We are all waiting...

It is only December but we are all waiting for the snow to melt and the temperature to rise. We have had an extaordinarily warm fall and start to winter but January is yet to come!

Winter Garden Pleasure

The winter birds are what pulls us out into the garden when everything is white. Chickadee's are always happy to land on Miles when he takes out the seed.

Hibernating Green Thumb

My green thumb hibernates. I have no success with indoor plants. I have tried many, only to be forced to admit that my gardening enthusiasm does not extend to indoor plants. I know this is why I never have any success. I can rattle off requirements for sun, water, location and staking for a good number of garden perennials as well as a smaller number of annuals without much effort. Yet inside, I have had this Amaryllis for over a year now and although it is getting leaves, I do not have a lot of hope for blooms. I think I was supposed to feed it in March or May. For some reason, an M month is ringing bells. I fed it a couple of weeks ago, in an N month and only after it sent leaves up. If it blooms, it won't be on my account. It would he a happy accident though so I am keeping my fingers crossed. I plan to move no houseplants. If the Amaryllis bloom, they will become Christmas gifts for others. I am going to keep my growing activities confined to the garden where my real interest is. As it turns out, I like hibernating through the winter break as much as the plants do.

Hope for Seven

This is the orange lily garden. My hope is that there is at least one of each of seven different lily varieties that were in that garden. I have no idea if it really does. Bets anyone?

Another day of digging in snow but I managed to get the red lily garden and pink lily garden dug. I think I only missed 'Acapulco' and 'Opus One' which can be a nice surprise for the new gardener. There are only four lily left to get and it is mostly because I forgot them until I had my boots off and the -5 temperature was not encouraging me to put them back on! I will get them tomorrow with tulips. I am worried I am not going to find a lot of the tulips. Some are marked but most are not and finding the lily under the snow was not easy eventhough they had dead stalks sticking up. Not always where the bulb was unfortunately. I am still going to try though.  Then Iris. There is an end in sight although everytime I go out, I think of something else I want to take. Today's addition to the list was Cerastium. I am running out of time though, if we don't get warmer daytime temperatures, the ground will be too frozen to dig in only a few more days.

Fall Moving

Here I am again, digging while paying no attention to the proper timing of anything. The only thing on my mind is that I am moving in either the spring or the summer and I want to keep my bulbs and tubers. So, I am digging in the snow and packing boxes to mail to Linda. I am sending glads for her 'fridge in case I am not there yet when it is time to plant them.

I dug up my orange lily garden today and although it is all mixed together, I hope this pile of bulbs contains 'Grand Cru', 'Cancun', Danielle's Hula, Early Orange and Tiny White as well as the Tangerine and Easter Yellow shorter varieties.

I managed to separate out the 'New Wave', 'Landini', 'Orange Electric' and 'Madrid'. I started packing the first box although I think there will be three this size before I am done!

Linda and Kelly will dig trenches or something to throw them in until I get there and I won't have to try and dig frozen ground in early spring here. Tomorrow the agenda is to dig all the pink and red lily. I hope the nicer afternoon temperatures hold for a few more days because I would like to get tulips and iris too :)

November Blooms

Mid-November and we still have lots of blooms (or re-blooms) in the garden:  this masterwort, honeysuckle, daisies, snap dragons, roses, dahlias, gaura, bugleweed, heather, daylilies, lobelia, lamium...

Soon to be Mulch

We make a lot of use out of all the leaves.  We shred lots and use as mulch in the garden.  Piles of them get composted every year and eventually find their way into the garden.  After 3 days of constant rain, we're going to have to wait for them to dry out.  The other nice thing is that, with so many trees around, the garden gets an extra layer of mulch for the winter without any extra effort.



Warm Weather Fall

Since the snowfall and frost, we have had a spell of warmer weather move in. All of the snow is gone and I have been able to get into the garden again. Today I was using the extra gardening time to empty, clean and sort containers. All the black plastic ones will be used to move plants in the spring. I am keeping my fingers crossed that this weather continues for another week but in this zone, that is always a question in November.

Long Gardening Season

This fall is a strange one in our garden.  We have yet to have our first frost so, on November 1st, we still have dahlias and glads blooming.  Since the spring gardening season started about 3 weeks earlier than usual this year, this is definitely the longest gardening season we've experienced.  The sumac above is a bright flash at the back of the garden.  Kelly's Huron Sunrise grass is a similar colour.  This year I didn't cut back any of my Oriental lily stalks and I love all the extra gold in the garden.

They grow them big here...

A neighbour took advantage of their big shrubs to put on a Halloween show.

