Guerilla gardening

Yesterday I was at a housewarming party at my friend Sam's and had a chance to talk to Torsten about his guerrilla gardening project. I had never heard of guerilla gardening before I started this blog, but I have become interested in this phenomenon because it is a wonderful form of flower power and urban renewal. Guerrilla gardening means gardening on land which the gardener does not have a right to use. It can be an abandoned or vacant lot, ugly little spots owned by the municipality or anywhere that you do not yourself own and never asked to use. My friend Olivier has snuck some extras of his own beautiful flowers onto vacant lots when no one was looking. I have begun to notice that many people in my own neighbourhood plant extensions of their gardens in squares of earth set in the middle of the sidewalks. The ones that are not cultivated are inevitably eyesores which end up covered in ragweed and burdock. I biked through Outremont and the Plateau en route to the party and found that around Park avenue the city has filled out many of these bits of ground amid the stretches of asphalt with lovely although repetitive mixes of flowers. Cote des Neiges is not so graced, so it is up to our local guerrilla gardeners to make sure the area looks nice.

What Torsten has done, though, is quite extraordinary. He and a friend tackled an abandoned lot covered with the detritus of a burned down house, cleared it, and built a community vegetable and flower garden as well as a park, all done with no permission. They brought the local community into their project, and even won an award from the city. I have attached a link about guerrilla gardening in general, as well as an article about Torsten's project. I told him that I was interested in checking it out and writing about it in my blog.
http://www.guerrillagardening.org/ggtips.html
http://www.theunexpectedtnt.com/2009/04/tresspassers-in-st-henri-win-city.html

I also checked out his Facebook page on the St Henri garden, and found some interesting information including a link about striped cucumber beetles. This was timely because some of my cucumbers shrivelled up suddenly and I saw one of these cuties on one of my hot peppers yesterday, and put two and two together. Josh once again regrets not having bought mantis ooths this year again. We hoped the gravid female  mantises ("pregnant") we saw last year had successfully laid ooths but we have not seen any mantids yet. We also need to order ladybugs next year. I have them around and many hiberbated last winter in my old sunflower stalks, but they are not keeping the aphids off my apple and crabapples.

The grass is always greener

Raspberries

Clematis

I promised Iulia that I would post some photos of her garden on my blog. The grass is actually greener on her side of the fence, it is not just an expression, because Ovidiu has a radically different vision of lawn than I do. He waters it, pulls out the weeds, reseeds the bare spots and while I just mow my dandelions and clover. In fact, I have not needed to mow my lawn all month, because it has been so hot and there is so little rain, and since I only water it minimally to prevent total death to the grass, I have not needed to mow. Ovidiu has been mowing. I suspect he uses fertilizer too. His lawn looks great. But that is not what this feature guest spot is about. I did a photo shoot of Iulia's garden and also of the front garden of her neighbour on the other side. These are the Joneses that I am trying to keep up with. At some point I will ask my Vietnamese neighbours across the street if I can do a feature on their garden too, but for now, here is Iulia's garden:

Basil and geraniums on the patio.

Staked tomatoes, no cages next door

Banana peppers

 

Our new walkway. My house is on the right, Iulia's on the left

The garden on the other neighbour's side.

Iulia's other neighbour

A rose by any other name...

Shakespeare knew what he was talking about when he referred to the fact that flowers, and plants in general, are known by multiple names. In my experience talking with friends about flowers as well as in researcher the names of what turns up in my garden I have been amazed at the variety of names a single plant bears, as well as the variety of plants that share the same name.

Growing up spending my summers in the Laurentians, I learned the names of the local wildflowers and trees (and fish, animals etc, but mostly the flowers). My mother says that by the age of five I could name everything in the forest. This may explain why there is no room left in my head for much else these days, however given my renewed passion for gardening it has not been wasted.  There was a bushy plant which had small delicate orchidlike orange flowers which I remember calling lady slippers. Then one day my mother found a large, wild orchid and told me that it was a lady's slipper. Just for fun, google images for lady's slipper and you will see how many varieties of orchids pop up, and a few that look suspiciously like irises too.

Black eyed susans, no smut!

When my friend Laure wrote out for me the names of the plants she gave me last summer, she carefully wrote out both the common names and the latin names for most of them. The anemone was one she missed on the common names, and I was puzzled when I expected a short plant with a single white bloom and a buttercup turned up (it was a yellow anemone, which was a buttercup in my lexicon). Josh the city boy was sure it was not a buttercup because he said buttercups are very short plants with a single flower, and this was two feet tall with flowers on multiple branches. I figured out he usually sees buttercups in city lawns where they will flower after being cut down by lawn mowers. In the country meadows and roadsides they always look like Laure's anemone. She also gave me what she called a white echinacea in English and a Rudbeckia in latin. I happen to know that black eyed susans are a type of Rudbeckia because I bought a pack of seeds two years ago which had both the latin and common name. I thought that they were not related to Echinacea, the most common one being the ubiquitous purple cone flower. Echinacea is well known outside of the garden as the herbal tincture to prevent colds, extremely common in use in our cold climate. I did some research and although they are related, and the names seem to be interchangeable on labels of photos of white flowers that all look like the one Laure gave me, the information sites did not seem to include any white rudbeckias. As an aside, one gardening site lists common problems of plants and one of the possible issues with rudbeckias was smut. (Is that why they are Rude Beckias?) I looked smut up on Wiki and apparently it is any number of plant parasitic fungi. I know that this was a reputable entry because they actually put the definition of the fungus first and the reference to pornography only third. I tried to find an image of smut, but unfortunately the other definition of smut is more common on the internet and I got a lot of smutty images pop up but not a single fungi, (just a few fun guys and lots of naked ladies). Did you know the Aztecs used corn smut in recipes? Apparently it has more protein than the corn it grows on. Barley can suffer from loose smut (is there any other kind?). Wow, I had no idea!
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Loose_smut_spores.jpg. and
http://lavidahuatulco.blogspot.ca/2011/08/huitlacoche-mexican-truffle.html (that is great marketing, they turned smut into "the mexican truffle.")

When my daffodils bloomed, Olivier complimented my narcissi (narcissuses?). I had heard of the flower made famous by Greek mythology, but never connected it with daffodils. My mother says it is only one variety of daffodil which is called a narcissus. Google images and wikipedia imply that this is not the case, they imply that the two terms are interchangeable. I was discussing with my friend Olga how much I love cornflowers and that I want to rescue some from a nearby vacant lot which was slated to be turned into a condominium. I grew up with cornflower being synonymous with chicory, but in Russia there is a different flower, even more beautiful blue in colour, and not related to the chicory which is a "real" cornflower. And it has nothing to do with corn.

It has been challenging figuring out the names of some of the plants that I have growing. Some have popped up spontaneously, others were given to me by friends who had no idea what the name of them were. I type in some descriptive words (blue flower thistle Amercia) and hopefully something that looks like my flower will turn up. Wikipedia has been surprisingly helpful, although many private photos and blogs tend to have "pretty blue flower that looks like a thistle" or only one name which may be a local or even erroneous one. When researching my siberian squills, I stumbled on something poetically called blue eyed grass. It turns out that the mini iris plant Alex gave me, which my mother informed me is actually called tradescantia.It is also called Blue eyed grass by some, but it looks nothing like the blue eyed grass I found when researching my squills. It is related to Wandering Jews, which surprised my mom, but I looked up wandering Jews and it turns out is is another name for what we call Moses in the Basket (setcreasia, Purple Heart) which is related to Tradescantia and looks a bit similar, and what we call Wandering Jew is a plant taking over my dining room right now is something else completely, latin name Zebrina pendula (that doesn't sound Jewish at all).

When we moved in there were these pretty purple bell flowers all over the property. Josh thought they were Foxglove (Digitalis), but I realized they were something else when Iulia bought some foxglove and the bells were much denser and thicker. I finally looked up purple bell flower weeds and discovered that the ones growing all over my property are an invasive week called Creeping Bell flowers. I really like them but they do take over and crowd out everything around them so I am pulling them out by the hundred, while leaving a few to flower.

Foxglove on top, Creeping Bell flower on bottom

Something new popped up between my cucumbers and my tomatoes with a beautiful flower. I saw it yesterday but as it was Shabbat I waited to photograph it today. When I went into the garden this morning it had disappeared. I asked Josh if I had really showed him a gorgeous new flower yesterday or did I dream it. He said it was real, he saw it, and his sharp eyes and good memory zeroed in on a tiny plant with a shrivelled flower and some buds. So no photo today, but I will catch it on the next bloom and post it to see if anyone can help me identify it. One name will be enough, thank you!

Friday afternoon I remembered I was supposed to hang the garlic to dry. It was still sitting on my woodrack since I harvested earlier in the week. José helped me to get it all up in the garden shed. He wanted to braid the stems, we tried but they there thick and difficult to work. Chloé told me this morning that the braided garlic is a soft stem variety, Music is not made to braid. In case you were wondering how this ties into my theme, garlic is also referred to as the Stinking Rose. It is not actually a rose, it is a member of the allium family.

One last note, although Shakespeare was correct in general that flowers can be known by multiple names, Roses themselves nowadays are one of the rare flowers that are known very widely by the name rose. There are over one  hundred species according to Wikipedia, but they are all, indeed, called by the name rose.

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Garlic Harvest

 Yesterday I harvested the garlic. For my first time doing this, I think I did okay. There is one head still lost amid the nasturtiums, I snapped the stem off and then couldn't find the bulb. Some of them had migrated 8 inches deep into the earth, others were near the surface. As per my instructions from my father-in-law Abraham, to pick them dry than wait for the rain, I got 82 heads out of the ground with more effort than I expected because my earth has been reverting back to clay. I left them to dry in our wood drying rack, and had planned to bunch them and hang them in the shed today but I ended up making more tomato cage levels because the tomatoes are now over my head and showing no signs of stopping. So tomorrow Josh finishes the last four tomato cage levels, and I hang garlic.

While I worked on the tomatoes, Josh made a fantastic dinner of fresh picked green salad, and egg salad, cuke and tomato salad and hummous flavoured with herbs from our herb tubs.

It started to rain last night and through the morning. It poured, and there was thunder and lightning (it seems this summer it never rains but it pours. Seriously). My garden and my lawn look much happier now, but the slugs have come out of stasis and they are medium sized now, as if the rain inflated them. Maybe it did. Josh says he will pick up more slug bait. One of my sunflowers was beheaded, and the culprit left it half eaten on the sidewalk. I marked my sunflowers with fox urine (the animal, not Fox urine!) yesterday morning, but I am sure it is well washed away now.

Josh visited our friend and garden guru Alex on Sunday, and came home with more of those mini-irises (a huge clump which I split with Iulia and planted in three separate clusters). My mom says they are not irises, but a variety of grass. Alex says they spread like crazy and are very hardy but they are not doing well up at my mom's Laurentian garden. The patch I planted last year went from looking half dead and straggly to being the healthiest cluster in the front yard now. The three new patches look like they are dying. I am patient though.

My mystery lily front and centre in my yard turned out to be red! I had planted a broken, not very viable piece of lily bulb that came with my offerings from my friend Laure's shade garden, and despaired that it would not survive. Now I have a nice clump of red lilies which seems to be taking hold, and started flowering after all the other lilies did. My centaurea are blooming again, having cut them back following Chloe's recommendation. Iulia's came back without cutting. My nasturtiums are huge and in full flower and adorning my every salad. I gave up on the advice my mom gave me to put them in bad, sandy soil. They are in my best vegetable garden soil, with loads of sun and they are doing fantastic. I am learning to take advice with a grain of salt.

J'ai maintenant quel qu'un en France qui lit mon blog. Bonjour!

