We headed over to Galiano for another week-long stay. This approach has been working well for us - it gives us time to relax, time to do some projects and stay well connected with work. StarLink has made a huge difference in that respect. As our weekends seem to be getting busy (more on that to come), it really provides some great flexibility. We’re making good progress, and this trip provided enough good weather to tackle a few things.
The last time we were over, we started to build a new flower garden. On this trip, we brought over a number of plants to fill it. It was a combination of plants that we removed from the roof (another post shortly will show the overhaul of the roof deck for this season!) and some new plants we bought at the nursery near the ferry. All in all, I think it turned out very well. We just need to hope that the deer don’t eat everything!
Last year, a friend of ours bought us a bee house. We had put it up but it never really attracted any bees over the course of last summer. As instructed, we brought it back in over the winter. This year, we decide to give the house a helping hand and bought a couple of (tiny) boxes of mason bee cocoons to help kick start the process. We figure with all the fruit trees, having more bees around would be a good thing! Hopefully this will work out.
While at the nursery, we bought a number of different plants, including some small starter veggies. Part of this trip was to keep planting seeds and get the garden started off well for the year. I’ve got a bunch of things started indoors at home that will need to come over eventually.
The last of the new garden boxes half full of local dirt. On the next trip we’ll bring another truck load of compost to fill up and mix together. This one is going to be our corn box.
The little lettuce plants are all in the garden now.
And next to them, the radishes have started to sprout.
Last summer, we saw this BBQ at Home Depot that we really liked. We were slow in making a decision, and by the time we decide to actually purchase it, it had sold out. Never fails. So this year, when the new model arrived (and of course $100 more…) we jumped on it. We were not going to be disappointed twice! So we picked it up - the box was huge, and they used a fork lift to put it into the back of the truck - and brought it to the island. One of our little projects was to assemble the beast.
All things considered, it actually wasn’t that bad to assemble. It was the most intricately packed box I’ve ever seen - not a wasted space to be found. It seems to be well made, solid and comes with some very cool features! In addition to the main grilling area, the piece to the right is a pizza oven! The inside is lined with stone, and apparently it heats up to 900 degrees! But that’s not all… You can also take the the pizza oven off, and replace it with a griddle. We haven’t tried any of the cool accessories just yet, but it gives us some great options for entertaining.
Our next project was also one that we had started the last time we were over. We’ve wanted a fire pit for a while, and after a lot of consideration had settled on a location for it. We picked an area where we had cleared the broom, and where you had a view of Mount Baker on a clear day.
As it is on a part of the front yard that’s sloped, we had marked out a circular area and started to remove dirt to flatten it out. The soil that ended up in the gardens came from this area. After a lot of manual labour with the pick and shovel (and removing a lot of rocks!) we eventually got it level enough to where we were happy.
We still have more work to do. Where we cut into the ground, we want to build a small retaining wall with all the rocks we pulled out of the ground. There are a lot of them around (you can see some off to the right), so we won’t be short on materials. A project for a later visit.
Every visit we’re excited to see what’s blooming as the weather warms up. It feels really late this year. Our daffodils are pretty much done, but the hyacinths are beautiful right now. We don’t have any tulips (deer…).
The cherry trees are very close to bursting.
The flowering currents are one of the earliest ones, and its so cool to watch the hummingbirds feeding at them.
The hummingbirds are getting more and more entertaining. We’ve got Anna’s and Rufous, both male and females. The male rufous seems to be the boss, buth there has to be half a dozen in total in our area. They’re going through a lot of food!
While we had a nice week, overall it was pretty chilly. It never really warmed up as we would have liked it to. One day, we even got some late season snow. That I had no use for. It absolutely came down one day, resulting in some accumulation on the ground (that thankfully melted right away). I am done with winter and ready for spring!
The day we were leaving, we left the cottage a bit early and drove down to Montague Harbour. It was by far the nicest day we had seen, and so we took a beer and sat at the beach in the late afternoon sunshine. It was lovely.
While we were there, we noticed an odd piece of driftwood (a pretty big log) that must have come from an old (?) log boom. It had this very odd metal collar drilled through the log. I can only assume it was used to hold the log boom together?
