Getting started

I have never blogged before, but I feel inspired by my first real garden and I want to write about it. I realize that I really should have started this before August, so I will be back tracking quite a bit before I can get into the here and now. I have already done a photo album on Facebook so for now I am not putting any images here, at least until I can figure out how to do that. I am giving myself enough time until my sprinkler has saturated my back yard for starters tonight.

The garden was inevitable. I married a very handy man who has a paranoid, survivalist streak, and is determined to be self sufficient if and when civilization collapses. Me, I just like plants. I have not had a particularly green thumb, and my experience with houseplants has been in the spirit of Nietzsche, what has not killed them has made them stronger (in other words, the ones I have are the true survivors). When Josh and I first rented an apartment together, it was essential for him that we had a place to garden. It did not matter that for fifteen years we never exercised that right, it was enough that we could. We spent weekends out of town, worked long hours, then had three kids, gardening was not the priority. Eventually, we did start gardening and composting in the back yard of the duplex where we lived with conditional access to the garden (based on the whim of the current downstairs tenant), and made a first attempt with broccoli, corn, garlic, strawberries, mint, cucumbers, tomatoes and morning glories (pink and purple). We barely started and there was a new tenant who was insistent that she did not want our garden and our compost in her back yard. She pestered my landlord about us digging everything out even before the snow was completely gone. We requested that we be given until the compost thawed and the plants sprouted so we could at least rescue and re-pot everything. That was when we knew it was time to move.

This was two years ago, and in the process of looking for a new, affordable, large apartment with the right to garden (and compost, of course), we found our house and took the plunge and became home owners. In fact, we bought a garden, with a small but cosy house where we could sprout the plants in the spring. Oh, there was room for three kids to have their own rooms too, which was a bonus. But we bought the house for the garden.

We moved in at the end of May and I heeded my friends' and mother-in-law's advise not to touch the garden the first summer so I can see what is there already.

Once upon a time, someone loved my garden. Though I suspect it was quite some time ago. I regret not having started this blog then, when I could have recorded just what we started with. The lawn in the front and the back was full of weeds, clover with some grass thrown in and under it all, solid clay with patches of gravel. In the middle of the back yard was a circle of sparse gravel with some children's play equipment and a miniature trampoline on it. In the far right corner, there was an area with some rocks suggesting it had been a flower garden once, and in the mess of weeds there were some wild irises that turned up  Foxglove and white morning glories spread in another weedy area along the left edge of the property bordering the neighbour's yard, as did a few spindly raspberry canes (at least they looked like raspberries). Day lilies lined the shadiest strip of the back yard along the house. There was a small, kidney-shaped mint patch, set in deep rich soil speckled with vermiculite, which (I discovered when I transplanted it) was very mature and had bigger roots than some of the trees on our property. This was located in a random place in the grass close to the back door. The area was full of weeds and some small trees which I suspect were not planted there but just randomly sprouted. We dug some up and gave them to a friend, but transplanted two which appeared to be crabapples. We guessed right, as they flowered in pink for the first time this spring, and we now have our first two crab apples growing on the larger of the two. In the same patch was a big, beautiful lavender plant, which now graces the front of the house.

The only truly exciting surprise was that on the day we signed the deed, seventy large morels appeared in the back yard. The former owners, not knowing what a treasure this was, said that they had never seen these ugly fungus before in all the years they owned the house. We have not had a repeat performance (this year there were two), but morels can be very fickle and unpredictable.

The front yard was worse. The lawn was uneven and full of the exposed roots of the many trees, as well as many stumps of trees remaining. At some point it must have been a forest, which may explain the lack of attempted gardening in the past. Half the yard was covered in goutweed, an invasive ground cover plant which apparently chokes out everything else. It is also more resistant to slugs, snails and whatever other pests have been gobbling everything else I have planted, unfortunately, and ridiculously hard to get rid of. I keep pulling it out daily.

Besides the trees and ubiquitous goutweed, there were some scraggly juniper bushes right in front of the house. They seemed to offend Josh who insisted on removing them leaving me with a blank slate to start in front.

Another peculiarity was that there was a clear place for a parking spot or a driveway, which was identified by some large stones and a sprinkling of gravel. We parked our car on the spot over our first winter, and by the thaw, had churned a big section of the yard into thick mud. I suggested to Josh that we put some gravel down before the next winter as this was a huge mess.

So began the biggest obstacle to starting my garden. Josh decided that there was no point in making a makeshift driveway, it made sense to do it right the first time. We were completely broke, so renting machines or paying a company to make a driveway was out of our reach.

Before I continue, I need to make a note about our neighbours. Iulia and Ovidiu are a young couple who decided to buy a house after having their first child. By chance, we bought neighbouring houses and moved in the same weekend. It was an instant bonding process. We had fun swapping items that came with the house which were not of interest to one or the other of our families. Iulia had the fortune of having her incredibly industrious do-it-yourselfer parents come to stay for several months, so we jealously looked on as they had four adults to one child, while we had three children who had to be taken to activities and helped with homework. Needless to say, their back yard and garden was turned over, reseeded, planted with flowers and vegetables, a deck and shed were build, a chain link fence erected with a request to prevent morning glories or other climbers from decorating the fence. Ours still looked like a war zone. Watching the deck built in a weekend, with manual excavation and laying down of gravel and patio tiles, Josh became inspired that we could build the driveway by hand. In fact, to cut the labour and expense, and be good neighbours in the same effort, we offered to share the driveway with our neighbours even though most of the land fell on our property. They have a beautiful, city-owned linden tree where a driveway would have been. They took us up on the offer.

The driveway took most of the month of May to complete. It turned into a Huckleberry Finn type of project, where a lot of the kids in the neighbourhood joined in on the action of digging and moving earth. With a minor expense of some geotextile to line the pit, then various grades of gravel and rock dust, plus rental of a machine to compress it, we ended up with a really professional looking driveway. Where he could, Josh found free material on Kijiji. He scored an entire façade of a building (concrete blocks which look like pink stone) which formed the walls for the driveway as well as the garden walls all over the property.

His intention was to recycle the excavated earth and use it for garden beds. The problem was that the "earth" we dug out was mostly clay mixed with gravel. It seemed someone had dumped gravel on the lawn once to make a makeshift driveway, but with nothing to hold it back, the gravel mixed into the muddy clay several feet deep. Lousy gardening earth to say the least. Josh had a plan: filter the earth, remove the gravel, break up the clay, mix it with compost and woodchips, lay it in beds, cover it with hay and wait for it to be decent earth before starting to garden.

The problem was that we have a mountain of earth to process. We put all other projects on hold, co-opted as many friends and relatives, bribed our children, and spent the rest of the summer sifting earth. By October we had managed to filter a good part of it, but the back yard was even more of a wasteland than before. Prior to moving the mountain of earth to the back yard, I succeeded in rescuing the iris, lilies, mint, crab apple trees and lavender and moved them all to safe and, hopefully, permanent places out of harm's way. I also moved the only survivors of the original garden (strawberries) out of the pots where they lived for a year into the first small piece of our garden. They are doing fine. The lilies I painstakingly dug and transplanted to a spot where they saw the sun for the first time in their lives and exploded. The mint were installed in a large tub so well camouflaged that only we know why they are no longer running out into the lawn anymore. The crab apple trees have become Josh's first attempt at arbour sculpture and will perhaps someday be shaped into an archway into the back yard.

The summer was spent in tension between my deep desire to get started on the garden, and Josh's determination to hold off until everything was set up. I rebelled and planted potatoes where the weed and iris patch were, and started my first raids on perennial gardens. I have Amy and Jack to thank for starting their flower garden 5 years earlier than I did, and for their generosity with bee balm, irises, violets, lavender,  black eyed susans, lungwart, and some other things which can tolerate the shade which I seem to have an abundance of. I also discovered lots of pretty perennials at my local grocery store and planted oriental lilies, stella d'oro lillies, astilbies, hydrangeas. It still looked pretty sparse but it was a start. My mother-in-law gave me a bleeding heart (next to the goutweed and lungwart, my garden sounds pretty sick). And so we ended our first year with strawberries, mint, some flowers and a mountain of mud.