Small Pond Trading Cards, Part 2

Here's the continuation of our "trading card" series begun in Part 1.

SEE PART 3

SEE PART 4

A Year's Worth of Flowers

With Valentine's Day just around the corner, I have a gift for you: a year's worth of flowers. I hope you enjoy them (...and I'm sorry, but you have to share them with everyone else on the internet).

Last year I decided that I would try to take a photo of every type of flower that I found growing on the Small Pond Arts farm here in beautiful Prince Edward County. I went out with my camera almost every single day, looking for something new. 

The project started out slowly, but the first flowers of the year always send my heart a-flutter. After a gruelling winter, spring had arrived!

Things really started going gangbusters in May.

Many of these are non-native species, planted by some flower-loving gardener who lived here before us.

I enjoyed the daily ritual of walking around the property, peering at the ground, training my sense of observation.

June brought many more wildflowers, and many vegetables in our garden started flowering.

July saw the sunflowers and hollyhocks burst into their full glory, and one lone poppy sprang out of nowhere.

The only decorative flowers that I plant every year are sunflowers; it's become a tradition. We've got a great spot for them, and in the fall we love watching the blue jays who visit to feed on the seeds.

Blue Jay perched on a sunflower

By August things started slowing right down. Although there was still lots in bloom, these tiny purples were the only new flowers I could find.

I know there are a few species that I missed. Some last just a few days, and then they are gone...

And that, my friends, is a year's worth of flowers at Small Pond Arts, some 95 varieties! I have yet to identify most of them, but perhaps that is a job for another season. 

Make sure you take the time to stop and smell the flowers!

Second Spring

This month we are celebrating the first anniversary of Small Pond Arts, and our second spring on the farm. When I look back on the past year, it is with surreal amazement that I take stock of all that we’ve accomplished. There is a confidence that comes with embarking on year two; there is a little less guesswork, a little less re-inventing the wheel.

I’m not going to lie, our first winter here was LONG, even though we went away for five weeks! Our 150-year old farmhouse is (not surprisingly) poorly insulated and drafty, and I wore a toque 24/7 from November through April. I missed the constant flow of friends and visitors, and had to mentally adjust to the solitude that comes with living in a seasonal community in the off-season. Of course this solitude has its benefits. Milé and I have both been incredibly productive, and have had the time to focus on our artistic pursuits. We seem to live a life of extremes; with the dawning of May we bid adieu to free time and embrace the madness of the busy season. There’s already been a steady stream of visitors, and the constantly-needing-to-be-cut grass reminds me that there won’t be much rest now until the fall when the cooler temperatures return.

Spring at Small Pond is nothing short of glorious. The flowers are coming up, the frogs are singing, the birds are building their nests, the rhubarb is daily doubling in size. It’s easy to be optimistic.

Although we’ve been hard at work over the past weeks, this spring the pace is a little less frenzied. Between the frequent rain showers, I’ve been spending a lot of time outside. I’ve continued hauling junk out of the woods, and have been arranging rocks and fallen logs to help give shape the Clearing and the Artists’ Trail.

I uncovered this cool stone wall, which turned out to be under several feet of dirt at the base of the old barn floor:

A few weeks ago some gale-force winds tore through the County, toppling our rather large and substantial outhouse.

The first step in raising an outhouse is acknowledging that it is tipped over.

This occasion called for an impromptu “outhouse raising party” – and we had plenty of friends show up to help us get the outhouse back in place.

Here we celebrate our achievement.  Can you spot the puppet?

Over the winter months I’ve been reading a lot about food, and our pitifully dysfunctional modern food system. On July 24 we’re giving artists and community members the opportunity to express their own thoughts and feelings about food with Cornography, an afternoon of art featuring more than 40 participants.

Milé is also on the cusp of launching a food-related art show, Field to Canvas, a series of portraits of local farmers. I’ve been watching him paint these portraits for more than four months now, and they really are a homage to the people who grow our food. With fresh, organic, REAL food on our minds, this spring we doubled the size of our garden. We just finished building the fence around it, and the first veggies went in yesterday, with LOTS more to come.



Milé rototills the garden

In June we’ll be building an outdoor cob bake oven, inspired by my time with Bread & Puppet Theater and four years of working in Dufferin Grove Park with Clay & Paper Theatre. Not only are bake ovens a great symbol of community, this project is also helping us move toward sustainability by allowing us to bake without using electricity.

In August, the shadow puppets will return to Small Pond, with three performances of Doubt Seed and our new show, The History of Shadows. I can’t wait to have my amazing crew of collaborators back here at the farm so we can do it all over again!

We’ve got lots of residents booking their summer stays with us. I love meeting new people, and can’t wait to welcome this year’s resident artists (the first of the season arrive today!). There are still plenty of spots left, but if you are thinking of a residency this summer, you should think about contacting us sooner than later.

