Summer 2010. We had ambitious plans. We were going to finish the driveway, sift out all the rocks from the excavated earth, break up the clay, add woodchips and compost, build garden beds, finish renovating the kitchen, finish the attics and in our spare time, tile the front hall. Only new home owners can be this naive. It did not take long before I realized that this just was not going to happen. I am sure Josh figured it out right quick, but was afraid to tell me. He was relieved when I said to postpone the inside of the house, I cannot continue to live in a sea of mud. That was what our lawn had become. Piles of muddy clay and gravel everywhere. Our friend Amy's brother is a tree surgeon with a wood chipping machine, and was more than obliging to dump several tree's worth of wood chips in our back yard. As summer wore on and we spent every waking hour after work and on weekends sifting earth, we decided that the only way to get through was to recruit reinforcements. We called and e-mailed and facebooked everyone who would not hate us for doing so to come out and sift. A few people really love us and put some back breaking work into building our garden the hard way. I am sorry I did not keep track, so I may miss some people. In fact, some who came were friends of cousins or other friends and I don't even know their names. Alexander, Alan, Kevin, Shaun, and lots more. Friends visiting us from as far as Germany discovered the joys of letting their children play on our mud mountain. Summer wore on and we decided to finish before the snow. We managed to sift out enough of the earth to put mounds of earth where the garden beds would be. The first ones done were in the front yard to let me plant the flowers I had been sneaking off to buy at the grocery store, and then the perennials I had gotten off of other friends' gardens. I think Josh was tired of my complaining that I could not garden yet. While he diligently sifted, I took breaks to dig up and replant mint, crab apple trees and give my uprooted strawberries from our old apartment a place to put down roots. I did my fair share of sifting, getting plenty of mosquito bites as I always ended up getting to it around dusk. By October, the mud was getting colder and thicker, and I had given up on the idea of finishing. I finally said it was enough. We will have time between the thaw and planting time to get it done. So we covered the earth in all the garden beds with our fall leaves, and let the snow bury our twin mountains of mud and wood chips.
Josh spent the winter planning. We would seed and sprout indoors with a grow light and a fan. We would check out the cost of renting a machine to finish moving the mud and woodchips into place. Josh was willing to let the remaining stones stay put, as the remaining earth would be used to level the lawn. The grass was pretty much destroyed by the mud mountain anyways. He also looked into the cost of sod and mushroom spawn. I just smiled and nodded.
By March 2011, we chose what to plant. What I mean by this is that Josh took our daughter Zara and bought 2 kinds of basil seeds, corn seeds, asparagus seeds, 2 kinds of squash seeds, cucumber, tomatoes, savoury, 6 kinds of pepper, broccoli, rapini, green onions, mixed spring greens, romaine lettuce...I am sure there was more. It was too much. I argued against corn and asparagus. I was not ready for that. Our first attempt at corn at our old house involved a crow peeling and devouring the only ear of corn we were able to produce just before we planned to harvest. I did not have the time and energy to devise scarecrows yet, and hated the heartbreak of the corn experience. Asparagus was too much about timing. Too late and you have a garden full of ferns. I really wanted our first big garden to be a success.
So we planted lots of everything because of course a lot of it wouldn't even sprout. But it did. The packages said it would take 14-21 days to sprout. It took two. My basement became a greenhouse. Everything outgrew the Jiffy pots too soon and I had to transplant everything. When May rolled around, Josh gave me a proposal for the cost of setting up the garden and finishing the lawn quickly with use of a cool machine (mini-tractor) for a weekend and sod instead of seed. I asked if we can have it done by June 24, so we could finally have a housewarming party. We kept postponing because of the sea of mud the previous year, and I really wanted a yard and garden by the time the kids finished school. Josh got the machine, and was able to flatten the mountains and mix in the woodchips in a weekend. Vive modern technology! The mushroom spore had the double function of breaking down the woodchips in the earth and making it into good black earth, while simultaneously producing some tasty gourmet mushrooms. Josh is a mushroomer who knows his stuff, which are the mushrooms to eat and which to ignore. He co-opted our friends Kate and Maya who worked hard alongside Josh and miraculously within six weeks I had a lawn and garden beds ready to go. Hallelujah!
