• About.
  • The rose garden.
  • When black roses bloom.

tarwanya

~ A Canadian garden.

tarwanya

Monthly Archives: April 2014

More of the same.

23 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by morilote in Bonsai, Master Gardener, Ornamentals, Spring, Spring planting, Trees, Vegetables

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

beetroots, bleeding heart, cherries, English oak, Jack-in-the-pulpit, potatoes, white ash

Potatoes and beetroots are planted. I don’t really grow these as a main crop; just a few for the hell of it. One English oak (Quercus robur) and one white ash (Fraxinus americana) have been bonsai’d. Let’s see if they survive. I don’t have the room for a lot of trees, and I’d rather not put invasive exotic species into circulation (hello English oak), so bonsai it is. As for the ash, I’d want to look up the current government regulations (if any) on those because of all the recent problems with emerald ash borer beetles.

Why do I have them at all? Well, the squirrels plant a lot of acorns, and there are a number of ash trees around and the seeds are spread by wind. I’m the mad sort of gardener who’ll let anything grow just to see what it is, and then feel bad if I have to kill it later. It’s actually very educational, but it does give rise to its own set of problems…such as the three wild cherries (Prunus serotina and P. virginiana [I think]), two more white ashes, one (possibly two) more English oak, and a couple Siberian elms that are all waiting in pots to be turned into bonsai. Actually, since the cherry trees are native species, I’ll hold off and let them grow another year, then put them up for sale. But I’ll root-prune them anyway just in case.

I was so pleasantly surprised to see that the three potted Jack-in-the-pulpits (Arisaema triphyllum) that were supposed to be in last year’s autumn plant sale have sprouted. One of the problems with herbaceous woodland plants is that if they’re transplanted or dug up, they often get sulky and go dormant early, and then you can’t tell if they’re dead or just dormant until next spring. Had the same problem with the bleeding hearts (Dicentra sp.). Since I was the one who had to look after them, it’s a bit of a vindication for me, even though the person who put them into the sale did tell me they were sulking. I do tend to take it personally when plants in my care die.

Today’s weather: 12C and sunny.

Enter title here.

19 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by morilote in Herbs, Indoors/Houseplants, Ornamentals, Spring, Spring planting, Vegetables

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

jasmine, lettuce, roses, thyme

Dug over the rest of the vegetable plots and sowed some lettuce.  Put the rest of the jasmines (Jasminum sambac) out today along with the orange thyme (Thymus citriodorus), and unmounded the roses.

Spring garden cleanup is pretty much done.

I went over to the neighbour’s deck today to have a quick chat. It never ceases to irritate me that my garden looks so much better from the neighbours’ vantage points than from my own home.

Today’s weather: 10C and sunny.

I can’t think of a title.

18 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by morilote in Ornamentals, Spring, Spring planting, Vegetables

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

cabbages, liverwort, peas, tomatoes, tulip, violet

Sowed some cabbages outdoors, set the last of those black violet seeds, and started hardening off the peas. A few of those saplings are two years old now, so now it’s time to start training them into bonsai in earnest. The liverwort is blooming. And man, those damned tomato seeds took forever to sprout. I guess the seed-house didn’t ferment them first.

I can’t imagine why people seem to have trouble getting their tulips to regrow or spread. I can’t get the flippin’ things to STOP spreading.

You know, I can’t help laughing whenever I go to the garden centres and see there’s a climbing rose cultivar called ‘Golden Showers’. It has yellow flowers, of course.

Today’s weather: 10C and cloudy with showers

Typical.

13 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by morilote in Herbs, Ornamentals, Spring, Spring planting, Vegetables

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

bloodroot, elecampane, honeysuckle, onions

Annoying, but typical. Every year (and I mean every year) just when spring seems to be in and winter is over, there’s one nasty cold snap. Apparently that’s suddenly going to be tomorrow night. And last for two or three days. So most of what’s been put out in the cold will need to be protected somehow. Sigh.

But I’ve started spring cleanup, dug over one of the vegetable beds, planted the onions, transplanted the elecampane and thinned out the honeysuckle. And the bloodroot is finally showing. Well, one of them is.

Today’s weather: 24C and cloudy.

Signs of spring

09 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by morilote in Herbs, Master Gardener, Ornamentals, Spring

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

astilbe, bee balm, bloodroot, bottle gentian, chives, garlic, garlic chives, liverwort, roses

Okay, I’m convinced it’s spring now. I had a furtle around in the garden and poked through the winter mulch (basically just fallen leaves) and some things are showing through at last. In the herb bed, it’s just the chives (Allium schoenoprasum), garlic chives (A. tuberosum), and garlic (A. sativum) right now, which is pretty much what you’d expect. Alliums are pretty cold hardy and are always among the first things to show up in the herb garden.