Basil Harvest

It has been a busy week. The basil started to flower, and I actually remembered what to do. I picked all the top leaves off and left them to keep growing. Josh took all the tops and made enough pesto to feed our family and my parents and my brother Marty and his fiancé Hilda.  Josh brought the basil up to my parent's place up north, and harvested a head of garlic as well. When he decided to make pesto,  and there were no pine nuts around the house, he improvised with pumpkin seeds mixed with walnuts. It was wonderful.

  I hoped that it would take a while before they flowered again, but perhaps because it has been hot and sunny every day for a few weeks with the single exception of the day of the thunderstorm, they ripened fast and flowered again within a few days. Some of the basil had been munched a bit, by slugs or caterpillars or who knows what, but it was relatively intact. Most was around a foot high, and some of the bush basil reached close to two feet tall. I cut it all back to the lower leaves for a second growth. Josh plans to donate the second harvest to our synagogue to make pesto for a Shabbos Kiddush. He already has discussed this with the cantor who is also the chief cook and mashkiach, and they are planning something really nice.

Josh stripped down all the basil, harvested three more heads of garlic and produced several litres of pesto which we will have to pack in small containers and freeze tomorrow. I donated two more of the volunteer tomato plants to one of the day centres where I worked because the ones they started with are not doing well. Josh, Lisa and I did a big blitz of building cages for the rest of the tomatoes, and they seem to have survived my attempts to thread the taller branches through the chicken wire. It has been really hot and there has been no rain at all. I have been watering everything, and thinking a lot about channeling our greywater into the garden. It is unbelievable how much water is wasted in the city, and to use filtered drinking water to water plants seems so wrong. Orianne visited my parents for a few days up in Morin Heights this past week, and informed us that she could see the water level of the lake dropping daily. I think it hit an all time low. No one has used the word drought but this is really not good. We need rain.

I have been eating a lot of pesto this week. On bought pasta, on homemade ravioli that Josh made while I put up tomato cages on Friday afternoon, mixed with eggs to make green eggs (no ham, but it was definitely a Suess moment), on toast, straight up by the spoonful. We also have been enjoying mint tea, mint lemonade (with wood sorrel mixed in, super refreshing on ice), strawberries, and a few raspberries. I took a break from garden salad to let the lettuce grow bigger. With the heat there has not been much eating it, so it is filling out nicely.

My astilbes and hollyhocks are in bloom. One hollyhock is a bubblegum pink, the other a very pale delicate peachy pink. The surprise one in the back yard is white. There is one more which is not yet blooming. My morning glories in the front yard burst into flower, and they are almost all purple. One single pink blossom. I am not sure what happened to the many seeds I planted in mixed colours collected all over the alleyways of my neighbourhood, but purple seems to trump it all. My blue morning glories on the side of the house have not yet bloomed but are growing up and around the shelving. My gooseneck loosestrife is in bloom and all of my sunflowers and black eyed susans. The sunflowers are a mystery to me, they are all short and blooming early. There are clearly different varieties, some with one flower and others with many, some thick and stalky and a few skinny ones but none more than two feet high. Also, I did not end up with the cool multicolour variety, they are all yellow. My orange and yellow daylilies and stella d'oros are in bloom too. I moved the bee balm into the back, and they are recovering from the move but not flowering.

I have green hot peppers, green tomatoes and flowers on tomato, scarlet runner beans and cucumbers. Harvesting will be very demanding this year, there is so much growing. Josh was talking about expanding the garden but I think it will be too much to manage on top of us both working full time. We decided to keep the frames for the tomato cages (we have more than doubled the number this year) and use them to guide our planting next year. The rows of tomatoes were a bit too close together for me to fit between easily once the cages were put up, and I still have a lot of stray tomatoes outside of the cages which I ended up staking as I was running out of room to transplant them into more rows.

Priviet to my readers in Russia, whoever you are!

Thunderstorms!

