All set for spring.

Tags

arugula, bloodroot, cabbages, camassia, cauliflower, cucumbers, fritillaria, gladiolus, honeysuckle, iris, lettuce, onions, peas, roses, spicebush, tomatoes, tulip, wood poppy

April showers bring May flowers! Or something like that. The last couple years we had Aprils that were relatively dry, but this year we’re finally getting a more typically wet April. I know it sounds odd to “normal” people (i.e. non-gardeners/ non-farmers) to want rain, but spring rains really are a crucial source of groundwater for plants, even well into summer. And climate change isn’t going to improve matters, at least not in these parts where even in the past ten years, summers have become noticeably drier (and possibly hotter).

Anyway, today I planted the onion sets. The peas I planted last week are probably germinating as I type. The lettuce and arugula have already started to sprout. I really need to sow the carrots soon. The brassica (‘Melissa’ Savoy cabbage and ‘Di Sicilia Violetta’ purple cauliflower), tomato (‘San Marzano’, ‘Black Krim’, ‘Black Beauty’ and ‘Hahms Gelbe Topftomate’) and lemon cucumber seedlings are well on their way. In fact, I ran out of room under the grow lights, so I started hardening off the brassica seedlings today – they tolerate cool temperatures better.

The bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) started blooming last week, as did the spicebush (Lindera benzoin). I’ve had the spicebush for three years now, and this is the first time it flowered…possibly because during its first winter here, the accursed demonspawn rabbits chewed it down. So this spring I’ve learned something new about it, which is that it produces masses of tiny yellow flowers first thing in spring, before it produces leaves, and that those flowers have a very pleasant, refreshing fragrance.

Everything else is going apace – the wood poppies (Stylophorum diphyllum) are just starting to bloom, and the yellow tulips will open within a week or two. The honeysuckle (Lonicerum tataricum), which I pruned three weeks ago, is well-leafed out and now starting to produce flower buds. The roses are unwrapped, unmounded and pruned, the hardy gladiolus (Gladiolus palustris) is finally sprouting, the camassias (Camassia quamash) are up, all the irises are well on their way, and I’m nearly done with spring garden cleanup. Right now the only worry is that I don’t see any sign of my Fritillaria persica showing yet.

I know it’s a month until our spring last-chance-of frost date, but right now everything looks set to be glorious.

…I’m not generally an optimistic person, so I’ve probably just jinxed myself.

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Autumn chores.

Tags

butterfly pea, cabbages, garlic, jasmine, lemon, pomegranate, tulip

Well, the first week of October is almost over and autumn garden chores are in full swing. Yesterday I planted the ‘Music’ garlic and today I planted some tulips.

…I really need to stop buying new types of black tulips. I just don’t have room for more. This new one is ‘Black Parrot’; like other parrot types it has ruffled petals and large flowers.

Yesterday I also harvested the only head of Savoy cabbage ‘Melissa’ left; that’s the last of those seeds, so next year I’ll try something different.

I’ve also started reacclimatising the indoor plants. Some of them don’t seem to care, but the ‘Meyer’ lemon, for example, will shriek and faint (i.e. drop all its leaves) if I just bring it into the house suddenly. The jasmines (Jasminum sambac) will take a hard pruning and then a damn good spray of insecticidal soap – I’ve never managed to bring them through winter free of whitefly, but this helps.

I’m undecided if I should let my dwarf pomegranate (Punica granatum ‘Nana’) go dormant for winter, or keep it as a houseplant. It did marvelously well this year and even set fruit (which the motherhating squirrels stole). Other types of pomegranate do need a winter dormancy, but this one doesn’t seem to. On the other hand, it would be much easier to let it go dormant and keep it in the basement rather than finding space for it with the other houseplants…

What else…oh yes, I chopped back the butterfly pea (Clitoria ternatea). It’s two years/three seasons old now and managed to pull through both winters fairly well, although last winter it got some red spider mite. It was also rather overgrown, so I pruned it back quite hard – I have no idea how this plant will respond (rejuvenate), but even if it doesn’t make it through, well, I have more seeds and I’ll have learned something.

Spring into summer.

Tags

arugula, begonia, cabbages, calla lily, chickadee, dahlia, dill, Eastern black swallowtail, freesia, gladiolus, ismene, roses, sawflies, strawberries, tomatoes

Well. Something like that. This has been a crazy year for weather around here, fluctuating from one extreme to the next. Spring started cold, went hot, then went to normal spring temperatures. It’s getting hot again, but at least that’s normal as we approach July. What hasn’t been normal is the dry weather; I’m already out of rainwater and using the tap. They did forecast one of the hottest, driest summers ever and it seems that it’s begun.

