Gardening in the Bush

When we started the blog a year ago, it was intended to provide us with a site to share a few travel experiences and pictures. Once we returned home to Vancouver Island in April, we hung up our backpacks and quit blogging. We'd drawn up a long list of home improvements to occupy our time and didn't see the point in sharing our everyday chores. I also decided to quit my brief foray into Facebook. Now with Christmas just around the corner, the blog seems like a reasonable place to connect once again with family and friends, share a few pictures and stories of some of the highlights of our year and send warm holiday wishes to all. This post shares some of our gardening efforts.

Raised Bed Mk 1

Mk III with refined legs

During a restless night in Vietnam in March, I turned my mind to our plans for a vegetable garden when we returned home. Raised beds are a popular way to garden these days, so my initial plan was to build traditional wood framed beds on the ground. Then it occurred to me that I could save our knees and backs by raising the beds right off the ground to waist height. At first I envisioned wooden legs, but realizing that they would be likely to rot fairly quickly, I decided the legs should be steel. This led to further scheming to incorporate a cold frame support into the legs, thus providing us with a poor man's greenhouse. In our setting in the bush, we also have to keep deer out of our garden, so the cold frame would do double duty as a frame for deer netting. The results are pictured at left.

When we cleared a space in our acre of bush for our house 32 years ago, we used some of the huge Douglas Fir trunks as a retaining wall for our back yard. These had rotted away pretty badly over the past few years and I'd looked forward to replacing them with a proper stone wall as one of my first retirement projects. The last job I ever did with my dad was to build a 6' red granite retaining wall in Coles Bay, Tasmania. The skills I learned on that project quickly returned. $50 worth of field stones from a local farmer plus loose rock I'd

Wall and deer fence

stockpiled provided enough material for a wall 40' long by 3' high.

While I enjoy building the garden beds and walls, Penny is the real gardener. As well as planting our raised beds and newly fenced plot at home, she also established a large garden on friends property a few miles away. The advantage of that property is that it enjoys all day sunlight, unlike our wooded acreage that gets a peep of sun for just a few hours during the summer. Between the 2 gardens, Pen managed to raise an excellent crop of potatoes, carrots, lettuce, beets, beans, peas, chard, kale, tomatoes, parsnips, peppers and egg plant. Our most self sufficient summer ever!