What's been happening in July

This summer I have really been falling behind on the blog. Lots of things to write about, but I have just had no time to sit at the computer and write. Today, back from 2 weeks of vacation, I am going to catch up, but in installments. My first post will be an update on my own back yard. I will be posting about some of our vacation adventures in the next day or two.

Nights have been cold, and we have had a lot of rain and clouds the past few weeks. Not only has that been a big drag for Josh and I who have lived in our tent for most of the past 16 days, but it has had some interesting effects on the garden. Usually my biggest concern when we are on summer vacation is the tomato harvest, which was a non-issue this year because the tomatoes are still green. Not one single ripe tomato in the month of July. We decided instead of a long distance trip, we would camp out at Allan Reid's new place near Lachute (an hour from home) which allowed us a longer time away with short trips into Montreal to restock food and harvest every 4-5 days. The girls are still at sleep-away camp, and Isaac stayed home while we were away, so occasional check-ins were a good plan. He is not particularly interested in the garden, so this worked well for everyone.

Although tomatoes are behind, the sunflowers were gorgeous early bloomers. We still have a few later varieties, including a couple of giant ones still to show their colours. Josh refilled the coyote pee containers today, and hung one on the leaves of the biggest sunflower in hope that will keep the squirrels from decapitating it.

The beach peas did not do well, a few attempted to grow and were demolished by something (possibly Japanese beetles, there were a few in that part of the garden). The weeds growing closest to that area are infested with black aphids, so that may have been an issue as well. This year there seemed to be at least three different variety of aphid (small black, large black and green), and the local ladybugs took some notice but did not make much of a dent. My attempts to kill them with insectigone and earlier in the summer with the dish soap/baking soda solution likewise did not do much good. I was not very consistent in my efforts, though. We need to work on it better this month. Time for a consultation with Claude.

My neighbour, Iulia, had a knee surgery which has limited her mobility for the past few weeks, and thus her ability to garden. She has been using her time productively by painting some gorgeous new paintings. I have been dutifully photographing material for her from the garden as well as landscapes across Quebec for her inspirations. She is working on a couple of paintings of sunflowers, which is why I have taken so many pictures of them this year (they are so beautiful!!).

On one of our short trips back into Montreal, we harvested all our garlic and hung it to dry in the bike shed. I also did the first basil harvest. I had fewer plants this year, but they did spectacularly well. They were in pots, in hay bales and in a couple of the concrete blocks (when I ran out of sunflowers to plant). There were a few varieties and they all did well except for some I put in the hay bale a bit too near the tomatoes which ended up shaded too much. Josh made basil before we headed back up north with fresh picked raspberries, salad greens, garlic, pesto, green and burgundy beans, snow peas and sugar snaps, broccoli and Swiss chard. I planted bok choy in one of the empty rows where the garlic had been, as the first batch I tried never grew. I have been selectively harvesting the lettuce (taking the big leaves and leaving the small ones to continue growing), for most of the past month, and they are still going. Only one plant has bolted, and I am letting it go to seed for next year. I also have a surprise patch of chicory, both blue and pink, where I had lettuce last year. I think it was in the mesclun mix I planted last year, and either it only sprouted this year, or it blooms the second year maybe? I need to do some research on chicory. It's very pretty between my tomato cages.

The cucumber experiment has been mixed results. We do have some small cucumbers now in the shape of half blown balloons (round at one end, skinny at the other), and did manage to avoid cucumber beetle problems (yay!) but the hanging pots dried out very quickly and even though we had a lot of rain, I suspect they would look a lot more robust if I had been watering them daily as well. Likewise the poppies (perennials) in the centre of the yard dried out and yellowed early this month, and never bloomed. The calendulas I planted next to them survived but are small, and only one has bloomed to date. The poppies (annuals) and calendulas that went into the new patch in front of the bee balm and bergamot patch on the left side of the garden are huge and all blooming in a riot of colour. Unfortunately, the petals of the poppies are so delicate that they fall apart in the rain, so we have not managed to get much time to see them or footage on film. Lisa kindly took a picture for us of the first one to bloom when we were camping. There are lots of green hot peppers but nothing red yet.

Our garlic were mostly small, with a few robust heads here and there. I can't tell what factors made for more or less success in the garden, but my friend Jasmyn commented that generally small cloves produce small heads. My garlic definitely appear to be smaller than their immediate progenitors. More of this when I write about our trip to the farm up north. I alternated the garlic with the carrots again this year, and planted the carrots much more sparsely than last summer, but they are not very well developed. I will see how they fare by late September, but am thinking about giving them their own area next year.