And windy. I don’t know if it’s just me, but these past three years have felt especially windy. It was aggravating because we had some lovely masses of raincloud overhead a couple days ago, but they just got blown right by with barely a drop.

Anyway. The late spring did provide some surprises: for example, all the roses are in bloom at once. This has never happened before. It may also have messed around with some pest life cycles, because the rose sawflies (Arge sp.) aren’t are bad as last year. And the day-neutral strawberries didn’t start bearing until the same time as the June-bearing ones.

I’ve been doing a lot of container planting this year. A friend was given of a lot of large containers that she didn’t need, so she passed them along to me. Good thing too, because I’ve rather overextended myself with the vegetables this year, so now I’ve got pots of tomatoes and cabbages and salad greens and herbs all lurking to snag the unwary. Also dahlias, gladioli, freesias, calla lilies, ismene (Ismene x deflexa) and tuberous begonias – essentially, all the summer bulbs that I swore I’d never grow because they were too much trouble to dig up and overwinter properly. Of course, in pots I can just let them go dormant and stick them in the basement for winter, and they overwinter that way just fine.

Also in pots is the arugula (Eruca sativa) which has now begun to flower. This isn’t as bad as if, say, lettuce started to flower, because arugula is bitter to begin with, so the effect of bolting isn’t nearly as noticeable. But it’s a sign that summer is imminent.

The wildlife continues as well. On the one hand, I’m really pleased that the chicadees (Poecile atricapellus) have used the nest box, and I’m also happy that the Eastern Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes)caterpillars have shown up on the dill (Anethum graveolens). I love raising butterflies and there’s always more dill than I can use. On the other hand, the squirrels have been even more annoying than usual, and the rabbits could do with a fox.

Bah. Too much to talk about. I think I’ll stop typing now.

First post of “spring”.

Tags

artichokes, ash, cabbages, calla lily, cherry, romanesco, spider plant, tulip

…and second of the year. My, how I’ve neglected this blog.

Today was relatively warm and sunny, so I took the opportunity to root-prune some of the bonsai. March is generally a good month for the job, at least for deciduous species, because the trees are still dormant and are much less traumatised by the experience than if they were in growth.

This year the ash trees (Fraxinus spp.; never got around to trying to determine the exact species) were troublesome. For whatver reason they were both really potbound, with long roots wrapping all around the pots, plus a nearly solid mass of fibrous roots. Ideally one wants to encourage a fibrous root system in bonsai, but these were really overcrowded. In one case it was somewhat understandable because the pot was too small for how large I let the tree get. I have trouble finding bonsai pots that I like that I don’t have to remortgage my house to afford, but I did manage to find one several months ago, so it’s in a bigger pot now.

I’m wondering if I overfertilised or underwatered them last year. Or maybe I did a half-assed job with last year’s root pruning. Or maybe it’s just one of those things, I dunno.

I didn’t manage to do all I wanted before the light faded, because I’ve got a couple of wild cherry saplings that I’m thinking of turning into bonsai. I can’t remember which is a wild black cherry (Prunus serotina), and which is a chokecherry (Prunus virginiana). I ID’d them last year but never got around to marking them so I could tell the difference without leaves. I’m not sure how good a bonsai they’ll make. They’re naturally small trees that prune well, so in that sense it should be easy – but they have extremely vigorous root systems and in fact at two or three years old (last year) and in one-gallon pots, they were already suckering. Possible candidates for a grove-type massed planting, which I’ve never tried. We’ll see, but that’s a job for another day.

Also began indoor vegetable seed starting early this month. This year is going to be quite an…experience…in the vegetable garden, because not only am I trying some new stuff, they’re forecasting an even drier-than-usual summer this year. Yay. I went to Florida in February and bought a few things off the seed rack, plus I got a couple things at Mississauga Seedy Saturday.

I’m trying a blue sweetcorn (and already wondering how to keep the squirrels off them), romanesco (a brassica that’s sort of like a cross between broccoli and cauliflower and looks like a green fractal conch shell), and artichokes (which may well turn out not to be hardy around here, but here goes). And this is all in addition to the usual carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, garlic, cabbages, radishes, lettuce, and peas. Sucker for punishment, me. If not for succession planting and container gardening I’d need to rent space from the neighbours.

Anyway, the seeds I’ve started so far are the artichokes, some romanesco and some cabbage. I don’t usually start tomatoes until the beginning of April and cucumbers in mid-April, and I’ll start the corn at the end of April (for planting out in early June). The lettuce can be sown whenever and the radishes are already sown. I need to buy onion sets and peas. Carrots…probably end of April. Garlic got planted back in October. (Couldn’t be bothered to put in the Latin names for all those, as I usually do. This post is already too long. Deal.)

