As the Garden Grows

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A lovely early Spring

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I haven’t been writing in this blog very much recently. Life has a way of getting in the way and in my case it got in the way BIG TIME. I don’t think that’s going to end anytime soon, and it’s affect my writing in all of my blogs, but I’m going to try to write more.

I do want to remind my readers that I have another gardening blog that I hope to write in regularly as well. It’s called Organic Gardening Tips and as the name implies it’s about organic gardening. As I’ve mentioned in many of my posts on this blog I don’t use chemicals or synthetic fertilizers on my garden beds. I use organic materials so I suppose this blog is also an organic gardening blog as well.

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In other news – my garden is doing very well this spring! I don’t think that I lost any roses this year. It was a very warm winter with barely any snow here in Toronto. So warm in fact that my roses started to leaf out in mid March! I’ve never seen that happen before. They usually don’t start getting leaves or even turning green until mid April or even later.

Everything is growing and I’d say that my garden is at least 1.5 months ahead of itself. My Crocuses, Glories of the Snow, Snow Drops, Hyacinths and the first of the Daffodils are just about done now. I’m waiting to see what will bloom next.

How is your garden doing this lovely Spring?






The quality of your pet food is important

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I’ve always believed that it’s important to feed my pets the healthiest diet I possibly can in order to ensure their health.  Even when I had reptiles (yes I had several lizards at once believe it or not!) I used to make special salads for my iguana and prepare special food to feed the crickets that were fed to my lizards.  So you can only imagine that now that I have a dog how careful I am about her food.

Luckily there are high quality dog foods out there – you just have to do a little research to make sure it really does have quality ingredients like those described in the above information.

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My Labrador Retriever Midnight has been eating quality dog food since she came to live with us at eight weeks of age.  She was quite ill when we got her and we had to give her a lot of tender loving care to make her healthy.

She’s four years old now and she’s doing great.  Obviously from the photos and stories that I post every now and then you can see that she’s a great dog.

She has a great personality and I think she might even have a sense of humor .. because she’s downright silly … just look at this last picture – I swear she posed for this by rolling over with her favorite bone in her mouth. I call her my silly girl.

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How do you care for your dog? Do you try to feed your dog a food with quality ingredients?

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Preparing our garden for winter

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October is almost over and it keeps on getting cooler here in Toronto. Most of our trees still have their leaves, but I’m sure that won’t be for long!

We spent yet another weekend – Or rather at least one day this weekend doing some more yard work in order to prepare our garden for winter. This time we were busy putting away things like our solar lights, garden ornaments and trimming back some of the plants that had become overgrown. I also took some time inspecting my rose plants and I cut out any dead branches that I noticed.

When the trees finally start to drop their leaves we’ll gather up some of the leaves and put them on our garden beds as we normally do each year. A good layer of maple leaves on our plants seems to help protect them through the winter.

Most winters we don’t get a lot of snow. Oh we get snow, but it snows, then it melts and we have a week or two of deep cold but no snow cover .. so if the plants are bare and exposed to all that cold it can really hurt them – so at least the deep leaf cover helps. Then of course it will snow again and our garden will have a foot or two of snow on it for a week or two until it melts again and that will keep the plants and ground insulated for a short while .. but the temperature changes the garden goes through through the winter because of our lack of good snow cover yet fairly cold temperatures can be quite hard on the plants if they aren’t prepared in the fall.

Do you put mulch or leaves on your garden beds in late fall to protect your plants over the winter?

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