I hope so, ’cos if it ain’t the rototiller, it must be me. At least I’m not wearing a Tilly hat. In fact, Pat reckons my lovely straw chapeau makes me look like “a little old English lady”. I shall grasp on to the little part and ignore the old.
Yes, it’s true. I have finally rototilled a vegetable plot. When Kelly brings her rototiller round for me to use, she is astonished by the transformation in the garden. Sally is similarly impressed when she walks past as I’m tilling the ground. Music to my ears. I do feel as if I’m actually getting somewhere.
Roses blooming, bees buzzing, butterflies on the blackberry bush. All very much what I want in a garden.
When I finish the rototilling, Pat comes over with a couple of cans of beer to help me celebrate. And to give his opinion on whether I’ve levelled out the decidedly sloped area which is now the vegetable bed. (I fairly quickly give up on the idea of trying to level more area as this seems to be the only part of the garden not peppered with large rocks. As nice as it would be to have more level ground, I really can’t risk breaking Kelly’s rototiller.)
Ask Pat if he happens to have any hydrochloric acid. Not surprisingly this surprises him. He doesn’t, he tells me, have any plans to kill anyone, so he’s out of hydrochloric acid. I’ve asked him because I got my cousin Peter to resend the instructions he’d given me on how to check the quality of the soil: “Mix soil into a stiff paste with water, make it into a pellet and drop this into a glass tube or small bottle. Put a few drops of hydrochloric acid on to the pellet. If there is a reasonable amount of lime in the soil, effervescence will occur though it may not be visible so put your ear to the tube. If you can hear bubbling/hissing there's no need to lime the soil. If not, it needs lime.”
I explain this to Pat, who’s never heard of this test before, but can tell me from experience and living across the road that the soil will need lime. And, because he has lime left over from his own vegetable plot (and because he likes me, he adds), he offers to rake in some lime next week while I’m away and he’s watering the garden. We like Pat.
So today I’m off to Vancouver for a week to undertake another project: Turning the beige apartment in Burnaby into somewhere I wouldn’t mind living and getting Mike moved into it. Of course, the apartment won’t look fabulous until my belongings (for which there is almost no room on Gabriola) arrive from London next month, but just getting it painted some colour other than beige will help enormously. Even though this has nothing to do with Gabriola gardening, updates will follow in due course.
Before I head off to the mainland, it might be a good time to review progress.
I started here.
And now I’m here.
Not bloody bad, really. Pat on the back for me.
Will send Peter (my horticultural guru) an email before I leave, asking for professional advice on what I can still realistically expect to plant and harvest starting in July. Hopefully his list won’t be as overwhelmingly long as Rowan’s, though I fear it probably will be. Still so much to do.
PS Sadly, a quick check in with Peter has dampened my enthusiasm for square foot gardening, which he dismisses as a “gimmick”, so I will proceed the traditional route. Will at least save me money on lumber.
PPS The eagle-eyed and flora savvy may have clocked an error in previous postings. Even though I knew when I was writing it that it sounded wrong, I have previously referred to the above plant, which grows in deep-rooted and annoying profusion around these parts, as sorrel. Sorrel, is of course, a herb. This stuff is salal. Much prized by florists because the leaves stay green long after the branch is cut off, it is a pain in the ass for everyone else.
Well, this is very exciting. Go out to water the garden in the morning and realise that, not only is there quite a lot of new growth on the lilac bush (hurrah!), but there is also new growth on my poor, scrappy, survivor rose bush.
Not sure quite what you’re seeing? Here’s a close up.
Yes, it’s true! Those red leaves are new growth. Is it possible? Have the two new rose bushes inspired my scrapper to a growth spurt? Or is it my TLC? Or just the fact that the poor thing is no longer choked out by weeds and is actually getting some water? Doesn’t matter. What matters is this poor little rose bush may live to flower another day.
Occurs to me that I really should be doing something to protect the roses from aphids.
So, of course, this means another trip to the garden shop and another hunt through the marigolds for some yellow ones.
