10 September 2006 by pat.

Although it hasn’t died, having all its leaves eaten has certainly slowed its growth. The weeds are doing much better! The edamame are the two fuzzy green stalks.

Here’s the soybean plant that I shot last week…. no leaves here (well, some are starting at the top). It’s the fuzzy green stalk. All the lovely leaves belong to weeds. Rabbits with good taste.And after a few gardeners told me about how invasive Jerusalem artichokes are, and how difficult it is to get rid of them, I decided to rip them all out.They’re listed in the Ontario weeds section on the gov’t website. One thing they say is:

Viable tubers formed during the preceding year will produce shoots during the current growing season. Tillage in late June, after tubers have exhausted their food supply but before new tubers begin for form, will retard the spread of an infestation. Usually two to three tillage operations will be required to significantly reduce a well established population.

I was definitely pulling up small tubers. I should take my garden claw down there next weekend to make sure I pull out any remaining tubers, so they don’t grow and multiply next year.At least, that gave me a sense of accomplishment.I really do need a rabbit fence.

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1 September 2006 by pat.

This is what the edamame plants look like. All of them. All 10 of them. I’m hoping, because they’re all showing signs of new leaves, that they might recover. Maybe, maybe not. We’ll see.

Some of the soybeans haven’t been eaten: here’s one that looks OK, so far. I’m afraid to weed around them: it’s like pointing out where dinner is! I’m just glad that Rabbits don’t read blogs.At least, I hope they don’t. Memo for next spring: put in chicken wire.

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24 August 2006 by pat.

Weeding, Watering, and Wandering

Spent yesterday morning over at the allotment garden. As you can see, the weeds have been enjoying the waterings, too, so it was time.Time for the tools of mass destruction.

They made short work of the weeds, after which the edamame was a lot more visible.

As you can see, they’ve each got two round true leaves, and are starting to develop their sets of three leaflets. From what I’ve read, I think I can expect all the rest of the leaves to be compound triplets.After weeding and watering, I wandered around the whole garden, admiring what people have done on their plots. I’ll put up a bunch of pictures shortly on Flickr. Until then, here’s a sample — a bumblebee on a hollyhock.

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9 May 2006 by pat.

Ah! The weekend of yellow things arrived. Many of my daffodils are open, and some migrating birds returned.

This is the Poet’s Narcissus, in front of a lot of King Alfred daffodils.Next is “Chromacolor” — its cup is more peach than yellow, and its petals are pale cream. It provides a good contrast to all the yellow daffs I have.The third beauty is Double Tahiti.And this is one of my favorite yellows in the garden — they always seem to come back while the forsythia and daffodils are in bloom.Also planted this weekend: a viburnum “snowball” bush, a white single Rose of Sharon, and a new rose! I’ll post pictures as they flower.

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24 April 2006 by pat.

King Alfred daffodils are in bloom.So is forsythia.And my early season species tulips.Migratory birds are returning.Seen so far: Ruby crowned and Golden crowned kinglets; yellow-bellied sapsuckers; Common grackles; Red-winged blackbirds; Robins (dunno if they left). White-breasted nuthatches, too.

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29 January 2005 by pat.

How that summertime used to make me smile….

But I’m seeing finches, sparrows, and chickadees (and the occasional downy woodpecker) out back, so that’s nice.

Soon I will start planting seeds: not just for me, but for a seed sale. ah, I shall have to take care that I don’t end up with the usual seed wilt&die: I’ve been told that a dusting of cinnamon or a spritz or two of chamomile tea can help reduce the dreaded die-off after the plants get their first real leaves.

I’ll let you know if it works!

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1 April 2004 by pat.

In 1962, Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring” about environmental damage caused by DDT and chemical pesticides, and predicted a desolate future caused by the poorly-tested chemicals used to grow our food and keep the golf greens putt-perfect. Her book shot to the top of the best-seller list, she was on the cover of Time magazine, and people listened. This was the effective start of the environmental protection movement.

The City of Toronto will become more envlronmentally sensitive by implementing the first stage of a new pesticide bylaw. Starting on April 1st, many insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides may no longer be used on your lawn or in your garden as a matter of course.

Why is the city doing this?

In part, because we don’t know what the long-term effect is of the chemicals used in combination — their use is pretty recent, dating only as far back as the 20th century, with most having been developed after World War II. Toronto’s pesticides frequently travel from lawns and gardens when heavy rains wash them into the storm sewer system. These chemicals end up in Lake Ontario, the source of Toronto’s drinking water. The city filtration systems simply aren’t capable of removing all chemicals from our drinking water.

How does this new bylaw affect you?

