Springtime - New Life Arises from Death

This year, Lent started off cold and snowy, with bare trees and everyone feeling like winter just wouldn't come to an end.  As Lent continued, the snow began to give way, the earth began to thaw, and little green sprouts pushed their heads up through the piles of dead plant life from the fall and dirt piled up from the winter snow.

Around the middle of Lent, our family planted some sunflower seeds inside - one of the clearest reminders that new life rises out of death; a plant, having dried up and died, leaves a dry seed as a reminder of its death.  We buried the seeds, seemingly dead, in the ground in hope that new life would come.

In the Roman tradition of the Church, there has existed a strong idea that the Feast of the Resurrection is closely tied to the arrival of spring and the new life that it brings out the death seen in winter.  In fact, many great theologians, from St. Ambrose to Pope Benedict XVI, have believed and given great strength to the idea that Christ did in fact rise from the dead on March 25, the same day he was conceived, and the same day that God created the world - all great signs of hope and new life.

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Now, only 3 days for the celebration, even the 10-foot piles of snow have receded, green grass has pushed up through the matted brown grass of the fall, and tulips and daffodils are just about ready to bloom and celebrate the greatest event of all history with the world.

Just about all the sunflower seeds we planted have sprouted and many have grown a few inches tall.

The world (or at least the part of it where we live) is just about to burst with new life, proclaiming the new life that Christ brought us in his death and resurrection.

Here are some more pictures of our sunflower plants:

 These are the egg carts we planted them in just until they germinated:

The transplanting process:

The wagon I use to take them outside to get some direct sunshine on warm days:

May is Time to Start Another Garden!

For my family, gardening has progressed from accidental tomato and papaya plants, to our beautiful bougainvilleas and mini rose bush in Playa del Carmen,
to last year's sunflowers here in Canada, and this year to a shared garden and a more complete house-side garden (instead of the usual flower gardens.)

Our elderly neighbour, who can no longer plant her garden alone, as asked me to help her plant and care for her garden, and has offered us the share the vegetables.  Her garden includes:

• tomatoes
• green, red and yellow peppers
• potatoes
• onions
• radishes

 and a few other items I can't remember right now.  Here are some pictures:

In the same flower garden where we planted the sunflowers last year, I planted various items since they all have space between them:

• tomatoes
• sunflowers (which will be tall and rise above the rest)
• string beans (between the tomato plants)
• marigolds (in a well-spaced line right in front)
• cilantro (between the marigolds)
• more potatoes (around the more shaded side of the house)

I don't know if I've crowded too much in, but we'll see.  It's our first experiment.  Weeding won't be a problem since it's all accessible from the front of the flower garden.  The kids helped to plant it again, and were very excited.

Unfortunately, I didn't get pictures of the kids helping, but I'll get pictures of them at harvest time.  Here are some pictures I took of the visible plants later in the evening:

These are the packages from the cilantro and string bean seeds:

I'm looking forward to enjoying fresh vegetables in August and September!

Sunflowers

During June, my sons and I planted some sunflower seeds in the flower garden beside the house.  We planted 12 seeds.  We planted them late (I think May is ideal) and it was a very dry summer.  However, with nightly watering and the daily careful watching of my 4-year-old, two finally sprouted.  Both grew up and finally, last week while I was here in Mexico, the flowers opened.  My wife sent me pictures.

First, this is us planting them in June:

Now, three months later, here are my two sons, each with the sunflower that they claimed as their own (well, really the older one dictated which one belonged to whom, but they're both happy:)

Springtime in Canada

While living in year-round warm weather sounds (and is) attractive for many reasons, there’s something wonderful about the passing of real seasons – seasons you can see, feel, smell and even hear.

I love the weather in Mexico – especially places like Cuernavaca – but the seasons really only pass on the calendar, and the change between sunny and rainy or hot and really hot (in the case of Playa del Carmen) really don’t match up with the traditional northern seasons I love so much, besides the fact that the complete appeal to all senses isn’t so noticeably present.

