Garden 2023

This year we got eight sunflower blossoms over eight flowers. Beats last year when we got five blossoms over three flowers.

The only surviving flower from our original batch. Squirrels did a pretty thorough job of digging up the seeds, so I put a green mesh weighted by rocks to protect the survivors. But every night I'd find the rocks removed. Eventually I managed to put enough weight that whatever was getting at them couldn't get through, but by that point there were only a few left. Those remaining were bent and weak from having to grow under the mesh and in the end only this one made it. It turned out to be the tallest, perhaps because it had more time to grow, but it wasn't the first to blossom.

Our second batch was grown in jiffy pots and transplanted after they'd matured a bit, becoming less appealing to squirrels. Glad to see they managed to blossom despite being planted late.

All the seeds came from the same pack, but there seems to be two distinct varieties. There are deep yellow ones with kind of stringy petals like the first, and there are paler ones with fuller petals, like this one.

Good examples of the difference.

After our first blossom, Lee-Anne noticed that this one looked like it was next in line. I saw that it's neck was broken and the bud was hanging on by a thread. Somehow, it still blossomed. It also might give us more, as it now has six additional buds! I suspect this might be some kind of emergency reproduction measure. It sensed that it had detached from it's initial bud and so it's sprouting more to compensate. The newer buds are dark green, unlike the light green of all the initial ones. Last year we got a couple late-stage buds, and they were a darker green than the first round as well. I don't know why this is, but it seems consistent.

This one was a surprise. I'd been tracking our flowers all summer, but it wasn't until they started blossoming that I noticed this little guy peaking through the back. He snuck up on us!

We didn't just grow sunflowers, we also attempted tomatoes, peas, cucumbers, lettuce, and radishes.

Our best crop were the peas. Once they started producing, they continued to do so for the rest of the season and continue to do so now, although the plants themselves are looking a little sad. We never got such a huge crop that we were using them as stirfry ingredients (I only reached that level once, on my last year of student housing), but we got to munch on them regularly.

The tomatoes weren't quite as bountiful but I'd say they win the most-improved award. In the past I've done well growing cherry tomatoes but the regular ones have matured late, leaving me with the delicious problem of resorting to fried green tomatoes in late fall. This year I learned the technique of "pulling the suckers off" (a term that makes me queasy every time I hear it) which helps them develop faster. Also, these were Early Girls, a breed specifically meant to produce early. So between the type and technique we managed to get a decent crop of red tomatoes. The only drawback is that we don't have a good batch for fried green tomatoes.

Our cucumber plants were large and sprawling, which is typical of their nature. Somewhere through the season they began to look sickly, but they still managed to produce a small crop for us.

The lettuce never grew. Our radishes were vital but didn't act like I expected of them. They became tall, viny, and had some bean-like growths. I doubted that they were radishes at all, but after digging them up it looked like they were trying, as thy had reddened at the root and some had begun to grow rounder.

I'd seen radishes grow pretty successfully when I helped out at the WALES community garden plot. They had poked out of the ground without the huge stalks that we had produced. My neighbour thinks we must have just planted them too close together. Maybe I buried them too deep.

All in all, this was our most ambitious garden at the place we currently live. I know some people with more successful sunflower patches, but this was one of the better ones for me, and we might yet get more. I've had better and worse crops of peas. This is my personal best for tomatoes. I've done better with radishes. Never tried lettuce before, and maybe I won't try again.

The Wedding

On September 16, me and Lee-Anne got married

It was on Lee-Anne's parents property in Brampton. It was sunflower themed, partly because of the season and partly because of our shared love of sunflowers. Main colour was purple, because it's my favourite colour while Lee-Anne's is yellow which gets worked in with the sunflowers, and they contrast. We had it 11:30 AM to 4:00 PM.

Lunch was sandwiches, wraps, potato salad, and bean salad. There were lots of desserts, mostly made by Lee-Anne's mom. Instead of a cake we had a tart tower. For drinks, we had mimosas, Caesars, beer, wine, and Grand Marnier. I don't know where the Grand Marnier came from, I think someone just slipped it behind the bar.

There were a lot of spacing concerns. We had invited about 70 people, and looking at the backyard, I thought it would be a little cramped. A professional had come through and verified that it would be sufficient and I thought to myself that it's a good thing we have experts, because I don't have a good vision for this type of thing. I showed up at the site a day early, and a tent had been put up, dividing what I already thought was a small size in half.

