Showers at Dusk

     We had rain showers off and on all day yesterday.  That is typical Spring weather in the Robson Valley, and certainly welcome, after weeks of no moisture.   The showers continued into the night. 

    When I carried Kona outside for her final pee, the sky was dark, except for an area of light over the Cariboo Mountains.  That light nicely silhouetted  the chaos of clouds and showers falling on the mountains.  

    I have always found it interesting how quickly my feeling toward rain changes.  During those very dry weeks, I was desperately hoping for showe

rs, but after a day of getting them, I was edgy and ready to move on to sunshine and blue skies.

You can take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Life Doesn't Give Up Easily

     Maybe it's because it is Spring, the season of renewal,  but it seems that I have a bit of a theme going here in the blog about new life surprising me.  While, I had some faith that our brutally trimmed willow trees that had topped in February would re-sprout from the top,  I wasn’t 100% sure, but now they have begun sprouting like mad.

    I had the very wrinkled, several-year-old peas that I had planted in desperation, because I couldn’t find the saved planting peas from last year.  Those old peas came up!   Then there was the surprising young plum tree I discovered that had sprouted from the roots of a long dead plum tree.  Life seems determined to persist.

    Yesterday, when I went out to split some of the bucked-up pieces of willow from those topped trees, I was surprised to find that even those sawed-up chunks of wood were throwing out sprouts.  That is something I had seen before with Cottonwood chunks.

    I guess it is these developed survival skills, that keeps lifeforms continuing through the millions of years of evolution.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Two Plum Trees: That Would Something!

    If you plant an apple tree, you will get apples.  If you plant a plum tree, you won’t get any plums, unless you have a second plum tree somewhere in the vicinity.   That has been a problem for us.  

    See the tree on the left,  that was a plum tree we planted probably 35 years ago (I know it doesn’t look it.)   At the time, we also planted a second plum tree, but it died.  That tree didn’t really prosper.  For more than thirty years, it didn’t even put out a bloom, although somehow it managed to stay alive.   Of course those blooms did start to appear, they never developed into plums, because we no longer had a second plum tree.

    In 2012 we bought two plum trees at Costco and planted them in our garden.  After a couple of years we got some plums from them.  In 2018, we had a bumper crop of plums on one of those trees, so many plums that we didn’t know what to do with them all.  Sadly, the other Costco tree then died, so we were down to two trees, the old original one that never flowered, and the bountiful one, that then no longer produced plums, because there was no second flowering plum tree.

    Then a few years later, that second Costco plum tree also died.  I cut it down, as well as the other dead Costco tree.

    Then as luck would have it, after those two Costco plum trees died and were removed, our original plum tree started putting out a few blooms.  More blooms appeared every year, but since there was no other plum tree on the property, those blooms produced no plums.

    Yesterday I made an amazing discovery.  About eight feet away from the stump of that first Costco tree, I noticed some white blooms along the garden fence, where our clematis vine grows.  It seems to be a plum tree that must have come up from the roots of that first dead Costco plum tree.  I assume I hadn’t noticed this straggly tree that had come up because it hadn’t bloomed, and I just thought it was part of the clematis.

    Anyway, miraculously, it looks like we now have a second plum tree in our yard.  I hope that the bees visit both of them, so some of the blooms are pollinated and produce some plums.  I know it might take a couple of years for the straggly plum to really prosper and put out a lot of blooms that will be more attractive to bees.  

    At any rate, at this point I am very happy and hopeful of this surprising development of having the much needed second plum tree.

View my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Remembering Our Forest Fire: May 5, 2023

     The photo above shows what I saw as I pedaled my bicycle home from the library on May 5th, 2023.  When I got to the highway, and saw all of the smoke, I knew I’d better start pedaling faster, and get home as fast as I could.  Our house is located to the left of the photo at the bottom of the slope.

    As soon as I got home, we figured that we would probably have to evacuate, so we immediately started to gather our valuables together.  The photo below shows the scene from our house as we worked to pack up our car and pickup truck.  It wasn’t long before the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) arrived at our door to tell us that we must evacuate; leaving our home behind to whatever fate was in store for it.  

