Road trip!

This spring has been most unusual. According to records, we had the warmest average temperatures for the month of March in Montreal, but this does not tell the whole story. While the temperature soared to 30 celsius with high humidity, it was followed by torrential rains and a drop down to 3 or 4 degrees above zero. I have taken out our summer wardrobe, worn shorts and then pulled out my winter coat again. It has been surprisingly happy weather for the garden, if I can judge by how big and green and blooming everything is. In fact, many flowers that usually bloom over the course of six weeks have all been up at once. Tulips, magnolias and hyacinths overlapped with forget-me-nots, irises and columbines, and the lilies and poppies are starting. I have managed to keep the lily beetles at bay with some liberal use of diatomaceous earth, so my oriental lilies are  doing okay and ready to bloom too. And this is only June 3, a mere two weeks past the frost line.

After my last post, I shamelessly advertised it on Facebook and one reply was from an old friend, Alyson Champ, offering me free old sheep manure. In other contexts, this may not sound like a kind, generous offer, but it came at the perfect time for me. Josh had bought a car full of earth and manure about a month ago, and I had just reached the end of my stock and only covered around 2/3 of my rapidly expanding garden. I have been laying out the manure slowly. Because of the explosion of creeping bell flowers, I wanted to remove them section by section, going right down to the deepest roots (some 2 feet deep), before fertilizing, so that the plants I wanted benefited. This has been a very slow, and very painful process, delayed by sore shoulders and a hint of carpal tunnel symptoms that suggested limiting weed digging activities to a few hours per week, well spaced out. I then requested Josh and my son Isaac to help out, with Isaac giving me a few hours of dandelion removal, and Josh on dandelion and bellflowers too. This has speeded up the process somewhat, but there is still a long way to go. In the meantime, I was offered as much well aged, composted sheep manure as I could haul in my car. I mentioned my plan to my neighbour Iulia, about visiting my artist friend's farm, and she asked if she can come and bring her daughters. As my schedule is fairly flexible these days, my preference was to go on a weekday while the kids are at school, so I suggested a second visit at a later date. My friend Allan, who plans on raising goats, was interested in meeting Alyson and discussing her experience with small scale farming (she has chickens, ducks and sheep, and has raised turkeys as well), so I offered him to come along for the ride, and some manure for his new garden he is starting this year up at the Shire.

We got off to a confused start of the day. Allan no longer has a cell phone, and we kept missing each other the day before so I was unable to pass on the message that although I hoped to be home by 10 am, I was meeting a student at Vanier and could not predict my timing exactly. Inevitably, she missed her bus and showed up 30 minutes late, just before I gave up on her. By the time I got home an hour late, Allan had decided to get a coffee at the local bagel shop, hoping I would have remembered our plans and shown up by the time he returned. No one was home, I did not leave a note, and it was miserably cold and rainy out.


Once we got on the road, we had a lot of fun. Allan had been a very serious cyclist for some time, and the area where we were driving was one of his favorite areas to train in. His parents also had rented a summer cottage in the area, so Allan entertained me with his stories. One vivid memory was of a greasy spoon restaurant in the basement of a local house which did not look like much but served amazing hot chicken sandwiches. When chatting with Alyson a bit later, Allan mentioned the place, and Alyson confirmed that they moved to the next town over and expanded into a much larger greasy spoon, which not only continued to sell the hot chicken sandwiches, but also have veggie hot dogs. It sounded like a great lunch idea for the both of us.


Spending a couple of hours with Allan and Alyson was a lovely mental vacation. They are both great raconteurs and I spent a lot of time just listening. Alyson and I met in an art history class in CEGEP, and although we really hit it off well, like many friends from that time of my life (pre-e-mail and facebook), we lost touch.

I have run into her spontaneously exactly twice in the past 25 years, and the last time I did, I connected on Facebook. Although I spend minimal time using social media, I do like the way I can do a quick catch up on what people are doing in their lives, and sporadically keep some contact which occasionally results in my reconnecting face to face in real time.

