What's Up

It has been another cold wet spring and we are even further behind this year than last year. The first crop of peas are up. They are about an inch or so high. One advantage of being so cold is that the slugs are still sleeping.

The asparagus is finally surfacing. It looks like we might have a nice asparagus and egg breakfast next weekend. Fingers crossed.

We also have ten new laying hens. But they are still very young. They look like tiny dinosaurs at the moment. They haven't quite grown all their feathers.

In the greenhouse, my first round of tomatoes are up. I planted them two weeks ago.
This morning I added another three varieties.

The list is:
Legend
Beefsteak (Ukrainian)
Czech
Brown plum
And a mixed package of heirloom seeds that I accidentally bought at the seed sale.

A New Gardening Season

It is hard to imagine that there is still snow on the ground in Banff. It is cold, but it is still spring on the west coast. Ever since I returned from Banff, we have digging a small section of the garden at a time. We are now almost three quarters of the way through.

We lost most of our raspberry crop last year. I spent all day yesterday digging out the old bed, trying to take the first four inches of soil away. I ended up digging out fifteen wheelbarrows full of very wet sod topped clay soil. We will replace this soil with a sandy mixture to improve drainage. We will then transplant some raspberry canes from a very old bed that was unaffected by the blight.

It might have been better to just relocate the canes, but we really didn’t have a place for them to go this year. If they fail again, we will move them next year. Also, from what I read replacing the soil should suffice.

We lost all but two of our Tulameen raspberries which is a real shame. They are such a nice berry. Big and sweet and no prickles. I don’t know why they are not more well known. Nobody seems to grow them around here. Maybe they are prone to blight? Which would explain why we lost so many, although we lost almost as many of the hardy regular plants.

Spring Comes to Banff: It is Time to go.

The Banff Snail

Shortly after the Japan earthquake, and while NATO was debating on whether to enforce a no fly zone over Libya, the Calgary Herald had a front page story on the Banff Snail.

The Banff Snail, for those of you who do not read the Herald, is an endangered mollusk who inhabits the streams around Banff’s Hot Springs. The unusually hot water, supports this rare little creature. A few years ago, the Park officials noticed that the snail was dying out in some parts of the area. This led them to close down the heritage bath house at the Cave and Basin and move the baths up to Sulphur Mountain. Or so the story goes.

The new spa is nice, but very small, and it feels, on busy days, a little like being at a mall. Hot springs can be very disappointing. The managed and finessed ones that is. They stink of chemicals and attract unhealthy people along with unruly parents with equally unruly children.

Besides attracting the unhealthy and unruly, hot springs create fragile ecosystems, creating or attracting species that grow nowhere else than in this unique confluence of events. I have heard of an orchid that only grows near one particular hot spring that attracts a hummingbird that has uniquely evolved to feed on this particular flower. Although it is not as attractive as an orchid or a hummingbird, the Banff snail is a rare and endangered species that lives in a incredibly fragile environment,

There are a few biologists in Banff who have made it their lives work to study this snail. They report that the hot springs are cooling down, and as a result, the snails are dying out. I also discovered that as I sat in this hot spring pool—when it was minus thirty degrees out—the pool had been heated with tap water. Tap water? I could have gone home and had a bath, without putting up the unwashed hordes and wasted fewer resources, and wouldn’t have got some weird fungal infection on my feet.

So the story about the snail, was as much about the hot springs cooling off as it was about the snail dying out. Anyway, as I walked into the staff kitchen, a co-worker sees the article on the front page and she says, “With the earthquake in Japan, and civil war throughout the Middle East, who cares about a snail?”