Beginnings

A blank canvas, or rather, just under an acre of land, mainly wooded with lots of douglas firs, a few arbutus and a couple of big leaf maples, a baby Gary oak, with abundant salal and swordferns. My property is wedge shaped, with the widest part in the front, and gently slopes towards the front. In the small fenced-in area I picked a spot under a massive Douglas fir to start what was to become a circular garden around it. That was when I discovered why Gabriola is sometimes called the rock. And why the local Home and Garden hardware store was selling sieving screens, which I discovered I needed. As well as purchasing a mattock. Sieving rocks was a thankless task, producing a miserable amount of poor soil. And having to use a mattock to make a hole was back-breaking work, which my daughter Sarah bravely shared while she was visiting. The fruit of our labours was a small roughly half circle four foot by three foot garden, which we filled with purchased topsoil. Gradually I extended the garden all the way around the tree, planting perennials in half of it, including shasta daisies, pink foxgloves, blue lupines, and heather, and herbs. Sarah also helped me build a raised bed using boards from the old deck we had removed. We gathered seaweed from a local beach to amend the soil, and grew garlic in it, with moderate success, despite the lack of full sunlight.