Where are you? Who are you?

Hello my dear readers. I just checked my stats since I started this blog around a year ago and discovered this. I have been read in the following countries: Canada 382 United States 71 Russia 39 Germany 13 New Zealand 13 Thailand 9 United Arab Emirates 5 China 4 South Africa 4 Israel 3 The column on the right is how many page views there were from each country.  I actually have friends and family in Germany, South Africa and Israel, so I know who they are. My brother traveled to New Zealand and Thailand, and I think he was stuck in an airport in China  en route so he may have flipped onto my blog a few times.  Thank you, I suppose, to my friends who are originally from Russia, for recommending my blog to your friends back home. Otherwise I have no idea who is reading my blog in Russia. United Arab Emirates?? I have seen photos from your country, does this mean you are internet slumming?? Honestly I am perplexed. Who are you? Josh bursts my bubble by suggesting someone is using a proxy. Maybe my son, bored in grade ten English, has been evading the firewalls. Unlikely that he would choose my blog over tetris friends, especially now that he is fifth in the world. He was supposed to be studying. I just thought I would share this weirdness with my readers. Today was a slow gardening day. I was given a new lavender plant and a sedum by Kate and Maya over the weekend, which I planted on a break from helping with homework, doing laundry and dishes. I also randomly popped some more basil sprouts into pots and stray corners of the garden, and found handfuls of tomato sprouts popping up from patches of compost. I think I am going to have a real jungle this summer. Maybe not Thailand style jungle, but busy for an urban garden. We had another heavy downpour all day yesterday, and my drowned tomatoes in pots got another bath. My holes in the bottom did not work well. Even some of the pots that had good drainage got flooded. By this evening, things are looking okay again. I am not complaining, a bunch of my friends had their basements flooded. I just lost a few tomato sprouts, and my garden has compensated by popping up a few dozen more.

Honey, I drowned the tomatoes!

We had a huge rainfall on Tuesday just after a gorgeous, unseasonably hot long weekend of intensive planting and weeding. Huge! It poured all day. We had managed to plant or pot most of the sprouts by Monday night. At 10 o'clock pm, after getting the kids to bed, I went outside to plant some beans and tidy up the yard, and asked Josh if he thought the tomato and basil sprouts, the tiny ones which were still too small to plant, would be okay out in the rain, and he thought it would be okay. The temperature was staying warm, and some rain and wind would do them some good. So we left them out.

Josh was home and checked on the plants a few times during the day, dumping out the excess water from the trays under the pots and the jiffies. I got home late from work because I had an event, and before eating dinner, I went to check on the garden. I realized that some of the orange juice cartons and yoghurt containers we had used as planters did not have holes for drainage in the bottom. We did such a mass planting two weeks ago of the San Marzano seeds, I was washing the containers and rinsing them in alcohol and Josh was punching holes in the bottom and filling them with earth. I did some punching and filling too. It was such chaos that it does not surprise me that we missed a few pots. It was not an issue until Tuesday, because that was their first big downpour. I did a search and rescue mission and made sure that all pots had proper drainage, but some of the seedlings were buried in mud, or maybe fell out when I poured off the excess water. I am watching to see what comes back.

We ended up with far too much basil and hot peppers. I have been giving away big pots with tiny sproutlings in them to everyone who says they'll take some. I am leaving a bunch in pots, all over the back yard, as insurance in case snails, slugs or whatever demolishes the ones I planted.

The flower garden is looking good. Now that I am taking photos regularly, I am trying to keep track of the trend of what blooms when and for how long. Of my first blooms in mid to late April, the daffodils and hyacinths finished within a couple of weeks. The late April lameum and periwinkle are finishing after a month, and the lilacs started about two weeks ago, and are going strong. I have two stages of tulips, tall red ones and shorter ones with sunset colours of orange and red swirled, which are just finishing, and a second variant of colour changers that started out pale yellow and turned white with pink/red ripples. They are tall and gorgeous. My only surviving blue anemone bloomed for a week or so and just finished. The lillies and one yellow iris are preparing to bloom. I planted the ruffled pink stargazer lily I bought for Josh (he loves stargazers), and it just finished blooming. My poppy appeared almost overnight full sized (no buds yet). My cosmos are sprouting, even the ones I just planted. Everything doubled in size after the rain. Iulia and I are continuing to swap plants and flowers. I am trying to sprout some more dianthus, but I realized that two of the spiky pale green plants Iulia gave me at the end of the summer last year look a lot like the surviving remnant of the dianthus I almost killed a couple of weeks ago while weeding. Maybe I will have a lot of it. They are so pretty!

