Strawberries, eventually

My fantasy about home-grown strawberries in June resulted in this hopeful new experiment in our back yard. Photo by John Denniston.

The strawberry plants were an impulse buy, I have to admit. But there I was on a rare trip to a garden centre in these non-shopping times, and the damp bundle of 25 sweet little plants, wrapped in burlap, leaped into my hands. After a winter of avoiding wooden strawberries from California, the fantasy was strong: Oh, to walk out the back door and pick ripe strawberries in June!

As always with impulse buys, recrimination and regret followed. Where, in a tree-surrounded garden, is there enough sunshine to grow heat-loving strawberries? Shall we really tear up the lawn for this dubious experiment? The capper was learning that all strawberry buds and blooms should be ruthlessly torn off the first year to ensure the plants’ energy goes into root-building.

But John and I are feeling full of enterprise these days, and we’ve been priding ourselves on our creative use of second-hand materials to make new things. It turned out that we had just enough left-over cedar and just enough remaining compost to make and fill a three-foot by three-foot raised bed. And we found a rare spot in the garden that may just get enough sunshine for strawberries.

 There will be no walking out the back door to pick them this year, but I like to think there’s hope. Maybe some June day in future, I will be looking at a luscious bowl of home-grown strawberries and deciding that my isolation-days impulse buy wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

Luckily for me, John knows how to build things. Here's the beginning of the new raised-bed frame for the strawberry plants. Photo by John Denniston.

One end of the box is in place at the top left; the other sides are in process. Photo by John Denniston.

The completed box, ready for its new life. Photo by John Denniston.

Here's me, tearing up cardboard to line the bottom of the box. The idea is that it will prevent the grass overtaking the new strawberry plants after they and the compost are added. Photo by John Denniston. 

Rich (I hope) soil from our own composting efforts fills the box. Add the plants and time, and there will be strawberries -- eventually.

The way we live now

We walk. Now that the coronavirus has closed fitness centres, playing fields and playgrounds, neighbourhood streets have become everybody's new gym. Luckily for everybody's mood, spring streets in Vancouver are very beautiful. Photo by John Denniston.

We celebrate health workers, the new heroes of a time when everybody fears ending up in a hospital bed. Windows all over the city have sprouted hearts and rainbows and child-written signs thanking health care workers for their contribution. The spray of hearts on the window of this house was particularly eye-catching. Photo by John Denniston.

Just down the street from the previous house was this one. No subtle hearts here, just a big-lettered statement. Photo by John Denniston.

We bang pots. As former journalists, John and I tend to observe rather than participate in events like the 7 p.m. nightly noise-making to celebrate health workers. But one night at dinner, John confessed: "I banged a pot last night." (I'd been in the back garden, so missed this event.) I asked: "Will you bang a pot again tonight?" He said: "Well, once you start, you can't really stop." Ever since, he has stepped out on the front porch at 7 p.m. and joined the neighbours in making a row. 

We don't dress up, even for public appearances. John does his pot-banging in riding pants and slippers. 

We get surprises. When my friend Andre showed up  at the front door for a scheduled "distancing" walk this week, he was wearing a plastic face-shield like medical workers wear. A handy friend with access to the right kind of plastic  had made it for him. Masks and other shielding devices like this are becoming increasingly common these days, but still, it was a surprise to see it on my easygoing buddy. Photo by John Denniston.

We don't hug when we meet. And we meet for the strangest reasons. My friend Linda and I maintained our appropriate distance when we got together recently to do another exchange. She had scored cinnamon, which I couldn't find at my local store, and I paid her back and gave her more quarters for her laundry machine. Photo by John Denniston.

I head back to the car, loaded up with cinnamon. Who knows what the next exchange will be about! Photo by John Denniston.

We make use of all our storage space. Since I'm trying to limit my time in stores, when I do go grocery shopping, I stock up for a week or more.That second fridge that John and I wrestled into our basement a couple of years ago has been worth its weight in gold in holding the extra load.

