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!