Working on the Community Garden Site

Yesterday dawned cool, overcast and windy. In late morning the group assembled one by one to lay the lumber wrap on the community garden site. Lumber wrap is like a four foot wide 1000 ft long piece of tarp. It acts very much like a sail in the wind. Get a small woman on each end and a stiff breeze in the middle and you have a sport, but I'm not sure if it's parasailing or skydiving. Just let go!

Okay, so laying it was a bit of adrenaline-pumping adventure. The wind was so strong it threatened to make you and the lumber wrap airborne. Rocks were gathered, along with tent pegs and blocks of wood, anything that would hold down a corner or edge of wrap.

Once we got it pegged and weighted down we stood and waited for the gravel to be delivered. And waited. And waited. Finally we went to sit down and that did the trick, here he came in his big red truck, rumbling down the road. Annabelle had to jump up on the running board and bat her eyelashes at the driver. He was kinda cute. But he could have stayed and helped shovel! Cute is as cute does.

He backed into the site and began to dump his load. Some people looked a bit dubious about this entire process. (Don't worry fellas. We won't force you to shovel gravel. The girls will do it.) He pulled forward and dumped some more, and more. He moved and dumped more. I mean, these were four foot high piles of gravel everywhere!

He moved and just about took out the neighbour's satellite dish. Another two inches and it would have been a good (but somewhat expensive) pizza dish.

Then we started raking, pushing, and shoveling gravel, although I did very little of any of that, because of my rib. Zak shoveled like crazy, and another guy (Steve) came along and shoveled more gravel than one would have thought humanly possible in 45 minutes, and never even broke a sweat. We discovered one of the truck's wheels had run over the valve cover for the water shut-off. Oh dear. Have to get that fixed.

After an hour or so of hard labour the job was about 2/3rds done, but the shoveling crew was completely done. We walked away from it and will finish it when energy and motivation return. September sounds about right. [Update: They all showed up to rake and shovel like crazy about 10:30 am, and it's done! Amazing!]

So far we have seven people who want space in the community garden. That's wonderful! Some have already built their 4 x 4 raised bed frame. I have three stacked in the back, waiting to be moved and filled with soil.

On other fronts Zak brought back a big section of dead wisteria vine from his walk this morning. It looks like an old, frayed piece of coarse rope. He sort of draped and wrapped it around the Mayday tree in the back, where it looks a bit junky, but the birds love it. Maybe I'll try to find a less junky way of displaying it.

I have about 25 plants which desperately need transplanting, if only I could get time and energy together at once. It's really quite cool out still, only 8 C (46 F) with a cool breeze. This isn't nice weather to work outside, but we have rain forecast for the next three days, so it isn't going to get much better.