Spring cleaning

Cec comes round, as promised, after his morning constitutional and helps me get the frames back over the berry beds.

No, your eyes do not deceive you. One of these things is not like the other. The strawberry bed in the foreground, built and properly levelled a couple of years ago by Mr Fixit, is the horizon line. The slapdash beds I concocted before that, not so much. Oh, well.

Cec goes off to rob from the rich and give to the poor (he played little John in last year’s panto) or do otherwise good deeds.

Cec as Little John, with my air guitar hero Will Scarlett (Paul O'Sullivan) .

 I go back to the cursed netting and the staple gun to get the strawberry frame done.

Oh, bloody bollocking bollocks. There isn’t enough netting to cover these two side panels. I refuse to buy another bloody bollocking roll of the bloody stuff for just these two panels. Back into the house to ring Cec and ask if he and Joyce by any chance have any spare netting – or perhaps some plastic sheeting? Yes, they do! Cec will return tomorrow. What a guy. 

(When the organisers of the Gabriola Garden Tour come to call – ha, bloody, ha – to ask if I would allow the public in on their fundraising weekend for People for a Healthy Community, I shall have to bill it as the Holmes/Ashley Garden – with special mention to the Rosses of Toronto.)

Oh, by the way, did I mention that Cec thinks my cup hook solution for holding the netting in place was inspired?

Well, he does.

With the netting job brought to a halt by lack of netting, I turn my attention to spring cleaning. Of the house, do I hear you ask? No, of course not. To hell with the bloody house. I’ll get to that later. No, at the moment I’m more interested in the garden path.

Not impressed? Well, that’s because I didn’t take a before picture. Trust me, bloody buckets of pine cones and needles have been removed. Not to mention the ten thousand (okay, okay – several dozen) little plastic potting pots which are going to GIRO tomorrow.

A good day’s work. Time to make a cup of tea and take it down to the garden, where I find Stella waiting.

Fifteen minutes later I’m heading back into the house because it is too bloody hot to sit in the sun. And it’s still only April. Yikes.

A fighting chance

Being a strong, independent woman is all very well and good, but, as previously noted, getting the frames onto the beds is a two-person job and I am but one person. So I ring Cec to ask if he might be able to help me shift them back.

“What about the netting?” he asks. I tell him it’s already attached. “Wow,” he says, “you don’t waste time.” Do I detect a note of admiration in his voice? Possibly. (Possibly not.) He says he is off island today, but can pop round tomorrow. That’s fine. There is plenty else to keep me busy in the garden, because the plumber was here yesterday.

What, you may ask, does this have to do with anything? I’ll tell you.

I have a wonderful plumber. If he comes over and discovers there’s a quick fix to the problem (as is sometimes the case), he doesn’t even charge me. Then there are the times when there is no quick fix, as was the case four years ago when I fried the pump. (My fault entirely, as I’d failed to turn the hose off after watering the garden.) I asked him how much it would be to replace the pump. He told me it would be about $1000. When he saw the look of horror on my face, he said he’d see if he could find a reconditioned pump. Final cost: $200. (As I said, I have a wonderful plumber.)

Several weeks ago I rang to tell him the well pump sounded as if it was going into overdrive when I ran water for more than a minute. “Uh, oh,” he said (echoing my own thoughts). Then I said the magic words: “So I switched over to the cistern and that seems to be working fine.” These are the magic words because they tell him I’m okay for water for the foreseeable, so the free house call can wait while he attends to paying customers.  Now that we’re well into April and it seems to be the end of the rain, the situation is somewhat more pressing, so he turns up. Apparently I need a new float mechanism which he says he will come back with in two days. And he does. Hurrah!

Why hurrah? Because I need the well to water the garden properly.

So, back to the garden.

First job of the morning is shifting the two flowering-nicely, orphan raspberry plants from their current location to the beds which will be covered by the frames.

Second job of the day, prior to planting some seeds, is to give the main vegetable bed a thorough soak. (An inspection has revealed that under the first, moist inch, the soil is bone dry. So much for the extra rain we had last winter.)  An hour later, the bed is ready and the planting begins.

And here we have it, folks: peas (regular and mange tout), and rows of carrots, beets, spinach, lettuce and rocket.

And I still have more than an hour before I have to leave for rehearsal, so I give the small bed (from whence the orphan raspberries have recently been removed) the same soaking and plant some squash seeds.

All given (for the first time, I now realise, in a long time) a fighting chance. Fingers crossed.

The wrath of Jehovah

I am not religious. Seriously. Ask anyone. Check my x-rays. You won’t find a religious bone in my body.

So, imagine my surprise today down in the garden when I realised there was a God. A proper, Old Testament, vengeful, pissed-off-with-humanity God. There must be, because nothing less than the wrath of Jehovah could explain the invention and sale of plastic netting.

At one point, as I struggled with a roll of it this morning, I genuinely thought I was going to lose my mind. I confess that after the first hour of cursing, I did consider ringing Cec for advice. I figured there must be something obvious I was missing. (This before I recognised plastic netting as Jehovah's vengeance.) But then I remembered I am a strong, independent woman who can figure things out and get shit done. So I persevered.

Six hours later (yes, six hours), my thenar (look it up – I had to) is aching from the staple gun,  I’ve run out of netting, but the three large frames have netting attached.  If you look too closely, it ain’t pretty, but from a distance they looks fine(ish) and should get the job done.