We remember our old gardening skills. It's been a long time since I had houseplants, but when the tomatoes I'm coddling inside until the weather warms up started looking droopy yesterday, I realized that the little dribbles of water I'd been giving them may not have been sufficient. I dosed them well in the sink, and today they brightened right up.

Transformation

Our new mini-garden, ta-daa! Once the site of an ancient compost bin, all it took was some intensive labour, lots of repurposed materials, a trip to the garden centre and a coronavirus pandemic to be transformed into a whole new thing. Photo by John Denniston.

This was what this area looked like before John began dismantling, digging and cutting back the laurel hedge. On the plus side, building a garden on the site of a compost heap has to have some advantages.

In process: The old compost bin, which was built in the mid-1970s, is gone, and John has sifted the soil and removed a pile of rocks. Still to come are a new fence made out of an old piece of lattice, a major trimming of the hedge, and the construction of a wire-mesh structure for plants to climb up.

With seeds in short supply -- you can order them but they may or may not arrive in time for this year's planting season -- I turned to Southlands nursery to get the garden started with seedlings. Note my charming pandemic mask. Photo by John Denniston.

Loading up the back of the car with my purchases. John stayed out of the garden centre to avoid other customers, and touched nothing while he waited for me. These are the kind of precautions we take these days; I just washed my hands for a long time when I got home. Photo by John Denniston.

Notice my fine, expensive, big tomato plants. They were still in the greenhouse at the garden centre, and I took the hint. They will stay inside until I know it's warm enough to risk them outdoors. Photo by John Denniston.

My new plants sitting on the green grass of home, awaiting placement.

A garden requires lots of watering, so John put his plumbing skills -- and some old taps -- to work and came up with this arrangement under the back porch. One outlet will be for a long-distance hose to the back garden; another will be for watering closer in.

How to make the best use of what is really a pretty tiny space? We decided on a narrow board down the middle for a pathway -- unlike stones, it's easily changed if it doesn't work. Besides, we had just such a board on hand. The wire construction is for climbing plants like beans and tomatoes, which are still to come -- hence the unplanted area. Photo by John Denniston.

These little green things are kale, bok choy, lots of lettuce, onions and Swiss chard. Some critters have decided bok choy and certain lettuces are tasty. Four have been chewed down to the roots already. This garden may be a work in progress all summer. Photo by John Denniston.

This is me realizing that I bought way too many plants. I forgot that most of  the containers I chose included multiple seedlings that had to be split up and planted separately. The bed I had just denuded of Solomon's seal became my fallback. Suddenly, it's a veggie garden. Photo by John Denniston. 

A closer look at the accidental veggie garden. Now the newly planted lavender shares space with rocket, kale, parsley, oregano and even a couple of strawberry plants. It will be interesting to see how they all get along. 

A Rousseau-worthy lesson from my garden

I've just learned a lesson about what happens when you plant Solomon's seal (those green sprouts in the foreground) and ignore it for years. Now that I'm spending a lot of time at home because of the coronavirus panic, I started really looking at it.

And digging into it. And digging and digging. My, what a lot of material these plants quietly produce underground!

There was something unnerving about the sheer size and quantity of the underground tubers I unearthed.

Partway through the excavation process. John says it looks like I'm in mourning; more likely I'm just tired from all that digging. Photo by John Denniston.

When eccentric 18^th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau fled to an isolated island on a Swiss lake because of the rage excited by his controversial views, he came up with a scheme that turned his virtual imprisonment into bliss – the happiest period of his life, as he later recalled. A new and enthusiastic student of botany at the time, he decided to divide the whole island into small squares. His plan was to study, record and describe, minutely, every single plant in every square. Sequentially. In every season.

 “They say a German once wrote a book about a lemon-skin; I could have written one about every grass in the meadows, every moss in the woods, every lichen covering the rocks – and I did not want to leave even one blade of grass or atom of vegetation without a full and detailed description,” he wrote in Reveries of the Solitary Walker, published in 1782.

To me, there’s something delightful about Rousseau using his confinement to direct a laser focus on his immediate surroundings and extract the last atom of meaning from the simplest aspects of nature. And hmmm, something amusing about his “raptures and ecstasies” in learning about plants’ structures, organization and “the operation of the sexual parts in the process of reproduction, which was at the time completely new to me.”

