Red Cedar

I’m back at work after a long weekend (flex-Mondays, hooray!) and sifting through the thoughts, projects, ideas percolating through my bloodstream along with the extra-strong americano I drank on the way to work this morning (thanks Brian xoxo). Of course I’ve lots to do so I think it’s bullets this morning so I can get on with the actual work piled up on my desk (not to mention the union-steward responses that need to be made). Here is essentially what I’m thinking about:

• I’m excited that a new altish yarn store is opening up in my neighbourhood this Saturday! Baaad Anna’s was originally going to be on the Drive, but it turns out that she (Anna) found a better spot up in Hastings-Sunrise which is way rad if you ask me. The grand opening is this weekend, and classes start in October which is awesome since I don’t know how to knit and have always wanted to learn. Going all the way up to Main Street (closest yarn shop) seemed a bit onerous and now I don’t have to! So tell all the east-van crafter/knitters you know. Baaad Anna’s!
• I’ve decided that next spring I’m going to keep Mason Bees to help with neighbourhood pollination efforts and to learn more about small-scale beekeeping. I would *love* to keep honeybees but I just don’t think it’s possible in such a small space.
• We’re almost finished the basement renos and by September 1st everything should be a go on that front. Brian and I are doing finishing bits now, and may be casting about for help if we can’t figure out some final details — but generally we’re well on our way to being done.
• I’ve started a new blog just for keeping track of my own gardening process. Among the Weeds can be found at http://sungarden.wordpress.com and will soon be documenting the building of raised beds for the back garden area.
• Speaking of which, I found some really cheap untreated cedar for the building of the garden boxes on Craigslist which I will be picking up Saturday. If anyone out there wants to spend an afternoon putting together garden boxes in the near future, please let me know. Otherwise I’ll just do it myself.

I suppose that’s about it – yarn, bees, renos, gardening, building stuff – I’m in Nanaimo Thursday night but otherwise just kicking about getting things done before the summer wraps up and we’re back indoors for the cold season.

It’s come to this I suppose, a separate blog for my garden to record photographs, thoughts, planting dates and miscellania about the garden at my East Vancouver home on William Street. Not because it’s anything much yet, but I’ve got big, big plans and not much of a clue about what I’m doing. Which means that documentation is everything. Both because I want to record the progress from one state to the next and also because I want to figure out what works in the process.

For the record, the backyard essentially looked like this when we moved into the house:

When we moved – April 2009 – it was a little bleaker, this photo was taken in May on the day of our housewarming… by this time we had tidied up the winter garden mess and put that dog area & dogshit composter into the back fence area. As the spring and summer progressed, I threw a lot of various things into the ground and into pots on the patio – not really arranging anything so much as filling in available bed space with whatever starts looked appealing at Como Market on Hastings Street.  It was a first year, haphazard garden planted in soil that hadn’t been fortified with anything in some time – and yet, it still produced enough to make us happy with this first summer’s bounty. I will detail my thoughts on everything planted this year in a future post, as well as put up another end of summer photo as a comparison in the next few days. Another upcoming post will also document the building of a raised bed system as I enter into the world of square-foot-gardening.

In any case, this blog is for my own use and record as I find other garden blogs of note, tools and resources – perhaps others might find this a useful set of resources as well.