Cool, wet May

There are lots of surprises in the garden. It seems that I must have moved irises and put in a new bleeding heart and one pink and one lone purple tulip, because amid the usual expected spring flowers, there were some I did not expect at all. And three of my daffodils actually bloomed. I had pretty much given up on them. Both of my crab apples are ready to bloom after two years of only one flowering, despite having my neighbour Ovidiu graciously pruning back the top branches significantly this spring.

Not surprisingly, by the time I had the time to do any gardening, the weeds were taking over. Which is why I have fallen behind in my blogging, because I have been pushing myself to work on the garden as many hours a day as I can squeeze in. The good news is, although this has been very hard on both my arms and my hamstrings (yanking and squatting), it took more than two weeks of working several hours almost daily before my hands began to get numb.

I started having this problem a couple of years back, which ended up restricting how much weeding I could do (part of the reason that the weeds have taken over). I think it may be a carpal tunnel thing, but only seems to be an issue if I try doing five hours a day of weeding for days running. I imagine that this is not a normal activity for most people, so if my body rebels against it, that is clearly my fault. I do not do any garden work on Saturdays (the Sabbath) and right now it is pouring rain, so I am giving my wrists a day off. And catching up on my blog.

Box elder, with squirrel, and lilacs behind

The photos in this post are in chronological order, starting at the beginning of May when my first flowers came out. This year I had three daffodils bloom. They have not bloomed much at all since I planted a whole bunch of bulbs given to me by Chloe, my mother-in-law, who was thinning hers out in her garden some eight years ago. They dutifully spouted every year and with few exceptions, never bothered to bloom. I had pretty much forgotten they were there. This year, in March, my request to the city of Montreal of three years ago was finally processed, and a truck pulled up to cut the branches of the Box Elder tree that were reaching my roof. Besides being told by a roofing company that the tree should be cut back and was in part the reason for the moss growth on the back side of the roof, the ant exterminator agreed with me that the carpenter ants which were all over the tree were walking into my attic and walls on those same branches. Those branches are now gone, and there is just a bit more sunlight coming into my front yard. The flowers seem to be happy. So are the weeds.


The dandelions are thriving. I have had all three of my children sporadically helping to remove some of them, as well as my neighbour's children who like helping me more than their parents in the garden (for at least twenty minutes, before it gets boring and they run off to play). I am grateful for whatever help I get. I am well aware that dandelions are an important food source for bees early in the spring, so I made sure not to start weeding them before the apple tree, the crab apples and my neighbours' plum and pear trees were in full bloom. The plum was so full of bees the tree was humming. The dandelions were no longer quite as popular. Furthermore, I have enough in the back yard to feed several hives, and cannot remove them fast enough before they go to seed and start the cycle over. So I did my best for a few days, and then gave up and mowed the lawn. It looks neater and mostly green, and the dandelions ducked their heads for a couple of days before bouncing back up and looking even more conspicuous.

I was getting very stressed just looking out my window at the disastrous amount of work it would take to tame the wild meadow and make room for the vegetables, and clear enough space so the flowers I planted would be visible.


Just to give an idea, the picture to the right shows my vegetable garden. You can see the lush growth of creeping bellflower next to the bare earth that I spent several days painstakingly clearing. That area I had attempted to clear out three years back. I planted garlic in the area, and a lot of the bellflowers grew back. I did not want to disturb the garlic, so let it go for the summer. The following year, Iulia and I bought a couple of pallets of bags of earth and compost and had them delivered. I piled the bags over the area of the garden where the worst of the bellflower infestation was, with the expectation that being covered up for a couple of years might kill them off. I have been gradually using up the bags, leaving a bottom layer covering a large patch of fallow garden for two years, and when I removed the bags, this is what came back.

So this year I am trying to do it right. I am digging down, right into the gray clay two and a half feet deep, inch by painful inch, and clearing out every root there is. I have thrown out several of the big paper garden scrap bags full of roots. I have also been tossing in bindweed roots and seeds (those are wild, white morning glories. I like them, but they are also pretty invasive and strangle plants). Last year, my friend Shaun came over for a couple of hours and helped me dig out the patch where I used to have my strawberries.

Shaun had the idea of digging up the weeds, roots and earth and putting it in buckets and bringing them to the ecocentre. This sounded great. In years past there was a vacant lot a block away, where we dumped excess weedy earth, which turned into a construction site (where we dumped excess weedy earth) which is now a nice apartment building with manicured lawns (and no place to dump anything). As it was a Sunday, I did not check with the Ecocentre about dumping weedy earth until the following day. It turns out that they do not take earth. Garbage pickup does not take earth. Green waste pickup does not take earth. I have five home depot large paint buckets filled with weedy earth, plus a couple of plastic black earth bags repurposed to fill with weedy earth. After collecting rainwater, freezing over and thawing, nothing is growing out of the buckets. I managed to lift them the few inches out of the garden bed onto the grass under the crabapple trees (heavy!). They do not smell unless you stick your nose too close, so I am leaving them there before I am thoroughly convinced they are not going to start growing creeping bellflowers. The bags where we dumped some of the earth did not get wet, and lots of things are growing out of the top. I need to decide what to do with them (I am running low on buckets) before the roots go through the bottom and start a new infestation.The area was so choked with weeds, I decided to dig out the strawberries (and gift them to friends who like berries) and repurpose the area once the weeds were gone.