    It was certainly a memorable stressful moment for us, not knowing whether we would have a home, full of all our hard earned possessions, to return to after the forest fire.   We were very fortunate. 

    While the fire continued to burn in our direction, it began to burn angling upslope, sparing the lower sections of the mountain.  Then too, the wind changed directions and the threat in our direction lessened, and there was rain that night.

    Although we suffered no losses, that fire was sure a wake-up call for us.  It led me to start doing a lot of work on the trees and other flammable surroundings close to our house, in an effort to diminish the possibility of fire on our house.  I still have a lot of work to do in that effort, because the threat still exists.  Summer after summer now, enormous forest fires have been burning unchecked through Canada’s massive forest lands.  Summers have now become a scary time for us, living where we do.  

    This 2023 forest fire didn’t even occur during the summer, it happened in early May, so the Fire Season has really lengthened, because of the changing climate.

You can view my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Monkey Bars

         I figure I probably owe a lot of the physical health I have had during my life, to having access to monkey bars in my  childhood.  As a child we would hang right-side up and upside down, twirl, and do chin-ups on the monkey bars that we had in our yard.  Besides the occasional swings that my father hung from trees, monkey bars were the only constructed playground equipment we had access to in our yard.

        I learned feats like “skinning the cat”, hanging upside down by the back of my heels, and other maneuvers that I don’t know the name of.  It made our muscles strong and gave us coordination.  

        When I began teaching in the one-room school in a remote lumber mill camp in BC, there was no playground or playground equipment for my students to play on.  At recess or during the time when they weren’t in school, there really wasn’t much for the kids that lived in camp to do, so in my free time I bummed some lumber and metal pipe from the camp where the school was located, and built a set of monkey bars so that my students could put their muscles to work.  The photo shows the kids in action on the bars.

        Now days such things as monkey bars are probably considered “too dangerous” for kids to play on.  I am thankful that during my youth, we were allowed, and benefited, from a little danger in our play.

        I have a inversion table in my room and still periodically use it to hang upside down.  While my old body is hanging upside down, I often think about all those physical maneuvers we used to do on the monkey bars as a kid.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

An Evening Drive Down Hinkelman Road

     Just about every Saturday evening we drive out Hinkelman Road to visit with friends.  Quite often on that drive, I have to stop to take a photo, which then often shows up on this blog on Sunday morning.  Last night was no exception.  The yellow green Spring foliage is now out on the trees, and it was being nicely illuminated by the low sun, far down the west side of the Valley.

    All winter long, when we made this drive it was totally dark.  The drive is so much more interesting on these stretched-out days of Spring.

take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

A Welcome Discovery

     I have recently blogged about the distress I felt upon discovering that I had misplaced the red and black beans I had saved from last year, in order to plant them again this year.  In the blog, I don’t think I mentioned that something else that was misplaced were the peas that I had saved.

    The peas were actually more of a loss than the red and black beans which I had only planted one time.  Those peas were something I have planted for decades, carefully sorting the peas after I had harvested them, saving only those peas from the most bountiful pods to plant the following year.  Losing them was a heavy loss for me.

    Peas are always the first thing I plant in the garden every spring.  They are tough and don’t mind the cold.  This year I was in a dilemma, because I had lost last year’s peas.  It was time to plant them, and I didn’t know what to do.  

    In desperation, I finally decided just to try planting some of the left over peas I had saved from 2022 and 2023.  Certainly they were old stock and I wasn’t sure they were still vibrant,  but I thought I might as well put them in the ground, hoping without much hope, that some of them might still have enough life in them to come up.

    It has been very dry now for weeks, and so after planting the peas, I watered the area day after day, without seeing any result.  I had pretty much given up on them, and actually ordered some more peas from a seed company two days ago.  Wouldn’t you know it, yesterday I noticed that some of those old peas had sprouted and were poking up through the ground.

    I was so happy.   After growing, and saving that pea strain for so many years, they begin evolve, adapting to the soil and weather conditions in my garden, so I really wanted to keep those peas, and fortunately, now it looks like I didn’t lose that strain forever.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca