Ablaze in colour

I have managed to get a few hours of garden time here and there despite all kinds of things getting in the way like kids, work, house, meals, and family. Zara is graduating high school and there seems to be a never ending stream of activities to celebrate. Orchestra has its final performance of the year next week. My aunt and uncle are moving and downsizing, so I have been selling furniture (or trying to) which seems to take much longer than one would expect. So the weeds are winning for now, but I am trying hard to keep up.

I managed to get most of what I want into the ground. Tomatoes are in, but still uncaged. I planted peas, but not yet beans, corn and squash (still need to weed their area). I looked up how to plant the three sisters, but then I will ignore what I read about staggering the planting. By the time the corn goes is, it will be too late to wait a week or two for the beans and squash. They'll just have to fight it out like all sisters.

Josh graciously helped me for a couple of hours to clear a new section in front of the lawn for a new garden bed, and take out the weedy earth next to where the city tore up my yard. My friend Moishe helped me rebuild the path from the driveway to the walkway, properly (I hope) with lots of crushed gravel underneath. It feels more solid. The city will be putting down sod on the area they dug up. I have subtly shifted the area so some of what they dug up is covered with the path, and some of my yard which was still "lawn" when they last left their work has been well dug up, eliminating weeds, and ready for sod if they don't notice that I moved things around.

Once they get the sod down, I will decide if and where to chop some out to balance the garden. Still not sure about that, but I have a few perennials I moved with Josh to the back yard last fall which still need a home.

Iulia took the opportunity to add about half of her front lawn space to her garden. She is going for a yin and yang center piece with red and white roses. I will wait for them to bloom to take some pics. She and her husband also spent a lot of time on the backyard with help of her parents. Note my mild envy that she has a team of 4 while I am struggling myself with occasional (though much appreciated!) guest assistance from a few of my die hard friends, or in the case of my ex, a divorce agreement that stipulates some home maintenance expectations. Next door they have seeded the area which was once the ash tree with grass, and Ovidiu's painstaking care is keeping out the dandelions and other invaders to which I am neglectfully exposing his lawn. He is very diplomatic and says nothing, but I can see him watching (and wincing) as I carefully mow my weeds rather than remove them. They have also planted a long strip of herbs and vegetables along the fence, unfortunately right up against the stubborn patch of creeping bellflowers which I have been trying to excavate for the past few summers, putting more of a priority on digging it out of that area than the front lawn.

So far, the onions and garlic are big and beautiful. I managed to plant the tiny lobelias which seem to have disappeared, possibly buried after the first rain, or they quietly died while I was not looking. I will see if they reappear before there are none left at the garden centres, and if not, plan B (buy). I have put in sugar snaps where the beans were last year. I planted basil in a planter near my raised laundry platform, broccoli and rapini in the bathtub, and lettuce in one of the large bins where I grow herbs, to evade the groundhog. He (or she) has been around a lot.

Watermelon is not looking good. From the directions on the package for the seedless watermelons, you need to also grow a seeded variety or it will not produce fruit. So I bought another variety and planted two of each back in March. Now there is only one plant still living (the seeded companion watermelon) and I am trying to find out if you can grow a single seeded watermelon plant before I dedicate a huge area of my garden to it. All the information on line seems to be geared at people who live on huge farms and will be growing many plants. The things grow ten feet long and produce up to 5 melons per plant. That's a lot of space wasted if it won't give me the good stuff.

The flowers this spring have been fantastic. I have a whole bunch of tulips still going, and the columbines are beginning to bloom, including a lot of new babies of unknown colours. I bought a new clematis to replace the one on the right side of my front steps, which I feel confident is quite dead now.

The next few weeks will involve mostly weeding. The construction industry in Quebec is currently on strike, so the people who are supposed to lay down the sod on the eyesore bare patch of my yard won't be around until that gets resolved, and in the meantime, I am not building that last front yard flower bed. I figure by that time, I may start moving around some cuttings from other parts of the garden, or maybe move some cosmos over, as there are an abundance of them coming up between the stones on the paths through the lawn. So much to do!