And, of course, while I’m at the garden shop I cannot ignore the pleading call of the lobelias. “Buy us,” they whimper. “Take us home. We’re meant to be together.” Yes, we are. I cannot deny it. So I liberate them, along with some more petunias which clearly would rather be in my garden than in the garden shop greenhouse. (I do consider adding a fuchsia to the mix to celebrate the news from Irmani that my Walthamstow fuchsia, nearly killed by last winter’s surfeit of snow, pulled through and put out. Unfortunately, the only one they have left is a pretty poor looking specimen and doesn’t have the wonderful pink and purple blend of the one now residing in Camden. Carrying my tray of flowers to the car, I spot exactly the one I want in a larger planter. Cannot stop myself asking how much it is. No, no, no. I cannot afford to be buying everything I want. I regretfully wave the fuchsia goodbye – knowing that, if it’s still there when I get back from Vancouver, I’m not going to be able to resist it a second time.)
What to do with the lobelias and petunias? I could, as I’d previously considered, plant them in the bed, but I’m not sure the petunias will survive in the not so great soil. Plus, if I start putting something other than the companionably planted marigolds in this bed, it will just make the rest of the bed cry out for more and more (and more and more) flowers. Decide I’d be better go with another pot, like the one I planted out back for Mike.
The pot does look pretty, but where should it go?
After picking it up and putting it down in various locations, all of which look vaguely ridiculous, I finally realise it belongs on the ground beside the bench. Oh, poor bench. Structurally there’s nothing wrong with it (other, of course, than the several missing planks). I really should do something about all the peeling paint. But not today.
Well, now that I’ve potted or replanted all these flowers and herbs, I do have quite a collection of small pots. More than enough, I think, to start sprouting some of those seeds I bought in a moment of folly. Kelly is, after all, going to bring her rototiller around, so it is feasible I could have some sort of vegetable patch soon. (Even if it isn’t that imaginary raised bed of mine.) If I stick some seeds in soil and make sure Pat waters these, too, while I’m in Vancouver, surely there is some possibility that some of the seeds will start to sprout while I’m away? Worth a try, I figure.
It’s only after I’ve put seeds in the second pot that I realise I have no old Popsicle sticks or anything else to write down what’s in each pot. Hmm. Need a system. Opt for “filing” the remaining seeds in a spare pot in the order they’ve been planted from left to right (front of pot being left). Let’s hope I remember this system when I return.
Come inside to check my email and play my turn in Facebook scrabble. (I really did plan to deactivate my Facebook account as part of my overall plan – including writing actual letters to people – to abandon 21st century annoyances, but the lure of scrabble has defeated this goal.) Out of curiosity decide to Google “Gabriola garden”. There are a surprising number of hits, but the one that really counts is an absolutely bloody revelation. It’s all about “square foot” gardening.
It’s like a raised bed wet dream: 12 inch squares of prepared soil in which you can raise small amounts of multiple crops (which is what you want when you’ve only got two people eating them). Where has this been all my life?
Run upstairs to look in the Gabriola phone book for a number for the Kandas. Of course there isn’t one. Either they’re not listed or this is an alias. (Name does sound unlikely, doesn’t it?) Determine that I will somehow track them down when I return from Vancouver and arrange to have a look at this marvel.
I am inspired!
I am also very definitely now in need of quite a few planks and a saw.
Not much time for gardening as I have to chauffeur Mike around to various appointments – haircut, physio, shopping. (I understand that he wants to have some involvement in food purchasing and of course it’s not his fault that it takes him a while to get around, but, man, it does make the shopping take a long time.) Still, I do find time to squeeze in a visit to my new favourite vendor: the garden shop.
The only down side to my beautiful Blueberry Hill rose bush is that the bed now looks completely unbalanced. Really, there is nothing for it but to buy another rose bush to plant at the other end. This gardening lark is getting expensive. If I’m not careful (and apparently I’m not) I’m going to have to get a job (heaven forefend) just to pay for it.
Try to find a nice pale yellow rose bush (yellow roses being a personal favourite), but no luck. The only yellow rose bushes they have are quite a vibrant yellow called, for some inexplicable reason, Marilyn Monroe. This would almost be an acceptable alternative, but all the Marilyn Monroes have spotted leaves and I’m figuring there is no point in handicapping myself unnecessarily. Opt for a pale coral rose bush. Lots of blooms soon to appear and, more importantly, lots of new growth showing.
While at the garden shop, triggered by Rowan-inspired guilt about how far behind I am on the veg front, in a moment of sheer folly I also buy packets of seeds for rocket, lettuce, beets, carrots, peas and even some cantaloupe.
What am I thinking? Not only is the imaginary vegetable patch still imaginary (a big enough obstacle to growing these imaginary vegetables), but, as previously stated, I’m about to go away for a week, so what the hell is the point in trying to start sprouting seeds in pots?
