A day of landscaping (I guess that's what you'd call it)

Start the day with an attempt to do some digging in the area I want to define as the shrub beds. It’s quite a bit higher than the rest of the garden, so I’m thinking a clearly defined step might be a good feature. Rocks, rocks and more frigging rocks, some of which are too big to be incorporated as border edging. Oh, fuck it, I figure. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em up.


And so I turn the biggest of the rocks I’ve been breaking my back digging up into steps. Photo doesn’t really do this new feature justice. It actually does look quite nice – almost as if someone planned it.

Also looking very nice is my beautiful new rose bush.


In about a week this is going to be stunning. Oh, shit, shit, shit. In a week I’m going to be back in Vancouver for a week, decorating the new apartment and getting Mike moved. Bollocks. Pat will, I know, water the garden for me while I’m away, but he’s not going to take photos of the rose bush in full bloom. Buggeration. I can but hope the excess of bloom will not be short lived.

Survey my vegetable patch. (I suppose, technically, the inclusion of cherry tomatoes makes it my fruit and vegetable patch.) What’s this I spy on the red pepper plant?


Can it be? Yes I believe I spy red peppers forming. Ha! I’ll believe these tiny things will turn into actual edible red peppers when I see it. Still, you never know. There’s a first time for everything. Perhaps this will be the year I actually get red peppers off a red pepper plant.

Glance guiltily over my shoulder at the area which I long ago earmarked for my raised beds. Well, it ain’t going to magically rototill itself, much as I’d love it if it did. Many, many years ago, working in the Greenpeace Vancouver office, I wandered into Catherine’s office, noting as I did, that her desk, like mine, was covered with piles and piles of files and reports and papers. Told her what we needed was a psychic filing fairy who would come in the middle of the night and file everything on top of our desks in exactly the place we would file it if we ever had time. Now I find myself wishing for a psychic rototilling fairy to pay a visit to my garden. I could cross my fingers and hold my breath, but eventually I’d just pass out and still the raised vegetable patch would remain shamingly nonexistent. So I go inside, leave a message for Mike’s friend Kelly, asking if she could possibly bring her lady size rototiller around some time this week. It’s gotta be done.

Make myself a cup of tea and head back to the garden.


It occurs to me that, much as I love this mug, I should find something with a more gardening-related philosophy.

The deer have not decimated Mike’s flower pot overnight (although some bastard insect has been nibbling one of my basil plants – may be time to get the slug pellets out). However, flowers in a pot outside the back door do not a garden experience make, so, true to my word, I spend some time with the secateurs and shovel trying to widen the path to the garden. At some point, possibly after there is something to sit on in the garden (other than the poor weather beaten and bruised bench with its several missing planks), it really would be nice to be able to get Mike out into the garden. As the ground is uneven, he will probably need to use his walker, so a much wider path is required.


The process reveals the mother of all rocks (rather what I expect Catherine’s piece of the Canadian shield might have looked like), which was so overgrown with sorel and covered with twigs and pine needles and cones that I’d completely forgotten it was there.

The process also involves digging or dragging up the sorel roots which crisscross the path. It is while I am doing this that the stupidest thing I can imagine happening happens. I’m tugging and tugging on a particularly stubborn root. When it eventually gives, my head snaps back and my glasses go flying off my head and into the undergrowth. Not quite a needle in a haystack job, but it does take me half an hour to find them. Argh.

Enough for today.