Speaking of seeds, there’s been one disappointment. My Master Gardener group did a children’s garden at a local home show event in mid-February and for one of the activities I removed about seventy plantlets (I hate calling them pups) from my giant spider plant (Chlorophytum comosum) planter to root up. To my surprise I also found seed pods, so I sowed a few seeds. They sprouted, but unfortunately none of the seedlings produced chlorophyll and stayed white. No pigmentation, no food; no food, seedlings die. Sigh. The wonders of genetics.

And finally, the calla lilies (Zantedeschia  ‘Schwartzwalder’) and dahlia (Dahlia ‘Karma Chocolate’) that were overwintering in the basement have sprouted, so they came up into the light. The tulips outside began sprouting early this month – this past winter was rather odd, being generally mild with occasional harsh spells. This spring has also been up and down so far.

Hurrah for pointless rambling posts.

Autumn harvests.

Tags

cabbages, Jerusalem artichokes, raspberries

I haven’t done much in the garden for the past few days, but there isn’t really much to do now. There are a few things to clip down and compost, but even those can wait until spring, and I won’t mound and burlap the roses until probably the middle of November.

I did make a start of harvesting the Jerusalem artichokes, a.k.a. fartichokes (Helianthus tuberosus). And by that I mean that I dug up the one that I planted out of place last year, though gods know why I did that. It also meant that with it gone, I could finally plant the poor suffering raspberry plant (Rubus sp.) a fellow Master Gardener gave me in May. This is a slight departure from my usual gardening M.O. because I very seldom put anything in my garden unless I know exactly what it is. She’s had that raspberry variety for a long time now and no longer remembers the name (so I can’t look it up), but I’ve seen it growing and tasted the fruit and I’m satisfied to have it. So I planted it in the space left by the fartichoke. That unfortunately was all I had time for today before it got dark, so I’ll have to deal with the remaining Jerusalem artichokes later in the week.

Another thing I’ll harvest soon is the remaining ‘Melissa’ Savoy cabbage. I started three plants this year, but one of the seedlings didn’t make it. Of the other two, one took longer to really get going than the other, so they naturally staggered their harvesting times, which was ideal. The first one got picked nearly a month ago.

This second one has been the subject of some attention when people visit the garden; for some reason they think it needed photographing. I’m not sure why; to me it looks pretty much how a cabbage ought to look and the first one looked the same…but I did take a picture. Apologies for the bird netting; I thought if I planted them at the edge of the strawberry patch, the netting would keep the accursed Cabbage White butterflies (Pieris rapae) off them. It didn’t. I used a lot of good words the first day I saw the butterflies just sailing right on through.

Anyway, soon cabbage will be on the table again. I like Savoy better than plain old white cabbage, and anyway I don’t see the point in growing the same things as in the supermarket, which are sadly increasingly becoming GM varieties.

Harvests.

Tags

cabbages, carrots, castor bean, Jerusalem artichokes, nicotiana, poppy, tomatoes

People tend to associate harvests with food – fruits, vegetables, grains, maybe herbs. Of course, people who raise plants have another type of harvest as well: seeds (nonedible ones). Next year’s flowers (especially annuals and biennials) often come from this year’s seeds, as do most of next year’s vegetables.

The jewelweed (Impatiens capensis), for example, did better than I could have hoped; because it’s an annual and I want it to establish itself in my garden, I collected every single seed I could and spread them around. From five plants, hopefully many more will return next year and then the population will sustain itself without any intervention on my part. For now, I’m giving it a helping hand because the seedlings seem to be quite susceptible to damping off (a common fungal disease, invariably fatal), so the more seeds, the better that chances in the long run. Collecting jewelweed seeds is fun in any event, because the ripe seed pods explode when touched. Aside from that, the only other annual seed I’m collecting is the castor bean (Ricinus communis) ‘New Zealand Purple’, the ‘Black Peony’ poppies and the ‘Chocolate Smoke’ Nicotiana.

In other harvests, I left a cabbage to grow for too long and it split. Oops. I think it’s still edible… The tomatoes are pretty much done, except for a few stragglers. The Jerusalem artichokes can wait a couple more weeks, as can the carrots, since I started those over a month late this year.

Roses and death and fruit.

Tags

cabbages, elder, leaf-mining midge, pyrethrum, raspberries, roses, strawberries, waterlily

The rose page is complete now; I’ve added pictures and descriptions of all the roses I have.

…actually, not all. A couple years back a wild rose popped up under a juniper bush and I dug it up and put it in a pot. It hasn’t bloomed yet so I’m not sure what species it is, or if I’ll keep it when I figure it out.