Pick Mike up from his physio appointment and make my way to the garden to dig a hole for my new rose bush. Roots, roots, bloody roots. Well, at least they’re not rocks (this area having once upon a time been properly dug over by me). While I’m digging the hole I note with great satisfaction that bees are buzzing around the ceanothus and the other rose. Get the new rose bush in and the hose out to soak the area. Water the other plants, thinking as I do so, that I really need to get my shit together to do the watering in the morning, when there is no sun in the garden, rather than late afternoon when the sun is broiling down everywhere.
Go inside for a cold drink, come back out, sit on dilapidated bench, light a fag and survey my domain. Really, I think, it would be nice to get some lobelia and other bedding plants in the bed with the roses and unintentionally dwarf lilac.
I am hoping the poor unintentionally dwarf lilac will eventually produce as much bloom as the genuinely dwarf lilac which I bought for the garden in Walthamstow and which now resides in my friend Irmani’s garden in Camden (see above – looking great, by the way, Irmani!), along with my monster rosemary and, I seem to recall, at least one of my potted rose bushes.
Anyway, sitting there thinking it might be nice to plant some flowers, I begin to wonder, somewhat belatedly you might think, what exactly I want out of this garden.
Do I want, like Rowan, to maximise my independence from the evil agri-business industry (uh, oh, just typing those words has me looking for a soap box, but I will resist a rant about why the hell there are green beans from Kenya in UK supermarkets year round while Kenyans watch their water table sink further and further)? Do I want the satisfaction of consuming my very own vegetables, which, given the reasonably temperate climate on Gabriola, I could do year round? Or do I want somewhere pretty to sit, listening to bees buzz and reading a good book?
Hmm. That is a bit of a poser. The latter option does sound fairly attractive and, let’s face it, would be much less time consuming.
No, no, no, I must resist this evil temptation to throw in the horticultural towel before I’ve really begun.
Go back into the house and ring Kelly. Yes! She can bring her rototiller around on Friday, show me how to use it. (Must remember to ask her to take a photo of me tilling the soil, else the sceptics amongst my readers might suspect that I snuck the errant Billy in to do the job for me.)
Okay, the timing could be better. I wonder how many weeds will take root in the week I’m in Vancouver. But at least I will know they are weeds so can pull straight away. I could actually pot some seeds for Pat to water along with the rest of the garden. Some might even sprout while I’m away.
Of course, I still won’t have any planks (for the building of raised beds) or topsoil. So, still a little ass backwards, but how is that new in this project?
As I find myself wishing the compost in the compost box was ready to roll (as I could use this to improve the quality of my soil and perhaps proceed without having to source and pay for a pile of top soil), I also find myself missing my three-tier worm composter from Walthamstow (also now residing in Camden). Oh, lovely worms, not only do you produce grade A compost in the bottom tray by the time the top tray is full, but you also produce lots of lovely liquid fertiliser which would come in very handy right now for the tomato plants (so much better than resorting to Miracle Gro, which Pat suggests.)
Do an internet search and discover that I could actually get a replacement three tray wormery for a mere $99.95. (Who do they think they are kidding with these prices? Why don’t they just charge an even $100? Not that the price would actually be $100 in this country with its stupid sales tax system which means, unlike unobtrusive VAT, everything costs a lot more than claimed on the price tag. Why can’t they just tell you how much the bloody thing costs? I blame Alberta. Oops, here comes a tar sands rant. Better rein it in.) Too late for the worms to produce their magic this year, but surely worth the investment? Pat, with his compost pile out in the open in the corner of his garden, would, I’m sure, shake his head, but I do love my worms.
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.
Let us ignore for a while (quite a long while – a week, perhaps) the fact that the area of the garden I’ve been talking about rototilling ever since my return in order to turn it into a raised vegetable patch still looks like this.
Instead, let us celebrate the fact that, with the use of my very own shovel, Pat’s borrowed wheel barrow and quite a lot of sweat, this afternoon I turned this into this
Yes, food actually growing in the garden. Cherry tomatoes to be eaten in the summer. Squash for the autumn. (I make no reference to the red pepper plant. Having failed dismally in all previous efforts to get a single red pepper off a plant, I'm not going to get excited about this one until it puts out.)
Okay, no, I didn’t grow them from seeds, buy, hey, one step at a time, eh?