Yesterday was back to reality, with a planning meeting at Vanier, correcting papers for my UQAM course and dealing with family and the routine. Early evening, my UQAM e-mail started to go wonky, and is still malfunctioning, which is the only reason why I am taking time to blog while waiting for the site to load again in hope I can get some productive work done before setting out to weed and lay down a shitload of manure.


Last night the temperature dropped to 4, but the sky cleared and it is now sunny and heating up again, with a high of 25 celsius tomorrow. While waiting for things to warm up enough to get back to the garden, I planned a little exchange with Olivier, who was interested in some of my bee balm, and swapped for some really cool springy mosses, some white and purple irises and some pink perennial geraniums, which turned out to be the same colour as the small plant I got from Laure a few years ago (on the left). I have the perfect place to put them, as I just opened a new patch of garden right in front of our driveway.

At Ollie's suggestion two years back, I eliminated as many straight lines from the front garden, and built my garden around curving, meandering stones, and made the retaining wall on the right side into an arch. I had not touched the little wall on the left side, right in front of the driveway, because I was hoping we would widen the tile pathway to have a wider space to bike through to the path to the back yard and the bike shed. We never got around to it, and in the interim, the area has been degrading to bare packed earth with a few weeds from heavy traffic.

 Iulia had suggested last year that I move the pink geranium into the space between the garden and the driveway to get more light than where I had it before, and I built a small, makeshift wall around it from some of the flat stones we used to make our garden paths.

It did not look beautiful, but kept the geranium from being run over.

Last weekend, I decided that I could move the bricks outward into an arch shape, and open up more garden space around the geranium and the migrating forget me nots, and moved the astilbe into a brighter spot, added some dusty millers looking for a home, and some of the calendulas which are taking over in the back yard. Today, I am adding some more geraniums to round it out and create a bit more symmetry.

The de-weeding and fertilizing seems to be making my flowers happier, or perhaps they like the wacky weather, but I am very pleased with the way the flower gardens are coming together. I have also constructed the tomato cages, this year with only three tiers that are more widely spaced. I am not sure if that is a good thing, but it was less work for me, and likely will decrease the risk of tomatoes growing into the spaces in the chicken wire.

I am gradually putting fertilizer directly around each garlic plant, which I will be continuing to do this afternoon when I get fed up with weeding.




The columbines are in their full glory, and Ollie and I will be swapping some seedlings because we have different varieties. He has one with a dark, dense and complex purple flower which I love. The perennial poppies are ready to burst open. They are huge and have a very "alien" look about them. The annual poppies which I liberally sprinkled in any spot that gets some sun appear to have sprouted but last time most of them died when still tiny, so I am hoping they do better this year. The cosmos are tiny but covering a nice wide area in the front corner of the yard, and I have been extricating the thick grass growing all through them, remnants of the year I put down hay in that corner to kill the weeds. Not only did it not work at killing weeds, but it left a legacy of thick, tough, resilient grass which I am still dealing with (you can see evidence at the base of the yellow irises, below, left).

I have created a nicer space at the front of the lawn, which had been choked with weeds, then cleared and covered with woodchips which did not keep the weeds out. I am trying once again, and put in a few more decorative perennials (coleus and dusty millers) along with the lilies and a few electric purple lobelias because they are just so startlingly pretty.

Josh also took some time to cut back a number of the taller lilacs that were overshadowing the apple tree and the the ones at the back of the garden, so we now have a bit more light coming in. We waited until just after they stopped blooming. He is planning to do some work on a number of the trees. More on that later this summer.

The beans and peas exploded into being over the past week, all except the soy beans which once again do not seem to be materializing. I have sunflowers popping up randomly everywhere, which I have dutifully been moving into more convenient locations, except for the one that popped out of a side hole in one of my composters, and is ten times the size of all the others. I don't have the heart to move it, despite being wedged between the compost bin and the laundry line pole, right next to the fence which is a  highway for squirrels. I suspect it may be the largest sunflower I will ever grow, if the squirrels don't get it first.

