"Just in time" can feel pretty good; it means that something has occurred at the right moment to take full advantage of circumstances, usually beyond one's control, to establish something that must be done or that gives satisfaction. I found my "just-in-time" moment of satisfaction when, last night, the sky was pummelled with dark, threatening clouds and gave loose to a voluminous downfall of rain that hasn't stopped since.

To me, there's little as satisfying as of-the-moment pleasure in realizing that yes, you got your plants set up, and though you've taken care to water them to give them a head-start, nature herself has intervened on behalf of those plants to do the job properly. It must be a little like, on a vastly smaller scale, what farmers experience in relief when their crops are irrigated by natural means and they can breathe a little sigh of satisfaction and gratitude to nature.

Yesterday I set about almost completing the season's planting. There's more yet to be done, but the greater balance has been accomplished. The initial visual satisfaction of seeing colour, however immature, where just a few hours before there was none, in the understanding that the colour and the plants responsible for them will mature and bloom incessantly through the hot days of summer providing the final contentment.

It just so happened that yesterday was scorching hot, reaching 30 degrees with a mitigating wind. My husband completed filling the backyard garden pots with soil, and though I didn't mange to fill them with the begonias that I overwinter in bulb form in our basement, that will be left for another day. I completed setting the vine-fillers in the garden pots and urns at the front of the house, planted tomatoes and herbs, perennials like liatris, delphinium and chrysanthemum and several miniature ornamental roses.

And then, we set off for a very humid, hot ravine walk to complete the afternoon's activities. The sound of evening rain is comforting to a gardener who has completed most of the planting chores that were envisioned for a certain time in a certain place, in the certainty that nature will assist in the nursery-chore of supporting health and maximum production in the plants tenderly placed in the garden.

There was additional gratification in this day dawning overcast, with torrential rainfalls, the oppressive heat of yesterday succumbing to more 'reasonable' temperatures, the cheerfully bright heads of flowers appearing to pop up out of nowhere, delighting in their new atmosphere. Even our now-very-large magnolia has recognized its opportunity, beginning to open its lush, large pink blooms.

It's a start, by no means impressive, but delighting me no end nonetheless. That I was able -- thanks to the extremely clement weather blessing the Ottawa Valley with warmth, sun and rain in appreciable amounts to enable me to begin the planting process for another spring, anticipating ongoing summer viewing pleasure -- to commence with the annual planting.

The gardens look raw and sere; those perennials that have begun their entrance into spring in preparation for a long, hot summer (dare we hope!) have hardly made an impression yet on the gardens. Each time I see a newly-appearing bit of green I exult, knowing that yet another plant made it through our extraordinarily long, frigid, harsh winter. Viewed overall, the gardens are nothing yet to celebrate, but they will reach that point and then it will all be taken for granted.

Yesterday it was windy as well as warm and with sunny intervals. So I took an inventory of the annual plants and flowers we've accumulated over the past week with the intention of planting them at the first opportunity, taking into account type, colour, anticipated growth, texture and how best to mingle or maintain them separately for maximum effect. I've been doing this for so long it's not a chore by any means, but a pleasure that can be expedited on the basis of familiarity.

In several hours' time I was able to effectively plant all of the garden pots and urns at the front of the house; the back will wait for another opportunity, most likely this coming week-end. My husband had many errands to run and drove out several times to dispatch them, each time returning with another choice group of flowers, until I finally convinced him we'd be running out of planting room. The last time he drove out he returned with yet another hanging basket; large and lush with mature flowers, a treat for flower-hungry eyes.

While I was planting, little Riley made himself comfortable sitting about and reclining in the sun or shade, whatever he was inclined to, sporadically. The birds and squirrels who regularly arrive at the feeding stations we've had out since winter more or less ignore him and he returns the compliment. All the slate-backed juncos that had found our seed offerings extremely attractive have now moved on, replaced by a more rare species in these parts; white-crowned sparrows, much bolder than the juncos, happy to take temporary possession of what the earlier migrants had enjoyed.

Squirrels continued to accommodate themselves to my near presence. Two tiny red squirrels in particular seemed to just find me invisible as they went about selecting nuts for their snacking appetite. One little fellow at one point decided to lecture me on squirrel-people etiquette and I had to remind him that I too live here.

Compelled by a tradition of our personal making, one just incidentally shared by much of Canadian gardeners in general, we made the trek to our favourite gardening centre. It sits on a hilly knoll overlooking a highway on one side, country road on another, an old farm which we discovered as a reliable venue where we're able to procure the most mature, healthiest floral stock for annual planting in the area. We've been returning to the site, called Cleroux Gardens for well over a decade, since the closure of our once-favourite gardening vendors, White Rose Nurseries.

