Buried in snow

I have not been on to blog in a while. This winter, I am on leave from my day job and teaching full time, partly at Vanier College in the Special Care Counselling program (a program that trains its graduates to do group and one-on-one therapeutic activities for people with disabilities or other special needs), as well as in the Social Work program at UQAM. This is the first year I am only teaching and not doing another job at the same time. It is challenging, interesting and very intensive. So my usually blogging time on weekends has been eaten up by course preparation and correcting. As well, because I am on a replacement contract at Vanier, I can be bumped out of the job with little notice. For this reason, I am trying to be conservative with spending money, and things like new seeds for next year have taken a low priority, especially because all the seeds I bought last year are still likely to be fertile. My usual seed perusing in February has been curtailed to looking and dreaming rather than planning and shopping. This still has not stopped me from drooling over my Vessey's catalogues.

So my garden adventure this time of year is putting out the compost. We have had a very cold winter, and one with a lot of snow. This is an unusual pattern, because usually when the temperature drops below -20 C we don't get snow, but this year we seem to have been getting both with great regularity. The snow comes down as very fine powder which packs down into a dense icy mass. However, in areas that do not get frequent traffic, you can sink thigh deep in a fluffy stuff which behaves almost like a liquid, pouring into your boots if you are foolish enough to have the tops of your boots exposed. This is what happens when I walk out through the back yard to dump the compost.

The content of my active compost box has turned into a solid iced block, and as such, does not create enough heat to decompose and "funk down" or reduce itself. It can still do this below zero (from the heat it creates) but not when the temperatures plunge. This is the second year in a row that I am running out of room in my compost box. The top of the box has two knobs that turn which lock the box to prevent the local wildlife from knocking the top off and digging in. The mechanism is vulnerable to icing up, which makes opening it a challenge, especially if we have a bit of a thaw then a big drop in temperature (which is what happens when the sun comes out mid-day sometimes). The hay and bags of autumn leaves I use to layer the compost are also rather solidly iced together and well buried in the snow. This morning there are only a few inches of the compost bin visible, the snow level has almost reached the top. I am not dumping the inside bin weekly like I usually do, and keeping it next to a heater so that it is doing some of its decomposition in the house (yuck!). I also wait until the weather warms a bit for a few days before attempting to dump it outside.

As for my indoor gardening, this year, I gave up on peppers so I did not bring them inside at all. Julie's pineapple sage succumbed over Christmas when we went out of town. My son, who was happy to stay home and have the house to himself, agreed to water the plants, and I must have underestimated the amount to water it in my instructions. We will start a new plant in the spring. To replace the dead sage, he and his girlfriend sprouted some green onion ends in water and introduced me to a new gardening idea. I planted them in earth,and they died quickly, but when left in water which you change every couple of days, they do very well and can be reharvested and regrown continually.

This past week I have found myself chatting in the most unexpected places about gardens and tree growing, at a shiva, with a few residents at a nursing home where I am supervising students doing their stage (in an activity that involved painting flowers and trees, it was a natural subject). From these informal conversations with people who are more knowledgeable about tree cultivation than I am, I am concerned that my magnolia has died. I will be closely monitoring its activity this spring and if it does not flower, I will do more careful research.

After much time not checking my blog, I was delighted to see I had over 200 hits this past month. Obviously some of you have not given up on me! I promise to be more prolific as spring approaches. One day in my UQAM class a few weeks ago, one of my students came up after class to tell me she had checked out my blog and liked it. She had googled me, and found it. This was a new one for me. I shamelessly promote my blog on my facebook status and on my personal e-mails, but never in my work world.

I am not including photos this time. They would be all white and right now I have seen enough snow to last a long time. Looking forward to some green in my life!