The front garden has been well balanced this year. There was always something in bloom even when there was more foliage than flower. Our new lilies planted last year started to bloom, but I suspect it will take a year or two before they are really robust. I put some of the orange day lilies on the corner of the property where nothing else has done well but weeds (call it giving in, but they are likely to be happy there.)

I came back from our camping trip today and found my aunt had left a bag of green onion ends tied to my front door knob (thank you, Katie!), which I promptly popped into the garden in the back where the beach peas had failed, as well as in whatever free spots were left in the green onion/savoury pot.

While harvesting beans, I watched a baby sparrow being coaxed to fly by two adult sparrows (parents?) in my carrot patch. Very sweet!

Canada Day Garden Fireworks

We had a very wet spring. I have watered the flowers in the front of my house perhaps twice since April. I was looking at my tomatoes and despairing that I would have any kind of harvest. Then I went back to my June posts for the past two years and lo and behold, my photos told a different tale. My tomatoes were just as small this time of year and did very well. In fact, my garden looked nicer this year than in Junes past. My birthday is in June, and two years ago I had a party and despaired that late June none of my flowers were in bloom. I had a lull of a few weeks. This year, I have had things in flower fairly consistently. In part I think it is a random function of weather.  My tulips were very late, my early spring flowers lasted longer because of cold, wet weather, and it got hot very suddenly which woke up the roses, lilies and primroses. My garden has shifted from mostly purple to an explosion of colours in time for Canada day.

 

The past few days have become excessively hot. Though the peppers and tomatoes are loving it, I am not. We had a party last week, and it poured rain most of the day. Today we have a family lunch and I hope it is not too hot. The prediction is thunderstorms tonight. I had ambitions to weed this week, but it is has been too hot to inspire me to work outside. My gardening and blogging recently has been distracted as well by Game of Thrones (I am now on season 4 so should be caught up before it interferes with the harvest), and a particularly active social life recently which has not revolved around my garden. 

This blog post is mostly going to be photos, to keep track in time of where things are at. I will, however, update on my experiments. The storebought cucumbers are doing well in their suspended pots. The ones I planted from seed never grew, or sprouted and died. I have no idea if the cucumber beetles have not found them yet or won't attack them so far off the ground, but so far, so good. The tomatoes and basil and peppers in the hay bales are generally doing better than the ones in the ground and in pots. The sunflowers look small and scrawny. The rose bush is spectacular, and I have hundreds of columbine hybrid babies coming up (any takers are welcome!). I have harvested the garlic scapes and gave out bags of them as party favours, and Josh pureed and froze a lot of them. We have been eating salad from the garden, stretched by storebought lettuce. We discovered that wood sorrel can replace lemon grass in Thai sauces, which is a good thing because my garden is overrun with it. It is in all my salads too these days. The strawberries are ripe and the raspberries are getting there too. The bergamot is in bloom. 

Today is July 1st (Canada day), I have no work. The kids are still asleep. I woke up at 6:30 am and couldn't fall back asleep. I have family visiting from out of town this afternoon, and the weather forecast is for 33 degrees. So, still in my pyjamas, I go out to weed, water and harvest. I got a nice bunch of strawberries, salad greens, the last of the garlic scapes and some mint for mint lemonade, which is a favourite around here. I was planning to spray for aphids, but as I put up a load of laundry standing next to the apple tree, I noticed a rather fat, contented looking ladybug making a feast of the aphids and decided to wait until tomorrow.

My Gardening community

Just after I did my big spring planting, I was walking in my neighbourhood and saw a fluorescent yellow sign that got me very excited. It said "plant sale," and it was posted right in front of the home of the best gardener in my neighbourhood, a fellow named Allan who told me three years back that he was not having any more plant sales. He didn't for the past two years, and I was surprised to see him giving it one more try. Allan says that preparing for the plant sale is very hard on his back, but he is having one more by popular demand.

Allan has a spectacular garden. One of his secrets, he revealed to me, is pouring 40 new bags of black earth into it each year. Given the square footage of his garden is at most 1/3 what mine is, and that it is exclusively flowers, that is very impressive. The results are extraordinary. He has been gardening for many years, and has moved things around and tried new things, which makes his a much more advanced garden than mine in all ways. He also has more light than I do which allows for a bigger variety. Allan sells off rootings, cuttings, seedlings and babies of the plants in his garden, many of which are rarer cultivars than what one can pick up at the local hardware, nursery or Walmart. He has been trading off and ordering online for a nice interesting mix, and is willing to share offshoots at bargain prices. The last time he had a plant sale, he told me that the proceeds were being donated to the nursing home where he worked as a nurse before he retired. Allan is as unique and special as his garden.

