Snow day!

Posted in: Garden, Island Life | 0

There is a fun page on the interwebs called SnowDays. It lets you create “paper” snowflakes and then paste them into a snowing vignette (with a message if you like). Perhaps not as much fun for the kiddos as the messy real thing, but quite a nice diversion for us “grown-ups”.

Today is a real snow day. The snow out here in Little Anse tends to blow away. No, really. It is constantly so windy here that most of the snow that falls blows straight back into the ocean or, I suppose, flies to the next village over. But yesterday lots of the white stuff came down and it managed to stick. It is sunny and the pretty combination of fresh snow and winter sunshine are  enough incentive to go out and take a few photos of the sleeping garden.

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The raised beds are buried in a thick bed of snow with only the tops of the twig trellises showing. The windswept texture of drifts of snow is so mesmerizing and I am always inspired by the shapes. Seems like a good time to start work on a series of Repoussé bracelets that describe the waves and rolls of the snow.

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I love this gateway. Built from salvaged Ash limbs and tied together with stout twine, it separates the upper garden from the lower raised beds. In the summer, this twig fence serves as a trellis that supports climbing beans, indeterminate tomatoes, tall snap peas, and provides shelter to our sunflowers against the ubiquitous Atlantic winds. It is interplanted with some living willow that will take over and form a hedge when the Ash limbs finally fade. But, right now, in midwinter I find the “boneyard” look of the bare fence quite charming.

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This is our bear-dog. Bear-dog is a rare breed – an Acadian Larch Dog. Her former owner was sending her to the dump and we sure could not let that happen! So she came to live here. Bear-dog looked cold though so she got a nice cosy scarf.

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