The "bad times" are coming

"The bad times" : that's how my husband refers to the winter and when the leaves start to fall like crazy and there's frost on the car windows in the morning it's hard to stay in denial.

This past weekend, we mowed up the front leaves and dumped a lot in the leaf composter out the back. Last year we added a lot of coffee grounds from my husband's favourite coffee shop to the mix. I think we are improving our composting techniques around the leaves, but many are from two large Norway maples on the property and they take a long time to break down.

Last night, I think we had the strongest frost so far and the tropicals in my containers are looking really poor - I think it's time to pull them up and into the composters and get the containers ready for winter. I took cuttings from the tropicals several weeks ago, so I have about a dozen of each now growing in little pots inside. I will keep taking cuttings and re-rooting over the winter to have enough for the containers nex spring.

I grew something new this year in my containers: Euphorbia Diamond Frost. It's a tender annual, about 18 inches high, with many tiny white flowers - something the same effect as baby's breath, but much nicer. I admit I bought the first 3 because of the newsletter I get from Proven Winners. But I liked it so much I went back and found some more. And the internet says it's easy to root cuttings.

Now I just need to figure out how long I can leave my ivy geraniums going before I take them in. I cut them back, pot them up and keep them going until early spring, when I will take some cuttings from them. "Spring" - isn't that a nice word?

And before Christmas, I will start receiving the seed catalogues and I will be like a kid in a candy shop.

The bad times aren't so bad.

Possum dis-Lodged

Maybe this isn't really a gardening post, but it did happen in my garden and because of my gardening, so I figure I'll report on it.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided I should neaten up the section of the yard in front of the front tool shed. This area has traditionally been cleverly camouflaged with many old overgrown forsythia bushes that either I or my neighbour perioidically attack viciously with clippers and pruners. Forsythias are very resilient, especially when they are probably 40 years old with trunks the size of small trees and they always came back strongly.

In early summer, I decided to cut them right down to the ground so they would grow up looking like real bushes again. but having done that, I thought - why not get rid of a lot of the really huge ones and just leave the smaller ones to grow on. Fortunately, I had my strong nephew working for me this summer, and he had a good time one afternoon getting about six of the monsters out. And I decided that in their place I will plant a row of cedars as a hedge next spring. The cedars and the small tameable forsythia should look nice together.

A good plan, but this means that an area that was very sheltered from view, where I had been in the habit of storing bags of left-over container soil, mulch, etc. is quite open to the public eye. We moved some of the material to the back, but I wanted to keep some bags of mulch near the front garden because that's where I will use them next spring. so we just moved those a bit under some over-hanging bushes and I decided to use some pieces of burlap, leftover from a project some years ago, to cover them up a bit more.

I found those burlap pieces in an old plastic bag in the back tool shed, carried them up to the front, pulled out the first piece, and shook it out. Much to my horror and surprise, an animal fell out of the burlap and took off very quickly into the undergrowth. All I saw clearly were strangely white looking feet. They reminded me of the feet I once saw on a possum that showed up on our deck one night a few years ago. My first thought then was - this is the strangest looking raccoon I have ever seen! But the word "possum" popped into my head (maybe because of all those years that I read the Pogo cartoon strip in the newspaper)and when I looked on the internet I found my strange nocturnal visitor was a possum.

So, I figured a possum had been making it's home in my burlap bag. Then I looked down and saw - a tiny possum baby. I was really horrified. It was smaller than my thumb and could only totter around in tiny circles. What had a I done! What could I do? I am not fond of possums and would just as soon they stayed away from my yard, but I felt terrible about separating a mother and child, even of the rodent variety. I covered the bags and the tiny possum with the burlap, hoping the mother would come back and get it. At least the burlap would keep it out of the sight of predators for a while. I hoped.

I consulted the internet again and found out - I had forgotten - that possums are marsupials and carry the young (called joeys, like baby kangaroos), in their pouch. Also, the mothers regularly give birth to several more babies than they are physically equipped to nurse, so only the strongest survive. I figured, if the mothers can take such a cavalier attitude toward their own babies, I shouldn't get too upset about the one I saw.

About 5 days later, I went into the back tool shed, whence came the bag of burlap, to get a rake, and I heard a loud squeaking noise. I looked down and saw another possum baby, squeaking its tiny head off . It was also tottering around in circles, quite energetically, although its sense of balance was not quite all there and it fell over quite regularly. If it hadn't been so pathetic, it would have been funny.

Again, I was appalled, but I figured this one couldn't be my fault; it was moving around so strongly it couldn't have been separated from it's mother for that long - surely not for the 5 days since the previous baby possum sighting. But every time I had to go back into the shed for a tool, it would start squeaking and totter in my direction. I began to suspect it thought maybe I was its Mom. Horror of horrors! I finally closed up the shed, hoping the mother possum would retrieve it.

Next day, I peeked in the tool shed - no squeaking. I looked around and finally spotted the little creature at the back , lying still. Okay, it's dead. But then it started to weakly move around. It's alive but too weak to squeak. Great. I can't stand this anymore. I move it outside and leave it under some bushes, where I figure it will succumb quickly to the elements or some roving predator.

Some days I find it very difficult to deal with the life and death struggles of gardening.

Me and my rainbarrels

I first read about rainbarrels some time in the 90's in an issue of Canadian Gardening Magazine. That article sparked a memory of an old wooden barrel that one of my grandfathers had when I was quite young to collect rain. I decided to get one for myself.
The task proved to be somehat complicated. The article mentioned several sources, but some proved hard to contact. We found some at Humber Nurseries, but they were too big to transport in our car. And at that point, Lee Valley did have some, but they were actually a bit small. Finally, my sister who lives in London Ont. found a source and they had a van, so she and her husband transported one to us when they were coming to To. And later brought us a second one.
Thus began my experiments with rain barrels. I tried positioning them under several different downspouts to see how well they collected. This involved removing parts of the downspouts - I got out the hack-saw and hacked away. I soon discovered that most any style of rain barrel will colllect water from a downspout - the trick is how easy it is to get it out again. After about a year of use, my original rainbarrels began to leak at the point where the hose was installed to allow the water to be taken out. I tried various things to seal the point of leakage - good old duct tape, some special glue for marine applications, even had a regular tap installed in one - nothing helped in the long run.
About this time, the City began to offer rain barrels for sale and I got one. It proved to be better than the old ones, so I bought another and another until I had 4 all together. And their way of allowing you to access the water collected worked better. Also, the overflow system was more straightforward and allowed me to line them up so the first one, once full, could push its' extra water into the second one. And, I found that one downspout collected better than the rest, so I lined them all up against one wall. I would love to have an arrangement whereby the first sent its overflow into the second, the second into the 3rd , and the 3rd into the 4th. Unfortunately, I have worked out that to do this the first barrel has to be raised about 3 feet higher than it is! And that ain't gonna happen. So, what I have allows me to send overflow from the first barrel to any of the others; When it rains hard, I leave my umbrella and waterproof shoes by the back door and pop in and out to move the overflow hose to where it is needed.
I must confess that although I love collecting rainwater, the history of my relationship with my barrels has not been without difficult incidents. The wall where my barrels reside has a cellar window set in a window well. Several years ago, during a particularly heavy rainstorm, I went out and found the water was coming out of the downspout so quickly, it was leaping past the rain barrel opening and overflowing into the window well. In the cellar, I had a miniature Niagara Falls flowing down the inside of the wall at the point - fortunately, in an unfinished part of the basement. My husband and I had to bail out the window well in the pouring rain and then stopped the overflow by covering the well opening with an old outside table upside down on top of the well. That made us realize the window well needed a cover.
This summer, during another heavy downpour, I went out to check the barrels and found none of the water was going where it was supposed to, (i.e, into the first barrel) because the force of the water coming out the downspout was too strong and it was leaping about 2 feet out into the gravelled area past the barrels. So, I moved an empty garbage pail into position and it filled in about 3 minutes. Later, I found a flexible downspout extender at Rona and found I can use it to aim the water into one of the old original barrels Iwas no longer using. I plugged up the original holes inside for the out-take and over- flow with duct tape and it actually holds very well.
My husband likes using this old barrel because he dips a watering can from above into the water and its less fiddly then using the out take hose on the new barrels. Hence the old barrel's new name : "the big dipper".
So is all this worth it? I like the idea that we are using rainwater instead of treated city water for all of our containers and my vegetable garden. And I always save rainwater at the end of the summer in Tropicana oj containers to use on my orchids over the winter and my seedlings in the spring. In a summer such as this one, I have only put the hose on the garden twice. I have had enough rainwater to spot water any plants (mainly a few evergreens) that were planted in the spring and a few perennials that were moved.
I know plants don't like chlorinated water, and when you think of the cost just in energy of treating our water, eventually, we won't be able to afford to put it on our plants. So, I figure we're just getting our system worked out before it's really necessary.
And by the way, once you start doing this, it's amazing how you start to feel a sense of ownership about the rain that falls on your garden and how you want to collect it and use it as efficiently as possible. The other day, we had a short but very heavy downpour and as the water came out the downspout that carries the water from the upper level eavestrough to the lower, it shot out into the front yard several feet away from the house rather than landing in the lower trough, from where it would eventually go to the barrels. My husband noticed this and remarked to me: we've got to do something about that water shooting out the front down-spout - it should be going into the barrels.
Yeah, that's going to be tricky, I'll have to work on that!

