Tulipalooza

Bit of a throwback there for the Gen X near-olds of Ottawa, Ontario. Show of hands if you, too, spent a weekend in May 1990-something lolling about Major’s Hill Park, ostensibly there to admire the thousands of rainbow-hued tulips that were, and continue to be, the main draw of the Canadian Tulip Festival, but actually there to flirt with cute boys (and girls) at the all-ages alternative rock show. I met my second boyfriend in just that fashion, in line for the Pepsi Taste Challenge, which was beside the Much Music Video Dance booth, just in case I haven’t aged myself enough with these references. It won’t shock you to learn that that weekend also involved hacky sacks, neon pink comb-in hair gel, and many appearances of local musical weirdo-heroes, Furnaceface.

But I digress. This post is actually about the tulipalooza that I hosted in my garden this past spring, a throwback in itself given that tulip season has LONG since passed.

And that season was, to put it poetically, a beautiful nightmare. It started in the fall of 2020 when I purchased nine or 10 different varieties of heirloom bulbs from Breck’s Bulbs (zero complaints there; the bulbs I bought were in beautiful shape, white, fresh and plump.) In anticipation of the bastard rodents that would surely make merry with my tender tulips, Mr. Finger Candy made eight cages out of zip ties and chicken wire to lock the bulbs in before I planted them in the ground. I then planted a couple dozen, foolishly unprotected, in the pie-shaped bed at the front of the house. I had been inside maybe 15 minutes before I looked out the window and saw that arsehole squirrels had made off with at least three. Mr. Finger Candy leapt to the rescue once again, this time pinning an entire sheet of chicken wire directly on top of the soil.

Winter came and went, and in the spring my fledgling tulips began to fledge. I was so excited to look outside and see their tender green shoots just beginning to poke through the loamy gloom! And then the rodents returned, kneecapping my efforts – and the growth of my flowers – at every. single. turn. It also snowed in the middle of April, necessitating a frosty jaunt out to the beds in my flip flops to rescue the more advanced blooms.

I spent the majority of my spring vacillating between wild gardening highs and crushing rodent lows (not to suggest that I ever actually physically harmed the thieving little jerks, unless you count dosing my flower beds with Da Bomb hot sauce-infused water, a neat little trick that only occasionally proved successful.)

Highs? This absolutely stunning bouquet of inky purple Queen of the Night tulips, ruffled Black Parrots and bubblegum pink Fancy Frills I pulled from the front bed at the very end of the season. How such gorgeous specimens dodged the Wrath of Rodent, I’ll never know, but I loved having this cut bouquet in our home for the two weeks that it remained pert and bright and upright.

I also loved this sunset-hued bouquet of early bloomers I clipped during that aforementioned springtime snowstorm. These gorgeous, plush blossoms are Coral Pride and Pink Pride tulips mixed in with some yellow and white tulips that just randomly sprang up in the yard (I call that gardening by squirrel, or let the tulips lay where they may.)

Another high? This unique blossom, a Showgirl tulip. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a blue flower before (okay, purple-grey) let alone grown one.

The cool tones of this beautiful tulip matched nothing else in the garden, which certainly didn’t matter to the squirrels, who seemed to find these particular flowers extra delicious. But when I was able to actually bring one or two inside, I just wound up hodge podgeing them together with whatever else was in bloom, making for some interesting arrangements.

Lows? Oh, pretty much any time I looked outside and saw a wilted pile of leaves, or worse, a tall, green stem with a nipped-off blossom just laying in the dirt beside it. My mom said, with a note of concerned pride in her voice, “Well, you’re a real gardener now!” when I called her one morning, wracked with sobs and blubbering about my decimated tulips. Apparently heartbreak is just part of the gardening deal? I *might* even have been sort of understanding if the rodents actually ate the tulips, or derived some sort of sustenance from them. Canadian winters are hard; I suppose I can’t fault the little guys for falling on the first fresh greenery they’ve seen in months. But to just nip off the head and then leave it there, fully intact, the plant now utterly destroyed, is unconscionable. I could wring their little rodent necks.