As for the flowers, liverwort (Anemone hepatica var. acuta, formerly Hepatica acutiloba), bottle gentian (Gentiana andrewsii), and bee balm (Monarda didyma) are showing up. Oddly, the bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) isn’t showing at all, and I’d expect that around now too…maybe I’m overfussing, because it is one of my favourite flowers. The astilbes (Astilbe spp.) I’ve been keeping for my Master Gardener group (in the garage) have also sprouted, so those came out today, along with some baby trees.

Tomorrow evening is the monthly meeting of said Master Gardeners, so I probably won’t get a chance to do much more mucking around until Friday. Although I uncovered the roses several days ago, I didn’t unmound them. They all look pretty hard hit, so a good pruning will probably be in order.

Today’s weather: 10C and sunny.

Radishes, castor beans, and butterfly peas

07 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by morilote in Indoors/Houseplants, Ornamentals, Spring, Spring planting, Starting indoors

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

butterfly pea, castor bean, radishes

Sowed some radishes today. I’ll have to rebuild that raised bed soon, but it should last long enough until the radishes are ready.

I also started some castor bean (Ricinus communis) ‘New Zealand Purple’ and some butterfly pea (Clitoria ternatea) seeds today. Neither of those is native, but they won’t survive a winter and therefore aren’t invasive in this area. I use the castor beans as a sort of seasonal privacy hedge because damn they grow fast. They’re a good filler until the hedge shrubs really get going. I kept ten seeds from last year, but I’ll probably only want about three plants, so whatever else sprouts I’ll donate to the Mississauga Master Gardener plant sale at the end of May.

Oh yes, and castor bean seeds are poisonous – the source of ricin. That’s not as bad as it may sound, because they’re only dangerous if you eat them, and frankly, I don’t see any temptation to do so. The generic name Ricinus means ‘tick’ in Latin, and the seeds do resemble blood-bloated female ticks. Yum.

As for the butterfly peas, I’ll probably grow those in containers. If you’re wondering about the generic name Clitoria, that’s because the entire genus has flowers that look remarkably like…lady parts. Attempts over the centuries (especially by the Victorians) to rename it failed because, well, the name is actually quite apt. But I got them for the colour, I swear. The flowers are used to make food colouring in tropical Asia (where they’re native), so I might experiment with that later in the year. Despite the fact that it’s a pea, I’m not sure if the seeds are eaten, but the plant has been shown to have some medicinal properties.

I also put one of the jasmine plants (Jasminum sambac) outside today. It might flop, but it should survive. If it does flop, I’ll just give it a damn good pruning and it’ll be back good as new. Plus, this plant is the only one that got much whitefly this winter, so it’ll be a good test to see if it’s safe to put the others out as well.

Today’s weather: 9C and rainy

Of tomatoes and dahlias and other things.

07 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by morilote in Ornamentals, Spring, Spring planting, Starting indoors, Tutorial, Vegetables

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

carrots, dahlia, peas, radishes, tomatoes

Today I started tomato and green pea seeds indoors. The peas will sprout and take off rapidly and probably be ready for hardening off in a couple weeks (or even a week if I feel like rushing them); peas prefer cool weather anyway so despite the late spring this year I could have started them a week ago.

The tomatoes are a new variety for me. I don’t like raw tomatoes; I much prefer them cooked into sauces and stews, so I mostly grow ‘Roma’ tomatoes. However, I’ve been a little curious about the ‘San Marzano’ ‘phenomenon’ as I tend to think of it. If you go to the grocery and look at the canned plum tomatoes, you’ll notice that the San Marzano tomatoes are considerably more expensive (sometimes leading to tomato fraud, apparently). Chefs love to wax lyrical about how wonderful this variety is and I’ve heard that many consider it the best paste tomato around. This year, I’m giving these a try. Frankly, I doubt whether or not the difference in taste will be significant once it’s been turned into sauce, but we’ll see. If nothing else, San Marzano is open-pollinated and considered an heirloom variety, so I can put on airs as a hoity hort and crow that I’m growing only heirloom tomatoes and stick my nose in air about it. *snort* As though it makes me morally superior or something.

I do usually grow a couple plants of a second, eating/slicing variety for other people in the house, but because it’s just a couple plants I buy them from a garden centre. Out of habit, they’re usually Brandywine (originally bought because I liked the name): another heirloom variety. Between these and the sauce tomatoes, that usually provides me with pretty much a year’s supply, plus enough to share with the neighbours. Starting the seeds now gives enough time to harden them off in the middle of May and plant them out at the end of May/start of June.

I’ll direct-sow some radishes tomorrow if it doesn’t rain too hard; radishes are also a cool-weather crop and can pretty much be ready to harvest in four or five weeks, at which point the carrot seeds can go in. Which reminds me that I also started a few carrot seeds today just to see if what’s left in the packet are still viable. I’ve been using that packet of carrot seeds for a few years now and I don’t know how long carrot seeds stay good for.

What else…oh yes, the dahlias. Interesting thing about tomatoes and dahlias: both are native to Mexico and while tomatoes were originally brought to Europe as an ornamental for the funny-looking red fruit, dahlias were brought to Europe as a potential food source. I suppose some explanation is in order.