Time to stop musing, and get out and clear some more weeds. I did not think to bring my camera with me on my excursions this week, so I will be rainchecking on pictures to accompany my description of my trip to Alyson's and visit to Ollie's garden. I will be returning to both, and with camera in hand. I hope to do a couple of feature blogs of other gardens this summer.

War on weeds

I can't believe it has been two weeks since I found time to blog. It has been very busy. The end of the semester at CEGEP overlapped with the planting of the garden, as well as other life events (imagine, life goes on!). I have been going non-stop without a break. Yesterday I got the last of my marks submitted and had the last meeting of the school year. There is one more next week to plan for next semester, but since I have no idea if I will be working in the department or not next semester, I opted out. I may have gone anyhow, but I have registered for a summer course on teaching CEGEP students, towards a certificate or master's in education specially tailored for those teaching in CEGEPs. I figured since I am finished teaching and have a full month until the kids are off, it was a good time to equip myself for what I hope is the start of a new career. I also volunteered to help out a couple of hours a week on the gardens on Vanier campus (this is the second year of their garden project and they are looking for experienced helpers).  Also, my students at UQAM finally ended their strike, and last week we had one last class, and next week I will be starting to correct their assignments. So I have a few days in between to get the garden really set up.

My plan was to clear out all the lingering, hard to get rid of weeds, then put a lot of manure down before I planted. This was a bit ambitious. I discovered, after Josh and I spent a very long time uprooting goutweed and creeping bellflowers last year, that we had done a great job with the goutweed but completely underestimated what it takes to clear out the bellflowers. Bellflowers have three levels of roots. We apparently got two of the levels out, but missed entirely on the third. The first level is sticking directly out of the bottom of the plant, and comes out easily when you pull them out. That was our first mistake. If you start with pulling them out, they just come back, as they ALL did this year. The second level are underground runners that allow them to spread like wildfire. I think we got a lot of those too. Then there are the white, carrot-like roots that anchor and nourish the plants which can get as big as a decent sized carrot, and the tops of which can be up to 9 inches underground. The good news is that you can dig under plants and "root around" in the earth and pull everything out. The bad news is that if you leave anything behind, they all come back. The effort required to uproot these pretty but highly invasive plants is backbreaking. I have been digging inch by inch to clear them, up to a foot deep. I am determined to do this once. It is slow work. I have not managed to finish the job before planting, but I am clearing each area before putting down manure, fresh earth and planting, so at the rate I am going, by the time I go on vacation, I hope to be done.

I am getting to know my garden on a far more intimate level. I know exactly where there are worms and what the worm density is, where the snails are (no slugs!), white grubs, where hay seeds have fallen and are growing, where the coriander and calendula seeds fell. I also have needed to take a lot of hot baths and use a lot of arnica in order to be able to move by the end of the day. Between the weeding and biking to work (up to two hours a day when I was doing my stage visits!) I am sore. Really sore.


Last week, I woke up one morning and my backyard was a bright sunny yellow. The ground was covered with big, multi-headed dandelions which looked more like mini-hydras than the pretty flowers I always saw them as. Too much of a good thing, I suppose. I have not been clearing them too much, but somehow this year they hit a critical mass and took over. I bribed my son Isaac to help out, and Josh did a few hours and managed to thin them out. Somehow, those things can communicate with each other, and as soon as we started pulling them out, the ones nearby started to go to seed. Here we go again.