We've gained a bit of an intimate knowledge of the life of the proprietress of the Cleroux Gardens over the years, through an exchange of pleasantries that eventually opened up to personal revelations, in the most natural of ways; people taking an human-interest in one another.

Much has changed in the personal life of the owner since we first met, but the fundamentals of her garden enterprise has not; reliability, prime garden offerings, advice when requested, and preferential pricing. It's a joy to pass through the rows of greenhouses stocked with hanging baskets in colourful, fragrant array, the greenhouse floors and tables loaded with beautiful plants that gardeners hunger after, particularly at this time of year when they envision their gardens for the coming year reflecting the Paradise of their souls' yearnings.

So we went through the various rows of offerings and made our mutually-agreed-upon selections. They are meant mostly for all the various garden pots and planters we maintain around our house. Which meant we needed geraniums in their various blaze of colours, begonias, our most favourite of summer-flowering plants, dracaena, to centre the pots, lobelia and trailing vines to complement the larger plants, and a variety of odds and ends. Unlike in other years when we were challenged to load everything into the trunk of a car, this time there was no shortage of room in my husband's little red truck box.

Now, all that's left to be done is the actual planting. With which I plan to proceed this day. This will not be the end of the accumulation of summer flowering plants, but it does form the basis of what we plan to enjoy throughout the summer and fall months.

Finally, and at last the days of spring discovery have arrived.

Wandering through our neighbourhood wooded ravine is like sauntering through a treasure-landscape of jewels, shyly revealing themselves with the arrival of more moderate temperatures, spring rain and strengthened sunrays.

These are, for the most part, fleeting treasures, present at precisely the time of year when the atmosphere is most gentle and the trees have not yet acquired their green mantle shielding the forest floor from the warming, life-generating rays of the sun whose kiss most flowers require to bloom.

In our ramble through the ravine yesterday, to our delight we saw the first Jacks-in-the-Pulpit beginning to emerge, an always-looked-forward-to event for us.

The old willow that had fallen straight across the creek, shattered at its base, its crown destroyed in the crash that ensued, still adamantly insists it has a right to live, and regularly sends up green shoots from its recumbent trunk, reaching for the sun.

We came across trout lilies, fungi, the first of the woodland violets, both yellow and mauve, Serviceberry beginning its evanescently-short bloom, the odd wild strawberry in bloom, trilliums, red baneberry, lilies-of-the-valley (not yet in bloom), horsetails (those unattractive, primitive plants used in the Medieval era in scriptoriums to erase the ink from vellum) and false Solomon's seal just beginning to take on its juvenile appearance.

Yesterday my husband hauled all of our clay and ceramic garden pots out from under the deck where they are stored overwinter. They're large and heavy and it's difficult to move them about, but with the help of a two-wheeled dolly the work is made manageable. It isn't practical to leave them in place over the winter months since they would be susceptible to cracking loaded with snow and ice and under stress from freeze-and-thaw conditions.

So now they're in place all around the front gardens and the backyard where we're accustomed to planting annual flowers to colour our landscape above and beyond what our perennials offer, and tomato plants just for the sheer love of watching the miracle of food growing within our own property on a postage-stamp-sized (50' by 100') urban lot.

Next step is filling all the pots with a mixture of garden soil, peat moss and well-seasoned sheep manure. Before I plant the annuals there will be a liberal sprinkling and mixing-in of a combination of blood- and bone-meal. And then we can anticipate the pleasure of witnessing the annuals mature and privilege us with the spectacle of their never-ending bloom-production from late May to early October, the practical growing season in this part of the world, without danger of frost.

Of course placing the pots inevitably interferred with some of the bird-and-squirrel feeding stations we've set up around the front of the house. One little red squirrel in particular, the one we often laughingly called "the boss" for her obvious sentiment of sole ownership of the site on our front porch seems very confused over the displacement; the large tray holding seed and nuts having been transferred from its perch on one of the porch banisters to a nearby wrought-iron table sitting on a stone patio within the embrace of the garden. She either has not yet discovered the alternate site or is dreadfully upset over the change. And she is obviously pregnant, which seems late in the season.

