They're Trying!

Barely forty degrees F. today.  Very discouraging.  But the plant world is really trying, as below.

 Red Currant with forsythia in background.

 Red Currant on its own.

 Tiny forget-me-nots.

 Alpine Primroses.

 Daffodils.

Pieris.  All pictures taken in the early evening of a cloudy day, and thus overly dependent on flash.

What's Wrong with This Sentence?

One of the developers in the Lily Point Beach Club Without a beach development, Wayne Knowles, has offered the following reassurances to the residents of Point Roberts.

"I have lived in Point Roberts for 18 years and I love the natural setting here. I hope to maintain that natural beauty with this development."

Why is it that developers always seem to think that, as a result of their personal occupational exuberance and financial well-being, more houses will "maintain natural beauty"? Building more houses might be a good idea or it might not, but it is hard to imagine how the "natural beauty" could be "maintained" with the addition of 62 additional houses.   It could be more or less diminished, depending upon how the development is done, but 'maintained"? I don't think so...

The Earth Abides

Sun at last, and all day long: the kind of spring day we have been longing for. You get out in the yard as quick as you can and then last as long as you can, which may not be as long as you'd like. It is clear to me that I have not spent my winter ensuring that my legs were ready for all that getting up and down that the garden requires when spring arrives in a single day.

What I am mostly doing is removing shallow-rooted, aggressive early spring weeds. I'm trying not to disturb the soil too much, and i can hear my father telling me i should not be messing in the garden at all when the soil is still pretty much mud. But, but, but, I say, it is the first nice day we've had, and besides my father never gardened in wetlands with buttercups and pop weed and dandelions, so perhaps his rules don't apply, perhaps the mud won't lose its oxygen by being further compacted.  In fact, I don't really know whether this abysmal soil ever had any oxygen in it, so I don't know whether it is possible for me to make it worse by mere mucking about with a trowel.

I was talking to one of the old timers here the other day and he said he didn't think he would be able to till his fields before the first of May. Clearly he is of my father's school. Another friend used today's gracious sun to plant his peas. Poking those little soaked pellets into theground is surely not going to be doing any harm to the soil and doubtless the extra moisture will be very useful to the peas in their yearning to get back up above ground. But there I am, trowel in hand anyway, poking about in the ground, and gathering bucket after bucket of leafy weeds.

And comes nightime, those unused muscles will be complaining bitterly to me about their recent ill use. And, Hallelujah! We will be back in the endless toil of the garden. I believe we come from gatherers, not hunters, and that explains all the difference.

Birds Arrive for Spring

Living so near the beach, there is a lot of driftwood around up here.  I think it's illegal to remove it from the beach because it presumably belongs to whoever owns the beach, but there's surely enough for everyone and most everyone has some of it around in his/her yard.  I myself have used it to make driftwood gates that sit here and there about the property.  They are gates, without sides/connecting fences, so they don't operate to shut anything in or out.  They just stand as lovely sculptures, sort of, or at least as a place to hang little mirrors or other things that sparkle and shine in the sun.

Most of them are back in the property, where you wouldn't see them from the road, but there is one right on the street near the front of the house.  It has a painted parrot and a little driftwood frame studded with beach glass hanging from it.  And it stands in wild ground, with lots of trees above it and oregon grape below it.

Yesterday, I was walking by it and noticed that the driftwood frame was askew.  And when I walked right up to it, I saw that there were two tiny little white birds affixed to the gate: one in the frame and one on the gate itself.  Never saw those little white birds before.  I guess someone walking by thought that was their home.  So, thank you, whomever you are!

Market Updates

The people directing the Saturday Market have announced their decisions, which at the moment include having the market open every other Saturday from Easter weekend (April 23) to Labor Day (Sept. 3).  They hope to get permission to have it every Saturday, but the Parks Board has not yet been heard from on that matter.

They have noted that the County's regulations about the selling of prepared food are sufficiently onerous that there may be some considerable diminution of such sales, although the County is okay with one's selling baked goods for charity causes other than one's own pocketbook.  Further, they have stated their displeasure with the selling of used goods which will only be allowed twice during the summer (once early and once late) but only if one's used goods have been vetted with the administrators.  (It's okay: I was pretty much through with selling my used CD's, but I take the implied insult.)  And they have encouraged the growers of vegetables to come forth.  If the weather doesn't sometime improve, there will be passing few vegetables of any kind around this summer: at least home grown ones.