Instead, I began dosing my beds with ground cinnamon, ground cayenne pepper and hot sauce-infused water. Capsaicin, the active component in chili peppers, is also usually the first active ingredient in critter ridder preparations, none of which seem to work very well, and all of which are quite expensive. So I bought a bunch of ground cayenne pepper at the bulk store and sprinkled it around my tulips. It worked as an invisible barrier more often than not, as did the hot sauce treatment, but I still suffered losses to squirrels who are apparently impervious to the pain of a 2 million scoville-rated hot sauce. As for the cinnamon, I was thinking anything that burns. Have you ever inhaled a bunch of ground cinnamon (or worse, done the cinnamon challenge)? It hurts and smells incredible all at the same time. I was just looking for the squirrel version of that. Is this also a sign that I’m becoming a “real” gardener, that I don’t want to hurt the rodents that thoughtlessly thrashed my garden, but I do want them to pay?

It’s been a learning process, that’s for sure, and one that I’m in the process of repeating right this very moment (get those bulb orders in now!) Heartbreak and tears notwithstanding. Only next time I’ll be approaching the whole endeavor with a bit more gardening wisdom – and A LOT more physical barriers.

September Band of Bloggers

Welcome back to the September Band of Bloggers! It’s that time of year again. School is starting back up. Trees are starting to turn. North America is recovering from the apocalypse brought on by the eclipse. Wait, what?

The eclipse that visited most of the United States on August 21st has been described as a once in a lifetime experience. The next eclipse to cover the US from coast to coast will not come until 2045.

That brings us to our question this month. What is your once in a lifetime experience?

Fifteen or so years ago (so another lifetime; in the case of my friends with children, many lifetimes) I was floundering.  Fresh off a journalism degree I wasn’t using and wracked with grief over the end of a four-year romantic relationship, I had moved downtown with some dear high school friends for a fresh start.  Except (probably much to the annoyance of my friends) I was having a terrible time starting over, at least for the first couple of months.  I’ve always been one of those serial monogamy types, and this was the first time since I had started dating at 16 that I didn’t have a boyfriend.  That the relationship had never been a grand one was totally besides the point, and despite the best efforts of my too-patient pals and parents, I was determined to be lonely and miserable, and I was obviously going to die alone and then be eaten by wild dogs.  It was all so very Bridget Jones.  I clearly needed to get the hell out of town.

At the time I was working as a court reporter.  Bored, terminally frumpy woman (they’re always women) clacking away in the corner of the courtroom?  That was me (except I liked to think I was fashionably frumpy.)  I worked out of an office that acted as a sort of neutral courtroom for the lawyers and their clients doing pre-trial examinations – that’s the deeply boring, paperwork-intensive side of the law.  They’d also frequently send reporters on out-of-office cases to such exotic locales as three blocks away, but sometimes to places a bit farther flung.

And THAT is how I wound up standing in the pitch black, -25 degree chill of a frozen Iqaluit afternoon three days before Christmas, contemplating the seriousness of the gigantic “DO NOT FEED THE POLAR BEARS!” sign that greeted me on arrival.

Iqaluit, for the unaware (and that would be everybody; Canadians barely know it’s there) is the capital city of Nunavut, a territory in the far north that used to go by the name Frobisher Bay.  It’s Nunavut’s largest city – nay, its ONLY city – and bears a population of about 7,500 people, most of them employees of the Government of Canada (that’s why I was there, to take the testimony of some people involved in a lawsuit with the GOC.) Despite sitting well outside the Arctic Circle, Iqaluit’s climate is a tundra one – lots of snow, little vegetation and no trees (the permafrost won’t allow their roots to take hold.) During the winter months (so everything that’s not June, July and August) it’s not unusual for the temperatures to dip into the -30s or -40s, and when I was there at the end of December, the sun had set to full black by two in the afternoon.  There is an ice road that leads out of town that is literally called The Road to Nowhere.  It is, by virtue of the unforgiving climate and its remoteness, a rather ugly city.  Also, there are apparently polar bears, and we are not to feed them.

So what once-in-a-lifetime things does a fish out of Ontario water do when she’s thrown head-first into the frozen, turquoise waters of the far north?

Well, I did my job, for one, but even that came with its own “Only in Iqaluit” moments, such as when I stood outside the courthouse in the deep, snow-muffled silence of an early Arctic morn, sharing a cup of coffee with the courthouse clerk as he explained how this frozen spit of land had captured his formerly city-dwelling heart.  Or when I glanced out the window of the courtroom later on that day and saw a mangy dog dragging a severed caribou head down the street.

