Planting weekend

Josh and I spent about 25 hours today this weekend between the two of us, planting and weeding. I have no idea how the weeds are doing so incredibly well when everything else is so far behind. We are trying to do a very thorough and deep job of removing them on the theory that if we work extra hard and do it right the first time, they won't all come back. Iulia is convinced this works. I have a few years of catching up to do.  

A few  days ago my lawn was green and relative short. After a few rainy days, I found my back yard turned yellow from all the dandelions. I do like them, but I try to be a good neighbour, because if I let them go, they end up spreading next door where Ovidiu is having a constant battle to have a perfect lawn. So I asked Josh to have a go at rooting them out. It took him a good part of the day.


My nephews were visiting from Toronto with their parents, who dropped them off to stay with us, knowing that there would be pretty loose parental supervision. Kids were running in and out, with watergun and nerf guns and foam swords. We fed them breakfast and left them to their own devices, and they seemed to have had a pretty nice time. I barely left the back yard.


We did some work last week on landscaping the front yard as well as setting up new beds in the back. Josh picked up a few organic fertilizers from his parents and from Alex in Ontario which they credit for their unbelievable size and quantity of produce, so this week we will be trying it out. Some of it is made from fish, and I think there were epsom salts too. I will give a full accounting of what we are going to do and what results we have with it. Josh spent some time laying out paths in the front yard with the pile of stones he rescued last year from an underpass reconstruction (they were dumped in a vacant lot and Josh saved them from the dump. We had planned to put them out to kill the grass and then remove them to dig and put a base down, but Chloe and Abraham have recommended we just leave them on the surface and let them settle in over time. The also suggest that instead of getting a jackhammer and ripping up our cracked cement walkway, we just use the cement as a base and get some sand on top and build our stone walkway above it. I was very pleased to be able to shout at  the kids to use the pathways and not trounce on my flower beds!

I managed to get around most of the tomatoes I sprouted into the ground. Based on my map from last year I have around the same number of plants (same number of cages, anyhow) so I think we are okay. I put garlic in all the areas I had tomatoes and potatoes last summer, and in order to find areas which have not been tomatoed to death, I had to open up some new ground. We started a new garden bed in a part of the yard which may not have enough light, but I am trying anyways. We also decided to put one of the tomato cages on top of hay bales, beside the broccoli, sweet basil, thai basil and celery (found a place for them!!). I have another hay bale section to plant tomorrow. I also planted the onions, and fit about 70 of them in the bathtub.

My seeds are starting to sprout. I have seen baby calendulas and sunflowers coming out, and some cosmos sprouts. The lilac are starting to bloom, and the tulips are finally catching up to the rest of the city and blossoming. The crab apple is flowering, mostly along the branch bent to make the arch. The magnolias all over the city went into bloom quite late, but had their big show starting about a week ago. Most are dropping petals now. Mine is still quite stubbornly shut. We are really hoping the tree is doing okay. I have to do more research on what to expect from a young magnolia tree.
Julie came by yesterday afternoon to swap seeds and seedlings. I got two cucumbers and some tiny sprouts from the chocolate cherry tomatoes (she kept seeds from last year, I didn't and was grateful to have some!), and some of her extra seeds to add to my "seed bank" for next year. I told her not to buy next year before we go through what we have. I gave her some San Marzano tomatoes, basil, onion sets, and some periwinkle and other small perennials for her land garden and vertical garden, as well as the last of my brother's purple morning glory seeds (mine have been reseeding nicely for a while).


Josh and I spent some time today contemplating the corner of our property which despite much effort continues to be infested with creeping bellflowers. I had put down a lot of hay, which in some places accidentally produces some lovely, hardy grass where I did not want it, and in other places fertilized the creeping bellflowers so well that they are growing faster and bigger than ever. This did have the advantage of making them thick enough and the ground soft enough to be able to get them out by the root if we pull them up one at a time. This is an exercise to try the patience of a zen monk, but we are taking turns working a patch at a time every day. I am determined to do a fantastic and deep job of weeding by June and hopefully we will have an easier time the rest of the summer and years to come. Nothing that I have planted in that corner has done particularly well, it gets full light part of the day, is too close to the spruce tree which probably has acidified the soil, and I have really not been terribly generous with compost or manure in that part of the garden so I should not be surprised that the poppies never came back, the sunflowers were tiny, the oriental lilies did not thrive (I moved them to a sunnier spot), the dianthus became completely inseparable from the grass the grew into its area, and the occasional bicycle or snow plow do significant damage. I gave up today and moved some of the day lilies over the the corner to let them take over. If they don't survive there, nothing will and I will just have to go back to grass.  I am going to have to move some irises and tulips around once the lilies spread some more, but I think it will look a lot better.

I tucked sunflowers into every spare cranny I could find in the back yard. I think I had five or six varieties, including some Kong seeds from Alex and a few of the mini multicoloured variety I had a few years ago and have never found again. Josh picked up a few annuals including some pretty red sage flowers (not pineapple though). I gave Julie back her barely alive pineapple sage, with the hope that my carefully keeping it alive through the winter was not in vain. If it comes back, we will see if we can split it, although I am not sure I have the space for two of them to overwinter in my dining room. It is easier to expand my gardening space than my house.


