Dreaming of spring

December 25 should be the depths of winter, but this year we have a green Christmas with just a hint of snow left from the earlier, colder days. The temperature has been jumping up and down, sometimes in the space of hours. I had a bit of time today (taking a break from holidays, overeating and socializing) to go outside and finish the last bit of yard tidying that I did not get to before the first big snowfall. It is a lovely -4 (Celsius to my American readers), calm and cloudy outside giving the sky that silvery winter haze that I love. Most ironically for a gardener, I love winter most of all, especially on the days when it is above -20.

I started my day baking bread for the next few weeks, and cooking up the last bags of puree tomato from this fall's harvest. I am out of my garlic, what I did not plant back in late October has been eaten, but we bought some local Quebec garlic so at least it is local if not homegrown. It tastes awesome!

Once the baking was done, I decided that I am tired of looking out the window at clutter, and before it snows over again, I went out to organize things a bit. Some of the fun things I found in the garden today:

We did a pumpkin painting activity with students for October (it was part of a goodbye party for a colleague) and I ended up with an extra pumpkin. I roasted the seeds (yum!) but the shell was already a bit past its prime, and no one felt like trying to turn it into a pie. Given the popularity of the decorative squashes I used to decorate my sukkah as squirrel food, I decided to leave it out as an offering to the squirrels now that they have eaten all my apples and sunflower seeds. 

It turns out that they do not like pumpkin as much. Or maybe they don't like it after it has frozen. I tried to capture the ice crystals that have grown along the surface, but this is the best I could do. It looked so interesting.

My lilacs are confused, as is my magnolia. Both have put out buds. I am not too worried about the lilacs, they seem to be able to keep buds in anticipation for a long time without damage, but the magnolia was almost wiped out by early budding one year, so I am hoping this will not be a problem.

I carefully do not clean up any of my plants to leave the seeds for whatever birds and animals may be searching in the depths of winter. Anyways, that's my justification for not having the time to cut everything back in the fall once my semester has started, it just turns out that it is a good thing to do for the animals, especially birds. Many of my plants reseed and spread, so I leave the calendulas, milkweed, nasturtiums, hollyhocks and columbines to do their thing anyways. They made some nice photographs.

My parsley, green onions and thyme are still going strong despite the frozen puddles and patches of snow. There are some very robust weeds frozen into puddles where the snow melted and refroze, waiting for me to restart our war in the spring. And the periwinkle seems to stay green and strong, its ever invasive presence slowed by the ice and snow but never giving up.

A happy new year to all my readers. Thank you for your patience with my sporadic posts, and your continued faith that I will continue my photography and essays.

 

Fall flowers

Even if the calendar says it is still summer, there was definitely a shift in seasons in Montreal. Nights are getting cold, and in the morning I have been debating if I am going to ride my bike or not. So far, barring a definitive forecast of rain, I have not bailed out yet, even doing most of my stage visits by bike. Between biking between Westmount and Ville St. Laurent, and my campaign to relandscape my front yard, I am feeling pretty fit these days. I am also intermittently continuing to work on weeding the vegetable garden, and I have reached the point that I am not feeling stressed out when I walk out my back door.

I have not yet finished the deep excavations of the areas where the creeping bellflowers had taken over, but I have cleared out the grass and weeds in most of the other areas, even though I keep going back again to keep them clear.

The front yard is looking so much better. The only part that still looks pathetic are the day lilies. I replanted the ones I rescued, and as I did not have the time or the number of pots to catch them all, they are much sparser and look worse for the wear. I am sure that they will come back in the next couple of years, though.

The cosmos are in full bloom, and look very nice. I had saved the tallest and strongest before the construction started, so they are much more uniform in size and all blooming at once. I also planted them in a more orderly fashion than they usually are when they reseed themselves. I am thinking next year I may start to do some thinning in July to get the same effect.