veggies and me

I swore many times I would never grow vegetables. I did grow herbs, but no veggies.


As a gardener with an Italian heritage, I grew up surrounded by growing edibles: lettuce, tomatoes, beans, corn, potatoes, peppers, peas, peaches, pears, cherries (I grew up in the Niagara peninsula), grapes, raspberries, strawberries, cucumbers, celery, fennel, herbs, currants, gooseberries . And chickens.


And, my mother and grandparents canned: peaches, pears, pickles, tomatoes, jams, etc. etc etc.


To this day I rarely eat peaches, even though I love them, because they remind me of endless hours spent in the basement peeling fuzzy peaches (they made me itch).


For almost 4 decades, I gardened, spending my energies stricly on ornamentals. but last year, I succumbed in a small way. I have a friend of British background with and Italian husband who had some health issues, and I asked if I could use part of his garden if he was not up to planting the whole garden. I grew green beans and lettuce very successfully and I was hooked.


I read up on "square foot gardening" and set up a bed 4 feet wide and 13 feet long. I have grown baby carrots, baby beets, lettuce , green onions and green beans. My beans are to die for!


I decided to grow a few tomatoes as well Because they take up quite a bit of room, I have grown them in a separate area, in containers. I used the old recycling boxes. They have finally startd to ripen and we are enjoing them as well. And the cucumbers, which I am growing on an obelisk that I usually use for morning glories. Home-grown cukes have a wonderful flavour!


Ok, so I will probably continue to have this modest vegetable garden in the future. But I want to make it clear that I will not keep chickens. NO CHICKENS!


But I have to admit those bantam chickens are rather cute.

Fuligo septica

A few weeks ago, I noticed something strange on one of my composters out the back. These are the big, heavy plastic (I think) black and brown composters that the City of Toronto has been selling at Environment Days for years. They have a top you plop on and slits on the sides to let the air in. And one composter had something strange sort of oozing out of the slits - a bright yellow something. I lifted the lid of the composter with some trepidation and saw the top of the composting materials inside were covered with this bright yellow something and it was oozing out wherever it could. Looked like something in a science fiction movie - and I wasn't far off the track there - see below.

Anyway, I was busy with something and just left the top off, hoping it would go away. I noticed the next day the yellow ooze had sort of hardened into a dark brown mass - I thought maybe that meant it had died - actually, it didn't.

Then this evening, I was admiring my raised vegetable bed and my husband said - what's that yellow stuff in the corner? To my horror, it was the yellow something again. I got rid of it by scraping it up and the soil underneath with an old piece of broken crockery, then washing the side of the wood bed in that spot with soap and water. But now I had to know what it was!

Enter the Internet. I googled "yellow fungus on soil" and son of a gun, I found it - just like that. Fuligo septica, also know as (are you ready for this ?) "dog vomit slime mold" . It seems to happen very commonly on ground bark mulch or wood chips and doesn't always take the bright yellow form. In fact, having seen many interesting pictures of slime mold in the last couple of hours, I think I have sometimes seen forms of it on wood chips - but never the bright yellow colour.

Anyway, I found out that it usually shows up in especially damp conditions, it's always around, it's perfectly harmless, and is even edible, if you really are that hungry. And, this particular kind of slime mold, Fuligo septica, is credited with inspiring the original movie The Blob.

