These pictures are from the summer. I'm still catching up a bit from last year. As stated previously, it's all Gracie's fault. The necessity of keeping my needlepoint work from my sister meant I had to stay away from the keyboard for fear of spilling the beans.
Anyway, while we were back in the Canada in August, we visited an old treeplanting buddy named Heather. She and her husband Lamont run an organic farm on the Saanich Peninsula of Vancouver Island. Their place is called Northbrook Farm and they supply organic vegetables to various local restaurants and are part of a home delivery service called Saanich Organics. If you live in the Victoria area, you should contact them for all of your daily gourd and rutabaga needs.
While we were there we helped her pick melons and beets. You smell melons to tell if they're ripe. I didn't know that. Now, every time I see a pair of melons I like the look of, I stick my face right up to them and take a deep breath. Mmm... Melons...
Beets are trickier. We were picking "small beets". Apparently restaurants are quite picky about what a small beet is. I figure if it's smaller than my head, it's a small beet. This wasn't good enough for Heather, however, and a large proportion of my beets went to feed the chickens.
I like Heather. She's fun. In fact, I like her so much we were almost engaged once. Well, actually, we just told people we were engaged. I've never even kissed the woman, never mind smelled her melons. It was a long time ago and it was at my 16 year high school reunion and Vicki was out of the country and so Heather and I went as a couple and lied to a huge number of people I used to call friends. You can see details about the whole shoddy affair.
And now she's a farm girl and lives in a house heated by boiling magma deep beneath the surface of the Earth. It's funny how people change.
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