I thought about Rousseau and the principle of proximity this week as I cleaned a garden bed of misbehaving Solomon’s seal. I’d planted it years ago, and because it was so reliable, coming up greenly every year before fading goldenly away in the fall, I’d paid little attention to it ever since. Now that the coronavirus panic has confined me to quarters and the Solomon’s seal was right in front of my eyes, I finally looked. Why was it trying to escape its rock enclosure onto the sidewalk, where it has imperiled walkers for years? What was it doing popping up in the lawn, and how did it migrate to other flower beds?

Which led to a massive excavation, reminiscent of an archeological dig with a somehow grisly undertone. I discovered that during all those years of neglect, the Solomon’s seal had quietly created layer upon layer of gigantic elongated tubers, some the size of a forearm bone. All those layers, going down a foot deep, had filled up the garden bed until finally there was no more space – hence the leap outwards and beyond.

The excavated tubers nearly filled the back of the pickup truck for a trip to the landfill, leaving the garden bed oddly deflated. I’ve since found other, less invasive greenery for that spot. But the Solomon’s seal provided a Rousseau-worthy lesson for those of us in confinement: Pay attention to what’s right in front of you. You never know what you might unearth.

Now that I know what Solomon's seal does underground, I'm going for something a little less enthusiastic in that garden bed. Some lavender for scent and bees and butterflies, plus a few annuals will fill in nicely. Photo by John Denniston.

Watering in the next bevy of plants. I plan to keep a closer eye on them than the earlier ones that occupied this space. Photo by John Denniston.

Silliness in strange times

Outside a modest house in our neighbourhood, where laundry hangs to dry, the homeowner has gone to great lengths to add something fun for people to enjoy. Passersby were doing double takes at the sight of a woman in a bathtub on the boulevard. Photo by John Denniston.

Here she is, Lorelei, with an empty wineglass, a rubber duck contributed by a neighbour, and a tummy covered in soil where plants will flourish this summer. The creator of the display, clearly a gardener, said she added earthworms to the soil, as it would be difficult for them to make their way up to the bathtub. Photo by John Denniston.

A couple of years ago, a bench appeared on the boulevard outside a modest corner house in the 3400 block of Collingwood. It was a pleasant bench, notable for the serene Jane Austen quote it bore, along with the obvious care that had been taken to beautify it for bench-users – planters with flowers on each side, and a plot of flowers in front.

Lately, an old-fashioned bathtub, chic navy blue with saucy yellow feet, appeared on the same boulevard. A great big planter? we asked when we passed it a week ago. On Saturday evening, we got our answer. The tub was indeed filled with soil, but lying in it was a sultry mannequin with honey-blonde hair and sunglasses, checking out the empty wineglass in her hand. Her tummy was covered with soil embedded with sweet alyssum and cranesbill geraniums; the bathtub itself sat in a newly planted periwinkle plot.

The point is fun, according to the display’s creator, who came out of her house while we were there to replace the mannequin’s wig. It had fallen off in the breeze, and she was pondering how to keep it on during the day but still be able to remove it at night. She said she’d found most of the materials for the planter in second-hand shops, but she had to buy the mannequin new. And when she did, she wanted one that would lift people’s spirits, especially in these difficult times.

Hence, Lorelei – named after the legendary Rhine maiden of irresistible attractiveness to sailors. The mannequin seemed to be living up to her name. While we were there taking pictures, a man in a black SUV drove past, slowed, grinned, and said: “Is that for real?” before snapping a photo from his window. Then he drove on, but changed his mind, parked, and came back with his camera to properly document it all. At another point, a woman came out of a back alley with her cellphone to take some pictures too.

We were only there for about 20 minutes, but it seemed clear the display was achieving its creator’s goal. Strangers were smiling and talking to each other (while maintaining the regulation distance); a silly scene had created a sense of fun and community in these isolating times. As we walked up Collingwood toward home, we heard pot-banging and jangling and whoops and hollers marking the daily 7 p.m. tribute to medical workers. More silliness to join us and help us along the way.

