplant, or they always needed to be tied to the fence. They’ll still probably need to be tied to the fence at some point because the fence is crooked, so they’ll grow on a downward angle, but I read on the West Coast Seeds website that long, limp stalks can happen when sunflower seedlings get root-bound, so both they and Vesey’s recommend directly sowing them outdoors after last frost. As much as I like starting seeds and feeling like a small god, I decided to follow the directions this year to get better results.
If I don’t have enough white sunflower seeds in one packet to fill that flower bed, I may also plant some of these absolutely perfect yellow ones, named after Vincent van Gogh that I have left over from previous years. They don’t fit the moon garden theme basically at all, but I think the combo will look so awesome, I don’t even care! 🥰
After building the trellis planter this week and planting all of my seeds and seedlings next weekend, the moon garden will need Harold to choose his ideal outdoor chair for sitting out there with me, then I hope to find some kind of large, square, outdoor rug to cover up the ugly concrete patio slabs. Once that’s all finished, that’ll be the grand vision complete!
As far as the front yard, this year it’s going to be a “cotton candy” mix of pink, apricot and yellow cosmos, mixed with low-growing sunflowers, then blue, pink, white & purple Bachelor’s Buttons along the border. I’m a bit wary of mixing the delicate cosmos with the more robust and brighter sunflowers and I’ve been going back and forth on it since the seeds arrived, so it’ll be a gut decision when I do all my planting next weekend. If I don’t scatter them in the main garden, I may throw the seeds in some big pots to have around the porch and maybe by my shed instead. And honestly, I may have enough low-growing sunflowers to do all three! I love sunflowers so much, they have to be as many places as possible! 🌻
So that’s the Sunnyland flora and fauna report! It took me until 4:30am to write and I’m sure it was boring for like, 95% of the folks potentially reading this, but whatever! Four hours until we leave for the garden centre! I’d better get at least a few hours of sleep! 😴💤
