I wish I knew

Cecil Cartwright, our 85 year old neighbour across the street is a “Conky Joe” – a white Bahamian. His grandfather jumped a British naval ship in the Caribbean (how long ago would that be?) and keeps us laughing with stories about Long Island in the Bahamas where giant roosters haunted graveyards, kids’ pets were mules and pigs and living in caves during the hurricanes was standard. Big and gentle, he comes over for visits with a hoe as his cane, scraping off the weeds as he goes down his driveway. He lost his driver’s license a few years ago which is the kiss of death if you happen to live in the country.

Cecil’s 83 year old wife, Helen woke up blind as a bat two years ago and now has Alzheimer’s. She slips out of the house occasionally, and starts calling for TOM! until I realize she’s yelling, “MOM!”

"MOM!”, “MOM!”, “MOM – WHERE ARE YOU?” Oh dear. Last week, it was wildly windy and I was working out in the front garden. I heard, TOM! (MOM!) and looked up. Helen was in a pink furry bathrobe that was flapping open and shut in the breeze revealing a white slip. She was weaving towards the road with a long wooden staff assisting her journey, her long matted hair trailing out behind her, looking all the world like Gandalf the Gray. A guy who was cutting their grass rescued her and gently led her back to the house.

You can’t keep a good woman down. Even after she lost her site, Helen liked to CUT THE LAWN! Cecil would start the lawnmower and she would weave and bob in wild designs through the grass. Every now and then the mower would slam into a rock or stump and shriek to a halt. Cec would start it up again and away she’d go.

The other day when I was putting out the garbage by the road, Helen came wandering down her driveway with a handful of sticks. She didn’t know where she should put them. Then she started to cry. “There’s been a death in my family. I just found out my mother died.” I said I was sorry, but she kept going on and was so despondent that I told her that maybe she had just forgotten that her mother had died a long time ago. “No,” she said, “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

Poor Cecil. He hears this ALL DAY. And dear Helen – she LIVES this all day.

Alzheimer’s is funny – meaning insidious. On one hand, many of us strive to live in the moment, but many people with this very sad condition keep living a moment that may be one of their worst.

My mother had Alzheimer’s. She always knew us (and never looked for her mother) but didn’t know that you’d just been in the room 2 minutes ago. She loved music and when she was in the later stages, I downloaded a ton of 40’s music that she could listen to on a little IPod machine that the nurses could turn on. When we first played it for her, I told her that I was going to play a song and ask her who sang it. I’d never before heard the first song I played for her, and asked her to Name That Tune. “I Wish I Knew”, she said. I thought she didn’t know the name, and looked on the IPod. The title was “I Wish I Knew”. I was amazed. 

I played the next one and I could see she was trying to remember it. She looked at me and gave a little smile and said, “I wish I knew!”

smashing pumpkins

Tom cut down the buckwheat today. (Also bushhogged my cantaloupes by mistake). Hot and windy. The bees are pretty well finished with it and the flowers are starting to form seed pods. I’ve been harping about it so I can plant our ‘giant pumpkin’ seedling for the market’s annual contest the end of October. I also want to put in some miserable little wilted squash plants that have been strangling in their green plastic containers since May. Good Luck.

One year we won the Pumpkin Contest. The prize was free stall fees for the next year. WOW. Now we get a plastic trophy if someone remembers to get them. Ken McCutcheon, another beekeeper won the previous year with a giant specimen that (rumour had it) he even peed on at night. He grew even bigger ones than the one he submitted, but when he went to lift them into the truck with the loader, they broke in half. These are Dills’ Atlantic Giant seeds – potential behemoths.

One of the farmers told me that when deer find pumpkins, they often trample on them and then eat the seeds. I told my organic farmer friend, Sharon McBride, who is my partner in grime at the market, that I was going to fashion a set of deer legs and hoofs and go and 'trample' on some pumpkins if I get wind that anyone's pumpkin is getting bigger than mine.

fortune teller

Our friend, Geoff just returned from a business trip to China. We were going out for dinner with him and his wife (my good friend, Susan) somewhere, but he was so bagged from the 14 hour direct flight that he just wanted to go to bed.  He brought us a little china caddy of tea which was really thoughtful. Not sure what the directives are saying on the side of the box, though.

