War on weeds

I can't believe it has been two weeks since I found time to blog. It has been very busy. The end of the semester at CEGEP overlapped with the planting of the garden, as well as other life events (imagine, life goes on!). I have been going non-stop without a break. Yesterday I got the last of my marks submitted and had the last meeting of the school year. There is one more next week to plan for next semester, but since I have no idea if I will be working in the department or not next semester, I opted out. I may have gone anyhow, but I have registered for a summer course on teaching CEGEP students, towards a certificate or master's in education specially tailored for those teaching in CEGEPs. I figured since I am finished teaching and have a full month until the kids are off, it was a good time to equip myself for what I hope is the start of a new career. I also volunteered to help out a couple of hours a week on the gardens on Vanier campus (this is the second year of their garden project and they are looking for experienced helpers).  Also, my students at UQAM finally ended their strike, and last week we had one last class, and next week I will be starting to correct their assignments. So I have a few days in between to get the garden really set up.

My plan was to clear out all the lingering, hard to get rid of weeds, then put a lot of manure down before I planted. This was a bit ambitious. I discovered, after Josh and I spent a very long time uprooting goutweed and creeping bellflowers last year, that we had done a great job with the goutweed but completely underestimated what it takes to clear out the bellflowers. Bellflowers have three levels of roots. We apparently got two of the levels out, but missed entirely on the third. The first level is sticking directly out of the bottom of the plant, and comes out easily when you pull them out. That was our first mistake. If you start with pulling them out, they just come back, as they ALL did this year. The second level are underground runners that allow them to spread like wildfire. I think we got a lot of those too. Then there are the white, carrot-like roots that anchor and nourish the plants which can get as big as a decent sized carrot, and the tops of which can be up to 9 inches underground. The good news is that you can dig under plants and "root around" in the earth and pull everything out. The bad news is that if you leave anything behind, they all come back. The effort required to uproot these pretty but highly invasive plants is backbreaking. I have been digging inch by inch to clear them, up to a foot deep. I am determined to do this once. It is slow work. I have not managed to finish the job before planting, but I am clearing each area before putting down manure, fresh earth and planting, so at the rate I am going, by the time I go on vacation, I hope to be done.

I am getting to know my garden on a far more intimate level. I know exactly where there are worms and what the worm density is, where the snails are (no slugs!), white grubs, where hay seeds have fallen and are growing, where the coriander and calendula seeds fell. I also have needed to take a lot of hot baths and use a lot of arnica in order to be able to move by the end of the day. Between the weeding and biking to work (up to two hours a day when I was doing my stage visits!) I am sore. Really sore.


Last week, I woke up one morning and my backyard was a bright sunny yellow. The ground was covered with big, multi-headed dandelions which looked more like mini-hydras than the pretty flowers I always saw them as. Too much of a good thing, I suppose. I have not been clearing them too much, but somehow this year they hit a critical mass and took over. I bribed my son Isaac to help out, and Josh did a few hours and managed to thin them out. Somehow, those things can communicate with each other, and as soon as we started pulling them out, the ones nearby started to go to seed. Here we go again.

One day after work, I was distributing hay around the patches of garden that needed reinforcement, when Iulia came by and asked if she could have some hay. I told her that I needed to finish using up what I wanted and then she could take the rest on her wheelbarrow, then I could get the area under where we were storing it ready to plant the tomatoes. A few minutes later, Iulia's mom and her husband were over and helping me move and take apart the half of the bale which was not for planting. They took a bunch of hay to cover their garden (seems we made a convert!), then helped me to move the last remaining centre part of the bale to another part of the garden to be used as a mini-bale garden. I put thick layers of hay on the areas where I planned to plant the tomatoes. Josh and I thought it would be too loose to plant directly into it, but I just spent my morning doing just that and it seemed to work fine. So I now have all my tomatoes except for the cherries planted on low piles of hay, which should give them the benefits of hay bale gardening, without the problem of hay bales collapsing like last year.

For the half round bales, I put manure on the top and planted broccoli, hot peppers and basil, and in the small inside remnant of the other half of the bale, I planted basil after rewrapping it to hold it together.

So I have planted carrots, soybeans, potatoes, hot peppers, basil, garlic (last fall), onions (last year), cherry, steak and san marzano tomatoes, broccoli, several climbing varieties of beans and peas, cucumbers in containers on my laundry platform, romaine and mixed spring greens. Calendulas and coriander reseeded like crazy, but I don't think any of the annual poppies came up. Some sunflowers popped up on their own, and I planted a lot of them in the cinder blocks that are part of the retaining wall. Things are alive out there.



We bought a new manifold and some additional hoses, and I have decided to water parts of the garden in rotation to ensure decent pressure. So far it seems to be working. Iulia set up some soaker hoses in her tomatoes for the first time ever. She also planted some new flowers along the fence between our yards, some phlox, peonies and clematis along side my purple bush beans and soy beans.

This past weekend I spent up at our friend JT's, and gave him half a day to help set up a vegetable garden (I brought some flowers too, and raspberry canes). JT has some mobility limitations, so I planned it out in a way that he won't need to bend or kneel, with climbing beans, peas and cucumbers along a shed wall, and the vegetables on a terraced row on a hill where he can reach everything from a standing position. I hope it does well.




I took a couple of red trilliums home which managed to survive being transplanted and are the first flowers in the new shade bed next to the shed. They were growing on the sandy shoulder of the road. I also took a trout lily (I just had to research what it was on line, they are beautiful but I am not sure mine will survive).

Exciting news is that our apple tree, the Jersey Mac which Josh's friend Jacques gave us 6 years ago as a housewarming gift has finally bloomed. I was concerned it was not fertile, but seems to be doing fine. Looking forward to apples later this summer. It is growing into my laundry line and onto my laundry platform. Josh plans to train the branches to flatten it so it fits and limit the amount of shade falling onto the garden. More on that when he starts that project.