This banning of the used goods seems to me a bad idea, not least because the market last summer had some difficulties with having enough vendors in the first place.  The administrators seem to think that there are vast numbers of people with exquisite original (make it, bake it, grow it) goods here on the Point and, furthermore, so exquisite that they will command the attention of vast numbers of buyers who will want to make a foray cross border to get what cannot be obtained more easily in greater Vancouver.  I doubt it.  My guess is that the  used goods (flea market/thrift shop) have the best chance of being a going concern for such a market.  That is, that you could use that as the base and work the other stuff up around it.  But I didn't volunteer to be an administrator and, though that point of view has been put forward, the decision went the other way.  We shall see.

I'm doing my part by taking my eight grown-from-seed potted kale plants outdoors to adjust to reality.  I have told them that they are very cool weather plants and they should do their best.  If all goes well, I could have a few bunches of kale to sell, although we do tend to eat them ourselves, of course.  Well, that's the problem with depending on home gardeners to buttress the community garden output.

Only Minutes Ago...

Hardly have I finished writing about the Point's apparent inclination not to change things much if it involves more people or more houses, when the issue of the Point Roberts Beach Club is back on our plates.  Or on someone's plate.  Last year, the section of the proposed Beach Club nearest to Lily Point was sold at auction and the guy who bought it (a Canadian, part-time resident) announced that he just planned to look at the land.  Which pleased us quite a bit here in Point Roberts, as most residents seemed not too interested in having a 100+ new houses built next door to Lily Point, even if you called it a Beach Club, and even if it was substantially above the beach.

And now, the same bunch (at least the same names arise) that had originally hoped to build that 'beach club' has amended its plan and is at the County urging it to approve their new and revised 'Beach Club'  plan to build (only) 62 houses on 62 small lots crammed up near the bluff in three rows on acreage (62 acres) next door to the kindly Canadian part-time resident who rescued us from this dread plan last year.  The new and revised Beach Club is generally south of APA, and between Boundary and Paul's Road, as far as I can tell from the maps in the plan.

Someday, it may be a good idea to build a bunch more houses in Point Roberts (from a profit-perspective), but it's hard to believe that this is the time.  Lots of houses for sale currently, but they don't look to be selling very fast.  I believe the two houses on our street have been for sale for well over a year and the multiple lots nearby on South Beach have been there for more than that.  The 'for sale' signs even look weary.  But even if it were an idea with a money upside (for someone), I doubt if it is what the community would be looking forward to.

There is this to be said for the plan.  Given that the Beach Club lots are about 100 feet above the beach (and the water), the prospective new owners would doubtless be safe from a tsumami.  Maybe that's the selling point.  "Beach houses in Point Roberts, way above the beach: No Tsunami Concerns."

Minimal Change

The County has come up a couple of times recently to see what Point Roberts people want done with the new Lily Point Park.  Usually, the County isn't all that fascinated with what we up here think, or at least it seems like that to me.  And suddenly, here they are more than once.  Coming up here for an evening program means a considerable drive coming and going and a total of four border crossings as well as doing it all at night since the meetings are always around 7 p.m.  It's extra work for them, surely.

And, alas, we have not been anywhere near appreciative enough of all this effort.  People come to the meetings. Not dozens and dozens, but maybe one dozen.  I didn't go; I didn't go because I don't have some grand vision of what Lily Point Park should look like other than what it currently looks like.  And, it turns out, even the dozen folks that show up for the meeting pretty much share that idea.  It is entirely possible that all anyone ever wanted was for the property not to turn into a housing development.

Perhaps what people in Point Roberts actually want generally is for there to be no more people or houses than are already here.  We aren't particularly interested, e.g., in having numbers of tour buses showing up to look at things, whether it's Lily Point or Lighthouse Park.  We mostly want it to be just like it already is.  And what that runs flat into is the idea that there ought to be some way to have economic development in Point Roberts.  It may be that we would be enthusiastic about an economic development plan as long as it didn't change anything and didn't involve a lot more people being here.  How's that going to work?