 In case you did not read my last post, the city renovated my street and redid our sidewalk, and in the process raised the area in front of my house by almost eight inches. To compensate, they also repaved my front walkway to match the height of the sidewalk, leaving the rest of my yard sunken below. I also ended up with some new garden areas after the new walkway was built, alongside the walkway where they dug it up to put in the frame to pour the cement.  With help from my son Isaac and his girlfriend, Leah, we redid the pathways in the front yard and raised them to the level of the new, higher walkway. We also filled the areas in between with earth. I decided to buy a cubic yard of earth from Home Depot with free delivery rather than repeatedly filling my car with bags of earth. A cubic yard is a lot of earth. I have not finished the whole job, there is still one more walkway and the area around it to raise, which Isaac will be finishing this week (I hope!). I have used up more than three-quarters of the bag and it is still too heavy to move, so it is staying on my driveway and will be redistributed as widely as I can spread it before Rosh Hashana.I transplanted some of the flowers that were in a shady area on the left side of my house (and never seen by anyone behind the lilac bushes) into the newly cleared area. I also bought a few new plants and ordered some seeds and bulbs for next year...I decided to keep some of the area closest to the house as grass, after some deliberation. I was considering another type of ground cover, or maybe even extending the garden, but decided it was too high traffic and I would keep it simple.

The tomato harvest was very late this year, but the last three weeks have been very productive. It turned out that two of the plants which Iulia gave me have small yellow tomatoes in the shape of light bulbs. They are very cute. My cherry tomatoes have not produced yet, but I am not yet giving up hope. The romas have been absolutely prolific. So I have managed to stockpile tomato purée for future sauces, in addition to using them for salads, pizza, tacos, sandwiches etc.


One of the cucumber plants managed to survive the summer, and has been producing a modest number of very tasty cukes. The basil has been slow to grow (no doubt because I have not been watering them enough) but it picking up some size now. Likely for the same reason, most of my potato plants died off somewhat earlier than usual, so I harvested most of the potato patch today, leaving the two living plants to keep going for a bit. Besides those, there is still lots of mint and some parsley still going. I was briefly considering planting some fall crops, but I think this year, with lots more clearing, weeding and landscaping to finish, I will hold off on that for this year. Between assignments starting to come in, and Jewish holidays just around the corner, I am going to keep things simple for now.

The other big harvest was the apple tree. First of all, the squirrels have been pilfering my apples long before they were ripe, so I lost a big bunch to them. There was definitely less damage by  worms this year, but not as much as I hoped. I still ended up carving up the good parts of the apples and composting the parts with worm holes. My moth trap seemed to have worked really well, catching a steady stream of moths from May through July (I emptied and refilled it weekly). The sticky ball traps for the flies caught a lot of insects but I don't think there were many apple maggot flies on them. I only had three or four on the tree, maybe not enough. I will do a bit more research to see how to improve my harvest for next year. I compared notes with Chloe, my former mother in law, who had a great, worm free harvest, so I know this is possible! At the same time, Iulia, my neighbour, harvested her plum tree which fruited for the first time this year, and she had a bumper crop. Buckets and buckets of plums. She passed by my house when I was out, and thrust a large bag of plums on my daughter Zara, which I have been handing out to anyone at work who will relieve me of some of them. A bit too much of a good thing!

Hot, dry summer

It is mid August, and I am posting one last blog before I start teaching. I have not posted since I came back from Newfoundland, but there is a reason for that. Shortly after returning home, the city of Montreal started a large project of renovations and redesign of my corner. Because I have a corner property, this impacted both the front and the side of my yard, both of which are the edges of my flower garden in front.

The city was replacing water pipes under the road. They had dug up my lawn a couple of years ago to replace the connecting pipe between the city and my property (resulting in uprooting and replanting a part of my garden). I am not sure why they had to do this in two installments, but at least this time, in addition to replacing the water pipe, they also replaced the sidewalks and are repaving the roads that intersect on my corner.

So this summer, every weekday morning around 6:20, trucks arrived and work me up. I would hear the loud beeping of their reversing. Then I would try to get back to sleep but it was like waiting for the other shoe to drop.




















