lolaraincoat | More garden events

So far this year nearly everything seems to have survived that difficult winter except for the one hapless peach tree, and some things are thriving that never, ever thrive.

For years I've been planting irises - either because they're on sale somewhere or because someone gives me some from their garden or just because I love them - and the bastards never bloomed, not even once. Yes, yes: shallow planting, plenty of sun, plenty of water, winter mulch, cut leaves ... nothing. They didn't die or anything, they just didn't flower. Until this year. We are about to have four kinds of iris blooming at once in the front of the house. Right now it's pale blue Siberian irises, which are short, and medium-height peach-colored ones that some relative of Matt's who lives in upstate NY gave us last summer (and that's definitely not a favorite color but I love getting plants from other people's gardens and don't care at all about making things match, so whatever.) Soon we'll have two shades of deep blue, one on some just plain old irises and another on the ones with leaves striped yellow and green that I got at the end of the season on sale, half-dead, at a Canadian Tire two years ago. And they're both super-tall, too - well over a meter. Yay!

Also the apricot tree which didn't flower at all our first summer here, and last summer produced less than a dozen fruit, this year is full of fruit - hundreds of them, it looks like. Of course we'll end up losing many of them to wind and raccoons, but we're definitely going to have a lot more than last year. Was that because I mulched the tree properly last autumn?

The sage, which never lives through a winter, not only lived but is about to flower. I've never gotten sage to flower before. Huh. Now if that stupid wisteria vine would only bloom, my springtime of well-mannered flowers would be complete.

And then we got another tree. See, Toronto has a city program in which they will plant trees in your front yard if you call up and ask. There's a whole list of trees to chose from, including some fruit trees and a sugar maple, but when I called two years ago the only trees they actually had available were lindens. So I said, sure, bring us a linden. This tree never appeared, and I didn't forget about it exactly but I never got around to calling up the city and asking what became of it either. Then a couple of weeks ago the city dug up the street in front of our house to fix a burst water pipe, and this somehow led to them digging two quite large, deep holes in our front yard as well. So last week we bought a lilac and a pear tree and plopped them in there, because why not?

And then this Thursday when I got home there was a linden sapling in our front yard in the middle of a flower bed, with the lilac about a meter away to its west and the pear tree about a meter away to its east. Which meant that they would all strangle each other in a couple of years as they grew. So that was no good. We very carefully dug up the linden and moved it south, to the other side of our front lawn. Now they're still all a little closer than I'd like, but not disastrously so. That was a lot of digging, and it's going to be a lot of watering too - did you know that newly transplanted trees require two gallons of water a day, every day for a month? (I didn't know that either, but the city left us a helpful brochure.)

My gardening-guru friend warned me that the city might fine us for moving the tree, but I say if they didn't want us to move the tree they should have planted it last year before the water-mains broke.

Meanwhile, in a fit of greed, I have purchased two more varieties of tomato, put out the first chile plants of the season, and one little eggplant plant too. Oh, and I put in nastursium in the front, where it can be pretty until it is time for it to be delicious. And I have a brilliant idea for growing zucchini without it taking over the entirety of the vegetable bed - I'm going to plant some in a basket that can hang from the grape arbor, so the vines can fight it out between them.

I can't remember if I've mentioned it here before - probably not - but for the past few years I've tried to get a measurable fraction of the food we eat out of our tiny garden, which has one sunny bed roughly 12' x 6' and another roughly 8' x 6'. I'm not maximizing production, since I won't use weedkillers (except for my trusty trowel) or petroleum-based fertilizer, and since I go for taste over quantity, and since I plant a lot of herbs and flowers which in theory we could use for teas or salads - mums, chamomille, echinechea, rue - but really are there only to look pretty and attract bees. None the less we got probably half the vegetables we ate all year last year out of the garden, and I'm cautiously optimistic that we'll do a little better than that this summer.

It stopped raining just now, and now robins are hopping all over the back garden looking for worms. The bastards! Those are my worms!

...

Current Mood: gluttonous
Current Music: Old 97s: W-I-F-E

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From:

twistedchick

Ecologically safe insect deterrent that will wash off the veggies and herbs: garlic juice (press the garlic, or smash it well, then put the whole thing in the jar or sprayer bottle), hot pepper sauce (from your local ethnic store), water, a few drops of biodegradable soap. Combine, put in bottom of sprayer bottle, shake and apply. If the garlic ferments a little, it's still good.

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these are the voyages of Spectacles H. Decolonizing

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