Today my wife, who can’t stand weather colder than 20 degrees Celsius, told me that there was something extraordinarily beautiful in seeing gardens full of freshly blooming flowers, bright green leaves just beginning to sprout from their buds, and lush, green grass, all against a sunny sky, on a day that’s finally warm enough to take off your sweater – after so many weeks of cold, grey, rainy days, with spring battling to emerge from a unseemly long season that resembled late winter more than anything else.  You can smell the flowers and freshly cut grass.  You can hear the birds singing in a sort of relief, a proclamation of the coming warmth.

Getting on an airplane and flying somewhere warm just doesn’t have the same rich appeal to the senses.

There’s is something very beautiful in this changing of the seasons in Canada.  I love every season in Canada just because it is such a beautiful contrast to the one that proceeds it.

Our Beautiful Bougainvilleas - Flowers, Flowers and more Flowers

As you can see in this picture, we now have a beautiful bougainvillea plant growing in front of our living room window.  Of course, it's going to get much bigger than this.  Our plan is to draw wires between the protection bars on the two windows so it grows up and covers the upper window, providing shade.  This plant has been part of our house since we moved here a year and half ago and has grown marvellously since then.

The flowers grow almost all the time, and the neighbourhood kids love pulling them off and making heart shapes, or flower-covered walkways on the ground.  At first we were going to tell them not to, but then we realized the flowers grow back so quickly that it really doesn't matter.  We've just told them not to break the plant itself, and only pull of the petals.  Yesterday my wife was going to take a picture of the heart they made, but the batteries in the camera were dead.  Another time.

As you can see from the second picture, the plant was tiny when bought in August 2010.  I'm  impressed and happy with how it's grown.

To read more about our gardening, read:

• Our Mexican Marigolds - Cempoalxochitl, the Flower of the Dead 
• Our homegrown tomatoes 
• More Gardening - Our Mini Rose Bush 
• My Papaya Tree and Our First Homegrown Papaya

Our Mexican Marigolds - Cempoalxochitl, the Flower of the Dead

The Cempoalxochitl (marigolds) in our garden

These flowers have been growing beautifully in our back flower bed. They are Mexican Marigolds, called Cempoalxochitl (pronounced cem-pa-SU-chil) in Mexico, which is the Aztec name.

The story behind these is more significant than our other gardening endeavours.  At the beginning of November, we celebrated Mexico's Day of the Dead by making traditional alters to the deceased nearest to us.  To read about the altars, and see pictures, read:

Day of the Dead - An Altar for my Grandparents
Remebering Someone Dear to Us

The main flowers used on these altars, as well as in other parts of the decoration are Mexican Marigolds.  After taking down the altars on Nov. 3, we placed the flowers on top of our book shelf to dry.  When my wife's mom arrived at the end of the same month, she found them, and remembered that they grow easily.  So, she removed the seeds and sprinkled them into a flowering pot we had sitting in the back yard.  Within a few days, the plants were sprouting out.

A close up of a full Cempoalxochitl flower

In January, when I transplanted them to our newly extended flower bed, they still didn't have any flowers.  There is now a total of about 15 - 20.

For a little about the tradition of the flowers and other symbols related with the holidays, read:

Day of the Dead - The Symbols and Traditional Elements

Some more flowers - these ones never opened fully

For more about my gardening, read:

Our homegrown tomatoes
More Gardening - Our Mini Rose Bush


My Papaya Tree and Our First Homegrown Papaya

Have you ever seen a tree like this one?

Notice the woven trunk, which is actually one single trunk!

I've never seen a tree like this one before.  The trunk, as seen in the picture, is a series of "smaller trunks" woven together into the cylindrical shape seen; the really impressive thing is that the points where the "smaller trunks" touch, they are actually fused together sharking the same bark; they've actually grown together and become attached.  So the trunk you see is actually one single trunk, shaped as a hollow cylinder with a woven service.

