Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
A garden diary.
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.
Arrest the bosses…..
Problems with Michael Moore aside…. this looks like it could be amusing.
Winter gardening.
I went to a winter gardening workshop at Kiwasa Neighbourhood House last night put on by my friend Jess and her neighbour Stacey and came away with seeds, starts and some new thoughts about my garden as we head into fall. This includes a plan to dig up the ugly box hedges lining my walkway and plant cauliflower, kale and brussel sprouts instead since it’s the south facing yard. For years now I have been aware of winter gardening possibilities on the west coast, particularly as the weather often stays warm into October and we often don’t get a real frost until December or later (last year notwithstanding) – but I have never gotten my act together to actually enact a food-producing garden year round. This year I have already planted spinach, mixed greens, sprouting broccoli and pac choi in the backyard, all from seed which has been sprouting nicely over the last few weeks – now with starts and even more seeds I’m excited to get back in the garden this weekend to ensure winter eating as good as our summer eating has been.
After I get that squared away, my next big gardening project will be to move the perennial herbs in the backyard into planters and start building the network of raised beds and pathways in the back – thus increasing my potential food growing square footage for next spring by about four times. This will also give me a place to locate the garlic which I intend to plant in October, not to mention an idea of where the permanent home for my asparagus patch might be (that goes in by February). I am a tad afraid of this project as I am so *not* handly with a saw and drill, but all the plans tell me this is pretty straightforward and I have an idea of the design and spacing that will give lots of food-growing space as well as a little sanctuary/sitting area in amongst it all. So exciting!
Now all we have to do is get the beer and wine-making set up in the basement and between that, the year-round garden, and our larder full of canning we should be good no matter what comes our way.
Bookish: Tess of the Baskervilles
I’ve been reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles outloud to Brian this summer (his cataracts make it impossible to read in the sunlight) as it happened to be on my “classics to read before I die list”. We’re getting pretty close to the end of what has been a great read-aloud book – what with the melodrama and all – and I happened to mention to Brian that when I was a kid I thought that Tess was a book about a woman who was attacked by mad dogs. I had no idea why, figured it was my own quirky thing…..
Except that Brian had the same childhood confusion over the book! So we puzzled that one out until he figured out that the confusion had come from another classic book The Hounds of the Baskervilles – Baskerville seeming close enough to D’Urberville for a six-year-old to confuse the two. Made sense to me, and I “remembered” that this was probably where I had also gotten mixed up.
In any case, we’ve decided in the tradition of Pride, Prejudice and Zombies (a totally worthwhile read, btw) that Tess needs to be rewritten along these lines, since surely Brian and I weren’t the only kids who got Urberville and Baskerville mixed up – right? It seem that after the rape of Tess in the first bit of the book, rather than continuing along the path of bad treatment by men, Tess should adopt some magical power that attracts rabid dogs to her side. Not to attack her, mind you, but to snarlingly go after those sexist scoundrels of Victorian society. The dastardly Alec, the priggish Clare, the nasty landowner from Trantridge who works her near death – why should Tess suffer any of these abuses? Nothing a foaming pack of hounds wouldn’t fix eh? She’s a fair morbid character at the best of times throughout (wishing her own death from the very beginning of the book), it really does seem fitting that rather than living up to some ideal of purity she give herself over to the gothic darkside of revenge and bloodlust. Ah yes, I can see it now – our childhood confusions brought to life in modern satirical literature!
So if there’s any aspiring writer out there looking for a new take on Victoria literature – look no further – but make sure to give us credit if you write the book. We’d love to see such a thing in print!