Next step, next week, is to borrow Kelly’s “lady sized” rototiller.
Then I have to figure out what to use for soil in these imaginary raised beds of mine. Must ask Sally and Jamie where they get their top soil.
Oh, yes, and what am I actually going to build the beds with? Sounds like a trip to the Arbutus lumber yard – assuming no luck at GIRO, where I may actually be able to find some donated planks.
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.)
(Note to readers: You might want to skip the back story. It turned out a lot longer than I'd intended.)
When we bought our house on Gabriola Island in 1996, one of the things we loved about it the most was the fact that it was completely surrounded by trees. This part of the island (attractively known as Phase 4) had been parcelled into ¾ acre plots some years previously. Almost every other owner had, as his or her first act, cut down almost all the trees on their property, but the people who’d originally owned our plot had simply cleared a space in the middle and built a small house on a hill. So, even though there are neighbours nearby, when you look out the windows of this house, all you see are trees. It feels as if you’re in the middle of a forest and we loved it.
Don’t let the photo fool you (as the image we first saw of the listing did). This was taken recently, following a major renovation in 2006. The house was like a reverse Tardis – smaller on the inside than it looked from the outside.
The original house had been a small cabin: the entrance was at the back into the kitchen, with a small bedroom on the other side of a partition wall, a bathroom and livingroom with wood stove. At some point someone had built an extension out front of the original – a large livingroom on top of a semi-finished basement. So, really, despite looking like a two storey house, it was only one – the basement/ground floor not even weatherproofed for safe storage. When I first looked around the house, I saw the tiny bedroom and thought, Oh, no, this will never do. You could barely squeeze a double bed into it. Then I paused, in what was now the diningroom (the old livingroom), turned around full circle and declared the house was backwards. Clearly the large front room was where the bedroom should be, so that when you woke up in the morning you could look out the picture window and see trees, trees, trees. The room with the wood stove should be the livingroom, so you could curl up and admire the fire, and the partition wall should be taken down to provide and open kitchen/diningroom. Oh, yes, and the semi finished basement should be finished as a spare room and writing space for me. (Photos now added here.)
As soon as I realised that, I was in love with the house. Of course, the path of true love never runs smoothly, nor did our purchase of the house. It was listed with a cowboy realtor who offered clients a saving by only charging a 3.5% fee – which they accomplished by trying to cheat the buyer’s agent out of their half of the traditional 7%. Patrick, our friend and estate agent, went basically to war with them. Our first offer was turned down. We dejectedly began to look at other properties on the island, but nothing ever came close. After our second day of looking, I asked Patrick to drive past “our” house. He did and I said, “We want that house.” And Patrick said, “Okay, it’s not going to be pretty, but I’ll get you that house.” And he did. Some of his methods would lose him his licence (if he was still in the business), so I won’t elaborate, simply say, no, it wasn’t pretty.
In February 1996 we rented a van and brought it, loaded with excess bits of furniture from our rented house in Vancouver, to our new getaway on Gabriola.
Things we’d somehow failed to notice, but discovered that first weekend:
Nowhere in the large front room or the semi-finished basement was there a single plug.
The only window in the livingroom was a small skylight.
If you looked up at the ceiling surrounding the woodstove chimney, you could see the sky, an infraction which meant we would not be covered on our insurance if we actually used the stove.
The large, multi-paned windows in the basement were set into, but not attached to their frames. (We discovered this when we touched one and, almost in slow motion, it fell out of its frame onto the rocky ground outside – miraculously not one of its 24 panes so much as cracked.)
Just as we were getting ready to leave, the pump stopped working and no water was coming out of the taps.
Mike, my then partner (and still good friend), groaned and referred to the house as The Money Pit.
Somehow while we were there and from Vancouver the following week, we tracked down the appropriate tradesmen to deal with all these problems.
So where, you ask, is the garden in all this? Patience. There was much to do inside the house during the limited time we had on the island weekends and during the summers. Our most excellent handyman Tom put a picture window in the livingroom. I painted. I ripped up the hideous carpet in the kitchen and bathroom, put down tiles, replaced the hideous carpet in the back “bedroom”. (There was nothing we could do about the hideous carpet which covered the floor space in the middle and front rooms. It was too big a project for me and too expensive.) Where, you ask, was Mike while I was doing all this home improvement? Working on his computer or watching baseball games on television. DIY is most definitely not his thing.