In hindsight, the entire trip was an exercise in surrealism.  My flight in was a delight, the likes of which I will probably never enjoy again – totally empty plane, save for maybe nine other passengers, three seats to myself, a really fantastic lunch, nice little post-nosh tipple(s) and a low, low approaching altitude that allowed me to gaze out the window at the wonder of all that neon turquoise water showing through the cracks in the ice and snow.

I walked the town in snowpants and Kodiak boots for three hours until I realized I had already seen everything.  I bought a $9 bag of potato chips at the North Mart (not making light of the very real problem of food deserts in the far north.)  I stood in a 6 a.m., two-person scrum (which itself was considered quite the turnout) as an accused murderer was brought to the courthouse.  I watched the sun rise at 10 am, cutting a weak, low path across the horizon, before setting to pitch blackness again three hours later.  I sat in my hotel room one night, blissfully crunching overpriced chips and watching silly teen movies on cable, and put together a scrapbook gift for a friend.  Every cab ride in the city cost $5, no matter where you were going or how long you were in the vehicle.  I shared a delicious breakfast of Arctic Char eggs benedict with a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada in the diningroom of a four-star hotel at 6:30 in the morning.  Later on that day we marched up to the Subway together for lunch; at the time it was the best performing franchise in Canada, and was a top five contender for all of North America.

On the day I headed out of town, two days before Christmas, I joined a city-wide exodus of bureaucrats fleeing the frozen north for (barely) warmer holiday climes down south. It seemed like the entire city emptied out in about five hours.  After checking my bags and securing my seat home, I spent those five hours in a nearby coffee shop/karaoke parlour/tanning salon, where I sipped tea, ate a scrumptious blueberry scone and contemplated asking the proprietors if they’d be willing to rename their establishment the Fake ‘n’ Bakery.

On the flight home – no empty plane this time, that’s for sure – through a massive snowstorm, I experienced turbulence so extreme, I really thought my end had come.  I suppose that’s normal when your plane is bucking wildly from side to side and dropping what feels like 20 feet at a time.  Also when the cargo hold is packed full of howling dogs and screaming cats and the flight attendants suspend all food service when your chicken cordon bleu flies up to the ceiling and then just sticks there.

My favourite part of the trip, though?  Like everybody, coming home.  Seeing my parents’ smiling, relieved faces at the airport, and then walking through the door of my apartment late on the evening of the 23rd to find that my friends had prepared an amazing holiday dinner and decorated the molting ficus.  Home really is where the heart is.  No place like it, as Dorothy might say.

That, coincidentally, was the moment I decided to drop my whole “woe is me” romantic bullshit and rejoin the human race as something other than a mopey dick.  The people I loved were making every effort to boost my fragile self-esteem, and I could certainly do likewise.  Besides, I had just conquered the far north!  Severed caribou heads, man – that kind of thing changes a person!  Four fun-filled, glorious, halcyon months later I met Mr. Finger Candy, and the rest is happy history.

So there we have it, that once-in-a-lifetime event that I was actually fortunate enough to experience firsthand.  Never saw a single polar bear, though. 😉

If you’d like to play along at home, please feel free to answer this question in the comment section below, and we hope you’ll visit these Band of Blogger blogs and help support the blogger community!

Amanda at Thrifty Polished

Jaybird at The Candle Enthusiast

Julie at The Redolent Mermaid

Lauren at LoloLovesScents

Liz at Furianne

Sandra – me! – at Finger Candy

If you are a blogger and would like to join the Band of Bloggers for our monthly posts, please contact us.

Fall Fun Series: Having a Ball in the Fall

Yesterday dawned gloomy and rainy, so of course Mr. Finger Candy and I decided it was the perfect day to take a wee country drive, head out to the little town I grew up in and visit its final farmers’ market of the season, purchase an abundance of holy-crap-that’s-good pastries, revisit the place where we were married and then perhaps swing by the site of one of my young life’s greatest embarrassments.  So come along, won’t you, friends, as we get out of the city for a bit to admire the leaves and indulge in a bit of a nostalgia tour.

North Gower is the name of the little Eastern Ontario village I grew up in.  It lays about half an hour outside of Ottawa, although with suburb-creep, “in town” is now just 15 minutes down the highway.  This barn, and its crazy, higgeldy piggeldy attachments, lays on the Seabrook property on Roger Stevens Drive, right down the road from the 150-year-old farmhouse I used to call home (apologies for the lack of pictures, but on that score, the earth appears to be reclaiming my once-beautiful home.  It actually hurts my heart to see what has become of it.)

