Usually, by this time each spring, we've started planting all of our many large garden pots and urns, an exciting time of creating miniature colourful gardens of annuals to complement the burgeoning gardens full of perennials that the pots flank. All of it together makes for a multi-layered, textural, colourful and eye-pleasing landscape comprising our very own magic garden.
My husband went out after breakfast to pick up the usual number of bags of garden soil, aged sheep's manure and peat moss needed to fill up the pots. They're emptied in the fall, all of their contents shovelled into the gardens as topsoil, the withering annuals placed in composting bags. But for the begonias and the potato vines; they are cleaned off and stored overwinter in the basement, to be brought back out at the end of May and re-planted in the backyard pots and gardens.
While my husband was off doing that I baked our Friday-night dinner dessert, and prepared some of the dinner ahead, putting on a chicken soup to steam up the kitchen with its restorative fragrance. On his return, we went off to the ravine for our daily walk-about in the forest. And a more lovely spring day to do that in could hardly be imagined. We noted that the first of the Serviceberry trees are now in bloom, their white blossoms covering the trees, to produce what is commonly referred to as Saskatoon berries, a favourite ingredient out West for pies.
We could even allow ourselves to imagine that this was an ordinary day in May, by which time the trails would all be nicely dry and spring wildflowers would be making their appearance. Unfortunately, this year has been unusual, with the amount of unending rain that caused some of the hillsides in the ravine to slump, affecting homes whose property lines backed onto the ravine.
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