False Spring

Last week we went from Arctic weather to a sudden, surprising melt down. Within a few days of above zero weather, the piles of snow dropped down to the point where I could see some patches of lawn emerging. Despite the joy that comes when the sun shines and the stranglehold of winter seems to be letting up, at the back of my mind it was disturbing because it was a month too early to get this type of reprieve. The compost bin defrosted and made room for a bucketful of kitchen scraps I had been saving for the right occasion to dump. The bags of leaves were visible again beneath the snow so I had dry materials to jam in on top. The forest of broken branches that fell off the ash tree next door are emerging from beneath the snow. We could put a modest size tree together from what came off in the wind, snow and ice the past two months, possibly helped along by some ash-borer beetles we suspect have moved in.

Then the weather became more like a typical March. We had a good old fashioned wet messy snow storm last night. It was supposed to rain, or snow, and what came down was wet and gloppy but definitely on the side of snow.

Today was melty again, after the snow stopped. I am holding off on planting my seedlings for a bit, March is expected to be ups and downs.

Buried in snow

I have not been on to blog in a while. This winter, I am on leave from my day job and teaching full time, partly at Vanier College in the Special Care Counselling program (a program that trains its graduates to do group and one-on-one therapeutic activities for people with disabilities or other special needs), as well as in the Social Work program at UQAM. This is the first year I am only teaching and not doing another job at the same time. It is challenging, interesting and very intensive. So my usually blogging time on weekends has been eaten up by course preparation and correcting. As well, because I am on a replacement contract at Vanier, I can be bumped out of the job with little notice. For this reason, I am trying to be conservative with spending money, and things like new seeds for next year have taken a low priority, especially because all the seeds I bought last year are still likely to be fertile. My usual seed perusing in February has been curtailed to looking and dreaming rather than planning and shopping. This still has not stopped me from drooling over my Vessey's catalogues.

So my garden adventure this time of year is putting out the compost. We have had a very cold winter, and one with a lot of snow. This is an unusual pattern, because usually when the temperature drops below -20 C we don't get snow, but this year we seem to have been getting both with great regularity. The snow comes down as very fine powder which packs down into a dense icy mass. However, in areas that do not get frequent traffic, you can sink thigh deep in a fluffy stuff which behaves almost like a liquid, pouring into your boots if you are foolish enough to have the tops of your boots exposed. This is what happens when I walk out through the back yard to dump the compost.

The content of my active compost box has turned into a solid iced block, and as such, does not create enough heat to decompose and "funk down" or reduce itself. It can still do this below zero (from the heat it creates) but not when the temperatures plunge. This is the second year in a row that I am running out of room in my compost box. The top of the box has two knobs that turn which lock the box to prevent the local wildlife from knocking the top off and digging in. The mechanism is vulnerable to icing up, which makes opening it a challenge, especially if we have a bit of a thaw then a big drop in temperature (which is what happens when the sun comes out mid-day sometimes). The hay and bags of autumn leaves I use to layer the compost are also rather solidly iced together and well buried in the snow. This morning there are only a few inches of the compost bin visible, the snow level has almost reached the top. I am not dumping the inside bin weekly like I usually do, and keeping it next to a heater so that it is doing some of its decomposition in the house (yuck!). I also wait until the weather warms a bit for a few days before attempting to dump it outside.

As for my indoor gardening, this year, I gave up on peppers so I did not bring them inside at all. Julie's pineapple sage succumbed over Christmas when we went out of town. My son, who was happy to stay home and have the house to himself, agreed to water the plants, and I must have underestimated the amount to water it in my instructions. We will start a new plant in the spring. To replace the dead sage, he and his girlfriend sprouted some green onion ends in water and introduced me to a new gardening idea. I planted them in earth,and they died quickly, but when left in water which you change every couple of days, they do very well and can be reharvested and regrown continually.

This past week I have found myself chatting in the most unexpected places about gardens and tree growing, at a shiva, with a few residents at a nursing home where I am supervising students doing their stage (in an activity that involved painting flowers and trees, it was a natural subject). From these informal conversations with people who are more knowledgeable about tree cultivation than I am, I am concerned that my magnolia has died. I will be closely monitoring its activity this spring and if it does not flower, I will do more careful research.

After much time not checking my blog, I was delighted to see I had over 200 hits this past month. Obviously some of you have not given up on me! I promise to be more prolific as spring approaches. One day in my UQAM class a few weeks ago, one of my students came up after class to tell me she had checked out my blog and liked it. She had googled me, and found it. This was a new one for me. I shamelessly promote my blog on my facebook status and on my personal e-mails, but never in my work world.

I am not including photos this time. They would be all white and right now I have seen enough snow to last a long time. Looking forward to some green in my life!

Winter and the flowers are still blooming

Just after my last post, we had a light frost which would have killed the tomatoes. My heartier plants, like the broccoli, monk's hood, dahlias, and nasturtiums kept on putting out new buds, as did my last remaining sunflower. The periwinkles woke up and started to bloom too. We had weather hovering around zero since then, with some light snow that did not last on the ground. Last night the temperature plunged and today we woke up with the lawn covered in snow, and the cannas looking worse for the wear. The monk's hood is still in bloom. Who knew it was so hearty?

The onions and green onions have been enjoying the cold weather and behaving as though it is spring.

Today I went outside after work to dig up the cannas and the giant dahlias, which despite having frozen the past couple of days, still had flowers on them. The calendulas were flowering under a cover of snow. I noticed as well there was yet another bunch of ripe raspberries ready to pick, though a bit soft from being partly frozen.

I popped the last of the broccoli plants into the compost, not expecting the tiny florets to grow much more without cold frames.

You may notice the ladybug on my last blooming sunflower. They seem to like sunflower stalks for hibernation.

I found some more potatoes when I cleaned up the last of the hay bales last week, which were delicious in an omelette. We have just a few more cloves of garlic before our stock from this year is done. I have maybe a dozen more tomatoes still ripening, and whatever is still green goes into the compost.

We are still looking for a supplier of hay. I have sent messages to all my country-living friends within a short range of Montreal asking to look out for neighbours who have supplies and are willing to deliver.



Josh spent a day last weekend driving around near the Shire to see if he could find anyone in the Lachute/Wentworth area, with no results.

Gardening season draws to a close. Its been a good one despite the erratic weather.

No frost yet, but ready in case

On October 30, my Monkshood suddenly decided to bloom. It was pretty cold, I had decided it was too chilly to bike to work, but we had not yet had a frost, so I suppose it was fair game. I am hoping this is not going to be its usual pattern because it is pretty risky waiting until the end of fall to bloom in Montreal. It is still in good company, one of my giant dahlias has a bud on it still, and the sedums and black-eyed susans nearby in the front yard are still going along with the last stragglers of the cosmos. My dusty millers which I thought were annuals last year came back and are doing better than ever as the days get colder. The centauras started to bloom again. My annuals, the lobelias and begonias and nasturtiums, pansies and sage are still in bloom but nothing is looking at its peak except the lobelias which keep on smiling.

I have continued to harvest lettuce, tomatoes, raspberries, green onions and mint, as well as the odd strawberry and hot pepper. I decided not to bring the peppers indoors, after the first one I brought in promptly shed all its leaves and died despite being directly under my grow light. I gave up. They are still slowly producing peppers outside.

The forecast for last night was -5 so we decided today would be the day to finish the harvest, clean up the garden and plant the garlic. I had put aside all the big heads of garlic for planting. Although this means that we will be running out of home grown garlic within the next few weeks, this is the first year that we are planting garlic grown in our own garden. We planted 240 cloves, and some of them were really huge. Some of the heads had only two giant cloves (I had not expected that). Following Jas and Gu's recommendation, we put a heaping spoon of bone meal in each hole with the garlic. I updated my garden map with the areas we planted the garlic written in .  A big thank you to my friend Lorena who decided to help us out and planted garlic for her first time ever. We will be sure she gets to enjoy it next summer.

