Big Projects: Front West Bed [aka Perennial problems]

Since I moved into my house last spring, I have enjoyed the challenge that is my south-facing backyard -- putting in 50 square feet of raised beds, planting shrubs, and my most recent project, a berry patch. I have big plans the next year including more beds, including some on the concrete beside our garage; cold frames to sit on top of my existing beds; and, hopefully in the summer of 2011, a deck.

But I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that my front yard fills me with despair.

The north-facing front yard doesn't get much sun to start with, and much of that is blocked by the (lovely) boulevard trees on our street. Even the lawn doesn't really grow, although the quack grass does -- so prodigiously that this spring it rapidly outpaced our little push-mower and a kind neighbour had to cut it with his gas mower. The beds that I carefully built out of old railway ties last summer and planted with native perennials in the fall this spring sprouted... hardy invasive thistle, more quackgrass, and ants. The temptation at this point is to give up, and possibly replace the small yard with a hot tub, or cover it with gravel, or plant hosta and call it landscaped. (If the hosta would even grow.)

BUT! That is not my style! Fortified by recent successes in the backyard-- blooming peas almost as tall as me, the first tomatoes and strawberries appearing, and the humble beginnings of a berry patch that will, I hope, mean fresh blueberries, raspberries and saskatoons next year-- I have finally found the motivation to try again. With recommendations from a wise gardening co-worker and the friendly people at the Bedrock Seed Bank's Farmer's Market booth, I have planted the following in my front beds:

Bonus: the pathetic grass/weeds are visible. The only reason they're this short is because our
neighbour took pity on us and cut them with his gas mower. Before they were almost waist-height!

• Clematis [back centre, against the fence] -- I don't know how this one will do, but I bought it weeks ago, and I had nowhere else to plant it. I do not have high hopes for it but it should be better in the ground than in its little pot. I also managed to mangle it pretty seriously in the process of trying to remove it from the pot. Sigh. If it survives until next year at all it will be a miracle.

• Euonymus [immediately to the left and right of the clematis] -- at the garden centre on the weekend, I knew we were looking for a mysterious shrub whose name had a lot of vowels. "I can't remember the word. I will recognize it when I see it." I love the variegated leaves of this plant and I hope it does OK in my front bed.

• A plant I got from the Walmart garden centre whose tag identified it as sandwort, arenaria montana [centre front]. But once I got it home and looked it up online, I'm beginning to believe that the plant had had its tag switched as it looks nothing like the arenaria pictures I found. So perhaps it is a mystery. FUN MYSTERY PLANT!

• And a boxwood shrub [right of the clematis], which I bought for $4. I cannot resist a bargain shrub. They are my kryptonite.

• And the ones that Bedrock suggested:

Gooseberry [far left] -- Because it's planted in a bed of old railway ties, we probably won't eat the berries from this plant. But if they bring birds to the garden, perhaps the birds will eat the ants. As a bonus project, I could write a children's book about this.
Meadowsweet [far right]
Maltese Cross[small plants on far left and right, front]

After planting these, I covered the remaining empty parts of the bed with landscape fabric and then with cardboard in an attempt to keep the weeds down until I find more plants for the front. And it has been raining on and off since I planted--Old Testament levels of rain, actually. I have high hopes for actual, non-weed plants in the front yard soon. And I hope to soon mix up some more of my organic fertilizer mix and compost to top-dress this bed, since the soil that went into it last year was the dregs of what we had delivered, and the quality is probably the poorest of all my beds.

June 14: the veggies

I have identified a problem with having a garden blog, which is that when it's warm and things are growing and I have stuff to blog about, I don't really have time to post because I'm in my garden. Go figure. But there ARE some things growing in my yard at last, so here I am (at last).

The very first tomato to bloom, a Sweet Tumbler in a pot on my stoop. I gave an audible squeal of delight when I spotted it.

The biggest Bloody Butcher tomato plant. It is looking pretty healthy, also. When the seedling had a few true leaves, I planted it straight into this big pot and it has been growing happily in there ever since (on a bed of potting soil and styrofoam packing peanuts, so the pot is still light enough to lift). It was VERY spindly when I moved it outside, but it has filled out nicely, like that nerdy platonic friend from junior high.