Tomatoes belong to the family Solanaceae, the nightshade family, along with potatoes and eggplants. That’s right, they’re poisonous, or at least the green parts are. They contain toxins called solanines, and Europeans thought that tomatoes (plants and fruit – they’re not a vegetable!) were deadly poisonous to consume. In fact, green tomatoes do also contain the toxins, but you’d have to eat a lot of them to keel over. Those original tomatoes produced fruit that were highly ribbed/ridged and often varied in colour, more like some heirloom varieties than the more familiar smooth red thing most people know now. Anyway, it was quite some time before people in Europe started eating them.

Dahlias, on the other hand, went to Europe as a root crop. This failed, because while the tubers are edible in that they won’t sicken or kill you, they taste awful. So they languished as a sort of curiosity until someone decided the flowers were pretty and started promoting them as ornamentals.

I’ve never grown dahlias before; not only are they not native, but being tropical they won’t survive a local winter and need to be protected. For plants growing in the ground, this means digging the roots up and storing them indoors, then replanting them the following year. I couldn’t be bothered. But I was at Home Despot a few weeks ago and saw they had ‘Arabian Night’ dahlias…and, well, gardening is one of the few areas in which I’m susceptible to impulse buys. The tubers had already started to produce roots (possibly because of improper storage or possibly because they all come from one central depot or something that also supplies to warmer areas) so they went in pots the next day. Two days later they’d already sprouted and I’m already a little worried because one of them is looking rather leggy and may end up being weak and floppy. Arabian Night is supposed to grow only up to about 42” high (not one of the taller varieties), but I may have to stake this one after all. I’m not sure if it’s because of insufficient light, because the other one (they were two to the package) is much more compact still. I’ve already begun hardening them off.

Today’s weather: 15C and sunny.

Here goes.

02 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by morilote in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

I suppose I’ve been agonising (for various reasons) over whether or not to start this blog, until someone told me to stop thinking about it and go do it.

This is essentially going to be a gardening blog. Specifically, my garden. In fact, the title of the blog means ‘my garden’ in Quenya. I’m going to try to make it more than just a “ooo, look at my pretty flowers” sort of thing and write some content that might just possibly be useful to someone who stumbles by mischance upon it. I’m probably not going to put a lot of pictures, partly to avoid what I just mentioned, and partly because I’m lazy.

As for the garden itself, see the About page.

It’s not really the most auspicious time to start a gardening blog right now. We’ve just had a fairly hard winter, and very few things are emerging at the moment. Technically spring started almost two weeks ago, but it’s only just begun to warm up. Potted plants that were overwintering in the garage are beginning to emerge or resprout and have had to be brought into the light, so I guess that counts in some minor way as gardening. I find that plants kept in the garage over winter consistently emerge anytime from two to four weeks ahead of comparable plants growing outside, depending on the conditions of the year.

In a week or two will be time to start certain vegetable seeds indoors. It really ought to be two weeks, but I’m getting impatient. But at least the tulips have started to show.

Recent Posts

  • Year of the wasp.
  • Another month, another season.
  • Spring blues
  • Spring!
  • Fall gardening.

Recent Comments

tonytomeo on Another month, another se…
tonytomeo on Spring blues
morilote on Spring!
tonytomeo on Spring!
tonytomeo on Fall gardening.

Archives

  • September 2019
  • July 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014

Categories

  • Autumn
  • Birds
  • Black
  • Bonsai
  • Bulbs
  • Butterflies
  • Carnivorous plants
  • Containers
  • Disease
  • Fruit
  • Gardenscaping
  • Herbs
  • Indoors/Houseplants
  • Infosheet
  • Master Gardener
  • Ornamentals
  • Pests
  • Products
  • Shrubs
  • Spring
  • Spring planting
  • Starting indoors
  • Summer
  • Trees
  • Tutorial
  • Uncategorized
  • Vegetables
  • Water gardening
  • Weather
  • Weeds
  • Wildlife
  • Winter

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com
Follow tarwanya on WordPress.com

Recent Posts

  • Year of the wasp.
  • Another month, another season.
  • Spring blues
  • Spring!
  • Fall gardening.

Recent Comments

tonytomeo on Another month, another se…
tonytomeo on Spring blues
morilote on Spring!
tonytomeo on Spring!
tonytomeo on Fall gardening.

Archives

  • September 2019
  • July 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014

Categories

  • Autumn
  • Birds
  • Black
  • Bonsai
  • Bulbs
  • Butterflies
  • Carnivorous plants
  • Containers
  • Disease
  • Fruit
  • Gardenscaping
  • Herbs
  • Indoors/Houseplants
  • Infosheet
  • Master Gardener
  • Ornamentals
  • Pests
  • Products
  • Shrubs
  • Spring
  • Spring planting
  • Starting indoors
  • Summer
  • Trees
  • Tutorial
  • Uncategorized
  • Vegetables
  • Water gardening
  • Weather
  • Weeds
  • Wildlife
  • Winter

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy