Primavera! and Vancouver Island emerges from fog, mud, rain, and the odd short lived snowfall during winter with an almost indecent hurry. One wakes up one spring morning, and the whole world is instant bloom, instant lawn, instant buds on trees, instant flowery meadows. The season for the ten mile diet has begun again.
Cherry Point Vinyard with rows and rows of tidily clipped vines, surrounded by meadows filled with mini daisies - Gaensebluemchen, as I knew them in Germany. Gooseflowers.
The race is on to dig out and eradicate masses of yellow dandelions, before they turn into a fragile and fertile starburst of seed pods, ready to fly forth and procreate to the dismay of hundreds of home gardeners, and to the delight of little kids who blow the seedpods off onto their magic journey.
The blue bells are ringing not only 'for me and my girl (boy?)' but anyone who has an ear to listen to their shy whispering.
The Gaensebluemchens, their faces smaller than a copper penny.
Definitely on the list for a wine soaked luncheon soon. The bistro is open and quite popular with the local landed/non landed gentry. No wonder, the menu is mouthwatering - and of course adhers to the 'locally grown' credo. Prices are decent as well. The new owner has immigrated from Ecuador, and just returned from a pleasant 'business holiday' in Mendoza, wine country of Argentina. He knows his grapes, his land, the secrets of extracting the best of them....and one can taste it in the result.
Everything absolutely neat and tidy, every wine stock individually and lovingly cared for.
The backyard 'feed lots', or better, mini pastures. Beside this one is a large array of baseball fields just outside Duncan. The cattle ignores whoops and hollers from the fans, and grazes contentedly in the shadow of fog enshrouded Mount Prevost.
This little darling is innocently enjoying the pre-barbeque season, when one or more of his bodyparts will be proudly seared to perfection by a happy backyard cook. HP sauce anyone?
He is just too sweet to eat...
Easter is past, so this little fellow may luck out and his woolly attire be woven into an earth mother garmet, instead of his whole little body finishing up shaped into a little rack of lamb, with some peas and mint sauce on the side.
Bucolic peace: grazing sheep, a few chickens way back under the trees, birds singing, apple trees blossoming....
Whatever it is, it looks pretty on the forest floor....
Ready for the new renters, who are still flirting in a pre-wedding frenzy.
Here is where the free-range gets into the eggs.
The chicken rights movements has decreed that chicken girls are entitled to have a male protector around, preferably a proud strutting ball of shimmering multicoloured feathers.
So roosters re-enter the rural paradise.
Paradise: Country air, country space, country quiet, country house. City dwellers move to live their rural back to the land dream - at least until the roosters do what they are bred to do: Crow loudy, crow early, crow often. Well, if they aren't busy keeping the 'girls' happy.
Then the neighbour farmer drizzles his field from his honey waggon, miniature horses mow the neighbour's front lawn, cows sink their rosy moist muzzles over white picket fences into the expensive shrubbery, and eat and ruminate on the roses, a whiff of a near by broiler chicken grow-op wafts into the conjugal bedroom, and guinea hens, roosters, pea cocks scream their heads off. Ah, the rural experience!
I personally love it.
Let them eat Crow!!
Or let them eat farm fresh eggs. Put your loonies in the bin, safely locked up. $3.50 a brown dozen, egg mental health care!! And never a whisper of NIMBY.
Percherons perching under high tension wires, converting freshly sprouted greenery into water soluble envirofriendly fertilizer.
Bit early for the pumpkins.
Lawn watering - the bane of surburbia, golf courses - and country homes.
Martin houses ready for the cheap (pun intended) crowd. Not that the little twitterers (yes, they do too!!) will notice, but they do enjoy a grand vista toward Booth Bay on Saltspring Island.
Some other unknown flowery bit, so small they probably full under the category of 'weeds'.
Plant your edible landscape - but do it inside the deer proof fence, Cowichan deer not only can READ they teach English in local primary schools.
Cherry Tree in full bloom.
The local gentry on their weekly weekend pilgrimage to La Saison on Mays Road. A little 'bistro' snuggled cosily inside a vinyard and vegetable garden: Great coffee, fresh breads, fresh crumbles, fresh quiches, fresh pies, fresh buns, fresh Bienenstich - all with a French Canadian (husband) flavour, slightly modified with some German (wife) Konditorei influence and voila: Afternoon delightful Kaffeklatsch!
The tiny place is packed with a constant stream of customers lining up at the counter, some to stay and enjoy, some just shopping, loaded with large bags full of fragrant treasure.
Apple Blossoms - delicately pink and white. Merridale Cider orchard must look like a field of blushing bridesmaids now.
And a Spring farewell: the little Brentwood Ferry has docked in Mill Bay for the last time in her 35+ years of duty. She is being replaced by something slighly larger and technically superior. Here she is, steaming past my window on her last departure from Saanich Inlet toward her 'working retirement'. She will be used to transport logging equipment, fishing equipment, construction vehicles somewhere 'up Island'.
I wonder if her crew was celebrating Spring down there inside the valianbt little ship....
