Having time helps

Early morning

I cannot believe it. Passover ended yesterday. Since yesterday at nine pm  and I have managed to put away all my Passover things, shop for a fridge full of real lovely chometzdik food, bake bread, catch up on all my correcting and still managed to do some work in the yard. Today was the first sunny day since I last blogged. Not hot, but at least dry. I managed to get a bunch of soggy leaves out of a section of the front garden and bagged them with branches that had fallen over the winter. I took advantage of the earth being soft and damp to pull out roots of the dreaded creeping bellflower that escaped my friends' assault last summer. I only got through a small patch, but it did not have a lot of new babies coming up.

Mid-afternoon

I am trying to understand why I managed to have time for this, for the first time in April since I have been single again. Then it came to me that this is the first spring in a few years that I am not caregiving, running to the hospital, dealing with family crises. I am also only working one job for now after turning down the spring support group for the Alzheimer society after running the last two in fall and winter. And rather than dreading the spring clean up as a huge and impossible job (which it still is), I actually enjoyed being out in the sunshine and making my yard look respectable. Which it never is once the snow melts. My corner is a vortex which collects bits of garbage from all over blown in by the wind. In today's catch, there were two bottles of Ensure, water bottles, candy wrappers, paper and styrofoam cups, part of someone's bumper and all kinds of unidentifiable bits of paper and plastic. I have not finished picking it all up yet, but got a good start. Too many other things competing for my attention.

Over the past eight years, my squills have doubled from the original three.

I need to backtrack a bit because I have not filled in some important gaps. Last summer, I kept my garden to a minimum because I was travelling for a couple of weeks during the hottest part of the summer, and did not want to come home to dead plants. And it was scorching hot in Montreal (not as much in Europe so I was very happy to be there and not here). I grew garlic, and sunflowers, and basil, but left a lot of the backyard fallow. I grew some carrots and broccoli in the bathtub. The broccoli never flowered. The carrots were good, and the groundhog couldn't reach them. I also tried lettuce and rapini and chard, but nothing did well probably because it was too hot. The weeds, however, did fabulously. My kids helped do a garden blitz in May, just after my father had died, but between then and my trip in July, I was working full time on a contract to organize a conference about residents' rights in long term care (a wonderful but challenging experience which I will avoid doing again). I kept looking at my garden and watching the weeds coming up.

This is what I was hoping for. Not happening on my lawn though.

I put out a call to friends to come and help me for a day of garden work as a birthday gift, and had some wonderful company and a rotation of friends from 9 am to around 8 pm. We spent most of the day trying to root out the creeping bellflowers, which is an annual event. I put a lot of the roots and the creeping bellflowers in large buckets that were full of earth and too  heavy to put out in the garbage or the garden waste pick up. I was told by a friend that I could bring them to the ecocentre to dump, but I found out that my ecocentre does not take earth. So the buckets, now full of muddy water and rotten roots, are still in the back yard waiting for me to decide what to do with them.

Then I travelled and coming home I had a ton of work to prepare the conference while starting to teach at the same time. The garden suffered. The weeds thrived. October was soon upon us and I had all this gorgeous, huge garlic to plant and no time to clear the weeds.

I stopped my car in Westmount next to Murray Hill Park to take these photos. I have squill envy

I contacted Shaun, who always seems to know people with time and skills that I lack, if he knows anyone who can do some yardwork and is looking for a bit of cash. He suggested I get in touch with a friend of a friend of my daughter's who had been doing some work for him. I hired Nemo, an 18 year old CEGEP student, who had negotiated with his gym teacher to use yardwork for credit (and I paid him. Talk about double bonus). I gave him the exciting task of preparing two areas of my garden for me to plant garlic. One of them was where I have been growing raspberries. That was quite the job and worth every penny I paid not to have to do it myself.

The past two summers my raspberries have become infested with this fruitfly that start their lives as little worms in raspberries. The first harvest in July both years seemed to be fine, but the larger second harvest that starts in August and goes into October was wormy. I ended up both summers having to cut the producing ends of all the canes to avoid having the fruit rot on the branches and breed more of the bugs. Even before the bugs started again last summer, no one wanted to eat the early raspberries after finding bugs in them the previous summer. I decided it was time to give it up. I don't even like raspberries, and it is a lot of work to do if you do not enjoy them. With my apple tree starting to produce seriously, I cut my losses and gave Nemo the task of uprooting and clearing the raspberry patch. There are a few canes that sprouted up this spring at the back (I will decide after I harvest the garlic if I keep a few or clear them out too).

To Nemo's credit, the areas where the garlic are look pretty good. There are some weeds in one area, which I did not get to yet, but will keep working at it a bit at a time. I still have messy areas to clear before planting the tomatoes which are sprouting nicely in my basement. I may get in touch with Nemo for another day or two of work.

This year, the city of Montreal introduced curbside compost pickup. I used it for the occasional pizza box, but until October I continued my garden compost, using for layers hay that I accidentally grew in some of the fallow patches of my garden. My supply of hay has been somewhat patchy the last few years, and the hay method for preventing weeds from growing only works if you have a lot of hay, and the hay does not have enough space to reseed itself. My hay had too much space. It was thick enough for snails to thrive but too thin to prevent hay from thriving. So I harvested it and used it for compost along with the less noxious weeds. When winter started I decided to avail myself to curbside pickup rather than traipsing through thigh-high snow, trying to open the frozen top of the compost, digging through icy snow to even icier haypiles for layers. Given the crazy weather this past winter (and lack of hay by late October) I am pleased with my decision. I have even been contemplating giving up hay and home composting altogether this year. Until my friend Alyson Facebook messaged me an offer of some nicely rotted hay if I take a trip out to the country to get it. I am still deciding. Maybe just a trip to the country, and no hay? Hmmm....