Aside from that, the summer blooms are still in full swing, and the vegetables are doing okay. I’m so eager to try out some homemade insecticide. Last year I sowed some pyrethrum daisies (Tanacetum cinerariifolium) and now the flowers are cut and dried. I’m looking forward to spraying the cabbages because the pyrethrum won’t kill anything beneficial on those. A pity I can’t spray the roses, but the bees do visit them. Perhaps I could try it on the water lilies to control the leaf-mining midges. I never did get fish, so saturating the tub ponds with pyrethrum should be an interesting experiment.

I think I will have to replace the strawberry plants though. A fellow Master Gardener gave me them last year because I was tired of the variety I had before and wanted to try a different kind. Unfortunately, these ones seem to be the wild strawberries…the fruit are about the same size as my fingernail and I just can’t be bothered. In fact, there are wild strawberries growing all over the place in the rest of the garden, so I’m certainly not going to cultivate more. Things should be going on sale soon at the garden centres, so with any luck I’ll be able to find something to try.

I do have a couple of wild black raspberry bushes (Rubus occidentalis) though, and those are cropping like mad right now. I know it sounds crazy, but the taste of the fruit (or possibly the seeds; they’ve got lots of seeds) always reminds me of mayonnaise.

Oh, and one batch of elderflower wine is on the go. I’ll probably start another batch in a couple days.

Stuff! And stuff.

Tags

ash, cabbages, catnip, clematis, hazel, heliotrope, jewelweed, lemon balm, marsh marigold, nicotiana, pansy, peas, peppermint, poppy, radishes, stevia, tomatoes, trumpet creeper, waterlily

I’ve had some computer trouble the past couple of weeks, but here I am again. Although I don’t know why.

It’s been a busy three weeks in the garden, so this will be a long post. The single most apparent thing is that I extended the flowerbed at the front, saying goodbye to more of the hated lawn. So far I’ve planted the American hazel (Corylus americana) and the trumpet creeper (Campsis radicans). The trumpet creeper will be an interesting experiment, because it’s quite a vigorous growing vine. I recycled a trunk of the lilac shrub at the back as a post for the trumpet creeper to grow up, and then I’m going to try and see if I can get it grow into something resembling a standard. (In gardening talk, a ‘standard’ is a style of shrub or small tree, trained to grow with a single upright slender trunk and a more-or-less spherical mass of foliage and flowers at the top. Think of the lollipop looking trees that a four-year-old might draw.) There are a few more things waiting to be planted there, but I’ll talk about those when I’ve actually done so.

I also planted (most of) my tomato plants today: one dozen ‘San Marzano’ tomatoes. The radishes are coming along, as are the peas, but the cabbage seedlings are scrawny. In the herb beds, there are now peppermint, chocolate peppermint, lemon balm, stevia (as an experiment) and catnip. These are all either replacements for things that died in that last harsh winter, or completely new.

Heliotrope ‘Poseidon Blue’ and pansy ‘Black moon’ are in planters, and my seeds for nicotiana ‘Chocolate Smoke’ and poppy ‘Black Peony’ are waiting to be sown. I know none of those is native, but I’m a total sucker for very dark-coloured flowers, so I justify it by growing them in planters (and most of those are annuals anyway).

At the back is now planted a western blue clematis (Clematis occidentalis), which is one of only two species of clematis native to this region (the other one, Clematis virginiana, is rather boring-looking in my opinion). And I finally got my tub garden going! I now have two fragrant white waterlilies (Nymphaea odorata) and a marsh marigold (Caltha palustris) in tubs of water. The original plan was to beg, borrow, or steal some floating bladderwort (Utricularia sp.) to keep the mosquitoes down – bladdwort is a carnivorous aquatic plant – but I don’t know if/when that will happen, so I might be making the trip to the petshop for a couple of fish soon. Again, I have a few more things to plant that I’ll mention when they actually get in the ground.

Another ash (Fraxinus sp.) sapling has been turned into a bonsai. It’s pretty much the very end of the window for the necessary severe root-pruning, so I’m not sure if it will pull through.

And jewelweed (Impatiens capensis)! I finally have jewelweed!

Finally, all the odd empty spaces along the pathways and corners are filling up with incoming plants for the upcoming Master Gardener plant sale. I live closest to the venue, so I ‘volunteer’ to act as a collection and holding point for everyone. It’s actually a real learning experience, because it means I have to learn how to look after a lot of things I would never otherwise have, without actually having to plant them. It also means that if there’s anything I’m interested in, I get first pick. On the downside, there is the possibility that any diseases or pests in the other Master Gardeners’ gardens could also end up in mine…

I can’t think of a title.

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