I've seen some larger trees around here, that seem to have multiple parts of one large trunk, sometimes even with spaces between parts of them, but never anything like this.

This was clearly planned and somehow "convinced" to grow this way.  But I can't image how it is possible. 



If anyone reading this blog knows how this works, please tell me!

We found this tree downtown Playa del Carmen, at the main city bus transfer point. Next time I go by, I might just knock and ask.  I'm very impressed by this strange but beautiful plant.

I uploaded the photo with higher resolution than normal so you can view it with more detail if you like.


If you want to read about my own garden - a very easy to understand, but enjoyable mistake, read:

Our homegrown tomatoes
More Gardening - Our Mini Rose Bush
My Papaya Tree and Our First Homegrown Papaya

Our homegrown tomatoes

Our accidental tomato plant

A bit less than a year ago, after filling our two flower gardens (front yard and back yard) with less-than-fully decomposed compost, tomatoes were among the first plants to sprout up.  While we pulled up most of the other kinds of plants, I recognized the shape of the tomato leaf (my parents have grown tomatoes in their garden for as long as I can remember) and we decided to keep them out of sheer curiosity.

Another view of the same home-grown tomatoes

As you can see from the pictures, the plants grew very large and produced beautiful red tomatoes.  Since my wife was running a little stationary shop for the local school at the time, kids took most of the ones from the front garden (seen in these pictures) but we enjoyed a few.  The ones from the back garden were smaller and there were fewer of them (although the plants grew quickly along the fence like vines,) but we also enjoyed a few of those.  They were delicious, as sun-ripened fruit always is!

More Gardening - Our Mini Rose Bush

A Beautiful Mini Rose - about 2" in size?

This is one of 2 plants that we grew intentionally from the beginning, our mini rose bush, the currently stand about 20 inches high, and is having it's 3rd or 4th burst of flowers.  It's located directly under the our living room window, with a larger bougainvilleas plant overshadowing it.  One picture shows both plans a bit more than a year ago not long after they were planted.
 

The entire bush - notice new buds, and fallen Bougainvilleas pedals

The recent flowers have been booming the most beautifully, and a greater number of them are showing up.

The rose can faintly be seen on the lower right, above the rocks

My Papaya Tree and Our First Homegrown Papaya

Our Papaya Trees

Have you ever grown your own fruit or vegetables?  We don't do it with any serious commitment, and it started mostly by accident.  We have a compost in our small back yard.  First some of the seeds from the fruit we buy spilled out of the container (not many) and others were carried off by ants (there are thousands of ants around here.)  Later more fruit and vegetables sprouted up from our less-than-completely decomposed compost when we spread it out through our newly created garden.

The first result of this accidental process was a papaya tree.  At first I thought it was just a big weed; weeds around here get HUGE.  But I hesitated to pull it up, because I had seen a similar plant in a neighbour's front yard, which seemed to be there on purpose. So I asked the neighbor, and he told me it was papaya.  So, of course, I let it go.

Our first ripe papaya - today!

That was about a year ago, and now we have to little trees (about as tall as me) growing side by side.  The smallest one was the first to grow fruit, but most of the little papayas kept falling off, very tiny and green.  Finally, about a week ago, a larger one fell off, and we left it in the sun to ripen.

By "larger" I mean 6 inches - hardly the right size for a papaya.  It's ripe now, and tomorrow morning we're going to try it.  We're excited!  This will be our second home-grown food; although the tomato plants showed up later, they produced fruit much quicker (last summer) - they were delicious!

Green papayas still on the tree

About 10 more papayas are currently growing and are already longer than this one, although they are thinner; hopefully this means they will fill out and become full-sized papayas.

I'll pictures and posts of our other plants over the next few days, both accidental (tomato, pineapple, avocado, beans and Mexican Marigolds - the famous Cempoalxochitl, pronounced "CEM-pa-su-chil"or flower of the dead) and planned growth (Bougainvilleas, and miniature roses.)

A papaya flower