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween! Hope you have a good one :)

Dahlia 'Yellow Star' Makes an Appearance

These poor flowers are a little worse for wear but it is the end of October.  A beautiful lemon yellow semi-cactus dahlia, the blooms are 3.5 inches across.  I won't need to plant yellow daisies next year because I'll get lots of yellow from these.
This may be the end of our dahlia story for the 2010 gardening season.  I have one more bud that I'm hopeful about but I imagine hope will be overcome by frost in the next couple of days.  I certainly can't complain - this has undoubtedly been the longest gardening season since we started 6 years ago.

Dare I Hope?

That next year the sidebar of this blog will say "Danielle's Zone 5 Garden"? Yes, it's true. We are once again considering moving East. This time, I think it may actually happen. Fingers crossed, everyone. Stay tuned for updates :)

Self-seeding Perennials

Self-seeding perennials can be a little scary in a small urban garden.  I find small sprouts of new plants in the oddest places.  This is a spotted lungwort commonly called 'Bethlehem sage' or 'Mary and Joseph'.  It was one inheritance from my mother's garden when she moved into an apartment.  Twice I've thought it was gone for good, only to find a sprout coming up somewhere different.  Since I have lots of shady spots and this lungwort is more like a ground cover, I can handle a few extra plants every year.  Other plants that have survived my methodical spring weeding are brunnera, Jacob's ladder, donkeytail spurge and campanula.  The two that give me the most trouble are my tall blue lobelia and my alpine columbine.  While I leave lots, I still have to yank or move lots too.  They're both worth that extra effort though.

Season Ends

This is what Summer and I stepped out the front door to find this morning. Worse still, this was the best weather of the day. Winter arrived in my garden today in the form of a storm bordering on a blizzard and the gardening season officially ended. The only thing we could do here now is plant lilies and that is only if the holes are already dug. I wouldn't want to dig in this. Since I have no lily holes dug, all that is left to do for me is to settle inside and look back on my 2010 season. I will spend more of the year looking back or looking ahead than I will actually garden. Yes, the first snow day tends to make me a little melancholy. Good news is, I always recover quickly.

Fitting Plants In

I would always advocate planting in a space large enough for the plant you are putting in, when mature. However, in every garden I have ever had, there are mature plants in too small spaces that I did not plant. Meet my Boardwalk Garden Dogwood. It lives at the drive edge where that garden ends. This puts it right in the middle of my view to the Sun Garden from my dining room window and my view to the drive from my kitchen window. Add to that the tiny space it is growing in and you begin to see my problem. My solution has been to hack it down every Fall. In this photograph, I have just completed that task. When I started, it was twice this height. I also take out all of the old wood stalks because I find that as the stalks age, they turn brown rather than the dark red of the young wood. I much prefer the red and removing the old wood keeps it airy, allowing light through. Although I often think I should move this Dogwood to the Sun Garden and plant a smaller, more decorative shrub in this spot, I know that is unlikely to happen soon. As long as it is happy being hacked down every Fall, I will probably happily avoid the huge job digging it would be. Especially when I have so much empty space to fill yet. It helps that it is a pretty Dogwood since everyone who arrives here has to walk by it if they are coming up to the house. If it were a Goatsbeard or Cotoneaster, I think I would have moved it long ago.

Introducing Little Stonehenge

Kelly has a propensity for moving big rocks around.  Since mid-summer he has been excavating the woods behind our garage.  Somewhere along the way we started calling it 'Little Stonehenge'.  What started out as a big pile of rocks has become, well, a more organized pile of rocks.  This upright rock above stands at the foot of the flipflop path.  He has it propped up to look like a console from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, or perhaps a DHD from StarGate.  I have to admit that I think many of his ideas are a little nuts but they always turn out, umm, interesting at the least.  This whole area is still under construction but a few plants are in and next year we should see a few blooms among the rocks.

Country Garden Plants

When I first started gardening in the City, I planted everything that anyone gave me, never asking why they were giving it away. I came to discover it was usually because they had too much... way too much! Some were great self-seeders, like the daisy above. Some spread rapidly through creeping roots like Summer Phlox. Still others, like Lamium, were good at both methods, spreading both their root and their seeds everywhere! Although I came to not appreciate those plants in the City, I have found them to be perfect plants for my country garden where there are lots of open, large spaces to fill. Included on this list of plants would be Bouncing Bet, Wild Violet, Yarrow, Forget-Me-Not, Johnny-Jump-Up Viola, Goutweed and Chinese Lantern, which I added this year. If you are limited with space, be wary of planting any of these in spots where they cannot be managed. All of them will get easily out of control, many of them are able to jump sidewalks, patios or lawns in less than a single season. A few will not even bother to jump your lawn but will instead come right up in the middle of it.