It was only a year or so later, when the inside of the house was transformed as far as I could take it without a major renovation that I started to think further about the outside of the house than hanging a basket of flowers.
Gabriel garden project – phase one
On our pie wedge-shaped lot there was one corner, near the road, which had been cleared of trees and actually got some sunlight. It was a mess and it wasn’t easy to access from the house, what with all the overgrown undergrowth and the rotten tree which had fallen across what might be a path to the sunshine.
It was time and phase one of the Gabriola garden project began.
I recruited Pat, our nearest neighbour, a widower and retired logger (whom I never, at that time, told that I worked for Greenpeace, the forest campaign being somewhat contentious).
Step one: Pat fired up his chainsaw and demolished the fallen, rotten tree. We had what would turn out to be the first of many bonfires, which dealt with the bits of log, fallen branches, overgrown undergrowth.
Step two: I bought some metal poles and wire fencing. Pat helped me hammer the poles into the ground. We wrapped the metal fencing around these and used some of the excess to block the entrance.
Step three: Tom, our handyman, who had just replaced his fence, donated his old gate, which we jury rigged between two trees.
Steps two and three were crucial to combat one of Gabriola’s greatest gardening challenges: deer. I love the deer on the island, get excited when I see one, but, with the exception of daffodils and a few other flowers, there’s pretty much nothing deer won’t eat in a garden. So, a fence and a gate had to be in place before anything else could be considered.
I couldn’t be too ambitious with my gardening plans. At that time we were only on the island weekends and for varying periods in the summer. Mike, a poli-sci prof at UBC, had the luxury of spending more time there in the summer. Unfortunately, his thumb was any shade but green, so there wasn’t much help to be had from that quarter other than watering. There was no question of growing fruit and veg, but I did want somewhere sunny with some flowers, somewhere to while away a pleasant hour or two in the summer, relaxing with a book.
The area which I was transforming was rock-filled and uneven. I dug over part of it, pulling out roots, trying to make a raised patch, surrounded by some of the rocks I’d jammed my shovel and back into. I planted some rose bushes. Because I’ve always loved lilacs, I planted a lilac tree, surrounding it with wire to protect it from the deer which might (could) jump over the fence. I bought a weed wacker to keep the combination of grass, clover and weeds down to a reasonable height.
Mike and I bought a bench. Constructing it from the flat pack was a reminder of two things: Mike’s complete absence of a DIY gene and our total inability to communicate and work together on any sort of construction project. Somehow (I honestly don’t know how) the bench ended up in one piece. I bought some forest green marine paint and coated it. We had a garden of sorts and something to sit on.
The following summer, I somehow wangled three months of working from home and so had a decent amount of time on the island. Now it was time to have more than the bench to sit on. Despite my workaday role as a toxics campaigner, I threw all principles to the wind and bought a white PVC table and chairs. Now we could have lunch in the garden. Hurrah! My plans were still not very ambitious: a few pots with flowers in them, bulbs planted for the spring. It was enough. I had a garden (of sorts).
In 2001 I had an opportunity to take on a one-year contract role with Greenpeace UK. I could (but won’t) go into all the reasons that Mike and I were not functioning well on any level as a couple by then. And I was missing my family in England, tired of the semi-annual fortnight of running around from London to Liverpool to Bristol, double booking my days with lunch and evening meetings to make sure I saw everyone. It was time to go home.
The one year turned into nine, not all with Greenpeace: WaterAid, Homeless Link, the National Union of Students, a surprising stint at the League Against Cruel Sports and a grand finale as acting director of Free Tibet Campaign, all factored into the mix. During that time I’m pleased to say Mike and I remained friends.
My semi-annual trans-Atlantic trips went in the opposite direction, usually at Christmas, which was a wonderful time to be on Gabriola. There’s nothing quite as pleasant as sitting in front of a roaring woodstove on a cold winter’s day. Still, not the right time of year to work on, let alone enjoy one’s garden. The only use for the garden during those trips was for yet another bonfire with Pat to get rid of the bits of wood and other crap (don’t worry, nothing toxic) from various renovation projects. The only flora addition during that period was the planting of a rhododendron to mark the grave of a much loved cat.