My columbines are in full bloom. I have one columbine which is pale purple, one colour. The rest are purple-white mix. Iulia and I are waiting to see what the rest turn out to look like, but I may not know mine until next year. They grow slow at first, then they come back every year faster and larger. My morning glories are starting to sprout, and my two roses are shooting up. My bleeding hearts have been blooming for a month, and are still going strong on the shadier side of the house next to the hosta. I am making my peace with the hostas. I never liked them much and could not understand why my mother went to such lengths to keep the deer from eating them up in Morin Heights, but (pardon the pun), they do grow on you. And they thrive in places that are too shady for much else. The one in my pit of doom is doing just fine. Below you see lameum and some type of ground cover that came with the house which is going nuts. 

Oh, and by the way, I have these wonderful blue spiky flowers that turned up in my garden last year. I really like them, and was wondering if any of my readers could identify them? Josh, reading over my shoulder as I write reminded me that Claude our agronomist friend is supposed to drop by tomorrow with his results from our soil sample and a big bottle of spray peroxide which he recommends we spray on all of our vegetables to reduce airborne bacterial contamination like we had last year. Claude showed us this cool app he has on his phone last weekend

called Leaf snap. You take a photo of a leaf from a plant, weed or tree you want to identify against a white background and it will tell you what it is. So if no one can identify blue spiky, maybe Leaf snap can.

The vegetables are a big experiment this year. I seemed to have taken care of the aphids on the peppers, but I am monitoring them closely. I am trying to keep some basil and peppers in pots and some in tubs and some in the ground. Some of the ones in the ground are getting munched despite my early saturation of everything with slug-b-gone. I am not sure it is slugs, I need to check them at night and I have not had time. The green onion and leek ends which I planted are starting to sprout (talk about recycling!) and I have seen tiny lettuces and one green onion from the seeds I planted directly in the garden. The green onions I sprouted indoors are doing better. The tomato plants which did not drown or get washed out or buried in mud are starting to grow their second row of leaves. Next week I will plant some in the garden and wait on others. Josh built the cages for those already planted, the chocolate tomatoes and the store bought San Marzanos. Based on last year's challenges, we did a single row in each cage, put the bottom lower to the ground and put up three rows right off the bat. I initially alternated rows of basil, but once the cages were up I realized it was too tight so I moved the basil to the back of each row and on the edges of the bean patches up against the fence at the back. Josh had to buy more chicken wire, and I picked up some plastic mesh stuff from the dollar store today to use as trellising for the beans on the fence, and on the trees around which we hope the morning glories and the climbing roses will twine.

Where did I put everything??

This weekend is the big planting weekend in Montreal. Although we generally do not get snow in May, it is possible to have frost overnight right up to the third week in May. In Canada, we have a long week-end as Monday is the anniversary of Queen Victoria's birthday (okay by me if I get off work on Monday) and those of us with gardens use the extra time to get everything in. I started working on Friday afternoon, while Josh took care of making dinner. Now it is Sunday night, and we have got a lot of work done. Unfortunately, I no longer know what is where in my garden, because Iulia and I have been swapping all kinds of plants, and I have been moving everything around. Orianne and I did a huge clean up of weeds and grass which had crept under or through the hay in my flower gardens. I built these beds over my lawn and I am slowly pulling out the grass blade by blade. I accidentally maimed some dianthus and irises which were deeply lost in tall grass. Our friend Lisa came over and mowed the lawn. Yay Lisa! Ollie came over too and brought me some bearded irises (I have no idea if any of my current irises are bearded, I am waiting still for them to bloom).

Some interesting changes in my garden. I have put sunflowers in my sunny patch bordering the street, and added some red and yellow cosmos seeds behind them. I moved all my Asian lillies away from my day lillies which were completely engulfing them. I also moved my tulips away from the day lillies. I tried to imitate an idea I saw where the tulips came up through the low lilly leaves and it looked lovely, but my lillies grew faster than my tulips so they were lost. I discovered that one of the three tulip varieties I planted is a colour changing variety which starts out pale yellow and then turns white with dark pink streaks. They are gorgeous, and just going through the colour change. The front yard is looking nicer every day.

