The South Facing Flower Bed

... the view from Arta's bedroom ...
A Spring Sunrise 

You have to be up at 4:13 am
to see something like this

I walk by Miranda’s and Richard's cabin at the Shuswap every day.

I am on my way to water Moiya’s newly planted raspberry canes while she is away.

As I am watering that space and a little more for I can see newly planted grass that needs some water, I look back at Miranda’s iris bed.

One tall iris between 3 and 4 feet high is in the bed.

The rest of the space is irises that aren’t doing that well – they maintain themselves as leaves but they do not flower.

The rest of the bed has the natural look -- meadow.

While I was holding the sprinkler, for I hand water, I decided to just dig that bed up for Miranda since I am walking by there every day.

The dig has not gone as planned.

I thought it would be easy to turn over the soil. And the top four inches were good.  But then there is a fist-sized rock or a boulder that stops the axe every time it hits the earth.

I can’t help thinking of the past when I unearth a buried treasure there. How about the rusty metal U-turn that goes with a plumbing unit?

I found the end of an electrical chord.  I couldn't pull the rest of it out from beneath the house no matter how hard I dug.

I dug out a horseshoe, now three feet deep. I wondered which kids were accused of taking it for their play and ruining the men’s game that was played in the area between the two houses. Now I know the horse shoe was just in the flower bed.

I found second spoon in my dig, while not in a condition to eat with, a perfectly good toy for the sand box. Another generation of children playing the same game of “Dig in the Sand” with the same tool.

I found a white bone, round, a diameter of maybe 1 ½ inches and 2 inches in length, the marrow now gone from the bone. I stopped to consider if this would look good as a necklace. Just a rope of the right kind through it and it would be pretty classy, I thought. I held it in the palm of my hand for a while and then decided, no – too heavy.

My Breakfast
strawberries from Moiya's garden

The hardest pat of the dig were two boulders and one stump. I had to call on David Pilling a few years ago to help me with a boulder I couldn’t bring out of a flower bed (the bed being, supposedly 2 feet deep, but sometimes I cheat with 18 inches or less). David pulled it, rolled it out and then said to me, “You could have done it if you had just believed.”

So I took David’s advice. I started to “believe” with my two boulders and kept working the first one with my axe. Nobody would have been more surprised than me when it first moved enough that I knew I was going to get it all the way out.

“A good case for believing,” I thought.

The stump was hard until I figured ut that I should cut all of the roots and then try to pry the stump out. This turned out to be a good idea.

And that is the end of my journey to the bottom of the flower bed. Tomorrow I shall refill it with the dirt I saved and I will add a little more black compost to it.

I will love that flower bed.

Arta