We have run into some difficulties with finding hay. Our friend Jack has supplied us for the past few years, but his source, a neighbour whose barn burned down, is not able to provide us anymore. Most farmers are no longer making small square bales, and the big round rolls are difficult to transport long distances unless one has a very large open truck. So far, no hay. We have enough hay from the bales we just dismantled today, the ones in which we grew tomatoes, for use in our composter for the winter and to cover the newly planted garlic, but come spring we will need a new source, or a big truck.

I can't believe our raspberries are still going. I forgot to pick them today, so if it does freeze overnight I have decided to pick them tomorrow frozen and pop them directly in the freezer.

Josh and I picked what was left of the tomatoes. We found a few that were orange that I had missed on Friday, and salvaged the nicer looking green ones that looked like they might be close to turning. The rest, those that were immature, very green or spotted from bacteria went into a big bucket and are staying outside overwinter.

We then took down the cages and dismantled and cleaned and stacked them for the winter. We left a large pile of dismembered tomatoes plants in the middle of the yard to break into smaller pieces and compost. I then opened up the two compost bins which have been sitting waiting to be ready. One was full of the end-of-season detritus from last year's garden, mostly tomato plants, which I had left for a full year. The bin was one-quarter full of soft, fluffy, fine earth which I raked over one patch of the newly planted garlic. The other bin was the one which we left to decompose last spring, which held our kitchen scraps from November to May. This one was about half full, and not fully composted. It doesn't smell much, but is still goopy and a bit harder to rake out. We spread that compost over the other patch of garlic.

Taking apart the hay bale, Josh found the wasp nest (all empty, no problem) as well as a bunch of potatoes which I missed on my first careful fumblings through the bales which at the time held a lot of live wasps. I suspected I may have missed some.

Our lack of hay may upset our plans to plant on bales next year again. We will keep you posted as to our developments. If you know a supply of hay and a means  to transport it to Montreal for a reasonable cost, please let us know.

This is what I harvested on October 31. I have never had such variety so late in the season!

Josh planting garlic

The broccoli is still producing small flowerettes so we are letting it continue on a small patch of hay.

My calendulas don't seem to mind the cold weather and keep on blooming.

Josh trimmed the lilacs and we now have to get rid of branches, as well as compost that big pile of tomato plants. I also have to dig up the dahlias and canna roots for next year. My cannas never flowered this year, nor did my small dahlias, but the giant ones did beautifully. We still have some work to do before we shut down for the winter.

Gentle autumn

Most unexpectedly, since mid-September, the weather has picked up. We have had alternating rain, clouds and sunny days with temperatures varying from a low of 1 degree to 24, sometimes within 48 hours. Although this resulted in a very early season for colds and flus, it also produced spectacular shades of red and orange fall leaves and an extended harvest. My hibiscus as well as some purple flowers Iulia gave me waited until perilously late to bloom, and seem to be undaunted by the thermometer hovering just above zero at night. I have not needed to bring in the peppers and basil again, nor cover the tomatoes, although I have all my extra blankets and sleeping bags piled up on a chair in the basement ready to roll if needed.

I am continuing to harvest tomatoes, hot peppers, basil, lettuce, some occasional beans, mint and green onions. The raspberry bushes are at their peak, I was picking a cup per day for the last few weeks, though they are slowing down over the past few days. I have a few strawberries still ripening as well. With the cold nights, the onions I left to overwinter in the garden have thrown up new shoots. I may check if they have grown enough to be worth harvesting some before winter.

The Jewish holidays were beautiful. Despite intermittent showers, we managed to eat in our sukkah every day through the holiday of sukkot, sometimes in a winter jacket and other days in t-shirts. Its been that kind of a fall. On a couple of evenings we waited to eat a bit later until the sky cleared. One evening we tolerated a bit of drizzle as we shared a cheese fondu with friends. A few evenings we had to clear the table and finish with dessert in the house. It was a beautiful week.