An update on apples. After posting my last blog, I learned that the delivery cost of the coddling moth trap I planned to order was $40 on top of the $30 trap. $70 can buy a lot of organic apples, I am thinking, so I nixed the order and will look for a cheaper, local alternative. I did not have time today to visit garden centres, but that's on my list before the apple tree blooms.

I only have three photos because that's all that is blooming right now. I have too many spring pictures of garlic shoots and sprouting leaves, so if you want to know what my yard looks like, any April posts from years past look pretty much the same. Although I did notice two of the daffodils look like they may actually flower soon. I have no idea why, they usually don't and I had given up on them. I will keep you all posted...

Suddenly it's spring

Today the crocuses bloomed. Yesterday, I was walking off the accumulation of two Passover seders with my mom, and passed by Siberian squills spreading their lovely blue bells across several lawns. My garlic is up. The tulips, hyacinths and lilies and even the poppies in the back are starting to grow. I even managed to put my first load of laundry out to dry on the laundry line today. This is miraculous given we were locked under inches deep sheets of ice for much of the winter, the last of which was still in patches on my lawn as I prepared for Passover last week. A neverending winter with quantities of snow and deep freeze and thaw cycles more extreme than ever before. Confused robins turning up early and colliding with snowstorms. Endless opportunities to get to know the neighbours and strangers whose cars I helped shove out of snowbanks and off ice patches. Then suddenly it is 17 degrees and I am panicking that I need to deal with treating my apple tree with dormant oil before it wakes up. 

I have thus far largely ignored my apple tree in the back corner of my yard. A housewarming gift from a friend of Josh's, the Jersey Mac was Josh's domain in its early years. It was destined to be espaliered (a term I had never heard of) and was one of Josh's partially successful tree sculpting projects. The idea was to trim and train the branches to grow in such as way to to make the tree somewhat two dimensional, to fit a tight space between my clothes lines and the garden, and prevent it from growing in a way that it would shade the garden. It is not quite as neatly shaped as I think Josh intended, but manages to keep its shadow in the right direction and does not interfere too much with my laundry. After an initial bout of tying and bending and shaping, Josh got busy with other projects and the tree was basically left to do its own thing. Which it was fairly slow to do. In fact, it took several years to flower and even more before producing a few fruit (which the squirrels nabbed before I could). Until last summer, when it really got the hang of producing and was covered in apples. Lovely Jersey Mac apples. Full of worms. Almost all of them. So I started doing research and discovered that the organic way to prevent this is to start last fall by clearing away all the fallen rotten apples. Whoops. I managed to catch up on that today, hopefully not too late to be of any use. And spray the tree with a "dormant oil" between November and when the tree wakes up. While putting out the laundry this morning I saw the first leaf on the tree. Almost too last for that one too. So I ran inside and looked for recipes for dormant oil with ingredients I have in the house, and finally ordered some neem oil because so many web sites swear by the stuff. I happened to have black soap which I hope is the same as Castile soap (both made from olives, sounded compatible) and baking soda, and hydrogen peroxide. I mixed it up and diluted with a gallon of water in my pump sprayer which decided not to work. I did not grow tomatoes last year so I had not used it for a year and a half, not sure why it is not functioning now. So I poured off the mix into spray bottles and spent three quarters of an hour shpritzing the tree bottom to top and raking away and bagging the old apples for the city garden scraps pick up. For good measure, I sprayed the crab apples too, and then ordered a pair of coddling moth traps (enough for 5 hectares, apparently geared at orchard growers not back yard gardeners) for a bit later in the spring. Once the temperature hits 16 degrees at sunset (I swear that's what it says online) I need to switch from a dormant oil mix to a more season appropriate organic stew. I need to do more research on that, but neem oil seemed to figure prominent in a wide range of natural pest control concoctions so its on its way.

I have had very little time to write in the past year. In fact, my last written post was last spring, and I never managed to finish up writing the intended post to go with my photos of last year's flowers. I did not have a big vegetable garden last year, mostly garlic and basil. I planted broccoli that never flowered before the frost. I managed to elude the groundhog by using my outdoor bathtub planter as a nursery, and managed to get my sunflowers big enough before transplanting them to be too big to interest him. Unfortunately, the lettuce and rapini and chard I tried to grow did not do well, probably because of a long hot dry spell while I was travelling around Europe with my daughter's orchestra. My flowers did very well though. Iulia, my neighbour, finally painted a painting of my garden, conveniently missing the weeds and with  number of flowers blooming out of their usual season (it takes a full month for all those flowers to bloom a patch at a time. It never really looks like that all at once. 

In contrast to my last post, this one is mostly text. I have not taken my camera out, but the garden is basically small sprouts and a lot of mess I have yet to clean up of leaves and branches that fell last fall and whatever garbage blew onto my lawn and froze over the winter. I live on a windy corner and things always seem to land on my lawn. Too much to do, too little time.

I was inspired to write because I periodically am surprised by someone I do not expect who tells me they are looking forward to my next blog. I have no idea who is reading this, but my shameless self-promotion on facebook seems to have snagged me some readers. I was worried that after almost eight years of blogging this may start to be repetitive and boring, but it seems that I still have new disasters and surprises to keep us all on our toes. So thank you Carolee, if you are reading this!

A last comment. I still have no idea who gave me the yakon plant, but it did quite well despite not blooming. And I followed the internet instructions to dig up the roots before the frost to store for the winter. So I finally did snack on a yakon. The roots are crunchy and tasty, a bit reminiscent of chayote. I am waiting for Victoria Day weekend, the magic "frost date" in Montreal (third weekend of May) to replant it. By then I should have some photos to post. Happy Easter, Passover and Spring!