For starters, it’s time to take any leftover Round-Up to your closest hazardous materials drop site. Weed & Feed is also prohibited, as are chemical weedkillers that rely on surface-coating broad-leafed weeds. Most spraying to kill insects is also forbidden, unless it’s city-directed to kill West Nile infected mosquitoes.

How will you adjust to this new way of gardening?

Consider your expectations: is it reasonable to expect an unvarying green lawn, even in the height of a drought, when the plants are stressed and less resistant to insects and disease? If you’re willing to be a bit less of a perfectionist, you’ll have an easier time. There are a few areas to look at: soil, weeds, and bugs.Good lawns and gardens all start with the same basic ingredient: soil.If you have healthy, well-structured soil, you’ll have an easier time growing healthy plants.

What can you do to promote this type of soil?

If you don’t already have one going, now is the time to start a compost pile. Composting is easy, benefits your soil, and reduces the garbage destined for landfill sites. You can buy a composter from almost any hardware store or the City of Toronto.There are a few general principals for a healthy, sweet-smelling heap:

• layer green (recently alive, like kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, or freshly-killed weeds) and brown (shredded newsprint, dead leaves fromlast year)
• keep it moist, but not wet. The bacteria need moisture to do their work, but if the pile starts smelling foul, that’s a sign that you’ve got an anaerobic bacteria take-over in progress: if it’s smelling bad, turn the pile daily for a week to help it dry a little, and to bring some oxygen into it to help the good bacteria win the battle. A fistful of nitrogen fertilizer might help, too.
• no meat products or byproducts. No dairy products. Although these will compost, you’re likely to attract city-based vermin to your pile: rats, raccoons, even coyotes if you’re near one of the city’s ravines. They will make a mess, and your neighbours will hate you. You don’t want that, now, do you?

After a couple of months, you should have rich, sweet, well-rotted compost. Dig it into your gardens, or top dress your lawn and around plants. You’ll be rewarded with healthy plants that are more disease-resistant and better able to cope with bugs and slugs.

How to deal with weeds?

A healthy thick lawn can keep many weeds at bay by crowding them out. The best way to get rid of them once you have them is to dig them up. Some can be easily pulled. Others require assistance. A whole assortment of aids is available these days, from tools like the garden claw and loop hoes, to water pressure-based tools that liquify the soil around the weed so it can be pulled, and butane torches for immediate destruction of weeds between paving stones. Check out your local hardware store or Lee Valley Tools.If you’re looking for an inexpensive, safe, and effective technique to spot-kill weeds, pour boiling water over them. In about 3-4 days they’ll wither and be very easy to remove, even from between interlocking brick.

But what about bugs?

Dealing with bugs can be very trying. There’s nothing quite like checking up on some rose buds that are about to open, only to discover that a cane borer has turned the stem into a flute and all the buds are dying. Most bugs have natural predators, and if you make your garden safe for them, they’ll help keep the population of the bad bugs down somewhat.If you’ve got to get rid of bugs, the first and best way to kill them is to squash them (or kill them manually some other way). It leaves no environmental residue, but it does mean that you need to be eternally vigilant. The second route, for insects like aphids, is to spray them off with water. The third path of attack is insecticidal soap, which kills bugs on contact. Read the instructions first: it can’t be used on all plants.Some pesticides are still available if you need something stronger. These are more natural solutions than the outlawed chemicals, but can still be quite toxic. Natural methods for dealing with insects include nematodes to eat grubs, rotenone to control chewing insects, or pyrethrum to kill many sorts of bugs. Check with the experts at your local gardening centre: they should be able to point you in the right direction. One word of caution: you may still find some of the banned substances for sale in local hardware stores, where the owners may not be aware of the new bylaw. Compliance is your responsibility.A good rule of thumb to use when taking care of a lawn or garden is to start with the least harmful solution, and gradually work up through more toxic solutions only if the environmentally friendly solution didn’t work. Strong insecticides kill the beneficial insects as well as the pests, so they should be avoided whenever possible.For more information about growing green and the City of Toronto’s new bylaw, see the following files on the city website:

• index file
• Green guide to a healthy lawn
• Reducing pesticide use

If you have any gardening questions, don’t hesitate to ask the Master Gardeners organization (throughout North America) — the Toronto group may be contacted at their gardening Q&A board or by phone at 416-397-1345.There’s also some good information on growing organic lawns  and on biological control out there.Have fun, and grow green!

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3 February 2004 by pat.

