Tussie-Mussies

I found out about tussie-mussies when I was browsing the internet learning about uses for herbs and the history of perfume. I guess tussie-mussies are somewhat connected to those searches. I found tussie-mussies to be very interesting, especially when it comes to their history, and I decided to make one for my grandma for her birthday last year. First, let's go over a bit of information about tussie-mussies and how to make them and then I'll talk about the one that I made for my grandma!

Tussie-mussies are small bouquets of flowers, plants, and herbs. The flowers are arranged in the center of the bouquet while the leafy plants are arranged around the outside. The bouquet is then tied together somehow (using elastics works great and then a nice ribbon can be tied around that) and then the bouquet is wrapped in a doily or pretty paper with a hole cut in the center where you place the stem of the bouquet so that the bouquet sort of sits on the doily.

Tussie-mussies were used centuries ago and then became popular again during the Victorian era. During that time, there were certain customs that controlled conversation so people had to figure out a way to speak without physically speaking. Tussie-mussies were perfect because the important part of a tussie-mussie is that each flower, plant, or herb means something. People call this the "language of flowers." People would wear a tussie-mussie to express what they wanted to say or sometimes they would send one to a specific person. For example, maybe they would want to show that they were grieving or maybe they would want to express their love to a certain person. A flower, plant, or herb can have anything from one to several meanings and sometimes the meanings are even contradictory. People would therefore consult special dictionaries that listed the meaning of the flowers, plants, and herbs or they would attach a small card to the tussie-mussie explaining the meanings, especially if the tussie-mussie was being given to someone. I recommend searching for tussie-mussie dictionaries online and finding the ones that you prefer to use. Some are better than others.

Since I was making a tussie-mussie specifically for my grandma's birthday, I wanted to express joy over this occasion (since birthdays are joyous occasions) and I also wanted to express all of my wishes for her on her special day. I also wanted to use flowers, plants, and herbs that were currently available on my family's property and in our garden areas.

I chose the following flowers, plants, and herbs for her tussie-mussie:
Pansy = Merriment
Yarrow = Health
Vervain = Good fortune
Wood Sorrel = Joy
Basil = Best Wishes
Fern = Sincerity

The pansies came from our hanging flower baskets. The yarrow, vervain, wood sorrel, and ferns came from further back on our property (in the bush by a river). The basil came from our vegetable garden.

It is also common to create a phrase using all of the meanings so I created the following phrase:
Sincere wishes for health, joy, and good fortune on this merry occasion.

I used rubber bands to tie all of the stems together and did this several times throughout the bouquet to ensure that the various layers stayed together and didn't fall apart. I cut a piece of paper in a sort of round decorated snowflake style and cut a hole in the center large enough for the stems of the bouquet to fit through. I also tied a nice ribbon around the elastics and the base of the paper to hide the elastics and paper edge as well as to hold everything together nicely. I wrote out the meanings and phrase on a piece of paper along with a little birthday message and tied it to the bouquet. I also placed the bouquet in a small vase of water to make sure that the plants would last. I told my grandma that she could leave the bouquet in the water for a while and when the plants start to wilt, she can try drying the bouquet so that she could keep it. She ended up letting it dry and still has it sitting on her table beside her chair.

Tussie-mussies are not just simple bouquets. They are so much more! I think that's why they make such special gifts. Also, you can adapt them for basically any occasion since there is a large range of meanings associated with the flowers, plants, and herbs. Give it a try!

Cheers,
Kaylie

Our Flowering Crabapple Tree

The property that my family and I live on, along with the house, pool, garden, and everything else on this land, belonged to my grandparents on my mother's side. When my grandparents were still alive, my grandma once received a flowering crabapple tree in the mail from Quebec. She hadn't ordered it. It was a bit of a mystery. She planted it in the yard and it ended up growing into this big beautiful tree that grows gorgeous blossoms every year.