Return to Gabriola
In early 2008 disaster struck for Mike. On the lengthy waiting list for knee replacement surgery, he’d had a fall, badly hurting his other leg. He hobbled around for a couple of weeks before finally going to his doctor in Vancouver. The x-ray revealed that his entire femur was shattered and the reason it had broken so easily was that it was riddled with cancer. By the time he was admitted to hospital the cancer seemed to be spreading all over his body. Femur replacement surgery ensued, followed by chemotherapy, followed by radiation. I’d managed a quick visit in April between the enormous pro-Tibet rally at the Olympic torch relay in London and the Dalai Lama’s visit the following month. I went back for three weeks in September, planning to get him back for at least a visit to Gabriola, which he missed terribly and hadn’t seen for months. Unfortunately, just before I arrived, he’d been hospitalised again, this time with pneumonia. Hoping that a visit to Gabriola might still be possible before I left, I came over for a weekend with my friend Catherine to make sure the house would be ready.
It wasn’t and we realised the evening we arrived that we were going to be spending a lot of our time cleaning. Bless Catherine, who is simply the best, she got tucked right in.
Catherine hadn’t been to the house on Gabriola since shortly after we bought it. Despite the three inches of dust on everything (the house sitters having somehow failed to grasp the concept of a dust cloth or furniture polish), she was impressed with the transformation. By then the house had been through its major renovation and was as it should be: an open plan kitchen/diningroom in the back, the “basement” now a finished bedroom with en suite bathroom and, almost most importantly, the hideous carpet in the two front rooms replaced with lovely new carpet. (I’ll let go of my shock and dismay – though it was hard to do at the time – that somehow in the reno process Mike had been persuaded to not only paint all the woodwork and wooden window frames, but that he’d chosen to have them painted brown, a colour I detest for anything except actual wood.)
In the morning light I was keen to show her the garden I’d created. Imagine my heartbreak at discovering my garden was no longer there. Oh, the fencing was still just about standing, but the gate, which had at some point been left open, had warped and rotted, fallen off its hinges. Paint peeled off the rotting slats of the bench. The white PVC table and chairs would never be white again. And of course everything I’d planted was dead, dead, dead. Okay, Mike had been hobbling around with a bum knee for over a year and had been in no position to do any gardening and, okay, the various house sitters who’d been taking care of the cats in his absence hadn’t seen gardening as part of their remit, but, oh, my, it was heartbreaking.
I had to take her to Drumbeg to cheer myself up.
Back in Vancouver, I took Mike, now out of hospital, to an appointment with his oncologist. The news was not good: the radiation which had been tried when the chemo didn’t work, had also failed. There was nothing else they could do. He had maybe a year, possibly less, possibly six months, possibly three. I understand why these guys say something as fatuous as “Try to enjoy the time you have as much as you can”, but it really does seem a slap in the face at the time.
There was no way to get Mike to Gabriola before I was due to leave. He was gutted. Inclined towards neediness for as long as I’d known him (one of the reasons being half a couple with him had proven impossible for me), he put neediness to one side and told me simply and honestly that the prospect of facing his last ever birthday, his last ever Christmas, his last ever New Year would all be a bit more bearable if I could be there. Well, what do you say to something like that? Of course I agreed to come back. Free Tibet had by then appointed a full time director, so I wouldn’t be leaving the campaign in the lurch. I went back to London, found someone to cover my half of the house share in Walthamstow for a few months, gave my notice at Free Tibet and flew back to Vancouver in time for Mike’s 65th birthday in November. We celebrated his birthday with his daughter, son, daughter-in-law and granddaughters. Then we headed over to Gabriola.
It was the worst winter on record. It snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed. There were power failures, during one of which the pump first froze, then fried. It was a week before the plumber could actually get to the house to replace the pump, a week of mornings begun by clambering across the road through the snow drifts to fetch pails of water from Pat’s house. Shovelling the drive, shovelling a path from the house to the woodshed, only to have four tons of melting snow fall with a crash off the roof and the trees and onto the freshly shovelled path. Despite all this, I was for the first time in eight years reminded just how much I did love this place on Gabriola. It was also a reminder of what good friends I had here.
In January I took Mike to Vancouver for his next appointment with his oncologist. The news was astonishing: his cancer, three months earlier still rampant and unstoppable, had gone into remission. I claim no role in this (although sanctification would be gratifying).