One day after work, I was distributing hay around the patches of garden that needed reinforcement, when Iulia came by and asked if she could have some hay. I told her that I needed to finish using up what I wanted and then she could take the rest on her wheelbarrow, then I could get the area under where we were storing it ready to plant the tomatoes. A few minutes later, Iulia's mom and her husband were over and helping me move and take apart the half of the bale which was not for planting. They took a bunch of hay to cover their garden (seems we made a convert!), then helped me to move the last remaining centre part of the bale to another part of the garden to be used as a mini-bale garden. I put thick layers of hay on the areas where I planned to plant the tomatoes. Josh and I thought it would be too loose to plant directly into it, but I just spent my morning doing just that and it seemed to work fine. So I now have all my tomatoes except for the cherries planted on low piles of hay, which should give them the benefits of hay bale gardening, without the problem of hay bales collapsing like last year.

For the half round bales, I put manure on the top and planted broccoli, hot peppers and basil, and in the small inside remnant of the other half of the bale, I planted basil after rewrapping it to hold it together.

So I have planted carrots, soybeans, potatoes, hot peppers, basil, garlic (last fall), onions (last year), cherry, steak and san marzano tomatoes, broccoli, several climbing varieties of beans and peas, cucumbers in containers on my laundry platform, romaine and mixed spring greens. Calendulas and coriander reseeded like crazy, but I don't think any of the annual poppies came up. Some sunflowers popped up on their own, and I planted a lot of them in the cinder blocks that are part of the retaining wall. Things are alive out there.



We bought a new manifold and some additional hoses, and I have decided to water parts of the garden in rotation to ensure decent pressure. So far it seems to be working. Iulia set up some soaker hoses in her tomatoes for the first time ever. She also planted some new flowers along the fence between our yards, some phlox, peonies and clematis along side my purple bush beans and soy beans.

This past weekend I spent up at our friend JT's, and gave him half a day to help set up a vegetable garden (I brought some flowers too, and raspberry canes). JT has some mobility limitations, so I planned it out in a way that he won't need to bend or kneel, with climbing beans, peas and cucumbers along a shed wall, and the vegetables on a terraced row on a hill where he can reach everything from a standing position. I hope it does well.




I took a couple of red trilliums home which managed to survive being transplanted and are the first flowers in the new shade bed next to the shed. They were growing on the sandy shoulder of the road. I also took a trout lily (I just had to research what it was on line, they are beautiful but I am not sure mine will survive).

Exciting news is that our apple tree, the Jersey Mac which Josh's friend Jacques gave us 6 years ago as a housewarming gift has finally bloomed. I was concerned it was not fertile, but seems to be doing fine. Looking forward to apples later this summer. It is growing into my laundry line and onto my laundry platform. Josh plans to train the branches to flatten it so it fits and limit the amount of shade falling onto the garden. More on that when he starts that project.

Redesigning again

Last fall we planted a lot of garlic. I mean, really a lot of garlic. We kept about half of last summer's harvest, picked the best and the biggest cloves and used up about a third of the garden space, including the new areas we opened last summer using hay bales. Given that another third or more is already used for mint, strawberries and raspberries, there was not much room for everything else I plan to plant this year.
We had decided to open up a new garden patch in the centre of the yard, and last fall when we took the roof off the shed, we piled the pressboard panels in the spot we chose, so we could kill off the grass to get things started. Then, last week, Josh and I rolled the enormous hay bale onto the same spot so we would avoid killing grass where we were not planning gardening space. Then we began discussing logistics.

Josh suggested we cut the bale in half, and plant directly on one half, and use the rest to cover the garden and for compost. I thought that half the bale would be way too high for planting tomatoes. Even if Josh planted stakes right through the bale (no mean feat) to support the tomato cages, I would have a hard time reaching all but the bottom level of tomatoes, and need to climb a decomposing pile of slimy hay to reach the rest. No thanks. My neighbour Iulia chimed into our discussion, asking why don't I just plant tomatoes between my garlic plants like she does. Not wanting to get into a discussion about rotating crops, not shading the garlic, my preference for cages over staking (okay, we have different ways of gardening on our side of the fence), I stubbornly continued my discussion with Josh, resulting in a decision to cut the bale in half (otherwise it would be too complicated and unstable), and starting two new patches in the middle of the yard, one for tomatoes planted in a lower stack of unrolled hay, and a second patch of smaller plants planted directly into the other half of the bale left intact.

