Garden On, Vashon

They say the quiet dark of winter is a time for dreaming. Planning. Resolving. The time for burying oneself on the couch under a blanket, surrounded by garden books, seed catalogs, spreadsheets, lists, and records of years gone by.

All so cozy … comfy … rational … and I’ll get to it once I drag myself out of the cold.

I spent the better part of this afternoon’s meagre daylight trying to weave wire in and out of bird-netting. My fingers were frozen—de-gloved because bird-netting tends to bind on thick fingers—and my deeply-squatted position was letting plenty of body-heat escape, shall we say, out the backdoor?

But winter’s the time to work on hardscapes, and this particularly project—four raised beds in a big square, criss-crossed by two paths to make four triangular beds—has been hanging around unfinished since fall.

The four beds are planted experiments in soil prep: one’s had its sod flipped and tilled; one is double-dug, amended, and tilled; the one on the right is a lasagna bed over newspaper-covered sod; and the last (near you, with newspaper peeking out from under newspaper) will be filled with “Mel’s Mix”—that combo of compost, coir, and vermiculite advocated by Mel Bartholomew of “Square Foot Gardening” fame. All were sown in a cover crop last September, which is now about 4-6″ high.

As soon as I planted this rich mixture of seeds, the Midnight Raider came a-sampling, and the morning after, my lasagna bed looked rather more like tossed salad. I know we’ve got raccoons: they sometimes stare at my husband from the office windowsill where Bob’s trying (in vain) to keep his bird-feeder full. So back in October, I resolved to cover the beds to keep out the furry, feathered thieves. 

Over my rectangular beds,  I had devised a quonset-style cover using bamboo, steel hoops, and netting (you can see it over my cabbage bed, foreground upper photograph). This system allows the gardener to lift the long sides up for access. I wanted the same kind of lift-up access with the triangle beds. 

In the garage, I found some old shelf-bracket columns that would stand in for hoops. Once I stuck the hoops in the ground and draped it with bird-netting, instance cover—or so I thought at first.

However, it’s not easy to cover a triangle and leave air-space underneath for plants to grow. My green manure—its most ambitious member a legume—took to the netting as its own trellis and grew up into a green snarl—an early warning system of how cramped my spring vegetables will be unless I devised a better system.

Bob (an 18-century man) suggested I make a test-model. So rational. I carved an old pizza box across its middle for the raised bed, brought together wire and netting, screw-eyes and wine corks. Came up with an idea that looked like two cornucopias meeting at the mouth, with outside corners lifting from hinges at the center, wine corks as T- joints to hold the meeting of many wires.

It looked a bit ramshackle and flimsy, but I couldn’t come up with any better ideas. Scaled up yesterday on site, the cover system looked even worse. It would have been 18-century rational to drill pilot-holes in the corks, to measure lengths, to pre-cut the wire. But I’m 20-century, trained to act on impulse and on the spot. So I tried to drive the wire through the corks with white-knuckled force.

The wire, naturally, did not run as through butter through the cold corks—instead, it writhed and bent under pressure, developed kinks, whipped about, got tangled in the netting. I clipped the wire-ends to a point so it would go through the cork easier. That worked: a quick through-and-through, right into the meat of my hand (Awwwh!!!).

Finally finished, I unbent my cramped knees and looked over my net-cover. It looked made of mangled coat-hangers. My own Homer Simpson spice-rack.

Still, the nets did cover the soil a good 16-24 inches high. My cover was no beauty-prize, but would it work?

I lifted the far corner and balanced the cover against the central spine. It leaned: it was definitely leaning. Then slowly, with kind of a roll, it listed to one side and fell to earth, the point protruding over the path like a buck tooth.

Hummm… where’s that couch-blanket when you need to hide?  Time to throw it over my head, consider the mess I’m going to make of the recycled-glass greenhouse I next have in mind.