Low-key weekend

Today we were supposed to go on a day trip with V. We wanted to experience Canada Day celebrations on a smaller scale in a smaller town and meet some friends. As much as we love the festivities around this day, I find it’s way too overcrowded and messy on Parliament Hill, here in the capital. And I’m not doing “good” in crowds. I think I picked up this phobia while living in Moscow – overcrowded spaces scare the heck out of me, I get claustrophobic, can’t breath and so on. So while I love Ottawa’s downtown on a normal day, during the celebrations I’d rather go someplace else.
But V had to work today and we cancelled our trip. Whole lot of disappointment, as you can imagine, I was so looking forward to getting out of the city, but instead, I‘m dealing with bare truth of our life these days – business comes first.
So lots of laundry and gardening for me instead.

P.S. We removed the wasps nest the other day. I just went to the store and bought some poisonous foam that worked very effectively and I got what I wanted: free of wasps shed. And I couldn’t possibly feel worse about it: something so full of life and growing got destroyed in a split second and is now hanging empty and lifeless. In moments like this, I wonder if nature and humans can ever harmlessly co-exist.

Garden progress

We are still not out of the woods in terms of stability around here, but we found a way to cope with life-related stuff - dive into backyard work!
Couple of evenings of outside work and I’ve managed to plant all of my tomatoes and cucumbers that have been screaming at me to get them into a real soil and out of yogurt cups:

 We also installed a rain barrel that I’ve ordered a while back. Feels great not to be wasting drinking water to water plants anymore. With rainy days that we’ve been having – it’s getting full pretty fast.

The progress came with a price though – I’m all itchy from monstrous mosquitos that seem to be blood thirsty even in the daylight. Gotta get us one of those lantern mosquito repellants soon.

Have you tried one of those?

Sustainable gardening

We are picking up our rain barrel this week and I thought I would share the source with other gardening enthusiasts out there: rainbarrel.ca. There are multiple locations listed to pick up your barrels from. The proceeds from the purchase go to support non-profit groups, schools and organizations.

Art barrel from 2011 auction. Image: rainbarrel.ca.

From a seedling into young plant

They’re growing up fast and becoming very promising young plants compared to what they were three and a half weeks ago.:) A little observation of mine: the egg carton plants (left) are developing at much slower rate than the plants I planted in aluminum baking trays (right). Total mystery to me, since I planted them at the same time and with the same type of soil. But I think it will work to our advantage – some tomatoes will be giving us fruits at a later date.
Can't you just hear how the bigger plants are screaming at me for deeper containers?
Re-potting this weekend is a MUST!

Have you been to Terra 20?

First one in Canada and in our city! Right next to Ikea, Pincrest Shopping Centre, to be specific.

Lots of green products from organic shampoos to organic clothing and kitchen décor. I was particularly impressed with their Eco bar, where you can fill a canister of a size you need with any type of cleaning product: laundry detergent, bath or window cleaner, etc. then pay at the cashier for the amount. Once you run out, you come back and refill it again in the same canister. I still need to read up on this system before I commit, but I think it’s worth looking into.