Long time, no see

Yes, yes, yes. I know. It’s been a ridiculous amount of time since the last garden update. What can I tell you? I was busy rehearsing and portraying the poisonous Miss Prothero. Then I was busy rehearsing and portraying mischievous Maria in Twelfth Night. Then I got distracted by the gong show in Cleveland. And, yes, truth be told, I’ve also had a bit of a case of what my friend Krys and I used to call the “I can’t be bothereds”. So, here I am, hopefully better late than never, trying to catch up.

For those of you who aren’t on Gabriola, the first thing to report is that, after three long, hot summers, normal weather service seems to have resumed. The return of Juneuary was a bit of a shock. (Actually broke down one evening quite late in June and lit the fire.)  Early July brought its own surprises, including two thunder storms (rare in this neck of the woods.) Good for water levels in the well.

Not so good for tomatoes. After three summers of having more cherry tomatoes than I knew what to do with, this year’s crop qualifies as slim pickings.

This is what I brought up from the garden this morning. May look like a fair few tomatoes, but I’m honestly not sure how many more I will see. Ditto the peas.

Something that is new this summer are the pink gooseberries (the things that look like grapes). Although the gooseberry bush has previously borne some fruit, this is the first year the berries have ripened enough to eat.

Ditto the black currants I picked last month. And in the next couple of weeks I will also be harvesting some blueberries. In all previous summers since the garden project began and the fruit bushes were planted the berries all disappeared just as they were getting ripe.

Thank you, Cec Ashley, for the fruit frames!

Pretty impressive, eh?

Yesterday’s blog about the transformation of the diningroom window into a hummingbird haven, prompted me to think it was probably time for the semi-annual “compare and contrast” posting.

I may not (and let’s face it, never will) be successfully growing and harvesting enough fruit and veg to feed myself year round, but, dang, the garden sure does look pretty these days.

This photo was taken yesterday.

This is where we began in May 2010. Pretty fucking impressive contrast, eh?

So, how did we get from this sad photo to the one above it?

Considering where I started in May 2010, I was quite pleased that three months later the garden looked like this. Please note the ceanothus (planted for its bee-friendliness to replace the dead rhododendron marking Jenny’s grave) in the bottom left corner.

I don’t seem to have taken a comparison photo in 2011. It was a bad year for the blog. Not much better for the garden. Hardly surprising, under the circumstances. The photo above was taken in April 2012 – first year I attempted to fertilise (semi) proper beds.

 

By the time this photo was taken in May 2013, I had (thanks to Krys and Glenn) a proper raised bed with fresh top soil. It was a good year for peas, beets, tomatoes, courgettes, squash and strawberries.

 

Alas, I don’t seem to have taken a comparison photo in 2014. Closest thing is this one of the prayer flags I put up confound and confuse Bambo after his garden invasion, but you can at least see there is now a second raised bed, thanks to the wonderful Cec Ashley.

By June 2015, the garden swing (best garden news of that year for both Stella and me) was added. Now let's see that first photo again.

Once again I say (along with giving thanks for the friends who’ve helped), pretty fucking impressive, eh? Oh, and FYI, remember that ceanothus I said to note?

This is what it looks like now.

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.