Things I’d like to grow in my garden this year:

• Lady’s mantle (again). I really like the ruffled velvet look of the leaves, and the way water beads on them.
• Sweet peas. Joanne grew them on the roof deck at work, and they look very pretty in a Victorian way with their loosely-ruffled blossoms in faded pastel colors, and they smell wonderful.
• Acidantheras (again). Yes it’s a PITA having to plant and dig them up each year, and they need to have support, but I love those six-pointed white flowers with the aubergine touches in the throat, the way they bob in a breeze, and the delicate vanilla fragrance.
• Salpiglossis, another Victorian flower. It comes in many colors, reminds me of stained glass, and with its yellow throat, looks illuminated from within. Very photogenic.
• Trilliums. I’m sure there must be a mail-order garden store in Ontario that has cultivated trilliums. I used to bring home bouquets of them for my mother when I was a child in the ‘burbs of Montreal. Maybe they could be the spring flower to come up every year along the south fence. Hmmmm.
• FOXGLOVES!! I don’t think I had any last year, and they are one of my favorite flowers. I saved some seed from two years ago, so I’ll have to see if it is still viable. It likes shade, so it should do well along the south fence.
• Okra. Because the flowers are beautiful pale purple hibiscus-like blossoms.
• Alyssum. White and deep amethyst-colored alyssum to grow between the slates on the path in the back yard. I saw a yard that used it this way in a gardening magazine, and I think it might work nicely in our little yard.We have white alyssum self-seeding every year in the front garden, so I might be able to grab some of last fall’s seed and shake it around out back. Between alyssum, thyme, moss, and pennyroyal (I’m still keeping my fingers crossed that it will come back) we’ll have a fragrant green walkway punctuated with slate stepping stones.
• Herbs: the sage, parsley, lavender, and bloody dock should all survive the winter, and I’ll have to see if the oregano survives. I’d like to plant tarragon again, because ours died last winter; also want marjoram again, because it just gives me a great rush to muss it up and then smell the essential oils that are released; basil, because nothing tastes more like summer than basil, boccancini, tomato slices, a drizzle of good olive oil and a splash of basalmic vineger.
• Something to attract fall migrating birds and winter visitors (other than the three bird feeders, one suet feeder, and water cascade). The thought of a berry-bearing bush appeals to me: there’s a mountain ash in the alleyway behind our yard, and I enjoy watching the robins eat the fruit. A local organization called LEAF (Local Enhancement and Appreciation of Forests) is willing to advise, dig a hole and subsidize the cost of planting a suitable native fruiting tree.
• Replace the thread-leafed Japanese maple with a Japanese maple species that is sturdier, taller, and has more mass to the leaves. Maybe I’ll donate ours to the office rooftop garden.

Things to remember that I don’t want to grow again:

• Lamium. Too invasive for a garden that is 17ft by 20ft.
• Creeping myrtle/perriwinkle. Ditto
• Icelandic/Welsh poppies. Unless I want to faithfully deadhead so I don’t have volunteers everywhere.
• Yellow flowers. Dunno — yellow just doesn’t turn my crank at this point.

…pat.

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27 December 2003 by pat.

Here it is, December 26, and I’m sitting on the back deck in my jeans, a t-shirt, and a fleece pull-over. The thermometer is reading 8 degrees.

It’s so warm that one of our indoor cats, Jimmy, decided to escape, and ran out the back door while I was bringing bags of birdseed back indoors after filling the feeders. I got him back inside, but only after he heard a neighbour’s voice, which frightened him, and after I grabbed him and suffered two tooth puncture wounds to my left hand, a scratch on my chin, and another scratch on my right ear (I bled like a stuck pig, and am not happy about the scratches, because we’re hosting a dinner party tomorrow night).

Returning the cat indoors was a good thing. The birds need to feed in the few daylight hours we get. They will need the calories tonight that they can gather from the suet, sunflower, safflower, and niger seeds — the temperature’s supposed to drop to -5 overnight. But then it will warm up: tomorrow night’s low will be above freezing, and daytime high for Sunday is expected to be around 10 Celsius.What does this mean for my garden? Well, the chives, which I had cut down almost to ground level a month ago, are now about 8 cm high; there are fresh new leaves on the parsley, and we’ve still got a few live purple sage leaves.

Even the buddleia, which I transplanted late in the season, continues to put forth new clusters of leaves.

Rose leaves, on the other hand, while still green on the canes, are crisp to the touch. There will be no more rose buds until spring.Everything else in the backyard looks dead for the rest of winter; most deciduous woody plants have lost their leaves, except for the Pee-Gee hydrangea, which is holding tight to them, even though the leaves hang straight down on either side of the central vein.

I may yet get a soil sample this next week that I can analyse: we’ll see how the weather unfolds. Right now, the prediction for Sunday is a mix of sun and clouds, and a high of 9.

What does all this teach me? You can’t always plan everything according to some averaged schedule of when events should occur… sometimes you’ve just got to play it by ear, and work the occasional green Christmas into the plans.

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