Author: gardencanada

An entire season has passed. I’ve worked eight hours a day, seven days a week here, on the seemingly endless project to clear the litter of trees laying like vast matches absolutely everywhere I looked and to find modest space to begin a cluster of gardens.

Thirty-five years to let robust nature do entirely her own thing is far too long a time. And as many of you know, I also had two robberies and their rippling consequences to grapple with, including all the ways in which it ripped the heart out of me.

On June 9th, clearing foot high weeds and brush at the foot of the barn foundation for new roses, I found a large machine key, and it served as metaphor enough for my heart to begin to repair and my work here to reclaim some meaning for me.

Last May I wrote of trying a lazy method of planting potatoes, and as I tried it, I had slim confidence that it would work. I was certain animals would pilfer the seed potatoes thrown casually atop the compacted dirt, covered by just inches of easily moved hay. And, in fact, I was so convinced the little nuggets had been eaten, that I purchased a late duplicate batch, went back to plant them fishing around into the hay to do so, only to find the original ones slowly sprouting exactly where I’d left them.

Two days ago, I harvested the last of the first earlies. All others are still sitting happily under the hay until my harvesting of them before first frost. My zucchini has been just as happy with the hay coverlet as are all my other vegetables. I could weep if I thought long about all those sweaty years of smashing my wrists against rocks, or clanking shovel digging, panicked marathon weeding. So the endless Bruce County rock extractions are no more. Thank you and bless you in heaven Ruth Stout.

Last year in heavy soil I dug deep. For potatoes. And dug some more. Then in these trenches, over weeks dodging rain, I hilled up more heavy soil dug serially from elsewhere (so bend, dig, lift to wheel barrow, lug, shovel horizontally, bend again, toss) to repeatedly build up coverage over the potato plants as they grew, …and grew, and I dug, buried, dug, buried. This exhausting process did produce the heavenly potatoes I’ve just finished consuming last month, but nevertheless, I am always looking for easier ways to do things. And on the all-powerful internet I came across a reference to a Ruth Stout (click to watch) who became famous for discovering in her 60’s a remarkable way to plant vegetables, including potatoes. And another video channel Back to Reality (click) of a beautifully lazy young couple who with great success, tried this with potatoes. A lazier process even than the currently de rigueur “no dig” method, it’s charm is a certainty. Toss seeds (or seed potatoes) on the ground, and cover them with hay. Lots of hay. And do it every year. That’s it.

Anecdotal evidence indicates harvests surpass the digging, burying and fertilizing old ways. So I’m on it, even if two months late due to excessive mud and two traumatic burglaries, but I’m on it. Done. Thirty seed potatoes planted yesterday in about a half hour start to finish. The added beauty of this method is that wet ground is suddenly of no concern.

Day 197: Anyone who gardens and also, in those impressionable years before YouTube or Netflix, saw in theatres the movie Howard’s End, will NEVER get over the writ-large scene in that film of the tramp through the bluebell-carpeted forest. See it here to remind yourself Bluebell tramp (really?).

So today, the shivers I had running down the back of my neck as I planted my first measly 75 bulbs of English bluebells into the midst of the first of my two maple bushes, were not due to the snowfall, damp and cold. It takes several generations and possibly hundreds of  years to hope for the effect shown in Howard’s End, but nevertheless, there is a smattering more English bluebell in the woods up here today, albeit dormant until spring, than there was yesterday, and I am thrilled well beyond reason. Yesterday there were none.

My 1500 bulbs to plant are very nearly planted. I have another 75 English bluebells, another 75 fragrant white Thalia narcissus (daffodils) to plant in the woods tomorrow,  and then my six month long mission is completed. I can’t get the car into the property anymore due to snow and mud, but I don’t give a damned. This has been the most thrilling period of my life by far.

