The following is an ongoing personal diary of the process of reclaiming our garden from years of neglect.

November 1st, 2004: The deal is done! We have just purchased a 1912 house in one of the city’s historic neighborhoods. The house is great although it does need a new kitchen and the basement will have to be finished at some point. I don’t really like spending time is basements – even if they are finished so I will spend my efforts elsewhere. Can’t wait to move in.

Feb. 18, 2005  : Well, we are finally moved in. Talk about a lousy day to choose – Minus 30 degree temperatures. The movers earned every single penny of their fees. Already I am seeing many things that need to be done. We start on the kitchen first then painting the rest of the house. I want to spend the time doing this while the weather is cold so that, when the weather gets warm we can start working on the yard. The yard is large – a double city lot. It is 66 feet wide by 135 feet long. I really wouldn't’t have minded a smaller lot. Ted, however, refused to live in a house where you could pass the salt to the neighbors next door without getting up from your deck chair.

We had to have a huge, lovely spruce tree cut down because it took up half the parking area at the back plus it had become totally intertwined in the power lines. It cost us $800 and this included another tree that had died but it was never removed. I hate to cut trees – it’s like we’re punishing them for doing what nature is supposed to have them do – to grow tall and strong. I just couldn't’t be there when it was cut down…

April 25, 2005: Oh my God! There’s a lake around our garage! The garage (the original one) sits at least a foot lower than the rest of the yard – even the paved back alley! The neighbor’s yard to the north is more than a foot higher than even our high spots and the spring snow has melted and created a pool of water around the foundation of the garage. We will have to put plywood down to even be able to access the path to the back area where we park!

May 15, 2005: Enough is enough. The ugly little “stoop” that is so wobbly that it shakes when our 15 pound dog Taffy walks on it! Today we are tearing it down. We will have to climb up some logs to get to the back door  for a good chunk of the summer – at least until the base is created for the small deck I am planning.  I’ve started designing it and calculating materials already.

I started working on all the weeds in the flower beds. Since I am not an avid or knowledgeable gardener I am sure many of these weeds were actually plants but so be it. I am having a heck of a time cleaning up the “bishop’s weed”. I call this the lazy gardener’s best friend. Since our neighbours have it, it is unlikely that I will be able to get rid of it completely so I will just have to learn to live with it I guess.

I love the little potting shed that is attached to the back porch. I’ve never had a potting shed before – another part of the charm of an old house.

May 25, 2005: The holes for the posts are done. The weather has been cool and rainy – The materials came in – finally. Had to deal with mistakes by the lumber company on three separate occasions. God, grant me patience. I’ve been staining the boards inside the garage but I’m running out of room. It had better get nice soon!

June 5th, 2005: Ted and I (with some help from my brothers) have finally gotten to work on the deck. Yes! No need to clamber up logs any more! The challenge here is trying to make the deck straight without accentuating the fact that the back porch has sagged noticeably on the south side. This deck is intended to be temporary - to last until we do a full kitchen addition to our house – however at the rate we’re going that could take several years. So we are doing a good job because we have no idea when that time will come at this point.

July 15, 2005: Our friend Jim came over to help us do some of the more complex parts of the deck. He and I work well together. My girlfriend and her young son came to visit for the weekend unexpectedly. Unfortunately, the small window of opportunity afforded by the weather and the help, meant we had to work a good part of the day. But we finished earlier and then we all enjoyed the amazing meal Ted put together. Our roles are somewhat reversed in this marriage. I totally prefer to be outside with a hammer and Ted prefers to cook – a match made in heaven!

August 20th, 2005: Will the rain never stop? We need to finish the staining of the deck. One day it rains, sunny the next, rain again – there’s never enough time for the wood to fry before you stain again. I am a white stain – it’s the last time I do this! Three coats and counting….

We cut down all the tall cariganna bushes in the front. Ted tried to trim them and all that was left was dead wood. They completely block off the view at the front of the house too. I have no idea how we are going to get rid of the roots – they are so prolific. 

September, 2005: Well the deck is as done as it will get this year. The nights are getting too cool to allow the stain to dry. I have moved some great twig furniture onto the deck and it looks cozy. The deck is small – more like a back porch really, but the lattice gives us privacy and the 2x2 slats act as a “ceiling” which creates a sense of intimacy.

Ted and I pulled a piece of concrete out of the back yard ( I suspect it held a light fixture to illuminate the back yard at one time). It turned out to be a great base for a table. I designed a way to attach a top on it and now it is our table. I absolutely love having breakfast here – the sun just streams onto the deck in the early morning and it provides blissful shade in the evenings while we are barbecuing.

