Our Wild-Looking Dog

    Skye’s hair is getting longer and the other day after rolling around on the carpet and shaking her self, we had to laugh at how she looked.

You can view my paintings at:  www.davidmarchant.ca

Unique Garden Tool

    One of the Seedy Saturday events that I found really interesting was called “My Favorite Garden Tool.”  The tool I found most interesting was Pete’s furrow maker (on right side of photo).  His father had used such a tool in Lebanon and he discovered that he could find no such implement after moving to Canada, so he had a blacksmith make him one.  When his father got to the age when he know longer could garden, he gave the tool to Pete.

    When you draw the furrow maker through the soil, it makes a nice groove for you to plant in.  Once you put the seeds into the furrow, you turn the tool over and draw the two wings over the sides of the furrow, and it pulls the soil back over the groove thus covering the seeds. 

    Pete’s tool seems like a really useful garden implement.

View my paintings:  www.davidmarchant.ca

Seedy Saturday

       Last Saturday I was among the 40 or so other people who braved the highways, after the big snow dump, to attend the annual Seedy Saturday event in Dunster.  It is an opportunity for local garden enthusiasts to share information about gardening.  I always leave the gathering, full of new ideas and renewed enthusiasm for the growing season ahead.

    The photo above shows local organic professional, Gary Lowe, explaining his attempts to breed a new variety of carrot, that combines delicious taste, a beautiful color, and can be grown in our climate.  (Note the carrot he is holding looks dull because Gary says you shouldn’t clean all the dirt off of them when you store them over winter.  

    Gary and Wendy Lowe are also breeding a new wheat variety, one that features all the nutrients of ancient varieties, but has the “hairs” on the end of the growing grain that deter wild deer and elk from eating it (a real problem in the Robson Valley).  Creating a new variety takes seven years of selection and growing before one comes up with a dependable seed that always reproduces what you are breeding for.  The Lowe’s make their living growing organic produce and I am always amazed at the knowledge and the seriousness they possess about growing plants and creating seeds.

    Below is a cross section of their developing carrot.  (Again, the sides look dirty because they haven’t been washed).

    

Take a look at my paintings:  www.davidmarchant.ca

Days of Snow

    True to the old saying, March came in like a lion.  We’ve gotten a couple of days and nights of stormy snow.  The photo shows my view as I piloted my snowblower up my driveway.  I had to snowblow the driveway twice.  We got about 12” (30 cm) of fluffy fresh snow over 24 hours, but overnight the skies cleared and the temperatures dropped.  It was -18C (0 F) this morning.  It sure feels as if winter has no intention of loosening her grip on us anytime soon.

You can see my paintings at:  www.davidmarchant.ca

Library Cards

    Another old memory that was triggered while cleaning out the bookcase concerned some of  the children books I found.  They had been purchased back in the 1970‘s when I was teaching in the one room school on Takla Lake.  The isolated school (there were no roads connecting to the outside world, only flights) was a really bare-bone affair and there were very few educational resources for the students to use.  To remedy this situation, Joan and I bought books for the kids to read and look at.  (That part of education hasn’t changed, teacher’s still end up using their own money to buy school supplies for the students.)

    We decided to set up a “school library” with those books, so that the kids could take them home.  To keep track of where the book was,  I ordered some paper pockets and library cards and pasted them in the back of the books.  One shown in the photo.

    It seems these cards and pockets are now a thing of the past in regular public libraries also.  Book barcodes and information are now scanned in a computer.  I always used to like the cards in library books, it seemed like a good system, but I guess not as efficient as electronic technology.

My paintings can be seen at:  www.davidmarchant.ca

Run, Jane, Run.

    The other day when I was cleaning out the bookcase shelf of VCR tapes to make room for Joan’s cookbooks, I also had to clear out a row of children’s book that were stored there.  I guess we kept them in case some kids came to visit at our house (I’m pretty sure we never had the occasion to use them).  Amongst the books were a couple of reading primers that I had used when I was teaching in a one room school.  Seeing it brought back some memories.