The best part of Allan's plant sale is that I get go tour his garden, because he stays home mostly until he sells out, and is open to anyone coming into the back yard to shop and chat. He told me he had people drive in from Saint Sauveur (about 45 minutes aways from the city) to shop in his back yard. I told all my gardening friends about the sale, which gave me the opportunity to go back numerous times in the past couple of weeks with different people in tow.

Just before I saw the sign up, I had been discussing with a colleague from work a plan to help her set up her garden. When I saw the sign, I told her the next day that she had to come with me to Allan's and then to take some stuff from my garden to get her started. Later this summer I am going to ask if I can have some pictures of her new garden, to see how the colony is doing at her place. I took Iulia over with me, and then Julie. I bought a Monk's hood, some fancy new daylilies and some phlox which I planted right in the vegetable garden so they get enough sun. By my third or fourth visit to Allan's, he decided to give me a "frequent customer" gift of an elephant ear hosta, the last of his babies. He told me that he was given the original plant as a gift and felt that it was good karma to do the same for me. His hostas are the most beautiful I have ever seen. I hope to do justice to its baby. I find it odd, that I have never bought or even asked for a hosta, and somehow I have a growing assortment of them which were all gifts. Iulia bought a few fancy ones, and I suspect that some of her plain green ones will be bumped out to make room for them, meaning I might have a few more hostas to accomodate.

Julie asked if I could give her a hand planting the things she bought, some black eyed susans and sedems, and to rearrange some of her plants between her garden and her vertical wall garden. She had put in some impatiens, not realizing that was what they were, which we thought would do better horizontally. Julie noticed that after the winter there were signs that the wood of the pallet she was using had started to rot, which was a positive sign that it was not chemically treated with preservatives. This means she can use it for food plants if she wants to. I noted that she had planted cosmos in one of the upper rows. Julie has no idea what they look like, and I have no idea how a tall wispy plant like that will do in a pallet, but I will check in periodically during the summer and see how it is turning out. We put in a few perennials which spread and are curious to see how those grow! Julie is growing another upside down tomato plant and some cucumbers in pots. She has big pots and built in containers on the walls of her large balcony, which gets a lot of sun and is a much hotter and dryer climate than my garden. It is interesting to see how things grow differently there.

You will note that I did not post any more pictures, mostly because I am blogging two days in a row and I have no new pictures today. I did, however, decide that I am long overdue to capture my garden plan for this year, so that next year I will be able to figure out what is what and where things have to be planted to keep my rotation going. We expanded the garden in two ways that will make rotation easier for next year than it was the past few years. We opened a new section up between the shed and the laundry platform, and I put one row of tomatoes which take up exactly one-third of the space. I plan to alternate the cage over to the middle next year and then to the front, giving me a three year rotation cycle for tomatoes, alternating with different things every year. The other section was created by laying down haybales coated in fertilizer and planting directly in the haybales. At the end of the summer, we will break up the bales and take out the potatoes (two more plants sprouted today!!), and spread it over the area so we can plant under where the hay was, and move new haybales onto areas of the garden which were heavily used the past few years. Under the hay, the land will lie fallow and we grow on top instead!

So I spent a lot of time this evening trying to draw with paint an even more accurate scale model of my garden. I think I am getting better every year. I even put a bit of colour and shapes on it!

My wet, purple garden

 This past month it has rained most days. We had a few really nice, sunny days. But mostly it has rained. About a week after my last post we had thunderstorms (in May!) and one sudden downpour in which it hailed. I ran outside to check the tomatoes, and fortunately everything managed to survive. That was the coldest night we had. In the past few weeks, the daytime temperatures have been seasonable, sometimes chilly but generally hitting a high around 20. Nights are cold, but well above the risk of frost. 

These weather conditions have been a real boon for some things in the garden. Snails and slugs are thriving. There is a bumper crop of lily beetles, those jewel red beetles which devour oriental lilies and stargazers and all those types of lilies. I have discovered as well that they lay eggs around the plants, and their larvae cover themselves in disgusting slimy fecal matter and climb up the lilies devouring leaves layer by layer. Last year I noticed some of these beetles, this year they are all over my oriental lilies. I have been using the old fashioned pick and squish approach, but they are proliferating and destroying faster than I can keep them at bay. Today I hosed down the plant and the area around them with diatomaceous earth. I have resisted using this stuff outside, because despite the fact that it is "all natural" (it is powdered fossilized plankton, and works by getting into the joints of insects' exoskeletons and rips them apart), it does not discriminate and will kill any insects that comes into contact with it, including bees. I am hoping I will do enough damage to the beetles before the next rain washes it off.

