I’m going to have to make this one quick - we’re headed to Ontario for our Solar Eclipse trip tomorrow evening. That said, we had a very busy and productive weekend on Galiano over Easter, so I thought I’d share a few photos of the progress being made. We had two main projects - plant all the trees and shrubs we had purchased the last time we were over and to make as much progress on the deck as possible

Tree Planting

We had bought in excess of 35 plants that needed to get in the ground while it was still soft and mostly wet. To help with their growth, I grabbed a load of compost from the Vancouver Dump. It’s the best deal around - they load up the back of our truck for a mere $8. It’s pretty great deal.

A truck load of compost and even more plants that need new homes.

We arrived Friday morning on the ferry, which puts us into the cottage around 11:00 a.m. We got at it immediately, with a goal to try and get as many of the trees and shrubs planted as possible today. It was not to be, but we took a pretty good run at it. I think we only ended up with half a dozen plants that we needed to finish up Saturday morning.

Some of the 30+ trees and shrubs we needed to get planted.

Justine had found this simple, cheap metal planters. So we dug up our strawberries and artichokes and gave them new homes with lots of fresh compost.

I think the strawberries will be much happier in their new home.

The artichokes did not do well through our cold snap over the winter. I hope they will bounce back in their new planter box.

We put a lot of the small Oregon Grape plants into the start of the slope, in the hope that it will crowd out the broome and not let it re-take the area.

Hellebores and Oregon Grape.

We had a beautiful day for it.

We thought this plant was interesting. It should grow quite large, so we thought we’d test it and see if it survives the deer.

They are hard to see, but we planted a section of native, prickly plants along the edge of the lawn. That whole area behind it is broome re-growth. So frustrating.

The pride of our tree purchases,a 12’ tall flowering cherry. It should be beautiful.

In the garden I have my first radishes sprouting.

We added some compost to all the fruit trees.

A few of the plants ended up in the firepit garden.

A bit of a wider view of many of the plants we planted on Friday.

Justine’s “Deer Garden” is looking great. The two trees we planted in it are starting to really get to a nice size.

Deck Building

Our big project for the spring was to build a new deck on the cottage. We’ve wanted this for a while now, and since we had been unsuccessful in finding someone to build it for us, we were stuck with doing it oursleves. The last time we were over we had done the concrete footings, and now they were set enough for us to continue building the structure of the deck.

After finishing planting on Saturday morning, we moved onto the deck project. While Justine did some final planting, I laid down landscape fabric and covered the area under the deck with gravel. I was not going to make that mistake again with the deck - no plants are growing under this one!

I put down a covering of landscape fabric to kill off the grass…

Then it was a lots of wheelbarrows of crushed stone. Heavy labour.

Ready to build!

The next step was the one I was most worried about - getting the posts in and cut to the right size to make the deck level and aligned with the top of the flashings. There was a lot of math and we got it mostly right.

Cutting the 6’ x 6” posts to size was a tough process. My poor circular saw was struggling to get through the guge posts. Impressively, we got it mostly right.

The brackets went on the posts…

And this step of the process was complete!

The next step was the moment of truth - dropping on the huge, 16’ long, 6” x 6” posts. This would tell us if we got the footings set correctly and if our posts were the correct height on both sides to ensure that the whole deck was level.

And amazingly everything came together! The beams slid right in place and everything was level!

You started to get a sense of the shape of the deck.

It was going to give us a lot more useable outdoor space.

Did I mention that it was level?

Another step of the process complete!

The next step, and the last that we were planning to tackle this weekend was to get the stringers up and on the beams. Thankfully there was no cutting involved, and so this process, once we figured out and marked up the measurements went fairly smoothly. I did make one rookie mistake - I did not buy enough brackets and screws to finish the stringers - we were three short.