Today the barn acts as the central site of the North Gower Farmers’ Market, a bustling local enterprise that began years after my family moved into the city.  Dim lighting and a generally overcast day put a damper on taking any photos indoors, but the interior of the warm barn was stuffed with vendors’ tables, each bearing all sorts of cute and delicious-looking homemade goods like jams and jellies, knits and jewelry, soaps and candles and tons and tons of baked goods.  There were also a number of tables outside bearing the veggie farmers’ wares, including tons of pumpkins, squash and gourds, and one pig farmer whose table I purposefully didn’t examine too closely (no judgement, but I just don’t have any particular need for half a pig in my life at the moment, you know?)

But I do apparently have a pressing need for pastries, because I fared quite well on that front, nabbing some absolutely fantastic Norwegian shortbread from one gentleman (as well as half a delicious, crispy pizza, not shown because we ate it!) and a buttermilk pie from Frank’s, which is apparently the home of Ottawa’s best butter tart.  Huh, the things you learn in a day!

I also picked up these two beeswax sheep (ram?) candles, which I’ll never be able to melt now that my husband has gone and given them names, which are Baaa-ob and Doug Mackenzie.

But can we go back to talking about the shortbread for a moment?  Because it was bloody fabulous and I wish I had bought sacks of the stuff (my waistline is glad I did not.)  Buttery and tender and glazed with just the barest wash of vanilla and raspberry jam, they were some of the best cookies I’ve ever eaten.  I kind of wish we had saved them to enjoy with an afternoon cuppa instead of just shoving them directly down our throats (kinda.)

After leaving the farmers’ market (carefully – parking was beginning to get a bit hairy) we drove to my elementary school, North Gower Marlborough Elementary, site of my first marriage in the kindergarten playground (never annulled; does that make me a bigamist?) It was also the place where I once fell over a chainlink fence and had to be rescued by my 5-foot-2 mother and where a very bad boy ripped the leg off my teddy bear (that very bad boy grew into a very bad man, and last I heard, he was a guest of Ontario’s Department of Corrections.)  I also once ate too many apricot-flavoured Fruit Roll-Ups on a dare and then went on the tire swing and THEN threw up in the playground sand.

But my greatest, dumbest claim to fame (infamy) might be the time I got my tongue stuck to a dirty old metal well cover while playing Care Bears with my friends at recess and had to be rescued by a teacher bearing a teapot of warm water who probably went home that night and laughed her ass off every single time she thought about the dumbass kid at school that day she had to rescue because she got her tongue stuck to a dirty old metal well cover while playing Care Bears with her friends at recess.

I was only moderately sad to see that my old pal Dirty Old Metal Well Cover had long since been filled in and paved over, but just for old time’s sake, we took some photos of me reenacting the idiot crime, until my husband pointed out that it kind of looked like we were taking crime scene photos.

After that we drove back through town and then up the road a few minutes to Strathmere, which is where we were married 12 years ago this coming Halloween.  I have virtually no exterior shots of our wedding, as the sun had already set by the time our ceremony was finished.  That and our photographer was grossly incompetent (I also have NO photos of my parents and I (and my new husband) together, but that’s a rage story for another day.) So I was going to take a few photos of the barn yesterday (yes, we were married in a barn, and it was lovely) but when I rounded the corner, I found a very testy couple hurling rolls of tulle and bunting out the back of a pickup in the persistent, sprinkling rain.  Gosh, I hope they weren’t the bride and groom – that’s kind of a lousy way to start things off, no?

The rain actually went on to completely clear up by afternoon’s end, but even before then, Mother Nature was putting on a beautiful show at Strathmere, like in this wee little secret garden tucked into the back cottages.

Or this lane between the parking lot and the main inn.

Or this gorgeous stand of trees edging the parking lot (again with the well-appointed parking lots!)

Or the gorgeous, leaf-carpeted lane that runs down from the highway and always reminds me of something out of Sleepy Hollow.

After that the rain began pelting down, so we skedaddled back home, but I had a wonderful morning revisiting some old haunts, checking out the foliage, finding a new pastry thing to obsess over.  As Ice Cube would say, it was a good day.