We have already put out another batch of Slug-be-gone, because the snails are everywhere, and I have holes in my baby lettuce, and have seen very small baby slugs which likely hatched out long after the rain washed away my first generous helping of Slug-be-gone. Orianne, who once kept a pet snail in a jar for months (and called him/her Sparkle, believe it or not) has become a real help in keeping the snail population at bay with snail tossing, away from our garden and onto the street. Our street is not very busy, so the snails do stand a chance of surviving, but may not end up back on my side of the street. 

Last week we had a visit of a youth orchestra from Guelph Ontario who joined my daughter Zara's string orchestra for a stellar performance. One of the reasons for my unseasonable silence on this blog is that I volunteered to "help" organize home hospitality for the visiting group. As the only one who volunteered, I ended up not just "helping" but essentially organizing the Montreal end of the visit. Once I took the pressure off, a number of other parents did step up and offer to host the kids, and did a lovely job of making the group feel welcome and all had a wonderful time. So getting back to snails. Upon arrival at our house, my daughter Orianne immediately took the youngest of the visitors staying with us, a lovely 12 year old, and introduced her to the sport of snail tossing. I did not see them for an hour or so after that, but heard giggles galore. Anyone interested in trying is welcome to come over anytime, we seem to have an ample supply.

One of my fellow Suzuki parents (also a great gardener) asked me if I had black aphids this summer, there seemed to be a lot of them around. I had never seen a black aphid (she used a French name for them which I was not familiar with, but described them so that it was clear what she was referring to), but made sure to check what was curling the top leaves of my orpines and sure enough, I have black aphids on the orpines and green ones starting on the newest leaves of my crab apples. Iulia had a bottle of Safer's which I borrowed and sprayed, and later when I hit the lilies with the diatomaceous earth, I put some of that on the orpines as well. 

Another unwanted guest on our block is the groundhog, which we seemed to have repelled last summer, but is terrorizing the local vegetables and annoying the gardeners on my block. He (she?) seemed to have moved in under Iulia's shed, and she bought some of our coyote pee and has been marking her territory. Today, we were chatting in my back yard and I saw the groundhog run through my garlic. I gave chase and he climbed the fence and ran into Iulia's yard. Now we know how he is getting around (I did not know he can climb chain link fences). We are looking into humane traps or other methods. I think all the rain may have decreased the effectiveness of our coyote pee dispensers.

I am very pleased with how my flower garden is doing. It seems that I have passed a turning point, where a lot of things I planted are settled enough to bloom and spread. All my irises were in flower this past week, and lots of columbines (not all because I have a lot of babies coming up now), peonies, centaurus, creeping thyme, clematis, purple sage, . The general effect is lots of purple, with hints of white, red and pink,  which changes the whole feel of the garden. Once the lilies start, I will move into yellow and orange again. My tulips lasted right into the first week of June, long after everyone elses' were long gone, and the irises took over. So far this year, I have not had any gaps in blooming from April right through to mid-June. Last year, I think I had almost a month, mid-June to mid July which was pretty sparse, but the weather pattern is different so I cannot predict what will happen this year.

The mystery flowers which Iulia translated from Romanian as "National carpet" are actually sweet williams and are in bloom finally. They are biennial and do not blossom the first year. I have one patch in the back yard in full bloom, and a patch on the side of the house which are destined to show their colours next year (although one is ready to go). Iulia tells me they reseed and keep blooming every year, and spread. I have a lot of things spreading, so next summer I will need to find more people looking to expand their gardens to keep mine under control.

