What a difference a day makes

A day (slightly drizzly – nothing you’d call actual rain) and a half (slightly busy with other things) spent indoors. When I go down to the garden yesterday afternoon, I can’t believe what’s been happening.

There are, quite undeniably, pears growing on the pear tree. How exciting is that? (Okay, okay, I know there’s a long way to go before I get a pear crumble out of this tree, but still. Pretty fucking exciting as far as I’m concerned.)

The California lilac has burst into bloom and is absolutely buzzing with bees.

You’ll have to take my word for it (as they are apparently camera shy), but there really were at least twenty bees sucking the nectar out of these flowers when I took the photo.

Lots of strawberries have started to appear. This is going to be a great crop – especially as (touch wood) the netting means most of them are for me and not for the birds.

Less good news elsewhere.

So much for my recent excitement that peas were starting to appear. Some have, but only four out of dozens planted. It’s possible the birds got to the seeds. It’s also possible the seeds (third year in a “good for three years” packet) were actually past their sell by date. More seeds will need to be purchased and planted. Peas now well behind schedule. Sigh.

The beets are still coming along nicely and I think (although it may be wishful thinking) that I spy with my little eye some carrot leaves starting to appear. (And as they do, I suddenly ask myself why the hell I planted them in the shallower end of the raised bed. Doh.)

Four squash plants have sprouted. No idea if they’re acorn or scaloppini. (Should have made a note of which I planted where. Time will tell.

No sign so far of any lettuce, rocket or spinach. Too soon to give up on these? Nah. Ever the optimist me.

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.

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.

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?

Berry good(ish) news

This is what I just had for lunch.

French toast with blueberry sauce and strawberries fresh picked from the garden. YUM! The raised bed Cec kindly built for me last year and into which I transplanted the strawberries in January is bearing an extraordinary amount of fruit. I can barely keep up. (I say “barely” because, really, there is no limit on the number of strawberries one can consume in a day, is there?)

Here is today’s haul. 

Yes, that is a combination of strawberries and raspberries.

The good news is that shifting the raspberry plants into better soil in an area with more sunlight has also worked a treat. 

The bad news is that it really is far too early in the summer to have this many raspberries. We’ve had one rainy day since the beginning of May (and it was more of a sprinkly day) and all signs are that it’s going to be another long hot summer. Fantastic! say the beach bunnies. Not so much, says everyone who realises this in not the way it’s supposed to be. May is supposed to be nice and June is supposed to be wet. That’s how we manage to grow fruit and vegetables in our gardens without running our wells dry. 

It’s only just the first official day of summer (so why is it known as midsummer?) and already islanders are wondering how much they dare water their gardens. (If any of them are still watering their bloody lawns they deserve to have their wells run dry.) Not good. 

Oh, yikes. Speaking of midsummer, I need to get ready for this afternoon’s rehearsal. 

As I said on Facebook yesterday, me in a Shakespeare play? I really didn’t see that coming.

Happy Solstice, all.