Summer and Fall Recap

Journal Entry No.7
A long hiatus

I feel perfectly awful neglecting my blog! But to be fair, this past year I spent far less time in my garden and twice as much time trying to do things for the house. Even now I'm "housebound", we're currently faced with a possible leak/condensation problem, and with the prospect of more rain on the horizon I feel my anxiety growing. Usually I take this time to start planning out the new garden goals for the year. I hit none of my goals last year. At all. It's amazing I managed to rake up the leaves in the fall. 

Our personal lives took a hit late last winter, hubs got laid off and things were intense for several months. We are okay right now (touch wood) but our priorities changed. There were fewer leisurely pursuits between us and the focus shifted on that which had to be done versus things that could be deferred to a later date. Oh, how I wish I had done several things in the garden. For starters, not trying to be shady, but I really want a privacy wall built around the deck. Our neighbors had their deck renovated and it now sits above fence level so we have zero privacy. I'm sure it's awkward for them, too, but I find I'm less inclined to spend anytime on my deck because it now feels like a performing arts stage. And their kids are small and want to talk to me when they see me and well, damnit I just like to be left alone sometimes. The backyard is an oasis. A retreat. But last year it felt different. The plan is to erect either a trellis attached to the deck, or a hedge row tall enough to obscure the view of our deck. The hindrance here is that if I do put in some cypress or the like, it will block any sun from reaching one of my only sun beds. There is much problem solving to be done in regards to the deck...Which is aging terribly, hubs did his best to "rejuvenate" it but it already looks like shriveled up driftwood again. I just don't have the funds to replace the deck this year, or probably the next six years.

The other major undertaking was that I was supposed to overhaul the side garden. I have to take out the ninebark, and level off the garden bed, replacing it with a concrete pad. I have a fierce goutweed problem. I'm told the only way out is to tarp it, but half the neighborhood is covered in this crap. We tried tarping for two years and all it takes is one rogue goutweed and it explodes. Last year was truly exceptional, we have never had so much rain before, and apparently it was perfect for the weeds. I tried to get out and weed whack but it was overwhelming. My garden looked atrocious. It really made me long for the flat, empty, uninspired backyard we had in our first rental. One day I'm going to have a blank slate for a garden where I can plant whatever I desire and hopefully won't have to contend with seventy varieties of weed (we live near a naturalized woodlot so a lot of weirdness spills into my garden and it's near impossible to control).

One thing I can say I mastered last year was the memorial garden for my late friend. Honestly, every garden in my backyard is a memorial garden, it's beginning to look more like a cemetery every day! The goth in me is proud. :) I think memorial gardens are a beautiful expression of love and I'm not planning on stopping them anytime soon! It's a great way to focus one's attention, too, you can't ignore a memorial garden! This wasn't a planned project, it just felt like the right time. You see, we had this sad, scraggly little side garden bed that had been long neglected. In fact, I believe when I moved in the only plants in the bed were yellow tulips and I think that might have been due to the squirrels more than anything. I half heartedly transplanted some hostas into the bed in the spring, but it really needed polishing off. I don't know if I needed a reason, but it seemed like the prefect time to close a chapter in my life, I had grieved the loss of a high school friend for over a decade and it was time to let her go and allow her to rest. It was time to dedicate the space to her. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do so I just sort of winged the whole process. Luckily my parents' neighbor was landscaping and pulled out a few dozen really good bricks from their own yard, we repurposed these to build a small retaining wall around the bed. We then filled the bed with gravel. I buried my friend's ashes beneath a rose - I selected the Martin Frobisher rose because it was the only really pretty fragrant rose left at the nursery, and it's named after a privateer, or a pirate. Yep, a pirate rose. For my goth friend who shared my dream of becoming a pirate. I can't make this up lol, it just worked out that way. I hung a pretty medallion on the gate next to it. I often think of her when I see it. It feels like the perfect tribute to her. I also buried her pictures and a few of our shared items in a box with her ashes. It was a proper burial. Apparently not illegal, either. Who knew?

The summer was surprisingly cool and oh, how I welcomed that fact. I'm sure the lakes stayed cold. It was too cold to swim. I shed no tears. The fact most of summer felt like autumn was dreamlike and awesome. I will say the foliage in autumn was not as good as it had been the previous year. Our rain and humidity levels were atrociously high and as such we had mass amounts of fungi and molds. The trees were badly damaged as a result and most leaves dropped at the first frost.

Plant wise my new Rose of Sharon - planted where the cherry tree stood - put out its first blooms. They were gorgeous periwinkle flowers but sparse as the plant is quite young. I look forward to it growing proudly in the sun bed and adding a bit of colour at the end of the deck. A few of the coral bell seedlings took root, the pulmonaria on the rocks performed exceptionally and I will now be planting more of them there in the future. Likewise, I'm working on transplanting and expanding the ground cover by the pond using creeping sedum. It looks like moss in the spring, utterly captivating and thankfully likes to choke out all the weeds. My plan is to get it growing all the way around the pond. After some research we found it's unlikely we'll ever get the waterfall going again, so I have to make new decisions regarding that in the future.