We have come so far, yet in many ways we are still at the beginning. We have so many things we want to accomplish and improve upon, and there are so many surprises around the corner. Who will we meet? What crazy projects will we dream up? If I had a crystal ball, I would throw it into the woods. I prefer to be surprised.

Finally, a huge thank-you to everyone who has helped us make Small Pond the dream come true! Friends and family, you have been capital-a Amazing, and we couldn’t have done it without you. Come visit us soon so we can show our appreciation in person!

PS - 'Like' our new page on Facebook by June 1, 2011, and you'll get a chance to win a one week artist residency with us!  Just click HERE

Summer Comes to Small Pond (a pretty Purdy place to live)

“… Something irrational had stirred in my brain. It said: stop wasting your life conventionally, waste it yourself, unconventionally.” - Al Purdy, poet and former resident of Prince Edward County.

Today marks the first day of summer, and for us, the beginning of our first summer at Small Pond. What a metamorphosis we have witnessed since we moved here four months ago! The gardens and fields are an endless parade of blooms – just as one flower is fading, another is coming to life.

The vegetables in our garden are growing by leaps and bounds. We are about to have a whole lot of veggies on our hands, so if anyone wants to stop by for an organic garden salad, you are most welcome!

The wild grasses, left unchecked, have in some places grown chest-high; to wade through them is like walking through a jungle. In the ‘back forty’, paths that were easily followed in the spring have become impassable tangles of brush. Next to the silo, the raspberry bushes are filled with the sound of happy, buzzing bees. The wild grape vines seem to be climbing everywhere; Al Purdy was famous for getting visitors drunk on his homemade wild grape wine.

The fruit of the black currant bushes are turning colour like so many jewels. The wild strawberries are sweet for those patient enough to stoop down and pick the small red fruit. Early one morning, I saw a wild turkey by the outhouse; it was huge, up to my waist at least. It didn’t bother to run or fly away, but casually just strutted off into the bushes. We have grown to know many birds on an individual basis; there’s the huge black crow that can be found on our front lawn most mornings, pacing back and forth as he looks for breakfast in the grass. The crow babies’ nest is in a tall pine tree out back; they entertain us with a variety of comical noises. There’s the red-winged blackbird that lives in the crabapple tree, who is extremely territorial and gets very upset when we come too close. And there’s the robin who repeatedly builds nests in our barn, despite the fact that I kept taking them down (I have now given up and conceded the robin free reign of the barn.  Robin - 1 / Human - 0).

A nest with horse-hair lining that I found in the early spring; these eggs were left abandoned on the lawn

One afternoon Guy and I were riding our bikes to town when we encountered a good-sized turtle crossing the road. We picked it up, and it retracted its head and legs inside its shell. As I held the turtle I looked into its eyes, and it looked into mine, surely wondering if it was about to become my lunch. We returned the turtle to the ditch it had been heading for, and went on our way, giddy for our encounter with such an intriguing creature.

A toad explores the front garden

A few weeks ago, I finally saw my first deer on our property, after months of seeing the tracks of these elusive animals. Milé had invited a bunch of our friends over to surprise me for my birthday, and we were gathered outside near the silo. I guess we were making such a racket that a doe was too curious not to check us out, and stood watching us from the edge of a nearby field before prancing off into the fading light.

Last week we met a woman who told us she has an entire photo album of Prince Edward County sunsets, each one of them different, and I can believe it. The skies here are some of the most beautiful I have seen, particularly at sunset, often lighting up in fiery shades of pink. At night the stars are clear and bright, and fireflies dance their magical lights through the tall grasses near the house.We love living here. We love it here even more than we thought we would. Although we have a piece of paper that says this land is ours, we know that we are such a small, insignificant part of the abundant life that is all around us, too astonishing and magnificent to ever truly be owned.

Caitlin meets Butty the butterfly

Since moving to Small Pond, we’ve barely watched TV, and I have to admit we’ve been a little slack on keeping up with news from the outside world. The one story that I have been following is the horrible tragedy of the Gulf oil spill. In the midst of this devastation I have taken great comfort in the pure, unhampered life that is thriving all around us.

     The world’s pain is a little away from here
     and the hawk’s burst of speed that claws
     a fish from its glass house is earlier
     and later than now under a rejuvenated
     Pontiac with frogs booming temporary
     sonatas for mortals and Beethoven
     crows thronging the June skies and
          everything still
     everything suddenly goddamn still…

     - From Spring Song by Al Purdy

(Some good folks are trying to purchase and restore Al Purdy's A-frame house in Ameliasburgh and turn this important site into a writers' retreat.  To find out more about how you can help, click HERE)