Plans for the location of the ceremony were changed the day before the wedding. Lee-Anne felt the second part of the backyard was too hilly, so we shifted it to a small park right outside their gate. Apparently you only need a city permit if your event is for 250 people.

This worked out, as the park was more visible from the vantage point of the church that had agreed to lend its parking space. Most people saw the altar and crowd while they were parking and made it over that way.

Since it was outdoors, we were vulnerable to unexpected shifts in the weather, but it turned out perfect. Neither too hot nor too cold. That didn't stop me from sweating bullets during the ceremony. 

I was holding Lee-Anne's hands and didn't want to break form. If I wiped my forehead, I'd have to touch her hands and get them sweaty, and if I wiped on my clothes I'd mess up my outfit. Couldn't do it covertly with everybody watching. I tried to endure but it got too noticeable, and feeling it was the lesser of two evils, I broke form and quickly tried wiping my forehead. The crowd laughed. Then, Lee-Anne broke form and, laughing, wiped my forehead vigorously.

Somehow, a lot of people felt touched by this. Someone cried when she was describing to me how Lee-Anne she reached out during the ceremony to clean my forehead. I don't really get it.

We were in direct sunlight. Lee-Anne's light sensitive so she was really squinting. Later, she would say "I was squinting, you were sweating".

We ended it with a tree-planting ceremony. Well, the small tree was technically already in a pot, but we took soil from my grandparents place in Northern Ontario, and from Lee-Anne's grandmothers farm and poured it into the pot, representing the union between the two families and new growth in the family tree.

That was workshopped between us and the person that performed the ceremony. When we talked to her beforehand, she was looking for shared interests and knowing that we both like to garden, she threw it out as a an idea and we ran with it.

People went back to the tent while me and Lee-Anne stayed back and had pictures taken. I'll have a post on my Gallery blog with the photos when we get them. We already have a bunch, and I've included a few at the top of this post. When we had our engagement photos done, the guy sent us a sampler package really quickly, but it was basically half the final collection. I'll still hold off until I've got all of them.

After the photos, we came back to the tent where everyone was having lunch. Turns out there was enough space for everyone to sit comfortably.

Speeches were done by Lee-Anne's dad, my Grandpa Rob, my brother, one of Lee-Anne's friends, and me and Lee-Anne shared a finishing speech. We hadn't written a script, but we had "sections". So Lee-Anne started by thanking everyone for coming, and the work put into organizing things, then I talked about the people that couldn't make it and people we wanted to remember, then she talked about what the symbol of the sunflower meant, then I went into our specific sunflowers, she talked about our cat Kieran convincing her of my quality, and I talked about how I adopted Kieran to impress her, she spoke to how my family invited her in, then I spoke to how hers did so for me, and then we both declared that we were looking forward to living the rest of our lives together.

As for the people that couldn't make it, a close family friend on Lee-Anne's side passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack. It was recent enough that she'd been aware of, and looking forward to coming to the wedding. One of her aunts also had a heart attack, and lived but wasn't in shape to attend. This happened as she and her husband were travelling to Brampton.

On my side, I spoke of a close family friend that used to always say she couldn't wait to come to my wedding. I used to tell her not to get her hopes up, as I was a natural introvert and comfortable on my own. I held this stance with her even after I met Lee-Anne and was intending to ask her out. Unfortunately, she passed before mine and Lee-Anne's first date, so I hope somewhere she knows she was right. I also mentioned my granddad, who is alive but with significant dementia.

As for the sunflowers, when me and Lee-Anne were dating, I finally managed to grow one in the backyard of the townhouse I was living in at the time. It was my first success after two years of failure. We dated throughout the summer and I got it in my head that if I could make the flower blossom, then the relationship would work out.

On the morning of the wedding, I got a Facebook notification for a memory. Turns out, the flower blossomed on September 16, same day as the wedding. We hadn't even thought of that.

Otherwise, our first sunflower of the year blossomed while we were having our wedding shower, and when I left Kitchener, it looked like our last sunflower would blossom on the day of the wedding. Unfortunately, this turned out to be false. We had three sunflowers set to blossom before I left, and on coming back two had blossomed. So I'm just going to say the one that is still working on it is a promise of future happiness. I know I'm playing with the rules a little here.