October 20, 2005: Time to put the garden to bed. Next year will be an important one for this garden with some big decisions to make. I am fed up with mowing the back “lawn”. This sunken pit is rife with quack grass.  According to our neighbors, the area was home to a huge vegetable garden. As the occupants got older, they stopped gardening and the area reverted to weeds . The next occupants ( from whom we bought the house) simply roto-tilled the area, but allowed it to return to weeds without leveling it. The result was a back breaking exercise with a lawn mower – trying to mow into valleys, bumps and flat spots caused by the roto-tiller! On top of that, the lawn care company came twice to fertilize our weeds in spite of our adamant instructions to the contrary! We have the healthiest weeds on the block! 

January 5th, 2006: Our sewer lines are blocked by the roots of the Mayday tree on the south side of the yard. It cost us a pretty penny to have this cleared up too. We are going to have to make a decision about these trees – they are also intertwined with the power lines and are 90% protruding onto our neighbor’s yard. They are growing right into the spruce tree next to it. The whole area is dead – there’s just nothing that will grow there.

Feb. 15, 2006: I can’t wait to work in the garden. It’s not that I’am a gardener – but I am a designer. I can’t look at ugly spaces without it sucking the energy out of me. I’ve been going through plan books, garden books and Ted and I attended both the Renovation Show as well as the Home & Garden Show for inspiration.

April 25th, 2006: We ordered 12 yards of garden soil, not top soil, at a cost of $260.00. This will be delivered next week. The soil in all the beds looks terrible. They need to be “revamped”.  We also made an appointment with a landscaping company to see how they can help us with the mess of quack grass, cariganna roots and low slope of the back yard.

May 2, 2006: Yikes! The soil is here. We spent the weekend pulling out an old French lilac bush that has roots like you wouldn’t believe! Or maybe you would. I couldn’t handle the hundreds of suckers that were killing the flowers I was trying to grow. There’s another one in the corner of the area of the yard where Ted wants to put in a garden. Last year he planted potatoes and tomatoes – both did extremely well.

We got a quote to remove the two mayday trees that were creating havoc in our sewer lines this winter. They, and the adjoining spruce tree, are over 60 feet tall. They are too close (intertwined really) to the power lines to allow for equipment to be used so the guys will have to climb up there with chain saws. The spruce tree has three “heads” and the sap is leaking at one of the joints indicating that there is a crack in the trunk. I remember my Uncle Ernie who took care of my home town’s trees telling me that an evergreen should never have more than one trunk – so I know this is not good news. It makes these trees very susceptible to wind damage and they are often the kind of trees that end up on your neighbor’s roof! Cost of removal? $1600 plus GST with an additional $200 if we want the stumps ground down. OUCH!  I wonder what the landscape company is going to tell us. This is getting expensive.

May 20, 2006: I can’t believe the difference in quotes. We got the whole job done plus some work on our neighbor’s trees for $950.00!  The yard work will set us back about $8000. But it needs to be done.

July 17, 2006: It’s been a while since I have written. Such a lot has happened. We hired a landscaping company (Whitemud Landscaping) to get the yard done. They have pulled out the cariganna bushes out in front (they were diseased and old and created a curtain that limited air flow in the yard – they just weren’t attractive any more) and got us to attempt to kill all the dead quack grass with the only means that seems to work – and that is Roundup. I hate using chemicals but the yard was unusable and quack grass is insidious – even now, when the entire top layer of soil has been removed with the help of a bobcat, the new quack grass is coming up quickly. I’m going to have to go out and try to dig it out – good luck!

The soil level has to be raised by as much as a foot on the side of the garage(see above photo) – where we experienced our “lake” last spring. This means that the soil is higher than the foundation of the garage and that the soil would be right up against the cedar siding – obviously we had to do something. We have built a low wall using standard concrete blocks. We dug out a ditch or trench and filled it with road crush – a mixture of sand and gravel- for drainage. We then placed the blocks about two inches away from the wall of the garage, and angled them slightly towards the garage, the way you do with any retaining wall. Once they were well set, we filled the cavity with the road crush to stabilize the blocks and then filled the area between the blocks and the garage. We placed a plastic sheet over the top of the block, down the facing of the concrete blocks and below the block base. Then more road crush. The soil will be placed against this. The end block was stabilized inside with rebar. I know this is temporary because at some point we will get a new garage that can be used for our vehicles – but right now this old garage is a wonderful workshop. Now if we can only get the landscapers back to finish the job…

One thin I did do, or have been doing is painting while waiting for this job to get done. I always disliked the heavy black outlines of the windows on the house - the house seemed to be a series of postage stamps (even though it is historically appropriate to paint storm windows black). While I was at it I added some color to the front door ( I love yellow - but as it was it turned out to be the best color because of all the other colors of the house), built a window box and small bench and painted them all yellow to carry the color around the front yard. I put a bit of lattice on the concrete foundation to add a little pattern until such time that we can place new bushes there. I can't wait!

Written by: Johanne Yakula