Road trip!

This spring has been most unusual. According to records, we had the warmest average temperatures for the month of March in Montreal, but this does not tell the whole story. While the temperature soared to 30 celsius with high humidity, it was followed by torrential rains and a drop down to 3 or 4 degrees above zero. I have taken out our summer wardrobe, worn shorts and then pulled out my winter coat again. It has been surprisingly happy weather for the garden, if I can judge by how big and green and blooming everything is. In fact, many flowers that usually bloom over the course of six weeks have all been up at once. Tulips, magnolias and hyacinths overlapped with forget-me-nots, irises and columbines, and the lilies and poppies are starting. I have managed to keep the lily beetles at bay with some liberal use of diatomaceous earth, so my oriental lilies are  doing okay and ready to bloom too. And this is only June 3, a mere two weeks past the frost line.

After my last post, I shamelessly advertised it on Facebook and one reply was from an old friend, Alyson Champ, offering me free old sheep manure. In other contexts, this may not sound like a kind, generous offer, but it came at the perfect time for me. Josh had bought a car full of earth and manure about a month ago, and I had just reached the end of my stock and only covered around 2/3 of my rapidly expanding garden. I have been laying out the manure slowly. Because of the explosion of creeping bell flowers, I wanted to remove them section by section, going right down to the deepest roots (some 2 feet deep), before fertilizing, so that the plants I wanted benefited. This has been a very slow, and very painful process, delayed by sore shoulders and a hint of carpal tunnel symptoms that suggested limiting weed digging activities to a few hours per week, well spaced out. I then requested Josh and my son Isaac to help out, with Isaac giving me a few hours of dandelion removal, and Josh on dandelion and bellflowers too. This has speeded up the process somewhat, but there is still a long way to go. In the meantime, I was offered as much well aged, composted sheep manure as I could haul in my car. I mentioned my plan to my neighbour Iulia, about visiting my artist friend's farm, and she asked if she can come and bring her daughters. As my schedule is fairly flexible these days, my preference was to go on a weekday while the kids are at school, so I suggested a second visit at a later date. My friend Allan, who plans on raising goats, was interested in meeting Alyson and discussing her experience with small scale farming (she has chickens, ducks and sheep, and has raised turkeys as well), so I offered him to come along for the ride, and some manure for his new garden he is starting this year up at the Shire.

We got off to a confused start of the day. Allan no longer has a cell phone, and we kept missing each other the day before so I was unable to pass on the message that although I hoped to be home by 10 am, I was meeting a student at Vanier and could not predict my timing exactly. Inevitably, she missed her bus and showed up 30 minutes late, just before I gave up on her. By the time I got home an hour late, Allan had decided to get a coffee at the local bagel shop, hoping I would have remembered our plans and shown up by the time he returned. No one was home, I did not leave a note, and it was miserably cold and rainy out.


Once we got on the road, we had a lot of fun. Allan had been a very serious cyclist for some time, and the area where we were driving was one of his favorite areas to train in. His parents also had rented a summer cottage in the area, so Allan entertained me with his stories. One vivid memory was of a greasy spoon restaurant in the basement of a local house which did not look like much but served amazing hot chicken sandwiches. When chatting with Alyson a bit later, Allan mentioned the place, and Alyson confirmed that they moved to the next town over and expanded into a much larger greasy spoon, which not only continued to sell the hot chicken sandwiches, but also have veggie hot dogs. It sounded like a great lunch idea for the both of us.


Spending a couple of hours with Allan and Alyson was a lovely mental vacation. They are both great raconteurs and I spent a lot of time just listening. Alyson and I met in an art history class in CEGEP, and although we really hit it off well, like many friends from that time of my life (pre-e-mail and facebook), we lost touch.

I have run into her spontaneously exactly twice in the past 25 years, and the last time I did, I connected on Facebook. Although I spend minimal time using social media, I do like the way I can do a quick catch up on what people are doing in their lives, and sporadically keep some contact which occasionally results in my reconnecting face to face in real time.