This was, as they for some reason say (whoever ‘they’ are), a different kettle of fish. Mike, most happily, was not going to peg it in a matter of months. Unfortunately, he still had major mobility issues. Although he could use a walker (and before I left a cane) over reasonably short and even distances, he was still recovering from femur replacement surgery and still in a wheelchair much of the time. If he wanted to continue living on Gabriola – and he did – he was going to need help after I left. A period of sorting this ensued, before I was able to leave him in the care of lovely Kelly (who became a good friend) and delightfully (for the most part) wacky Claudia.
I flew back to London. Sadly for me (and a lot of other people, I do concede) during my absence the economy had collapsed. Jobs were in short supply and I agreed without hesitation to take on some temporary work writing new business tenders for my friend Irmani’s housing charity. Still, as grateful as I was for the income, the contrast between fronting the hottest campaign on the planet in April 2008 and writing tenders in April 2009 was a bit dispiriting, truth be told. A year of temporary contracts, of filling out applications which didn’t even lead to interviews, of interviews which didn’t lead to jobs ensued. I was out of work and on the ludicrous dole (£65 a week job seeker’s allowance and a weekly housing benefit that was £35 a week less than my actual rent), when a letter arrived from the estate agent reminding us that our tenancy agreement was up for renewal in May.
How, I asked myself, can I renew the tenancy for another year when I don’t even know if I’ll have a job in May? It wasn’t as if I didn’t have options. I had a house on Gabriola. And a garden that needed me. Sod it, I thought. Time to go.
Before leaving London behind, I sign up my cousin Peter to assist me in my summer project of rehabilitating my poor garden. Peter, a lifelong gardener and for many years before his retirement a syndicated gardening columnist, has considerable experience in rehabilitating the sad gardens of his family.
Peter getting dug into his daughter Philippa’s garden in Ireland.
Normally, as above, his involvement is hands on, but distance dictates he will, in this instance, have to direct operations electronically from afar. I am instructed to send him photos and some compass references, which I promise to do.
GABRIOLA GARDEN PROJECT
Day 1 - 24 May 2010
It is late in the evening when I arrive back on Gabriola in May. I decide to put off looking at the garden until the morning, thus able to remain blissfully unaware of quite what a challenge I’ve set myself when I blithely stated in London that I was going to spend the summer transforming the garden.
In the morning I go down to the garden and gulp. The gate is, of course, still broken. The fence is still in need of some attention. The bench is still dilapidated. But now, unlike my previous winter visits, there is also two and half feet of grass and weeds covering the entire area.
Oh, well, I think, first job will have to be getting out the weed whacker. Until that job is done I can’t even begin to assess what needs to be done.
I go to the shed, where I know the weed whacker was hanging in December 2008. Uh, oh. No weed whacker. Or hose (also last seen in the shed in December 2008). Or shovel. Or hoe. Or rake. Or … Zip. Nada. Rien. Absolutely no garden tools of any description anywhere. Buggeration.
I sigh, go into the house, send an email to Gary, who’s done or organised a lot of work on the house and property for Mike in my absence, asking him if he has any idea what happened to the weed whacker and hose, last seen in the shed. He replies that he has no idea, but can lend me both. I tell him I’m a long way away from needing the hose, but the weed whacker would be most appreciated.
Day 2
I go out in the morning, take some more pictures of the garden to send to Peter, make a note to myself that I need to get a compass. Sigh.
Late in the afternoon Gary drops off his weed whacker (and the hose I’d said I didn’t need).
Day 3
It rains.
Day 4
Pat is supposed to be coming over to have a look at the garden and offer suggestions about how the fence might be strengthened – at 88 and with a bum shoulder now, he won’t be pounding posts in again, but I’d appreciate his thoughts.
Of course, it’s raining, so we give up on the idea of garden work and instead go to the pub for a pint and a few games of pool. He beats me 8-2 and the only reason it’s not 9-1 is that he misses the eight ball and pots the cue ball instead in his final shot of the final game. On the plus side, in the one game I did win, I managed to pot four balls in one go – a personal best in a game which I’ve never really mastered.
Day 5
The rain has finally stopped. I pull out the long extension cord (one of the few things still left by the gremlins in the shed), plug in the weed whacker, start whacking weeds. I hear someone calling my name, look around. It’s my neighbour Jamie, welcoming me back to Gabriola. We briefly discuss the sorry state of the garden in general and the bench in particular. I tell him optimistically that it will not be long before he will see an amazing transformation. I’ve already lined up, thanks to Mike, access to a small rototiller, which I shall be able to put to use once I’ve dealt with the knee deep weeds. Jamie carries on up his drive and I get back to work.
