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.