I never knew if the house would start shaking, or I would have to run around closing all windows because the dust started blowing in, but I have been waking pretty early for someone on vacation. The worst part is that I had to dig up the plants on the periphery of my property and keep them potted for around a month until I was able to replant. I did not have enough pots for all, so I rescued around 2/3 of the lilies, which means it may take a few years to get them up to the stunning wall of green and orange they were at the time I had to dig them out.

The city decided to enlarge the sidewalks on the three corners that they redid, creating a small garden space in the middle. It means we lose three parking spots, but that my garden will now be in full view to all passersby whether on foot, cycle or car. Also, I am less likely to have cars parked blocking the edge of my driveway, although you never know.

A long term inconvenience has been the position of the dip in the sidewalk in front of our driveway. For my longtime readers, you may recall that when we moved into the house, there was not really a driveway, just a muddy space on the lawn with some gravel buried in the mud. The dip starts in front of a large linden tree, which obscures more than half of the part of my neighbour's property where their driveway should be. Clearly the city department which plans sidewalks and the department which plants trees do not pay much attention to each other, or at least they did not some 50 years ago or more when the linden was planted.


So our arrangement, which followed the arrangement of previous owners of our two homes, was that they could park overlapping our side. Ovidiu had, at the time we moved in, tried to get the city to either cut the tree or repave the sidewalk, but to no avail.

When the workmen started, I asked the supervisor if they could expand the dip in the driveway so that we could both park our cars, and showed him that the tree blocked the entrance. He told me I needed to go to the planning department of the city and make a formal request. We knew this was not likely to be successful, especially after I was informed I needed to bring my certificat de localisation (which shows the limits our my property.) Fortunately there were several work teams, and the one that paved the sidewalk were quite generous, and kept the original end point in front of the tree while giving me an extra few feet. In order to make their case visually, Iulia and Ovidiu spent a very busy weekend expanding their side of the driveway behind the tree, in order to be able to make the argument that they needed the extra space to be able to enter the driveway, then move the car behind the tree to be on their own property. I am not sure it was necessary, but I suspect I will enjoy the extra space to be able to ride my bike into the back between the two cars which was not always possible before. It will also make things easier in the  future when one or both of us sell our houses, in case some future owner is less flexible than we are.

Once the sidewalk was paved, my front walkway was suddenly eight inches below the new sidewalk. At first I was concerned that I would need to find a company and the money to repave my front walkway (long overdue and much needed!), until one of the workmen cautioned me that I should hold off from replanted all the plants I had put in pots until they were done repaving my walkway. I did a double take. The city was repaving my walkway for me!

So it has been five weeks, and today I finally replanted all the plants that were displaced. I have an order for a huge load of garden earth from Home Depot, because now I have to raise up the rest of my front yard (or parts at least) which are sunken below the walkway. I also got a new garden bed along the other side of the walkway to fill with earth and plant.

So my front garden has not been very photogenic, and is still a work in progress. Because of the noise and dust, I had not been doing much work in the garden up until this week. Also, everything has been last because we had a cold spring. Tomatoes finally started ripening this week (the romas I bought at Walmart only, the rest are still green). I had my first (wonderful) cucumber for lunch today. The apple tree seems to have some apples that are not wormy, and the squirrels are feasting on what falls to the ground so I am hoping to have a decent harvest in a few weeks. I am finding half eaten apple cores everywhere, including stuck behind the chicken wire on my fence above the cucumber plant. The kids have been helping me weed, because I had let things go during the super hot heat wave of the past few weeks, and we are making some progress. The garlic is very small, but super tasty. Clearly I did not water it enough during the dry spell. Isaac has been cooking sourdough pizzas, and homemade pasta using my tomatoes, basil and garlic in the sauces. I am thinking of planting some greens next week now that I have a lot of space, and the weather is cooling off.

  The photos are not in chronological order (actually most are in reverse, sorry!) I got some very interesting insect shots, including dragon flies, bees, monarch butterflies and a very odd worm which looked like a stick, hanging from a web. I brushed it and was surprised it was soft, and not a stick at all!