We built a small sunflower circle in the back outside of the garden, like a little colony. Inspired by Iulia's arrangements, I put four disco marietta marigolds (the two-toned ones that do not look like stupid pom-poms) alternating with the sunflowers. I had some challenges with the sunflowers, I had carefully labelled each of the three varieties I planted. One was the small decorative multi-headed ones, one was a giant variety called Kong. The third was something a bit smaller, not sure what it was but I got it from my last visit to Alex. The labels, paper on brochette sticks, smudged when I first watered my jiffy pots. I hoped the seedlings would be easy to distinguish but alas they were not. So Ollie helped me guess which was which and I hope for the best. I may need to move things around yet again.

Today I planted basil, tomatoes, hot peppers, chinese greens , marigolds, and some fancy impatiens that looked like roses. We are trying alternating tomatoes and bush basil, and I put marigolds around the peppers (they are supposed to keep insects away). I noticed aphids on the peppers and I sprayed them all with diluted dishsoap. This is likely my fault. I kept one of the infested peppers, hoping I had killed all the aphids, and that was the probable source of the infestation. The rest of the plants look okay, but for good measure I sprayed the apple tree and the crab apples too.

Josh put together the frame of an old gazebo which friends of ours were throwing out, and fitted it with chicken wire on two sides. We put it up against the chicken wired fence where we had our cucumbers last year. We are trying a technique used by our Vietnamese neighbours, where they grow melons around a frame and vegetables that need shade underneath. We are trying romaine lettuce and mixed spring greens and bok choi underneath, and Korean melons, 2 types of cucumbers and some type of melon which our friend Claude gave us (labelled in my seed envelopes as "Claude melon,") around the sides and back.

I also planted basil in the bathtub, and also next to each of the garlic plants. An onion popped up, it had been thrown in the compost last year inside the mesh bag and was growing right through the bag. I did a bit of surgery and popped the freed sprouting onion and its companion back in the garden. I am also trying to regrow a green onion from the root. Josh gave me the bottoms he cut off to cook dinner and we will see if it works (I will try anything once).

Josh was concerned about our San Marzano tomatoes which are just starting to sprout, a full month late. He found a nursery which sells the seedlings, so those went into the garden with the chocolate tomatoes and the single tomato plant from Nathalie. With my companion planting I had less room and we still hope to find place for the seedlings I am sprouting. Not sure where we will put them all! I still have a bunch of hot pepper plants, a huge number of bush basil sprouts and will eventually have two varieties of home grown San Marzano tomato sprouts ready to plant. I have finally received the seeds we mail ordered. I hope they stay fertile for a few years because now I have enough seeds to start a commercial farm. Next year we plan to extend the garden in the back. This year I have to get creative.

Josh also picked up some herbs at Atwater market this week (Vietnamese coriander, Rosemary, oregano and Chocolate mint). Orianne and I cleaned the weeds in the mint box, and added fresh earth. I planted the Chocolate mint in with the other variety (some kind of really nice hybrid, not sure what). I still have not figured out where to put the rest. That is tomorrow's task, along with getting the tomato cages built. I want the lowest level to be very low, and the upper rows to go up now, even though they will be empty for a while to come. Last year we got too busy and it was a big mess before we got the upper levels of chicken wire done.


What has been really fun was being able to give starter plants to my friend Alan, to Iulia, and to be able to start new colonies from one part of my garden to another. I have moved some  lungwart and periwinkle from one side garden to another. I now need to thin out my day lillies and Alan is starting a colony in his newly made garden. He also asked me for some of my goutweed (I have rid myself of most of it but there is a part of my garden which is hidden from public view and very shady which is still infested). I warned him that it is aggressive and invasive, but he has a dark area between his duplex and his neighbours', a dead zone, which he thinks it will cover well. I am happy to oblige.

This morning an egg sac of a garden orb weaver spider hatched out on the side of one of the pots where I transplanted my bush basil. There were hundreds of tiny spiderlings making minute webs and climbing up to the apple tree and parachuting onto the wind propelled by a tiny piece of spider silk web. We watched for a while and showed the neighbours. We look forward to having them settle in our garden. I also found thousands of worms, something like one every square inch I dug. The garden is doing well!

It's garden time!!

