Building The Love Shack

I hadn’t realized till today how long it has been since I did a post. My explanation boils down to two words… Home Work. My course is coming to an end and exam time in only a few weeks away. With loosing the first month of the course to kidney stones, I’ve been working and doing home work to play catch up on both.

Right now I’m pleased to say, I’m sitting at the cottage with just the dogs. I’ve spent the past couple of days focused on school work, my gardens and sleeping. Yes sleeping!

This past two months has been work, school and taking care of the guest at the cottage who have be up to do the major repair job on the Warriors Cottage.

As any good hostess will tell you guest are nice, but guest are work too. Three meals a day need to be prepared. There is extra laundry, extra cleaning and having everything everyone needs gets tiring after a while. There’s a lot of pre-work involved and a lot of follow up. That being said, I’m greatful for their help.

Without the Warriors coming to the rescue, it would have been impossible for us to repair this disaster and would have had to hire electricians, plumbers, framers and contractors to come in who would still be may months away before they could even begin the repair at the Warriors Cottage. And the cost of the rebuild would have been double of what it is.

I know that months sounds like a long time to wait for a contractor, but not at the lake. First, there are no contractors who live down here who aren’t already booked at least a year in advance, because there are hardly none. And two supplies are up to an hour away. Rural deliveries can take weeks instead of days. In the mean time Building Permits can take months to get and Inspectors are few and far in between. The words here are hurry up and wait.

I’m happy to say that the major repair job is near completion after eight weekends and two full weeks of work, we only have a few more weekends to go. Now its a question of which will happen first, will we get the cottage finished before they arrive or will the bored open and they will be arriving to an uncompleted cottage with no water?

So again I have to say thank you to the Ten Warriors who traveled, gave up their time, worked for food or were paid a fraction of their normal labor charges, for friends they have not met yet. Their efforts and time has not gone un-noticed.

Back at the Love Shack, the long awaited May 24th Weekend arrived which is our kick-off for Summer with barbeques, fireworks and planting. It’s the time the last frost had passed and young vegetable plants can be safely planted in the ground.

I’m also happy to say, thou nothing else at the Love Shack has gotten done so far this year, our gardens have gotten in. This too did not come without a challenge which we can give the credit to the Pandemic for.

How you ask could a Pandemic affect gardening? Supply and demands.

Getting the wood to frame the garden boxes was surprisingly the least challenging part, once we swallowed the price of the wood. But getting soil was a bit more of a challenge.

One would have to wonder, in a country’s with the land mass the size of Canada, how could we be short of dirt? The answer is the lock down. Canada still has all sort of different rules for shut down. And because of that, people are at home with nothing to do.

This is making gardening bigger than it has ever been. In return, the Garden Centers are overly busy and they’re selling out quickly of their stock including bagged soil.

This Winter I spent growing seedlings allover the house. Today, I’m grateful that I took on that adventure. This appreciation for my young grown vegetables came from my three trips to the Garden Center where I encountered some very scary people standing in front of the trays of vegetable plants.

Some of those shoppers made the Cabbage Patch Dolls Shoppers in the 1980’s seem like kind and sane people. I’m pretty sure if I had reached in between them I might not have my hand to be able to type out this blog.

With bag soil not being an option, to get the amount of soil needed to fill the garden boxes and not have multiple trips hauling it on the back of our trailer, it had to be brought in. Which meant a delivery. As I mentioned earlier there is a difference between the city and the lake. A bag of soil would be delivered in the city in two days, at the cottage it took two weeks to arrived.

Once the soil was finally delivered, Husbands, Kevin, Nelson and Christina built my boxes while I was at work. Not only was I pleased to arrive and find them built but the many yards of soil had been placed in them.

It took me a few trips down to the cottage with a car load of plants, but I’m pleased to say that the baby plants have arrived safely and are now growing beautifully in their new garden boxes.

Of course being me and my nature, I grew more than I needed and was able to share plants with my neighbor who didn’t have as good of luck with his seedling as I did. He in return gave me a few plants I hadn’t thought of and now we have a large variety of plants.

The little plants have now set blooms and some have started producing baby vegetables. I’m looking forward to soon be able to go out and pick my vegetables and herbs from our garden and serve our Warriors the freshest of food we can get. I also suspect I may have grown to many which means delivers to their homes in the near future.

It’s also nice to see the newer cottagers who have bought over the past few years are using the cottages as more of a second home, which includes more gardening. For me, from a Landscape Designers perspective, the only thing that beats the natural view of nature is beautiful gardens.

I was please to see over the past few weekends that the garden boxes seemed to have caught on as we are seeing others starting boxes this year too which something we have never seen in the six years we have been here. From a gardeners stand point this is a very good thing. The more vegetable plants, the more pollinators will be attracted to the area meaning a better production.

While I haven’t been blogging, I have been weeding, watering, and watching the plants grow. And yes, talking to them.

It’s been sixteen years since we sold are big home and down sized to a smaller home in the city. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed spending time in the garden. Not something I plan to ever give up again as my green thumb is enjoying this very much.

If I had to give 2021 a theme, for me it has been defiantly all about the garden.

And soon. Very soon, we’ll get back to finishing my screened-in-porch and hopefully put in that kitchen that I have waited so long for.