If at first you don't succeed

Last summer, construction on the outside of our apartment building rerouted my plans for a garden from the front of our building to its roof top.  My first solo gardening project, indeed my first gardening activity since the third grade, was suddenly more experimental than I had anticipated.  I bought a collection of plastic storage containers and large pots, filled them with rocks, dirt, and compost, stuck in my seedlings and crossed my fingers.  Like a novice monk, I spent the summer carrying buckets of water, filled in our bathtub, up three flights of stairs to the roof where I poured them over my parched plants.  I managed to get a decent harvest of cucumbers, some great zucchini, several harvests of herbs, and even a few tomatoes and peppers.  It was very modest, but encouraging.  By the way, I forgot to tell my landlord, who knew of my desire to plant in the front, that I had moved my operations to the roof.

We came home one afternoon after labour day weekend and the smell of basil was in the air outside of our apartment.  Looking at the ground out front, we suddenly saw all of my containers.  Most of them were broken, the earth and the plants they had held were raked out across the ground, shards of bright blue plastic half-buried among them.  With tears streaming down my face I stepped among the wreckage of my garden, trying to salvage some basil and chive plants that had been buried whole.  It was a tragic day.

Mat called the landlord who explained that he had just discovered my containers over the weekend.  Having recently redone the roof of the building he was more than a little concerned about potential damage their weight might cause.  Being too heavy to carry down, he decided to launch them off the side of the building instead.  Well!  We would have at least liked to see the fall!

It was agreed by both our landlord and ourselves that the entire situation could have been handled better by both parties, and our landlord reimbursed us for half the cost of the materials that had been broken.  He promised that next year I would have dictatorial gardening powers over the front and would even put new soil down.

So here we are in the spring of 2011 and I am very excited to have our new garden in the front.  With the help of some friends I have spent hours loosening up the soil and adding compost.  I started seedlings inside and they have recently been transplanted.  But the first plants to come up in April, before I had begun to do any work at all, were those rescued chives, three bright green patches.  They are perennials, I suddenly learned, and had survived a particularly cold Montreal winter.  Now here they were, a pungent sign of encouragement for the new season.