I've added a few of my plant successes in the photos below. My highlights of the year that aren't pictured would have to be the impatiens, I plan on buying more impatiens and adding them to the preexisting beds in containers, it fills out beautifully which is a nice treat when other plants fail. Like the daffodils, my double bloomers failed to show themselves due to the warm winter temps. This year proves to be similar thus far so I'm not expecting miracles in the spring. I hope all is well with those who read this!

With kindness.

Happy Gardening!

Summer Recap & Other Things

Journal Entry No.5
It's Raining!

You read that correctly, I am sitting in February and it's raining. I love it. I even dreamt that I woke up, ran downstairs and proclaimed to my husband, "It's raining in February! I love it!" Because rain and February are rare instances in Southern Ontario. In fact, the whole winter has been a bit screwy. While we aren't out of the woods yet, we've all been fairly surprised at the lack of winter. But what it lacks in quantity it has certainly made up for in quality. When it has snowed it's been blustery, frigid cold, with heaps and heaps of snow to shovel. I'm not sure what the perfect winter would be. This is like a bizarre trade off where we get several weeks of warm spring like weather in exchange for a few brutal winter ones. I think I can handle that, all we've done is bunker down during the worst of it. Now that temps are rising and there's no longer a -25°C wind chill I've been able to go for my walks again and I'm losing those pesky Christmas weight pounds! And all of this balmy weather has me thinking about the garden, what's to come and what has been. I never did publish a recap on the end of summer so here it is!

My last post was in July, so there are few months to look back on. July was the height of the bloom period for most of my garden. Many plants ran through their cycle and by August others were beginning to take hold. I had struggled with plant loss due to a rather large rodent colony that had taken up residence beneath my deck. As luck would have it my neighbors installed a brand new deck of their own, which lead to a lot of construction noise and vibrations. I wasn't thrilled that I lost the use of my backyard for several weeks (my side garden abuts their yard so I was directly in line with all of the activity), but the noise was a blessing in disguise: I noticed a marked improvement with the rodent activity, it must've scared a number of them off. Better still, after construction halted, I noticed an uptick in predatory birds! Bonus. This created the prefect opportunity for my remaining plants to thrive. I can only hope we enter in the new year with this luck.

Last spring I endeavored to plant annuals by seed. I had no experience with this sort of thing and results were a mixed bag. I struggled with properly thinning plants out, I think I might have over thinned some, where others looked wild and unkempt to the point I couldn't identify which was flower and which was weed, so I left them alone. It's painfully obvious that I struggled with the Candy Tuft and Alyssum. I did not get those magnificent croppings of full bushy growth. For the effort I think it's better to buy those at the nursery instead. Several plants never made it past seedling stage, the Sweet Pea was one of those. The Scented Stock barely made it's presence known. Even my pansies didn't fair very well, although they are somehow still surviving in the garden bed so perhaps this year will be their chance to shine. The most painful experience was when I lost my Teddy Sunflower seedlings to slugs and rodents, even with protective cloches. I did everything to save them. It was disheartening to say the least.

The things that did manage to grow from seed, for the most part, didn't grow in the way that I had envisioned or hoped. I had some Chinese Forget-me-not that bloomed in the late summer into autumn. The flowers were beautiful shades of uniformly soft blue, but they were leggy and falling over top of other plants. By the end of the year they looked a tangled mess. I don't think they received enough sunlight. I might try planting them again this year but further into the sun bed. Likewise my Zinnias produced flowers continuously but the blooms were very small and the stalks long and leggy. I think I'll try planting Zinnias again but perhaps purchase young ones from the nursery. I can't help but feel things lagged due to a combination of our unpredictable weather and the time I chose to directly sow the seeds. I should have started them indoors first. My mother had assured me my Four o'clocks would flourish but results were all over the place. Those in the deepest shade bloomed best and grew to two feet tall. Those that were located in partial and direct sunlight did not grow more than a couple of inches and never bloomed. And to add to that they were not Four o'clocks but more like 9PM to 7AM's, if I got up early enough I might catch them in bloom. As such, I don't think I'll revisit those flowers, their foliage isn't so fancy it makes up for the lack of blooms. 

My success stories were unexpected. I had planted Moonflowers in the spring, greatly anticipating white dinner plates on my trellis, but instead found Flying Saucer Morning Glories! They certainly were a UFO. I don't know if I was sold the wrong seeds by mistake or some combination of soil acidity caused them to turn this way? It was utterly bizarre but they yielded great blooms. I had also planted Heavenly Blues in the same container and they looked lovey together. They did become quite unruly and began to strangle each other out, so this year I plan on building a larger trellis for them to climb and hopefully plant the right amount so it doesn't go haywire. My other triumph were the Marigolds that I had grown from seed. I had somehow managed to produce several plants with enormous yellow heads which I could see from the back windows. I loved to look out and see them swaying in the wind. They looked fabulous with the purple aster that I had unknowingly nursed back to health after I planted it in my garden for fun. I can envision a whole row of aster wrapping themselves around and supporting the yellow marigolds.