In the back yard, I have a few of the annual poppies coming up, though most did not. I planted a variety of sunflower seeds, some new ones I bought, and some from older packages, as well as a row of Alex’s Kong variety and a few I kept from the pretty multicoloured ones I grew two or three years ago. Half of what I planted, including the Kongs, did not grow. I fed the remainder of the Kong seeds I saved to our bird Coco (who was very grateful). I put a bunch in the front of the house too, and only one or two sprouted. I had doubled up on the seeds and so had enough to spread them around. When we expanded the garden, we put the concrete blocks in strategic spots and planted sunflowers in most of them. In the end I did not have enough sprouts to fill all of the blocks, so some got peppers or basil instead. I put calendula in two areas where I have poppies, and in one bed they all grew, and in the other, very few did. I also had very sporadic results from nasturtiums. I had a few returnees in the garden beds, but nothing in the boxes and containers sprouted despite there being plenty of seeds from last year, and a full pack I bought this year.  Julie gave me some of her extra seeds which had already sprouted, so I have some in the front and side of the house.

I did a huge clean up of weeds with Josh two weeks ago, and restrung the morning glory area so hopefully this year they will climb up the tree again. The attempt to use chicken wire last year was a bust, so I pulled off the chicken wire that covered the area horizontally, allowing me to get in there and clear the weeds out properly. I also removed the grass which had infiltrated the cosmos, and dug out the roots of the purple bellflowers. Josh did a good job on the goutweed (still one patch to go off to the side). The next two weeks were very busy for both of us, and so I have a huge job of weeding to do yet again tomorrow, this time in the vegetable mostly. We have a lot of baby trees popping up, and if I don’t keep at it, I will have a forest here. It makes me think of the Little Prince who had to weed out the Baobabs to protect his rose, and his planet. Some of these baby trees take hold and it can sometimes feel like you are uprooting a Baobab.

 My cucumbers have been another problem. Not one of the seeds I planted grew, or maybe one did but died within a few days. I suspect that putting them in suspended containers to foil the beetles had the side effect of it being harder to keep the soil as wet as the ground. This may sound strange as it has been raining so much, but the week or two after I planted, we had some very hot dry days and I think I did not water the cukes quite as much as they needed. Fortunately, Julie had given me a few of her extra cucumber plants which she bought, and I picked up a cucumber plant at a local oriental store hoping it was one of those cool Japanese cucumbers which we had three years ago, and those cukes have all survived and are doing well. The tomatoes need more sun and are a bit small still. The beans and peas seem to have something eating them, not sure if it is bacterial or yet another beetle. 

I have been keeping an eye on how things are doing in the hay bales, and so far they are doing at least as well as the same plants are in the garden. Lots of weeds are sprouting up too. Only one of the pieces of potato Josh planted has grown, but it is doing well and the potatoes will be nice and clean and easy to remove in the fall. It is a nice experiment, and so far working well. 

Planting weekend

Josh and I spent about 25 hours today this weekend between the two of us, planting and weeding. I have no idea how the weeds are doing so incredibly well when everything else is so far behind. We are trying to do a very thorough and deep job of removing them on the theory that if we work extra hard and do it right the first time, they won't all come back. Iulia is convinced this works. I have a few years of catching up to do.  

A few  days ago my lawn was green and relative short. After a few rainy days, I found my back yard turned yellow from all the dandelions. I do like them, but I try to be a good neighbour, because if I let them go, they end up spreading next door where Ovidiu is having a constant battle to have a perfect lawn. So I asked Josh to have a go at rooting them out. It took him a good part of the day.


My nephews were visiting from Toronto with their parents, who dropped them off to stay with us, knowing that there would be pretty loose parental supervision. Kids were running in and out, with watergun and nerf guns and foam swords. We fed them breakfast and left them to their own devices, and they seemed to have had a pretty nice time. I barely left the back yard.


We did some work last week on landscaping the front yard as well as setting up new beds in the back. Josh picked up a few organic fertilizers from his parents and from Alex in Ontario which they credit for their unbelievable size and quantity of produce, so this week we will be trying it out. Some of it is made from fish, and I think there were epsom salts too. I will give a full accounting of what we are going to do and what results we have with it. Josh spent some time laying out paths in the front yard with the pile of stones he rescued last year from an underpass reconstruction (they were dumped in a vacant lot and Josh saved them from the dump. We had planned to put them out to kill the grass and then remove them to dig and put a base down, but Chloe and Abraham have recommended we just leave them on the surface and let them settle in over time. The also suggest that instead of getting a jackhammer and ripping up our cracked cement walkway, we just use the cement as a base and get some sand on top and build our stone walkway above it. I was very pleased to be able to shout at  the kids to use the pathways and not trounce on my flower beds!