Just as I finished planting today, friends of ours dropped by and said they had a couple of packs of seeds for us. Sigh. I just managed to fit everything in, even a few potatoes, broccoli, chard, bok choy, coriander, basil, four types of tomato (I think the Amish paste never sprouted, so we will have to try that one again next year), three types of peas, four types of beans, two types of strawberries, four types of mint and I heard a mourning dove in the lilacs (I have no pear tree, and no partridges in my neighbourhood).  We rigged up a new system for the cucumbers, by putting geotextile in a milk crate ziptied to my gazebo frame with chicken wire both above and below so it can climb where it wants to, but hopefully not succumb to cucumber beetles. I planted beans and peas along the edges, lettuce and bok choy underneath. I am hoping this year the system will work better. I even left some space at the back corners for the cherry tomatoes once the plants are bigger (Julie started her seedlings late. I am growing three types of cucumbers in hope that at least one variety is able to resist the beetles. A pickling cucumber, some English or lebanese cukes from Julie, can't remember which, and something called salt and pepper cucumbers. Wish me luck!

The crab apples were in full bloom with the arch thick with flowers. I suppose later in the summer there will be lots of crab apples falling on my head whenever I pass through, but right now it is breathtaking! It is still wired and tied to hold the position in place, but hopefully those will come off this summer.

Slow spring

One week into May and it has been cold and rainy for days on end. Josh and I took a drive up to the Laurentians with a friend on Sunday and the farms along the highway were so flooded, they looked like lakes. The tiny river that runs past my in-law's property in eastern Ontario flooded its banks farther than it ever has. It has been unseasonably cold too, with temperatures hovering at zero at night. I have not yet put away our winter coats and boots, and have not washed our blankets yet because it has been too cold and wet to hang them out to dry. I usually do this mid-April as part of my Passover cleaning.  Yesterday, mid-morning, I actually saw snowflakes blowing about outside, but they did not last once they hit ground. Today was sunny finally, and it started to warm up. Despite the chill, I have started biking to work, but wearing my winter coat and gloves still. Iulia has bought some annuals yesterday, but even she has not planted them yet (she was so excited to show me her new stuff she called me over to see them, standing in her doorway in pyjamas at midnight, when I came home from an evening at a friend's house). The conditions have been ideal for early snail and slug proliferation, so I made haste after seeing a few rather large ones munching on some forgotten carrot which survived the winter, and put out two full bags of slug-b-gone, one of my sponsors for this years garden. 

I would like to take a moment to thank another one of my sponsors. In my last post I described how I learned about treated seeds. I decided to call Vesey's and order the untreated variety of the burgundy beans. I described what had happened, and the person who took my call offered to send a replacement free of charge, without even asking me to send back the treated beans. I am not sure what to do with the original pack. My gardening friends and acquaintances tend to be either those who buy flats and transplant, or those who grow from seed and though perhaps not strictly organic, would likely share my reaction to planting seeds so obviously un-organic. The package warns that one should not eat them or feed them to animals either, which is my usual means of disposing of excess seeds or sprouts. I am open to any offers to take these magic beans off my hands. I promise I won't tell anyone I gave them to  you.

Despite the slow, wet start, things are busy popping up in my garden. Once again, I see things that I recognize but still don't know well enough to remember what they are. I am pleased to say that I am getting better at recognizing the weeds I really don't want, and with all the rain, they were far easier to pull out than usual. Feeling like I got a great head start, Iulia reminded me that those were merely the leftovers from last year's weeds, and their seedlings have yet to appear. I found four poppies (perennial ones, I think) returning from last year in the back, unless they weeds. There are also some things growing that did not flower last year and I am not sure what they are because I kept planting different seeds in that spot until something came up. I don't know what I would do without this blog to keep track of things. I will do research on past posts and try to figure it out. I have also discovered a few unharvested garlics, carrots and some red oak lettuce which self seeded I suppose, and is loving the weather. I had planned to put lettuce somewhere else, but it seems the decision was taken for me. 

I still have only a vague idea of where I will plant things this year. It has been too wet outside for me to spend enough time mapping things out. I know that I will need to expand some sections and leave some areas fallow. We have been thinking of trying a new technique which Chloe has been raving about, growing directly in hay bales (actually she's trying in straw bales, but we have a motherlode of hay thanks to another sponsor, Jack the master gardener who has hay producing country neighbours, a truck and a brother he visits who lives around the corner from us.

I spent some time this week cleaning up and looking around, picking up the garbage that always accumulates in my yard before the lilies get tall enough to catch the debris. As usual, my flowers are slower to bloom than everyone else on the block. I have had one daffodil, one hyacinth, three siberian squills, periwinkles galore, lungwort buds, one single tulip bud not yet open and a hint of magnolia buds not yet ripe. There is much green though. The grass doesn't mind the cold wet weather and has lost its winter fade. I see signs of life on both rose bushes, peony shoots, lots of columbines, including one growing way out where I had tomatoes last summer. I moved that one to the front and am curious what colour it will be and how it got there. I also removed the chicken wire which we put horizontally over the area around the spruce tree where I had morning glories. That particular experiment failed, as the vines did not understand what we wanted them to do so they did not make it up the sides of the tree. I am going back to using string, but kept the chicken wire we wrapped around the base of the tree.

After doing some research on line on re-planting begonia, cana and dahlia roots, I got cold feet and shoved them back in the basement for a couple more weeks. Laure, my companion through hours of youth orchestra rehearsals and fellow shade-gardener, told me that she has never managed to get re-planted begonias to bloom. I am trying anyways, but may end up picking up more dahlias, begonias and canas.

My next shopping list includes coyote urine, sheep manure, black earth and maybe a few annuals. Also, I am going to get another clematis to put on the right side of my front door where the Blue bird Rose of sharon bush has refused to accommodate me by surviving. Of course, Iulia's is doing fine. I plan to take vicarious pleasure from hers and planted the magnolia right near her windows too in exchange. Nice to have great neighbours.

So thanks to all my sponsors, supporters and fans who are making this wet and lousy spring more fun and promising.