When I think of all the Yuletide projects I felt compelled to take on when the family was young, I’m overcome with a compelling urge to lie down for a long nap.
There were the light and dark Christmas cakes sent to all the family, each one covered in layers of almond paste, royal icing and decorations. Then there was the enormous tree, the house strung lavishly with lights and greenery, the Yule log, the Christmas eve trifle, the elaborate Christmas dinner, the flaming pudding. Exhaustion.
Now? Bliss. A few, almost all consumable, gifts. A pared-down Christmas turkey meal and an easy tourtiere and salad dinner tomorrow evening to mark the anniversary of my son’s adoption. I was making a tourtiere filling when the call came to pick him up — on Christmas Eve.
We arrived at my parents’ house in Sidney that afternoon, with a new baby. Most of the family were there. They all crowded into the bathroom to observe me changing a diaper. During the procedure the baby regurgitated, let loose a watery fountain, and pooped. My father’s comment: “Isn’t that nice. Everything works.”
My father, M.V. Chesnut, wrote this column before me. I guess I caught the gardening gene from him, though my mother’s family grew most of their own food on a farm in northern Alberta.
At the time of the adoption, I lived in a simple farm house in the middle of a huge alfalfa field, close to Kalamalka Lake in the Coldstream district of Vernon.
There I created a large vegetable and flower garden, divided in two sections by a wide centre path. The ground’s hard, back-breaking clay soil produced the most bountiful garden I’ve ever had.
Heavy, dense clay soils, despite their drainage and workability issues, hold on to both moisture and nutrients. They can be made more easily workable, over time, with additions of fine bark, shredded leaves, compost and composted manures. Never sand, unless you want concrete as a result.
In summer, I mulched the plantings with aged sawdust mixed with grass clippings from the extensive front lawn. In the fall, I scratched these materials into the soil. They worked effectively to help break up and lighten the heavy clay.
Last June, on the Denman Island Home and Garden tour, I came across clay soils again. And once more, I was reminded of their advantages. Broad bean plantings were impressive. In one garden I noticed beautiful, pristine lupins. These flowers are hard to grow well in my loose-textured, sand-based soil — the exact opposite of hard, clumping clay.
Whatever soil conditions, light exposures, and microclimates we end up gardening in, over time we come to know what does and does not grow well without much fuss. We work with what we have.
Noel Baba. You may have noticed an article on St. Nicholas, the saint who inspired the figure we know as Santa Claus, in the Dec. 9 Times Colonist. A fourth century Christian bishop in Myra on the south coast of Turkey, St. Nicholas was known for his many acts of kindness and generosity that put needy people on a path to a better life.
With apologies for the brief topic diversion, I remember Myra.
During my youthful roaming years, I took the “Orient Express” from Milan to Istanbul, with brief stopovers in Ljubljana and Sofia. After about a week in Istanbul I took a bus down through Turkey to Myra (now Demre).
In Myra I met a Dutch journalist who hiked with me around the historically interesting area. There were ancient tombs cut into nearby cliffs, and an amazing semi-circular Roman theatre with many tiers of rock-cut seating. Sitting high up in the theatre, I imagined performances on the “stage” below during Roman times.
We were shown the church of St. Nicholas, where remains of the original church could be seen at a lower level than its replacement. St. Nicholas was called “Noel Baba.”
Apart from a brief encounter with a viper, that afternoon was an enchanted one.
From Myra we hitched lifts to Marmaris, where we took the last ferry of the season, in October, to the nearby Greek island of Rhodes, where I lived for a year.
Joyeux Noel, happy holidays, a Merry Christmas to all. May the days of celebration be filled with sweetness and may the new year bring blessings of peace, contentment, and many pleasant gardening adventures.