Speaking of China, Tom had an interesting fortune cookie the other day when we were out for Chinese food at Gung Ho. It read: “THERE ARE 10 DIGITS, 3 COLOURS AND 7 NOTES. IT’S HOW WE USE THEM THAT MAKE A DIFFERENCE”. He said it was the most cryptic message he had ever received from a cookie. I laughed and told him that maybe he should have gotten my cookie and handed him my message – “NEXT TIME, ORDER THE SHRIMP”.

marketing 101

Ken, a vendor at one of our markets likes to wear ‘message’ t-shirts. One that he’s particularly fond of asks, “How can I NOT help you today?”

I’ve been looking for some gravity chairs lately. I picked up two red canvas ones a couple of years ago, but they now have some weird yellow scale all over them. Last week I went into the local Canadian Tire and asked two sales guys in official red shirts clutching clip boards where the gravity chair display was so I could see the various models out of the box – how were they constructed, what exactly does a ‘brown’ or ‘black’ one look like?  I was told that the store didn’t have enough room to display.

Today I drove down to a much larger Canadian Tire in Barrie. I think it’s one of the largest in Canada. I asked where the gravity chairs were set up. “Oh, we don’t have any,” the salesgirl said offhandedly. “Every time we set one up, someone buys it.” WHAT?

Based on that marketing theory, I should just keep our honey in the truck when I roll into the market and not bring it out so people can see it. Because, before I know it, someone might actually buy it. I’ll just keep it in the back – cap shut, and make people guess what it looks like.

I’m going to find out where Ken gets his T-shirts and start handing them out to a few of the crew at C.T.

apple tree swarm

Tom stuck his head through the front door and told me to grab my camera. He doesn’t do this too often, so I thought it might be worth dropping everything to do it. When I got outside, he was holding a branch from our apple tree, looking like a boy who had caught a trophy fish, and dripping off of it were about 1,000 bees in a tiny swarm cluster.

Sometimes, half of the colony will swarm and that could be about 30,000 bees. He walked away with them down the driveway and shook them into one of the empty bee boxes in the back field hoping that they’ll like their new home enough to stay in it.

cutting the catmint

Today, I’ll cut back the catmint (Nepeta). I always put it off whenever it’s time because visually, it’s stunning and the honeybees and bumblebees are still working it. But if I don’t do it now, it may not re-bloom later in the season.

These large purple clouds are probably one of our bees’ most favourite and most visited plants in the gardens. Hummingbirds also hover in them too. It’s one of the first plants to leap out of the ground in the spring with its gray green foliage and it quickly forms itself into a rounded mound of prolific blossoms.

Catmint at the end of the driveway.

Nepeta doesn’t mind the lean sandy soil that we have here and while it thrives in sunshine, will do reasonably well in partial shade. I prefer the common N. x faassenii, - about 24-30”, but also have smaller varieties, as well as a taller but rather sprawling pink flowered variety, “Dawn to Dusk”. Catmint grows in zones 3 – 8. It almost looks like lavender from a distance, and the neat thing is that it’s amazingly easy to propagate. Just snip the tips off the plants, and plunk into some pots or plug trays. It’s also deer resistant!

Honey bee working the catmint.

 Still have lots of other purples left – the sages and lavender hyssops are still blooming and the “Grosso” and “Munstead” lavenders are just about ready to bloom.

queen of the sun

"What are the bees telling us?" asks Queen of the Sun, Lavender Hills’ food-for-thought film. As honeybee die-offs continue, filmmaker Taggart Siegel takes up this question with beekeepers around the world. From rooftop hives in London and New York City, as well as beekeepers in France, Italy, Australia and New Zealand, the messages come in, teaching us about our shared crisis with the honeybee, but also about the richness of our shared history.

Taggart's three-year effort has resulted in a beautiful, moving, and lyrical production, full of insights from beekeepers, many of whom are organic or biodynamic. We also hear from an entomologist, a biochemist, a philosopher and a playwright, with cameo appearances from food activist and author, Michael Pollan and environmental activist, Vandana Shiva. We see honeybees at work interacting with flowers and beekeepers interacting with their hives.

 Philosopher Rudolf Steiner's powerful indictment of modern beekeeping weaves through the footage, often interpreted for us by biodynamic farmer Gunther Hauk. In the 1920s, Steiner predicted that continued industrial style beekeeping would destroy honeybees by the end of the 20th century. The Colony Collapse Disorder we're seeing now, Hauk says, is "the bill we are getting for all we have done to the bees."