Sunday, May 8, 2011

Blank canvas

This is what the garden looked like last week after my handy, handsome man rototilled it all up for me. (with plenty of poultry compost worked in of course)

A blank canvass. I have wasted far too much time since then staring out the bathroom window, planning bed placement and crop rotation. Imagining this growing here and that growing there. (weeds don't grow at all in my daydreams)
Why through the window? Because even though the calendar is creeping towards June, the cold and rain have yet to let up here on the Wet Coast. It's enough to start a girl dreaming of greenhouses and cold frames. Last year the garden was well started when a mid-June frost killed off all the tender plants. Mid-June!!! Seriously, if anyone had mentioned global warming to me that week, I would have hit them. Maybe with a dead tomato plant.



Anyhow, one of the things that requires planning is how to incorporate a kid's area into the garden. Last year I devoted the front section of the garden to Caley. She wanted to grow peas and beans and carrots and sunflowers, so we made an A-Frame structure for the peas and beans to grow on, and a carrot bed all bordered by sunflowers. My brilliant plan was for the A-frame to make a tunnel leading under the plum tree so she and her cousins would have a cool place to hang out in the hot weather. I could just picture it being like a leafy clubhouse stocked with juicy plums and crisp fresh peas. What I hadn't counted on was that by the time the weather warmed up enough for the peas and bean to grow up the poles the tree would be overrun with swarms of cantankerous wasps after those same juicy plums. We couldn't get within 10 feet of the tree for fear of being stung.





Caley, nevertheless, enjoyed her little garden. This year she has decided on sunflowers, chives and pumpkins for her patch. All very far away from any fruit trees.

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