I managed to get around most of the tomatoes I sprouted into the ground. Based on my map from last year I have around the same number of plants (same number of cages, anyhow) so I think we are okay. I put garlic in all the areas I had tomatoes and potatoes last summer, and in order to find areas which have not been tomatoed to death, I had to open up some new ground. We started a new garden bed in a part of the yard which may not have enough light, but I am trying anyways. We also decided to put one of the tomato cages on top of hay bales, beside the broccoli, sweet basil, thai basil and celery (found a place for them!!). I have another hay bale section to plant tomorrow. I also planted the onions, and fit about 70 of them in the bathtub.

My seeds are starting to sprout. I have seen baby calendulas and sunflowers coming out, and some cosmos sprouts. The lilac are starting to bloom, and the tulips are finally catching up to the rest of the city and blossoming. The crab apple is flowering, mostly along the branch bent to make the arch. The magnolias all over the city went into bloom quite late, but had their big show starting about a week ago. Most are dropping petals now. Mine is still quite stubbornly shut. We are really hoping the tree is doing okay. I have to do more research on what to expect from a young magnolia tree.
Julie came by yesterday afternoon to swap seeds and seedlings. I got two cucumbers and some tiny sprouts from the chocolate cherry tomatoes (she kept seeds from last year, I didn't and was grateful to have some!), and some of her extra seeds to add to my "seed bank" for next year. I told her not to buy next year before we go through what we have. I gave her some San Marzano tomatoes, basil, onion sets, and some periwinkle and other small perennials for her land garden and vertical garden, as well as the last of my brother's purple morning glory seeds (mine have been reseeding nicely for a while).


Josh and I spent some time today contemplating the corner of our property which despite much effort continues to be infested with creeping bellflowers. I had put down a lot of hay, which in some places accidentally produces some lovely, hardy grass where I did not want it, and in other places fertilized the creeping bellflowers so well that they are growing faster and bigger than ever. This did have the advantage of making them thick enough and the ground soft enough to be able to get them out by the root if we pull them up one at a time. This is an exercise to try the patience of a zen monk, but we are taking turns working a patch at a time every day. I am determined to do a fantastic and deep job of weeding by June and hopefully we will have an easier time the rest of the summer and years to come. Nothing that I have planted in that corner has done particularly well, it gets full light part of the day, is too close to the spruce tree which probably has acidified the soil, and I have really not been terribly generous with compost or manure in that part of the garden so I should not be surprised that the poppies never came back, the sunflowers were tiny, the oriental lilies did not thrive (I moved them to a sunnier spot), the dianthus became completely inseparable from the grass the grew into its area, and the occasional bicycle or snow plow do significant damage. I gave up today and moved some of the day lilies over the the corner to let them take over. If they don't survive there, nothing will and I will just have to go back to grass.  I am going to have to move some irises and tulips around once the lilies spread some more, but I think it will look a lot better.

I tucked sunflowers into every spare cranny I could find in the back yard. I think I had five or six varieties, including some Kong seeds from Alex and a few of the mini multicoloured variety I had a few years ago and have never found again. Josh picked up a few annuals including some pretty red sage flowers (not pineapple though). I gave Julie back her barely alive pineapple sage, with the hope that my carefully keeping it alive through the winter was not in vain. If it comes back, we will see if we can split it, although I am not sure I have the space for two of them to overwinter in my dining room. It is easier to expand my gardening space than my house.


Just as I finished planting today, friends of ours dropped by and said they had a couple of packs of seeds for us. Sigh. I just managed to fit everything in, even a few potatoes, broccoli, chard, bok choy, coriander, basil, four types of tomato (I think the Amish paste never sprouted, so we will have to try that one again next year), three types of peas, four types of beans, two types of strawberries, four types of mint and I heard a mourning dove in the lilacs (I have no pear tree, and no partridges in my neighbourhood).  We rigged up a new system for the cucumbers, by putting geotextile in a milk crate ziptied to my gazebo frame with chicken wire both above and below so it can climb where it wants to, but hopefully not succumb to cucumber beetles. I planted beans and peas along the edges, lettuce and bok choy underneath. I am hoping this year the system will work better. I even left some space at the back corners for the cherry tomatoes once the plants are bigger (Julie started her seedlings late. I am growing three types of cucumbers in hope that at least one variety is able to resist the beetles. A pickling cucumber, some English or lebanese cukes from Julie, can't remember which, and something called salt and pepper cucumbers. Wish me luck!

The crab apples were in full bloom with the arch thick with flowers. I suppose later in the summer there will be lots of crab apples falling on my head whenever I pass through, but right now it is breathtaking! It is still wired and tied to hold the position in place, but hopefully those will come off this summer.