The last step was cleaning up the junk and weeds that had already accumulated in the back yard which was less noticeable when it was a mountain of mud, but now was an eyesore. One item of dispute was the bathtub. Josh loves old clawfoot bathtubs. Our new neighbours did not, and one of the first renovations they did when they moved in was to replace theirs. Josh could not let them throw it out. We had no plans to renovate our bathroom, at least not for a long time, so the bathtub sat outside near the shed and started to collect lilac rootballs and branches and all sorts of things for future projects. By this time, two years after our move, the projects collecting in the bathtub were put in cold storage and so were the items collecting there. However, the bathtub was not allowed to go. So I proposed using it as a planter. This was a happy compromise, and it moved up into the garden bed where it was planted with basil and savory, with sweet potato vine training down to cover up the splotchy paint job. I chose the basil in particular as it is a favourite of slugs, and I discovered that slugs do not like to climb up into big pots. The basil planted directly in the earth was almost totally decimated. The bathtub provided the bulk of our first basil harvest out of a few robust, slug-free and beautiful plants.
I want to note that we have had a lot of inspiration, support and advice from many people, but mostly from my mother-in-law Chloe, who has been using Ruth Stout's no work garden method. Being someone who has not experienced the all work garden, I can only say I shudder to think how much time that must take. In fact, if I had to turn over my earth and mix my compost and plow and weed, I would have called the whole thing off. I mean, seriously, I work full time and have three kids. The grocery store is 3 minutes away by bike, 2 by car, I am doing this for fun in my limited spare time. That being said, it has taken a lot of work to make this garden. We raked out two year's worth of compost, added manure and store bought black earth. Josh built the garden walls from the façade of someone's house who gave it away on Kijiji (I forgot to mention that there were also mounds of bricks all around the mountain of mud and wood chips). We discovered that we were a bit short of the pink, pressed concrete fake stone bricks to finish the walls in the back yard. We prioritized the driveway walls and front yard flower garden beds. So Josh bought a few cinder blocks and interspersed them evenly in the wall. They made perfect flower planters along the garden wall.
We were ready plant. By the time the sod was setting in mid May, we put the seedlings out to "harden" which I learned meant to get used to being out in the elements. We had too much rapini. Too many sunflowers. A stupid amount of basil ("it's ok, we can make lots of pesto and freeze it.") I kept asking Josh to let me know his plan. He wanted to wing it. So of course we ended up arguing. I wanted the sunny spots for sunflowers. Chloe said that other plants won't grow near sunflowers. Josh did not want them where he put the mushroom spawn. There was not enough sun in the front of the house. I started giving sunflowers to anyone who would take them. I managed to convince him to let me plant 4 giant sunflowers behind the broccoli, and the little sunflowers in the cinder blocks with a promise to reassess for next year. I put both small and giant sunflowers in every spot that got some sun in the front yard. Those sunflowers ended up being stunted and many lost their heads. The ones in the back did wonderfully. The plants near them seemed not to have suffered. Josh conceded that sunflowers are good for producing oil, so it was in his survivalist plan to try them out anyways. The small sunflowers provided a year's worth of treats for our parrot, and I am hoping the giant sunflowers will provide some guaranteed nut-free snacks I can send with my kids to school this year to jazz up their school lunches. If the birds and squirrels don't beat us to it.
Following the Ruth Stout approach, we covered our entire garden thickly in hay, which keeps in the moisture and warmth, prevents weeds from growing, and decomposes to create rich black earth full of worms underneath. The plants love it. Unfortunately, so do slugs. We had a large indigenous population of garden snails on our land, radiating out of the lilac grove on the eastern border of our property. We seem to have added to this a huge crop of slugs. I have been told by friends that this year everyone had slug issues, so I can only suspect that the hay gardening technique exacerbated the problem. So as I innocently planted my little seedlings, they were instantly devoured and I nearly lost all my peppers, my non-bathtub basil, my lettuce, broccoli, violets, impatiens..well you get the ugly picture. We tried surrounding all the plants with eggshells, with coffee grinds, sprinkling lime everywhere, and then put out a dozen bowls of beer. Slugs are drawn to beer like nothing else, they dive right in and drown. Labatt has become this year's sponsor for my garden. The bar opens at sunset, and I refill the beer every 3 days if it has been hot, and after big rainfalls which dilute it too much. I am getting embarrassed bringing back the empties. "I swear, I am not an alcoholic, it is my slugs!" But it works. Not only do I see evidence of the alarming number of these little pests drowning nightly, my plants have survived and have mostly bounced back.
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