The things I wouldn't know if I wasn't a gardener!

Tadpole tales

Most of my readers know that I have a small water feature built into a corner of my deck. When the deck was built, 10 summers ago, I decided I didn't want the complications of fish and water lilies, mainly because of the many racoons who hang around our yard at night. All I wanted was the sound of water, so I bought a pump, a core-drilled rock, and some liner material from Water Arts and we set up a small water feature in what is essentially a box, about 3 feet square and 12 inches deep.

I soon discovered that I had to add some plant material, because otherwise the algae takes over. I tried water hyacinth and it spread quickly over the surface, but then the racoons, during one of their nightly revels, decided to play with the plants and pretty much destroyed them. After a few other experiments, I settled on salvina, a small floating aquatic plant that spreads quickly over the surface, and oxygenators, plants that resemble underwater ferns, that live under the surface and maintain a good level of oxygen in the water. I simply bought a bag of oxygenators and a small container of salvina every spring, added them to the water when I set up the pump and all seemed to be well.

Until this year.

Two Thursdays ago, I was near Water Arts, so went in and bought the 2 plants. Friday, I cleaned out the water feature, filled it using the garden hose and set up the pump. I had put the plants in a couple of buckets filled with water from one of my rain barrels, because I know plants don't like chlorinated water. For the same reason, I did not dump the plants in for a couple of days, so the chlorine in the water I had added with the hose could dissipate.

A few days later, I glanced into the water and noticed that the salvina was looking rather bad - in fact, it looked brown and dead. I wondered if I had inadvertently introduced something toxic into the water when I cleaned off the liner before filling the water feature. I mulled over the situation for a couple of days, then decided to take out the oxygenators, which looked still reasonably healthy and I put them in a bucket of rainwater again. I also noticed at this point that the dead salvina was disappearing.

A couple of family members have given me small ceramic frogs to adorn my water feature and the racoons, during their nocturnal carousings, often knock them into the water. Sunday morning, I noticed that all 3 frogs were missing and I peered into the water to find them. That's when I saw these tiny black creatures, about 1/4 inch long, zipping about in the water. At some point in the distant past, I must have seen a nature program about frogs and I instantly recognized them as tadpoles. I have tadpoles in my water feature! I announced to the world. (Well, actually I announced it to my daughter, because I was talking to her on the portable phone at that point)

So, now what? I consulted the Internet for information on how to raise tadpoles and found out I should feed them boiled lettuce. I have a lot of a japanese salad green called mizuna growing in my vegetable garden at this time, so I took some leaves, steamed them in the microwave, and have been dropping little bits in a couple of times a day. And there does not seem to be any salvina left in the water.

Yesterday, I went back to Water Arts to consult with the owner who had sold me the salvina. She was as surprised and charmed as I was by the idea of tadpoles in my water feature. And she figures the little creatures first ate the tiny roots of the salvina, causing the little plants to die, and then they ate the dead plants. The oxygenators are a rougher textured plant and probably more difficult to chew. But my water feature has no algae - which is very unusual as well as desirable. So, the tadpoles must be eating any algae that is forming.

As I said to the woman at Water Arts, I feel I am in an ethical dilemma: should I simply empty the water feature, discard the tadpoles and start over with fresh water? She said; "oh, you can't do that" - meaning, kill the tadpoles.

But, here's the thing: can I keep this tadpole thing going over the summer? If they keep the algae from forming, I am very happy to have them live in my water feature. But, they will grow and start turning into little frogs, and I suspect when they are big enough to be noticed by the racoons - who seem to figure in this story much more than I would like - they will simply become hors d'oeuvres at the nightly party. So, am I simply raising food for the blasted racoons?

All I wanted was the sound of water bubbling through and around rocks, and I am now caught up in a moral dilemma.

I will let you all think about it, while I go steam some more gourmet greens for my tadpoles - nothing but the best for these babies.

Mulch ado about nothing

I always mean to do more mulching than I actually achieve. I know it's a very good thing to do to the beds - cuts down on watering and suppresses weeds - if it only killed earwigs as well, it would be a wondrous thing. It's pretty good, anyway.

Usually, by the time I get organized to do some summer mulching, it's August. Here it is, June, and I have done quite a bit. I believe this is all due to the early warm weather we had ths spring. As I remarked to a gardening friend the other day, I feel as thought we have already had 2 months of summer!