Slow spring

One week into May and it has been cold and rainy for days on end. Josh and I took a drive up to the Laurentians with a friend on Sunday and the farms along the highway were so flooded, they looked like lakes. The tiny river that runs past my in-law's property in eastern Ontario flooded its banks farther than it ever has. It has been unseasonably cold too, with temperatures hovering at zero at night. I have not yet put away our winter coats and boots, and have not washed our blankets yet because it has been too cold and wet to hang them out to dry. I usually do this mid-April as part of my Passover cleaning.  Yesterday, mid-morning, I actually saw snowflakes blowing about outside, but they did not last once they hit ground. Today was sunny finally, and it started to warm up. Despite the chill, I have started biking to work, but wearing my winter coat and gloves still. Iulia has bought some annuals yesterday, but even she has not planted them yet (she was so excited to show me her new stuff she called me over to see them, standing in her doorway in pyjamas at midnight, when I came home from an evening at a friend's house). The conditions have been ideal for early snail and slug proliferation, so I made haste after seeing a few rather large ones munching on some forgotten carrot which survived the winter, and put out two full bags of slug-b-gone, one of my sponsors for this years garden. 

I would like to take a moment to thank another one of my sponsors. In my last post I described how I learned about treated seeds. I decided to call Vesey's and order the untreated variety of the burgundy beans. I described what had happened, and the person who took my call offered to send a replacement free of charge, without even asking me to send back the treated beans. I am not sure what to do with the original pack. My gardening friends and acquaintances tend to be either those who buy flats and transplant, or those who grow from seed and though perhaps not strictly organic, would likely share my reaction to planting seeds so obviously un-organic. The package warns that one should not eat them or feed them to animals either, which is my usual means of disposing of excess seeds or sprouts. I am open to any offers to take these magic beans off my hands. I promise I won't tell anyone I gave them to  you.

Despite the slow, wet start, things are busy popping up in my garden. Once again, I see things that I recognize but still don't know well enough to remember what they are. I am pleased to say that I am getting better at recognizing the weeds I really don't want, and with all the rain, they were far easier to pull out than usual. Feeling like I got a great head start, Iulia reminded me that those were merely the leftovers from last year's weeds, and their seedlings have yet to appear. I found four poppies (perennial ones, I think) returning from last year in the back, unless they weeds. There are also some things growing that did not flower last year and I am not sure what they are because I kept planting different seeds in that spot until something came up. I don't know what I would do without this blog to keep track of things. I will do research on past posts and try to figure it out. I have also discovered a few unharvested garlics, carrots and some red oak lettuce which self seeded I suppose, and is loving the weather. I had planned to put lettuce somewhere else, but it seems the decision was taken for me. 

I still have only a vague idea of where I will plant things this year. It has been too wet outside for me to spend enough time mapping things out. I know that I will need to expand some sections and leave some areas fallow. We have been thinking of trying a new technique which Chloe has been raving about, growing directly in hay bales (actually she's trying in straw bales, but we have a motherlode of hay thanks to another sponsor, Jack the master gardener who has hay producing country neighbours, a truck and a brother he visits who lives around the corner from us.

I spent some time this week cleaning up and looking around, picking up the garbage that always accumulates in my yard before the lilies get tall enough to catch the debris. As usual, my flowers are slower to bloom than everyone else on the block. I have had one daffodil, one hyacinth, three siberian squills, periwinkles galore, lungwort buds, one single tulip bud not yet open and a hint of magnolia buds not yet ripe. There is much green though. The grass doesn't mind the cold wet weather and has lost its winter fade. I see signs of life on both rose bushes, peony shoots, lots of columbines, including one growing way out where I had tomatoes last summer. I moved that one to the front and am curious what colour it will be and how it got there. I also removed the chicken wire which we put horizontally over the area around the spruce tree where I had morning glories. That particular experiment failed, as the vines did not understand what we wanted them to do so they did not make it up the sides of the tree. I am going back to using string, but kept the chicken wire we wrapped around the base of the tree.

After doing some research on line on re-planting begonia, cana and dahlia roots, I got cold feet and shoved them back in the basement for a couple more weeks. Laure, my companion through hours of youth orchestra rehearsals and fellow shade-gardener, told me that she has never managed to get re-planted begonias to bloom. I am trying anyways, but may end up picking up more dahlias, begonias and canas.

