The good news is that Mike’s friend Kelly has, it turns out, access to a small (“lady sized”) rototiller which she says I can borrow. I’m so annoyed with Billy saying he would do the job while we were away and then not showing that I’m inclined to write him off, despite Pat managing to dig out contact details (although this does take me back to square one on getting the gate repaired or replaced). And I do figure that, if I’m going to do this, I should really be putting the sweat equity in. So, I’ve said I would like to borrow it next week.
Kelly does warn that large rocks are a problem. After the number of rocks I hauled out of one small hole the other day, this seems as if it could be a major problem – I can’t keep borrowing and breaking garden equipment. (Well, I could, but I’ll get fairly unpopular fairly quickly.) So, I go out to try turning over some of the soil in the area I’m planning to use as a veg plot and, lo and behold, there are hardly any rocks. Is it possible sometime in the long, long ago someone has already de-rocked this area? I sincerely hope so.
This is a great relief. After reading this blog, my friend Catherine sent me an e-mail. In addition to claiming she could see progress being made (whilst to me it looks as if sod all is being accomplished), she shared her own rock story from homesteading in northern Ontario many years ago. Made me laugh so much, I hope she will not mind me sharing:
“Your rocks remind me of a book written about the area of Ontario we lived in. It was called Harvest of Stones, which pretty much described the author’s experience and our gardens. Every winter the frost would heave up more pieces of the Canadian Shield and the garden we’d cleared of stones one spring would be full of more the next. Talk about tough conditions. When Bob and I first fenced off the garden and started digging up rocks, we found a big one in a corner. We kept digging around it, deeper and deeper, and finally took the gate down, drove our small tractor into the plot and rigged a chain around the rock. When it still wouldn’t move we dug deeper and discovered the ‘rock’ we’d been trying to remove was the tip of the iceberg – it was a bump on, well, the Shield. That corner became the storage area for wheelbarrow, tools, etc. Whatcha gonna do?”
Anyway, fingers crossed, the exploratory digging in the veg plot area suggests it might (god, I hope so) be rototilled with relative ease by me next week. Now all I have to do is figure out what, if anything can still be planted in the second half of June which might actually produce something this year. (And I really, really need to overcome my triple Scorpio desire for instant gratification and accept that I’m in this for the long haul.)
The bad news is more like really, really annoying news.
Coming out of the garden after the exploratory (and, let’s face it, not very deep) dig, I spot something out of the corner of my eye. Could it be, tossed into the undergrowth behind the shed? Yes, it is. It’s a piece of hose! Manage to scrabble through the undergrowth far enough to grab one end, start pulling and end up with a full length of hose. Climb a bit further into the undergrowth and poke around, just in case the bastard (or bastards) I thought had stolen all my garden equipment had even more bastardly simply removed everything from the shed and tossed it into the bushes. No such luck. (Not that I really thought I was suddenly going to find a shovel and a rake and a functioning weed whacker, but you never know.)
Attach the hose to the outside tap and start carrying the remainder towards the garden. That’s when I realise, first, that the spray nozzle is gone, and, second, the hose doesn’t actually reach the garden. Then I remember that I used to have two pieces of hose attached to one another to reach the garden.
So, at some point some cunt (yes, yes, I know, that’s not a word to be bandied around lightly in North America, but, honestly, there just isn’t any other word for the bastard) went into my shed, took down the hose, removed the piece with the spray nozzle on it and then threw the remainder behind the shed. Why? Why? Why? And why, why, why can’t I psychically track this clown down and punch him in the face? (Okay, truth be told, I don’t pack much of a punch, so I’d have to take a two by four with me – or a shovel, if I had one.)
Off to Nanaimo in a couple of hours to buy a weed whacker and a few other things. Perhaps (until I can get a shed that actually has a door and a lock) I should store the weed whacker at Pat’s.
He would certainly appreciate this, as he’s having his own weed whacker saga this summer. Like Jamie, the starter switch on his weed whacker stopped working. Like Jamie, he took it apart and tried to bypass the starter switch. Unlike Jamie, he couldn’t get his back together. When he spotted me using Jamie’s weed whacker, he said it was the same make as his, so I suggested he ring Jamie and ask for advice. Jamie went round, got the pieces back together in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately, after Jamie left, Pat discovered it still didn’t work. Got Jamie back, Jamie fixed problem. Pat started whacking weeds, then whacker died again. He couldn’t face bothering Jamie again so he borrowed his friend Margaret’s, which somehow lost a small, but important piece in the long grass (where he could not find it). Last night, when we were at the Surf playing pool (I won for a change, but only by default because Pat kept missing the 8-ball), he asked me if I would pick up a replacement part when I’m in Nanaimo today. I said yes, of course. (Bloody hell, after all the equipment I’ve borrowed from him, it’s the least I can do.) I’ve also told him, once I have my very own weed whacker, he’s welcome to use it whenever he wants. (Figure that means I can save a bit of money by continuing to use his wheelbarrow.)
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