I love thyme. Period. I love the smell, the taste, the hardiness, the appearance, the growth habit and the flowers. I grow several plants in my garden. Since it is a perennial, it doesn’t grow well for me indoors, so the only time I get fresh thyme for my meals, is when I pick it from outdoors.
Here we are, November 20th, deep into autumn in Nova Scotia, and my thyme is still doing well.
Continue reading “It’s Still Thyme Time”My first dystopian novel is now available in eBook form. The paperback is coming soon.
Today is bathed in the shadow of yesterday.
The year is 2051. Almost three decades have passed since the Devastation destroyed civilization. Only the strong and wise survived; the weak and intellects perished. New societies emerged, forging a future with skills from the distant past.
In Green Wood, Eloise has lived in seclusion with her uncle for 12 years. While they receive visitors to Larkspur Cottage, the number of friends they have can be counted on one hand. When strangers arrive and capture her uncle, she is forced to run, but who can she turn to when she doesn’t know the land outside Green Wood or where her friends live?
Continue reading “Now Available: “Natural Selection””In the past few weeks, temperatures have dipped below zero a few times, gracing the early morning landscape with frost. It makes the air crisp and refreshing.
The leaves have clung to the trees fairly well in spite of a few days of high winds. In fact, the day I planted my Midgarden garlic (update coming soon), most of the leaves were still attached to the branches of the Horse Chestnut that hung over the end of the bed. That night, we reach -2 degrees Celsius. Heavy frost greeted us at dawn. Walking into the garden, I was shocked to see about 1/3 of the leaves from the huge tree had fallen and blanketed the ground, burying one end of the garlic bed in a thick layer.
A few days later, another 1/3 of the leaves fell off. Within a week, only a few remained on the horse chestnut.
Continue reading “The Season of Naked Trees”
The only thing I knew about Halloween as a child in the 70s was I could dress up and gather candy from neighbours. My older siblings, children in the 50s and 60s, remember trick or treating, but they did not start as young as many do today. A friend of mine remembers going when she was five in 1953. Her mother didn’t trick or treat but recalls a Halloween party at school. My parents did not celebrate Halloween. They were children in the 20s and 30s.
The earliest record of trick or treating in Canada took place in Kingston, Ontario, in 1911. At that time, it was called “guising”. It was brought to Canada by the Scottish and Irish who dressed in disguises and went door-to-door begging for food or money. They paid for the treat by singing, dancing or performing a trick. Guising can be traced back to the 1500s.
Many attribute the origin of Halloween to the Celtic festival Samhain that began more than 2,000 years ago. It marked the end of the harvest (summer) and the beginning of the darkness (winter). The Celts believed the barrier between the worlds of the living and the dead disappeared, and souls could cross over.
Continue reading “The Origin of All Hallow’s Eve”
In my gardening journey, I seek plants that grow well in my climate. If they are perennial – come back every year – it’s an added bonus. If I can eat it, it’s a staple.
Sunroot is both perennial and edible. They’ve been eaten by humans for centuries, yet I didn’t grow up eating them or growing them in the garden. I don’t know anyone who grew them. Once a staple in the homesteader garden, the sunroot has been replaced with more fashionable edible perennials such as rhubarb and asparagus.
When I tried to find a source for the tubers, I failed. My sister and her son joined the hunt. After two years, my nephew stumbled upon an old rural garden outlet that had sunroots growing in its field. They didn’t sell it but remembered it was growing there. They dug up a few tubers, and I was the lucky recipient of three small pieces.
Continue reading “Sunroots: a sustainable source of food for homesteaders”
In the past several years, I’ve heard a lot about preppers, and I’ve watched many videos on how they prepare. One topic of discussion that comes up regularly is long-term food storage. This food is intended to sustain individuals in the household for x-amount of time. Some keep a month’s supply of food on hand while others keep a year or two stashed in their pantry.
What continues to amuse me is up until about sixty years ago, having a storage of food in the pantry was common practice. Perhaps people living in cities were less inclined to keep a month’s worth of food on hand, but those living in the country dedicated space, time, money and energy to having a well-stocked pantry for the brutal winter months.
In today’s climate, my family would have been considered preppers because our freezer was full of deer meat, rabbit meat, fish and various items bought from the grocery store. By the end of October, shelves in the cold room were stocked with preserves my mother had done down: chow, pickles, cranberry jam, blueberry jam and a host of other foods picked from the garden or gathered from the forest that surrounded our neighbourhood.
Continue reading “Calculating Long-term Food Storage”I chose three quotes from one of my favourite actors for the front of my next novel Natural Selection. That actor is John Wayne. He’s been a hero of mine since I was a kid. While he was several generations before my time, he was a mainstay on our black and white television set.
My dad also enjoyed his films. They were more of the same generation except Dad was born in 1922, and John Wayne, given name Marion Robert Morrison, was born in 1907. He was 60 when I was born, and he died when I was 18.
Wayne’s tough, shoot from the hip style was addictive. He was an honourable man who spoke his mind. Whether I agreed with him or not, it was something I admired. That honour is lost on most actors and television personalities today. The only one left from that era is Clint Eastwood.
Continue reading ““Natural Selection” Front Matter Quotes”For the past few months, I’ve been disconnected with the movement of the world. I didn’t know what caused this lack of grounding, so I passed the days tackling the large list of projects I have on the go. Some days, I felt disorientated. It was like I was lost, a drift at sea with no land in sight and no sails to propel me forward.
This inspired a trip to a medium to see if I could find the source of the disconnect. Coincidentally, before I sat down, she had a vision of me walking the beach searching for people to save from a ship wreck. Apparently, I had feared my light was not bright enough to guide the ship to safety. However, my job was to save those who managed to crawl from the sea and to gather the bodies that drifted in.
Continue reading “Connecting the End of Summer to My Disconnect”On my journey to be self-sufficient with garlic – I mean Queen of Garlic – I have met with success in the summer of 2021. If you haven’t read about the garlic growing in my garden, check out this post: In the Garden: Growing Garlic.
While the garlic donated from my sister and nephew grew well, the garlic that has grown in my garden since November 2019, which I dubbed Midgarden Garlic, did amazing. I expected three cloves per bulb, but instead I got four or five cloves.
Continue reading “Garlic Update for 2021”Late last week, the proof arrived for Natural Selection. This is my first dystopian novel, and the third book in the Romance Collection. The novel is set to launch in October.
The paperback, standard print contains 402 pages. It measures 6 inches by 9 inches.
Diane McGyver 