My next shopping list includes coyote urine, sheep manure, black earth and maybe a few annuals. Also, I am going to get another clematis to put on the right side of my front door where the Blue bird Rose of sharon bush has refused to accommodate me by surviving. Of course, Iulia's is doing fine. I plan to take vicarious pleasure from hers and planted the magnolia right near her windows too in exchange. Nice to have great neighbours.

So thanks to all my sponsors, supporters and fans who are making this wet and lousy spring more fun and promising. 

Do beans get tuberculosis?

Last week we had some pretty extreme weather. One day the temperature hit 26 and we all shed our parkas and put on shorts and tank tops, and the next day it was -10 and it snowed. So while everyone was catching colds trying to adjust, the crocuses decided they were ready and popped up right through the snow. I thought about what a pretty picture that would be, but by the time I had my camera out, the snow had melted from that part of the garden. Lots of other green things have been popping up despite the temperatures staying on the lower end, though hovering around zero at night the past few days. And with the green things, I found some surprise carrots (with no tops, just exposed orange) and the first slug happy to find an early feast. Slug-b-gone is back on my shopping list. Sigh.

My seeds arrived a couple of weeks after my last post. I have not had time to post, because last week was Passover and I barely had time to plant my seeds, being ridiculously busy cleaning my house from top to bottom, cooking and generally being domestic. I probably should have taken the time to read the fine print on the seed packets, because too late I realized that some of the peppers I bought were supposed to have been planted 6 weeks earlier. Oh well. Some of the varieties mature in 65 days (ring of fire), some in 73 (flame hybrid thai peppers) and some in 80 (mayas). This means that for a decent pepper crop, I will have to plan to have lots of manure in October so they will survive the move inside better than last year's batch. The monkeyface peppers did not even say how long they take, but the recommended a later planting time than the mayas so there is some hope there. I got some new tomato seeds from my mother-in-law called Amish paste, and I planted some of those, the steak tomato seeds given to me by a client at our day centre who knows I garden, and san marzanos, totally forgetting about the Black Krims. Josh reminded me about them a week later and I got some of those planted too. Where I am going to put all this stuff is a bit of a puzzler, especially when I noticed the garlic popping up beautifully (did I really plant that much garlic?!). I will be expanding the garden space a bit to fit it, especially as we are trying broccoli again, which takes up a lot of space.

More on the topic of organic versus non-organic seeds, I had a bit of a surprise when I looked at the packet of Royal Burgandy beans and found that they were treated with captan, streptomycin, apron, thiram, and underneath it says do not use for food or feed. Apron? Captan? What the heck is that? Clearly, these are not organic. I did a bit of reseach: apron, captan and thiram are antifungals, and streptomycin is, as I guessed from the name, an antibiotic. It is used to treat tuberculosis. Beans have tuberculosis? Really?? I went back to the Vesey's web site to see if there was anything which should have signalled to me that these beans would not be appropriate for my generally but not strictly organic garden. I found the error of my order. There were two options, for treated and for untreated seeds. Incidentally, they were identical in price. I am going to contact Vesey's and see if I can make an exchange. I am now going to be more careful when I make orders. I would expect that there should be a big red warning that these seeds contain potent antibiotics, even a pop up saying "are you sure you want to get these seeds? They have been treated with fungicides and other naughty things!" So to add to my last list of things to know when ordering seeds, "treated" indicates definitely not organic.

My last order, for onion sets, has turned up today, but as no one was home for the delivery, we pick it up tomorrow from the post office. They arrive just in time for planting, which meant that I need to finally make some decisions about where they are going to go. As I really do not like doing things in a disorganized manner, this also means I have to decide where everything else is going to go. So I ducked outside after dinner and sketched out some ideas of where I will put things this year. The onions are going into the bathtub, and I will weed out any savory that sprouts. We are pretty sick of savory after discovering how huge it gets and how well it reseeds (oops). Josh liked that idea, but pointed out that my placement of carrots would be too shaded by tomatoes. I am trying to find places where there have not been tomatoes in the past year. I also did not think about where to put broccoli, and forgot completely about potatoes. I have to be careful where to put those because some diseases cross between potatoes and tomatoes. Also, I covered the area where I had the cucumbers with hay bales to try to kill off any cucumber beetle babies, and plan to keep that section undercover this year.

I am planning to add some pics soon. As of yesterday I had three crocuses blooming, one Siberian squill, and a daffodil budding, but not much to photograph. I am waiting for the magnolia which has had buds since sometime in February but is biding its time. I am also going to work on my garden design and post that once it is more advanced (I have learned not to say finalized until at least mid summer!), now that the onions have a designated spot, I have time to plan the rest.