A few nights back as we indulged in a last-minute check before going up to bed, from the glassed front door, there was the raccoon making itself comfortable on the porch floor surrounded by nuts and seeds and delicately selecting those of interest to it. It sat, plumply large and hunched over its task, its striped tail curled behind its body, looking solitary and somehow pensive, to us. We watched for awhile, too dark to successfully take photographs, admiring and yet feeling sad about its lonely presence.

At long last, just as Spring's adoring public was beginning to despair that she would ever stop teasing us and present herself in her fully determined glory in our atmosphere and landscape, she has decided to appear. Full sun, refreshing breezes, and a high yesterday and for the next three days of 23 degrees. What more could we possibly ask for?

On Friday, while a pleasant day, we had no idea that the following day would be so absolutely perfect. Friday was when my husband decided it was time to put up the canvass awning over the deck, and reinstall the summer furniture for our outdoor house extension in anticipation of our long, lazy summer months of pure pleasure.

In the ravine, coltsfoot has bloomed bright yellow, almost indistinguishable but for its stalk and close scrutiny, with dandelions in their glory, and shy trout lilies can be glimpsed on the forest floor, their small yellow heads straining toward the sun. Now too, the trilliums are opening their blooms and when the sun glances on the crimson petals they absolutely gleam with joy. The honeysuckles and the dogwood are putting on their green coats and will soon both begin to blossom. We're on the lookout now for the flowering of the Serviceberry trees, and the ferns are unfurling just a tad after schedule, while the catkins of the hazelnut shrubs promise a productive season ahead and as well for the raspberry canes coming into leaf.

In our gardens early blooming perennials have begun to evidence themselves, poking out of the fertile soil, from lilies to peonies, coral bells to hostas, spirea to lilacs, burning bush to sandcherry, climbing hydrangea to honeysuckle.

Yesterday, off we went to drop by two neighbourhood garden centres. Our first purchase was two new pairs of secateurs on sale at an irresistible price. I am seldom able to resist Clematis and last year we lost several, so this was an opportunity to replace them, and they were quickly dug into the garden for vertical display this coming summer. Some of our clematis have already shown new growth, others leave us questioning whether they will return. The Forget-me-nots are up, the Japanese spurge has bloomed already, lilies of the valley coming up, and so are the Bleeding Hearts.

We bought baskets of bright lovely verbena, bacopa, million bells, begonias, New Guinea impatiens and fuschia, hanging three in the front garden and five on the deck, for ultimate pleasure in viewing them at close range.

Riley is not having any problems returning to the outdoor life now that outdoor life possibilities have finally entered our landscape.

The charity industry has found its niche as governments, cash-strapped by growing populations all demanding their fair share of attention as they see it from universal tax-paid coffers, find themselves struggling to meet the demands of social issues from grants to medical, education, legal, migrant-settling, and a host of other matters claiming first priority, forcing them to end up editing their priorities, cutting back on support, relying increasingly on private charities to fund themselves.

The proliferation of call centres working for private industry as well as charitable institutions has made life miserable for people responding to telephone calls that are either automated or anchored by someone whose use of the English language has been diluted through the lens of their native tongue. The irritation quotient of incessant dinnertime calls, of doorbells ringing to reveal itinerant, low-paid representatives of one never-heard-of-charity or another, or fly-by-night service enterprise drives people crazy.

Aside from alienating potential donors to worthy causes who tend to lump all such pleas for support as nuisance calls into a basket of negative thought, the well-known charities whose work has been well established and creatively useful, are increasingly seeing their once-guaranteed avenue of fund-raising closing down.

I have found, increasingly, when out canvassing my neighbourhood for the long-established medical charities such as Heart & Stroke, Arthritis Society, Canadian Diabetes Association, Canadian Cancer Society, that people are suffering from an overkill of requests. Rather than face someone on their doorstep many people now prefer to make their own choices online and conduct charitable giving in that manner. Who can blame them? I do it myself, while never turning away someone canvassing for a legitimate charity at my door.

With the advent of so many incidents (we read about these events in the newspapers and shudder lest something like a home invasion occur to us) of increasing urban crime, people are becoming loathe to acknowledge a doorbell ringing after dark; they simply will not respond. A door-to-door canvasser knows it's useless to canvass during the day when people are either out at work or shopping, so they will use the week-end to canvass, and alternatively, the evening hours when people do tend to be in their homes.

It's a Catch-22 situation. Canvass in daylight hours to find no response from an owner-empty house, or do it in the evening when people have had their evening meals, want to relax and shut out the outside world, and gain their enmity for disturbing them. The era of the neighbourhood door-to-door canvass has seen its death-knell, thanks to the alienation of a charity-overtaxed society.