My friends Alan and Dustin lived in my building on Capitol Hill - that's how we met, actually - and we all moved out within two weeks of each other. They bought a sweet house on Vashon Island and have been living there for about a month. They invited me to spend the night on Friday, so I hopped the 6:30 p.m. ferry from West Seattle. It's only about a 15 minute crossing, yet somehow in my 30 years of being mostly in Seattle I've never made the trip! Here is the view from my car on the ferry:
Once there it's about 10 miles to drive to their house, and despite the proximity to Seattle it felt just like all the other islands you have to get to by ferry, crisscrossed by isolated country roads with beautiful trees standing guard over everything. As soon as I pulled up it started pouring rain, much to Dustin's disappointment (he was hell-bent on building a bonfire). Their new friend Kurt, a local cheesemaker, was over, and later Jenny, an old friend of theirs, came over with two friends to surprise Alan. The rain ended after awhile and a beautiful, starry sky emerged. It was an awesome sight after so many cloudy nights. We did get a fire going with a little help from some gasoline, but it was short lived.
The next morning Dustin opened my door at 8:22 and said, "it's time for you to wake up. It's almost 9!" Of course I hadn't come for a leisurely trip; it was time to get to work in the giant blank slate that is their garden. First, we had to run some errands. Dustin took me to the old dump/recycling center to drop off their recyclables, and then we went into town to go to the hardware store. It's just what you want out of an island town - plenty of practical businesses mixed with a lot of art galleries and import stores that you are impressed stay in business. What I particularly liked is that so many shops were in the first floors of homes.
We also went to a nearby estuary and harbor where there was an extreme low tide. We walked out as far as we could, but once we started sinking in the mud I pulled the plug and headed back. There was an astounding variety of colors of starfish, and sand dollars by the thousands. What luck to live so near a tidal coast!
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| Dustin standing where the estuary starts. |
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| Crazy low tide! |
Once back on the "estate" we had a look around. I'll be honest, it's daunting. The property wasn't maintained for three years before they moved in, and it shows. They have made incredible strides in a short month but they have years of work ahead of them. While Alan got busy with the chainsaw, hacking up some trees they had cut down, Dustin showed me into the garden. The previous owners had built a large fenced-in garden area to protect the plants from deer, and they had brought in good soil. That's where the good news ends. The boys had rototilled the entire area a few weeks ago but it hasn't been warm enough to plant anything since and the weeds came back with a vengeance; specifically grass, morning glory, blackberries, and this tiny sprout that was coming up in the thousands. Oh boy, I thought to myself. But out loud I said, "Let's get started!" We ended up hand tilling the entire area. It took about 4 hours but we both decided it was a worthy endeavor in terms of weed control in the future. By doing a deep hard rake and then combing over every square inch with our hands, we removed huge swaths of root systems, pulled up grass, dug out blackberries, and severed the many thousands of sprouts, leaving them to decay as organic matter for whatever Dustin plants (picking them out of the soil was definitely out of the question). We also pulled a huge barrel's worth of rocks from the soil to line the paths. Was it time well spent? For sure. Was it tedious as hell? You bet. Welcome to the farm life, me.
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| About 75% done; this doesn't even show the whole area. |
Before we knew it, Alan was calling us for lunch - homemade barbecued cheeseburgers. Uhhhh, yeah. Delicious.
Back to the hand tilling. We'd been so ambitious about what we could accomplish but the tilling was a seemingly never-ending task. The forecast was sun and we were lucky with several hours of beautiful weather, but then it clouded over and even started to sprinkle a little. Luckily we had FINISHED TILLING (victorious exclamations ensued) and had to go back into town for a few more items before we could actually plant anything, so we took the rain as a sign and got back in the car.
Dustin wanted to plant flowers in the front of the garden, so we separated the many packets of seeds he had into tall, medium, and short and sowed three rows of each combination. Then it was time to dig holes for their fifteen - FIFTEEN! - tomato plants. I'll have you know I dug them all myself while Dustin cleaned up hunks of sod from the walking paths. I might have whined about it, but I'm happy to do all the manual labor I can get. I'd like to be in slightly better shape before I start work on a farm, guaranteed to kick my ass no matter how fit I may be.
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| Tomatoes in their holes. The wet area in the front = flowers. |
Thank heavens - time for dinner. Again, Alan came through on the barbecue, making carne asada tacos in honor of Cinco de Mayo (which is not Mexico's independence day, FYI). This meat was otherworldly. Using my caloric expenditure throughout the day as an excuse, I gorged on it. Alan had also made incredible guacamole for the second time that weekend. I would have eaten more if I hadn't been so busy exclaiming over how good it all was. It doesn't take much to get me to labor for a day - good company and really good food.
By this time we were all knackered so we decided to finish the day off with something really satisfying - gathering up the branches from the chainsaw massacre and having a huge fire. YESS.
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| Don't worry, all that grass is still wet and showed no interest in burning. |
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| Their house and my Matrix in the background. |
The boys had been invited to an islander's house for a 5 de Mayo celebration and I was invited too, but a soak in the beautiful bathtub at KMJ's house was too much to resist for my stiff body. I was on the 7:30 ferry, tired but very satisfied, and in the tub by 8:30.
I can't wait to go back to their house in a month and see how everything is coming up. I told Dustin that if he doesn't plant the rest of the garden before the weeds come back, there will be trouble.
Today is Sunday, luckily a day of rest. I woke up stiff and sore but secretly wishing I were still on the island being put to work on another project.
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| The happy homeowners. |
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