There are a few other things that happened at the wedding. My grandma got me some literature on our family history, and Lee-Anne's sister in law brought some kittens to be adopted by my mother and brother.

We got Finn from the same person, and in fact these new kittens are his half-siblings (at least). I thought it might be too soon after Cassidy, but these two were in need of a home before Cassidy's passing. Mom and Duncan were aware of them, and the fact that they they would be in the same place as Lee-Anne's sister in law felt like fate.

They're at home now. The black one with the stubby tail has been named Castor and the tuxedo cat is Pollux. I'll have to do a post dedicated to them.

After the wedding, me and Lee-Anne stayed over in a hotel in Brampton. In Pokemon Go, my buddy gave me a bouquet as a gift. I'd never seen that gift featured in the game before. Felt like a wedding present.

 The next day we visited Granddad since he couldn't make it. The uber driver dropped us off in slightly the wrong spot, but it was okay because he put us in front of a sunflower mural. It felt kind of fated

Granddad can't speak for the most part, but when he saw me he shouted and reached out to me, smiling. Pretty well the best I could hope for. We had lunch with him, Oma, and two of my uncles that had flown in for the wedding.

When we got back to Kitchener, we found a red rose taped to a post on our home street, welcoming us back.

Wedding Shower

This will be some tonal whiplash compared with my last post. I was going to take a break from blogging until the wedding, but my coworkers did something very sweet that I feel I have to share

They threw us a wedding shower!

I took a few more photos but I'm not going to show anything with identifiable information.

I kind of knew something was coming. Sometime earlier one of the members apologized for not being about to make it to the party. I asked if she was talking about a party connected to me. She said yes and I didn't press further.

I really tried to be oblivious. Later, someone apologized, saying they didn't want to ruin the secret. So I told them not to. I saw someone wiping something off the white board when I walked in. I asked what she was erasing, and she said she couldn't tell me.

I told Lee-Anne that I felt like I was getting something a little bit more than my congratulatory flowers and Indigo gift certificate, which I'd gotten a couple weeks earlier. I didn't know what time it was going to happen, or to what scale though.

Day of, one of the members asked "When's Gryphon's party?" and I saw the staff try to quiet her, but she still said "Is it at 12:30?" So I texted Lee-Anne "I think I'm having a party at 12:30"

Apparently I still missed a bunch of tells. Apparently the calendar just had "Community Event", and I didn't think to question it. There was a Strategic Plan at the main office and it was decided that each team should send a facilitator, and both my partner facilitators called not it, leaving me to fill the role. That put me out of the office for a couple hours before the event, giving them a chance to decorate.

So I went in, they all shouted surprise. I looked around, texted Lee-Anne "Do you know anything about this? It doesn't look like it's just for me". She said she didn't know anything. I sent her pictures, and she said "Fine, I know. Coming over right now". Apparently they told her when I said that she had gotten a job, so she was able to book time off to celebrate.

They had us play The Newlywed Game. It's where you sit back-to-back with your partner, questions get asked, and you raise an indicator (they had us use our shoes) showing which person you thought the question applied to more. Because you're facing away from each other, the couple doesn't get to see each other's answers but the crowd does. It makes it funny to see how well they know other and where they disagree.

Me and Lee-Anne agreed on almost everything. People were surprised when we both said she was the better cook (they know I have a food blog). We both said our own families were the weirdest, though.

They had a bunch of gifts for us and they were super thoughtful. They gave us some wooden bowls that were sourced from a local artist and an old friend of mine. I'd bought some for my mother and brother, and when I saw that the bowl I had for myself fit perfectly into the set I gave it away too. I'd said that I needed to go to the Art Walk this year to buy two soup bowls and a salad bowl. My coworkers tracked this guy down, bought two soup bowls and he's currently making us a salad bowl.

One of my coworkers made homemade blueberry jam as kind of an homage to my grandma.

We got a camping set. We got some chocolate canoes and some drinks referencing a boat tipping over, because of mine and Lee-Anne's fourth date in which we capsized a canoe. We got a gift card to Vincenzo's, an independent local Italian grocery.

The decorations were really thoughtful too. A lot of them were drawn by hand, and a lot of the sunflowers in the bouquets came from one of my coworkers personal garden.

You might have noticed that the theme was sunflowers. Well, when we came home, we saw this:

Our first sunflower blossom of the year! It opened up while we were celebrating (and it filled out more the next day)