Ready to plant!

Earlier this week, I was at our plot in the community garden, preparing the bed to be planted. I turned all the soil and added a bit more fresh soil. I was hoping to go back the next day and plant the seeds, but it started raining. Not that rain bothers me, but I haven’t heard of people gardening in the rain — do all the seeds get washed away if you plant during the rain? I’m sure the local gardeners would laugh at me. It rains so much here that I imagine that people must garden in the rain.

In any event, yesterday and today have been pretty rainy, but there have also been a few dry breaks throughout today. I took one of these moments (the sun even shone through for a moment!) to go down to the garden, with the sole intention of planting out the only vegetable seedling that I brought from the mainland: a zucchini plant.

When I got to the garden I discovered that the tools necessary to set up a grid for square foot gardening were all in the communal shed! So I got to work and strung up a grid of 9×3 feet (with an extra 3 half-feet at one end). There was no ruler to measure feet by, so I estimated that a foot would be about the length of my fore-arm. Really, I don’t think it has to be precise. I noticed that across the short side of the raised bed, about three of these estimated feet would fit. So I took a bit of string and “measured” the short side of bed. I then folded the string into three equal sized pieces and these were my “feet”. I made a mark on the string at “foot length”  and then used this string to measure even spaces for bent nails along the long side of the bed. Then it was just a matter of stringing line through the bent nails and the squares were made. (A quick aside: I first heard of square foot gardening when Dave installed a garden as one of his projects when we lived in New Brunswick.)

I stuck the zucchini plant in one corner and will make up a plan for the rest of the squares. Hopefully later this week I can go back and plant my seeds!

Shortly after I left the garden, the rain started again — and this time it was a downpour! I know I’ve mentioned the rain several times in this post, so I just want to set the recored straight: I absolutely love the rain; it is what makes this place so beautiful.