Yesterday was back to reality, with a planning meeting at Vanier, correcting papers for my UQAM course and dealing with family and the routine. Early evening, my UQAM e-mail started to go wonky, and is still malfunctioning, which is the only reason why I am taking time to blog while waiting for the site to load again in hope I can get some productive work done before setting out to weed and lay down a shitload of manure.


Last night the temperature dropped to 4, but the sky cleared and it is now sunny and heating up again, with a high of 25 celsius tomorrow. While waiting for things to warm up enough to get back to the garden, I planned a little exchange with Olivier, who was interested in some of my bee balm, and swapped for some really cool springy mosses, some white and purple irises and some pink perennial geraniums, which turned out to be the same colour as the small plant I got from Laure a few years ago (on the left). I have the perfect place to put them, as I just opened a new patch of garden right in front of our driveway.

At Ollie's suggestion two years back, I eliminated as many straight lines from the front garden, and built my garden around curving, meandering stones, and made the retaining wall on the right side into an arch. I had not touched the little wall on the left side, right in front of the driveway, because I was hoping we would widen the tile pathway to have a wider space to bike through to the path to the back yard and the bike shed. We never got around to it, and in the interim, the area has been degrading to bare packed earth with a few weeds from heavy traffic.

 Iulia had suggested last year that I move the pink geranium into the space between the garden and the driveway to get more light than where I had it before, and I built a small, makeshift wall around it from some of the flat stones we used to make our garden paths.

It did not look beautiful, but kept the geranium from being run over.

Last weekend, I decided that I could move the bricks outward into an arch shape, and open up more garden space around the geranium and the migrating forget me nots, and moved the astilbe into a brighter spot, added some dusty millers looking for a home, and some of the calendulas which are taking over in the back yard. Today, I am adding some more geraniums to round it out and create a bit more symmetry.

The de-weeding and fertilizing seems to be making my flowers happier, or perhaps they like the wacky weather, but I am very pleased with the way the flower gardens are coming together. I have also constructed the tomato cages, this year with only three tiers that are more widely spaced. I am not sure if that is a good thing, but it was less work for me, and likely will decrease the risk of tomatoes growing into the spaces in the chicken wire.

I am gradually putting fertilizer directly around each garlic plant, which I will be continuing to do this afternoon when I get fed up with weeding.




The columbines are in their full glory, and Ollie and I will be swapping some seedlings because we have different varieties. He has one with a dark, dense and complex purple flower which I love. The perennial poppies are ready to burst open. They are huge and have a very "alien" look about them. The annual poppies which I liberally sprinkled in any spot that gets some sun appear to have sprouted but last time most of them died when still tiny, so I am hoping they do better this year. The cosmos are tiny but covering a nice wide area in the front corner of the yard, and I have been extricating the thick grass growing all through them, remnants of the year I put down hay in that corner to kill the weeds. Not only did it not work at killing weeds, but it left a legacy of thick, tough, resilient grass which I am still dealing with (you can see evidence at the base of the yellow irises, below, left).

I have created a nicer space at the front of the lawn, which had been choked with weeds, then cleared and covered with woodchips which did not keep the weeds out. I am trying once again, and put in a few more decorative perennials (coleus and dusty millers) along with the lilies and a few electric purple lobelias because they are just so startlingly pretty.

Josh also took some time to cut back a number of the taller lilacs that were overshadowing the apple tree and the the ones at the back of the garden, so we now have a bit more light coming in. We waited until just after they stopped blooming. He is planning to do some work on a number of the trees. More on that later this summer.

The beans and peas exploded into being over the past week, all except the soy beans which once again do not seem to be materializing. I have sunflowers popping up randomly everywhere, which I have dutifully been moving into more convenient locations, except for the one that popped out of a side hole in one of my composters, and is ten times the size of all the others. I don't have the heart to move it, despite being wedged between the compost bin and the laundry line pole, right next to the fence which is a  highway for squirrels. I suspect it may be the largest sunflower I will ever grow, if the squirrels don't get it first.

Time to stop musing, and get out and clear some more weeds. I did not think to bring my camera with me on my excursions this week, so I will be rainchecking on pictures to accompany my description of my trip to Alyson's and visit to Ollie's garden. I will be returning to both, and with camera in hand. I hope to do a couple of feature blogs of other gardens this summer.