I am feeling particularly smug today, because we bought 10 bags of mulch at 15 % off at Rona today - and Rona was already selling mulch cheaper than anyone else I had checked out. I may actually get all my beds mulched this year!

Plus: last fall, I was planning on growing some veggies this summer, and figured I should get some straw for mulching. And, around Hallowe'en, the nurseries always sell bales of hay for decorating. So, I bought a bale and left it out back over the winter and now am using it to mulch my tomatoes and cucumbers. I am very pleased with myself.

Any time now - I'll find out that mulching with straw causes earwigs to multiply excessively or slugs to attack veggies with extra voraciousness. In the meantime, I am basking in my farsightedness.

Confession: I chose this topic because I really wanted to use that title!

Garden tours

They're interesting and inspiring but mostly fun.


Last Sunday, we went on the tour organized by the Parkdale and Toronto Horticultural Society. Almost all the houses were on High Park Ave., extending from Bloor St., just north of the park itself. up to Dundas. This is an old area of Toronto and as one of the Master Gardeners in one garden remarked, this was once "Millionaire's Row". The houses must all date from the mid 19th century and are mostly huge. A lot have been broken up into several flats, because who could afford to maintain a house like this these days - well, actally, the people who can now live in Rosedale and Forest Hill.


But getting back to High Park Ave: the diversity of the houses and gardens was amazing. Some gardens were dominated by huge trees. We saw a deck at the back of a house built around an oak tree that was probably 4 feet in diameter at the base. That same garden had the most amazing tree house I have ever seen. Apparently the children who grew up in the house are now all adults but the parents remain and the kids come back to do the upkeep on the tree house. Smart parents.


I was quite amused by the story behind a front rock garden on Humberside Ave., just west of High Park Ave. It was described in the brochure as "supposedly a low maintenance endeavour" that turned out to be quite the project. The whole front yard ( it's a B&B, actually) is on a steep slope and the woman owner said she got tired of the perilous job of trying to cut the grass. The landscaper she hired advised her to put in a rock garden, because rock gardens are low maintenance. Anyone who has a rock garden would raise their eyebrows at this! The owner is definitely a gardening neophyte and she went along with it - and cursed him daily for about 3 years she told me. But, after a this initial painful period, she found as everything filled in, with groundcovers and low evergreens, it has become fairly low maintenance. But she had a narrow escape, when someone gave her some goutweed. She was going to plant some in that rock garden (let us all give a collective shudder), but fortunately, she had an experienced gardener staying in her B&B that week who advised her not to do it - for God's sake, don't do that, lady, I would have said. So, she put it instead in the bed that runs along the other side of the driveway and now understands it's one of those plants with a bad Napoleon complex - I will take over the world!


You pick up bits of local history on these tours. One big house originally belonged to Daniel Webster Clendenan, who was the first mayor of the village called The Junction. He owned most of the land around there and he was the reason the area still know as the Junction was dry until well into the 20th century. And of course Clendenan Ave., which runs parallel to High Park Ave., was named after him.


I'm not saying much about plants, am I? So now I will. I saw so many kousa dogwoods in bloom on this tour. I fell in love with this plant about 15 years ago, when I first saw a very large specimen in bloom in James Gardens. I have spoken to various horticulturalists about this shrub/tree over the years and often have been told I would have to protect it if I planted one in my garden. And I don't plant things I need to protect. Maybe the proximity of these yards to the lake helps? Or maybe the fact that most of the houses are so close together creates sheltered areas? Anyway, they were gorgeous.


Garden tours - a good thing. (Pace, Martha, I just couldn't resist)

On garden design

I'm bad at it, but I am getting better.


The first time I tried to design a perennial bed (about 33 years ago), I did lots of research on how to do it. And, I got some graph paper and measured and did research on what plants to put in, and how to improve the soil and all that stuff. My soil improvement was good - that area still has good soil and my choice of plants as I remember wasn't too bad. But, I made the bed a rectangle. Rule one of good garden design (in my book): try to imitate what nature does, and nature does not have a lot of 90 degree angles in its design. I suspect that I did the rectangle thing partly because I had graph paper in front of me; it was so easy to divide it up that way. And, maybe it was also because I was replacing an old tool shed that had been on that spot when we bought the house. So, somehow, that area was rectangular in my mind.


