Sarah, my wife, loves having a garden. Her mom has alway grown a substantial part of their vegetables.
In order to accommodate her desire to grow a vegetable garden, I built her two plant boxes when we were still in Ottawa. Now it should be noted that there was a lot of shade, so growing things was quite hard, but vegetable-wise we never got anything bigger than a carrot the size of the tip of my pinky finger.
Suffice to say, she was pretty excited when we moved back and there were two large vegetable beds all ready to go in the bright sunshine.
She completely filled one, and half filled the other, in addition to filling some large tubs with squash and pumpkins. She also, however, left the gate to our yard open twice. Consequently, cattle got in, ate or wrecked most of it and she had to replant.
Then the wildfires started.
After being evacuated for about three weeks, we were able to go home.
Coming home was a bit of a mixed bag. We were quite worried about what we would return to as we had left some of the windows open and were expecting ash to be everywhere.
Before I left, I had been able to transfer most of the things in the fridge and freezers to my in-laws’ who were running off a generator nor were without power for very long.
As a result, there was some stuff in there that had gone bad but overall things were really not that bad.
The grossest thing by far was two mouse traps that had gone off some time ago, where the mice had moulded to the traps.
When we left, the vegetable garden didn’t amount to very much (in part because the cows had gotten in there and ate most of it twice).
Upon return, we had the biggest vegetable garden we’ve ever had. Sarah proudly asked me to take a picture of her with the plants.
Our neighbours, who don’t have a little baby, had been watering it and it grew phenomenally well.
If anything I would say it might even be a little overcrowded.
With us being back, Sarah took the gardening responsibilities again. Last night, she watered it for the first time and promptly left the gate open.
Consequently, when I woke up this morning, the garden and yard were once again filled with cattle.
I think that for Sarah’s mental well-being, that maybe we should ask the neighbours to take care of our garden permanently.