Day 189: I haven’t written since August, because one day has been exactly like another. Since mid-August, if not raining, I’ve stuck to a punishing routine. What can one say about monotony? I daily felled three trees, limbed those trees, stacked long logs, and hauled tree parts out of the way. I learned, sometimes the hard way, how to stay safe. I’d wait for a good day to burn the accumulated mountain of fine brush. I got used to hearing coyotes and to seeing an unpredictable mix of white tailed deer, scruffy coyotes, coy bunnies, turkeys in groups, thundering pheasants and dubious snakes. I was cutting so obsessively I thought it pertinent to cut my hair. Until a week ago, the sameness of the work was discouraging.  I hovered mid point on that neither-up-nor-down staircase, gripping the hand rail, painstakingly taking minor steps ad nausea. So much so that the bottom step I was trying to gain on seemed just a likely sign of my madness. I took the odd lovely break: I made it to see the Kathe Kollwitz and Rebecca Belmore exhibits, went to the comforting Owen Sound library, spent a day helping a friend move, had visits with my children, went to a friendly wedding reception. But that was all. I felled one tree last Monday that was resoundingly different. That tree being gone meant I’d at last cleared twenty percent of the south yard strip of forty-foot high cedars. Forever. I could see the future not just in my head, but in the yard, both north and south. One final tree gone that created a fifty foot open stretch of nothing but five waiting rose pillars, lining a crucial part of the south yard, revealing a grand possibility to plant fall bulbs. Today being three days later I have since had eighteen cubic yards of top soil delivered and have planted four hundred of my fifteen hundred fall bulbs. I am at last delivered of the self-imposed burden of my six months of hard graft, and am standing proud and almost stunned at the power of being at the very place I had last spring crazily dreamed of standing.

I made a productive vegetable garden from weedy ground. I designed and planted a large fruit cloister. I’ve made tomato sauce from things just picked; eaten potatoes only half an hour from their life in the underground; discovered the magic of garlic scape pesto, and boiled up both rhubarb and concord grape jams. At the moment I am inventing new uses for pumpkins. During these same end-of-summer months, I hired a tree angel, a man who gracefully climbs to frightening heights to rid me of immense trees tickling the house roof or hydro wires. He was here for weeks. I had my first ever ride in a fifty foot high cherry picker platform, courtesy of the capable two men now still working to save the sides and insides of my barn. I’ve learned how to use a chain saw and sharpen chains, how to fell tall trees, how to push past the seemingly impossible. Tuesday a wood stove was sold and removed. Today the second was removed, two port hole sized openings were punched in the house walls, two safe chimneys are going up, and two amazing stoves are being installed exactly as I write this. There is one more week of barn work and bulb planting here ahead of me, then everything will be put on hold waiting for a spring that promises some show, and far more time to relax.

This has been the most physically arduous, most amazing, and the best six months of my life with the possible exception of the first awe struck moments and months of motherhood. And I suppose this is a kind of entry into a fresh late life motherhood, and the beginning of a deep love to last me until the end of my days.

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Although I don’t know many half completed creatures or projects that look anything but ugly, still, I am disheartened that I have worked such a long, hot, hard summer and have so little to show for it, with absolutely nothing I’ve done looking even remotely beautiful. My new chain saw caused confusion and delay; the only wheels my trailer now has, are on back order; the barn needs hired expertise, for which I wait a month and pay large sums. Large trees come down in a month, with cost. Many are up to me to cut, haul, and burn, which can’t be done without the trailer. Everything is taking painfully long to progress. And I find myself chanting the gardener’s chant: next year will be better. In the meantime, I face with a downcast mood, the dreary dishevelment of unfinished business.

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Day 111: Yesterday I planted and watered a twenty-five foot by three foot row of forty-seven Excelsior foxgloves, just before they began to suffer horribly from being crammed in their seedling flat together for four long months. I have reached the end of the beginning up here. Everything to follow will be progress approaching a moving target, or it will be maintenance. Along with a perpendicular trench for ten delphinium and the parallel iris walk, the approach to the barn now has mild definition. The foxglove trench produced glass, rusted metals, and half a cubic yard of stone. It was given a hundred and sixty two kilograms of plastic bagged manure (where are you farmers?), as a bare minimum to keep the seedlings alive until more nourishment can be built in. 

By the house I converted a weedy old herb section into a flower garden that contains Apricot Beauty foxgloves, two types of delphinium, deep red snapdragons and scabia, one Velvet Queen sunflower, and a border of lavender. The herbs for the time being are in box planters.

The river here needs serious attention, and August is the time to do it. Two trailer loads of river silt have already been relocated from the swimming hole to a fallow quadrant of the vegetable garden, and much more needs to be cleaned out: when added to the soil already in the garden, it makes for a velvety loam.

I am past the stage where madness and physical stamina was required to see past the vast impossibility of the vision.