Fortunately, a couple of springs later, I had my baby and did not have time to pay attention to those perennials for a while. By the time I had the leisure to spend on the flowers, the perennial weeds had taken over and I eventually had to have the whole bed dug up and I replaced it with an elongated oval design - much more aesthetically pleasing.


The next time I really got into perennial bed design was about 15 years later. I had in the meantime read about the garden hose approach to layout: you put a hose or hoses down and arrange the outline of the bed that way. It works well, because you tend to get gentle curves in your outlines. In my case, I was laying out a bed for the front yard, and by looking out the front upper windows of the house, I could see the form the bed would be very well. Maybe that's why, to this day, you get the best view of that front bed by standing at one of those windows!


Two springs ago, a major feature of our front yard , a very old and impossibly large burning bush (Euonymus alatus), failed to leaf out and we realized it was dead. Once past the chore of removing all the dead branches, and hacking out as much as possible of the huge trunk, I began to see the possibilities for a whole new bed. It has taken a while, but I am now pretty happy with the results. We planted 3 globe blue spruce and 3 "rosey glow" barberries along the south side of the opened up area. Dusty millers and silver brocade artemesia line the south edges. I now have a small and slow-growing tricolour beech towards the north side and a dappled willow which I should prune this weekend. Last summer, my gardening friend Jean gave me a couple of balloon flowers (platydocon) she had dug up and I put the blue one near one of the blue spruce. The effect of the blue flowers, with the blue spruce, the silver edging, and the burgundy barberry, plus the burgundy beech and the white frosted willow in the background was spectacular. I was awestruck with my wonderful design - but really, it pretty much just happened. At least I can recognize a good thing even when I do it by accident, so this spring we transplanted the blue and white balloon flowers that I had out the back into that front bed.


By the way, if this sounds like a lot of plant material to replace a single burning bush - you would not believe how big that thing was!

A final note: my gardening friend Bev, who is much, much better at design than I am, dropped by yesterday to pick up a couple of plants I was giving her, and commented favourably on this new area. I was very pleased.

Roses

I always said I wouldn't grow roses because they are too much trouble, and even though the flowers are undeniably beautiful, the bushes themselves are not. (I also said I would never grow vegetables...but that's a story for another day)

But, finally, I decided to just grow a few roses because it seemed any serious gardener should at least try. So,about half a dozen years ago, I ordered the Pickering Roses catalogue and ordered 4: 2 climbers and 2 shrub roses. One climber died on me a few winters ago, but the other, the Duke of York ( a white rose that is supposedly the white rose of the War of the Roses fame - Lancaster vs. York , remember?) is doing very well. It started blooming about a week ago and is quite lovely and very vigorous. It is blooming about 2 weeks early, but everything has done that this spring.

The other rose that has flourished is the shrub rose Prairie Princess. The flowers are very like those of a hybrid tea and are a gorgeous medium pink. And this spring, it is blooming like it has never bloomed before. When I look out my kitchen window, I am treated to the sight of dozens of roses in bloom. Maybe it's because we had a milder winter, or maybe I gave it an extra dose of compost last fall. And because it's blooming extra early, I don't think the insects that usually attack it are around yet. It usually blooms for about 3 weeks starting in mid June, then rests for a while and blooms again less prolifically in the later part of the summer. It's in that second blooming period that I have to fight those Japanese beetles. I pick them off, wearing gardening gloves, and drop them in a pail of soapy water. But you have to be fast when you grab them, because they are flying insects. It will be interesting to see what happens with the roses later this summer.

A day for weeding and pruning

We've had lots of rain in the last few days and the ground is so soft, the weeds mostly just kind of pop out, when you pull. I started at the front yesterday, using my Jekyll weeder from Lee Valley on the stubborn ones. Today I did more of the same, then moved to the back where I tackled really big weeds in the wild area on the east border.

Then I attacked some of the really nasty pruning jobs - I got rid of lots of the weedy branches that were keeping my composters from getting enough sun and took out some of the bigger branches from the forsythia forest by the front tool shed. I'll need to get some help from my husband or nephew to cut out the biggest stems at ground level.

Several hours work that left me tired - very tired - but in a good way. I find weeding and pruning both very satisfying activities.