Five to Delight on Friday

 

Tugboat seen along a walk along the breakwater in downtown Victoria

Here we are at the end of another month, and one-quarter through 2025. 

We took a walk through the neighbourhood yesterday evening in warm (14C) temperatures with more humidity than usual. Thunder rumbled and occasional shafts of lightning arced high above us. Only a few fat raindrops fell before we arrived home again, but then the heavens opened and rain fell in sheets. This morning the air is fresh and cool, with a watery blue sky mostly hidden behind pale grey clouds moving in from the Pacific. 

Big boats on an even bigger boat being transported who knows where

In the potager seeds are beginning to emerge - peas, spinach, radishes - and I've planted out onions and kale that I started indoors and moved to the greenhouse. Sweet peas next, and Snapdragons are ready to plant outdoors. The flower beds hold bright spots of colour - daffodils, hyacinths, muscari - and the sharp points of tulip leaves.

Himalayan Blue Poppy seen in the indoor Spring Prelude at Butchart Gardens

Several people inquired about the squash lasagna I mentioned in my last post. I used my regular recipe for Bolognese sauce and the filling (cottage cheese or ricotta). In place of the pasta, I cut butternut squash into rectangular pieces to fit into my dish, about 1 cm or a thick 1/4 inch thick. Before assembling the lasagna, I brushed the squash with olive oil and roasted it at 425 F until tender. 

There are many recipes online for Butternut Squash Lasagna, but I've found that baking the squash from raw in the casserole tends to take a very long time and can become quite watery. I also have a Butternut Squash Lasagna recipe on my recipe blog - it's a vegetarian version. 

Bellis Daisies growing outdoors at Butchart Gardens

I read Erica Bauermeister's The Scent Keepers this week, picked up from the library more because I enjoyed her other novels than being taken with the premise of this one. Once I started, however, I could not stop. Her descriptions of the landscape of the west coast evoked memories of our boating excursions, so much so that I wondered if she had visited some of the same remote places. As I read at the end of the book, she had, setting her story in the remote Broughton Archipelago, where islands jut straight out of the sea and tidal lagoons are crossed only at slack tide. It's a wild and wonderful place we visited in 2018, my first post is here, and one we hope to visit again this June, weather dependent. 

The Scent Keepers left me stunned with its beauty, the thoughts and feelings of a girl who grew up away from human contact other than her father, and the idea of being able to capture moments in scent as humans have learned to do with our sight and hearing. Relationships in the story are tangled and make for captivating reading. 

A bouquet of grocery store tulips

Two weeks of Spring Break are almost over. I've spent a little more time with the grandchildren while they've been off school - going out for lunch one day and baking madeleines, plus time here at home. They grow up so quickly. 

Light stays now later than 7 pm. How I love the longer days. And no matter how cold, wet, or snowy the weather can be in March, spring is inevitable. I'll leave you with a few words by Daniel Blajan from his delightful book Foxgloves and Hedgehog Days: Secrets in a Country Garden:

If one is to believe the almanac, it is easy to distinguish one season from another. It rigidly divides the year into four equal parts; on the twenty-first of March winter simply slinks away and in comes spring, tripping like a prima ballerina through our gardens. Nature, however, sublimely ignores these calendric hints and frequently neglects to indicate a clear borderline between the two. An unusually mild day in January's tail never fails to trick the birds into a feeble and premature Jubilate, whereas I remember occasions on which the daffodils sported idiotic coiffures of snow as late as April.