One of the things I have come to enjoy during this new phase in my life of not having to go to work is the ongoing landscaping development in our yard.
It’s something I missed more than I thought when we moved back to Victoria from Belize and had a very small yard – which I also spent a considerable amount of time landscaping but with our current home here in Collingwood, we bought a fairly nice sized piece of property and had a blank slate and I have really had the time to fully understand how much effort goes into truly developing a property visually and seasonally.
When we started in 2014, all I knew is that I wanted a forest of our own in the backyard, something that would provide us with our own sense of privacy.
As you can see from the set of photos below, the first few years involved planting some fairly large trees, but not massive. The red maple and the crimson maple were each about 12 feet tall and the three spruce trees not much more than six feet. The grasses were relocated to other peoples houses where they fit better or moved to other spots on our yard. They did not work in the forest concept I had in mind.
During this process, I learned that the variegated Japanese Willows (the two shrub like greenery in the middle) planted in the back were more like weeds and required a massive amount of tending so I replaced them and moved them to other parts of the property, however, the six grafted Japanese Willows on either side of our deck (second photo below) I kept because we wanted to build or rather grow a natural privacy break. You can see how small they were when we first planted them. You can also see from the main photo how nice a privacy break they’ve become, which was the plan.
Along the outside of the house, I planted six Black Cedars, which were originally only about three feet tall and have now grown to about 15 feet and are beautiful along the side of the house, as are the hydrangeas, although I am in the process of replacing the hydrangeas with a different varietal. The Annabelles I originally planted are too weak to survive properly when it rains and I have had to build an enclosure to support them so I am replacing them with a hardier varietal.
So far, we have planted 33 trees on the property and a dozen or more different varieties of flowers and plants. It’s a work in perpetual progress as I learn the seasons here in Ontario and what grows when.
However, many of the plants I originally planted are now in neighbours backyards.
In 2019, we decided to start growing our own vegetables and built our first raised garden bed and had a considerable amount of success in the first year so as of this summer, 2022, we have added two more for a total of three raised garden beds and are growing a considerable amount of our own food including Swiss Chard, Kale, Cherry Tomatoes, Eggplant, Broccoli, Leeks, Bok Choy, Basil, Garlic, Dill, Raddachio, Arugula, Bell Peppers, Strawberries and multiple types of Lettuce as well as having planted a Yellow Dwarf Plum, a Honeycrisp and a Golden Russet apple tree.
I am very keen of watching the garden develop every year.
Unfortunately, the beautiful Crab Apple that you see in full bloom below was planted in the wrong place eight years ago and when I tried to transplant it, I must have damaged critical roots so that is no longer with us. Also, you can see from that photo what the space where the back variegated willows were and the nice space transplanting them provided me.
One of the things I love about the yard is if you stand at the back fence, you are actually behind the main trees. There is about eight feet of space behind them which makes it feel like a forest and I am gradually planting shade plants there to achieve a foresty-type of ground cover sprinkled with several types of flowers, like shasta daisies, coneflowers, black eyed susans, croscosmia, coreopsis, foxgloves and several types of day lilies. As I learn and have the time to be in the yard in the summer, I buy plants which bloom at different times, keeping parts of the garden in bloom all summer.
During this development, I also decided to install a rock gardeny type area to the side of the house where it was very difficult to mow the grass and this turned out really well. The ferns grew in well and I love watching the fiddleheads pop up each spring, although ferns are hard to control as they spread wildly each spring.
I wanted to achieve a type of look that had the feel of a spring river wash. Something that felt like a stream had a lot of water flowing in the early spring after the winter melt and pushed river rocks down the river bed naturally and ferns and hosta’s grew along the shore and I like to think I somewhat achieved that look. I especially love it after it rains…
I absolutely love having the raised gardens in the backyard. There’s always fresh produce and each year we learn more and more and I suspect, moving forward, we will continue to develop our gardens.
I have many more projects still to integrate. Next year I plan on building a multi level strawberry container and planting wisteria along a section of the fence between the French Lilac and Yellow Dwarf Plum for additional privacy.
The backyard has become home for us in more ways that we imagined. We spend most afternoons in the backyard relaxing, talking, hanging out and tending the garden beds and most days, that is accompanied by a before dinner beverage.
Our Experiment in Building an Espalier
An Espalier is a method of training and pruning a tree or shrub by forcing it to grow flat against a wall or a free-standing trellis and this was the year we decided to build on for ourselves.
We started by getting a Golden Russet apple tree specially grafted on to a hardy root stock for our winters here in Collingwood, courtesy of my friends Mike and Mark at Twin Pines Orchards.
I decided to build an Espalier and train the tree to grow along a wire structure for a variety of reasons but mostly because I wanted to plant something between our property and the neighbours property to act as a privacy screen and this was the best and nicest way I could think of doing that. That space gets seven plus hours of sunshine daily in the summer and is the ideal spot on our property to try this.