    Back in 1973 when Joan and I arrived in the logging camp on Takla Lake to start and teach in the one room school, there were absolutely no school supplies at all because the school district hadn’t been able to find a teacher, so there was some doubt as to whether there would be a school that year.  Once I was there ready to teach, I had to order and wait for supplies to come.  I had never actually been in a school in British Columbia, so I wasn’t sure what would be coming and when I got the supplies, I was dismayed that there were no primers or early reading books to guide me in teaching reading to the first graders.  

    I think at the time BC’s Ministry of Education was going through one of its “new theories in education” modes, and no longer believed in text books.  I, however, still believed in the old methods of phonics and graduated texts and was very frustrated that I didn’t have any to use.

    I mentioned it to my mother, and she sent me some ancient primers (actually the same ones that had been used when I was in the first grade).  Despite their age, they were very helpful and in using them, I taught all of my first graders to read, which I felt was one of my most important jobs.

    I remember getting a new first grader late in the school year.  When I checked on her abilities, I discovered that she didn’t know how to read.  I inquired to her parents and was told that in the school she had previously attended, the teacher’s attitude toward reading was, “She will learn to read when she wants to.”  

    I found this appalling, and immediately started teaching her to read, whether she “wanted” to or not.   I don’t think she had ever thought about it, and when it was presented, she accepted that that’s what we did in school, and there was no problem.  She was soon reading at the same level as my other students.

    I still remember Dick, Jane, Sally, Spot, and Puff from my first grade.  Those old memories from your youth really stick in your head.

You can see my paintings:  www.davidmarchant.ca

VHS Tapes, Goodbye

    Things stay pretty static in our house.  I guess Joan and I don’t like change too much.  Anyway, yesterday, a small change was made.  Change often causes a cascade effecting which causes other things to change.  That happened yesterday, when Joan wanted to clear a space in the lower part of the table behind our couch.  This mean’t moving all of her cookbooks that had taken up residence there.

    Of course, all those cookbooks needed a new home.  The logical place for them were the two shelves on our book case that had been used for storage of our old VHS tapes.  We haven’t watched a VHS tape on our tape deck for at least a decade, so there was really no reason to hang on to them and I began taking them from the bookcase and putting them into two trash bags for disposal.

    I always feel bad about chucking things away, thinking it is such a waste, but despite my feelings I filled the bags with the video tapes and put them into the back of the truck destine for the dump.  

    I am sure this operation has been carried out in most North American households many many years ago, but up in our little corner of the world things move much slower.

    As I took out the tapes and looked them over, it struck me what an important part of our lives they used to be.  Living in our isolated valley in BC, we were far away from mainstream culture.  We could read and hear on the radio and TV about what films were popular, but we had no movie theatre, and only a few TV stations; we were starving for culture and entertainment.

    When video recorders first hit the market, I immediately saw the value of them, and when I saw one of the then rare machines in Prince George, I bought one and was one of the first people in McBride to have one.  They were terribly expensive at the time.  Having a VCR didn’t really solve our problem though, since there were no places in little McBride where you could rent a movie, and so we had to rent them whenever we drove up to Prince George  and send them back by mail after we viewed them.  

    Even getting a blank tape to record TV shows was a problem.  One McBride store did get a few, but it was selling a blank tape for $40 each, way more than I was willing to spend.  Fortunately as time passed, other people in McBride bought video recorders, thus creating a market for tapes and movies.  Several places in town began renting movies on tape, but the selection was very small.

    We depended heavily on my brothers in the US to record more obscure films and send them too us.  We enjoyed being able to tape TV shows when we were away from the house.  We often invited friends without VCRs over to watch movies with us on our tiny 14 inch Sony TV.  It seems ridiculous now, but everyone was disparate to see films.

    VHS tapes were soon replaced with DVDs and now they are being replaced by internet downloads and streaming.  The page has turned on VHS cassettes, and now these once valuable items are headed to the dump.

My paintings:  www.davidmarchant.ca