It has been hot and dry. All last week there were predictions of chance of showers, even possible thunderstorms, but no luck. Today started out cloudy, but I took a chance and biked to work because as long as it isn't raining on the way to work, I don't mind the risk of coming home soaked, or even leaving my bike in my office and hopping the bus. As I left the office, it was cloudy but it still hadn't rained. I almost made it home, but ended up soaked in the last ten minutes. Sam was in the neighbourhood and passed by to weather the storm, so as it poured outside and Josh and I made dinner, Sam picked up Zara's guitar and we sang for a while. After a dinner that had absolutely no content from my garden besides strawberries, I sent Josh out to pick some mint for tea. Then I asked Sam if he wanted to see the garden now that the rain stopped. Before I knew it Iulia and her daughter Ada called me over to play and check out what was growing on their side of the fence, and when I turned around, Sam had left.

There is nothing like a garden after an intensive rainfall. Iulia discovered I have a white hollyhock growing tucked in among the lilacs in the corner of my back yard. She has a better view of it from her side of the fence. I would have missed it completely, and today it was in bloom. It faces a climbing rose on Iulia's side of the fence, tucked in between mint and tomatoes. She has been working on Ovidiu to loosen up on his prohibition against flowers climbing on the fence, and now there is a rose and a clematis (which is casading over her fence and dripping with purple flowers. Iulia says mine will look like that next year too). We have been scheming of me putting a lighter coloured clematis in the corner where my fence meets hers, once Josh puts our fence up (it'll happen by the end of summer so help me).

I discovered that the tomato plant which was a gift from Nathalie (Josh's landlady when he worked up in Mont Laurier) is a cherry tomato plant and is monstrous and full of little green tomatoes. Whee! I moved some of my cucumber plants over the weekend, and learned that this was a bad thing to do. They keeled over and played dead, but I think the thunderstorm and the downpour may have revived some of them. Iulia and I did a full tour of both of our properties, and are pleased to see how well our exchanges are doing. Okay, I only have one single daisy (it is a start), and she ran out of room for hot peppers, and has some little cups of tiny peppers languishing like my leftover unplanted tomatoes, but the rest looks pretty decent. She had some suggestions for where to move my moribund hydrangea. I think that hydrangeas don't like me, and I am still not convinced I like them. I have just taken their lack of success as a personal challenge.

Last night, I found three of my small sunflowers beheaded, two before even blooming. The leaves were damaged too, so I think it may have been the local groundhog (we have seen him around again), or squirrels. Josh broke out the container of Fox pee, although what we read online is that coyote pee is better for squirrels, groundhogs and mice (we have all three). We explored some alternative distribution methods, like pellets and vaporizers which do not wash away with the rain, like the jar Josh used last night (sigh). I just hope my property doesn't reek of piss.

We still have slugs. They have eaten the violets and pansies down to skeletons. They haven't done serious damage to anything else, though, but I see them in the evening. We have put down our third bag of slug be gone, and refilled the cups of beer. It is not nearly as bad as last year. Josh thinks that last year's eggs are still hatching out, but they are not maturing. One can hope. I have seen as many empty snail shells as live snails, which is promising. The apple tree and the crab apple are aphid infested. I have sprayed them with diluted dish soap intermittently. I also found a huge lamb's quarters near my tomatoes full of aphids and ants, which I uprooted and tossed over the fence. I have to keep them in check, they like peppers too.

Olga dropped by on the weekend, and picked my nettles as well as amarynth (I had no idea what that weed was. Who knew?) to make me a soup. She e-mailed last night to tell me she did something wrong and the soup came out bitter. I am certain I will have more nettles to experiment with. Fortunately, she says they are best when young and tender. I find they are painful and annoying when they get big and you pass by them en route to the tomatoes and end up full of embedded spikes. That soup better be worth it.

Our friend Misha dropped by midway through writing this. He came to worm in my garden as he is heading up north to fish. We have boasted about how our garden is bursting with worms, and after a rainstorm I figured this would be a no brainer. Surprise, not a single worm to be found. I suppose they hide under the roots and I hit them whenever I transplant anything, and we were trying to avoid direct contact with my plants. I offered him vats of slugs instead but he did not think they would weather the journey as well as worms. Mores the pity, I certainly have enough slugs to experiment on.

The weather predictions are fair for the next while, I hope today's rain with last for a while. I am trying to minimize my use of water, but it has not been easy this summer. Let's hope for some intermittent thunderstorms.