An Espalier also has a great deal of ornamental value and is also an effective technique for producing an ample crop of fruit in a small space. We hope it will allow us to grow an abundance of my favourite apples along a system that allows the apples to get maximum sunlight and grow within a system that allows us to easily harvest the fruit when it is ready and look nice when it is fully developed.
That said, it is going to require all of my patience because common advice is that it generally takes five to seven years to create a completed espalier structure and harvest fruit. Until that time, my research tells me I will have to prune out any developing fruit. The goal in the first few years is to encourage the tree to put all of its energy into growing branches that establish the basic framework. Once that happens, all future pruning is to encourage fruit production. Apples on all trees, whether espalier or not, are borne on short stems called spurs. As buds and new shoots form along a lateral branch, I will have to prune them back to a point close to the branch where five leaves cluster around the stem. This encourages the buds on the bottom half of the lateral branch to produce fruit. This pruning will also remove the end buds that are more likely to produce leaves and stems.
So next spring, and for several springs after that, no matter what, I am going to have to pull off any developing fruit, so that will be a test for me.
The Hot Tub Extension
Bringing the entire space together over the years has centred around the deck we built in 2014, which we extended this year because we decided to install a hot tub. As usual, it took me several years to make the hot tub decision and plan the extension in my mind as to how it could fit into our space but once I settled it, we were good to go and it didn’t take us long to purchase the tub we wanted.
One Saturday morning we got up, visited the four Hot Tub outlets in Collingwood and before the day was through, we had made our choice.
From there, some measurements and some planning included staking off the area with string so I could wrap my head around the space it would take up and then off to Home Depot to buy some wood.
The deck turned out to be quite a fun learning experience for me. I hired my neighbour Larry for a day’s help. He is an experienced builder and he tutored me for a full day and helped me build the framing and taught me how to use a skill saw, which I bought for myself. Who knew this is something I’d be doing in retirement. It was a good day as we work well together. He has the technical know how and is a great teacher and I am good at figuring out how much materials we need and doing the grunt work.
After we got the initial framing done, I spent the following day rabbit proofing the undersides of the construction with wire meshing so no varmints could get under the deck in the winter. I’ve learned that having rabbit winter under our deck is ruinous for my trees and shrubs over the winter,
Then I laid down some weed protection cloth and a layer of limestone gravel powder to top it off and seal the underneath. That will also hinder animals from burrowing under the deck. Then I topped the deck with the planking and added the outside edging.
I am very pleased with the end result.
So we had a bit of coordination issues with the hot tub as we’ve had some hiccups getting the electrician here and then the tub showed up 4 hours late, which kind of pushed us back a day but also gave us the chance to re-consider where we wanted the tub.
The next morning after delivery, we both went outside in the morning for coffee and said to each other, “We can’t see our beautiful gardens”, so we decided to push the hot tub around the deck for an hour and a half until we came up with a solution that we both liked but which was not the original plan.
So we located the hot tub closer to the house and moved our table and chairs out onto the new extension area that we had planned to place the hot tub on and we can enjoy our backyard view and still have our hot tub on the deck.
We are happy with our choice and spent this weekend finally enjoying our new tub.
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So this post is basically about having had nine years now to create a backyard for ourselves and that has been a real joy for us. We both think this addition will provide us nice times together over the coming years.
And who knows, we may build a platform out in the yard somewhere next year and move the hot tub but for now, we are going to simply enjoy it where it is. We did the best we could and had a little shortsightedness in the location we (mostly me) envisioned the tub. That said, I think this is where we would have ended up putting it if we had given thought to losing our view so we think it worked out. There really isn’t any other place to place the tub other than building an entirely new platform somewhere else in the yard and I don’t think either of us really wanted to be running across the backyard in the dead of winter to get to the tub. Now it is right outside the back door.
Couple of other things we did this year – we planted a Honeycrisp apple tree and six different varietals of blueberries and a Yellow Dwarf Plum as well as a strawberry patch. The strawberries are a work in progress as I still have to build a ground level planter for them next spring or perhaps this later this fall.
Stay tuned for next years update.
On a closing note:
One of the things I’ve had to reconcile over the years is my travel lust with reality. I’ve always slightly regretted selling our beachfront property in Belize because I always thought I could build the perfect garden there, with the Caribbean as the focal point. I remember when I bought it, I thought I needed a partner to help me build the small eco-resort but I’ve since learned partners suck. I don’t need one other than Yim… ever.
Now, having built a deck extension on our beautiful property in Canada, where I can sit, stretch and meditate in my own backyard, with Georgian Bay five minutes away and all the conveniences Canada offers – this provides me peace of mind. I’ve never had a space like this to really call our own and connect to. It’s very therapeutic for me.
Lately, in the mornings, I have started to go outside and have my coffee, sit on the deck and stretch and listen to the morning sounds as the day begins. That in itself is an incredible gift to me. I can listen to the wind in the leaves – our leaves – our little forest space.
So the garden has turned into more of a sanctuary for me anyways and I suspect that once the hot tub is installed, it will also become more of a spa for Yim… a space where we can both enjoy spending time, separately and together.
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