Peas, growing like gangbusters. What is a gangbuster, anyway? That sounds like something I could be successful at growing in my garden. Presumably they're not too hard to start from seed. You could say they grow like peas.

James and I finally got the last raised bed built and stained. It's planted with snapdragons (along the left side), succulents (along the right side), and 2 Jimmy Nardello peppers. It's in a corner of the yard where it just COOKS during the day. I hope the peppers flourish there. Yep, those are blue plastic bendy straws holding up the tender pepper plants. I roll like that.

The other vegetables that are growing from seed are also starting to poke their little heads up, including onions and scallions. I just planted some lettuce last weekend--it should have been in the ground much earlier, but I decided better late than never. All my seedlings are in the ground, almost, except for a stray watermelon (I have no space for it and may put it in a pot) and a single hybrid zucchini (which I BOUGHT after my hybrids perished in the cold weather earlier). Still to come, some day when it's raining: flowers!

Emma guards the plants

photo.jpg, originally uploaded by jocelynb.

My dog, Emma, is so diligent in her protection of the plants on my back stoop. Thank goodness! If she wasn't guarding them, who knows what might befall them. Of course, the fact that it's sunny and warm out there is just a side benefit as far as she's concerned.

Succulents

I've been just obsessed with succulents lately. I think this post on Apartment Therapy sparked the initial obsession. Look at this amazing planter! I love the range of textures and colours you can find in succulents, the little leaves that just beg to be touched, the spiky otherworldly shapes they grow in. They can grow very close together-- they don't mind being a bit squished.

Here's my version--somewhat crappy photo with my iphone. I picked up the blue container from the discount shelf at Winners. I filled the bottom with styrofoam packing peanuts to make it lighter and to improve drainage-- succulents really don't like having wet roots.

And I keep buying more. I was at the surprisingly awesome Walmart garden centre today and I picked up another bagful:






It's astonishing to me that anything survives our winters, let alone these delicate-looking little plants that look like they grew on another planet. I've already planted a bunch in my outside planters, and hopefully I will get these ones into the ground today or tomorrow. My desk at work is also being overwhelmed by them. The Safeway near my work carries cute little ceramic pots full of succulents too. I'm finding them everywhere.

Plants not dead! Pt II

The weekend was pretty much a write-off, garden-wise. We had a little hail storm yesterday and it was kind of miserable all weekend. I'm home sick today, and actually I would be home anyway since it's my day off. I'm never sure which is worse, missing work because you're sick or having to give up a day off on the couch, watching movies and feeling sorry for yourself.

I did venture outside, though (my dog insisted on being walked even though I told her I was sick), and I took some pictures of what's going on out there.





My peas are starting to come up. The rough weather left some of them a bit exposed but they seem none the worse for wear.



This mysterious plant is growing right on the edge of an old compost heap. It's in quite a damp and shady part of the yard. I have no idea what it is, but it doesn't look anything like our ususal weeds. I'm going to leave it and see if it grows into anything interesting. Is it crazy to think it might be bamboo? Does bamboo even grow here? There are some bamboo shoots that ended up in the compost near where this mystery plant is coming up.



Apple tree buds!



On the inside front, all the watermelon and pepper seeds are sprouted now.

Finally: I've been covering up my outside beds at night, but it's looking like I might finally be able to relax about it. Here's our friendly weather forecast:

I don't mind my tax dollars paying for weather forecasts like this!

Plants: not dead! pt I

Today I finally summoned the courage to lift the covers on my perennials and see how they had fared through the spring storm.




I wasn't sure what to expect, but they're doing fine-- at least, these ones are. (Some other perennials were under cotton sheets because I ran out of proper covers, and they're still too snowy to check on.) I covered them with plastic lids (saved from a catered event at my work), and I guess the snow insulated them before it actually got cold. I think at the coldest it got to around -6 earlier in the week. I would like to know what temperature it was under the covers!

[The plants are, clockwise from the top, creeping jenny; periwinkle; some succulents including several hen & chicks; and the one in the middle is a mystery, even to me. I bought it from the farmer's market without a tag, but the person at the booth assured me that it would take over my garden if I let it, and that sounded like my kind of plant.]