It used to grow blossoms all over it when it was younger but now it only grows blossoms on one half of it. We had some family portraits taken beside it when I was younger, back in its days of looking like a big snowball. The tree has spread to grow another tree right beside it and that one leans and sort of acts like an umbrella. I'd like to put a small table and chairs underneath it someday.

When it blossoms in the Spring, the flowers first grow as little pink and magenta balls until they start to open and they turn white. It's a really beautiful sight and I love clipping some of the branches to put in vases inside the house, especially if some of the blossoms on the clippings haven't opened yet and can open in the house.

There's usually a lot of bees around the tree when it flowers so I get a bit scared when going near the tree since I have a severe phobia of bees, hornets, and wasps. I'm thankful for the bees though (I love honey!) and I'm glad that this tree provides for them.

This tree is so lovely and the mystery behind it only makes it lovelier. It only blossoms for a certain amount of time in the Spring though, so we have to enjoy it while it lasts.

This tree is really a very magical sight and I'm so glad that it's in our yard. I don't know if this tree being sent to my grandma was a mistake but I like to think that it was destiny. I like to believe that my grandma was meant to receive this dreamy tree and that it was meant to be here.

The garden decoration that I bought at the Sudbury Gardening Festival this year looked perfect in the crabapple tree while it was blooming!

We have a little garden area set up underneath the crabapple tree. We have a bench, a swing, a birdbath, various garden decorations on the ground and hanging in the surrounding trees, as well as a few plants that grow well in the shade. We call it our "zen garden" even though real zen gardens look completely different.

The area looks so pretty when the petals from the blossoms fall on the ground. It's like Springtime snow!

Thanks for letting me show you this magnificent tree!

Cheers,

Kay

Our 2016 Garden

My family and I ended up planting our garden a bit late again this year but not as late as last year. This year we planted around the beginning of June. Most of our plants were bought already growing from a greenhouse but some were bought as seed. As you can see, our garden is quite large. We have 10 rows as well as a section beside the last row on the far end of the garden where we are growing vine plants and perennials. The photos in this post were taken when the plants and seeds in the garden still hadn't grown very much and there weren't many weeds (that's why it looks so "clean"). This gardening plot had been used for years by my grandparents on my mom's side (who owned the property for years after my great and great-great grandparents) and it was used a bit during the years after they passed away so I am happy that we are using the full garden again! It was a favourite hobby of my Poppa (my grandfather) and it is a hobby that I enjoy as well!

While we were preparing and planting the garden, the mosquitoes were pretty bad because of the time of the year. I told my mom that Spring is, of course, the best time of year to plant a lot of plants but it is also the worst time of year because the mosquitoes just make it so difficult. One day, however, there were tons of dragonflies flying all over our backyard and we hardly noticed any mosquitoes. It was so nice and it was absolutely magical to look up and see all of those dragonflies darting around in the air!

I think it's very important that people learn gardening. In the past, basically everyone used to grow gardens during the nice weather because they had to for food. Nowadays, we don't necessarily need to because we can just buy everything at a grocery store but growing your own garden is still very beneficial because it can save you a lot of money while also giving you organic vegetables that you grew yourself, therefore giving you the knowledge of exactly what has happened to the vegetables. You know that they haven't had any weird pesticides sprayed on them or that they've been sitting in a truck for a long time while traveling to a store. Also, maybe someday we'll all need to use this skill again so why not learn it now, just in case. If prices go up or if pesticides cause too many health problems, you'll be glad that you know how to grow your own food. Also, there's just something satisfactory about growing your own food and it always tastes so much better!

Here are all of the plants that we have growing in our garden this year: onions, green beans, yellow beans, carrots, radishes, beets, tomatoes, peppers, spinach, romaine lettuce, swiss chard, celery, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, early cabbages, watermelon, honeydew melon, potatoes, peas, cucumbers, zucchinis, butternut squash, jack o' lantern pumpkin, strawberries (bought from the Sudbury Gardening Festival 2016) rosemary, thyme, oregano, peppermint, spearmint, parsley, basil, dill, curry, chamomile, lemon balm, and eucalyptus. We also have chives growing in a short wooden barrel planter near our driveway and we have lavender and bergamot (or bee balm) growing elsewhere as well (none of these are pictured in this post). 