Resistance is futile

I tried. I really tried. I went to Arbutus with every intention of buying garden-variety wood stain. I’d decided to go with pine, as this would be lighter. I even had a tin in my hand, all set to go. And then, in a moment reminiscent of those in my twenties when a pair of shoes I hadn’t even known I needed would suddenly scream my name as I walked past them in a shop window in Oxford Street, in just such a moment as that, I spotted something. Like those shoes (oh, so many pairs of shoes), as soon as I became aware that such a thing as turquoise wood stain existed, I had to have it. 

Down to the garden first thing this morning (first guaranteed sunny day in a while) to get cracking. 

Seriously, how fabulous is this?

Unfortunately, once the strawberry/blueberry bed frames were done, a problem with the other frames became immediately apparent. I cannot not stain them in situ. Manage – with some difficulty – to shift the one on the left and get it stained, but moving the other two is definitely a two-person job, and I am but one person.

So, a message is left on Mr Fixit’s answering machine, in the hope that he might be able to pop over later today or sometime tomorrow.

After that, it’s just a question of acquiring and attaching some wire mesh. (I do have some plastic netting in the shed, but it’s a bitch to work with and anyway the holes might be big enough to trap and endanger small birds. Definitely not the object of the exercise.) Hopefully I will get around to this part of the job before the birds start eating the berries.

Appley ever after?

The question of paint versus stain has been duly debated and the answer seems to be stain. Although some followers quite fancied the idea of brightly painted frames, WISE woman Catherine made the best point.

“I just finished staining a planter box we built. Here's why: stain will protect the wood, to a degree, from wind, sun and snow and last for several years. It won't crack, bubble or peel. So the question is: do you want bright, beautiful colour and more work sanding, stripping and repainting in a couple of years? Or natural looking wood, less work and more time for the swing, the book, the cats and wine?”

Obviously more time for the swing wins. Stella, when asked, totally agrees.

Quite a bit of staining in my future, although possibly not in the next couple of days. (After a week of summer-in-April, when I go outside to take this photo of Mr Fixit’s latest delivery, there is a clap of thunder. As I write, rain has started falling.)

Elsewhere in the garden, the most exciting news so far is…

Regular readers will, I’m sure, recall that three years ago Krys and I planted a dwarf apple tree in the garden. It produced lots of blossom and one apple the first year, lots of blossom and eight apples the second year (and there would have been many more apples if frigging Antler Boy hadn't got to it) and precisely zero blossom last year. So, yes, the fact that there is once again lots of blossom on the apple tree is pretty bloomin’ exciting. Will any of this blossom turn into actual apples? Time will tell.

There is also lots of blossom on the pear tree, added to the garden two years ago. This is not quite as exciting as pear blossom has appeared in abundance every spring. What has so far failed to appear on the tree is an actual pear. Fingers crossed this might be the year.

Speaking of things blooming (or not, as the case may be), across the road at Pat’s place – and all around the island – lilac trees are already flowering. Alas, not so in my garden – neither the long-established, flowered-once-only-for-Krys-three-years-ago tree nor the second tree I planted two years ago which I was promised would flower the following year and didn’t. Considering how much I love lilacs I consider this to be most unfair. Fortunately, Pat remains very generous with his overabundance.

My aching butt

Oh, yes, I remember this now.  The day after the first day of really bending down and digging in: the sore legs and the aching butt. I get the leg muscles – all that stretching and crouching, but my ass? I remember posing this question on Facebook years ago, after my first big gardening day in Walthamstow. Someone – I vaguely remember it being Birgit –  who clearly paid more attention in anatomy classes than I ever did, replied with the information that there are butt muscles (glutes?) attached to the thigh muscles which I’d also been stretching more than usual. How annoying is that? Not quite as annoying as the clear recollection that tomorrow it will be worse. That just doesn’t seem fair.

Anyway… 

During all the bending and stretching yesterday, I spot the first flowers opening on the strawberry plants. I haven’t put a seed in the ground yet (must get on to that) and already food is beginning to appear. Hurrah.

Tiny, tiny flowers are starting to appear on the raspberry plants. There are also tons of flowers on the blueberry and black currant plants and lots of berries already sprouting on the gooseberry.

This is all very promising, I think, as I add compost to all these beds.

Mind you, it always seems very promising this time of year. And it all gets very exciting as we move into summer, and then this happens.

There is part of me that thinks it’s only fair that my gardening efforts (such as they are) should benefit other species. (Although never bloody Bambo.) Have I not, after all, made a concerted effort to have a bee-friendly garden? Yes, I have. So, in theory, it should be fine if the birds get something, too. It’s the ratio that’s a little galling. I figure it’s about 75/25. If I was the one getting the 75%, that would be fine, but I’m not. (With the exception of the blackberries, which for some reason the birds leave largely alone.) I mention this to Cec when he comes round to fix the fence.

Two days later, Mr Fixit, bless him, returns with this.

It is the first of four netting frames he’s decided to build for me. What a guy!

Before attaching the netting the frame needs to be either stained or painted. Which should it be? I’m pretty sure I actually have some stain stored away somewhere, but is that what I want? I’m thinking something colourful might be nice? But what colour? Day-Glo pink might be nice. Too much? Perhaps. Turquoise? There’s already a fair bit of it in the garden.

Too much if the frames are turquoise, too? Perhaps. Purple? Cobalt blue? Red? Oh, my god, I just don’t know. Decisions, decisions. Well, I need to figure it out and get on it before the birds start snarfing berries. What do you think?