On a complete tangent, I have another surprise tonight. I checked my stats and audience and now I have had two readers in the Phillipines. Gotta love the internet!

Late June, all in bloom

Lysimachi on the edge of creeping Thyme

It has been a busy couple of weeks, with no time to blog. Sorry to keep you waiting! School ended with exams, projects, Zara's sixth grade graduation, and I managed to squeeze in a lot of garden work. I have continued to add, swap and move things around in both the flower garden and in the vegetables. Iulia and Olivier have donated a few more plants (some Marsh Mallows, more ground cover plants which I believe are Lysimachia, some pretty red and yellow gaillardia). I have planted my dianthus sprouts hither and yon. They look completely different from the ones I bought at the grocery store and the ones which Iulia gave me, but when I checked on line, it seems that the flowers are similar but different varieties have completely different foliage.

Wintercreeper

Since I last blogged, the irises and peonies finished, and the colombines are slowing down. My lameum and one of the bleeding hearts are still blooming, and three different varieties of ground cover bloomed. I had no idea that they were flowering plants, they hadn't bloomed in previous years.The Lysimachi has yellow flowers and the Wintercreeper has white ones. I think those are the names, they came with the house and I have been looking at google images to identify what they are.    

Oriental lilies

Most of my lilies are in bloom. I moved all the oriental lilies away from the day lilies which were drowning them out, to the front of my lawn. I have developed that area in front of my morning glory tree. I have multiple patches of multicoloured cosmos (no flowers yet), oriental lilies, a yellow lily cluster which

Ageratum?

  just opened this morning (I just checked, I had no idea what it would look like) and another cluster which is not planning to bloom yet.  Josh bought me some fuzzy purple flowers which I think are ageratum, and some white celosias (those little feathery flowers that are turning up everywhere), and I put some salvias in the corner of the driveway where my hydrangea bush is still a tiny branch with a few little leaves on it. I also have the mini iris which Alex gave me, which appears to bloom perpetually with tiny clusters of purple and yellow flowers. The first sunflower started to bloom this week. I still have no idea which variety is which.

Stella D'oro lilies

This is under my window

Yellow lillies and sunflower on left

You can see it above to the left of  the yellow lilies.
All the sunflowers have budded, and they are all relatively short except for three of the four which were planted in a circle on my back lawn. Those are slightly taller but skinny. They are budding too. Josh remembers that they budded early last year but kept growing, however I think they were full height before the flowers opened. 

It's a weed, but it has pretty tiny purple flowers.

My evening primroses spread and started to crowd out my beebalm. So we moved the beebalm into the back yard along the side of the garden wall in two patches. I think they needed a lot more sun. I planted some of the evening primroses here and there in the shady areas close to the house. I pulled a seedpod off of my neighbour Albert's pink columbine and planted seeds here and there around the garden, who knows, maybe one will take!

My biggest piece of work has been the tomatoes. I got over my reluctance to treat them as weeds and pulled out dozens of the smallest sprouts. I transplanted the largest of the volunteer tomatoes and made four more rows. Gu will be in town this coming week, and I hope to send him home with some of the remaining ones which are still scattered randomly in my pepper patch. My garlic have all been de-scaped. I have collected the flower buds and top leaves from all of the basil. We have been eating salads made from the outer leaves of my Romaines, my mesclun salad plants, nasturtium leaves, orpine and lamb's quarters. My mom taught me the trick that if you keep removing (and eating) the outer leaves of a lettuce, you can keep it growing for a long time. My bok choy started to flower yesterday, so I plan to harvest today. I also moved my cucumbers around, I had too many on one side of the gazebo and too few on the other. So my varieties will be all mixed up.
Some of my beans have topped the fence, so we will be extending the chicken wire. The alpine strawberries have doubled in size this year, and we are also getting big strawberries from the plants Iulia gave me.  I think that one of the melon seeds has sprouted, it doesn't look quite like the cucumbers or the weeds, so we can hope. I have green tomatoes growing on some of the larger plants. It will be a very busy time when we start to harvest.