All that being said, I have struggled with my garden. I'm finding some plants will need to be transplanted elsewhere if they do not produce again this year. I've already shifted some into other parts of the bed and I was fortunate enough to get several seedlings of Lungwort, Coralbells, and Columbine to spread out. This year I want my focus to be on mostly store bought annuals. I had a great year with my petunias and impatiens, and I was amazed at how easily they can "fill" the gaps in the beds. Since the neighbor removed the mulberry tree, and we cut down our cherry, the beds will receive different quantities of light. I think it's best I play it safe this year and get a feel for the change before committing to new more permanent plantings. I'll see if I can control my impulses when out shopping! Easier said than done. 

Happy Gardening!

BloomStruck

 

Journal Entry No.4
The Summertime Swing

In my last journal entry I talked about a number of things afflicting my garden. While there have been some improvements, this year still feels like a bizarre unfolding nightmare, and after speaking with my neighbors recently I realized that this isn't my battle alone. This past weekend we flushed a skunk out from underneath our deck which then attempted to take residence under my neighbor's deck. I am awaiting my other neighbors return from their vacation to notify them that they also have yet another skunk living under their shed (which is situated directly beside my courtyard garden, so it's been leaving turds all over the place). Our house is literally flanked by skunks, as you can imagine, I seldom get the opportunity to open my windows anymore. And speaking of our skunk, it was only a few weeks earlier that I had to flush out a groundhog from the same space under my deck! It had dug a large hole beside the extension foundation which is obviously not good. We backfilled it with gravel and reassembled the deck on a very hot afternoon. I was not pleased. Which reminds me...a few months earlier than that we had to racoon proof our roof after one squeezed into the extension! The wildlife has gone, for lack of a better description, ape shit. Perfectly ape shit. I don't know where any of our natural predators have gone. We once had a number of very large predatory birds nesting in the area and I have not seen one in ages. My husband theorizes that the construction has scared them off, and has allowed our rodent population to proliferate, which explains the incessantly increasing number of chipmunks, squirrels, moles, voles, shrews and what have you.

We did set up a number of snap traps. Now, where I live it is illegal to trap and remove animals from one environment to another. I think this has something to do with maintaining eco-systems. Some people believe it renders the animal "homeless" and causes it to die a slow and painful death because it can't adapt to its new surroundings. Either way, I don't want to get fined, so we endeavored to use snap traps and we have experienced some success with them. Unfortunately it's both time consuming and gross. I'm at a point where I go out every few days, set them up and empty them a few times that day, and then I take a break from it. I'll have a few days where I see no rodents scurrying about, then they appear to forget all about the traps and come back. It comes and goes in waves but when I manage to get the numbers down I see improvements in spades. Less holes dug, less destruction, more flowers! I still have to drape my rose bush in netting, though, and it looks awful. I sincerely hope next year we see an upsurge in predatory birds and things go back to normal. 

Some good news is that my hydrangeas are mostly performing well. Namely the Wee Bit Grumpy and the Bloomstruck I planted last year (photo above). Also my Invincibelle Limetta looks quite lacey and contrasts beautifully with the variegated hostas and the magenta and fuchsia flowers I've planted nearby. I'm sad to say that my Princess Diana daylily was beheaded so I won't be seeing any blooms this year. My pink astilbe, which promised several heads of blooms for whatever reason flopped over and dried up (despite the foliage being okay?). I also have doubts my Visions in Red will bloom, either. The forming buds have dried or stopped growing entirely. My back garden beds look sadly sparse. The balloon flowers on the other hand are full and blooming in excess! They bring a lovely touch of periwinkle to the back garden which matches my patio rug. I will be buying more of them and filling in the spaces where nothing seems to grow. The daylilies that came with the house are also blooming nicely this year. After we take the cherry tree down I imagine this will only improve with the amount of sunlight they receive.

I have much to do in the garden but our primary focus right now is finishing our basement. It's been a massive undertaking spanning two years. This is okay because we are in the midst of a heat wave and I spend less time outside when it's unbearably hot. Today we're facing humidex temperatures of 40°C. It wasn't so bad this morning but once the sun rises the cool humidity becomes thick and unbreathable. Thankfully it rained yesterday so no need to water the plants. We had a terrible dry spell recently, I shudder to think about our bills lol.

For now I am awaiting the blooms of my Mango Salsa OsoEasy shrub rose, and a bushel of Chinese Forget-me-not which looks so lovely in its uniform periwinkle blue. Also, the morning glories I have planted throughout the garden are starting to produce. It took longer than I thought but I'm thrilled to see them! They are one of my favorite flowers. I'm trying Moonflowers this year and I'm positively excited to see what they look like. There are still adventures to be had in the garden! Not much longer now and it will be autumn, so I take my wins where I can get them. 

Happy Gardening!