Greens

After a busy (but successful!) final exams season, followed by one delightful week in Mallorca, I am BACK! I am on summer vacation and plan on enjoying a huge amount of time in my greenhouse, my garden and at the creativity table.

We have been so busy on the greenhouse project that all the so-called flowerbeds, as well as both the terraces are totally overgrown with weeds. So the cleanup of these is definitely high up on my to-do list. Thankfully, things are going very well now in the greenhouse. My very nice neighboor took really good care of it in our absence (and fed my cats!). I was delighted to see how much everything had grown in just one week! (the plants, not the cats)

Greenhouse is really getting green!

Some 8 varieties of tomatoes, 2 varieties of cucumbers, Apache chilies, jalapenoes, bell peppers, sweet peppers, a few different sorts of herbs (including a lot of basil, green and red) and a few more things are all doing really great! I've eaten my first mini-cucumbers, some red juicy strawberries and beautiful lettuce already.

Inuksuk found its home!

Pick-and-eat lettuce and strawberry leveled pot. 

I don't have many flowers, but can definitely see that I will be looking more into that next year.

Meanwhile, the vegetable garden is also picking up in pace. I've tried sweet corn again this year and it seems to be doing much better than last year. I started it in paper pots and carefully tranplanted them a few weeks ago, trying not to disturb the roots. 

The red kuri squash and pumpkin plants took a while to "feel home" on the veggie patch, but also seem to be growing now. 

The romaine lettuce is beautiful, as are the onions!  Today, I finally transplanted a zuchini plant, some interesting kinds of beans I received from my good friend and some peas, which I all had started a few weeks ago and just never had time to transplant. 

Veggie garden. Corn, beans, squashes, onions, lettuce, peas. 

If you guys remember well, last year, my husband and I built a compost bin. I have been using some of the resulting compost to enrich the soil on the patch, which came from the hole we dug for the greehouse, so wasn't the very best soil for a garden. This seems to especially have made a difference with the corn. It went from a pale green to a nice healthy green, and more than doubled in size since I added compost around the plants. :D

Following advice from the experienced, I started covering the soil with cut grass to help retain some humidity. The only problem is that our lawn mower is specially made to cut grass in tiny tiny pieces so that we don't have to pick it up, and it feeds the lawn at the same time. (it is called Bio-cut). So it makes it difficult to find enough grass to cover the whole garden patch. I have to go along the bicycle trail behind our lot! 

That's it for now.... happy summer everyone!

An Inuksuk in my garden

What exactly IS an inuksuk?

An inuksuk (plural inuksuit) is a stone landmark or cairn built by humans, used by the Inuit, Inupiat, Kalaallit, Yupik, and other peoples of the Arctic region of North America.

The inuksuk may have been used for navigation, as a point of reference, a marker for travel routes, fishing places, camps, hunting grounds, places of veneration, drift fences used in hunting or to mark a food cache.Despite the predominant English spelling as inukshuk, both the Government of Nunavut and the Government of Canada through Indian and Northern Affairs Canada are promoting the Inuit-preferred spelling inuksuk.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuksuk 

"The mysterious stone figures known as inuksuit can be found throughout the circumpolar world. Inukshuk, the singular of inuksuit, means "in the likeness of a human" in the Inuit language. They are monuments made of unworked stones that are used by the Inuit for communication and survival. The traditional meaning of the inukshuk is "Someone was here" or "You are on the right path."

source: http://www.inukshukgallery.com/inukshuk.html

The Inuksuk is not directly in our culture in the southern part of Canada, but it certainly is in the culture of the northern part of my homeland, and in my family, well, we like them! My dad has this tradition of building a little inuksuk wherever he goes on vacation. It's his "marque de passage"... a fun "I was here" note. I remember he made a small one the very first time he and my mother were in Denmark. It stood on the windowsill of the summerhouse where we stayed. I wonder how many new visitors it greeted.

When my parents and grandmother visited us in Denmark in July 2012, my grandma built a small inuksuk out of some of the stones that were covering a part of our lot. Even after my family were gone back home and for the remaining of the summer, this little 15 cm high mark of their visit stood on the side of our driveway, looking out for visitors and passer-by's.

At Fall, when my husband and I decided to get the stones removed and sow grass in stead, little inuksuk was in danger, standing right by the edge of the stone covered area. So I carefully picked it up and placed it safely in the shed, making sure it didn't loose any part of its fragile construction. It stood there all winter and today, I finally brought it inside and glued it together, to immortalize this little token of my grandmother's visit to my adoptive country.

Inuksuk built by Grandma - summer 2012

My biggest inspiration and drive for having a vegetable garden are the memories I have of my grandparents' garden when I was a child. It was always so beautiful and successful. Among other things, I remember the freshly picked carrots we got when we visited. My grandma or grandpa would dig them up, wash them with the hose and we'd play outside munching on the fresh root. My grandpa has been watching over us from above for a few years now (love you grandpa xox), but I feel so extremely lucky that my grandmother was able to visit us in Denmark and see where we live and even see my very first garden. She gave me tips, too! She lives in Canada so she can't be here all the time to guide me in the garden, but I want her inuksuk to stand and watch as I (hopefully) learn and gain gardening experience, year after year... Someday, I want a vegetable garden like the one my grandparents had back in the days. :)