Holey moley!

 

The question for today: Now that I have an area filled with holes (can holes actually fill anything?) from transplanting the berry bushes, what do I do with it?

The answer (possibly not immediately obvious from the photo below) is dig a deeper hole, use up all garden bricks to outline it…

… add landscaping fabric, fill with sea soil.

 

 The forecast is for rain tomorrow and I’d rather water the garden with rain than well water, so I might as well get some squash  (acorn, butternut and scaloppini) seeds in the ground.

Hopefully these seeds will do better than the ones I planted in my new mini-greenhouse back in early March.

 

So far all I’ve managed to grow in there is algae. I would like to blame this on noxious fumes from the PVC covering, but I suspect the culprit is me. Being new to this greenhouse game, the fact that one actually needs to open up the front during the day to let some air in had eluded me until I noticed the green slime. Oops. Oh, well.

After planting the squash seeds, I move over to the main vegetable bed. Peas (both regular and mange tout) were planted at the beginning of the month. Today I plant, from left to right (so I’ll remember when they start coming up), lettuce, spinach, beets and carrots.

Rumour (the internet, so it must be true) has it that rocket grows well with raspberries. As I now have these sea soil-filled raspberry beds, I throw some rocket seeds in there. We shall see.

Now there’s the question of what to do with the other former raspberry bed.

Last month Cec very kindly agreed to build me another raised bed in this spot. Of course that was before he and Joyce decided (hurrah!) to stay on the island. Now, if there are raised beds for Cec to build, they are for Sandra Bullock. (Sorry, I meant to say Joyce.) Fair enough. Rome wasn’t built in a day. I can wait.  

Sorry!

With apologies to friends whose gardens may currently be buried under two or more feet of snow (yes, Jane, I do mean you), this is early February on Gabriola.

Last autumn, to celebrate my land (and rock) scaping work out back, I planted dozens of daffodil bulbs. They are the only thing bloody deer absolutely, positively will not eat. It may not be easily discernible from the photo below, but they’re coming along nicely. Friends on the island who get more rather more sun than I do this time of year, already have daffs in bloom. (Again, sorry, Jane.)

Something new for this year. For the first time ever, I have a sort-of greenhouse. A friend on the island who has one like this swears it does the job, so I figured I’d go mad and splurge fifty bucks on one.

Despite the dozens of pieces arriving in a box without instructions, I managed to figure out how to put the frame together.

When I started unfolding the cover I was suddenly reminded of the toxics talk roadshow I did around BC back in the 1990s. At one point I would always ask: “Has anyone here ever pulled a PVC shower curtain out of the package and felt as if you were being gassed?” Invariably there would be a couple of nods. And then I’d say: “You were.” I would then explain about the various component chemicals in PVC that escaped as soon as the plastic was unfolded.

Oh, crap, I thought the other day. The plastic cover for my mini-greenhouse is PVC. Why didn’t I think to check?

And then I thought, am I really going to take the whole thing apart and try to send it back for a refund? Is there any chance I could get a refund? Almost definitely not.

And then I wondered what sort of chemicals were likely to leach out of the PVC when the sun got on it and what might those chemicals do to any seedlings sprouted inside it for my supposedly pesticide-free garden?

And then I poured myself a drink.

We shall see.