After a full three weeks away, we made our first post-snow trip back to Galiano. There had been some storms and other weather, and we were interested to see the state of the place and to start the process of moving from winter to spring. We had lots of projects to do, and it looked like we might have some nice weather to do them in.
We were on the late ferry Friday evening, and with the ferry about 45 minutes late in departing, it was quite late (and dark) by the time we arrived at the cottage. It had been a long week for both of us, so we called it a night pretty early, knowing that we had a lot going over the weekend.
Sunrise Saturday morning was beautiful.
We were in for a lovely day.
Saturday morning I was up pretty early, certainly early enough to catch a beautiful sunrise. The light was amazing, and it was warm enough for me to try and get in my first round of golf for the new year. Letting Justine sleep in, I headed down to the course. Sadly, the course was in rough shape! It was still very wet, with standing water on many of the fairways. And the greens were rough, as it looked like they had not been cut in quite a while. Still, it was a beautiful morning, and it was good to just get out and take some swings and enjoy the day. Not keeping score also helped with that. After golfing, I made a quick trip to the hardware store to pick up some deer fencing and some wood for a project we wanted to tackle today. They did not have exactly what I needed, but it was close.
One of my favourite all-time shots off the Bird Buddy.
And another pretty good one. I love the little feet.
After getting home from the golf course, just was up, and we did a bit of a walk around the property, just to see where things were at. We were happy to see that flowers were starting to come up, some even blooming! That was exciting to see! During the cold snap, our hoses and such for the rainwater collection had frozen over. Things had thawed, so we pumped over the collection tank near the house. The second tank is now well over 3/4 full, and I imagine will be full by the time we get back. That will give us over 6,000 gallons of water for irrigation.
One of the projects that we wanted to tackle was to build a planter box for the end of the new deck - to act as both a safety stop, and to add some more plants to the deck. We had just started working on it when our friend Tova came for a visit. Tova is our local horticultural guru and helps us out with a lot of different gardening related projects. In this case, we needed to prune our fruit trees for the season. We were thankful for the help, as we were starting to get a bit late in the season for doing the planting. Many of the trees had lots of buds on them, and one of the pear trees even had a little leaf starting to unfurl. Weird. So we got through that project, and I feel much better that our fruit trees are ready for the new season.
After wrapping up that job, we got back to work on the planter box. It took a little while, but I was generally pleased with the results. I think we might want a couple of more small, square ones, but we’ll see. It will be nice to get some plants into it.
The new planter box in its new home.
The view from the deck.
It had been a pretty full and productive day, so we called it around 4:30, and since it was so nice outside, we built a fire in the fire pit. We had a beer and our neighbour Gerry stopped by for a bit to chat. It was a nice way to end the day and enjoy the nice weather.
We had a nice fire going!
Justine found one of our local tree frogs in the garden.
There were lots of big banana slugs around.
Sunday I skipped golfing, as the course had been in such rough shape. That meant I could sleep in a little bit, before we continued with our projects. Sunday was going to be a gardening/planting day, and we had lots to do!
The primary goal was to dig up the garden boxes. There was a bit of an accumulation of old plants (the kale survived the winter fine), weeds and a whole lot of mint that had taken over. I turned the soil in all the boxes, added some fertilizer and generally got it all cleaned up. I have quite a lot of garden space, so it took quite a while. Justine did the same with her flower boxes and we made good progress. Once that was done, I was able to start my planting. I got radishes, peas and kale started. There’s lots more to do over the spring, and hopefully we’ll have another successful harvest.
Getting the gardens sorted, along with a quick visit down to David and Tova’s pretty much took up the morning. Tova had dug out a number of ferns as she was building out her own gardens, so we thought we’d try and transplant them into our yard in areas where we’d cleared a bunch of broome.
In addition to the ferns, we had a few trees to plant. I had purchased a couple of Giant Sequoia’s, a tree I’ve been dying to plant for years. They are only three years old, so quite small, but maybe one day they will live up to their names! We planted one on each side of the property, in areas that we had cleared on broome.
On the west side of the property, we had, after clearing broome, fenced off an area to see what would grow back if the deer weren’t constantly browsing it. We’ve been amazed at how many pin cherry trees have grown in just a year. We added one of the sequoias to that area, to give the tree a bit more protection.
On the east side, we planted the other sequoia along with a jasmine plant. We decided to duplicate the experiment and so part of our afternoon was spent putting in a new set of fencing, so we can see what grows (in addition to protecting out two new plants.) It was a lot of work digging holes and planting plants (and driving fence posts), and by 4ish, we were beat and ready to call it a day.
We had another relaxing night before working all day on Monday. I took a break around lunch time to go out and pull and cut broome. It was good to make a bit more progress.