On Thanksgiving Monday, I took a break from piles of correcting to take a walk with Josh and Orianne. A friend of Josh's mentioned to him that he found a lot of mantis ooths in the bushes behind the parking lot of the local Walmart. We decided to take a walk. It was a beautiful late afternoon before sunset. The area is technically private property, once owned by Blue Bonnets race track, a small strip of land with tall grasses, wildflowers, and a few odd trees on a hill which looks like it was made by excavators dumping earth when the racetrack or the parking lot were originally built. The chain which marks the edge of the area is loosely ignored by the occasional dogwalker, but it is a fairly low trafficked area. We were interested in picking up a few mantis ooths and attaching them to convenient locations in our own yard. It seems that the local variety of mantises prefer to lay their eggs in areas with tall grass so the newly hatched babies have a good food source, as they tend to prefer crickets and grasshoppers to flies. Our garden does not seem to meet their criteria for an ideal nursery, which would account for why most of the hatchlings we had migrated and laid their eggs elsewhere.

We found no ooths, despite a lengthy stroll through tall grass. We did find wild roses, several beautiful crabapple trees in full fruit, and to our surprise and delight, two apple trees, one of which was covered in fruit at the perfect stage of ripeness. We had pockets, a plastic bag intended to collect ooths, and a couple of hats which we filled with some of the crispest, tastiest sweet/sour apples I have ever had. I am eating one as I write.

On our way home, we took a shortcut through an alleyway, and Josh spotted some perfect shaggymane mushrooms, just around the corner from our house.

Now that the holidays are over, we are waiting for the first frost to finish off the harvest and wrap up the garden for the year. Until I take the tomato plants down and dismantle the remaining haybales (the only ones left are those in which tomatoes are still growing), I cannot do the rest of the preparation for winter: cleaning up, weeding, laying out last year's compost, putting down new hay. Josh is following up with our friend Jack to try to find a source of hay. I am hoping for some soon, but it looks like the weather is holding out for another week at least.

Crazy weather!

We had something unheard of last week. Mid-September we had our first frost warning, a full month earlier than I remember ever having. Fortunately in my back yard, it got cold but it did not freeze. I did, however, scramble around after work to get sleeping bags and blankets on the tomato plants, and brought in all the pepper and basil plants which are in pots.

Just before the sudden, untimely plunge in temperature, we had been having an exceptionally hot September. Back to school meant piling into sweltering classrooms (air conditioning is not a basic commodity in our climate, especially buildings not usually in use July and August), and a sudden belated ripening of tomatoes. For two glorious weeks, I was picking a basket of ripe tomatoes daily. Despite Josh's boasts in past years, I have never had that many ripening simultaneously, and usually pick every 2-3 days. We managed to get our first batch of pasta sauce made, and I have been busy pureeing and freezing at a frenzied pace. Then suddenly our late but glorious harvest was slowed to a trickle with plunging temperatures. I am now picking anything moderately orange to ripen indoors. I moved the pots back outside, all but one plant which I missed, a monkeyface pepper. After 4 days indoors, all the leaves started falling off, so I picked the green peppers to ripen off the plant. I still have not figured out why that happens to my peppers.

The raspberry plants seem unconcerned with the radical weather shifts and are productive beyond belief right now. The berries are big and sweet and very popular. I hid yesterday's crop so I can share them at our Rosh Hashana family gathering.

I harvested the potatoes. The ones I put in the hay bales did not do as well as the ones that were on the ground directly covered in hay. I think the humidity was too high in the bales, and the potatoes I planted rotted too quickly. My yield was not too impressive but I did get some new red potatoes for the holidays. I harvested carrots yesterday, some nice Nantes ones, which are being served with dinner tomorrow night at my mother's. Isaac helped me pick the highest beans which no one else could reach.


I separated the beans from their pods and they are drying out now for soups and seed stock for next year.