This week we have been working on redesigning the yard and infrastructure. Olivier had come by just after Josh finished the roof of the shed, and watched me moving the stones around to more useful places. Josh had laid out a flat, stone paved area in the corner between the shed and our house, which he has been using to store junk. I took at day and cleaned up the shed, found places for things that need places, and gave Josh an ultimatum to get rid of the things that really do not belong in the back yard. Olivier suggested I remove some of the paving stones and put a garden space for shade tolerant wildflowers, including trilliums (yay! trilliums!). He knows a place in the east end that has tons of wildflowers and promised to take me there.

So this week the weather forecast was sunny and warm, but not too hot to do heavy work. I am at the tail end of the semester, with lots of correcting, but not so much that I can't take breaks to enjoy the weather and haul rocks. On Sunday, Josh picked up supplies to replace the water manifold which was leaking last year, and lots of royal blue spray paint. By the end of the day, the roof of the shed was no longer special, but a nice neighbourly shade of blue. I also scraped the peeling flakes of pink paint off of the bathtub I am currently using as an onion planter, and sprayed it to match. It blends in with the shed and the herb buckets, and no longer looks like an eyesore. I moved a lot of rocks around, and found some spaces around the garlic to plant carrots.

Monday after work, Josh took out the huge two handled saw (think lumberjack) and invited our friend Misha over to take the haybale in half. While they were sawing, I worked on weeding and continued to move paving stones to create a small garden bed by the shed. The tulips started blooming, and the lungwart as well. While we were working, a fire truck drove by. Then another. Then a third. They parked in front of my house. Josh and Misha continued sawing with much arguing and swearing, and I went around the house to see what was going on. Firemen were walking onto the corner of my property, connecting the fire hose to the hydrant. I am carefully eyeing my tulips and calculating if they are likely to survive. Fortunately, the only thing I plant right around the fire hydrant are the cosmos, which have not sprouted yet, but may respond well to the thorough watering the fire hydrant dripped into the corner of my yard which is the furthest from where I can reach with my hose.

Once I got over my selfish preoccupation with whether my garden will be affected, I checked out where the fire was. A neighbor around the corner, who was a work colleague many years back and still as friend, had a fire in his basement. He and his wife were out when it started, from an old stove stored in the basement (probably electrical), and someone passing by heard the smoke alarm and called 911. I was watching when Mark walked up the street and realized what the fuss was about. Once Josh finished halving the bale, it started raining, so we gave up gardening for the day, and went by Mark's to offer our support once the fire trucks left.

This morning I started my day distributing hay to all the bare patches in the garden, and planted another row of carrots. I called Josh as I finished work, and he said he was just heading up to Walmart to pick up earth and manure to fill in the new beds, and to fortify the rest of the garden. I told him I would meet him there, because I did not sprout any annuals besides sunflowers, and wanted to get some early while the choice was still good. Feeling a bit guilty because I am buying non-organic flowers from Walmart, at least I biked over from work, while Josh got stuck in traffic for the equivalent of 4 blocks from our house (I can't carry 30 bags of earth and manure by bike no matter how I try.) I did not find any pineapple sage (I want some, and owe Julie a new one), and none of the electric blue lobelias that I love, but there were some beautiful begonias and violet coloured lobelias, icelandic poppies (a perennial) and a new bunch of dusty millers (also perennial) to add to my small collection, as well as pansies which are one of Josh's favorites. I am looking at putting some flowers at eye level, and we explored the idea of a window box, but I may buy a couple of stakes with hooks to hang the begonias in the pots they came in rather than planting them into the garden. In the meantime, the whole bunch are decorating my front steps until I have time and decide what to do with them. My neighbour Ovidiu says the temperature, which has been quite warm this week, will be dropping to chillier weather next week, so I am not planted too soon.