My friend Linda enjoys the bench on the same boulevard where Lorelei now reigns. This photo was taken a couple of years ago when the bench was new; the homeowner has since added pots for plants on each side and planted a clematis to climb up the tree behind the bench.

Improvising: the fence project

John stands behind our new see-through fence where a vegetable garden will one day thrive (we hope). The fence makes use of an old lattice that once served as a trellis, and replaces a solid cedar fence that blocked too much sunlight. At the end of this post is John's video of the triumphant ending of our fence-replacement project.  

It’s not easy – or comfortable – to go shopping in these coronavirus times, so when we needed to replace part of the solid cedar fence at the back of our property with something less, well, solid, we tried to think creatively. The goal was to build a fence that would let enough light through from the lane that the vegetable garden we’re envisioning for that spot might actually happen.

How about building a frame and using the roll of tiny-paned wire we found in the garage? How about removing every other slat from the existing fence? Could we imitate the neighbours and create a picket fence? Chain link was too ugly to contemplate, and besides, we’d have to go shopping.

But there was something intriguing about the square lattice that we’d gotten years ago from a neighbour whose house was being torn down. She’d used it as a trellis, and hated to think of it ending up in the demolition pile. It’s served us well as an addition to another section of the back fence (we like to improvise, never rebuild!) when a newly trimmed hedge exposed how low it was. Now that new trees have grown up in that section, maybe the lattice could be repurposed once again.

John did have to go shopping after all, as he wanted to save the old fence – just in case. He bought wood to build a frame, and fitted the old lattice into it. We hauled out the old fence and inserted the new one. Even after the virus scare fades and we can shop in comfort again, who knows how many more times our fences ­– both lattice and cedar ­– might come in handy again?

On the right is the sunlight-blocking, very solid cedar fence that we removed, but saved, just in case! The open spot is where we hope vegetables will grow.

John puts primer on the frame for the new fence insert.

The old trellis that had to be cut down to fit into the frame.

All fitted in and ready to go!

Making sure the bottom board is level before the new fence is inserted. The video that follows shows the new fence in place and the old one being taken away.

Tree-watching

One of the highlights of  Covid-era life for many of us is our daily walk. Fortunately, there's lots to look at at this time of year, as the neighbourhood trees are doing all kinds of interesting things. I'm the main tree-spotter on our walks, as John's attention tends toward bicycles and other wheeled things. But he has the good camera and the professional eye, and gracefully obliges when I suggest a photo. Here's a look at what the trees are doing in our area these days: 

This magnolia tree was all bare branches except for several bright blobs that looked like forgotten Christmas ornaments. Photo by John Denniston.

One of the other buds on that same tree, eye-catching against the grey fence. Photo by John Denniston.

Some trees are still bare at this time of year, giving a clear view of what's beyond. Photo by John Denniston.

On the other hand, some trees are already going full-tilt, with a full set of leaves and an abundance of blooms. Camellias keep their leaves year-round, and some begin blooming as early as November. Photo by John Denniston.

Magnolias and cherries make a gorgeous combination. Photo by John Denniston.

Wouldn't you love to live in this old-fashioned cottage, looking out onto magnolias and forsythia in the sunshine? Photo by John Denniston.

This was taken a few weeks ago, when the cherry and plum blossoms first started. A spectacular show for whoever lives in that house and on that street. Photo by John Denniston.

This beautifully twisted tree base, combined with daffodils, made a pleasant spring scene. Photo by John Denniston.

Magnolia buds against a stormy sky caught our eye on a recent walk. It will look very different when all those buds are fully open. Photo by John Denniston.

The straight line of a hedge, topped by a froth of cherry blossoms. Photo by John Denniston.

This enthusiastic forsythia bush wants to take over the sidewalk. The gardening lore is that when the forsythia blooms, it's time to prune the roses.

Those yellow blooms close up.

This star magnolia to the left and tulip magnolia to the right are what we see when we open our front door at this time of year. Spring is definitely the best season for our front garden!

What our neighbours see of our spring trees when they take their daily walks.