CHICKENS CANADA BURL BLACK SQUIRRELS AND THE WEATHER

CHICKENS

We visited a garden centre in search of a particular type of unglazed pot and were surprised to find pet chickens wandering around everywhere. They were of different types and not all had the freedom of the centre. But the ones who did were very friendly and would follow you around and allow themselves to be petted. I felt like the Pied Piper at one point.













CANADA

We crossed over into Canada on June the 6th with no hassle. Well just a little, Carol has been dying to show some officious border defender Charro’s passport and guess what, they did not want to see it.

The first job was to buy a pay as you go phone sim. Carol also wanted to upgrade her phone to a quad band. The Apple IPhone was her choice. The interface seems pretty intuitive but Carol needed to download the 190 page manual to get some stuff done. It is a beautifully engineered item in terms of both it’s hardware and more importantly the software.

BURL

Our burl is a hard conglomerate of many dormant buds formed when the tree was damaged in some way. When it was removed from the parent tree it the dormant shoots somehow know it is time to grow Our chunk of California redwood has sprouted multiple shoots, one at least 6 inches long. We do not know how old the parent trunk was but it is likely to be at least 100 years old and could be 10 times older than that.

We have discovered that the typical buyer of a redwood burl places it in water, watches the shoots grow, then disposes of it after the shoots die from lack of nutrients. So we will need to find a suitable site to plant it. Possibly in a RV park.

BLACK SQUIRRELS
We took the old boy for a walk in the woods in Vancouver and were surprised to see lots of black squirrels. They are a right stroppy lot fighting for territory, mates and food. I found out that they are displacing the greys in some areas. Carol says it’s because they’ve got better nuts.













WEATHER
Unlike England which has just had a heat wave Vancouver is dismal, wet cold and windy. It is way below normal, so cold that the Olympic qualifying triathalon was cancelled partly as entrants were getting into hypothermia on the swim even though they were wearing wet suits and there have been snow warnings on the passes north.