When we got home, it occurred to me that I had just carefully layered as much hay as possible in and around all the garlic, and now I had wonderful manure and new earth to put under the hay. That was not well thought out. I will have a lot of work to redo over the weekend.

Springing up all over

The past week or so, the weather was rainy and cold, and then the sun came out and things have been heating up. Everything is growing so fast you can watch the sprouts coming up. I have been outside at least a bit every day cleaning up and organizing. It is too early to do much planting, but not too early to get everything ready.
The absence of a roof on the shed resulted in a large collection of pots, buckets and other containers of varying sizes filling up with snow, which has now all melted. I realized that through lack of planning, I had inadvertently accumulated a bunch of rain barrels to empty on all my sprouts in the garden once the initial mud left from the snow melt began to dry up. This was particularly useful because the manifold we use to attach all our outdoor hoses has sprung some serious leaks and is not functional yet. Repairing it is on Josh's to do list today.

I spent a busy few days emptying and distributing water, and noting what needs doing where. We still had a pile of unused flat paving stones on one side of the house, and areas of high traffic that were churned up into mud outside the shed, between the shed and the house, and on other transitional spots. I redistributed the pile of stones and made them much more useful and neat while eliminating yet another slug breeding ground near the lilacs.

Once the stones were set, I noticed that the garlic we so carefully planted in rows exactly where we wanted had not come up quite that way. Possibly some had shifted, and others were surprises (an entire head of garlic missed during harvest, and springing up as a cluster in a very inconvenient spot, like right in front of the compost bin). I spent some time uprooting and replanting garlic to rescue it from being crushed.

Given that in the past, I am working a 9-5 job as well as teaching a course at night in April, I have rarely had much time this early in spring to spend time outdoors. This year, I am teaching part time at Vanier, and my students at UQAM have been on strike since mid-March, resulting in my having at least the equivalent of a full day or more per week, in bits and pieces, that I can dedicate to the garden. I have learned that it is infinitely easier to weed in April when the ground is soft and still moist from the snow melt, and the weeds have not established themselves well. Hopefully this will lead to less problems later.

My spring flowers have been coming out day by day. This week, the hyacinths all bloomed, and I had enough this year that we can smell their fragrance as we walk in and out of the front door. The two lonely Siberian squills were up and blooming, but have not spread at all, surprisingly. I had two daffodils bloom this year, though squirrels bit the head off of one, as well as one of the hyacinths. A volunteer I used to work with suggested to me putting out bowls of water in the spring for the squirrels, based on the theory that squirrels bite the heads off spring flowers and use the stems as straws to drink, and putting out water will reduce this behaviour. I have no idea if is true, but I put water out in a bowl in my front garden and since then, no other flowers have been mutilated.

I have loads of little sprouts popping up where we had poppies and calendulas last year. I looked up images on line of what the sprouts look like for both types of flowers to be able to guess which they were.The images look identical at first, and differentiate only later on, so I have no idea which are growing or if they are both. Josh's dad picked up a container of poppy seeds at Bulk Barn, and despite my believing that the poppy seeds you buy for baking are irradiated or treated in some way to prevent them from being viable to grow opium plants (yes, those are opium seeds on your bagel), our garden guru Alex says that this is not the case, and you can grow them. The purpose is strictly for the flowers in my garden. They are beautiful. Josh has decided to guerilla garden the ones we don't use, and has been carrying them in his pocket wherever he goes.

Today we hope to figure out how to distribute the huge hay roll in the back yard. Josh wants to cut it in half, or 1/3 and 2/3 chunks, using part as a unit to plant tomatoes, broccoli and basil like we did on the bales last year. I am requesting a "lower profile" for the hay, after having to deal with bales collapsing and warping under my tomato cages last year, I want a much more stable structure. Josh also bought some blue spray paint to make our shed a bit less "special" if not less colourful.

Enough with writing, I need to get out there and lay down the soaker hoses, and enjoy the gorgeous summer-like weather while it lasts!