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!