Tulip Deadline Zone 3

It is time to finish planting and moving tulips in zone 3. According to Environment Canada, we have three more days of good weather and then a few of bad. Once the bad hits in Saskatchewan, all bets are off and there are no guarantees. Last Fall, I added so many new tulips that this Fall, I am finding myself content with moving what I have here already and saving some of the old that are struggling in very tight spaces. The fact that Linda and I were discussing tulips the other day, which made me pull out my trusty notebook, to realize that so many of my new ones did not perform well this year, has made me a little tulip weary. I was planning on just moving my 'Angelique', 'Bastogne' and crowded 'White Dream'. I think now that I will move all of the tulips that did not perform well this year and see if I can get them to give me a better display next year. I am hopeful that even with the increase in number, I can finish in one day so that is now my agenda for tomorrow. I am starting my race against time... and snow!

Fall Visitors

Although we have visitors to the garden all year, their numbers seem to increase dramatically in the Fall. I think the deer start to come in closer because it is hunting season and they seem to sense they are safer here. The Woodpeckers, on the other hand, leave for Summer and return in Fall. I don't know where they go or why they want to be here in Winter. This little guy is baby Hammy and he has found a couple of new friends in recent days. I hope one of them is building a warmer house than baby Hammy is because baby may be looking for a roommate come snow!

Fall Buds

It always amazes me that some plants grow their buds in the fall.  It seems a little backward.  Those little buds have to survive the long cold winter!  Above is my Japanese pieris 'Purity'.  Azaleas, my miniature rhodo and a few heathers are also full of buds.  And then there's the oddities - like my 'America' Asiatic lilies that are all developing buds in October.

Linda's Perennial Pick of the Season

This was a hard choice!  However, I am a BIG fan of phlox and this phlox paniculata 'Nicky' is my new favourite.  It had a rocky start - I planted it bare root in the spring of 2008 and it has taken this long to grow and bloom.  It was well worth the wait.  I've noticed that many of the tall phlox change colour depending on the time of day (or maybe the temperature?).  Nicky looked quite pink when it was first opening and had me confused.

I also love Danielle's perennial pick and was tempted to post my 'Summer Sun' heliopsis - it was a close second.  (I managed to sneak it in here anyway ;)

Food!

I have always been a flower gardener and still consider myself as such. This year I added food to my garden and was surprised to find that it was as easy as growing flowers. This was the first of my potatoe crop to be made into a meal. It was yummy! I had success with everything I planted so I am going to expand that next year with the addition of a fenced kitchen garden. Although the dogs did not bother potatoes, onion and chard, I have a feeling they may feel differently about carrots, spinach and lettuce. Add to that our visitors from this morning and I think the kitchen garden will need a fence.

The Love Bus

This is our Love Bus, eventhough it is a van, and it is probably my favourite piece of garden art. It is certainly the single piece we invested the most in. It was one of those things that we just fell in love with when we first saw it and there was no way I wasn't taking it home. Actually, though, it was delivered because it is concrete, very heavy and did not fit in our car. The two boys that delivered it were not happy to find that I wanted them to put it in the farthest corner of the yard from the gate. That was when we lived in the city. The movers brought it here for us and it was much easier to place up by the back deck in Benedict's Upper Level Garden. I love the little peace sign rims and the yin yang bubble window. The other side says Flower Power in bright coloured paint on raised letters. Until this year, I have always grown impatiens in it but this year I grew my new Begonia 'Golden Wave' inside. If they survive the winter, I will repeat that next year because it was quite stunning. The Love Bus also has a roof that sits on top of it in the Winter. I usually fill it with leaves to replenish the soil and cover it until Spring. I used to make a table out of the roof for the Summer, using bricks as the legs, but because it has raised flowers and a bigger peace sign on it, it was not the easiest table to set a cup of coffee on. So in recent years, I just lean it somewhere in the garden. Usually on the opposite side of The Gecko at the same stump. In the front of the bus, there is a personalized license plate with the artist's name, C. Johnston, carved into the concrete. Although we ate peanut butter sandwiches for a month to buy it, I have never regretted the purchase. We have had it since 1996, it has always lived outdoors and shows no signs of fading. Well worth the brief sacrifice!

Dahlia 'Karma Bon Bini' - Hard to Miss

I'm getting close to the end of my dahlia season and so glad I got to see this one.  The yellow interior is close to lime and the red is wonderfully bright.  Karma Bon Bini is a straight cactus with 3" blooms and stands about 2.5' tall.  These cactus dahlias are really growing on me!