3 posts tagged “gardening”
Shockingly easily, I have found out. Over the passed week, I have been greeted, almost daily, with new little shoots pushing their way out of my garden plot. I haven't blogged about it yet, as I am superstitious, and didn't want to jinx it, but check these veggies out:
But as I suspected, some of the salad greens were a little too tempting for the local critters to resist, so I am going to have to find a way to protect these little guys....
One of my new year's resolutions was to turn an overgrown flowerbed into a vegetable garden, so this past weekend I tore everything out (as best as I could, there is still a stump I couldn't get rid of) and planted some seeds and seedlings. Here are my before and after shots:
The garden had an old catoneaster bush, and some lemon mint and garlic chives that I replanted along the edge (since both act as pest repellents). The far right-hand side was completely overgrown, and had been for years, since the rock wall had completely disappeared, and I had to dig it out from under the soil, and then rebuild it.
I think the former owners were also dumping their potted annuals in here, as there was a lot of potting mix, and some crysantemums who had rooted themselves, but which I pulled out anyway.
Part of my motivation came from buying my very cool Toronto Gardening Journal, which had a lot of helpful information, and dates when certain things should be done for our Zone 6 conditions. The journal also has plan pages, so I could design my garden plans while it was still too cold to get the garden established:
So, I've planted heirloom varieties of the following: Mammoth Sugar Snap Peas; Baking Pumpkins; Roma Tomatoes, Jaunes Flamees Tomatoes; mixed bush beans; lettuce and mesclun mix. I also planted some scarlet runners. I did buy some english lavender and lettuce (green leaf, red leaf, salad mix) that were already sprouted, since I was going a bit nuts waiting to see something grow. Next year, I'm going to get as many sprouts going early as I can, unless the direct cultivation of the seeds turns out to work just fine. So far, I've fertilized with an organic mix called Carbonitite that I got from Urban Harvest, and organic worm castings. This is my first veggie garden, so I really do not know what the soil is like, and what supplements it needs, but I'm looking at this as a learning year. I'm a little concerned about what sort of damage the wildlife around our place will do (squirrels, rabbits and raccoons) but as yet, I haven't taken any steps to protect the garden. I might as well put a Salad Bar sign up!
My husband finally took a weekend off, so I was able to get out of the house and do a couple things I had really been looking forward to doing: attending Seedy Saturday, and going to Lettuce Knit's yarn handpainting workshop. Seedy Saturday was an event for local seed savers/sellers to make their open pollinated/organic/heirloom seeds available for sale/exchange, and for people to attend workshops and meet local gardening resource people. An old colleague from my former employer was there doing a presentation on Terminator Seeds (i.e. seeds that produce sterile seed so you can't replant it; there's a global moratorium on them, given their scientific and social dodginess) so I got to spend time with her as well. I went to workshop on growning herbs for spices, tea and medicine, and another workshop on how to plan your planting so that you will have vegetables year round. I'm not really quite that ambitious yet, I'm just hoping to gain something other than exercise from my garden this year. I did get some good advice on pest control, and I'm imagining building a lightweight, moveable covering for the entire garden out of light and water permeable material, so that I don't have to use any pesticides. But I was also told my only option against raccoons may be an electric fence, and with a toddler around, you can imagine how undesirable this would be. I'm going to check the Lee Valley catalogue, and see what kinds of options they may have for me........
And I was finally able to take my plain, natural Malabrigo worsted merino yarn and get learn how to handpaint it. The workshop was actualy quite brief and straight forward, and we had results pretty quickly. I wasn't sure when I went in what colours I would be looking for, but here is what I ended up with:
I have called it Tulip Garden, cuz it has the green and pink of tulips, with a little brown thrown in as the soil. I left quite a lot of it plain, because I was worried about the colours bleeding into one another, but they pretty much stayed put. If I used brown again, I would be a bit more committal about it, cuz in some place it looks kinda muddy, and not as solid as I would have liked it. I would also have wrapped the other colours in plastic wrap before using the brown, because it tended, more than the other colours, to get on the rest of the yarn, so parts of it look dirty. I haven't decided yet what I am going to make out of it, but from what I've seen on Ravelry, the Malabrigo worsted is best used for things like hats, mitts and scarves, and for felting, so this yarn will likely end up as one of the above.