The chamomile and chives actually grew back from last year which was pretty exciting. We might try covering up our perennials in the Fall to ensure that a lot of the others grow back again next year. We have to cover the strawberries with straw anyway, or else they will freeze during the Winter. I'm excited to try using peppermint, spearmint, lemon balm, chamomile, and bergamot for tea since we are all tea drinkers in my family. We also want to try making pickles so we made sure to buy some pickling cucumber plants and dill.The plants that I'm most interested to see growing are the honeydew melon, watermelon, and eucalyptus because I'm not sure how well they'll do but I'm hoping that they'll make it.

Cheers,

Kay

Sudbury Gardening Festival 2016

On May 28th, I went to the Sudbury Gardening Festival with my mom and my best friend, Bethany. We had never been to this free annual gardening festival and were excited to go since we all like gardening. It took place at the YMCA Centre for Life and Parkside Centre in downtown Sudbury. Since we had never been to this event before, we decided to just wander around and take it all in. There was much more going on, like speakers, but we decided to just look at all of the vendors and exhibitors.

At the gardening festival, vendors and exhibitors don't mind answering questions. The questions can range from gardening and environment related questions to art questions since there were also vendors selling art and homemade yard decorations. There was a vendor selling chaga tea so I asked the two people at the table a few (or a lot) of questions about chaga since we have found it on my family's property. Chaga is a fungus found in some Northern countries that grows from wounds on birch trees and has many health benefits. I wanted to know how to harvest it properly and how to prepare it so that it could be used for tea. The people at the table were happy to answer my questions and seemed enthusiastic while talking about chaga. While visiting some art/yard decoration vendor's tables, the vendors told me how they make their decorations. So, I not only got some questions answered about chaga that I had been wondering for a while, but I also learned how to make some really neat yard decorations and I hope to try making them some day. I was very happy with all of the information that I received from speaking to people at the festival and I also picked up some booklets and pamphlets with environmental and gardening information as well as information about re-greening in Sudbury. This festival was definitely educational!

One of the super exciting things about the gardening festival was receiving free plants, trees, and seeds! There were many vendors selling plants and seeds but you could also get plenty for free! Some of the popular plants being given away were these two shrubs that you see in the photo above, If I remember correctly, the plant on the left is Black Chokeberry and the plant on the right is Wild Raisin. Apparently they were also giving away milkweed, which I would have also liked to receive to attract Monarch butterflies to my yard, but they ran out fast.

There were two tables giving away various types of trees so my mom and I tried to choose trees that we don't have too many of on our property. From left to right in the photo above, there is Jack Pine, White Pine, White Spruce, and Mugo Pine.

In the above photo, you can see the free seeds that we received. There are Black-Eyed Susans, Orange Jewelweed (also known as touch-me-nots), Fire Weed, and Evening Primrose. My mom got the touch-me-nots for my brother since he loves them!

One of the plant vendors that was selling plants by donation at the front of the building was selling starwberry plants so we bought a paper cup full of these guys! We got ten plants for $5. They had been kept in a fridge so we were told to also keep them in a fridge until we were ready to plant them. Once we were ready to plant, we were told not to worry if they still looked dead for a while because they would still be in hibernation mode. These strawberry plants will come back year after year and spread but we have to cover them with straw in the Fall to prevent them from freezing during the Winter. That's why they're called STRAWberries!

Here's a closer look at one of the strawberry plants! Aren't they creepy? I think they look like weird little aliens! Hehe!

I also bought a yard decoration from a vendor that was selling hanging decorations made from old tea pots, plates, metal dishware, etc. This silver creamer decoration was $10. I love the simplicity of it and how the jewels look like water pouring out of it. Of course I had to hang it in our flowering crabapple tree, especially while it was flowering!

That concludes my thoughts and summary of my first visit to the Sudbury Gardening Festival. I had a great time and look forward to going again next year!

Cheers,

Kay