The nasturtiums are doing phenomenal. They have climbed up the sunflowers and spread widely. They are in my most fertile area, right in the middle of the garden, and have huge leaves and flowers everywhere. So much for the advice to put them in crappy soil. .



The tall sunflowers are in bloom now, small heads but many blossoms per stalk like the shorter ones so they make a nice, cheery contrast to the general look of entropy in the garden. The cosmos are still going strong, and the hibiscus looks like it is ready to bloom, if it survives another cold night and frost warning tonight (with a high of 21 and sunny tomorrow, then going up to 27 by the weekend!). My gentians just bloomed (I always forget about them!) and have spread a bit despite tough competition from goosenecked loosestrife and periwinkle.

There are hundreds of green tomatoes which, barring frost, should be ripe by the weekend with more sun and heat coming. And my spring lettuce mix, which I have been selectively harvesting since June, is still going.

I have started thinking about next year. I have decided that we will be starting a new garden patch in the centre of the yard, where we get the most sun. The kids are not doing much playing in the yard at their ages, and we really have not been entertaining heavily. The new patch we started this year was not very productive, even by this year's particular standards.

Gardening in haybales was a mixed experience. For small items like broccoli and basil, it worked fantastic. The tomatoes were amazing but supporting them was a big challenge. We are looking at using very long stakes to make cages that start in the ground below the bales so they remain solid even if the bales don't. Also, I am thinking of using half'-bales so the structure has a lower profile. I also need to give items growing in bales more space because they really do get quite a bit bigger that the same plant in the earth.

Next year, the potatoes are going back into the ground. In fact, some of them, and more than half of the onions, are staying in the ground for another run next year.
We managed to get rid of most of the potato bacteria with hydrogen peroxide. Claude said that the same solution will kill off the mildew that covered half of the bee balm (one patch, not the other), as well as the phlox and the peas. I haven't tried, we had a lot of rain recently so I decided it was a losing battle at this point in the season, but I know for next year.


Vanier college started a little gardening project this summer, and small patches of mixed herbs, flowers and vegetables appeared in raised boxes and small beds. I noticed them this summer when my daughters went there for day camp. In the weekly staff newsletter, there was an article about the gardens and a call for donations. What great timing! I was beginning to be concerned about overruns of bee balm, gooseneck loosestrife and dozens of baby columbines cropping up. So last week, I did a bit of culling, and added in some small samples of periwinkle, creeping thyme and bits and pieces of other ground creepers and spreaders, and delivered them to Vanier, as well as gave some care packages to friends starting gardens. I am sure by the spring I will have more to donate, if anyone is interested.

The coyote pee was doing a fine job repelling hungry local mamals until the sunflowers started to go to seed. Despite refreshing the pee containers (not sure refreshing is the right word), the scent of sunflowers must have overpowered all else, and I ended up with a feeding frenzy of squirrels. It turns out the none of the varieties I planted this year had large enough seeds for people to enjoy. I know this from the few quasi ripe heads I managed to rescue, as well as the seeds scattered everywhere on the ground by squirrels. Now I have tons of birds dropping in to snack on the remnants, so maybe I won't have a jungle of sunflowers growing everywhere next spring.

I also seemed to have gotten a handle on the aphids on the apple and crab apple trees. Not eliminated completely due to my lack of consistency in spraying, but definitely controlled by the soap and baking soda solution. The pepper plants seem unaffected, which is important given I will probably be hauling them all inside again tonight.

We are coming up on the Jewish holidays, and I may be even less available to blog in the coming weeks, not like I have been prolific in writing this year. I thank all of my readers for their patience and devotion to following my rambling thoughts and observations and sharing my joy and wonder as I am starting to feel less like a complete beginner.

To all my Jewish readers, I would like to wish you all a very happy, healthy, prosperous and peaceful new year. To all my gardening readers, may you be spared early frost and have a bountiful harvest.

From Chloe's garden, a mini-fruit bowl