I have several watermelon sprouts now and the very first peeking signs of a pepper. The peppers should have been in their pots weeks ago, of course, but these seeds only just arrived from Terra Edibles. There are two watermelon varieties, Cream of Saskatchewan and Sugar Baby; and the peppers are Jimmy Nardello, a sweet Italian pepper.

So why this blog?

I've been blogging since 1999, when there was still a blink tag in HTML and websites had those "under construction" gifs on them all the time... remember? Oh man, it was awesome. But lately all I feel like talking about is my garden, and rather than cluttering up my normal blog with talk about homemade organic fertilizer, I thought I would give this specialty blog thing a try. Plus, I'm a Northern gardener-- not super-northern, but northern enough that most garden resources are pretty irrelevant. I know there are more of us out there, and we can provide moral support for each other during those June snowstorms.

The story - the short version: In 2009 I bought a house, got a dog, got married, and started a garden. In fact, the getting married and buying a house were sort of to make the garden-starting and dog-adopting possible. I had gotten tired of trying to garden on my dry, windy, sun-scorched 9th floor condo balcony and I was dreaming of neat rows of vegetables. We bought our house in February and moved in in March. By April, the snow was starting to melt, and would uncover-- or so I assumed-- a nicely tilled garden patch, some attractive shrubs, maybe a fountain or two. I was surprised (although I shouldn't have been) to find, instead, a mostly-dead lawn overrun with very-much-alive dandelions, some with thick trunks that seemingly grew down a foot or more. There were a few shrubs and one fruit tree, none of which had been pruned in years. And everywhere were broken, abandoned toys pushed into the ground and never retrieved. Sad! And creepy!

Discouraged, but not totally disheartened, I started small. Last year my husband and I built 3 raised beds with 36 square feel of space in total. This year I'm starting off the year with an additional 16 square feet, plus whatever space I make in the grass I will inevitably dig up as i run out of space for seedlings.

I'm also growing mostly heirloom seeds. One of the first books I read about gardening was Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and one of the things she writes about in that book is the modern phenomenon of hybridized plants cultivated for hardiness and high yields. I'm more interested in interestingness and flavour than yields, plus I'm a big fan of biodiversity, so there's that. (Am I the only one saving seeds for the apocalypse? No? Never mind.) I do have some hybrid plants, especially perennials like raspberries and asparagus. Because I wanted heirloom veggies, I'm starting seeds inside this year for the first time ever, and it has been such an adventure--one I can't wait to repeat next year, with improvements.

Why "gardening for masochists"?

I live in Edmonton, on the Canadian prairies, which is in Zone 3a. Our short growing season and unpredictable weather seem like a gardener's worst nightmare in some ways. But when it's warm here, it's really warm; and this is one of the sunniest cities in Canada. On the longest day of the year, we get over 17 hours of sunlight. This year I started seeds indoors beginning in late March. I should be able to transplant them by the third week in May. When I read about gardeners in more temperate areas, I do get a bit jealous. But at the same time, we Canadians thrive on adversity. And crappy weather. And those four short months, from May 24 to Sept. 21... They will be glorious, Internet!

the May spring fake-out, and the despair that accompanies it.

This happens every year, and every year it's like I have no memory of anything that has happened in previous years. The garden centres are open. There were plants for sale at the farmer's market last week. Therefore, I must shop for plants! And my indoor seedlings are looking bushy and anxious to meet the outdoors. In fact, if anything, I am running out of room in my basement for them. And I have a whole bench full of new perennials and annuals in my living room, under my biggest available window.




Whereas outside it looks like this:




You're mean, Edmonton. We woke up yesterday morning to a huge dump of snow, cold, miserable winds, and a sense of self-pity.

However, when I woke up this morning I know it would be miserable outside, and I also knew there was a chance that I would have a few more sprouts. And lo and behold, the first of the watermelons:




That's a sugar baby watermelon, and even though at this moment it seems unbelievable that it will ever survive outdoors, I know that in a few weeks today will be like a half-remembered nightmare.