This Week's Favourite Things! May 12th - May 18th, 2014

1.  Straw mulch.  It's gardening time and I've been a bit obsessed with our berry bushes and putting mulch around them to keep down weeds.  A nice horse owner gave us a few bales of old hay (which he assured us was never sprayed with herbicides) and now I'm wondering why I didn't do this 2 years ago when I first planted some raspberries.  Throwing down a pile of straw seems a lot easier than weeding.

New to the garden are 6 blueberry bushes.  4 of them were very big! from Indian Garden Farm Market in Bridgewater.

I also moved our haskap berry bushes which I picked up at an open house last year for LaHave Natural Farms which isn't too far from us.  The garden was pretty full when I brought them home so they got put in a row and overcrowded by some New Zealand spinach.  Last month I dug them up and moved them to a south facing slope.  They're a lot happier now, have grown lots and put out some flowers.  And now they are mulched! Looking forward to trying some fresh berries.

Haskap Berry Bushes planted from small seedlings in 2013

Haskap berry patch with some oregano plants around them and a bed of lupines that were started from seeds last year above them.

Here's a shot of part of our raspberry section.  I pruned the old fruit bearing stalks, dug up and moved some daughters around to fill in the rows and put straw mulch around.  There are a couple of lupine plants in there too.

 

These got "mulched" with silage plastic instead of straw, but here's a shot of the current patch which was started from cuttings my mom mailed to me from her yard in BC in 2012.

2. Mindfulness.  Had a great visit with an old friend, Malcolm, who is CEO of Rhythm Mastery  in Calgary and was in Halifax giving a workshop at the Podium conference.  Mal is a percussionist but also studying neuroscience so we had some great chats about mindfulness. His visit was timely as I want to have that be the main point of my art practice again, and to focus on making fewer things but making them better.

3. Carrefour Atlantic  while showing Malcolm a bit of Halifax we visited this shop in the Historic Properties and had a great chat with the owner, Michel.  I ended up mentioning this blog and suddenly I'm interested in his suggestion of making a scene of 10 - 15 figurines for his shop; including puffins as he also owns the Puffin Gallery across the hall.  I haven't felt like sculpting for awhile, having instead been ruminating over some art business choices I've made over the past few years but finally I'm feeling like getting over myself and moving forward... mindfully!

4. Lucky Rabbit Pottery.  In the middle of all this musing I checked out the new work that Lucky Rabbit Pottery has been making for an upcoming show at the Mary Black Gallery.  It's really spectacular! and super inspiring. I love their stuff and have one of their teapots but these new pieces look incredible.

5. Ravenview Art & Craft.  Discovered these folks on twitter and I really like their work and the way they've organized their website, including blog posts about their garden.