Now it is May 5. We got a late start this spring on everything because we had Zara's bat mitzvah a week after Passover, which delayed everything. We are still awaiting the arrival of our last batch of spring seeds, San Marzano tomatoes which Josh ordered on-line last minute because nobody in town seemed to be carrying the seeds. My basement is once again full of little green sprouts, most for us and a few for our friend Lisa who will grow chinese eggplants and tomatoes and hot peppers on her balcony. I seemed to have won the sunflower battle, Josh said I could plant the three or four varieties which I am sprouting. They will be in the one sunny corner in the front of the house, and a free standing line right in the grass in the back. I have some Kong sunflowers sprouting, and those get really big. We also sprouted several varieties of hot peppers, green onions, three types of basil (including bush basil this year), chocolate tomatoes, pansies, nasturtiums and some seeds which I have no idea what they are. No one could figure out what they are. I am hoping for something interesting. At Chloe's recommendation, we are not sprouting cucumbers, lettuce and melons inside, I will be seeding them directly. We also decided over dinner tonight to skip squashes this year, and swap pesto for my in-law's squashes. We have not finished eating theirs from last year, and the one we opened to cook for dinner last night was bursting with sprouts. I couldn't find our popsicle sticks, so Josh wrote labels on paper which we impaled on brochette skewers broken in half. It looked like a good idea, but the water in the jiffy pods traveled up the wood and blurred the ink on the papers to complete obscurity. Good thing I recognized most of the sprouting plants, but we may have some pansies in the basil and vice versa. I was inspired by Gu and Jas's clever re-use of milk cartons and yogurt containers as planters. Square orange juice containers stack together nicely. I am not sure if there is a reason that pots are usually round, but I figure they are being replanted in a couple of weeks anyways. We also are using plastic beer cups now that everything was bursting through the jiffy pots. I think I may seed directly in beer cups next year to reduce all the time and mess it takes to keep transplanting. I ran out of space for all the pots so I transplanted the green onions directly into the garden, as well as the four surviving columbines (my garden columbines are big and one has a bud) and some basil directly into the bathtub, which is a bit protected from frost problems. For the record, we planted seeds in mid-April. Last year I think we planted too early and needed to transplant the seeds twice. This year it was a week or two later. The garden is a full two weeks behind the rest of Montreal. I am convinced I live in a microclimate that covers my front lawn. Iulia and I planted daffodil and tulip bulbs from the same bags, randomly split, and hers bloomed two weeks before mine. I have made my peace with this. So May 5th, a few of my daffodils bloomed and are now turning brown at the edges. The rest of them, and the crocuses, grew but did not bloom. The tulips are up and just opening. I planted some right in my lilies. Someone up the street did this and it was really lovely, the tulips bloomed while the lily leaves were very low, and then the lilies grew next. My lilies are faster growing, and the tulips in there are a bit lost. I may move them once they finish blooming. The orpine are spreading. The columbines, geranium, irises and peonies are growing. I have almost killed a few small pinks while weeding today, I hope they will survive. The bleeding hearts,

lambeum, lungwort and periwinkle are blooming beautifully, as is a bush which I believe is a bridal wreath spirea which I discovered last night smells sweet and similar to honeysuckle. I think that the past two years I trimmed it back at the wrong time and inhibited its blooming. I did not think much of it, but now that I know what it can do, I will treat it with more kindness in the future. The roses are back and starting to grow, as well as the clematis. I tossed down my cosmo and morning glory seeds which I collected all over the neighbourhood last fall, hoping we will have a riot of colour. I also planted some of Miriam's blue morning glories in a pot which I am putting in the back yard, far from my neighbours. Miriam says they are more domesticated and don't reseed and spread. Josh picked up two canes of yellow raspberries which I planted a couple of weeks back, but forgot to water. They look like dead sticks and I feel guilty. He also bought some asparagus roots. I looked up on the internet how to plant them and it said they should be planted in February (in the snow???) and had very complicated directions. They seem to need a lot of water too. Josh plans to call his mom for help. I feel too intimidated to take them on right now. We had a planning session tonight. We are doing things differently this year. No broccoli, rapini or squash which took up a lot of room. More basil. The garlic is doing great (I have to be careful not to step on them as I go in and out of the garden.

We hope to set up a frame to grow cucumbers and grow lettuce underneath in its shade. Josh plans to convert Evan and Lisa's old gazebo frame for this purpose. I told him it needs to be picked up and modified asap, I want to plant the lettuce now. We plan to try melons, I collected all kinds of seeds last year. We are also planning to intersperse single rows of tomatoes with single rows of bush basil, so the cages will be much narrower. I have no idea how all this will fit back there. I promise lots of photos. I just reread my February blog, and realized that I never followed up on our little rodent issue. I am not sure if we managed to catch them all, or they moved back outside once the snow melted, but the action seems to be gone at night, and none of my sprouts were eaten by mice. I also washed every pot I have used for the sprouts with hydrogen peroxide, as well as all the vegetable and herb seeds to prevent contamination with aphids and bacteria (Claude's suggestion). We haven't done the soil testing yet, Claude has been working long hours on the South Shore and not been in our area for a while. I will keep you up to date.