It’s April! It’s not even an April Fool’s joke, it’s actually April. I do not know what it was, but, as I mentioned before, March felt like it was three months long; not in a bad way, this is not a complaint, but it seemed to stretch on and on. Maybe it was because we had a short trip mid-month, who can say. All I know is that it is April, my birthday month!

I don’t play favourites with months, because I anthropomorphize everything and I don’t want to hurt any months’ feelings, but I love April. I especially love it here, because GUESS WHAT IT IS ACTUALLY SPRING! I had a weird seasonal cognitive dissonance back in October and November; I felt like it was September during those months, and now I feel like it should be May or June. My mind is on its own strange Daylight Savings-esque journey; my mind is falling back in fall and springing forward in spring, but instead of an hour, it’s months. Forty-eight years in the Canadian prairies, forty-six of which were in Calgary, have conditioned me to never let my guard down in April, because snow can easily continue into late May. But here, that is unheard of, and so I am in full-on garden preparation mode.

This is our new veggie garden, do you love it? I am so excited about it. My husband has been working nonstop on this project for over a month now; he built all the garden boxes and brought in many loads of dirt, he rototilled the flat part, and last Friday, he rented an auger and he and my son drilled holes to put up a giant fence, very necessary in this place where the wildlife roam and eat everything.

I cannot wait to start planting. One of the boxes we are reserving for my mother-in-law, who has been starting her own tomato plants from seeds that she saves from the previous year’s tomatoes, something which she has done for decades now. The rest of the boxes are going to be filled with cherry tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers – my Greek salad garden! – spinach and kale and lettuces, and so many herbs. The flat part will be a berry patch, plus there’s room for some squash. I’m planning butternut, zucchini, and pumpkin. I’ve only ever grown zucchini, so I’m quite excited to try something new.

A friend very sweetly said that, given our over-the-top vegetable consumption, we would be saving so much money on our grocery bills, and while I agreed with that in principle, I also thought of the expense of the wood, and the drainage rock, and the soil, and the new miter saw to cut the wood, and the new rototiller. Will the garden pay for itself? Not in our lifetime, Clifford. However, there is nothing like eating fresh vegetables grown in one’s own garden, and seasoning one’s meals with one’s own herbs, to make a person feel like Ma Ingalls. An incredibly spoiled and privileged Ma Ingalls, but Ma Ingalls nonetheless.

The veggie garden isn’t the only thing we are undertaking; we are also overhauling the grass and having giant flower beds put in. We are actually consulting with a garden designer who specializes in this area, and who is well-versed in the problem of deer, and also knowledgeable about drought-tolerant plants. She has some really great ideas and I can’t wait; the gnomes are anxious to get outside into their natural habitat.

If it were up to me, I would have no grass at all, just one giant garden, but having a nice lawn is very important to my husband, and having a lawn, not necessarily a nice one, but an existent one, is important to Rex. He needs somewhere to roll around in so that he can track grass and leaves all over the house, after all. The grass around our house is just a complete mess from the construction; it’s patchy and bumpy and still has some gravel in it. But! In six short weeks from now, Rex will be rolling around in soft, green, all new grass; he will be chewing sticks in it and leaving little shards everywhere, and my husband will be happily mowing up those shards along with the grass.

Is this going to become a gardening blog? Maybe! Well, probably not, but you can certainly expect many, many plant-related updates in the months to come.

Weekly Reading

How To Be A Better Person. As many of you know, I like to read a little inspiring something something right before my yoga practice; typically this means poetry, but at the start of this year I thought I’d try something else – a reread of a book that was already on my shelf. I met Kate Hanley in 2014 at the Blissdom Canada conference (bring back blogging conferences, except instead of panels about how to monetize, let’s just have parties and cozy chats, who’s in?), and in 2017 she very kindly sent me both of her newly-published books to be reviewed. I haven’t read either of them since that time, and I thought it was time to revisit. This is a lovely little book with helpful ideas on how to make small changes to improve your life and the world around you. It’s so interesting, I had made many notations in this book about things I felt were very important, when I read it in 2017. Some of these resonated seven years later, and some didn’t. Interesting how life changes and evolves. 

Tropical Attire Encouraged (And Other Phrases That Scare Me). If you don’t know by now that Alison Rosen’s podcast is one of my favourites, well, then, you haven’t been listening to me! It’s a delight and so is this entertaining book of short essays. The fifth anniversary edition has five new essays, the remainder were written around 2012-14 I think? It’s a fun trip down memory lane (skinny jeans!) (I’m still wearing them). Fans of the show will love this.

None Of This Is True. I have been learning a lot lately about the craft of writing, and one of the keys to a successful novel – particularly a psychological thriller! – is to “plant curiosity seeds” and then “water them” throughout the book, so that readers are interested to see the plant in full bloom, so to speak. This author is really excellent at that; even though psychological thrillers are not generally a genre I reach for, I was hooked from the beginning and dying to know what was going on. I think this was a pretty good read; I had a few issues with a couple of the reveals and details, which I shall obviously not go into here because I don’t want to be a spoilsport, but this was a solid, engaging read. I liked the lead up to the climax better than the actual denouement itself, which I found a little flat, but, as I said, a very compelling read.

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend, and even if it doesn’t feel like spring – hello, I love you, Calgary friends! – I hope you have a little spring in your step and sunshine in your heart. And maybe some chocolate? Do you have an Easter candy preference? I sure do; it’s Cadbury Mini-Eggs or NOTHING. Nothing, I say! Well, probably I would eat something else, but there is something amazing about those little shells. And aren’t these nests so cute? Happy April, everyone. xo