I’m about halfway through the job, just beginning to feel some sense of accomplishment when Gary’s weed whacker makes a popping noise, stops working. Smoke emits from the motor. Uh, oh. Borrowed weed whacker now dead. Shit.
Day 6
On my way to the shop, I run into (not literally) Sally, Jamie’s other half and our other neighbour. I tell her the sad story of my missing weed whacker and the demise of the borrowed one. She tells me they have one I can borrow, although it’s somewhat jury rigged, so she will need to consult with Jamie to see if he thinks it’s safe to lend out.
Day 7
It is raining.
I ring Sally and Jamie for the verdict on the jury rigged weed whacker. It seems the starter switch (which probably cost five cents to manufacture) had stopped working. After much checking with shops and manufacturers, he was informed that it could not be replaced and that he would simply have to buy a new one. Jamie was having none of that. He took the handle apart and bypassed the starter switch. The weed whacker now works directly off the mains. As soon as you plug it in (which must be done carefully to make sure it doesn’t start leaping about), it’s going. As long as I follow these instructions, it’s safe to use and I’m welcome to borrow it.
I say I will come by to pick it up if it ever stops raining.
Day 8
It rains. Apparently, unlike the UK, where the first half of May was crap, it had been glorious in British Columbia until the day I arrived. Ha. (Emails from friends in the UK inform me that as soon as I left, beating the ash cloud by four hours, the weather turned beautiful. Grrr.)
Day 9
It’s still raining, but Sally and Jamie are going away for the weekend, so I decide to collect the weed whacker anyway, in the hope that it will stop raining while they’re gone. We have a chat about the best sources of various plants on the island. There is apparently a Thai woman who has a stall at the Saturday market and who sells the best tomato plants and herbs. No point in visiting her at the market this week as I still don’t have a gate on the fence.
Have I mentioned the deer? I do believe I have, but to recap: there is nothing other than daffodils which deer won’t eat. Partly for this reason, people on the island have planted a profusion of daffodil bulbs – not just on their property, but along the side of the road, everywhere they can find some soil. It’s a beautiful sight in the spring.
Day 10
It’s market day, but, as noted, no point in buying any plants for the garden until the rotted gate is somehow replaced. I figure just seeing plants at the market will depress me, so I don’t go.
It’s still raining and I’m getting very impatient and wound up.
Day 11
Still raining.
Bloody hell, I’ve just seen my first BC mutant (technically called banana) slug in years. I’d forgotten how big these buggers are. I remember the first time I saw one after moving to BC in 1990. I pointed in horror, demanding to know what the hell it was and refused initially to believe the person who told me dismissively that it was a slug. Slug? Get out of here. I’ve seen slugs and they should not be the size of a 12” ruler. (Trust me, I kid you not.)
I update my status on my soon to be deactivated Facebook account to mention the slug sighting – with an added message to my friend Rowan, who moved to Vancouver the same time as me, but has been back in England for more than a decade now, that it was indeed one of those slugs. She responds by asking, to the bemusement of other friends, if I licked the slug’s bum? One of the first pieces of nature trivia we somehow picked up in BC was the fact that if you lick a snail’s bum (hard to imagine, I know, and never tried by me) your tongue will go numb.
Make a mental note that if I ever reach the point where I’m ready to start emailing my cousin Peter for long distance gardening advice I will have to mention not only deer proofing, but the threat posed by mutant slugs.
Day 12
Still bloody raining. In a somewhat vain attempt to feel as if I’m doing something, anything to move this project along, I dig out a couple west coast gardening books I bought many years ago and start rifling through them.
Of course they’re both about what you should be doing every month of the year and make the assumption that everything is already in place, simply being properly tended. It’s a depressing reminder of just how far I have to go before I can start to catch up with the bloody books.
However, I do discover in one of the pest sections that mutant banana slugs aren’t actually that big a threat – the ones you have wage war with (beer traps for me) are the little black ones we all know and hate. (I remember going for a walk with Mike one summer’s evening many years ago and seeing an army of black slugs out and about.) This cheers me up, but only for a second or two.
Nowhere in either book is there any mention of how to keep deer at bay. Methinks some internet searching is called for.
When, oh when, is it ever going to stop raining?
Oh, shit. Just remembered the whole point of keeping this Gabriola garden project journal is to set up a blog to share my progress (ha!) with friends and family. It's now June. Better do it.