This year, some of the bellflowers came back up in that area, but not all of them, so we did make some impact. I have been digging down, inch by painful inch. I removed the bricks that were under the fence between my yard and my neighbours. They were initially placed there to keep the earth on my side and the lawn on their side, but in the years since, they have extended their garden along the fence. A lot of the roots were hiding beneath the bricks, and there were plenty extending under their garden as well. Iulia had been removing the tops but the roots were still deep down and sending their tendrils sideways onto my side of the fence.

I have been taking breaks from the worst of the weedy patch to clear up some small outbreaks of bellflowers on the side and in front of the house. The whole area on the street edge of the property and in front are impossible to clear because the roots are entwined with all my perennials. I am just tearing out or mowing down the plants and keeping them as low groundcover. The back yard is my target this year. I am not doing any major contract this summer, so plan to be working a lot on the weeds.


My other project this year is protecting my apple tree from being infested by coddling moth larvae. Those are what make apples wormy, and they ruined my otherwise bountiful apple harvest last year. I did online research and learned a lot about coddling moths. They arrive to lay eggs when the flower petals fall from the tree (that would be now), and in addition to the dormant spray, the other recipe I found which looked promising was for a moth trap made of apple cider vinegar, ammonia and molasses. I discovered that all three ingredients were available at my local grocery store.I also discovered, while looking for them, that black oil is not the same as castile oil (whoops) which is available at Bulk Barn. Who knew? I now have enough dormant oil made with the black oil to last a decade or so, so I will see if the apples come out all wormy or not before making any decisions for the fall. I just got another tip from Chloe today, something I have not seen online but her neighbour has used successfully. It involves painting some sticky goop called tanglefoot (available at Home Depot) on hanging red balls (fake apples) which attracts the moths and they stick to them. Couldn't hurt, so I am heading off to Home Depot and the Dollar store to put this together before the petals finish falling and my crop is ruined.

The lilacs, crab apples and apple tree were in full bloom last week, and looked and smelled divine. A few years back, we had someone trim down the lilacs at the back of the property, but left the ones closer to the house which are huge and covered in blossoms. Two weeks ago, I had a city inspector come by and left a note for me to call. It seems that someone had lodged a formal complaint that the lilacs are too close to the sidewalk and that I need to cut them back. I had a tree expert come for an estimate. He suggested that I do not cut them low as we did one area of the lilac forest, and pointed out how the patch that grew back had more leaves than flowers. He proposed that we selectively cut and shape the patch leaving the tall parts as natural as possible, which would maintain the advantages of cutting the sound, giving more privacy and keeping the trees healthy and fully flowering. I hope the city inspector will be satisfied with the result. I had some fun showing the guy my backyard, and discussed his experience with apple trees (he told me he has given up and let the moths take over, not very hopeful).

This May has been the wettest in 45 years. Chilly too. The flowers have been enjoying it, everything is larger than life and gorgeous. It has been disastrous for my tomatoes, though. Victoria Day weekend is usually when I plant everything, but the week prior it was cold and rainy, and I had tons of correcting and student evaluations still to do, so I did not have time to weed the patches of garden where I planned to plant. I figured it could wait a bit since it was unseasonably cold anyways. I did put my tomato plants out to harden for a few days while finishing up the last of my department meetings and starting to weed. On the third day, it was windy and a bit chilly, still sufficiently above freezing that the tomatoes should have been okay on a table in the sun for a few hours. I came home and found them flattened. I brought them inside again and left them under my light in the basement hoping for a revival, but no such luck.

Oddly, there were eight new sprouts of tomato seeds that had stubbornly resisted two months of attempts to get them to grow that magically popped up that same day, a few San Marzanos and a two chocolate cherries. They are pretty late starters, but I will give them a try, maybe I can get some September tomatoes from them. In the meantime, I gave up and bought eight Roma plants from Walmart. I planted them on Thursday in the patch I have cleared of bellflowers. I had some potatoes which had sprouted in my potato bin a few weeks ago which I tossed into the area where the strawberries used to be.

I also planted around a dozen gladiolas bulbs which Iulia gave me during Passover (I got her a hyacinth for Easter).I also picked up some parsley and Lebanese cucumbers, and planted the red lobelia seeds I bought last summer.

This has been a great year for wild violets, I have a lot of white and purple ones in the garden and lawn, but walking to the metro I saw some lawns covered in them. So pretty!

I am off to buy tanglefoot and try to get another moth trap up before they take over. Hope it works.

A lawn full of violets in my neighbourhood.